Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution
- Thread starter Hoyr
- Start date
- Location
- Budapest, Hungary
- MAC-are more versatile.
- Recoil can be reduced with repulsors.
- Laser's effectiveness is reduced in atmosphere
- High powered lasers tend to burn atmosphere.
Let me clarify my design idea (I edit it after this post) but know that I made a mistake with the numbers. Please look at it again and thank you for pointing it out.
What do you mean, maximum range?
You are Katherine Grant, one of the foremost marksmen in humanity. And you just missed... again.
Years earlier....
You were proud, immensely so, that you had been accepted into the Alliance military on your first application. It was a competitive process, particularly for someone from a backwater like Mindoir. Upon receiving your acceptance papers, you booked the first transport to Benning. Good thing too, as Mindoir was attacked by a particularly vicious raiding party a few scant days later, changing life there forever. You came from Landing, and watched the vids in horror as civilians were marched into the square for processing or execution. Like everyone else, you also saw vids of the 'hero of Mindoir', who you remember meeting once on a school trip.
All this was quickly forgotten about when you arrived for training. It was a long year in basic. Unfortunately for you, things had not evolved much in the last two hundred years. Sleep deprivation, endless drills and digging. Why do you still dig trenches when kinetic barrier devices exist? Any time that point got brought up, it inevitably caused the instructors to rethink the locations of the trenches, and so the digging was begun anew.
It was during this time you distinguished yourself as a marksman. With the Mantis rifle, you were regularly shooting perfect scores, even on unknown range shoots with distances out to 1500m. Your uncanny ability to 'call the target' during astounded your instructors, who promptly shipped you off to the Infiltrator program.
There, your skills were average. You were still able to bullseye a target from distances your instructors could only gawk at, but your hacking... well... there's no polite way to say it. You graduated comfortably in the middle of your class and expected to be assigned to some ship for guard duty. Instead, you went to Anhur.
War. War never changes. It's brutal, it's messy, and it's tiring. At least you didn't have to dig any holes. Most of your duties revolved around observation and overwatch. It was an excellent opportunity to practice marksmanship under realistic conditions, while still maintaining some distance from the horrors of war. And then Paragon Security forces arrived and just like that, the war was effectively over.
You knew you wanted in on that. And so, with your contract with the Alliance military expiring, you signed on with ParSec. This brought you full circle, back to Mindoir, four years later. And in your current predicament.
You drag yourself up from the prone position and recall your spotter drones. You'd traded in your Mantis sniper rifle for a Goliath anti-material rifle; a monstrosity that took advantage of the increased strength and stability of the Legionary platform by modifying what amounted to an IFV cannon into a man-portable (well, Legionary-portable) weapon system. Some additional modifications needed to be made of course, the automatic stabilizers had to go to allow for the minute adjustments necessary when firing over extended ranges.
And the ammunition! Working for the private sector meant that you were afforded the opportunity to shoot daily. Which led to your current shenanigans - engaging targets at 5327m. The targetting information relayed to you by your spotter drones was instrumental in getting shots in the right area, but try as you might effective fire was just out of reach. The rounds just kept falling short, or disappearing entirely.
As you pack your gear, it dawns on you. You've reached the limit of direct fire weapons - the curvature of the PLANET is what is interfering with your striking targets at long range. How rude.
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Comments and criticism welcome. Feeling vaguely creative and wondered what kind of limits legionary equipped snipers might come across, should their skill level be high enough.
You are Katherine Grant, one of the foremost marksmen in humanity. And you just missed... again.
Years earlier....
You were proud, immensely so, that you had been accepted into the Alliance military on your first application. It was a competitive process, particularly for someone from a backwater like Mindoir. Upon receiving your acceptance papers, you booked the first transport to Benning. Good thing too, as Mindoir was attacked by a particularly vicious raiding party a few scant days later, changing life there forever. You came from Landing, and watched the vids in horror as civilians were marched into the square for processing or execution. Like everyone else, you also saw vids of the 'hero of Mindoir', who you remember meeting once on a school trip.
All this was quickly forgotten about when you arrived for training. It was a long year in basic. Unfortunately for you, things had not evolved much in the last two hundred years. Sleep deprivation, endless drills and digging. Why do you still dig trenches when kinetic barrier devices exist? Any time that point got brought up, it inevitably caused the instructors to rethink the locations of the trenches, and so the digging was begun anew.
