104 réponses à ce sujet

[Novak]

A bullet the weight of a grain would need to have a muzzle velocity of 8000 m/s to achieve the same kinetic energy as an AK-47 round. Considering that for significant damage against the shields and armour of ME universe you would need it to have quite a bit more energy the muzzle velocity would be much higher. And since 8000m/s is nearly 24 Mach(23.5 times the speed of sound) I would say that anything significantly higher than that would probably end up in the projectile itself becoming plasma from simple friction against air. I am not sure what kind of range it would have if any or if the plasma will stay together for any significant amount of time but so far it seems that the whole grain-bullet thing is not workable. 

 

Chemrail is a combination of electromagnetic rail technology and standard chemically accelerated rounds. Hence the CHEMRAIL designation. Requires less energy since you have the initial boost from the propellant burning up with additional boost given by the railgun.

 

Wait the muzzle velocity of an AK-47 is 720 m/s and the projectile weighs about 8 gramm. If a grain weighs about 4.4 mg then you would need a lot more speed to achieve the same kinetic energy as a 7.62 round.

[Novak]

Honestly it shouldn't be necessary; the conclusion that modern weapons aren't comparable to the fictional tech in ME basically follows from them stating it in the codex.  Obviously any calculation is going to be based on some amount of conjecture, since Bioware was not writing a physics textbook.  And this is fake-science.

 

***

 

Grain of sand volume: 6.2x10^-11 m^3 [1]

 

Tungsten density: 19250 kg/m^3 [2]

 

Stand in bullet mass: 1.2x10^-6 kg

 

Muzzle velocity: 3.9x10^6 m/s

 

KE = 0.5*m*v^2

 

= 0.5*(1.2x10^-6)*(3.9x10^6)^2 = 9.1x10^6 J, aka 9.1 megajoules, or about 500 times more energy than 50BMG, or 4000 times more than 7.62x39.

 

Similar to the 9MJ railgun in Austin.

 

Fair enough, still leaves the energy transfer to the human body though. But you're right about kinetic barrier's. 

[Xen]

Fair enough, still leaves the energy transfer to the human body though. But you're right about kinetic barrier's. 

Nevermind the space magic needed for the projectiles to not disintergrate, or the fact that assault rifles producing energy levels comparable to the DU penetrators of a 120mm tank gun APFSDS round makes the whole "hide behind waist high rebarred concrete and thin wooden barriers" gameplay seem incredibly stupid. If 600mm of RHA on a T-72 gets defeated like wet cardboard by that level of energy, why do I need "piercing mods" to make my Black Widow antimaterial railgun punch through a foot of concrete that even a modern steel core 7.62 NATO would obliterate?

 

Infantry tactics would be unrecognizable. No one should ever bother getting behind any cover. It won't make a significant difference when you are talking several megajoule range strength projectiles coming at you at 1200RPM

[Master Warder Z_]

Infantry tactics would be unrecognizable. No one should ever bother getting behind any cover. It won't make a significant difference when you are talking several megajoule strength projectiles coming at you at 1200RPM

 

Well... One Day on Mars does it alright, but that's a series where one hit to the chest, regardless of the state of the art combat suit, that makes modern body armor look pathetic and your dead. There is no 'shields or barriers', you have a fully automatic railgun, and body armor that can withstand something to the effect of a brick of C-4 detonating on it, and you'd be fine and the opposition. Infantry tactics in that book series revolves around rapid deployment, mobility and close cover air support and supremacy.

 

Basically you charge positions rather then taking cover, because you can't afford to get bogged down, if you encounter a hardpoint, you disengage, call it in and blow it from orbit if you got a battle cruiser in the area or fighter craft.

 

Also and Tanks are basically behemoth constructs because they have to apply so much armor to ward off your standard assault rifle, that they become akin to world war one era rail cannons, oh and there are personal combat mechs that equiped with railcannons and your standard affair of anti personal missiles and alike. Really as far as Sci-Fi authors go, Travis Taylor can sell concepts.

 

It wouldn't apply well in Mass Effect.

[capn233]

Nevermind the space magic needed for the projectiles to not disintergrate, or the fact that assault rifles producing energy levels comparable to the DU penetrators of a 120mm tank gun APFSDS round makes the whole "hide behind waist high rebarred concrete and thin wooden barriers" gameplay seem incredibly stupid. If 600mm of RHA on a T-72 gets defeated like wet cardboard by that level of energy, why do I need "piercing mods" to make my Black Widow antimaterial railgun punch through a foot of concrete that even a modern steel core 7.62 NATO would obliterate?

