mrinku

Dare I say that it's just as anachronistic to assume that modern planetary travel and communications is a good model for interstellar travel and communications?
 
Science Fiction (especially adventure Science Fiction) is notoriously bad at prediction, which is not its function anyway. It's there to entertain, but should be true to its assumptions and fictions.

Fire, Fusion & Steel is in fact a generic science fiction technology kit. It defaults to the TNE setting but constantly suggests atlernatives. One of the best supplements ever written, once you have the extensive errata patched in

I think the GM is also mistaken about the characters overlapping.
 
You're going to actually buy Dexterity and Speed, while Metamorph Guy is using Aid to boost those? He's vulnerable to Dispel, and has to burn phases to build those up and keep those powered up - you don't. If you both end up with Clinging, it's not exactly going to cramp your style any more than if you both had Flight, or were both brawlers. Probably you'll both have different Complications.
 
Chameleon Boy is another character who fits his concept, possibly closer than the others:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reep_Daggle

Barsoom for me, although generic Burroughsian planetary romance would be fine as long as there wuz fencing involved (in Pellucidar - not so much)
 
By extension a system that actually makes sword fighting feel like it works in swashbuckling fiction. I've yet to see it done to my satisfaction, though I was toying with a heavily modified version of the Pendragon rules. It would definitely be some kind of opposed contest with a high chance of a draw-per-round between skilled fencers and a back and forth of advantage, instead of I-attack-you-attack. HERO definitely doesn't work so well as Chaosium or GURPS in that regard. In some ways it could work a bit like a Tennis tie-breaker - maybe each fencer needs a certain number of advantage points based on the other guy's skill, so a Master can dispatch a novice with a simple win, while the novice might need to get to Advantage level 4. Have to think on that. 
 
The obscure gem Lace & Steel came fairly close but needed a card game to do it with which made things tricky for the GM who needed to bend the rules unseen to make things happen. Hidden dice rolls allow this easily (you just lie), but when you actually have to lay cards down it's a lot harder, and if the player has a truly hopeless hand and the GM's is all strong attack cards, you may not be able to do much more than kill 'em. (Nonetheless, I'll always recommend Lace & Steel - a pretty unique background, quite well fleshed out and chock full of Donna Barr artwork. Non-human species based mostly on Classical myth instead of Tolkien, too, which is always refreshing. Including her beloved half-horses.)

I suspect for Steve it's less Unicorn and more Questing Beast, the amount of time he's spent chasing it...

Likewise commercial shipping and airlines. Though they don't use or need the higher operational ranks like Admiral.
 
Police also have a rank structure. Starfleet certainly has a law-enforcement role within Federation space, too, though in the same mode as Navies do (i.e. dealing with crimes that happen on the high seas.
 
Actually, as far as rank structures go, any bureaucracy mirrors military structure, even if the titles differ. Team Leaders and Subject Matter Experts are NCOs, Managers are Officers.

Bank Robbery always goes well for me, especially with a new player group. 

Did a bit more testing on DriveThru RPG... even internal searchers there don't pick it up well unless you actively type in "Golden Age Champions", since there's no reviews posted at all (Anyone who knows anyone who bought a copy there, PLEASE get them to post something). "Golden Age" brings up the M&M product and a bunch of other stuff. "Champions" lists "Darren Watts' Golden Age Champions" way down the list (possibly because of no reviews, possibly because of alphabet sorting, possibly because the keyword is later in the title than a lot of other HERO products).
 
If you could get those particular searches to bring up the product higher in the list, it may help a bit, Darren. I don't know if the site owners can adjust things for default searches within a company's products, but it might be worth asking.

I just wanted to add that Firefighters have a ranking system and are not considered military.

That isn't my superpower, though I would love to have it.  No, my superpower is the ability to always select the slowest checkout line at the market, or the slowest lane of traffic. It's quite a gift, let me tell you. 

Star Wars was so good because the screenplay had been perfected over the course of many years, with input from esteemed peers (like Coppola). The prequel screenplays were garbage because they were typically pumped out over the course of a couple of weeks, while pre-production crews sat around twiddling their thumbs, and nobody was willing to stand up and tell Lucas his first (and only) drafts needed significant work.

So... business as usual for Star Wars, then?
 
*cough* Canteen Aliens *cough* IG-88 *cough* Gammorean Guard *cough* Captain Phasma *cough* (okay, that last one was a bit cheeky...)
 
There's always been cool design work that gets cherry picked for the trailers and makes a good action figure, but which isn't a big deal in the actual film.
 
In this case, it's a no-brainer and damn little effort to release reskinned BB-8 toys.

The Batman TV series was genius. WB movie studio isn't capable of replicating it.

Louis Lewis is a short, somewhat rotund man who thinks he is the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte.  Oddball gave Louis the power to literally explode on command (with his pieces coming back together and reforming him unharmed just seconds later).  Since he dresses as the former French emperor, the media have taken to calling him Napoleon Blownapart (an attempt to call him Napoleon Dynamite was stopped by legal action from Paramount Pictures).

I burnt it but because it was awful.

I just want to acknowledge that Cate Blanchett absolutely nailed the role of Hela. She was completely convincing as someone with great power and confidence and came across as every bit as threatening and dangerous as she was supposed to be. IMO, she also looked damned good doing it. I found it impressive that she was able to project both "oozing sexy" and "oh hell no, I'm not going near that" at the same time. Mad props to her screen presence and acting ability.

