ijuin

Furnaces may be in the basement in homes that have both basements and furnaces, but the furnaces are set up to channel the heat into the main part of the house rather than to warm the basement itself.

Camera mode is when you can turn off the HUD and then nanually tilt, pan, and zoom the virtual camera to look in any direction—or to look at your character from any angle and distance. This is most often used for screenshots.

Sacrilege?

I would assume that Edward’s desire to conserve energy and save on the power bill is the reason why there is no heater in the basement.

Catalina has shown consistently that she misreads subtext, which is a large part of her conclusion-jumping.

Likewise, smartphones or mobile internet access were not a thing when I was in high school (during the Clinton Administration)—the only cell phones anybody had were for making voice calls only and did not have text messaging, and the lower-income kids had no phones at all. However, teachers did confiscate personal electronics such as radio/cassette/CD players and Gameboys.

I don’t care for the whole testosterone-dripping masculinity thing that he exemplified, in which you have to either be Top Dog or you’re nobody at best or shameful at worst.

Win7/32? I'm pretty sure that 32-bit versions of Windows balk at being presented with more than 4 GB of RAM.

Hi folks! I would have been back sooner, but this is the first time that I found out that the forum was back in service since it went down last year. Nice to see y'all again.

Sure there's a limit, but there's some distance in between "normal operating power" and "about to burn out", where the extra power is putting strain on the engines, but it is expected to take minutes/hours/days before it actually breaks. See War Emergency Power for a real life example--the P-51 Mustang's engine could be over-driven for short periods to get up to 60% above its rated power level, but five hours at this level was enough to require a full rebuild of the engine, and even five minutes of it was enough to require a full visual inspection of the engine's internals for damage.

If by "robots", you mean sapient ones like Data, it's pretty well established that Dr. Soong made breakthroughs that nobody has yet been able to duplicate, with Data's creation of Lal being the closest to success that anybody has gotten. In the episode, "The Measure of a Man", Cmdr. Maddox had wanted to reverse-engineer Data in order to attempt to duplicate him, and the plot of the episode revolved around establishing that Data had the right to refuse to be taken apart. Other sapient Artificial Intelligences have also mostly been stumbled upon "by accident", such as the holographic Moriarty or Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram Mk. I. It seems that Federation technology is not yet up to the challenge of reliably creating sapient AI on demand. If, however, you mean non-sapient automated drones, we have seen those being used, especially in areas hazardous to organic life--e.g. exterior work on starships in space dock, or the Exocomps. Actually, an ion rocket is a good example here. Any engine that accelerates its reaction mass using an electromagnetic field will accelerate it more strongly in proportion to the strength of the field. In other words, increasing the power to the electromagnets will increase the specific impulse of the engine. This, in fact, is how the VAriable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) engine achieves the "variable specific impulse" in its name. Of course you're a Looney--it's even in your name!

An engine’s “rated” power output is not the maximum that it is capable of—it is the maximum “safe” output. Whereas civilian engines are designed to be unable to exceed their rated output as a safety measure, military engines in real life have no such limits—they can be over-driven, though at the risk of excessive strain causing a breakdown. It is analogous to afterburners on a turbojet engine—A lot of extra energy/fuel is thrown into the engine in order to get extra thrust, but at far lower efficiency than normal operation, granting diminishing returns. In Star Trek, we see the warp engines being over-driven in this manner whenever they go to “emergency” speed, above the rated warp 5.0 (NX-01), 8.0 (NCC-1701), 9.2 (NCC-1701-D), etc.

I think that we need to distinguish between powerplants and engines here. The warp reactor ("warp core") provides power for the warp engines (those huge nacelles), which are the most power-hungry system on most ships. The impulse reactors are a set of fusion reactors that provide power for the impulse engines (those red glowy things seen on the aft side of the ship), and also provide secondary power to the rest of the ship when the warp core is offline. Now, the key thing here is that one type of reactor can be used to provide power to the other type of engine if need be. For example, in "Star Trek Beyond" (the third JJ movie), when the Enterprise loses her warp nacelles, Scotty rerouted the warp core's power output to the impulse engines. Likewise, if the warp core is offline (or destroyed), power from the impulse reactors could be diverted to the warp engines--though this would result in them being seriously under-powered and would give a much lower warp factor, e.g. Warp 3 instead of the normal Warp 8 or higher. So, warp travel at relatively low speed is still possible without the warp core, as long as the warp nacelles themselves are still functional.

Sounds like my cat—when he sees a moth or a fly he will chase it.

Furthermore, Federation starships are not held together by the strength of their physical structure--they are held together by forcefields--the "structural integrity fields". The structure only needs to hold on its own under relatively low strain because when the ship has power, the forcefields provide 99% of the strength. As for the shapes of ships, apparently streamlining is meaningful for warp travel--keeping your frontal area reduced, for example, would reduce "how much" space you need to contract in front of the ship, and therefore the amount of energy required. The more-streamlined shapes probably allow for greater energy efficiency.