Battlefield: Wars of the Systems Alliance

by GreaterGoodIreland

Humanity is no stranger to war. For thousands of years, human fought human, and once we reached for the stars, it was no different. Attacked by aliens, threatened from within by separatists, menaced by an ancient enemy, we fought and triumphed. A documentary following the conflicts of humanity after discovery of the mass effect. ME with the background of Battlefield 2142, BF2183 AU

52. FIRST CONTACT: The Weapons II

THE WEAPONS II

Of all the species to discover element zero and the mass effect since the destruction of the Protheans, humanity did so at the very peak of technological development possible without use of such knowledge. Most notable among such developments was that of nuclear fusion. That Earth was able to achieve this before discovering the mass effect was considered to be a pinnacle of human innovation by other species. Such was the power of isolation and competition.

Of all innovations however, military technology was perhaps the most significant where First Contact is concerned. By the start of the Cold War, humanity had learned how to create hovering vehicles without changing the mass of matter, had created laser point-defence systems that could destroy incoming threats, and had integrated railgun technology into almost every projectile weapon at every useful scale. Even before the mass effect, humanity possessed equal technology to that of Citadel species in areas like optics, sensors, lasers, materials and computing.

Furthermore, human physicists had long known that mass appeared to be variable in the universe, without understanding why. The only other explanation for both observed evidence and mathematical problems was that the speed of light was variable, which would have destroyed the entire basis of the science of physics.

Having both maximised technological development and a high degree of theoretical understanding of the physics of the mass effect before the discovery of element zero is unique in galactic history, as far as can be determined via information gleaned from the Reapers. It is almost certainly a product of humanity's extended isolation, the blame for which can be laid at the feet of the rachni and thus the Reapers themselves.

Indeed, the Arcturus cluster among those scheduled to be explored by asari pathfinder flotillas before the law banning further uncharted exploration, and long before the krogan were uplifted. There is speculation that this could have led humanity to be discovered by the asari during the height of the Roman Republic.

Some have even suggested that humans would have been uplifted by the salarians to fight the rachni instead of or even alongside the krogan, or that the asari would have done so for various other reasons, not least the physiological similarities making humans pleasing to them. These what-ifs need not capture us at this juncture, but they demonstrate the difference that humanity's isolation had.

Thus, when humanity did finally discover the mass effect, human scientists could integrate it into existing technology in a matter of months. Historians have compared this speed of integration with the experience of the asari, whom had to spend tens of millennia just trying to figure out the science behind their biotics, or the others, whom found themselves thrust into a wider galaxy before they had the other technologies required to truly flourish.

Humanity paid the cost for this advantage with the lives of billions, however. There is little doubt that conflicts such as the Cold War could have been avoided if colonising other garden worlds had been an option. But it was not, and so the armies of Man made war on each other for centuries after it was absolutely necessary.

Inventing entirely new technologies with the mass effect took more effort. Faster-than-light travel and kinetic barriers were prioritised and quickly made into a reality, but with so many possible applications beyond those two key ones, the introduction of the new knowledge into all fields was not even-handed. Even in military technology, priorities had to be set.

Systems Alliance: Small Arms and Support Weapons

By 2157, small arms remained largely in the same state as they had since the mid 21stCentury, despite the discovery of the mass effect. In principle, the function of almost all human small arms was the same.

By the 2080s, improvements in battery and electronics technology allowed a further improvement to chemical-projectile weapons in the form of electromagnetic boosting, allowing firearms to operate using less propellent per bullet, increase muzzle velocity, or a compromise between the two. Improvements to reduce felt-recoil were also developed.

It wasn't possible to entirely replace propellants with electromag firing except in the very largest of forms, such as naval cannons or fixed emplacements with access to reactors, as the electrical energy needed to achieve the same velocity that an equivalent explosive charge created wasn't cost effective. Humanity would have to wait for the advent of the mass effect to achieve that progression.

It wasn't until the 2120s that the marriage of both means of firing a bullet was perfected for small arms. Until that decade, the weapons an infantry soldier would carry were sophisticated but not greatly different to something a soldier of the 2030s carried. The new weapons were mostly smoothbore and fired caseless sabots, as rifled barrels were found to be unsuitable for electromag propulsion. Only weapons with quick-change barrels remained rifled. They were often fed by top-mounted magazines to facilitate popular doctrinal changes that emphasized larger bullets or more bullets per magazine, requiring changes to the size of magazines either way.

The Cold War was fought with such weapons, and they were found to be highly effective. Of all the military equipment affected by the discovery of the mass effect, human small arms were found to be the least obsolescent, and so were given a low priority for upgrade to full mass-effect designs. The vast majority of troops that fought the turians would therefore go into combat wielding much the same weapons as the troops of the Cold War had.

However, new small arms and machineguns using the mass effect were still developed, adopted and issued by the time of Shanxi. Almost all consisted of upgrading existing designs by vastly improving the efficiency of the railgun elements.

The most famous of these was the M2 Browning 0.5in machinegun, which had entered its third century of service, receiving an upgrade with railgun technology in the 2120s, and was again upgraded to a full mass effect weapon. While perhaps it is not correct to say that its final iterations were even the same weapon as that which first was designed in 1918, the Browning would only retire in 2183 at the end of the Eden Prime War, but even then, they still see service in the post-Reaper era in limited numbers.

There was one exception to the trend of upgrading existing designs. Even though it kept costs down, the Alliance Navy had no intention of settling for second-rate equipment for its N Programme Marine Corps. Using the greater resources at its disposal, the Navy would develop a weapon that became humanity's first infantry weapon to use the mass effect alone to propel bullets. The weapon would find its way into the hands of N7s during the course of the conflict. However, it was truly to be an exception.

