Riddle78
Reality nibbler.
- Location
- CFB Middle of Nowhere on the Trans-Can
Hey,isn't there already a Hammerhead IFV in Mass Effect? Eeh. I always preferred the Mako.
Reverse Engineering For Fun and Profit (Planetary Annihilation/Multicross SI)
Kinetic shield breaching torpedoes fired from those huge railguns?
Gatling railguns?
Armor on fighters to last long enough to deliver torpedoes? (or just use drones, they do exist in ME vesre)
Attachable ME torpedo racks on frigates eliminating the need to use fighters? Heck, dedicated ME torpedo frigate!
Some torpedo launchers on everything in case of very short range combat?
Hard light armor and shield perpetrators fired from railguns?
Hardlight kinetic interception shields creating a patch of hard light in front of incoming projectile?
Cheap omnitool style drones used to intercept incoming projectiles?
Yup, totally no new options available for their tech base.
Riddle78
Reality nibbler.
- Location
- CFB Middle of Nowhere on the Trans-Can
1) Fire a slow munition with a destructive payload; Kinetic barriers ignore anything moving slow enough,as to avoid trying to deflect the seat out from under the user's ass,or the ground out from under the vehicle.
2) I direct your attention to the Geth Spitfire,N7 Typhoon,the M-76 Revenant,and the YMIR Mech's machine gun; They all have multiple barrels to help with waste heat. Furthermore,all heavy machine gun turrets,be they stationary or materiel mounted,feature at least two barrels.
3) Armour is pointless for snubcraft,as they'll always be vulnerable to GUARDIAN lasers,due to their engagement ranges,and a more heavily armoured snubcraft will be slower to manoeuvre in space,as you now need to overcome more inertia. Kinetic barriers cannot protect against light.
4) Element Zero is rare,expensive,and nonrenewable. Good luck convincing people to design an Eezo-based weapon.
5) Wasted space. It's simply more efficient to have dedicated torpedo vessels,rather than sticking few torpedoes on everything as a paranoid contingency.
6) Hardlight technology actually doesn't exist. Omni-tools are purely holographic. Omni-blades use a flash-forged carbon-silicate blade with holograms to inform the user of its dimensions (They're ruinously hot). All of those terminals are holograms designed to work in tandem with haptic feedback implants.
7) It's always better to invest in something you can recover and repair,in the long run. Besides,GUARDIAN lasers are Mass Effect's premiere AMS.
Generic_Generica
Notice me Senpai~
- Location
- Right behind you
Pretty sure they've already got torpedoes on their frigates. Well the SR-2 had torpedoes.
Besides most every ship has GARDIAN laser point defense which means you kinda have to drown em in torpedoes to get past the point defense in the first place.
Also... Mass Effect's got Hardlight? That's news to me, I was under the assumption that they just used holograms for omnitools and shit. I thought the omniblade was just an incredibly hot flash-forged blade or something along those lines.
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Actually, the guy you were replying to got it wrong, they don't have hard light. Your guess about the omni-blade is correct.
FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
Things with sensitive components are rarely treated well by enormous accelerations... The most likely thing to happen to a missile fired from a railgun at speeds worth mentioning is exploding messily in the barrel.
Since the useful part of a rail gun IS the barrel of the thing there is no meaningful difference between a Gatling railgun and just having more railguns... Asides from them being in a weird configuration and spinning around for no reason. The only reason to do a Gatling setup at all is to reduce short term heat capacity problems, something that should never apply to large weapons with proper cooling systems.
Ask yourself, if the Gatling setup was so great why wouldn't it be used far more right now in modern weapons?
Thanks to the square cube law armor is worse and worse the smaller the ship. This is due to it having far more surface area compared to its volume. As power generation and weapon capacity is a function of volume not surface area spending more mass on actually keeping a slightly more armored fighter flying at the same accelerations means cutting down on the mass available for weaponry immensely.
