Shepard Quest Mk VII, Age of Revy (ME/MCU)
- Thread starter tri2
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unlicensed and undeclared Eezo mining actually
Everyone does that.
- Location
- Leeds
Unfortunately not a strong legal defense.
But why are you asking
It was your plan? Why are you suggesting this plan if you think this no actual benefit the plan is getting us.
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Well I'm not so delusional as to think it'd never get out. I just didn't want to tell anyone as soon as we crack it. I want a few years, decades maybe, to prep for that announcement, because it's the kind of thing that will absolutely get assassins on our ass and one of them may actually be competent. I want to be in both a financial position to mitigate the inevitable wave of panicked stock brokers, and take advantage of it. I want us to have the infrastructure and logistics pipelines set up before people realize what they need to be looking for, I want a media blitz prepped to counter the inevitable PR attacks, and I want to have studies done that show that our version isn't gonna turn everyone into amphibians or give them eye cancer before they start demanding long medical trials to bog us down.
Unfortunately I'm not sure we could hide it that long. Or rather hide it while using it. Spaceship construction over an inhabited planet isn't something you can realistically hide. So every decent intelligence agency should know we built 28 LLP in 2174-Q3, 35 LLP in 2174-Q4, 9 LLP in 2175-Q1, 36 LLP in 2175-Q2, and 100 LLP in 2175-Q3. They would also be able to fairly reasonably know* roughly how much Eezo we ordered in each of those quarters. From that you can estimate the Eezo utilized per LLP.
*For example by tracking known Eezo transporters entering and leaving the system. Throw in some deceleration/acceleration measurements to estimate change in mass and you can calculate how much Eezo was delivered. Or for a more simple route they've just got pre-existing backdoors in the Eezo companies (because this is a priority target since it lets you estimate a nation's shipbuilding) and can just use their shipping manifests to get the data.
Any change in PI's Eezo imports without a corrosponding change in our LLP production would suggest we've found an alternate source. Incidentally this probably means it is already known, among the Intelligence communities anyway, that Paragon Industries has a way of building competative starships with less Eezo as our Eezo use is likely already highliy out of line with what it should be for the quantity of ship produced. This would be especially noticable with the Zuma being produced in Hanar Shipyards and thus likely more accessible to foreign intelligence operatives then our Alliance based shipyards.
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How the STG will find it as opposed to my previous solution of how the Volus will find it out 
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Question:
Why don't we just "expand" in an otherwise inefficient/empty/unoccupied direction (because space is Big) and then "find" a new Eezo "mine", and then have it legally on paper that we are "experimenting with new bleeding edge mining methods." And like, we're Revy, so we can actually spend a Quarter investigating and developing actual new bleeding edge mining methods for the cover and to license out to others even, but actually it's a legal cover for the artificial eezo.
Sure, it won't hold forever, but if it's done properly we'll eventually be able to justify a lot more eezo access than we currently do.
And we can still maintain our current eezo contracts and just develop our own strategic eezo reserves, or use it for something Fancy.
An eezo engine the size of a small moon would likely have fascinating scientific experiments that could be run with it!
Why don't we just "expand" in an otherwise inefficient/empty/unoccupied direction (because space is Big) and then "find" a new Eezo "mine", and then have it legally on paper that we are "experimenting with new bleeding edge mining methods." And like, we're Revy, so we can actually spend a Quarter investigating and developing actual new bleeding edge mining methods for the cover and to license out to others even, but actually it's a legal cover for the artificial eezo.
Sure, it won't hold forever, but if it's done properly we'll eventually be able to justify a lot more eezo access than we currently do.
And we can still maintain our current eezo contracts and just develop our own strategic eezo reserves, or use it for something Fancy.
An eezo engine the size of a small moon would likely have fascinating scientific experiments that could be run with it!
It'll immediately be lousy with intelligence agents, foreign, domestic, public, private, you name it.
Paragon Industries is just too big, especially when Revy has upended the technological paradigm multiple times already.
It would actually be easier to admit we can make artificial eezo... and that the capital and manufacturing costs are so large you only barely make a profit, if that, so it's just not worth it unless you want autarky, and in that case it's still easier to claim an eezo mine.
Paragon Industries is just too big, especially when Revy has upended the technological paradigm multiple times already.
It would actually be easier to admit we can make artificial eezo... and that the capital and manufacturing costs are so large you only barely make a profit, if that, so it's just not worth it unless you want autarky, and in that case it's still easier to claim an eezo mine.
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This isn't minecraft we can't enchant a pickaxe with Fortune III. Bleeding edge mining is not going to be a satisfactory excuse unless Eezo refinement techniques miss a huge % of the viable product.
I have thought about the idea and I assume anyone who is also putting thought into how we can obfuscate Eezo creation has also considered it.
