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I once had a fever dream of playing through the mass effect series as a biotic god volus.
I had another fever dream of being a salarian cyborg dreadnought.
Then lastly I was a flying powered armorer elcor
Shepard Quest Mk VII, Age of Revy (ME/MCU)
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I had another fever dream of being a salarian cyborg dreadnought.
Then lastly I was a flying powered armorer elcor
I wanna push Volus, they're the natural counter for the council to bring in should they end up giving us a seat, and they're the ones with the money and expertise to do something wacky like create a white collar crime division or something to count as their contribution to citadel defense, or use their financial wizardry to get the Turians a steady stream of Revytech ships on the cheap.
My fan theory is that the live ships that we see in-game. The huge ships that the Quarians used to grow their food were once colony ships that the Quarians used to transport colonists over long distances. The ships would be full of plants and animal life that existed on Rannoch due to the unique requirements of Quarian biology.
Yeah, Volus should be next citadel race we cater to. They may not be a council member, but they have large influence within the galactic economy and are also tied heavily with Tyrian's. It wouldn't hurt to have the Galaxy's bankers in our corner.
That was very likely true but the codex explains that the quarians did not put the effort into keeping those specimen alive during the first few years. They were convinced they could retake their homeworld and would not need them, so why waste recourcess on keeping them alive?
Codex explains that the Live Ships are full of hydroponic crops to feed the population. They can't keep animals because it is too unproductive. My idea is that the Live Ships, as colony ships, once had livestock before Exodus forced the Quarians to flee their homeworld and the Ships were turned into ultra-productive hydroponic farms.
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I mean the asari basically did that with one of their own super projects in canon, but just no real reason to with planets being plentiful
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But it would probably be less effort to make an equivalent amount of Space Factory III's
What's the Production cost for a Star Destroyer 2?
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no idea right now, will figure it out later.
Insane. An Imp II is 1.6km long so Super Dreadnought territory. You upscale a LLP to Super Dreadnought territory, for simplicity, and we're looking at ~650 million Production over eight quarters. For Comparison a Space Factory III outputs 30 million per quarter. Thus a Kuat Equivalent would need to be building 1,928 Super Dreadnoughts in parallel (that comes to 482 per two quarters aka ~6 months) requiring at least 964 Large Shipyards (possibly Mega Shipyards since Large are for Dreadnoughts not Super Dreadnoughts) to hold all those ships and 5,200 Space Factory IIIs to supply the Production required.
In short; not happening. Especially given each Space Factory III costs a trillion credits and each Super Dreadnought ~207 trillion credits. No one has the economy required to support such a project.
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really makes you realize how economically powerful the galactic empire really was considering it could feed and pay for such industrial output every year for like a decade from that one shipyard alone, let alone all the other shipyards across the empire, and that was just the navy.
If we want to get into large scale ship production the real play is upping our reputation with the Human Colony Worlds faction. We only have 15 Orbital Slots of the potential 40 we could have over all our colony worlds. That said I'm not sure how necessary it is.
Current planning has us on track for 1 Large Shipyard, 21 Medium Shipyards, and 36 Small Shipyards for an annual ship production of 2 Dreadnoughts, 168 Cruisers, and 864 Frigates. Using the LLP as a standard and scaling up to the larger size ships for simplicity, in reality we'd design our designs differently depending upon their role, gives 49,174,560 Production on Frigates, and 113,830,000 Production on Dreadnoughts. Cruisers are a little more complicated due to the two size classes but using a 1:10 split (15 Heavy Cruisers to 153 Light Cruisers) gives 172,452,450 Production. That is a total of 335,457,010 Production vs. the 996,000,000 Production that all our Space Factories output so easily affordable.
That is with basically all our Orbital Slots, outside Mindoir, filled out. If we want to increase our output we need more Orbital Slots for more Shipyards. Getting our HCW relation up to 81 (+7) gives us an extra five Orbital Slots per colony (+30) and 91 (+17) gives us an extra twenty five Orbital Slots per colony (+150). Even if we filled all the extra 30 Orbital Slots from reaching Friends with Medium Shipyards only adds an extra 256,117,500 Production so at 591,574,510 Production we'd still be ~60% capacity with all Shipyards going full bore so we'd need the full Allied status to really have a chance of filling our Production capacity.
