iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Destroyer Droids too. Always hated those guys.

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Although, there were a handful of B-17s that ran bombing runs at the Battle of Midway, so there's a sort of obscure historical parallel.

I agree with that. Y-wings are more of akin to IRL torpedo bombers, which make more sense in the flow of Star Wars space battles. The TLJ Bombers are like B-17s, which was a strategic bomber, and I don't think that role makes a ton of sense for Star Wars.

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Disclaimer, never played Republic Commando

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Good on Zero Company for making droids feel threatening to me for the first time. Hailfire droids were always a threat, but now I'm like oh god a B2 Battle Droid how am I going to survive?!

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I'm ok with that criticism.

Lol yeah I wonder. Sounds like some Rogue Squadron tomfoolery

Everybody didn't expect me coming in with the hot takes today.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The bombers in the TLJ are fine. Real starfighter knowers know that bombs always go down in the flight sim games. Horton Salm disapproves of your ignorance of space bombing techniques.

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Qian Xuesen's 1949 concept for a commercial spaceplane, designed to carry 10 passengers from New York to LA in 45 minutes. (Render made with Blender, backgrounds NASA public domain)

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Somebody's gotta recanonize the K-wing

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

We need a sequel, and one with more flyable options. It'd be neat too if they came up with some new starfighters for the game.

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Thank you, glad you liked it!

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$Waechter produced a map of North America, pointed at a bay in Nunavut. “We’ve lost much of our radar coverage. We need to reinitialize it. There’s an old DEW line radar base that was abandoned in the Cold War drawdown, we need it up and running to win this war. CAM-3. Should be power still there, the weather service was using it as an automated station.” He handed over a photograph. A long shed. The brilliant white radome of the primary search radar. The Cold War, she thought, wasn’t this supposed to happen then? With a lurch she realized she had been sleep walking; had been targeted from the cradle onwards. She had always been in danger, her teachers just forgot to tell her. They talked about nukes in history class. Basic’s radiation training had felt perfunctory. “This war? Sir?” It seemed like an absurd word to use. Did they actually have a name for this? Consensual annihilation, maybe. Waechter was not amused, “Yes Lieutenant, this war. Now, if you don’t mind keeping your questions confined to the realm of mission relevance, please.” She reached down to the map and used her finger as a scale marker to estimate the straightline distance from Grand Forks to CAM-3. The ceiling vibrated. Dust fell. “That’s something like fourteen hundred miles.” The lights flickered again. Throughout the world the computers were following their software logic, finding targets, dispersing weapons, watching for results and doing that again and again and again. Abstraction had built the system; a technofractal of decentralized decisions that had combined to form an edifice of death that was falling—now, finally, irreconcilably, with mathematical precision—onto the human race, or the end thereof.$

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At 18:31 CST on March 13, 2029, the world started to end. First Lieutenant Jessica Marinakis was driving back from dinner, returning to her Army base to chisel away at a stack of paperwork. She stoppe...

In my story "Strategic Hypostasis" a nuclear war breaks out in 2029. A theme in it is the general public's unawareness that our government's deterrence policy didn't end with the Cold War. This article is the sort of thing I was getting at. Story link: www.unlikelystories.org/content/stra...

unlikelystories.org

Strategic Hypostasis

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If you visit please use the MBTA Commuter Rail.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

As a Salem resident I feel obligated to wish everyone a happy start of Halloween season!

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The Integrated Interplanetary Vehicle, my design for an alternate history joint US-Soviet vehicle for exploring Mars (first picture) and Venus (second picture). Renders made with Blender (Edited NASA public domain images for the backgrounds)

A realistic 70s spaceship over the Mars limb

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

If we were to attempt a crewed interstellar flight choosing and building the propulsion method would be the easy part.

