Isambard Brunel, one of history's great engineers, tried to make one in the 1800s.
The project failed due to materials science limits of the day (leather seals for high vacuum)
So he went back to building normal, non-silly railways.
So it's fair to say "maybe we didn't have the technology 150 years ago" but that also means you know exactly what mistakes to not repeat. Of course, this assumes a good-faith operation, not a placebo promised to keep people from demanding normal, non-silly railways in thr first place.
I suspect it's a hamfisted approach to limited data. If some kids can play 6 hours a night and still keep up with schooling, it's probably okay, but to track that requires impractically constant levels of feedback between parents, teachers, children, and game operators.
There's a case to be made for dueling what is essentially a post-scarcity socialist Federation against the embodiment of capitalism-as-cult.
Conversely, the Borg are in a way aspirational-- growing and assimilating knowledge and improvements seems a bit higher of a goal, but their presentation comes off ham-fisted.
I feel like there's a missing explanation of why "assimilating the diversity" of a civilization needs to be a total stripmine rather than taking a few (potentially willing) representatives and regularly coming back in case anything new evolved, like binge-watching a civilization every few years. The stripmining aspect seems necessary to make them recognizabily villianous-- the enemy of sacred individuality rather than just data hoarders whose homelabs turned into giant cubes.
It does feel like Latinum is very much a MacGuffin for undermining a huge amount of "we have virtually infinite free energy and can replicate anything we need" worldbuilding; they needed a way to make 24th century capitalism seem remotely plausible.
Every sort of microcontroller/breakout board imaginable. I'm fond of the nanoCH32V305 (144MHz RISC-V CPU, 32k RAM/128k flash, and GPIOs for days)
Soldering project kits. I bought a NTP capable clock kit to learn SMD techniques, then discovered that the Chinese market has no need for time zone support, but I had little need for the time in Beijing.
There's a surprising amount of miniature stuff there-- terrain parts for model railways, or dioramas or wargaming. The actual model railway stuff seems sort of thin on the ground, mostly resold and expensive foreign brands or toy grade stuff.
I got one of those ominous looking wire-stripper-cutter-tools and rather like it.
For some reason they tend to describe the flash capacity of phones as ROM (i. e. 4Gb RAM/128Gb ROM); a typo or bad cut-paste seems plausible.
But Xiangling seems like a weird choice of featured unit. I guess she's one of the more memorable four-stars, but slap Raiden Shogun on a freaking Nokia G20 and fanboys would buy it.
-- sent from my G20 with a $2 Genshin-themed case on it.
In a single-party state, I'd expect the actual debate occurs inside the framework of the party. You've still got different viewpoints and factions, but they're not directly campaigning for votes. That might encourage more work towards consensus, because it's not an every-four-years winner-take-all battle for control.
The fetish for electoral democracy runs the risk of confusing means for ends. Democracy is one way to deliver good governance, but is it the only one? Is it the best one for all situations?
I've had fairly decent luck with ordinary dry-erase markers and the cheap Neje engraver (possibly 1W, maybe 1.5W, I don't remember) that's basically made out of old DVD-ROM stepper motors.
I actually wore out the laser after doing a few hundred caps, so I'm waiting for a new one in the post.
One of the bigger problems is predictable mounting so if you do 10 keys in a row, they're aligned. A jig helps, like gluing a spare switch to the engraver bed.
I built a 130% design. It cost about $75 delivered for five PCBs from JLCPCB. But I do it through-hole, so add:
Three resistors
Three LEDS
130 diodes
Encoder(all together, like $5 per board if you bought the diodes by the thousand)
MCU (I've been using the $6 nanoCH32V305, but your design may vary)
Caps and switches (not going there, way too personal taste)
You can also abuse their "aluminium PCB" service to generate a plate. It's not as stiff as a real laser-cut/waterjet-cut plate, but the price is right (like $80 for five; they add a penalty fee for asking for 130 big holes punched into the plate :D :P Then use a second plate as backing for a "sandwich style" mount.
Another alternative is some of the cheap hotswap kits on Aliexpress-- there's a 100% for about USD55 under the name "Monsgeek MG108W"; I can't speak of it for experience. I tried another similar but pricier one (SK108) a while back when I wanted a testing experience, and it worked well enough but the software for customization was awful
Damn, is he a healer type with Elemental Burst "Improve standard of living for 800 million people?" I might finally find a replacement for Qiqi in my team.
As a Qiqi main, I support your life decisions.
People don't even bother to ridicule me.