The UK have liked making 6-episode series for decades; it's pretty much their default format.  This discussion goes into some of the reasons:
 
 

Yes, we can forgive old movies (and books, and plays and comic books).  What we can't do is insist that other people other people forgive them as well.
 
For example, I love Will Eisner.  The man was genius at visual story telling and created a large swath of the storytelling techniques that are used in comic books today.  Beyond his talents as a creator, based on the stories that he chose to write, I believe he was a compassionate and honorable man.  Unfortunately, he was also a product of his times, and without even being aware picked up the blatant racism of his day.
 
So, yes I can love Will Eisner's work, but I can't ask anyone else to overlook the extreme racism in his depiction of blacks and Asians.  If others find these portrayals as insurmountable obstacles to enjoying his work, I should not tell them to give him another chance, or to be more open minded, or to look at in historical prospective, or any garbage like that.  I just need to acknowledge that they have a point and not try to foster my love of Will Eisner on them or judge them over our different perspectives.  

Sure.  Among the many otherwise truly great movies that were made by Hollywood during WW2 to help inform and train soldiers and the pubic about the war, there was one about the Japanese that was truly shocking, hateful, racist, and unworthy of its director.  Some of this kind of film may still be being made, but won't be understood for their nature for generations, perhaps.  One of the best reasons to watch old movies is what CS Lewis said about reading old books: so that you can see how the people at that time were blinded to and so used to their culture they could not see its evils and confusions... and through that perhaps get a glimpse at our own.

You've got to keep things in context. Bismarck wanted to reunify Germany (which the wars of religion had broken up, followed by French conquest under Napoleon) and restore them to a world power.
 
In the 19th century, that meant Colonial Imperialism, so yeah, Germany had Imperial ambitions. They were playing catchup with Britain, France, Russia, Turkey, Austria, Spain, Portugal and The Netherlands. Japan fell into that trap as well, but had less options, so went for what it could in Asia. Italy had a go as well.
 
I'm not excusing any of the colonial powers, any more than I take sides in the Thirty Years' War. It's just what it was. 

I think you have to be able to examine and discuss works from an earlier era, explicitly including aspects of them which are now considered reprehensible, making due accounting for things which are now way out of bounds.  If you don't do that, then subsequent people will lose the ability to recognize those attitudes now deemed reprehensible, and they will arise again with new vigor.  In short, you will be empowering those attitudes you profess to despise.  I think a great deal of the polarization we have now in the US is in fact partly due to the wish to forget, to put old bigotries behind us, and it omits the fact that those bigotries spring back to virulence from those fetid corners where they've hidden when people stop remembering what evils they spawned.
 
Consider it a form of vaccination.
 
I ask my students from time to time if they know what a "necktie party" is.  The few that do look at me with shock, and they are unhappy when I tell them that choosing to overlook that part of our cultural heritage means that we're doomed to repeat it.

I suspect for Steve it's less Unicorn and more Questing Beast, the amount of time he's spent chasing it...

The Dec. '17 issue of Discover has a couple articles relating to the Kuiper Belt. One is about the little Kuiper Belt object that's the next port of call for the New Horizons space probe. The other is about Pluto and Ceres. A few planetologists wonder if there's a connection: Ceres isn't much like other asteroids, what with its unusually large mass and evidence that it has a lot of ice under the surface. These guys suggest that if you took Pluto, moved it to the asteroid belt and let the nitrogen, methane and other volatiles evaporate, you'd end up with something like Ceres. This could have happened early in the Solar System, when the planets were shuffling around. As Uranus and Neptune's orbits move outward (and maybe switched), a lot of the icy outer planetesimals were scattered outward to become Pluto and the rest of the Kuiper Belt; but some surely would have been scattered inward, too.
 
Dean Shomshak

I had to do a bit of library searching to find this, but when synchronous rotation develops, the orientation of the spin axis also undergoes a forced change.   Exactly what happens depends on what other masses are in the system and where those are.  I have found decent discussions of this only in papers dealing with known systems with more than two bodies, for example Earth's Moon (considering the Earth-Moon-Sun system) and the satellite system of Jupiter (the planet plus three or four of the Galilean satellites).  For Earth's Moon, there are small but constant-in-magnitude-but-not-direction differences between the orientation of the Moon's spin axis and the orientation lines perpendicular to Moon's orbit around Earth and Earth's orbit around the Sun.  Put another way,  the spin axis and the normal to Moon's orbit plane around Earth precess around the normal to Earth's orbit around the Sun, and the three are always coplanar.
 
If the moon were perfectly spherically symmetric, or fluid, then the orbit also would be driven to circular.  But with a solid and rigid body, it may end up in a state close to but distinctly and persistently different from circular.  This is true, e.g., for Earth's Moon, which has an orbit eccentricity around Earth of 0.055 (compare the eccentricity of Earth's orbit around the Sun, 0.0167, a perfect circle is exactly zero).
 
The most comprehensible discussion of this that I've found is in one chapter (chapter 19, "Europa" by Chyba and Phillips) of a team-written book Planets and Life, edited by Sullivan and Baross, published 2007 by Cambridge U Press.  While some chapters from that book can be found separately and downloaded for free, I haven't found this one in that form.  It's written as a graduate-level textbook for students coming from a variety of disciplines, which means it's a bit more approachable.  See if you can find it in a library.