4. Nitpicky, but gravitational waves are REALLY hard to detect. There's no way they'd have a gravitational wave detector active if there was anything they could shut down. Especially not if they had given up on powering the optical telescope.
[...]
8. The fight against the Ilwrath is weird. Stall it for ten minutes? The Vindicator would have been toast by then. Also, that Avenger had a damaged cloaking device; it wasn't simply overconfidence.

If you want realistic gravity, then the star control style of battles must be tremendously speed up from real time.  With the speed you travel relative to planets, the influence of gravity from said planets would have no noticeable effect on your ship's trajectory.

So 10 minutes of real time might equate to 10 seconds of melee time, no?

Not the only solution; you can keep a dogfighting feel to combat if you try. In Peeru, I chose that the drive used in-system uses space stretching so that the ships are entangled in a hypertorus. The wraparound is actually real, and the ships suffer scale-changing effects that make them seem (and only seem) to be comparable in size to planets. This is practically necessary in order to make it possible not to get into a fight with every ship in the inner solar system at the same time. Considering crossing the entire solar system takes half a day of game time and traveling just an AU takes only 16 minutes, getting super duper swarmed will be all too easy if fights are decompressed in time.

I remember starting the book and being a bit put off by it. This thread got me to start it over again.

I remember the problems from before and still think they're problems. Generally, it seems like the author was just running with nifty ideas that popped into his head rather than thinking things through and searching for consequences and making sure that things were in the state they would have been in already when it starts.

1) The porn watching is dumb except the first time, and especially dumb when people who'd been involved in things get distracted by it as if it's new and they'd never seen any before.
2) They should have been shutting down sections for a long time, not thinking about it a few days out from the very end.
3) One would not expect there to be a science section on the starbase, which is present for refuelling and repair. Where would you get a science section in time for all those '"that's our scientists' report"? Well, the colony was about 30% scientists by population!
4) Nitpicky, but gravitational waves are REALLY hard to detect. There's no way they'd have a gravitational wave detector active if there was anything they could shut down. Especially not if they had given up on powering the optical telescope.
5) Wu is a moron if he didn't immediately get the implication that he should get his telescope. Why make a deal out of his taking a while?
6) Why is every starbase crewman we see in part 1 male?
7) Why did the Ur-Quan put a major human tactical genius on the station? They should all be on the ground. I can't tell why he didn't push for and get overall operational control immediately. I suppose he kind of did, but after the battle I don't see how he could end up not keeping it (I haven't gotten that far, so maybe something comes up).
8) The fight against the Ilwrath is weird. Stall it for ten minutes? The Vindicator would have been toast by then. Also, that Avenger had a damaged cloaking device; it wasn't simply overconfidence.

I did like the 'what if it was a trap' thought. That was a nice addition.

I don't know, maybe Peeru couldn't stand up to such scrutiny. I just feel like this needed some beta reading. Most of these would only take tiny tweaks to address (either explain and otherwise leave as is, or remove)

He's been spending most of his video game since trying out supermelee. Quite a bit of it has been rather useless for learning to be better, like human vs human with him at both controls just shooting things and seeing what happens.

Still, he did eventually manage to go back and beat the Ur-Quan at Vela, losing a cruiser but keeping Fwiffo alive.

He also found the Taalo shield, and realized that could help out in their other save file.

I wonder what it would take to apply your mac-building magic to the balance mod. I'd like to actually be able to try that out some time…

Well, I have windows machines available. But it'd still be nice.

Ah, good. I always felt that the power drain on the fighters was out of place.

I guess I could look into making a mac build.

My son resumed his own session and reached Vela. He saved, and tried to face the Ur-Quan flying the ship himself. This went poorly.

So, he spent the next two days in Supermelee trying to train up. At first, he was having trouble beating a goldfish (i.e. human player with no one flying). His sister took the other human controls and is still having trouble, but supermelee is their big thing now.

Unfortunately, yesterday had a big meltdown because of a Kohr-Ah vs Spathi matchup that was just too tedious, plus he (Kohr-Ah) lost, plus I was advising her (Spathi) how to fly it since that's what you need in the campaign mode (and he was flying it roughly indistinguishably from a Good AI level except for the occasional double fire ring for no reason due to wrong key presses).

It came out that he didn't realize the blades were long ranged. Maybe he'll do better tonight now that I told him he can hold the key down.

Now I'm trying to imagine translating that into the diplomacy-speak the AI could understand from Spaceward Ho!

This sounds like it could be very funny…

PM me a link to the exact post so I can delete it. I don't want to guess which one(s) you mean.

I think that is about as far as that idea should go.

I do not see justification for that. It could be much faster or slower, and far more lumpy.

Also, you started at zero. Some professions are already mostly handled by AI. Humans have been relegated to second-layer responders in these roles.

This reminds me of a Heinlein article where he said how nationalism was a good thing - an incomplete thing, but a step up from being solely concerned with the individual.

Did you ever read Too Like the Lightning? That last comment reminded me of Bryar Kosala.

I posted this on the Star Control Reddit sub, and figured I'd duplicate it here (and SCDB): Write a story inspired by the title of this thread. It doesn't need to have this as the title. There doesn't even need to literally be an Eluder with 29 Spathi and 1 Ilwrath.

Wow, there are a lot more of them than I thought. I'll see about compacting some of the more similar ones.