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Terminus Quest: A CKII Mass Effect Quest

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For the whole tech thing well canon wise the ezio core engine hasn't really changed at all. Hell the Normandy special stealth version is just make it big enough to hide the ship in the fluctuations it causes plus an improved heat sink which an there you have stealth in space .

As well as the fact that Satellite dishes are still something used for communication in the canon time So at least has to stay the same then again we still use couriers to pass information despite phones and email though we call them Mailmen now :) in fact the most important documents are usually either come in person or through the mail no using the more advanced stuff

Still something to do with using something to alter the mass of something to make it go faster for things other people are better than me here.( I mean that is how FTL drive work just lower the mass of the ship )

So I do agree with mainly it is just lasers being made better at getting to one ship to another and only that distance, So improve the ability to pinpoint where the ship will be, be able to split the lasers on the fly to send to multiple moving things.

The reason QE is so good is there is no real way to block or listen through the means but then again to the time of ME2 it is just one place to one place so great for say contacting from the cidital to say a planet or ship but can't at that point also contact another ship as well

I'm rambling and barely understand myself so hopefully you get my felling on it from this though I really don't mind what is chosen in the end
 
kel said:
So we can have a better idea of what our ships are capable of so when we need to do military actions we know which ship class would be best suited to the job and also so we have an idea of how would could improve our ships to get the most out of them because in blue fleets each class builds on the previous ones
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In general, ships cleave to the doctrinal roles described in the Lore Screen. In terms of the technical details of each ship, that's well below the level of abstraction. Some day I'll make an original SF setting for a quest focused exclusively on ship design, but this is a civ quest, and I don't actually want to get into the Stellaris-type ship design game here.

As far as what your ships do, doctrinally, you can find that information in the Lore Screen.
 
PoptartProdigy said:
In general, ships cleave to the doctrinal roles described in the Lore Screen. In terms of the technical details of each ship, that's well below the level of abstraction. Some day I'll make an original SF setting for a quest focused exclusively on ship design, but this is a civ quest, and I don't actually want to get into the Stellaris-type ship design game here.

As far as what your ships do, doctrinally, you can find that information in the Lore Screen.
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Ah ok I see so they are built around the doctrine we are currently using. So since we are using the raiding doctrine currently I imagine they would be geared towards better acceleration/ deceleration factors, EW and weaponry.
 
Well, we've only adopted the raiding doctrine in the past decade or so, so I suspect our ships are still evolving towards that direction, but as we go on longer and as older ships get blown up and replaced by newer ships, it seems likely that this will be the case.
 
uju32 said:
Gravity-wave transmitters across a mass effect channel.
Tachyons.
Quantum-tunnelling radio.
Ultrawave/hyperwave/subspace radio/pick your technobabble.

Science fiction has never actually been short on hypothetical FTL comms.
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And I'm goin to point out that most of those are worse then Mass Effect's Comm Buoy system. In scifi you have to look very hard just to find an ftl communication system that merely rivals the amount of bandwidth ME's Comm Buoy's can handle, never mind surpass it. The system might be infrastructure intensive but it's still capable of supporting a galactic level internet handling god only knows how much data travel from trillions of sentient beings with barely any lag at all even from two separate sides of the galaxy.

That's pretty much the reason why QEC never caught on for civilian communications. Sure QEC is instant and undetectable, but QEC's still only point to point, it cant be easily networked and has far lower bandwidth limitations.
Unfortunately, QECs cannot replace the galactic civil communications infrastructure. First, they have extremely limited bandwidth. A single entangled particle can only transmit a single qubit (quantum bit) of data at once. Second, the system's exclusively point-to-point nature precludes peer-to-peer networking and data dissemination through the galactic extranet.
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QEC's are fine for military communications, which why they are used by militaries in Mass Effect, but they aren't that good for civilian use when the comm buoy system is better for civilian purposes.
 
To be fair, In ME3 Samantha was on the team that made it so QEC's can connect to more than one point. That's part of the reason she was brought on for the retrofits.

But that's way far out.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Uh... we kind of already know that. And it's assumed that our scientists and engineers are designing their ships as well as possible for their doctrinal roles. We know capital ships and to a lesser extent cruisers are mainly for fighting, while frigates and corvettes are for screening and scouting. Corvettes are tiny and lightly armed, relevant mainly insofar as they launch torpedoes. Frigates are multirole. And so on.

Given that the scale of the dodging maneuvers is single-digit kilometers, maybe double-digit, it's actually not that hard to just 'shotgun' your laser pulses all across the entire general volume that the friendly ship can possibly occupy. You could maintain communications, even if there'd be occasional gaps and breaks when someone did something truly unexpected.

