THOMASPENZHORN11: The concept of a 'frigate/cruiser-carrying vessel', a bit like the Infinity in Halo but given a quintuple dose of steroids, seems kinda unrealistic and redundant to me...I mean, why bother of you can just have your escorts sail with you instead?
The concept of a superbattleship with what essentially amounts to a Wave Motion Gun appeals to me, however. Because ya know whut? A superbattleship with a Big Fucking Gun that's just Bigger than Big? Sign me up
Interplanetary space, Theta Lyrae system, 26th July 2257 1414RS Coordinated Universal Time
Winter-class insertion prowler SSV Normandy (SSI-117)
"...once more through the plan, folks: Hop out, use the Normandy's FTL emission silencer to enter realspace without being found. Fight our way past the escorts if they find us, sneak in if they don't. Board the enemy dreadnought. Find the bridge and kidnap as many high-ranking officers as we can before hauling ass outta there and be picked up by the Normandy while Edi locks down the ship's computer systems. And we're done." Cleveland mumured as the platoon of N7s braced themselves for the upcoming fight. "If shit goes wrong, then we'll just pop some vaccumn barriers and punch a hole in the side of the ship to get out..."
She took a deep breath to calm herself down as she mentally prepared herself for what may lie ahead. It was the first time in decades that she'd seen live combat again ever since the Second Abyssal war, which ended some thirty years ago. And no, being in a holo-FPS that was often played over a neural uplink dosen't count; she was talking about real-life experience, not being in a game. Which...
"Calm down, Lieutenant Commodore," Fubuki called out over from directly beside her, casually lighting a cigarette with her left hand and an old-fashioned lighter, exhaling out a cloud of smoke and watching listlessly as it drifted by.
"Right," Cleveland mumured, taking one last drag from her own cigarette and exhaled the smoke from her inhalation, watching intently as the smoke drifted past her position. With a single motion afterwards, she removed the expended cigarette end and promptly chucked it down into a nearby trash can. After she extinguished the fire lit within it, of course.
"First time?" Suzuya called over from where she was, the heavy cruiser halfway through the process of tossing her expended cigarette end into a nearby trash can, after, of course, extinguishing it properly.
"Well, we haven't deployed out rigs in years, and if we don't count Fubuki and the rest of her fireteam, who've been here since the moment this shit all began, nobody here has ever seen live combat yet. It's been a while since we last deployed...that was like decades ago. And to top it all off we ain't fighting Abbies, either, which opens for us another fresh can of worms," Cleveland said, glancing at the timer. "What if they turn out to be a lot more powerful than the intel we got told us off? And we don't know it until we get to face them in open combat?"
"Yeah, right," Suzuya agreed, running a hand through her light blue hair and glancing at her dark brown uniform. "Lack of information, a near-total lack of information on our oppoments...nice. At least this time securing that information is our job and mission, this time around..."
