90's Future Empire

>>50009290

>Butlerian Jihad
>building things for durability and mono purpose because industry but also corporations not giving a shit about building expensive stuff
>resource-strapped, so they make due with cheaper-to-manufacture and less resource intensive product
>more advanced stuff is too vulnerable to hacking
>I don't know, A E S T H E T I C, I guess

>>50009321

Also watch Moon for more on the;
>corporations not giving a shit about building expensive stuff
angle. Built to last/built for simple, single-minded durability while also shaved down to bare-minimum as a cost-saving measure.

>>50009333
Maybe there are so many citizens, and so many worlds that have just recently become colonized, it now pays more to make cheap but durable products than cheap but shitty ones because everyone is starting from square one again but they're all really far flung?

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>>50009321
Damn, I forgot asthetic was an overdone word. Pretend I said "style".

That's a good reason. I was also thinking
> Race is hyper obsessive about certain tech but doesn't care about the rest
> Thousands of scientist work night and day on warp tech but no-one can be bothered to perfect high-def visual display
Or
> Turns out apple-sleek futurism was just a fad and blocky plastic is where it's at.

>>50009290
It's quite possible to reach the spacefaring era without microcomputers; the miniaturization issue isn't as big an issue as the whole carrying enough fuel to reach delta-v. NASA used slide rules and human brainpower back in the day to reach the Moon.

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>>50009290
>How would you justify a civilization like this existing and being able to compete other "futuristic" civilizations?
Model it off of Soviet Russian tech or at least the pop culture perception of Soviet Russian tech; simple, arguably primitive, but reliable af. It can't be hacked (at least, not easily, and not without being in close proximity), all their tech has multiple redundancies, and, most of all, it's all cheap and easy to manufacture.

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>>50009290
The 90s were way past Vector graphics. Hell, even the 80s were largely better than that.

>>50009450
>Soviet
>Reliable tech
Fucking hilarious.

>>50009518
>the pop culture perception of Soviet Russian tech
pay attention, anon

>>50009360
Possibly dumb question, but would oil for plastics be able to be mined on other planets? It'd need to have lots of dead organic matter at some point to turn into it, right?

>>50009526
>pop culture perception
Even more hilarious how this stupid perception came about.

>>50009534
Yes. There are literally lakes of hydrocarbons on Titan.

There are postulated worlds with such large amounts of Carbon that it literally rains shit like butane and propane.

>>50009333
We use a DOS system from the 90s for our inventory at work and we're a major chain retailer. If that doesn't say something

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>>50009535
>pic related
Also the T-34 prolly. I'm not saying this is an accurate perception, but you could use it as a basis for making OP's idea work.

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>>50009534
That's...actually a very good question.

As dumb as the answer sounds Synthetic Plastic may be the only way.

>>50009290
Well anon the primary issue with this is your popular perception of 1990s stuff. When people talk about computers in the 1990s they think of CRT monitors with absurdly small screens, black and white and sometimes vector graphics.

The main reason why we think computers today are super powerful because they run lots of things to make it look pretty. Point and click, graphics, and a whole slew of things to make our lives easier.

In the 1950s the first digital computers and technologies were being written up and manufactured. In the 1960s we had larger and more powerful computers that took up rooms but they featured rudimentary flat-screen displays with touch-pens (big fat fuckers with a thick cord) for the US military. In the 1970s refinement of technology allowed shit to be more faster and smaller.

1980s is where things got interesting. All of the technology being used in your 90s universe would have to been conceptualized, designed and tested 10 years before. Plus in interstellar empires with 1990s technology would place emphasis on reliability (radiation hardening and easily replaceable components) rather than pure brute power. If anything having flat screen monitors with black and green is well within 1990s technology.

>>50009548
If it works why mess with it?

>>50009290
Give the game P.O.L.L.E.N. a look. JFK survived the assassination attempt, US and USSR ally, and instead of focusing on computer technology we discover some quirk in quantum physics that lets us manufacture antimatter. Not enough to break the light barrier, of course, but fairly easy access to antimatter, even if it costs more energy to produce than we can derive from it, would make interplanetary travel a relative breeze.

>>50009553

Worse comes to worse we already have good ways to produce that stuff ourselves, it's just not inefficient compared to digging it out of the ground.

If you're a space faring civilisation, converting a barren moon to growing petroleum generating algae may not be a crazy idea.

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>>50009543

>>50009290
Good old "Machine uprising happened", its a staple of Sci Fi. anything more advanced than what you discribe is a potential danger and would help an AI uprising.

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>>50009290
A shortage of materials required to make more complicated displays/better processors/sleeker materials etc. leaves a civilization's tech with a large gap between effective and expensive vs. workable and affordable.

It might be that the government and official bodies get better tech, but on the fringes of society everyone is stuck with CRTs and DOS.

>>50009290
> Everything runs command line interface

Future transhumans are so smart graphical interface woudl be unnecessary distraction.

>>50009420

The Apollo landers guidance computer was the first successful IC based microcomputer, it did things like control the descent of the lander during the landing on the moon part of the mission.