The effectiveness of the weapons against the few turian troops with kinetic barriers can be summarised by a quote immortalised in the Citadel Archives; "A bullet is a bullet." However, turian body armour was optimised to prevent penetration, which allowed greater first-hit survivability against human hybrid weapons compared with hits from a high velocity mass accelerator weapon. This came at the cost of greater overall damage to the armour itself however, as the mass of human bullets was an order of magnitude larger, meaning that turian troops often found their armour cracked and useless after one engagement.

SCAR 11

The standard assault weapon of both European and US forces, the SCAR 11 was designed in 2123 to tackle the challenge that had arisen in the form of vastly improved personal body armour. At the time of its adoption, the availability and quality of armour had become very worrying indeed to military planners, much as the invention of cheaper kinetic barriers would worry planners in the late 2170s and early 2180s. The SCAR represented the application of one of the solutions to the issue; longer bullets.

The weapon fired tungsten-core caseless rounds at 600 rounds per minute, a relatively low rate that partially resolved a controllability issue due to the increased recoil of a larger bullet. It could fire in single shot, in bursts or in full automatic, from a thirty round magazine mounted on top. The weapon was available in two calibres, 5.56x55mm CS (caseless sabot) in US configurations or the 5x57mm MP (munition de perforation) in EU configurations. All the electromagnetic-propelling mechanisms except for barrel elements were interchangeable between the two configurations. The weapon had a full mass effect upgrade kit developed, but this would not reach production in time to see service against the turians.

The weapon had rails for mounting optics and other equipment, coming with a wide aperture holographic sight out of the factory in both configurations. It was also capable of firing the PK-74 Rocket, a multipurpose rocket-boosted rifle-grenade that was the precursor of the Alliance Carnage rifle-grenade. EU Troops also often mounted an underslung Herzog AR shotgun, for breaching doors or as a close quarters weapon.

The SCAR 11, designated the M-11 in Alliance service, would serve through the First Contact War and into the early 2170s, when it was replaced by the M-8 Avenger. The vast majority were mothballed in the EU's Siberian Vaults, where much of the PAC's former arsenal was stored, before being used to arm local militias in the defence of Earth during the Reaper War. Some have fallen into criminal hands in the chaotic aftermath, but the vast majority have been rendered useless for lack of spare components and ammunition.

Voss L

The Voss Light was the standard infantry armament of the African Union, the South American Federation, Australia, and Brazil. Considered the most successful infantry assault weapon of its day, it was one of the African Union's most successful exports. Developed in 2127 by Voss Munitions of South Africa, it was the answer to the joint US-EU development of the SCAR 11 and the Pan-Asian Coalition's own Krylov FA weapon. Many countries did not wish to buy the SCAR or Krylov for political reasons, an opportunity Voss seized on with aplomb.

The weapon fired at 700 rounds per minute, shooting 4.6x40mm caseless rounds fed from a forty round top-mounted magazine. Like the Krylov, it was optimised for the urban environments, being shorter than the SCAR, producing less recoil per shot due to shooting a smaller bullet, and having a forty round rather than thirty round magazine. Given the rise of the so-called megapolises and the invention of assault-pods launched from APCs and aircraft, these traits made it greatly attractive. The African Union adopted it in 2129, with Australia following suit in 2131.

Designated the M-12 in Alliance service, it would not be any less effective against turian armour than the SCAR was, but its higher rate of fire and larger magazine capacity made it shine against troops equipped with kinetic barriers. There is an apocryphal story that it was the experience of turians fighting South African troops on Shanxi that led arms corporations galaxy-wide to consider faster firing high capacity weapons as a counter to mass introduction of kinetic barriers. The story is entirely false, as the Voss L predated the mass use of infantry barriers by two decades, but such was the effect the weapon had on turians facing it that its reputation continued for so long.

The Voss L would continue in service until the adoption of the Avenger, but unlike the SCAR, they would not be held in storage. Almost all of the inventories were destroyed, save for Australia, whom kept their entire number for service on Earth only. There they would be used against the Reapers, and were found to be particularly useful against husk horde attacks, but the ammunition for them ran out quickly and they had to be abandoned in favour of more modern arms. Very few examples survive today.

Moretti Sniper Rifle 4

The Moretti was designed in 2134 from its previous namesake to integrate the newly perfected railgun technologies. An American weapon, it was quickly adopted by every major military except for that of the PAC. Moretti Arms were world-renowned for their precision firearms, and as they were willing to allow licensed production, they were very successful at marketing and selling their design to a world that felt it was on a runaway train towards war.

The US Senate blocked the application of the Pan-Asian Coalition to start their own production run, leading them to produce the Park 52, leaving them the only nation involved in the fighting of the Cold War that did not use the Moretti SR4. When the South American nations declared war on the US, the Moretti license was revoked, but production continued there illegally for the duration, for which the company would be compensated in 2148.

The Moretti was a semi-automatic weapon with a five round top-mounted magazine, firing 8.6x95mm LCS (Lapua Caseless) rounds. Its feed action was by an electrically-powered mechanism, not by the force of firing recoil. This allowed it to retain sniper rifle grade precision with the semi-auto function of a designated marksman rifle and the recoil compensator of an AMR. The weapon was used in both sniper and designated marksman roles. It was usually issued at platoon level in the latter role, and it was supplemented in the former with the Zeller Heavy in EU and US service, an anti-material rifle of German design.