"Let's just hope we don't all die in this," Cleveland mumured. "...here goes nothin,"
Fubuki found herself leading the platoon of N7s as they all cruised gently onwards through the dense field of fire that was being sent in all directions, half of which was being sent downrange by them in no part thanks to the many refits that essentially stripped them down to the keel and built a completely new ship around them, which probably was the only reason why she could fly around in space at several hundred to several thousand times that of Earth's gravity in terms of acceleration force units and fling around 130cm, in Fubuki's case, kinetic-nuclear fusion rounds at respectable chunks of the speed of light. Holding her twin 130cm MACs in her hands like a rifle while her secondary armanents suspended from arms like a mecha backpack turned another alien frigate to shredded ribbons via sheer volume of fire in a moment's notice as she strafed sideways to avoid an enemy shot, the individual turrets turning and tracking targets almost on the fly, she lurched sideways as another shot missed the position where she just once was. Metal splinters from mass accelerators zinged past her and the others as they all headed towards their target, the dreadnought in the center of the enemy fleet that was already lighting up the expanse with it's main battery pointed at the Alliance fleet in front of it. It's escorts spotted her and the rest of the platoon easily enough and began to light them up with defensive fire of their own, but with fleetgirls being fleetgirls and thus with their riggings active giving the enemy sensors the signature of up to fifty ships cruising in after popping out of nowhere also did it's job well enough, most obviously giving the enemy quite the scare as well given how what essentially amounted to ten wolfpacks worth in ships suddenly appeared on their sensor consoles, and to top it all off, a good chunk of them were also cruisers and battleships in further addition to the destroyers, which meant that they were already facing a few dozen duplicates of an asari superdreadnought in a flank-attack. Not one round hit it's mark while Fubuki and the rest were already laying down accurate, sniper-accurate fire of their own downrange at the escorts, Fubuki lining up her MACs onto a target at random and simply shot escort after escort out of the stars, almost as if they were charging through a hallway filled with stationary turrets in one of those random crap easy-level maps she often played in FPS games over neural uplink with her friends, the targets themseves hilariously easy to hit while the turrets that were supposed to spice up the game's difficulty having a targeting alglorithim that was crappier than even someone who had just graduated fresh from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Acadey with flying marks. Fubuki lined up her guns at a cruiser at random while said cruiser was attempting to light her up with it's broadside cannons and whatever type of point-defense laser that every ship the aliens brought to bear seemed to have, the broadside cannons missing clean of their targets in no part thanks to her erratic maneuvering as well as the jammers on her electronic warfare suite rendering them incapable of hitting a barn broadside, but the lasers found their targets straight and pure largey because they were, well, lasers, the beams hitting against her shields as a minor inconvinence while her secondary guns fired, mangling the cruiser's broadside with 25cm rounds with the kinetic energy equivalent to the Krakatoa explosion of 1883. The cruiser's mangled wreck drifted off in two seperate halves messily away from each other and left a passageway for Fubuki and the rest to go through, and they did, trailing blue trails of exhaust as they glided their way through with antimatter torches on full tilt.
Shigure meanwhile was also busy doing some kills of her own, lining up with their respective targets the 533cm variant of Enoshima's 'Long Lance' disruptor torpedoes within the quadruple torpedo lunchers just below her knees and mentally giving the 'go' command to launch them all, eight torpedoes in a single volley all went off screaming blue trails of exhaust at some unlucky cluster of escorts while her Rapier pods were also doing more or less the same, smaller missiles screening the larger munitions from being intercepted while the larger ones hit home both to humanity's refined missile tactics as well as the enemy's point-defenses being, well, crap, leaving eight bright explosions in the distance to mark eight successful kills, debris floating in the void to mark where the ships once were. Shepard's 200cm guns unceremoniously deleted yet another cruiser from existence and added a fresh line to her already miles-long list of kills she had stocked up over the years, and Cleveland in the meantime obliterated a frigate with a 155cm round, the sheer proximity of conflict combined with her sheer maneuverability meaning that she could just line up with targets and fire at will without even bothering to ladder-aim her shots, replaying a scene straight from Battlestar Galactica as the platoon of fifty N7s continiued on a straight path, side-strafing away at targets as they flew by just like Viper pilots maneuvering past Raiders and side-shooting them up into bits and pieces of shredded metal. Tracers and missiles flew in all directions, the dreadnought and it's escorts trying their best to keep them at bay while the N7 fleetgirls just casually inched closer and closer, firing off shots left, right, and center. An unlucky cruiser fell victim to Fletcher's 130cm and 25cm guns as she sailed past it, drive-by shooting the cruiser to unfortunately shredded ribbons, while in the meantime a 350cm shot courtesy of Kirishima, a Japanese battleship enjoying her vacation only for Shanxi to throw a wrench into it, vented her displeasure onto another, rendering it simply deleted off the map entirely as she side-dodged a shot sent towards her that came too close for confort. Her sister, Haruna, was also similarly picking off some kills of her own, a 350cm shot deleted another cruiser from existence while her 40cm broadside array of secondary guns ripped a frigate and a cruiser off to shreds.