>>50010081
Shortage of rare earths which make modern cheap electronics possible would do it, we're slated to run out of all known dysprosium sources by 2040. Which will make LCDs and microchips very difficult to make without.

>>50010615
If you're space faring, wouldn't rare earth shortages become the least of your problem?

Other than the pain the in ass of prospecting entire planets at a time.

>>50010469
Didn't it overflow, becoming a useless chunk of shit, forcing Armstrong to make a manual landing in a spot that wasn't suicidal?

>>50010615
We can recycle them from existing electronics. It's just that nobody does it these day because mining more is considerably cheaper.

>>50009933
Kek

>>50010391
>Future transhumans are so smart graphical interface woudl be unnecessary distraction.
Anon the GUI has always been an unnecessary distraction, learn to bash

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>>50009290
aesthetics bump

http://rekall.me

Vector graphics are 100% believable. Not because you can't have 3D graphics in space, but because you want every single process of your computer dedicated to calculating important things, not wasting processing power for the pleasure of the astronauts. Also, it's simpler and more efficient.

>All electronics are bulky and basic-looking because of shielding from cosmic radiation and multiple redundancies built in.
>Like current military gear it's a lot more powerful under the surface, but the user interface isn't a priority.
>Gear must be serviceable far away from the civilization so you could just pop the lid of and solder things up. You can't solder microcomputers.

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Spaceship computers are already behind anyway, smaller transistors makes them more vulnerable to radiation/cosmic rays and you don't actually need that much power for most space stuff.

>>50009290
The aesthetic term is "cassette future"

>>50009579
You wot? You're confusing the 1980's with the 1990's, buddy. The 90's were the decade where computers passed the vector, black and white, 16 color graphic phase and where 16-bit got mainstream. Multimedia, CD-ROM's, True type fonts and WYSIWYG became standard.

Streetfighter 2, Wing Commander, Privateer, X-Wing, Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Arena: The Elder's Scroll, Decent, Command & Conquer, Pentium processors, Windows 3.1 and 95, are all from the 1990's.

Also, for 90's aesthetics see: http://i.4cdn.org/tg/1477582168052.pdf

The space magpies / space jews will jack your shit if it looks any good. You have to purposefully make your craft as low tech and shitty looking as possible to avoid attracting attention.

The same reason I don't wash my bicycle or even protect it from rust. Because a shitty looking bicycle is better than no bicycle.

Hell, it can even be really advanced underneath all that! You just have to make sure that from the outside everything looks like a plastic brick with an oscillascope hastily jammed into its orifices.

>>50009290

the opposite of this shits me though.

In the Civil War movie Captain America and Iron man fight in some soviet era millitary base with flat screen monitors.
shitty continuity error.

>>50011876
How are kids supposed to know they're computers otherwise?

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>>50011738
no real reason for posting this, just contributing to epic bread with more based games/aesthetics

post-apoc is best apoc

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Command Line Interface is the sexist interface.

Also, any military guys here? How does military tech look? I know they like to keep it minimalist and simplistic.

Military gear must be sturdy and functional, not good looking. Most of the gear is designed so that user can disassemble and assemble hardware down to the smallest parts. Also - bigass switches and keyboards because it must be operable in gloves (it should also apply to spacemen - in case of life support malfunction).

>>50009290
>90's

FYI: The apostrophe goes before the 9 since you're omitting the 19.

>'90s

>>50012015
People who use apostrophes to denote plurality should be shot.

>>50012032
Is that not proper grammar/spelling?

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>>50011702
Really? can't find much stuff on it.

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>>50011876
Nah Hydra had been waking them up and getting them to kill certain targets. That was the point. See in Winter Soldier there's the thing about how Bucky has repeatedly assassinated people since world war 2 and then got put back on ice. Civil War reveals that while that is true, there were also more "winter soldiers"

Having flat screens in the base makes sense if the base was still being used up until fairly recently, say when Hyrda were exposed in Winter Soldier

Navigating in space doesn't require fancy graphics, much less lots of processing power. NASA did it with slide rules.

Well-written, specialized software also is vastly more efficient for its given purpose than general-purpose software bloated from graphics and lazy designers.

In short; your question can be summed up as "how would you justify aesthetic 1 being as good as aesthetic 2?"

The actual performance, when it comes to important tasks, is about the same. The "modern" aesthetic is better for certain edge cases, but 99% of its advantage is simply allowing retards to pretend they are as good as experienced professionals.

>>50011904
Touchscreens are rare, because they malfunction easily, provide no tactile feedback, and are generally 100% inferior to buttons (which are set around the edges of a screen).

Paperwork stuff runs on windows.
Battle systems run on linux.
A lot of hardware used to use dedicated programs, but it's being shifted over to linux.

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>>50009403
>apple
>fad

As an engineer, most of the software I work with looks like it was hand-rolled by a grad student.

An some of it was. SPICE is the default for simulating circuits, and it was written in the 60s. Sure, it's usually got a cheap circuit capture GUI now, but the guts are a text file that's generated from connecting those little boxes. NEC is used to model antenna performance, and it was written in the 70s. Every once in a while someone will wrap a new Windows or Java-based UI around it, but they're never fancy.

