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

Alanek2002 said:
on the subject of military ships: how shall we handle selling them to the other citadel races? Say, a 1 to 2 ratio between the alliance amd the entirety of the citadel species, with the citadel ones costing more? I would say one to one, but we need the tech to spread.
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It will probably be very much determined by the political climate when we build it.

Some considerations that would effect it would include building a cut back version for export, number of hulls the Alliance order vs our available construction space and speed. Citadel Military build up compensating for their own inferior hulls and whether and/or how the Alliance tries to use our technology as leverage.
There's also whether there has been a war with the Batarians or not triggered by butterflies.
Lastly so long as they can get or clandestinely make arc reactors the big stumbling block of power generation vs mass ceases to be a problem so they might turn out their own versions of some of our systems a few years later.
 
tyaty1 said:
I think, that the main reason , that religious people are minority in SA, that BW did not want to deal with RL religions.

Turians showed to be generally religious o the surface, like the old Romans.

And the Hanar......
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It's possible, but at the same time it's pretty much said that Turians have accepted ones such Zen buddistism and Shinto, so they seem to go for ones that have either a pantheon of gods/goddesses or 'household/local' gods/goddesses which more or less is the same as thier original 'faith' that was supposedly a 'generalised belief in spirit beings that interferred for good and ill with lesser life'.

The Hanar worshipped the Protheans, they were basically a cargo cult.
 
Silversun17 said:
:Citation Needed:
first i heard of that.
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Liara flat out states that if an Asari meld enough in mass effect one they can advanced to the matron stage several hundred years before they would normally become one.

Edit: Reading over it it doesn't say that they can't have kids until the matron stage. However the fact that they have kids then and you don't ever hear any mention of Maidens having kids leads me to believe they can't until then.
Asari have a robust cellular regenerative system. While they do not heal faster than other species, asari are known to reach 1,000 years of age.
Although asari have one gender, they are not asexual. An asari provides two copies of her own genes to her offspring. The second set is altered in a unique process called melding.
During melding, an asari consciously attunes her nervous system to her partner's, sending and receiving electrical impulses directly through the skin. The partner can be another asari, or an alien of either gender. Effectively, the asari and her partner briefly become one unified nervous system.
This unique means of reproduction is the reason asari are talented biotics. Their evolved ability to consciously control nerve impulses is very similar to biotic training. Asari believe that their offspring acquire the best qualities of the "father" from the melded genes, but evidence is anecdotal.
Asari pass through three climacteric life stages, marked by biochemical and physiological changes. The Maiden stage begins at birth and is marked by the drive to explore and experience. Most young asari are curious and restless.
The Matron stage of life begins around the age of 350, though it can be triggered earlier if the individual melds frequently. This period is marked by a desire to settle in one area and raise children.
The Matriarch stage begins around 700, or earlier if the individual melds rarely. Matriarchs become active in their community as sages and councilors, dispensing wisdom from centuries of experience.
While each stage of life is marked by strong biological tendencies, individuals do make unexpected life choices. For example, there are Maidens who stay close to home rather than explore, Matrons who would rather work than build a family, and Matriarchs who have no interest in community affairs.
 
Stroth said:
Basically. The general position seems to be that if there are aliens then God created them too, so what's the big deal?
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But the interaction with the core dogma is what would be key. The main point of interest would be original sin and Jesus as savior. I don't claim to be an expert but I believe that an argument could be made that the don't apply to aliens and well what then? That what I'd be interested in reading a discussion about.

But that's not really important. I was just wondering if some one had a link resource on such thing as it was brought up.

nightblade said:
*Snip*
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We really have too little data on the Asari to make those qualifications. We get to know only one really well and maybe 3 or so others sort of well and a fair number more we just meet a few times. It doesn't help that Liara is abnormal by Asari standards. Without a codex statement its really hard to tell. A similar observation could be made about humans and the early teenage life period. I think it important to note that the matron stage can be triggered very early if the Asari finds a partner/link a lot making the qualification that they need to be a matron mostly meaningless. Its sort of a non-exclusive or qualifier, you are a matron if you are between 350-700 years old or you've settled down and had a family before that.
 
