26 réponses à ce sujet

[The Unfallen]

 I saw this thread over at B.net, and saw many good arguments against the Reapers, as to why the Covenant would win, and thought I might see what BioWare forums have to say about that. 

Here's some of the things they've come up with so far as arguments against a Reaper victory:

1) Mass Effect ships fire in Kilotons, Covenant fire in Megatons (Still, we really don't know the damage output of Reaper tech.)
2) Mass Effect technology relies off of Kinetic Barriers, which don't protect against Plasma. (Yes, they honestly think Reapers use the same tech as every other race)
3) Reapers are 2 km average, apparently, while Covenant ships are miles long. (Then again I don't think size matters)
4) Ships cannot engage in lengthy combat without discharging their cores. (But they are still MUCH more maneuverable than Halo craft)
5) FTL does not exist in the ME verse without Mass Relays (Still, why should this matter)

These are just some of their rebuttles, I personally think the Reapers would win, simply because the Covenant in HALO allowed themselves to fall apart through civil war, which shows me they have a very frail and primitive political leadership, which doesn't even compare to the pinpoint accurate and flawless mind of a machine. Plus, the Reapers have been committing Galaxy wide genocide for millions, possibly even billions of years, I am at least 100 percent sure the Covenant isn't anything out of the ordinary for the Reapers. 

Reapers win, hands down.

[Black Raptor]

1)it's quite clear that Reapers are far more advanced than anything else.
2)same again
3)Size doesn't matter. If anything, the huge size of covenant ships would be a disadvantage (easy to hit)
4)It wouldn't be a lengthy battle
5)yes FTL does exist in the ME universe without Mass Relays. Some of the books mention Alliance vessels cruising around 50x the speed of light. Mass Relays just enable stuff to travel several thousand light years in less than a second.

[caradoc2000]

I might see what BioWare forums have to say about that.

vs threads are generally frowned upon here.

[capn233]

There is an interesting parallel in that the Covenant's tech was all basically Forerunner tech that they did not completely understand.

At any rate, most of the Covenant ships can be taken down in a couple hits from a MAC... which is a kinetic energy weapon that fires at a small fraction of the velocity of Mass Effect weapons, although they are a lot more massive (20kg @ .013 c v 600 ton @ 0.0001c ). Don't ask how a human ship stores more than a few 600 ton slugs though. Using reletavistic energy equation, the Mass Effect gun has about half the energy (56% to be precise). Covenant shields are probably weaker than Reaper barriers... Additionally they have to drop part of their shields to fire their plasma weapons.

As far as the plasma weapons, I don't know how that compares to Sovereign's guns, which just sliced through Alliance ships. In Halo, the plasma basically blows up human ships in 1 shot, but they are somewhat fragile.

FTL also does exist outside of relays as said above. It is also probably better than slip-space travel. Additionally, as above, ME ships are probably slightly more maneuverable than those in Halo.

Usually this sort of thing boils down to fan boy ism as the physics of each universe aren't really compatible. I think upgraded SR2 would not have too hard a time with a Covenant cruiser if we pretended the physics might work out in the same universe. The sub light maneuverability would allow it to evade the plasma, and Thanix would probably take them out in 2 shots.

edit: the speed for the ME gun was wrong, it is supposed to be 1.3% of c not 1.3c.  Changed the results....

Modifié par capn233, 13 septembre 2011 - 11:17 .

[Bogsnot1]

Ming the Merciless would like, totally pwn both Reapers and Covenant. And like, chew up Darth Vader and his Death Star and spit it out, as well as like, completely kicking the butt of both Doctor Who and the Daleks combined. <_<

[Black Raptor]

Bogsnot1 wrote...

Ming the Merciless would like, totally pwn both Reapers and Covenant. And like, chew up Darth Vader and his Death Star and spit it out, as well as like, completely kicking the butt of both Doctor Who and the Daleks combined. <_<

But Gordon's alive!?

[Bogsnot1]

Black Raptor wrote...

Bogsnot1 wrote...

Ming the Merciless would like, totally pwn both Reapers and Covenant. And like, chew up Darth Vader and his Death Star and spit it out, as well as like, completely kicking the butt of both Doctor Who and the Daleks combined. <_<

But Gordon's alive!?

Yeah, but oh well, who wants to live forever, ahahahaha....DIVE!

[capn233]

Ha. Yeah you can't beat Star Wars. What with a turbo laser having the output of all the suns in the galaxy practically.

Halo isn't quite as extreme in their number exaggeration though. Perhaps except that the human ships have to be bigger on the inside than the outside to fit all the missiles, MAC shells, transport ships, tanks, warthogs, and fighters... not to mention fuel, reactor, drives...

Or that a Spartan weighs 500kg with armor, and yet they don't sink through swamps or squishy ground when they don't have a remarkably larger footprint than any other grunt, and would have a huge ground pressure.

[Black Raptor]

Yeah, Halo hasn't really gone into all the sciency stuff that's supposed to make the things in the universe work.
I mean, they have ships that would require most of the usable metal from a planet, yet their tanks are outgunned by the ones used in WW2.

