Discussion WhatAnIdiot / MassEffect

I think a lot of ships were retrofitted with Thanix cannons, the graphics simply not doing it justice. The Quarian liveships were mentioned having them, the Volus Dreadnought had them. The codex entries mention they have widespread use.

Also, it takes time to retrofit entire fleets, so even if they were upgrading every ship they had, they still only had about 17-22 months between the first working Thanix cannon and the outbreak of the war.

As for the second, Shepard was injured and exhausted and they threw everything they had in the opening volley, and they were well aware they were still out matched. The fleet would get chewed up by the time he made his way off the Citadel, and the Catalyst would probably poison the atmosphere to get rid of Shepard faster.

Entire Mass Effect 3 codex entry on Thanix Cannons:

"After the Battle of the Citadel, human and turian volunteers spent three months clearing the station's orbit of debris. During the cleanup, the turians secretly salvaged Sovereign's powerful main gun along with much of the weapon's element zero core. Eleven months later, the turians introduced the Thanix, a scaled-down version of the weapon.

The Thanix's core is a liquid alloy of iron, uranium, and tungsten suspended in an electromagnetic field powered by element zero. The molten metal, accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, solidifies into a projectile as it is fired, hitting targets with enough force to pierce any known shield or armor. The gun can fire reliably every five seconds.

The weapon's relatively small size allows it to be mounted on most fighters or frigates. It is now widely used by the Alliance military and is the primary weapon on the refurbished Normandy SR-2."

http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Codex/Ships_and_Vehicles

As for the second entry, like I said Shepard has faced insurmountable odds before and always found a way to overcome them. Shepard giving up for no reason is an act of stupidity. Moreover I could debate the legitimacy of half the entries here. You know what I DON'T do? Delete them outright.

This is not up for dispute. The game backs me up. Zaptech is a biased vandal and obvious Bioware fanboy, I am simply adding facts from the game. I expect to see my entries restored.

So, are we arguing both, or just the second? If we're arguing the second, I don't feel like getting into it too much, I think Shepard is simply at the point of no return, and all he could do at that point is limp defiantly to the end, but if you think something more could/should have happened that's your perfectly valid opinion and I won't contest putting it back.

If we're arguing the first one as well, then I don't get it. You're saying they're idiots because they're not making extensive use of these uber-powerful weapons, even though according to the lore, that's exactly what they're doing.

My point is that the lore says they're using thanix cannons, but we never SEE them used. We see ships using mass accelerators and *only* mass accelerators, some "tanks" pull "thanix missiles" out of the blue, but they have nothing to do with anything.

The thanix cannon is a distinctive, solid beam of blue light that can cut through ships in a couple of shots. It may take more for a Reaper, but we see these beams exactly NEVER. This is the stupidity. We're told they have them, they just don't use them.

In any case, I've looked over this page's history. Zaptech deletes any entry he disagrees with, and gives only opinions as the reason for deletion. He is clearly a vandal, and should have his editing privileges revoked.

Also, I have re added the entries. If anyone wants to remove them, they had better provide suitable evidence as to why they're wrong.

Wow, reis, you have some kind of serious problem with me, don't you? Which is weird, because I haven't butted heads at all with you before, or at least not with this particular account name.

I could accept the first entry, but the second one is blatant complaining about an ending you don't like disguised as a What An Idiot entry. You're not even trying to hide it under a veneer of neutrality. It needs to be pulled or rewritten completely. In fact, both of them need to be rewritten to cut out biased whining.

I admit that I have a knee-jerk reaction to seeing complaining, where I just remove the entry outright. My objective has always been to prevent TV Tropes from becoming people's personal blog to whine about things they don't like. I'm open to a rewrite of the entry that cuts out the complaining and explains the facts as-is.

Addendum: It's amusing I'm being accused of being a vandal when reis turned around and vandalized the Mass Effect Analysis page with an angry jab at the series' creators and me.

Putting whatever issue you two have aside, I agree that the Refusal ending is a Take That! against the criticism for how the series originally ended. However not only does it not qualify as What An Idiot as I understand it the reason why we don't discuss the ending if we can is because we are trying to protect the site from vandalism by the pro ending side.

Even when others say it's not a Take That! I can live with that. The Refusal ending would have had to include scenes like one fan theory of Wrex and Grunt eating the rest of the Normandy crew until they are gunned down when trying to kill each other for me to make it an issue.

I'm not going to get into any sort of discussion involving bans and whatnot, as I can't really do anything about that.

I am going to state that us never seeing them use Thanix cannons is a problem with the Art Department, not the lore. Battles are supposed to take place at thousands of kilometers but we hardly ever see that.

I would say that should be Informed Ability, not What An Idiot. According to the lore, they are using these incredibly powerful weapons, but the visuals don't bear that out.

I think you misunderstand what I'm getting at. Them not using the Thanix weapons is not a matter of the assorted fleets grabbing the collective idiot ball. It's a matter of the art department not doing their jobs right.

The lore tells us that they are doing precisely the thing you condemn them for not doing. The fact that we don't see this in the space fights puts this in Informed Ability.

As for the effectiveness of Reaper ships vs Collector ships, Sovereign-class ships are stated to be require the collective effort of 4 dreadnoughts to reliably kill, whereas the Collector ship was defeated by a single frigate who could do so with or without the Thanix weapon, and the Thanix weapon only gives it the relative firepower of a cruiser meaning that most fleets could take that thing out in a straight-up battle where it couldn't run. If they are using Reaper tech, they're using the watered-down, weaksauce stuff, assuming they're even using that stuff in their ship designs and not just for their experiments.

Agree with Peteman: this is Informed Ability by way of the VFX artists not talking to the people who wrote the codex, not What An Idiot. Doesn't make it not stupid and ridiculous, just like dreadnoughts closing to See the Whites of Their Eyes range in clear space when the codex and simple scale says otherwise, but this is a clear-cut case of Square Peg Round Trope.

Yeah, Mass Effect is one of those series where the cutscenes and lore are very consistently inconsistent. Just look at the final battle in the first game. Hell, 90% of the time they forget to include shields on characters when they get shot. Its one of the more annoying continuity errors in the series, and IIRC, Bioware themselves have said that when the visuals and the codex conflict, the codex wins.

Also, as for the geth, maybe they didn't have time to contact Shepard. The quarians were overrunning them right then and there.