Presumably that plume is a bad thing. It’s not providing any propulsion burning where it is. It is fuel left over from incomplete combustion in the rocket. It’s inefficiency.

I don’t really see how that would work. The virtual space is going to contain objects appropriate to it. That probably won’t include my sofa, unless it is somehow a virtual living room. Even if the walls get turned into boulders or something, in most experiences it would be weird to be surrounded by a rectangle of…

Dark Matter has trouble with cliché generally. They have an Asian guy, and he’s all about honour and swordsmanship. It’s still worth watching, and fun as long as you don’t compare it to Firefly.

I don’t think any serious scientist is claiming no life anywhere else in the universe. You need to make two distinctions. The first is between life, and intelligent life. The second is between intelligent life somewhere and intelligent life close enough to communicate with.

Anything for the Vive will work on the Rift, and Revive makes anything for the Rift work on the Vive. The former is by design. The latter is contrary to Oculus’s wishes, but it works, and it shows that technically the headsets are far more similar than, eg, PS4 and XBox One.

Surely there’s less fragmentation? There will be two worlds: PSVR, and PC. Vive and Rift will work on PC and XBox One, so that’s less fragmentation than where PC and XBox One are separate. Rift doesn’t have tracked controllers yet, but they are promised by the end of the year.

It’s more of a problem on Earth in the Arctic. There are places that have 186 days between sunrise and sunset (according to Wikipedia). I gather they just give up, and fast according to the solar time of some other location, usually Mecca.

Positional information is low bandwidth. The Vive and Rift work differently, and the Vive system could allow each device to locate itself, but it doesn’t really matter as the answer has to be transmitted to all the other players anyway so it might as well be calculated centrally. This warehouse system seems to work…

The closes we currently have is http://store.steampowered.com/app/446750/ for the Vive.

Or room scale games where you can walk around a small space by walking. Although often combined with teleporting, it adds quite a lot. With Budget Cuts, for example, you do a lot of crouching behind desks and in narrow crawl spaces, peeking around doors etc. With Vanishing Realms, you fight with sword and shield, and…

There are a few. Call of the Starseed, for example.

Sony consoles are good at doing a lot with a little. The PSVR headset uses fewer pixels, but that’s OK because each pixel is full RGB and that largely makes up the difference. Games will run at 60fps rather than 90 and be time-warped up to 120fps. And of course, it has the “stable platform” advantage that devs can…

Most of you objections seem to be about what happened on Earth. The author deliberately doesn’t cover that. He covers space, and even then he jumps over a lot of detail. Several more books could be written explaining how people survived underwater and underground. There was probably more to it than talking to each…

It’s been tested for pigeons. See for example,

Because they can jump, some of them.

The next gen won’t be for many years, if there is one at all. Now that both consoles use more or less standard architectures, they can improve by evolving, incremental updates. They can keep backwards and forwards compatibility indefinately. That’s what happens in the PC world and it can happen for consoles too.

No automatic clamps, but some guys weld covers over the top of the legs to hold it down. It’s not really necessary as the rocket’s centre of mass is very low when it’s empty.

Depends on how easy it is to avoid “eavesdropping”. If I’m at work and the guys at the next desk have a conversation, I’m going to overhear it because I’m right there. I can’t leave my desk and still do my job. The choice is either ask them to stop, or be spoiled. That doesn’t justify yelling, of course, but it’s OK…

As it happens, I’ve read the GoT books so couldn’t be spoiled from the TV show until the latest season, and now I find I’m not that bothered about it. I do care about some other shows, though, and tend to an extreme notion of what counts as a “spoiler”. I find that watching the previews at the end of one episode can…

There’s no statute of limitations on spoilers. For example, I am in the UK and my TV supplier does not provide a channel that runs Game of Thrones, so I might not see an episode until it comes out on DVD. It might be 10 years until I buy the DVDs. I still have as much right to an unspoiled experience as you.