That said yeah fighters are generally hugely stupid in space combat. Drones of course are often only slightly better. Because if you are directing stuff at the enemy they should be missiles because those don't need to decelerate to engage and you don't have to worry about getting them back.
Very narrow utility there though. The Mass Effect verse has very good point defense. And it would get them slaughtered at range since anything added to a ship comes at the cost of something else. Also IIRC the v1 Normandy was mostly indeed a torpedo/stealth setup.
Again, it comes at the cost of something else.
Most of the ships you would be putting them on have no business whatsoever being that close to the enemy. Meaning you would be striping out useful stuff in exchange for stuff that might be useful if the situation is absolutely FUBAR.
It is like handing a modern sniper team broadswords under the logic that they will be useful if they get stuck in hand to hand combat. And they have to hand over a bunch of their gear and ammo to keep the weight manageable.
There is no hard light.
There is no hard light.
Shields are very likely more efficient for that. Also most projectiles in this verse are FAR to fast to intercept. Maybe a infantry/vehicle scale point defense drone against missiles would make sense.
Long story short, there is no free lunch. When you add something new you either upscale the entire design meaning it is more expensive so you get less of them or it costs you something else.
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FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
Why not go for a mobile fortress for them if you go so far to making them so many shinnies they don't know how to get for themselves???
The Turians were willing to shoot at squads from orbit during the Shanxi mess... So the following combination of factors is really bad here:
1. You can see this thing from orbit.
2. You can shoot this thing from orbit.
3. If it belongs to the enemy you really want to shoot the thing from orbit.
These things would never make it to a fight they would be useful in. Because if you are attacking you can shoot anything worth fighting for something this big from orbit before this thing gets there. And if you are defending it'll get blown up long before the enemy gets in range.
Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Artillery crewman: "Is it my birthday!?"Why not go for a mobile fortress for them if you go so far to making them so many shinnies they don't know how to get for themselves???
Virian
Sage of Reason and incomplete information
- Location
- Where logic has never been before
- Pronouns
- he/him
so? give them shields, GARDIAN lasers and anti orbital guns and they'll keep pesky things like dropships,fighters, bombers, frigates, destroyers and the odd cruiser away.
edit: also these are meant for defensive measures as unless you have COmmander style manufacturing tools or huge ass ships to carry them and get them there you can't deploy them on planetary invasion unless you already have them there.
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And yet they DO use fighters to deliver tons of slow moving torpedoes to their targets, and it apparently somehow works. Take away fighters and put torpedoes on frigates and you get a much surer delivery method along with means to capitalize the shield breach created by the torpedoes.
ME Normandy 1&2 were mostly... empty space... huge hangar for heavens know why, huge CIC because Turians like it or something, that huge elevator, security checks in Normandy 2, briefing room in 1... all you get is lots of empty space that could be used to hold MOAR ammo. Mass is not an issue due to mass reducing effect of... mass effect.
I was talking more akin of space combat. Sure, 0.013c seems cool... before you realize the distances at which battles would take place. At 10k kilometers such projectile would take three seconds to reach the other side. Enough time to place a disposable drone on it's path. On top of it, at 10k km you can easily see the other side and watch WHERE they fire, the very very big disadvantage of spinal mount weapons.
Then when you get into ranges where this tactic won't work, your shields are at top condition while the other guy's... aren't.
Yeah, ME totally do not have frigates designed to enter knife fighting range and mess you up...
Seriously, snipers DO have knives, many assault rifles CAN mount bayonets and I think many armies still train in their use. Heck, ME has those totally not hard light magical knife thingies! If they weren't needed why Omnitools have them installed?
The name of the verse is MASS effect. They can decrease mass so more armor would not effect it THAT much.
Hey, I totally agree with missiles but apparently the only race to ever develop them has forgotten about their existence. The idea was about using pure Council tech and not 'ancient forgotten human weapon' thing.
