naledgeborn wrote...
Dean_the_Young wrote...
I fully agree with your position
What's your take on this Dean? You often make solid points. Maybe you can convince me otherwise, but I have a hard time seeing the Quarians pulling their weight in the coming war against the Reapers.
If the Quarian population can be placed somewhere temporarily, the Migrant Fleet provides three incredibly useful opportunities, all of which combined can be incredibly potent.
1) Logistical lift (military)
A ship's value is more than the strength of its hull or its power generator: at its heart, every ship's value is in what it can carry. Some ships carry soldiers who fight. Some ships carry supplies that allow soldiers need to fight. Some ships carry weapons. At their heart, every warship is simply a craft to carry a weapon somewhere else.
The migrant fleet offers the galaxy's best ability to pick up some element of power and take it somewhere relevant. That could be resupplying an Earth on the brink of collapse. That could be ferrying a Krogan army to fight Reapers. That could be providing all the necessary support-craft functions to allow the Citadel fleets to rapidly deploy and sustain any action.
Logistics
is war power. The reason the United States remains the military hyper-power in the world today isn't because it has the most people on the ground, not even because it has the best of everything,
but because it can be there in the first place. The United States has a better ability to move around the world than anyone else because of unglamorous transports which allow it to take the fight anywhere.
The first massive value of the Migrant Fleet is as a force multiplier for everyone else. The Migrant Fleet can supplement and boost
everyone's ability to fight the Reapers, without firing a shot. They can carry your allies better than your allies can carry themselves. They can carry
supplies to those allies, and by weight of numbers soak up losses in transit.
The migrant fleet, in a word, changes the single greatest problem of deployment, that of having the vehicles to move with, and replaces it with the much more desirable problem of 'how do I handle this capability'?
2) Logistical lift (evacuation)
While I focused on the direct military applications, the migrant fleet can also act as a significant life savior and diminisher of casualties by the other aspect of logistics: sustenance, aid, and evacuation.
This was someething that's actually already been brought up already in Mass Effect, in Bring Down the Sky: the Migrant Fleet can evacuate a lot of people very quickly. Entire colonies, at the threat of the Reapers, could be picked up and carried to safety in a matter of hours/days, instead of weeks and monthes. On Earth or on Pavlon or Tuchanka anywhere else, entire cities or continents faced with crumbling defenses and approaching Reapers could be flown away to safety.
This isn't only valuable humanitarian reasons, this is valuable for other aspects as well. Every civilian who isn't killed by the Reapers is one who can live on to contribute to the Reapers elsewhere. Every emergency convoy that allows a city to continue fighting for another day is another day the Reapers are tied down, damaged, and occupied.
And every Dunkirk, every salvaged army, of course, is an army with another chance to fight and win.
The Migrant Fleet is an undisputed master of logistical lift, in both cargo and evacuation capacity. The entire Fleet's existence, after all, was based upon that principal.
3) Disposable firing platform
Here's the military application that a lot of people think is irrelevant. Here's the military application I think many people underestimate.
The largest objection that people have to arming and militarizing the Migrant Fleet is that, well, it's old. It isn't as good as modern vessels. It won't last. In a fight between a Turian frigate and a Quarian freighter, Turian wins every time.
But from an engineering perspective, this is irrelevant: all that matters in engineering is the alternative to the situation at hand. A crappy old ship that can't take a shot isn't worse in a situation where no one can take a shot. 'Bad enough' is just as doomed as 'worst.' And since Sovereign rather aptly demonstrated entire cruisers being torn apart in single shots, endurance really isn't a significant advantage for most of the ships of the galaxy. A cruiser that costs fifty times as much for shield one hundred times as strong that still gets gutted in one shot is simply a target that costs fifty times as much.
Moreover, armament is exceptionally feasible for 'lesser' craft with the development of the Thannix. Even fighters can supply the firepower of a cruiser with the Thannix canon, and the Normandy 2 demonstrated the applicability for retrofitting such weapons on ships never designed for them. The development of Thannix is a game-changing technology in its own right: even if only a hundred Quarian vessels are fit to be retrofitted with such, that's a hundred cruiser's worth of firepower, and without meaningful loss of endurance (due ot, well, paper-shields compared to Reapers in the first place).
But the central aspect of all this is that, by and large,
there is no necessary mutual exclusivity. A hundred, or a thousand, or ten, Quarian vessels that bring modern/old weapons to the battlefield are a hundred, a thousand, or ten ships you didn't have beforehand, while all the rest of the fleet is still providing awesome logistical power. Quarian ships change the limiting factor from the number of ships to be fielded, to the number of weapons that can be attached. This is an amazing reduction in the costs of power-deployment, and a massive advantage in force addition.
No one expects Quarian ships to go toe to toe with the Reapers. They don't need to. No one to date can. What the Quarian Flotilla brings in terms of military options is the opportunity to bring a lot more guns than you would have otherwise. Is each gun as desirable as a dedicated military craft? No. But then, you don't have the option of a dedicated military craft instead. The Migrant Fleet isn't an 'instead of' factor, it's an addition.
And those are some thoughts. These ignore all suspicion and expectation and possibility that he Quarian-Geth delimma may be resolved by helping Xen take control of the Geth, giving the player access to both the Fleet and Geth forces.
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