During the First Contact War, it was found to be the most effective of weapons against turian body armour among those issued at squad level, but it was found to be far less useful against kinetic barriers. After the war, Moretti Arms was bought by Voss Munitions and continued to manufacture sniper rifles until the 2160s. That decade saw lower priority for military spending killing off some of the more niche armaments companies, and competition from off-world soon grew fierce. By the time of the attack on Mindoir, humanity had finally opened up trade with the rest of the galaxy, and any number of off-the-shelf options for precision weapons existed. Moretti ceased trading in 2169, a casualty of the new economic order.

Rorsch AT Railrifle

Rorsch were the leading railgun weapons developers since the 2120s, creating almost every successful vehicle or emplacement mounted railgun weapon until the discovery of the mass effect. Their AT rifle was the direct predecessor of the Rorsch Anti-Material Rifle, Commander Shepard's own preferred support weapon. Called the Railrifle, it was the first human infantry-borne weapon to integrate eezo into its design. Created in 2150 for use by the European Army, it was also the first weapon to be adopted by the Alliance Army as an independent entity. The Alliance Navy also adopted it for the N Programme, making it the go-to weapon for dealing with enemy armoured vehicles.

It was a large, single shot weapon. It fired a 12.7x139mm tungsten slug, sheathed at the sides with super-ferromagnetic material to allow assisted firing. Like the RAM rifle, it could only be reloaded by opening the breach and manually inserting a new round, as the recoil system required all the available space in the receiver where a magazine and feeding system could be placed. Unlike the newer and more famous RAM, it was not for use against infantry targets. It was too heavy, and early variants were even considered two man weapons. The weight problem was ameliorated somewhat by the time of First Contact, but not to the extent it would be later in the successor design.

The preference of the Alliance for kinetic weapons in dealing with enemy vehicles can be attributed to humanity's highly advanced laser-based point defence systems. HEAT-carrying missile weapons are far more easily defeated by such a system, though such weapons were still in use.

Point defences are not impervious, generally requiring cooldown periods during high intensity engagements, both to recharge capacitors and for literal cooling of their laser elements. The turians would suffer heavy losses at the hands of Alliance tanks equipped with such systems when fighting without air support, until they learned to target one vehicle at a time, overwhelming the defences with attrition.

The Railrifle was the one infantry weapon that could reliably defeat turian vehicle barriers, although this was only the case due to the turian's own preference for mobility and firepower over protection. Smaller engagements post-war would prove it was far less effective or even useless against the sorts of barriers seen on asari tank designs or those of the krogan Tomkahs. Against turian tanks and tank destroyers however, neither their barriers nor armour protection were sufficient. It was not as deadly against turian APCs, but could reliably immobilise them by targeting their antigrav repulsors.

The success of the weapon influenced the creation of the Jiris Fighting Vehicle, and the Railrifle's direct successor improved on every aspect of its design; weight, length, projectile and optics. Its contribution in being the stepping stone, as well as showing the faults in turian armour design, are perhaps as much important as the combat service it put in during the First Contact War.

It is important to note that similar weapons did exist inside and outside of Citadel space, and that humanity's main innovation in this regard was the mass adoption of such a weapon rather than the invention of its concept.

Other Support Weapons

Alliance soldiers used a variety of light machineguns, the three most common being the European Bianchi FA-6, the African Shuko K-80 and the American Ganz H. All had mass effect upgrades, being a 'heavier' weapon and so placed higher in priority than small arms. The high rates of fire of the former two and the larger projectiles of the latter served very well, and the variety improved kill rates simply by requiring turian engineers to compromise on optimal barrier settings.

The Ganz was even capable of wearing down the barriers of the turian tanks and tank destroyers, if given the rare opportunity of a continually stationary target. No single machinegun distinguished itself however, all doing equally good service in the grander scale of things, but not making any earthshattering impression. The turians did not consider a change in their own doctrine as a result of encountering the weapons, and continue to disregard the squad-level light machinegun as an unnecessary extra.

Alliance missile weapons were better regarded. In particular, the man-portable systems manufactured by Mitchell Missile Systems of Canada.

Of these, the Mitchell Anti-Vehicle 18 was considered something of note. No great innovation in design terms, it was nonetheless a good solution to the problem it was created to defeat; vehicle-borne point defences.

Not entirely unlike the far larger turian Claw system, it fired four rockets simultaneously, capable of being guided by the operator, a secondary spotter or a small drone. When used in conjunction with drones, it was particularly deadly, and EU troops often fired it from just behind the crest of hills as their drones guided the warheads in using a variety of sensors, allowing them to reload and redeploy. It also featured a quick reload system, a legacy of the need to defeat the massed ranks of PAC armoured units.

The multiple missile idea was designed to either overwhelm a target's point defences, or place them under enough stress so that they would require an immediate cooldown, allowing another missile team or vehicle to act freely. During the Cold War, it proved highly effective against the PAC's armoured vehicles.

This anti-vehicle capability translated well against the turians, albeit for different reasons. Against kinetic barriers, deflecting four warheads often requires more energy than deflecting one, even if the single warhead is travelling faster. This is due to the 'activation cost' of turning barriers on against incoming targets, the effect of which was later exploited for small arms during the 2180s. More advanced barrier systems now keep the barriers up continuously for a small period to avoid this, but in 2157, such modifications had not yet been conceived.

Furthermore, the Mitchell AV18's four HEAT warheads were doubly effective, as they detonated cleanly on impact against barriers in 70% of hits. Being a two stage weapon, this meant that the weapon's armour-defeating second stage detonation would require deflection as well.

