Your Honor, may I have your attention please. An ME/HV RAR

[Mr Bean]

I'm honestly curious where you got 8,000c for the Citadel races since http://www.masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/FTL places their speed at 5,479c.

Part of in game dialog is a comment that "no that far away, just twelve light years, that's a day trip" translated into speed terms puts them at 8000c

Either way, Mass Effect FTL speeds are superior while combat and sensor ranges are greatly inferior yet FTL communications is decades ahead of Honorverse.

[gigabytelord]

Part of in game dialog is a comment that "no that far away, just twelve light years, that's a day trip" translated into speed terms puts them at 8000c

Either way, Mass Effect FTL speeds are superior while combat and sensor ranges are greatly inferior yet FTL communications is decades ahead of Honorverse.

I'm definitely seeing some good options for trade if the diplomat can work things out and the batarians don't do their best to screw things up which of course they will.

[Joun_Lord]

Just for clarification purposes humanity never discovered the mass relay network, the Prothean archives on Mars never existed neither did the gate orbiting Pluto. This is first contact with humanity.
Apologies for the poor quality of this post I made it on my phone at work.

EDIT: the Mass Effect date is around the same time first contact with humanity was made in canon.

Does this still mean there is two humanities and Earth, just one still confined to the Sol System and one not? Or has the Honorverse Earth (along with all the rest of their inhabited space) replaced the ME one?

[gigabytelord]

Complete replacement with the honorverse.

[Simon_Jester]

I assume there's nothing important enough in the thousand or so light years around Earth that replacing it with Honorverse would cause major long term effects?

[gigabytelord]

I assume there's nothing important enough in the thousand or so light years around Earth that replacing it with Honorverse would cause major long term effects?

No Mars archives. Which means no crucible blueprint.

[SilverDragonRed]

How effective are the Honorverse ground forces? Weapons, vehicles, armor, and training?

[gigabytelord]

Okay I've got a questions and theories to throw out.

First of all I'd like to respond to this.

As for element zero itself the basis of all ME ships, it alters gravity... something Honoverse sensors are very good at seeing.

Um.. not really... at least not from what I've read and heard. Case in point, the battle fought during Honor's escape from hell. It was never stated that she ordered the on board grav plates turned off, only the grav wedges. this allowed her to sneak into such a close range that she was able to quite literally able to gut the enemy ships from within their own energy envelopes. In fact she came so close that she risked being picked up on non-FTL active sensors. This tells me that FTL gravitics sensors are designed with the intent to detect hyper translations and gravity wedges, both of which are massive, easily detected gravitational anomalies. It's stated in the honorverse books that a wedge is a wide band of extremely focused gravity that can literally tear objects that pass through it into their constituent atoms. Case in point the tug boat that blocks chunks of the station hit during the Oyster Bay attack. To my knowledge the only natural anomalies that can produce these kind of effects are black holes or possibly pulsars.

Now what does this have to do with mass effect fields? Well it's stated in the mass effect series that, and I quote from the wiki:

Mass effect fields are created through the use of element zero. Element zero can increase or decrease the mass content of space-time when subjected to an electrical current via dark energy. With a positive current, mass is increased. With a negative current, mass is decreased. The stronger the current, the greater the magnitude of the dark energy mass effect.
In space, low-mass fields allow FTL travel and inexpensive surface-to-orbit transit. High-mass fields create artificial gravity and push space debris away from starships. In manufacturing, low-mass fields permit the creation of evenly-blended alloys, while high mass compaction creates dense, sturdy construction materials

Now the science I learned tells me that an object with low mass produces less gravity, the higher the mass the more of a gravitational effect the object will have.
Now to get to the point, if gravitic sensors can't normally detect on board grav plates then they most likely won't detect the same sort of tech when used on board a mass effect vessel. Combine this with the fact that the mass inside the M.E. field is having it's mass artificially lowered relative to the space outside the field, means that any out side sensor would have even less to lock onto than normal. I suspect that mass effect ships would either be completely invisible to grav sensors or at most appear as very weak ghosts.

Please feel free to poke holes in my argument. I also have other questions to raise depending on the answers I receive.

[Mr Bean]

I assume there's nothing important enough in the thousand or so light years around Earth that replacing it with Honorverse would cause major long term effects?

No Mars archives. Which means no crucible blueprint.

Won't be needed, Honorverse can role right over the Reapers in a conventional war, 1900's Honorverse ships will treat reapers like so many targets. Not to say Indoctrination and other Reaper tricks can't beat the Humans via-non conventional warfare.

How effective are the Honorverse ground forces? Weapons, vehicles, armor, and training?

