A/N: I've recently updated my main fic (Of Sheep and Battlechicken) , but I still have some more on the asari before moving on to Salarians or Turians (not sure which is best to write about first, but probably salarian.) I'm also getting closer to releasing my Encyclopedia Biotica - an examination of what biotics is, how it is enabled in each race, measures of power, biotic and anti-biotic equipment, and dozens of new powers I've thought of. After I finish that I will probably move on towards more OSABC, before doing a series of one-shot stories and preparing to wrap up the ME1 segment and begin OSAB: Downfell. The goal is to finish A Season of Sorrow no later than the end of 2013 so I can focus entirely on the other two books in 2014. Then, finally, I will go back and update the Reaper Story and start on my post-ending fic.
The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space
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To the Three:
The asari military is a mishmash of city-state sponsored elite units, packs of asari commandos, huntress militia from the clans, and a fairly professional navy sponsored by the Republic. Despite the population of the asari, few of them take up military service, but one must keep in mind that almost all asari have biotics, even if they never bother developing them. Basic biotic defense and combat techniques – barrier, a simple throw, and a warp field – are taught to literally every single asari, and as such, the militia fielded by the city states is more dangerous than it might appear.
Interestingly, except for certain prestigious command positions, the asari military is fairly free of the social maneuvering and manipulations of the rest of asari society. This is probably due to the freewheeling, often shifting nature of military deployments, which makes building up a network of associates difficult, but also due to the asari focus on merit in terms of being able to be put in charge of the lives of other asari. One must prove their skill at fighting to be given such a chance.
My analysis of the military doesn't include the Night-wind, as these creatures are being researched by a different cell. After watching them pull Dr. Uraj apart like taffy, while I regret the loss of life caused by our retaliation, I'm more reconciled to the acts I once called terrorism in dealing with these witches. Thankfully, the asari military prefers not to work with them – even aliens being able to see the depravity of the Night-wind is not a good thing.
Cerberus Thought for the Day: Analysis is the bane of conviction. One cannot risk survival by embracing that which is corrosive to it.
Asari Military Doctrine – ground combat
Asari do not practice attritional or asymmetric warfare concepts within their ground combat units. With few wars in their history, the asari focus has always been on scouting, infiltration, the use of small special forces units to decapitate enemy leadership, and biotic-assisted static defense. Given the overwhelming strength of the asari navy, this is hardly surprising – the asari have never faced planetary invasion, colony revolts, or even large-scale wars since the War of the Queens in ancient asari history.
Asari military doctrine follows the concepts set down by the ardat-yakshi queen, Shatha. Her tactical and strategic genius is held in the asari mindset much as humanity looks at the writing of Sun Tzu. Shatha had zero confidence in the ability of large numbers of asari to fight in coordinated battles, which is why she eventually lost – the sheer size of the armies of the Thirty were able to beat her in attritional warfare. But this left millions dead, and proved her point to the Thirty, who were quick to take up her tactics instead, and used them to defeat the Silent Queen.
The core of asari ground doctrine is called the Concordat of the Strike. Asari units are assembled into what is called the Echelon. At the lowest rank are the independent city-state militia and mercenaries. Above that are the clan huntresses, above that, the commandos of the Thirty, and atop the echelon are battle priestesses, war matriarchs, and Justicars.
The Echelon formation is designed to tie up and occupy an enemy force – be it a landing party, invasion, pirate assault, or even a firefight between a few dozen combatants. The front ranks of the echelon, under the cover of the back ranks, fight defensively, pinning enemies down with biotics and automatic fire whenever possible.
The middle ranks of the echelon provide defensive barriers and, once the enemy is stopped, begin to flank. Huntresses and commandos strike swiftly, sowing chaos and confusing in enemy ranks, forcing enemy commanders to try to adjust on the fly to multiple lines of attack. The goal of the flanking attacks is not to panic or rout the defenders, but to force the commitment of any reserve forces.
Once the enemy is framed and prepared, the senior ranks of the echelon swing into action. Prior to that point, they occupy themselves with hurling powerful biotics into the ranks of the enemy, demoralizing them, and bolstering defensive barriers. Once the enemy is committed, the senior ranks will charge the enemy command, often using kanquess (vanguard biotic charge) to close distance rapidly. They will destroy the enemy command structure and utilize biotic explosions to cover their retreat.
Once central command is down, the asari will use pressure tactics to encourage routs and retreats, while flanking commandos will rush ahead to set traps and further disrupt enemy fallback.
The asari are masters at this, such tactics proving devastating in the war against the krogan. The asari take care to prevent such tactics from working on them by ensuring that sub-commanders are placed in the ranks of the first two echelons, with careful orders to protect their own lives and take command if and only if the senior commanders are defeated. This, along with asari unity and biotic abilities, means that asari military forces have never been routed or broken in combat.