While claiming our success is due to bleeding edge mining is a silly idea, just owning an eezo mine is already sufficient to justify importing our own eezo from there and this could certainly buy us a bit of extra time. However it does come with issues:
If we're genuinely using the fake mine as the place where we're actually creating eezo, we're then putting the artificial eezo equipment outside of our normal and better defended locations and losing any advantage we could have gained from removing vulnerable supply lines.
If we're just using it to pretend we then have to either deal with a growing stack of rocks that we're importing to the factories or then we have to carefully spoof our flight profiles to mask people recognising that the freighters are empty when they arrive as UberJJK proposed earlier.
As I think its been in the news recently a mining company just falsely declaring they've discovered a new deposit might also be legally fraud, however as a purely privately owned company as long as there are no shareholders other than us it might be fine? If actual legal people can speak here that would be helpful.
Depending on the world building that Tri decides to use if we go through with this, as I don't think the lore already has been developed her. It is plausible that a single Eezo mine/deposit capable of supplying PI's growing needs would be improbably large, forcing us to make multiple, which would multiply the complexity and expense.
Having said all that? Money is still cheap enough for us that we might genuinely consider it just to throw people off for a quarter or two, we'd need to see the actual option and risks of being known in order to decide.
As for maintaining current contracts... thats actually adding another layer of complexity onto the spreadsheets and calculations, as we're not talking about real things, we're describing things that we just assume must exist in universe. How it actually functions is that a number of credits is removed from our money equal to the amount. Artifical Eezo generation would just reduce that number.
At the very least, this would force Tri to add another couple of lines saying "Total mass of strategic Eezo stockpile" as an asset and "Strategic Eezo purchases" as an expense. And then instead of paying cash we can substitute and amount from the stockpile
Narratively I can see a reason that we might want an Eezo stockpile, however even if we do go through making it, why wouldn't we just spend the same amount of money on artificial Ezo and get more for our buck?
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- Canada
Just bringing this up but which race should be next for the Peak "Human" treatment since we've already done the Salarians and Turians?
I know realistically we should pick the Asari but a part of me wants to be petty and make them wait.
I also have this intrusive thought of doing the Krogan next just to see what would happen.........
I know realistically we should pick the Asari but a part of me wants to be petty and make them wait.
I also have this intrusive thought of doing the Krogan next just to see what would happen.........
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We already know what would happen, it'd just turn them all into Wrex.
F0lkL0re
Officially not an Inquisitor
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- Shetland
You say that like it's a bad thing.
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- Leeds
I said it like peak Krogan was actually a very obvious outcome. You read the bad into into it.
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Okay but this is Revy. Like, I get that there needs to be some sort of technological basis for "Things Be Better", but at the same time, Tony Stark Genius can also be described as being a Technology Flavored Wizard. We don't know the current state of eezo mining, so having Revy poke at that entire situation for a quarter should at minimum give us an understanding of what the "average" is, what the theoretical if super expensive "most efficient, effective, and advanced" option is, and depending on the state of things Revy may have time to do her technosorcery to it before even touching on actually going beyond existing methodologies.
Reviewing the Tech Tree and the Character Sheet, an Advanced Construction/Utility/Mining Drone that uses Biotics/Mass Effect Fields for material handling may or may not be more effective than current eezo mining methods, but it sure would be fancy at least, and a useful testbed for other drone related technologies/uses.
Okay, so, a couple things.
First, I think you missed or skipped over the "space is big, go somewhere were people aren't to set things up" bit, or at least the implications I meant by that. I will revisit this in a moment though.
Second, Omega is a huge eezo mine/stockpile/whatever the hell it is responsible for the supply and sale of some ridiculous amount of the Terminus, implied to use truely atrocious mining methods with very limited safety measures to meet Aria's quotas. That's one source responsible for supplying significant percentages of the needs of a whole ass half a galaxy. If we limited ourselves to "one PI owned mine", we should almost certainly be fine in terms of "where is their eezo coming from???" measures.
Now, to get to the previous point.
Space is huge. Space is tremendous in size. And existing FTL measures are honestly kind of crap.
My memory is a bit rusty, but I'm fairly sure that there are areas in ME 2 and ME 3 that you can essentially only reasonably get to due to getting fuel expansion upgrades, and that's with the Normandy being a top of the line experimental military ship meant to be as self sufficient as possible for both its original mission profile (stealth frigate) and its revised mandate (shuttle a Specter/Savior of the Galaxy around on the job).
With repulsar propulsion systems, Arc reactor power sources, and the multi-core ME drive systems, we have the ability to reach areas of space that are otherwise impractical and unprofitable to even attempt to reach, allowing us to set up infrastructure well outside normal operational parameters.
