Not to mention the "That's no Moon" reaction on the part of the Citadel forces. Would YOU willingly engage if a citadel made of ****-you could appear at any time and start blowing your entire formation away with dreadnaught gun turrets?
The Juggernaut wasn't originally designed as a warship. It's mobile, but that's a secondary addition. It exists as a space station designed to be able to support operations of all sizes from itself even far outside Imperial space. It was only deployed when it was due to the fact that Turians had enough ships left and were throwing everything they could to break the siege. It is also built differently than starship construction normally is. As with the defense platforms, they started with something that had the mass to protect what they needed it for. In this case, essentially the core of a burnt out planet left behind from a dead system and burrowed into it. Even then it took almost two decades to build it. And it's sort of an evolution of the concept behind a carrier, just taken up in scale to the point where it can haul around entire fleets. And during the battle, the issue became one where they wanted a Turian surrender rather than to blow up another homeworld if possible. It was also there to cover one of the weaknesses the fleet had, namely that smaller ships mean smaller storage. Missiles are space intensive, so having a mobile facility working for repair and maintenance along with rearming/refueling helps in maintaining a siege of a heavily reinforced position.
That's a glorious feat of macroengineering. It still would need a truly gigantic mass-effect core, though.
So they tow around mobile factories and make the missiles on demand? I did ask about the logistics involved. Mass missile attack hits hard but has low staying power.
No, they don't tow around factories. But they do have larger ships designed for hauling munitions and other supplies with the capability to reload the warships in the field, normally at arranged points outside the systems where combat is occurring. In longer battles, you might also hit limits of fuel which may also be resupplied, though that is a rather rare occurrence.
Nah, at that point I would see humanity laughing at using a ME core for that. They can mass produce anti-matter and thus use an Orion propulsion system. Maybe with a ME core to provide limited gravity.
You're still looking at moving a ridiculous amount of tonnage. Mile thick armor, mined out of the core of a planet (let's call it iron)? Billions/trillions of tons. To get any appreciable drive impulse, you'd have to use a whole heap of antimatter (pions, pions everywhere!). Steering that thing would be a pain in the butt, because moving the pusher plate to change direction would take a LOT of impetus (or leverage). Newton would be giggling at the prospect of moving such a monstrosity. Archimedes would boggle, then start looking for a place to hoss down with a big enough lever. Wait, describe the juggernaut in detail, please, SotF. If it is what I think it is- a giant, metal sphere- then... have you been reading Niven? Or if not Niven, then Ringo?
It's close to a sphere. The big reason is that it started out as what is essentially left over from the planet after a lot of the organic material was burned off. They tunneled in, building access points, weapons, defense systems, and engines. Much of the armor is essentially just relatively raw material hardened by the nova that essentially shaped it. It was essentially the same process later used on larger asteroids to build defense installations, though those are orders of magnitude smaller. The naming of it is also essentially a misdirect that the Empire plans on making a fact, thing is that it's rare to find a suitable planetary core that can be worked and they were lucky to find the one they did. Unfortunately, the downsides are that it is relatively underarmed for its size though it can be devastating on its own with the armor and kinetic barriers covering it that essentially mean it can plow straight through any other craft out there.
Actually it sounds more like Ringo's Troy then anything else. Space inside for repair and rearming a fleet; ridiculously large missile capacity; 1000 meter thick armor, and an Orion drive. Take a read of Live Free or Die, Citadel, and The Hot Gates. It's actually easy to make one of these with the right infrastructure. Bore out a nickle/iron asteroid, fill the borehole with water, plug it, spin it, then hit it with multiple exa-watts worth of redirected sunlight. Asteroid inflates and you've got a cavern in the center. As the main character in the Troy series says, "All the rest is fiddley bits."
The Turian forces pride took the largest hit as peace settled about. Their spoils from the Krogan Rebellions were taken from them, returned to the clans that still lived and the rest went to museums. Scrapped ships were harvested, the metals used for a new reward to the soldiers fighting for the Empire. Where various militaries remembered their lineages through history with a saber, the Empire chose a weapon more in tune with those whose name was claimed. Each soldier was presented with a gladius forged from the hulls of the ruined hulks of enemy vessels. The victory swords were also presented to the widows and orphans of the dead. And while the Turian fleet lay in ruins, the Batarians were worse off. Only a dozen ships were still space worthy, and of those only one was from their military and even that was a reconditioned pirate vessel rushed into service. For the first time since the Rachni Wars, the Asari were essentially the only Citadel race with a notable military. Codex: Effects of Peace
Whens soverign going to turn up "Sigh another 50,000 years another activation....lets see what the stupid meatbags have gotten up to this time........OH CRAP SLEPT IN TOO LONG" The fortress sounds like it would solo the reaper fleet
Only a dozen ships left overall? I could see that occuring to the military, but don't you think that there would be more? Especially with all the pirates/slavers and merchants the Batarians have (That's not even including the ships owned by private citizens). By the way, the Juggernaut sounds impractical as hell, but so very, very awesome.
Their problem was that when the Batarians realized they were losing, they essentially invited back their pirates and other rogues. Unfortunately for the less militaristic portion of their population, one tactic those forces were using was essentially the converted cargo haulers and similar that retained the appearance of a civilian ship while designed for hitting unsuspecting craft. In other words, they essentially made all Batarian ships valid military targets at any point. Add in heavy commerce raiding that became easier when it became impossible to rely on the relay network with left over dustings and the ability for missile ships to hit and run far more easily than the tactics the citadel races were used to. It would be in direct combat, or against anything that wasn't heavily defended. When attacking the turian homeworld, the intended use of the Juggernaut was to move ships into easy striking distance of the planet that the enemy was dumping everything they could to defend. Its normal use would be to linger outside the system and work as a mobile base to coordinate from.
Peace was a fleeting thing. It was neither the Citadel or the Empire that ended the fragile peace. The Quarians had continued their covert operations beyond the veil, into Geth space and what they found started the spiral to conflict once more in a galaxy that had but three years of peace. Geth scouts had found something amidst the chaos of the Contact War, an ancient derelict and within its hold the last eggs of the Rachni. At that news, even the fragmentary attempts at developing longer lasting peace seemed to halt as both sides began an almost frantic buildup of military assets. Excerpt from The Second War