Asari do not fear death, and most are convinced their fights aid all asari. By human norms, almost all asari units can be considered to have fanatic morale. Even when the echelon is broken, as with historical records showing happened during the Rachni Wars, the asari retreat in good order. They are not as unshakable as turians, however – despite their high morale and battle unity, if the echelon is disrupted so severely that even sub-commanders are lost, they will fall back very rapidly, spreading into guerrilla style hit-and-fade bands that mimic ancient hunting packs rather than stand and die to the last asari.
Asari do not have a 'male' culture, and as such, war is not seen as glorious. They place soldiers below intellectuals, artists, and even craftsmen in terms of social standing in most cases. Most asari drawn to the military do so out of a sense of duty to the race. This means that there is no 'machismo' culture in the military ground forces. Unlike humans and krogan, the heroes of asari military lore are neither strong fighters or even clever generals, but cunning huntresses that lead enemies astray and dismantle their assaults before they can find any purchase. A bloodthirsty asari is reviled, and most of this disposition end up in bands like Eclipse or Azure Kiss rather than in the military proper.
Asari are allowed to fraternize fairly freely, although the asari military will not accept bond-mates in the same unit, instead moving most bonded members to non-combat positions. Asari feel that their soldiers will fight all the harder if their lovers and friends are in the line of fire, and asari never leave their dead behind.
Asari Military Doctrine – space combat
The asari navy is unmatched in Citadel space, even by the vast turian forces. While the turians have more ships, and the salarians have higher overall technology, asari ships have three advantages that they have never surrendered.
Asari ships have vastly more effective mass effect cores than any other race. Even the cutting edge Tantalus core recently placed in testing by the Systems Alliance is no match. The asari "Cascade Cores" use shifting multiphase mass effect fields, balanced by a team of specialist biotic engineers, to allow both faster mass shifting and something like a short-range FTL jump. Nicknamed the flash-step, after the short kanquess move many asari soldiers practice, the Cascade cores allow asari ships to effortless dodge most long-range kinetic shots and even some heavy torpedoes. Despite constant and ongoing espionage efforts, no real progress has been made by any race to replicate this technology – only the asari have the biotic and mass effect field sensitivity needed to run such powerful, large cores.
The second advantage of the asari has been incredible advances in armor technology. The city of Silaris, the home of House T'Rome, pioneered a new kind of starship armor based on carbon-nanotubes. These tubes are heavily woven with a vaporized diamond substance, forming a crystalline lattice that is crushed by mass-effect driven plasma forges into super-dense, inflexible, heat resistant layers. The resulting material, called Silaris armor by most, is incredibly resistant to both laser fire and kinetic shots, requiring obscene amounts of direct hits to break through. An asari frigate sheathed in this material stood off two batarian cruisers for an hour before help arrived, despite taking over a hundred clean shots from 25mm guns. While the techniques behind making the armor have been discovered by other races, the expense is ruinous. The massive asari economy is the only one that can handle the cost of equipping ships with such armor – any other race would simply not have the resources. (Indeed, something like 4% of the entire asari GDP can be attributed to this cost alone. Given that it makes their ships nearly invulnerable, however, this expense is borne. Remember, asari like profit, but devotion to the race trumps even that.)
The final attribute of the asari navy's dominance is the nature of asari governance, and the flexibility given to the city states and colonies. As I mentioned in the government section, there is no back and forth between defense departments and governments – the navy gets every asset it thinks it needs, with astonishingly little graft or waste. Unlike other races, where disbursements compete with other government expenditures, the asari government has no real upkeep costs – most of the taxes it collects go straight to the navy, army, and to civil engineering with little overhead.
The asari fleet, as with other races, is built around the power of their dreadnaughts, supported by heavy cruisers, destroyers, and frigates. Asari military doctrine in regards to space combat is a faint mirror of their old surface naval tactics. Rather than forward deploy ships in bases from from home, the asari have a wide array of scouts and frigates looking for trouble, and rapid deployment strike forces to respond to incidents.
In battle, asari are graceful. They disdain brutal tactics like boarding for elegant plans, using their frigates and destroyers to harry an enemy and keep them distracted while dreadnaughts line up their shots carefully. Asari prefer to not engage fully in the fight at first, launching overwhelming numbers of extremely accurate long range bombardments with dashing close-in strikes by frigates, softening and tenderizing the foe, dancing in and out of his range using their flash-step maneuver. Their superior heat dissipation and armor mean they can trade shots for far longer without consequences, and when the enemy is damaged enough, only then do they go in for the killing blow.
Asari Military Doctrine – ship design and influences
Asari ships can be classed into the same rough approximation as human ships, but they were designed for very different tasks and functions. All asari ships have the same basic frame, a Y-shaped arrangement of three wings around a central, hollow core, which is due to the ring rather than ball shape of the Cascade Core in their mass effect drives.