 

Infantry tactics would be unrecognizable. No one should ever bother getting behind any cover. It won't make a significant difference when you are talking several megajoule range strength projectiles coming at you at 1200RPM

 

There's a handwave for that.  Materials made in mass effect fields are very strong.

 

ME1 was the most 'pure' with respect to the lore, and it was more or less implied that everybody needed kinetic barriers, and there really wasn't much of a cover system.  Granted, there was no cover penetration in that game.

 

They could always end up retconning some of the pseudoscience with respect to the weapons.

 

As an aside, you also need to ignore the "murder-pistol" in cutscenes that can kill with one-shot to any target.

 

edit: 

 

For completion's sake, the ME bullet has somewhat mediocre momentum of 4.68 kg*m/s ... of course that is without knowing real velocity.

[KamuiStorm]

Solar powered guns, kinetic energy based guns, but the ark should seeing as what it is be equipped with a means to produce sufficiently large quantities of weaponry, first aid, food etc. I mean upon discovering mass effect technology and even before discovering new life mankind created an army just because they could and knew what to expect. With a collective of alien species alongside mankind I'm 100% positive there's some form of a factory to mass produce sufficient supplies

[ZipZap2000]

I mean upon discovering mass effect technology and even before discovering new life mankind created an army just because they could and knew what to expect. With a collective of alien species alongside mankind I'm 100% positive there's some form of a factory to mass produce sufficient supplies

Pretty much.

Dunno how they'll explain materials needed but pretty sure they'll get creative.

[KamuiStorm]

Pretty much.
Dunno how they'll explain materials needed but pretty sure they'll get creative.

Recycling the dead?

[Killroy]

Solar powered guns, kinetic energy based guns, but the ark should seeing as what it is be equipped with a means to produce sufficiently large quantities of weaponry, first aid, food etc. I mean upon discovering mass effect technology and even before discovering new life mankind created an army just because they could and knew what to expect. With a collective of alien species alongside mankind I'm 100% positive there's some form of a factory to mass produce sufficient supplies

 

Why devote resources to useless items? Manufacturing capacity would surely be limited so there's no logical justification for producing thermal clips when heatsinks and ammo blocks are easier to sustain and objectively better.

[Xen]

There's a handwave for that.  Materials made in mass effect fields are very strong.

 

ME1 was the most 'pure' with respect to the lore, and it was more or less implied that everybody needed kinetic barriers, and there really wasn't much of a cover system.  Granted, there was no cover penetration in that game.

 

They could always end up retconning some of the pseudoscience with respect to the weapons.

Yeah, but that hardly helps unless the trees, rocks and piles of dirt/snow I frequently used to defeat 10+ megajoule slugs in ME1 were all enhanced with "mass effect fields".

 

It's needed, or at least some clarification. Why melee and acid/heat attacks also started depleting shields is another thing which needs adressing.

 

Why devote resources to useless items? Manufacturing capacity would surely be limited so there's no logical justification for producing thermal clips when heatsinks and ammo blocks are easier to sustain and objectively better.

Eh, define "objectively better". Easier for logistics, sure, but that's like declaring a blackpowder musket to be "objectively better" than a cartridge rifle because smoothbore pipes, powder and lead balls or even rocks require devoting no resources to the "useless items" required for manufacturing brass/steel cartridge cases, primers and dremels for rifling.

 

The blackpowder musket works fine until you go up against someone with a cartridge rifle and they kill you because they can fire at 5x the rate you can with greater accuracy and range. Thermal clips allow higher sustained firing rates, and seeing as how infantry combat revolves around establishing fire superiority through volume and using it to manuver, the weapon capable of putting more rounds downrange has a huge advantage. They apparently also allowed for more powerful rounds, though it seems at least the M7 Lancer has overcome this limitation to a certain extent by 2186 (it still isn't as powerful as clip based weapons in its class such as the Harrier, Typhoon or Saber, neither per shot nor sustained damage capability).

 

I don't think having a higher performance weapon would be in any way useless, although it is an oppoutunity cost if you can get reasonably effective weapons that have much lower logistical requirements( thermal clips alone hardly seem like a resouce/ labour intensive item, though).

[Killroy]

Eh, define "objectively better".

Thermal clips allow higher sustained firing rates, and seeing as how infantry combat revolves around establishing fire superiority through volume and using it to manuver, the weapon capable of putting more rounds downrange has a huge advantage. They apparently also allowed for more powerful rounds, though it seems at least the M7 Lancer has overcome this limitation to a certain extent by 2186 (it still isn't as powerful as clip based weapons in its class such as the Harrier, Typhoon or Saber, neither per shot nor sustained damage capability).

