Mass Effect 3 Spoiler Thread [Spoiler tag free, beware]

[Stormwaltz]

Which brings up one of my science fiction pet peeves. "Get through their shields, and discover that the alien menace seem to build their space ships out of paper machie"

I don't mind that. If you have good shields, why spend the resources on good armor, too? If your shields are about to go down, it's time to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Also, I suspect redirecting incoming ordinance via shields is much easier than absorbing the blow on your hull. But that's arguably personal bias.

[Jeff Kelly]

It actually makes sense if you consider the physics behind space travel and combat.

The less mass a ship has the better because it means that you need less fuel/energy for acceleration/deceleration especially at relativistic speeds (>10% c).

Armor in a classical sense - the one you strap on tanks or navy vessels to stop actual bullets/shells - is also rather ineffective if your projectile can travel at relativistic speeds. The cross section of the projectile doesn't change yet its mass does proportionally to the speed it travels at so you'll probably end up with a hole in your armor anyway.

If you consider it, armor on vessels or vehicles is ineffective even today. Tanks usually don't survive a single direct hit and navy vessels travel in formation to protect the larger, less manouverable and more important ships. Most of modern warfare is about not getting hit because ordnance is usually better than armor. Shells are also usually designed to penetrate armor and to explode inside the armored vehicle. If two men in a small boat loaded with explosives can disable/destroy a navy capital ship then armor is not really a concern especially if it means that it makes your ship even more massive and therefore slower, less manouverable and leads to a much higher fuel consumption. An aircraft carrier without its support convoy of ships and subs is basically a sitting duck.

The only armor that would make sense in a space combat context is ablative armor that 'burns away' and is designed to stop energy weapons.  That kind of armor doesn't have to be heavy instead it should absorb the energy of the weapon blast by disintegrating due to being 'burned up'.  In fact density and the properties of the material should be so that a section that gets burned up peels away from the rest of the ablative armor and floats into space so that the hit can't spread by burning up even more of the armor coating.

If you have the facilities for space travel and can fire projectiles at relativistic speeds no amount of armor will save you from the simple fact that force is mass times acceleration. Especially if slapping armor on means that your huge behemoth of a ship will handle and move with the speed and nimbleness of a glacier. You also have to consider that with respect to space combat all engagements are basically at 'point-blank range' or probably less than a light second of distance between the combatants. Longer distances make hitting something more challenging due to the speed of light issues.

So it does make sense that ships get destroyed quickly once their shields are down.

The only real issue I have with depictions of space combat is that you simply can't have the sudden changes in speed or direction that you see for example in the battle at earth in ME 3. The crew inside wouldn't survive the sudden and rapid change in speed and the ships would be torn apart by the mechanical forces. Even if your universe allows mass effect fields or inertial dampeners a delay of picoseconds between change of speed/direction and the dampeners kicking in would mean that your ship and its crew are subject to massive and probably lethal forces.

[Ratman_tf]

I wouldn't necessarily mind it except it's taken to hugely exaggerated extremes. It seems like shields protect them against everything and anything, especially nukes, but if those shields come down, a stiff breeze will shatter their ships.

You see it in ID4, and Skyline. And to a lesser extent, the Reapers in ME. Though the aliens in Skyline took the damage and regenerated, I still say they shouldn't realy have taken that much damage in the first place.

We, right now in the 21st century, have materials that are lighter and stronger than steel. What could a truly advanced spacefaring race come up with? Super low density armor that makes titanium look like tissue paper would probably not be out of their grasp.

But no, they make their ships out of cardboard so the heroes can exploit their cheap construction materials and save the day!

Like those who bitch about realisitc inerta and thrust in space combat, just once I'd like to see the alien invaders shields go down, and have everything the heroes throw at the ship just go "Tink!"

[Stormwaltz]

We, right now in the 21st century, have materials that are lighter and stronger than steel. What could a truly advanced spacefaring race come up with? Super low density armor that makes titanium look like tissue paper would probably not be out of their grasp.

"This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3% of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth."

As a matter of historical record, the ability to deal damage has increased far more rapidly than the ability to absorb it. That's why we now have stealth aircraft and submarines rather than super-flying-fortresses and battleships. It is better to design to avoid being hit than it is to design to survive being hit.

[Ratman_tf]

We, right now in the 21st century, have materials that are lighter and stronger than steel. What could a truly advanced spacefaring race come up with? Super low density armor that makes titanium look like tissue paper would probably not be out of their grasp.

"This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3% of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth."

As a matter of historical record, the ability to deal damage has increased far more rapidly than the ability to absorb it. That's why we now have stealth aircraft and submarines rather than super-flying-fortresses and battleships. It is better to design to avoid being hit than it is to design to survive being hit.

A single Reaper cycle is 50,000 years.
50,000 years ago, humans were hunter gatherers with the most primitive tools. Let's say, just for fun, that we take the full military might of just the USA through a time portal and fight a war with pre-civilization humanity.
It's not even a contest. There is no way a group of heroic cavemen to get a lucky spear throw against an A1 Abrams and knock it out. Not that they are even likely to see their opponents, since they'd probably be bombed and shelled from beyond visual range. But even if they did close with their enemy, their weapons will be largely ineffective against modern tanks and body armor, and the superiority of machine guns versus spears.
Getting past the "shield" of artillery and air power would net them diddly squat.