At least if we maintain the roughly 1:10:100:1000 ratio for ship classes. If we shift things over to Heavy Cruisers then just the currently planned 21 Medium Shipyards outputting 168 Heavy Cruisers would easily fill most our Production budget at 956,172,000 Production. Of course this also raises the question of who exactly is paying for all these Warships. Each Heavy Cruiser LLP knock-off costs 1.8 trillion credits and has a break even sales price of 3.3 trillion credits. The above fleet (2 Dreadnoughts, 15 Heavy Cruisers, 153 Light Cruisers, and 864 Frigates) sells (at break even price) for 194.6 trillion credits which is noticeable amounts of GDP levels of money.
Current planning has us on track for 1 Large Shipyard, 21 Medium Shipyards, and 36 Small Shipyards for an annual ship production of 2 Dreadnoughts, 168 Cruisers, and 864 Frigates. Using the LLP as a standard and scaling up to the larger size ships for simplicity, in reality we'd design our designs differently depending upon their role, gives 49,174,560 Production on Frigates, and 113,830,000 Production on Dreadnoughts. Cruisers are a little more complicated due to the two size classes but using a 1:10 split (15 Heavy Cruisers to 153 Light Cruisers) gives 172,452,450 Production. That is a total of 335,457,010 Production vs. the 996,000,000 Production that all our Space Factories output so easily affordable.
That is with basically all our Orbital Slots, outside Mindoir, filled out. If we want to increase our output we need more Orbital Slots for more Shipyards. Getting our HCW relation up to 81 (+7) gives us an extra five Orbital Slots per colony (+30) and 91 (+17) gives us an extra twenty five Orbital Slots per colony (+150). Even if we filled all the extra 30 Orbital Slots from reaching Friends with Medium Shipyards only adds an extra 256,117,500 Production so at 591,574,510 Production we'd still be ~60% capacity with all Shipyards going full bore so we'd need the full Allied status to really have a chance of filling our Production capacity.
At least if we maintain the roughly 1:10:100:1000 ratio for ship classes. If we shift things over to Heavy Cruisers then just the currently planned 21 Medium Shipyards outputting 168 Heavy Cruisers would easily fill most our Production budget at 956,172,000 Production. Of course this also raises the question of who exactly is paying for all these Warships. Each Heavy Cruiser LLP knock-off costs 1.8 trillion credits and has a break even sales price of 3.3 trillion credits. The above fleet (2 Dreadnoughts, 15 Heavy Cruisers, 153 Light Cruisers, and 864 Frigates) sells (at break even price) for 194.6 trillion credits which is noticeable amounts of GDP levels of money.
Tangentially related, but do you think the SA Navy will want us to design a Dreadnought for them once the revised treaty is out or are they likely to want to keep pushing LLPs to cover more ground, hunt pirates and get a crop of personnel trained up as spacers before doing more expansion?
I'm wondering if setting up some sort of naval depot stations in the colony regions to act both as logistics and maintenance hubs, personnel transfer points and communications nodes (QEC might fit on a Dreadnought but it may be more useful to fit them on planets and stations first to help with patrols and coordination). Maybe a dry dock slip that can make repairs on an LLP in pressurized atmosphere go easier?
What would we need to do to improve our relations with them further? I get the feeling we're more or less in the same political camp and 'get more jobs and investment' seems a reasonable course of action but I doubt it'll be as simple as "throw thirty billion credits at the problem and get another +2", what do the various worlds need or want to see?
How well served are other polities for shipbuilding? Do the various Terminus worlds need more ships than they have? I don't believe they're all pirate states, and I can imagine there's some call for some sort of armed merchantman traffic between them due to the risk of piracy. I know there's a boom on exploration and colonization due to being able to lego some hab units together and add an engine for cheap and the construction of cheap base buildings, but what about reducing the cost of civilian ships? Heck, what about building Eezo production facilities so the most expensive and inelastic cost becomes a lot cheaper all of a sudden?