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Hoyr said:
Its sort of a non-exclusive or qualifier, you are a matron if you are between 350-700 years old or you've settled down and had a family before that.
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Yeah, there was a codex I read somewhere which basically said that 'the Matron stage can either triggered by reaching that age bracket, melding regularly or 'simply mentally maturing' to that stage.
 
Say... what's out health care package look like? If we hire on any krogan it might be a bit embarrassing to explane how we "ooops" cured the genophage in them as per out health insurance guide lines.

Side note: Dental's gotta be a bitch, they have how many teeth?
 
Pai said:
Say... what's out health care package look like? If we hire on any krogan it might be a bit embarrassing to explane how we "ooops" cured the genophage in them as per out health insurance guide lines.

Side note: Dental's gotta be a bitch, they have how many teeth?
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depends on how often they visit a bar and how rough the bar is.
 
UberJJK said:
The first and most obvious is it allows for the ultimate alpha strike. Have covert forces in the area feeding information out via undetectable QECs which allow a wave of Cabira to drop out of FTL right ontop of their targets and unload a devastating alpha strike. At which point they either jump back to FTL and swing around for another undetectable attack or raise their TIR system and completely disappear.
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It's even scarier than that. If they have assets in the area observing the opposition (and they can get them there quite easily, as TIR works in FTL perfectly fine, masking the telltale signs of it), they don't even need to drop out of FTL to do the first strike, or to drop TIR ever. Essentially this makes them almost completely invulnerable in case of defensive warfare where listening posts have been established in the area. And I like Cabira as a name. Don't remember seeing it before, but I like it for frigates.
ares20 said:
Honestly I doubt Psychohistory would be all that useful in the ME universe
when you take into account this fact. Hari Seldon's Psychohistory was designed
with human psychology in mind and not alien psychology.

(Psychohistory has one basic, underlying limitation which Asimov postulated for the first time on literally the last page of the final book in the Foundation series: psychohistory only functions in a galaxy populated only by humans. In Asimov's Foundation series, humans form the only sentient race that developed in the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Seldon developed psychohistory to predict the actions of large groups of humans. Even robots technically fall under the umbrella of psychohistory, because humans built them, and they thus represent more or less a human "action", or at least, possess a thought-framework similar enough to that of their human creators that psychohistory can predict their actions. However, psychohistory cannot predict the actions of a sentient alien race; their psychology may differ so much from that of humans that normal psychohistory cannot understand or predict their actions. ) Quoted from Wikipedia Psychohistory article.

I admit it has been years since I had read any of the foundation series
but I did distinctly remember this particular flaw in Psychohistory.
But take it as you will.
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Those are the flaws we could correct (at least ones that make it have trouble with aliens, and ones that make it fail if psychohistory is a widely known discipline),
 
Yog said:
It's even scarier than that. If they have assets in the area observing the opposition (and they can get them there quite easily, as TIR works in FTL perfectly fine, masking the telltale signs of it), they don't even need to drop out of FTL to do the first strike, or to drop TIR ever. Essentially this makes them almost completely invulnerable in case of defensive warfare where listening posts have been established in the area. And I like Cabira as a name. Don't remember seeing it before, but I like it for frigates.
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Wouldn't someone have to drop the TIR stealth field (even if only on a probe/sensor arm) as the TIR stealth field is a two way EM radiation blocker? Or have an advance team with a QEC feeding targeting data?

Basically at some point you have to get targeting data and that can't be done by an object in a TIR stealth field as it just as blind as it is invisible.

Hell normal FTL ships should be completely blind thanks to TIR. I suppose you could pulse the FTL core so that you could see but that would make ME drives even more complicated and one would have to be careful about itmor risk Cherenkov radiation.
 