That's one cycle, and a BEST CASE SCENARIO for the poor cavemen. (us) We know the Reapers have had many cycles, so we'd actually have to multiply that technology advantage by tens or probably hundreds of times.

Your 20-kilo ferrous slug accelerated to 1.3% of light-speed would be about as effective as a stone spear hurled at a Reaper. More likely the Reapers would use their analog of artillery and air power, say the artifical generation of black holes in space amidst the enemy forces, from a distance of parsecs. But let's do some incredibly unlikely rationalization and say that the space cavemen actually get past the superweapons and shields and get a shot off at a Reaper. Again, stone spear against a MBT, or if they're very lucky, a dude in kevlar who just might get a gash if struck in a limb.

Of course these analogies break down because the nature of combat also evolves. Hurling spears is not considered the cutting edge of warfare. And our cavemen protagonists have no concept of air power or tanks or sattelites. Armor technology does lag behind the ability to deal damage, for now. But we only have a few thousand years of warfare to compare with the Reapers hundreds of thousands or millions. Sticking with the analogy, the Reaper version of tank armor versus spears would be less effective against other Reaper weapons, but likey more than adequate to deflect or absorb the damage caused by the races of the ME universe.

[Tebonas]

I see it that way.

The Reapers are a reaction to cycles destroying themselves at a certain evolutionary stage by their own AIs. So there is no large technological advantage because their own cycle must have been ended at roughly the same point (given a few centuries more) for that to be an universal truth. Unless they do R&D when they are sleeping beyond the stars (which I doubt) their technology is basically frozen at the same level since their creation.

[Ratman_tf]

I see it that way.

The Reapers are a reaction to cycles destroying themselves at a certain evolutionary stage by their own AIs. So there is no large technological advantage because their own cycle must have been ended at roughly the same point (given a few centuries more) for that to be an universal truth. Unless they do R&D when they are sleeping beyond the stars (which I doubt) their technology is basically frozen at the same level since their creation.

Sure, it can be rationalized that way. But it's a very convenient and precise rationalization for our heroes that the Reapers have their technology frozen at exactly the right spot where they can still be destroyed by their technology.

And it also involves the Reapers being mindless killbots, which I personally find a terribly dissapointing thing.

[Tebonas]

Technological Progress is driven by adversity, by curiousity, or by your needs.

The Adversity get erradicated at the point where they would provide sufficient challenge to drive the Progress, and I haven't seen any proof of the other two in the Lore.

[Jeff Kelly]

Technology has an upper bound determined by the laws of physics in your universe. At one point you can't simply advance your technology any further because the laws that govern your universe prevent that.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the reapers won't have a huge technological advantage because they have been around for aeons while each galactic civilization usually only has about 50,000 years of technological advancements. The reapers can't evolve their technology indefinitely though because at one point they hit the physical limits of their universe and therefore a point at which further technological advances are simply impossible.

You can't integrate circuits any further once the dimensions of your patterns approach the planck distance of 10^-30m (in reality you hit the wall probably long before that). The properties of your materials are limited by the way electron bonds work and what the crystalline structures of your materials are. Change in speed/thrust is governed by the volume/speed of the particles used for thrust and the size/cross section of your thrusters etc.

At one point you'll hit the physical limits of your universe which means the end for technological improvements. The organics also didn't really only have 50,000 years to advance technologically since previous civilizations left them technology caches that jump started their development.

I don't really want to get into the argument about the supposed superiority of the Reapers though because quite frankly nothing about the Reapers makes any sense if you really think about it. The whole story only makes sense if the reapers are - for all practical purposes - invincible in a mythological sense i.e outside the laws of the universe. Even if there are more than a thousand of them they are always outnumbered. 10 or more spacefaring races each with billions of people each cycle would mean significant losses for the reapers just by the sheer brute force of the Reapers' opposition. Given that they need a whole civilization to build just one Reaper the Reaper threat would end due to attrition eventually.

If all the Chinese suddenly decided to get up and walk west into Russian territory then there's nothing short of nuking their own country that Russia could do about it. The Chinese wouldn't even need weapons. A colony of ants is able to kill prey orders of magnitude bigger then them etc. If we take your example then sure a batallion of modern age soldiers would be pretty powerful, but as modern examples show this superiority translates very poorly into assymetrical conflicts or guerilla warfare, even if your side is technologically vastly superior,  otherwise the conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq would be long over now.

Then there's indoctrination. It affects physical beings at a distance so it has to be some kind of force-interaction, which means that it can be measured, detected and blocked or at least greatly reduced in strength. Yet ME tells me that nobody has figured out how indoctrination works or how to block it in an Universe that can even increase or reduce the effects of gravity and project force fields.