Still it's not really important. In halo, you're just a grunt (with extra health) taking orders and killing baddies. In ME, you are the ones making the decisions so have to be knowledgable in the workings of the world and the devs have to cater to that.

Both are good games but I don't think they should be compared.

[sponge56]

Again your taking two things from two separate universes and comparing them against each other. Its like saying 'who would win, sauron or the british army?'. Unfortunately for the evil dark lord who is the plight of middle earth, one warplane could bomb all his orcs into oblivion. Two separate ideas which have two separate physics and lore etc cannot be compared against each other. Reapers would get destroyed massively. Hell, humans in halo could probaly kill reapers. THATS how much you can't compare the two.

[capn233]

The real British Army, or the one in Call of Duty?

Two separate ideas which have two separate physics and lore etc cannot be compared against each other.

A fair point

Reapers would get destroyed massively. Hell, humans in halo could probaly kill reapers. THATS how much you can't compare the two.

How can you say you can't compare, and then matter-of-factly say the humans in Halo are better than the ones in ME?

Modifié par capn233, 14 septembre 2011 - 10:40 .

[albafica]

 lol sry but covenant are retards aliens,Reapers are just pure epic and have class not to mention that epic voice

[albafica]

And plz dont compare the lore of mass effect with halo lore...halo doesnt has any (played all halo games)

[capn233]

Actually Halo has a crap-load of books. The only problem is massive inconsistencies in orders of magnitude for various things. But I agree, in game they don't go into much detail. I read the books, and in some ways they make everything less believable due to spewing crazy numbers, and also massive amounts of typos.

The ME books are vastly superior in those regards.

[Black Raptor]

capn233 wrote...

Actually Halo has a crap-load of books. The only problem is massive inconsistencies in orders of magnitude for various things. But I agree, in game they don't go into much detail. I read the books, and in some ways they make everything less believable due to spewing crazy numbers, and also massive amounts of typos.

The ME books are vastly superior in those regards.

I don't know, ME books and comics have their fair share of inconsistancies.

If anything, the games are the only canon and books are just flavour. Personally, I find that books written about video game stories are never all that great as the events are hardly referenced in the games themselves and anything new added to the lore is just overwritten by the next game anyways. 
 

[sponge56]

capn233 wrote...

The real British Army, or the one in Call of Duty?


How can you say you can't compare, and then matter-of-factly say the humans in Halo are better than the ones in ME?

Ummm yes the real British Army, not the all two guys in call of duty

I was emphasisng how you can't compare.  The lores are so different that humans in halo and humans in mass effect vary drasticaly in power.  Whereas humnaity in mass effect wouldnt kill the reapers on its own, humans in halo easily could.  It was an emphasis on how useless the two comparisons are.

[capn233]

So it's like if you were to ask if a Civic was faster than a Corvette and I said it isn't comparable because the Corvette is vastly superior?

Really it isn't the case here, and if you are comparing humans the physics aren't as different as you might think.

In both cases the primary armament are kinetic energy weapons. In ME, point defense are lasers, whereas humans in Halo use 50mm cannons for whatever reason (the reason is crappy writing, which is how a Pelican got a 70mm chaingun, and yet a 25mm grenade launcher). In ME the humans have armor and kinetic barriers. Halo has armor. Ship-mounted MAC's are about 2x as powerful as a ME mass accelerator, except that they have less than half the rate of fire and you can hold a lot more 20kg slugs than 600ton slugs. Halo humans have much less precise FTL with slower transition in and out. If anything the humans in Halo are even with the ones in ME if not worse in a real ship to ship engagement. They do have the orbitals, which are somewhat impressive.

The Covenant are slightly harder to gauge mainly because the huge differences in the amount of firepower that has taken down their ships in the various poorly written Halo media. The traditional easy answer would be 3 standard MAC shots or one SuperMAC shot. Even so it gets inconsistent in that nuclear mines have taken out multiple ships, a nuclear reactor overloaded by Spartan-III's has taken out multiple ships, etc. The nuclear mines in space are most interesting mainly because a nuke in space has no blast or thermal effect, only radiation effects / EMP from high frequency radiation. So directly comparing a 30MT mine that is detonating away from your ship to a 64kt kinetic energy weapon would be difficult.

The only Reapers we have seen were Sovereign, who had something along the lines of hybrid between a particle cannon / mass accelerator which cut through Alliance ships and barriers, and that could withstand bombardment from the 5th until Shepard killed his avatar (I would have like coincidence explanation better than disrupting his defenses... oh well); and an at least 37million yr old derelict with a hole through it from a weapon that blew a chunk out of Klendagon after it had already passed through it. I think that weapon might have been better than a SuperMAC, and yet that race still lost.

I don't see how Halo humans can easily beat the Reapers, who are superior to the Covenant... Especially when they only beat the Covenant because the prophets were idiotic, and the Elites joined the humans.