I don't think having a higher performance weapon would be in any way useless, although it is an oppoutunity cost if you can get reasonably effective weapons that have much lower logistical requirements( thermal clips alone hardly seem like a resouce/ labour intensive item, though).

 

Thermal clips don't allow you to deliver more rounds faster unless you always let heatsink weapons overheat. Stopping to reload, especially in real-world conditions, costs a lot more time since all you have to do with a heatsink weapon is take a second to line up your next burst of shots(which you have to do anyway) and the heatsink is cooled, at least partially. The thermal clips are just ammo mags. You have to eject the spent mag, pull out the replacement, insert it, and arm your weapon every time. You need to substitute gameplay trappings for logic to make thermal clips make more sense than heatsinks.

[Remix-General Aetius]

We can salvage Remnant/Khet weaponry. Who says we can't use their stuff?

[ZipZap2000]

Recycling the dead?

Feed them to their own children.

[AutumnRose]

Why don't the just have a chemist on the team that can make gunpowder? Combine that with planet scan resource gathering and we have bullets.
It seems silly that with the technology they posses, they can't even make standard ammunition.

[Xen]

Thermal clips don't allow you to deliver more rounds faster unless you always let heatsink weapons overheat. Stopping to reload, especially in real-world conditions, costs a lot more time since all you have to do with a heatsink weapon is take a second to line up your next burst of shots(which you have to do anyway) and the heatsink is cooled, at least partially. The thermal clips are just ammo mags. You have to eject the spent mag, pull out the replacement, insert it, and arm your weapon every time. You need to substitute gameplay trappings for logic to make thermal clips make more sense than heatsinks.

Only if you don't subject the heatsink weapons to the same "gameplay trappings". You are assuming the only cooling downtime ever needed is a couple of seconds needed between bursts of automatic fire, but nowhere is this displayed except in gameplay(i.e. the same realm where clip weapons vastly outperform them in sustained fire capability despite reloads).  By the same logic, It's obvious that heatsink weapons aren't capable of firing infinitely without overheating or using up the ammo block like in ME1 gameplay. Were heatsink weapons more effective in lore, the geth never would have developed the clips and no one adopted them, but they did. It's stated right in the codex and  certain weapon descriptions they allowed greater volume of fire and higher velocity rounds, which is furthermore backed up by gameplay in the lone game that they are both present.

 

For the record, I think it's a stupid lore rewrite that was done only to shoehorn in an ammo system, but it's there that the clip system is more effective from a performance standpoint until they handwave it away again with heatsink tech advances or something other than a Conrad Verner gag.

[KamuiStorm]

Only if you don't subject the heatsink weapons to the same "gameplay trappings". You are assuming the only cooling downtime ever needed is a couple of seconds needed between bursts of automatic fire, but nowhere is this displayed except in gameplay(i.e. the same realm where clip weapons vastly outperform them in sustained fire capability despite reloads).  By the same logic, It's obvious that heatsink weapons aren't capable of firing infinitely without overheating or using up the ammo block like in ME1 gameplay. Were heatsink weapons more effective in lore, the geth never would have developed the clips and no one adopted them, but they did. It's stated right in the codex and  certain weapon descriptions they allowed greater volume of fire and higher velocity rounds, which is furthermore backed up by gameplay in the lone game that they are both present.
 
For the record, I think it's a stupid lore rewrite that was done only to shoehorn in an ammo system, but it's there that the clip system is more effective from a performance standpoint until they handwave it away again with heatsink tech advances or something other than a Conrad Verner gag.

someone say conrad verner?

[Xen]

Verner points out the absurdity of the situation in ME3, probably as a reference to fans doing the same since ME2.

 

It's blatantly obvious that clips were simply a contrivance to introduce a conventional shooter ammo system. The lore rewrite was hardly needed and just results in absurd situations where we run into mechs and shipwreck survivors who've been cutoff from civilization for 10 years, yet have access to cutting edge weapons/clips that are less than 2 years old.

 

My hope (other than just introducing conventional cartridge ammo, which won't happen) is that since Battlefront has shown that you can make an overheat system with varied weapon characteristics and a decent skill curve to heat management is that ME will follow suit.

[Osena109]

7.62x51 or 308 is vary powerful round id like to see mass effect go to projectile weapons.

[katamuro]

7.62x51 or 308 is vary powerful round id like to see mass effect go to projectile weapons.

 

ME weapons are already projectile weapons. 

[Hammerstorm]

We can salvage Remnant/Khet weaponry. Who says we can't use their stuff?

 

This is what I want.

 

Btw, I wonder if the alien in Andromeda will have different protection than MW. Their technology should have evolved different than our.