For one thing, accelerating a slug designed to shatter from 0 to 0.01c under a km should shatter it. Also, they do have means of surviving acceleration to and from light speed along with the ability to survive g forces involved in all maneuvers Normandy did. Somehow Joker, a person who can shatter a bone from a simple fall, survived all that unscratched.
This means they have to have some sort of acceleration negation technology.
Oh, there is also Newton's third law to consider - the frame of the ship in question has to be strong enough to survive accelerating that slug. As it takes one hit to shatter ME ship, those frames are either made from Explodium or they have some trick to reduce the forces involved.
Huh... I think I have overused the 'shatter' word for some reason.
Give it space dreadnaught spec shields. As you CANNOT use main guns as those count as WMD, the orbital bombardment is limited to secondary guns (something akin to ME3 on Rannoch against the reaper). Those are much, much slower so you can
a) dodge.
b) shot them down
c) laugh as your shields tank them
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FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
I don't think there is anything like 'anti orbital guns' in the setting... This is because a ship can move much faster than a planet bound gun so their effective range is much much further than yours. You can't hit them but they can hit you just fine... And no shields will stand up to orbital bombardment for long.
I chalked most of that up to generic scifi genre stupidity and moved on tbh.
You would get much less of them too. I agree frigates would be better than fighters... But that is only because pretty much everything imaginable is a better idea than fighters.
Even if you argue you could fit more stuff on ships in the setting that doesn't change that that means you could also fit other stuff on there instead.
You realize that a ship killing kinetic round hitting a small drone is going to lead to a small cloud of rapidly expanding shrapnel and a round going straight on through, right?
And if you are fitting a drone bay you aren't fitting more shield or guns so the efficiency argument stands.
Knives and bayonets are standard gear because they cost very little weight and space. No trained fighter with a sword loses to a equally skilled fighter with a knife on average. Yet they still don't give snipers broadswords.
Fitting a dreadnought with substantial close range weaponry doesn't make sense, they are artillery pieces. Having some specialized ships that do use the weapons doesn't mean it makes sense to put them on all ships like you suggested.
Then why weren't they faster in the first place? Or better armed? Or anything really, there is always a trade off.
As I said fighters bring out all the genre stupidity in scifi.
Oh there is obviously a trick to limiting the amount of energy involved in launching rounds. After all the infamous speech points out those things have the energy of nuclear weapons, and it is all generated inside the ship firing the thing. Since dreadnoughts don't explode into a fireball every time they fire they are cheating somehow... But since they also can't fire rounds at .9999c there are limits to this trick. And a missile will just not stand up to as much force as a solid metal slug will. So I bet launchers for missiles do have some launch assistance in there... But you can't just fire a missile out of something meant for slugs and expect it to work.
a) Oh yes, that thing looks exactly like it'll race around at hundreds of miles an hour... Which is basically called being stationary in starship terms.
b) No, because you can't hit ships from the ground. They move.
c) You realize that even dreadnaughts can't keep tanking hits right? If nothing else everyone inside the thing will boil to death if you try this.
vyor
KITTY! \o/
I'd just put an americium bullet type warhead into the railgun rounds. One of it's isotopes has a half life of 141 years and it can be manufactured by us today(expensive though), and the ME universe has the ability to make anti-matter. It has a critical mass of around 11 kilograms for just a bare sphere but that can be lowered to around 3-5kg with a good neutron reflector. Easily achievable with the tech they have, and even assuming the efficiency is around, oh, 2% that's still 1.2 megatons of energy, if they use the 3kg setup.
This means that, even though only half the energy will actually hit the target, it will kill every single ship in the galaxy in 1 shot. It's more energy than the reapers put out. The everest class fires a 20 kilo slug, meaning that it could actually fire 11 kilograms of it. That is an insane amount of energy at 4.7258 megatons, again assuming 2% efficiency.
That is fucking terrifying.
