Hot Fuzz is one of the better examples in this thread, because it doesn’t run solely on ribbing buddy cop films. If you’ve never seen a buddy cop film in your life, Hot Fuzz is still a perfectly good comedy with some surprisingly touching moments.

Knowing what it parodies makes it better, of course, but it doesn’t look down at them.

I’ll have to put that on my to-read list. I’ve heard of it, but never looked that far into it.

Worked briefly in the waste management industry. Guns in the garbage were rare, but a problem. Policy was to call the local police to wherever they were found and turn them over. Police would take perfunctory statements from facility staff and review camera footage to verify someone hadn’t dumped it and claimed it “found”, then take the gun.

The real problem is we weren’t supposed to touch it until police showed up, so the garbage just had to kind of sit there waiting for them.

Everyone’s telling you why “It doesn’t happen”. They’re not objectively wrong in their answers of how resilient firearms can be, but they’re also not answering the question.

The ultimate answer for a lot is “broken down and recycled”. How do they get there, though?

• A lot come through “buyback” programs, where guns can be turned over to authorities for some nominal reward. These tend to harvest a lot of inoperable weapons, frequently from people who had one but didn’t know how to otherwise get rid of them.

• In states with more lax firearm laws, scrap dealers may accept repairable weapons as scrap metal. In more stringent states, they may only accept them if you’ve destroy the weapon as /u/SolOrion@sh.itjust.works outlined in the ATF poster.

• Even in states with strict firearm laws, guns can frequently be turned over to authorities without charges. (CAUTION: Read guides on how to do this, and consult your local laws and policies before treating this as truth. Better yet, consult a legal professional.)

• In some rare cases, a gun dealer may accept the gun, strip it of useful spare parts, and sell them independently.

At this point, the gun will be deliberately damaged to render it nonfunctional (if it isn’t already) and sent to a scrap metal handler. Metal components will be melted down and reused. Plastic or wood components may be recycled or thrown away.

Funnily enough, I actually liked the Death Star in the “opposite” way - what they did with it in the old EU, as opposed to the Disneyverse. But yeah, it’s very emblematic of the entire setting and has lots of different angles.

On the one hand, I’m glad someone’s finally dragging us back into using one of the most potent energy sources available to mankind. On the other, of course it’s being driven by the miserable mess called “corporate AI”.

Best case scenario, the infrastructure for new nuclear platforms is available by the time the AI bubble bursts, leaving low-cost systems available for useful power generation. Worst case (or more likely, depending on your point of view): Manufacturers go bust after investing all that money, leaving people yet again mistakenly viewing nuclear as a pointless money pit.

“Everything I’ve made is shit.” And then he posts some really damn impressive art…

They’re actually modeled! I do these in CAD software, so I just make a “pie slice” of the wheel, model in the tread cuts once, and then instruct it to duplicate the whole thing in a circle to fill out the rest of the wheel, treads and all.

Annoying thing is, the CAD workflow has totally ruined my ability to use more traditional “art modeling” software (e.g., Blender, 3DS Max).

Struck by railgun fire.

Those are some spectacular sky shots! Like, all of these are good, but those really stand out to me as impressive.

I do 3D modeling (I hope that counts?). Right now I think my favorite is a a spacecraft I completed not too long ago, but the reality is that each one I produce is a learning experience. I’ve gotten better at making things look detailed, learning how to texture, and so on.

So something like the Caracal Heavy Anti-Air Gun, which is a few years old now, I sometimes look at it and see where I would do much better if I were to try to go back and do it now - but also where I was figuring out how to make things work (e.g., making the stabilizing feet actually work).

Gotcha. I don’t know Alibre specifically, but that sounds like a good system.

Hello fellow CAD friend!

I don’t know exactly which program you’re using, but a lot of the ones which are Linux-unfriendly sadly won’t even work on a VM. You will have to have an entire dual boot configuration for them. The good news is that if you’re still on a tight budget, decent 7200 RPM, 1TB hard drives can be had for around $40, sometimes less.

Minecraft is a whole different beast, and honestly it’s harder on my system than some CAD work… but can still be managed.

Point #1

…ah, race conditions. My old enemy.

What’s impressive (or scary, depending on your point of view) is how much of this rings entirely true to my real-life experiences. “The correct method is a pain in the rear/would require rework, so we’re going to take the fast and dirty method” is something I’ve watched have catastrophic consequences down the line. That, and peeling back the lid on the “new standard” and finding a hodgepodge of old standards, legacy code, and poor decision making is painfully real.

The question I have now is, if they actually tried to rip the bandaid off and replace the whole thing, would it be a political problem?

As an engineer, I have two responses to this. The first is that this is an incredibly cool bit of worldbuilding; you’ve done your work to actually show how such a critical vulnerability might arise and how it works.

The second, of course, is awestruck horror that they would let such a critical system exist without checking or validating inputs. It sounds like if a malformed but non-malicious message was sent, then the pilot would get a rejected dispatch message… but what would happen if a new dispatch needed to be issued mid-flight (e.g., due to weather or airspace disruption)? Would a different system handle that?

Either way, really cool addition.

It’s not as dumb as you make it out. The issue isn’t that GPS is really, really good at what it does; it’s that it’s also incredibly vulnerable to disruption and spoofing. And due to the particulars of how GPS works, we can’t entirely fix that. We can do some things to ameliorate it, but a lot of those aren’t suitable for smaller things that use GPS today.

The other thing is that GPS largely replaced a tremendous number of other navigation aides and techniques, including other radio-navigation systems like LORAN-C.