Codex Entry: Industry, Logistics and Technology - Council

The ability of a nation to build and supply its forces have been shaped by not only their inclinations, but also experiences.

|Asari Republics

This is more evident in the Asari Republics than any other faction.

For the Asari, their greatest strength is often touted as their long lifespans. Due to a technological plateau brought along by chasing Prothean technology, Council space's paradigm held true for millennia.

Under these conditions, Asari craftswomen received wide renown across the galaxy for their ability.

Every set of armor laboriously hand-fitted and rigorously tested, guided by the weight of centuries. Each rifle personalized, built with loving care, and tuned to legendary precision. An large Asari family 'guild' would produce perhaps a few dozen products every year.

Then, the Krogan Rebellions happened.

Often, Asari forces would survive the encounter victorious… but with broken armor and damaged weapons. The industry of the Asari, so lavishly focused on individual craftsmanship, could not fulfill the ever growing demand for materiel and supplies that was total war. Even their most dire of projections failed to accurately predict reality.

With mountains of stockpiles being depleted in the very opening phase of the rebellions, the Asari Republics reluctantly adopted Salarian and Turian style mass-production for arming her infantry, and as the war dragged on, even the large vehicle-guilds and aviation-families eventually (and reluctantly) ceded ground to industrial cartels focusing on cost-effective, standardized and sustainable production.

However, due to the relatively weak Krogan naval capability, the Asari shipwrights did not face the same degree of pressure, and survived… until now.

Prior to the Koprulu-Council Contact and the ensuing Great War, each Asari ship's structural components were manually shaped to perfection, every armor plate hand-finished. All systems were physically inspected and tested with great care by Apprentice-Maidens under the watchful eye of the Master-Matriarch.

Like products of Japanese swordsmiths of old, no two Asari frigates from the same 'class' were identical. Except each Asari 'swordsmith' had been honing her craft for centuries, or in many cases over a millenia.

Each group of shipwrights, from the esteemed Thessians, to the upstart Illians had a different set of priorities, emphasizing different aspects of their ship designs, but all had one goal: perfection.

Where the Salarians (and later, the Turians) would rigorously compile known weaknesses of known ship designs, this was of little use when it came to Asari ships, for each ship would have subtly different handling and stress-loading characteristics, depending on builder and date it was built.

However, this extravagant overemphasis on creating units with great individuality meant nothing to the Zerg.

Each Asari dreadnought was painstakingly crafted over decades, but could be torn to shreds in the blink of an eye by the Zerg. They did not care if the famed Silaris plate of an Asari Assault Cruiser could withstand impacts from an Scourge - the Zerg would launch a hundred more to replace them.

Nowhere was this weakness more evident than the Destiny Ascension. Designed from the very start not to be "just another jumped-up Turian flying gun", but the flagship and showpiece of Council Might, the Destiny Ascension featured massive ambassadorial suites, luxurious VIP accommodations, and palatial recreation decks.

Of course, it also was fitted with first-rate barriers and triple heavy (1200m length) catapults. At the time of it's design, it was decried as a colossal waste of resources; as a Council-tech cruiser eating a direct, center of mass hit from an standard (800m length) dreadnought main gun would be crippled or outright destroyed, and no sane fleet commander would position his forces in a way where multiple ships were lined up to get shot by a multi-barreled dreadnought.

The sheer cost of the Destiny Ascension could be used to build four or five conventional dreadnoughts, and without the extra mass of all the VIP support facilities these dreadnoughts could turn and acquire targets far more rapidly, killing cruisers at least four times faster.

As if to thumb their noses at the Salarians and Turians, all Asari Dreadnoughts built after the Destiny Ascension were dual-barreled, 1200m designs.

Over a century later, after the Asari lost their Council seat and the privileges that came with it, the mystery of "What were they thinking?" was solved when communiques from the Asari Councilor to the Republic's leading politicians were unsealed.

These messages revealed that the Asari Matriarchs were 'highly amused' but not surprised that the 'lesser races' did not understand the contrast that would be presented by the Destiny Ascension - on one hand, it is a flying six star hotel, absurdly decadent and outrageously expensive, furnished to match, on the other, it is the largest warship known, the first ship designed to kill other dreadnoughts rather than cruisers - the ultimate combination of carrot and stick.

The Asari hoped to overawe any species they encountered by inviting representatives to greet them aboard their 'mobile pleasure resort' and enjoying themselves (and perhaps the company of omnisexual Asari diplomats) all the while aware that the flagship is also the most heavily armed ship ever built.