It was during this time you distinguished yourself as a marksman. With the Mantis rifle, you were regularly shooting perfect scores, even on unknown range shoots with distances out to 1500m. Your uncanny ability to 'call the target' during astounded your instructors, who promptly shipped you off to the Infiltrator program.
There, your skills were average. You were still able to bullseye a target from distances your instructors could only gawk at, but your hacking... well... there's no polite way to say it. You graduated comfortably in the middle of your class and expected to be assigned to some ship for guard duty. Instead, you went to Anhur.
War. War never changes. It's brutal, it's messy, and it's tiring. At least you didn't have to dig any holes. Most of your duties revolved around observation and overwatch. It was an excellent opportunity to practice marksmanship under realistic conditions, while still maintaining some distance from the horrors of war. And then Paragon Security forces arrived and just like that, the war was effectively over.
You knew you wanted in on that. And so, with your contract with the Alliance military expiring, you signed on with ParSec. This brought you full circle, back to Mindoir, four years later. And in your current predicament.
You drag yourself up from the prone position and recall your spotter drones. You'd traded in your Mantis sniper rifle for a Goliath anti-material rifle; a monstrosity that took advantage of the increased strength and stability of the Legionary platform by modifying what amounted to an IFV cannon into a man-portable (well, Legionary-portable) weapon system. Some additional modifications needed to be made of course, the automatic stabilizers had to go to allow for the minute adjustments necessary when firing over extended ranges.
And the ammunition! Working for the private sector meant that you were afforded the opportunity to shoot daily. Which led to your current shenanigans - engaging targets at 5327m. The targetting information relayed to you by your spotter drones was instrumental in getting shots in the right area, but try as you might effective fire was just out of reach. The rounds just kept falling short, or disappearing entirely.
As you pack your gear, it dawns on you. You've reached the limit of direct fire weapons - the curvature of the PLANET is what is interfering with your striking targets at long range. How rude.
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Comments and criticism welcome. Feeling vaguely creative and wondered what kind of limits legionary equipped snipers might come across, should their skill level be high enough.
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You know, I almost forgot about that, but you're right, Invisible Man/Fighter/Tank/etc are not IR or radar-invisible:
On the other hand, radar-absorbing materials are available today, and repulsors put out much less heat than normal rocket engines, so the big gap we have to cover is LIDAR, which Invisible Man can do. All it has to do is work with our E-war VI well enough to confuse a GARDIAN tower's point-defenses for a second or two, and apparently we do have to worry about this sort of thing, possibly even before the end of the Anhur intervention, as a set of GARDIAN towers seems like the perfect thing for @Hoyr to send at us as a "boss" encounter.
I do have to agree that reactive barriers are awesome, but with the latest influx of omakes we can easily buy that outright next quarter (and we should, if only to see the price and capabilities on the next tier of shielding from Gaver Dor). If you don't want Invisible Fighter, then maybe Miniaturized DEWs, so we can find out more info on the repulsor cannon?
@Hoyr
Shouldn't the evolution of defence systems somewhat counterbalance the Dreadnought firepower?
Otherwise any technological weapons developement would be effectively illegal as guns are only allowed to achieve a certain power before it is cut off.
It makes more sense if Firaxen is reworked along the lines of the nuclear treaties, or if it limits the defence spending percentage of GDP while the Citadel Accords handle superweapon useage rather than trying to limit technological developement.
Because limiting that wouldn't sit well with anyone, considering that the Terminus still exists (as is stated to be able to take on the Citadel if they unified). There is also the ever present risk of Rachni Mk II through exploration as well as the Geth.
The Geth should be especially concerning because PI was attacked using an AI (fairly sure we reported that).
Shouldn't the evolution of defence systems somewhat counterbalance the Dreadnought firepower?
Otherwise any technological weapons developement would be effectively illegal as guns are only allowed to achieve a certain power before it is cut off.
It makes more sense if Firaxen is reworked along the lines of the nuclear treaties, or if it limits the defence spending percentage of GDP while the Citadel Accords handle superweapon useage rather than trying to limit technological developement.
