287 réponses à ce sujet

[Johnnycide]

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

Johnnycide wrote...

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

spiros9110 wrote...

No, but my Shepard would rather go down fighting in what he believed in, compared to the ending we got.

Too bad you doom the infinite amount of lives the galaxy would ever see due to your stupidity.

Why would you insult someone for the ending they would choose? It may not work out, but it shouldn't invalidate their choice.

Calling a stupid decision stupid.

Calling said person stupid.

Don't get them mixed up.

My mistake then, your lack of coherent grammatical structure misled me. As did your use of "your stupidity."

[spirosz]

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

Johnnycide wrote...

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

spiros9110 wrote...

No, but my Shepard would rather go down fighting in what he believed in, compared to the ending we got.

Too bad you doom the infinite amount of lives the galaxy would ever see due to your stupidity.

Why would you insult someone for the ending they would choose? It may not work out, but it shouldn't invalidate their choice.

Calling a stupid decision stupid.

Calling said person stupid.

Don't get them mixed up.

So the fact that Shepard proved we can work with synthetics - Quarian/Geth conflict, yet we can't state that to the "Godchild" because it "believes" it's three options are the only "right" ones? lol.  

[Clayless]

Johnnycide wrote...

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

Johnnycide wrote...

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

spiros9110 wrote...

No, but my Shepard would rather go down fighting in what he believed in, compared to the ending we got.

Too bad you doom the infinite amount of lives the galaxy would ever see due to your stupidity.

Why would you insult someone for the ending they would choose? It may not work out, but it shouldn't invalidate their choice.

Calling a stupid decision stupid.

Calling said person stupid.

Don't get them mixed up.

My mistake then, your lack of coherent grammatical structure misled me. As did your use of "your stupidity."

Given the fact I was responding to a post about his actions it's bizzare that you got confused.

[Clayless]

spiros9110 wrote...

So the fact that Shepard proved we can work with synthetics - Quarian/Geth conflict, yet we can't state that to the "Godchild" because it "believes" it's three options are the only "right" ones? lol.  

One week of experience against the star childs 37 million years of experience (at least). And the fact that every AI you have met rebeled against their creators.

[spirosz]

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

spiros9110 wrote...

So the fact that Shepard proved we can work with synthetics - Quarian/Geth conflict, yet we can't state that to the "Godchild" because it "believes" it's three options are the only "right" ones? lol.

One week of experience against the star childs 37 million years of experience (at least). And the fact that every AI you have met rebeled against their creators.

Sure, that's a possibility, but that doesn't deny that we still proved that we can...  and yet we still can't mention this to the star child, that's the main problem.

You can argue that Shepard just committed a worse scenario with the "galactic dark age".

Modifié par spiros9110, 25 mars 2012 - 12:58 .

[Dominator24]

Its hard to tell. Its true Protheans lose and they were more advanced yada yada BUT the lost citadel and control of mass relays first. So every system fought for them self there was no mass grouping of they're forces like we had.

We have a different situation here. And this precedent happened thanks to the Protheans and they're citadel changing plan that they did (plus sovereign failing in ME1).

Still in straight up fight we would lose in the long run. To have a chance we would have to use some extreme tactic(relay destructions, hit and runs, kamikaze pulling space reaper forces so other fleet can make hit and run planetary reaper bombardment and so on).

[Talhydras]

justafan wrote...

Ultai wrote...

The fleet is only there to buy time, Hackett says a few times in the game they can't win conventionally.

They also said it was impossible to get to Ilos or go through the Omega 4 relay and survive.  

Worth requoting for truth.

The question of conventional weaponry vs. the reapers is one I've been working on for some time. Not only is it possible, I think that as currently presented and based on the codex and in-game dialogue, had the Alliance fleet been built by people who knew what they were doing the Reapers could have been annihilated in a single volley. Perhaps as many as three, but no more than fifteen seconds from the start of combat to the last Reaper capital ship being vaporized.

It is explicitly stated that antimatter is used as a fuel at least by the Asari. Since fleets are dispersed throughout the galaxy and require regular refueling, that means that in this universe there is the means for industrial production, storage, and distribution of antimatter.

Sir Isaac Newton is a deadly dude, but he is respectfully not the nastiest man in space. Einstein is.

Alliance Everest-class dreadnoughts fire a 20 kg solid slug every 5 seconds at a high enough speed so that it has a kinetic energy equivalent of 60 kilotons of TNT. This is a solid case of Sci-fi Writers have No Sense of Scale; as a cold war era ballistic missile sub could fire multiple missiles with half a megaton warheads on it so this firepower is actually quite anemic. 

