Reapers and Collectors vs. UNSC

[Stargazer]

Instead of encountering the Covenant, in 2525 the UNSC is invaded by the Reapers. The Reaper's intent: make a human Reaper. They have several Collector ships, but the Collector ships will only appear over UNSC worlds once the orbital fleets are defeated. Collectors and husks act as the ground forces for the Reapers, and of course the Collectors employ seeker swarms. Can the Reapers subjugate the UNSC and turn the population into a Reaper? Or can the UNSC marshal its forces and repel the invasion?

[Srelex]

It would help if you could give us some links on the first two, and from where they're invading, and so on.

[Stargazer]

The Reapers and Collectors are from Mass Effect. They first find Harvest, like the Covenant. The Reapers don't have any planets initially, but are given the Citadel and the Collector Base several lightyears apart.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

The Reapers and Collectors are from Mass Effect. They first find Harvest, like the Covenant. The Reapers don't have any planets initially, but are given the Citadel and the Collector Base several lightyears apart.

Wow, totally unhelpful. I know Mass Effect is some sort of newfangled video game, but I'm not seeing any real attempt here at making a versus anyone can sink their teeth into. Some background information and maybe even an honest-to-gods assertion as to who you think might win and why would be useful.

[DrStrangelove]

The in-game codex describes everything well enough to make a decent guess.

[adam_grif]

A standard UNSC ship fires a 600 tonne slug at .4c. Orbital defense platforms fire 3000 tonne slugs @ .5c.

The Reapers / Collectors don't stand a chance. Reapers are "impervious to dreadnought fire" according to EDI, but dreadnoughts are 20 KG @ .013c. The halo coilguns are just ridiculous. Slipspace travel is slow however, UNSC ships go at ~2.625 lightyears per day. By contrast, ships in MEverse have typical FTL speeds of 12 lightyears per day, and can go much faster with the use of mass relays.

But still, if their goal is simply to protect human colonies, they just need to have an orbital defense platform or two and / or a warship in orbit. Reapers can't stand up to that kind of firepower.

[Stargazer]

Their frigates also weigh 6000 tons. I wouldn't trust any numbers on weight. Speed, maybe, but not weight.

On the weapons side, reapers fire streams of molten metal at "a fraction of c", which cut through Alliance cruisers like tissue paper.

[Sheridan]

Let's assume that the Halo masses are off by two orders of magnitude. My reasoning? Nimitz-class supercarriers are ~332 meters in length and displace ~88,000 tonnes. UNSC frigates are 478 meters in length.

This assumes, of course, that the frigates are built like modern aircraft carriers. I don't have any other comparisons that spring to mind, though. If anyone else does, let me know.

That would make the ships fire 6 tonne slugs at 0.4 c while the stations fire 30 tonne slugs at 0.5 c.

Going by the old standby of Ke = 0.5 * M * V2, I get the following kinetic energy results:

Dreadnought Coilgun (20 kg @ 0.13 c): ~1.521e16 Joules

Frigate MAC (6,000 kg @ 0.4 c): ~4.32e19 Joules

Station MAC (30,000 kg @ 0.5 c): ~3.375e20 Joules

So, a difference of three to four orders of magnitude in projectile energy.


"But wait! They're relativistic weapons!" I hear? Okay, let's look at it from that angle.

Using the relativistic projectile equation from Atomic Rocket, I get the following kinetic energy results:

Dreadnought Coilgun (20 kg @ 0.13 c): ~1.815e18 Joules

Frigate MAC (6,000 kg @ 0.4 c): ~5.892e20 Joules

Station MAC (30,000 kg @ 0.5 c): ~3.118e21 Joules

So, you're talking two to three orders of magnitude in difference for the three projectiles. Either way, that ship is screwed. I mean, assuming that the projectile actually manages to dump all of that energy into the target (which I doubt, but I'm not about to set up a linear accelerator in my back yard to attempt to simulate it, even if I could), you're talking gigaton-equivalent explosions at the very least.

How the dreadnoughts/stations/frigates generate enough freaking power to fire the damned things and/or aren't disintegrated by the firing of these weapons is left to someone else to explain, 'cause I sure can't.

Either way, though, you're talking between about 500 to 3,000 times the energy contained by the dreadnought projectiles for the Haloverse weapons. And, mind you, these are probably lowball estimates. I think it much more likely that the writers made an error in one place (the mass of the frigates) rather than two (the mass of the frigates and the mass of the projectiles) for the Haloverse. 'Course, this is all conjecture. Better-researched numbers are welcome.

[adam_grif]

Their frigates also weigh 6000 tons. I wouldn't trust any numbers on weight. Speed, maybe, but not weight.

On the weapons side, reapers fire streams of molten metal at "a fraction of c", which cut through Alliance cruisers like tissue paper.

Their cruisers are 100,000 tonnes, and I didn't see specific craft mentioned on the MAC page where I pulled the projectile and velocity figures from. It could be that cruisers are packing those guns, with frigates having smaller ones. Also, I didn't see mass of the ships mentioned on any of the frigate pages I just looked at over @ halo wikia.

