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For 40k, I actually feel like "An open mind is like a fortress with its gates open and unbarred" is a cooler, if less iconic quote. It just conveys the ridiculous dystopia of the Imperium so well and so quickly.
But yeah gotta love the classic BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! YOUR CORPSE-EMPEROR WILL NOT SAVE YOU!
My project has been retconned so much I don't think it can even be considered the same world anymore, however here's some of the most major changes:
-The entire genere changed from steampunk to fantasy then to post-apocalyptic.
-The country I initially focused on was completely removed, along with the entire continent.
-Planet turned into a large moon orbiting a gas giant.
Oh I didn't know that, I thought they were locked to the server like Lemmy. Ok then I'll just use masdodon.social for now until I know more about the rest.
This is something I've been putting off. My world is post-apocalyptic. Originally, it was set so long after the apocalypse that the languages had changed to something completely different, but I've sinced changed it to <1000 years after the apocalypse, so I now have to come up with variations of modern names that are still somewhat recognisable but changed in some way.
I have no idea how to go about this, so I just... haven't named any of the people in my world. I really should get around to this.
Something kinda in the same vein, in the book series Red Rising, hanging people on Mars is ineffective because of the low gravity (not enough force to snap the neck), so someone has to go up and pull on the legs of the executed person to kill them.
It doesn't reduce the surface area though, the butt stock is still the same size.
I've got two answers for this, one for before the apocalypse happened, and one for after.
Before the apocalypse, it's easy enough. I wanted the tech of that era to be near-magical, so that after the apocalypse it's seen as magical.
1- There's already a bunch of mall santas (that profession is still around in the 2100s), just hire one.
2- Get a large sack, buy a bunch of toys off A3 (Amazon-Alphabet-Apple), done.
3- You'd have several choices for this. If you're on a low-gravity world, you can hide propellers or thrusters inside the sleigh and it'll probably be enough to fly. On Earth though, you'll either need to basically build it as a massive 4-rotor drone, carry it with a helicopter, or use anti-grav tech. I'm leaning towards the former, since I haven't decided yet how I want the pre-apocalypse anti-grav tech to be like. That's the flying done, the sleigh shape is just building a decorative frame.
4- Humanity's gene-editing tech isn't good enough to make flying reindeer, so they'll have to be regular reindeer strapped to a rig in front of the sleigh. It might be hard to make that look convincing.
5- Humanity's gene-editing tech is good enough however, to make a reindeer with a florescent nose.
As for difficulty, the hardest part here would be getting permission to modify a reindeer to have a glowing nose. The rest is doable for a small dedicated group.
If they actually try to break into houses though, they'll just get arrested. That is if they don't get shot down first for refusing to identify themselves ("Santa" is not a valid identification number) and going into controlled airspace.
After the apocalypse, it becomes significantly more difficult, for obvious reasons. Note, the post-apocalyptic part takes place on a far-off moon called Eren B, with about 1/3rd Earth gravity and few Earth animals.
1- Finding someone fat might be difficult, as the low gravity kinda stretches everyone out vertically, but it's definitely doable. The beard and red clothes is easy.
2- Easy, sacks are everywhere. Obtaining that many toys would be expensive but that's nothing compared to the next few points.
3- Oh boy, this would be almost impossible. You can "fly" using a Shard Of Gravitation, but the problem is that you only have control over how strong it is, which is why they are primarily used to lighten vehicles instead of fully lifting them off the ground- if you lift off, you have 0 control. There have been experiments with people strapping 5 or 9 Shards to a single platform, with them arranged around the sides, so by changing their strength you can stay upright, but that is insanely expensive- even a single shard is worth more than some villages. And it still only lets you hover, not control your movement. Perhaps, if you manage to find an undamaged fully functional ancient sky-ship (an artefact that would quite possibly be the most valuable thing on the planet), and built a wooden frame around it, you could get a flying sleigh. I suppose another way would be to invent airships. Eren B's low gravity make them a lot easier to build, but that would still require a bunch of technology that just isn't available to them.
4- Impossible again. Reindeer don't exist on Eren B. The original terraforming effort didn't move over the entirety of Earth's ecological diversity, as that would have been pointless. Reindeer were left behind, together with most of the substitutes you could use. The closest you could get would be to strap horns to a horse, but that's still difficult, as there are very few horses on Eren B and the ones that are around are carefully guarded by a (currently unnamed) group in the south, because of the large advantage it gives them. It's not entirely impossible to get a couple from them though, either through trade or by stealing them.
5- I guess you could strap a lantern to a horse's nose? You're already strapping horns to them.
This would be impossibly difficult. No.3 especially is the issue, even if the entire planet was dedicated towards this goal that would still probably be impossible.
As someone who isn't as hardcore about realism, my approach is just to use it as a sort of base to figure out where stuff goes (for example, determining where mountain ranges and resources are), but I don't bother adhering too strictly to it and if it comes into conflict with another idea I have I'll usually prioritize whatever that idea is.
For example, I wanted a desert with a mountain range along its eastern and southern sides. So I did it backwards, first drawing the map then figuring out some plausible plates for it and using those to come up with the surrounding areas that I didn't have plans for.
Though actually I'm not sure if realistically my world should even have plate tectonics, since it takes place on a terraformed moon, and AFAIK smaller planets/moons tend to have less active cores. I probably should research that a bit.
I mean yeah it makes sense. Agriculture is the foundation of sedentary civilizations; in a medieval world like FR the vast, vast majority of people would be farmers; and without food everything else just falls apart.
The technology behind it isn't new, but The Thought Emporium is a Youtuber who:
1: DIY-d a genetically modified virus to cure his own lactose intolerance (successfully)
2: Is currently working on a biological computer that runs on animal neurons.
3: Has livestreams where the viewers submit ideas (like making tomatoes spicy) and he designs DNA to accomplish it.
Also he helped shut down a scam health product that contained radioactive material which isn't particularly futuristic (actually it reminds me of the "radiation is good for you" craze in the early 20th century) but I wanted to mention it anyways.
I can't come up with any ways to show the flight corridors without it being visible, but maybe you could instead have the hovercraft move very predictably when at low altitude to make them easy to avoid.
For example, when landing, they could move directly above the landing pad while at cruising altitude, then descend directly downwards which would be obvious and easy to avoid, and the birds would know to avoid the space directly above landing pads.
If the sudden changes in direction are a problem, maybe you could have sort of indicator lights to show when a hovercraft is about to change direction.
For my post-post-apocalyptic world, the main feeling I'm going for is hope. The idea being that some time far in the past a great calamity happened, but humanity has rebuilt, and despite all the great setbacks nothing can stop people from reaching ever higher (indomitable human spirit, etc, etc).
Another feeling I'm going for is the sadness of knowing that some ancient civilizations are lost, and we have no records of them and how they lived, and these things that were so important to people of the past are just gone forever. In my world the knowledge of the old world from before the apocalypse is fading, their buildings are eroding away, stories of them are slowly warped until they're unrecognisable, and the artifacts left behind are lost one by one.
I guess these combined also creates a theme of moving on, though I don't think that counts as a feeling.
If my future child cannot drink their own body weight in water in a single go by age 3 I'd put them up for adoption.
I've never watched Blade Runner, only this scene, but this scene is incredible. And this quote gives a really strong impression of a much larger world.