A/N - see bottom
I don't own any of these games.
Legacy of the "MANTLE"
There was a time when the ancient humans had achieved a technological level that could rival even that of the legendary Forerunners. During that time humanity encountered one of the oldest species roaming the stars, the Chozo. They were a vaguely humanoid avian species who once ruled the galaxies. However, they had made so many changes to themselves that in the end, they lost the ability to breed. Therefore, as a species, they were on the brink of extinction.
The humans of the small mining colony K-2L came under attack by a group of organized criminals identifying themselves as Space Pirates (Apparently lacking the imagination to create a more unique name) A group of Chozo intercepted the emergency signal and hurried to the planet, but were too late to help. The only survivor was the then three-year old Samus Aran.
After a quick consultation with the few remaining Chozo elders(literally thousands of years old) it was decided that the sole survivor(who would have died if left alone) would be upgraded and enhanced to become a guardian of the galaxy, and carry the mantle left behind, once the Chozo had passed away. This required young Samus to undergo massive genetic re-engineering to become a hybrid species. This was made much easier by humanities highly adaptable genetic structure, allowing them to overcome and adapt to inhospitable terrain. Even then the process took a year to complete, but the result would prove to vastly surpass any and all expectations set by the Chozo.
So proud were they of their success that they failed to see the danger of the Space Pirates. Betrayed from within, all Chozo were eventually slain, leaving the teenage Samus as the last of the Chozo. The childhood of Samus completely lacked any and all contact with other humans as she was raised among a coven of Chozo elders, and as a result she had very few social skills. As time passed, Samus Aran would become a true living legend, able to complete dangerous missions that entire armies would have had trouble with.
Samus eventually became inflicted with the X-Parasite. The vaccine contained Metroid DNA wich fused with Samus very adaptable human DNA. This mix had two side effects. One was that her natural resistance to cold was severely impaired, the other was that the constantly reproducing X-Parasite, when consumed by her Metroid DNA, generated massive amounts of energy that seemingly had no limit. Her powersuit capitalized on this and absorbed the excess energy to power its many systems and shields.
All was not well however as the human government, the Galactic Federation, made her an outlaw after several extremely dangerous missions ended with her having to make some very hard choices.
Stripped of all allies and suffering serious injury Samus fled to one of the few remaining Chozo fortresses still in operational condition. Once there, she tended to her wounds to the extent of her skills and then entered the only working stasis pod left.
It would be a long time before she would once more walk among the stars as a living legend.
Humanity managed to not end themselves in the centuries that passed since Samus vanishing. Unknown to them however, was the massive war across the stars between the Precursors and the Forerunners. This war eventually ended with the Forerunners as the winners, but the Precursors refused to let them enjoy their victory. They secretly left behind a plague to avenge them.
The Precursors had traveled far and wide among the galaxies and one of the many forms of life they'd found was the Zerg, a hive mind species of insectoid creatures in a form of amalgamation of many other lifeforms. The precursors found this particular trait useful and swiftly weaponized some specimens.
Like a flood these devoured the space pirates and then descended on the human worlds. Though humanity suffered massively at first, they lost colony after colony, only adding to the flood sweeping across the stars. In the end humanity had to resort to species wide genetic augmentation to gain immunity to the flood. The tide crashed against the shores of human core worlds, and was completely stopped. Fighting as one the humans held the flood in check for a long time, until they encountered the Forerunners.
The war with them was unlike any war humanity had fought up until then. In the end, fighting the flood on one front and the Forerunners on the other cost them the war. With humanity eliminated the flood once more swept unhindered across the stars. And by the time the Forerunners met the flood they were an unstoppable force. Too late did they realize that it had been humanity who had held the flood in check. And in eradicating them, there were now no longer any greater guardians to uphold the mantle of guardianship. In the end the Halo array was fired.
Locked inside the heavily shielded Chozo stasis chamber Samus Aran slept calmly. It drew power from Samus herself to sustain its functionality. Time would pass unhindered for her as millennium after millennium came and went. The galaxy was reseeded, life started anew.
For humanity, once standing at the apex of technological advancement along with the Forerunners, the journey back to rediscovering lost technology would take many years. Then came a massive boost as they settled on the moon and Mars, space engineering had become the foremost of scientific fields. Great advancement in engines during the later half of the 23rd century made trips to the edges of the Sol system a simple task. Many settlements were built using resources mined from the many new finds on the planets now settled.