Because limiting that wouldn't sit well with anyone, considering that the Terminus still exists (as is stated to be able to take on the Citadel if they unified). There is also the ever present risk of Rachni Mk II through exploration as well as the Geth.
The Geth should be especially concerning because PI was attacked using an AI (fairly sure we reported that).
There is also the possibility of filling the flightpath to the GARDIANs with reflective dust that scatters the laser. Or just try to overwhelm their firerate with missile spam.
I have them using every sensor that the system they are employed on can use. So if it can AMS will use visual, IR, radar and the rest.
It's got medigel bullshit, which is pretty damn good. As well as some basic medical response stuff. Not sure how advanced prosthetics would help. In what way were you thinking?
Oh wow, that tech has some errors in it. Huh, could have sworn I caught most of the stuff from last GM that bugged me. I'll have to go though again later.
Anyway AB covers a lot of those issues. I've expanded invisible man's stealth stuff a bit and altered things, here would be a corrected version:
[ ] The Invisible Man [100/400]: The stealth system that was installed in the prototype the Berkeley students presented at the power armor conference was not good enough to fool Alliance security, but then it was Conrad piloting the thing. While working on your advanced ceramic, you've had some ideas of your own on how to incorporate digital camouflage at a fundamental level. Sound, thermal and radar detection will still be issues, but issues exist to be solved! (Make infantry nearly-invisible. Includes a variety of stealth and cloaking technologies for soldiers)
The original idea was that it was a piece of material that acted like a cuttlefish's skin does. It's chameleon armor in short, but... meh? ME has awesome cloaking in the later games, so I fell fine including that. You know unless you want me to make this tech tree even more complicated.
Basically the package is:
Cloaking (Invisibility in most EM bands, temporary)
Armor Integrated Chameleon Camouflage (Semi-passive super-camo)
EM refracting/absorbing meta-materials (Anti-radar/LIDAR, Arcane Blur being a great example)
Sound Dampening (It's won't make you soundless if your super load, but it'll make the unit harder to detect, also partial counter to sonar)
Emissions Dampening (Mostly for IR/thermal, will only work if the background isn't to cold AKA space)
Ultimately so I don't have like six different Cloaking/Stealth techs, and so the name makes sense Man==Infantry, Man!=Vehicle.
Unless some one has a problem with this? I admit is sort of a change that wasn't included in the tech when posted for voting...
No. The treaty has very little to do with combat and everything to do with civilian and planetary targets. Dreadnoughts are freaking dangerous a single one can devastate a planet, just by siting there and pulling the trigger. Dreadnoughts are WMDs, and thus it is kinda like a nuclear treaty. It just looks like a ship treaty.
At the same time they are useful. Thus the treaty has a simple out: the Turians get to determine how many dreadnoughts run around, the more they have the more everyone gets to have. If there's and active/pending threat the Turians build more so everyone else can.
In addition, dreadnoughts are expensive and a dreadnought arms race would be bad for the economy, so the treaty has a sort of "relative parity" baked in.
Better weapons tech just means the bar for being a dreadnought goes down. For defense tech to matter you'd have to massively drop the price of planetary shields and make them nearly omnipresent.
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- Location
- his hidden lair
Eh, going by the calcs provided in the Codex, Dreadnoughts don't actually seem to be all that destructive even in terms of orbital bombardment;
Now if we're using different calcs, then sure, Dreadnoughts are terrifying, but as is when we're talking about wiping out planetary populations, the idea is laughable. Hell, even the lore on the Krogan wars mentions the Krogans pulling colony/asteroid drops as opposed to using Dreadnought bombardment on Asari colonies.
Compare that to the fact we have nuclear missiles over a thousand times as powerful as one of those slugs and the whole "Dreadnoughts are a horrifying WMD" seems sort of exaggerated. Even assuming that a dreadnought has over ten thousand slugs and time to fire them all, we're still taking less than half a gigaton of TNT, hardly planet killer levels of orbital bombardment. And that's not taking into account atmospheric drag/slug deformation from the atmosphere.
Now if we're using different calcs, then sure, Dreadnoughts are terrifying, but as is when we're talking about wiping out planetary populations, the idea is laughable. Hell, even the lore on the Krogan wars mentions the Krogans pulling colony/asteroid drops as opposed to using Dreadnought bombardment on Asari colonies.
So, anyway, on a different subject. @Hoyr , what would it take to make an artificial melding system for non-asari viable?
Maybe, but advanced prosthetics is also something I dearly desire. We'll see.
Well, if, say, something punctured our soldier's heart, an armor with advanced life support could keep pumping the blood through their body. Or something like that.
Dreads are a space WMD.
If anyone wanted to devastate planets, they are just stupidly overpriced. As Karugus noted, even the Krogans rather used asteroids to do the job.
Firaxen always seemed more to prevent an arms race while the Dreadnought definition was just there to ensure there is a definition other than the price tag.
Wouldn't a neural interface on both participants and a wireless connection suffice?
...that gives phone sex a completely new meaning.
If anyone wanted to devastate planets, they are just stupidly overpriced. As Karugus noted, even the Krogans rather used asteroids to do the job.
Firaxen always seemed more to prevent an arms race while the Dreadnought definition was just there to ensure there is a definition other than the price tag.
Wouldn't a neural interface on both participants and a wireless connection suffice?
...that gives phone sex a completely new meaning.
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- Location
- Terror Australis
A dreadnaught given time could pretty thoughly wreck planetary infrastructure and kill a lot of people. But it definately isnt going to wipe out a planetary population on a garden world or have a major long term impact on the biosphere. On a planetary scale kiloton level impacts are chump change and plantary biospheres are inherently self regulating.
If you are going to trash someones stuff it would probably be easier to just use a freighter loaded with nuclear missiles, its not like they are hard or particulary expensive for a spacefaring civilisation to build.
If you are going to trash someones stuff it would probably be easier to just use a freighter loaded with nuclear missiles, its not like they are hard or particulary expensive for a spacefaring civilisation to build.
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NavySeel
"I don't know what I'm doing."
- Location
- Places
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I should note that I'm not using ME's WMD definition* I'm using a more RL one. I mean we can agree that something that can kill around half a million people (or more?) with a single shot is a WMD yes?
*Which is "alters a planet's environment".
A single shot isn't terrible on a planetary scale, but a dreadnought can keep firing. Dreadnought slugs are a puny ~20kg. One can store 50,000 shots in a cube just a little over 5m to a side, which is basically none of the ship's volume or mass. (Hell you can store more shots than a dreadnought can fire in a year in less than half of a percent of it's volume). And the winning fleet will have quite possibly have days or more to shoot at the poor planet.
Dreadnought destructive potential is specifically called out as being the reason they are limited in number, are there worse weapons? Yes, some of them even get actively used too. Others fall under the "fuck no" category though. Is a single dreadnought cratering an entire planet? No that'd take over two years. But it is going to cause a lot of destruction... masses of destruction on might say.
Wiki's copy of the Codex says: "Due to the destructive potential of dreadnoughts, the Council races agreed at the Farixen Naval Conference to fix a ratio of dreadnought construction between themselves."
They don't want more of them around because they can cause so much damage. Several historical race's site's stories end with "was destroyed by orbital bombardment", which when you start seeing that pattern it becomes a little scary to have that sort of weapon running around. So you have to make that issue go way before people will be okay with more. Or show that more are needed for whatever reason.
Tech not on the current tree.
How though? I mean your basically talking about the suit being able to implant a artificial organ on the battlefield. Medigel sealing works for most low trauma injuries, and the high trauma ones usually means you have worse to worry about.
I'm just not seeing prosthetics which normally need surgical implantation helping in this context. Unless you'd done it before hand.
Without the need for equipment / implants for the other participant. Also, add in an advanced prosthetics based artificial male genitalia - womb hybrid with the gene sequences randomization linked to the artificial melding system, and asari's "can breed with anything" shtick becomes commercially available for other races.
Because I want asari to stage protests under "she's stealing our
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...Huh. So, not even full-body prosthetics + advanced xenobiology + P&P skills would allow us to slot into an asari-type body with all the features working?
I guess we'll have to see if virtual aliens cross-species mind transfer would help there.
Well, you are probably right. Still, with some prep... Install ports in the major veins, with the suit being equipped with miniature pumps+blood purifiers. Link whatever implants the soldier has with the suit, so they work in tandem. In case one gets damaged, the other takes up the work.
