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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   212 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 1st, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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This last week has been mostly AI work, setting up shell mechanics for my tank project.

  • Safety classifiers are exceedingly frustrating, and combined with the AI's verbosity in commenting code resulted in a situation where the AI effectively poisoned itself, writing a bunch of files individually which, when loaded into context simultaneously, dropped the safety locks like a guillotine. I think I've cleaned up most of it, but it's still a pain. Projectile and armor mechanics look good, and I've got a start on internal component damage; still need fires and ammo rack explosions.

  • I've upgraded my bespoke-GURPS-Vehicles-2nd-Edition weapons and ammo pipeline, and I'm working on implementing various weapons and turrets; the next goal is a loadout menu where you pick weapons, equipment and components to take into battle. AI enemies, improved gun/explosion effects, and a light-baking/environment pass are in the hopper.

  • The social situation is dire. I'm making vastly better progress than I have in years, with a level of effort that feels entirely sustainable... But discussing classifier woes and the HE shell breakthrough with one friend led to him deploying snark, quitting the group chat, and a 24-hour communications blackout. Another friend was like "hey, cool stuff, but maybe don't show this to anyone in the (other) groupchat, they hate AI and anyone that uses it." The latter reaction is hardly unexpected, since I've lurked long enough to know that this was the firm group consensus and there's zero point challenging it, but... At some point, it would be nice to have some form of human connection outside my immediate family not rigorously policed for conformity to alien dogma. The general Artist position on AI is a skin of intellectually-bankrupt blather on top of an ocean of naked self-interest, but goddamn will they crucify you if you cross them on it in any way.

Are you telling me that GURPS is so realistic, it triggers antiterrorism safeguards? I think SJ games needs to advertise with that.

You know the story about GURPS Cyberpunk and the Secret Service, right?

Sadly, I lost my copy of Vehicles (2nd edition) on a Canadian bus trip in the early 2000s, so I'm stuck getting Claude to write me something similar by trial and error. Things Claude has argued are true:

  • With the projectile and powder charge held constant, shortening a cannon barrel increases chamber pressure.
  • Shell walls need to be extra thick to survive, unsupported, max chamber pressure being applied to them, or they'll deform laterally.
  • The best way to simulate shell fragmentation is to build from scratch a geometric model of the shell casing, rederived from the shell and filler mass values.
    Fixing any of these is fraught, as the code is still triggering classifier safety lockdowns when I try to load it into context. Fixing that and further debugging the shell/gun stat calculators is my current goal.

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