So... I don't really think that's a problem.
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That would make the system a horrible power hog. Suppose receiver is area of 1m2. To guarantee that at least one of your rays hit receiver you should saturate the area where that receiver can be and have roughly one bear per 1m2 of that area. If evasive maneuver is only 5 kilometers (which is on low end of your "single or maybe double digit kilometers"), that means that area is 100 km2=100 000 000m2, so you need 100 millions of rays instead of one and that makes power requirements pretty unfeasible. Even if we suppose that all of ship's area is one giant receiver (which I doubt) and that ship's profile is like 200mx50m=10000m2, then we will still need 10000 rays. So we need power to generate ten thousands rays and some equipment to actually emit that may at once.
 
Inserted tally
Adhoc vote count started by Miner249er on Mar 16, 2018 at 1:27 PM, finished with 11993 posts and 54 votes.
  • [X] Shoot first, shoot often. Sucker punch the Lystheni with an all-out assault. You possess the advantage of quality. An alpha strike could easily burn half of the Lystheni's ships before they get their engines started, and secure the battle.
    ... and 2 more.
    [X] Play it cool. Depart in your own shuttle without comment to anybody. Get off of this toothless platform before the shooting starts.
    -[X] Call for the surrender of the "Navy". Hopefully they're more reasonable.
    --[X] And make sure it's recorded for posterity.
    [X] Secure the Payload
    -[X] Take control of the hanger. VIPs leave with the Dalatress and (if living) her aide.
    -[X] Board the CL, CL takes out a ship. Fleet advances to secure the station. FF and K focus on anti-screen duties.
    -[X] Message the Lystheni and tell them we have the Dalatress and that their kidnap attempt has failed but make it seem like we're still on the station.
    --[X] If the CL is close to being destroyed (somehow), message that she's on the CL. Provide video.
    -[X] Destroy their fleet.
    -[X] Retrieve our people once safe to do so and leave.
    [X] Secure the Payload
    [X] Shoot first, shoot often. Sucker punch the Lystheni with an all-out assault. You possess the advantage of quality. An alpha strike could easily burn half of the Lystheni's ships before they get their engines started, and secure the battle.
    -[x] Make sure that the dalatrass is kept up to date on the progress of the war.
    [X] Write-in
    -[X] Force the Dalatress at gunpoint to record a message of her ordering local troops to stand down as we leave, with any appropriate codes. Make a second recording of her declaring she's been captured after she attempted to betray us during negotiations, and that the Lystheni are to surrender unconditionally and comply with any orders we give.
    [X] Shoot first, shoot often. Sucker punch the Lystheni with an all-out assault. You possess the advantage of quality. An alpha strike could easily burn half of the Lystheni's ships before they get their engines started, and secure the battle.
    -[X] Make sure to secure the recording of this negotiation.
    [X] Play it cool. Depart in your own shuttle without comment to anybody. Get off of this toothless platform before the shooting starts.
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RoninSword said:
To be fair, In ME3 Samantha was on the team that made it so QEC's can connect to more than one point. That's part of the reason she was brought on for the retrofits.

But that's way far out.
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Still doesn't change the bandwidth issues. The minimum requirement for something to render the Comm Buoy system obsolete is "can it run the extranet just as well as the comm buoy network?". Most scifi ftl communications methods are just ftl radio, at best capable of live video communication, where as the comm buoy network is literally likened to being interstellar fiber optic cabling capable of handling the data transmission of a galaxy of trillions. And computers in Mass Effect are no joke, even an Omni-tool can handle yottabytes of data.
Uprising Pg 56 said:
"Tella needs to wrap it up with the questions," she murmured. As she spoke, she watched the readout on her omni-tool as it scrolled by in... whoa. Those were yottabytes, not zettabytes. What the hell was this code package? It was enormous.
Then finally -though it really hadn't taken long- the download was done.
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While current computers here in the Rachni war probably aren't nearly that powerful and refined, that's still gives an excellent hint into what type of data transmission capacity is needed to support the extranet.
 
GhostKing 666 said:
And I'm goin to point out that most of those are worse then Mass Effect's Comm Buoy system. In scifi you have to look very hard just to find an ftl communication system that merely rivals the amount of bandwidth ME's Comm Buoy's can handle, never mind surpass it. The system might be infrastructure intensive but it's still capable of supporting a galactic level internet handling god only knows how much data travel from trillions of sentient beings with barely any lag at all even from two separate sides of the galaxy.
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That's actually wrong.
Multiple implementations of each of the previous modalities mentioned have proven capable of literally everything highspeed internet is, and unlike ME comm buoys, do not require spaceborne installations to do so.

