Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution

[Hoyr]

Do they? If that's the case, why are all ME guns shooting sand at people at hypersonic velocities; wouldn't it be better to fire traditional hand cannons instead? The game specifically says SMGs are better than pistols at overwhelming barriers, so presumably barriers can be overwhelmed by lots of small objects; the logical extension there is that a particle stream would be even better at overwhelming a barrier than an SMG.

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The information comes from the disruptor torpedo blurb.

"In flight, torpedoes use a mass-increasing field, making them too massive for enemy kinetic barriers to repulse. "

And then the shields description:

"Kinetic barriers are repulsive mass effect fields projected from tiny emitters. These shields safely deflect small objects traveling at rapid velocities. This affords protection from bullets and other dangerous projectiles, but still allows the user to sit down without knocking away their chair."

The reason small rounds are used is because the need mass to preform a shield bypass is high. As in the shot needs to have its own mass effect core to do this. On the scale of possible bullets sizes this really isn't a factor so its better to use the smaller higher velocity shot so you have more ammo. Which makes the higher rate of fire weapons that effect shields more better. Rapid impacts do deplete shields faster (not sure the exact reason, but I have a few guess). We know how much better a particle stream is, 1.5x times its effect on generic material. Assuming we use ME damage numbers... which are not really the best. While rapid impacts are better its not by an overwhelming amount, just enough to make it tacticaly useful.

Not quite correct, see radiation pressure. Massless particles can still impact momentum.

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Okay just to make sure were using the same terminology: Rest/invarient mass is the mass of a particle that is the same in all frames of reference. Inertial mass is the mass of an object that resists moving, gravitational mass is the mass that produces gravity. Interial mass and gravitational mass have always been equal in experiments and the equality is a postulate.

Photons have no rest mass. The do exhibit the property of inertial mass (the mass of momentum) which is equal to E/c^2 or h/(λc). Which checks out if you do all the substitution p=h/λ, p=mv. v=c, m=h/(λc) => p=h/(λc)*c=h/λ. Photon also exhibit gravitational mass and the two have always been observed equal.

He's the wiki link for radiation pressure by particle:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure#Radiation_pressure_by_particle_model:_photons

I think its preferred to use slightly different terminology, but all energy has inertial and gravitational masses and thus interacts with at least gravity.

Building a dedicated Space factory for that seems like a waste. Better to either double down on Arc Reactors (either another 5GW or a 150GW) or some other high volume (@Hoyr What do our marketing people say sells the best/would sell the best after the Arc Reactors?) item.

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Uhhh... Well these some of your civilian weapons and armor products... but for thing where number actually exist. Arcane Blur plates and pilums, lots more pilums.

They do have mass but it's pretty tiny and they are moving rather fast. However given that we know MAC rounds can 1.3PSL I really doubt speed is that much of a factor in whether or not KBs can effect it.

Best I can come up with is that we're talking about really low masses. Which would actually further explain why ME projectiles are so small. The smaller the mass the less they can be effected by KBs.

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See the thing is that can't work. Shields need to be able to block the interstellar plasma or its going to make the ship look like an glass before a blow torch. At least I'm pretty sure that's true, hitting particles at 3,300,000,000,000m/s can't be good for the ship and its only 1e-21 kg per cubic meter, but a second's flux is 7.1 Exa joules w/o mass lighting and possibly as low as 594 megajoules with. (using top speed of a 15/day frigate of ~11,000c, speed of light multiplier of 110,000, and a 20m x 20m face). Divided over the face that's 1 .485 MW/m^2. Even using pure Tungsten a 77,000,000 kg ship is going to melt over a day's travel. *Sigh* something else the writers forgot. I suppose a magnetic deflector might get used, but its going to help against any charged beam at least. No sure what that'd do against the plasma. Also they never mention such a system.

Yeah that makes sense. Would applying the -2 part only to Space Factories work? It could be justified as with smaller factories the difference between specialized and single product is small enough that there isn't a significant reduction in time while with larger factories it becomes significant.

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Maybe on the Level II and level III space factories? I think that works and satisfies my inter pattern obsession. I could work with that.

Well duh. It's pretty obvious that they have to only use those high levels of ME in FTL only otherwise fighting would be really different.

I can see a number of reasons for this. First off the more you decrease the ship's mass the more the light coming to it's sensors is distorted. Now going by the codex this can be accounted for but that would increase sensor lag due to the needed processing time and consume computer resources.

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While this is true the real question is how quickly you can safely change the mass. If you can do it quickly you can have the FTL core work on a frequency and get pretty go visual data still, as long as you don't go faster than the minimum apparent C of the field.

Furthermore it takes a lot of energy to power a ME core so the more you push it the more energy your pumping in. Not only does this reduce your drive time, important if you lose and need to escape since it reduces the number of possible directions to escape in, it would also increase heat build up therefore lowering combat endurance.

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You've go hours of time. A commander might have to budget, but always reserving an hour of time for combat? Meh. Heat? Welldepending on how you read the heat management bit the FLT heat is... low, the trade off for the massive tactical advantage is worth is in the vast majority of situations. ONly done side is it makes aiming harder.

Finally the laser beams fired by the ship's GARDIANs will be distorted by the ME field which could reduce their effectiveness (going by the glow ME fields seem to scatter light).

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GARDIAN's suck anyway for ship to ship and the defensive advantage of not being there is far superior. Seriously the response to incoming fighter swarm should be move, not shoot them down. Better yet if you can Kite them and do both.

