Daniel wrote:

1. Omni-Tool burns

Since it’s entirely composed of condensed photons (hardlight), how come the user doesn’t receive any burns whenever it materialises around their arms or tapping their fingers on it?

This is something I didn’t go into much detail on in the technical document, but most hard-light creations that are easy to touch (like omni-armor) have thin minimal strength kinetic barriers to prevent touches.

Omni-blades are ‘live’ and will burn you if you are dumb enough to touch the blade with a bare hand.

The omni-tool generator itself does not generate omni-effects, the hardlight haptics there are basically arrayed photons in a magnetic sheathe. TBH, some of the details of how exactly this would work I haven’t figured out entirely, as the physics works in a mathematical sense but the power reqs would be … retarded. I suspect I’m limited by the Rule of Cool nature of most ME canon technology.

Daniel wrote:

2. AIs and emotions

Can Artificial Intelligences such as the Geth comprehend, or even act on, emotions or they’re too logic-driven to even do so?

It depends on the complexity of the AI and the amount of neural networking it possesses.

At some biochemical level, emotions are nothing more than organic reward / punishment schemes, embedded deeply within our neural cortex and tied to a great amount of input. They are autonomous responses that developed for a number of reasons, most importantly to boost social interactivity.

AIs that do not engage in social interactivity will not, I suspect, ever develop anything akin to emotions. The Geth, in particular, develop something akin to emotion as a gestalt, but not necessarily on smaller-runtime-grouping amount, due to density of … interactions per runtime.

The amount of runtimes it takes to have the complexity to have emotions isn’t something I can cleanly answer, but for sanity’s sake assume it’s slightly less than canon Legion hosted.

More conventional AI’s (EDI, EVA, etc) develop emotional analogues usually through the programmer creating crosswalks from the standard reward schemes used to motivate AIs into more complex branched ones to encourage neural complexity.

Daniel wrote:

3. Carrier vs. Dreadnought

This is sort of an experiment of mine. In an isolated fight, who would win between an SA carrier and a Turian dreadnought? And how?

A Turian dreadnought would almost certain win. The engagement range of a TDN modern flight is well over six light minutes outside the best guided torpedo range of an SA Carrier’s bomber wings. While the Carriers are designed to (theoretically) take heavy damage, they are still carriers with huge HE3 fuel tanks and large open spaces (hangars). Taking a long range bombardment from the dreadnought would cripple the carrier badly — if they did not launch all fighters and bombers first, a great many would be destroyed.

Assuming that the carrier deployed its full fighter bomber complement AND both were in weapons range, I’d still put my money on the turians. (In PV. In Canon, I suspect a carrier would destroy a turian dreadnought because canon turians are moronic about defenses). Turians would have heavily invested in GARDIAN defenses which means they could stand off fighter wings, but enough torpedo strikes would conceivably cripple the dreadnought.

What I can’t see happening is it being crippled before it blows giant smoking holes all across the carrier.

Daniel wrote:

4. Batarians and Hanar

It always puzzles me how the Hanar and Batarians (the only two races in the Milky Way under the leadership of Ascended) have a large gap in technological levels. How come Katha has more skill in Godpower than the Black Leviathans? Given the latter’s position in the military, am I to suspect that Sharn and his band of deranged fellows are the Ascended-equivalent of military privates?

Katha was the equivilent of a very highly trained Special Forces soldier who was then promoted to General and taught a bunch of combat engineering stuff.

Sharn is like a very grizzled badass master sergeant who has a knack for repairing engines.

But honestly? The divide isn’t that great. The difference is the Imperial Guard is not allowed to demonstrate the actual power they have available. The main reason they’re using the SoylentPeople technology systems is to keep the heavy stuff completely out of sight.

The Black Leviathans do not trust Katha, and do not want him to know their actual capabilities. This is why (among other reasons) they haven’t told him about Lethath or their own experiments on the Reaper they killed at Dis.

Daniel wrote:

5. Lethath’s fault

How much of exactly what happened (Ascended Holocaust, Reaper Harvests, and the Darkness Threat) can be traced at Lethath’s proverbial feet (snip)

Like…pretty much EVERYTHING.