Asari ships are (by human standards) luxurious, with even the smallest ships boasting comprehensive entertainment and exercise facilities. Asari shun sleeper pods for private, cozy quarters for everyone on board,and asari are not only allowed to freely fraternize but encouraged to do so to bolster unit cohesion. It must be noted these private quarters are shared spaces, like a mix between a den, bunk-room, and lounge. Asari in space do not like sleeping alone, as the ship's mass effect field, so much weaker than the gravity of a planet, makes them feel somewhat adrift and often leads to bad dreams.
Asari ships are not built for endurance at space – most patrols last less than two weeks, and asari naval personnel are fairly intolerant of longer patrols. Amusingly, asari sailors are far less rowdy than other races naval personnel, preferring to keep the drinking and orgies on the ship, presenting a calm, professional appearance to aliens ashore.
Asari build very solid ships, with good damage control, full medical facilities, and strong survival and evacuation modules even in the smallest frigates. That being said, asari ships are not good at fending off boarding parties, and most of their ships are either purely military or purely non-combatant in nature, lacking the labs and research facilities of SA ships, or the intelligence components in salarian vessels.
Asari do not use fighters and prefer lighter to heavier ships.
Asari Military Organization – The Echelon
As described in the military doctrine section, the echelon formation is what asari use in ground combat, designed to amply their natural mindset and ensure the destruction of foes.
The echelon is comprised of 'ranks' – the kasha (beaters, from when asari huntresses would have younger hunters make noise to flush out prey), the mishaan (archers), and the kalaqus (spears). These ancient terms are used both to embrace olden culture and as reminders of one's place in the military formation.
The kasha are usually light militia – independent, mostly – arrayed in a broad front, stiffened here and there with Republican Guard units. While they are going to take the most losses, they are also afforded the most protection from biotic fields generated by the next two ranks, acting as shields to take cover behind.
The mishaan are commandos and battle matriarchs, along with some more professional militia members and lead by impetuous Royal Paladins. Utilizing the charging force of kanquess, cover, or cloaking, they will slip to the flanks of an enemy and attempt to turn them. The goal is not really to achieve a flanking maneuver, but to force a division of strength and the committing of the reserves of an enemy force, which would normally surround any command units. The mishaan also contains Lifeshapers and powerful biotics, both of which work to mitigate damage taken by the kasha.
The final rank, the kalaqus, is almost entirely war priestesses or powerful matriarchs from the Thirty, wielding titanic biotic abilities and coordinating events with a handful of leaders. Their job is to hurl pure biotic power at the foe, shaking and scattering their lines, until such time as the mishaan have drawn off defenders, and then to thunder in, carving a path through the enemy lines and slaying their command staff.
The echelon formation is built to the strengths and weakness of asari combat. Unwilling to field large numbers, and unfamiliar with stand-and-fight tactics, the asari must find ways to leverage their power as a force multiplier. The echelon formation prevents close quarters or melee combat, which would be disastrous for the lighter built asari against turians, krogan, or other foes, and also ensures unit cohesion by having each part of the military force work with the others.
Asari Military Ranks
Asari do not have 'enlisted' or 'officer' ranks as we understand them. They refer to three graduations of rank bands, in order of seniority. But all asari, with the exception of the Thirty, start at the bottom and must work their way up. Even Justicars must, for those who wish to join the order without military experience must serve for years in the military to prove their skills.
The bottom ranks of the asari are called the lasha (shoreline). There are five ranks, roughly translating to : beginner, novice, practiced, skilled, and master. By our best estimates, skilled and master are about the same as human chiefs and master chiefs. There is no such thing as 'time in rate' in these system – there are ancient tests of skill involved, for coordination, targeting, biotics, and the ability to think on the battlefield. An asari who can master them all can go from beginner to master in a day, one who cannot can spend five hundred years in the military and not advance at all. For most asari, becoming a Master takes about ten to twenty years, sometimes more or less.
Those who achieve the rank of Master are allowed to move from the various independent militias to more prestigious units, or to advance to command the independent militia. Militia commanders have no rank beyond that of "grand master", but often when dealing with multiple militias, the various leaders will elect one of their own as a "high grand master".
Masters who go on to other units enter the furlasha (shallows) and must climb five new ranks. Three are for warriors (rough translations would be cleared, enlightened, aspirant) and two are for leaders (seeker, finder). These leadership ranks are not officers, but just that, leaders – they inspire by doing, by leading from the front and acting more like NCO's than true officer corps.
Rarely, asari enter the Republican Guard, or the Republican Navy. The mirlasha (deeps) is the rank structure for these rates. It is more formal than the other two, with four junior and three senior ranks. The junior ranks (trainee, trained, skilled, and master) mimic the ranks of the basic military, but the senior ranks (lieutenant, captain, war mistress) mimic more alien rank structures.
The asari military rank structure, as I mentioned earlier, is refreshingly merit based. To ascend its ranks asari must prove themselves both in battle and in testing. Asari do not often participate in cross-species training, with the exception of asari commandos, who do so to further their knowledge of enemies they might face. Asari have no war-fighting colleges or N7 academies – the closest thing they have is the Lodges of the Hunt, and those are more akin to finishing schools for assassins than professional development centers.