It just depends on what the GM chooses to implement.
GhostKing 666 said:
QEC's are fine for military communications, which why they are used by militaries in Mass Effect, but they aren't that good for civilian use when the comm buoy system is better for civilian purposes.
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QECs are unjammable, and secure, which means your comms can't be intercepted.
More than anything else, they're NEW as of canon. It took us a hundred years to go from the early radio sets to the high bandwith transmissions that allow high definition internet and audiovisual access that characterize cellphones.
 
I was thinking that a step on the personal kinetic barriers could be a deployable shield sort of carried by a couple soldiers. Current soldiers likely have either good armour or mass effect weapons unleash carnage on soldiers. Maybe their weaker than bullets per shot and their big advantage is logistics and not needing to carry tons of ammo about for prolonged battles.
 
uju32 said:
That's actually wrong.
Multiple implementations of each of the previous modalities mentioned have proven capable of literally everything highspeed internet is, and unlike ME comm buoys, do not require spaceborne installations to do so.

It just depends on what the GM chooses to implement.
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No I'm not. FTL communications in scifi that predate the 2000's are always limited to being the equivalent of ftl radio(or even worse when the writers didn't want to make things easy). The internet is new, and took the vast majority of science fiction writers by surprise. It wasn't really until the mid-2000s and beyond that scifi writers finally started taking the internet into account when making their future settings, which is around the time when space opera scifi started loosing popularity in mainstream media. Mass Effect is the most mainstream internet age space opera scifi setting, most others are very obscure and don't have anywhere near the presence that Mass Effect does, hence why I said that you have to look very hard to find something that can rival the data transmission capabilities of the comm buoy network.
 
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The solution to having QEC's being point-to-point is one we've already solved. A system of routers can easily redirect data packets from one pre-established link to another. It would basically have the same layout as the modern internet with the user access point being connected to the QEC the same way your computer right now would be connected to a landline. Once miniaturization has caught up enough QECs might be vehicle-mountable or even handheld, but that would be in the far flung future.

As for establishing secure tunnels for PTP communication a switch could take an existing pair of entangled particles and entangle them with a third, then disentangle the switch board particles. The switch would need to keep reset links for all existing channels.

ex.)
Code: 
A' === A === B === B'    C' === C === D === D'
 
A' === B' === A === B --- C ===  D === C' === D'
 
A' === B'    A === B === C === D    C' === D'
 
A' === B' === B    A === D    C === C' === D'
 
A' === A === B === B'    C' === C === D === D'

A' and B', C' and D' are back-up links
A and D are end users
B and C are switch ports

Following this the largest problem would be bandwidth which is likely to initially be solved with parallel buses. As the ability to send and receive information improves it will move toward smaller serial bus systems. Chances are that it may behave similar to SATCOM in using Time Division Multiple Access to service as many users as possible with higher priority (and expense) Frequency Division Multiple Access channels being reserved for the highest paying customers/PTP connections.
 
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GhostKing 666 said:
No I'm not. FTL communications in scifi that predate the 2000's are always limited to being the equivalent of ftl radio(or even worse when the writers didn't want to make things easy).
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A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge was published in 1992, and won the 1993 Hugo for Best Novel.
A Fire Upon the Deep - Wikipedia
The core conceit of much of the book was godlike AIs, transhuman and transspient intelligences, an interstellar internet across much of the galaxy, a bad guy that was basically a transhuman computer virus that got instantiated from backup by archeologists....

The Culture books started being written in 1988.
And that's just off the top of my head. This shit isn't new.
 
LockedMind said:
That would make the system a horrible power hog. Suppose receiver is area of 1m2. To guarantee that at least one of your rays hit receiver you should saturate the area where that receiver can be and have roughly one bear per 1m2 of that area. If evasive maneuver is only 5 kilometers (which is on low end of your "single or maybe double digit kilometers"), that means that area is 100 km2=100 000 000m2, so you need 100 millions of rays instead of one and that makes power requirements pretty unfeasible. Even if we suppose that all of ship's area is one giant receiver (which I doubt) and that ship's profile is like 200mx50m=10000m2, then we will still need 10000 rays. So we need power to generate ten thousands rays and some equipment to actually emit that may at once.
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Remember these communication lasers are not combat lasers. They only have to be detectable, they are not required to be able to damage something.

The power requirements are much, much less; comparable to the power requirements of a television. On Earth lasers have to overcome atmospheric diffraction and compete with other light sources, these issues are much reduced in space.