Erin lined up an escort with her 330cm MACs on a dime, holding her twin magneto-plasma accelerator cannons within her hands like she would a sniper rifle (and it did look like one, just double-barreled) and causally deleted it off the map with one quick trigger pull before a burst of tracers sailed across to her right, a quick glance at her radar return signals telling her off at once about the prescence of the returning 350 enemy fighters that had dumped their payloads on the SSV Delaware andwere now returning to join the fight with their light caliber autocannon mass accelerators in their noses, clearly attempting to do a last-ditch defense of their flagship as they soared in at full speed, easily matching her acceleration and maneuverability due to them being fighters and thus having the capacity to essentially dogfight...which while seemingly impressive, proved massively underwhelming due to her battleship-grade shielding that could protect her to the same degree as a full-on battleship, of course in the meantime coupling ludicrous survivability with overwhelming maneuverability. Three shots somehow found their mark despite being aimed at a human-sized target and caused her shields to flare, but the hopelessly underwhelming shots had about as much chance to go through as a musket ball had against the frontal armor of a Leopard. Her 57mm point-defense guns were already on it by the time the enemy had managed to get their aims in order and start to pepper her with tracers, but the PDWS was already raining down a hailstorm of fire by the time they did, each turret letting downrange more than enough flechettes from beehive shells to completely flood the area in flakbursts and rip clean through whatever underpowered shields the fighters had, leaving mutilated, wrecked craft to spiral downwards and away as ripped shreds of their former selves, clouds of fuel and eezo trailing behind the more intact onces as their cockpits got punctured and exposed the pilots inside to vaccumn. Two 330cm SAP-KNF rounds later deleted another pair of cruisers off the map without even breaking a sweat, the rounds were themselves already overkill for ships the size of the average Citadel cruiser, let alone the inferior copies the slavers in the Terminus had in their arsenal, and mere moments afterwards, Erin's 50cm autocoils sent a frigate to join it's comrades in death as well.
Shigure and Yūdachi, meanwhile, deftly evaded a pair of torpedoes launched in their direction before wasting no time in filling up their offenders with ten-inch autocoil fire, Yūdachi dodging left to evade yet another pair of torpedoes as Shigure pulled out of her armories a dual-barrel launcher for ATGM-48 Jackhammer anti-tank guided missiles at near point-blank range and left one of the offending fighters to spiral out of control with a wrecked cockpit and a dead pilot whilist Yūdachi pulled out an SA43 battle rifle and dumped the contents of the magazine into the fighter nearest to her, taking maximum advantage of the sheer closing speeds to both sides to see the 7.62x64mm rounds pierce the canopy and expose the pilot within to vaccumn, more or less killing him instantaneously. Fubuki glided by directly in front of their faces with antimatter torches on full tilt, leaving a distinct trail of blue exhaust as she accelerated forwards, chewing the rest of the enemy's fighter cover to shreds. While dogfighting with them as if she was Iron Man, in fact.
Cleveland took the lead after the last enemy fighter had been dealt with via malicious intent and combined firepower, leaving naught but distance to seperate them from their target, shots from the dreadnought's own broadside mass accelerators and point-defense lasers lighting up the void over Shanxi. Fubuki and the rest of her team followed suit, some fifty fleetgirls trailing blue plasma through the darkness of space as they headed onwards towards their target, weaving back and forth between shots sent forth by their enemy's defensive armanent if needed be. No words were spoken between them, for there was no need to (not to mention nobody could hear you scream in space). Seasoned, battle-hardened veterans they were, all of them knew exactly what they were doing in this operation, and even if they didn't, they would figure it out for themselves easily enough. There wasn't anyone in the fifty-strong platoon who hadn't been through less than three world and interstellar wars before.