If the 6000 tonnes figure is accurate, it may just be that the ships are mostly empty space except for the guns and crew compartment. Or maybe they're employing some kind of mass lightening for them? I don't know. The >1 KM long cruisers are still only a big more hefty than a Nimtz, which is less than half it's length.

[Stargazer]

The mass for frigates is ridiculous, and so is the mass for cruisers. A Nimitz-class displaces 103,000 tons fully loaded- it was calculated that a UNSC frigate would have to be less dense than air in order to have a mass of 6000 tons. And there's no indication anywhere else of the UNSC having mass lightening tech. Someone just majorly screwed up the numbers.

Also, Sheridan, two problems. First, the weapon from Mass Effect fires at 0.013c, not 0.13c. However, this is not the weapon the Reapers use. It's what the Reapers are described as being impervious to. Their own weapons, as I said, fire a liquid iron-uranium-tungsten alloy shaped into armor-piercing projectiles accelerated to a fraction of the speed of light, which takes the appearance of a beam. There are no precise numbers on this weapon, but we do see the beams cut through Alliance cruisers like no one's business, and a miniaturized version mounted on a ~75m frigate destroyed a powerful Collector ship in two hits.

Here's an example of what it takes to kill a Reaper. Thirty-seven million ago, the Reapers were doing there MO of wiping out all advanced life in the galaxy. The particular race they were fighting built a weapon that could do this (from an in-game description of the planet Klendagon):

"Klendagon's most striking feature is, of course, the Great Rift valley that stretches across the southern hemisphere. What is most fascinating about the Rift is that it does not appear to be natural. The geological record suggests it is the result of a "glancing blow" by a mass accelerator round of unimaginable destructive power. This occurred some thirty-seven million years ago."



The race that built this weapon was still defeated by the Reapers. And the one Reaper that was hit by it was left "brain dead", but was not destroyed, with its power core still operational. Its mass effect fields kept it in orbit of a brown dwarf for 37 million years, and even after that it was still capable of throwing up kinetic barriers- which is where the whole "Reaper kinetic barriers are impervious to dreadnought fire" deal comes from.

[Batman]

EVERYTHING that moves does so at a fraction of c. And while it is usually safe to assume that when someone mentions stuff doing so, they mean a reasonably NOTEWORTHY fraction of c, without knowing how HIGH a fraction of c that bit of information really doesn't tell us much.
Nor does the picture you posted I'm afraid as it doesn't show us ONE rift, but about half a dozen, NEITHER of which (possibly excepting the one on the lower left) could have been caused by a weapon hit thanks to NOT being a straight line.

[adam_grif]

The race that built this weapon was still defeated by the Reapers. And the one Reaper that was hit by it was left "brain dead", but was not destroyed, with its power core still operational. Its mass effect fields kept it in orbit of a brown dwarf for 37 million years, and even after that it was still capable of throwing up kinetic barriers- which is where the whole "Reaper kinetic barriers are impervious to dreadnought fire" deal comes from.

We've already blown up a reaper in ME1 and the Alliance only lost 8 cruisers some some fighters to it. Blah blah killing Saren lowers the barriers we know, but this can't be used as a calc for reaper durability because there are too many unknowns. Where did the reaper get hit? Did the reaper only take a small hit on one of it's arms? Did the shot punch clean through it's "brain"? Did the shot just glance the Reaper? Were those craters created by one hit or fifty?

Klendagon is an arid terrestrial, slightly larger than Earth, but with a lower density that reflects its relative lack of heavier elements. The crust is composed of tin and aluminum, with wide deserts of dust-fine sand that are easily stirred by the wind.

...

Surface Gravity: 0.88 g
Mass: 1.169 Earth Masses

...

Radius: 7,377 km

(in case anybody wants to run some calcs or something).

We wouldn't see much / any evidence of reapers that were totally destroyed, so there's selection bias regarding samples we can examine here. For all you know, that great big MA cannon had already destroyed 50 Reapers in a glorious last stand before it missed that one we do have that survived. There are far too many variables to account for. All we ever saw the Reaper take fire from in ME1 were cruisers, the only dreadnought at the battle, the Destiny Ascension, was engaged in combat with the Geth fleet.

What we do know is that Thanix guns have twice the power draw of a frigate's wing-mounted mass accelerators (i.e. banter from the engineering crew "Garrus installed some crazy tech. It has nearly double the power draw!" "Yeah, they seem pretty wicked!"). This can give you a sense of scale for firepower, but not their endurance.

There are no precise numbers on this weapon, but we do see the beams cut through Alliance cruisers like no one's business,

The reaper main guns are also bigger than a dreadnought is going by rough eyeball estimates, and dreadnoughts get brought down by low double digit KT level firepower. This isn't good for determining upper limits of firepower. Cruisers getting shot in the battle doesn't indicate much at all.

and a miniaturized version mounted on a ~75m frigate destroyed a powerful Collector ship in two hits.

"Powerful"? The thing gets taken down by a similar number of hits from the regular mass accelerator guns too (if you didn't upgrade), but they apparently have to close the distance to ensure the hits land on the target. The only time we see the Collector Ship in action is against the original Normandy, which got taken by surprise and didn't have time to fight back.

[Balrog]

Blah blah killing Saren lowers the barriers we know

The hell? Since when is this explained? And what kind of shitty stupid setup did Sovereign have to make for this to be even possible?

