90's Future Empire

Possibly dumb question, but would oil for plastics be able to be mined on other planets? It'd need to have lots of dead organic matter at some point to turn into it, right?

>pop culture perception
Even more hilarious how this stupid perception came about.

Yes. There are literally lakes of hydrocarbons on Titan.

There are postulated worlds with such large amounts of Carbon that it literally rains shit like butane and propane.

We use a DOS system from the 90s for our inventory at work and we're a major chain retailer. If that doesn't say something

>pic related
Also the T-34 prolly. I'm not saying this is an accurate perception, but you could use it as a basis for making OP's idea work.

That's...actually a very good question.

As dumb as the answer sounds Synthetic Plastic may be the only way.

Well user the primary issue with this is your popular perception of 1990s stuff. When people talk about computers in the 1990s they think of CRT monitors with absurdly small screens, black and white and sometimes vector graphics.

The main reason why we think computers today are super powerful because they run lots of things to make it look pretty. Point and click, graphics, and a whole slew of things to make our lives easier.

In the 1950s the first digital computers and technologies were being written up and manufactured. In the 1960s we had larger and more powerful computers that took up rooms but they featured rudimentary flat-screen displays with touch-pens (big fat fuckers with a thick cord) for the US military. In the 1970s refinement of technology allowed shit to be more faster and smaller.

1980s is where things got interesting. All of the technology being used in your 90s universe would have to been conceptualized, designed and tested 10 years before. Plus in interstellar empires with 1990s technology would place emphasis on reliability (radiation hardening and easily replaceable components) rather than pure brute power. If anything having flat screen monitors with black and green is well within 1990s technology.

If it works why mess with it?

Give the game P.O.L.L.E.N. a look. JFK survived the assassination attempt, US and USSR ally, and instead of focusing on computer technology we discover some quirk in quantum physics that lets us manufacture antimatter. Not enough to break the light barrier, of course, but fairly easy access to antimatter, even if it costs more energy to produce than we can derive from it, would make interplanetary travel a relative breeze.

Worse comes to worse we already have good ways to produce that stuff ourselves, it's just not inefficient compared to digging it out of the ground.

If you're a space faring civilisation, converting a barren moon to growing petroleum generating algae may not be a crazy idea.

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Good old "Machine uprising happened", its a staple of Sci Fi. anything more advanced than what you discribe is a potential danger and would help an AI uprising.

A shortage of materials required to make more complicated displays/better processors/sleeker materials etc. leaves a civilization's tech with a large gap between effective and expensive vs. workable and affordable.

It might be that the government and official bodies get better tech, but on the fringes of society everyone is stuck with CRTs and DOS.

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> Everything runs command line interface

Future transhumans are so smart graphical interface woudl be unnecessary distraction.

The Apollo landers guidance computer was the first successful IC based microcomputer, it did things like control the descent of the lander during the landing on the moon part of the mission.

Shortage of rare earths which make modern cheap electronics possible would do it, we're slated to run out of all known dysprosium sources by 2040. Which will make LCDs and microchips very difficult to make without.

If you're space faring, wouldn't rare earth shortages become the least of your problem?

Other than the pain the in ass of prospecting entire planets at a time.

Didn't it overflow, becoming a useless chunk of shit, forcing Armstrong to make a manual landing in a spot that wasn't suicidal?

We can recycle them from existing electronics. It's just that nobody does it these day because mining more is considerably cheaper.

Kek

>Future transhumans are so smart graphical interface woudl be unnecessary distraction.
user the GUI has always been an unnecessary distraction, learn to bash

aesthetics bump

rekall.me

Vector graphics are 100% believable. Not because you can't have 3D graphics in space, but because you want every single process of your computer dedicated to calculating important things, not wasting processing power for the pleasure of the astronauts. Also, it's simpler and more efficient.

>All electronics are bulky and basic-looking because of shielding from cosmic radiation and multiple redundancies built in.
>Like current military gear it's a lot more powerful under the surface, but the user interface isn't a priority.
>Gear must be serviceable far away from the civilization so you could just pop the lid of and solder things up. You can't solder microcomputers.

Spaceship computers are already behind anyway, smaller transistors makes them more vulnerable to radiation/cosmic rays and you don't actually need that much power for most space stuff.

The aesthetic term is "cassette future"

You wot? You're confusing the 1980's with the 1990's, buddy. The 90's were the decade where computers passed the vector, black and white, 16 color graphic phase and where 16-bit got mainstream. Multimedia, CD-ROM's, True type fonts and WYSIWYG became standard.

Streetfighter 2, Wing Commander, Privateer, X-Wing, Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Arena: The Elder's Scroll, Decent, Command & Conquer, Pentium processors, Windows 3.1 and 95, are all from the 1990's.

