Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
I'm fairly sure Legionnaire armor outclasses everyone else, although they're starting to catch up.
Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution
- Thread starter Hoyr
- Start date
I'm fairly sure Legionnaire armor outclasses everyone else, although they're starting to catch up.
- Location
- United states
Yep, as I recall it's currently the best Power Armor out there. Of course IIRC we ended up finishing the Mk 2 variant which severely outclasses the old legionnaire to a great extent.
This really isn't the case. Closed biomes are something that we have already been studying for the last 50 years and they aren't that hard to do. Honestly none of the technology involved in space colonies is really that hard. The biggest issue is that any successful colony has a minimum population size which in turns necessitates a minimum colony size.
Now the absolute minimum size for a colony to be viable is around 160 but if we want a robust colony without any restrictions on breeding partners and a good coverage of vital skills something like 5,000 people is probably preferable. So how big does the colony have to be to support 5,000 people? Well numbers vary a lot depending upon who you ask and what the exact method you are using is but I'm going to be cautious and estimate 1000m^3 per person. That gives a total station volume of 5,000,000m^3 or a station roughly 200m x 200m x 125m.
So how much would such a station cost? Well we know the costs for the following:
Tiny Space Station (2/3 Size): 100 million credits
Small Space Station (6/8 Size): 1 billion credits
Medium Space Station (13/16 Size): 10 billion credits
Large Space Station (28/32 Size): 100 billion credits
and we also know the large axis of those stations:Small Space Station (6/8 Size): 1 billion credits
Medium Space Station (13/16 Size): 10 billion credits
Large Space Station (28/32 Size): 100 billion credits
So the station dimensions are:
300m = Size 8
600m = Size 16
900m = Size 32
which makes it clear that each additional 300m of radius is simply a straight lengthening of the station since the overall size is equal to multiple 300m stacked end to end.600m = Size 16
900m = Size 32
This doesn't actually tell us the internal volume though size we have no idea what the secondary axis radius is. However we can do some working backwards to determine the minimum radius required to hit the goal of 5,000,000m^3
5,000,000 / 300 = 16,666.67m^2 = 72.84m
5,000,000 / 600 = 8,333.33m^2 = 51.50m
5,000,000 / 900 = 5,555.56m^2 = 42.05m
and on the face of it none of those radii seem unreasonable large. Still lets go to one of the few references we have for size; starships. A couple years back I found this awesome image displaying scales for Alliance ships. Sure it's non-canonical but it looks reasonable. Pixel measurements give the following:5,000,000 / 600 = 8,333.33m^2 = 51.50m
5,000,000 / 900 = 5,555.56m^2 = 42.05m
Dreadnought = 561px
Cruiser = 328px
Destroyer = 182px
SR2 Normandy = 89px
SR1 Normandy = 63px
and if we assume the dreadnought is 1,000m long then that comes out to:Cruiser = 328px
Destroyer = 182px
SR2 Normandy = 89px
SR1 Normandy = 63px
Dreadnought = 1,000m
Cruiser = 584.7m
Destroyer = 324.4m
SR2 Normandy = 158.6m
SR1 Normandy = 112.3m
which comes fairly close to what we'd expect given the numbers we are given. If we use the dreadnought as a scale for the diameter of the space stations, since it's fairly similar in length to the Large Space Station and it been much skinnier would look weird, we get 63pxs or 112.3m. Halving that gives a radius of 56.15m which puts the Medium Space Station as the minimum size required to house 5,000 people long term. Cruiser = 584.7m
Destroyer = 324.4m
SR2 Normandy = 158.6m
SR1 Normandy = 112.3m
Given that Medium Space Stations cost 10 billion credits and house about 5,000 people that means the station would cost around 2 million credits per person and have maintenance costs of around 100,000cr per person per year. That is almost certainly well above the average total income per person on the station let alone what they can afford to pay towards maintenance. So for any future station plans to be practical we really have to drop the cost, both initial and maintenance, significantly.
Depends upon how you define powered armor. Technically everyone's armor is powered armor. It's just their power armor isn't as awesome as ours. The Alliance has a significant advance in quality but due to it's newness it is really behind in personnel. Humanity just doesn't have the population of older races like the Asari and Turians. I made estimates ages ago, which have been used fairly commonly, that the Alliance military has about twelve million total. Although a good chunk of that is that the Alliance is actually barred from having a ground army with that being reserved for the various member nations. All the troops the Alliance deploys are either 'marines' who aren't 'technically' army soldiers or soldiers from the armies of the various member nations.
Power armor is so eighteen months ago.