Hoyr said:
Wouldn't someone have to drop the TIR stealth field (even if only on a probe/sensor arm) as the TIR stealth field is a two way EM radiation blocker? Or have an advance team with a QEC feeding targeting data?
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Or drop QEC equipped drones / probes during the fight to feed the ship targeting data. Or have gravitic sensors that defeat TIR's stealth at least in some way.
Basically at some point you have to get targeting data and that can't be done by an object in a TIR stealth field as it just as blind as it is invisible.
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True. Which is why QEC is essential for TIR usage during active combat. Well, TIR can be quite effectively used without QEC, yes, but with it, TIR becomes far more deadly. Not to mention that QEC allow for FTL alpha strikes, as QEC are essentially the only (proposed so far) FTL sensors (assuming one has dropped a number of QEC relays in the area of operation).
Hell normal FTL ships should be completely blind thanks to TIR. I suppose you could pulse the FTL core so that you could see but that would make ME drives even more complicated and one would have to be careful about itmor risk Cherenkov radiation.
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You could also extend some very small "periscopes" beyond TIR that would have sensors built into them.
 
Yog said:
It's even scarier than that. If they have assets in the area observing the opposition (and they can get them there quite easily, as TIR works in FTL perfectly fine, masking the telltale signs of it), they don't even need to drop out of FTL to do the first strike, or to drop TIR ever. Essentially this makes them almost completely invulnerable in case of defensive warfare where listening posts have been established in the area. And I like Cabira as a name. Don't remember seeing it before, but I like it for frigates.
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But a complete stealth attack would only be capable of using the mass accelerator. The lasers would be trapped by the TIR and any missiles would presumably be fried by the massive levels of EM radiation between the two TIR layers.

That said they could pull off some pretty crazy short attacks. From what I can tell it takes humans an average of 1.2 seconds to perceive a highly surprising event, like a ship appearing out of nowhere.

1.2 seconds is enough time for at least one, if not two, shots from the accelerator, probably enough time to drop a missile from each of the side launchers, and enough time for the twin 2GW lasers to output a total of 4.8GW of lasery doom.

If the Cabira dropped out of FTL 10km away from it's target then each of the lasers would be capable of punching through 25km of tungsten armor. I imagine in actuality they would sweap across the target to prevent over-penetration but that's basically a coring shot for any ship.

So it should be more then possible to program the computer to drop out of FTL, fire all weapons at preassigned locations on the target, and jump back to FTL before the enemy crew can even realize the Cabira was there.

Alanek2002 said:
on the subject of military ships: how shall we handle selling them to the other citadel races? Say, a 1 to 2 ratio between the alliance amd the entirety of the citadel species, with the citadel ones costing more? I would say one to one, but we need the tech to spread.
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...

You do realize our military ships are the sort of thing that would get slapped with the Invention Secrecy Act right? Or at least the Alliance version of it.
 
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I still think Flawless Blackboxing should be high priority.
 
Durabys said:
I still think Flawless Blackboxing should be high priority.
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Why? What does further levels of blackboxing get us? It's not retroactive, tons of our gear is already out there. Hell, the Quarians have some. If they have it, you have to assume that everyone else and their brother has it as well. We need to be developing NEW stuff, not hiding our existing stuff under deeper and deeper layers of paranoia.
 
No. Because once we get later tech that is utterly HAX our earlier tech will become obsolete. I am thinking here about the very long game.
 
UberJJK said:
*snip alpha strike*
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The best way to leverage this would be targeting the other ships weapons, sensors and thrusters to cripple them, which I think at such a close should be feasible. Thus even a smaller ship with otherwise technological parity could use TIR to win against even much larger ships, especially if it has enough time to do multiple hit-stealth-and-run strikes.
 
