Shepard Quest Mk VII, Age of Revy (ME/MCU)

[newwriter]

So instead of trying to cure the Genophage we really should modify their birthing capabilities, in a much more humane way of course, so that they are only able to reproduce at the same rate as the average as every other race.

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As I said before, we can debate the Genophage all day. I just believe we shouldn't force an external solution on Krogan like the Salarians and Turians did with the Genophage. At the very least, any solution for the Genophage needs to have Krogan participation before any talk of invasive treatments on the Krogan without their consent or knowledge. There is a reason why the Krogan don't trust Salarian doctors and I don't blame them. Talks of limiting Krogan births sound good in practice, but to a Krogan it is really offensive and degrading to have an altered Genophage forced on you by outsiders who believe they are better suited to solve your issues, especially a species-wide trauma such as the Genophage. And we know that the Krogan Female Clans tend to favor diplomatic solutions due to their experience in using diplomacy to protect themselves and young krogan children from the males. So Krogan Female Clans would likely be interested in working with PI if we treat them respectfully.

In any case, I just mentioned the Genophage as an example of the sort of activities we could be doing outside of the law. We could be doing illegal AI research. After all, we already have an illegal AI, that would be destroyed if anyone outside of PI found out. Or we could use a secret research base to analyze technology from other races. Or to secretly conduct relations wth the Geth using Cortana as an ambassador etc.

 

[Mannan]

Isn't part of the Issue the Krogans themselves?

For all the horror of the Genophage it actually just lowered their fertility to match the standard level of population growth in all civilization.

Its just the Krogan are culturally not interested in salvaging their situation. Wrex tried to fix it, but even he has given up before Shepard managed to inspire him to try again.

 

[newwriter]

Isn't part of the Issue the Krogans themselves?

For all the horror of the Genophage it actually just lowered their fertility to match the standard level of population growth in all civilization.

Its just the Krogan are culturally not interested in salvaging their situation. Wrex tried to fix it, but even he has given up before Shepard managed to inspire him to try again.

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Not exactly, but I get why you think that. The Genophage was designed to bring the Krogan to pre-industrial population growth. So even with the Genophage, the Krogan population should be growing just with a lot of dead babies (because the babies who would have died to predators in the Pre-industrial age are now dying in the womb). But rises in the Krogan population are deliberately countered by STG by the introduction of new versions of the Genophage. And Krogan fatalism and lack of care for their future brings the Krogan population down further.

Also, what the Genophage does on paper is one thing, seeing it in practice is another. As the Genophage in practice only enables a few Krogan females to be able to have viable births while the vast majority of Krogan males and females literally have little to no chance of having a baby as most Krogan pregnancies end in still births. This trauma, aka the realization that you can't start a family, is what causes many Krogan to just give up on their future and focus on satisfying their urge for battle and fighting.

It also has forced female Krogan clans to isolate themselves for their safety and breeding privileges are carefully controlled.

 

[Dark as Silver]

I like the implication that we're building with the expectation of growth.

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Erm, this goes beyond the expectation of growth. That would be like "Excess capacity for 10 years"

Any current human colonies could migrate their whole population onto one tiny satelite and at least half the space would be empty, on average 90% of it would be.

The population of the largest ones, the one that we are actually basing those tiny satellites above would be a total of about 24Million, with some assumptions (I didn't find pop numbers for Dementer and Mindoir so I went for 4M since that seems to be common for Garden World colonies, and Acturas appears to be a military base with no permanent civilian habitation so they would have a population close enough to a rounding error that we can ignore them.)
All of these combined could be relocated onto the central hub and 2/3rds of it would still be unused.

Using Eden Primes growth number of Eden Prime and assuming that its two dots of an exponential growth, EP is not likely to exceed 10M pop before 2205. 30 years from now, at which point this station will be such old clunky tech Revy would probably have wanted to replace it years ago, and 20 years after the Reaper war.
And this assumes that everyone only wants to live on the PI space station rather than on the Garden World they called Eden.

