Ertebolle

The fun thing there is that they seem to have then turned around and deified a bunch of mytho-historical figures like Kahless, much as how on Earth (and in many other SF universes) any time you kill off one set of gods you end up with the new gods or the One True God or whatever. (and they tend to be much more bland / un-fun than the previous ones, e.g. the intentionally dull Faith of the Seven in "Game of Thrones")

Hmm, I missed that about seamless takeoff/landing. But as @dingus mentions, you can use cutscenes and animations and other things to make that feel more immersive / continuous even if they are temporarily dropping you out of the engine.

I think the fundamental problem is that people had different expectations for a game set in space, both because Bethesda stoked them (all of that talk of having the idea decades ago / first new franchise in however many years / Microsoft bought the company just to get it as an exclusive / etc) and because after No Man's Sky people kind of expected that with their budget / resources they would manage to fix that game's problems and create something richer + more seamless.

In retrospect, if they'd simply sold it as "Skyrim in Space," admitted to the limitations up front - same underlying engine, limited amount of variety to procedurally-generated content, loading screens instead of seamless takeoff/landing, etc - and not pretended that it was something new, the response would have probably been much more uniformly positive.

They’re really not, and if you think that then you need to read more. And “political capital” isn’t some big fungible pool of quatloos, it’s a lot of little tiny stupid slow fights.

Again, I’m arguing we do both. And anyway this is a volume question, not a construction time one (enough renewables fast enough) - I’m OK with waiting 20 years for new nuclear plants if in 20 years we get a fuckton of them.

"A 2010 National Nuclear Laboratory report" "for some years ahead"

It's 2023, "some years ahead" is, y'know, now. 13 is "some." Quite a few, actually.

Based on what? And how can you possibly make that claim with any confidence if nobody's built one until now?

I'll cheerfully concede both of those statements, I just don't think they result in you winning the argument.

It's not clear that we can build enough renewables fast enough, or that we can build storage capacity fast enough when we do; you cite vague studies that suggest we might be able to do, but that's all they are. I'd rather not bet everything on that and then discover in 20 years that we made the wrong bet.

According to the anti-nuclear group cited in one of your articles, nuclear produces about 4x the CO2 emissions of solar but 1/4 the emissions of natural gas. (1/8 those of coal) And it also assumes we can't improve on that any, even though there is a tremendous amount of money + research going on right now on lowering CO2 emissions from construction materials like concrete and steel. (perhaps we don't have any of those improvements up and running for in 20 years, but meanwhile those shiny nuclear plants are getting rid of 3/4 of the CO2 from the natural gas plants they're replacing)

Well now you're back to arguing about new construction instead of keeping existing plants running.

Also, we can build both. Surely you appreciate that there are other factors slowing the speed of the energy transition besides the availability of capital, and that while nuclear has its own roadblocks, many of them are different from + don't overlap or compete with those standing in the way of renewables.

He is, in fact, arguing against keeping existing plants running too. (I suspected he believed this and he did indeed)

rules limiting how close they can be to residential buildings (apparently 10 times the height of the turbine)

These... don't seem like crazy rules; I don't know how this works in other legal systems but in the US every little podunk wind installation in a residential area is going to be tied up in years of lawsuits over this sort of thing.

building new nuclear instead of using the same resources to build solar or wind at this point means relying more on fossil fuels

I don't think it is the same resources, that's part of my point. I don't think there's a finite pool of money here; the limitations on solar / wind have as much to do with raw materials and suitable locations as anything else, if nuclear provides an additional path to getting carbon-free energy on line (and with the added benefit of not needing to worry about storage, which is going to bring its own rat's nest of location + raw material problems once we get to it) then we ought to be encouraging it as well.

Yeah, it's still commercial-scale, not a "pipe dream" or "not viable with current tech."