Then there's the problem that given the age of the universe, the age of our galaxy and the fact that you'd need at least a second or even third generation of stars to actually have planets that could sustain and produce life, you can't actually have thousands of reapers or countless cycles. In fact it would probably be less than ten cycles. If you assume the absolute best conditions for evolution at least in one system of the galaxy and if you assume that the first species ever to evolve would also be the ones that created the reapers. Then they could realistically only have been around for a million years or so before us. Assuming anything different would mean that Earth's evolutionary process worked significantly longer than the galactic average.

Then there's the fact that harvesting a galaxy with 400 billion stars is practically impossible. It would presume a mass portal in every system or every small cluster of systems because otherwise you'd miss a significant number of systems where AI could be developed eventually simply because they aren't connected to the mass portal highway. Even if the galaxy was that well stocked with mass portals searching each system in our galaxy for signs of space flight would take aeons. The ways whole civilizations could simply vanish and hibernate until the Reapers leave are endless.

So Ships disintegrating like thanksgiving parade floats once their shields are down are the least of my concerns with Mass effect.

[Maledict]

I would agree that by ME3 the reapers were too easy to kill BTW. The entire reason Sheperd was supposed to be special was because he killed one, and yet in ME3 they get killed all the time.  It used to take an entire species its entire collective resources to build a single gun that managed to critically wound a single reaper, now numerous ships are destroyed in standard battles.

The reapers were definitely downgraded in ME3 to allow for a more even battle. Alongside the invasion of earth which takes forever it left the Reapers significantly downgraded - they felt more like a huge army of a very powerful race that was slightly more advanced than us, rather than the ancient unstoppable god like menace the first and second games presented them as.

Fixing that would require a completely different plot to ME3 though on a fundamental level.

[cironian]

Then there's the fact that harvesting a galaxy with 400 billion stars is practically impossible. It would presume a mass portal in every system or every small cluster of systems because otherwise you'd miss a significant number of systems where AI could be developed eventually simply because they aren't connected to the mass portal highway. Even if the galaxy was that well stocked with mass portals searching each system in our galaxy for signs of space flight would take aeons. The ways whole civilizations could simply vanish and hibernate until the Reapers leave are endless.

That's actually one of the things that work pretty well in the story, due to the husking/indoctrination the Reapers are doing. They can just spread in a virus-like model, converting a planet into resources (soldiers+a few ships), then use that to hit, say, five more planets. Once the major military resistance in space has been crushed exponential growth should take care of murderizing the galaxy within a few centuries, as then they don't have to send the actual Reapers on missions anymore.

[Ratman_tf]

The reapers were definitely downgraded in ME3 to allow for a more even battle. Alongside the invasion of earth which takes forever it left the Reapers significantly downgraded - they felt more like a huge army of a very powerful race that was slightly more advanced than us, rather than the ancient unstoppable god like menace the first and second games presented them as.

Fixing that would require a completely different plot to ME3 though on a fundamental level.

You know what Soverign reminded me of strongly? So strongly that I believe it was intentional.
V'Ger from ST:TMP.
A thing that can vaporize whole solar systems, and not even as an attack or defense. It was simply scanning them, with the side effect that the scanning process vaporized them.
V'Ger could project an energy field of truly cosmic scale, create androids that were indistinguisable from humans without a scan in medbay. It's power and technology dwarfed Starfleet, and almost everything they had yet encountered. The Klingons popped a few photon torpedoes at it, and they hardly registered as interesting, much less any kind of threat.
As a kid, V'Ger gave me the heebie jeebies. Contemplating it was like, I imagine, what HP Lovecraft wanted to convey in his fiction. We are bacteria on a flea on the back of a dog.

Now, in the extended version, they contemplated self-destructing the Enterpise inside V'Ger to blow it up. It would have taken the detonation of an entire starship to take out V'Ger, inside it's shields. Just shooting it with phasers and torpedoes would likely have been humorously futile, even from the inside.

[Stormwaltz]

I agree that Reapers should require quite a bit more to bring them down. During ME2's production, I had a vision of an ME3 scene in which the quarians have to ram a Liveship into one to cripple or kill it. The only thing that would have saved the quarian fleet from destruction was the geth using a wormhole to jump in one of their great works - if not the actual Dyson Shell, then a Matrioska Brain. It throws back the Reapers by chucking black holes at them - biotic-style Singularities on a massive scale.

But if I may borrow the caveman analogy, what you're pointing out there seems to me less that our tech make equivalent units unbeatable, but that our tech allows new types of unit. The Reapers have no equivalent to armor and artillery in that analogy, and I think if you run a bunch of angry cavemen at one guy with an assault rifle and kevlar, he's going to take out a bunch before they reach him, but there's a good chance one is going to get up close and bash his head in with a rock.

Unfortunately, no ever really sat down and worked out the tech base of the Reapers. We just decided a few things they could do, and aside from that, it was "same as us, but better." Their most obvious advantage is in power generation and the size of their element zero cores. They can make crazy-powerful mass effect fields. Kinetic barriers you can't crack. High speed travel. They can cancel maneuvering stress and make high speed turns with a battleship that other races couldn't pull off with a frigate.