Beam diffusion means the "ray" is a cone, expanding out from the emitter. With the right design, a single laser could cover the entire "area where that receiver can be".

The technology involved is not that advanced, it became commercially available in the 70s.
The receiver is basically a digital camera and the communication laser is pretty much the same as the lasers used in lightshows.
Given that the Asari have had the technology for centuries, it should be much more advanced and commonplace compared to modern Earth lasers.
 
Chrestomanci said:
The power requirements are much, much less; comparable to the power requirements of a television. On Earth lasers have to overcome atmospheric diffraction and compete with other light sources, these issues are much reduced in space.

Beam diffusion means the "ray" is a cone, expanding out from the emitter. With the right design, a single laser could cover the entire "area where that receiver can be".
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If your recipient is AUs away, that becomes a problem, as the energy hitting the detector is quite diminished.
 
MTB said:
If your recipient is AUs away, that becomes a problem, as the energy hitting the detector is quite diminished.
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True. The energy requirements greatly depend on the sensitivity of the detector.
According to NASA, communication laser technology uses less power and mass than an equivalent radio system.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130215200428/http://esc.gsfc.nasa.gov/267/278/279/351.html said:
Space laser communications technology has the potential to provide 10 to 100 times higher data rates than traditional radio frequency systems for the same mass and power. Alternatively, numerous NASA studies have shown that a laser communications system will use less mass and power than a radio frequency system for the same data rate.
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And now, a total non-sequitur!

Do we have Ardat-Yakshi on Virmire?
If we do, can we:
a) Launch investigations into their capabilities, limitations and whatnot?
b) Get some Ardat-Yakshi brainwashed and feed her some shmucks (We have over 6 billion of population, there must be some death sentences and/or people going for euthanasia) to the point of getting Eversor-style death machine, and then dropping her on some unlucky Rachni-held world?
 
Angelform said:
Considering that in canon there were somewhere between 3 and a dozen Ardat-Yakshi, out of an Asari population in the tens to hundreds of billions… I very much doubt it.
Also, what you propose sounds morally dubious at best.
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From the wiki
Ardat-Yakshi (meaning 'Demon of the Night Winds' in an old asari dialect) is a rare genetic condition in asari, specifically affecting their nervous systems. Although the condition does not harm the asari, during mating the Ardat-Yakshi's nervous system completely overpowers and dominates that of her mate's, causing hemorrhaging in the victim's brain, and ultimately death in extreme cases. As a result, the Ardat-Yakshi becomes smarter, stronger, and deadlier after each encounter. Ardat-Yakshi also have the innate ability to dominate the minds of others. Falere, Rila and Morinth, all daughters of Samara, have the lethal version of this condition. Morinth chose to embrace her condition, while Falere and Rila opted for a life of peaceful seclusion. According to Samara, these are the only three living Ardat-Yakshi. However, less severe cases are supposedly more common, including up to 1% of the population.
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You might want to consider what Samara means by living, especially in a population that lives to a thousand.
Are all the rest dead. Or were they murdered assassinated killed.
 
uju32 said:
You might want to consider what Samara means by living, especially in a population that lives to a thousand.
Are all the rest dead. Or were they murdered assassinated killed.
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Depends what it means by less severe.

Does that mean its only so strong that they can slightly influence peoples minds bonding might cause a jolt of pain/be a bit more intense, is it super duper noticeable at all? Sliding scale?

Eh they probably just shove em all into the monastery that Falere and Rila were at or others like them. IIRC it did have more people than just them and their wardens.
 
Doomed Wombat said:
Depends what it means by less severe.
Does that mean its only so strong that they can slightly influence peoples minds bonding might cause a jolt of pain/be a bit more intense, is it super duper noticeable at all? Sliding scale?
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Note that that quote explicitly states that only in the most extreme cases does it cause death; I quote:
Although the condition does not harm the asari, during mating the Ardat-Yakshi's nervous system completely overpowers and dominates that of her mate's, causing hemorrhaging in the victim's brain, and ultimately death in extreme cases.
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So there you go.
Doomed Wombat said:
Eh they probably just shove em all into the monastery that Falere and Rila were at or others like them. IIRC it did have more people than just them and their wardens.
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Like I said, that statement had several possible answers:

The Justicars/asari society murder them out of hand, and everyone else turns a blind eye.
They almost all turn psychotic like Morinth, and so are killed in self defence/law enforcement.
They run for the Terminus first chance they get, and out of range of the Justicars
A bunch of people hide their medical records.
Samara was lying.
 
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