[Mirrman70]

If they didn't bring along at least a few prefab factories I would be disappointed.

[capn233]

Yeah, but that hardly helps unless the trees, rocks and piles of dirt/snow I frequently used to defeat 10+ megajoule slugs in ME1 were all enhanced with "mass effect fields".

 

It's needed, or at least some clarification. Why melee and acid/heat attacks also started depleting shields is another thing which needs adressing.

 

Pretty much space magic is the answer.  Also I doubt BW intended small arms to really be in MJ range for energy.  Of course, it is unlikely they got that far.  Since I was bored late last night before bed I wandered around the nerdy part of the internet looking for people who tried to calculate ME small arms power before, and it was all over the place.

 

It is impossible to reconcile the various lore points about the small arms with physics they don't really address.  The game claims the only limit to small arms is actually the recoil, which seems a bit odd if you think about it too much.  That's why it is probably better not to do so.

 

-Codex claims small arms power is only limited by recoil.  Don't know the relation between space magic momentum and actual momentum.  For instance, my imaginary bullet I used has the mediocre momentum in between 5.56 and 7.62x39, despite absurd energy.  ME field should mean momentum was even less in the field, unless bullet is really space magic version of tungsten which is super dense.

 

-People tried to calculate some recoils based on the Cain, which actually has some info given (25g at 5km/s).  That gives you 125 kg*m/s which is like a 20mm cannon.  Shepard is pretty stout to handle that.

 

-Small projectile through atmosphere never explained.

 

-Never seem to have to charge small arms.  Power supply / battery is "very good."

 

Eezo probably makes even less sense if you read the codex.

[Novak]

Pretty much space magic is the answer.  Also I doubt BW intended small arms to really be in MJ range for energy.  Of course, it is unlikely they got that far.  Since I was bored late last night before bed I wandered around the nerdy part of the internet looking for people who tried to calculate ME small arms power before, and it was all over the place.

 

It is impossible to reconcile the various lore points about the small arms with physics they don't really address.  The game claims the only limit to small arms is actually the recoil, which seems a bit odd if you think about it too much.  That's why it is probably better not to do so.

 

-Codex claims small arms power is only limited by recoil.  Don't know the relation between space magic momentum and actual momentum.  For instance, my imaginary bullet I used has the mediocre momentum in between 5.56 and 7.62x39, despite absurd energy.  ME field should mean momentum was even less in the field, unless bullet is really space magic version of tungsten which is super dense.

 

-People tried to calculate some recoils based on the Cain, which actually has some info given (25g at 5km/s).  That gives you 125 kg*m/s which is like a 20mm cannon.  Shepard is pretty stout to handle that.

 

-Small projectile through atmosphere never explained.

 

-Never seem to have to charge small arms.  Power supply / battery is "very good."

 

Eezo probably makes even less sense if you read the codex.

 

I'm pretty sure the weapons use a combination of E-zero magic and normal rail gun designs. I posted in an earlier post that they tried to observe how much recoil railguns produce and found none. But there's still controversy why that is etc etc. 

Anyway I can only assume that they use e-zero magic to decrease the mass of the projectile inside the firearm so you need less energy when firing, but wouldn't that mean you would get less recoil (if railguns behave like Newtonian physics would dictate) since mass is decreased?

[katamuro]

Eezo is straight up magic but its exactly like the dilithium crystals in Star trek, the naquada metal in Stargate or pretty much any other scifi, its there to allow the universe to exist, it just sounds a bit more plausible than most.

As for the recoil, the mass effect field doesn't just accelerate the bullet, it also lightens it so that it weighs much less than it would really do so both the recoil and the muzzle velocity would be much higher than what you would get from a traditonal gauss gun. 

 

The bullet effects and powers present in all three games are just that, in-game powers used for gameplay reasons. Its why you can spam singularities as an adept, why ME ships appear to do the standard "sailing" instead of the actual turn around and burn as was stated by Joker. Someone probably came up with the whole "no need to reload" for ME1 and it worked there because of cooldown but later it just wasn't plausible when they introduced the whole thermal clip system. 

I can see that they came up with the whole "grain sized" bullet thing trying to explain how can someone just run around and shoot so much without needing more ammo. After all a lot of elements that worked in ME1 did not in ME2 but the lore remained. 

[Novak]

 

-People tried to calculate some recoils based on the Cain, which actually has some info given (25g at 5km/s).  That gives you 125 kg*m/s which is like a 20mm cannon.  Shepard is pretty stout to handle that.

 

 

 

Isn't that a little slow to cause such an explosion? I mean I don't know to what kind of bullet you're referring to but here's a 20mm anti-tank rifle: