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Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution

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What would it take for 'advanced terraforming' tech, do you think? Something to bring down the 'default' terraforming from centuries to decades? I may or may not be thinking of the Genesis Device from the old Star Trek movies...

...on an unrelated note, how effective would oceanic arcologies be at mitigating orbital bombardment? Numbers people?
 
Slamu said:
...on an unrelated note, how effective would oceanic arcologies be at mitigating orbital bombardment? Numbers people?
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Deep undersea settlements are basically the last word in anti-orbital protection; unless somebody's willing to drop Dino-killers, there's no way to work though a couple km of water faster than it fills back in.
On the other hand, if they control the orbitals and the surface, there's nothing stopping them soft-landing a gigaton-range nuclear depth charge and letting it sink down to you...
 
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So what you're saying is that we need to be able to populate the oceans with cybernetic sharks with laser beams on their heads that seek out and destroy nuke-shaped objects.
 
random half asleep thing that should be probably looked into during the war..Gundam...or at least have the fighters as sort of transformers for heavy ground combat.
 
Dark as Silver said:
Yeah.
Well you get me a theoretical paper explaining how you intend to stop cross sections being area and volumes being volumes and I'll vote for it.
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Obviously with the mass effect!

The main implications of the square cube law is that if something gets twice as long, it has four times the support area but eight times the mass. By using the mass effect to counter the mass scaling up the robot should be perfectly possible.
 
Lord Death said:
random half asleep thing that should be probably looked into during the war..Gundam...or at least have the fighters as sort of transformers for heavy ground combat.
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I prefer the mechs from the still newish Xenoblade X which are at most two to four stories tall (I have got the art book and the sixth page has an image where a man is standing beside one and he gets up to its knee which is about a third to quarter of it's height), also the BHG is a lot like their gravity weapons which are strictly melee style or very heavy weapons, they also have a difference between beam and thermal type weapons even if they do similar types of damage.

Dark as Silver said:
Inverse Square Cube law would wreck a Gundam or any transforming mech.
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We already have high grade meta materials which should get past a lot of problems.

Although the human Xenoblade ships are huge, like far bigger than purgatory huge, at 10-15km long (I tend towards the longer end, yes that means they were building in the stratosphere because they launched these things FROM THE BLOODY GROUND FOR SOME REASON) with a small bloody city/town thing which they could literally drop on a planet from low orbit (not that it wouldn't sustain damage though, but still).
 
Emizaquel said:
The main implications of the square cube law is that if something gets twice as long, it has four times the support area but eight times the mass. By using the mass effect to counter the mass scaling up the robot should be perfectly possible.
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Yes, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander; any improvements to space efficiency that turn mechs from impossible to possible will turn tanks and ships from useful to near-invincible.

The issue with mechs remains that both maintenance and target profile are worse than an equivalent-weight tank or ship. The only way to get around that is to include some sort of mech-only supertech that suddenly makes them viable. Hoyr has been good enough to approve one for us: vehicle/ship-scale biotics, which means eventually we can have cruiser-sized mechs throwing around Warps, or the Vanguard Charge+Nova combo, if we're willing to work at it.
 
TheEyes said:
Yes, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander; any improvements to space efficiency that turn mechs from impossible to possible will turn tanks and ships from useful to near-invincible.

The issue with mechs remains that both maintenance and target profile are worse than an equivalent-weight tank or ship. The only way to get around that is to include some sort of mech-only supertech that suddenly makes them viable. Hoyr has been good enough to approve one for us: vehicle/ship-scale biotics, which means eventually we can have cruiser-sized mechs throwing around Warps, or the Vanguard Charge+Nova combo, if we're willing to work at it.
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The good thing about mechs is that they can swap weapon types near instantly, they are also useful in areas and jobs that aren't warfare and have greater mobility than any wheeled design and have an easier time traversing some terrains (among some other things).

Other than Xenoblade I like some of the ones in front mission, though they are thick and blocky and can't transform.
 
shade argost said:
The good thing about mechs is that they can swap weapon types near instantly, they are also useful in areas and jobs that aren't warfare and have greater mobility than any wheeled design and have an easier time traversing some terrains (among some other things).
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1. I'm sure refers to having manipulator arms that can grab weapons. This is a really bad idea for any weapon that has recoil, as opposed to just mounting the thing on a turret at center mass, so you're essentially pre-limiting yourself to only using lasers. Humans use held weapons not because they are better, but because that's the least worst option for them.

2. Only really applies to small mechs, meaning power armor. Once you get to 5 meters or so mechs become a bad idea in every civilian application, because:

3. Mechs have both an extremely high center of mass and a small contact patch with the ground. Not only does this mean that your mech provides a huge cross sectional area for the enemy to target, and major difficulties with recoil compensation, but the tiny contact patch means that you will be shattering nearly all possible construction materials, including reinforced concrete, and sinking into the ground with every step, limiting wartime mobility and destroying road infrastructure in peacetime. Compensating with a neg ME core just makes the recoil problem even worse, and means that you're spending more money, eezo and space on compensating for poor design decisions rather than better weapons and shields.
 
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Ya, know its not nice to shoot down peoples ideas just to keep your SOD.

If someone wants to put forth an idea of Mechs or other things that don't work in reality completely, just let them. Because quite frankly adding too much realism in the setting, only bogs down the quest, and yes I know this quest likes realism a lot. I also get a good deal of people enjoy the math and everything, but in a setting were Stark Tech works, giant robots aren't too far fetched.

If you want a semi good idea of Mech warfare look at Code Geass, before all the bullshit started, I mean the regular units.

And can anyone tell me why people don't infuse Eezo into metal?

This are my thoughts, take them with a grain of salt and I will do the same.
 