And are these the same .5c MAC guns we see being fired at the Forerunner dreadnought? Because, correct me if I'm wrong, aren't we suppose to see some kind of interaction between a 600-ton object going half the speed the light and a planetary atmosphere? At least the old 30km/s speed wasn't quite as ludicrous (and still made a UNSC Frigate comparable to a ME dreadnought, of which the UNSC had hundreds while the Systems Alliance has...seven).

[adam_grif]

The hell? Since when is this explained? And what kind of shitty stupid setup did Sovereign have to make for this to be even possible?

It's patently obvious. The alliance cruisers are not making any progress, then after you kill Saren, the shields immediately drop completely to zero. In ME2, Harbinger, another Reaper, possesses collector drones, but every-time you kill one of the possessed drones it takes 5-8 seconds before he can posses another one. It seems that when Reapers are possessing things that get destroyed, they get stunned for a couple of seconds.

This makes no sense, but it's what appears to be happening.

And are these the same .5c MAC guns we see being fired at the Forerunner dreadnought?

I have no idea.

[Stargazer]

Nor does the picture you posted I'm afraid as it doesn't show us ONE rift, but about half a dozen, NEITHER of which (possibly excepting the one on the lower left) could have been caused by a weapon hit thanks to NOT being a straight line.

Erosion over 37 million years must have caused all of the roughness about the rift, but there's obviously one main rift.

We've already blown up a reaper in ME1 and the Alliance only lost 8 cruisers some some fighters to it. Blah blah killing Saren lowers the barriers we know, but this can't be used as a calc for reaper durability because there are too many unknowns. Where did the reaper get hit? Did the reaper only take a small hit on one of it's arms? Did the shot punch clean through it's "brain"? Did the shot just glance the Reaper? Were those craters created by one hit or fifty?

I'm not sure exactly what got hit, but I don't think a hit to the arm would leave it brain dead. And the rift was created by one- glancing- hit.

We wouldn't see much / any evidence of reapers that were totally destroyed, so there's selection bias regarding samples we can examine here. For all you know, that great big MA cannon had already destroyed 50 Reapers in a glorious last stand before it missed that one we do have that survived. There are far too many variables to account for. All we ever saw the Reaper take fire from in ME1 were cruisers, the only dreadnought at the battle, the Destiny Ascension, was engaged in combat with the Geth fleet.

If more Reapers had been destroyed, there likely would have been more derelicts to find, or some kind of wreckage. Only one was found. That would tend to the side of the weapon wasn't actually all that successful.

What we do know is that Thanix guns have twice the power draw of a frigate's wing-mounted mass accelerators (i.e. banter from the engineering crew "Garrus installed some crazy tech. It has nearly double the power draw!" "Yeah, they seem pretty wicked!"). This can give you a sense of scale for firepower, but not their endurance.

The quote is "Did you check out the crazy new tech Garrus put into the main gun? It has draws twice as much power now." Note that he says into the main gun, not the gun directly. The Normandy's regular weapons (which are likely Javelin disruptor torpedoes, actually) were not considered the Normandy's "main gun". The quote would seem to mean that Garrus simply put some personal improvements into the Thanix after installation that doubled the power draw, not the power draw compared to regular mass accelerators. And, even if it did, that may not indicate low firepower on the part of the Thanix. Fighters with Thanix cannons are supposed to rival cruiser firepower, and obviously they're not going to produce as much power as a cruiser.

"Powerful"? The thing gets taken down by a similar number of hits from the regular mass accelerator guns too (if you didn't upgrade), but they apparently have to close the distance to ensure the hits land on the target. The only time we see the Collector Ship in action is against the original Normandy, which got taken by surprise and didn't have time to fight back.

Again, the Normandy's standard weapons are likely Javelins, and the Collector ship is supposed to be quite powerful. When TIM tells Shepard that the Collector ship was disabled by a turian patrol, Shepard responds with disbelief that the turians could bring it down. Also, the Collector ship is able to land on planets, something impossible with regular ships that size due to power demands. It's spelled out in Sovereign's codex entry that doing something like that would require a tremendous power source and eezo core. Power which can be diverted to the beam and kinetic barriers.

And are these the same .5c MAC guns we see being fired at the Forerunner dreadnought?

Yep.

[Ford Prefect]

The Collector cruiser being able to land on planets isn't actually that impressive. Regular cruisers are noted as being the largest ships able to land on planets, they just don't do it frequently due to power draw. It's no even remotelyin the same league as Sovereign - twice the size of any dreadnaught - landing on Eden Prime. We can assume that it is vaguely better than your regular crusier, but not that far beyond.

[TC Pilot]

The derelict Reaper obviously didn't tank the Klendagon mass driver, or else Cerberus would never have found it in the first place (they found the gun and traced a line between it and Klendagon). Either the slug punched a hole straight through the Reaper (unlikely IMO, given the lack of any gaping hole) or the "shockwave" of the slug was powerful enough to fry its brain (during the escape from the "abandoned" Collector ship, Normandy jumps to lightspeed and causes several of the Turian hulks to move, which could easily be applied to this weapon).