Lethath was the primary researcher into the Godpower and dimensional fatigue side effects, the latter of which he not only ignored but falsified evidence to hide. He ignored several other Leviathans who warned him of dangers in his research and even murdered one and covered it up as an unexpected Godpower accident.

Lethath was the one who came up with the Extractor Theorum, the concepts that took Godpower usage from “destabilizing other realities across billions of years” to “ripping apart entire realities in a manner of decades for MAXIMUM POWER.”

Lethath not only did all the coding on the Catalyst, he coded in the subroutines that he KNEW would result in the Catalyst betraying the Race. He also did almost all the actual design work on Harbinger, and the Reaper warform.

Lethath advised the Highest to combat the Darkness directly, saying his power should match even though he knew from his instruments even the entire Leviathan race couldn’t match the Darkness’s power.

Lethath was the one who ordered Katha and his men to ‘hold the line’ and then prevented the new Reaper cannon fodder from going to reinforce their positions.

Not only is Lethath playing with fire, he’s somewhat aware that there are even greater powers than the Darkness — and he is crazy enough to plan to try to use them or even control them.

Last but not least… Lethath is tampering with (and has been tampering with for a looooooooooong time) various races in cycles, as well as races overrun by the Darkness, in all manner of fucked up experiments.

Very nearly everything bad (including what happened to Athame, crazy bullshit with P. and certain incidents in the Black Zone of the SA) are all the fault of this deluded evil jackass.

Daniel wrote:

Lastly, you seemed to have skipped my Sixth question – something you rarely do. Did I manage to, at long last, break you? (asking a question that you can’t answer.) =)

No. I just didn’t see the point of answering it.

If you ask Spacebattles, my work is grimderp. If you ask DLP, my work is great but with too much personal angst. If you ask the bioware forums, my work is “too long”.

Everyone has, and is certainly entitled to, their own opinions of the work. What I do not care about is what people think of it.

Asking me to ‘justify’ how I make a statement makes me wonder if you have read Warhammer 40k much. The only ‘horrific’ things in 40k are stupid shit like Dark Eldar. Most of it is not grimdark so much as it is terminally depressive. There is no hope allowed in 40k and it ends up defeating itself, which is why the relaunch has been received like the pile of dogshit it is.

It becomes hard to care about 40k ‘atrocity’ if it is nothing more than billions of faceless nobodies dying, or badly written ‘horror’ about torture. There’s worse shit than torture.

PV has the corruption of almost everything moral in the name of expediency, and posits that reality itself is just a foamy bubble that could pop at any time.

I don’t feel like it’s a question I need to answer since I pretty much wanted this to be a forum about reading between the lines.

Here, I can answer the sixth question for you: fuck off, idiot. You didn’t “break” shit. It’s such a dumb question that he had to get me back here to tell you to stop being such a pretentious dickface. “The most important question yet”…? Seriously, how fucking stupid can you be?

Let’s break this down. What kind of question are you asking? “How did you manage not to fuck up your dark world?” Is that it? Not sure if I was able to translate well enough from Fockin-Retardian. The grimdark of a universe is a purely subjective concept, and LP’s original statement that the PV makes the WH40K universe look like MLP is simply to give the reader a foundation to decide whether or not to read this.

How did he manage “not to turn it into a grimderp”? First of all, fuck that stupid word that you just made up. It’s fucking dumb, but I suppose it makes sense that it was produced out of a brain like yours. Again, pretty goddamn simple that LP explains on his FF.net profile. He’s been through some shit. In fact, he’s been through a lot of shit. There are people that have been through worse shit, but that’s not the point. The point is that LP, at the wise old age of fuck-off-youngster, understands the darkness that lies at the core of humanity, and extrapolates off of that to form this fictional universe that at times seems all-too-believable. LP is not an angsty teenager going through an edgy-nihilism phase. He’s not perfect, but he understands how to warp his mind in certain ways to fit into alternate perspectives, and then creates lenses for us to see those perspectives through.

God, I hope somehow at least 10% of this managed to get into your camel-dung excuse for gray matter. Maybe then you’d stop fucking pestering him every second and thinking that somehow you’re actually intelligent enough to ask questions of any value.