Hurray for gameplay/story segregation? I mean it would be pretty sucky if phasic rounds ripped right through enemy shields (OP) and players would hate it if an enemy (Collectors) could out and out ignore your shields and deal direct to health (or tech armor if you have it) damage.

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ME 2 and 3 seem to have seriously ignored the whole particle beams go though shields thing. You even get a Prothean particle rifle at one point. Seeing as in the opening scenes where the SR-1 gets pasted, Joker observes the kinetic barriers are down from a particle beam hit. 'Course that might be from ship damage. Actually look at that scene. You see how much shit the Normandy took from a cruiser size particle beam and was actually fairly okay in the face of the fact it should have beam shredded? Mind I have the visuals, but still.

Actually if anything I think that's what they are least effective again. Why else would they make guns the shoot high speed low mass objects? You don't use lighting pokemon against rock pokemon, you use water pokemon (first example I thought of...).

So if anything the fact that all the guns in ME shoot low mass high speed projectiles suggests that KBs have issues dealing with that. As I speculate above my guess is that speed isn't important (that's just to keep the energy up) the mass is. The less mass something has the less effective kinetic barriers are against it.

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The trick to kinetic barrier bypass is high mass according to the disruptor torpedo blurb. The reason guns use low mass is that you can't make a gun that fires shots with enough mass, so instead you go for speed. Because speed is range is accuracy (effectively). and you get more bullets.

Good to know! Luckily the Accipiter is kinda overpowered. It can run all 6 repuslors at 700MW each and have 800MW to spare. Given that at most it would only ever have cause to activate 4 repulsors (Weapon, counterbalance, and dodge in the other two directions) at any given time there should always be at least 2.2GW of spare power for the weapon to draw upon.

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Sounds peachy.

Indeed. That's why I said it's the real question (for the GM! ). Running quickly through the notable numbers:

100mm = 3,184,713 = 3.1MPa
90mm = 3,930,818 = 3.9MPa
80mm = 4,970,179 = 5MPa
70mm = 6,493,506 = 6.5MPa
60mm = 8,833,922 = 8.8MPa
50mm = 12,755,102 = 12.8MPa
40mm = 19,841,270 = 19.8MPa
30mm = 35,360,679 = 35.4MPa
20mm = 79,617,834 = 79.6MPa
10mm = 318,471,338 = 318.4MPa
5mm = 1,275,510,204 = 1.3GPa
1mm = 31,847,133,758 = 31.8GPa

Huh. Turns out I screwed up my prior numbers. Whoops. I've triple checked these so hopefully they are right.

5MPa = max estimated rated pressure of the Seawolf SSN submarine
9.2MPa = Atmosphere of Venus.
15MPa = yield strength of human skin
21MPa = pressure inside an aluminium scuba tank
70MPa = yield strength of copper
250MPa = yield strength of structural steel (A36)
941MPa = yield strength of tungsten
1.5GPa = tensile strength of Inconel 625
2.6GPa = yield strength Steel, 2800 Maraging steel

So really it's up to you to determine just how much damage you want the Repulsor beam to do. Although @TheEyes brings up an interesting idea. Perhaps there is some kind of lensing effect going on so that rather then forming a really narrow beam it instead focuses that beam on a really narrow point.

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Hmm thanks for the math. I was consider a lensing effect but again that's a mess. The beam will still spread, so it gets even more fun, you need to know a lot of thinks to get the math right. Based on some of the IM movie visual effects I'm thinking 5mm spread for every... 10m? Either that or the beam refuses to compress beyond about 5mm (well a bit more than that the beam seem to do good against man sized metal targets at that range.)

3ab. They reached a Nuclear Age without becoming the Dominant race of Tuchanka

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Actually the Krogan became the dominant race on their homeworld once they reached their gunpower age. That was when the main cause of death became gunshot wound as opposed to animal attack IIRC. And is thats not a sign of dominance I don't know what is.

On KB, Faster is better. From what little I understand, the mass effect is gravitational. So the longer something is in the field the more time they have to deflect it. Which means you really should be able to use your KB as an awesome melee weapon, but hey. (rather than punch a guy, "deflect" his face.)

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Faster is better if you have the same mass, but for force based defenses like gravity if you trade mass for speed or vice versa it doesn't matter. The energy is the same and you can stop either in the same distance. Its a linear decelerator problem instead of a linear accelerator and energy added or removed is the same regardless of mass. Energy=force x distance applied. I'm pretty sure barriers aren't gravity though as gravity doesn't repel.

Although @Hoyr hasn't yet specified which ones we need space labs for, the multi-core eezo drive and TIR techs seem sure bets. We can always re-purpose/upgrade the factory later on, or maybe build and sell luxury space yachts to other super-wealthy individuals/corporations; maybe we can give one to Liara if she becomes the shadow broker early this time around.

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I have put note on the relevant techs you can see and the ones that need it on the tech tree that you have access to (the yellow ones) have annoyingly colored purple borders if I updated it right. (Really need a better color and to go though them all...)

@Hoyr - If we apply for a loan this quarter do we get the money to spend in this quarter or next? Same question but with a corporate bond? Also I remember us discussing it but did we ever come to a conclusion as to exactly how many Arc Reactors per quarter, and in total, the Humanity/The Citadel could support?

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I'm not going to claim any expertise in this matter, but you could get "credit" really easy. Few millions over? Put it on PI's credit. I really don't know how fast bonds sell or loan get okayed, but I think it in part depends on how much you asked for and the relative size of the individual institutions for loans. You could probably get a few billion very quickly either way. So IDK if you want a few billion quickly you could get it in a quarter? If you want bigger amounts it takes some time for the money. Just recall that interest is a thing and you have a limit to what you can borrow (I have no clue what that is ). I'd like to here your thoughts on the numbers and all. Main thing is that it tosses the money thing so far out of whack its not even funny. I was looking forward to at least a year of not totally broken, but headed that way.