I really cannot overstress:

urban explorers abandoned liminal space dream

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E:
Wait, the population of the Citadel is 13 million! Oh wow Arcologies need to be nerfed.

 

[UberJJK]

I am also not aware of any laws and any regulation will have a damn hard time keeping pace with Revy, however like the Zumas, I do think its worth asking if we want to regulate ourselves, so that we don't have to deal with the SA attempting to regulate us.

Yeah Arcologies are so big that when our smallest unit is half a New York, any space station we were going to make was always going to be an urban explorers abandoned liminal space dream. That probably ought to be rebalanced, but even reduced to 1% of its current amount it would still be more than sufficient.
Broadly I guess I'm against overbuilding station capacity because I dislike the vibe of wastefulness more than I think its really going to impact our competitiveness. If theres one thing that kills the coolness of a giant space station for me its imagining the maintenance worker who has to cover miles and miles of uninhabited arcology for no other reason than its there. You are right, Space stations are cheap, its those darn expensive ME drives that realistically would be the major cost in all of this.

I'd make an adjustment for your charging expectations, the ships probably won't be running at 100% capacity full time so probably worth adjusting that. Even so $70 to move a cubic meter is pretty cheap. This is why in ME, Space Elevators aren't competetive.
And it seems unreasonable to expect the average colonist to need to ship 23 cubic meters of stuff per day or spend 310,000 per year so I think your plan is significantly over servicing the market.

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E:
Wait, the population of the Citadel is 13 million! Oh wow Arcologies need to be nerfed.

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If we were talking about weaponized starships I'd agree that we should be proactive about self-regulation. However we're talking about purely defensive technology here. I could certainly see an argument for dropping the Plaustrum down to lower tier defenses but the Carpentum are for transporting up to 31.6k people. Putting that many people on a ship with anything but our best defense is hard to justify even inside the relative safety of human space.

For Arcologies I'd say the problem is they are listed as a Size 1 building for some reason. Given their size:

Fits 10 million people, 100 stories tall.

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200 sq km foundation, eezo helps

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For reference 200km^2 is a radius of ~8km while the Citadel (which is highly space inefficient) is 6.4km radius but 44.7km long compared to the 100 stories or ~430m.

As for the question of over-servicing the market; I (obviously) disagree. To begin with while I can see how you got 23m^3/day that is comparing apples and oranges. In that example I determined what each ship would need to charge to pay for the entire operation (assuming all ships at 100% capacity which isn't likely but serves to set a floor). The Carpentum only comes with 1.4m^3 of cargo for its passengers . The Plaustrum meanwhile is a pure cargo vessel transporting 716,800m^3 of cargo and intended for interplanetary commerce not something sold directly to the general public since it is effectively a space container ship.

While initially I expect there probably would be an oversupply as there is both the existing shipping capacity and the fact I based the target cargo capacity off Australia (26 million people) which is significantly larger (population wise) then our colonies. This whole project is in effect a gamble of "if you build it they will come" in that the goal is to increase migration from Earth and out to the colonies by lowering the boundaries to access. While there will obviously have to be a fair amount of ramp-up my goal is moving a million colonists per colony per year. Which is a lot for the colonies (currently in the single digit millions) but compared to the overpopulation on Earth is nothing. We're talking over a century to hit the first billion at that rate.

If we get into a situation (Batarian War 2, Reaper War, Attack of the Geth etc) where we feel the need to militarize these ships, how difficult would that be? Would we just need to put them in the yard for a few weeks while we add reinforcing spars and replace comfortable sheets with regulation itchy ones, or are we better of building dedicated troop transports and/or military cargo ships?



I know this is a long shot, but I don't suppose we have an idea what the value of a single credit is per person in setting? Like, is 1 credit worth 1 soyburger? Does the average factory worker on Terra earn 10,000 credits/year but spend it all on rent and food? Because if we can say something like 'for the price of a happy meal you can have a new life on New Eden' that'd run good advertisements, y'know?

