24 réponses à ce sujet

[Megamag]

I mean, the Reapers come equipped with their certain-death-beams but that's a pretty focused weapon. The beams are undoubtedly well suited for taking out airships or other targets. But they lack radius. It's not exactly a weapon of mass destruction. At that rate it would probably take them another whole cycle to actually wipe the planets surface clean (including every last living organism of that species). And they're not particularly fast moving either. So I asked myself, wether the Reaper arsenal would even be capable of performing such tasks. What do you think?

[cap and gown]

Flyswatters. The Catalyst is looking for the plans for flyswatters. That is what the harvest is all about: finding the plans for making giant flyswatters.

[Michotic]

Well, the Relays can go supernova and destroy and entire system. Yes, I think it's perfectly within their capabilities to explode planets, if they are able to harness and control energy of that magnitude. I don't think they see that as a necessity. Blowing up planets destroys resources.

[KaiserShep]

I don't suppose anything precludes the reapers from employing a more destructive weapon should they prefer to just glass a planet rather than invade it. They can build the relays and the Citadel. There's no reason they can't build bombs bigger than the one the turians left for the krogan.

[Fanuilos]

They Reaper-fy species to handle taking out the living that they cannot get to. It's a really sick and sadistic thing to do. I was just thinking about the refuse ending. It's quite possible that one or multiple Reaperfied species of our cycle would become the Collectors of the next cycle. Pretty grim.

[Anthormee]

Weren't reaper supposed to cause massive damaged when they landed? Like on Eden Prime? I'm sure that would help some, since their "numbers will darken the sky of every world."

[wolfhowwl]

From the Codex:

The main gun on a Reaper capital ship dwarfs that of the Alliance's Everest-class dreadnoughts. No dreadnought has yet survived a direct hit from the weapon. Estimates put its destructive power anywhere from 132 to 454 kilotons of TNT.

For comparison the weapon used at Hiroshima had a blast yield of around 16 kilotons.

Also as shown by Bring Down the Sky, using asteroids as weapons wouldn't be difficult either.

Modifié par wolfhowwl, 22 décembre 2013 - 10:33 .

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

The reapers didn't cause that much damage when they landed. We saw that. It wasn't like sovereign on Eden Prime. And that dreadnought on Earth took four hits from the reaper capital ship. The core blew up less than 5 km (unobstructed) from Shepard and Anderson and merely knocked them over. Wow. I would have thought radiation burns and stuff. Damn. They were only in uniform. Possibly turned to ash. But such is a video game logic. Of course I can destroy a reaper's core with bullets.

[AlanC9]

On the galaxy map you can find plenty of planets that once housed intelligent life but were destroyed by someone. Draw your own conclusions.

[Daemul]

AlanC9 wrote...

On the galaxy map you can find plenty of planets that once housed intelligent life but were destroyed by someone. Draw your own conclusions.

Yep, read those planet descriptions, many of them were bombarded from orbit and destroyed, by who remains a mystery.....

[dgcatanisiri]

The Reapers don't WANT to destroy the planets. They want to wipe out organic life and their entire civilizations. That begins by destroying everything the organics have built, blowing apart their constructions and probably killing millions then and there by striking urban areas. Then they move on to unleashing their husks, cannibals, collectors, adjutants, whatever you call them, en masse.

Sure, this is more complicated than just, say, unleashing some kind of bio-weapon and THEN wiping out all signs of civilization, but they still need to create the new Reaper, the one with the combined knowledge and understanding of the species of the current cycle, as part of the 'preservation' of a species.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

You're right. The reapers don't want to wipe out and destroy the planets. It just happens when the organics fight back. If the organics would simply give up and stand in line and wait to die it would all go so much more smoothly, and the ecosystems would recover. See, the organics are the bad guys. The reapers are doing them a favor.

Baby back ribs for lunch... mmmm.... mmmmm.

Modifié par sH0tgUn jUliA, 23 décembre 2013 - 01:04 .

[AlexMBrennan]

What do you think?

There is no way the Alliance could have won if the Reapers actually used their guns, thus the writers restricted them ineffective lasers and retconned physics to prevent the Reapers from just shooting at the Crucible (we can shoot at the Reaper ships, but there is nothing we can do to stop the Reapers from focussing fire on the Crucible short of blocking the fire with our ships, and if we had armour capable of withstanding concentrated fire from the entire enemy armada for hours then we'd have won already)

[Han Shot First]

Even ignoring Reaper firepower for a moment, anything capable of traversing the Milky Way in the blink of an eye (it takes light 100,000 years to cross it) would surely also possess the means of towing a large enough space rock into range to do this.

[SporkFu]

The reapers have been perfecting the technique of harvesting civilizations for millions of years, and each harvest adds to their collective intelligence. Of course they can take out planets.

