u/KaiWinnBot

On a post yesterday, someone mentioned Ted's ex "Blah Blah". I recalled that when I first watched HIMYM, I was in my 20s and couldn't understand how you could date someone and not remember their name.

Now that I'm Future Ted's age, I'm realizing I have several "Blah Blah"s in my past.

And then I realized this morning that I'm probably "Blah Blah" to at least some of them as well.

I've pretty much always got my node with me, and I get a lot of fleeting messages and new node pings when I'm driving around town, so I know there's activity. Unfortunately, I'm usually both driving and on an errand, so I never get to stop and chat.

Curious if there's a mesh group or anything coordinated around here. I've got a dedicated primary channel, but I keep the secondary channel set to the "default" so I can pick up people using a stock config. Not sure if I'm missing the larger userbase or if what I see is what I get.

Related question: If there is no coordinated mesh group, and there's overlap between Charleston redditors and Meshtastic users, would anyone be interested in starting a mesh group?

Edit: By mesh group, I mean something like this: https://meshtastic.org/docs/community/local-groups/

Remember, however many years ago it's been, when we'd just get a nice little summer shower to break the summer monotony? Something you'd just play through if you were outside when it hit?

I miss those.

The last few years, we were basically in a drought from mid July through almost October. Contrast that with this year where it's just been non-stop monsoons. I forgot what the "sunshine" icon even looks like on my weather app.

There used to be weather that existed between those two extremes.

Yeah, I know, climate change, but I can still complain about the symptoms.

As of S3E06 "Twice in a Lifetime", Lamarr has further developed the Aranov device such that it can move an object forwards or backwards for a specific duration of time. At minimum, the device seems to have no problems sending something small six months into the future (as seen with the sandwich).

Given the current state of the device and the Union's ability to control it, they even acknowledge in the episode that it is an extremely powerful and dangerous weapon, but the example they give is traveling back in time to wipe out the Union before it can even exist (à la Star Trek: First Contact, Terminator, et al).

Here, I would like to discuss some more creative ways an Aranov-based weapon could be utilized while avoiding temporal paradoxes and branch realities.

Assumptions:

1. The Aranov device is connected to the ship's deflector, or other suitable emitter, and can be controlled from the ship's tactical stations.
2. The device is given an appropriately-sized power source such as a smaller, dedicated quantum core or similar.
3. There is a mass to energy to temporal displacement "distance" relationship. For a given unit of energy (X), a mass of Y can be displaced Z units of time. In other words, for a given amount of energy, you can move something small a long way in time or something very large a short amount of time.
4. The Union laws surrounding temporal displacement remain the same, and events of the past are forbidden to be changed in any way.
5. Number 4 effectively means the device can only send targets into the future, though it remains technically capable of sending them to the past.
6. The movement of the ship, stars, planets, and galaxy are hand-waved away and the object remains "stationary" relative to where it was when the device affects it; e.g the sandwich showed up at the same location in Engineering six months later despite the ship being nowhere near where it was when it was sent into the future.

Given those assumptions, how might a ship such as the Orville, outfitted with a tactical Aranov device, use it in combat?

Using the example from the episode, where the Kaylon have destroyed the secure research facility and are waiting in ambush for the Orville and its escorts, a few combat tactics come to mind.

Example 1: Wait Safely for Backup

When they realize they've warped into an ambush, they can determine how long it would take for reinforcements to arrive. Assuming reinforcements are 3 days out, they could fire the Aranov beam at the attacking Kaylon ships and send them three days into the future. When the Orville and its reinforcements in local time "catch up" to the Kaylon ships, the ambush situation has basically been reversed.

Example 2: "Stop Time"

Given the sixth assumption about the target remaining "stationary" relative to the motion of the universe, then moving a target into the future effectively stops time from the viewpoint of an outside observer.

Move an adversary 10 minutes into the future, and that will give you time to lay mines where it was previously and will reappear. When local time catches up, the adversary's ship materializes into an active minefield.

I don't think we have enough information to speculate how the Aranov device handles two objects suddenly occupying the same space, but it wouldn't be unheard of in sci-fi for them to merge or otherwise phase into each other. This would allow, say, moving a large asteroid into the position where the adversary's ship would materialize in the future.

Conclusion

I fully admit I didn't get the best grade in temporal mechanics, so if there are flaws in my logic, please feel free to point them out.

Would also like to see some other ideas of how an Aranov-based weapon might be used without resorting to changing the past or causing other temporal paradoxes. Additionally, what could an enemy do to counter these tactics?

Edited: Added assumption 3 governing the mass, energy, and temporal "distance" relationship.

Liz Lemon dressed as Princess Leia

Clearly it wasn't Carrie Fisher because in that universe she was Rosemary Howard, also one of Liz's idols, whom Liz met.

So who do you think played Leia in the 30 Rock universe?

https://preview.redd.it/ovd7jz3joggh1.png?width=979&format=png&auto=webp&s=21ac3ca91fd50a48ae0b52996a1c4a0e8044d047

A Vulcan crew member on Voyager just smiling and chatting it up with other personnel.

https://preview.redd.it/7tk7ljn8rcgh1.png?width=979&format=png&auto=webp&s=207954098ef4c7ba51e4666736c918cf6e83da71

This line hits hard on its own, but if you've read the PIC novel "The Last Best Hope" it hits even harder.

Raffi gets a lot of hate from the fandom, but as someone who has struggled with loss and addition, her struggle just hits home in all the right ways.

I totally understand that she was dropped-in as a brand new character whose backstory and relationship with JL was largely glossed over, so I'll concede that point to the Raffi haters.

Beyond that, blame the medium (streaming) and showrunners rather than the character.

"The Last Best Hope" (TLBH for brevity) is the prequel novel to PIC season 1 and wraps up right at the point the synths attack Mars. It's basically the first half of S1 that we didn't get to see on screen and fills in pretty much all of the blanks we were supposed to pick up via small throwaway lines of dialog.

Without doing a full book review, TLBH begins events at the inception of the Romulan evacuation mission. At the time, Raffi is working for Starfleet Intelligence and is the first to realize the scale of the disaster. Starfleet puts together a relief mission with Picard in charge.

Eventually she has to brief Picard who is impressed with her hyper-competency, attention to detail, efficiency, and ethics, so he recruits her as his executive officer. Reluctantly, because it would mean being away from her family, she accepts.

As was apparent from the show, the mission had its difficulties, both practical and political. As the mission drew on, and in the face of political pressure to call it off, it strained Raffi's relationship with her husband and son. The show indicates this, but the novel shows just how many times Raffi chose Starfleet, Picard, and the mission over her family as well as her struggle with prioritizing those.

Raffi's heart was fully invested in the mission because she was on the front lines and saw firsthand the lives she was saving; the Romulans weren't just a faceless adversary, and she met many who were just normal people living their lives. Abandoning the evacuation efforts would mean breaking promises, and condemning to death, people she had met personally and promised to help.

By the time of the show, Raffi's family has left her, and combined with the forced abandonment of the mission/people she personally promised to help, she's the broken shell of a person we see on screen. The toll the mission took on her, to both her overall morale, faith in Starfleet, and her family life absolutely destroyed her.

There's a good bit I left out as to not spoil the book (it's a fantastic read), but the point is that the show did her dirty by just dropping her in like that.

The second novel in the PIC series, "Second Self" really lets her shine after the events of PIC S1 where she starts to become her old self agian.