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Probably not possible to militarize these ships since the Military tag is a straight 50x multiplier on cost and Production to represent everything being built to handle the rigors of combat. At that point laying in the sort of redundancies, hardening, increased tolerances, ect that are representing by the 50x multiplier means it is probably easier to just build a whole new ship. Or accept you are flying in a tin can with weapon slapped on.

Roughly speaking a credit equivalent to a US Dollar from back in 2014 when we were running the math on all this stuff. Your average factory worker on Earth is probably bringing something in something like 40k/yr. So a trip to the colonies is a week or two's wages.

Uh, the issue with fixing the Genophage completely is the fact that Krogans as a whole haven't really changed or learned their lesson. In fact IIRC if either Eve or Wrex are dead a number of issues including potentially going on to launch another Krogan conquest. And people have talked about giving them the Peak treatment that would pretty much turn them all into Grunt the super Krogan. Which would be really goddamn bad for everyone involved if they pull their canon shenanigans.

It's also a serous issue since we also have the Eternal Youth treatments as an unlock. We literally seen how things turned out when the Krogan's population exploded in canon leading to the Krogan rebellions. Throw in the peak treatments and eternal youth research and that's guaranteed to cause a long term issue due to the whole 1000 kids per clutch thing.

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While I generally agree that the Krogan need a more humane Genophage (because as is mountains of stillborns is too culturally devastating) Eternal Youth isn't really an issue here. Remember the Krogan are already standing alongside the Asari as the longest living species in the galaxy (both top 1,000 years).

 

[Dark as Silver]

If we were talking about weaponized starships I'd agree that we should be proactive about self-regulation. However we're talking about purely defensive technology here

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So there is a reason for restricting even defensive technology. And thats that it actually makes it much easier for other people to scout out their weaknesses.
The fact that we're at an all out war with the batarians kinda removed the most likely person to do this, however its still actually fairly easy to imagine the STG handing a bunch of missiles to some pirates and saying "Fire these at one of those and we'll pay you for the recording even if you don't manage to steal anything."
Against a military vessel thats a very difficult gamble to get away with as they're going to be shooting back and not on publicly posted regularly scheduled delivery routes, but its near 0 risk against a civilian... Unless you're also doing it in range of their heavily armed station.

As far as build it and they will come, have we confirmed that the reason colony growth is so slow is that people can't afford to move rather than 90% of the planets surface is owned by a techno feudalist farming company who aren't really interested in importing more workers than they need to manage the farms?

 

[Red Bovine]

E:
Wait, the population of the Citadel is 13 million! Oh wow Arcologies need to be nerfed.

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Eh, The Citadel is impressive for multiple reasons instead of just being able to house over ten million people. So I think it's fine as is, especially considering that a single arcology would only be able to house a mere fraction of most races populations with humanity itself having around 10 billion.

As far as build it and they will come, have we confirmed that the reason colony growth is so slow is that people can't afford to move rather than 90% of the planets surface is owned by a techno feudalistic farming company who aren't really interested in importing more workers than they need to manage the farms?

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I'm pretty sure it was confirmed multiple times that there are indeed multiple factors for why it's so expensive and work intensive for people to move. Also don't think the SA is willing to just sell off human planets to corporations since it's a plot point that the SA and by extension humanity wants to expand far and wide to increase their influence on a wide scale and habitable planets are extremely rare. Not to mention I imagine that most companies don't buy planets due to how obscenely expensive they are with only exceptions like PI doing so, especially since imagine that it's not actually practical for many companies.

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.

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I wouldn't be sure of that, couldn't we just work with colonies and the SA to be able to export more people without as much issues? Like planets are freaking and can house tens of billions of people. It doesn't seem like if we handled things right that moving something like 10 million people to a colony over something like 2 years could be that problematic.

