- Location
- Usa
The funniest "Mass Effect is not ready for humanity" did I've read is Pencils down, death rays up. But Mass Effect: Glorious Shotgun Princess is also very good.
Distance Learning for fun and profit...
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm
- Location
- Rotting in port
That only means that your RCS is grievously underpowered for combat, and maybe your engineers need being shot in the face.
- Location
- US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm a bit confused by this. If you get up to a velocity v, then increase your mass, m, your momentum, p=mv , obviously goes up. The mass effect violates conservation of momentum quite readily.
The base of their mass accelerators is exactly this. Decrease mass, bring it up to v at the lower mass to save energy, then it leaves the field and its mass increases again, bringing momentum and kinetic energy up by the factor the field lightened the projectile by. 5x times lighter, 5x yield at the other end. The energy savings are essentially the kinetic yield times their efficiency factor on the rails, minus the energy to power the mass effect field and the energy used to accelerate the round.
Unless I'm widlly mistaken about ME pseudoscience, everything they do with the Mass effect violates energy/momentum conservation.
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- Location
- Texas
Awful lot of people assuming all the weapons are dumb because of the Citadel aversion to AI, but VIs are completely legal and virtually omnipresent. In fact, most of the modern militaries of the ME universe use extensive VI support across the board, and it is a noteworthy hallmark of the Systems Alliance military doctrine. Sure, VIs are not as smart or adaptive as AIs, but they can be significantly more of both than dumb weapons.
- Location
- Russia
The issue is that, from what we've seen and been told, Citadel VI are actually worse than modern AIs, probably being less complex than a friggin' chat bot.
- Location
- Germany
How effective what type of weapon and engagement is depends entirely on the avaiable tech. E.g. Taylors reference frame generator, if it equally distributed all outside influences over the entire frame would entirely no sell any type of kinetic impactor and protect from anything short of flash boiling the entire frame.
How many seconds, though? ME-verse cruisers apparently tend to be around 700 meters long, and they're not super-narrow dowel ships. Say maybe 100 meters displacement to dodge? If you've got 5 seconds warning, that calls for over a quarter-g of lateral acceleration.
Depends on whether you've elected to take a combat doctrine that relies on RCS-based dodging, doesn't that?
I always assumed that most of the Citadel Species were the equivalent of bronze age civilizations that stumbled across caches of fully functioning eezo tech. They never developed the scientific method since discovering new tech was more about archelogy instead of research. They never had to innovate beyond figuring out better ways to copy perfectly good Prothean relics. Having sub-optimal warships is fine as long as you expand fast enough to conquer your potential enemies before they get off their homeworlds.
The Quarrians were probably the only ones who tried to invent new stuff, and look how that turned out.
- Location
- USA
but that would be gasp changing something of the Protheans. We can't possibly do better than them, they are beyond compare, their tech is unknowable eldrich magic, the best we poor poor mortals can do is copy what they did and hope it works.
Seriously, I think all species in ME except Humans all but worship the Protheans, in only a slightly less obvious way than the Hanar. Look no further than Laira's problem, she did research and came to a conclusion that fit the research. Yet, she was laughed at for the mere fact of advocating for the Protheans of losing a war.
The implicit understanding is that the general philosophy is that the Protheans left the galaxy in a couple of wars
1) they ascended
2) they got tired and left to another galaxy
3) something else but definitely not killed off
Basically, no one would even take the time to look at her research as she said the Protheans might have been in a war and died.
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
For that matter, look at Liara's dad, Matriarch Aethyta. She suggested that the Asari start work on building their own Mass Relays and got effectively laughed right off Thessia. The only time the Republic wanted to talk to her after that was to have her keep an eye on her daughter the Shadow Broker.
(Fun fact: Matriarch Aethyta and Admiral Daro'Xen had the same voice actor, Claudia Black.)
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- Location
- uk
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That's a 5mph or 8kmh collusion, which would be jarring but hardly the end of the world for humans.
DarkJediLiteSith
Grown-up Squirrel
- Location
- Colorado
I love the insight, as usual, but I request an opinion.
Ever heard of Descent: Freespace - The Great War?