[adam_grif]

I'm not sure exactly what got hit, but I don't think a hit to the arm would leave it brain dead. And the rift was created by one- glancing- hit.

You can see on the right of the image you posted the hole in the "forehead" of the reaper.

Oh, and I did some digging. The derelict reaper is in orbit around Mnemosyne, which is in a completely different solar system to Klendagon, which is the planet with the rift. The only connection is that they come from the same approximate timeframe of "37 million years ago". At best, this puts them as both being systems owned by the same civilization, and both events happening in the same cycle. For all you know it was a reaper main gun that left the rift. Even if it was the other civilization, you don't know jack shit beyond "they had something that created the rift" and "they killed a reaper".

Fuck, if they penetrated it's barriers, they should have anihilated it. Sovereign was broken into a million pieces by one torpedo.

As for the thing looking naturally made,

Klendagon's artwork, visible from Presrop's surface, is actually a real-life depiction of Mars. The 'Great Rift Valley' -- the massive trench dug into Klendagon from the mass accelerator round -- is actually the Valles Marineris. The same artwork is used for Chohe's moon.

If more Reapers had been destroyed, there likely would have been more derelicts to find, or some kind of wreckage. Only one was found. That would tend to the side of the weapon wasn't actually all that successful.

No, only if the Reapers were mostly in-tact, and didn't fall to the planet or into the sun. That reaper is apparently only where it is because it's mass effect fields are keeping it suspended there. It's "brain dead" but still mostly functional. Are you suggesting this is the only Reaper ever destroyed other than Sovereign? There could have been millions destroyed over the cycle and we'd never know about it, because if they won a battle they'd salvage the wrecks to reverse engineer tech from it, and most of the kills they make would likely destroy it entirely. The Reapers are supposed to clean up after each cycle to leave no trace of themselves, leaving an entirely in-tact reaper is evidence of their sloppy cleaning job.

Note that he says into the main gun, not the gun directly. The Normandy's regular weapons (which are likely Javelin disruptor torpedoes, actually) were not considered the Normandy's "main gun".

This is part of the SR2 codex entry:

Personal upgrades are numerous: the airframe could support additional armor and an axial mass accelerator, the thrusters could support recent advances in fuel technology beyond H2/O2 chemical rockets, and the hull can mount double the standard number of kinetic barrier projectors, leaving space for stronger shields, easily sustainable via the new eezo drive core.

This implies that there isn't an Axial mass accelerator already. This means that if there are any, they must be necessity be wing-mounted. We can infer that they have wing mounted mass accelerators because of the following things:

1. The SR-2 has a Javelin system. Mounted on the wings somewhere, the Javelin system fires two torpedoes simultaneously on converging trajectories, where they both detonate to amplify the effects of the blast. This is never done in the final cutscene. Instead, he fires a swarm of torpedoes, separately, over and over and they aren't on converging trajectories, and they don't detonate simultaneously.

2. They look absolutely nothing like the disruptor torps we saw in ME1 (the thing that hulled Sovereign in one shot), nor do they look like torpedoes at all:



If you just think I've cherry picked a photo to make it look bad, then look up the video on youtube. It's easy to find. Actually never mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmy_qUSMOWY.

3. Although it doesn't look like the "bullets" seen in ME1 from cruiser gun fire, it does strongly resemble the handheld mass accelerator weapon special effects, with the blue trail. It looks exactly like a geth pulse rifle, and the sound effects are exactly like geth pulse rifles too (look at the video again, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmy_qUSMOWY).

4. They use whatever-they-are to fight off the occulus, regardless of whether you have Thanix guns or not. It's stupid that they didn't use point defense, but why would you use Disruptor torps, which are infamous for being so slow they need to be carried by fighters for use, against a small, fast moving, manoeuvrings target? Although still not optimal, mass accelerator guns make more sense in that their move much, much faster.

5. If it was a disruptor torpedo, this is even worse for the collector ship, since it means that a pair of fighters would have been able to totally destroy the collector ship. A souped up frigate is bad enough, but now you're saying that all it would take to kill it is some fighters?

When TIM tells Shepard that the Collector ship was disabled by a turian patrol, Shepard responds with disbelief that the turians could bring it down.

Shepard had no idea about the actual strength of the ship because he'd only encountered it once, been taken by surprise, and didn't have a chance to fire on it. His knowledge was limited to:

- It's cruiser sized.
- It has some kind of beam weapon.
- It can see me even with stealth systems.

The beam weapon wasn't very impressive in firepower terms, a cruiser main gun would have wrecked the Normandy normally anyway. The only thing unusual about it was that it was a beam weapon at all, because nobody uses them in MEverse.

Fighters with Thanix cannons are supposed to rival cruiser firepower, and obviously they're not going to produce as much power as a cruiser.

They have to be able to, at least in some kind of capacitor banks (meaning they have equivelant firepower per shot, but have to wait a long time to be able to fire again), because you can't get out more than you put in. Cruiser level firepower means cruiser level energy.

Also, the Collector ship is able to land on planets, something impossible with regular ships that size due to power demands. It's spelled out in Sovereign's codex entry that doing something like that would require a tremendous power source and eezo core. Power which can be diverted to the beam and kinetic barriers.