UberJJK said:
If the Cabira dropped out of FTL 10km away from it's target then each of the lasers would be capable of punching through 25km of tungsten armor. I imagine in actuality they would sweap across the target to prevent over-penetration but that's basically a coring shot for any ship.
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Can I ask how you arrived to 25 KILOmeters result? It seems vastly over the probanle number. Even barring the fact that the armor will evaporate, ionize and disperse laser beam, spreading the energy from a tightly focused beam into a larger area, 25 kilometers is an insane number. 25 meters... Maybe. Possibly. But not kilometers.
 
nightblade said:
Liara flat out states that if an Asari meld enough in mass effect one they can advanced to the matron stage several hundred years before they would normally become one.

Edit: Reading over it it doesn't say that they can't have kids until the matron stage. However the fact that they have kids then and you don't ever hear any mention of Maidens having kids leads me to believe they can't until then.
.....
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Actually Liara is a Maiden and she does get pregnant in ME3 if you romance her.
 
Yog said:
Can I ask how you arrived to 25 KILOmeters result? It seems vastly over the probanle number. Even barring the fact that the armor will evaporate, ionize and disperse laser beam, spreading the energy from a tightly focused beam into a larger area, 25 kilometers is an insane number. 25 meters... Maybe. Possibly. But not kilometers.
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Technically it should be 19km since 25km was from when I forgot to adjust the wavelength from the default.

According to this calculator a continuous 2GW laser with a lens of 1m, a wavelength of 400nm and a beam duration of 1.2 seconds will burn vaporize 19299192.79mm of Tungsten armor at 10,000 meters.
 
UberJJK said:
Technically it should be 19km since 25km was from when I forgot to adjust the wavelength from the default.

According to this calculator a continuous 2GW laser with a lens of 1m, a wavelength of 400nm and a beam duration of 1.2 seconds will burn vaporize 19299192.79mm of Tungsten armor at 10,000 meters.
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I am pretty damn sure it's wrong. 2GW produces 2 GJ of energy per second. Tungsten has vaporization heat of 774 kJ per mole. This mean that, assuming 100% efficiency, forgetting about melting and solid heat up parts, one could vaporize 2000000/774=2583 moles of tungsten. This gives us 2583×184=475452 grams of tungsten. Tungsten's density is between 17.6 and 19.2 tons per cubic meter depending on its state. This means that 2 GW second long pulse could vaporize, at most, 475452/17600000=0.027 cubic meters. Realistically it would be about an orser of magnitude smaller, perhaps smaller.

I think the calculator has problems with duty cycle on/off ratio moved into infinity.
 
UberJJK said:
What will scare the fuck out of the Citadel Council will be the military tech we're selling to the Alliance.
[...]
Frankly genetic engineering nothing compared to what they really should, and will, be worrying about.
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I... suspect my original argument was lost in the ensuing debate.

Okay, let's try again. My original argument is that we should make the push for researching AI--blue box and possibly pure software--before we play around with releasing other tech into the wild, like the Cabira and Eternal Youth. Our track record with the Arc Reactor patent and distribution alone should get us enough leeway from the Council to at least do the research, although we'll probably have to come back if we want to actually start birthing our own independent race of AI. The boost to our research rolls alone should be worth the effort of upping the priority of AI, but my main argument is that these other technologies we are pursuing are very possibly more controversial than artificial intelligence, and if anything at all goes wrong in their deployment then it'll make our push for AI research even more politically unlikely.

Besides, I want my snarky AI companion Cortana/Jarvis, darnit! :)

Tabron89 said:
Here's what the codex says: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Systems_Alliance
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People don't like it when their religious leaders don't have answers.
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That doesn't sound like the discovery of alien life killed religion; it sounds like it caused the creation of a few new splinter sects, while politically we ended up getting a one-world nation. Religious figures squabbling over religion is nothing new: the Protestant Reformation comes to mind as the most glaring example, but most of the major world religions these days are offshoots of older religions, or have several offshoots of their own.

No, I expect the biggest hit to religion is going to be extrasolar colonization efforts. I see the first waves of colonists as being scientists and engineers by necessity, and probably will have a higher proportion of atheists than the average Earth population. In that way religion will slowly become less popular for the simple reason that the fastest growing subset of the population will consist of a greater proportion of atheists. Evolution in action. :D
 
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