This usually resulted in one of two outcomes; either the warheads triggered the kinetic barriers once more, effectively turning four high velocity hits against the barriers into eight, or the barriers would fail to trigger, resulting in the side of the vehicle's armour being hit by the high velocity molten metal instead. Due to the space between the barrier-deflection area and the armour itself, the latter rarely resulted in anything more than glancing damage to the target vehicle, but given that kinetic barrier plates are mounted externally, sometimes damage was done to the barriers themselves.

If two missile teams were working in tandem from nearby firing positions, the turians sometimes found that the first missile group was deflected, only for the second to penetrate barriers and armour both due to damage to the sensors or mass effect field generators. Turian mechanics and programmers soon came up with an ad hoc solution, fitting additional infantry-spec barriers to the sides of tanks and tank destroyers to deflect the second-stage hits. However, this was costly in terms of the limited resources available to the initial forces deployed against humanity, and only 1 in 3 vehicles received the upgrade by the time the Alliance Second Fleet had secured the space over Shanxi once more.

Alliance infantry were also equipped with 40mm grenade launchers, as well as 60mm and 81mm mortars. Unlike the turian philosophy of centralised artillery command and its technological realisation in the 'Claw' artillery systems, human officer doctrine demanded independent artillery capability at the platoon and company level.

While varying between country to country, typically every Alliance infantry squad possessed two 40mm grenade launchers, every platoon possessed two 60mm mortars with semiautonomous capability, and every company possessed a section of 81mm mortars with a similar capability. This allowed far greater tactical flexibility in a human infantry company compared with a turian one, which had to appeal to battalion level to get similar artillery support. Mechanised units had even more numbers of mortars and grenade launchers per unit, mounting the weapons on their vehicles.

Perhaps more interesting with regard to the fighting on Shanxi is what these support weapons were intended to fire. Aside from the two staple ammunition types, high explosive and IR-blocking smoke, Alliance troops on Shanxi would use incendiary, 'EMP' and tear gas rounds. It has never been confirmed officially that tear gas was used against the turians, as use of chemical weapons against soldiers was banned on Earth and some of the more common compounds used were banned by the Citadel specifically because they could blind turians permanently. Despite this, turian reports from Xi'an Valley clearly state that chemical weapons were deployed in a limited fashion against their troops. Tear gas was the only chemical weapon available to the troops at that battle.

Alliance: Electronic Disruptor Nanite Dispersion Weapons ('EMP')

The most famous human weapon of the First Contact War, EMP weapons are distinctive for the blue flashing haze that bolts through the air just before they discharge their stored energy.

With the widespread use of networked battlefield systems (NetBat) in the middle of the 21stCentury onwards, facilitated by 'wrist computers' and the ubiquitous use of drones, the ability of information to travel both up and down the chains of command greatly expanded, becoming a force multiplier for any military that could get an edge in such systems or could bring down those of their opponents.

For decades, the primary countermeasures to such systems were jamming and hacking, but these proved to be less crippling and more nuisance. So-called 'cyber armies' and later virtual intelligence level programmes made hacking less and less viable, at least without direct physical access to hardware, and man-portable anti-radiation (MANPAR) missiles like the Mitchell SAAW 86 were capable of targeting jammers.

Until the 2130s, there was no great leap forward in disrupting NetBat and systems got ever more sophisticated. NetBat was one of the primary reasons for the rise of the Pan-Asian Coalition; the alliance of China, Russia and Iran was able to wage the Asian Unification Wars with such ease precisely because of their mastery of battlefield information all the way down to the squad level.

The war against the Middle Eastern Coalition and the intervention in the Indian Civil War were case studies in the advantages. Asian commanders were able to track battle in real time, allocating resources appropriately, every enemy contact spotted appearing to them. An Asian soldier was able to see any enemy or heat contact that any other did, not merely down to a general vicinity called in by verbal relay, but to an exact map position if such information was available. Calling in airstrikes, armoured support, artillery or naval fire, or simply moving infantry to take the opponent by surprise, it created a whole new set of rules for war.

The success of NetBat, and its role in the annexation of both the Indian and Arabian subcontinents in the name of the PAC, caused great consternation elsewhere. While the European Union, the African Union, the United States and South American Federation all had their own networked battlefield systems at various stages of completion or capability, the PAC was widely considered to hold the advantage. If hacking or jamming could not work, more radical solutions had to be tried.

Nanite weapons for use against human beings had been banned along with fully autonomous combat machines in the 2030s in the Treaty of Tokyo. Research into nanite technologies had continued for the next century however, and a large number of applications did come into being, most commonly in manufacturing and most famously in healthcare.

Among the others was the ability of nanite 'chains' to disperse electrical energy, originally conceived of as a safety feature against electrical fire hazards in high risk applications, but this was found to cause damage to nearby electronic devices by a combination of shorting circuits and creating disruptive electromagnetism. It was scrapped for that purpose.

America, Europe and Africa all rediscovered that research independently by the 2120s, and saw the potential military application. Deploying electrically charged nanites using some form of explosive dispersion came about by convergent technological evolution. All three powers had their own designs in the early 2130s. Tests against infantry and drone equipment were very encouraging, although railgun weapons seemed remarkably resistant to disruption, due to their enclosed nature.

Perhaps more startling were the results of testing done against vehicles and other large targets. The nanites seemed to be able to entirely disable any vehicle not equipped for full NBC protection, and even on those, electric motors and air filtration systems were often temporarily disabled or damaged. They were particularly effective against strategic targets like power relay stations and radar facilities, which had to be hardened against such attacks. They also were found to not harm humans, adhering to the Treaty of Tokyo.

Espionage soon brought the results to the PAC, and by 2139, the weapons were being deployed in a variety of forms by all military powers.

