I suppose one could argue that you want the more dselicate computers behind the pilot, since then it has the greatest achievable shielding on all sides without having excessive distance from the flight controls and without becoming inaccessible if the pod that is loaded into the middle is not traversible. Similar reasoning is used in Formula 1 - delicate bits of the car (such as the fuel tank) are placed between the driver and the engine, to keep them as safe as possible without creating a burden. This would necessitate there being a step down to get to the pilot's chair. It's not a particularly good piece of "lore repair" but it's the best I can do.

The nuclear waste silos were, though.

The feet operated as vertical rockets, so I'd say the designer was thinking along the same lines you are.

The landing pads are also vertical thrusters (which is how they can skim), so you need space for the nozzle, engine, and fuel. The size of the landing pads would seem fine, given everything that needs to be in them.

I'm calculating mass in terms of filled volume. The entire mid-section of the Eagle was a mesh of girders, rather than a solid hull. Since the total space filled is 1/Nth that of a solid hull that has to be able to handle the same rotational forces, the total mass is reduced. The cross-hatch patterning is likely to be good there, as it's strong along those lines. We don't need to specifically know what the material is, or the specific mass, as long as we can use engineering techniques to figure out the percentage of material we need relative to having a solid hull.

That's true of all sci-fi, by nature. The challenge, though, is to make it as plausible as possible. The "traditional" rule (variously ascribed to Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov) was that good sci-fi was allowed to violate one law of physics (although this had to be justified and explained) but everything else shoud be as plausible as possible. S:1999, as a whole, certainly did not comply with that, but if we restrict ourselves to the Eagle, then I'd say that it would just about pass muster there.

BTW, AI is a godsend for ALS patients. Even with an eye tracker, your writing throughput is low / tiring compared to typing, and of course you can't do anything that requires physical activity (painting, playing an instrument, speaking, etc). AI tools help fill the gaps.

Did *she* want to die? Did *she* want to be "released"?

Did she have an eye tracker, to allow her to communicate naturally?

Motor neurons dying != brain control of motor neurons dies.

Anyway, you don't need a brain-computer interface for an ALS patient to work. I have a friend in Finland with ALS who works as a consultant on safety for a nuclear reactor startup (he was a nuclear safety engineer before becoming paralyzed). All it takes is an eye tracker.

The biggest problem is the typically short and unpredictable lives of ALS patients. He has lived abnormally long (I think something like 13 years now), but a large part of that is due to him thinking like a nuclear safety engineer (backup on backup on backup, training his nurses to have zero tolerance for error, etc), and still has a close call like once per year or so, and I regularly worry when I don't see him online in a while that something happened that killed him. A tube comes off a life support system. A nurse forgetting to reconnect something. A mucus plug in his airways. Etc. ALS patients' lives are fragile. He does CAD design for parts on his computer (it's too hard to do it with the mouse using the eye tracker, so he designs the shapes programmatically) and orders them 3d printed to correct any deficiencies he finds in his support systems.

ALS patients also have to constantly fight the medical system. Even in a place like Finland that will actually do long-term care for ALS patients (which is very expensive), it shows that it would be much more convenient for them if those danged ALS patients would choose to die (and there's often pressure put on them to do so). One of my friend's goals is to outlive a doctor who told him he would only live a year or two put a lot of effort into getting him to choose death. It was a battle to get long-term ventilator care. It was an even bigger battle to get to use a cough machine and to be able to control the settings on it; without regular, meaningful cough support, your lungs fill with mucus, and you'll probably eventually die of a mucus plug, pneumonia, or whatnot.

By contrast, ALS patients today can actually live a decent life using eye trackers. It's not like before when you had to tediously spell out things one character at a time to a helper holding an E-tran frame. Given that 1 in 500 people will get ALS at some point in their life, we really should be allocating a lot more money toward researching cures, even if purely from a cost-saving perspective.

(One final note: if anyone here starts getting peripheral weakness and worries its ALS: your instinct will be to exercise more. Do just the opposite. If your peripheral neurons are dying, the last thing they need is more work. ALS overwhelmingly strikes active people - one researcher I was reading noted that in her entire career, she's never met a couch potato who got ALS. Take it easy, see a doctor immediately, and if it is ALS, start preparing early, but know that you do not have to be forced to choose to die, so long as you can get care. You can live a decent, productive life if you choose to).

Capitalism doesn't care where the money comes from, government or not

Let's look at the various aspects of the Eagle design.

1. It was "designed to work in space" so wasn't designed to be aerodynamic
2. It was modular
3. Mass was kept to a minimum without compromising strength, which is precisely what you would want if your job is to carry a significant mass in space and be able to manoever without ripping apart
4. Cockpits were functional and minimal, not glamorous or more advanced than necessary to do the job

There were terrible aspects as well (nowhere to keep fuel, for example), but if you were going to design a sci-fi ship that is intended to be a simple short-range transport, then the design for the Eagle is close to perfect in a way that most sci-fi vessels really aren't.

Brian Johnson really did a superb job of actually making something LOOK like a practical workhorse.

Orbital Factories are unlikely to employ very many human workers.

Replace the word "any" in your post with "some" and it reads much more rationally.

We're already seeing the bottom drop out in code quality, in those organizations that are really trying to apply AI in the way it's been sold (as a magic bullet to kill labor.)

Maybe quality doesn't matter for some people. There are certainly a lot of "too big to fail" companies who bring shit products to market year after year and never have to worry about competition. But that's not everyone who needs computer software.

For used cars, at least, I would like to test-drive the actual one I am buying. It is not clear from the description whether this is possible though.

Yes, that's why they have to specify.

"Microsoft sucks" isn't just something you read in Slashdot comments anymore. This last year or two, the meme has gone fully mainstream. Starting with the Clownstrike thing (blamed on Microsoft, rightly or wrongly) and accelerating with the Windows 11 shitshow and the contemporary Copilot / cloud services force-feeding.

Their patches have gotten so bad in the vibe-coding era that even Susan From Accounting is starting to notice. She's afraid to update anything now. I don't blame her, and I no longer install Windows patches immediately either. (Same goes for nVidia drivers.)

Sure, if we all have a daddy with an emerald mine and a bunch of clueless cucks to line up to suck our cocks we can ALL make 10 trillion!