I think I'm getting lending caps of trillions from a loose estimate of loans vs gdp? Well for the SA alone. Citadel might give you access to more. I'm not sure on a per quarter cap or a vs size of business cap. I'm just spit balling here so take none of this for grated

Previous GMs kind of had a no big loans rule... meh this could be a mess and the end ruling will probably be a game play one. Some thought is needed.

Edit: Number of arc reactors for civilian needs? Probably a few billion units per quarter. Most likely not more than 125 billion per quarter tops. I think ten billion sounds good. For the military... oh man that's a mess I don't feel like calculating right now. Eh maybe 40 billion per quarter all told? (more spit balling here really).

@Hoyr - Any details are to what a deep space lab requires? Is it just a Lab IV but in space? Something else?

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You build a space station and you stick labs in it. Preferably a safe distance from the planet just in case it blows up or something. Generic Space stations basically act as another planet/site and follow the same rules. They are limited based on their size. Though I'm probably going to limit the number of lab housing stations to one per system, it basically an extra planet.

Or as TheEyes said you could make a labship those work to. No spamming those.

Wait a second.... I forgot to price generic space stations in the sub km range... I'll fix that later.

Speaking of GM questions...

I keep hearing TheEyes talk about space factories... how do we get those?

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You buy them?

Ah, I knew I saw that somewhere! Anyway, need to plan for this ASAP, since TIR tech is required for the Cabira, so we can't do @Yog's plan of just staying out of space until the Cabira is built. A 100m-125m frigate should be build-able by a single-product Space Factory I in 1 quarter, meaning that assuming that meets @Hoyr's specifications for a deep space lab we can have a respectable space yacht with high speed maneuverability that can double as a space-lab mid-2174

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A lab ship could meet the qualifications yes.

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.

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You'd still get a bit of light, but yeah pretty darn stealthy.

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.

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And that's why a good sci-fi author never allows unlimited acceleration and Jon's Law is a thing.

*Snip duct tape options*

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Stuff to think about.

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.

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Oh I totally agree. I was assuming you used FTL/near FTL missiles buses and fired the missiles when the buses where doing a .1c pass though the 10km engagement zone. Its one of the few ways I can makes sense of fighters as a useful weapon.



Also two Omakes, what do you guys want @UberJJK, @Crazy Tom?

Crazy Tom's is more a RP point thingy. UberJJK's is an option for Biotic training.

Now did I forget something?

 

[Hazard]

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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That's at 0.9c, which is rather a good deal faster than 0.02c.


@Yog, I'll ask my question again, what happens when you slam a chunk of iron into something at 0.02c?

 

[Ramble]

Oh! I know a way to supplement or funding.

We will introduce the citadel races to the marvelous thing known as Duct Tape! It'll be a big seller man! A good roll of duct tape would probably be even more useful than an arc reactor.

 

[Tabron89]

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.

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Um, to actually stop? You know their FTL drive works by actually speeding up past the light barrier. So more they accelerate in one direction the more they have to perform counter-thrust. ME might have screwy physics, but that was one of the few things they had right.

So yes, that means they have to turn around 180 degrees into the direction they came from in order to slow down.

Turning? At FTL? Where you yourself is more or less blind as a bat and everyone can see you without time lag due to being within 1 lightsecond of their sensors and you are using matter/anti-matter drives? Good luck.

I'm sorry, but even taking account the intensly short time you are in FTL, then 1) you are lit up like a sun due to using anti-matter as a propellant 2) the fact you would need to slow down to actually hit anything with your guns, then all you get after/during your short jump to and from FTL is dozens of missiles to the face, because either your enemies missiles track you down due to not having jumped far enough from them all due to a mis-calculation or your enemy wasn't dumb enough to fire all their missiles in one go.

You also run into the problem of your FTL Plotter going on the fritz while it's trying to calculate the directions of all the missiles heading towards you...

The ship has a higher chance of surviving a MMM just by sublight running and switching the PDS to automatic that to try to perform a high speed missile dodge.

 

[Hoyr]

@Yog, I'll ask my question again, what happens when you slam a chunk of iron into something at 0.02c?

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Well I'm not Yog but I can tell you what I've read.

How big is the chunk of iron and how big is the something? (also what is the something made of?). Assuming that your talking about a dreadnaught round and a ship the round gets turned it to plasma and explodes due to it kinetic energy rapidly being converted to heat from the round breaking rapidly on contact with the armor/shields. We can see that today with space junk. Which is why we equip whipple shields. Some have argued that for large objects only the outer layers get turned to plasma and become a shield for the rest of the stuff allowing it to penetrate further.

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth#Newton.27s_approximation_for_the_impact_depth

There is also this but that is for much slower objects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event

As for firing into atmosphere the round blows up in mid air from heat from what I've read and peppers the ground with fragments. Airblast effects on the ground are minimal. Run it as an asteroid impact calculation. Google for a calculator and you can get a good estimate of what happens I think. Now the codex says it works and each earth's atmosphere takes up 20% of the energy... Meh space magic/special stuff.

The is actual a lot less information about high velocity impacts than one would like for this sort of thing, most because we have such little experience with this kinda stuff. Don't know about any fusion events but I think that's a bit irreverent due to the burst height combined with the limited penetration of radiation though the atmosphere The projectile just isn't large enough or strong enough to survive. Not to mention the base energy of the shot.

