The Unbound II (Homeworld: Cataclysm/Mass Effect)

We all can only hope. Do you know about FenSpace?

And that is why there is that BLACK line dividing that image into HW1 and HW2 ships - so scales are not confused with each other. I correct myself from previous opinion and say that Pride is still smaller then the Kushan Mothership...but definitelly not being half as big. Just smaller.

You have to remember. By the time of Homeworld 1 the Bentusi had shamed themselves into Traders because of their indirect help in Exiling the Hiigarans.

They demilitarized but obviously from their Tradeships firepower not undefended. XD


I think what will happen is that the Bentusi will trade the tech to fight the Reapers.

To echo Homeworld 2.

"This will be our legacy. Use it well."

The Bentusi did not became traders because of the Exile of the Hiigarans. The Bentusi stepped down from being the interstellar peacekeepers because the younger races most emphatically stated their displeasure with Bentusi policy by lighting the entire galaxy on fire.

With Bentus unable to be everywhere at once and war flaring back up practically the moment the Bentus left the system, they were unable to maintain the peace and asked the younger races what they wanted.

When the answer was 'live our lives freely' instead of 'peace', well, the Bentusi relented and mostly demilitarized.

Of course, I do say mostly, because as noted Tradeships are extremely powerful, for non-military vessels.

Construction or mining speed is not an issue for them, clearly. Crew is.

At this point their expansion rate depends on the Bentusi themselves; what their growth rate is.

Notice I don't say "biological growth rate". At their technology level, they would certainly be capable of creating clones and copying their own minds into them - or, more simply, uploading and then creating forks. That would let them create new minds as quickly as they can create bodies for them, which is pretty much a "Rocks fall; Bentusi win" scenario in Mass Effect. The Geth presumably do something similar, but they do not have the industrial capacity for quite the same outcome just yet. (Give it another century.)

This would wreck the story, or at least turn it into something very different from what it's trying to be.

As luck would have it, there are all kinds of reasons why you would not want to mass-replicate uploads, however. Robin Hanson wrote it better* than I, but the basic outcome will probably be.. "whole brain emulations (‘ems’) are developed, diverse producers create ems of many different human brains, which are reproduced extensively until the marginal productivity of em labor approaches marginal cost, i.e. Malthusian near-subsistence wages."

In other words, life becomes cheap. Cheap enough that the median worker will only barely be able to pay for his own life, at prices far lower than ours. Death becomes rampant, with the median lifespan perhaps measured in days or hours, but reproduction would be near-instant instead of taking thirty years.

Unless you're Robin Hanson, this is a bad outcome.

Never mind the reapers, the Bentusi - who have not fallen prey to this scenario - would likely do practically anything to prevent it. Which is not to say that they might not initiate some limited, strictly controlled replication if they, say, are sufficiently threatened as to be risking extinction.

*: FSVO "better" that appears to include considering this a good outcome. I'd say "to each their own", but let's not give him the chance to steer humanity, 'kay?

Actually I think that the point is that the Quarians can now mine what others wouldn't even bother with. So they can stay out of the spot light.

With the PDA tech it is entirely possible for the quarians to stay in a single system looooooong past when they normally would have left it. Before it would be based on the availiblity of resources and how easy they were to get to. It wouldn't matter if there were huge despoits of rare metals in a given asteroid after all if they had to excavate through hundreds of billions of megatons worth of useless rock to get to it. The PDA changes that entirely, allowing them to do in minutes with a single device what would have previously taken hundreds of workers, tens of thousands of man hours, and multiple different refineries and other such infastructure. It's the space age equivilent of going from mining picks to precisely placed blasting caps for resource mining, except in this case the "blasting caps" also make everything fall into neatly organized piles that are also sorted according to type.

Hell, if they could work up the infastructure and some specialised devices it is entirely possible they could start on something similar to Planet Cracking as seen in Dead Space. Or giant bore-hole mines on planetary surfaces (like dead moons or such) that would allow them to get at all the useful minerals and such that are buried underneath the planetary crust.

Hmmm, so this might mean the Quarians could stay in an unclaimed system then. They'd be more then capable of maintaining a steady resource flow for a long time and this would finally atleast allow them to build up non-mobile infrastructure, which would basically be much cheaper to develop.

Admittedly this still isn't a planet, but it seems like it could be a substantial step up from their current predicament. There might finally be some hope to become entirely self sufficient.

It could allow them to have a population boom. Certainly not something truly massive, but not needing to constantly look for eezo since they need to go from system to system and the fact that all these materials give them some breathing room for constructing new ships allows them to for once expand their population.

Given a few more simple technologies (Nanofactories, anyone?) it might even allow them to get over having lost their planet.

It was never clear to me why, other than limited technology, the ME races still preferred to live on planets anyway.

Close confines aren't conductive to their psychologies if it's too crowded?

Then make the ships large enough that they don't count as "close confines".

Or, I suppose, use VR spaces - either with clever AR, or the way the Bentusi do.

The technology required seems to be a bit beyond what the mass effect races have, but it really shouldn't be. We're close enough to that; they should be far beyond it.