Honorverse starts and ends combat with "control space then control the high orbitals". However they have powered and unpowered armor, carry weaponry ranging from dedicated anti-personnel weaponry launching shards at hyper velocity sufficient for evening glancing hits to tear arms off. Tribarrels can shread spaceships internal bulkheads and they have impeller man portable missiles that tear apart small craft like tissue paper. They are a NASTY force on the ground.

[VhenRa]

Ground forces tech? Lets start with their shoulder-fired Impeller Missiles. Those, the size of a MANPAD? Are likely going to outright kill Reapers. Yes, I just said their MANPAD analog is going to kill a Reaper. Some calculations of the kinetic energy of them... puts them in the range of Dreadnought main guns by ME terms at low end and thats assuming you simply don't shear the target in half with the wedge. Next we have their Pulser weaponry, this is basically ME guns but better.. and they can be improved with element zero no less. Then we have their portable plasma weaponry, their power armor, etc etc. This is basically no contest.

Of course, if they seize a planet's orbitals against a major power in ME? They aren't going to bother landing troops except to occupy. They will give the locals 30 minutes to disarm and surrender or every military base on the planet dies from pin-point orbital bombardment. From orbital bombardment buses, deployed from counter-missile tubes, with kinetic impactors in the 50 times the strength of a Dreadnought main gun range. If they still don't surrender? Honorverse doctrine pretty much says they are allowed to start leveling anything of value in order to compel the other side to surrender. People don't try to make a fight of it against warships in Honorverse once their fleet is dead, that way leads to your cities being flattened by the invader.


In Space though, it gets more interesting. The extremely long range missile attacks are going to be painfully ineffective because of Mass Effect's FTL capability. They can zip away from long range missile attacks by simply getting out of the missile's vector. Of course, they can't really do anything to hurt a Honorverse warship. The particle screens alone will basically no-sell their gunfire, being designed to intercept objects 200 times as large going like 50 times as fast as a Dreadnought's main gun. Meanwhile, at the ranges ME can shoot at? Honorverse PD lasers are actually viable anti-ship weapons, against ME vessels anyway.

[Mr Bean]

VhenRa your forgetting that Mass Effect ships have a FTL cooldown time, the more they use the core the more a "static charge" builds up. Failing to discharge it in time results in the crew dieing as they get cooked along with the ship.. Jumping to lightspeed can be done most anywhere but FTL drives have to be spun up after each jump. And even if Mass Effect ships start jumping around to dodge Manticore missiles swarms they have the problem of only being able to "dodge" a few times. And with Manty sublight speeds if they run they lose since the fleet will simply keep going and flatten the targets in question. Once a Mass Effect ship dodges into FTL it's out of the fight because it can't build up an intercept vector anymore. Oh and discharging the core? Takes hours or DAYS depending on if you can land the ship and what space based facilities are available.

And that still leaves the problem of any fleet that gets within 500,000 kilometers of any Honorverse ship dies instantly to lightspeed grasers. 30,000 kilometer ME weaponry VS 500,000 ME weaponry sucks. Even reapers don't have greater than 30,000 kilometer ranges even if they do use laser weaponry.

[SilverDragonRed]

The Reaper's Thanix finger beams are only seen being used at distances to or less than the Sallie's 60 km GUARDIAN laser range. Their range is still laughably pathetic compared to the Honorverse.

[White Haven]

In fairness to ME, that's largely because there's an enormous disconnect between the fluff and the cinematics, which were farmed out to a contractor IIRC. They're still going to get hosed, but perhaps not quite THAT badly.

[Mr Bean]

In fairness to ME, that's largely because there's an enormous disconnect between the fluff and the cinematics, which were farmed out to a contractor IIRC. They're still going to get hosed, but perhaps not quite THAT badly.

I remember that. Mass Effect 3 was more in line with what was expected if I recall correctly but ME 1 was supposed to have about 100 human ships fighting Sovereign while Sovereign went Macross Beam spam and tore the fleet apart and being battered in return instead you got a short range slug fest and WWII fighter speeds at WWI ranges.

[Simon_Jester]

Ground forces tech? Lets start with their shoulder-fired Impeller Missiles. Those, the size of a MANPAD? Are likely going to outright kill Reapers. Yes, I just said their MANPAD analog is going to kill a Reaper. Some calculations of the kinetic energy of them... puts them in the range of Dreadnought main guns by ME terms at low end and thats assuming you simply don't shear the target in half with the wedge.

