Then you can swap them with a couple clicks between training, off duty, and whatever station schedules you need.

I did notice that it seems like dwarves won't/can't dig straight up with stairs, they need another path up. Not sure if that's new or pre-existing limitation, as I haven't played classic in over a decade.

Biggest bonus was being able to set the height of the desktop to fit my short legs. Having a desk top at 26" looks somewhat comical, but now I can sit with my feet flat on the floor, knees at right angles, thighs resting on the seat, elbows and forearms resting on the armrest and hands resting on the desktop/peripherals. Nothing bent at an odd angle and no pressure points. The difference has been way more than expected.

Second best part is having a big L shaped desk with nothing to bang my knees on from one end to the other.

Imagine you need a bunch of people trained to do X, and machines capable of Y, in order to build your missiles, but you don't need many missiles right now, but if a war against a major power broke out you'd need to ramp up production massively and instantly. Either you keep making missiles you don't need, or you somehow train people and maintain machines without actually using them, either way you're spending just to maintain readiness for no immediate value. Or you find a close enough use where you can get some value by producing something similar enough that you can convert to military use rapidly.

That wouldn't be so much political pork as actually practical. But I know little to nothing in this area, so just speculation.

Made me really lean towards never abbreviating in variable names unless it was extremely necessary for brevity, and also provide good comments.

That said, my understanding is that the military budget mostly goes to salaries, so any drastic cuts would leave us with massive unemployment. You'd have to take things really slow to make that big a change in the labor force without pretty ugly side effects.

If the assumption isn't correct, you could possibly still place at least two lasers and define a narrow zone between them where the angle would be about 180 degrees. Would be damned tough to hit an eye from two sides at once. But that limits you to half power per laser, which probably isn't enough margin.

I'd say that if you are gluing together a bunch of known-good components into a specific configuration that isn't a full copy of something else, you're building from scratch.

Where you want to make sure a pointer you've been given isn't null before you try to dereference it. Without short-circuit, this becomes a segfault.

You could fit 40 base-3 values into a 64 bit integer, but in order to read/write index 39, you have to perform 39 multiplications/divisions. So no efficient random access. And is there any way to encode more than 40 base-3 values if your largest integer is 64 bits? If you need 45 elements, I guess you could use an array of 5 8-bit integers where each 8-bit element represents 5 base-3 elements. Of course, now you're limited to increasing the size of your array to increments of 5 (or more generally, smallest efficient integer size / log base 2 of the number of representable values)