Since living on a planet is many times easier and less vulnerable than a space station? Not every space habitat can be outfitted with sufficient weapons and is therefore incredibly vulnerable. Why build something new and expensive that you need incredibly large amounts of material for when you can just live on a planet? The technology that would be required to make such a thing make sense in terms of making it a valve for population increase is ridiculous.

It doesn't have to be outfitted with weapons, I don't think. If someone comes along to attack you, you're not really any better off on an undefended planet than an undefended space station. You can also defend a larger volume with the same amount of weaponry, giving economies of scale to very large space stations.

As for the rest.. yeah, it's going to take better technology than the mass effect races have shown, but mostly in automated manufacturing, which the Bentusi have down pat.

I don't think it'll take hundreds of years before our construction technology is good enough in real life, either, but that's besides the point really.

They were traders LONG before they de-militarized. They created the Outer Rim trade routes at first. They were traders and peacekeepers. Then after the sucessful 'Unbound Rebellion' they became traders with a military. After the guilt of what they did to the Hiigarans/Kushans caught up with them, they became de-militarized but armed traders.

Oh. I can see that would work just fine.

..they really don't want to freak out the Council. Not yet. Not until they have sufficient amount of firepower, manpower and resourcepower. That will take at least a decade at best..the problem being? The Reapers won't wait.

They didn't want to become full on Spacers like the Belters in BattleTech because then an entire generation of Quarians would be born without the need to 'reconquer' their homeworld from the Geth..which the Amirality Board would not be happy about..especially Rael'Zorah and Han'Gerrel. Unsterstand that it is all about control over the population. Nothing else. The Admirals still see blood red and want, even mostly unconsciously, to have the populace feel the same about it.

EDIT

Not after a certain level of tech it isn't. Once you get weapons tech sufficiently stronger than defensive tech, the only viable response to being shot at is to dodge--because anything that *hits* will *kill.* A space habitat, even a big one, can potentially be fitted with some kind of maneuvering system. A planet, not so much.

You forget that firing on garden worlds is expressly forbidden and will get pretty much everyone else to hate you while firing on space stations is perfectly fine.

Just to interject firing on space stations filled with millions of sapient beings is not perfectly fine unless you are a Reaper. We are aware that there are rules expressly forbidding firing on garden worlds but it doesn't mean that there aren't rules for space habitats which are simply not revealed to us.

That said the story is going a little further and I would read this story simply for the insight into the Bentusi as a people and culture. The images of what the Bentusi keep doing are cream on top with the further plot the additional desert.

Yeah, so WHO, might I ask will spend the money to do just that when they don't have to waste ANY money and live on a planet which has so much more space it's friggin redicules? Building such enourmous habitats that could actually house a planetary population of the millions and more would be an enourmous undertaking that could very well take decades of work and investments. Not to mention the amount of maintenance work you'd have to do, the Citadel has the Keepers and they are better then any sort of maintenance and repair team in the Citadel. With PDA tech that is certainly a possibility, but PDA tech won't make repairs easier, it will make the resources avaidable and with that comes the price of maintaining such a habitat in tip-top shape which could very well proove too expensive to bother with. Or maybe, JUST MAYBE...people don't want to live in a Space Station surrounded by vaccuum and no athmosphere, unlike...say...A PLANET!

While living in space has its advantages, living on a planet has the advantage that all that maintenance you have to take care of to make sure your life support remains functional is nearly completely free on a garden world. Nevermind that maintaining and expanding the planets ability to house and feed its inhabitants is a lot cheaper, atleast untill you start hitting the billions of people mark.

When you get to the level of tech that planetary defenses become impractical, you'll probably be able to build large space habitats easily. And if a planet is essentially a sitting duck where a space habitat is harder to hit, the cost becomes irrelevant because the latter can survive an attack while the former can't.

How? A planet will not become compromised if it is bombarded from orbit. A space habitat needs a single breach to kill most of the population; even assuming multiple airlocks, as would no doubt me the case, it would be much harder to successfully defend. Besides, Planets are a no-go when it comes to real, heavy bombing by a mass effect race. There's light bombardment, but no one's going to glass a garden world. With a space habitat, no doubt they'll go their merry way as they have no qualms about it, especially if it has weapons, in which case it would be a military structure and they can attack it without much political backlash.

You're talking WAY too advance technology, something that not even Homeworld has. Except for the Bentusi.

Shame, there is always potential for a good "dismissed these claims" just as Bentus mk2 casually jumps in close proximity, completely dwarfing the Citadel, and goes 'Yo'. Sometimes, freakout is good.

On space habitats. There is that thing called 'engines' on them. They can simply leave a 'hot' area. Also, Reapers and any sane strategist have zero qualms about bombing a garden worlds to ash if it furthers their goals. Guess what would the Repaers find the most annoying? Planets, who they can bomb from AU distances *projectiles can fly-fly-fly-fly until they hit something* or habitats that have engines and so can dodge and can also enter FTL?

Does anybody has any idea what would happen if Javik touched anything made by the Bentusi?