We can already build them; check General Information tab. Frigates tech was a prerequisite.
Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution
- Thread starter Hoyr
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Yup; the only incentives we have to build space factories are:
1) we're arbitrarily limited to 3 ground-based factories per city, so we literally cannot build any more Factory IIIs than @UberJJK, @Yog and I have allocated this quarter,
2) "Large" constructions need to be built in an appropriately-large Factory, even if other Factories can asist in construction (eg. Dreadnoughts need a Factory that can produce 30m Production per quarter, since Dreadnoughts themselves cost 80-150m Production. @Hoyr hasn't given a hard rule on this, but it seems reasonable to me that a product needs a Factory that can provide up to 1/6 its Production cost per quarter). Also,
3) Because of f*ck Bioware, humanity has retroactively forgotten how to build scaffolding, so starships larger than a frigate need to be built in space. Presumably mammoth tanks, 500m mechs, and larger ground tech like buildings need to be built in space as well, for the same reason.
TheBleachDoctor
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Because of Bioware, Humanity has forgotten a lot of things.
Such as shaped nuclear charges, multi-layered point defense systems, long-range laser weapons...
Actually, 1 km long dreadnoughts probably can be build in atmosphere, but why would you? They are assets meant to be deployed in interplanetary space, and the construction compromises you'd need to make to build them on the bottom of a gravwell would only impede their proper functioning in space.
Or you'd have to build and launch a 1 km long skyscraper, because the 'down' for a dreadnought is 'towards the engines.' Because it's cheaper than having to implement tons of artificial gravity systems.
Or you'd have to build and launch a 1 km long skyscraper, because the 'down' for a dreadnought is 'towards the engines.' Because it's cheaper than having to implement tons of artificial gravity systems.
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Probably banned by international arms treaties, which is kind of silly since 800m MACs are nukes too.
Yeah, granted; we should probably adapt our autocannons/Sagitta for additional starship point defense.
These don't exist due to diffraction. We're getting around the issue by using variable wavelength lasers and pumping the frequency up to the X-ray/gamma ray level.
TheBleachDoctor
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Silly, yeah. Nukes in space are currently outlawed (I mean real life currently). This would probably change if we were required to fight aliens. Aliens with heat management issues.
Just saying a Casaba Howitzer would fuck up their day if it connected.
Yes. Why depend on just one layer of defense when you can have one with lasers, another with missiles, and another with freaking ECM.
For god's sake, what were the Bioware writers thinking? I don't care how good one layer of defenses (two if you count shields, I don't) are, YOU NEED REDUNDANCIES.
They wouldn't be a problem for static defenses.
Just imagine a bunch of orbital platforms lasering ships to death from far away.
800m MACs don't leave parts of the planet irradiated. I think. Yog, IIRC you are the local high energy physicist, could you tell us what happens when you slam iron into something at about 0.02c?
Sagitta would be an excellent idea, although they have a limited range they'd be helpful with incoming missiles at minimum.
azoicennead
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Well even with canon ME tech levels its not hard to make one. Now will making them be worth it. Because they will hurt like a mother when they hit but is it better than any other weapons to kill in space. We do plan on selling better armor and stuff like ablative and the canon Siliaris armor exist.
Will we be in trouble for using them due to treaties. Will they be easier to detect due to the nuclear materials, and thus easier to shoot down. Cause radiation sensors are a thing they have.
What compromises? It's only 1g; if your warship can't survive the 1g conditions that are going to be imposed on it anyway due to artificial gravity, how is it going to survive actual combat? We're used to thinking in terms of construction compromises because we're thinking about the fragile spun-glass, reduce weight at all costs construction of modern satellites and space vehicles; all of that goes away in the face of dreadnought armored construction designed to survive impacts from large MACs, and construction and launching problems fade in the face of eezo cores that can reduce a 1km ship's mass to a few kilograms (note that these cores will be easier to discharge while on a planet's surface, further increasing the benefits of building inside a gravity well). Civilian ships might need to be built in space since they have bargain-basement eezo cores, but military ones ought to be able to be built in a gravity well with no issues whatsoever.
In fact, as mentioned by a few others (@UberJJK and/or @Yog I think?), there are strategic reasons for the Alliance in particular to build their dreadnoughts on the ground: they build them, rip out the 1000m MAC and hide it somewhere, then launch it as a "carrier", knowing that if the Turians ever try to invade them again then all of those "carriers" can suddenly, inexplicably sprout nuke guns.
No, you're not understanding: we're diffraction-limited. Even perfectly parallel laser light will spread out over long distances due to diffraction. The amount is inversely proportional to the wavelength, so getting around it means you need ultra-high-frequency lasers.