Likewise, the asari have military structures no one else has, such as the incorporation of siari into the military training routine, and the lack of any form of logistics, which are instead bidded out to asari private corporations.
Asari Military Units
Independent Militia: Clanless militia raised directly by the Republic, these are usually young maidens with little experience. Given light armor and assault rifles, they are where most asari begin their military career. As they are sponsored directly by the Republic, they are not responsible for paying for their gear, and most of these militias have identical equipment. Most serve for ten to twenty years in a militia, upon which they either take up a new task, or move further into the militia. They lack support units and equipment, but most can use their biotics fairly well, and their rapid-fire fragmentation assault rifles are good at both medium and long range. On occasion, House or Clan forces will join independent militia for training.
Clan, City State, or House Organized Militia (Spear of City): City-states, colonies, Houses, and the Clans each have the right to raise up to three full battalions of troops for defense. Better equipped than the independents, at least some of these militia have already served their full term in the independent militia and have good experience. Some of the militia are mechanized, using light hover-tank troop transports or gunships to move from place to place. As with the independents, most militias require a ten to twenty year commitment. They have their own leaders, either commandos or in the case of a House unit, a Royal Paladin.
Elite Guard : Lifer asari military vets, these are the hardened soldiers of the city states or Houses. Often backed with armor elements, this force includes both war matriarchs and asari commandos. Flexible and using state of the art equipment of either asari or alien make, the Elite Guards often are the main battle units of any large asari military deployment.
Republican Guard Unit : comprised of Republican Guards, this unit answers only to the Republic, and is often dispatched to support other forces. This is the closest thing the asari have to a regular infantry military, and it shows in their higher level of organization and discipline than the often disorganized packs of huntresses seen in the militia.
Fist of Athame: Clan armed forces, roughly the equivalent of the Elite guard of a House, but lead by War Priestesses of Athame, these traditionalist forces use only asari weapons and armor, and rely more on biotics than technology.
Royal Hunting Party : Occasionally, a band of Royal Paladins from one or several Houses will band together with battle matriarchs, commandos, in some cases Specters or even alien assassins, and follow a Justicar into battle to deal with a criminal or other threat to the Asari Republic. This sort of event hasn't happened in over three centuries, the last occurrence to hunt down a krogan warlord who'd killed a matriarch. The Hunt is considered sacred, a revenge killing for an affront to the race, and aliens invited along are given the highest honor the asari can give another being.
Asari Infantry Types
A note about the soldiers: regardless of rank or what kind of soldier they are, all asari are equipped with top of the line equipment, either of asari make or the best money can buy. Even the greenest asari maiden fresh from the Clans will be sporting Mark X armor and brand new weapons. The asari have no real concept of 'garrison units' or sacrificial forces, and their economy allows them to outfit each and every soldier with the best gear and equipment.
Additionally, remember: even the militia units have years of training. A 'green' asari militia unit would not match up unfavorably to a mainline A-level infantry unit of the line in the SA military. Even fresh soldiers have limited biotics and five to ten years of training behind them. Despite my disdain for their culture, do not underestimate the asari or think them weak. They are the most dangerous aliens in the galaxy bar none.
Finally, asari units do not specialize in rates like humans or turians. Commandos are cross-trained in a bewildering litany of tasks, but as a rule asari don't have dedicated support soldiers other than Lifeshapers. Logistical and organizational aspects are outsourced to asari companies, and technical and repair services also outsourced. Sailors do have functional rates, such as navigation and gunnery, but asari sailors are expected to cross-train so heavily that the loss of anyone on the ship can be filled in by another asari seamlessly.
Militia Soldier: Militia are maidens with limited battle experience, acting mostly as garrison units, guards, and the front rank of assault forces. Usually they wear light, form-fitting armor, carry the asari frag rifle, and perhaps a handful of grenades. Quick and agile, they use barriers and can throw basic biotic attacks.
Militia Huntress: a more senior militia member, huntresses have at least 20 years experience, and have been trained in stealth, stalking, tracking, and info-war techniques. Using the old asari hunting methods, these warriors are equipped with sniper rifles, sub-machine guns, and asari close-quarters hunting blades charged with biotic energy. They wear packs with compressed rations and water, and can forage and operate far from lines for long periods of time.
Lifeshaper: asari medic, usually with some military training, but mostly deployed to mitigate casualties. These medics are deployed with heavy armor and actual shields, eschewing biotics, and packs of medical supplies and medigel. Armed with the heavy blast pistol, they rarely engage in fights except when forced or covering the evacuation of the wounded or civilians. Lifeshapers are all very brave, but are not real combatants.