If we vet a particular group of staff, give them a bunch of VI and drones to help with labor, and use QEC comms, we can have PI infrastructure set up practically anywhere we want, while also being outside the normal easy view of galatic spy organizations.
From there, let's say we actually find a source of eezo large enough to set up a mining facility. We do that, tack on a "proprietary processing center" onto it, and use our "revolutionary developments" to cut in our artificial eezo alongside our "natural" eezo mining harvests, while also beginning to break into a new tech industry of eezo mining machinery if we have Revy spend a Quarter on the topic and then license out what she technowizards up.
And while we're there, out in space well beyond easy access to anyone, we can see about turning whatever system we're making use of into the most heavily fortified production center in the galaxy and somewhere that should be sufficiently Reaper Proof to allow us a fall back option if things go to super shit, if we don't just turn said random solar system into our main base of production and research.
Though if we did do that, we'd likely want to actually have that Advanced Construction Drone with Built In Biotics as well as a Super Dreadnought Construction Ship to actually coordinate and process all of the materials needed to create enough powerful weapons to make a system Reaper Proof.
To return back to the original point though, if we make whatever cover story we do set up far enough away from easy access that people can't actually go in person to check things out without being Super Obvious, then it doesn't matter if we have an actual eezo mine or not to launder our artificial eezo through, we can just slap down sufficiently armed "no trespassing" signs that people get shot if they want to get close enough for proper answers.
We would probably want to work on an advanced "Astronomy" VI at some point though, to handle a lot of telescopes for surveillance/protection purposes, so we can see people trying to sneak around said "signs".
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Yes this is Revy, but the issue is that no matter how good the technology she makes is it cannot refine more than 100% of the available material from the ore.
If she did more than that... well thats just Artificial Eezo Generation and now in order to hide the fact we've developed that we've announced we've developed it but with more steps.
So given that we will take for granted that Revy's refinement techniques produce a perfect 100% of the possible Eezo, how much better can it be than our competitors? Well a quick look suggests that on average modern mining techniques lose a total of 30% between extraction and processing https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17480930.2021.1949878
So immediately assuming no further advances in technology for all the rest of the galaxy between now and the Mass Effect time line, Revy can at most be 42% more efficient than our competitors mines. Revys miracle tech isn't the equivilant of making her 1 mine worth two or ten or one hundred of the other mines in the galaxy its worth 1.4 of them.
This is why its just more plausible to say that "Oh, we found a big by coincidence." because its not really implausible to find one that's 50% larger than average and thats just more than the hard cap that mining tech would impose on us.
Could you provide actual numbers for the Eezo production of Omega, either absolute terms, the fraction of the Terminus they provide, or whatever you have? I'm not familiar with this so it would be helpful for me.
Yeah no, so perhaps heres the thing you're missing, space is huge, but everyone knows where we live, in order to get from the secret hidden mine our freighters still need to connect to the mass effect relay system and enter Mindoir normally.
Well they could just FTL directly into Mindoir without using the relays but that adds a limitation, because our FTL is better than everyone elses non repulsor FTL however its still worse than Relay based FTL, so our ability to access the vastness of space without using the relays is actually relatively constrained to a tiny fraction of the galaxy (although still huge in absolute numbers).
And they can't get around having Mindoir as the final destination, because thats where the factories and the workforce are so eventually the Eezo needs to get there to build the spaceships, so spys can always just monitor Mindoir.
Space is indeed big, but not all of it matters.
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Oh! I see where the miscommunication is going through!
Yes, I am advocating for us blatantly lying about things like that to people who we don't want to know these things. If a normal mine is getting 60 out of 100 units of eezo, and Revy's magic that we decide to sell gets like 70 to 80 out of 100 units of eezo, then I'm saying we should lie and say that our proprietary technology let's us get something like 85 to 95 out of 100 units of eezo, and also we're actually mining anywhere between 150 to 500 units of eezo instead of 100. And then we should make sure our eezo mines are in places that no one can actually properly bother to check directly without getting shot and detained, so no one can firmly prove we're lying liers who lie.
In the games, there are areas that you Relay Jump to, and then there are areas you directly fly to, and then there are areas that you can't safely fly to after Relay Jumping to the general area because of fuel costs and stuff. I'm saying that there areas around Relays that could technically be "normally" ftl traveled to, but aren't because it's at best Expensive and at worst Super Dangerous, and with our tech we should be able to get to them inexpensively and safely. If we settle in an area like that, and set up a bunch of automated telescope systems to watch everyone who shows up, then anyone who tries to get to us should be Super Obvious.
The best I am able to dig up is that in ME 3, the War Asset value of Omega committing to providing eezo to the "Stop The Reapers" effort is 300 points. The highest value "normal" organic military fleet, with all possible bonuses, that I have been able to find ranks at I believe 155 War Asset Points.