Mushroom clouds (more likely airburst nukes, but that's still bad). The basic idea is that you're shooting things through atmosphere faster than the atmosphere can be repelled by electrostatic forces, so you get air molecules fusing with the iron atoms, which then undergo nuclear decay.
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So I was doing what I so often do before going to sleep, pondering how to weaponize things, when a thought occurred to me; repulsor torpedoes.
Now we could just swap out the engine on a regular torp for a repulsor to make it very stealthy*, no thermal bloom, but I was wondering what could be done with a torpedo that was just a repulsor and an arc reactor.
*This would actually be a big thing for the Accipiter that I overlooked. With almost no thermal bloom (biggest source of heat would be the computer systems) compared to everything else it space they would probably go unnoticed until they open fire.
Well a 100mm Repuslor consumes 700MW. I don't have time for the math right now (about to go to sleep) however since an Arc Reactor outputs 5GW then it's rasonable to say a Repulsor that consumes all of that would output 7.14 times the thrust for a force of 178,571.4 Newtons.
If we assume the Repuslor is also 7.14x more massive then the total mass of the torpedo would be 8.14kg.
These two combined gives it an acceleration of 21,929.8m/s/s.
Unfortunately this means my original idea of using it as an anti-ship torpedo doesn't work since in the 183 seconds it takes to reach 4025km/s (Dreadnaught main gun speed) the target ship would had too much time to move.
However it does raise another possibility. Anti-Station and Anti-Planet duties. It only takes 1367 seconds (22 minutes) to reach 10PSL. At which point it's hitting with 823KT.
Bring it up to an hour and it's in the 5MT range.
5MT of boom in something that's at most the size of a person for all of half a million credits. You could easily fit hundreds if not thousands of those on a starship.
With that you FTL into the system, drop the payload and FTL out. The Repulsor Torpedoes invisibly accelerate away at such speed they'll almost certainly go undetected. Right until they start obliterating everything they hit that is.
Discount Apocalypse. Brought to you by Paragon Industries and the ramblings of a half asleep UberJJK.
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Reading through that spherical war cows thread post linked above (and "spherical war cows" is now in my personal lexicon 
), and someone brought up a really cute idea:
Decoys!
With repulsors replacing fusion torches on our ships, we can deploy relatively cheap Accipiter-like drones with fast-inflatable foam decoys, both for our disrupter torpedoes (which are probably millions of credits each thanks to eezo), or even of our own fighters and frigates! Throw out a cloud of blinding chaff, and all of a sudden an enemy has to deal with a dozen visually-identical frigates (at least for a few seconds until weapons fire blows up the duplicates).
), and someone brought up a really cute idea:Decoys!
With repulsors replacing fusion torches on our ships, we can deploy relatively cheap Accipiter-like drones with fast-inflatable foam decoys, both for our disrupter torpedoes (which are probably millions of credits each thanks to eezo), or even of our own fighters and frigates! Throw out a cloud of blinding chaff, and all of a sudden an enemy has to deal with a dozen visually-identical frigates (at least for a few seconds until weapons fire blows up the duplicates).
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ALL THE EXPOSITION!
"Welcome to Hephaestus station." Shepard said with a smile as Anderson disembarked his shuttle. "And congratulations on the promotion, captain."
Anderson grinned as they shook hands, noting that the Shepard was wearing an armored skinsuit instead of the usual business attire.
"A discrete invitation to Paragon Industries' new shipyard? A private shuttle? You've made a man mighty curious as to what you're hiding up here."
"Oh, just the usual: a challenge to the galactic balance of power." Shepard smirked.
Anderson raised an eyebrow. He'd met a lot of salespeople that wanted him to think the same thing, but Shepard was the one he actually thought could deliver.
"I wanted to run something by you before the big reveal later this month."
"Looking to get some good words spread along the grapevine?"
"Something like that. Follow me."
Not what I expected. Anderson thought, as he stripped out of his uniform behind the changing screen.
"We haven't actually named it yet, so far we've just called it the ship-suit. It's basically your usual ship-board mechanical counter pressure suit with the usual bells and whistles you see in the military: kinetic barriers, radiation shielding, hardened comms. How does it feel?"
"Comfortable." Anderson replied as he twisted the last latch.
He walked out from behind the screen and started to stretch out.
"We've optimised the design for long periods at rest. There are active electrostimulators to combat stiffness, but that's just gravy. The big deal is this. Put it on." She handed him a head band. Following her example, he placed it so that it cupped the back of his head, temples and cheeks.