But there's another factor overlooked here - and they may have overlooked it in ME3. The Reapers control the mass relays. They knew when they were used, and when they wanted, they could lock them down or set them to misfire (as the Omega relay). I have to use an extended metaphor for this, so bear with me. Take World War I Europe, before the advent of air transportation. There were trucks to drive people around quickly, but most strategic troop movement and commerce was via train. Imagine someone invades Europe and somehow takes all their trains away The tracks are still there, and the invaders can use them, but the defenders have to make do with trucks like this. There aren't as many of them as they need, and they're not efficient for long hauls, because - hey, that's what we have trains for, right?

I thought what normally happens in a Reaper sweep is they lock down the mass relay network. They can focus their forces - few but immensely powerful - at will, while hobbling the mobility of their enemies. They can jump around enemy force concentrations, hit 'em where they ain't, and take out their forces once they're weakened by lack of supplies. It's Pacific War island-hopping on a massive scale - take out the important targets and leave the rest to "wither on the vine." I imagine that in this cycle they couldn't do that because they haven't managed to get control of the Citadel. At least that's how I'd have explained it - though if I were the Reapers, I'd also have had a backup system.

Oh, and W/R/T cleansing the entire galaxy, I've explained a bit of that before. For most races, they know where they are because they use the mass relays. Every time you activate a relay, it's like saying "Voldemort" or tapping a spider's web. You just told them exactly where you are. For races that don't use the relays, they just listen for them. You don't need to check every single planet or system. Just stop every 100-200 light years and listen for the electromagnetic signals that indicate technological life. Yes, that still takes a while, but they have machine patience and probably fleets of drones to help. Any race that doesn't emit technological signals... they don't care about them. Too primitive, no threat, not of interest.

First the Reapers destabilize the defenders by using Indoctrinated agents to set the biggest powers against each other before they arrive. Then shut down most interstellar mobility when they take an active hand. They don't really need to devote time and effort to making better guns. Things went badly awry this cycle. I think the greatest plot hole here isn't that the Reapers don't have sufficiently high tech, but that they didn't seem to have any backup plans.

This doesn't mean that no one ever escaped the Reapers - fled into space far from the relays, made as little EM noise as possible, pulled the blankets over their heads and hoped the monsters went away. As cironian points out, Indoctrination would get a bunch of those. But some would make it. I had a vague idea that the gas giant with structures in it from ME1 could be such a race. And in my opinion, that might make a good opening for Mass Effect 4 - an organized search to find the First Ones and get them to rejoin galactic society.

[Sjofn]

The no back-up plan thing doesn't bother me much, because of how full of themselves they are, how far beyond us technologically they are (as far as they're concerned, anyway) and how their plan has worked fine every time before this. I think their back up plan was essentially, "Fine, we'll kill them the hard way."

Obviously Shepard didn't defeat the Reapers, hubris did. 

[TNG3]

With regards to the primitive vs. modern tech analogies: technological progress isn't that predictable or necessarily inevitable. Tech will generally improve as time goes on, but how much and in what areas can be very unpredictable. 2000 year old Roman concrete has a compressive strength roughly equal to that of modern concrete. The 64 year old AK47 is still comparable to assault rifles made in the last few decades. The more than a century old Colt M1911 is still in wide use, and it isn't that different from newer semi-automatic pistols in terms of mechanical design.

You can't just extrapolate a certain amount of time and expect every technology to improve by the same factor that they did in the previous period of that amount of time.

I'm not really sure how this would apply to Mass Effect, but I just wanted to point out the general issues with these kinds of analogies.

First the Reapers destabilize the defenders by using Indoctrinated agents to set the biggest powers against each other before they arrive.

I don't recall anything like that ever showing up in the actual games, apart from a vague suggestion that Sovereign might have caused the Rachni wars. Was that an idea that was never implemented?

[Stormwaltz]

I don't recall anything like that ever showing up in the actual games, apart from a vague suggestion that Sovereign might have caused the Rachni wars. Was that an idea that was never implemented?

I suppose so. During ME2 we discussed the possibility that someone on the Council was Indoctrinated, to explain why they were so dismissive of the Reaper threat even behind the scenes.

In case there's any doubt left, yes, Sovereign was responsible for the Rachni Wars by Indoctrinating the queens.

[Sjofn]

I believe it's also implied Udina was indoctrinated in ME3? Buried in the Codex somewhere?

Perhaps I'm high.

[TNG3]

The Codex entry said that Udina might have been indoctrinated, but he was probably just desperate and stupid. In any case, this was after the Reapers arrived, so it doesn't fit with what Stormwaltz said anyway.

It's a shame that that idea wasn't developed further, as I think it would make a good plot for a ME game, and would give you some human-scale enemies to fight. I've come to think that a significant problem with the Mass Effect series, particularly the third game, is that the gameplay consists of cover based shooting and talking to people with no space combat/strategy elements, but the story has you fighting giant robot spaceships.

[Margalis]

This is a lot of explanation to try to justify how Jeff Goldblum defeated the Reapers with a MacBook.