 

[Hellteddy]

I like the idea of a PI Logistics & Busing division.
It would speed up the growth of colonies massively, especially if it is cheap transport.
As for the tiny space stations holding 10million people, couldn't we rent out or sell space on the stations to the planetary government, the SA, shops, tourist attractions, other companies/corpos ect? (This will probably all be narrative)

 

[w34v3r]

As far as a secret illegal research base: I'm not seeing the utility, we're on the path to getting an A.I. licence so unless that gets rejected I don't see a reason to do that research there. The genophage cure/solution would have to be done with a lot of other people in the loop, so secrecy isn't going to be a thing there either. That leaves other sensitive projects which we mostly don't want to do for other reasons. Like we're not gonna create our own adeptus astartes after all, and if we find the rachni we're not gonna want to try to make them Into a weaponized slave species. I could see the value of such a facility if the council rejects our A.I. application, but even then I'd want to wait 1d10 years and 1d12 months before starting in on it to prevent snoops from noticing patterns.

 

[Silversun17]

So if our shipping frim is as successful as we hope what I'd we partner with a Volus to help set up companies with simular set ups in the various citadel nations?

The idea is that rather then own those companies paragon and thr Volus would get a cut of the profits till the equipment and investment is paid off. This is important because it makes it politically safe for the various national governments to use their services or even subsidize them if they are supporting under-serviced regions.

(Remember, most shipping companies make more profits from densely populated areas then less populated ones so most will skimp on those less populated worlds, the Paragon logistics set up being proposed would ensure every world has a base level of shipping)

 

[Red Bovine]

Erm, this goes beyond the expectation of growth. That would be like "Excess capacity for 10 years"

Any current human colonies could migrate their whole population onto one tiny satelite and at least half the space would be empty, on average 90% of it would be.

The population of the largest ones, the one that we are actually basing those tiny satellites above would be a total of about 24Million, with some assumptions (I didn't find pop numbers for Dementer and Mindoir so I went for 4M since that seems to be common for Garden World colonies, and Acturas appears to be a military base with no permanent civilian habitation so they would have a population close enough to a rounding error that we can ignore them.)
All of these combined could be relocated onto the central hub and 2/3rds of it would still be unused.

Using Eden Primes growth number of Eden Prime and assuming that its two dots of an exponential growth, EP is not likely to exceed 10M pop before 2205. 30 years from now, at which point this station will be such old clunky tech Revy would probably have wanted to replace it years ago, and 20 years after the Reaper war.
And this assumes that everyone only wants to live on the PI space station rather than on the Garden World they called Eden.

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First off yeah, realistically imagine that a lot of people just aren't interested in living on space stations. What with their being plenty of habitable planets with plenty of space. And unlike places like the Citadel they would lack the prestige that places like the Citadel has.

Second long term it's going to be unappealing to the SA I imagine. Sure certain space stations can house a few million people but the issue becomes long term in that the human population is going to keep growing. To give an example IIRC a century ago we had a population of two billion people, today it's eight billion. Meaning that in a century the human population quadrupled and this is not taking into account Pi's new medical technology increasing human lifespan, increased access to medical technology and peak treatments making it far harder for humans to be killed in accidents.

Basically the issue I see with using space stations to house the increasing human population is that it's really just not practical compared to planet side growth. If you say filled a station of 10 million with 2 million than the capacity could be filled in potentially just around 2 decades, at which point any excess population is going to need to move or they are going to need to spend a lot of money to expand any stations. Now imagine doing this for billions of people every few decades.

Meanwhile it would be far easier to expand populations on planets due to having tons of space to expand into. This also comes with the benefit of planet bound populations being able to be more independent and self sufficient

 

[Silversun17]

First off yeah, realistically imagine that a lot of people just aren't interested in living on space stations. What with their being plenty of habitable planets with plenty of space. And unlike places like the Citadel they would lack the prestige that places like the Citadel has.

