Mars is a meme planet with no real resources or reason to settle aside from the reason that it looks cool. The planet's core is essentially dead, meaning there's no magnetic field to protect the surface from deadly space radiation. As a result, all colonial buildings would have to be built underground and pressurised, just like a space habitat. Not too bad, right? Well, Mars' atmosphere is thin enough that, for human purposes, it's a vaccuum, but for attempts to land on the planet, it's the worst kind of atmosphere. Solar wind blows away any significant atmosphere but there's just enough there to be awkward - spacecraft landing on Mars will burn up in the atmosphere if they are built with no consideration for atmosphere but the atmosphere is also too thin to be used for direct aerobraking (such as landings on Earth or Titan) - requiring a joint mechanism for landing that incorporates rocket engines and parachutes, increasing complexity and cost for any mission landing on Mars. This is less space useful for "dry" mass (people, food, water, supplies, anything that isn't the spacecraft structure + fuel essentially).

What else does Mars have? Well, there's the one-third Earth gravity that could cause the potential for muscle atrophy and reduced bone density (among other potential health risks we can't estimate yet), particularly for those growing up in such an environment. People growing up on Mars and living their entire lives there would have to perform rigourous training regimens to ever be able to go back to Earth-normal gravity, as otherwise their bodies would weigh three times as much as they would be used to. What about the drastic temperature variation that Mars recieves every day-night cycle that would quickly wear down and destroy exposed components such as communications equipment, I mean that's pretty drastic. This is all before considering that Mars has no particular natural resources that make it suited for habitation. Where Ceres, Deimos, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa have multiple-Earth's-worth of water ice, Titan has ample hydrocarbon lakes and the biggest heat sink in the solar system or Mercury has sunlight, Mars has nothing. Want minerals? The asteroid belt has you covered by an order of magnitude more, while also being much cheaper and less costly in regards to Delta-V to obtain. Even Mars' moons Deimos and Phobos are incredibly useful staging areas, as their essentially null gravity makes landing and extraction of ice easy, but their gravel-esque composition makes them easy to hollow out for cheap radiation shielding. But even then, if you can protect against radiation on Mars, you can do it a million times cheaper in space, while also being able to control the gravity of your habitat because of based centrifugal force, meaning you can easily live in 1G gravity your entire life.

This is all before considering that terraforming is a project that would require at least a civilisation at level two on the Kardashev scale (complete control of all resources of a given star) - where we only rank at barely 0.7 (not even capable of fully harnessing our own planet). Good luck trying to melt a literal planet's worth of mass to restart the core for that magnetic field, and another planet's worth to increase the gravity to Earth's. Not to mention the question of where you're going to get all of that water from to fill the oceans and the air to breathe, because all that mass has to come from somewhere too.

It's probably just easier to build a shit ton of space stations in a Dyson Sphere orbiting the sun tbh fam. Planets are more trouble than they're worth.

>the virgin mars


>the chad o'neill cylinder

Quote from: BaconShelf on April 08, 2018, 08:23:29 AM

Quote from: Fedorekd on April 08, 2018, 07:44:02 AM

Wake up
Go to lectures
Do some coursework
Play video games
Sleep

This basically

I guess you guys left out the eating part because British "cuisine" isn't food 😏

I don't eat much anymore

Quote from: bzkx on April 07, 2018, 05:25:52 AM

Quote from: Desty on April 07, 2018, 04:37:33 AM

Quote from: bzkx on April 07, 2018, 04:29:41 AM

you are a big stupid

no, you are

I do not punch or own laptops

It had it coming. What else can I say but that you're big gay?

UUUU

So this means that all the gun channels on YouTube are just gonna get shut down I'm guessing?

peanut butter is based

I saw it. My thoughts upon leaving were "I spent money watching this."

Me and my friends decided to see it today. I'm gonna be disappointed if it's anything but utterly shit.

Quote from: BaconShelf on March 29, 2018, 06:24:05 PM

Quote from: Assassin 11D7 on March 29, 2018, 06:02:21 PM

Quote from: BaconShelf on March 29, 2018, 05:45:21 AM

Quote from: Boomdeyadah on March 28, 2018, 01:40:24 PM

Unironically just played the entire Reach campaign for the first time since 2011. Yeah it's still crap. The skyboxes and camerawork were great though. Elites were fun to fight until the Ultra's decided to strafe like gods

I always felt that Halo Reach had some really good level design in the campaign. In particular, ONI: Sword Base and your ability to do objectives in any order, Exodus, New Alexandria and Pillar of Autumn. I also liked Long Night of Solace though I generally seem to be in a minority of people who liked the Sabre segment.

Tip of The Spear is also fun but is always gonna be offset by the fact that you get hyped by the cutscene then get stuck in a fairly small linear path after it finishes.

People didn't like the Sabre section? That's the first I've heard of this.

Yeah I've heard a lot of people say they found it kind of tedious on repeat playthroughs and that the Sabre's mechanics were a but shallow. I can see where they're coming from as the enemy spawns aren't really diverse or randomised, but I always had a lot of fun in that section.

Everyone that I know says they wished there had been more of that in the game, even if it was just some separate gamemode.

I don't really see the validity of the complaint about shallow mechanics. I mean, if you're talking about vehicles in Halo as a whole, then yeah I guess, but it's not a vehicle-focused game like World of Tanks.

the spawns and difficulty of the enemy fighters/dropships were pretty mediocre, but it was still fun.

I'm not the one who thinks these things. I really enjoy Long Night of Solace as a complete package.

Quote from: BaconShelf on March 29, 2018, 05:55:01 PM

[img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/252298926433107971/428991130454065192/1522327994843.png[/img
DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

nice try

frick

Cryptum and Silentium are the best Halo books.

"No!"

Unironically just played the entire Reach campaign for the first time since 2011. Yeah it's still crap. The skyboxes and camerawork were great though. Elites were fun to fight until the Ultra's decided to strafe like gods

I always felt that Halo Reach had some really good level design in the campaign. In particular, ONI: Sword Base and your ability to do objectives in any order, Exodus, New Alexandria and Pillar of Autumn. I also liked Long Night of Solace though I generally seem to be in a minority of people who liked the Sabre segment.

Tip of The Spear is also fun but is always gonna be offset by the fact that you get hyped by the cutscene then get stuck in a fairly small linear path after it finishes.

If I only scanned in the negatives of my and Ec Mrs Chalies travels. I did a ton of pretty good architectural shots and people. That’s one of my regrets. I didn’t keep my negatives.

Completely serious question. What's a negative?

what happened to that YouTube Kids thing

also there'll be a bit where all the heroes are stood back to back and the camera does a cool slow mo pan around them all as they [prepare to] fight minions

Halo and the Star Wars prequel era/ clone wars (moreso than the OT because I only had the prequels on VHS for a while) were my main series' growing up so I gained a pretty (un)healthy interest in science fiction and astrophysics. Both series' going to utter shit around the same time led me to more or less start looking for more scifi media, which led me to more classic and harder science fiction stuff.

Getting an interest in concept art around 2014-ish led me to games art as a subject, so I started worldbuilding to support my own original designs, which was what led me to becoming interested in trying to make stuff scientifically accurate.

My reading/ to-watch list right now has The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune, Armour (half way done), Ringworld, Firefly (rewatch), Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5 and Stargate and also maybe Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on it so a lot of science fiction lol. I read Starship Troopers, The Forever War and all of The Expanse (and watched the series) last year too.