Called EMP weapons due to the influence of popular culture, their detonation became a common feature of the 2139-45 Cold War. Any offensive action began with orbital EMP attacks, particularly during the PAC offensives against Minsk and Berlin. At the war's beginning, both the EU and the PAC had orbital strike capabilities that used EMP, and everyone else had grenades, mortar shells and artillery shells. The fog of war became thicker, and what the course of the war could have been if the PAC had been able to keep its alleged superiority in NetBat is impossible to know.

Post-war, it was unknown whether or not such technology would be useful against highly advanced alien species. However, it had become such an integral part of human warfare that abandoning it seemed foolish. Even if alien vehicles were immune to nanite disruptors, it was theorised that alien infantry and alien civilian infrastructure was not so hardened, and so the weapons were likely still useful. With the mass effect to help things along, Alliance created the 'Medusa EMP Projector', a modified mass accelerator designed to bombard larger areas of planets from orbit than the previous satellite designs had been capable of.

Little did the Alliance planners know that the rest of the galaxy was entirely unprepared for such devices. Nanite weapons had been dismissed by galactic military thinkers as wonder weapons, something politicians might dream up but nothing that a competent general or admiral ought to take seriously. They were considered either ineffectual, brutal or a source of potential blowback by all species, depending on the sort of nanites in question. Furthermore, the asari and salarians had banned their development as weapons within their own borders, due to an incident in 517 BCE on the first asari-salarian joint colony project before the creation of the Citadel Council.

Due to this lack of preparation, as well as the choices of turian vehicle designers, the Hierarchy's forces would get a rude awakening on Shanxi. No cost-effective countermeasures would be discovered that could shield existing turian designs from the weapons, and it was only afterwards that the turians would address this by creating the same sorts of redundant systems that the Alliance itself used. Debate over developing indigenous designs or buying human designs raged throughout the decades after First Contact, not being resolved until after the Reaper War.

Post-war, the 'EMP' weapons of humanity continued to serve well. During the Second Verge War, Batarian omnitool and computer designs tended to be crude, which meant that they could be disrupted more easily, but also cheap, meaning that any damage done to them could be undone. The weapons would also face the geth during the Eden Prime War. The synthetics' foot units were very vulnerable to the nanites, but their mech and heavy mech units had too many redundancies to be affected for more than a few seconds. Reaper ships of both destroyer and dreadnought classes were entirely unaffected by Alliance EMP strikes during the Reaper War, but they were effective in disrupting the weapons of Reaper ground troops.

Alliance: Fighting Vehicles

For the most part, the Alliance went into battle during the First Contact War using earlier versions of many of their current vehicles.

The Riesig Assault Walker featured heavily in its Riesig-E model, still armed with 20mm gatling weapons and HEAT missiles. The walkers originally deployed to Shanxi were not equipped with barriers, and most were lost, although on rough terrain they proved able to take on the turian vehicles and infantry. Those that deployed as part of Drescher's counterattack would have barriers, and would perform far more ably.

The Orca tank's mother design, the A-8 Tiger, would also see service in its final form with appliqué kinetic barrier plates. The Orca only greatly differs from the Tiger in terms of its main armament, adding a missile system to the retained 155mm mass accelerator, and its powerplant, which is produces more energy to compensate for the added weapon and the need for greater speed. The Tiger was thus slower and had a lower range than either its successor or the turian opponents, but retained greater close-in firepower and far better threat protection from armour, barriers and point defences.

The original Groundhog infantry fighting vehicle would see action with African and EU forces, its assault pod launchers allowing rapid deployment of its carried troop to otherwise inaccessible places. They were most typically armed with light and heavy machineguns, as well as grenade launchers or mortars. US, SAF and Australian forces used their own designs, but they were not substantially different to the Groundhog in terms of armament, the use of assault pods or their role, except that they were considered inferior in some respects of these.

The Alliance's first space-to-ground titan design, the Mark III, was also to see action over Shanxi, dropping the first troops in the Second Fleet's counterattack. They were smaller than the Mark IVs that would replace them, using the same hulls as the Mark I titans that fought in the Cold War. They were armed with the same array of armaments on their belly; short-barrelled 155mm cannons, 20mm gatlings, but it lacked the anti-ship EXALT weapons and did not possess a GARDIAN battery. Their shielding was still in the range of a cruiser, and they allowed the Alliance to do yet another ability the turians would have found difficult; contested orbital assaults.

A noteworthy feature of Alliance ground vehicles was the point defence system designed to deflect or degrade enemy munitions before impact against armour, in a manner not unlike that of GARDIAN laser batteries on the Navy's ships. The very earliest designs used explosive-tipped bullets or buckshot for the task, but by the 2130s, lasers were employed alongside them.

Threat assessment information was gathered by a sensory suite almost identical to that of a kinetic barrier system. The lasers or counterfire weapon was aimed by the computer to intercept the incoming munition. The laser or bullet would be fired, either detonating the incoming round's explosive charge or altering the flight profile so as to slow it or change its trajectory. As the turians relied on missiles rather than fired projectiles for their anti-tank work, the defences worked very well, being able to track the heat trail and thus the munitions. The turians themselves had once possessed such systems, but had abandoned them in favour of kinetic barriers centuries earlier. After the war, the Hierarchy bought human designs and later created their own.

Alliance: Ships

The popular telling of the First Contact War among humans is that of a glorious victory in space and a forgettable defeat on the ground. While this greatly diminishes the role of those that fought on Shanxi itself, as well as placing rather too much blame on the shoulders of men like General Williams, it is perhaps as much a testament to just how important the fight in space was. All the superiority in the world groundside would have meant nothing had the navy battles been impossible to win.

The Alliance had a number of advantages over the turians in the coming naval war, but not many. Most of them owed directly to humanity's own maritime history, as humans have had more reason to develop certain ideas due to the conditions of their planet.

This theory is disputed by historians, most often by asari experts on ancient warfare. The asari are classified in 'Terran' taxonomy as aquatic apes, having evolved from highly social bonobo-like creatures that lived in the extensive mangrove forests of the equatorial continents, whose descendants moved to the flat river floodplains and began to walk upright. Thessia has comparable surface coverage of water to Earth, the asari were and are avid sailors, surfers and swimmers. It seems to many an eye that the asari, not humanity, have the most affinity for the sea.

But love for the sea is not the measure of learning to fight wars on it out of necessity. Of all the civilised species in the galaxy, only humanity had such a history of oceanic warfare. Putting aside the probability of humanity being more warlike than the asari, only Earth possessed large unbroken oceans, or even a single ocean as large as that of the Pacific. On Thessia, Sur'kesh and other homeworlds, the land breaks up the water far more evenly. In the case of Thessia, creating many small seas, and in the case of Sur'kesh, long but thin ones.

In addition, neither the salarians or the asari were not prone to waging mass industrialised warfare, having moved faster in cultural terms than they did technologically. Thessia's only world war occurred in the blackpowder age some 25,000 years ago, and owed its roots to the Ardat-Yakshi phenomenon, ending with the creation of the Justicar Order. The salarians prefer assassination and intrigue, though they had a number of large wars which were quickly ended through the former principles of action.

As such, humanity developed two forms of ocean vessel that other species did not. The aircraft carrier and the 'submarine of battle'.

To the other species, the dedicated aircraft carrier was simply unnecessary. The oceans were too small to justify the expense. Hybrid battleship/carrier hulls were considered more flexible, by the turians in particular. Airbases on land could cover the entire water surface, and guided missiles were soon developed that could do a similar job. As for submarines, the salarians did use them for military purposes, but created them for deterrence rather than actual combat, to deliver commandos or missiles into enemy cities, rather than engaging other warships or convoys.

Humanity's conceptualisation of aircraft carriers and submarines can be directly tied to that of space carriers and frigate wolfpack tactics, and both would be utterly crucial to the Alliance victory over Shanxi.

A ship that would stay away from the fight, instead deploying many small fighters to fight, was ludicrous to most Citadel admirals. That frigates would target larger vessels and expect to do anything except annoy them, equally so. In the tight confines of a relay jumpzone, the focus of most naval theory since the Rachni Wars, such behaviour was viewed as suicidal or useless. There were dissident voices, almost exclusively among asari admirals looking to break the stalemates that relays created. That the Citadel had not fought a major war in centuries no doubt contributed to the lack of imagination and the hidebound traditionalism that kept experimentation on the matter stifled.

The Alliance would go into battle with four main classes of combat vessel.

Geneva-class Cruiser

Humanity's first full production FTL-capable warship, the Geneva-class was structurally and conceptually almost a complete copy of another Prothean vessel found in the Archives complex on Mars. Named for the city in which the Treaty Founding the Systems Alliance was signed, it established both the tradition of naming cruisers for cities and the 'manta-ray' shape of early Alliance military designs. The civilian Ariane and the military Styxprototypes were the mother and father designs of the Geneva, and it is fondly considered a classic military vessel to this day.

Borrowing so heavily from Prothean designs, certain particular design choices that the ancient aliens had made would be very much to the advantage of humanity. Most notable perhaps was the number of weapons. Unlike most later Alliance designs, which placed broadside weaponry, the Geneva was designed from the start to be a long-range slugger rather than a jack of all trades. As such, it had six main mass accelerators, one more than any existing turian cruiser class, and Alliance accelerators were not less powerful than turian designs by any means. The Prothean wrecks had contained many engineering hints about such weapons. The lack of broadside firepower would however create problems during the battles to come.

About one in four of the Genevas were escort carrier types, replacing all but the two central cannon with fighter bays capable of carrying forty fighters.

Orders for a replacement design would come even before the war was over, and it would come in the form of the first New Delhi-class. Despite this, Geneva-class ships served in a second-line role for a decade after armistice, and as military transport vessels until 2186, when most were scrapped. The surviving examples were mostly rescued from destruction by desperate refugees in need of ships to flee the Reapers, and at least one gutted Geneva-class is known to have went to the Citadel during the Reaper War. After the defeat of the synthetics, in desperate need of transport vessels, the Alliance pressed all six remaining vessels back into service. They remain so, plying the Rannoch-Eden Prime routes as armed transports.

Juno-class Fleet Carrier

The first non-Prothean design of the Alliance Fleet was the Juno-class. All examples would be named after mother goddesses. Originally, it was not even conceived of as a carrier, but as a colony ship, the first large civilian vessel of the Alliance. However, in 2151, no less than three aerospace companies invented modified versions of their fighter designs for use in space, fully integrated with the new eezo technologies. The need to develop a fleet carrier design became more urgent, having been dismissed by EU naval planners before the foundation of the Alliance due to a lack of fighter designs.

The Juno and many of her sister ships had already had their keels laid down at the time, and with very few changes could serve well in the role. It already possessed large flightbays and cargo holds, so that a large amount of colonial equipment could be deployed by a large number of shuttles quickly and the ships used as mobile space-ports until more permanent stations were constructed. As such, it already possessed good engines, strong kinetic barriers, and inherent durability. The addition of GARDIAN batteries and accelerator weapons was a simple matter.

The Alliance would have twenty such vessels by the outbreak of war, although not all were immediately available for deployment in a military role until Drescher's counterattack. They were fitted to carry one hundred and fifty fighters, the standard loadout of a fleet carrier until the development of the Niké-class. Performance of the carrier during the war was mixed. Although it filled the role of a protected and mobile base for fighters, the Junos were not optimised for the role and some poor design decisions left them a logistical nightmare in terms of use of their internal space.

The fighters did their job however, and the Juno-class ships were kept out of the direct action to the greatest extent possible. This didn't stop the total loss of one example, the SSV Ninsuna, in the fighting over Shanxi. The range of the turian Palaven-class was to be underestimated by Alliance military intelligence.

The development of a dedicated fleet carrier would continue after Shanxi, eventually resulting in Macha-class of 2165. In the interim, the Juno would serve as the Alliance's main fleet carrier, with post- war retrofits making it better suited to that role. The Junos would later serve in their originally intended role as colony ships right through the Verge Wars, the Eden Prime War until the Reaper War. Today, they serve as hospital ships, having been hidden within the uninhabited systems Sol cluster itself during the fighting.

Perseus-class Dreadnought

The Perseus-class was the newest class of naval vessel in the Alliance inventory in 2157. A hybrid of Prothean and human design, and the origin of the distinctive wedge/arrowhead shape of more modern Alliance vessels, it was created to fill the 'overwatch' position against similar ships and advancing cruisers. Named for the mythical Greek hero, all nine ships ordered would be named for mythical heroes, although only seven ships would ever be completed. Four would serve in the Battle of Shanxi; Perseus, Hercules, Aeneas, Gilgamesh, and Yamato Takeru.

The change in hull configuration was a solution to two particular problems. The first was that the main armament of the proposed class was far longer than that of the Geneva-class, and so protruded far beyond the hull in a way that left it outside the protection of the ship's kinetic barriers and caused manoeuvrability problems. The second was that the Alliance discovered the deficiency in broadside armament in the Geneva during early exercises, and wished the secondary forward armament to be capable of turning to broadside as required. The wedge shape provided the answer to both problems, and had the additional advantages of creating more space for secondary systems and being more economical.

As the hull change suggests, the main mass accelerator would have been classified as a superdreadnought weapon only legally available to Council species under the terms of the Treaty of Farixen. The ship's hull was 888 metres long, but the main weapon was one hundred and fifty metres longer.

The other four spinal mass accelerators were also in the dreadnought spectrum of power, which suggests a ship even more destructive than the turian Palaven-class. However, this was not the case. The power requirements of the main weapon when fired for maximum velocity were enormous, reducing its rate of fire to barely two thirds of an equivalent turian weapon. Furthermore, it required the shutdown of shorter two of the four additional spinal accelerators, so that the main capacitors could remain filled to sustain fire. This made the ship more flexible, allowing a greater rate of fire at cruiser-ranges and shorter, and slow but powerful hits further out, but no match for the Palaven-class one on one.

However, after data from the initial turian attack over Shanxi was analysed, the Alliance became aware enough of this fact to respond accordingly. The Perseus-class ships sent as part of the Second Fleet's counterattack would not target their dreadnought counterparts, but instead would concentrate on the turian cruisers, against which they were far more able. Fighters and frigates would be tasked to deal with the Palaven-class and Menae-class ships instead.

The Perseus-class was never truly retired from Alliance service. It continued as the primary dreadnought class until the introduction of the Thor-class in the mid-2170s, an indication of the lower priority the Alliance held on dreadnoughts. Their dreadnought armaments were downgraded for compliance with Farixen as the Thor-class ships rolled out of the shipyards, but the hulls themselves were retained in a cruiser configuration and replacement parts continued to be made for them. The end of the Second Verge War in the Battle of the Kite's Nest provided the Perseus-class with a new lease of life, of a sort, in that the Alliance began to apply the lessons of that war.

The Heracles-class is both a modernisation and an upgrade of the Perseus, with the first being commissioned in 2182. Retaining the same hull, engines and secondary systems as the Perseus, the Heracles was designed to fight broadside in low orbits or in relay jumpzones, and possesses a staggering degree of firepower. The second vessel of the class is also called Perseus, the naming tradition transitioning from the older class, and the ships continue to serve in Alliance fleets, having fought all the way through the conflicts of the recent past.

Artemisium/Narvik-class Frigate

The Artemisium and Narvik class frigates are more or less the same design, and along with the Geneva-class, were the result of reverse-engineering of Prothean designs. They were in effect scaled down versions of the European experimental cruiser Styx, which so terrified the nations of Earth before the foundation of the Alliance.

The Artemisium-class was the original, named for the famous battle. The first tranche of vessels was laid down in 2149, just after Drescher's infamous fly-by over Hawaii. However, by early 2153, when the second tranche of vessels were due to be laid down, several upgrades to the engines and sensors were available. The commissioned ships were retro-fitted, while the newer vessels being called the Narvik-class had the improvements native to their construction.

Like the Geneva, they had 'manta ray' shaped hulls and had six main forward weapons. However, the frigates were armed with torpedo launchers rather than mass accelerators in the bow, although they had GARDIAN lasers and a single accelerator as secondary armaments. They also had additional engines to provide greater sublight acceleration and manoeuvrability, as well as small cargobays and drop-pod dischargers to facilitate long range patrols and the deployment of N7 teams.