You know what also isn't fancy? The more modern circuit design environments (which are really just an interface to run the old sim methods and the new international standard data-sharing together). They also look done on the cheap, even though licenses can cost tens of thousands a year. That's because numerical code is prone to little gotchas, and specialists are required to build and maintain the part of the code that actually does real work. It's very niche use, so you have to ask a fortune per license to justify employing anyone to create it. All company budgets are finite, so the graphics are almost always an afterthought.

You know what uses vector graphics with primary colors on a black background? All layout software. That high-contrast shit is easy to see, and that's what's important. That it's cheap also helps.

And then there's all the orgs that actually DO roll their own software. Do you think anyone is writing control software for petroleum refineries out of their garage for sale? Do you think anyone would buy it and trust it? That shit is ridiculously niche, so most companies started by writing it themselves.

You know who else wrote all their own software. Everyone in the 80s. Banks. NASA. Stock brokers. Schlumberger. Because none of that SW existed yet. It was all new. But because it works and is simple enough to run on damn near anything, it's still in use.

>>50012540
So how niche is your application? And by that I mean now many people will see it in a year, not how profitable the target industry is. If the answer is 1~10 times as many people as it took to write it, then that is tiny, and your GUI is dirt simple.

Does this need to be monitored in real time? Then nothing should move, ever, unless something goes horrible wrong. You need to see what's happening at a glance.

How complex is the math behind it? Is it something you needed a special calculus or higher class to understand, or in a field that actually depends on math and physics? Then you want a proven engine and you're going to slap a shitty UI on top of it.

How much money is your boss willing to spend to make it pretty? Don't bother, the answer is "nothing". You will have a shitty UI.

Your application is not for people. It's not entertainment. It's for work.

>>50009518
Except he's right. Consider that the USA spent $buku to develop a pen that astronauts could use in microgravity. Your typical Bic is gravity fed.

The Soviet solution: use a pencil.

Whether it worked isn't important because, in OP's fictional universe, all you need to say is, "It does."

>>50012582
Also, when I was getting to know a friend of mine with naval experience, his comment about engineers was, "you can always recognize them on a ship. They're the ones carrying stack of unmarked aluminum cases and rolls of PVC pipe, which they insist costs $10k"

>>50009548
Does that mean, if someone strikes a match, we get real-life Praxis?

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>>50012600
You know that "use a pencil thing" is a crock of shite, right?

Weirdly enough, you don't want graphite dust floating around in space and getting in your electronics.

The Soviet solution certainly was NOT to just use a pencil.

>>50010622
No. He did override the computer but he did it because he deemd the pre-programmed landing site to be u safe upon getting an up close view the scientists back on Earth couldn't have when they chose it.

>>50012600
Do you have any idea how bad it is to get graphite dust floating around a spacecraft?

>>50012032
apostrophe's

>>50012600
NASA did not do anything, Fisher invented the space pen independently then offered them to NASA. And the USSR used space pens as well.

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>>50012600
The Fishcher pen company spent $1 million of their own money on it.

The Soviets also used the space pen.

Also: >>50012675


But

>Hurr durr the smartarse scientists got took down a peg didn't they? hurr durr

>>50012600
You know, I honestly didn't. I did know about the issues with graphite but figured the soviets didn't care enough. Plus, I was told this by someone who emigrated from Soviet USSR in the early 1980s. But you made me go look and now I know, like most stuff that asshole said, it was pure bullshit. Thanks for setting me straight.

But, excluding my shitty reference, it can still work for op's use.

>>50012760
Meant to reference >>50012675

But, ok... got it.

>>50009290
How about...

The chunkier tech fulfills some other need. It's easier to repair in the field, easier to adapt to multiple configurations so you can usually take a component from one purpose-built mechanism (space ship, mining vehicle, sensor station, etc.), change some jumpers (omg, I just shat myself) and you can put it in a completely different purpose-built mechanism. But that much compatibility and cross-usefulness comes at the cost of sleek miniaturization.

This would even allow you to have sleek, miniaturized aesthetic where it makes the most sense. Some rich asshole's yacht will have colorful graphics and flat screens, holographic keyboards, etc. because it is custom-built for him.

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>>50009290
>unequal advancements in technology
>if it works don't break it
>space wizard time shenanigans

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>>50012856
I'll just post the rest since I'm already here.

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>>50012861

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>>50012870

>>50012876
>Here we go again, apparently disregarding all ethical responsibility and releasing a product with enough computational potential to shift the balance of world power overnight at *dangerously* low prices
>a child's toy that can literally guide nuclear warheads. Whoops!

man the 70s were some good times

>>50012973
nvm, i'm an idiot

>>50011904
It's shit because the people responsible for programming shuffle every 3 years.
Looks is windows 98-like.
Hardware varies widly, from hich-tech touchscreen to '70s interfaces.

>>50009290
Spaceships are expensive and will see decades of hard use so simpler and durable means of technology that can take a literal beating by potentially generations of users are preferred.

