Oh, you're totally right! I knew I was a little braindead today. Thanks so much! It absolutely already does the thing I'm asking for, it just got confused because the edges of the bridges were close enough that their anchors overlapped.
Bridging working normally: https://imgur.com/a/U7yqZU3
Thanks!
I'm using PrusaSlicer, and in PrusaSlicer there is a specific setting for this, which is called "bridging angle." But my point is that bridges are already specifically identified by the slicer as a specific category of print area needing specific settings, and in this case it should be possible for the slicer to choose an optimal bridging angle on a bridge-by-bridge basis, rather than requiring the user to choose a single global angle. You're right that it would be less catastrophic for the bridging to be 45 degrees off than to be 90 degrees off, but it's not obvious why this should be a global setting at all, rather than tailored to the needs of the local geometry of the bridge. It could even be something fairly simple, like just drawing lines parallel to the perimeters of the bridge, similar to what "concentric infill" does. I haven't really looked in to what the best way to implement this feature would be, I'm still at the point of trying to work out how to even describe the issue.
Basically this: https://imgur.com/a/VjUTVaq
The blue sections have no support material below them and are printing as bridges, but in the default behavior, PrusaSlicer just uses the single, global "bridging angle" setting to decide which way to print layers on top of these sections. The perimeters on these sections are printed correctly to make the shortest path across the gap, but the rest of the lines making up those bridge layers are printed to match the "bridging angle," which here means that two of the bridges are printed so they are supported only by those two perimeter bridges themselves.
Please ignore the details of the print itself, as I'm a little braindead today and this is a print that won't actually fold together correctly as designed. But the issue of bridges orienting poorly is more general than this particular design.
Sure, I mean, anything you need a spacecraft to do but that you can accomplish without adding extra equipment, you should probably do it that way, because it means less mass to accelerate and less equipment to test and certify and so forth. It's definitely not hard to imagine getting this functionality without adding equipment. The question is whether the ability to do this in the rare scenarios that call for it offset the drawbacks of having a system in which the protections against such failures can be disabled. Which means you then have to include a bunch of interlocks and crap to ensure it's as unlikely as possible that the ship can get into that mode without someone being very sure they want that. I think OP is probably right that on, say, a cargo ship, it's pretty unlikely that "also, the engine can explode!" would be seen as a feature rather than a wholly alarming bug.
That would make sense for a cutting edge spy plane, but it's a little weird for something like the Nostromo, which is just a standard cargo ship. I guess if you sometimes carried secret cargo, though, you would want that equipment standard, since otherwise installing it custom for one trip would be a dead giveaway that there was something secret on board.
I really don't think it's that stupid. Your particular machine has a lot of ports, yeah. But there are plenty of machines out there, like the 12-inch non-pro macbook, that have ONE USB-C PORT and absolutely no other ports. That's clearly limiting. Like, you can connect it to ethernet, if you buy an additional USB-C ethernet adapter, but if you want to be able to ethernet and have it connected to power at the same time, you need to buy a special power brick that combines the two functions, because they didn't include any other ports.
Plus, there are a bunch of things that still use USB-A. I've got a bunch of old thumb drives that work like that, especially for transferring video files to my TV, which only supports USB-A itself. Wireless dongles for mice and game controllers, which still offer a latency advantage over bluetooth, tend to be USB-A as well. I've also got a wearable pulse oximeter that requires a special cable to load data, and the other end of that cable is USB-A only. Again, you can get an adapter dongle, but that's never as convenient as just having the right port in the first place.
I went a bit out of my way to get a laptop with a decent collection of ports (and it's a bit of a less portable laptop as a result, maybe more like a desktop replacement), but even it has for some reason dropped the SD card reader, which I would have used a lot. I had to get a dongle for that. And I had to get one that used USB-C in particular, because my USB-A ports are usually both filled.
Basically the selection of ports used to be something that laptops used as a point of differentiation and pride in a crowded market; but Apple managed to invert this, making the prestige marker having a slimmer laptop with as few ports as possible, and that was a dumb change. I do think the pendulum is swinging back, as with your Pro macbook, but I don't think it's unreasonable to be frustrated with the way this element of the market went in such a consumer-hostile direction for a while.
I've been seeing that one mentioned a lot lately because the sequel just came out.
I was being an idiot. It does bridge correctly, it just got confused because the bridges were close enough together that it thought it had to make them one single bridge. Thanks!