I like the idea that they are not comparable due to lore, but my reasoning is different than yours.  Halo lore is a gigantic cluster with little consistency.... with the cop out that new material takes precedence as an excuse for mistakes in the earlier media.

Modifié par capn233, 15 septembre 2011 - 10:44 .

[Ricardo HWO]

Covenant ships have have lasers, directed plasma beams and plasma torpedoes as well as several fighter (seraph and banshee) squadrons escorting them
The largest covenant ships are like 2km too. On average Reapers are comparatively tiny ( like 200 metres if memory serves), not as numerous ( as far as I can tell), and use molten metal as a weapon. And given the accuracy of Covenant plasma torpedoes and beams, the smaller size would only be a disadvantage for the reapers as it would require smaller/weaker shields. And there's the fact that kinetic barriers cannot protect from radiation, so the covenant pulse laser turrets (which can melt 45cm of Titanium Ain one salvo) would tear the reapers to shreds.

Modifié par Ricardo HWO, 15 septembre 2011 - 11:08 .

[capn233]

Sovereign was 2km long.

As far as Covenant accuracy, they still missed on occasion. And it wasn't as if the human warships in Halo were maneuverable at all. Reaper maneuverability is probably on par with the Normandy, given what Joker said on Virmire.

The pulse laser is supposedly in the kilowatt range... what that actually means is Titanium-A armor is pretty terrible, not that Covenant weapons are any good. The plasma torpedoes are probably decently powerful though. The inane calculations that make them on the order of teratons are nonsense, given what targets they are actually shooting. And relative effectiveness of other weapons... like the 64kt MAC. Or the rapid fire but less powerful Pillar of Autumn shredder MAC.

Oddly, mass effect kinetic barriers offer some protection against Collector Beams... don't know how that would translate to Reaper barriers though. Nobody tried to fire a laser at one on camera.

[Danielnrg]

Covenant would outnumber reapers, for certain. We're looking at hundreds of ships versus thousands. Not to say that is an automatic win, but it is a contributing factor. And have to disagree its you, Ricardo. The largest covenant ship believe it or not is the super carrier, which is around 17km long, about the size of the citadel, according to codex. Assault carriers are more around 8km and are more common in covenant armadas. Now what gets more difficult is analyzing the actual technologies, like weapons and shielding. Based on mass effect 3, I would immediately argue that reapers have that covered. But then again, reapers cannot or have not been shown to be able to render planets inhabitable via glassing. And I'd say those glassing beams are about as powerful as reaper weapons. Assault carriers forward mounted energy weapon is about as powerful as the mass accelerator on a dreadnought, which we know is one of the major firepowers in mass effect universe second to reapers, being able to destroy most vessels and even other dreadnoughts in one or two shots. Based on what I predict, covenant seem to outgun reapers in most fields. That said, the reapers could be capable of a lot that we do not know. So when these powerful forces go head to head, it could be a certain reaper victory. But based on what is grounded in both universes, it would be a pretty fair and interesting fight worthy of anyone's attention. And I do agree that we cannot fully predict anything, since they are in fact two different realities. But don't even get me started on ground forces...

[Danielnrg]

And cap'n in my opinion they are more maneuverable than the normandy. Reapers can reach physically impossible speeds. If normandy was to try to outfly a reaper, 9 times out of 10 the reaper would catch up to it at remarkable pace. Which is what I meant by how unknown the reapers are. We don't truly know what they're capable of. But there is enough media in halo to put a limit to the powers of covenant technology.even with mass effect 3, we barely have an idea of what the reapers are capable of.

[Zakatak757]

A Covenant Supercarrier is 27km long. TWENTY SEVEN KILOMETRES LONG! Both of them are capable of megaton firepower (although the Reapers generally only use those against ships and nuclear silos), and both are capable of turning the surface of a planet into glass.

One advantage that the Covenant has is their FTL technology. Accurate to an atom, and clocks in around 340'000c. Reaper FTL, when not using relays for power, is closer to about 100'000c. Covenant shields block ALL forms of energy, but something tells me Reaper tech does that too. I mean, not EVERY cycle would use kinetic weapons mainly, right?

[Boardman]

Sorry but with all this talk about ships and firepower, I think we're forgetting the Reapers most frightening and most effective tools. Indoctrination and harvesting. If infighting occurs within the covenant hierarchy due to indoctrination, they would most likley loose a big chunk of their fighting force. Plus their main foot soldiers being grunts, don't think they'd last too long against grunt, erm husks? But yea, you must be able to catch my drift with this? Just think we're putting this fight down to spaceships and firepower alone.

Modifié par Boardman, 08 août 2012 - 12:47 .

[Orion the Geth]

Actually Zakatak, the Reapers have always ensured that the technology developed in a cycle is based on the Citadel and the Mass Relays ensuring that the developing races always develop tech that is inferior to the Reapers themselves.

[Spanishcat]

Pft, you're all talking nonsense: Wolverine would kick the hell out of Count Duckula, and here's the why----
...wait, this is the wrong Pointless Versus Thread, isn't it? My bad!! ;-)