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Integrated Interplanetary Vehicle (IIV), my own design for a Cold War era joint Soviet-US spacecraft. NASA would be in charge of the NERVA rockets, transfer capsule, and S-IVB workshop, the Soviets would be in charge of the other crew accommodations and scientific systems. (Made with Blender)

A spaceship with four rocket stages and space station-esque modules sticking out the front.

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Discussions about aliens more often than not tell us more about humans then they do about aliens.

Ambient Radiation - Perseid Prophecies

I recently got a short story published about a civilization that finds itself in a related and unusual situation: lots of detectable technosignatures, but no way to reach the civilizations sending them. perseidprophecies.ca/issue-10-sum...

perseidprophecies.ca

by Zachery Brasier Data fell before Astrohistorian Cixyr’s eyes, stylized into streams of flowing mercury. The observatory’s circular wallscreen displayed the radio sky in this way, rendered from comp...

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Europa always gets all the focus when it comes to a subsurface ocean but Ganymede's got one too!

Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I do wonder what we'd actually do in a realistic first contact scenario. Interstellar travel seems to be extremely difficult if not impossible. So the two sides would never meet. And any civilization outside 50 ly makes one call-and-response cycle longer than a human lifespan.

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I don't really think it's a paradox. It's one of those things where science fiction and science reality are a little too mixed together in people's minds.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Over on Twitter they are talking about solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Mine is that space is huge, we haven't been looking that long, and separating the hypothetical signatures of alien civilizations from random radio noise is significantly harder than most people think.

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Thank you :) that really means a lot to me, honestly.

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I'm the same way. I like the history and the science.

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It has been surprising to see just how susceptible spaceflight fans are to tech bro marketing tactics.

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For the record, I've never been happy about the rise of Isaacman. It was pretty obvious that this was how things were going to go. You just had to look beyond the rockets.

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Is he the most blatantly corrupt NASA administrator we've had?

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

You'd hope the NASA administrator would understand the difference between Congress funding his administration and him personally donating $3 million to a super-PAC supporting his boss.

You'd think running America's space program would be a position above politics.

@rookisaacman
, however, has given $3 million to MAGA, Inc. since being confirmed as NASA administrator.

This isn't illegal, experts tell me. But is it right?

Jared's response: Not sure what you mean by America’s space program being above politics. Leadership has been politically appointed since inception, national space policy is established by the executive branch, oversight and funding come from Congress, and industry lobbies everyone extensively. I would say it has always been very political, and if you love America’s space program, being politically savvy is an asset. I have also donated $30 million to charity this year, which is also not illegal.

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Tongren space station, my design for a joint US-Chinese lunar orbiting station, roughly based on Hexagram 13 of the I Ching. (Renders made with Blender)

A cylindrical space station with moon behind it.

A three module space station with a Mengzhou and Orion attached to it.

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Element115Art @element115.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Fluidic Lens Telescope: my design for a near future astronomical station based on the symbol for Earth, showing off some of the cool reflective geometry. The lens would be, as the name suggests, formed from a liquid. (Renders made with Blender)

A reflective telescope with trusses extending out of it and reflecting back on the lens.

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Upgrading that tactical console center post was also a good call, makes shots of Picard in his seat more visually interesting.

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People really weren't ready for this one in 2013. I often wonder if it would have found a better reception if it'd been released a few years later.

I take this bit about the Eisenhower era as being one of the main themes of The Counterforce section of Gravity's Rainbow. Then the next paragraph one of the main themes of Bleeding Edge.

"For me? Too technical. But people at Bronx Science I ran with . . . Crazy Yale Jacobian, nice kid, we used to go downtown, make a little change playing Ping-Pong. He went off to MIT, got a job with the RAND Corporation, moved to California, We lost touch."

"Maybe he didn't work in the blowing-up-the-world department."

"I know, I'm a judgmental person, sue me. You had to been there, kid. Everybody thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was the pure terror. Midnight forever. If you stopped even for a minute to think, there...

...it was and you could fall into it so easily. Some fell. Some went nuts, some even took their own lives."

"Pop."

"Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid."

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