Let's say that we take one of those 20 kg slugs and remove the core. We instead add in four kilograms of antimatter and four kilograms of its appropriate opposite. Using Einstein's famous E=mc^2: 8 kilograms of matter annihilation times the speed of light squared divided by 4.184 petajoules / megaton TNT gives us: 8 kg annihilation ~ 172 megatons TNT equivalent. That's equal to 2700 times the firepower of a standard round.

And all those joules making up that 172 megatons? It's entirely barrier-ignoring hard gamma rays.

How does this mean the Alliance fleet can annihilate the reapers in a matter of seconds? Simple. If four dreadnoughts firing 60 kiloton slugs are all that's needed to overwhelm a reaper's barriers and then its hull, we have a rough "damage limit" that reapers can sustain, and it's well below a single megaton of TNT. Proximity detonations as antimatter shells hit Reaper barriers will still vaporize the Reaper - kinetic barriers are fairly close to the hull and again, antimatter reactions produce their energy in the form of photons that go right through barriers. There are only a few hundred reaper capital ships, and we need five seconds to recharge our Everest Dreadnought's main guns. So each dreadnought can one shot a Reaper capital ship every five seconds.

And according to the cutscene where Sword fleet engages, the Reapers are charging into point blank, no-miss range. 

Thanix cannons? We don't need no stinkin' Thanix cannons.

Oh yeah - and antimatter weapons don't need high velocity to kill the target, so you don't actually even NEED a dreadnought scale mass driver to throw it at the Reapers and still kill them. Fighters could easily deliver Reaper-vaporizing bombs, if the universe actually cared, meaning that a few thousand fighters could probably annihilate the entire Reaper fleet in under a minute (with horrific casualties of course).

If we're worried about reaper point defense - don't! Again, look to the cold war. Make missiles that split into a hundred submunitions - 99 of which are inert duds, and one is the small but hyper-deadly antimatter warhead. Reaper PD has a 1 in 100 chance of hitting the right one, and if antimatter is cheap enough to be used as a fuel and widely distributed to fuel depots it should be a no brainer to extract whatever is needed. Hell, since it's the end of days any existing antimatter stock should be used immediately for that effort - because what good is fuel reserves if we have no ships left after the final battle?

In conclusion: Not only was utlimate victory trivially easy, but would have been utterly instantaneous had the writers not been wedded to the idea that kinetic energy is the only energy. Einstein's energy-mass equivalence makes him the deadliest son of a b*tch in space, folks.

The only - ONLY - way the Reapers could possibly survive this attack is by having hulls that are EXTREMELY (99.99+%) reflective to short wavelength photons. Which in and of itself would be a materials science feat; on top of that though they would need extremely rapid repair of this reflective coating because any impact of any other weapon creating scratches would destroy the reflectivity and allow antimatter weapons to again be one-hit-kills.

Modifié par Talhydras, 25 mars 2012 - 01:04 .

[Clayless]

spiros9110 wrote...

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

spiros9110 wrote...

So the fact that Shepard proved we can work with synthetics - Quarian/Geth conflict, yet we can't state that to the "Godchild" because it "believes" it's three options are the only "right" ones? lol.

One week of experience against the star childs 37 million years of experience (at least). And the fact that every AI you have met rebeled against their creators.

Sure, that's a possibility, but that doesn't deny that we still proved that we can...  and yet we still can't mention this to the star child, that's the main problem.

You can argue that Shepard just committed a worse scenario with the "galactic dark age".

Save the galaxy or

Let the infinite lives of the galaxy be killed by the Reapers forever.

Yeah you could argue the first one is worse if you want.

[Devils-DIVISION]

I would've much preferred that conclusion: somehow we find and tackle their weakness! Like Independence Day. Much better and more realistic than the space magic ending 

Modifié par Devils-DIVISION, 25 mars 2012 - 01:07 .

[Misterdde45000]

Just a quick reminder. The normandy can take out a reaper with 3 shots at their beam cannon.

So i guess yes, if the gunsman know their jobs, they can take reapers out.

[katamuro]

Devils-DIVISION wrote...

I would've much preferred that conclusion; somehow we find and tackle their weakness! Like Independence Day.

Yeah, that what ME was about. Hope that we will find a solution, thorugh all the hardships

[Corvus74]

In my opinion it is entirely possible that they could be defeated by conventional means.

While the Reapers are more advanced technologically, it isn't so vast as to be insurmountable. And the Reapers have been technologically stagnant for a long, long time. You board a 37 million year old Reaper Cap Ship in ME2 which is exactly the same as current ones to recover its IFF to use. Think of that. In 37 million years they haven't changed their IFF codes or technology.