We have no idea how it operates, Maybe it had to divert significant power to fire up the beam weapons (which are mentioned to need an order of magnitude more energy htan equivelant slug throwers) . This would actually explain why a frigate gun could penetrate it, although this is not confirmed and is never explained.

[Stargazer]

The Collector cruiser being able to land on planets isn't actually that impressive. Regular cruisers are noted as being the largest ships able to land on planets, they just don't do it frequently due to power draw. It's no even remotelyin the same league as Sovereign - twice the size of any dreadnaught - landing on Eden Prime. We can assume that it is vaguely better than your regular crusier, but not that far beyond.

Nope, they don't land on regular planets at all, very low gravity planets like Tremanre excepted. And there's also the fact that the Collector cruiser didn't actually land, but was floating the whole time.

The derelict Reaper obviously didn't tank the Klendagon mass driver, or else Cerberus would never have found it in the first place (they found the gun and traced a line between it and Klendagon). Either the slug punched a hole straight through the Reaper (unlikely IMO, given the lack of any gaping hole) or the "shockwave" of the slug was powerful enough to fry its brain (during the escape from the "abandoned" Collector ship, Normandy jumps to lightspeed and causes several of the Turian hulks to move, which could easily be applied to this weapon).

Shockwave? Unlikely, mass accelerators don't use mass lightening tech once out of the muzzle. And what do you mean "turian hulks"? There were no turian ships. It was a trap set by the Collectors, with a fake turian distress call.

You can see on the right of the image you posted the hole in the "forehead" of the reaper.

Oh, and I did some digging. The derelict reaper is in orbit around Mnemosyne, which is in a completely different solar system to Klendagon, which is the planet with the rift. The only connection is that they come from the same approximate timeframe of "37 million years ago". At best, this puts them as both being systems owned by the same civilization, and both events happening in the same cycle. For all you know it was a reaper main gun that left the rift. Even if it was the other civilization, you don't know jack shit beyond "they had something that created the rift" and "they killed a reaper".

The Illusive Man was pretty confident that the Cerberus scientists had found the weapon and confirmed that the Reaper was its target. They probably know details you don't; you can't pretend to dismiss there judgment from the few specific details we are given.

Fuck, if they penetrated it's barriers, they should have anihilated it. Sovereign was broken into a million pieces by one torpedo.

The explosion that destroyed Sovereign happened several seconds after the "torpedo" hit (and pierced) it. It likely hit the power core, while this shot obviously didn't.

No, only if the Reapers were mostly in-tact, and didn't fall to the planet or into the sun. That reaper is apparently only where it is because it's mass effect fields are keeping it suspended there. It's "brain dead" but still mostly functional. Are you suggesting this is the only Reaper ever destroyed other than Sovereign? There could have been millions destroyed over the cycle and we'd never know about it, because if they won a battle they'd salvage the wrecks to reverse engineer tech from it, and most of the kills they make would likely destroy it entirely. The Reapers are supposed to clean up after each cycle to leave no trace of themselves, leaving an entirely in-tact reaper is evidence of their sloppy cleaning job.

I am suggesting that, for this specific battle the derelict Reaper was involved in, it may have been the only one "killed". But I have no definite evidence.

As for a "sloppy cleanup job", well, the Reaper isn't immediately detectable. There are some noticeable distortions in the southern hemisphere of the brown dwarf, which the planet description says some scientist was trying (unsuccessfully) to get funding to investigate.

This implies that there isn't an Axial mass accelerator already. This means that if there are any, they must be necessity be wing-mounted. We can infer that they have wing mounted mass accelerators because of the following things:

The projectiles being wing mounted is actually evidence against them being mass accelerators. A mass accelerator's power is directly tied to its length- a short accelerator like the ones on the wings would be isn't going to be very powerful. And Garrus says the SR-2's regular armament is improved over the SR-1's, so it's not like the SR-2 is going around with weak mass accelerators.

1. The SR-2 has a Javelin system. Mounted on the wings somewhere, the Javelin system fires two torpedoes simultaneously on converging trajectories, where they both detonate to amplify the effects of the blast. This is never done in the final cutscene. Instead, he fires a swarm of torpedoes, separately, over and over and they aren't on converging trajectories, and they don't detonate simultaneously.

Maybe that's just a style of firing them. In a side quest in ME2, batarian extremists were going to fire two long-range Javelin torpedoes at two different parts of a human colony (the main colony and the spaceport).

2. They look absolutely nothing like the disruptor torps we saw in ME1 (the thing that hulled Sovereign in one shot), nor do they look like torpedoes at all:

Actually, I think they look quite like what the SR-1 fired, glowing blue and all.

3. Although it doesn't look like the "bullets" seen in ME1 from cruiser gun fire, it does strongly resemble the handheld mass accelerator weapon special effects, with the blue trail. It looks exactly like a geth pulse rifle, and the sound effects are exactly like geth pulse rifles too (look at the video again, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmy_qUSMOWY).

That's geth technology, nothing the Alliance or Cerberus has access to.

4. They use whatever-they-are to fight off the occulus, regardless of whether you have Thanix guns or not. It's stupid that they didn't use point defense, but why would you use Disruptor torps, which are infamous for being so slow they need to be carried by fighters for use, against a small, fast moving, manoeuvrings target? Although still not optimal, mass accelerator guns make more sense in that their move much, much faster.