See, part of the problem is that, since PI signed that non-compete agreement with H&K after they agreed to mass-produce our Legionary suits, there's not much incentive to really upgrade them. In the meantime PI has gone into VI-enhanced drones in a big way, with the result that we end up with drones that can easily counter Legionaries and everything else in their way.
Honestly I prefer it that way. Legionary suits on the front line puts lives at risk; drones on the front lines only risks material resources, and those are comparatively cheap.
There is also the matter of scalability. Drone armies can be expensive but they can be scaled up in size a lot compared to a more squishy army. There are (generously) only around 12 billion humans:
while the Turians should, absolute bare minimum here, have a population over 34 billion and honestly probably in the high hundreds of billions as Hoyr discusses here:
I saying that the Turians have 17 colonies (named even) that appear in their history and one quest that are 2500 years old and are the origin of the Turian facial markings. Think about that. They never show up on the map, you never get to go to them, but they are there. The one good old Turian colony we get to see in canon from a few centuries later has a pop of 1.9 billiion. (There is another one that's about a thousand year old that only has a quarter billlion... odd is there something wrong with it's location?)
If you took canon literally going by the wiki the Salarians would have 11 planets... Asari 21 and Turians 28 vs Humanities 52 (not counting Sol world other than Earth and Mars).
So as is the case with many RPGs one must conclude that stuff the game doesn't show is there because it doesn't actually make any sense for it not to be there (two city kingdoms anyone?) and the spots you do see are just the one the game makes had the time/money/plot need to fill in. ME focus on a human protagonist thus humans get more detail. So yeah there are more alien world and many of them are old and thus have a few billion people. Some may be from minor races that don't appear in the games. They just aren't interesting (aka there is no one to shoot). ME1 has apparently has a Councillor stating that the galactic population is in the trillions after all*.
Similar numbers really should apply to most the major races since they have been in space for literally centuries or even millennia longer then humans. We just can't compete in the numbers game for soldiers since they have vastly deeper population pools to draw upon.
Drones meanwhile act as somewhat of an equalizer. They' still have a significant advantage simply due to having so much larger economies due to both more people generating wealth and more time to have established large amounts of infrastructure. However it is a lot easier and faster to scale up production methods then it is population numbers.
HanEmpire
Delicious
PI Legionnaire PA is one of the most advanced ones on the market right now, but the other powers have caught up with their own PAs:
They can't really be compared to one another because all of them use the same base technology (Arc-Reactor, which is the only one that really matters right now) and are adapted to different military doctrines.
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And notice that they said "announced". Given this is military tech, being built by traditional companies, that means they're probably not going into actual production until early-mid 2175, just in time for our exclusivity contract with H&K to run out and the perfect time to start researching, building, and shipping the Mark II. Remember that PI is paying a comparatively large amount for factory production, mostly because of OOC balance issues, but IC what it means is that we're basically using prototyping machines to do production builds, translating into near-zero time to retool.
That gives PI a structural advantage that no other species can match, and all because of a situation that OOC is being forced on us for balance reasons so we don't break things even worse. After all, for anyone else this would be an insane way to run a customer-facing manufacturing business, and really only works because 1) Arc Reactors are a license to print money, 2) Revy is such a prolific researcher/research manager and 3) PI owns the entire stack from research to prototyping to final manufacturing, but what it means is that we can go from lab bench tape-outs to shipping products inside of a quarter, when just about every other company in the galaxy will take closer to two years. Realistically it ought to have been more, maybe much more, in this case, especially since the Citadel version of the Arc Reactor had only been on the market for six months when the Turians made their announcement.
TLDR: Revy OP, plz no nerf.
HanEmpire
Delicious
PI can run an Arms Race against itself with speed like that. We might get hit for dumping practices or something by playing legit.TLDR: Revy OP, plz no nerf.
- Location
- West Michigan
The Geth have been working on a Dyson sphere for most of the last three hundred years and still weren't done when that lore was revealed in ME2.TLDR: Revy OP, plz no nerf.
PI could probably do it in ten.
PI is already running an arms race against itself. We invented the Pilum, invented the Lorica plate to beat the Pilum for the Tiger, and then invented the better warhead to beat the Lorica plate.
- Location
- United states
IIRC we already ended up researching the Mark II armor. Though IIRC the contract said that we couldn't sell anymore armors. Didn't say anything about us making our own for personal use. Thinking about it could we maybe make and give away around 100 or so of them to the military for their elites in the war against the Batarians? Wouldn't be breaking our contract in that situation if we are only giving them away and only a very small handful.
