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What about if NATO territory is invaded directly? This is something I hadn't considered when thinking about such conflicts earlier in life: The nuclear-armed NATO states are in a bit of a bind if Russia should make a penetration into Europe that can't be contained by conventional forces: either...

I think the idea was that we're supposed to have been less starvation-prone. The extra muscle is helpful in a fight if you can feed it.

So within NATO, there are three groups: 1) The Eastern European Nato members like Poland, who have centuries of memory of living under the Russian yoke, and for whom a Russia willing to invade its neighbors, and able to do so without consequences, is a direct existential threat. 2) Western...

For my part, I would be willing to guarantee that no further states join NATO, including Ukraine. But, Russia has to back out of Crimea and Donbass, and if Russia invades any of its European neighbors, any European state that applies for NATO membership is to be admitted automatically.

That's not quite right: emotions are as much an output as they are an input. Call them an intermediate processing stage. Of course, one thing that AI neural nets don't replicate is the various hormonal feedback loops, which are significant to emotional state.

The big issue is that the US being in NATO and Eastern Europe being in NATO are both good ideas, but not simultaneously. Problem is, if either the US or Eastern Europe leaves NATO (or isn't admitted for Ukraine et al.), then Putin will take liberties with Eastern Europe. And if both remain in...

As noted before, this can be a problem in real life too. Take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_(spacecraft) for an example.

There's something deeply satisfying about the number of times I've seen NASSP "bugs" on OF, in effect, marked as "WONT_FIX (bug-compatible)".

I'm interested in things like the effect of librational dynamics on climate, so I'm interested in arbitrary orbits in the vicinity of the L4/L5 point (thus the word approximately in my previous post). The literature seems to be undecided on whether Trojan planets can actually form (highly...

I was thinking for a Trojan arrangement, where the tertiary body needs to lead/trail the secondary by approximately 60 degrees. I'm more thinking in terms of a gas giant moon.

Huh. A couple questions I thought I'd asked, but apparently haven't, looking back at the thread: Is it currently possible to specify mean anomaly for bodies? Is it currently possible to specify moons? Is it currently possible to plot the time evolution of a parameter (such as temperature at a...

Here's something that might be good to include eventually: A clean-sheet implementation of the "Accrete" algorithm. Now, if you're into writing code for sci-fi worldbuilding enough to be putting together a project like this, you might ask "sources for the accrete algorithm are already available...

Not in the optical, anyways. If you're watching a neutrino scintillator the ~10s surrounding the core collapse would be impressive, and several hours later, the literature suggests that the X-ray shock breakout burst could ramp up on the order of seconds, and certainly less than an hour. The...

Oh, just thought of this: Is it possible at present to specify binary stars? An interesting test case would be a circumbinary planet at Delta Trianguli (binary separation of ~0.1AU, spectral types G0V and something between G9V and K4V, period of 10 days).

Well, there's "hostile environment for life" violent, and there's "disrupt a planet" violent. No source that I've ever seen has said that the mass loss on the (primary or asymptotic) red giant branch gets to the latter level of violence. All planets not physically engulfed by the star are taken...

Any chance of a 3D solver? Eccentric orbits with orbital resonances offer interesting worldbuilding scenarios, and inclination can be a critical element in the stability of such arrangements (see Neptune/Pluto). Also, it would be nice to have a some kind of calendaring tools, to answer...

Random failure is best for covering things like defects in manufacturing or mishandling of equipment during maintenance: stuff that happens to the vehicle between scenarios. An interesting use of scenario-configurable random failures would be an "acceptance trials" or "breaking in" mission...

Mars in Capricorn through Cancer: The red planet subtends an angle of 180° in your sky; a lithobraking accident is in your immediate future.

"Made away themselves" is such a long winded way of saying "suicide". And if you're trying to avoid latinate vocabulary, why not just "killed themselves".

Where is stuff from users' legacy OF galleries stored? Nothing shows up in the "your media" section (which seems to be where one would store such things with the new software). My sig pic still appears, so it's still stored somewhere, but if I try clicking on it (which would have taken me to it...