Republican Guard: Professional trained infantry, the Guard is the rough asari equivalent to Salarian Shieldbreakers or human A-rate marines, long-term lifer military soldiers. The Guard is small, barely number a half million asari, but is heavily trained. Each Guard wears light powered armor, with built in weapons systems including a neural whip and dual shield generators, and carries a scaled up version of the Acolyte blast pistol called the Spear of Athame. Fully automatic and equipped with an under-barrel frag grenade launcher, this weapon is vicious against enemies in ranks or other tightly packed locations. Guard members practice support biotics, cross train with Lifeshapers to learn first aid, and generally act as a thin line of stiffened defenders around locations the asari prize above all others – the Citadel, the Destiny Ascension, certain temples, factories, etc.
Commando: asari in the Republican Guard, or more rarely, clan Elite Guards, who catch the eye of their instructors are tapped to go to one of the many "lodges of the hunt" on Thessia, who train the asari special forces known as commandos. Most are matrons, with over two centuries of combat experience, and almost all of them are master biotics. Equipped with powerful sniper rifles, rapid fire light machine guns, and even augmented-strength bio-modification of their muscles, these are some of the finest light infantry in the galaxy. They are specialists at sabotage, flanking, biotic defense, and above all else intimidation. Most of them are religious devotees, spouting siari garbage even in combat, and believe they sacrifice half their life so that the asari can grow stronger. Commandos have no set load-out, armor, or weapon – each is granted a gift of funds when they complete their training to equip themselves. Most answer to the Clans or the Thirty, but some city states and even corporations have sponsored commandos.
War Priestess : religious fanatics who worship Athame, these are even more deadly (and crazy) than asari commando forces. They wear no armor, only robes (or in some cases, go stark naked) and powerful barrier fields, and wield no weapons other than a ritual curved sword charged with biotic energy and a powerful set of biotic attacks they teach to no one else. Yet almost no one has ever even survived an encounter with them, much less triumphed. Their biotic strength is anomalous, enhanced with a large, overlapping gauntlet and pauldron that appears to be a scaled up, powerful bio-amplifier. The swords, charged with shifting warp fields, can cut through the armor on a Mako like butter, and their lack of armor means they are incredibly agile in combat, often using mass effect fields to render themselves nearly weightless as they flip and dance through combat, singing praises to Athame and killing everything in their path. Other asari hold them in a mix of awe and dread, and they are rarely deployed.
Battle Matriarch: Asari commandos usually retire upon reaching 600 or so, settling down finally to start the families they delayed in service to the race. But on occasion, after raising their children, these women put on their leathers again, as leaders of the commando forces. Battle matriarchs are as to asari commandos as the commandos are to regular asari. With biotics that can crush a gunship in flight, or knock aside a main battle tank with a throw, each one is a living siege engine. Too old for the gyrations of their younger days, these matriarchs wear heavy armor, and wield heavy weapons to match, using them to break shielding and then letting fly with powerful biotics. As befits their age and power, most asari forces are commanded by these asari.
Justicars: the supreme ground combatant of the asari, Justicars are feared for more than their ability to dispense justice. Only those asari who display the most titanic of biotic strength are accepted, and then they are often doused in Thessia waters for months on end to augment their power. Justicars wear no armor, often instead wearing flimsy, sexualized jumpsuits and trusting in their barriers for defense, and using a horrific combat shotgun called the Disciple. The shotgun fires clouds of microscale flechetting submuntions, which break into armor piercing needles that explode, tearing open armor, creating craterous wounds that burn and boil. The Justicars are all master biotics, using some biotic abilities that we can't even really classify, such an ability to rip the life from foes and leave their twitching corpses without a mark on them or their armor, right through their shields. Justicars do not retreat, do not falter, and are impossible to intimidate. They can shrug off wounds that would kill a krogan in their single-minded determination to complete whatever task they have set themselves.
Royal Paladin: when the Thirty go to war (which is extremely rare), they kit themselves out in war-gear and panoply that would shame the House of Windsor. The Thirty usually have at least some of their house given over to the role of paladin, a professional warrior and champion of the House who fights for the glory of the House and leads any House forces in combat. Equipped with highly decorated powered armor suits standing seven to eight feet tall, wielding biotically charged monomolecular blades and surrounded by hovering combat drones, each Paladin is a nightmare on the battlefield. A natural general and leader, they are inspiration for other asari forces, capable of defeating dozens of foes with flashy biotics and sweeps of those great blades. When they use ranged weapons, most rely on Adept rail cannons mounted to their oversized battle armor. Out of their powered armor, they wear top of the line kinetic barriers and ritualized light armor decorated in ivory, blue and gold. It sounds ridiculous, but watching these asari in combat is chilling, and it's easy to understand why the Thirty embrace this sort of drama for their warriors.
A final note of caution: human military forces are built around an attrition-specialist-leader pyramid, where he rank and file protect those who are more equipped to deal with threats, and the leaders guide events but are not usually combatants themselves. Our officers are trained in academies, picked from a social elite, trained for leadership and inspiration, tactics and only then military skill.