I don't think the shoulder-fired missiles have impact velocities in the range of thousands of kilometers per second. We've seen (in Shadow of Freedom) what an Honorverse shoulder-fired antitank weapon looks like; it's quite nasty (essentially a gravity-powered railgun, typical impact velocities 10-100 km/s)... but it's nowhere near the destructiveness you're attributing to shoulder-fired impeller drive missiles. Of course, said missiles would be very problematic for use against ground targets in any event, because the wedge would interact with the ground, destroying the missile and doing nothing but throwing up huge clouds of dirt and building fragments.

Next we have their Pulser weaponry, this is basically ME guns but better.. and they can be improved with element zero no less. Then we have their portable plasma weaponry, their power armor, etc etc. This is basically no contest.

All this, I agree with.

In Space though, it gets more interesting. The extremely long range missile attacks are going to be painfully ineffective because of Mass Effect's FTL capability. They can zip away from long range missile attacks by simply getting out of the missile's vector. Of course, they can't really do anything to hurt a Honorverse warship. The particle screens alone will basically no-sell their gunfire, being designed to intercept objects 200 times as large going like 50 times as fast as a Dreadnought's main gun. Meanwhile, at the ranges ME can shoot at? Honorverse PD lasers are actually viable anti-ship weapons, against ME vessels anyway.

I think the particle screens are badly overrated and would likely not stop kiloton-range impacts or energy weapons given their actual performance.

[VhenRa]

Ground forces tech? Lets start with their shoulder-fired Impeller Missiles. Those, the size of a MANPAD? Are likely going to outright kill Reapers. Yes, I just said their MANPAD analog is going to kill a Reaper. Some calculations of the kinetic energy of them... puts them in the range of Dreadnought main guns by ME terms at low end and thats assuming you simply don't shear the target in half with the wedge.

I don't think the shoulder-fired missiles have impact velocities in the range of thousands of kilometers per second. We've seen (in Shadow of Freedom) what an Honorverse shoulder-fired antitank weapon looks like; it's quite nasty (essentially a gravity-powered railgun, typical impact velocities 10-100 km/s)... but it's nowhere near the destructiveness you're attributing to shoulder-fired impeller drive missiles. Of course, said missiles would be very problematic for use against ground targets in any event, because the wedge would interact with the ground, destroying the missile and doing nothing but throwing up huge clouds of dirt and building fragments.

Ok, I will grant you the kinetic energy part (I was misremembering), but the wedge part will do the trick nicely. Gravity shear is a pain.

In Space though, it gets more interesting. The extremely long range missile attacks are going to be painfully ineffective because of Mass Effect's FTL capability. They can zip away from long range missile attacks by simply getting out of the missile's vector. Of course, they can't really do anything to hurt a Honorverse warship. The particle screens alone will basically no-sell their gunfire, being designed to intercept objects 200 times as large going like 50 times as fast as a Dreadnought's main gun. Meanwhile, at the ranges ME can shoot at? Honorverse PD lasers are actually viable anti-ship weapons, against ME vessels anyway.

I think the particle screens are badly overrated and would likely not stop kiloton-range impacts or energy weapons given their actual performance.

Should do the trick, ME's kinetic weapons are kinda dinky. Hell, they are so slow they can probably use the PD lasers to simply burn the shots out of space..

VhenRa your forgetting that Mass Effect ships have a FTL cooldown time, the more they use the core the more a "static charge" builds up. Failing to discharge it in time results in the crew dieing as they get cooked along with the ship..

For tactical scale, thats basically a non-issue. You can maintain FTL without the core killing you for what was it? 2-3 days? So around 45~ LYs, you are only going to be hopping into FTL for seconds at a time. That will get you from edge of weapons range into shooting distance with them.

[Mr Bean]

For tactical scale, thats basically a non-issue. You can maintain FTL without the core killing you for what was it? 2-3 days? So around 45~ LYs, you are only going to be hopping into FTL for seconds at a time. That will get you from edge of weapons range into shooting distance with them.

Nope, there's a spin up time at least in game there is a spin up and spin down time for FTL jumps. As in when the Normandy jumps to FTL and returns to normal space it's a plot point once or twice than the FTL is still spinning up require Joker to dodge until it's ready to go.

It's not like there is an FTL On/Off button any captain can flip on a whim. A Element zero equipped ship can simply jump into FTL at whim anyplace they like. However there's a limiter on how far they can run and how quickly they can return. The exact combat limit seems to be a few minutes at least and not likely an hour or something. It's likely not much, but it's enough, after all if mass drivers traveling at 1% of the speed of light why are not every single mass effect ship dodging out of the way? Why is mass effect combat not something like dozens of ships jumping to ftl for 1 seconds to doge then dropping back out, spinning around and come in again?