This soon caused a great divide as those living in space refused to send resources to Earth. Rich colonies even declared themselves independent, forming their own government.
It was during these troubling times that Wallace Fujikawa and Tobias Fleming Shaw created the first ever functioning translight engine. Vast resources were spent on creating the first human settlements outside the human core world of the Sol system. These early models had a reputation of failing, causing catastrofical engine meltdowns and subsequent destruction.
The new financial boom lead to several of the biggest companies staging a coup on earth, forming the United Powers League or UPL for short. In the violent unrest that followed, later known as the interplanetary war, the UPL gathered up thousands of criminals and state offenders into four super carrier colony ships. These prisoner were meant to travel to Gantris IV and setup a new colony world, much like how England had done with Australia.
The war effort and pure cheapness had resulted in only one ship to be outfitted with navigation systems, the others would simply follow it. Faulty programming lead to a system error and with all crew in cryo sleep, the four ships continued on course for twenty-eight years before the engines on the lead ship Nagglfar had a meltdown and exploded. The other three ships was violently thrown out of slipspace in a part of space identified as the Koprulu sector.
The crew, guards and prisoners would eventually settle on the planets their ships crashed on. Tarsonis, Umoja and Moria were settled by those who survived. In the first fifty years the ships were stripped of all useful materials and the technology was lost. Only the ship that crashed on Tarsonis had proper scientists aboard, who had some form of understanding of the theories surrounding warp space. they would eventually develop spaceflight based on the theory of black holes. The first practical application of a warp engine used the repurposed slipspace engine of the colony ships.
As the Tarsonians had access to the only surviving data storage, they had a technological head-start on their stellar neighbors. Even so, it took them sixty years to build second-generation subwarp engines and eventually discover the other two colonies. With Moria and Umoja resolving to go their own way, the inhabitants of Tarsonis spread throughout the sector, eventually creating an interstellar Terran Confederacy. They also came into conflict with Moria over its own colonies. The Morians founded the Kel-Morian Combine to fight back, sparking the Guild Wars but eventually lost it. Umoja, in order to safeguard their interests, founded the Umojan Protectorate. An uneasy status quo settled between the three nations. Due to the many criminal settlers, rebels were numerous in all systems, most, if not all centered against the Confederacy.
On Earth the UPL was eventually cast down and the new United Earth Directorate, or UED for short, took its place. Using military leadership as a template, the UED managed to unite even those who had fought the hardest against the fascist UPL. The UED was an effective civilian leader, but in order to avoid unrest, all military forces were placed under the newly formed United Nations Space Command, the UNSC worked hard to unite the many different military organizations scattered throughout the colonies into one single fighting force. With the UED tending to the civilian sector, there were very little dissention and the UNSC could complete the more peaceful tasks of exploration and scientific advancement.
The UED created the Colonial Administration Authority, abbreviated CAA, to maintain control of the colonies beyond the core worlds and in doing so sparked a truly massive war as insurrectionists fought to overthrow the administration. In a matter of months the newly formed CAA sent UED core world fleets to suppress all colonies, even the far off Koprulu Sector. Only scattered bits and broken pieces returned containing flawed data on some horrible new alien lifeforms.
Admiral David Anderson was dispatched by the UNSC to investigate the Office of Naval Intelligence's suspicion that CAA was behind the insurrection and was abusing their position. First he was to identify the potential threat in the Koprulu Sector, secondly to confirm ONI intelligence.
After the Admiral had left on his journey the UNSC lost contact with the colony world harvest. The fist confirmed alien contact had started horribly. ONI tried to piece together these aliens with the limited data from the CAA fleet sent to Koprulu but failed to see any similarities. It was unanimously decided that the Covenant who struck at Harvest were unaffiliated in any way with the Zerg of Koprulu. They would simply have to wait for Admiral Anderson's report.
A/N
This was only the start. My previous SC story has so far only covered a single member of Raynor's Raiders on a few missions. This story will be bigger and cover a broader universe.
the (my version)halo/me setting will be the first contact war (like so many others) but I will try to tell it in a more calm method. Also, the halo MAC's = ME MAC's...no
Starships: Dreadnought Mass Effect
The dreadnought is the ultimate arbiter of space warfare; millions of tons of metal, ceramic, and polymer dedicated to the projection of firepower against an enemy vessel of like ability. No sane commander would face a dreadnought with anything less than another dreadnought.