Asari value all of their troops. While their echelon formation, on the surface, seems to be willing to sacrifice lesser troops, the middle and last ranks are constantly providing biotic barrier protection to these lesser troops, significantly lowering any casualties. But more than that, asari have no concept of officers as we do. The only way an asari goes through the ranks is by service. An asari Battle Matriarch spent at least 50 and probably more years in the militia, before serving in the Guard, and then becoming a commando, and finally returning to their ranks. As a result, the higher ranking an asari is, the more dangerous they are.
Asari Armor and Support Assets
The asari have a fascination with hover vehicles, not surprisingly since such vehicles handle well on land or sea, and much of Thessia is ocean. Asari armor has never had a severe test, however, with most of its classes only seeing limited action in the war against the Krogan, and much of it's usefulness is theoretical.
Asari have four main battle vehicles:
The Moonrise light scout craft is a ground hovercraft, with light armor and dual mass accelerator cannons, holding about five combatants, and is often used in scouting. Moonrise class scouts have been updated for the past thousand years and haven't changed much except to incorporate modern shielding.
Sunrise light battle tanks are high speed flanking units, designed to goat and break infantry, equipped with plasma flamethrowers and microwave emitter weapons, as well as a light cannon. These strangely vicious machines were used to great effect in the war against the Rachni, and were hated by the Krogan as well, making them a primary target of missile and rocket fire. To counter this, auto-targeting warp flak generators were installed with VI fire-control systems to track incoming missiles.
Storm Main Battle Tanks are huge, forty foot long behemoths equipped with triple mass effect cannons and a wide array of anti-personnel weapons and a small GTS missile battery. They were built in the years after the discovery of the turians, when there was tension about the Hierarchy joining the Citadel races or declaring war, and have been updated repeatedly since then. They serve as the anchors of the echelon formation back ranks, combining the functions of main battle tank and artillery. Slow and lumbering unlike other asari hover units, their armor is thicker than some starships.
Windsong gunships are similar to the A-61 aerospace superiority gunship used by the Systems Alliance, with multiple rocket pods, integral barriers, and a dual-phase rapid firing mass accelerator in the nose. Less well armored but more maneuverable, these units have SSTO capability and can fight in atmosphere, low orbit, or deep space with no issues. They are the only real air units the asari field, as asari do not use fighters of any kind.
Asari troop transports are tracked, heavily armored and fitted with ECCM and jamming technology to keep their contents safe from missile attack.
Asari Ship Classes
The asari mindset to naval forces is different than most navies. Asari ships are designed to work in tandem with each other, covering blind spots and enhancing performance based on overlapping fields of fire, rapid VI coordination between ships, and communal comms relays. Unlike human ships (designed to draw a force into dreadnaught range and to flank them with fighter assaults) the asari navy is strangely capable in direct throw-downs, shrugging off shots with arrogant grace and evading heavier fire to deliver surgical, almost elegant blows.
Asari seem to prefer larger number of frigates and cruisers, with fewer dreadnaughts. They have never maximized their allotment of dreadnaughts under the Treaty of Farixen, but have vastly larger numbers of cruisers than other races, even the turians. The overall turian navy is larger, but only by a few dozen vessels – and all of the asari ships have Silaris Armor.
Frigate: The asari frigate is a deceptively fragile looking thing, a hoop with four small wings off coming off of it. Equipped with heavy mass accelerators at each wingtip, the ship can easily blow a SA destroyer in half with four direct hits. They boast a collimated GARDIAN array of pulse emitted blue-green lasers, which are more focused in atmospheres than standard red-orange lasers, and can tear apart fighters in a spray of burst fire. Frigates are used as scout ships, flankers, and to drive into enemy lines clearing the way for heavier ships. They are named after fish on Thessia.
Raider: A cross between a destroyer and a landing assault craft, the raider serves as the delivery vessel for asari commandos and other special forces. Raiders are more heavily armed than frigates, but are primarily designed to batter through station defenses or landing zones and disgorge asari commandos to wreak havoc. Raiders have superior GARDIAN defenses, but can be overwhelmed by missile fire. They are named after famous hunters and warriors throughout history.
Light Cruiser: The four cruiser variants are all built off of the same hull, but each is equipped in a unique manner and given very different roles. The light cruiser is a scouting cruiser and a leader of frigates into battle, using heavier weapons to pick off challenges from enemy cruisers. Equipped with top of the line sensors and optics, light cruisers most often operate on the asari frontier, or act as first-alert responders for remote colonies. They are typically named after stellar events.
Storm Cruiser: The storm cruiser is equipped with very heavy shielding, redundant armor, shock absorbing struts, and a host of other damage mitigation features. It is designed to deliberately close in and take hits for other vessels, spraying GARDIAN fire to shoot down missiles and jam incoming weapons. Equipped with powerful ECM and ECCM suites and heavy missile batteries, it gets up into enemy lines, fouling maneuver warfare attempts and generally acting like an ass. Assaulting these ships is pointless, as when they go into battle they discharge atmosphere to suppress fire and the whole crew is in battle armor. I've seen footage of storm cruisers taking direct hits from krogan dreadnaughts and closing in, the crew singing and laughing. It is no surprise that these ships are mostly crewed and lead by religious fanatics of siari, or worse, priestesses of Athame. They are named after asari priestesses of fame.
