Due to the extreme reduction of mass (and, correspondingly, kinetic energy) necessary for even sub-lightspeed space travel, it is entirely possible for modern spacecraft to survive collisions at what would normally be considered relativistic velocities. Nonetheless, ramming (often followed by deliberate overload of a vessel's drive core) is recognized as an effective if desperate naval tactic.

Successful rammings are typically accomplished by vessels smaller and more agile than their targets- otherwise the target can shoot them down or maneuver out of the collision path- and as a result the ramming vessel rarely if ever survives in salvageable condition. Therefore, ramming is typically performed only by critically-damaged warships after all or nearly all surviving crew have been evacuated- otherwise, the damage inflicted on the enemy is not worth the loss of otherwise recoverable assets. A notable exception is the "barriers-front and sweep" maneuver occasionally performed by turian dreadnoughts, which is capable of inflicting heavy damage on smaller craft defending fixed positions with minimal risk to the attacker. Low-velocity "jostling" may also occur among civilian freightercraft during docking maneuvers in crowded ports, but rarely results in damage.

The Systems Alliance, Salarian Union, Batarian Hegemony, Federated Krogan Clans and Quarian Conclave have at various points in their history investigated the creation of cheap, mass-producible spacecraft built specifically for ramming. Of these designs, only the krogan Varren-II fighter-bomber and quarian Geth Firestarter light fighter were ever deemed viable for production. The Varren-II (which, alongside the Alliance Project GLASGLOW, is notable for including an organic pilot as opposed to being remotely or autonomously piloted, although it lacked the GLASGLOW prototype's redundant auto-ejection systems) was used extensively throughout the Krogan Rebellions- although it achieved greater success against turian naval forces than contemporary krogan warships, over-reliance on the craft is generally considered the single largest factor contributing to the collapse of the krogan industrial base during the latter half of the conflict. The Geth Firestarter was produced in extremely limited numbers before the onset of the Morning War, and is not known to ever have been fielded against an enemy force. There remains some debate over whether it should be classified as a fightercraft or merely as a large, artificially-intelligent guided missile equipped with point defenses.

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Author's Notes:

I see a lot of Mass Effect 'fics make ramming into 1) an unreasonably effective tactic commonly used by human forces, and 2) something the other species somehow never thought of. I thought both things were kind of dumb, but at the same time I needed some way for an unarmed civilian freighter to exploit the element of surprise to take out a turian patrol cutter so I didn't want to remove it completely.

Those of you with a little physics or engineering background might be wondering how two ships ramming at reletavistic velocities could possibly do anything other than destroy the target, the rammer, and anything remotely nearby. The answer is that mass effect technology kind of has to allow ships to get up to those velocities at very low levels of kinetic energy and to operate constantly even when just maneuvering because the alternative is, quite frankly, terrifying- a mass of only two metric tons (the size of a small car) traveling at "merely" 1% of the speed of light would have roughly the same energy as 500 megatons of TNT- ten times larger than the most powerful experimental nuclear weapons. I've heard of people trying to run with this Larry-Nivel-style and make ship engines super destructive, but that seems very incongruous with the Mass Effect universe as a whole: Citadel Space has a lot of dumb evil people in it, so if spacefaring civilizations really were able to routinely generate energy at that magnitude extremely little of the galaxy would be left standing by now.


On another somewhat thematically-related but ultimately irrelevant note, the famous "double-check your targeting solution" officer in ME2 was very probably just lying to scare his recruits. Space is large and mostly empty and far and away the largest things in it are stars. Randall Munro's "What If" site includes an article called "Into the Blue" that discusses shooting things randomly into space (albeit with lasers, not physical projectiles) and comes to the conclusion that 89,999 times out of 90,000 a misaimed projectile will exit the galaxy entirely (and his calculation assumes a terrestrial firing location, so the sun and moon would be much wider targets than in deep space). Eventually the projectile is going to hit something- I can't be arsed to estimate whether it would be more likely to hit a star which would absorb it harmlessly or be more gradually eroded by some type of relatively dense gas/dust cloud, but even if it somehow struck an inhabited planet it'd very probably end up in an ocean or something. Given that terrestrial militaries often can't even be arsed to remove unexploded bombs and landmines in populated areas, it is highly unlikely anyone would care.


Archangel1207 wanted to write up a five-kiloword essay on all of the problems with Mass Effect space combat and is currently working on his own heavily altered system, but since PD is shaping up to not really do many naval engagements and keep the ones it does include at a higher level of strategic abstraction, I am content to just make up new mechanics as needed and as they come up in the story.