She reached up and hit a recessed switch on it.
"That is a basic neural interface. Any minute now it's going to start stimulating the audio, visual and tactile sensory neurons on your brain."
Sure enough, parts of a heads up display were already overlaying his field of vision.
"Want to know the best part?" Shepard asked with a wicked grin.
"No, but I feel you're just dying to tell me."
"This is already obsolete technology. I've for about three grams of nonotech mesh in my brain right now that does all that and more. The BNI headpiece you're wearing suffered from speed and fidelity output issues that made it suboptimal for abstract operations. But the ANI lets me, with a few hours of surgery and a few weeks of training, give you the ability to direct your ship with the speed of your thought.
"The reduction in the time it takes to complete an OODA loop would be cut by what? At least a quarter?"
"Closer to a third for experienced users."
"Shepard…" Anderson sighed with a smile. "Every time we think we've got a peg on you, you go and do something like this."
"Heh, if this impresses you, you're going to have a heart attack when I show you the real reason I brought you here.
Shepard brought him to one of the high security hangars, where both were subject to a full biometric scan before being let in. They paused before a polarised observation window.
"Anderson." she said, "I give you the Manes of Pydna class interceptor frigate."
It was a pretty good piece of salesmanship, Anderson through as spotlights turned on in sequence to illuminate the ship before him. If he had to use a word to describe it, it would be… predatory. A flattened main hull hung between two oversized repulsors on gimbals. It looked more like an atmospheric gunship than a frigate.
"It certainly looks very pretty."
Shepard's grin was predatory.
"Well, we can't have you being influenced by it's pretty looks, can we? I guess I'll have to turn the digital overlay off."
The ship in front of him suddenly became a blurred outline.
"There's a reason I named it after the Roman spirits of the dead. The metamaterial stealth coating adds twenty percent to the final cost and production time, but it renders RADAR and LIDAR basically useless against the Pydna, anyone trying to shoot it would have to do it by thermal and sensor emissions alone. Twenty percent decrease in accuracy for missiles and simple drones from the stealth coating alone, more once you factor in the ECM, e-war, decoys and all that."
Anderson gave an appreciative whistle.
"Propulsion is fully repulsor based, two capital grade main drives and an array of maneuvering thrusters that can double as point defense if you're feeling desperate. Main power comes from a ship-grade arc reactor."
After the boarded the ship, Shepard began her tour. "The Manes of Pydna is meant for anti-piracy work first and foremost. Don't get me wrong, it'll go toe to toe with any frigate from the other major powers and come out on top but I know the navy is stretched thin trying to cover our colonies, so I decided to do something about it. With that in mind it's got a drop bay and a workshop for maintaining six Legionary suits and their attendant drone support and equipment. Crack a base, board a ship, rescue some hostages, all covered."
"The main reactor." she announced as they walked past ten centimeter blast doors. A blue crystal a bit shorter than him rose from the floor, suspended in a metal column.
"It's more efficient to make one big arc reactor than a bunch of small ones, but we ran into the issue of transporting that power. Right now it's in maintenance mode, but under regular flight, it slides into the floor where there's a nice superconducting socket that surrounds it on all sides."
"So tell me Anderson, between the repulsor drives and the arc reactor, what happens if I cut a ship's heat production by two thirds?" Shepard asked, turning to him with a smirk.
"You know, we have analysts that has already run those simulations. We're not blind to the potential either of those technologies has towards space combat." Anderson said with a chuckle. "The ship's combat endurance would skyrocket."
"Heh, I guess all that taxpayer money isn't going totally to waste."
"We've made a lot of progress on advancing our understanding of mass effect theory in the last few months." Shepard said as she showed him the mass effect core. Unlike most ship's Anderson served on, the spherical core was nestled in a rather small cavity. There was maybe a metre of clearance between the core and the outer walls of the chamber.
"It's going to be hard to run maintenance on it with this little clearance."
"You're not meant to."
A mechanical spider scuttled into view from behind the curve of the core.
"Between the advanced VI's and the neural interfaces, your engineers can delegate a lot more work to the maintenance drones. That's part of why you need a crew of only twenty two."
"I'll take your word for it."
"Between the refinements we've made and the output of the arc reactor, the Pydna can do 60 light years a day, four times what any military ship in Citadel space can do. If you get a distress call you can be on site in a quarter of the time, and you can run a spiral back plot on any pirate that jumps to FTL now, they won't be able to get away so easy anymore."
"No." Anderson whispered. "They won't."
"Welcome to the main battery!" Shepard exclaimed with glee.
"That's not a mass accelerator."
"Nope."
