And they first batches of the current network are at their end of life. That means that with the same level of investment, growth will slow down, which is terrible for venture capital.
And orbital mechanics is a bitch. You can't add more speed to a certain area (like a city with a lot of people) and less to the empty ocean. So there's a harsh density limit to your subscribes.
perpetually burning up satellites in the atmosphere is a pretty shitty business though.
Exactly. The business isn't remotely sustainable. All that money being invested into new satellites will, by next year, need to be invested constantly to keep the network at the same size.
Starlink needs run as fast as it can, just to stay in the same place, and the investment money is finite when people see it's not going to grow.
There's a saying: "it's not your fault, but you are the only person who can solve it".
Only you can reduce your calories, only you can stop smoking and only you can quit alcohol. That's shitty that you have to, and in an ideal world it wouldn't be like this, but it is.
On the other hand, this factor might be the salvation: the current AI market is full of 2000-era-dot-com business models based on selling at a loss and making it up on the promise of global domination later.
Except of course, that's all a lie and they can never remotely turn a profit. AI can't perform anything that's being promised, it's not getting cheaper and it doesn't noticeably improve where it matters.
You can see the cracks starting to form: The classical big tech players are already bailing out of AI-growth, microsoft, oracle, amazon are opting out of their growth and not investing anymore. And of course they are, Amazon pumped over 200 billion into AI, and are turning 5b revenue. Not profit, revenue. They're not making any profit, despite 200b of investment.
Soon enough, Open-AI too is going to fail under the strain of their immense and constant losses when the people who keep pumping venture capital stop doing that. I'll eat my hat if they last into 2028.
massive choices on where the story goes based on your responses,
Really? What massive choices do you make? Hunter or emissary? That just changes the last 20 minutes of the game. Before then, you have no major impact on the plot.
the capabilities to befriend or antagonize any enemy whether a human, alien, or these strange pirates
But you don't. You can't befriend the pirates, there arent really any strange aliens, and you can't antagonize most friends.
You deal with politics, survival,
Do you? There's some minor "deal with this for me" stuff from the factions, but that's hardly politics.
And survival isn't an issue in the game at all, even though you can see the scrapped leftovers from it.
attempting to save the galaxy while trying to discover the hidden story.
The "hidden story" is spelled out and telegraphed in the main questline. It's not a souls like where you piece it together, they literally tell you to your face
I maintain that if they didn't bother with the space thing, or abstracted it more to a "blip on a screen" type of topdown play like in mass effect, it would be a better game. They could have spent that time on the shooter gameplay loop not being shit.
Especially the ones who bought the debt. They want income, they don't want to spend time. If you pay them some tiny amount that's higher than the pennies they paid, they're happy.
It's actually surprisingly hard to get a lithium cell to catch on fire from simply physical damage. You need to break it very specifically, and crushing them flat with a fucking tank will just shatter them before anything serious happens.
The reason that it happens so much due to damage is because there are a LOT off cells, and if someone damages the pack, there's a point between total destruction and no damage where it's just the right level of damage to cause thermal runaway reaction.
The other reasons are manufacturing defects, and shitty charging, which are WAY more common than physical damage.
And they first batches of the current network are at their end of life. That means that with the same level of investment, growth will slow down, which is terrible for venture capital.
And orbital mechanics is a bitch. You can't add more speed to a certain area (like a city with a lot of people) and less to the empty ocean. So there's a harsh density limit to your subscribes.