Revya Alt.Zero said:
Can anyone tell me why people don't infuse Eezo into metal?
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The only three reasons i can think of is it would mess with other ME Fields if you are trying to have it as a sort of 'super light' armor EG trying to 'warp' while using that on a ship would probably cause all kinds of hell, it could also mess with how the guns or shields work.
The other reason it could be is that EZero is super brittle or is like a dirt substance so it messes with the strengh of armor to the point that having more is the same as no EZero.
The last one (Actually two) could be that it simply won't mix with other materials or the prossess to mix the things together could remove what makes EZero work. Think of how if you melt a magnet then let it solidify it just becomes a hunk of metal.
And now i'm thinking more on this all but the first one could be more or less ignored by simply putting a core of EZero in the plateing..another idea that just came to mind is that simply having EZero 'Infused' armor is far too expensive for what it grants.
 
Revya Alt.Zero said:
Ya, know its not nice to shoot down peoples ideas just to keep your SOD.

If someone wants to put forth an idea of Mechs or other things that don't work in reality completely, just let them. Because quite frankly adding too much realism in the setting, only bogs down the quest, and yes I know this quest likes realism a lot. I also get a good deal of people enjoy the math and everything, but in a setting were Stark Tech works, giant robots aren't too far fetched.

If you want a semi good idea of Mech warfare look at Code Geass, before all the bullshit started, I mean the regular units.

And can anyone tell me why people don't infuse Eezo into metal?

This are my thoughts, take them with a grain of salt and I will do the same.
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Alright so going throught this in order,
1) The entire length of this quest, we have been exploiting and attempting to exploit two different types of space magic by applying real physics.
Saying that its not nice doesn't just betray a lack of understanding about the quest it is also a spectacularly bad argument. Because I could now point out that the Reapers are cuttlefish so clearly we win by building a giant Space Shark, turn about is fair play.
2) Ignoring arguments that are bad is a bad idea because the people who proposed them think that they're good ideas. If people see that nobody is arguing back then they and others have this belief validated. And we end up with people voting for them.
3) I enjoyed Code Geass. But Semi good idea and Mech warfare do not belong in the same sentence. The only reason that Knightmare frames were viable is because all infantry and armour units were equipped with peashooters.
4) Its never really come up. According to canon Eezo doesn't really do anything until exposed to a positive or negative current. I personally translate positive current to refer to electron holes. In this case it makes sense to infuse Eezo into semiconductors and that will likely be a step towards artificial biotics. However infusing Eezo into armour would require the entire plate to be electrified in order to produce an effect, this runs the range of being a situationaly good idea to lethally bad and everything in between.
 
Carrnage said:
but it also allows large scale biotics.
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Any synchronized distributed network of eezo nodes should work for biotics. Gestures and such are an entirely programmable mnemonic an can be done without.

Speaking of, this means that drone swarms generating cooperative biotic effects should be entirely doable if proper software can be written. Each drone would act as a node of eezo network.
 
If biotics are just about triggering Ezo correctly, what would an AI(*) with an artificial node network stop from being the best biotic there can be?
(*) or an sufficiently advanced expert system
 
Never said ignore arguments, just that it is not nice to rub it others faces, or explain in a that isn't insulting or shoot down the idea altogether.
If an idea doesn't win now, then it maybe it will tomorrow, no hard feelings are needed.

No ideas are worthless, even if they only, shine once, so don't let bias be a shield.

As for 3 you don't know for certain numbers say one thing actions another in the world.

But remember it is possible in this quest for good quality mechs to be useful or they would not be on the tech tree.

So there has to be something special or useful about them. Shoot down my arguments all you want, I still believe them true.
 
Revya Alt.Zero said:
Never said ignore arguments, just that it is not nice to rub it others faces, or explain in a that isn't insulting or shoot down the idea altogether.
If an idea doesn't win now, then it maybe it will tomorrow, no hard feelings are needed.
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...

If the idea is bad it should be shot down and made clear as the foolishness it is. And if people don't listen do rub their faces in it, how else are such stubborn people going to learn? That way you don't have to constantly argue against a wall of idiocy.

Revya Alt.Zero said:
No ideas are worthless, even if they only, shine once, so don't let bias be a shield.
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Including 'I like this idea no matter how stupid it is in the context of the game we're playing, and as such will advocate it until the end of time and it ends up ruining the quest due to precedence for accepting stupidity or the consequences of stupidity in a roughly realistic setting with consequences.'

Revya Alt.Zero said:
As for 3 you don't know for certain numbers say one thing actions another in the world.
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If Mechs were viable weapons systems we'd have had some by now. As it is they are just too complicated and vulnerable for the protection and weapons they offer compared to a wheeled or tracked vehicle.

Revya Alt.Zero said:
But remember it is possible in this quest for good quality mechs to be useful or they would not be on the tech tree.
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Yes, this is true.

In boarding actions and other highly confined spaces where it's difficult to park a tank but a one man bipedal weapons platform can go through most larger corridors fairly easily without getting shot to shit from everywhere through the windows in nearby structures. It's a very niche weapons system.

Revya Alt.Zero said:
So there has to be something special or useful about them. Shoot down my arguments all you want, I still believe them true.
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Generally such unwillingness to face reality despite all evidence is considered insanity or stupidity.
 
Hazard said:
If Mechs were viable weapons systems we'd have had some by now. As it is they are just too complicated and vulnerable for the protection and weapons they offer compared to a wheeled or tracked vehicle.
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The Systems Alliance fielded mechs in cannon. While the human military command aren't the super geniuses Revy is, I wouldn't consider them stupid either. I can assume there is a viable Watsonian reason for them to be there (Doylist, obviously, being 'giant stompy robots are cool') and I don't know what tech we have brought to the table that would change this.
 
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