Battle Cruiser: The polar opposite of the thuggish storm cruiser, the battle cruiser is a command and control ship, coordinating the actions of other vessels and the fleet as a whole, packed with communications equipment and repair labs. Boasting long range weapons and precision targeting, it tends to act like a sniper, hanging back and making sure the asari formations do not get flanked. These are capable warships on their own, however, and when required they are capable of getting into the line of fire – but they prefer not to. They are named after philosophical matriarchs.
Torpedo Cruiser: The volus love of missile and torpedo technology (taken to utterly preposterous levels with their dreadnaughts, which has more missiles than fucking Arcturus station) has influenced many other races to rethink how they approach missile weapons. The volus defense of Irune in the Krogan war, where lightly armed volus merchant ships with strapped on missile pods blew apart an entire krogan war fleet, was an eye opening experience for the asari, who had written off the volus as money-obsessed wretches. The torpedo cruiser is the final result of this reassessment, built in the past forty years and viciously effective against pirates who can't afford the expensive ECCM gear needed to stop masses of disruptor torpedoes. The cruiser has a lighter weapons load otherwise, and once it has disgorged its packs of missiles and torpedoes is likely to withdraw, but it can crush a dozen ships with easy if it can connect with it's shots, and the asari like jumping them into a battle about midway, swamping unsuspecting foes with a sudden wave of missiles that are too close to evade. Amusingly, the asari name these vessels after the the family of Matriarch Semanya, who spent millions of credits to ensure she could be the first asari with volus-asari offspring. (Needless to say, volus lovers are not highly sought after by asari.)
Dreadnaught: The asari dreadnaughts are massive, equipped with some of the biggest guns and best shielding in the galaxy. Larger than human dreadnaughts, they have a crew of a thousand, and said crews tend to form 'military clans', fiercely devoted to their ships. The Thirty sponsor most dreadnaughts, but the Clans as a whole sponsored two, and Illum five. Dreadnaughts, unlike most races ships, do not act as the center of the fleet but are deployed forward, aggressively, and then fire when flanking disruptions end up turning the line of battle to one side or the other. Unlike the other asari vessels, which are graceful enough and have powerful enough mass effect cores to operate in atmosphere, the massive dreadnaughts can't even enter low orbit. Serviced only in space, dreadnaughts tend to spawn their own cultures and quirks, and over the centuries, almost all have been customized in one way or the other. Dreadnaughts are named after concepts found in siari.
Destiny Ascension: The single most powerful ship in Citadel space, the DA was the joint effort of the Salarian Union and the Asari Republic to build a flagship for the Citadel fleet. The salarians wanted no part of having the ship as part of the salarian fleet (to them, prestige is like painting a big target on your forehead) but were happy to show off their technological prowess to their new allies. As a result, the DA is, even after hundreds of years, probably the most advanced ship in space. Boasting a main spinal weapon nine times the size of the largest SA dreadnaught guns, three synced mass effect cores, and three feet of Silaris armor under kinetic barriers adapted from city shielding units on Sur'Kesh, the Destiny Ascension is a dreadnaught killer. Every war-game scenario run shows that it requires between six and nine dreadnaughts to inflict significant damage on this monster, and that there is only a 35% chance that such an action would end with victory for the attacker. The DA is crewed by only the finest asari specialists, and commanded solely by members of the Thirty. The name is the highest study of siari, where destiny ascends to reveal fate or some other such gibberish.
Asari Military Equipment
Asari weapons tend towards the repeated utilization of a few common themes. Asari never applied the mass accelerator to personal weapons in the same way most races have, instead focusing on the capability of the mass effect field to hurl plasma or micro-explosives. The asari also never forgot their roots as nomadic hunters, and their natural biotics means that blades and spears (usually poisoned) are very common.
The natural asari flexibility and agility means that most younger asari dislike heavy armor, and the strain of lugging around lots of gear on the body means they rarely use heavy weapons either. That isn't to say you can't find asari with huge sniper rifles or giant shotguns – but most prefer lighter, more subtle weapons, and the use of biotics to back them up.
All asari weapons take advantage of the asari's natural mass effect field to reduce kickback. This has the side effect of tiring the asari a bit faster than normal, but being able to fire light machine guns with no recoil can't be discounted.
Asari weapons are manufactured by two companies : the Serrice Council (based in the capital, a Clan Organization) and the Armali Council (based in Armali, dominated by two Guardian Houses, T'Soni and Devir). Serrice provides weapons and gear mostly to the Clans and clanless, while Armali focuses more in supplying wealthy off-world asari and has exclusive contracts with the Thirty.
Asari units also use weapons from Armax Arsenal, and a handful of sniper rifles from Haliat Armory. However, since these weapons can't take advantage of the kickback reduction, most asari prefer to use traditional asari weapons.