This means that, even though only half the energy will actually hit the target, it will kill every single ship in the galaxy in 1 shot. It's more energy than the reapers put out. The everest class fires a 20 kilo slug, meaning that it could actually fire 11 kilograms of it. That is an insane amount of energy at 4.7258 megatons, again assuming 2% efficiency.
That is fucking terrifying.
FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
Why wouldn't it explode inside your own ship?
vyor
KITTY! \o/
...
I... I'm not entirely sure there's a way to answer this without being horrifically condescending.
Just... just look up what a bullet type warhead is.
(seriously what the fuck)
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
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Buet type warheads seperate the critical mass into two subcritical masses, then throw them at each other. It's the most. common kind in Uranium Bombs IIRC.
vyor
KITTY! \o/
Indeed, of course in this case it's less "throw them at each other" and more "smack it into this thing really hard so they squash together." Less efficient but effective.
FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
Yeah, but you accelerate the thing really fast when firing the thing. And there is no meaningful difference between acceleration and deceleration for this effect.
vyor
KITTY! \o/
Well, to be fair, that's actually an airburst shell design, which is a gun-type bomb that is built to go off after being fired from the gun, with the g-force of firing being what arms the shell in the first place. That being said, all you need to do to turn that shell into an awe-inspiring (in the terrifying sense of the word) armor piercing shell is changing the fusing for the shell and making the outer coating tougher.
TikiTau
Commander Pangolinski
- Location
- Texas
<Agent Red> *note-taking scribbles intensify* *wheezes* Like...East...India...Company....in...space...age...
<Agent Green> ...So, do we need to start cultivating tea now? *confused*
<Aurus> INDEED! It is a FINE beverage!
<Agent Green> you...don't have a mouth...how...
<Aurus> *adjust monocle* BECAUSE I AM A SPACE GENTLEMAN.
<Agent Green> *GREEN_MIND.EXE has crashed. Please Reboot Your Infiltration Unit*
Also, to be fair on Gatling Railguns...
Well...
Legion General Operation Order BRAVO-6!~ Because It's Cooler That Way!
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FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
Yes artillery exists... That thing is no way shape or form a kinetic weapon like we are talking about here though.
My point is that the mass accelerator of ME ships work because they are firing a projectile as simple and robust as possible. If you reduce the durability of the projectile you have to reduce the speed at which you are firing the thing, else it breaks/explodes in the barrel. And speed is effective range in space combat. You would be sacrificing range/accuracy to do more damage. Your ammo would also be much more expensive. The question is if that would be worth it.
Riddle78
Reality nibbler.
- Location
- CFB Middle of Nowhere on the Trans-Can
I think he was getting at that it's easy to make it so that the acceleration imposed by firing won't prematurely push the payload into supercriticality,but impact would. As evidenced by nuclear artillery pieces,it is indeed possible. Mass Effect can easily get away with it... Especially if they use the titular phenomenon on the round.
FullNothingness
Mostly DHMO.
You can fire an explosive from a railgun sure. But you can't fire an explosive as fast as a solid slug from a railgun. Especially when we are talking about relativistic speeds like in ME. And projectile speed is crucial for hitting enemies at range.
Riddle78
Reality nibbler.
- Location
- CFB Middle of Nowhere on the Trans-Can
You seem to be forgetting what the Mass Effect does. Anything within a Mass Effect Field can have its mass altered with proper electrical input or output. With careful calibration of the Mass Effect Field,it would be possible to ensure that the Americium payload would be happy and secure during the 0.013c acceleration. Mass Effect technology is advanced enough to produce emission-free propulsion,create antimatter,and,most notably,faster than light travel. During said FTL jaunts,ship occupants are no worse for wear. Volus and Quarians,the two most fragile races in the galaxy,can handle acceleration to many times c,and they're more fragile than the Americium payload.
So,I say again; Mass Effect's technology renders your proposed problem moot. They can,and will devise a solution,more than likely revolving around Mass Effect Fields.