It's really old - '98, and a sequel in '99 and spiritually a part of the Descent series made at the same time - but I loved the story built by it and the gameplay was pretty fun, incredible graphics for the era.
What is your opinion of both the game / series, and what would happen if Freespace and ME intersected?
And, to be on-topic, what would Taylor think of them if she found them? Or GravTech-influenced DARPA?
...What collision?
If you're likening the acceleration to dodge to a collision, the point wasn't that the dodging would be intolerable for a live crew but that the dodging would call for quite substantial auxiliary thrusters that would not otherwise be necessary.
- Location
- Somewhere.
That's a vastly different sort of "not ready", though. "Humans have magic bullshit" is not the same as "Humans are actually upteched".
RavenWolffe77
The Marauder series is the best BattleMech.
- Location
- Deep Periphery, A Long Way From The Inner Sphere
What is that? I've never heard of that, unless it's the one where SKYNET evolves a conscience and makes peace with humanity....
Link?
This is false. The V1/V2 "cruise missiles" did not have these things, "as cheap as you can make it" cruise missiles do not have these things, but all modern cruise missiles do have course correction capability and some have satellite uplinks that might allow you to fake anti-intercept capability. The original Tomahawk missile was actually designed with terrain following capabilities similar/based off the B-1 bomber. Relative agility is quite low.
The SR-71 and X-15 would beg to differ.
You are referring to the same US State Department that issued an updating "deck of 52" bounties during the Iraq conflicts that included different amounts for alive vs dead, some of which were only listed as dead? And paid out on those bounties?
Going out, maybe. Going in? Explosive delta-v is very definitely an option. Lethal delta-v is even easier.
1) Radar and LIDAR are, by definition, Line-of-Sight systems - if you have a clear, unobstructed line to the target, you CAN see it. Your only limitations are signal fade, time to live on your pulses, signal absorption/deflection, and receiver resolution; the second can be overcome with sufficient programming skills.
2) A radar could, theoretically, be setup with a basic radio-with-dish-antenna setup and an auxillary processor. Descriptions for a sufficiently learned person have even frequently shown up in 1950s Heinlein works. So, yes, off the shelf.
3) As mentioned earlier, if said missile has sufficient support uplinks, it doesn't need it's own engagement processor, just sufficient if-then updates with allowance for "speed of light (through an atmosphere)" transmissions.
4) There are missiles out there with their own homing/tracking capabilities. Sufficient processing and programming can invert this to non-target avoidance without too much difficulty, within the allowance of missile agility.
5) There are nominal "cruise missiles" out there that actually have an extreme amount of agility comparable to air intercept missiles and designed to take supersonic, randomized, snaking paths to their target before popping up for a terminal down angle.
- Location
- Tatum, Tx
Oh, now this bets for an ME cross with the most horrifying universe they could encounter. Five years before the Shanxi event, the Post Dated Check Loan, and it's crew, Tagon's Toughs find themselves at Shanxi, and settle down insystem until they can find a way home...then when the Batarians/Turbans, whoever show up, the government offers a reward for defending the planet.
I fail to see how this is related at all. The original point was wealthy individuals posting bounties, and you've just brought up yet another case of the government doing it.
Regardless, I think we've wandered far enough off the threads topic to kill this divergence anyway, I think we'll just have to end of 'we do not agree'.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
The original point was never how legal such bounties were. It was that Wanted: Dead or ALive bounties and posters were really a thing that happened. And such bounties can still occasionally occur. In fact, the bounty on Jesse James was posted by a group of railroad tycoons at the behest of the State Governor.
And so it was answered.
Isnt my realname
This isn't my real name.
- Location
- Not Here
So, uh, yeah... did you really mean to say that you cannot recommend this book? The context suggests that you were recommending it...
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
Larry Niven is... an acquired taste. Either you love his style of Science Fiction, or you absolutely hate it. Personally, I find it alternates between boring and horrible.
Like a lot of "hard" sci-fi authors, I think that his short form stuff holds up a lot better. Give him enough word count to play with and at some point you realize he got lost playing with extrapolations. Not that there's anything wrong with that (Zummers said, looking around for lizards), but like you said, acquired taste.