In the past the Reapers have always used the same tactics. Hit the Citadel, shut down all Mass Relays and then take down each small, isolated pocked one at a time. And doing so takes centuries of fighting, even with indoctrinated agents sowing confusion amongst their victims.

With that option gone they have to try new ones in the current cycle. First is the Rachni, which fails. Then Saren, which fails. And out of that defeated the races of the galaxy get a major upgrade - Thanix weapons reverse engineered from the Reaper's own weapons. Just two Thanix missiles are enough to take out a Reaper destroyer.

With all other options gone, the Reapers go with plan D - an all out Blitz. If they were so confident in their victory why wasn't that plan A? Because they weren't confident. They don't want a stand up fight because they know they may not win. They loose numerous ships to the Turians alone, both on the ground and in space.

What they do is spread themselves thin out across the galaxy, trying to blitz the homeworlds of the major races. My guess is they had the same theory as the Germans did in WWII - if you bomb London to the ground or capture Moscow, the enemy will capitulate. Except it didn't work.

So while they are scattered out among the stars, the allies races put together a truly staggeringly massive fleet of ten of thousands of starships. Mine had humans, batarians, salarians, turians, asari, geth, quarians, elcor, volus, hanar and even unnamed Terminus races.

The Reaper fleet, scattered as it was, was much, much smaller. And, per the Codex, we know the vast majority of the Reaper fleet is made up of destroyers, which, once again from the Codex, we know can be destroyed by single cruisers or even fighters in the right circumstances. All they needed to do was pick a single cap ship and pour one almighty volley into it. No Reaper could withstand a 10,000+ starship volley. Then hit the next and the next, while the fighters are busy chewing up the destroyers.

Those in game may say they have no chance, but they are just looking at history without a true understanding of how it went - fighting the last war as it were.

Would their be heavy losses? Yes. It would be a slow, hard slog, but a darn sight cheaper in loss of life than blowing up all mass relays and the untold trillions that would leave dead.

[Devils-DIVISION]

katamuro wrote...

Devils-DIVISION wrote...

I would've much preferred that conclusion; somehow we find and tackle their weakness! Like Independence Day.

Yeah, that what ME was about. Hope that we will find a solution, thorugh all the hardships

Very much agree!

[ibage]

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

spiros9110 wrote...

No, but my Shepard would rather go down fighting in what he believed in, compared to the ending we got.

Too bad you doom the infinite amount of lives the galaxy would ever see due to your stupidity.

No, I disagree here. If given the choice of fighting, being harvested in an extremely horrific manner or being slung back into a galactic darkage, I'd let the fleet try it's luck.

I'd much rather fight than give in.  

[SNascimento]

No, and there isn't even room to discussion.
.
It's said time after time by multiple people that it's impossible to beat the reaper with conventional means.
.
Even Palaven with its miracle couldn't not stand the reapers.

[goose2989]

Mass Effect is set in a science fiction universe; none of it "has" to make sense. For example, look at element zero; isn't it just as ridiculous to say there is any element, which hasn't been discovered, that will give organic beings super powers?

If Bioware had wanted to write the story of defeating the Reapers in a conventional manner, they could have. Sure it's a stretch, but it's no more of a stretch than the Catalyst just letting Shepard decide the fate of the galaxy, rather than order Harbinger to swoop in and fry him in a heartbeat.

[Corvus74]

SNascimento wrote...

No, and there isn't even room to discussion.
.
It's said time after time by multiple people that it's impossible to beat the reaper with conventional means.
.
Even Palaven with its miracle couldn't not stand the reapers.

Except those people are fighting the last wars. and ignoring the vast differences between those and the current ones.  All other times Reapers picked off small pockets of isolated resistance one at a time.  This time for the first time they are takin on a unified galaxy that is not isolated.  With Reaper based weaponry.  Against a scattered enemy.

[MrAtomica]

Yup.

Destroy the Citadel, the Catalyst dies, the Reapers are left leaderless and disoriented.

Their kinetic barriers fail, they are left scattered, the fleet wipes them out.

Problem solved.

[Clayless]

ibage wrote...

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

spiros9110 wrote...

No, but my Shepard would rather go down fighting in what he believed in, compared to the ending we got.

Too bad you doom the infinite amount of lives the galaxy would ever see due to your stupidity.

No, I disagree here. If given the choice of fighting, being harvested in an extremely horrific manner or being slung back into a galactic darkage, I'd let the fleet try it's luck.

I'd much rather fight than give in.  

You can disagree all you want. It doesn't mean that you would win, in fact your stupidity would doom the galaxy forever.

[RGFrog]

Yes, conventional means should have been enough. Shep figures out how to kill them on the Quarian home world.

Did he forget to tell anyone else? Shoot the big red thing when it's charging... they go boom. Don't bother shooting them any other time as they don't explode.