[Dean_the_Young]

Is the OP asking if Reaper capital ships themselves are capable of destroying planets? If so, the answer is probably not. They might be able to do apocalyptic levels of biosphere destruction, if the planet scan inferences refer to Reaper bombardment, but then those could be the result of special, purpose-built orbital bombarders as part of the Reaper mop-up process. Regardless, the planets themselves are very much there.

If you mean do the Reapers have the capability to destroy planets if they choose to go about it? Certainly. Besides dragging asteroids or planetoids, relay-scale explosions, or pulling the prothean sun-destruction trip, if you gave the Reapers enough time they could easily build something along the lines of the Klendagon Canon.

, but the planets are very much there.

[AlanC9]

I presumed the topic was biosphere destruction rather than blowing the whole planet to smithereens. That's just overkill, and doesn't serve any conceivable Reaper goal.

[Daemul]

Han Shot First wrote...

Even ignoring Reaper firepower for a moment, anything capable of traversing the Milky Way in the blink of an eye (it takes light 100,000 years to cross it) would surely also possess the means of towing a large enough space rock into range to do this.

This video has messed me up for good.

[ImaginaryMatter]

I always wondered if the Reapers had some sort of extremely large mass effect generator that could increase the mass of a planet so that it would eventually collapse on itself and turn into a black hole? This is what I thought the Crucible would do back in the day. Purely a hypothetical question but that sort of seemed like a good doomsday device for the Mass Effect universe.

Modifié par ImaginaryMatter, 23 décembre 2013 - 09:21 .

[Gervaise]

Technically the Reapers are only trying to wipe out all intelligent organic life capable of building synthetics that might kill them. So really a planet wide total destruction of all life goes against their remit. The ground troops of altered beings are to ensure they locate all beings worthy of being harvested. In former cycles they also began the harvest by taking over the Citadel and apparent former cycles always made this the centre of their civilisation. Certainly the Protheans did and kept records there of all their subjects and their locations, no doubt originally to ensure efficient collection of taxes and that they were properly subservient. So in that case the Reapers had all the details they needed for an efficient wiping out of those organics that needed to be harvested. Even so, it took several centuries to achieve their goal and certain groups still managed to avoid detection. The trick it seemed was to cut yourself off completely from the outside world. The problem was sustaining yourself until the crisis past since presumably normal methods of food production, etc, would be denied to you.

In the current cycle it would take even longer to achieve their aim since they did not achieve the element of surprise they had with previous ones. Planets like earth certainly looked a mess but they had concentrated their efforts there. It may well be the majority of other life forms had already suffered through the expansion of human population so the Reapers did not have to worry about inferior organic beings in their attack. But whilst the Reapers might initially use shock and awe tactics to frighten the population into submission, mass destruction was not the aim. They were intent on harvesting the intelligent organic life forms and making use of the processed material. Blowing up planets would not be conducive to this aim.

[Iakus]

Megamag wrote...

I mean, the Reapers come equipped with their certain-death-beams but that's a pretty focused weapon. The beams are undoubtedly well suited for taking out airships or other targets. But they lack radius. It's not exactly a weapon of mass destruction. At that rate it would probably take them another whole cycle to actually wipe the planets surface clean (including every last living organism of that species). And they're not particularly fast moving either. So I asked myself, wether the Reaper arsenal would even be capable of performing such tasks. What do you think?

Can they render a planet uninhabitable?  Sure.  It can be done with warships already in teh galaxy.  Just need to drop an asteroid on it or fire a few mass accelerated slugs at the surface.

Can they make the planet Go Away with an Earth Shattering Kaboom?  Maybe, given enough time and numbers.  But it's not really efficient. 

Since ultimately they seem to want organic life to continue, if they really wanted to deal with a troublesome population, they'd probably just drop one of those specialized Collector plagues on it and be done with it.  No more troublemakers, and the planet sticks around for another species to rise.

[Nitrocuban]

Orbital nucular bombardement ain't that difficult.
But Reapers do not want to kill all life on a planet, they are no mindless killers but gardeners, taking care of their crop fields

[Ruadh]

Listen to the news feeds about Earth in ME3. You hear reports of entire continents being wiped out from orbit, and thats on a species that they're actually 'harvesting'. Wouldn't be much of a stretch for them to further the destruction, especially on a planet/species they simply want out the way.

Of course, they only do that because they're misunderstood good guys, and are trying to help you by making you dead.

[Argentoid]

Daemul wrote...

AlanC9 wrote...

On the galaxy map you can find plenty of planets that once housed intelligent life but were destroyed by someone. Draw your own conclusions.

Yep, read those planet descriptions, many of them were bombarded from orbit and destroyed, by who remains a mystery.....

I love that foreshadowing.

[Navasha]

We have the capability in the real world of destroying all surface life from the face of the planet, so it would be a small thing for Reapers if that was their goal.