However, against the might of the Zerg, diplomacy, intrigue, and intimidation were all meaningless. The massive diplomatic decks on the Destiny Ascension were but dead weight, while its barriers failed under the unrelenting Zerg tide and its guns literally silenced by the huge swarm of Zerg bodies.

One of the few positive things from the Destiny Ascension's unfortunate Koprulu Campaign was that its heavy guns had even more extensive range and power than standard dreadnought guns - which was crucial for holding off the Yamato-armed Terran battlecruisers. After their Koprulu experience, both the Union and Hierarchy have been building only 1.2km long, Asari-derived dreadnoughts, with double-linked main cannon.

Immediately after the Fall of Thessia, commentators predicted that Asari power had been permanently broken. Even the Asari themselves were dejected - but yet, today, they have not only resumed Assault Cruiser production, but also are finishing a monstrous, quadruple main cannon-armed superdreadnought, the Destiny Resurgent. How is this possible?

A wealthy, long-lived and the pre-eminent Council species, the Asari were accustomed to living in the lap of luxury, as befitted their status. After the brutal Zerg invasion, however, their former hyperliberal xenophilia and profligate opulence were exchanged for Dominion-like nationalistic fervor and acceptance of a spartan lifestyle.

Secondly, was their industrial reorganization. The surviving Asari industrial cartels, realizing that with current production methods regenerating Asari power was but a pipe dream, broke the political power of the shipwright-guilds. Swallowing their pride and disdain, they asked for aid from the ITSA, whom initially offered Terran industrial capacity towards building Asari roads, farms and hospitals, and then Asari mines and factories with some hefty technology and Element Zero bribes.

Although the Independent Terrans refused to share SCV or automated factory technology, they were convinced to build near-Asari specification ship components for Eezo. Reworking their designs around Terran manufacturing limitations, the Asari Republics have assembled multiple squadrons of new-build, Silaris-plated Assault Cruisers. Fitted with both Eezo and Warp Drive, the resurgent Asari Navy is mobile and deadly. If only they weren't absurdly outnumbered...

|Turian Hierarchy

In comparison, the Turian war machine has always been (and steadily becoming even more so) more machinelike than any other faction, even that of the Terrans. Turian children are raised with expectations of duty, the understanding that they may be called upon to die for the cause. They are drilled in military discipline from a young age.

Turian equipment, while not of low quality like products of Batarian State Arms (pre-KMC takeover) emphasize cost-effectiveness and reliability, as well as ease of manufacture. Turian lives, though not cheap, are secondary to victory.

Compared with the Asari, who have a very distributed industrial system where each significant Asari planet has significant industrial capacity, Turian industry is heavily centralized around Palaven. While other star systems can manufacture components or process materials, the only turian dreadnought yards and their largest cruiser and frigate assembly plants orbit their capital.

Their logic is both cold blooded and sound. By concentrating their critical-warmaking industries around their capital, it is impossible to knock out the Hierarchy without taking out the most heavily fortified world. Its shipyards are protected by near-countless defense platforms, its subterranean factories defended by over six billion souls, its very moons turned into orbital fortresses bristling with anti-ship weaponry.

This concentration of industrial ability in one place has lead to excellent economies of scale. Their dreadnought construction program is the most rapid in known space, building a dozen dual-drive, dual-cannon dreadnoughts in the last four years alone, and projected only to accelerate.

Since encountering the Koprulu sector, the turians have built more dreadnoughts than the Asari still possess.

However, the Turians are not without weaknesses. Their industrial plant is crude, inefficient and inflexible compared to Terran automated manufacture. A large fraction of their fleet has not yet been refitted with Warp Drives, and must rely on the Relay network, due to the sheer size of their military.

Many of their client species, such as the Volus, have become dissatisfied with being another cog in the Turian Empire. Large areas of their territory, some holding critical mining operations, are vulnerable to potential revolts.

Compounding this problem is the fact that the Turians are unsuited for fighting in the environments of some of their client races. Famously seen during the Irune campaign, the dangers of an high pressure ammonia environment meant that injuries barely breaching their armor - which would cause perhaps a flesh wound - became fatalities.

Even in rare cases where the wounded Turian soldier had his armor patched and resealed before dying, their lungs would often suffer permanent damage and the survivor afflicted with life-long complications.

This, of course, increases the bitterness many a Turian feel towards the Volus. Entire fleets were rerouted from critical fronts - from defending Turian lives, in many cases, to save the Volus. Millions of Turian soldiers died to protect planets even more hostile to their survival than the Zerg, and the cowardly Volus repaid their sacrifices with sedition and treason.

While orbital fire would suffice if extermination were their objective, the most valuable asset of Irune are the Volus financiers - and the taxes they pay to the Hierarchy. Not to mention the backlash and loss of legitimacy the Turians would face if they began violating Council laws they swore to uphold.

Worst of all, like many other avians, the Turians are a carnivorous species, which means that unlike the omnivorous humans and asari, they must consume large amounts of meat. Each ton of meat requires an order of magnitude more crops to be raised for the meat animals. To supply their empire, dozens of agricultural planets must harvest mountains of feed, while entire blocks in each city are gigantic freezers. Cut off from nourishment, the Turians would be vulnerable to starvation.

Although the Turians had been building a massive food supply, they expended a large amount of it supporting frontline troops during the Zerg Invasions.

In cases where troops had been cut off from supply, some had even attempted to find out if Zerg flesh could be eaten - with terrible consequences.

|Batarian Hegemony

Long the laughingstock of Council space, current Batarian logistics are perhaps second only due to that of the Protoss, due to heavy investment into Waygates, connecting not only KMC-Batarian space, but also the ends of the Batarian Hegemony and the Terminus Systems.

With each KMC world burned or conquered by the Dominion's implacable, supercapital-backed advance, more and more KMC refugees stream through these Waygates into both the Terminus and the Hegemony proper.

Coming by the dozens of millions, these refugee-colonists bring with them Terran automated manufacture and expertise, and have sharply increased the industrial output of the entire Hegemony. Batarian State Arms underwent a Morian corporate takeover, increasing both quality and profits due to a reimagined (and predictably cutthroat) KMC business model.

Meanwhile, the KMC's innovative and fresh ideas for the usage of slaves have taken the imagination of the Batarian upper classes by storm. Entire new industries have formed as they seek to follow the fashionable new trend; indeed, 'The Slave Games' have become the most popular extranet series in Hegemony space, raking in record profits for Moria Media Corporation while simultaneously adding another item to the list of reasons for the Council to root for the Hegemony and KMC's swift downfall.

Although many more conservative elements of the slaveholding society have strenuously objected to the rapid change and inclusion of millions of non-Batarians as non-slaves, other elements have been either blackmailed, bribed, or threatened into line by the current Hegemon's cabal - as this change has been key to the transformation from an friendless, backwards third-world space nation to a rising power; the Hegemony are the only major Council-space faction to be experiencing an economic boom.

Overruling the objections of the High Priests of the Hegemony and thousands of years of tradition (where no non-Batarian had ever risen above Freeman status) multiple KMC industrialists have been made members of the Hegemon's Cabal, while other KMC politicians have become the first non-Batarian planetary governors.

Their naval technology, however, falls behind other factions. Although Terran manufacture is effective and flexible, KMC engineers have little idea how to optimize around Eezo-based designs, nevermind hybridizing Terran and Council tech.

The situation is equally as bad for Batarian engineers, whose initial designs could be described as 'One step above Krogan space-going rowboats', worsened by the refusal of Council species to share technology and insights with the pariah Hegemony.

After the countless skirmishes with Turian patrols, Batarian engineers settled for attempting to outnumber the local Turian forces and strapping as many guns as possible to each ship, with little consideration of stress loading or long term endurance... which often caused significant problems.

The Batarian Overseer-class heavy cruisers were decommissioned less than a decade into its service due to the inexperience of Hegemony naval architects; for example, the lateral structural framing is too stiff, so firing all its broadside weaponry simultaneously would literally rip support beams out of the ship's spine.

With KMC assistance, these obsolete flying deathtraps have been refitted with MK2 Yamato generators, but this required extreme compromises (and more money than the KMC wanted to spend), such as reducing supply storage to only two weeks, stripping out most of its starboard weaponry, and reducing dorsal barrier strength and armor.

Further flaws were found after refits; Batarian power relays did not actually meet design specifications as the contractor utilized substandard materials to save on costs; so charging the Yamato device at 100% power would backfeed into their fusion reactors with explosive results. After three Overseer (Mod 1) heavy cruisers were lost, remaining captains have been ordered not to exceed 80% rated power levels on a discharge, and the power relay manufacturer's entire family was enslaved as a punishment.

Armed with BC-scale Yamato cannon, these Overseer Mod 1s are fast and hard hitting, but the ship itself is an aging maintenance nightmare with multiple near-fatal flaws, and are undergunned in terms of conventional firepower.