Javelins could be useful as homing missiles. And while you're mentioning speed, the projectiles move nowhere near as fast as the- bare minimum- tens of kilometers per second mass accelerators would be moving at, let alone the possible hundreds.

5. If it was a disruptor torpedo, this is even worse for the collector ship, since it means that a pair of fighters would have been able to totally destroy the collector ship. A souped up frigate is bad enough, but now you're saying that all it would take to kill it is some fighters?

If you read the description of Javelin in the codex, it actually says nothing about being mounted on fighters, just frigates. And yes, fighters can destroy the Collector ship- with a high enough yield missile. A fighter could blow up the Death Star with a high enough yield missile. On the subject of yield, in the aforementioned terrorist mission the Javelins would have completely destroyed a colony and its spaceport with just two missiles, suggesting nuke level yields.

My evidence for them being Javelins are:

1. When you get a codex entry in the Main Battery Room, the codex updates with Javelin and Disruptor Torpedo entries.
2. The projectiles glow blue, akin to the SR-1's projectile. Glowing blue usually denotes the presence of a mass effect field, which Javelins use.
3. In combat without the Thanix, Shepard orders Joker to engage the Collector ship at very close range. This is consistent with the use of Javelins, close range as to minimize exposure to point defense lasers.
4. They are launched from short tubes on the wings, rather than ship-length accelerators expected from ship mounted weapons.

They have to be able to, at least in some kind of capacitor banks (meaning they have equivelant firepower per shot, but have to wait a long time to be able to fire again), because you can't get out more than you put in. Cruiser level firepower means cruiser level energy.

Nope, the codex entry says it fires just every 5 seconds, not very far from a dreadnought's every 2 second firing rate.

[TC Pilot]

Shockwave? Unlikely, mass accelerators don't use mass lightening tech once out of the muzzle.

Ah. I thought ME mass drivers still have mass effect fields around them. In either case, the damage done to Klendagon > damage done to Reaper.

And what do you mean "turian hulks"? There were no turian ships. It was a trap set by the Collectors, with a fake turian distress call.

The distress call was faked, but the Illusive Man wasn't lying about the Turian patrol that the Collectors destroyed (the Normandy crew would have to be pretty stupid to not notice that no Turian ships or signs of battle were around the area that a distress call was supposedly made from). You can see the wrecks of at least two of their ships.

Check at a little bit before 4:00: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quI1uRd0 ... re=related There's a Turian ship near the bottom right corner of the screen and another in the top left about 2/3 of the way between the Collectors and the right-side of the screen. And at about 6:00 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myfQtyLl ... re=related there's some debris to the right of the Normandy that moves as it escapes.

[Sheridan]

The mass for frigates is ridiculous, and so is the mass for cruisers. A Nimitz-class displaces 103,000 tons fully loaded- it was calculated that a UNSC frigate would have to be less dense than air in order to have a mass of 6000 tons. And there's no indication anywhere else of the UNSC having mass lightening tech. Someone just majorly screwed up the numbers.

That's why I said two orders of magnitude. 6,000 tonnes is ~15 times less than the ~88,000 tonnes given as the official fully-loaded displacement of the Nimitz-class in the US Navy Fact Sheet.

Also, Sheridan, two problems. First, the weapon from Mass Effect fires at 0.013c, not 0.13c. However, this is not the weapon the Reapers use. It's what the Reapers are described as being impervious to. Their own weapons, as I said, fire a liquid iron-uranium-tungsten alloy shaped into armor-piercing projectiles accelerated to a fraction of the speed of light, which takes the appearance of a beam. There are no precise numbers on this weapon, but we do see the beams cut through Alliance cruisers like no one's business, and a miniaturized version mounted on a ~75m frigate destroyed a powerful Collector ship in two hits.

First, you're right. I dropped a decimal point there. However, that simply reinforces my point (which, if I was not clear on, I apologize for the confusion about): the Reaper ships stand up to cannon that are no where near as powerful as Haloverse MAC weapons. I wasn't trying to say that the Reaper weapons aren't capable of hurting UNSC ships; I was trying to point out that the energy disparity in the projectiles is quite a bit larger than might first be thought.

So, the corrected relativistic equation gives me the following energy for the 0.013 c projectile: ~1.8e18

This is less than an order of magnitude difference when there's that much of a disparity in the velocities, so it makes me inclined to say that Newton is more likely to be correct for the energy involved at 0.013 c.

0.5 * 20 * 3.9e62 = ~1.521e14

Given that the ship MAC is ~5.892e20 and the station MAC is ~3.118e21, well, that's an huge difference in energy (6 to 7 orders of magnitude). This assumes, of course, that all of the information I'm basing it on is correct.

Also, I made another error in my first post. The original difference between projectiles (assuming that the relativistic equation applies to the 0.13 c projectile [which really isn't 0.13 in the first place, but I'd rather point this out than leave it wrong]) is closer to 300 to 1,700 times. Sorry about that.

