BSG/ Mass Effect Crossover discussion.

After reading Fanfic/Renegade I thought it was cool, and wanted to do the same thing with my favorites series: Battlestar Galactica. Take the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, and put it in the Mass Effect storyline, more or less following the same plot.

A list of the major plot... thingies that will be involved.

• The Second Cylon war never happened.
  • Ten years after the first war, Colonial Asteroid Miners found a prothean outpost on an ice encrusted moon. The subsequent tech bump made them too much of a threat for the Cylons to handle alone.
• The Normandy is a Battlestar under the Command of Commander Adama, at least at first.
• Colonel Shepherd is the XO. A Colonial fleet officer, Shepherd is an outstanding ship commander, holding off three basestars during the blitz with a gunstar. After becoming a Specter, Shepherd is promoted to Commander, and -takes command of the Normandy.
• Joker is the Normandy's Tactical Officer (the role Gaeta fills)
• Ashley Williams is a Gunnery Sergeant.
• Corporal Jenkins doesn’t die on Eden Prime.
• n return for mechanical and technological aid, the quarians have a home in Colonial space.
• The First Contact War was between the asari, for whom the Rachni war was a only a generation ago, and the Colonials, with the turians stepping in to break it up.
  • Asari and humans don't get along. But, turians like humanity, and the turian conciliar is more reasonable
• The Cylons side with the Reapers, with skinjobs, and organic tech courtesy of Harbinger.
• The protheans took primitive humans from earth, to the Helios system, (“Life here began out there”) and destroyed the mass-relay on their way out. Thus, forcing the Colonials away from the technological path the reapers had set.
• The Colonials have some knowledge of the Cycle of extinction (“all of this has happned before. And All off this will happen again”), but its Shrouded in Myth.

• Colonial Tech revolves around an isotope of Element-Zero. This Not!Eezo is less powerfull, but still workable for low end stuff like Artificial Gravity, Inertial Dampening, and Mass-reduction. (the latter two are needed for Battlestars and Vipers to manuver they way they do). However, this Not!Eezo cannon be used to make a Mass-Effect bases FTL drive, it takes to much power. Instead, it's the central part of the more complicated Colonial FTL.

• Mass-Accelerator based weapons are purely ship-based. Infantry weapons are still chemically driven. Honestly, the idea of sand-sized projectiles doing any damage other then a tiny hole is kinda far-fetched. Even the comparatively massive 5.56mm NATO sometimes has problems. As for a battlestar's main batteries, they're some species of electromagnetically-accelerated bean-riding missile.

So, any thoughts?

edited 16th Aug '11 6:09:56 PM by Borkless

The sand-sized projectile thing is a terrible misapphrension: it makes perfect sense when you realize it's a grain of sand moving at .1C. The math involved makes these very powerful weapons. It doesn't punch holes in things; it effectively explodes on impact from the transfer of kinetic energy. The real wonder of the Mass Effect games is that your armor and shields actually matter a damn instead of your entire front side exploding into vapor when you're hit.

As for the rest, I am decidedly meh.

Well, everyone has the right to an opinion. As for sand-bullets, I concede that they would have staggering amounts of kinetic energy. But, seems like they would have a hard time transferring that energy to something as soft as the player's armor, and would instead over-penetrate, leaving a nice clean hole.

A similar kind of thing happened with APFSDS rounds from the M1 Abrams' main gun. A lot of energy, but if the target is something lightly armored like a BMP, the round flies clean through, barely even noticing it hit something.

Of course, this all assumes the metal-flake rounds are just that. If there's some kind of Applied Phlebotinum going on in the round that could change my argument.