The best part is I was too lazy to make the text matchingly low quality to the images but the it went on a round around the internet and by the time it came back to me it was this scrunched up version that had gone through compression on a variety of sites.
Post a meme made by you
Also I had to just do a plain link because I'm not allowed to reply to that, or, if I repost it, I'm not allowed to add any comment or even reply to it on my own timeline so it'd just look like I'm endorsing it.
I think it kinda sucks that someone representing Bluesky spends their time boosting AI and shitting on artists! On a site so many artists escaped to. bsky.app/profile/why....
Oh we're getting there. We already had people lose their artificial eyes and return to blindness because the company pivoted to a different product and stopped support. (Argus II - apparently a new company picked it up in 2023 though. But it's down to corporate whim anyway.)
The thing that gets me is not just that it's AI-generated (which already sucks), but that it's clear that no human ever even glanced at it. Nobody knows if it's total nonsense. They just don't bother. Fill the page with something that looks legit. Good enough.
Concept art of a spaceship (for Alien?) by Chris Foss
The Foss-colored birds of River Foss
Of course it also sucks for the final product for a variety of reasons. Man, it's almost like gen AI for art kinda sucks...
A go-to defense for companies using AI is "we use it for concepts, not the final product" but that's one of the worst uses for it exactly because it's a digested average that will smooth out anything distinctive or unusual.
One case I ran into: Thin metal structures always deform and wrinkle a bit. On airliners it's really subtle and only really noticeable at glancing light angles. One day I looked for references and it was all AI. None of them had that detail because it's not present in most images of airliners.
It might not be the biggest of the many harms they cause but it's just a beautiful cherry on top that now they're hogging all the RAM, so the prices have tripled. It's like they go out of their way to shit all over everyone else. And then they act confused when people dislike them.
They turned the home screen button on my phone into a Gemini button so if you press it for slightly too long you get AI and presumably are counted in metrics of AI use.
Gazing
Volumetric clouds are cool. My poor old GTX 1080 disagrees.
I feel I have a head of unremarkable size and for me to be eight heads tall I would have to be way taller than average male height (in a country where people average relatively tall). Eight heads tall is some weird aspirational thing.
Spidey?
There isn't actually any reason I can think off why you couldn't enclose the shock absorbers of an Orion drive. This is a normal Orion setup otherwise. The things around it are a tensile structure hanging off the base thrust plate.
The end result
@chuwol.bsky.social made this unhinged anamorphic lens stack in Blender where the lenses are raytraced to produce an image like a real camera, and rendered my ship through it.
Finished up this one with some unit markings
It's incredible how business and government are suddenly falling onto a very pro-piracy stance. I'm not sure why they think anyone should care about their copyright either if it's going to be like this.
I learned Neil Armstrong backwards is Gnorts Mr Alien so I immediately had a vision
Yup! A huge 10 meter wide thing, shaped to resemble the expected pressure and temperature profile of the nuclear plasma at the pusher surface.
It's interesting how much computer simulation was involved. The document talks about it. They also validated it against Starfish Prime and other tests.
I get how this works now, thanks to @nyrath.bsky.social digging up the source document, GA-6307.
I didn't even think that they wouldn't be projecting anything at the pusher but just blowing up sheets of high explosives affixed to it.
Damn, nice find! That's also a whole Orion document I've never seen before. I wonder how many more are out there. I know my GA-5009 series (I think vol. 2 is not available), right from Atomic Rockets, of course...
Is this the tip of the iceberg for the giant underground nuclear spaceship lair
Yeah, but I don't see how the shock absorber assembly would work if it's hanging off the pusher like this. Not like the pusher can move forwards. Also there's no obvous place there for pulse tests, what's with the pit and the building and the wall...
So many questions. Why upside down? How are they supposed to move through this facility? There appears to be a solid rock wall between the one inside and the one hung outside, which is also in a pit. Are the ones outside actually just plates and the one outside the only full craft?