Also, how likely are the politicians to want to throttle naval expansion now that the war is won and they obviously don't need any more ships? Is there anything we could do to help fund the expansion of the navy in peacetime (beyond 'pay taxes' and 'build the ships')?
Post-war predictions regarding the Alliance is basically impossible at this point because so much depends upon how that plays out.
The Systems Alliance is in many ways a deeply xenophobic nation (See: Cerberus & Terra Firma) but it also has good reason to be so. The first encounter with alien life was when they destroyed a human starship and conducted a brutal military conquest of one of our colonies with the clear intent to render us into a vassal state. Anyone with any vague understanding of history knows how terrible that would have been for humanity. Fortunately we successfully repelled them, although only after the colony had been forced into surrender, at which point we were saved from all out war, which we'd have likely lost, by the Citadel Council intervening.
Right away this establishes us as almost being enslaved as a species by one of the leading nations of Citadel Space. This is immediately followed up by tensions with the Batarian Hegemony a race of slavers who protest our expansion into what they perceive as "their territory" and begin preying upon humanity. Raiding our colonies and enslaving our people.
In short humanity's history with intersellar relations basically boil down to "everyone out there wants to enslave us!!!". Hence why the constant massive military expansion going on ever since the First Contact War; a perceived need to defend ourselves against outside threats. Except now things are changing.
If this war goes well for us the Alliance will have defeated their number one threat (the Hegemony), proven their military capabilities against an ancient space-faring civilization (their first contact was back in the days of the Roman Republic), and earned the respect of the Turians they are fighting alongside. That should serve to significantly counteract the sense of fear towards the outside that has driven a lot of the Alliance's military build up and general actions over the last few decades. If we get a seat on the Council well that will only further increase the effect.
Alternately if the war doesn't go well and turns into a grueling slog well it will only reinforce the idea that the Alliance isn't safe and we need to not only rebuild but do so bigger and better. Similarly that seat on the Council could provoke more military spending to try and bring the Alliance up to the standard of the other Council Races.
In short it is really too early to tell.
As for navel depots; in a way we've already established those. If you look at the Galaxy Map on the front page we basically already have the core of Alliance territory covered with our existing facilities. We've got the Petra Nebula (Elysium), Arcturus Stream (Benning), Local Cluster (Demeter), and Exodus Cluster (Eden Prime and Terra Nova). We've also got the Citadel Space fallback position covered by Bekenstein's position within the Serpent Nebula. Soon we'll have the Horse Head Nebula with our future base on Amaranthine.
Interestingly Mindoir's location is hilariously far away from everything else we've invested in. While we don't have a canonical system we do know it is in the "Attican Traverse". If I had to pick I'd say it is in the Shadow Sea Cluster (same as Horizon) since there is a regular shuttle route to Ilium and Shadow Sea is the closest Cluster to the Crescent Nebula (where Illium is) occupied by humanity; just two Relays (Shadow Sea -> Omega Nebula -> Crescent Nebula) away. The fact it is directly connected to Omega makes it being the target of a Batarian slaving raid so easy and believable.
Honestly I've got no idea. The only major human extra-solar colony we don't have a presence on is Trident and on all the colonies we have facilities we've done our best to increase their safety and security as well as (presumably) bringing plenty of credits, and possibility even jobs, into the economy. Maybe helping them expand and exporting new colonists from Earth? Establishing cheaper travel and shipping with a large fleet of starliners?
The Terminus Systems are all pirate states in a sense. They are all nations that reject the laws of Citadel Space. They, for one reason or another, are places that have decided the laws under which the Citadel governs most of known space are unacceptable to them. This of course makes any form of trade with them difficult as they are all, in a sense, criminals under Council law and I'd be shocked if they weren't under various sanctions and embargoes as a result. This is of course before getting into the fact that the Terminus worlds are heavily backing the Batarian Hegemony, as they are the sole major power friendly to the Terminus, in the current war so in a way they are also enemies of the Systems Alliance.