[Ratman_tf]

I agree that Reapers should require quite a bit more to bring them down. During ME2's production, I had a vision of an ME3 scene in which the quarians have to ram a Liveship into one to cripple or kill it. The only thing that would have saved the quarian fleet from destruction was the geth using a wormhole to jump in one of their great works - if not the actual Dyson Shell, then a Matrioska Brain. It throws back the Reapers by chucking black holes at them - biotic-style Singularities on a massive scale.

See, that would have been much more palatable to me. Have them put some effort into it, instead of "Shields down, you're teabagged sucka!"
But to come back to my first post on this topic, it makes for depressing endings if the bad guys are competent and have redundancies. How would ID4 have ended if the aliens had backup shields and superdense armor? (Not to mention firewalls and anti-virus software  ) Not well for humanity.

[Margalis]

Shields are science-fictiony enough that they allow enemies be be defeated via technobabble. Reverse the polarity, modulate the frequency, fire a tachyon beam, shut down the off-site generator, inject a virus, call Penny from Inspector Gadget.

I think that's most of the appeal of shield technology, it's way to make enemies powerful but beatable via good old fashion human ingenuity. Whereas "fuck you, our hull is made out of some unknown material that your weapons bounce off of" doesn't have nearly as many outs.

[Nayr]

I don't recall anything like that ever showing up in the actual games, apart from a vague suggestion that Sovereign might have caused the Rachni wars. Was that an idea that was never implemented?

I suppose so. During ME2 we discussed the possibility that someone on the Council was Indoctrinated, to explain why they were so dismissive of the Reaper threat even behind the scenes.

In case there's any doubt left, yes, Sovereign was responsible for the Rachni Wars by Indoctrinating the queens.

Actually I think Leviathan retconned that.

The files in Dr Bryson's lab state that there was nothing matching Reaper tech present during the Rachni Wars(they even have a shielded chunk of Sovereign in the base for study) and Bryson actually believed that Leviathan was behind the Rachni Wars -- that it was trying to condition the Rachni to face the Reapers.

Bryson's study of the Rachni also apparently stems from his daughter, Ann, who wrote her dissertation on them and how Rachni Queens aren't actually telepathic, but rather use an organic form of Quantum Entanglement to control workers and other beings. Ann told Shepard that the Rachni's organic-QEC control is similar to how Leviathans control their thralls. And the Leviathan's enthrallment was the basis for the Reaper's Indoctrination(makes sense since Leviathans created the AI which used them to create Harbinger. Indoctrination came from years of refining their control power).

So what I take from all that is that the Leviathan was controlling the Queens by using that.

Another hint is that when the Leviathan controls someone, they black out and experience sensations of "dark and cold". And since the Rachni perceive everything as sounds, it kinda compliments the "Songs the color of oily shadows" that the Queen mentions in Mass Effect 1.


Also it's possible that Udina was indoctrinated in ME3. He was actively helping Cerberus who had implanted everyone under them with Reaper nanites like Paul Grayson. And his master plan was stupid(to kidnap the council and ransom them to make the races send their fleets to retake Earth, which would be suicidal without the Crucible).

Also if I had to guess about which councilor originally was going to be indoctrinated, I'd say it was Valern(Salarian) and Sparatus(Turian). Those two were always the most derisive and skeptical, and condemning of Shepard. Tevos seemed like she half-liked Shepard.

[Nayr]

I don't mind that. If you have good shields, why spend the resources on good armor, too? If your shields are about to go down, it's time to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Also, I suspect redirecting incoming ordinance via shields is much easier than absorbing the blow on your hull. But that's arguably personal bias.

To be fair, isn't it better during the suicide mission for the Normandy to have both the upgraded cyclonic shields and silaris diamond armor?

There are some times when you can't make a tactical retreat when the shields take a hit.

I agree that Reapers should require quite a bit more to bring them down. During ME2's production, I had a vision of an ME3 scene in which the quarians have to ram a Liveship into one to cripple or kill it. The only thing that would have saved the quarian fleet from destruction was the geth using a wormhole to jump in one of their great works - if not the actual Dyson Shell, then a Matrioska Brain. It throws back the Reapers by chucking black holes at them - biotic-style Singularities on a massive scale.

Unfortunately, no ever really sat down and worked out the tech base of the Reapers. We just decided a few things they could do, and aside from that, it was "same as us, but better." Their most obvious advantage is in power generation and the size of their element zero cores. They can make crazy-powerful mass effect fields. Kinetic barriers you can't crack. High speed travel. They can cancel maneuvering stress and make high speed turns with a battleship that other races couldn't pull off with a frigate.

But there's another factor overlooked here - and they may have overlooked it in ME3. The Reapers control the mass relays. They knew when they were used, and when they wanted, they could lock them down or set them to misfire (as the Omega relay). I have to use an extended metaphor for this, so bear with me. Take World War I Europe, before the advent of air transportation. There were trucks to drive people around quickly, but most strategic troop movement and commerce was via train. Imagine someone invades Europe and somehow takes all their trains away The tracks are still there, and the invaders can use them, but the defenders have to make do with trucks like this. There aren't as many of them as they need, and they're not efficient for long hauls, because - hey, that's what we have trains for, right?

