Frienship is Eezo: Mane Six Thread... something, something

Sixth thread for the FIM/ME crossover.


Thread One
Thread Two
Thread Three
Thread Four
Thread Five

Just to start things off, there's been alot of talk about Equestrian trade with the Citadel and other polities, and talk about what Equestria is selling. But well... it's TRADE, an "exchange of goods". For non-Equestrian money used to purchase Equestrian goods to be worth anything at all, Equestria needs to import stuff.

So what exactly is Equestria buying with all the Citadel money coming in from fuel, Hornmade goods, and other stuff?

It doesn't need to be anything world shattering. In an exchange of cultures, anything different can be valuable. For example, art, music, literature. Not everything is about raw materials or weapons.

Do'nt forget Movies and Television. I bet the ENN(Equestrian News Network) Would be verry popular out in the Terminous and in Citadel Space.

Equestria mostly imports culture, knowledge and high end finished products.

The latter so they can be studied and reverse engineered.

Well if the EA has a surplus of Citadel credits then they could invest it into non-hostile Terminus polities that can use the cash. Builds healthy relationships and stronger friends at the same time.

One idea was that so much was 'horn/paw/hoof' done, things like Diamond Dog mining, the purchases might be for very large scale industrial equipment. They just didn't develop the small scale stuff as much so jumping to large scale is a problem. Or at least easier for the times it is needed just to buy galactic instead.

Also if Equestria is trying to build up some of the small independent systems in the Terminus area, artwork is a fine way to sink Equestrian funds into the local economies.

Also, how much of Equestrian is scaled for large scale mass production, vs short runs and high flexibility production? Military and ship production might be, but consumer goods?

The EA has a fairly sizeable cottage industry in comparison to the Citadel, which produce a lot of really high end goods, but the underlying economic strength is mostly automated mass produced wares.

I'd say that only about 5%, at most, of the goods economy is fueled by handcraft.

Try less. Fully automated factories , where raw material go in one end and finished products out the other, will account for 99% of the manufacturing industry. Depending on how advanced the nanites are you could even have small nano factories where a person puts money in the machine and wallah the finished product is produced before their eyes.

Now then imagine a nano factory covering a few acres and what it could produce. This includes foodstuff.

Is mass effect industry really up to that level? I don't recall seeing anything about nanotechnology assembly in the series. That's the sort of thing you'd start seeing in post scarcity economies..

Actually you do with Omnigel and the ability to create stuff with it. The major issue is mainly around the fact that energy wise you don't have enough for the very big things.

You forget that the EA is vastly behind the Citadel technologically speaking outside of a few very select fields. And even the Citadel doesn't have large scale manufacturing capabilities that advanced.

This would suggest that the EA would import high tech items that they can't yet produce, mostly as civilian goods of course. Think about the US importing Japanese game consoles, TVs, and the like.

Somebody might want to bring the indexes from the last thread over here.

hmm, i kinda vaguely remember a few lines during me2 about replicating weapons. Some mention about galactid DRM, so it meants that somehow it's possible to "copy" hardware... Kinda hints at the existence of fabricators?

It was in the fluff text for the missile launcher in ME2.

It's also a dig at the real-life DRM.

That is more or less what happens Evil. Equestrian goods are in general of lower quality than what the Citadel produces. The only exceptions are that Equestrian ship drives are more efficient and thus both faster and build charge more slowly and Equestria has very very good protective gear, actually several cuts above that of even Citadel cutting edge.

Everything else just doesn't quite manage the same levels and is several decades at minimum behind the Citadel, often centuries as Citadel space counts them.

Unfortunately for the Citadel, they are a mostly stagnant society while Equestria is actually rather progressive, and now has a good reason to improve more still. Even during the Liberation/Shadow War, Equestria made tremendous technological leaps by reverse engineering the slavers' and pirates' equipment, and in the 30 years or so from that point onwards to the ME1 equivelant the EA will have managed to establish a rough technological parity.

They are still behind, but they are starting to catch up significantly enough that they don't have to cut too many corners or increase bulk that much to reach the same capabilities. And their defensive capabilities have only increased more still, while the Citadel tends to be too arrogant and certain of their own superiority to realize that the EA does have the advantage in several areas that will have a major effect in any conflict.

They know of some of them, they just tend to forget to consider what that means.