Anderson looked at Shepard, then went to inspect the sturdy looking collection of metal and composite.
"This is a wiggler. Shepard, are you telling me that the main armament of this frigate is a laser?"
"More specifically, a 1 gigawatt, high ultraviolet free electron pulse laser that can be fed trough one of two, two metres diameter focusing mirror turrets. With the arc reactor, we can do more with less when it comes to eezo. Mass lightening systems were used to to get the necessary electron velocities from a cyclotron without excessive bremsstrahlung losses, and we've reduced mirror wear thanks to material science advances."
"Unless you've got room temperature superconductors stashed away somewhere Shepard, the heat this thing generates… oh."
"Exactly, we've got no reactor or main engines to add to our heat load. The laser main battery is the main source of the Pydna's heat output, and even then it can still remain in combat longer than the competition."
She leaned in conspiratorially. "Wanna hear what this thing can do?"
Anderson nodded, a little wide eyed.
"One gigajoule per second at one hundred kilometers, on a 10 square meter spot. That's enough energy per square meter to literally vaporise a person. And all that power completely bypasses kinetic barriers."
"You said the Pydna is meant for long term independent deployment Shppard. But this ship is really cramped, people are going to start getting antsy."
"Are they?" She asked, and he could feel the smirk over the radio.
Suddenly he was surrounded by a plain of grass. Next they were floating above a storm cloud, then they were in an undersea aquarium.
The neural interfaces can be used to create the illusion of open space and privacy, my psych people say it should increase the psychological well being of the crew. You can probably crew this thing with krogans if you wanted to."
"It's got the usual Paragon Industries goodies." Shepard said as they strolled along.
"Electronic warfare, advanced heuristic fire control. I've even adapted the base defense VI's I've developed for anti-boarding work. And a research VI so you can run astronomic observations in the background where you're not shooting people out of the sky."
"Ah, here we are, the CIC."
Anderson squeezed through the door after Shepard and frowned at the size of the room. A spherical chamber maybe five meters in diameter, with six reclining seats around the perimeter.
"Not much elbow room."
"What? It's cozy." said Shepard defensively. "The Pydna can pull more gravities than it's core can compensate for under war emergency power."
She hit a switch and the seats rose up, flattening and shaping into special grooves in the ceiling.
"This chamber is one big ball bearing that can spin in whichever direction to keep you on your back to prevent you from blacking out. There are smaller versions in engineering and the troop bay as well."
"Besides, the view is really something."
The walls swam before Anderson's eyes and seemed to turn transparent, showing the hangar surrounding the ship as if they weren't in fact surrounded by metal and ceramics on every side.
Anderson shook his head after they took a seat in the galley.
"This ship is going to change things, doctrine, standard operating procedures, hell, even the strategic goals will have to be re-evaluated. This is above my pay grade Shepard."
"I figured as much, I can give you the specs to pass along to your people, help them figure out what they can and can't do with my ship."
"That would be appreciated."
Anderson sighed. Well, if nothing else it would be good for his career.
"So how many do you think the admiralty will want to order?" Shepard asked with an impish smile.
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Most people are fairly rational, my point was that the ones holding Revy's age against her in light of her achievements won't be convinced by a specific venue.
The reason for the interview isn't for converting the irrational it's to shape public perception of a reclusive and controversial figure that has had a huge impact on the galactic stage.
Our parents aren't part of the interview, their seeing Revy in an intimate setting, possibly with a minor tour of the building she designed as a family home. It is an achievement in her own right and showing we're as proud of it as some of our other achievements isn't negative. Then there's that the home is for all intents and purposes Revy's and her parents are staying with her, which is an important distinction and is how most will see it in light of who designed and paid for it.
Possibly that's the one of the reasons I have laymans then technical, as it also covers those in Nova Mark's audience who would be out side of their own specialisation.
Your right about it being likely covered before but that's another reason to go for the more intimate interview as apart from the details of the Reactor it's a largely biographical piece though I fully expect to be answering questions on tangential topics too.
And that's a serious compliment from a major Interviewer at Revy's age.
There's also that biopics are likely fairly common on Nova Mark as people are interested in the people behind the science. That I can attest to from trade publications about the computer gaming industry, the toy industry and those from Scouting. There is nearly as much about people involved as there is about facts, figures and review.
Going off like that though gives the appearance of indecisiveness as the question is which is our favourite, implying singular. Two is acceptable as many people have a hard time choosing, three is pushing it. More though is either rambling or sounds like a gushing schoolgirl. The exact opposite of what we want
No we can't but we don't have to imply the arc reactor is purely a military requirements based invention. They are separate questions.