Second long term it's going to be unappealing to the SA I imagine. Sure certain space stations can house a few million people but the issue becomes long term in that the human population is going to keep growing. To give an example IIRC a century ago we had a population of two billion people, today it's eight billion. Meaning that in a century the human population quadrupled and this is not taking into account Pi's new medical technology increasing human lifespan, increased access to medical technology and peak treatments making it far harder for humans to be killed in accidents.

Basically the issue I see with using space stations to house the increasing human population is that it's really just not practical compared to planet side growth. If you say filled a station of 10 million with 2 million than the capacity could be filled in potentially just around 2 decades, at which point any excess population is going to need to move or they are going to need to spend a lot of money to expand any stations. Now imagine doing this for billions of people every few decades.

Meanwhile it would be far easier to expand populations on planets due to having tons of space to expand into. This also comes with the benefit of planet bound populations being able to be more independent and self sufficient

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What if we took the space arcologies and cut the population capacity in half in favor of addional industrial/shipping capacity? We park one in orbit of a planet and it acts as a port for larger transports while also keeping the more polluting industries off the planet.

 

[Red Bovine]

What if we took the space arcologies and cut the population capacity in half in favor of addional industrial/shipping capacity? We park one in orbit of a planet and it acts as a port for larger transports while also keeping the more polluting industries off the planet.

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Feels like that would be pretty impractical considering we have space factories specifically for industry.

 

[Silversun17]

Feels like that would be pretty impractical considering we have space factories specifically for industry.

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These would be owned by and operated for the benfit of the colony they orbit, in short for us it would be a product to sell rather then an asset to use.

 

[w34v3r]

I like this idea.

We could make an entire product series to speed and ease expansion/creation of colonies.

 

[Dark as Silver]

Eh, The Citadel is impressive for multiple reasons instead of just being able to house over ten million people. So I think it's fine as is, especially considering that a single arcology would only be able to house a mere fraction of most races populations with humanity itself having around 10 billion.

I'm pretty sure it was confirmed multiple times that there are indeed multiple factors for why it's so expensive and work intensive for people to move. Also don't think the SA is willing to just sell off human planets to corporations since it's a plot point that the SA and by extension humanity wants to expand far and wide to increase their influence on a wide scale and habitable planets are extremely rare. Not to mention I imagine that most companies don't buy planets due to how obscenely expensive they are with only exceptions like PI doing so, especially since imagine that it's not actually practical for many companies.

I wouldn't be sure of that, couldn't we just work with colonies and the SA to be able to export more people without as much issues? Like planets are freaking and can house tens of billions of people. It doesn't seem like if we handled things right that moving something like 10 million people to a colony over something like 2 years could be that problematic.

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The citadel is impressive for many reasons, but lets be clear, the 10M population equivalent is a Tiny Space station. The citadel isn't quite so run of the mill in scale that its unsurprising our plan involves shitting out 7 stations of similar population capacity and one 6 times larger.

What if we took the space arcologies and cut the population capacity in half in favor of addional industrial/shipping capacity? We park one in orbit of a planet and it acts as a port for larger transports while also keeping the more polluting industries off the planet.

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The problem really is that the arcology is the smallest unit of abstraction we have.

 

[Red Bovine]

The citadel is impressive for many reasons, but lets be clear, the 10M population equivalent is a Tiny Space station. The citadel isn't quite so run of the mill in scale that its unsurprising our plan involves shitting out 7 stations of similar population capacity and one 6 times larger.

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Wasn't the Citadel actually one of the biggest space stations in the series?

 

[tri2]

Wasn't the Citadel actually one of the biggest space stations in the series?

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yes, which makes the fact that none of them made anything bigger a shame

 

[w34v3r]

Ok so now we have to put a bigger space station in orbit around every human world just to rub everyone's noses in it

 

[Hellteddy]

<Citadel News Network>
In the latest news out of the new race on the block, the eccentric genius human Rebecca Shepard has started construction on multiple new space stations dwarfing the Citadel itself!
The Hannar ambassador has been heard discussing the purchase of one of these 'Prophesied Holy Stations' for their home system with the System Alliance's ambassador, who'm denies any knowledge on the subject.
Paragon Industries announces its Universal Logistical Department, promising 'next day' deliveries to their customers.
The Council has announced a design contest for a new Capital station.
Cure for Drell Kepral's Syndrome announced!
Taurian Happiness Index has gone up 10% since the Humans came onto the galactic stage, coincidence or something more sinister?
Citadel Economic Boom, cheap energy and easy to construct modular facilities has lead to a minor boom in the mining sector.