Both asari warp swords and Disciple shotguns are handcrafted by the Steelshape Clans. While they have updated many of the methods used to produce the Disciple, a warp sword requires over fifty years of crafting to produce, and each one costs millions of credits.
Asari weapons include:
Devotee: this asari submachine gun fires explosive submuntions at a blistering rate. While each impact is minor, it can stagger and knock down foes reliably, and is very good at overloading and cracking shields, allowing biotics to take effect.
Initiate: the asari sniper rifle, this is an elegant vicious weapon. Firing a hollow slug in a double-action, the rifle is lightweight and easy to carry. The slug explodes on impact, scattering corrosive particles and polarized magnetic dust, which disrupts mass effect fields and biotics for a few moments. Against shielded or armored foes, this is dangerous enough, but against other biotics relying on barriers for protection, it's lethal – the blast shatters the barrier and sprays corrosives into the target's face, leaving them wide open for a second shot or biotic assault.
Spear of Athame: a savage assault rifle, this is a larger version of the Acolyte, coupled with a grenade launcher under the barrel. It fires 'warp bombs', impact triggered mass effect canisters that when detonated created uncontrolled and out of sync warp fields. These have the effect of breaking molecular bonds on what ever they hit, generating a blast of plasma that explodes outwards. This weapon has an element of EMP, devastating to shields and electronics, and can stagger foes with the blast.
Disciple: the Justicar shotgun, now beginning to see use among commandos after centuries of wrangling. Each one is hand-crafted by Clan artisans, custom fitted to it's owner. It's mass generator fires clouds of explosive micro-munitions, that break into detonating needles. Each blast thus blows a large chunk out of whatever it hits, and continues to burn with minor plasma fires for several minutes afterward. The multiple explosions ensure it almost always knocks down what it hits. Even a krogan hit by this weapon would stagger to their knees, and Justicars use this moment of weakness to execute their targets. I would strongly advice using long-range sniper weapons against anyone equipped with this shotgun – we simply do not have any armor strong enough to prevent our forces from being pulped by it.
Adept: the asari version of heavy weapons, the Adept is a rail-cannon, using both mag-chains and mass accelerators to hurl a slug of metal at a significant fraction of light. Nothing less than a shrunk down version of a dreadnaught main gun, the Adept creates a shocking explosion of blue-shifted light and a terrifyingly loud sonic boom when it fires, and only powerful biotic stabilizers and powered armor allow it to be fired without sending the wielder flying. The Royal Paladins wear these weapons on their power-armored battle suits, allowing them to bring down light fighters and crush enemy armor like tin cans. Nothing, I repeat, nothing this side of a light cruiser is going to repel a half-kilo slug going at .05 of light-speed, not a gunship, not a building, not even a damned tank. Thankfully, the weapon has only a few dozen shots, and requires a charge time between blasts.
Asari warp swords: The first time we saw these, we thought someone was playing a joke on us. The asari version of a goddamned lightsaber, indeed. These weapons are composed of phase-compressed, highly carbonized plasma-forged steel, coated in a magnetically charged coating of transparent aluminum crystal, and ground down to an monomolecular edge. That alone would be bad enough, as the swords are unbreakable without applying tons of force and can cut through most materials with a single swipe. But the reason for their unnatural toughness is that the asari have filled the inside of each blade with finely dispersed eezo, allowing them to channel biotic warp fields through the blade, engulfing the sword in warp energies. I can't overestimate how lethal this kind of weaponry is. I know we've played around with monomolecular weapons, but these swords cut a krogan clean in half with a single blow. The good news is that they are rare, ruinously expensive, and require decades of training to use one. An inexperienced user will melt the blade, or worse, over charge it and make it explode into a cloud of burning, warp charged, mono-edged fragments. The last time that happened it killed six hundred asari.
Asari armor tends to be light, non-ferrous (magnetism interferes with their natural biotics) and with a free range of motion. It also tends to emphasize their form, with leather analogues hugging the chest and rear. Asari rarely wear heavier armor, and when they do it is very heavy indeed, often powered by myomer bundles to augment their strength. On the whole, however, since most asari prefer to rely on their natural biotics for defense, armor is seen as as matter more of style than protection.
There are no longer any real asari armor makers, as once they began trading with salarians, the salarian craze with impenetrable, flexible armor showed up asari work as inferior. As such, most of the armor worn by asari these days is actually produced by Aegohr Manufactory, the premier salarian armor and weapons corporation who also supplies the STG. However, the Asari Republic recently signed contracts with Jormangund Technologies of Earth to provide modified Crisis and Hazard suits for asari militia and the Guard.
The only 'native' asari armor made are the suits of of the Royal Paladins. These battlesuits are handcrafted by the Steelshape Clans, and customized for each generation who wears them. The suits are staggeringly expensive, crafted in the same method as Silaris Armor and warp swords, and even House T'Armal, worth tens of billions of credits, can only afford about five of them, with most Houses having only one.