Empire is actually quite literal too.

While their organized crime was the normal illegal and semi hidden type through a huge percentage of the galaxy they did also have worlds they literally were the legitimate and direct government for.

Some of the city states in Italy history do fit fairly well to this.

A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.

My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven't played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.

You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.

Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.

Then an aquatic species that doesn't do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.

And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.

And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don't have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.

So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.

It is categorized.

Most of those kids if things like parks and walkable safe cities increase economic health overall but it doesn't go into the specific pocket of a capitalist in a direct way they can see. Plus the general kick the poor attitude from the same group.

I had a 1980 year Oldsmobile 98 that didn't have as many crazy issues as yours but did have one amazing one.

Driving home one evening from college classes the headlights didn't work so I took it into the shop.

Couldn't find anything normal as a cause but I had one of those old time small town mechanics that couldn't stand to lose to the car. So he said he wouldn't charge us for the extra work hours if he could keep it as a project until he was done. Took over three weeks of him going through the wiring and finally found a harness/wire that had worn through and was grounding to the car frame.

So far nothing too weird for an old car. The bizarre part is that he had good current equipment and it is supposed to test if a wire is grounded out like that to the frame or even if it is broken by kicking signals along it like you can to find damage to Ethernet cables.

So with that tester in hand and knowing without question what the problem was he hooked it back up and it still reported nothing wrong. He called the manufacturer and they said as far as they know that violates the laws of electricity.... Worked fine with the new wires so again definitely correct and his tool worked on everything else he ever tried it on.

I'm well aware that across most of the rest of the franchise Stormtroopers generally are bad shots.

However I argue that it is easy to view the entire original trilogy as Stormtroopers being competent. A New Hope is easy as you already pointed out that they were supposed to let them go. Plus the off screen extremely effective results against the Lars homestead and the Jawas which is both combat and effectively following the droids.

Empire Strikes Back they are extremely effective with invading the Hoth base. Luke is supposed to get to Vader so that part can be ignored. Then for the rest escaping Lando arranges a lot of surprise trouble for the troops as well as R2D2.

Then for the Ewoks I think almost everyone has it backwards. They all look at how tiny and low tech they are and draw conclusions from that. The more important thing to look at is their results. Not just the main battle but look before that.

1. A scout (Wickket) is smart enough to make a reasonable level of basic communication with absolutely zero starting point with Leia.
2. They successfully trap/ambush a Jedi and a Wookie and a droid with sensors. Ok yea required some stupidity on Chewies part but still incredibly impressive on the Ewoks part.
3. They were literally planning to eat several of the heroes.
4. The traps everywhere. They clearly didn't make the big traps just in the day or two when the heroes showed up. That forest is an absolute death trap and miracle that the trap the heroes triggered didn't kill them.
5. Battle morale at large not breaking under attack from mechanized and ranged weapons.
6. Immediate willingness to ride a speeder and a successful dismount in spite of zero clue how they work.

That is just what I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there is more. Honestly they are closer to facing an army of fantasy dwarfs than what people say they are like.

I'm shocked nobody has brought this up yet.

I would absolutely be a town citizen in Phineas and Ferb. Ideally the guy who always has a new fun project and the side effects from the kids just drop everything in his lap.

Every benefit of a cartoon world with almost none of the cartoon downsides. Nearly Culture level tech after a few years once the boys grow up to by adults and actually start taking things "seriously" as shown in episodes where they go to the near my future.

The worst people in the world are so bad at being bad that they are consistently kept in check and even rehabilitated by trained animals.

Ugh I guess I'm going to be this type of fan.

I like both universes but the "they will just get a transporter lock and teleport everyone" is an awful argument that shows a very bad lack of understanding of Star Trek.

There are hundreds of examples of transporters not working. Shields which even the tiny falcon does have are a constant example. Even past that there are tons of other cases. They don't work in storms, through thick rock, through unusual armor/metal, around jamming which is used basically universally in Star Wars on anything larger or more expensive than a Tie Fighter.

Those are just the ones off the top of my head and there are at least a dozen more. It is one of the top plot lines used in every series.

In a fight the falcon just runs away since even mid grade Star Wars ships have radically faster FTL.

Now if you ignore the running away yes the tiny falcon probably does lose to most or maybe even all of the Trek hero ships. It is a smuggler ship that can just run past blockades if it gets flagged.

Actual combat ships are far harder to figure out. Star Wars deals with a massively larger scale of ship size, total energy output, and FTL speed. At first glance that seems like an obvious win and in a full galaxy scale conflict probably does go to Star Wars.

But any single ship to ship combat especially with the hero ships the range of gadgets/tricks on the Star Trek side is massively in their favor. The rate they pick up tech charges probably would largely even out the tech difference in a galaxy wide fight as well. However that doesn't solve the scale difference. Maybe convince the Borg to produce ships with stolen FTL and hypermatter reactors so they can produce enough at scale quickly.