The class also had the distinction of being the first human spacecraft to kill an enemy spacecraft. The event was a hangover from the Cold War. Human separatists stole several armed transport vessels, Kowloon-class cargoships armed with GARDIAN lasers, and began waging a campaign of piracy against EU ships travelling the route to Eden Prime. A frigate wolfpack of eight ships was assigned to search and destroy.

The pirates were not stupid enough to let themselves be caught. They fled deeper into the cluster, requiring the pursuing frigates to split up into pairs to cover the search area. The frigates Narvik and Carillonfound the stolen ships, and destroyed two before the others surrendered. They suffered no significant damage, having used the superior lethal range of their torpedoes. Perhaps of greater interest to later galactic events was the fact that the officers in command of the Narvikand Carillonwere Mari Stokke and Hannah Shepard, names that would ring out in later wars.

The Artemisium/Narvik class would both perform admirably against the turians. They were head and shoulders above turian frigate classes, at least as long as their limited ammunition lasted. They also were able to cause significant damage to turian cruisers. Their main weakness was to be the turian fighter wings, whom were often tasked against smaller enemy vessels due to the lower chance of encountering unassailable point defences. Assessment of the class in the post-war era discovered this weakness, but the design being a scaled down Geneva, it could not be modified to carry more GARDIAN lasers without changing the hull configuration. The entirety were scrapped between 2158 and 2165, replaced with the Agincourt-class.

EXALT

Aside from carriers and frigate doctrine, humanity had one other advantage; the Extremely Advanced Long-Range Torpedo, or EXALTs. At its most simple, an EXALT weapon differs from other torpedo designs in its initial firing sequence only. It is still a gravity-warping eezo-core warhead being fired which increases its mass just prior to contact with a target ship's shields so to better penetrate it.

However, using a specialised mass accelerator to give it a huge initial boost to its speed and thus its range and penetrative capability, the torpedo was turned from a close-range, alpha-strike weapon used by small vessels after close-in FTL jumps to a weapon useful to any class of vessel of any size. More importantly, it turned smaller vessels into ones that could duel it out with cruisers at comparable ranges, greatly increasing the threat of both frigates and fighters to capital vessels in particular.

The weapon was the brainchild of the ComitéUni pour la protection de l'Humanite, or the United Committee for the Protection of Humanity. The Comité wasa collection of assembled scientists, engineers and military thinkers formed by the European Union in 2146. Their job was twofold; to extrapolate the possible capabilities of alien threats and create countermeasures. EU leadership was terrified that the day was coming soon when such threats would arrive in orbit over Earth.

One of the identified threats was kinetic barriers, described by the Archives VI in great detail. However, the VI was unable to provide a immediately viable solution, as the Protheans used particle-beam weaponry which was beyond the understanding of humanity to create. A more brute-force solution was designed in 2146, the 'disruptor torpedo' with warheads that used eezo cores to create dangerously unstable mass effect fields. Further refinements to the concept included the now well-known capabilities; mass increase for penetration, use of a specialised accelerator to increase range. The committee was moved to Mars in 2148 by the Arianeto work in the Prothean Archives directly, and was expanded to include the best and brightest of the rest of the major human military powers, and it would become the Special Weapons Division of the Defence Intelligence Directorate.

Like some other examples of so-called human innovation in naval thinking, EXALT concepts did in fact exist before humanity's discovery of the mass effect. Records on why they were not adopted are fragmentary, but seem to indicate that the cost was not deemed appropriate. This is likely due to the fact that the idea was concocted during the height of the Rachni Wars. The need for quantity over absolute quality would have made such an advancement too expensive, particularly as the rachni often simply strapped engines and barriers to hollowed out asteroids for use as space vessels. This attitude continued when the krogan became the enemy, and after that, the galactic peace was no good reason to invest in radical and expensive ideas.

Humanity, suspecting correctly that she would be outnumbered in any case, had no such scruples about cost. Survival required expansion, expansion against the unknown required the very best. Indeed, by mounting EXALT launchers as the primary anti-ship armament of fighters, Admirals Grissom and Drescher had the preservation of numbers in mind; close-in fighter attacks often had terrible loss rates in terms of both equipment and lives, attacks that became unnecessary once torpedoes didn't have to be used within point defence range.

Combined with massive heat decoy deployments, EXALT weapons could be deployed from both long and short range for maximum effect against GARDIAN and barrier protected targets. Alliance frigate wolfpacks and fighter wings were drilled for seven years in various envelopment tactics utilising the capabilities of EXALT to their fullest, first in VR simulations and later in space. The training, along with the bold ideas of Admiral Drescher, would see the weapons used to the doom of many turian ships.

The EXALT design became ubiquitous galaxy-wide after First Contact, and the weapons were the first product that humanity ever exported to alien civilisations. They had been created by the Alliance itself rather than a private corporation, and the profits from the sales helped replace the equipment losses that the Navy had inevitably suffered. Licensed production would start after the admission of humanity as an associated Citadel species, and to this day, it still receives royalties for use of the design. Illegal production in the Terminus and the Batarian Hegemony did occur, but the quality of the weapons was lower, particularly with regard to targeting.

Later, the weapon would be further improved. The 2170s saw the use of the weapons core not only to increase mass for contact but also to decrease mass during firing, for even greater range. Multiple torpedoes were also linked together to target keypoints of enemy ships simultaneously. In the aftermath of the Eden Prime War, designs for larger torpedoes from the same era were dusted off after the development of cheaper quantum entanglement technology. The Alliance hurried to develop anti-ship guided missiles, resulting in the Charybdis Anti-Ship Missile, an upscaled EXALT design that used QEC links with stealth scout vessels for targeting data acquisition. These were used very successfully against the Reapers.