Also, for 90's aesthetics see: i.4cdn.org/tg/1477582168052.pdf

The space magpies / space jews will jack your shit if it looks any good. You have to purposefully make your craft as low tech and shitty looking as possible to avoid attracting attention.

The same reason I don't wash my bicycle or even protect it from rust. Because a shitty looking bicycle is better than no bicycle.

Hell, it can even be really advanced underneath all that! You just have to make sure that from the outside everything looks like a plastic brick with an oscillascope hastily jammed into its orifices.

the opposite of this shits me though.

In the Civil War movie Captain America and Iron man fight in some soviet era millitary base with flat screen monitors.
shitty continuity error.

How are kids supposed to know they're computers otherwise?

no real reason for posting this, just contributing to epic bread with more based games/aesthetics

post-apoc is best apoc

Command Line Interface is the sexist interface.

Also, any military guys here? How does military tech look? I know they like to keep it minimalist and simplistic.

Military gear must be sturdy and functional, not good looking. Most of the gear is designed so that user can disassemble and assemble hardware down to the smallest parts. Also - bigass switches and keyboards because it must be operable in gloves (it should also apply to spacemen - in case of life support malfunction).

>90's

FYI: The apostrophe goes before the 9 since you're omitting the 19.

>'90s

People who use apostrophes to denote plurality should be shot.

Is that not proper grammar/spelling?

Really? can't find much stuff on it.

Nah Hydra had been waking them up and getting them to kill certain targets. That was the point. See in Winter Soldier there's the thing about how Bucky has repeatedly assassinated people since world war 2 and then got put back on ice. Civil War reveals that while that is true, there were also more "winter soldiers"

Having flat screens in the base makes sense if the base was still being used up until fairly recently, say when Hyrda were exposed in Winter Soldier

Navigating in space doesn't require fancy graphics, much less lots of processing power. NASA did it with slide rules.

Well-written, specialized software also is vastly more efficient for its given purpose than general-purpose software bloated from graphics and lazy designers.

In short; your question can be summed up as "how would you justify aesthetic 1 being as good as aesthetic 2?"

The actual performance, when it comes to important tasks, is about the same. The "modern" aesthetic is better for certain edge cases, but 99% of its advantage is simply allowing retards to pretend they are as good as experienced professionals.

Touchscreens are rare, because they malfunction easily, provide no tactile feedback, and are generally 100% inferior to buttons (which are set around the edges of a screen).

Paperwork stuff runs on windows.
Battle systems run on linux.
A lot of hardware used to use dedicated programs, but it's being shifted over to linux.

>apple
>fad

As an engineer, most of the software I work with looks like it was hand-rolled by a grad student.

An some of it was. SPICE is the default for simulating circuits, and it was written in the 60s. Sure, it's usually got a cheap circuit capture GUI now, but the guts are a text file that's generated from connecting those little boxes. NEC is used to model antenna performance, and it was written in the 70s. Every once in a while someone will wrap a new Windows or Java-based UI around it, but they're never fancy.

You know what also isn't fancy? The more modern circuit design environments (which are really just an interface to run the old sim methods and the new international standard data-sharing together). They also look done on the cheap, even though licenses can cost tens of thousands a year. That's because numerical code is prone to little gotchas, and specialists are required to build and maintain the part of the code that actually does real work. It's very niche use, so you have to ask a fortune per license to justify employing anyone to create it. All company budgets are finite, so the graphics are almost always an afterthought.

You know what uses vector graphics with primary colors on a black background? All layout software. That high-contrast shit is easy to see, and that's what's important. That it's cheap also helps.

And then there's all the orgs that actually DO roll their own software. Do you think anyone is writing control software for petroleum refineries out of their garage for sale? Do you think anyone would buy it and trust it? That shit is ridiculously niche, so most companies started by writing it themselves.

You know who else wrote all their own software. Everyone in the 80s. Banks. NASA. Stock brokers. Schlumberger. Because none of that SW existed yet. It was all new. But because it works and is simple enough to run on damn near anything, it's still in use.

So how niche is your application? And by that I mean now many people will see it in a year, not how profitable the target industry is. If the answer is 1~10 times as many people as it took to write it, then that is tiny, and your GUI is dirt simple.

Does this need to be monitored in real time? Then nothing should move, ever, unless something goes horrible wrong. You need to see what's happening at a glance.

How complex is the math behind it? Is it something you needed a special calculus or higher class to understand, or in a field that actually depends on math and physics? Then you want a proven engine and you're going to slap a shitty UI on top of it.

How much money is your boss willing to spend to make it pretty? Don't bother, the answer is "nothing". You will have a shitty UI.

Your application is not for people. It's not entertainment. It's for work.

Except he's right. Consider that the USA spent $buku to develop a pen that astronauts could use in microgravity. Your typical Bic is gravity fed.

The Soviet solution: use a pencil.

Whether it worked isn't important because, in OP's fictional universe, all you need to say is, "It does."

