u/CycleZestyclose1907

"Laser weaponry? That's a concert venue. The lasers are entirely decorative and harmless."

"Your 'harmless' laser shot down one of our ships!"

"Okay, leaving the question of why one of your ships was flying where it had no right to be, how was it supposedly shot down? Those lasers are pretty, but they're not powerful enough to cause even a sunburn."

"That was what we want to know! The pilot was clearly sniped through his cockpit glass. Recordings clearly show a burst of anomalous neural activity and muscle seizures when your lasers swept over the ship..."

"Anomalous neural... did your pilot have an epileptic seizure from seeing lots of flashing lights?"

In honor of our European friends visiting the USA for FIFA...

Earth wins the rights to host a major galactic cultural event. Galactic media pundits predict a disaster because Earth is a Death World. Alien tourists are sure to die in droves if not from the insanely violent humans, then from Earth's violent weather and wild life.

But when the tourists arrive, they find...

1. The human hosts aren't violent. They CAN BE violent, but the humans are very sociable and friendly, both the common civilians and authority figures. In fact, many human authority figures (police officers, bureaucrats, etc) are much friendlier than many of their alien counterparts on other world.

2. Earth's weather can be as volatile as reputed, but every human building seems to have as much life support as space station of the same size. It might be hot enough to literally cook a tourist outside, but the tourist is perfectly fine just inside the door. How do the humans even keep their building interiors a comfortable temperature when there isn't even an airlock on the outer doors?

3. Wild life aren't running rampant through the streets of Earth's cities. Mostly. What's living in Earth's urban areas aren't swarming to attack alien tourists.

4. And human technology is way more advanced that the galactic "primitive savages" stereotype has led the tourists to believe.

5. And the food? Some of it's poisonous to alien visitors sure, but aliens quickly learn to check listed ingredients for chemicals hazardous to their species. And what they can eat tastes amazing...

Messages home from alien tourists are full of complaints about how Galactic Media got Earth's peoples and cultures wrong...

"The ancient relic connected to the galactic network?"

"Yes. As soon as we powered it on."

"What's it doing?"

"It looks like it's downloading security and update patches."

"But I thought you said it was last turned on two million years ago."

"I did. And there's A LOT of patches to download. This could take a while."

In a galactic civilization that classifies sapient species into the binary categories of "predator" and "prey", the concept of a "monster hunter", a predator whose hunting strategy is to look like prey in order to lure in prey who are themselves predators, is a completely alien concept. So when humans explain the concept, the idea goes viral.

Species that consider themselves predators find the entire idea horrifying, that there are creatures that might regard THEM as prey.

Species that everyone calls "prey"... are suddenly reevaluating their relationships with the predator species.

This happens because...

1. Galactic civilization runs on an ancient portal network that spans the galaxy.

2. Humans being isolated, invent their own portal technology from first principals.

3. Being isolated, humanity doesn't know the galactic portal network even exists.

4. As a result, humanity's experimental portals lack certain features that the ancient portal have: like being able to discriminate between target portals. Or the ability to deny a portal connection.

5. End result: ancient portals in range will randomly send alien traffic to the Sol system. And the only way to leave the Sol system is via a human made portal which will send the traveler to a random portal in its range, which is USUALLY an ancient portal, but is sometimes another human portal in the Sol system.

And because the galactic portal system is ancient, the only people who know how to build ancient portals or upgrade human portals to ancient standards can't be arsed to come out to Sol to fix the problem.

Text book response is that most races will give up researching FTL drives and let the Aliens be their one interface with the rest of the galaxy, which the Aliens will ruthlessly exploit to extract their resources by selling them worthless garbage.

But when they try to run this scam by humanity, it completely backfires. But not because humanity saw through the lie, but because humanity believed them... and had already invented their own FTL systems without the Aliens noticing.

You know the old saying about "the best defense is a good offense"...

Humans live everywhere, in every interstellar nation, and have a reputation for being friendly and peaceful if having quirky habits and interests. They've been around so long, no one's sure where their homeworld is or what it's named. Not even the humans themselves know.

Space Orcs are a know danger of space travel. Their raids used to be rare but ferocious, leaving little in the way of evidence and witnesses behind. Space Orc raids have been growing in scope and frequency in recent years, which is concerning, but the increased tempo was how the genetic sample was acquired; accidents happen.

Previous DNA samples were assumed to be contaminated, but the origins of this sample are indisputable. Scientists examining the DNA discovered that it was identical to human DNA. Not a related species, but the SAME species.

The galaxy is confused. How can the ferocious Space Orcs be the same species as the peaceful and friendly humans everyone lives with?

Human rep points out that due to the broad wording of the treaty, not only would chemical propellants and explosives be banned, but so would ANYTHING chemically powered. This would include:

- Every battery and capacitor tech used to hold the charges required to fire energy weapons that are so popular with most races.

- Any OTHER power source that runs on chemical energy; space faring or not, most species do not put nuclear reactors in small combat vehicles which are classed as weapons in their own right (because ramming enemies is a known tactic).

- The biochemical processes that power the muscles of every known living creature, making any and every living soldier and warrior illegal. Especially if they engage in melee combat.

"Excellent! Now our ship armor will actually be useful!"

*Alien ships still get shredded by bullets and missiles.*

"Dude, just because we have energy weapons now doesn't mean we gave up using our old, still effective weapons."

Got this on my very first hard drive scan.

https://preview.redd.it/6159p4fbe56h1.png?width=1577&format=png&auto=webp&s=ae3e20966cc8b6b4cba8f9b0092380608d79610e

I haven't even automated Reinforced Iron Plate production yet!

At first, the warrior races assumed humanity was afraid to attack them. But as human forces continued to pass by their positions and win victories elsewhere, they realized the truth: the humans didn't attack because the humans didn't think they were worth attacking.

And nothing hurts warrior pride and morale like knowing that the enemy thinks you're harmless.

I was going through some old sketchbooks and found this thing in its pages.

https://preview.redd.it/dq8wgviuwh5h1.png?width=2099&format=png&auto=webp&s=56cf2111a1f778c07cc22ce27ac3c1e2bd53d983

Obviously, I didn't have a grasp of the construction system at the time. Or how big mechs were actually supposed to be.

https://preview.redd.it/frnwkmft6s3h1.png?width=329&format=png&auto=webp&s=5a7aa5510e4e80621d9264e177575945bf29ca0d

Decided to play this game for the first time in years. I'm not sure if it's because I remember where everything is, but it seems much easier playing on a controller than on the keyboard and mouse that i used back in the day.

I remember back in the day wondering what I was missing for this achievement. Now in this last playthrough, I finally figured it out: You have to actually visit EVERY part of the map, not just grab all the pickups. There's probably some tiny patch of unexplored map in my previous playthroughs that I missed because I thought I got everything.

It was late at night and John had the munchies. Upon opening his fridge, he discovered it was being looted by mice. But they weren't normal mice.

https://preview.redd.it/w3ndipisvb2h1.png?width=1408&format=png&auto=webp&s=4e188a5e5607157a02e38b340f3f96458ad47c6d

Steam's new controller while expensive, seems to be well received by the people that got them. And when you think about it, it's amazing no one has thought to put track pads on a controller before.

So how long before we can expect cheap, third party knockoffs of Steam's controller? Basically new controllers with built in trackpads?