Well, that's all well and good except regular dreadnoughts use plasma torches, antimatter drives and eezo cores for propulsion; if you're spending that much on your dreadnought decoy that's only going to last 1 or 2 shots you may as well just build a cruiser instead. The revolution here is how repulsors are so dirt cheap compared to the traditional ME approaches to propulsion that you can build a decoy unit cheap enough to matter.
There is one "p" in Shepard. Sorry, just a little pet peeve of mine.
@Hoyr, I was thinking about all the duct-tape that needs to be deployed for space combat, and had a few ideas that might help:
Manned fighters: Fighters are, as you mentioned earlier, just modest-sized missile buses (frigates in such a combat would serve as large missile buses). The "pilot" isn't really a pilot at all: VIs handle both driving and shooting. The "pilot" is really more like an embedded flight engineer; his main job is to keep the fighter running, fixing stuff in-flight, maybe changing the mission parameters fed to the VI depending on the situation. He is also in charge of the two big red buttons in the cockpit, one labeled "Manual Cutout" and the other "Self destruct", to be used if the enemy deploys an exploit and suborns the pilot/gunner VI and turns the fighter against your own ships.
No Kinetic Point Defenses in Space: There's probably a few reasons for this, some political some practical. On the political side, you have to remember that lasers can (and would be, for efficiency reasons) designed to use the minimum amount of energy to mission-kill a fighter. The instant the enemy vehicle is disabled the laser is cut off, and redirected to a new target. For this reason the non-combatant engineers inside the fighters would have a decent survival rate against a laser-star: it's simply inefficient to kill them all.
Kinetic Kill Devices, on the other hand, are almost impossible to precisely regulate in this manner: you either fire too few and they're all dodged/intercepted/deflected, or you fire too many and overkill the target. As such, there is likely a treaty or rule of war of some sort that encourages laser point defenses only against non-combatants (read: flight engineers), enforced by Citadel Specter and Turian nuke-gun.
There's also a practical aspect: once you start deploying counter-missiles, then your opponent starts deploying counter-counter missiles, you start deploying counter-counter-counter-missiles, etc, until the battlespace develops Kessler Syndrome due to all the hypersonic sand flying about, and nobody gets to go home anymore because you can't find a path that your FTL plotter will let you take.
Hm. Yeah, I think we're at the "Agree to disagree" stage here. I guess I just have less faith in the average person/alien's ability to set aside their unconscious biases and be purely rational than you do (and no faith at all in the ability of the Citadel's political power brokers' abilities in this regard), so I just assume that Revy will be fighting the same battle to be accepted as a serious scientist/businesswoman for at least the next half decade.
The sad fact is that canon sort of backs me up here: even in 2183 the members of the Council treat humanity as a species of ravening murder-monkeys, despite ample evidence that we are not in fact like the vorcha or krogans, due to an incident that happened 26 years prior.
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Someone on SB has "Tuchanka is the only planet which a nuclear winter made safer."
People forget that the Krogan are a prey species, not a predator one like Humans, Turians, Salarians (How?!), Asari, Elcor, etc.
I think you overestimate that strategy.
Given that ME has tactical FTL, as soon as you try to implement a long range missile strategy?
Your enemies will jump out of the way until your missiles build an unrecoverable vector, and then close the range for knifework.
The only fights you'd be able to force would be if your opposition had targets they absolutely had to defend.
And those kinds of targets have very good fixed defenses.
Or should.
Ummm no not really. They usually only use FTL at 200,000 KM out (around 1 second) to actually escape, at that point they have already decided to bail, if they think 'sure we take these guys on/we need to take these guys on' then they would approach into a closer range.
At 0.1c (which is 10% of lightspeed) you can cross 1 lightsecond in 10 seconds.
Don't forget, these guys can only travel at FTL in a straight line and can only stop by either rotating their ship around or by firing reverse thrusters.
No-one wants to risk the chance of getting hit by a missile while travelling at 10c or higher, kinetic barriers or no Kinetic Barriers.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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Every single instance looks to be wrong.
In canon.
You can safely assume canon is out of the window if you are throwing cee-fractional missiles out of missile tubes.
With the arc-reactor changing the available power budget of a warship, meaning it's possible to charge FTL during combat, why would it wait around?
Point of order:
Why do you think they have to turn?
Fire thrusters to change your heading by a few degrees, and then dart out of the way before turning.
Changing heading is part of what ships do during combat after all.
When the alternative is to stay in the engagement envelope of a Manticoran Missile Massacre?
You may get hit by a missile when at FTL.
You WILL get killed by a missile swarm.