Also, when I was getting to know a friend of mine with naval experience, his comment about engineers was, "you can always recognize them on a ship. They're the ones carrying stack of unmarked aluminum cases and rolls of PVC pipe, which they insist costs $10k"

Does that mean, if someone strikes a match, we get real-life Praxis?

You know that "use a pencil thing" is a crock of shite, right?

Weirdly enough, you don't want graphite dust floating around in space and getting in your electronics.

The Soviet solution certainly was NOT to just use a pencil.

No. He did override the computer but he did it because he deemd the pre-programmed landing site to be u safe upon getting an up close view the scientists back on Earth couldn't have when they chose it.

Do you have any idea how bad it is to get graphite dust floating around a spacecraft?

apostrophe's

NASA did not do anything, Fisher invented the space pen independently then offered them to NASA. And the USSR used space pens as well.

The Fishcher pen company spent $1 million of their own money on it.

The Soviets also used the space pen.

Also: But

>Hurr durr the smartarse scientists got took down a peg didn't they? hurr durr

You know, I honestly didn't. I did know about the issues with graphite but figured the soviets didn't care enough. Plus, I was told this by someone who emigrated from Soviet USSR in the early 1980s. But you made me go look and now I know, like most stuff that asshole said, it was pure bullshit. Thanks for setting me straight.

But, excluding my shitty reference, it can still work for op's use.

Meant to reference But, ok... got it.

How about...

The chunkier tech fulfills some other need. It's easier to repair in the field, easier to adapt to multiple configurations so you can usually take a component from one purpose-built mechanism (space ship, mining vehicle, sensor station, etc.), change some jumpers (omg, I just shat myself) and you can put it in a completely different purpose-built mechanism. But that much compatibility and cross-usefulness comes at the cost of sleek miniaturization.

This would even allow you to have sleek, miniaturized aesthetic where it makes the most sense. Some rich asshole's yacht will have colorful graphics and flat screens, holographic keyboards, etc. because it is custom-built for him.

>unequal advancements in technology
>if it works don't break it
>space wizard time shenanigans

I'll just post the rest since I'm already here.

...

...

>Here we go again, apparently disregarding all ethical responsibility and releasing a product with enough computational potential to shift the balance of world power overnight at *dangerously* low prices
>a child's toy that can literally guide nuclear warheads. Whoops!

man the 70s were some good times

nvm, i'm an idiot

It's shit because the people responsible for programming shuffle every 3 years.
Looks is windows 98-like.
Hardware varies widly, from hich-tech touchscreen to '70s interfaces.

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Spaceships are expensive and will see decades of hard use so simpler and durable means of technology that can take a literal beating by potentially generations of users are preferred.

Oh man, that weird helmet is the best.

True space age fashion.

How about Jumpspace fucks with anything more complex than a CRT monitor?

old sci-fi is hillarious
youtube.com/watch?v=EpF6o2-nx4I

which is why we love it so much.

Hey, I remember that show.
Have another classic, with one of my favourite op themes ever.
youtube.com/watch?v=-AvjMHs7U7I

Will they too be fans of Dwarf Fortress?

Am OP
can confirm

Absolutely.

Bump

That story is actually complete bullshit

Le bûmp

>1990s era computer systems
>while everyone else was on CRT the US Navy started deploying LCD flat screen stuff in 1980s

>then decided to upgrade combat information workstations in 1995.

...

LCDs, especially back then, were not objectively better than CRTs. In exchange for the space/weight(/cost?/power?) benefits there are multiple tradeoffs in terms of how quickly they can change pixel values, viewing angle, resolution limitations, etc. which are either non-issues or generally much better with CRTs.

True but large screen displays are worth the cost due to diminishing returns on large CRTs. Otherwise smaller screen like workstations would rely on CRT.

It's those fucking minimalists. They ruined our civilization by making us unable to comprehend or appreciate any level of art, so now everything looks like a BBC Micro.

THIS
Fucking """modern art."""

I'm honestly still mad that the Enterprise went from being colorful and retro-futuristic to an apple store in space.
A bit slow on the uptake are we?

>How would you justify a civilization like this existing and being able to compete other "futuristic" civilizations?
"futuristic" designs are usually actually supremely non-functional. Why would I need a ship's bridge to have polished chrome fixtures with smooth white plastic? Why should the displays be some weird, floating hologram display, when a screen works?

in order for some scifi minority report display to "compete" it needs to actually function better than a mouse and keyboard. A series of analog light displays and a dos prompt readout can be just as or more informative

I'm fine with abstract art, I fucking love impressionist art, grunge is my hometown, I can tolerate almost any aesthetic except minimalism. I find minimalism to be actively evil, because it discourages the creation of art, it actively seeks to reduce the amount of art in the world. I loathe it.

...but in return we get elegance and zen like harmonic tranquility.
Most art is shit anyway.

But it looks terrible.