There's also the fact that thye're friendly with the Migrant Fleet. One of their agreements being that they'll supply the MF with ships in exchange for the Quarians helping them tech up to the level of the Citadel races.

Then you have the fact that the EA is in possession of the Prothean Outpost and isn't just leaving it simply lie there with them just barely scratching the surface...

A lot of the EAs advantages arn't so much technological as idealogical. The Citidel races could have directly colonised gas giant planets like the EA has and reaped (pun unintentional) the benifits of having operators and maintanance crews near the platforms.

However the Citidel never considered this option seeing it as too much of a hassle to set up a colony when they were getting perfectly acceptable results using remote equipment jut like they had been for the last thousand years. It was only when they saw how much more effective the EAs method was that they realised they could have done so with their tech hundereds of years ago.

The EAs biggest advantage is that they will try out any idea at least once, and throw a decent amount of resources at it. To the Citidel this looks horribly wasteful and hazerdous as many of the projects never work out. However in the long run the 5% of projects that get resources thrown at them work out and are benificial, and of those 5% one percent turn out to be hugely benificial and worth all the money spent on the 99% failures.

With the EA following this principle of giving any idea a decent shot they have managed to find some really inovative uses for what is, by citidel standards, antiques. And the EA has been doing this for a few hundered years now so they have developed along several paths that were unthinkable or dissmised as foolish by authorities in Citidel space.

For anyone who thinks this is Marysue-ish this happened all the time in our own earth history, look at Japan they were more technologicaly advanced than europe for centuries but they never developed or used many technologies to the extent they could of due to cultural and burucratic inertia. The europeans were a lot less controled in their use of tech (Mainly because we spent 2000 years murdering the shit put of each other with it)

Oh crap are we going to see them uncover Javik before or during the events of Mass Effect 1?

That would sure be an interesting way to kick the existing story line to the curb and set ourselves up for a much better ending than cannon. Shepard and Sparkle presenting a living prothean to the council and him explaining in detail what the reapers are and what they do. Shepard leaning back with an epic "Dissmiss this fuckers..." face;7

This would be a great way to differentiate our fic from the others by using a cannon story character earlier in the story, Javiks presence in ME1 would make a massive difference, No shepard getting ganked by collectors, No "Reapers" dissmisel from the council, A proper response to the collector attacks.

So.......whos keen to take this direction with the story/

Uncovering a live Prothean early on makes it seem pretty close to a Peggy Sue fic. It takes away quite a few obstacles early on and further benefits the Equestrian Alliance, which already has the benefit of magic, superior defenses, and immortal benevolent god-princesses.

The Citadel actually made it illegal to inhabit gas giants because like it or not, such planets tend to have absolutely massive and destructive storms, and then there is the normal weather that is often nearly as bad. It was actually a lot cheaper in lives and material costs to simply remote operate everything.

Equestria has effective weather control. Sure, it's not perfect, sure, every once in a while a pegasus dies due to storm conditions and such, but they have such effective weather control and such effective protective equipment that such a thing is about as common as a fire fighter getting killed on the job.

so what prevents the Volus or the citadel space companies hiring pegasus for their own operations?

after all, Hired krogans for security are common, if the savings on the prices on He3 is that much, i can see them trying to recruit pegasus for a lot of $$

after all, no tariffs since it's a citadel operation... I'm sure that at least one Volus tried.

That, or the equestrians register a company in citadel space and produce He3 at great profit in some gas giant outside their space. (I'm guessing that that is fair game, right?)

of course, they would be a target for the traditional He3 companies interests after all, but that's what mercenaries are for.

Hmm... that could make for a good sidestory.

Herd mentality and a general disdain for Citadel policies. It's rather hard to hire someone that rather dislikes your government when he can get the same job at not that much worse payrates without having to move and feeling like an outsider.

And then there is the fact that there is extensive legislation in the Citadel that make colonising gas giants illegal on top of it being expensive, and colonising would actually be necessary to get similar efficiencies.

Not to mention that you can't just hire ONE Pegasus to do weather control. You need an entire town's worth or a city's worth of Pegasi to do more than purely local cloud manipulation. For something like manipulating a gas giant's weather system, you need an entire Pegasus colony.

At that point, you're not hiring some independent contractors. You're basically asking the EA to move in to your own star systems.

How about an entire corporation?

The Storm-Busters.

An Equestrian Alliance based company often contracted by non-EA companies and colonies for climate control work.