Here's an example of what it takes to kill a Reaper. <snip>

I'm honestly not qualified to do more than algebra using someone else's equations, so I can't comment on that right now. When I get some time, I'll see if I can dig up enough information to get an idea of the energy involved. Probably by Tuesday or Wednesday, I'll have enough time to sit down and do some semi-serious reaserch. Sorry about the delay.

[adam_grif]

Nope, they don't land on regular planets at all, very low gravity planets like Tremanre excepted. And there's also the fact that the Collector cruiser didn't actually land, but was floating the whole time.

All the entry says is that it's low gravity allows cruisers to land safely to discharge their drive core charge. Cruisers can land on "low gravity worlds" according to the codex entry on them, but it doesn't specify how low that is. The collector cruiser landing indicates that it has a larger than average drive core, but not much else.

Shockwave? Unlikely, mass accelerators don't use mass lightening tech once out of the muzzle. And what do you mean "turian hulks"? There were no turian ships. It was a trap set by the Collectors, with a fake turian distress call.

Go find a high res video of it on youtube. You can see wrecked Turian ships floating around it. The distress call was a trap, but the ships were real.

The Illusive Man was pretty confident that the Cerberus scientists had found the weapon and confirmed that the Reaper was its target. They probably know details you don't; you can't pretend to dismiss there judgment from the few specific details we are given.

I'd like a direct quote.

The explosion that destroyed Sovereign happened several seconds after the "torpedo" hit (and pierced) it. It likely hit the power core, while this shot obviously didn't.

The drive core is tiny compared to the ship as a hole. Not saying it didn't hit it, but we have no idea if it did or not. When I nuked the drive core on the derelict reaper it took a huge amount of time until the reaper exploded, and even then the explosion was obscured so we have no idea about what it looks like.

The projectiles being wing mounted is actually evidence against them being mass accelerators. A mass accelerator's power is directly tied to its length- a short accelerator like the ones on the wings would be isn't going to be very powerful. And Garrus says the SR-2's regular armament is improved over the SR-1's, so it's not like the SR-2 is going around with weak mass accelerators.

I've been searching for a while, and I can't find any mention of the SR-1 having any mass accelerator weapons at all. If you know of one please share it, because it's driving me mad. It also has javelin racks instead of vanilla disruptor torps (although the difference seems to be only that the fire on converging trajectories and detonate in sequence, the weapons themselves aren't mentioned as being anything special). I'm aware of the length = firepower connection for railguns, but this alone doesn't rule anything out. Dreadnoughts for instance mount dozens of broadside guns which have nowhere near the firepower of their main ones. That the codex mentions that the SR2 is built to take an Axial MAC indicates that it was intented to have one strapped on after the fact. That it was a Thanix instead of a regular one is just incidental.

Maybe that's just a style of firing them. In a side quest in ME2, batarian extremists were going to fire two long-range Javelin torpedoes at two different parts of a human colony (the main colony and the spaceport).

So they deliberately fired them in a sub-optimal way when they could have fired them properly to do extra damage? And since this was the first time they fired on the collector ship, which as far as they know is very advanced, and thus they would be wanting to take no chances engaging it?

If they were disruptor torps fired from Javelin racks, then somebody was being a dumbass.

Actually, I think they look quite like what the SR-1 fired, glowing blue and all.

The ones the SR-1 fired were much slower moving, the blue trail looked different, and they had a visible, physical body at the front. Whatever the SR-2 fires is considerably faster, and looks like a bolt of energy. Coincidentally, this is exactly what all the MA weaposn you fired looked like in ME1, and what some of them still look like in ME2 (although the Revenant and stuff are yellow glowy for some reason now?).

That's geth technology, nothing the Alliance or Cerberus has access to.

Geth pulse rifles are mentioned to operate in a manner very similar to the vindicator battle rifle. They are just MA weapons that fire phasic rounds, which we know the citadel races have. That doesn't matter anyway, because I'm not saying they are pulse rifles, just that they look and sound a fair bit like them. It's not an exact match, but it sounds nothing like what you'd expect a torpedo to sound like, and instead they put visual and audio effects in that indicate that it operates like MA weapons do.

1. When you get a codex entry in the Main Battery Room, the codex updates with Javelin and Disruptor Torpedo entries.

Weak inference. There are a lot of ship systems that don't get mentioned. Where is the codex entry on the bathroom I wanted?!

2. The projectiles glow blue, akin to the SR-1's projectile. Glowing blue usually denotes the presence of a mass effect field, which Javelins use.

Again, MA weapons look like that too. And the whole "looks like a bolt of energy" thing is more supportive of MA weapons than torpedoes.

3. In combat without the Thanix, Shepard orders Joker to engage the Collector ship at very close range. This is consistent with the use of Javelins, close range as to minimize exposure to point defense lasers.

Yeah but the other stuff they do isn't consistent with it

It's also consistent with closing to knife fight ranges so their huge ass gun can't shoot you, since the whole collector ship needs to be aligned with you to get a shot off.

Nope, the codex entry says it fires just every 5 seconds, not very far from a dreadnought's every 2 second firing rate.

It's unclear from the entry whether it's discussing all thanix cannons or just the ones on the SR2. The cannons on the underside of the SR-2 are as large as a fighter is by my eye's reckoning, so they must have a physically smaller unit on the base of the fighters. Are the exact same guns mountable on both? Are there different sizes? Etc.