Much of the Batarian naval force suffers similar issues; during the Battle of Thessia, the light cruiser Thresher of Turin did not have functioning toilets. The crew abandoned ship to join Batarian ground assault teams, declaring they'd rather face the Zerg than the nauseating smell onboard.

New KMC designs combining Mass Effect technologies and Terran manufacture have been prototyped, but have not reached satisfactory levels of operation. In any case, given the immense demands of fighting the Dominion invasion, the KMC-Batarian axis has little room for experimentation.

|Salarian Union

Salarian territory is the smallest out of the major council factions.

Even after the Fall of Thessia and loss of the Asari home sector, the Republics cover more volume than Union space, never mind the holdings of the Turian Hierarchy or Batarian Hegemony.

Long content to control their birth rates and focus on inwards development, Salarian core space is the most built up of all species. Although Sur'kesh itself does not have a remarkable industrial output (due to lack of resources and environmental concerns) their home system as a whole, Pranas, has an industrial output rivalling that of Sol, handily outstripping Illium, Korhal, Umoja, even Moria and Palaven.

Under these circumstances, the Salarian Union chose to concentrate industry around complexity rather than sheer scale; instead of centralizing all dreadnought production around Sur'kesh, they instead have gathered their UV lasing element production, superconductive transmission fabrication, and EWAR research around their highest concentration of intellectual capital.

With the ability to prototype systems as soon as they were theoretically conceived, the development time for Salarian military technology was the shortest in known space. Multiple generations of Salarian research, development, production, and feedback would occur before a single Turian or Asari R&D cycle completed.

However, this brought the Union fleet's costs up through the roof. In order to reduce the expense of replacing 'obsolete' hardware, the Salarians embraced modularity to a degree no other race can compare to.

By the time of the Krogan rebellions, ships were nearly completely modular; Salarian shipbuilders could not predict which system would need replacing next, so whether it be main reactor, drives, power relays, sensors, weapons and defenses, they all needed to be easily removable.

And since replacing the main reactor on a normal ship without cutting open half the hull was plain impossible, they made the structure highly modular as well.

This grossly simplified Salarian logistics. Replacing a burnt-out UV cluster on a Salarian ship was now simple as detaching the defective assembly and inserting a new one, whereas Asari and Turian engineering teams often needed hours of cutting through hull and patching up the mess afterwards to replace an laser cluster.

Of course, making your ships out of Lego blocks, no matter how you overlap them, leads to sharp limitations in structural integrity, especially if you intend to ensure that said Lego blocks are easily removable/replaceable.

Traditionally, the Union emphasized advanced barrier technologies (even if the accursed Asari would laugh and just throw more Eezo at the problem) and more powerful and accurate GARDIAN systems to compensate for these deficiencies.

Under times of peace, most of the Salarian Union naval elements are owned and operated by their parent family-corporations. During times of emergency (such as the post-Koprulu Salarian-Turian Cold War) however, the Union Navy is supposedly under the command of the central government - but there has been much resentment of the heavy-handed actions of the Salarian Union's current High Dalatrass.

Lately, Salarian society has become strained as the Union officially adopted a strategy of growth, repudiating their former doctrine of strictly controlled birth rates. Taking advantage of their amphibian biology, Salarian matriarchs have been giving birth to record sized-egg clutches, with each year's birth rate exceeding the last.

With an enormous percent of their population retraining or cross training as educators, Salarian growth is beginning to look Krogan-like. It is estimated that the Union's population will double within the next decade, and match that of the Hierarchy within half a century.

This threat is further exacerbated by the fact an Salarian male is considered mature after only eight years of age, and that the first of the massive-post Koprulu boom generation will reach adulthood rather soon, placing the Hierarchy command structure under an immense pressure to attack before the Salarian population growth gets to dangerous levels.


A/N: Mad props to AVTM and Kaoupa for going over this (and the next 2) chapters. Q/A response will occur on the the third chapter.

Also, I realize I didn't answer your question, since this isn't really a shipyard codex, Saris - so I'll treat you again and give you a simplified explanation.

For Council species, units were traditionally produced in bigass space stations. Lately though, they've begun adopting Terranized methods, although they aren't quite there yet, and don't have the automated factory systems to really exploit it.

For Terrans, they use giant open-space scaffolds equipped with industrial manipulator arms in an assembly-line like manner.

SCVs and specialist construction EVA suits (and their workers) help install parts as the chassis moves down the assembly line. The skeletal scaffold is durable enough for industrial work, but super cheap (compared to a space station) and construction speed can be accelerated by making more factories to ship up components faster, and lengthening/adding parallel assembly lines.