Why not make a dedicated torpedo frigate though? Fighter/Bombers are a pretty space inefficient way to store torpedos
We use aircraft carriers at sea because plans have a much higher speed than boats and a much greater range than guns which means they have a larger area they can control and attack than a battleship.
I don't think its particularly clear this advantage is maintained in space, or at least they seem to be significantly reduced.
I think that's what was being modeled in the previous picture, where Javelin multi-rack disruptor torpedo launchers were being added to a frigate in an attempt to make a dedicated torpedo frigate. Not sure if it works in practice, though, because eezo cores become exponentially more expensive for linear increases in ship size, plus the frigates need to have living space for multiple personnel, where fighters keep all that in the handy box they're carried around in (eg. the Carrier).
And yet the Javelin launchers still exist. Maybe they were some REMF Admiral's bright idea and he used his clout to make them happen regardless of practicality; that'd fit a human navy pretty well.
AIUI, the electric charge buildup comes from the Eezo drive core, not collisions with space debris.
That said, it ought to be simple to solve the charge buildup issue. It's not clear from ME what they mean by 'charge buildup' exactly, but there are only 3 options I can think of, and all of them have simple solutions:
I think what's happening is that generating a negative mass field requires feeding electrons into a mass effect core. Which, as you say, is fine, because you just strip them off of a feeder stock of hydrogen and vent the protons as part of your hydrogen torch... right up until you want to slow down and
stop generating the negative mass field, and then all the electrons you fed into the core for the past few days all come back out.
At the same time.
Yes, you
could just sit around gradually venting electrons
out of the core the same way you were introducing them, but that generally requires sitting around for the same amount of time that you were in FTL, venting electrons and doing basically nothing else, spending a day venting electrons for every day you spent in FTL, effectively doubling your travel time.
Or you can hook a large cable to the hull of your ship, head over to a gas giant, and create the mother of all lightning bolts, letting you get back to FTL in a few minutes/hours rather than days.
Important Question for all of you.
What is Revy's Superpower?
[...]
So question 3, what seems to be the common theme to all your tech ideas?
I've kind of discussed this before, but I wanted to put this into the wider thread to see what others thought of it: like MCU Tony Stark, Revy's superpower is building crazy technologies
into suits, specifically.
One thing I suggest is just wholesale doing away with the gateway techs for suits, the whole "Mark 1.5/2/3/X" thing, and rule that being able to integrate new technologies into Iron Man-style suits is just something Revy does as part of her creative/innovative process. The idea then becomes that, instead of power armors being a
separate project, it just
is the thing we build, and then sort of extract the technology inside the suit we built for use in other formats.
For example, say we invest in Quantum Entanglement Comms this quarter, like most of us want to, to counter the whole "Comm buoy got hacked -> we're cut off from the galaxy" issue. When the research is complete, what that
means is that Revy finishes building the Mark 35, "Hermes" suit, with an integrated QEComm suite that can communicate back to her home lab from anywhere in the galaxy in real time, and that we can now extract the technology
out of the suit for use in other products. This would apply for basically every technology we create that isn't a ship-scale weapon or alien biotech project.
I think this will help bring the quest back to being more like an Iron Man crossover, rather than it being a more generic "super-genius in Mass Effect" quest. We're in the weird position right now that we just plain don't have the time to invest in what most players realize is a vanity project, and so the Mark 2 keeps getting pushed back; it's starting to cause friction among the player base, and sort of takes away from the whole "Revy is Iron Maiden" vibe we were trying to create in the first place. By tightly integrating the technology tree with the creation of new armors we can get back the Iron Man vibe and reduce that perennial complaint. It'd involve a bit of a retcon, although I should note that we generally
have integrated new technologies into various suits as we've created them, such as the Invisible Man being made into a stealth suit (that Kasumi promptly stole!).
As a sort of side note, I'm also imagining that Revy has a similar attitude to Edna Mode when it comes to her own products, which is why we have such a ridiculous product development cycle compared to other, saner companies (and why we, unlike other companies, simply can't spare the time to build single-product specialized factories to make our products more efficiently, as it just makes Revy super-bored, and a super-bored Revy leads to a Revy that
builds weaponized toasters and
burns down her kitchen):
"Shepard, the 5th fleet would like to order a hundred Light Laser Pyndas..."
"The Pynda is a hobo ship, Admiral. It's last year's model; it was fine back then, but now? Pfeh."
"Wh- What do you mean? You designed and built it."
"I never look back, Admiral; it distracts from the now. You'll need a new ship entirely, that's for certain."
"A new ship?"
"I'm glad you asked, Admiral. I'd like to introduce you to the Cabira
stealth frigate..."
trying to brainstorm new stuff for tech tree and adding prereqs to certain items.
I've long been suggesting that we add the
Unibeam as an additional, separate weapon technology track, both to add a more Tony Stark feel to the quest and to give Revy a very powerful personal weapon that is uniquely hers (or maybe hers and her fellow research heros'):
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.
Other things to consider:
- Adding levels to our base Repulsor tech, to add more "go fast" options.
- Either doing away with or severely cutting down on the RP cost for larger ship technologies; the technology on those isn't that different from smaller ones so much as the cost and scaling.
- Adding nanite tech, now that MCU Tony deployed it in two movies, so we can have nanite suits.
