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Mass Effect: Circle of Ashes
01-06-2013, 03:01 AM
I think this bunny has hopped out before, but...
What's a couple centuries compared to 50,000 years? Sovereign 'woke up' a little early and decided not to laze abed, and the Reapers swept the galaxy around 1920. The Charon relay, the Mars beacon, all the other relics and ruins uncovered in the series to hint at the Cycle are still buried, but this time as Humanity crawls out of the cradle there are worlds where the skies are still dark with the smoke of civilization's pyre, where actual video
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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records of the Reapers are recoverable from surviving equipment. The - Drax maybe? The alien Shadow Broker - are also stretching their legs into the power vacuum to serve as opposition in the immediate term, but the story would probably have to be told in timeskips to satisfyingly address the issue of the Reapers... unless maybe such obvious evidence leads to active avoidance of the eezo tech tree, in which case it would still need to cover at least a few centuries, but perhaps the watchdog reaper left to
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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keep an eye on things could call them back early because civilization was following an unpredictable path, one that might lead to unacceptably effective resistance if given a full normal cycle to grow away from the known and controlled paths.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
An interesting idea - I might see it going both ways, though- on the one side, they have tech that they know is tainted, but that can give them a significant jumpstart on some things. They use that to bootstrap them up and then abandon and/or booby trap it.
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Out of curiosity, is there a particular reason your posts get split after 89 words?
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Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
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Yes, the length of the PSP text input box. It's characters, though, not words. Damn annoying, but I'm fresh out of alternatives ever since my laptop died last august. In another year or two I might be able to afford a replacement, maybe... ,_,
Jz B haP I dNt Uz K-R4D 2 mAk shRtr!!
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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Really? Huh. That's odd. I copied both posts into word, and the first has 499 characters, including spaces, and the second 511, but both have 89 words, which is what threw me off. Anyway, this is kinda off topic, so I'll stop now.
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Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
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Odd indeed, that.
Anyway, the big question is how to actually get people to not use the free, easy, trapped tech now, since "it's 50k years before it'll be a problem, someone will come up with a way to untrap it by then!" and soon "it's how it's always been done, and we haven't had any problems." Maybe just get in ingrained into the culture somehow, but I can't actually think of an example of a "don't do X" message that doesn't get regularly flouted, and you just know any attempt at outlawing the stuff
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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would be jumped on by every political group who can see an advantage to crying about being oppressed, and every commercial interest that does business in transportation or heavy vehicles.
Then you have to ask, what exactly will be used in its place...
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Actually, I can see it as a sort of odd almost Space Amish thing - there are those who follow the Old Code and avoid all taint of the Cursed Tech, and are mostly marginalized off by themselves in tiny systems that people let the have because it's not worth taking them, mostly trading with one another because they can't really compete with the rest of the galaxy. Then the Reavers show up and suddenly everyone except for this strange, insular, backward, cult-like group following an ancient doomsday prophecy is dead. That could wind up being a very interesting little story in a number of ways.
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Planting seeds or stacking the Deck Example seed tech and pawn shops for laptops
01-07-2013, 09:20 AM
Hello
I don't play mass effect, but I've read a few fan fics and from them gained enough interest to look up what I could find of the back story behind the game.
One idea I tossed around for a couple of days was the idea that the ?Protheans? instead of just leaving a few mind whammmy probes as warning instead salted humanity and a few other races with a technologies that addressed some/most of the weaknesses of mass effect tech.
The Protheans were advanced enough and old enough to have had several technology trees that were stunted by the use of Mass effect and element zero. What if they build a fake starship using these stunted or abandoned techs and "crash" it just enough to make the humans think what's missing/undeveloped was destroyed in the crash.
The humans get what they think is badly damaged tech from a crashed starship and proceed to do basic research in tech fields the Prothean were lured away from and unknowingly grow to maturity a set of technologies carefully designed to make them strong in many areas where mass effect technologies are weakest.
When the Humans finally discover mass effect technologies their seeded near mature technology will be mixed with the mass effect technology of other races and create a night mare for the reapers to face.
EXAMPLES remember I've never played the game.
Particle beam weapons
FTL jumping bombs or missiles (see FTL below)
badly damaged missiles with warheads that appear to be incredibly powerful laser heads powered by nuclear warheads.
Shield technology that seems to be an outgrowth of magnetic fields and cold plasmas possibly an outgrowth of fusion containment tech.
A FTL drive based on instantaneous jumps, for balance purposes and story excitement put more limits than what was in nBSG.
LIDAR Sensor tech that is a FTL system that seems to have been based on both constant streams of entangled photons and teleporting entangled photons.
Pawn ship LAPTOPS
ClassicDrogn have you thought of looking for a laptop in a pawn shop around here( in Arkansas) much to my surprise I've seen several relatively cheap laptops appear lately.
Presumably they were sold either because of the economy or because Tablet computers are now all the rage.
I picked up an old windows XP laptop for a cheap enough price that I'm not to worried about plugging some of my experiments into it's ports.
Be warned I'm an EE and hobbie computer tech so I know computers, software and how to test/repair a machine and research a machine before buying.
If your not a techie get a friend who is and see what the pawn shop has then get on line and do several searches based on what you saw look for used prices, known issues or problems.
Also beware trojan horse computers. about 10 months ago I picked up a 8 or 9 year old dell laptop for it's USB 2.0 ports and good selection of old legacy ports. The laptop appeared to have been wiped with the hard drive reformatted and then a clean install of windows XP put back.
That bothered me I've worked on many personal and some business computers in the area and I have to harp on basic computer security constantly and actually getting some individual or even a small business to actually securely wipe a computer before tossing it or selling it is almost impossible.
I pulled the laptop's hard drive and hooked it up externally to another machine and a careful check revealed some type of virus in the boot sector and a couple of different virus infecting several files in the OS.
Needless to say I did a low level wipe and then did a clean install of windows XP.
hmelton
God Bless
edited to fixed the sudden wall of text problem.
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Hmmm...
Well one alternative you could have is that the Pluto relay was a bit more thoroughly buried than in Mass Effect. As well as having the Prothean repository destroyed by a nearby asteroid impact...By the time they come across a ME dependent tech they will have already have developed along a very different tech tree. Maybe something along honorverse lines. Or a totally different tech tree.
As for replacement laptops I recently (last week) had to replace my laptop (Toshiba L645D) which suffered a pretty terminal motherboard failure (First symptom was windows 7 reporting that a USB device had malfunctioned namely the SD card reader). I managed to hit Staples in D.C. at right moment to get a clearance laptop (Toshiba L875D with Windows 7) for $330 (50% off). Also check some of the shops that sell refurb systems you can find some fairly usable older systems cheap. Two shops that I've used in the past are Geeks.com and pcretro.com which has a bunch of older Dell latitude laptops in the $100-150 range...
--Werehawk--
My mom's brief take on upcoming Guatemalan Elections "In last throes of preelection activities. Much loudspeaker vote pleading."
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Hmm, the latter might actually be possible, though there's shipping to consider as well. I've had generally good experiences with refurbs.
As for the fic, the possibility of just having the eezo relics harder to find until a native techtree was beginning to blossom has its merits too... combined with evidence of how the previous civ got wiped out due to relying on it, it might be enough to keep milspec ships at least from relying on eezo... laser or other collimated EM weapons as the norm too
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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