Now if you shot something bigger... Well XKCD had an article about that: https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/. Though I have no clue as to the mass of the impactor used. Some one should ask him.


Oh yeah and some one talked about insurance. I don't think your stuff is actually insured. Not sure of the cost, you guys seem kind of high risk.

 

[CyberFemme]

Fixed spelling.

@Hoyr put my omake toward RP's.

 

[TheEyes]

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?

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Far as I know, FTL drives are all reverse-engineered Relay/Reaper tech that simply won't let you go to FTL without a scanning solution that prevents FTL collisions. That kind of thing takes time.

GARDIAN's suck anyway for ship to ship and the defensive advantage of not being there is far superior. Seriously the response to incoming fighter swarm should be move, not shoot them down. Better yet if you can Kite them and do both.

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Except that fighters apparently have even better acceleration and top speed than larger ships do, due to nonlinear eezo core scaling. The tradeoff is that the fighter has less long-term longevity in flight and need to refuel (note that repulsors would make this not a problem.

Based on some of the IM movie visual effects I'm thinking 5mm spread for every... 10m? Either that or the beam refuses to compress beyond about 5mm (well a bit more than that the beam seem to do good against man sized metal targets at that range.)

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If the beam spreads that quickly then the Tiger main canon based on a repulsor is useless and needs to be retconned away. Fortunately for all our sanities I don't think that's the case:



It doesn't look like there's that much beam spread here, and that has to be at far more than 10m.

You could probably get a few billion very quickly either way. So IDK if you want a few billion quickly you could get it in a quarter?

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With ~10 billion in non-current assets? We could probably get that in a few weeks, maybe days depending on the repayment interval.

Yay data! Yeah, it seems that short-term business loans can get done within a week, and given how much bigger the SA economy is I doubt a billion is too hard to get ahold of in an emergency like that, especially since PI can actually secure the loan with collateral, something a majority of borrowers apparently don't do today.

Main thing is that it tosses the money thing so far out of whack its not even funny. I was looking forward to at least a year of not totally broken, but headed that way.

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Meh, like I've been saying for awhile now: once we successfully patented the Arc Reactor in Citadel space the money game was won. Right now we're more limited by build times, tech levels, and the speed at which we can plonk down expansions.

Oh! I know a way to supplement or funding.

We will introduce the citadel races to the marvelous thing known as Duct Tape! It'll be a big seller man! A good roll of duct tape would probably be even more useful than an arc reactor.

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Where do you think Humanity got enough credits to build Bekenstein?

 

[uju32]

Um, to actually stop? You know their FTL drive works by actually speeding up past the light barrier. So more they accelerate in one direction the more they have to perform counter-thrust. ME might have screwy physics, but that was one of the few things they had right.

So yes, that means they have to turn around 180 degrees into the direction they came from in order to slow down.

Turning? At FTL? Where you yourself is more or less blind as a bat and everyone can see you without time lag due to being within 1 lightsecond of their sensors and you are using matter/anti-matter drives? Good luck.

I'm sorry, but even taking account the intensly short time you are in FTL, then 1) you are lit up like a sun due to using anti-matter as a propellant 2) the fact you would need to slow down to actually hit anything with your guns, then all you get after/during your short jump to and from FTL is dozens of missiles to the face, because either your enemies missiles track you down due to not having jumped far enough from them all due to a mis-calculation or your enemy wasn't dumb enough to fire all their missiles in one go.

You also run into the problem of your FTL Plotter going on the fritz while it's trying to calculate the directions of all the missiles heading towards you...

The ship has a higher chance of surviving a MMM just by sublight running and switching the PDS to automatic that to try to perform a high speed missile dodge.

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Again, why do you suppose the ship has to decelerate or turn?
Instead of, say, shifting bearing by single digit degrees and sidestepping the missile salvo faster than it's sensors can report?

Lemme do the math for you:
Put two ships, missile ship A and railgun ship B, at max ME combat range(40 thousand klicks) on the same plane on opposite vectors.
Missile ship A fires missile salvo.
A five degree change of bearing by B means a separation of 1700 kilometres if B should crank FTL to dodge said missile engagement envelope
Done. No need for deceleration.

And since ME sensors are all lightspeed, ship B is outrunning the missile swarms sensors, even if they had the fuel to change vectors..

 

[uju32]

Far as I know, FTL drives are all reverse-engineered Relay/Reaper tech that simply won't let you go to FTL without a scanning solution that prevents FTL collisions. That kind of thing takes time.

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As far as I know, that's impossible; ME did not have FTL scanners.
Would have significantly changed the face of combat if they did.

 

[Tabron89]

Again, why do you suppose the ship has to decelerate or turn?
Instead of, say, shifting bearing by single digit degrees and sidestepping the missile salvo faster than it's sensors can report?

Lemme do the math for you:
Put two ships, missile ship A and railgun ship B, at max ME combat range(40 thousand klicks) on the same plane on opposite vectors.
Missile ship A fires missile salvo.
A five degree change of bearing by B means a separation of 1700 kilometres if B should crank FTL to dodge said missile engagement envelope
Done. No need for deceleration.

And since ME sensors are all lightspeed, ship B is outrunning the missile swarms sensors, even if they had the fuel to change vectors..

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You don't understand - ME Ships have interia with their FTL drives. To get to FTL you need to acclerate to FTL, which means you need to de-accelerate to sublight speeds before you switch off your FTL drive, or your ship will be fried by having all that extra energy turned into lethal radiation.