If that is going to be an issue, we could just talk to Hahne-Kedar to make some minor changes to the contract. Personally, I do not think that they would mind at all. The suits were already selling like crazy before the outbreak of war. Now that the Systems Alliance is at war, I would imagine that the SA's need for Powered Armor is currently skyrocketing.
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We have not, unfortunately. We in fact never even finished voting for 2174-Q3 research; the last things we researched were here in 2174-Q2:
We finished the Gen II Arc Reactor, not the armor. Our current must-finish big projects are Brain shielding (and improved brain shielding), QECs and Multi-core eezo drives, Miniaturized Energy weapons (and possibly UV lasers). After that we can start debating the merits of getting the Mark II suit over say Advanced Xenotechnology or TIR stealth/grav sensors. Personally I do want the Mark II suit, but sometime on 2175; I definitely want to have Miniaturized Energy weapons first so we can integrate them into the suit from the beginning.
Although, speaking of energy weapons that I want to integrate into the suit, I'd very much like to have a unibeam put somewhere on our tech tree. The way I'd distinguish them from our other weapons techs:
Repulsor Cannon/Particle Beam/Go Away beam (existing tech tree)- These are basically range improvements on the original Repulsor's weapon system, which is a linear quark plasma beam, using a thermal laser pump. Normally that doesn't make sense because plasma expands, and just adding heat would just make it expand faster, but it works in this case because of the exotic origin of a Repulsor's particle source (the same weird zero-point energy source that Arc Reactor energy comes from)
Unibeam/Unibeam Cannon/Unibeam Projector (new tech tree)- Rather than exciting the decayed quark plasma, the Unibeam fires a laser through the center of the Repulsor blast as it's firing, essentially projecting out the exotic extra-dimensional particle stream that normally only exists inside the Arc Reactor/Repulsor. The unibeam is ridiculously powerful and deadly, but it creates a problem in that literally every time you fire it you're bringing particles into this universe that operate under entirely different universal constants, which means you need a very well-read theoretical physicist around, monitoring the output in real-time with an advanced ANI, just to keep the output from indiscriminately ravaging everything within a light-second of your position.
TLDR: Repulsor cannons let us put plasma beam main guns on our warships, sort of our answer to the wide-scale deployment of TIR shielding. Unibeams are much stronger than Repulsor cannon tech, but you need a very smart high-energy theoretical physicist in the cockpit (eg. a research hero like Revy, Gaver Dor, Conrad, etc) to actually use it in a fight without dooming your own ship, and possibly the surrounding star system.
Something like that ought to be possible, but likely gated behind the space station tech tree, which is just yet more "must have" tech to put on our list.
- Location
- United states
Looking at the front page we actually have around 350 RP pooled into the MK2 armor meaning that we only need 50 RP to get it. So seems pretty reasonable considering the low cost.
150, actually. The Mark II is 500 RP total.
You're right that it's not much to invest. At the same time, that's 150 RPs that isn't going into the critically important brain shielding techs, or the QECs and multi-core eezo drives that we need to counter the Batarians' use of the Alpha Relay, both of which we need to have done yesterday. And, once you feed the people who just want to chase shiny personal-only techs rather than investing in the stuff that's actually keeping us alive, they're going to insist on other shiny techs, like tanks, and mechs, and transformation systems, and Invisible X, and the Lazarus Project...
Point is, research is, at this point, basically our only limited resource other than time, and everything is balanced on us making good choices with it.
The other reason I don't want to invest RPs in the Mark II is that we have, to date, managed to drag seven omakes out of people who primarily wrote them so they could dedicate the bonus RPs toward the Mark II. I'm aiming for an even ten.
In regards to QECs and multi-core eezo drives, have we considered the reaction of the rest of the Citadel Races? I would imagine that the Turians, Asari and the Salarians would really not want the SA to have sole ownership of such groundbreaking technology. Is it possible that the Council nations would impose an economic blockade if the SA refuses to share certain groundbreaking military tech like multi-core eezo drives and QECs?
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I mean, we know that the report to the Citadel Council suggests that the Asari Republics should try to form an alliance with the SA so that the other Citadel Races can get access to such technology. But, I am not so sure that the Systems Alliance would be interested in such an agreement, after the eventual victory over the Batarians.
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This is a legitimate worry, and we probably ought to be looking into Council and Citadel attitudes more closely in the future. At the same time the Council is (or shortly will become) aware that the Batarians have figured out something even worse than QECs and multi-core eezo drives: how to somehow hack a fleet to bypass known Relay topography. Given the Hegemony's status as a rogue state that doesn't even pretend to adhere to Citadel law, the Council is going to be very reluctant to piss off the golden goose that's been regularly laying golden eggs for five years now.