>>50013185

Oh man, that weird helmet is the best.

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>>50013657
True space age fashion.

How about Jumpspace fucks with anything more complex than a CRT monitor?

>>50013770
old sci-fi is hillarious
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpF6o2-nx4I

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>>50014452
which is why we love it so much.

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>>50014452
Hey, I remember that show.
Have another classic, with one of my favourite op themes ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AvjMHs7U7I

>>50010391
Will they too be fans of Dwarf Fortress?

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>>50012760
Am OP
can confirm

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>>50015380
Absolutely.

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Bump

>>50012600
That story is actually complete bullshit

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Le bûmp

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>1990s era computer systems
>while everyone else was on CRT the US Navy started deploying LCD flat screen stuff in 1980s

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>then decided to upgrade combat information workstations in 1995.

>>50019360
LCDs, especially back then, were not objectively better than CRTs. In exchange for the space/weight(/cost?/power?) benefits there are multiple tradeoffs in terms of how quickly they can change pixel values, viewing angle, resolution limitations, etc. which are either non-issues or generally much better with CRTs.

>>50019799
True but large screen displays are worth the cost due to diminishing returns on large CRTs. Otherwise smaller screen like workstations would rely on CRT.

>>50009290
>>50009321
>>50009403
It's those fucking minimalists. They ruined our civilization by making us unable to comprehend or appreciate any level of art, so now everything looks like a BBC Micro.

>>50020100
THIS
Fucking """modern art."""

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I'm honestly still mad that the Enterprise went from being colorful and retro-futuristic to an apple store in space.
>>50018271
A bit slow on the uptake are we?

>>50009290
>How would you justify a civilization like this existing and being able to compete other "futuristic" civilizations?
"futuristic" designs are usually actually supremely non-functional. Why would I need a ship's bridge to have polished chrome fixtures with smooth white plastic? Why should the displays be some weird, floating hologram display, when a screen works?

in order for some scifi minority report display to "compete" it needs to actually function better than a mouse and keyboard. A series of analog light displays and a dos prompt readout can be just as or more informative

>>50020193
I'm fine with abstract art, I fucking love impressionist art, grunge is my hometown, I can tolerate almost any aesthetic except minimalism. I find minimalism to be actively evil, because it discourages the creation of art, it actively seeks to reduce the amount of art in the world. I loathe it.

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>>50021645
...but in return we get elegance and zen like harmonic tranquility.
Most art is shit anyway.

>>50021937
But it looks terrible.

>>50009548
Most likely it just says that it would cost the company more to rip out your mainframes, and replace with newer servers and operating systems than the company thinks it could gain from such improvements.

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>>50021994
It's beautiful.
You know, maybe it's just too sophisticated for you?

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>>50022055

>if you don't share my subjective tastes then you're a clod

>>50022055
The only thing approaching beauty in that picture is the view from the window.

>>50022055
Maybe the beautiful frills and decorations that rich men, powerful men, and smart men have enjoyed on their own objects for millenia are too sophisticated for you?

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>>50022213
>>50022262
>>50022276
When did /tg/s tastes become so plebeian?

>>50022758
>>50021937
lamp is kitsch
pictures are kitsch
acrylic X wtf
this isn't even japanese so why zen?

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>>50021937
I can see where you're coming from, but I also think there is beauty in messiness and clutter. It feels a little more human.

>>50021937
That looks awful. If I could afford to live in a place like that, I'd spend some money to make it look actually nice rather than an Ikea showroom.

>>50022758
You're the Pleb falling for the minimalist meme.

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Man, looks like the thread has already gone through all the major points. I'll just throw in my 2 cents and say that the civilization in question probably would have propulsion/energy/chemical technology that far outpaces the advances in computer technology. Bonus point: if the computers are slower and react more sluggish than what we're used to, human actions and piloting skills could still play a major role in navigating in space.

>>50022758

I don't even think it looks bad or anything, I think his pic looks quite nice. It's his attitude that stinks like shit.

>>50012096
That's because not much exists inside that 'genre' or whatever word you want to use. It's only just becoming a big thing. Now is the time to cash in.

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>>50025988
Isn't it just retrofuturism?

>>50012600
>did u guise know women have more ribs

>I heard it in church

>species deals with space travel better than us, maybe hibernates for shitty winters as well
>develops nuclear weapons
>no cold war
>uses them to push spaceships
I can see aliens doing limited colonization of their stellar neighbors using retro tech if they are biologically rugged enough.

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>>50026059
Sort of. Retrofuturism is a broad term for anything that extrapolates any period of the past to the future; as such, it's too broad for any particular analysis or cohesive archetypes. When your 'genre' technically ranges from Archer to Batman Returns, from Fallout to The Time Machine, what you have is completely ineffective for differentiating styles. As a result, there are now subclassifications of retrofuturism. The term itself will be defunct in about a decade.

