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Shepard Quest Mk V, Base of Operations (ME/MCU)

I don't know, I don't really see why it would be any more difficult to turn off all of them compared to turning off a single one. Sovereign got into the system pretty much immediately on docking, and Shepard has no problem at all undoing the lock while Sovereign focuses on opening the door for the Reaper armada.


Hackett is a problem, but so is the Normandy being there in the first place - how the fuck did they get from Ilos to the Citadel?

At least in Hackett's case, the Fifth Fleet could have been hanging out in the Exodus Cluster, which is human space one relay jump from the Citadel.
 
Van Ropen said:
We really don't give the ME races enough credit. Their technology is truly incredible.

On that note...I was looking at a relay map, and good lord - the one in-game makes no fucking sense at all.
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I know, right? I mean, the fluff and in game dialogue states that the Alliance has a border along Geth space, yet if you go by the galaxy map then the Batarians are either directly in between the two or the Alliance and the Hegemony occupy the same volume of space with systems all jumbled together. The routes to the Citadel from Earth and Karshan are only different by a single relay, for fucks sake.

Honestly, I have no idea how the fuck Bioware got a reputation for attention to detail--they never bother with the little things like "internal consistency" and "not being fucking morons.":mad:
 
Tachikoma's Uncle said:
I know, right? I mean, the fluff and in game dialogue states that the Alliance has a border along Geth space, yet if you go by the galaxy map then the Batarians are either directly in between the two or the Alliance and the Hegemony occupy the same volume of space with systems all jumbled together. The routes to the Citadel from Earth and Karshan are only different by a single relay, for fucks sake.
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The Relay's do make the concept of borders slightly unusual, it's quite possible that there are one or more Long Range Relay's in Alliance Space that terminate within Geth Space.

And now I have the image of Revy and Cortana running an underground 'railroad' for AI fleeing persecution.......

A few other thoughts:

I think Uber's suggestion of 3 factories per further planet and only one planet per year is reasonable and justifiable by a fair number of measures situational, environmental and political. Or failing that delay everything a quarter for the same effect by saying no building Factories or Labs till Administration and Barracks are complete. Even with that sort of funding we won't have enough capacity to match the Reaper's numbers but we might have enough to hold the line while we develop options.

However I believe at the start of the Quest it was said that there is not Crucible so if we want to have much ability to effect anything when the Reaper's show up we need the capacity to start our own defensive fleets.

And remember there is the disaster that the Collectors are almost certain to get their hands on some of our poorly black boxed early gen technology, especially arc reactors. That means the Reapers will have it and any of their forces, the main reason I've been pushing BB/FRM so hard.
 
Van Ropen said:
We really don't give the ME races enough credit. Their technology is truly incredible.

On that note...I was looking at a relay map, and good lord - the one in-game makes no sense at all.
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That's probably due to the fact that there are Relays that are actually capable of sending you to numerous Relays instead of between two particular ones, only that they suffer from a lower distance value.

Or at least....That what I believe when I read about the Relay in the....you know, that system were the SA put their center of government?
 
Stroth said:
No, he needed Saren to open up the Citadels arms. Once that happened he docked with it and started controlling everything directly.
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Not true.



0:40 said:
CO of Destiny Ascension: "Activate the defenses! Seal the station!"
Asari Officer: "The arms aren't moving. Systems not responding."
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My guess is that Sovereign and the Geth attacked to draw the defenses out of the Citadel while Saren fought his way to the control room. Once there he began closing the arms and Sovereign flew in.

The reason being that Sovereign is apparently vulnerable while connected to the Citadel. Which makes sense since his mind is on interfacing with it rather then controlling his KBs and weapons.

So they needed to make sure that no one was inside the Citadel when it closed to keep Sovereign safe.

Hazard said:
It's also implied that the lock on the Relays was on the Serpent Nebula Relays only.
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3:40 said:
Joker: "I'm sitting here in the Andrus Sector with the whole Arcturus fleet. We can save the Ascension. Just unlock the Relays around the Citadel and we'll save the council."
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Pretty clear that multiple Relays were taken offline. Given that standard Reaper doctrine is switch off all the Relay and open the Citadel Relay it's logical to assume that all the Relays were down.


3:35 said:
Shepard: "Opening the Relays now Joker."
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Again mention of plural Relays.

Of course the Normandy somehow making it there makes absolutely not sense, besides cutscene teleports, because IIRC Didn't it take hours for the trip from the Citadel to Illos?

Enough time for Shepard to sit in contemplation for a while and your love interest/s to work out their courage to visit you, and sexy times of course.

