The effects of magical mass reduction fields on stuff.

[adam_grif]

Thing might belong in SF instead of SLAM, so move as appropriate.

In buttloads of fiction I've seen, mass-lightening and inertial supression seems to be the new black. In Absolution Gap, effects relating to fucking up the human body are mentioned, by lowering the mass, they mess with circulatory systems and body chemistry. Then this got me thinking about a few things.

Assume a field that runs by magic and halves the mass of everything inside it. What happens to Joe space cadet standing inside of it? The ship has a thrust of 2G's at peak output normally, how does this change, assuming the entire ship is encompassed by the field? Although it's initially tempting to just say "it can now do 4G's" and be done with it, the mass of the propellant is also being reduced by half, and I doubt the engine is just going to behave identically under the circumstances.

As a more extreme example, the SSV Normandy 2 routinely reduces the entire ship's mass, passengers included, to near-zero. Does the crew survive a trip?

[Starglider]

In Absolution Gap, effects relating to fucking up the human body are mentioned, by lowering the mass, they mess with circulatory systems and body chemistry. Then this got me thinking about a few things.

Gross organ systems shouldn't be affected much. They work on pressure differentials constrained by friction, inertia isn't terribly significant. Cell chemistry is another matter. Lower particle mass means higher velocities for the same temperature. Everything will diffuse faster, molecules will bump into each other more often, so basically all reactions will be accelerated. Phase graphs and gas solubility will be drastically altered. In short even a minor mass effect field should cause a whole multitude of health problems with limited exposure, and a power of ten plus field should be almost instantly fatal (by screwing up the fairly delicate chemistry of synaptic gaps / nerve transmission if nothing else).

As a more extreme example, the SSV Normandy 2 routinely reduces the entire ship's mass, passengers included, to near-zero. Does the crew survive a trip?

I don't think the fields in Mass Effect work they way you are implying. Aside from everyone not dying the minute they're turned on, there's the fact the crew seems to manipulate objects normally while in FTL. If everything was a hundredth or a thousandth of its normal mass, people's movements would be very jerky and exagerrated, as things accelerate up to max speed almost instantly. Non-powered objects would come to a stop almost instantly due to friction, having virtually no intertia. Heat conduction would be ridiculously fast, causing all sorts of mechanical issues. The artificial gravity system would have to be creating a field of 100s or 1000s of g, otherwise we'd see an effective microgravity environment to the miniscule object weights.

We don't see any of that, so what is probably happening is this; the generator creates a bubble around the ship. The bubble directly modifies the velocity of particles (assuming conservation of energy, that means shunting energy from KE to the generator or back, probably with thermal losses), and absorbs/attenuates gravitons. The result is that the external universe acts as if everything inside the bubble is of lower mass than it should be, and vice versa, but to occupants of the bubble everything seems to have its normal mass.

From an objective standpoint this is somewhat less plausible than the already highly dubious notion of a field that temporarily alters particle masses, but subjectively it's the only way to explain how these 'mass effect' fields can operate without massive, obvious and fatal side-effects.

[adam_grif]

First of all, whoops, I meant Redemption Ark, not Absolution Gap.

Secondly, I've never bought the whole "universe must be explained at any cost" thing that so permeates this community. A contradiction is a contradiction, and official materials trump fan theories. The codex is very explicit about how the fields work - positive current run through Eezo increases the mass in a region of space-time, negative current reduces it.

All I was interested in was whether or not what I thought (getting fucked up / rapidly dying) would happen given this explanation would indeed happen. Thanks for the info.

[Starglider]

Secondly, I've never bought the whole "universe must be explained at any cost" thing that so permeates this community. A contradiction is a contradiction, and official materials trump fan theories. The codex is very explicit about how the fields work - positive current run through Eezo increases the mass in a region of space-time, negative current reduces it.

I am more flexible than a lot of posters when it comes to disregarding canon. I am happy to overlook the odd discrepancy if it avoids a stupid explanation. However you cannot handwave every single ship-interior cutscene and gameplay segment. Reducing particle mass by several orders of magnitude would have numerous visible effects that we simply don't see, and would also kill everyone on board. There's also the fact that a simple reduction of particle mass would not allow FTL travel; light speed is the same for electrons as it is for protons, despite them being ~1800 times less massive. There must be some kind of spatial slippage along the field surface for FTL travel to work, which is further support for the field being a boundary effect.