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SkySkimmer
I use hugs for evil.
Sounds like a worthy goal to me.
Miniaturized Energy Weapons - Part II
Laser Drones
Laser Drones
Converting an Aspidai to utilize your recently miniaturized lasers was easy, just replace the Hastas with lasers and lay some heavy duty power cabling. By itself that made them a far more dangerous foe on the battlefield but still didn't change battlefield tactics much due to the laser's limited size hampering it's effectiveness against heavy targets.
But you weren't content with that. You wanted something more.
After crushing the slaver faction on Anhur ParSec captured a number of tanks and other military vehicles that were almost certainly provided to them by the Hegemony. While the majority were left behind on Anhur both for the Abolitionists' use and due to the impracticality of shipping them to Mindoir a number were taken for weapons testing.
All of which serves to explain why exactly a Batarian heavy tank was storming it's way through the holographic city ParSec used for live fire training missions. The tank was of course completely unmanned and instead piloted by a VI trained to mimic the tactics shown by slavers on Anhur and, thanks to data generously provided by Captain Anderson, pirate groups across the galaxy.
The tank's powerful engines, thick armor, and heavy barriers allowed it to blaze through the city's packed streets, filled with holographic cars and civilians, carelessly crushing civilian cars under it's treats and turning crossing into a meaty horror show. A sight you became all too familiar with while reviewing after action footage of your soldiers on Anhur, although at least there people had enough sense to get out of the way of a tank going 70km/h unlike the simple VIs managing the holograms.
As this mobile wave of destruction approached yet another crowded intersection, you'd guess there were at least a hundred people freely crossing without a care for the painful death barreling right towards them, the tank's interior cameras showed alarms going off on every console, apparently they caught your drones approaching.
Unfortunately for the poor tank it was far too late. Flying in at a ridiculous 1,800km/h, a full twenty five times faster then the tank, a dozen modified Aspidais, you still needed proper name for them, flitted across the skies in a pattern optimized for confusing VI targeting systems, organics are simply too slow to even try tracking your drones.
All of that however was already fairly well tested. The real test was about to begin. In a blur of movement every laser capable on every drone simultaneously locked onto a single point atop the tank and fired. While the lasers themselves were invisible the superheated air left in their wake was not so each beam appeared as a golden line tracing from the tank to the drone that fired it. Of course you weren't paying the slightest bit of attention to that, you'd already seen it hundreds of times before in previous tests, but instead at the mangled mess that was once a Batarian heavy tank.
The second the drones' lasers impacted they burned straight through the tank's heavy armor and took out it's power core in a single devastating strike. Without power the kinetic barriers failed and the tank was shredded by the cars it impacted. Even if the roads had been clean the tank would have still been mission killed and helpless to a follow up attack aimed at destroying it.
After the test one of the ParSec soldiers in the observation room, whenever you scheduled a test there was always a dozen or two off duty soldiers who showed up to enjoy the explosions, asked the question you'd been waiting for, "How did you destroy a tank with an infantry laser? I know they aren't powerful enough for that."
Smiling widely enough that some of the
"As you said a normal infantry sized laser would take forever to burn through a tanks armor, and who has the time for that? Instead of giving up I started looking for solutions." While talking and gesturing to distract him I slowly approach my lecturee. "So tell me; how would you get through a Kinetic Barrier too strong for you to take down with just your Hasta but without using heavier weaponry?"
At this your poor
"Who says you can't?" Thanks to me accessing the room's security cameras with my ANI I can easily see the Cheshire Cat Grin spread across my face as I peered up at him. CASIE says I should probably reduce it's size by 43.7% but I'm having way too much fun for that.
Clearly disturbed the soldier responds with a slightly panicked "The target is too small to coordinate, especially with drones moving as fast as those do, it's impossible." The second the word impossible crosses his lips I leap back a good meter, hurray for Peak Human, and I'm back to the cheery persona I started with.
"Yep! It's completely, utterly, impossible. That's why I spent my lunch hour writing the software rather then someone else. My day's just not complete without me pulling off at least one impossible thing."
And with that you fold away your brainy specs and leave the room. All the while reviewing the feedback from CASIE on how well you pulled off pretending to be a mad scientist.