Erandil said:
And for the Citadel, like others said it had a massive defense fleet, the Reapers probably had no idea what happened to the Keepers/how to fix them and suppressing the industrial centers was more important. (and it becomes supposedly invulnerable if its closes its arms)
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Closing the arms isn't a problem because Sovereign already showed he can block that somehow. As for the defense force, by 2185 there are:
39x Turian
20x Asari
16x Salarian
8x Human

Assuming every single Dreadnaught was there, which they wouldn't, the Citadel would have a total of 83 Dreadnaughts.

It takes sustained fire from 4 Dreadnaughts, a really hard thing to achieve, to take down a Reaper Dreadnaught. So even in a worst case Scenario it would only take 21 Reaper Dreadnaughts to take the Citadel. Considering that they have tens of thousands of Reapers, likely thousands of Dreadnaughts, the defenses really don't matter.
 
Tabron89 said:
That's probably due to the fact that there are Relays that are actually capable of sending you to numerous Relays instead of between two particular ones, only that they suffer from a lower distance value.

Or at least....That what I believe when I read about the Relay in the....you know, that system were the SA put their center of government?
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From what I understand there are two types of Relay; One-To-One Relays and One-To-Many Relays.

One-To-One Relays are dedicated pairs that have basically unlimited range but are limited in that they only connect to the matching Relay. That's why Illos was lost because the Mu Relay was a One-To-One relay, like how the Charon Relay is a One-To-One pair with one in Arcturus.

One-To-Many relays can connect to any relay within their range, which is limited compare to the One-To-One relays but still really big. Arcturus has one of these which can connect to a ton of other One-To-Many relays which is why it's the heart of the Alliance. That it acts as a choke-point for anyone trying to reach Earth is just a bonus.
 
UberJJK said:
One-To-Many relays can connect to any relay within their range, which is limited compare to the One-To-One relays but still really big. Arcturus has one of these which can connect to a ton of other One-To-Many relays which is why it's the heart of the Alliance. That it acts as a choke-point for anyone trying to reach Earth is just a bonus.
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That actually bugged me. Why would you put something like Arcturus Station that is supposedly the seat of 'government' for the SA inside what is basically a kill box?

Wouldn't be better to leave it on Earth? Think about it, if the enemy wanted to cripple your fleets they actually have to hit Earth.

If anyone wanted to hit Earth, they have to go through Arcturus to get there, meaning that something like a 'space fort' or simply an observation outpost would have been better.

I mean I understand the other races using the Citadel because of the fact they are made of three 'top' races with weaker client races and seeking a neutral ground which is dangerous to get to, but it's not like the UN would be better off uprooted from Geneva and shoved into outer space 'just because' it's multi-national.
 
Tabron89 said:
That actually bugged me. Why would you put something like Arcturus Station that is supposedly the seat of 'government' for the SA inside what is basically a kill box?

Wouldn't be better to leave it on Earth? Think about it, if the enemy wanted to cripple your fleets they actually have to hit Earth.

If anyone wanted to hit Earth, they have to go through Arcturus to get there, meaning that something like a 'space fort' or simply an observation outpost would have been better.

I mean I understand the other races using the Citadel because of the fact they are made of three 'top' races with weaker client races and seeking a neutral ground which is dangerous to get to, but it's not like the UN would be better off uprooted from Geneva and shoved into outer space 'just because' it's multi-national.
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They presumably wanted to step away from Earth to distance themselves from the national governments - those are still around, even if they grow weaker each year. Sticking the headquarters in space helps that along, and binds the colonies more tightly to the government.

Arcturus Station basically is a space fort - plus it is the main mooring for the Alliance fleets and a major shipbuilding site.
 
Madfish said:
And remember there is the disaster that the Collectors are almost certain to get their hands on some of our poorly black boxed early gen technology, especially arc reactors. That means the Reapers will have it and any of their forces, the main reason I've been pushing BB/FRM so hard.
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Actually, it wouldn't be that weird if they already have them, as they seem to have unlimited power generation in the canon. From the wiki:
Reaper power sources seem to violate known physical laws. Reapers usually destroy fuel infrastructure rather than attempting to capture it intact, indicating that Reapers do not require organic species' energy supplies. Consequently, the Reapers attack without regard for maintaining supply lines behind them, except to move husks from one planet to another. Unlike Citadel ships, Reapers do not appear to discharge static buildup from their drive cores, although they sometimes appear wreathed in static discharge when they land on planets.
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Tabron89 said:
That actually bugged me. Why would you put something like Arcturus Station that is supposedly the seat of 'government' for the SA inside what is basically a kill box?
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I'll be honest. Never made sense to me either. I can understand Arcturus becoming a massive economic hub since from there you can get to every other system in the Alliance but moving the seat of Government out from behind one of the best defenses in the galaxy makes no sense.