The Geth Fleet on the otherhand has a base value of 300 points, +/- 150 depending on whether or not you brainwashed the heretic geth or killed them all.
The Quarian Heavy Fleet caps out at 280 out of a base value of 200, but the Quarians are Quarians so they don't quite directly correlate to the "standard" galatic power.
So, out of "we can just throw eezo at the problem" alone, in the short timeframe of the Reaper War, Omega committing all of its stockpiles and production of eezo to the effort is worth just about two standard military fleets that have received all of the anti-Reaper optimizations that are available to them, or otherwise literally the entire Geth Fleet that hasn't been supercharged with brainwashing nor taken damage by quarian assaults.
Other than all of that, Omega is per the wiki listed as "the dark mirror of the Citadel, being to the Terminus Systems what the Citadel is to the Galactic Council" and the only possible point of influence it has is all the eezo it has access to in terms of mining and distribution, as otherwise no one would have bothered to build anything there, let alone a space station/mining operation.
That's the best I have on that topic at this time.
With that in mind, it really seems like it's more "Omega is loaded as hell in eezo" than "a single eezo source could reasonably supply a NGOSP", though it does provide precedence that insane deposits of eezo do in fact exist in the wild.
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sounds like it would just be easier to buy a planet,fake the survey report, create a deep mine, plant fake eezo all over the mine, and install a eezo maker deep in the mine and just have automated machines just transport said eezo to the surface to transport ships to ship to HQ, deep enough that anyone down there is obviously a spy to be taken care of by machines, and no way for them to prove you are generating eezo as they are obviously coming from a scanner detected eezo rich location, and coming off of ships which are properly logged as loaded and unloaded.
Actually as it turns out this may not be as unreasonable as it first seems. To further expand upon this let us consider where you find Eezo. Eezo is formed when solid matter, such as a planet, is effected by a supernova. While planets can have small Eezo deposits these are secondary sources; the primary source of Eezo is from the debris fields orbiting neutron stars and pulsars (which are just a form of neutron star).
Thing is neutron stars are a lot more common then I thought. Turns out the estimate is approximately a billion in the Milky Way and given the Milky Way is estimated to have between 100 and 400 billion stars neutron stars should have roughly a frequency of 0.25% to 1% that of stars.
This matters because a top of the line Citadel starship could theoretically (IE: ignoring drive discharges) travel 105LY in a week. More realistically the sort of slow cargo hauler that would be used on this sort of route could probably manage that in under two months. Meanwhile the same week of travel for a standard PI ship puts you 315LY out (and we can actually do that with multi-core drives) and our cargo ships would have the speed to make that trip in a reasonable time.
In a 105LY radius with a Local Cloud stellar density of 1 star per 250 cubic lightyears you'd expect roughly 19,400 stars. In a 315LY radius though you're looking at ~520,000. So even with normal Citadel levels of travel a given system should have ~50-200 neutron stars in range and at PI scales more like one to five thousand.
So finding a system to set up a serious Eezo mine, as opposed to the smaller but vastly easier secondary sources, isn't really a problem at all. The problem is the actual mining given the intense radiation involved.
That is really obviously a lore/game mechanics mismatch. Most ships utilize ion drive or fusion torches to travel which, by their very nature, have stupendous amounts of fuel. In lore the real limiting factor to travel distance is the need to find a suitable location to discharge which makes exploring, except by long range probe, dangerous as the system you arrive in might not have any good* places to discharge your drive.
*A poor location can take days to discharge during which you are, due to the requirements to discahrge, utterly blind and defenseless (shields offline).
This one would get Omega and it's Queen gunning for us. Also might cause the reapers to flip out early.
This plan is really good, we should do this... Maybe two or three times, but this plan is solid.
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Thinking about it, it could make sense? If the fuel was eezo related, and it was the potential lack of mass alteration that caused problems rather than the actual direct propulsion fuel being the issue.
no the fuel is just straight hydrogen the only way the short fuel range makes sense is if for some reason the Normandy is burning its antimatter fuel outside of combat
If we really need to use artificial eezo and hide it, the easiest way to do it would be to invest heavily in a massive eezo mine somewhere that Paragon (or at least the SA) can heavily control access to, and use the artificial eezo manufacturing to bump the productivity of the mines.
A known source, pumping lots of eezo, with an extra amount of eezo flowing out of it in ways that can be made harder to track the artificial origin of.
A known source, pumping lots of eezo, with an extra amount of eezo flowing out of it in ways that can be made harder to track the artificial origin of.
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What I'm saying is that the difference between everyone else getting 60 (I notice you reduced all other competitors by 14% of my estimate) and us getting 95% isn't enough to justify us increasing our spaceship production by 100%. There is a significant gap betwen our growth and what our lie actually says we can achieve.
E:
Once again Mass Effect lore is thwarted by the ridiculous size of space.
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