Star Fleet Battles
Term Paper
Where the wild things ain't.
- Jeff D. Conrad, USS Wisconsin (Stardate 2006.07.30)
Intelligence reports from the Tholian Holdfast suggest that Tholian captains are excellent monster hunters. Since the arrival of the 312th Battle Fleet (R7.60), monsters have been hunted without discretion using the tactics described here. There are even reports of using these tactics to herd monsters toward the Klingon Tholian Border Harassment Squadron (R7.1). The web caster (E12.0) is a primary reason for success of Tholian tactics against monsters. These tactics use free-standing web (E12.22) in several ways: 1) limit the movement of a monster; 2) create a situation where the Tholian may fire but the monster cannot, 3) lure monsters away from planets or other targets.
The first tactic is successful against monsters with predictable movement. The Planet Killer (SM1.0), and the Sunsnake (SM5.0), are both examples of creatures whose movement patterns are predictable. Monsters follow a preset path to their target, causing them to get caught in stratigically-placed web. The more time that they spend stuck in the web allows the Tholians to analyze and/or destroy the creature. Though the electro-magnetic interference (SM1.45) prohibits firing directly at the creatures from beyong 60,000km, it is possible to still create free-standing web in their path.
The second tactic is used when the Tholian has closed within the monster's attack range. By placing free-standing web between the Tholian and the monster, the monster is prohibited from firing direct-fire weapons at the Tholian (G10.61). Meanwhile, the Tholians may collect information with labs, or use (G10.62) to fire phasers with impunity at the monster.
The third tactic uses the spirit of the killdeer to pull the monster away from its target, and lure it into web. Some monsters have a pursuit mode, where they will veer away from their primary objective and chase a ship. By activating this mode, the Tholian lures the monster to then, then sets up a string of web in the path of both units. The Tholian can pass through and ignore the web in terms of movement as per (G10.53), but the monster will get stuck or slowed. By repeating this procedure, the monster will get further and further away from its objective. This is especially critical if the monster is already near its target.
Web caster tactics may not work against intelligent monsters such as the Space Dragon (SM7.0), or with monsters who have gotten stuck in webs before, and learned their lesson. As with all wild creatures, their exact behavior is not likely to be predictable in any given situation. But it does appear that the Tholians can use their web technology to at least maintain the upper hand when dealing with monsters. It may be possible in a dire situation to recruit a mercenary force of Tholians who would allow their scarce resources to be recruited for hire to help defeat or slow-down a monstrous foe heading through Federation territory.
The link on their website doesn't work, but here is the real link for the webtools downloads.
http://download3.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/
Here is a list of plug-ins for Mozilla Firefox.
Venkman debugger Allows debugging of Javascript.
HTML Validator - Validates every page you go to.
View source chart plugin - View the source per container
Web developer - Useful tools for developers
ColorZilla - View colors in the browser window
IE Tab - allows you to change the embedded browser in Firefox to IE.
This has to be one of the nicest jobs ever.
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/index.html
Two links about the internet and tubes. Although you can tell what is going on here, it is hilarious video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtOoQFa5ug8&search=DJ%20Ted%20Stevens
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhOtlQ8-mcU&mode=related&search=DJ%20Ted%20Stevens
Tonight I finally have finished the basic summary, script and graphics for the Blakes 7 fan site I have been working on for a couple years. I finally sat down and did some image captures tonight using 2x speed. I found it was fun to do, but even though there are only 52 episodes, it still took a while to integrate the information.
In the future, I will probably add to the highlights and try to incorporate a way to view the large images inline on the same page, maybe have a slide show.
Just got done watching Season 3 again of Babylon 5, YR2260. I just did a quick look up on Anne Sheridan (Melissa Gilbert) on the IMDB and in real-life, she is his wife. If you look back in Bruce William Boxleitner's history and you will see he was in a lot of modern westerns, and he was Tron!
They did spend some time at the beginning of the last episode of Season 3, Z'ha'Dum, to redo the video communications of Anna calling John before she went on her fateful mission. It is too bad they could not have, for purposes of the dvds, also included her footage in the older episodes so that her appearance remained consistent.
From this image, it looks like the Babylon 5 race the Minbari uses a Holographic System for space combat based on Star Fleet Battles.
Found this in a humorous article at thedailywtf.com.
The article depicting a study was ironically listed on the usability.gov site, which still as of today has a right-navigation motif.
When updating my box at work this week, I discovered a link to the new Eclipse 3.2, plus add-ins, which is referred to as Callisto.
I originally found out about Concept Draw from a writing group site. I guess they have a separate product Concept Draw Mind Map, for handling neural idea organization a la the Brain. In evaluating the core Concept Draproduct it looks very similar to Visio, but seems to have a more modern set of export formats, to graphics or to PDF for instance. The version of Visio I used at Blue Cross Blue Shield did not have all of these export formats.
I was a little disappointed in their templates. The preview icon for how the template will look like shows color and effects, whereas a document generated from the template does not really load automatically with the colors and effects.
I knew a speaker, Pablo Celi, in the Lawson Thrillspeakers that used a neural chart for his speech notes.
Struts layout has tags for "required" form fields and "every other" css in lists.
Not sure yet if this is any better than scriptlets which handle list row colors via %2.
Explorer Canvas is a script that enables all kinds of cool graphics within web pages. Now dynamic 2D and 3D images can be controlled by... JavaScript! Very neat script and it does not require any new plugins.
From the documents on the web you would think it was easy to create a Tiles interface independently of Struts. However the links are dead in the current version. Also, I believe some of the documentation is dated, and the scattered remains you find today on the web are leftover descriptions from an older version of Tiles. I have created a fixed example that fits with some of the previous documentation, but actually will work in the case of using Tiles definitions.