Best reason I can think of is politics. Can't have SA government on Earth since it's still broken up into countries so they would have to pick a country to host the government. Can't use Mars because that favoures it over Earth. And so on.

Acturus as a planet-less uninhabited region of space outside of the Sol system is about as neutral as you can get.

Would still just make more sense to put it in Geneva.
 
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Regarding limiting growth, I'm canning that idea. Go ahead, spread across the galaxy like a plague of high-tech locust. It might be educational :)

At some point, you'll probably want to look into constructing 40K-style industrial worlds in order to have room for your facilities, but I think you'll manage.
 
Esbilon said:
Regarding limiting growth, I'm canning that idea. Go ahead, spread across the galaxy like a plague of high-tech locust. It might be educational :)

At some point, you'll probably want to look into constructing 40K-style industrial worlds in order to have room for your facilities, but I think you'll manage.
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ALL HAIL REVY, THE AVATAR OF THE MACHINE GOD! ALL HAIL!

Anyway, I'm starting to realize why comic book continuities that have Stark in them have to be "reset" periodically, or have at least them suffer some great world-wide near-apocalypse. Or just have Stark suffer some grave setback/injury. Given time, he would just win the technological/economical victory and make the setting unworkable if he is not removed from the active heroes.
 
Esbilon said:
Regarding limiting growth, I'm canning that idea. Go ahead, spread across the galaxy like a plague of high-tech locust. It might be educational :)

At some point, you'll probably want to look into constructing 40K-style industrial worlds in order to have room for your facilities, but I think you'll manage.
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Challenge accepted.jpg.

meianmaru said:
Anyway, I'm starting to realize why comic book continuities that have Stark in them have to be "reset" periodically, or have at least them suffer some great world-wide near-apocalypse. Or just have Stark suffer some grave setback/injury. Given time, he would just win the technological/economical victory and make the setting unworkable if he is not removed from the active heroes.
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Pretty much this. There is even a comic page where Tony is showing off his Extremis Iron Man Armour by driving with a woman who is supposed to be his assassin on his lap, and she wonders if it's safe and Tony comments that he is using the Replusor nodes on his knuckles as eyes while he is holding wheel.

She makes a bunch of comments about the fact that he pull that kind of stuff off that her bosses want him out of way and says that 'everyone that has tried to kill you by reverse engineering your tech has failed, so the only way we have is to discredit you. Disprove you at every turn, so you become nothing more than a laughing stock which no-one believes. After all, what better way than to stop a 'man of the future' than to remove his own 'future'?'

Tony just replies that he met a boy who came from the future who was using Replusor Nodes in same fashion that he using them now and basically says 'I am not a 'man of the future' - I am the future.'

Then procedes to suffer from mega villiany, gets either killed/brain wiped and restores from a six month old copy of his mind which so happens to have been done before his slide into insanity.

But how much of that was just Tony's ego stroking I have no idea.
 
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Yog said:
One good point of QE is that it makes hacking of comm systems much harder, thus limiting the amount of data geth, Shadow Broker and Reapers can get access to.
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well that and the zero-lag-time computer transmitters you can build with it.

EDIT: just realised that Qcomputers would have non q-com parts which would cause chokepoints
 
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Carrnage said:
well that and the zero-lag-time computer transmitters you can build with it.

EDIT: just realised that Qcomputers would have non q-com parts which would cause chokepoints
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Advanced Mass Effect Theory followed with Optical Computers. I'm betting that because we are starting to see advances towards optical computing in real life already, the advances there would be FTL data transfer on-chip, not just creating first or better optical computers.

...Which just brought to mind one question: As the relay ME "corridors" are used to transfer FTL information by lasers (which could be used in the computers, like I mentioned), wouldn't that mean we could create FTL lasers weapons? "Paragon FTL laser-cannon: Because light-speed is just too damn slow to kill your enemies with". And maybe we could use it to "pack" laser pulses tighter by concencrating the tail end of the laser beam by shortening the space it has to travel? Would this be feasible and/or has it been mentioned already?
 