And per the codex, 50 hours is an average for how long they can run the FTL for before having to stop to shut it down.

[gigabytelord]

Hey I was wondering if anyone might be up for discussing an RP based off this scenario? I haven't RP'd in a long while and would like to get back into it again. PM me if any of you have any ideas because I have a few world building ideas of my own that are specific to this RAR.

Now back to the subject at hand.

I had an idea about how ME ships might be able to get within their own weapons range of HV ships and maybe inflict some damage.

Say you have a reaper hanging out in a system and a RMN cruiser shows up. The reaper can't approach directly without getting blown away instantly so our friendly reaper decides to wait until the cruiser is either pointed directly away from or directly toward our friendly reaper. Once the reaper has a perfect up the kilt shot, it slams the FTL and passes right through, either the rear or forward opening of the manty ship's wedge, popping out of FTL directly above or directly below the manty ship where it has little armor and very little defensive weaponry.

From this point, which places it well inside it's on weapons range, it can then land on and crave up the ship or get a couple of shots off into the manty's soft under or topside. I doubt this would work for very long as I'm sure someone would figure out what happened and make adjustments but it was just a random idea I had.

[Crazedwraith]

i know very little about Mass Effect. But the possibilities of their tech, mainly defences and inertial compensators (if ME has them) that aren't tied into wedges would be at least very interesting to the HV powers. Especially Mesa and their spider drive ships.

[Mr Bean]

Now back to the subject at hand.

I had an idea about how ME ships might be able to get within their own weapons range of HV ships and maybe inflict some damage.

Say you have a reaper hanging out in a system and a RMN cruiser shows up. The reaper can't approach directly without getting blown away instantly so our friendly reaper decides to wait until the cruiser is either pointed directly away from or directly toward our friendly reaper. Once the reaper has a perfect up the kilt shot, it slams the FTL and passes right through, either the rear or forward opening of the manty ship's wedge, popping out of FTL directly above or directly below the manty ship where it has little armor and very little defensive weaponry.

From this point, which places it well inside it's on weapons range, it can then land on and crave up the ship or get a couple of shots off into the manty's soft under or topside. I doubt this would work for very long as I'm sure someone would figure out what happened and make adjustments but it was just a random idea I had.

I have a simple method to avoid this, the Manty ship is not stationary. Thanks to ME speeds and Honoverse speeds any ME ship trying an FTL jump would have to "A" be within 1 million kilometers so light lag does not throw this off (Remember no FTL sensors in ME, light lag is a big combat issue) and two have sufficient resting speed they don't instantly get splatted by the inside of the wedge and tore apart by the gravity shear. Remeber ME ships can't do much beyond 5% of the speed of light while Honoverse ships can push 80% before partial impacts get to dangerous.

There's also the option called, slowly and randomly role the ship so even if you do managed to get the exact right spot to FTL jump and get through the gap your not instantly getting torn apart by the broadsides that were topsides a second ago.

[gigabytelord]

I have a simple method to avoid this, the Manty ship is not stationary. Thanks to ME speeds and Honoverse speeds any ME ship trying an FTL jump would have to "A" be within 1 million kilometers so light lag does not throw this off (Remember no FTL sensors in ME, light lag is a big combat issue) and two have sufficient resting speed they don't instantly get splatted by the inside of the wedge and tore apart by the gravity shear. Remeber ME ships can't do much beyond 5% of the speed of light while Honoverse ships can push 80% before partial impacts get to dangerous.

There's also the option called, slowly and randomly role the ship so even if you do managed to get the exact right spot to FTL jump and get through the gap your not instantly getting torn apart by the broadsides that were topsides a second ago.

First of all the part the part that's bolded doesn't make any sense. I thought that any object that can maintain a constant acceleration, no matter how fast or slow the acceleration may be will eventually top out close to, but not quite at, the speed of light.

As far as how fast an ME ships sub-light acceleration is I think this might give us a good idea of speeds.



Notice that at 2:18 they're through the relay which is in orbit of Pluto. By 2:53 they're passing Jupiter and they reach earth by 3:16. Which frankly makes no sense because in order to do that they'd have to be traveling at FTL speeds to replicate that in real life. However, it is implied that they were moving much faster than 5% the speed of light.

[Mr Bean]

Notice that at 2:18 they're through the relay which is in orbit of Pluto. By 2:53 they're passing Jupiter and they reach earth by 3:16. Which frankly makes no sense because in order to do that they'd have to be traveling at FTL speeds to replicate that in real life. However, it is implied that they were moving much faster than 5% the speed of light.