I thought what normally happens in a Reaper sweep is they lock down the mass relay network. They can focus their forces - few but immensely powerful - at will, while hobbling the mobility of their enemies. They can jump around enemy force concentrations, hit 'em where they ain't, and take out their forces once they're weakened by lack of supplies. It's Pacific War island-hopping on a massive scale - take out the important targets and leave the rest to "wither on the vine." I imagine that in this cycle they couldn't do that because they haven't managed to get control of the Citadel. At least that's how I'd have explained it - though if I were the Reapers, I'd also have had a backup system.

Oh, and W/R/T cleansing the entire galaxy, I've explained a bit of that before. For most races, they know where they are because they use the mass relays. Every time you activate a relay, it's like saying "Voldemort" or tapping a spider's web. You just told them exactly where you are. For races that don't use the relays, they just listen for them. You don't need to check every single planet or system. Just stop every 100-200 light years and listen for the electromagnetic signals that indicate technological life. Yes, that still takes a while, but they have machine patience and probably fleets of drones to help. Any race that doesn't emit technological signals... they don't care about them. Too primitive, no threat, not of interest.

First the Reapers destabilize the defenders by using Indoctrinated agents to set the biggest powers against each other before they arrive. Then shut down most interstellar mobility when they take an active hand. They don't really need to devote time and effort to making better guns. Things went badly awry this cycle. I think the greatest plot hole here isn't that the Reapers don't have sufficiently high tech, but that they didn't seem to have any backup plans.

Okay, where to start with this....

1. In ME3, I'm pretty sure they gave an explanation as to why ramming a ship into a Reaper wouldn't work. A codex entry that says that FTL drives have a safety built-in where a ship cant make the jump if anything significant in size is in the flight path - some anti-collision function. And there's no apparent way to turn it off. It was presumed that the protheans had developed that function, just as they had "developed" the mass relays. So the Reapers really put that in to cover their metal asses.

2. True that the Reapers can turn fast, but it's explained in the codex entry for Reaper vulnerabilities that when a Reaper turns it has to lower its mass to a level that's unacceptable in combat. And when that happens, ships can fire on them faster than they can counterattack.

3. Also as for locking down the Mass Relays, the Reapers need the Citadel to do that, and they don't actually retake it until near the end of ME3. And even then, they don't. The reason why exactly isn't stated, but I presume it's because having the "catalyst" means that all the galaxy's military force will come to them and march into certain doom(the Reapers marshal the bulk of their strength around Earth and close the Citadel arms, with the only means of entry being a conduit on Earth that's guarded by a Reaper Destroyer and later by Harbinger himself). Shepard and Anderson only make it through because they were believed to have been killed by Harbinger's blasts. Then it left to pursue the rest of the Hammer ground unit, leaving only a Marauder to deal with any weary remnants.

4. First I gotta say, the Harry Potter analogy is hilarious. Second, the Normandy apparently can bypass that in ME3 thanks to the Reaper IFF. And the Salarian fleets are able to acquire the IFF's algorithms along with the blueprints for the Normandy's stealth drive and apply it to their entire fleet, even their dreadnoughts.

5. That's how the Batarians got beaten. Thanks to them keeping the Leviathan of Dis(a dead Reaper) to themselves, they got hit right out of the gate and fell almost instantly. And I think, based on everything I know about ME's overall story, that the Reapers plans went awry as early as the Revelation novel. If Saren hadn't killed Shu Qian and Edan Had'Dah, he wouldn't have needed to restart their work from scratch, and could have went on his search for the conduit sooner, before Shepard could become involved. Shepard was the silver bullet in all of it. Cunning, brutal, charismatic, with the tenacity of a cockroach.

[Jeff Kelly]

I suppose so. During ME2 we discussed the possibility that someone on the Council was Indoctrinated, to explain why they were so dismissive of the Reaper threat even behind the scenes.

In case there's any doubt left, yes, Sovereign was responsible for the Rachni Wars by Indoctrinating the queens.

My explanation was always that basically everybody on the Citadel is indoctrinated because people are living on the biggest Reaper artifact there is. Take the whole issue with the Keepers. Nobody is allowed or dares to interfere with them. Disturbing them is a criminal offense. Nobody knows who they are or why they are there but nobody is curious enough to find out.

Since the Kerpers are helping the Reapers gain access to the Citadel once the Harvest starts I always figured that it was the Citadel subtly indoctrinating its inhabitants that Reapers don't exist and that people don't need to be too curious about the Citadel's origins or purpose.

I found it to be rather clever from Bioware and it irritated me slightly that nobody ever realized in game that millions of people frim all spacefaring races basically lived on the largest Reaper indoctrination device ever.

[Morat20]

4. First I gotta say, the Harry Potter analogy is hilarious. Second, the Normandy apparently can bypass that in ME3 thanks to the Reaper IFF. And the Salarian fleets are able to acquire the IFF's algorithms along with the blueprints for the Normandy's stealth drive and apply it to their entire fleet, even their dreadnoughts.