Cassette Futurism is the future from the perspective of the eighties/nineties. It's blocky, it's grimy, it's hard and nasty but it gets the job done. It's pure function. As a reflection of all of this, it takes the eighties approach to the human spirit and projects it onto the screen: there's a great deal of anxiety about the interaction between humanity and technology, about the limitations of technology. There's an almost palpable sense of betrayal, which is reflecting the unfulfilled promises of earlier retrofuture trends. The blocky utilitarian form of the Nostromo is telling here. Horror at the growing abjection of the human form in a post-Vietnam world is captured especially well in this image of the android from Alien.

The image you posted is Raygun Gothic. It's the future from the perspective of the forties/fifties. It's smooth, it's shiny, everything is art deco and favours form over function. Everything is as much a tool as a work of art. Although I've picked one of the grimier works for raygun gothic, and perhaps slightly out of time period, it definitely picks up on the same threads: the computer here, complete with video screen, wood-grain inlay, and attached clock, hold an incredible optimism towards the future. Likewise, and unlike our android from alien, the robot is shiny, beautiful and chrome.

From a visual perspective they couldn't be more different. From an ideological perspective they favour different things and reflect different times in human society.

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>>50026059
Ehhh. Kinda
Someone's gonna shit on me for getting the dates wrong but I think retro-futurism is from '40s and '50s sci-fi and nobody really expected the world to be all ray-guns and jetpacks by the year 2000. Cassete futurism is a genuine attempt to imagine what the world would look like by 2010-ish is as written during the '70s and '80s.

I think.

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USS New Jersey's CIC from the 1980s.

>>50009290
One must always keep in mind that the Nostromo was a tugboat.

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>>50028496
a huge, clunky, beautiful tugboat

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>>50029179

I just love the designs in the Alien universe. They are clunky, they are industrial, they are glorious.

>>50029179
>MU/TH/UR AI main computer is 2.1 Terabytes

that's adorable

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>>50029179
>Juggernaut M Class starfreighter

I take it something called a Juggernaut is bigger than usual? Most ships from that era of WY universe seem to be big as a rule

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OP Here
Holy Shit
Thread not Dead

>>50009290
>How would you justify a civilization like this existing

Semiconductor fabs are unbelievably expensive, high-tech projects. A cutting-edge, modern fab circa 2016 runs something in the range of $15 billion to build - and that's not even counting the enormous advanced, specialized industrial base required to build and maintain the equipment to run them, or the cost of the resources required to actually make the chips (and the massive supporting industry processing and supplying those resources).

Maintaining a modern semiconductor industry requires an economy as large, interconnected, and voracious, and an industrial base as high-tech as Earth - which has the benefit of the most human-friendly environment possible.

For a space colony, building up their own industrial civilization and economy from scratch, carving out a home in a hostile environment, manufacturing modern chips will not be possible for a long, long time. On the other hand, things like analog storage, 1970s-era chips, and vacuum tubes can be built much much more easily, with much less precision technology. And critically, they're much more rugged - space hardware is built *today* with 1970s-era chips, which are far more tolerant of things like radiation. Analog, parts-big-enough-to-see technology also has the benefit of being repairable - if a Commodore 64 broke, you could just break out the circuit diagram that came in the manual, and replace the offending chip.

Suppose that, say, various mostly-self-sufficient colonies had been established throughout the solar system, when some sudden disaster wiped out civilization and technological infrastructure on Earth. They'd certainly have no logic industry of their own - chips are very light, so can be cheaply imported from Earth. They'd only have the crude semiconductor capacity needed to make good-enough solar panels.

[Cont]

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>>50029283

Might be because most of the films (and Isolation) are set on the galactic "frontier" in one way or the other, and like people already said, frontier equipment tends to be pretty big. So going with the "space truckers" analogy, the Nostromo and Torrens might be the equivalent of an Australian road train or Russian Uragan truck. Picture very much related.

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>>50029283
>>50030014

That picture is actually still relevant to this thread but not the one I meant to post.

>>50029992
After they'd hurriedly cobbled together enough patches and substitutions to keep themselves alive without the trickle of advanced technology from Earth's global factories, and the computers started to be superseded by the simpler circuitry they could actually maintain and replace and grow, this might be what you end up with.

Also, much harder to hack or hijack, which could be very important if the civilization in question has had a very bad experience with rogue AI, or is currently under threat by them or what they left behind.

Given the Martian and Lunar space elevators, and the Belters' lack of a gravity well - not to mention the numerous on-orbit propellant depots - the increased mass isn't a critical concern.

>and being able to compete other "futuristic" civilizations

Oh. No hope there.

>>50009290
They're built blocky, small, and simple, with a large number of redundant components and shielding from radiation. Perhaps all technology looks like some refuse from an Apple store on their planets, but starships are built like submarines or battleships, sturdy, utilitarian, and not particularly comfortable.