A dreadnought's power lies in the length of its main gun. Dreadnoughts range from 800 meters to one kilometer long, with a main gun of commensurate length. An 800-meter mass accelerator is capable of accelerating one 20 kg. slug to a velocity of 4025 km/s every two seconds. Each slug has the kinetic energy of 38 kilotons of TNT, three times the energy released by the fission weapon that destroyed Hiroshima.
When used to bombard planets, some of this kinetic energy is lost due to atmospheric re-entry friction. As a rule of thumb, each Earth-atmosphere of air pressure saps approximately 20% of a projectile's impact energy.
Info from Mass Effect wikia - wiki/Dreadnought#Dreadnoughts
HALO
Standard Magnetic Accelerator Cannon
The standard ship-mounted MAC fires a 600-ton ferric-tungsten projectile with a depleted uranium core at 30 kilometers per second. The large amount of energy needed to fire the weapon is particularly onerous on a warship, and the extended recharge time is a significant factor in combat against Covenant warships as multiple MAC rounds are required to penetrate Covenant shields. At 2.7e14 Joules per shot (KE=.5 x 600 000 kg x 30 km/s x 30 km/s), it has a standard destructive output of 64.53 kilotons TNT-equivalent.
"Super" Magnetic Accelerator Cannon
UNSC Orbital Defense Platforms typically mount larger and more powerful versions of the standard Magnetic Accelerator Cannon, nicknamed "Super" MACs or the "big stick".
These cannons fire a 3000-ton ferric-tungsten round at 12,000 kilometers per second,[3] or point four-tenths the speed of light, impacting with a massive amount of kinetic energy.
No known ship, UNSC or Covenant, has been shown to survive the impact of one of these rounds. Against Covenant shield technology, the rounds possess enough kinetic energy to punch through shields, cut through the ship, and, upon exit, still retain enough energy to destroy a second ship, and cripple a third ship.
It is theorized that if a ship's armor or shields were to absorb all the kinetic energy of a super MAC round, the release of thermodynamic energy would still vaporize the ship. By receiving power from ground-based power plants, orbital platforms could achieve recharge and reload times as short as five seconds.
Info from Halo wikia - wiki/Magnetic_Accelerator_Cannon
The "small" Halo MAC's = 64.53 kilotons of TNT
The biggest ME MAC's = 38 kilotons of TNT
Ship size.
Mass Effect wiki/Starships
As of 2186, the dreadnought count was 39 turian, 20 asari, 16 salarian, 1 Volus
50 000 ships, some armed, no new, next to no pure warships. info from - wiki/Migrant_Fleet
between 2183 - 2186 the Turians built 1, the Asari lost one and the Volus built their first and only.
Batarians will most likely have at least a few (5?) lack of resources prohibits larger numbers.
The Terminus systems and the Hanar might have a total of ten between them.
The Fleets arrive video shows many thousands of ships. 50k belong to the flotilla. what remains is divided like the following: 33% Geth, 33% Turian, 20% Asari/Salarian, 14% "The rest"
Halo Smac's beats 2 ships + half of a third. Lets say 4 mac rounds (2 for the shields and 2 for the armor) beats ONE Covenant ship. ONE smack would then equal ((4+4*2)+2) to kill two and only cripple a a third. 4+4=8, 8*2=16, 16+2 =18, 18*64.53=1161.54 kilotons of TNT...EVERY FIFTH SECOND. It will really hurt to take any fortified human world (Earth had 300 during the human-covenant war) ONE fleet admiral was in command of at least 75 ships, a portion of earths home fleet. His fleet alone equals the Citadel council fleet.
Halo - wiki/UNSC_Navy
wiki/Covenant_Navy
The Covenant navy outmatches humanity, humanity is a match for THE COMBINED CITADEL NAVY.
there is a shaky but permanent alliance between the separatists and the UNSC. They will fight as one against a perceived threat.
The Geth dreadnoughts is particularly formidable. It is nearly one-third larger than a Citadel Dreadnought and are only limited by resources.
This will eventually be a Halo-Mass Effect cross over. In this story the UEG(Halo) is replaced with the UED(Star Craft) The UED is EXACTLY like the UNSC (disciplined soldiers working with several smart AIs) and therefore does not suffer from incompetent politicians. I have made Samus the last remnant of both the extinct Chozo and ancient humanity. She will eventually be discovered, but until then she'll stay in Chozo stasis.
I always wondered why the player character from SC1 was left out from SC2. In this story I will make the Magistrate (called Commander in the game) into the female Sheppard. How does: former Colonial Magistrate, Commander Jane Shepard sound?