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meianmaru said:
...Which just brought to mind one question: As the relay ME "corridors" are used to transfer FTL information by lasers (which could be used in the computers, like I mentioned), wouldn't that mean we could create FTL lasers weapons? "Paragon FTL laser-cannon: Because light-speed is just too damn slow to kill your enemies with". And maybe we could use it to "pack" laser pulses tighter by concencrating the tail end of the laser beam by shortening the space it has to travel? Would this be feasible and/or has it been mentioned already?
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I'm not really sure...I mean, the comm buoys do it as well and the Mass Relays are used to transmit a FTL message from comm buoy to Relay to comm buoy if what you are after is in another system, but I'm not sure exactly how much eezo is used, because neither of them simply use a ME field, but rather a tunnel made from a ME field, which some fans believes it generates a 'time travel' event which grants it the whole 'near-instant' thing both have, due to some theory about wormholes.

If you simply want to generate bigger laser pulses, it might be better off researching Bose-Einstein condensate, you can actually slow down a laser beam to around 30 miles an hour if you have enough.

Or at least I think that was the effect achieved by the experiment....

'Slow Light' does crop up now and then on empire building quests on SB and is usually treated as a laser weapon upgrade.
 
Citadel Ships can go an average of 15LY/day = 0.625LY/Hr for an average of 50 hours for a total distance of 31.25LY before discharge is needed.

Based upon a variety of prior calculations I estimate a normal Frigate of comparable size to the Cabira has an engine power of 1,506MW which with an exhaust thrust of24,500m/s (Anti-Matter) gives a thrust of:

T = 2*1,506,015,000/24,500 = 122,940 newtons

If we assume it has the same mass as the Cabira, roughly 2,500,000kg, then we know it has a pre-me acceleration of 0.049176m/s.

By applying the Brachistochrone equation we can work out how much the application of Mass Effect increases it's acceleration:

T = 2 * sqrt[ D/A]
180,000 = 2 * sqrt[ 295,647,827,268,150,000/A]
90,000 = sqrt[ 295,647,827,268,150,000/A]
8,100,000,000 = 295,647,827,268,150,000/A
A = 295,647,827,268,150,000/8,100,000,000
A = 36,499,731.7615m/s/s

That is an astounding 742,226,528 times faster then it goes before mass effect. To achieve that level of acceleration requires a mass of 3.37 grams which is unsurprisingly a 742,226,528 times decrease in mass.

The Cabira has three rear facing Repuslors each with a thrust of 2.5MN for a total thrust of 7.5MN. This gives her an acceleration of 3m/s/s or about about 1/3 of a gee.

Assuming it has the same mass reduction the Cabira has an FTL acceleration of 2,226,679,585m/s/s. That makes her 61 times faster.

Now repulsor blasts have a speed but who knows how that relates to the maximum speed they can accelerate. Frankly I think we can just ignore the problem since even a hundred hours of accelerating, it would only get half that due to the need to decelerate, at 3m/s/s doesn't even get the Cabira up to 1PSL.

Applying the FTL acceleration to the Brachistochrone equation and assuming her multi-drive core allows twice the FTL endurance:

360,000 = 2 * sqrt[ D/2,226,679,585 ]
180,000 = sqrt[ D/2,226,679,585 ]
32,400,000,000 = D/2,226,679,585
D = 32,400,000,000 * 2,226,679,585
D = 72,144,418,554,000,000,000
D = 7,626LY

So. 244x increase in traveling distance. I think I broke the game.

For reference Earth is about 26,000LY from the center of the Milky way and the whole galaxy is only 100,000LY. It would take the Cabira about 14 hops, two months plus discharge time, to travel from one end to the other.

Did I mention I broke the game?
 
UberJJK said:
*Snip*
Did I mention I broke the game?
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Actually....it is implied that ME ships can go faster than the 15LY a day limit, but they get hit by relativity even when in a ME Field.

In other words, their method of FTL travel simply changes the speed of light within a limited area to a different limit, and approaching that limit causes the same time dilation effects that normally attempting to travel at high speeds causes.

EDIT: Found it: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/FTL

Physics Edit
FTL drives are devices which allow ships to travel at FTL speeds through space. FTL drive cores work by exposing element zero to electric currents, creating mass effect fields. It reduces the mass of an object, such as a starship, to a point where velocities faster than the speed of light are possible. With a mass effect drive, roughly a dozen light-years can be traversed in the course of a day's cruise without bending space-time and causing time dilation.

The precise maximum speed and the time this acceleration can be maintained varies depending on the exact type of FTL drive being used. In general, the larger the drive, the longer the ship can run at FTL.

From my point of view that basically means: 'Sure you can go faster, but you start warping spacetime and get kicked in nads by time dilation'.

Not sure what the bottom part is meant to mean really, I mean can you have a different drive system other than 'bigger' and 'smaller' which changes your speed limit?

Or is it talking about acceleration, were an Ion Drive has sucky acceleration while fusion/anti matter spiked drives have much higher acceleration?
 
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