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My Javik channels some inner Samuel L. Jackson as well.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
This is a tactic the Thirty eventually use on Thessia. Even a conventional warp sword going off is basically like a CAIN detonation.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
GARDIAN was thought up by salarians, then quickly adopted by asari.
And yes, the salarians currently use x-ray lasers in their ships for GARDIAN purposes. They haven’t really explored smaller scale laser tech, but an Inusannon power star could power such a device.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
Let’s put it like this.
I’ve made changes to how ships use eezo, but a cruiser needs about ten pounds of eezo to operate its core for a six month deployment.
There are fifteen pounds of eezo in that sword. A standard warp sword has two pounds.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
Maxwell and Aloxius know.
Jacen’s original suicide note was supposed to be deleted by the Guard of Iron. A rather bitter Manswell — Elga, the grandmother of Helga Manswell — made a copy in case she ever felt the need to topple the High Lords.
Richard Manswell knows all about it. He has his own plans for using the information … and has no idea it has been copied and that anyone else knows.
As to how it was copied….well, Elga Manswell went missing nine years after Jacen’s death, when she was on a long-term mission to scout new colony worlds (she refused to sit at home looking pretty).
Dun dun dun.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
It’s actually a mix.
Modern hardsuits worn by Council species are pretty much immune to lasers. You can’t make a laser in a range hot enough to burn through the ablative components without a huge power supply, which is why lasers are only seen (even in Canon) on huge towers and ships.
The Guard of Iron did have laser weapons and used them extensively. However, development of them and particle beam style weapons was always frustrated by limits to energy and technology. When humanity mastered mass accelerator style weapons, most of that tech was dropped, and only the large-scale GARDIAN stuff was still researched.
A kinetic barrier will do jack shit to any kind of laser. Nor will magnetic shielding stop one. The main reason humanity hasn’t been tinkering with such things is that they are experimenting now with x-ray lasers, shifted into frequencies that would bypass most armor.
So far, the drawbacks are focusing power, power needed to fire, heat, and penetration. Again, there are simple methods (alumina comes to mind) to defeat even X-ray lasers.
A larger point (and one often skipped) is that humans have become innovatively cripples. Exposed to so much higher technology they tend to play with and refine that rather than struggle to come up with entirely new concepts that all too often only mimic at a weaker level existing tech.
Likewise, the rest of the galaxy has entered into an innovative slump, as the mass effect technology can only be taken so far without a better understanding of just how eezo cheats the laws of physics, and no one gets that just yet.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
The point that really bothers me is that it’s just dismissed out of hand. No one takes the time to think: We’ve gone from a elite force of reaper agents, to a race who’s entire leadership is potentially indoctrinated.
It just makes no sense that it is dismissed…..
/end rant
Sorry, but my back has been acting up, and I didn’t want a 20k chapter with a small chapter after that. And in said chapter they do identify that as a big issue…
…but just imagine if you suddenly were given hard proof the Illuminati were real. It would throw you for a loop for a few minutes, even if the world was facing extermination by way of listening to John Tesh and Yoko Ono duets.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
Huh. Any chances Levi’s been trying to sabotage Reapers with processed DNA goo when Reapers are done processing a species?
Yes and no. 😀
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
….it is so. Keanu Reeves with soul-patch is Keiji Okuda.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
Did I not say it would involve trolling at it’s finest!?
A lot of what you two bring up I will incorporate into the next chapter. Shepard FINALLY stops fiddling around and tosses in with the Dog.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
The problem with it is that it doesn’t serve any useful purpose that isn’t counterbalanced by the problems.
Saren had help from Okeer, Collectors and Reapers and hybridizing rachni and krogan still was a mess that only worked because Nazara basically cheated. (Which is why when he withdrew his attention from them they sort of melted into goop).
Rachni genetics and mental patterns are completely alien to those of humans, and rachni blood chemistry is also utterly against other forms of life. Swapping genes between humans, asari, salarians, batarians, turians, drell and quarians is easy because they’re all built off of Leviathan DNA patterns scattered around to seed life. Elcor, volus, hanar, Inusannon, rachni, Tho’ian and raloi are NOT built off such patterns (which is why they look so alien and their chemistry is so VASTLY different than humanoids).
More importantly, there’s no good way to utilize them without turning the full might of the Citadel Races against the Alliance. NOVENSILES is ultimately designed to leave humans looking perfectly human, and to be subtle in introduction over time over the course of a century.
Rachni/human crossbreeds might be good on an infantry level, but the sort of ansible instant communication the hive mind used would not be replicatible.
Most of what I introduce has to be able to not instantly destablize the political situation. NOVENSILES is skirting the line heavily, but since the big genetics companies of Sol would be in on it, and since the Salarians and Asari have no reason to be constantly scanning the human genome, they could get away with it at least for a while. I don’t see how you hide the hybrids that easily.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
Javik is in stasis … and will be amused to see Vigil.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
Ahmet, that was poetry. I would like it you wrote this up so I could put it in Fear Unrelenting as a new chapter.
Chills. 😀
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
WARNING: THE BELOW MAY CONTAIN MINOR SPOILERS.
How powerful is that Godpower stuff, we keep hearing about?
It is basically the ability to affect higher dimensions than our own.
We’re three dimensional creatures, moving along the ‘curve’ of the fourth dimension (time). A four dimensional creature could change things in any part of time the way we move around a room.
Reapers can effect up to seven dimensions. Leviathans nine. The Darkness, all eleven.