There's a conversation you can overhear between EDI and one of the engineers that confirms the Normandy is still flying through the Mass Relays pretending to be a Reaper.

Also, EDI then mocks the way Reapers talk.

[Jeff Kelly]

See, that's the problem I was getting at. Bioware explains too much, which only points you to stuff that makes no sense. This is generally a problem in Sci Fi.

Most of the high tech in Sci Fi is basically a way to overcome storytelling limitations or so that you are able to drive your story forward. So you need FTL travel or certain tech that makes your story possible. It's basically another way of saying "a Wizard did it". You need the stuff to exist but you usually don't need to provide a detailed explanation of how it works. It is sufficient if people get to know what you can/can't do with the tech, what the limits are etc either by exposition or by analogy. This is because people expect something to have positive and negative traits and properties, limitations and such.

That's why most universes employ a "navy-like" metaphor for space travel/combat for example. You won't need to explain in detail because people assume that it works "ship-like". They float through space, are operated by a crew and shoot at each other with cannons or torpedoes. When they get critically damaged they "sink" and the crew dies if the ship isn't equipped with "lifeboats" because the ships operate in a hostile environment and Ships can crash into each other or can get stranded on "islands/rocks".

Another way would be to get into the realm of "hard sci fi" which concerns itself more with scenarios that are in the realm of physical possibility even if they are not technologically feasible today. You'd need writers though that have physics and engineering knowledge on an university level and even masters of hard sci fi like Isaac Asimov can't pull that off most of the time without it getting boring or risking the story to get completely buried in the technical details.

Most of Sci Fi though doesn't need a 100% realistic tech base because that's not the concern of the story.

Most writers fall into the trap of trying to describe their tech setting in too much detail which usually leads to tech that is logically incoherent, inconsistent or self contradictory. Technically it would be anyway even if I don't explain it but by explaining it in detail you basically rub the face of your audience in all of the technical and logical inconsistencies.

Mass Effect fields for example increase or decrease mass so it's basically a fancy way to describe a variable and projectable gravity/antigravity field generator. (You can locally increase or decrease the mass of the content of a certain volume of spacetime - actual ME codex entry for mass effect field).

So now you have offered a detailed explanation of your most important piece of tech and you have put it into the context of actual theories of the physics of our universe. This offers nerds like me all kinds of avenues to poke holes in it and to write pages upon pages of text about why your tech makes no sense. As you'll shortly find out ;)

For example: Changing the mass of a certain volume of spacetime unfortunately only has an effect on the amount of energy required to change velocity and/or direction (length and direction of your movement vector). So lets assume for a moment that you can even increase or decrease the "mass at rest" i.e. that part of the mass of objects we generally mean when we talk about "weight" (contrary to the increase in mass that comes from acceleration/velocity relative to the reference frame that is at rest).

This doesn't change the fact that you can't decrease the mass to zero or increase it to infinity.

Firstly because this would lead to some kind of perpetual motion machine that outputs more energy than gets input. Technically doesn't matter anyway in the ME universe since the "static electricity buildup" basically means that you have a perpetual motion device anyway. (Hint: a less fancy term for "static electricity storage device" is battery).

Secondly because all fundamental forces or interactions of the universe require entities to have mass. For example f = m*a requires that the object that transfers or is affected by a force needs to have a mass of m > 0. Even photons have mass they just don't have a "mass at rest", i.e they always move with a velocity of > 0 relative to all objects in all reference frames.
Thirdly because a too large increase of the mass of a certain volume of spacetime would cause it to collapse into a black hole.

This doesn't change the fact that you still are affected by gravity of other bodies, so you still need to overcome the escape velocity of a planetary or stellar body although you'll need less energy. (You just destroyed the explanation why you need a Kodiak shuttle though because if I can decrease the mass of a certain volume of spacetime the fact that Normandy SR-2 is twice the mass of Normandy SR-1 simply doesn't matter).

This still doesn't change the fact that you are affected by any force component not related to mass.

If your velocity is large enough then changing speed or changing direction quickly still means that a very large force will be exerted upon you regardless of how light you are. An ant that hits a wall after having been accelerated to nearly the speed of light will still get smashed since the deceleration is so aprupt that a is large enough for m to not really matter anymore as far as the outcome is concerned.

So if the change of movement/speed is sudden or large enough mass is really no longer a factor for forces to still go beyond the structural and physical limits of your ship or crew.

It also doesn't change the fact that you can't FTL travel by just reducing the mass content of space time since objects with a rest mass of 0 travel at the speed of light c. To travel faster than c in our universe would require a negative rest mass. Unfortunately this also means that the "time" component of spacetime is negative so you'd not only travel faster than light but also back in time.

Einsteins formula of E = mc^2 is often described as a formula that describes the "conversion rate" of matter and energy but on a more fundamental level it describes that everything that has Energy must have mass or vice versa.

So just by overexplaining one part of your universe and connecting it to physical concepts of our universe you've now already opened it up to all kinds of nitpicking potentially destroying any immersion or suspension of disbelief for your audience.

