Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution
- Thread starter Hoyr
- Start date
A little. Toasters have a fairly large cost range (roughly 20 to 80 euros, depending), so that implies that the relative purchasing power of a single credit is about equal to a euro up to 4 times as great. Novels are less certain, due to the likely shift towards digital sale and storage of novels. This removes most of the material concerns when it comes to cost, and a potential audience of trillions makes it possible to turn out even very good books for a relative pittance.
Unless the novel is a hard copy, in which case it's probably a luxury product and wouldn't cost 5 creds, but 50 or more depending on how fancy it is.
I'd guess that for ease of use Bioware assumes that a credit is about equal in purchasing power to a Canadian dollar, so a rough estimate would be that for most of the western world the numbers are close enough to the same as with the currency you normally use, so 'a few billion credits' sounds about right to me for a space craft.
And yet, you have to account for the massive shift in cost that's going to be a result of both the ability to source materials in space and the much greater and efficient planet-to-space lift capabilities made possible by the mass effect.
Really, the big problem is that while ME is a fairly well done setting, what we really need to figure out what's the 'reasonable' cost of any ship is examples of how much money ships cost in universe. And we're lacking in such examples, I think.
Geez, 46 billion for a single, average quality frigate. That's expensive enough I'm wondering where the SA is drawing its funding from when the Earth nations have their own militaries to maintain. You'd need a major wealth per capita growth if you want to field enough troops and ships this way to support interstellar warfare, there's simply no way you'd be able to pay for major campaigns otherwise.
Because Asari, Turians and Salarians at least are supposed to have populations in trillions and economies to match.
Yet Earth holds by far the most major chunk of the population, has a population itself of only about 12 billion people and with even mature colonies not even close to reaching 100 million, yet the SA fields 7 or 8 dreadnought class vessels. With the implication that it could field more without ruinous effort because of the way the Treaty of Firaxen annoys humanity, and I repeat, without it being too much of a bother when Earth's nation states maintain their own militaries.
Yes, because canon HFY!wank was, well, bad.
It's far more plausible if a dreadnought costs a lot of money (perhaps even a trillion) to construct, and the Council are not actually trying to keep as many dreadnought grade ships in service as possible, instead going for a 'dreadnought fleet in being' doctrine crossed with a cruise and frigate based anti piracy doctrine.
In case of a major war the Citadel expects that with its active dreadnought fleet they can either win or stall the enemy long enough to build up to a war footing (note that the 5 for the turians, 1 for the associate races rule implies that the turians have 3 dozen to 3 and a half dozen dreadnought class vessels if the EA has 7 or 8 and is not allowed to expand).
Their actual major naval contributors are the frigates and cruiser class vessels they've got running around in considerable numbers.
Except inflation does not increase the actual wealth per capita even as it increases the amount of currency per capita. For increases in wealth per capita you have to be able to acquire more resources per capita, which means in depth investments in production efficiency.
Historically the naval battleship was a refinement of the dreadnought. Also, they were larger, more heavily armed and generally more capable.
A cruiser light in armour but with big guns for its tonnage. Note that a 'cruiser' at first denoted a vessel that's long ranged for its displacement, rather than strictly speaking being a tonnage class. It's actually possible to create a frigate or dreadnought class cruiser with that definition; just trade armour and guns for fuel and food, basically.
Target practice for the enemy, sadly. Space based ballistics are effectively infinite range so long as your targeting systems are good enough. And something that moves in a predictable way is easy to target.
- Location
- Budapest, Hungary
Dreadnought: any FTL capable ship with 1km+ MAC.
Anything with shorter main gun is unbound by the treaty.
In this setting /Battleship/*In any lageuge* is translated as Dreadnought in English by universal translators.
The RL Battlcruser concept is a waste of Dreadnoght limit.
The SF definotion of Battlecruiser is basically a bigger Heavy Cruiser with addtional command capababilites. It is used in small to medium task forces in the most cases.
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- Dreary ol' London Town
I still say we should build a fleet of frigates that can combine into a dreadnought. Technically, not a dreadnought. Just, you know. Fleet of frigates.
Though it might be better to have developed AI before then. So that the frigates that have to transform into a main gun don't have to be crewed by squishies.
Though it might be better to have developed AI before then. So that the frigates that have to transform into a main gun don't have to be crewed by squishies.
Oh economics!
Around a USD, Canadian dollar or euro. Give or take.
A ~135m frigate's drive core contains 60 billion credits worth of element zero (Normand SR-1's core contains 120 billion credit of element zero and is twice as large as normal). Not counting the equipment processing or other stuff. A fighter entire drive core cost 10 million (which may include power plant). (IIRC)
Ship prices were done by scaling the prices of some "known values". Fighter prices and the Normandy SR-1 values, comparing to some real life craft in the same size range etc. Technically all those warship prices are one tenth the values I initially calculated.
Earth nations don't maintain large space forces. They may "donate" specific ships to the SA fleet, but technically there aren't independent NRF Cruisers running around or something. They do have their own armies navies and air forces, though they're getting down scaled more and more as the SA takes over the role of humanities primary defender. Pretty classic case of federalization.
As for the economy. We've played around with a lot of different numbers. One idea was to project current growth percentages for GDP into the future. Or using a 20th-21th century per capita (common low point for earth development) and multiplying it by 12 billion. Then taking 5% of that for the military. It's debatable, but those numbers fall into a reasonable enough range.