[Stargazer]

The Collector cruiser, outside of being tagged as a cruiser, is described elsewhere as being huge, with enough room inside to clear out the Terminus Systems of humans and still not be half full. It's got to have a much, much bigger core than a standard cruiser

I'd like a direct quote.

Really? You must not have been paying attention when playing the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myfQtyLlZms

At 9:15.

"An Alliance science team recently determined that the "Great Rift" on the planet Klendagon is actually an impact crater from a mass accelerator weapon. A very old mass accelerator weapon. I sent a team to find either the weapon or its target. They found both. The weapon was defunct, but it helped us plot a flight path of the intended target- a 37 million year old derelict Reaper. We found it damaged and trapped in the gravity of a brown dwarf."

Yeah, the mass accelerator is inextricably linked to the derelict reaper and the rift, if you're going to believe what the Illusive Man says at all.

The drive core is tiny compared to the ship as a hole. Not saying it didn't hit it, but we have no idea if it did or not. When I nuked the drive core on the derelict reaper it took a huge amount of time until the reaper exploded, and even then the explosion was obscured so we have no idea about what it looks like.

There's a difference between destabilizing the core at a weak point with firearms and blowing up the core with a heavy torpedo.

I've been searching for a while, and I can't find any mention of the SR-1 having any mass accelerator weapons at all. If you know of one please share it, because it's driving me mad. It also has javelin racks instead of vanilla disruptor torps (although the difference seems to be only that the fire on converging trajectories and detonate in sequence, the weapons themselves aren't mentioned as being anything special). I'm aware of the length = firepower connection for railguns, but this alone doesn't rule anything out. Dreadnoughts for instance mount dozens of broadside guns which have nowhere near the firepower of their main ones. That the codex mentions that the SR2 is built to take an Axial MAC indicates that it was intented to have one strapped on after the fact. That it was a Thanix instead of a regular one is just incidental.

There's no clear definition on what either the SR-1's weapon is or the SR-2's standard weapons are. Dreadnoughts mount a lot of accelerators, but even those are 40% of the ship's width.

So they deliberately fired them in a sub-optimal way when they could have fired them properly to do extra damage? And since this was the first time they fired on the collector ship, which as far as they know is very advanced, and thus they would be wanting to take no chances engaging it?

If they were disruptor torps fired from Javelin racks, then somebody was being a dumbass.

Alternate, not necessarily suboptimal.

The ones the SR-1 fired were much slower moving, the blue trail looked different, and they had a visible, physical body at the front. Whatever the SR-2 fires is considerably faster, and looks like a bolt of energy. Coincidentally, this is exactly what all the MA weaposn you fired looked like in ME1, and what some of them still look like in ME2 (although the Revenant and stuff are yellow glowy for some reason now?).

Geth pulse rifles are mentioned to operate in a manner very similar to the vindicator battle rifle. They are just MA weapons that fire phasic rounds, which we know the citadel races have. That doesn't matter anyway, because I'm not saying they are pulse rifles, just that they look and sound a fair bit like them. It's not an exact match, but it sounds nothing like what you'd expect a torpedo to sound like, and instead they put visual and audio effects in that indicate that it operates like MA weapons do.

I think we're just going to have to settle on a difference of opinion here.

Weak inference. There are a lot of ship systems that don't get mentioned. Where is the codex entry on the bathroom I wanted?!

...what? The matter is not over whether the codex lets us know if the Normandy has weapons or not. The matter is identifying the weapons.

It's also consistent with closing to knife fight ranges so their huge ass gun can't shoot you, since the whole collector ship needs to be aligned with you to get a shot off.

But why not open fire at long range then close in, like was done with the Thanix?

It's unclear from the entry whether it's discussing all thanix cannons or just the ones on the SR2. The cannons on the underside of the SR-2 are as large as a fighter is by my eye's reckoning, so they must have a physically smaller unit on the base of the fighters. Are the exact same guns mountable on both? Are there different sizes? Etc.

"The Thanix can fire reliably every five seconds, rivaling a cruiser's firepower but mountable on a fighter or frigate."

Judge for yourself.

[Ford Prefect]

The Collector cruiser, outside of being tagged as a cruiser, is described elsewhere as being huge, with enough room inside to clear out the Terminus Systems of humans and still not be half full. It's got to have a much, much bigger core than a standard cruiser

Do you remember the opening of ME2, when they first detect the Collector cruiser? They specifcally say 'it looks like a cruiser', which means it literally cannot be wildly outside of the bounds for what counts as a cruiser, otherwise how could they come to that conclusion?

[Balrog]

It's patently obvious. The alliance cruisers are not making any progress, then after you kill Saren, the shields immediately drop completely to zero.

So it couldn't be the fact that the Alliance had been pounding on him for however long, and that their efforts to bring down the barriers happened to coincide with Saren getting shot in the head. Saren was intimately tied into Soveriegn's defense systems because...err...the giant robot's an idiot? Having a disposable puppet that hurts you when it kicks the bucket kinda defeats the purpose of having one in the first place.

I mean, people make fun of the Reapers being stupid, but even that's a bit much.