Reminder: if you want to catch up with the latest Starmoth fiction and articles, it's on the other, slightly more functional site, same handle, same bio.

In the second movie, the RDA has transitioned from strip mining Pandora to exploiting its biological resources because surprise! Ecosystems are more unique and valuable than raw minerals! Which you would understand if you weren't a humanity fuck yeah troglodyte.

Join millions who have switched to Grok.

Also, re: Avatar, "why don't they just nuke Pandora" is already explained in the movies. In the first one the RDA literally can't. They have one (1) interstellar spaceship with a limited payload, the fuck are they gonna do? Drop a single nuke and hope Eiwya will peace out?.

"nooo how did a bunch of savages beat the glorious humans twice" be fucking serious, it was a fully integrated ecosystem w/ psychic aliens vs a bunch of mass-optimised equipment and mercs.

Avatar may present itself as technology vs nature but the truth is that the Na'vi are as advanced as the humans: it's just that their tech, which is based on ecosystem integration, doesn't register as such. The RDA picked a fight against a peer, they just don't know it.

Remove cops and special forces from your space operas.

The sci-fi fan is a strange creature; one that will simultaneously yell at a worldbuilder for daring to have cruisers with heavy guns in a deliberately divergent setting, yet still put railguns on every single spaceship because something something that mass effect 2 quote.

Everytime the birth rate debate comes up I'm reminded the morons proposing coercitive solutions advocate for short term social collapse. You've forced people to have kids. Good. You now have a generation of parents who hate their children, themselves acutely aware of that fact.

The real issue with the gorilla vs 100 men is not "can the humans win" it's "how do you convince 100 humans of engaging in a mostly useless activity where a significant portion of them may die." It's a leadership problem not a fighting problem.

Go to Enceladus instead of Europa. We have a warm water ocean, cute cuttlefish and a megawar so stealthy and high tech no one actually died. I think we are actually getting scammed out of our defense budget.

Remember when I said the Saturn megawar was a trade war? Our merchant ships are stealth, too. They waltz in and unload, just like that. Transactions in cash only. A steamer came yesterday, retrograde burn from the rings. Gave me 7,000 tractors. I dunno who ordered them.

What the Titanians do is that they spend two billion credits to build a hydrogen steamer. They claim it's the stealthiest hull ever. But there's no ship. You can't prove it, it's stealth. But you know there's no ship. Then Enceladus spends in kind. It's year 52 of the megawar.

You gotta understand that there is no hard evidence the Saturn megawar even exists. Have you ever seen a Titanian stealth dreadnought? The shipyards are off limits, on parking orbits, far from prying eyes -- but there is *nothing* here. They're stealth too, apparently.

I'm telling you that Saturn megawar is something else. Everyone's stealthy. Fleets entirely made of hydrogen steamers. 72 day shifts on Japet, not a single detection. I'm not even sure there's a war anymore. I'm thinking of Europa. At least *something* happens there.

They're throwing hydrogen streamers on cross ring trajectories and you're Europa posting.

The Europa war posts are a psyop to distract you from the real conflict -- the megawar between the Enceladus anarchists and the Titan ultrasocialists.

For the record I have good money on the Great Filter being mostly that space is hard as hell and in the long run absolutely no one went interstellar so far because it's really underwhelming.

RT @Sarusquilla_: Recent commission for @isilanka ✨

If the sole response to Musk and co turning space colonisation into a turnoff is to yell about the evil degrowthers, the topic will forever remain confined to an ever-shrinking circle of well-off first world speculative writers and engineers with little political traction.

There's been lots of stupid aeronautics comparisons, so let's add one: if you were to get a 1930 Kansas farmer and ask them if they were enthusiastic about future supersonic planes, they'd just tell you to fuck off. With good reason.