I used to work at an airport and they had a internal tracking system for passengers with special requests (mostly for unaccompanied kids).
Anyway it’s programmed in assembly and only works on one particular type computer. Even if it runs on a different era appropriate processor apparently this app won’t work. So there was a buttload of old motherboards in a store room somewhere so that we could just swap the board out if the computer ever died. It’s critical infrastructure that there is no backup for.
So basically I’m pretty sure the way the world ends is because somebody threw away an important floppy disk, and now a nuclear reactor is going into meltdown.
Sure but there are star systems that are above and below the exact ecliptic of the galactic plane. We’re not on the ecliptic that’s why you can’t see the milky way as well in the southern hemisphere because we’re kind of below it.
If a ship was travelling from Sol to Arcturus it would travel up (relative to the galactic plane) because we’re slightly below it and it’s considerably above it. The galaxy is very thin compared to its width, but it’s still of thousands of light years high.
The ships can land and take off at least some of them can but they don’t fly around in the atmosphere they just go up and down they’re either on the ground or they’re in space but they can’t really manoeuvre.
Except for that one episode of Voyager where they just kind of forgot about that, but I think that was hand-waved away by saying that they just made the shields into a bubble and so essentially from the air’s perspective the ship was a sphere. That’s apparently what the shuttlecraft do too, which is why they fall like a brick whenever they’re shot down.
Gatekeeping for profit (lemmy.zip)
Space is 2D, right? (lemmy.world)