Thus the only sane conclusion is that the mass effect field is a boundary effect rather than an area effect, and that the codex entry was written by a graduate of the 2146 Space Media Studies course, who doesn't know enough science to distinguish between the two. This dovetails naturally with the notion of kinetic barriers produced by ME generators, which are also a boundary effect. If it really did work the way you are proposing (as an area effect) the only way for the crew to survive would be to put them in cryogenic suspension every time the drive is powered up.

[Covenant]

The reason people do the "This must be explained at any cost" is just so these explanations remain rational, not because they're anal-retentive. The goal is to align the stuff you see and read with the rules of the world today. If you suspend reality just for one part of the fictional universe it makes a lot of subsequent assumptions very hazy... anyway.

While official source material can say that this happens because of that, but the result is incredibly broken with regards to observed reality, then making a workaround is actually more respectful than just disregarding canon entirely. Especially when you have written canon that lays out how it works and then observed canon showing how it looks while working, and these two are both at odds with the reality of how we understand the situation.

In order to answer a question like yours, when the situation is so far outside observed reality, you either have to create a workable explanation or start dismissing elements of one of those two canons.

So yes, authored materials trump fan theories, but unless those materials also say they add in new science (which is a legitimate hand-wave under most circumstances) it can be very hard to explain or quantify or make assumptions based on things which run counter to intuition. As such, explaining it helps, so long as it stays consistent with the canons.

[Junghalli]

If it really did work the way you are proposing (as an area effect) the only way for the crew to survive would be to put them in cryogenic suspension every time the drive is powered up.

Which I think would actually be kind of cool: a "magic" drive that handwaves away a lot of the problems with real space travel but only at the cost of being very inconvenient to use because it screws with basic aspects of physics that our biology and most of our technology are built around working the way they normally do. Physics-bending magic tech often feels a little too convenient to me in the way it seemingly often has no effects that aren't convenient for the plot. Like those hyperdrives where you can go into another universe and then travel FTL ... and said other universe's presumably alien physics doesn't do horrible things to the operation of humans or machines that aren't designed for it.

It'd be cool to have something like an FTL method that works by going through a "hyperspace" ... and when the ship is in hyperspace the crew has to stay in suspended animation because their biology won't work in the place's alien physics, and the same is true for most of the ships technology; only specialized systems designed to function under alien physics that are useless in normal space will function in hyperspace.

[darthdavid]

You know it's fairly simple to turn an area effect into a shell effect if all you need is a second piece of Eezo with positive current...

[Neko_Oni]

Wouldn't the idea of mass effect fields producing lots of inconvenient physiological effects would have the result of turning biotic users into rampaging death machines? Why throw someone across the room when you can just destroy their bodily functions with a subtle increase or decrease in inertia?

Out of curiosity what would be the physiological effect of a mass raising field? I'm tempted to think ''well the opposite of a mass lowering field'', but maybe someone could expand on that.

[adam_grif]

You know it's fairly simple to turn an area effect into a shell effect if all you need is a second piece of Eezo with positive current...

Except you'd just end up in a situation where the ship tries to jump to FTL, it does, but the bubble inside containing people at normal-mass don't. The passengers end up being red smears on the hull, and the ship flies into seventeen pieces when it's near-zero mass collides with the extremely massive (comparatively) passengers.

Wouldn't the idea of mass effect fields producing lots of inconvenient physiological effects would have the result of turning biotic users into rampaging death machines? Why throw someone across the room when you can just destroy their bodily functions with a subtle increase or decrease in inertia?

Why throw somebody across the room anyway when you can just apply the force to their neck instead of their torso? Instakill. Or instead of warping their armor, why not warp their internal organs? Etc etc...

Biotics in general are bizarre and out of place in the universe, except that it's an RPG and they needed a mage class. Eezo creates fields locally, but Eezo nodules in their brain apparently let them generate fields non-locally, wherever they please in line of site?! Totally unexplained in the canon.

The only other example that's related is that apparently the Normandy has a reactionless drive that can "create high mass regions of spacetime" that cause the normandy to "dive" in that direction. Since they can go forwards with this, and the core is at the rear of the ship, this means that they must be able to make the field nonlocally. How they do this is, likewise, unexplained.

If this can be done, then they SHOULD be able to create biotic guns that operate on a point and click basis. And since more eezo = more powerful, as long as you don't mind forking out the dough you should be able to make them ridiculously powerful compared to biotic individuals.

Also, HOW THE FUCK DOES AN ASARI "UNIFIED NERVOUS SYSTEM" LET THEM CREATE BIOTIC FIELDS?!