>>50011471
>rekall.me
Nice, but what is that Vanderbilt store? I did a search and there doesn't seem to have ever been such a clothes store. >this is where I learn I've taken an art and style website too seriously

>>50009290
Maybe the extra bulk houses other electronics. Or maybe it houses very thick shock absorbing baffles to prevent damage. Maybe those are actually flat screens with a bunch of stuff packed in behind it. If I was going to design a computer that had to go in deep space for decades without failing, I would include some pretty strong shock absorbing baffles, several Banks of capacitors set up to serve as internal surge protectors, a small internal battery backup or other power source in case something happens to the rest of the ship. Maybe some extra emergency gear to serve as redundant backups like a small geiger counter and carbon monoxide detector.
As for command line interface is, that would certainly be my choice as a security precaution. If my computer is on my ship I'll run a specific proprietary operating system with its own unique command lines structure and syntax, there is very little chance of spies or saboteurs just tapping or clicking their way through my security. Only people who actually know how to use my systems would be able to use my systems. At the risk of sounding like an old part, it is one of the things I miss about the 19 eighties and early nineties period when the only people who use the internet or the people who actually understood how computers work. Before Gates and jobs made it easy for any random retard to spout bullshit to the world.


What always bothers me is the idea of a single ship's reactor. What, you only have one source of power for absolutely everything on the ship? If anything happens to your sole source of power, the entire ship dies. That is just really sloppy engineering.

>>50030681
>What always bothers me is the idea of a single ship's reactor.

That's not actually *that* unrealistic, you know. You're not going to bring along enough power to run your ship twice over, so that if half of it dies you're still fine; that would be a waste of space, resources, and mass. It's totally not unheard of for nuclear submarines to just have the one nuclear reactor.

Of course there's backup power systems, but that's just things like batteries.

>>50026892
Good post.

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I made a thread about this a couple weeks back.

The fact of the matter is the aesthetic quality or "style" or "-punk" does not have a name, as everyone gives a different response as to what the name is.

Another option is the Embargo Route.

Take modern North Korea and, for a while, Brazil. North Korea is cut off technologically because they're asshats and insular as fuck and expect to wear the big Napoleon hat and still be taken seriously. As a result, we put them in the corner and don't let them have either access to modern electronics, or the economy and infrastructure to buy them. They're limited to whatever they can scrounge domestically or smuggle in from China, so they deal with faulty cell phones n'shit and cannibalize them to make functional PCs that look like some shit Stalinists fired out.

Brazil had a period where they refused to import anything from outside the country and so demanded everybody buy and invest in the domestic computer industries. So you had ripoffs of Nintendo Wis and Apple IIs and as a result, some of the best and most gritty programmers and hackers ever exist in Brazil. Them being poor as fuck also meant that Brazilians had to hijack other servers to play games, which meant sucky ping. Explains some of their animosity online now, doesn't it?

Space is an uneasy place. Think of it. Think of what happened with the United States warring to separate from Great Britain. Think of Australia gaining independence. Think of Mexico splitting from France and Spain. The mother country wants to make sure that their child nations don't cut the cord from them. They want loyal colonists and to expand their nation, not something that'll snap and go "thanks ma/pa" before doing their own thing and oh hey may as well use the grandfathered technology for RAILGUNS AND POSITIONING SYSTEMS to fire back in the event their independence isn't respected. And so, they want to make sure opportunity for rebellion is very, very low.
(continued)

>>50031834
(part 2)
So they limit the sorts of people whom can even go live on the colonies, they limit the text books and information that can even get there. Subtly. Quietly. They prevent colonies from having the kinds of resources, science, management or funding for anything. They deliberately try to make sure the people going are screened and neither have the information nor access to the information to make anything big in their lifetimes. It's easy to stop brilliance. You'd need to be blatantly and obviously brilliant as a single computer scientist to sneak aboard a ship with some hidden comp sci books and resources in tow, and you'd need to teach people in secret.

If no one in the colonies is given the privacy nor funding on high for independence from the government OR the private businesses they use, then they can't make any domestic high tech in space, nor can they receive any. They're stuck, trapped, making only what they know. Like 1950s Cuba being stuck with 1950s automotive technology. They may be able to build a 1950s Ford truck in their sleep, but it's still an engine and tech and science from the 50s.

Colonies and industrial ships and the like being oppressed both institutionally and by the businesses themselves to keep the colonists and workers as divorced from technology and independence as possible could be a way to keep them dependent, beholden, and loyal.

And thus, you get people working with commodore 64s in space.

>>50031900
(part 3)

The next sorta futurism will probably involve stuff like this. Government and culture that wants to impress and instill its dominnce and control and camradery on populations that just want to go be independent and/or spore their own kingdoms and empires on other planets, and the passive aggressive arguments they have on whom made whom and who controls what soil and what the other can do about it from billions and billions of miles away when even a railgun round traveling light speed may not be fast enough to spank them by the time they move. And all the little people caught between.

All the little people that may as well be meat shields and tragedies. All the little people that justify colonization of a place, souls and lives to populate a would-be king's nation, effectively just there in lieu of computers or robots for propaganda purposes so any retaliation or threat imagined by homeworld can be pointed at as having a fatal and destructive effect on the population. It's impossible to look good if you're firing railgun rounds at annexed territory that is not just a heavy metals manufacturing moon, but also an orphanage and planet sized school system for children. You don't hate children, do you? :( Oh no our precious children! This means war! Provoked by the guys provoked by us for keeping their space gold I mean provoked by the guys infringing on our god given soverignty.

