Okay, not all of them.  But way too many.

<rant mode>

The Global Trade System was a great concept -- take advantage of the Nintendo DS's Wi-Fi receiver to trade Pokémon between players all over the world, theoretically enabling you to Catch 'Em All without necessarily needing to personally know a fellow player or own multiple versions and systems.

Unfortunately Game Freak and Nintendo grabbed the Idiot Ball with both hands and curled up around it in the fetal position, releasing a bare-bones system without enough hard-coded safeguards to prevent abuse or impossible trades.  The end result: lazy players quickly wrecked the GTS by filling it with ridiculous offers like low-level ComMons for legendaries and Level 100s, or seeking Pokémon at levels lower than it's possible to acquire them at.  All told, it is nearly impossible for serious players like myself to find any Mon they were looking for at a reasonable price. Various unpatched glitches and rampant hacking make it even worse.

I want to do this ... ... to the guy who thought his Shellder was fair compensation for a Level 100 Celebi.  And all million-something of his friends.

Oh, and ... ... off with their heads, too.

</rant mode>

The games are still decent, though the anime went to seed a long time ago.



If you're still here, I'm gonna do a little world-building for my EVN mod now.

Somebody once asked me over on the Ambrosia Forums why the capital ships of the United Galactic Navy have big, long, wings when they're plainly space-only.  I have made an Executive Decision™ that the wings are big fat radiators for cooling.

Sci-fi goes on and on about the "cold depths of space", and to an extent it's correct:  the average temperature of the universe is around 3K (-270°C, or -454°F).  However, that's averaged across the entire visible universe, all 1.131 x 10^35 cubic light-years of it.  (And if I have the math wrong on the volume, feel free to point it out.)  Individual regions, particularly near stars, can be very hot indeed; look no further than Skylab for confirmation.  Rather than handwave the problem away, I decided to look into it some more, and eventually decided that ships are packed with design features to get rid of waste heat.  The hulls of Galactic ships feature nanoscale texturing to increase surface area, and are honeycombed with microscopic channels for liquid cooling agents.  Some recent models have technologies that can use the waste heat for power generation as well.

I've gotten back to work on placing worlds in Balcrusian space, and an English name I picked at random when placing the systems gave me inspiration to write the landing text for it myself (rather than have my helper Waladil do it).

Creedmore I is uninhabited now, but for just under 400 years it was a colony of the Milky Way Union, which settled it in late 503 GSD for its sizable kanium-445 deposits.  The next year it was the site of first contact with the Balcrusian Empire, with which the MWU managed to work out a power-sharing agreement on Creedmore.  Fast forward four centuries, and the Emperor was deposed by left-wing extremists who proceeded to annex the planet in its entirety.  But the nascent UGF had the last laugh, as the best Ka-445 deposits had petered out long ago.  The colony's sixteen million inhabitants were evacuated in Operation Red Clover (unofficially "Operation Raspberry"), the first major operation the United Galactic Navy undertook, leaving the now basically worthless Class M to the Balcrusians.  It was never settled again.

Operation Red Clover basically consisted of the Fourth and Seventh Battle Groups leading what little was left of the Balcrusian space forces after the civil war on a run-and-gun chase for a month.  Meanwhile the entire rest of the mobile UGN and several major shipping companies destroyed any usable equipment and evacuated the population, whether Galactic or Balcrusian in nationality. It was an incredibly successful campaign, and it gave the People's Republic a black eye their upper leadership never really got over.



I love world-building.  It's gotta be my favorite part of speculative fiction.

EDIT:  3 Kelvin is -270°C, not -200°C.