EAEWSTW#$53534563

[The Nomad]

It'd be cool to have something like an FTL method that works by going through a "hyperspace" ... and when the ship is in hyperspace the crew has to stay in suspended animation because their biology won't work in the place's alien physics, and the same is true for most of the ships technology; only specialized systems designed to function under alien physics that are useless in normal space will function in hyperspace.

I think there was a movie like that, Supernova (movie with James Spader IIRC), where the crew had to remain in special booths for the duration of HS travels (usually a minute or so, the drive was capable of doing over 10^9 c easily).
Spoiler

At the beginning, the captain's booth remains disfunctional, and he ends up a warped monstruosity that has to be euthenized.
At the end, there is only one functional booth left and an impending supernova-level bomb ready to tick. The last two survivors share the booth, which result in the both of them gaining mismatched eye colors, and the woman getting pregnant...

[ebs2323]

As to the whole idea of the wardrive/FTl drive thing screwing everyone on the ship over, so they have to go into cyro. Those few systems that do work in our wierd alternate universe, how did they figure out how they work in the first place. That would be a more intersting story to me at least.

[Junghalli]

Spoiler

At the end, there is only one functional booth left and an impending supernova-level bomb ready to tick. The last two survivors share the booth, which result in the both of them gaining mismatched eye colors, and the woman getting pregnant...

I watched that movie.

It amuses immensely that they think you could do that and the result wouldn't be to completely fuck both people up physiologically. If its cells being swapped then their immune systems are going to immediately start rejecting all the foreign matter in the body, which ... probably can't be good for you if there's enough of it that you get macroscopic chimaeraism effects. Especially if some of the other person's immune system got swapped too and will start to attack your body as a foreign entity.

If it's DNA being swapped (which seemed to me the implication) then it's even better, as the epigenomes between different cell types will probably be getting swapped too, and you've got random bits of foreign DNA inserted into you everywhere. Assuming they don't get immediate intervention with some seriously advanced bio/nanotech (which I'm betting doesn't exist in the setting as it could probably have fixed the guy who got melded with the cryotube), I'm betting they'll both soon be breaking out with all sorts of cancers and teratomas and who knows what else, and ... it will be fatal, and probably not very pleasant.

And don't even get me started on Spoiler

the implication a viable child could be concieved that way

the karotype and gene dosing and epigenetic imprinting would be all fucked up, even if by some miracle it survives it'd be some kind of horribly fucked up cripple.

As to the whole idea of the wardrive/FTl drive thing screwing everyone on the ship over, so they have to go into cyro. Those few systems that do work in our wierd alternate universe, how did they figure out how they work in the first place. That would be a more intersting story to me at least.

I imagine it would probably involve a lot of trial and error.

[Utsanomiko]

Also, HOW THE FUCK DOES AN ASARI "UNIFIED NERVOUS SYSTEM" LET THEM CREATE BIOTIC FIELDS?!

It doesn't. As I recall having read about the issue, it gives them a natural level of control over mass effect fields which other races require intense muscle-memory training to achieve. They still require biotic amps to amplify these fields to useful levels, as well as trace amounts of element zero in their bodies to create the fields in the first place.

Whether all Asari naturally possess eezo in their bodies or whether it comes from artificial means is never directly stated to my knowledge. I think it's said in the first game's codex that not all of them become biotics (or at least train to use such techniques), which might be strange if their physiology had both eezo nodules and an innate control over them.

Also, mass-intensifying fields are apparently used for manufacturing where extreme forces are needed, such as compacting wastes and creating dense materials. Artificial gravity is also apparently achieved with ME fields.

[Surlethe]

You know it's fairly simple to turn an area effect into a shell effect if all you need is a second piece of Eezo with positive current...

Hey, don't make fucking one-line posts. Try again and elaborate on your point.

[Starman7]

Is there a way to translate mass effect (which I understand to be exclusively increasing/decreasing observed mass of objects inside the field) into applying force? For example, biotic throw: even if you assume they're taking a small patch of air and vastly amping up its mass, you still need to throw that bit of atmosphere somehow. Also, there are several points where they're doing this in vacuum. If you're throwing the gravitational anomaly, you're still not applying force, although I imagine that a part of your body becoming about 10x denser would be... unpleasant.

Maybe there's something my half-remembered high school physics is missing, but I'm not seeing how mass effect can pull off some of the things like kinetic barriers without it also being able to project force and momentum.

[adam_grif]

Well, the existence of those powers, artificial gravity and shields ("kinetic barriers") that repel things seems to imply that ability, but as I said, there's no actual in-universe explanation for how they get to that with Eezo.