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

Von Neumann Swarms are considered to be illegal WMDs, no matter what you are using them for.

If we used them as 'one shot/rechargable blobs of nanomachines that pull stuff apart and make blobs of certain elements' then we could get away with them, but have nano-machines that produce nanomachines?

Nope, the Council cracks down on stuff like that.

I would be more interested in laser generated spin asteriod mining - if we manage to get it as an actual tech, I can see the Volus, Elcor and the Hanar actually becoming a worthwhile threat to the Reapers.

The Volus have one of the best economies/industries going (which can be further improved by shifting their physical crews to eezo mining and ship building thanks to less people needed to mine normal asteriods), the Elcor should have problems working in micrograv because of being adapted to 2G so they should become even more broken (they are actually the closest to a post scarcity society in ME, they don't trade for raw materials but finished goods), and the Hanar either have the Drell mining for them or import manpower/resources because their tentacles suck at carrying heavy loads - remove the need for actual people moving heavy loads around as much as possible and their industry should be boosted, if their industry goes up, raiding would likely go up which means they need more ships.

Let me put it this way - the Hanar forces you get in ME3 if you save the Hanar homeworld amounts to 50 points - If we can get them to double their forces, they could actually have a fleet which that can take on one of the Alliance's Fleets at full strength.
 
One of the major bottlenecks in eezo mining is that actually getting at the locations where eezo is most prevalent requires heavy-duty radiation protection. I imagine TIR will help with that significantly...
 
Yog said:
Citation please. As far as I know they are forbidden for use on garden worlds, not in general.
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http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Codex/Citadel_and_Galactic_Government#Citadel_Conventions

Citadel Conventions Edit
These diplomatic talks occurred in the wake of the Krogan Rebellions, as a response to the destruction of the conflict and an attempt to distance the Council from the brutal krogan warfare.

The Conventions regulate the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction. A WMD causes environmental alteration to a world. A bomb that produces a large crater is not considered a WMD; a bomb that causes a "nuclear winter" is.

Use of WMD is forbidden on "garden" worlds like Earth, with ecospheres that can readily support a population. If a habitable world is destroyed, it will not be replaced for millions of years. The Conventions do not forbid the use of WMD on hostile worlds or in sealed space-station environments. Many militaries continue to develop and maintain stockpiles.

The Conventions graded Weapons of Mass Destruction into tiers of concern. Tier I is the greatest threat to galactic peace.

TIER I: Large kinetic impacters, such as asteroid drops or de-orbited space stations. Effectively free and available in any system (in the form of debris left over from planetary accretion), kinetic impacters are the weapons of choice for terrorists and "third galaxy" nations.

TIER II: Uncontrolled self-replicating weapons, such as nanotechnology, viral or bacteriological organisms, "Von Neumann devices", and destructive computer viruses. These weapons can lie dormant for millennia, waiting for a careless visitor to carry them on to another world.

TIER III: Large energy-burst weapons such as nuclear or antimatter warheads.

TIER IV: Alien species deliberately introduced to crowd out native forms necessary for the health of an ecosystem. Ecological tampering can take years to bear fruit, making it difficult to prove.

So yes, it's likely the moment Revy says "I'm going to deploy a von neumann nano-machine colony anywhere within a solar system." it's either going to attract major attention, or be vetoed immediately, just on the off chance of someone landing on said asteriod, 'accidently' picking a few up and then landing on a colonised planet.

After all, it is somewhat hard to make a von neumann device discern the difference between a building or plants or people when you have programmed them to pull apart carbon/iron/what have you to make more of themselves.

The fact that these things are considered to be second tier to someone lobbing an asteriod at a planet must give people second thoughts about using von neumann tech to build things.

Just because we are going to be using them somewhere else doesn't get past that, part of the law against them includes the fact that they can be spread.

Like I said before, we can probably get away with dumping a blob of already made non-replicating nano-machines on an asteriod (as long as they are observed at all times) but von neumann stuff? Nope.

It's 'fine' to have von neumann devices in military storage because it's expected that every military would have a stockpile, but using them to harvest an asteriod would probably be met with the same concern as using nuclear warheads to a dig a canal.
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And, yes. Someone actually proposed a plan to dig a canal with nuclear warheads before in RL...

EDIT: The law against nano-machines probably would explain why not everything in ME is made from grey goo but omni-gel instead, most companies probably abandoned that line of research/production in order to avoid excessive government oversight.
 
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meianmaru said:
And this is why I just want to skip straight Disassembly/Construction Beams. Mining ships which have these could build other ships that have them, but would be (very likely) faster at the task and less likely to accidentaly eat everything in the galaxy.
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While that makes some sense from a gameplay perspective I personally believe that such a level of technology would destroy the setting because there is a good reason why books like the culture series (which has that level of high tech). Those books focus on the culturally and moral aspect of such societies for a reason. It is very difficult to write in such a setting, especially anything even remotely resembling interesting military action.

So I am personally for keeping the setting and technology at a level where we can still follow the technology.
 
