This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”

Definitely enjoyed the first one, didn’t notice any problems with it myself. What was remarkable to me, is that he manages to make the three-dimensional combat easily follow-able, something I see a lot of authors struggle with.

Especially the politics on here. I’ve seen some wild takes going completely unquestioned.

Here’s a picture of a to-scale model to emphasize what the other comment is saying - Ingenuity isn’t that small, and also remember that Mars’ surface gravity is only about 40% of Earth’s.

So by all means correct me if I’m wrong, but is this really that bad?

Like, people always freak out about “turning one falling object into many” because they would still share the same collective kinetic energy, but smaller objects are far more likely to burn up high in the atmosphere rather than penetrate for a destructive impact.

The article describes 37 boulders, each with a ~15kT kinetic energy. We have record of meteor events in this magnitude, and they aren’t terribly destructive. Nor is it more than a footnote in terms of Earth’s daily total energy budget; the Earth isn’t going to be cooked by a meteor-swarm of this scale.

It’d seem to me that the biggest risk would actually be peppering Earth’s orbital region with far smaller objects that could still damage satellites, no?

c/worldbuilding

Thanks for the shoutout! It’s going to be a slow climb up, but I’m looking forwards to growing this place as well.

Those’re some absolutely gorgeous floofs there. Especially the Ragdoll(?) - I have a soft spot for those!