So the Nation Seed wealthy oligarchs starve and exploit people to live on and operate on their company owned habitats and hardware, but make sure all of the computer power on board has less power than a calculator in their pocket.

But as a tradeoff, the technology they're allowed to work with is incredibly sturdy, tried and true and perfected to be dirt cheap.

>>50032048
(part 4)
So as a result you'll have people working in their space garages on some colony worlds making secret computer hardware, cobbled together from home worlds and smuggled by anarchists, patriots and compassionate people to smartass hot blooded highschooler wiz kid types.

You'll have the guys that get 3d printers and vehicle sized facilities that can take handfuls of dirt and separate the minerals and materials to their core components and refine them into copper, carbon and similar.

You'll have guys that use future equivalents of Arduinos and Raspberry Pis in place of the cheap ass C64s that native industries limits the populations to, that are used like satellite dishes in Saudi Arabia, where the technology is outlawed and yet tolerated when it's owned by some but not others, and not at all when it's pointed out.

Everything will be the equivalent of future tech duct tape, micro OLEDs and unreliable but futuristic touch screens mixed with clunky as fuck bash and CRTs and that godawful green-text-on-black Pipboy style command consoles, as green text on a black background gives the most readability for the lowest amount of electricity, living in a harmony of diverse poverty and oppression by desperation, public and private industry.

Progressive colonies, however, will have all the good stuff and be able to take it with them. The duality of some countries pilot colonies favoring principle of freedom and the rights to science, knowledge and technology over soverign control vs. making sure the satellite nations/colonies remain subserviant and underteched.

In which case there's also good reason to disguise OLED screens as run of the mill CRT displays and hide button sized super computers behind big gaudy boxy blocky towers and integrated stations. So the equivalent of space Mexicans don't rip it up and take it when they visit and get jealous of the 'first world' tech being trusted to the working class rubes.

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>>50009551

Russia has so many problems with the T-34 they had some American engineers look at some and they concluded that the samples they were sent had been sabotaged by germans.

>>50032348

Had*

>>50032348
>"Sabotaged by Germans?"
>"Nope. Functional Russians."

Jesus christ.

>>50032440

http://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.com/2012/07/wwii-myths-t-34-best-tank-of-war.html

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>>50009290
> CRTs for more rugged durability like entering atmo in harsh conditions, etc.
>It's not uncommon for heavy workload servers to only run in command line to cut down on bloat and unnecessary shit running on them. The only problem is that you need people who know what they're doing which is important on a spacecraft anyway.
>Redundancies available in case of catastrophic failure.
>People really love mechanical keyboards these days.

>>50032686
it is a tribute to the Russian people that they continue to exist despite their fucking retarded leaders and their fucking backwards technology.

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What if there's a super-contagious alien nanoplague that corrupts or destroys any computer technology more advanced than what we had in the late 80s/early 90s? Supercomputers and AI can still be built, but they have to be built in hermetically sealed factories and kept in giant lead cases to prevent infection; unimportant stuff like PCs, monitors, game systems, etc. are built primitive.

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>>50032903
> Ancient Empire was almost destroyed by robot uprising
> Created a safeguard by which no-one could create advanced computer systems
> safeguard persists long after they evolved themselves into a higher dimension

I could see this being a setting.

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>>50032903

That's arguably Traveller's deal. Beware the Black Fleets.

>>50032984
>Ancient Empire was almost destroyed by robot uprising

It's almost this, too -- the cultural resistance to rapid tech advance in the Third Imperium is largely because the Vilani homeworld was originally ruled for thousands of years by ancient war machines, and they only got free when the things' nuclear batteries finally died.

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>>50032903
>>50032984
Or how about this: ancient galactic civilization is destroyed by nanoplague created during a great war. The plague never goes away and it corrupts any advanced computer technology. A smartphone will just stop working but if an AI gets infected it will slowly turn into a malicious alien cyberbrain. That pairs nicely with the evil AI stories in movies like 2001: A Space Odessey, Alien and Terminator.

>>50033162
>evil AI stories in movies like 2001: A Space Odessey
Hal wasn't evil, he was just following orders that conflicted with those implemented at his origin, thus malfunctioning.
If you get what I mean.

>>50033269
I know, but you get the general idea: in sci-fi movies from the late 80s-early 90s era the AI is an antagonist, even if it isn't "evil".

so kind of like the starship graveyard in Dead Space 3?

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>>50033299
>in sci-fi movies from the late 80s-early 90s

Oh yeah, who here has read the Moontrap Timeline? It's a worldbuilding exercise that ties a ton of old sci-fi movies into a single timeline.

>>50032348
>quality control throttling tank deliveries
>suspend quality control indefinitely
Also I'm flabbergasted that people keep purging their militaries. It cripples the institution which leads to wars as everyone realizes you are a fucktard.

