Mass Effect: Glorious Shotgun Princess (ME/Exalted)

Sometimes I wonder what kind of fiction sci-fi fans will follow if we manage to develop Casual Interstellar Travel, as space opera would become technothriller. More Sliders maybe? And time travel stuff?

Er, the Kodiak is the APC-like vehicle that the SA leaves dead everywhere. I think you meant the M-44 Hammerhead.

Now you are talking sense!

Well. I dunno. But interesting question nevertheless.

No, the APC-like vehicle that the SA leaves dead everywhere is the Grizzly. The Kodiak is the shuttle.

Ah, sorry. Too early here.

Yeah, never get in a Grizzly. Instant death sentence.

I think the only time you use a grizzly in game aside from it being just background is on the garage level in Noveria.

It is still a background piece there.

It seems like the Grizzly's getting phased out, so they're not making new ones or spare parts. Of course most of the ones you encounter would be wrecks.

Only to Organics

You can hack it just as the battle starts. It's a Mako turret that can't move.

Actually not. You would have to ingnore the second part of the question I gave for it to become circular..so, spit it out or the little kitten gets it! Just kidding.

I'd say "move this to the general ME thread" but they've pretty much done this discussion to death as well

I don't think I came across that quote from Adams, but it makes sense. That last bit, your 'However,' is what I was thinking of. I guess I should have said 'the SR-2 lost a capability the SR-1 had,' not that it was 'less capable.' And given the improved general performance, I think it was worth it. I just remembered it gliding into a planetside dock on Illium, so I wasn't sure if I was actually remembering something correctly, and couldn't find it on the wiki to check, so I decided not to mention it specifically. My bad.

Let me preface my response by stating that on a visceral level I like the concept of fighters, even though I intellectually know it's pretty ridiculous with regards to technological limitaions in most sci-fi settings and mostly a fancy way to send people out to get killed like a massed formation charging a machine-gun line. If you throw enough people at the machine-gun line they might run out of bullets, or break their guns, or just fail to keep up with the waves of troops, but that's a shitty consolation to the 99% of the charging troops that got slaughtered to bring the survivors their oppurtunity, especially when they could have sniped or called in artillery without friendly casualties. This dichtomy between what I know and what I feel shapes my arguements, despite my efforts.

The difference between a fighter and a missile is that once a missile is used, it's lost; once a fighter with a non-missile weapon system attacks its target, it can attack another. This arguement fails when a fighters punch against capital ships comes solely from its missile payload, and the concept of a fighter is usually a vehicle too small to mount a full, capital-grade, energy weapon...or mass accelerator/GARDIAN Laser, given that we're discussing the concept in a ME thread. The problem is that the concept of a reusable, less costly platform appeals to some minds, and that even the strictest, most carefully controlled and rationalized militaries don't always have optimum decisions made. Politicians, desk jockeys, armchair admirals, people less willing to examine their reasons for advocating something then they should be...spitballing geeks like us...Flawed people are making the decisions. I meant to display the arguements I'd expect them to be using, and just ended up advocating them without that distinction.

Honestly, I agree that 'more missiles,' is far better then 'expendable fighters,' for saving lives. And rolling broadsides, cycling launchers to fire more missiles, setting up time-on-target massed attack waves, these are all valid counters to my arguements in favor of fighters. I also recognize the capability of missile boats (or as they were reffered to when the concept finally made sense to me thanks to David Weber, Light Attack Craft) as superior to fighters.

The main problem I have with your response is arguement that not using bigger craft is simply 'throwing lives away,' is how I automatically extrapolate that arguement. Don't send fleets, send antimatter in automated shuttles. Don't take a system, detonate a Mass Relay. Don't send people, send AI fleets. I realise even as I type them that the examples I suggest are ridiculous, and totally outside the scope of your objection, but they're what came to mind initially, and they help frame the arguement that I actually have with your response.

I'm trying to state my point clearly, but I keep getting tied up in pointless sophistry and rhetoric that rambles uselessly, so I'll put it simply: Soldiers die. It happens because war isn't bloodless. We could avoid risking our troops by simply bombing a battlefield. We don't. We could reduce risk by eliminating infantry and putting them all in tanks and/or planes. We don't.

If the technology can perform better in a smaller platform, if individuals can outhink or outfly or just be effectively random compared to AI/VI/Computers, if the ships can't carry enough computers to simultaneously control their full supply of missiles, if the ships can't carry enough missiles, if fighter waves perform better in simulations then missile waves despite casualties, if fighters are cheaper or more agile or easier to mass produce or just attract more enlisting civilians or funding then missile boats, if those dispersed targets aren't in range of missiles or missile tubes...If. If. If.

It all boils down to to questions: Can pro-fighter factions make an arguement? Do those who make the decisions side with the pro-fighter arguements? If both are answered 'Yes,' then there will be fighters.

Then the question arises: Will the fighters work? Not 'Will they work effectively' or 'Are they the best choice' or 'Would missiles/missile boats work better', but 'Will the fighters work?'

And according to ME canon, the answer is 'yes.'

With the prerequisites that missiles aren't that effective, that humanity isn't allowed to build so many dreadnaughts but can build as many carriers and fighters as they can crew, that carriers and fighters expand and project the power of the SA military...