Eezo production may or may not actually help that much when it comes to Starship costs for Paragon Industries. Our ships are already significantly cheaper then normal because we can use lower purity Eezo in our cores due to improved FTL designs. The biggest expense in our ships is actually down to the Kinetic Barriers. On the LLP for example the Warp Barriers represent 7.8 billion of the 18.2 billion construction cost and 24,414 of the 56,915 of the Production cost or ~40% the credits and Production of the unit goes into its Kinetic Barriers. Figuring out how to lower the resources there is the next big drive towards lower starship prices.
As for how well everyone else is served when it comes to shipbuilding; I have to assume they have most of what they need considering every other major player has been around for centuries longer then humanity has been on the scene. That said we do have some game changer technology here that in theory could change things but in practice probably won't.
The first is of course one of our oldest pieces of tech; the humble Repulsor. It literally triples the range of starships by increasing the ship's speed. Before the best a ship could do was 31.3LY before needing to discharge but that required boosting your engine thrust with anti-matter a limited consumable; without that you were down to just 20.8LY. A Repulsor equipped ship meanwhile can go 62.5LY between discharges with no fuel usage (besides power). This significantly increases the range of starships, makes more distant colonies viable, and improves travel times due to straighter paths. It is also a restricted technology limited to just the Systems Alliance Navy and Paragon Industries subsidiaries.
The second is Multi-Core FTL drives. While this doesn't come with the speed boost it instead comes with unlimited range. Want to travel from Earth to Noveria without using the Relays? Now you can. Sure at 10LY/day (best that can be done without Repulsors or anti-matter) it will be a long trip taking nearly four years to cover the 1,375LY to the Horsehead Nebula but it can be done. This opens up massive chunks of galaxy that were previously difficult to reach (no good locations to discharge) or just too long (when you add in discharge time) to be worth traveling to. It also isn't restricted yet. It almost certainly will be though when we reveal it given the massive strategic implications.
... uh? Don't you mean 137.5 days?
...yes. I rewrote that section a couple times with different examples so I guess I forgot to divide through by the 10LY/day in the final version. So yeah; a bit over four and a half months makes that a far more reasonable (although still unnecessary) trip.
I'm going to quibble this part at least; while I don't deny that several worlds are likely pirate bases that grew too large to be kept secret and too profitable to dismantle, I imagine there are other polities there like the nice folks we traded with who gave us some good drugs who prefer remaining independent of Citadel control without actively being a menace to society. A failure to accept the laws of Citadel Space doesn't automatically make you a pirate, it makes you an independent polity. (Raiding your neighbors for shiny things makes you a pirate)
My suggestion was to put forth some effort separating the wheat from the chaff and do a little to promote the interests of the 'you aren't the boss of me' worlds at the expense of the 'we have you now my pretties' worlds.
I'm guessing the SA Navy would prefer a bit more separation between "PI facilities" and "Navy facilities", but you have a point about us seeding the area with resupply options (even if accidentally? I'm not great at stellar cartography), but I suppose that for the duration of the war making due makes sense.
I like the idea of shipping in colonists from Terra. It disperses the human population so we lose less if 'Terra go kaboom' happens and it shifts political weight out towards the colonies. I'm thinking something cruiser-weight that can be converted to a troop transport in wartime (not sure how much conversion is really necessary if you're not expecting to get shot at or drop soldiers directly onto Normandy Beach). Would the SA let us go the 'stick repulsors on it, make it go vroom' route or would they want us to make the ships go the same speed as everyone else? I'm thinking we talk to colonies and say something like "we want to encourage migration here and are willing to pony up free transportation and jobs for 10% of migrants in the following fields, do you want to help sweeten the pot with land grants, tax breaks or similar considerations?" I don't know how many takers we'd get but I get the feeling that we're more likely to get takers if we start the talks early (before the end of the war) and give people time to mull it over and get ducks in a row.
"Energy shields redesign" a potential new tech then, do you think? Shake things up on the defensive front for a while?