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>>50033444
You are right anon. Clearly all these world leaders are idiots compared to you. If only you had been on hand to impart your wisdom history would have been very different.

>>50009548
Same here I work for a medical supply business and we use DOS based stuff for everything not-HR related. It's old and has problems but it works and works fast.

Anyone who has worked for the DOD medical side can attest that CHCS is way faster than AHLTA.

>>50030790
I think it is a better idea to have three reactors each capable of supplying 50% of the ship's needs. Run each at 70% of their max. Keep it efficent. So if there is a problem with one reactor it can be shut down for repairs without compromising the rest of the power network. Having a number of smaller, more efficient reactors just makes sense compared to banking all your needs on a single massive inefficent reactor.

>>50019375

The story of these are really interesting:

http://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_Tell_Me_What_to_DO_-_The_Story_of_the_Naval_Tactical_Data_System,_NTDS

>>50012185
Fucking BFTs

Also everything is designed to be used with gloves on.

>>50033510
Has there ever been a case of a massive military purge that didn't then lead into a comedy of errors in their next war? This is a serious question I can only think of three or four examples of someone even trying this at all, pretty tired.

I appreciate this thread and all you posters.

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>>50033789
I know dude but they do purges for a reason. Clearly whoever is in charge and his/her team of advisors thought the loss to military power was worth rooting out corruption, dissidents, incompetence or whatever. The people in charge have access to the historical records as you and probably more training, education and knowledge about their specific scenario then
> purges != bad

Btw I love this chicks headset

>>50033789
Doesn't change the fact that the purge was necessary/advantageous at the time. A large military is expensive to maintain and update.

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>>50009543

>>50033907
I should clarify that I was more criticizing later leaders more than Stalin. Namely ones that launched military operations after or during the purge. Stalin was 150% convinced war was not imminent so I consider his case more understandable, along with Iran. It was really a jine at Erdogan most of all. Anyway polite sage I want to learn more about ergonomics.

>>50021645
Minimalism in what sense? Electronics? Home furnishing? Decor, or art, or landscaping?

I like functional minimalism. Putting a bunch of things and a bunch of colors on something doesn't make it good or aesthetic. No icons on the desktop, no clashing colors, simple, stark elegance.

You shouldn't confuse Apple's shitty "chrome and plastic" technology with minimalism. That's just their version of sleek and shiny. Real minimalism looks more like >>50021937, though I'd change the light and the pictures and the knick-knacks.

Good minimalism gives you all the effectiveness of what you're trying to do while eliminating the clutter and the useless designs and displays, much like CRTs and 80s/90s computer tech.

>>50033095
Explain the Black Fleets or point out where I can read about them.

Cli interfaces are efficient as long as the crew is trained. Crt based monitors are too, for work stations. Ease of repair is a consideration.

>>50034337

They're ships infected by the Virus, a sapient organism that's one part of what wrecks the Third Imperium inbetween the Rebellion and the The New Era, though it had been kicking around the edges of the setting for a while before that happened.
You can read all about 'em in Traveller: TNE's sourcebook about the Virus, "Vampire Fleets."

https://mega.nz/#F!lM0SDILI!ji20XD0i5GTIUzke3iv07Q
Link courtesy of Traveller General.

>>50009450

And what would some of the cons of it be?

>>50034644
>And what would some of the cons of it be

It doesn't exist. That's the con.

>>50032984
Dune has that setting

I was really hoping Battlestar Galactica would be this when Adama said that technology was deemed unsafe due to the cylons.
But it feels like they sort of forgot.

just cause something looks like junk doesnt mean it is

so you have CRTs that can draw faster than an LCD, you have magnetic tape with thousands of times the storage of solid state, the beige plastic is almost indestructible, the user prompt is still command line because it takes up less space and their scientists hate user friendliness and gatekeep the casuals

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This is the e-3 sentry's operator consoles, still in use to this day. The military practically still runs on old sci fi tech.

>>50037474
This. Combine it with the fact that in space you need reliability, ruggedness and uniformity between systems when sent into space and the fact that contact and timescales are measured in years - something that flashy, consumer-oriented electronics aren't capable of surviving. Modern digital electronics are also fragile and running on seemingly outdated but ultimately robust systems might be preferable to an i-Ship.

>>50037882
I like it when the super shiny ship and the boxy ship are actually equally matched, and the difference is mostly a matter of personal philosophy instead of "my tech is better than yours"

>>50013770
Looks like in the future our women would wear hijabs...

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>>50009333
Also throwing Outland out there. 80s space western with Sean Connery. Very good example of the old futurism and heartless space corporations.

Also SS13 inspiration, if you're into that

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Random bump.

>>50039222

What the hell is that on the right?

>>50009518
MIR lasted forever. Russian space tech was pretty solid.

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>>50041207
A remote?

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>>50041270
Thank God for duct tape and chewing gum.

>>50041270
>Soviet tech was pretty solid
Tell that to Vladimir Komarov.

>>50041625
As a very wise man once said "Russian parts, American parts. All made in Taiwan!"

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>>50041779
Did the soviets have the money to import everything?