Edit - I just realized that while the transporter argument doesn't generally hold water it would totally work on all the cheap Tie Fighter pilots. LOL. That would be so funny to watch.

They do make induction models that are curved specifically for woks. Don't know the right places to search to see if restaurant power level models exist but don't see any electrical reason it couldn't be done.

TIE Fighter. Flying as a pilot for the Empire in Star Wars including flying alongside Vader to save the Emperor. Includes getting pulled into a secret society with a cool glowing force tattoo showing your rank in service to the Emperor.

The game never says your name but in the old expanded universe books you are basically the Empire version of Wedge.

Edit - It isn't open world but the limited story does do well at making you feel like you should in the role.

I'll add that the game came with a manual that did have the character name and a back story. Short version is your character was an illegal swoop bike racer on a world that had been in a multi generation war. Includes your father dying. The empire stops it by basically making it impossible to for the two world to even be able to send attacks at each other. Then recruits all the youth that would have fought in their own war and just sends them out to different parts of the empires wars.

Your preexisting flight skills gets you first a mechanic job on a Star Destroyer and then you save a VIP while testing repairs on a TIE Fighter and get pulled in as an actual pilot with a quiet push to get you up the ranks due to your impressive start.

Have you played it?

One of the top well known examples is Mr. Rogers. Very deeply Christian on a personal level but, to the best I'm aware, he never brought it up on his show.

Sadly I don't but would also like to see it if it is available.

Totally valid feeling but also monopoly was designed to intentionally be awful to get across the point that real monopolies are terrible for the world. So arguably it is exactly how you should feel about it.

I hear people say all the time that it is perfect. It definitely has imperfections.

However while I will insist on it being imperfect it has still been my number one favorite game for at least two decades.

It is easily the closest to perfect I think you could possibly ask for with the hardware limitations and the fact that teams don't have magical infinite time or budgets. Anyone with even a slight interest in RPGs should play it.

Plus it gave us the musical career of Yasunori Mitsuda

PipePipe (a fork if I understand right) is working so looks like there is at least one workaround still possible.

There are a lot around here and even the black wrap looks awful in my opinion.

I lothe Musk and all his idiocy and politics etc. so even if I was given one I would sell it or destroy it. I refuse to have something like that.

With that said I do think the original intent of the design if they had actually made it work would have made the ugly mess worth it for a trade off. It was supposed to be a single exoskeleton that doubled as both panels and the frame and saved weight, space, manufacturing simplicity, and provided for letting you get the benefit of stainless steel. I doubt it would have been any better at towing but at least steel has a better failure mode than aluminum for that use.

However instead of reduced weight it is a crazy increase in weight with that for external panels instead of being a frame. Such a total mess that I have no clue why anyone buys them as they are exclusively downsides compared to options like the Ford Lightning etc. which still have a lot of trade offs due to the electric range issues when towing but at least it is expected and fundamental to the tech. Not the push of some idiot that wants us living in a cyberpunk dystopia.

Absolutely. Used to work at a small MSP. Got ultra unlucky in that we got chosen as the rest case target for a zero day that leveraged our Remote Support tools so our own systems and all of our client systems that were online got hit with ransomware in a very short time frame.

Some clients had local backups to Synology boxes and those worked ok thankfully. However all the rest had backups based on Hyper-V. The other local copy was on a second windows server that also got hit so the local copies didn't help. They did also have a remote copy which wasn't encrypted.

So all good right? Just pull the remote backup copy and apply that.... Yea every time we had ever used the service before had either been single servers that physically died and took disks along on the death or just file level restores.

Those all worked fine. Still sounds like not a problem right? Nope. We found both that a couple of the larger servers had backups that didn't actually have everything in spite of being VM images. No idea how their software even was able to do that.

And the worse part was that their data transfer rate was insanely slow. About 10mbps. Not that per server or par client. Nope that was the max export rate across everything. It would have taken literally months to restore everything at that rate.

I hate to say it but yes we did in fact pay the ransom and the. Had to fight for several days going through getting things decrypted. Then going through months of reinstalling fresh copies and/or putting in new servers. Also changing our entire stack at the same time. Shockingly we handled it well enough we lost no clients. Largely because we were able to prove we couldn't have known ahead of time.

If you read through all that I'll even say the vendors name. It was StorageCraft. I now have a deep hate for them.

Also one more is that with the old Apple HFS+ filesystem based time machine backups it would sometimes report as a valid self checked backup even if it had corruption. It would do this as long as some self check confirmed that it could fix the corruption during a restore. However if you tried directly browsing through the time machine backups it would have files that couldn't be read, unless again you did a full system restore with it.

Nearly lost my wife's semester ending before finding it worked that way.

I can't confirm it but seems it is fully fixed with APFS and might be one of the reasons they spent the effort to make that transition.

Hop (2011) from Illumination is exactly that formula but Easter. Also agreed very few outside of the insane number of Christmas ones.

Nightmare before Christmas is also unusual in being directly about saving Christmas but indirectly saving Halloween.