 

[Red Bovine]

So I just remembered the ME story line where Mordin's old squadmate was secretely working with Krogans to undo the Genophage and ti got me thinking that that could be an interesting way to bring it to Revy's attention in story.

 

[Dark as Silver]

Wasn't the Citadel actually one of the biggest space stations in the series?

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Correct. Which is why this is darn weird.

 

[UberJJK]

So there is a reason for restricting even defensive technology. And thats that it actually makes it much easier for other people to scout out their weaknesses.

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That is a decent point. I'd say that is sufficent to justify dropping down to Cyclonic Barriers since we are already exporting those on the Zama.

Arcane Blur meanwhile I feel justified keeping on as it is a passive sensor baffling effect so simply observing ships equipped with it is sufficient to develop countermeasures. Plus we are going to be deploying Stasis Plating soon so it is about to become a last generation piece of technology anyway.

I wouldn't be sure of that, couldn't we just work with colonies and the SA to be able to export more people without as much issues? Like planets are freaking and can house tens of billions of people. It doesn't seem like if we handled things right that moving something like 10 million people to a colony over something like 2 years could be that problematic.

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Housing people isn't a problem. It is everything else that is the problem. If you double a planet's population then there are now twice as many people competing for the same jobs, twice as many people using the public infrastructure, twice as many people consuming goods and services, ect. While such things would naturally balance out over time, more people means more jobs producing more stuff, the initial shock could cause serious issues. Hence why it is something that would need to be carefully managed to begin with but because less of a problem over time.

What if we took the space arcologies and cut the population capacity in half in favor of addional industrial/shipping capacity? We park one in orbit of a planet and it acts as a port for larger transports while also keeping the more polluting industries off the planet.

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Every colony of note already has multiple Paragon Industries Space Factories in orbit producing OOMs more goods then we can/do on the ground. So right now it feels rather redundant.

The citadel is impressive for many reasons, but lets be clear, the 10M population equivalent is a Tiny Space station. The citadel isn't quite so run of the mill in scale that its unsurprising our plan involves shitting out 7 stations of similar population capacity and one 6 times larger.

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Honestly I can only assume either the Citadel has major immigration controls or that the canonical number is just wrong. The interior area of the Citadel is something on the order of 990km^2. Now while that honestly isn't much in terms of cities it is also worth remembering the Citadel's arms are 330m thick so easily fifty plus floors of living area in the arms themselves.

The Citadel should probably have ten times the population it canonically does.

 

[tri2]

Honestly I can only assume either the Citadel has major immigration controls or that the canonical number is just wrong. The interior area of the Citadel is something on the order of 990km^2. Now while that honestly isn't much in terms of cities it is also worth remembering the Citadel's arms are 330m thick so easily fifty plus floors of living area in the arms themselves.

The Citadel should probably have ten times the population it canonically does.

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that's assuming they can even get into the arms instead of only the surface layer and possible a sublevel or 2, not the whole thickness of the arm.

 

[Dark as Silver]

Honestly I can only assume either the Citadel has major immigration controls or that the canonical number is just wrong. The interior area of the Citadel is something on the order of 990km^2. Now while that honestly isn't much in terms of cities it is also worth remembering the Citadel's arms are 330m thick so easily fifty plus floors of living area in the arms themselves.

The Citadel should probably have ten times the population it canonically does.

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The eternal struggle of ME writers verses scale marches on.
Even if the citadel did get 10X'd we could still exceed it with a dedicated Medium station so I still think Arcologies need to be nerfed.