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This is a bit of an incorrect statement, ME does paint with a broad brush so its kinda true, but its also like describing the USA as a lawless zone which denies the enlightened rulership of the EU.
Different laws aren't necessarily an inability to cooperate. Theres a wide spectrum of possibilities from "We'd love to be in the Council but the only way to access us goes through Relays that are controlled by factions who do not." to "Our laws align 90% of the time but we culturally we reject the 10% of differences, hope we can work together on the rest" and ending at "Yar har fiddle dee dee..."
We don't really have a good idea what travel times are like in Mass Effect. So I'm going to make some numbers up. A normal civilian transport ship probably does something like 6LY/day. That is the sweatspot when it comes to speed vs. price from my fiddling with the ship designer and limited to civilian grade technology. Lets say colonies are within two weeks of travel from Earth (using Relays as basically instant hops so they don't matter much here). I'll also be assuming these colonies are in relatively prime locations, given humanity hasn't really had the time needed to start expanding to sub-prime locations in our area, so discharge times are fairly negligible.
That gives a maximum trip distance of 2,016LY. A transport from Paragon Industries even without Repulsors meanwhile can do 12LY/day dropping the trip down to one week of travel. We could do faster speeds with purer Eezo cores but without the additional multiplier of Repulsors the extra cost just isn't worth it.
A Heavy Cruiser configured to transport colonies comfortably (VIP Transport rather then Bulk which is more troop transport) carries 31,680 people while still being able to allocate ~1.4m^3 of cargo per person (~10 Extra Large Suitcases). With a maximum two week round trip such a ship could transport a minimum 800,000 people per year.
An Arcology can hold up to 10 million people. So with a even dozen such ships we could fill an Arcology of people per year. Wouldn't you know it it takes people, outside PI, about a year to build an Arcology.
That said the real problem here is ensuring we don't collapse the colony's economy when doing this sort of thing. As I outlined in this post most the Alliance's existing colonies have historically averaged around 100k new people per year. So a hundredfold increase to ten million people per year is probably not survivable. Especially when you look at the existing colonies (ignoring the top four for being outliers in a lot of ways) they are all in the single digit millions. With support a million people per year might be sustainable but certainly not more then that.
So I'd say we can at most assign just one such transport ship per planet.
Cargo is an interesting one. If we look at Australia as an example of a small population (26 million) island where all trade must come via ship then it seems like a good matchup for our existing colonies. Australia has roughly eight million TEU of cargo flow through its ports each year. One TEU translates to 33.2m^3 of internal volume. If we convert over the above ship to pure cargo it carries 716,800m^3 of cargo or ~21,590 TEU. Assuming a decent amount of exports as imports that translates to 1.1 million TEU per year.
So an arrange of something like one passenger liner and nine cargo liners per major colony seems like a decent blend for boosting the mobility of goods and people throughout the Alliance. It wouldn't even be that expensive an operation at roughly 50 billion credits and 100k Production per ship.
While that sounds good the problem is that isn't really the direction shielding has been going. Every new piece of shielding technology we design is actually more expensive. Which makes sense because that is what keeps you, and the rest of your ship, alive so prioritizing improved resilience over anything else seems obvious.
This might be an area where Eezo production helps drive down costs but that is a massive RP sink so I doubt we'll be going for it anytime soon.
The thing to remember here is that the Baterians were a member of Citadel Space for over 2,300 years and practiced slavery the entire time. The standards for being an associate are pretty low with the main one we know about being don't deploy WMDs on garden worlds. Not don't use them at all but don't use them on worlds with functional biospheres.
The Litinana (IE: the nice drug people Slamu mentioned) their whole shtick is horrific bioweapons and they've committed total genocide on at least one known occasion:
emphasis mine.
Now that all said I'm sure there probably are some nice races they have managed to carve themselves out a safe space in the Terminus Systems. The problem is finding them, getting to them (Relay travel means you have to travel through all the not safe places), and convincing everyone on both sides that trade is worthwhile and legal. Oh and not making them a target for retaliatory strikes since we've already pissed off most the Terminus Systems.