So congratulations, you have fried yourself and your crew, that is even if you somehow managed to instantly go to FTL without somehow accelerating.

As far as I know, that's impossible; ME did not have FTL scanners.
Would have significantly changed the face of combat if they did.

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The FTL plotters scan ahead of you, taking all sorts data including easily calaculated projections, like the orbits of planets, etc.

But combat? That's hairy, especially when everyone is firing MAC rounds at each other. The GM has already come up with how FTL plotters work.

Ask him if you cannot find it.

 

[Ehorin]

why does everyone keep doing this? Mass Effect is NOT Warp or Hyperdrive, it DOESN'T let you go instantly to lightspeed

 

[CyberFemme]

As far as I know, that's impossible; ME did not have FTL scanners.
Would have significantly changed the face of combat if they did.

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We might be able to create something like the VDA is we can mass manufacture small comm buoys and put them on sensor drones.

 

[Tabron89]

why does everyone keep doing this? Mass Effect is NOT Warp or Hyperdrive, it DOESN'T let you go instantly to lightspeed

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Thank goodness I'm not the only one who realises that out of all the FTL drives I've read about, the ME FTL drive is the worse one for short distance 'hops', thus extremely dangerous to use as a 'tactical' FTL drive.

 

[TheBleachDoctor]

Not "extremely dangerous", try "impossible" and "suicidal".

 

[Tabron89]

Not "extremely dangerous", try "impossible" and "suicidal".

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It...isn't impossible, if you can easily judge the actions of your enemy, such as 'bringing their main gun about to your flank' or 'doesn't have a lot of broadside cannons', but suicidal?

Very much so. Which makes the fact that there was a Turian who thought of it and got awarded for it all the more spectacular...

That is until the Reapers basically did the same thing to get out of his trap...

 

[Hoyr]

Far as I know, FTL drives are all reverse-engineered Relay/Reaper tech that simply won't let you go to FTL without a scanning solution that prevents FTL collisions. That kind of thing takes time.

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Okay I'll clerify this again. The technology in FTL plotters is not Prothean or Reaper tech. The various factions got the idea of FTL safeties and plotters from the Prothean FTL drives they found and then used them because Jon's Law is a bitch. For the most part FTL plotters are a fiat reason to ignore the issues of Jon's Law, all we can really do is try to see what secondary consequences that fiat has.

If the beam spreads that quickly then the Tiger main canon based on a repulsor is useless and needs to be retconned away. Fortunately for all our sanities I don't think that's the case:

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Oh wow that range was much farther then I remembered from that scene... That's like a few mm at 50-100m. Much better. Still give me know idea as to the bloom or if that just maximum compression.

The GM has already come up with how FTL plotters work.

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It mostly me reading the CDN and the codex bit and guessing

The sensor scan ahead using STL passive sensors and simulations and act paranoid. I am currently trying to make a ray tracer that will tell me if you can use sensors at FTL, via fancy stuff.

 

[TheBleachDoctor]

Hey, that gives me an idea.
FTL-Jammer Torpedoes.

They look like they're going to miss so that the enemy ship's PD doesn't bother with them, then they scatter particles all over the battlefield.

If the enemy ship wants to jump out, they need to escape the chaff cloud so their FTL plotter can give the A-OK.

During that time, you pound the ship to dust.

 

[Van Ropen]

While that sounds perfectly plausible, isn't the issue at that point "space is really fucking big"?

 

[TheBleachDoctor]

While that sounds perfectly plausible, isn't the issue at that point "space is really fucking big"?

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True, but the idea is to saturate the local area with the particles. Even if they get really spread out...

Wait a second, just remembered that KBs are supposed to deal with that. If the shields can take it, does the FTL plotter still care?

 

[UberJJK]

The information comes from the disruptor torpedo blurb.

"In flight, torpedoes use a mass-increasing field, making them too massive for enemy kinetic barriers to repulse. "

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Hmm. Maybe that's a engineering limitation rather then an inherent one? Normal ship kinetic barriers can't output enough energy to overcome the torpedoes' momentum. It would fit in with Arc Reactors significantly increasing kinetic barrier strength.

And then the shields description:

"Kinetic barriers are repulsive mass effect fields projected from tiny emitters. These shields safely deflect small objects traveling at rapid velocities. This affords protection from bullets and other dangerous projectiles, but still allows the user to sit down without knocking away their chair."

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That sounds more like the way the kinetic barriers are programmed.

If (velocity > X) {
 
    kineticBarriers.Online = True;
 
}else{
 
    kineticBarriers.Online = False;
 
}

The reason small rounds are used is because the need mass to preform a shield bypass is high. As in the shot needs to have its own mass effect core to do this. On the scale of possible bullets sizes this really isn't a factor so its better to use the smaller higher velocity shot so you have more ammo. Which makes the higher rate of fire weapons that effect shields more better. Rapid impacts do deplete shields faster (not sure the exact reason, but I have a few guess). We know how much better a particle stream is, 1.5x times its effect on generic material. Assuming we use ME damage numbers... which are not really the best. While rapid impacts are better its not by an overwhelming amount, just enough to make it tacticaly useful.

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But the thing is that if you scale kinetic barriers down to human size they are going to need a lot less mass to overcome them then spaceship sized ones. Torpedoes are designed to takeout Dreadnaughts, things which can shrug off 38kt impacts.

A grain of sand masses 0.67 milligrams on the low end. A 12.7mm BMG round has a rough volume of 30cm^2. Iridium has a density of 22.56g/cm^2 which for a solid slug gives it a mass of 676.8g.