That is true, but the Council may lose that reluctant after the Batarian Hegemony is defeated. In fact, the Council may grow even more concerned if the SA seizes and occupies the Alpha Relay with a large military force. Especially if the SA refuses to withdraw from the Alpha Relay, after the war. Essentially, in the minds of the Council, the potential threat of the Alpha Relay to their territories is still present as the military threat of the Batarians would be merely replaced by the military threat posed by the more dangerous Systems Alliance.
Depending on the outcome of the war with the Batarian Hegemony, the Council might intervene to prevent the Batarians from being destroyed. Most likely, the Council will try to force a peace between the Batarians and the Systems Alliance, rather than launching an military intervention. There is no question in my mind that the SA, due to its increasing strength from PI tech, will eventually defeat the Batarians. But, the Council might try to save the Batarians to keep the Systems Alliance in check. If the Batarians are utterly defeated and their territory completely occupied by the SA, the Council Races will definitely begin a military buildup and perhaps prepare economic sanctions if the situation with the SA becomes really bad.
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Why would we even want to have sole possession of the Alpha Relay? Once we have multi-core eezo drives and QE comms the Relays themselves go from critical assets to somewhat redundant niceties. If we don't outright destroy the Alpha Relay, then we're going to be much better off leaving it in the hands of a multinational guard force, just like what @Yog has been suggesting we do with the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy (won't it be fun if we happen to stumble upon Harbringer along the way?
)Right. Here's how that would go:
"For over two thousand years, the Batarians have been exploiting, enslaving, and murdering Asari, Salarians, Turians, Elcor, Hanar, Drell, Volus, and now humans. For two thousand years, they have sat on critical knowledge of the underpinnings of the legacy the Protheans have left behind: the Mass Relay network, endangering the very basis of interplanetary travel and trade. And, for two thousand years, the Council sat and did nothing. And, now that Humanity, the youngest race in the galactic community, has finally done what the Council should have done centuries ago and brought this society of slavers to heel, the Council wants to intervene, to ensure that they escape justice?"
And with that, the Systems Alliance joined the Terminus, and were swiftly followed by the Hanar, the Drell, the Elcor, half the Asari Republics, and probably the Turian Hierarchy and Volus as well.
Well yeah, the reason why the Citadel didn't do anything to stop the Batarian Hegemony, is that the negatives consequences of the fall of Batarian Hegemony outweighed the positives consequences of the fall of the Batarian Hegemony. If the SA allows joint control of the Alpha Relay, it would no doubt prevent tensions with the Council. But in my mind, the Batarian Hegemony plays a vital role by being a barrier between Citadel Space and the Terminus Systems. This is why I think the Citadel did not openly act against the Batarian Hegemony despite the constant slave raids.
Of course, the Council would be more than aware that they should not be seen as the Batarians' allies due to their negative reputation. Instead, the Council will merely say that they are supporters of peace, which is why they must help create a peace agreement between the SA and the Hegemony. What would be unsaid is that the peace agreement would prevent the Batarians from collapsing and the Council might secretly inform the SA that secret economic actions would be taken if the SA continues a war against an already beaten foe.
Having made this post last night I decided to expand upon drones.
Alliance Carriers are (roughly speaking) 1km long behemoths and if we assume square fronts (50m sides) similar to the Dreadnoughts that gives a volume of 2,500,000m^3. For comparison a Nimitz-class is approximately a triangular prism with a base (top) of 76.8m, a height of 12.5m, and a length of 332.8m for a rough volume of 159,744m^3. That puts an Alliance Carrier at roughly 15.7x the size of a Nimitz and the Nimitz can hold ~90 aircraft so an Alliance Carrier should hold around 1,413 fighters which I will round up to 1,500 to reflect that on such a large carrier a larger relative amount of it's volume would be dedicated to aircraft storage.
With a carrier wing of 1,500 fighters we can expect such a wing to cost (production not retail) between 150 billion credits + 510,000pr (Scimitar) and 390 billion credits + 1,393,500pr (Gladius Type D). If we charge out standard markup of 270,000cr/pr that comes to retail costs of 287.7 billion credits and 766.245 billion credits respectively.
Meanwhile the Accipiter drone costs 400,000cr and 2.2pr per unit which at 270,000cr/pr comes to a retail cost of 994,000 credits. However that design is still using the old Gen I Arc Reactor. Swapping out for a Gen II Arc Reactor cuts 35,000cr and 0.225pr off the cost and thus drops the price down 95,750 to 898,250 credits. At that cost we could outfit a carrier with 320,289 Accipiters at Scimitar wing costs and 853,042 Accipiters at Gladius prices.