Erandil said:
While that makes some sense from a gameplay perspective I personally believe that such a level of technology would destroy the setting because there is a good reason why books like the culture series (which has that level of high tech). Those books focus on the culturally and moral aspect of such societies for a reason. It is very difficult to write in such a setting, especially anything even remotely resembling interesting military action.

So I am personally for keeping the setting and technology at a level where we can still follow the technology.
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And I'm the kind of guy who aims for the Transcendence Victory the moment I can. But anyway, it depends on what Esbilion thinks he can/wants to write and allows us to have. Maybe he could continue this with a crossover to a different setting to keep us challenged?

Or just do away with the whole military conflict -thing. Keep writing about tech advances as long as he can, until we reach a level of power, and more importantly intelligence on what we can't play and Esbilion can't write convincingly from our viewpoint, and end it with us winning that Transcendence Victory I mentioned earlier.

Really, I can't see this ending any other way unless our QM starts throwing periodic "resets" to Revy like what Marvel does to Tony Stark.
 
Erandil said:
While that makes some sense from a gameplay perspective I personally believe that such a level of technology would destroy the setting because there is a good reason why books like the culture series (which has that level of high tech). Those books focus on the culturally and moral aspect of such societies for a reason. It is very difficult to write in such a setting, especially anything even remotely resembling interesting military action.

So I am personally for keeping the setting and technology at a level where we can still follow the technology.
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We shouldn't have picked Iron Man in that case. The only way we can hope to defeat Reapers is through technological advancement. And It's in Revy's character to boldly go forward.
 
meianmaru said:
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Really, I can't see this ending any other way unless our QM starts throwing periodic "resets" to Revy like what Marvel does to Tony Stark.
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Well he could always declare that we can no longer research new technologies because we reached some sort of scientific tableau.

But to be fair you are probably right... I just hope that we meet the reaper on a technological level where they are still a credible threat.
 
Erandil said:
Well he could always declare that we can no longer research new technologies because we reached some sort of scientific tableau.

But to be fair you are probably right... I just hope that we meet the reaper on a technological level where they are still a credible threat.
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Reapers are, and always will be a credible threat due to the nature of how technology develops in Mass Effect, their numbers, their complete lack of supply chains and their persistence.

Even if we develop beyond them (and we likely will), there will still be more of them then us, and even one Reaper could casually devastate a planet before it's stopped.
 
Erandil said:
Well he could always declare that we can no longer research new technologies because we reached some sort of scientific tableau.

But to be fair you are probably right... I just hope that we meet the reaper on a technological level where they are still a credible threat.
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Fuck that. Next thing you know. You would proclaim giving Revy a lightsaber, and Reapers a Deathstar.
 
What sort of person desires a fair fight against a army of honorless scum? :p

In all honesty, even with a massive tech advantage, we'll still be hard pressed to win. Note the estimations that give 20k as a absolute minimum for how many dreadnaughts they have. Short version is thus: with 50k confirmed cycles, even with them potentially losing more than they gain on a number of cycles, they'll still have tens of thousands. And note that it apparently only takes a few to 10 million or so people to make the core of a reaper dreadnaught, meaning that they really should have far far more than that estimate of 20k, unless all the other races made the protheans look like wimps in space combat.
 
Esbilon said:
Maxim 31. Only cheaters prosper.
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Exactly! ^.^

And honestly, our only hope is that they only send a fraction of the reapers to assimilate us in a wave, to save on energy costs, that we can survive against and start to build up. At which point, we have a few possible results. we'd have 3 months if the reapers tell the others the moment they start losing. If the other reapers don't leave until the last member of the first wave is destroyed, we have 6 months. Third best case, is that near the end of the war a few reapers head back to wake up the main fleet, giving us a year for their travel time. Second best case is the same as the third, except that it takes time to wake the reapers up. The absolute best case is case 2, with the added caveat that the theory that the reapers first left for us at the end of ME1 is correct, making the travel time 2.5 years each way, instead of 6 months.
 
Mind you, according to the extended ending where you can tell the 'Star Child' to go hang himself and everyone dies, Liara's blackboxes are found in the next cycle and the whole thing actually causes all of the important races of the next/current cycle to gear up to fight the Reapers and win.

So it is more or less canon that the Reapers can be beat as long as the Galaxy considers them as an actual threat and has enough time to prepare.

I wonder...if the SA get their hands on reverse engineered Reaper weapons, could we buy the blueprints off them and pump out the weapons for them, so that way they have more to go around?
 
By then, we should absolutely be on the list of people they give the Reaper chunks to in order to reverse engineer stuff in the first place.
 
Tabron89 said:
Mind you, according to the extended ending where you can tell the 'Star Child' to go hang himself and everyone dies,
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Going by anything EA put out for me3 is painfully dim way to do things. There's fan-fiction with better endings.

This is a filler line as just putting down Fuck EA isnt very usefull post.

PS: Fuck EA
 
Van Ropen said:
By then, we should absolutely be on the list of people they give the Reaper chunks to in order to reverse engineer stuff in the first place.
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Heck, I wonder if at some point after our tech levels really start going crazy, Sovereign might not give us some Reaper tech thats still active to be analysed in an attempt to indoctrinate us to the side of the Reapers. :)
 
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