Author's Note: I have no idea where that whole last bit came from. I was just going to explain how the laser drones, I'm thinking of calling them "Aspidai II", can increase their firepower by networking together to synch up all their lasers so they all impact the exact same point for maximum damage.
The version used in the omake is done with radio communication but I figure the final version would use QECs to relay targeting data to a supercomputer which would then process the data and feed the drones targeting solutions.
- Location
- Budapest, Hungary
That would require a sepatate research hero, I think.
Melding is very exotic area of biotics and biology, specific to Asari.
Implementing to any other race would mean essentially redesigning a species.
For the same reason we can not make humans lay eggs either.
Our tech is not Type III yet.
or like, a better Dialysis machine?
- Location
- Somewhere
- Location
- United States
People want a Reaper-killer tank?
Well, an external pump that can circulate blood if heart fails seems not that difficult if we have Peak Human methods.
You get a dreadnought! And you get a dreadnought! And you get a dreadnought! Everybody gets a dreadnought!
Have to sorta disagree here. I mean, pretty much all prothean tech is based on technological analogue of melding. Telepathic tech is clearly possible, as shown by beacons. We just need to reverse engineer those. I would assume this is somewhere down the mind shield tech tree, probably as a combination of prothean research (Liara as a tech hero), mind shields (Mordin's tech), advanced xenobiology (to analyze asari), advanced prosthetics (to implement it in the recipient's body) and P&P skills (to give the recipient of the implant actual ability to meld).
On a different subject, I'm kinda wondering what sort of waves the peak human project is causing. I mean, it's the biggest humanitarian project since... I would say eradication of smallpox, but this actually might be bigger. Humanity is in the process of quite dramatically transforming itself. I wonder how it's viewed, both by aliens and by humans themselves. I mean, what, say, amish, are thinking about it? What about asari? Quarians? Salarians? If someone made an omake with media coverage of the project, that would be great. It would really add flavour and depth. On that topic - we know that we can make eternal youth a reality. It is likely it'll be researched before the peak human project is finished. I think we should start backstage talks and lobbying to allow for a genetic modification law exemption, so permanent inheritable version of eternal youth could be implemented.
Hm. Well, if that's the way you wanted to do it, sure.The original idea was that it was a piece of material that acted like a cuttlefish's skin does. It's chameleon armor in short, but... meh? ME has awesome cloaking in the later games, so I fell fine including that. You know unless you want me to make this tech tree even more complicated.
Basically the package is:
Cloaking (Invisibility in most EM bands, temporary)
Armor Integrated Chameleon Camouflage (Semi-passive super-camo)
EM refracting/absorbing meta-materials (Anti-radar/LIDAR, Arcane Blur being a great example)
Sound Dampening (It's won't make you soundless if your super load, but it'll make the unit harder to detect, also partial counter to sonar)
Emissions Dampening (Mostly for IR/thermal, will only work if the background isn't to cold AKA space)
Ultimately so I don't have like six different Cloaking/Stealth techs, and so the name makes sense Man==Infantry, Man!=Vehicle.
Unless some one has a problem with this? I admit is sort of a change that wasn't included in the tech when posted for voting...
I was figuring that each set of sensors was either its own die roll or contributed to a single aggregate sensor roll: radar, IR, lidar, ultrasound. Modern materials (eg Advanced Ceramics tech, AB, Superalloys) give small, across-the-board bonuses to stealth. Invisible Man gives a huge bonus to anti-lidar stealth, but only a small bonus to everything else. Invisible Fighter lets that same bonus apply to anti-radar and ultrasound, while Invisible Tank applied it to anti-IR.
Then, locked behind Invisible Tank or Invisible Fighter are the scale-up techs: Invisible Starship, Invisible Space Station, Invisible Planet.
Hm. Could work, but you need to do the same for other organs failing too. Once we get to full-body, it'd probably be easier just to preemptively put the brain in a jar and have the jar take over if anything happens to the body. Headshots would still be fatal, but everything else would be survivable.
@Hoyr would have to confirm, but I'd assume that something like this would require Swarm Networking, not just for the coordination aspects, but for the increased network security that would be required to prevent a clever tech from hijacking the network and calling down fire on our own troops/civilians.
As for the name: Archimedes.