Ending cut scenes when shep goes back to earth I was expecting more of this tactic... but no mention of it. WHUUUUT was all I was thinking when the main attack started at Earth...

[SNascimento]

Corvus74 wrote...

SNascimento wrote...

No, and there isn't even room to discussion.
.
It's said time after time by multiple people that it's impossible to beat the reaper with conventional means.
.
Even Palaven with its miracle couldn't not stand the reapers.

Except those people are fighting the last wars. and ignoring the vast differences between those and the current ones.  All other times Reapers picked off small pockets of isolated resistance one at a time.  This time for the first time they are takin on a unified galaxy that is not isolated.  With Reaper based weaponry.  Against a scattered enemy.

.
And? This is what make the last battle of ME3 possible... Javik himself said there wasn't anything like in his cycle, no last battle. But then saying the galaxy had a chance agaisnt the reapers with conventional means is wrong. There is no evidence to support this, on the contrary, every evidence suggest that even if we can win battles, the war is impossible to win. 

[ibage]

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

ibage wrote...

Our_Last_Scene wrote...

spiros9110 wrote...

No, but my Shepard would rather go down fighting in what he believed in, compared to the ending we got.

Too bad you doom the infinite amount of lives the galaxy would ever see due to your stupidity.

No, I disagree here. If given the choice of fighting, being harvested in an extremely horrific manner or being slung back into a galactic darkage, I'd let the fleet try it's luck.

I'd much rather fight than give in.  

You can disagree all you want. It doesn't mean that you would win, in fact your stupidity would doom the galaxy forever.

Man, I took the bait didn't I...

[AllergevKev]

Not for the overall war, but for that battle it certainly was.

I don't think they should've included the crucible in the Battle for Earth. Personally, I think we should've fought that battle then decided what to do with it, but that's just me.

[aliengmr1]

Sweep the leg!

Would have loved raining untold carnage upon the Reapers. Screw realism. My Shep would have preferred to go down punching Harbinger right in the face. Stupid Reapers

Robopocolypse anyone?

We humans have many weaknesses, but back us into a corner and we become a whole different animal.

[Taldek]

Corvus74 wrote...

In my opinion it is entirely possible that they could be defeated by conventional means.

While the Reapers are more advanced technologically, it isn't so vast as to be insurmountable. And the Reapers have been technologically stagnant for a long, long time. You board a 37 million year old Reaper Cap Ship in ME2 which is exactly the same as current ones to recover its IFF to use. Think of that. In 37 million years they haven't changed their IFF codes or technology.

In the past the Reapers have always used the same tactics. Hit the Citadel, shut down all Mass Relays and then take down each small, isolated pocked one at a time. And doing so takes centuries of fighting, even with indoctrinated agents sowing confusion amongst their victims.

With that option gone they have to try new ones in the current cycle. First is the Rachni, which fails. Then Saren, which fails. And out of that defeated the races of the galaxy get a major upgrade - Thanix weapons reverse engineered from the Reaper's own weapons. Just two Thanix missiles are enough to take out a Reaper destroyer.

With all other options gone, the Reapers go with plan D - an all out Blitz. If they were so confident in their victory why wasn't that plan A? Because they weren't confident. They don't want a stand up fight because they know they may not win. They loose numerous ships to the Turians alone, both on the ground and in space.

What they do is spread themselves thin out across the galaxy, trying to blitz the homeworlds of the major races. My guess is they had the same theory as the Germans did in WWII - if you bomb London to the ground or capture Moscow, the enemy will capitulate. Except it didn't work.

So while they are scattered out among the stars, the allies races put together a truly staggeringly massive fleet of ten of thousands of starships. Mine had humans, batarians, salarians, turians, asari, geth, quarians, elcor, volus, hanar and even unnamed Terminus races.

The Reaper fleet, scattered as it was, was much, much smaller. And, per the Codex, we know the vast majority of the Reaper fleet is made up of destroyers, which, once again from the Codex, we know can be destroyed by single cruisers or even fighters in the right circumstances. All they needed to do was pick a single cap ship and pour one almighty volley into it. No Reaper could withstand a 10,000+ starship volley. Then hit the next and the next, while the fighters are busy chewing up the destroyers.

Those in game may say they have no chance, but they are just looking at history without a true understanding of how it went - fighting the last war as it were.

Would their be heavy losses? Yes. It would be a slow, hard slog, but a darn sight cheaper in loss of life than blowing up all mass relays and the untold trillions that would leave dead.

^This, ive also seen it mention in the ME wiki that 3 alliance dreadnaughts can take down a reaper capship, while their chances of getting within range to deal the damage is low it can be done.