This is why I said that designing the next generation fighter and such should wait until we are designing the next generation of carrier. Because while Accipiters are, without a doubt, inferior to Scimitars let alone Gladius they are both unmanned and literally hundreds of times cheaper. The price difference gets even more extreme if you consider that Accipiters are the weapons and thus don't carry expensive missiles. The Gladius for example carries 2 missiles by default and can have up to an additional 8 strapped on for a total of 10 missiles. Even with the cheap Small Anti-Ship Missile retailing for 62 million that is an extra 620 million per Gladius and that grows all the way up to the Testudo (Large Antiship Missle w/ armor+shields) which retails for 174.25 million and thus adds an extra ~1.7 billion per fighter. The cost of missiles thus adds between 207,069 Accipiters (2 x SASM) and 2,909,824 Accipiters (10 x Testudo). That is all without considering that carriers almost certainly carry multiple reloads of missiles for surviving fighters.
So a straight swap from fighters + missiles to Accipiters means ships go from having to deal with (at most) 16,500 targets (1,500 fighters + 15,000 missiles) to (a minimum of) 527,358 targets and quite reasonably as many as 3,762,866 targets. Considering that the primary method of getting around GARDIAN defense systems is by throwing targets at them until they start overheating and slow down well Accipiters are clearly a vastly superior choice there.
I think you're kind of off-base here. The Batarians weren't the buffer state between the Citadel and the Terminus; that was Omega, and Aria, who had personal contacts with the Asari Councilor and kept the
This all sort of got turned on its head in this Quest because the Batarians miscalculated with their attempt at a Salarian-style instant multi-pronged decapitation strike using the Alpha Relay and a bunch of Reaper forces. They failed on every front, and now the Systems Alliance has enough casus belli that even the most die-hard Terminus species acknowledge that they have the right to give the Batarians a proper beating. The upshot is that the Systems Alliance now has the opportunity in the aftermath to become the exact kind of buffer state that you suggest the Batarians were, that they refused to be for two millennia.
I think people here are forgetting something fundamental to this discussion; The Alliance is tiny. I discussed this earlier with my bit on human population but that applies to pretty much every aspect of the Alliance. It is really strong for it's size, especially with all the advancements we've been throwing at it, but it is still tiny. The Alliance can barely hold onto the territory it has already claimed. The Alliance's strategy of "fleets at major relay nodes" is less a matter of practicality and more a matter of necessity. They just can't afford to put ships, let alone fleets, in every sector they have claimed.
The Alliance has done the smart move in any 4X game; claim as much territory as you can as fast as you can and then develop it as you can. There are dozens of tiny colonies that mostly just exist to push the Alliance's borders outwards. In centuries they will be filled with people and represent massive economic boons but for now they are basically outposts depending upon government support.
In an ideal world the Alliance would take advantage of this war to claim as large a swath of Batarian territory as possible. More territory almost always better. Thing is that almost is there for a reason; if you can't hold your territory it becomes a net loss for you.
So my expectation is that the Alliance will go in; obliterate the Batarian's naval forces, cripple the Batarian's economy by smashing most their factors, rescue as many slaves as practical, and then leave. They just don't have the spaceships, let alone the raw manpower, to actually try to hold and occupy Batarian space. Especially since the Terminus has made it clear how they feel about the idea of land grabs:
Odds are the Alliances goals for this war are:
The Alliance has done the smart move in any 4X game; claim as much territory as you can as fast as you can and then develop it as you can. There are dozens of tiny colonies that mostly just exist to push the Alliance's borders outwards. In centuries they will be filled with people and represent massive economic boons but for now they are basically outposts depending upon government support.
In an ideal world the Alliance would take advantage of this war to claim as large a swath of Batarian territory as possible. More territory almost always better. Thing is that almost is there for a reason; if you can't hold your territory it becomes a net loss for you.
So my expectation is that the Alliance will go in; obliterate the Batarian's naval forces, cripple the Batarian's economy by smashing most their factors, rescue as many slaves as practical, and then leave. They just don't have the spaceships, let alone the raw manpower, to actually try to hold and occupy Batarian space. Especially since the Terminus has made it clear how they feel about the idea of land grabs:
Odds are the Alliances goals for this war are:
- Cripple Batarian naval forces to prevent future attacks and slave raids.
- Recover as many (primarily human) slaves as possible.
- Force as harsh reparations upon the Batarians as possible to exploit their larger manpower.