Honestly, were I in charge of an actual space navy, I wouldn't want to build fighters. I'd love to build planet-size battleships with hundreds of kilometers of armor, and trillions of ship-killing missiles, and guns that teleport bombs into enemy headquarters, and pilot everything by remote control from far enough away that the enemy could never reach me so no one under my command would die, be they biological-person or clone or AI or sophisticated preprogrammed autopilot or janitor-robot. But I probably couldn't, even if I had both the technology and the raw materials. So I'd build smaller, weaker, more limited ships, and crew them with people and programs, and field them, and respond to threats as they occur with a force that I believed could deal with it even if it wasn't big enough or powerful enough to smash the threat before it could respond much less attack them, and if the technology made fighters potentially capable of being effective and if the tactical flexibility and force projection of fighters seemed useful I'd build them; and if the romantic, exciting cultural image around fighters and fighter pilots got people to enlist where missile boats or capital ships didn't I'd use them, and if fighter pilots survived long enough and learned enough and remained in the military long enough to be good capital ship handlers, hey! Promotion time.

And I've really been rambling. Wow. I don't mean to sound like I'm biting your head off, I'm just trying to find words that I believe will get the ideas in my head across. I think we just need to agree to disagree, in the end, since I can't exactly invalidate your points, just bring up equally valid counter-arguements. No hard feelings?

EDIT: So maybe I should stop cluttering the thread. If anyone wants to conintue, feel free to PM me, I guess.

Here is a different thought.

What would Twilight Exalted + Internet equal? Normally they are the sciency caste, but with a galactic network, would they be the caste? I wonder what sort of charms they would have? *Ponders*

Wait for Shards of the Exalted Dream. Firearms Charms, Drive Charms, computer Charms...

. . .Her Redness the Megacorp Lawyer. . .
(Be afraid! )

Just because this topic has been done to death in the ME story thread [rant] DOESN'T MEAN IT NEEDS TO BE TAKEN INTO THIS ONE WHERE THE WORD "FIGHTERS" HASN'T EVEN BEEN USED!!! [/rant]

The only possible reason I think fighters could be mentioned is if Joker gets to fly one. And the Normandy is cooler than just about any fighter imaginable anyway.

damn straight

Seconded.

Sorry, but this is something that frequently rubs me the wrong way; the way pop culture worldbuilding and pop culture references always come from what the author (and the audience) knows and is familiar with. There are centuries between now and ME time, plus a manifold stemming from alien cultures, and yet every thing, every quote, every reference that comes up is from the late 20th and turn of the millennium Earth. No one ever quotes that classic asari 'Way to the Stars' series* that ran for over twenty seasons, or the krogan 'Killing time' animated shorts, that combine breathless action with black-hole-black humor. Joker references Hunt for Red October with the Russian anthem, not Void Predator, when the human crew of the one-of-a-kind stealth ship starts discussing sports results when slipping through the turian cordon around Shanxi, which would be a lot more recent and on his mind. In ST, Picard got compared to Captain Ahab, and not to the Bajoran folk story of the Old Hunter and the [Bajoran predator animal. No fucking idea what ST has running around]. Even if you want to stick to that blasted known material, nothing is ever subjected to a remake, reboot, reimagining**.
There is a lot of potential lying around unused, and it's frankly cultural narcissism. Accessibility for the audience is an argument, but I like my science fiction well-built, not common-denominator.

* And no, that's not a Star Trek carbon-copy. It was science-fiction that depicted speculative everyday life on a colony ship, with such a grand heaping of idealism that one wonders how it ever got so popular. Though nowadays everyone's bitching about the never-ending romance plot that took over during the last seasons. Still, everyone knows and likes to quote the iconic adorkable 'I do believe I love you' exchange form S18E10.
**Only works I know that do so are AEE and Schlock Mercenary.

Sorry, post became rant. Is pet peeve.

A few points.

1.)Gregg is doing this in his spare time, and is not being paid for it. It's clear he's put a lot of thought into the important parts of world building, namely in how ME and Exalted are fitting together, where he's taking the plot, where major "players" fit, and so forth. Chiding him for "lazy storytelling" when you know this isn't what he's paid to do is ridiculous.
2.)I don't know about you, but I played the ME series for 2 things: dialogue/roleplay-lite, and shooting things in a scifi setting. I didn't play it to be immersed in a bunch of made-up pop culture. And I didn't watch Star Trek for made-up books they read, but for the adventures they had.
3.)150ish years isn't that long, for ME. Consider we're still performing Shakespeare, that Moby Dick is at least that old, and that we can't predict how societal upheaval might change things even further in that time (or lock them in stasis). For Star Trek, consider that their history is different enough one could explain away stasis in entertainment.
4.)Joker's a quirky guy; him making references to Hunt for Red October and other such works that are contemporary to us isn't out of the question.
5.)The person who referred to Picard as an Ahab figure was from something like 2-300 years in his past, and only a couple decades in our future, if I recall. So, yeah. She wouldn't have know about Bajoran folk stories anyways.
6.)Picard is played by Patrick Stewart, who's an acclaimed Shakespearean actor; expecting a bit of the Bard to not leak in is just silly.
7.)Frankly, inventing a bunch of new pop-culture is basically the bottom priority in my mind when it comes to world and story building. So if that means I get an engaging story, interesting technology, well-fleshed-out characters, but "lazy" pop culture references...I don't mind that at all. I'm reading the book to know about its story, not some wacky other book the author invented to title-drop in his own book.

Schlock Mercenary is pure awesomeness, but what is AEE?

The problem becomes that if you do make up your own references, then they lose all meaning to those actually reading the story.

Sure you could reference Void Predator, but for those reading the story would have no idea what the hell was going on with the reference. And adding both tends to create the effect of trying to hard to add stuff which pops up in several scifi universes.