That is over a million times more massive then a sand grain sized projectile. Also because of the contrast between momentum and kinetic energy if both rounds have the same kinetic energy the 12.7mm one will have 1,000 times the momentum.


Grr. I really hate mass effect lore sometimes! How about this; Kinetic Barriers require more energy to stop something with more momentum. However the faster an object is traveling the more power they need.

For example; let's talk about two objects with identical momentum. They both require 100 joules of energy to stop. However object A is traveling twice as fast as object B. So while they both require the same amount of energy object A requires that energy be delivered in half the time, which doubles the power output required.

In practice this would mean there were two ways around Kinetic Barriers. The first is to hit them with something so massive that it requires more energy then they have in their capacitors. The second is to hit them with something traveling fast enough that the Kinetic Barriers are incapable of outputting enough energy to stop it in the short time the projectile is within their field.

Uhhh... Well these some of your civilian weapons and armor products... but for thing where number actually exist. Arcane Blur plates and pilums, lots more pilums.

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I'm not surprised there is a large demand for Pilums. After all unlike most of our products it's a consumable. That Pilum reloads just so happen to have the best profit to production ratio of any of our products is nothing more then a happy coincidence.

See the thing is that can't work. Shields need to be able to block the interstellar plasma or its going to make the ship look like an glass before a blow torch. At least I'm pretty sure that's true, hitting particles at 3,300,000,000,000m/s can't be good for the ship and its only 1e-21 kg per cubic meter, but a second's flux is 7.1 Exa joules w/o mass lighting and possibly as low as 594 megajoules with. (using top speed of a 15/day frigate of ~11,000c, speed of light multiplier of 110,000, and a 20m x 20m face). Divided over the face that's 1 .485 MW/m^2. Even using pure Tungsten a 77,000,000 kg ship is going to melt over a day's travel. *Sigh* something else the writers forgot. I suppose a magnetic deflector might get used, but its going to help against any charged beam at least. No sure what that'd do against the plasma. Also they never mention such a system.

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That really depends on the interactions between the FTL field and things crossing it's boundaries.

On one hand we know:

If within a field that allows travel at twice the speed of light, any radiation it emits has twice the energy as normal.

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so conversely energy entering the field should be divided by the C modifier. However I spot an issue with your estimation. It assumes that the ship is going 10PSL within the field which seems pretty unlikely.

Going off my old (and somewhat outdated/incorrect) calculations over here the FTL factor would be more along the lines of 21 million times the speed of light.

So with 7.1EJ of energy dividing that by 21 million gives 338GJ.

However that is another factor to consider. The shock wave. Interstellar plasma outside of the field is traveling at 11,000c but inside the field it drops back down to to the relative velocity it would have with the ship outside the FTL field.

So there would be a massive matter buildup on the edge of the FTL bubble as the fast moving particles outside the bubble impact the slow moving ones just on the inside.

This might actually help with shielding the ship since the cloud created would likely move slower allowing for it to be more easier deflected.

Maybe on the Level II and level III space factories? I think that works and satisfies my inter pattern obsession. I could work with that.

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/Mrburns "Excellent!"

ME 2 and 3 seem to have seriously ignored the whole particle beams go though shields thing. You even get a Prothean particle rifle at one point. Seeing as in the opening scenes where the SR-1 gets pasted, Joker observes the kinetic barriers are down from a particle beam hit. 'Course that might be from ship damage. Actually look at that scene. You see how much shit the Normandy took from a cruiser size particle beam and was actually fairly okay in the face of the fact it should have beam shredded? Mind I have the visuals, but still.

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It's a bit hard to tell, and we all know ME visuals are never the most accurate of things, but from the looks of it the collector beam attacks just speared right through the ship and kept going. Whether that was because of the sheer destructive power or it's nature as a particle beam we don't know but it basically cored the ship with each hit.

As for the particle beam guns I already commented on those. People would throw a fit if they could just ignore your shields and do direct to health damage. Especially when you fight a lot of Collectors over the course of the game.

It's just like how Jack doesn't murderize her way through everything when you bring her as a squad member. It wouldn't be fun gameplay.

Hmm thanks for the math. I was consider a lensing effect but again that's a mess. The beam will still spread, so it gets even more fun, you need to know a lot of thinks to get the math right. Based on some of the IM movie visual effects I'm thinking 5mm spread for every... 10m? Either that or the beam refuses to compress beyond about 5mm (well a bit more than that the beam seem to do good against man sized metal targets at that range.)

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5mm spread over 10m is insane. To put that in perspective over the 500m maximum range for atmospheric use that would spread the beam an additional 250mm over it's starting spread.

A 250mm diameter gives 500KPa of pressure. It's like been hit with a cork from a champagne bottle.

How about this. Here you mention a range of

I don't recall ever giving any official range commentary for the repulsor in space. Maybe that was the previous GM. Or my memory is going, if you see it can you tell it to come back? I miss it.

That said I don't think it would have exactly amazing ranges in space particle/plasma beams do defocus and the main issue your repulsors have right now is maintaining long distance focus. Mind ranges of a 10-100km might be reasonable? Around GARDIAN laser ranges.

Let me get back to you on that latter when I've had time to take nap, do some math and think about the numbers math gives me. Assuming it even comes up again before you guys research repulsor cannons.

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10km to 100km in space. Now Atomic Rockets mentions that a neutron beam could theoretically have a range of 10,000km so I'll go with the 100km estimate. With the decreased range because of the Repulsor lacking the optimization it really requires to be a weapon.