More importantly though you could ask yourself the question why a ship that can change the mass of a volume of space time at a distance still needs thrusters ;)

[Fordel]

I suppose so. During ME2 we discussed the possibility that someone on the Council was Indoctrinated, to explain why they were so dismissive of the Reaper threat even behind the scenes.

In case there's any doubt left, yes, Sovereign was responsible for the Rachni Wars by Indoctrinating the queens.

My explanation was always that basically everybody on the Citadel is indoctrinated because people are living on the biggest Reaper artifact there is. Take the whole issue with the Keepers. Nobody is allowed or dares to interfere with them. Disturbing them is a criminal offense. Nobody knows who they are or why they are there but nobody is curious enough to find out.

Since the Kerpers are helping the Reapers gain access to the Citadel once the Harvest starts I always figured that it was the Citadel subtly indoctrinating its inhabitants that Reapers don't exist and that people don't need to be too curious about the Citadel's origins or purpose.

I found it to be rather clever from Bioware and it irritated me slightly that nobody ever realized in game that millions of people frim all spacefaring races basically lived on the largest Reaper indoctrination device ever.

Don't the keepers just self destruct the moment you try to fiddle with them in any meaningful way?

[Ratman_tf]

See, that's the problem I was getting at. Bioware explains too much, which only points you to stuff that makes no sense. This is generally a problem in Sci Fi.

But then if you don't explain it enough, the audience loses immersion in the story. Things have to make some kind of logical sense for there to be issues and problems to resolve.
Otherwise, the characters could just say "We're having a problem, now we solved it. It was dramatic, trust us."

[Nayr]

See, that's the problem I was getting at. Bioware explains too much, which only points you to stuff that makes no sense. This is generally a problem in Sci Fi.

From what I've seen, people rant and holler when they don't[/i] explain things enough.

Some things though, like the anti-collision mechanism in FTL drives, makes sense in that the Reapers gave us mass effect cores and would naturally fix what is a major design oversight.

If the safeguard wasn't there, the Reapers could easily be defeated by scuttling even the smallest spacecrafts. I believe I've heard somewhere that an FTL collision has enough kinetic impact to punch a hole in a planet, or something like that. A Reaper's shields/hull would be driving a hot knife through butter.

[Stormwaltz]

1. In ME3, I'm pretty sure they gave an explanation as to why ramming a ship into a Reaper wouldn't work. A codex entry that says that FTL drives have a safety built-in where a ship cant make the jump if anything significant in size is in the flight path...

I don't have time to reply in detail, but I was talking about a sublight collision. Get that much mass moving and it's hard to stop. You'd have to set up a situation where the Reaper was maneuvered into the target corridor by other ships.

[Nayr]

1. In ME3, I'm pretty sure they gave an explanation as to why ramming a ship into a Reaper wouldn't work. A codex entry that says that FTL drives have a safety built-in where a ship cant make the jump if anything significant in size is in the flight path...

I don't have time to reply in detail, but I was talking about a sublight collision. Get that much mass moving and it's hard to stop. You'd have to set up a situation where the Reaper was maneuvered into the target corridor by other ships.

Okay that makes more sense.

Although you'd think technological wizards like the Quarians and Salarians would be able to figure out how to turn off the safeguard, or be able to develop new drives without it.

[Ratman_tf]

Although you'd think technological wizards like the Quarians and Salarians would be able to figure out how to turn off the safeguard, or be able to develop new drives without it.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php#johnslaw

Anything that can go FTL can make a planet go boom. Either from exhaust, acceleration, or the amount of sheer power necessary.

[TNG3]

Although you'd think technological wizards like the Quarians and Salarians would be able to figure out how to turn off the safeguard, or be able to develop new drives without it.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php#johnslaw

Anything that can go FTL can make a planet go boom. Either from exhaust, acceleration, or the amount of sheer power necessary.

Not necessarily. The thing is that FTL isn't just "really really fast," it is impossible by our current knowledge of physics, and if it was possible, it would probably involve objects and interactions very different from what we see in garden variety Newtonian physics.

I once read a forum post where someone tried to calculate the effects of an FTL collision. He wasn't able to figure it out, simply because of how weird the math gets when you input velocity values greater than C into Einstein's relativity equations. For instance, in General Relativity, the mass of an object traveling faster than the speed of light isn't a negative number, it's an imaginary number. As in, the square root of a negative number. It's really hard to imagine how such a thing would interact with STL objects with a positive amount of mass.

Things like this are the reason that most sci-fi FTLs (at least in popular entertainment) use things like moving into an alternate "space" (Star Wars, Babylon 5, Halo), wormholes or other "gates" (Stargate, Freelancer), or instantaneous teleportation (Battlestar Galactica). All of which neatly avoid troublesome questions like this.

[Nonentity]

I want like, a paperback version of this thread to read on the toilet. I'm like 20 pages behind but the highs and lows of this thread seem like good reading.

[Merusk]

I want like, a paperback version of this thread to read on the toilet. I'm like 20 pages behind but the highs and lows of this thread seem like good reading.

Any of the tablets will change your life.