I am not going to share much personal information because I like to keep my online life mostly separate from the real world, but I will say that I am a male with a background in engineering and physics. This background does not matter all that much for most things, but it does mean I can usually spot technical flaws in work and any technical information I post will be as accurate as I can make it, but I am human like everyone else so I do miss things. I try to accept criticism and correct my mistakes if proven wrong because that is the only way to get better, but I know that I do tend to dig my proverbial heels in if people are excessively condescending or stupid in debates so please try to proofread your comments some before you post.

As for writing skill, I think I am not too bad at crafting descriptions or the technical aspects like spelling and grammar, but I have absolutely no confidence in my ability to create convincing dialog which limits my ability to write longer pieces even though I do occasionally have ideas that I think would work well. This means anything I write on my own will likely be limited to short, contemplative or philosophical one shots. Also, please be aware that due to my fickle muses and the fact that every piece requires its own idea I will probably not be producing work with any kind of speed or regularity.

I am a big fan of science fiction and fantasy with the exact details varying somewhat based on consumption. That said there are a number of universes I greatly enjoy so I will go over some of the most relevant ones here.

First is Battle Tech which I feel does a great job building a convincing dynamic universe with shades of grey rather than the black and white abstractions of human behavior that are so popular. I also greatly enjoy the Clans because despite being human they are so culturally alien that I find them a lot more interesting and fun than most supposedly alien cultures in other science fiction. I consider myself a fan of Clan Ghost Bear and am greatly enjoying the merger with the Free Rasalhague Republic they are currently undergoing because I feel it is the best approach any Clan has taken to dealing with its Inner Sphere holdings to date. I am happy to read any good work here, although I am not a fan of dragging canon characters into fan fiction because the universe is big enough that you can easily tell any story you want to without interacting with canon.

The second universe that comes to mind is Mass Effect which can work well with original stories that do not interact with canon, but Bioware has given us a wonderful cast of characters and the flexibility to use them in ways they did not have time to in the game so I do enjoy reading about them. My favorite characters are Joker, EDI, Wrex, Tali, Jack, and Legion, but I can enjoy stories about most of the other characters as well even if I think some of them like Samara or Grunt should have been cut from the game to make room for more interactions with the other characters to show things like Jacob’s personality which only starts to come out in his last conversation or Tali’s prejudice against AI’s. Garrus’s issues with his dead team should also probably go in here, but I get the feeling that was intentionally left to be dealt with in 3 so I will give that a pass for now.

The third series that I will mention is more of a memory at this point, but I did greatly enjoy Halo up until after the second game when I felt Bungie sold out to the multiplayer community which turned the Halo 3 campaign into a plot summary of a game that was never made while ODST and Halo Wars were almost totally irrelevant to the universe. Things then managed to get even worse with Reach which butchered the existing canon around the events which had been well covered in a book and added a massive pile of stupidity that I feel is better off ignored like most of the newer material.

There are naturally other series like Firefly and The Dresden Files that I enjoy, but I think I have covered the bulk of my likes and reasoning well enough to move on to my pet peeves.

The biggest things that annoy me are chronic poor spelling and grammar because while I acknowledge that some errors will inevitably slip by even professional proofreaders, you should really take the time to run a spellcheck and read over your work for grammatical errors because I feel like a failure to do this indicates you do not care enough to edit your work or get some help if you cannot do so yourself because of something like a language barrier. Also, as a reader if I am bombarded by errors trying to work my way through your story I find it distracts from the piece and destroys the flow of the work so good ideas can be completely destroyed by the lack of editing.

Another thing that annoys me is erroneous technical information because I feel that any explanations you give should make physical sense. Audiences will generally accept a quick vague explanation that lets the story keep moving, so unless you have actually taken the time to work out how something could be done it is best not to spout meaningless technobabble without a good reason like a character not really knowing what they are talking about. This naturally gets a by when the source material contains these errors and you are just repeating canon, but that is just because the fault is transferred from the author to the writers of the source material.

Now that that is out of the way, I will use this space for some miscellaneous fun stuff. I derived the equations for the velocity and momentum of an object accelerating under a constant force for a given time when you take special relativity into account. These equations are good for any situation where you have a constant or near-constant force and should hold true at relativistic velocities, but I think they will break down if you start dealing with things like black holes. You also have to remember that at relativistic velocities, velocity addition does not work like you would expect so if you start dealing with transverse velocity components you will have to look up the appropriate equations.

F=dp/dt=d(Gamma*m*v)/dt=(m*v/(1-(v/c)^2)^.5)=F*t
v=c*F*t/((F*t)^2+(c*m)^2)^.5

KE=(Gamma-1)*m*c^2 =(1/(1-(v/c)^2)-1)*m*c^2=(1/(1-((c*F*t/((F*t)^2+(c*m)^2)^.5)/c)^2)-1)*m*c^2
KE=F^2*t^2/m

I derived these expressions for the angular acceleration and rotation time for a long, slender spacecraft of linearly uniform mass with thrusters at each end. The maximum possible lateral acceleration from a pair of thrusters is a, the length of the vessel is l, the angular acceleration is alpha, the angle it rotates through is theta (in radians), and the required time is t.

F=ma
M=I*alpha=F*r
M=2*(F/2)*(l/2)=F*l/2=m*a*l/2=I*alpha=m*l^2*alpha/12=a=l*alpha/6
alpha=6*a/l

For spin up: theta/2=.5*alpha*t^2=t=(theta/alpha)^.5
demonstrating same time for spin down: omega=alpha*t=(alpha*theta)^.5=theta/2=(alpha*theta)^.5*t-.5*alpha*t^2=(alpha*theta)^.5*(theta/alpha)^.5-.5*alpha*(theta/alpha)=theta-theta/2=theta/2
this equivalence demonstrates that the same amount of time is required for both spin up and spin down, so t=2*(theta/alpha)^.5 which brings us to this final result
t=(2*theta*l/(3*a))^.5

to put this into perspective, if you have a ship capable of a full g (9.81 m/s^2) of lateral acceleration you get the following results for various lengths rotating through an angle of Pi/2 (90 degrees):

10m=1.03 s
50 m=2.31 s
100 m=3.27 s
500 m=7.31 s
1000 m=10.3 s