Let's say that at 10km the standard 100mm Repulsor has a pressure of 1MPa, human bite pressure, and that at it's optimal distance of 10m it's capable of 1TPa (179 micrometer diameter). So over a 1,000x increase in distance the pressure decreases by 1,000,000. Which fit's perfectly with the inverse square law!

So assuming the hull is made of steel, the strongest steel I could find had a breaking point of 5.2GPa, then a 100mm Repulsor would have to be:

5,200,000,000 = 1,000,000,000,000 / D^2
D^2 = 1,000,000,000,000 / 5,200,000,000
D^2 = 192.31
D = sqrt(192.31)
D = 13.87

Since D is in multiples of 10 it would have to be 138.7m away.

So for the Accipiter to be effective it has to get up close to the enemy ship. But that was how it was designed anyway so no problem there!

I'm not going to claim any expertise in this matter, but you could get "credit" really easy. Few millions over? Put it on PI's credit. I really don't know how fast bonds sell or loan get okayed, but I think it in part depends on how much you asked for and the relative size of the individual institutions for loans. You could probably get a few billion very quickly either way. So IDK if you want a few billion quickly you could get it in a quarter? If you want bigger amounts it takes some time for the money. Just recall that interest is a thing and you have a limit to what you can borrow (I have no clue what that is ). I'd like to here your thoughts on the numbers and all. Main thing is that it tosses the money thing so far out of whack its not even funny. I was looking forward to at least a year of not totally broken, but headed that way.

I think I'm getting lending caps of trillions from a loose estimate of loans vs gdp? Well for the SA alone. Citadel might give you access to more. I'm not sure on a per quarter cap or a vs size of business cap. I'm just spit balling here so take none of this for grated

Previous GMs kind of had a no big loans rule... meh this could be a mess and the end ruling will probably be a game play one. Some thought is needed.

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There will be a bunch of math and businessy stuff here. You have been warned!

So first off no bank, or at least not reputable bank, is going to lend you more then you can theoretically repay. The first part of this is the interest rate. Now I don't believe we've ever came up with an interest rate in game or in mass effect. So here I'm just going to roll a 1d1000 and divide it by 100 to get the interest rate.



So the interest rate I'm going to be using is 2.18%.

So far this year (counting Q3) we've had a net profit of 27,746,412,000cr and expect to make profit of 23,900,036,000cr next quarter bringing our years profit to 51,646,448,000. Now our profit is projected to grow to 233,572,144,000cr next year with 39,320,000,000cr (16.8%) of that already locked in via contracts. However banks can be both risk takers and conservative at the same time. So lets say they decide to base our loan off a yearly income of 50 billion per year.

While there would be a lot more detail here and complex calculations that's a bit beyond the scope of this quest. So simply put the maximum we can theoretically borrow is our yearly profit divided by the interest rate. So:

50,000,000,000/0.0218 = 2,293,577,981,651cr

However that is basically the credit card trap (string people along on minimum repayment). In actuality the amount we could borrow would depend on the duration of the loan. So for a 1 year loan they would only lend us 48.9 billion credits and a two year loan 97.9 billion credits.

Of course this is all for an unsecured loan. With a secured loan they would be more willing to risk us defaulting however they still wouldn't want to go too much over what they know we could repay since banks don't want to claim your collateral since it's a hassle for them.

Now as @TheEyes found and my searching agreed with you can generally get a corporate loan in a week or so, especially if it's deemed a low risk loan like the type Paragon Industries would be getting.

Edit: Number of arc reactors for civilian needs? Probably a few billion units per quarter. Most likely not more than 125 billion per quarter tops. I think ten billion sounds good. For the military... oh man that's a mess I don't feel like calculating right now. Eh maybe 40 billion per quarter all told? (more spit balling here really).

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Excellent. *Insert Evil Laugh Here!*

You build a space station and you stick labs in it. Preferably a safe distance from the planet just in case it blows up or something. Generic Space stations basically act as another planet/site and follow the same rules. They are limited based on their size. Though I'm probably going to limit the number of lab housing stations to one per system, it basically an extra planet.

Or as TheEyes said you could make a labship those work to. No spamming those.

Wait a second.... I forgot to price generic space stations in the sub km range... I'll fix that later.

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Yeah I was mostly after the price. Although would a Deep Space Lab require an administrator like another planet or would it operate off the planet's administator? Basically I'm asking if we put a Deep Space Lab in the Mindoir system would it operate at 100% (Because it's supervised by Revy) or would it need an Administrator and hence operate at >= 15%?

You'd still get a bit of light, but yeah pretty darn stealthy.

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That would be pretty scary when you think about it. From the codex ship sensors consist of:

Passive sensors include visual, thermographic, and radio detectors that watch and listen for objects in space.

Active sensors are radars and high resolution ladars (LAser Detection And Ranging) that emit a "ping" of energy and "listen" for return signals. Ladars have a narrower field of view than radar, but ladar resolution allows images of detected objects to be assembled.

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For the passives; visual sensors are obviously not very good since the Normandy works as a stealth ship ("Windows are a structural weak point."), thermals have already been covered, and the torpedoes wouldn't release any radio chatter.

Of the active sensors RADAR would be defeated by putting on a coating of RADAR absorbing paint, our stuff today is pretty good so I imagine future anti-RADAR stuff would be even better, and LADAR would only really be used once a target has actually been detected.

So those torpedoes could likely get very close, if not outright hit it, thanks to their low detectability. Same thing with the Accipiter.