Looks at in game factories and employment rates. Sound right. Also I've been generally assuming inflation is leveled. Actually the SA has gotten to the point IIRC where wealth per capita is a meaningless average, they've had over a century of the rich getting richer. Though GDP is worth while.
Errr.. Dreadnought guns start at the 700m-800m range. Everests have a 800m gun, are ~880m long and are considered dreadnoughts.
Besides, One of the news segments for this update was going to be revisions to the Treaty of Farixen. Dreadnoughts are going to be rated by power output and per shot energy. Makes more sense anyways.
Around a USD, Canadian dollar or euro. Give or take.
A ~135m frigate's drive core contains 60 billion credits worth of element zero (Normand SR-1's core contains 120 billion credit of element zero and is twice as large as normal). Not counting the equipment processing or other stuff. A fighter entire drive core cost 10 million (which may include power plant). (IIRC)
Ship prices were done by scaling the prices of some "known values". Fighter prices and the Normandy SR-1 values, comparing to some real life craft in the same size range etc. Technically all those warship prices are one tenth the values I initially calculated.
Earth nations don't maintain large space forces. They may "donate" specific ships to the SA fleet, but technically there aren't independent NRF Cruisers running around or something. They do have their own armies navies and air forces, though they're getting down scaled more and more as the SA takes over the role of humanities primary defender. Pretty classic case of federalization.
As for the economy. We've played around with a lot of different numbers. One idea was to project current growth percentages for GDP into the future. Or using a 20th-21th century per capita (common low point for earth development) and multiplying it by 12 billion. Then taking 5% of that for the military. It's debatable, but those numbers fall into a reasonable enough range.
Looks at in game factories and employment rates. Sound right. Also I've been generally assuming inflation is leveled. Actually the SA has gotten to the point IIRC where wealth per capita is a meaningless average, they've had over a century of the rich getting richer. Though GDP is worth while.
Errr.. Dreadnought guns start at the 700m-800m range. Everests have a 800m gun, are ~880m long and are considered dreadnoughts.
Besides, One of the news segments for this update was going to be revisions to the Treaty of Farixen. Dreadnoughts are going to be rated by power output and per shot energy. Makes more sense anyways.
Amberion
Mighty #9
The issues are size and heat dissipation, as well as energy transmission. If we can solve them, sure. Though, wouldn't it make more sense to make the one gun fire faster?
If I'm understanding the images/videos correctly the SA's cruisers already have two spinal guns.
It's the military. Why have one when you can have two at twice the price?
Its implied that what ME!Humanity considers as a 'third world country/nation' is a 'nation that has the same income as a first world country in the 21st Century'.
So basically, if you are living in a first world country nowadays, then that is the standard of living for the pooreest countries.
Considering that America could pull off space travel without eezo decades ago...
What should frighten you is that SA's economy is reputed to be close to the elcors...
Which means that there is an entire race, capable of mounting tank weaponry on their backs that is capable of matching SA if they decided to actually host their own fleets.
Yes, that includes dreadnoughts.
Also, Earth has both an asteriod belt and an Oort cloud which are said to be able sustain expotential growth for two centuries.
So if SA did not expand to other systems, its likely that their industial growth, thus their fleet production, would have been declining by the time canon rolls around.
The Elcor too possess an Oort cloud, which makes it impossible to trade embargo them.
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- Location
- Somewhere
Uhh.. wouldn't that make nearly any ship of Military Class with an Arc Reactor a Dreadnought?
No, because if the calcs I read somewhere else is correct, a cruiser main gun is around 9~10 Kilotons, where as the Everest main gun is around 39~40 kilotons.
Its due to the length of the gun, which changes things like the amount of acceleration and the amount of time being accelerated.
They would freak out though if we figured out a turreted version of the Thanix cannon, made dreadnaught scale guns and fitted multiple of them in one hull due to the size difference.
If a cruiser scale thanix can fit into a frigate, I would not be surprised if we could fit a single dreadnaught scale one into a cruiser.
We could try fitting four dreadnaught scale thanix into a single dreadnaught, have them all turreted and set to staggered fire, with 1 second in between and we would have a dreadnaught that can take on four of its weight class at any given time.
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- Location
- America
When the reapers invade, the find the System's alliance fleets
All of them
Armed with these.
Well some one explained most of this, but I was talking about guns not reactor power. Linear accelerators (Coilguns, Railguns, Particle Weapons, and FELs for example) have their per shot energy largely determined by length. Now the "power output" clause was for weapons so even if each "shot" was low energy, but it fired a lot in a "burst" it's still be counted.
Basically the revision was to reenforce the core ideas of the treaty, a) keeping the number of WMDs down and b) preventing expensive arms races. Spinal length is becoming a questionable determining factor (see lasers and guns with more firepower per meter being developed) and honestly was a poor test to begin with.
Edit: Also the per shot energy of an example 800m dreadnought is ~162TJ and it's Power 81TW A single AR generates 0.005TW
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Once again, the Council tries to avoid another Krogan Rebellion scale war...without realising that its potentially styming their own tech advancement.
Honestly, if the Turians want to be the peacekeepers of the galaxy, then they should enjoy the influx of cash into their military hardware.
Expense does not matter, considering that you very rarely get any one arms manufacturer that deals sorely in military equipment.
Heck, PI only got off the ground thanks to military funding, which allowed PI to break into the civilian market.
I would honestly not be surprised if the Volus of all races complain slightly about that.