Godpower allows you to ‘break’ the laws of physics completely, alter the fundamental forces that make what we understand as realty, and worse. Unfortunately, all uses create ‘echos’ or ‘smells’ (there is no good language for the concept) which not only can be detected by other beings, but can themselves cause unwanted side effects.
Some dimenions are ‘quieter’ to manipulate than others. Time manipulation is the loudest of them — even tiny changes would tear apart the cloaking field the Reapers have constructed.
Is what Harbinger sprouting that crap – ‘you exist, because we allowed it’ true? In that regard, can he just say ‘fuck it’ and simply say to Shepard you die…and she can like a finger snap, die?
Yes…to a degree. The Reapers prefer only to use the Godpower when they must, as their existence depends on not being discovered and every use is a risk. Nazara, in particular, did not see any organic as threat enough to bother.
Using the Godpower requires the ability to perceive the chosen target, usually. It is possible to channel its effects, as Harbinger does through Collectors and Nazara through Saren and Benezia, but only a tiny fraction can get through.
It is possible for Harbinger to annihilate Shepard and the entire Normandy with a single action, but such a thing would be … loud.
We saw a few snapets of the Leviathans, whom could do repair damaged stuff, and then make it cease to exist. Can Harbinger pull-off that stuff?
Yes. Leviathan and his kin are far more powerful than even Harbinger in terms of Godpower. One thing they do is … anchor … Shepard so that some of Harby’s Godpower tricks can’t just erase her from existence.
And…if their creators and they are so powerful – how come they fear the Darkness, like…well darkness…
Because the Darkness can manipulate ALL dimensional states. Even the old Ascended were as helpless before them en masse as a 3-D being would be against a 4-D being. The only counter was amassing enough sheer power to ‘overwhelm’ their ability to manipuate the godpower and attack them conventionally, but there were not enough Ascended to do such a thing.
Why not just create a super-large black hole and let them all get sucked into there?
When two beings each try to use Godpower, the stronger usually wins. The Ascended tried things like this in the Long War, only to find the Darkness was so fucked up and… different that they could literally walk right out of a black hole talking shit the entire time.
A blackhole destroys anything in it…in three dimensions. To an eleven dimensional energy being, being thrown is one is about as damaging as you having a very sharp paper cut.
And what kind of techno-sorcery is this – that one can simply flex his fingers and turn his entire city into a chicken-salad sandwich?
That is exactly what it is. It is a mix of being able to see and affect other dimensions through a mix of natural abilities and phase-shift technology, as well as a few other things.
Ultimately, the laws of physics cannot be BROKEN, only cheated. All energy has to come from somewhere, and every action has to have an opposite reaction in one way or another. The only understandable reason the Reapers act is to prevent young races from experimenting with the Godpower and attracting the Darkness. The main reason the Darkness acts…is harder to grasp.
Ultimately, much like the Mythos, any use of Godpower is corrupting. Our species is simply not equipped with the mental structure, senses or intellect to understand eleven dimensional geometry. Most go fuck-all insane. The Reapers suffer from this greatly, the Leviathans to some degree, and the Black Leviathans are completely baked.
The Darkness is beyond sanity, more akin to Azathoth than anything else in some ways. Whatever it used to be was broken in it’s translation to our reality, where it is so alien that it fucks up natural law just by existing.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
It really depends on how well setup the Reaper is and how much Godpower they’re willing to pull out.
Mainline dreadnaught guns shoot a variety of slug weights. A 20kg slug, according to the wiki, hits at around 38 kilotons. As we can see from in game, those didn’t do dick-all to most of the Great Reapers, but could destroy lessers (like the one on the quarian homeworld) in masse even at lower weights.
Since tech is slightly more advanced in the PV, we’ll go with a base rating of 2.2 kilotons per KG of slug weight. Most lighter ships fire slugs weight 1 to 5 kg, midrange from 4 to 15, heavies and what not 13 to 25, and dreadnaughts 15 to 40 by the time ME3 rolls around.
Your average Dreadnaught, one on one with a Destroyer, will need at least a dozen clean shots to wipe it out, so roughly (assuming a 30kg slug) around 790 – 800 kilotons.
Destroyers are mass produced, have no real Godpower, and are designed as attrition units. A single harvested race can produce fifty or more of the things.
Great Reapers (I.E., not one of the Big Three) have a much thicker, tougher hull and a form of impact shielding that makes most kinetic weapons ineffective. Overloading the shielding would require sixty to seventy megatons of combined firepower, and the Reaper itself could asborb a blast of upwards of 500 megatons before being destroyed.
Upgrading technologies helps. A slug of equal size of degnerate matter would blow a Destroyer away in a single shot, as would two kyle torpedoes. Thanix guns do roughly eight to ten megatons of damage per apeture width of stream, so a 30cm Thanix cannon is hitting for something like 240 megatons a second.
Inusannon phase disruption beams and Tho’ian antiplasmatic borers do even more damage, although the energy requirements are problematic.
Taking out Harbinger/Uhl, Niquasa or Tanthor would be … problematic. Harbinger/Uhl is the most severe test, but all three would not hestiate to draw on Godpower to shield themselves. I’m not sure even gigaton or petaton weaponry would crack that in a frontal assault. Of course, such shielding stops them from using their own weapons , but not other Godpower attacks.
Once past a Reapers defenses — breaching its insides — internal damage from even conventional explosives can wreck any Reaper in short order.
Purge the alien. Kill the heretic. Suffer not the witch to live.