And that's why a good sci-fi author never allows unlimited acceleration and Jon's Law is a thing.

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Too bad Iron Man is a comic and hence closer to fantasy then sci-fi. Also I think Burnside's Advice would be more applicable here:

Friends Don't Let Friends Use Reactionless Drives In Their Universes

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Also two Omakes, what do you guys want @UberJJK, @Crazy Tom?

Crazy Tom's is more a RP point thingy. UberJJK's is an option for Biotic training.

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Well I wrote mine with the intent of improving our biotic training, as you mentioned, so I'll go with that.

As for firing into atmosphere the round blows up in mid air from heat from what I've read and peppers the ground with fragments. Airblast effects on the ground are minimal. Run it as an asteroid impact calculation. Google for a calculator and you can get a good estimate of what happens I think. Now the codex says it works and each earth's atmosphere takes up 20% of the energy... Meh space magic/special stuff.

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Eh. I'm not sure about that. The thermal diffusivity of iron is:

Thermal diffusivity = thermal conductivity / (density * specific heat capacity)

∝ = 80.4/(7874 * 449.458) = 80.4/3539034.83 = 0.000023m^2/s = 22mm^2/s.

Now considering that at 4025km/s the projectile goes from space to the surface of the earth in 24.8 milliseconds and there just isn't any time for the heat to spread.

And as I said over here that 20% is surprisingly accurate since the projectile would lose 24% of it's momentum pushing through the atmosphere.

Meh, like I've been saying for awhile now: once we successfully patented the Arc Reactor in Citadel space the money game was won. Right now we're more limited by build times, tech levels, and the speed at which we can plonk down expansions.

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Basically this.

 

[Yog]

@Yog, I'll ask my question again, what happens when you slam a chunk of iron into something at 0.02c?

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Lots of destruction? Though, seriously, @Hoyr provided a good explanation for what's likely to happen (in my opinion). The projectile will be destroyed. At the very least liquified, not sure about plasma, though. The energy will be released in the form of heat. I don't think one will observe (lots) of fusion happening, but some plasma generation is certainly possible.

 

[UberJJK]

@TheEyes what do you think about adding this to the votes (I'm going to revise and repost mine later today so people can switch to the updated version if they want):

[] Arrange for a 12 month Corporate Loan of 24 billion credits to build a Single Product (5GW Arc Reactor) Medium Shipyard above Mindoir. (1 billion)
[] Build a Single Product (Pilum Reloads) Small Shipyard above Mindoir (2.5 billion)

That would leave us with 1.9 billion credits, above my reserve, and bring in some serious cash.

Assuming Hoyr gives us the -2 quarters on Single Product Medium shipyards then both of these will come online in 2174-Q2 and bring with them ludicrous income.

Medium Shipyard = 3,000,000 production / 0.3 = 10 million Arc Reactors per quarter @ 200,000 profit = 2 trillion profit per quarter

Small Shipyard = 300,000 production / 0.15 = 2 million Pilum reloads per quarter @ 112,500 profit = 225 billion profit per quarter

Since this is a short term loan the interest rate will probably be higher then the benchmark so let's say it's at 3.5%. 3.5% of 24 billion is 840 million. So that's our interest per year; divide by per and we come to a quarterly interest of 210 million which we can easily cover.

By the time the 12 months are up we'd easily be able to pay with our current income, expected CaB of ~219 million, let alone the fact we'd have made ~2.2 trillion credits in 2174-Q2 thanks to these two factories.


Edit:

@Hoyr - I meant to ask you this earlier, how many shipyards can we have in a given system? I think you answered this before but I can find it.

 

[Van Ropen]

@UberJJK - Five per planet.

I think I'm going to go with ~five installations per earth sized planet. Five sounds good. Mind you could build your own giant installations using some of the techs on the tree and shove crap tones of factories in those.

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[TheEyes]

While there would be a lot more detail here and complex calculations that's a bit beyond the scope of this quest. So simply put the maximum we can theoretically borrow is our yearly profit divided by the interest rate. So:

50,000,000,000/0.0218 = 2,293,577,981,651cr

However that is basically the credit card trap (string people along on minimum repayment). In actuality the amount we could borrow would depend on the duration of the loan. So for a 1 year loan they would only lend us 48.9 billion credits and a two year loan 97.9 billion credits.

Of course this is all for an unsecured loan. With a secured loan they would be more willing to risk us defaulting however they still wouldn't want to go too much over what they know we could repay since banks don't want to claim your collateral since it's a hassle for them.

Now as @TheEyes found and my searching agreed with you can generally get a corporate loan in a week or so, especially if it's deemed a low risk loan like the type Paragon Industries would be getting.

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Right, and given we're going to be using these funds to build space factories which take a year to build we wouldn't want to get a 1-2 year loan anyway, but a more medium-term loan, 48-60 months (4-5 years). It would be nice to get 2 trillion to build 4 specialized Factory VIs (two for Arc Reactors two for starships, split 50/50 between Elysium and Mindoir), but it looks like the only way we'd get that would be by going to the corporate bond market, which will naturally cost us higher interest (my first glance research indicates around 2-2.5 percent more for investment-grade corporate bonds, so maybe something like (5d50+100)/100 % more than a secured loan?

 

[AzaggThoth]

Maybe we could cobble together a retrofit package to upgrade the Alliance's current ships to have repulsors and arc reactors. The old fuel storage bunkers could be torn out to make room for additional heat sinks and ammo! Sure, it wouldn't be a "super frigate" but uprated old is better than nothing and the Alliance won't be able to buy to many new super ships right away.