Mass Effect FTL is literally using element zero to generate negative gravity and falling into it, it's non-nonsensical but that's how it works.

[Terralthra]

I have a simple method to avoid this, the Manty ship is not stationary. Thanks to ME speeds and Honoverse speeds any ME ship trying an FTL jump would have to "A" be within 1 million kilometers so light lag does not throw this off (Remember no FTL sensors in ME, light lag is a big combat issue) and two have sufficient resting speed they don't instantly get splatted by the inside of the wedge and tore apart by the gravity shear. Remeber ME ships can't do much beyond 5% of the speed of light while Honoverse ships can push 80% before partial impacts get to dangerous.

There's also the option called, slowly and randomly role the ship so even if you do managed to get the exact right spot to FTL jump and get through the gap your not instantly getting torn apart by the broadsides that were topsides a second ago.

First of all the part the part that's bolded doesn't make any sense. I thought that any object that can maintain a constant acceleration, no matter how fast or slow the acceleration may be will eventually top out close to, but not quite at, the speed of light.

That's complicated, and a little more complicated. All other things being equal, sure, a ship which can maintain constant acceleration will sooner or later reach a hair below c, but all things are not equal.

Firstly, space is not a vacuum, and even hydrogen molecules become a significant impact event at .9 c, let alone micrometeorites, etc. So your ship has to be able to withstand that sort of thing, either with particle screens, an ablative shell, whatever.

Secondly, inertial mass increases with lorentz factor, asymptotally with c. Engines capable of accelerating a mass m at 9.0 m/s^s at 0.0 c will not be able to accelerate that mass at that acceleration at 0.5 c, much less 0.9 c. This is true even if you can reduce the inertial mass of your ship with element zero or whatever. ME still uses reaction drives for propulsion, and if you reduce the mass of your ship, including your engines and propellant, the force exerted as a reaction to the propellant being ejected will be similarly reduced, meaning - again - less acceleration.

[Me2005]

First of all the part the part that's bolded doesn't make any sense. I thought that any object that can maintain a constant acceleration, no matter how fast or slow the acceleration may be will eventually top out close to, but not quite at, the speed of light.

That's complicated, and a little more complicated. All other things being equal, sure, a ship which can maintain constant acceleration will sooner or later reach a hair below c, but all things are not equal.

Or thirdly, that it takes a whopping amount of energy to get to 80% c and ME tech simply can't generate it in a useful span of time (Here, 'useful span' is 'even a fraction of that in which the Honorverse ships can').

[gigabytelord]

That's complicated, and a little more complicated. All other things being equal, sure, a ship which can maintain constant acceleration will sooner or later reach a hair below c, but all things are not equal.

Firstly, space is not a vacuum, and even hydrogen molecules become a significant impact event at .9 c, let alone micrometeorites, etc. So your ship has to be able to withstand that sort of thing, either with particle screens, an ablative shell, whatever.

Secondly, inertial mass increases with lorentz factor, asymptotally with c. Engines capable of accelerating a mass m at 9.0 m/s^s at 0.0 c will not be able to accelerate that mass at that acceleration at 0.5 c, much less 0.9 c. This is true even if you can reduce the inertial mass of your ship with element zero or whatever. ME still uses reaction drives for propulsion, and if you reduce the mass of your ship, including your engines and propellant, the force exerted as a reaction to the propellant being ejected will be similarly reduced, meaning - again - less acceleration.

Or thirdly, that it takes a whopping amount of energy to get to 80% c and ME tech simply can't generate it in a useful span of time (Here, 'useful span' is 'even a fraction of that in which the Honorverse ships can').

Thanks for the info guys. Interesting stuff and it was very informing. I think that we've successfully pointed out, even magnified, some of the technical differences between the to peoples.

Now to type out this fucking thing for the second time because the Internets ate my fucking post.

I, as Klaus Hauptman, have determined that the two most important technologies we need are advanced FTL coms and mass effect technology it's self. The question is what will the counsel races want in exchange since it's clear that we both have things the others want.

I was also thinking about the tactical situation. Humanity has slower FTL drives and less capable FTL coms. Little to no information about the relay network or about the areas outside our little two thousand light year wide bubble. The counsel races have faster FTL drives and much more capable FTL coms. Should a military issue arise they would have vastly superior strategic maneuverability. At least until the geeks like Shannon had time to overcome certain technical issues. Now I'm wondering if given enough time could the counsel races adjust their fleet tactics or re-engineer their existing tech to at least be comparable to HV fleet tactics?