Slowly but surely, the distance dropped to three thousand kilometers with fire zinging off to the sides in all directions, forcing the fleetgirls to maneuver on spirals, rolls, and every other maneuver that one of the best fighter aces of the Second World War or the Second Cylon War could drum up as they dodged shots and tanked laser shots, the volume of which seemed to merely intensify as they drew closer and the distances dropped to two thousand kilometers, and then one. Once it reached that mark, all fifty wordlessly hit their brakes and burned their antimatter torches to begin deaccelerating to a crawl and arrest their forward momentum, reducing the speed to a manegable thirteen meters a second by the time the range dropped to half a kilometer. There was fire from the ship no longer as they had now slipped out of the arc of fire of most of the dreadnought's secondary armaments and laser arrays, and it was the memo for them to get their equipment in order lest they wanted to get into the fight with their bare hands (although they could still pull it off with only their bare hands and some karate). Shepard dragged out of her armories an SA42 assault rifle and fixed on a bayonet and underslung grenade launcher before cradling it in both of her hands with her dominant hand around the pistol grip, while Erin, Shigure, and Yūdachi all sported eight-gauge shotguns in their hands, held at the ready for the moment they landed on the deck to spray someone at random with more than enough buckshot pellets to make them a splatter of gore and flesh on the ground. Inazuma and Ikazuchi, the wierdest one of the bunch on the spot, all got themselves a pair of Type 38 Arisaka bolt-action rifles, or to be more exact, the modernized version of such weapons, polished neatly to give off a dull reflection as they were held at the ready as well, bolts cycled for a round to be chambered in the breech and a long eight-inch bayonet attached to the end of the weapon to turn it into an extremely deadly spear. Why went beyond Cleveland's head, even as she cradled her own assault rifle in her hands, but as far as she knew, it still worked nonetheless. Something to do with their passion for historic Japanese weapons and bolt-action rifles in general, it seems. They all killed their engines once the distance dropped to three hundred meters, and as it drew even closer, they all held their weapons out at the ready, gliding straight into the open confines of the enemy dreadnought's hangar bays. Several of them, in fact.
Fubuki had her rig disengaged upon hitting the artificial gravity of her destination, given how it was of little use other than a really bulky piece of deadweight that was much more likely to completely and utterly rip apart the ship they were within rather than additional fire support to lug around in the cramped confines of the liminal spaces that they'd be fighting in. The rest of Szurdok Fireteam—Shepard, Erin, Shigure, and Javelin all followed suit as a second fireteam of N7s, Ayanami, Amatsukaze, Murakumo, and Akatsuki with Myuki as team leader, all of them similarly disengaging their rigs in a swirl of millions of glowing blue cubes that would vanish into thin air a few moments later to allow them to fall to the ground as gravity took hold of them as opposed to the weightlessness of space, shoes making contact with solid, hard metal floors often hard enough to dent them in by up to a foot in some cases, making the distinct, hard thuds of soles striking metal.
Fubuki's first victim got sent to his gods early when she was still in midair, her Improbable Aiming more or less dropping him instantaneously before sending another three to join their comrade in death before they even knew what was going on, let alone react; Fubuki used the recoil to slow down her landing enough for her to control it much more easily and allow her to connect her feet solidly with the head of some unlucky batarian and crushed his skull in all the way, just as she used the momentum and the ensuring forwards face-plant pitching motion imparted by the rules of the lever to spear the one directly in front of her using her bayonet, leaving him to drown in his own blood pouring into his ruptured lungs while she pinned his body to the ground, got up, and crushed his skull in for good measure as well as a conveniently placed launching-pad for her foot to go against, just as Shigure mutilated an unlucky trio with her HW317 shotgun, the business end of an eight-gauge shotgun payload maiming completely and utterly the aliens within her sights and painting both her uniform and the floor in multicolored alien gore. Murakumo's victim suffered a similar, but rather out-of-the-box gory end; Murakumo's arm mainfested a glowing spot from which extended a four-foot polearm in a fashion no different from a telephoto lens, it's owner in one swift single motion whacking the krogan hard enough to send him down faster than a pole-axed ox with his skull crushed to bits as if it had been hit by a sledgehammer. Ayanami's thirteen-meter drop also met a similar end, the momentum of her fall driving the bayonet of her Type 38 rifle in had enough to split open the skull of a krogan just as she shouldered her rifle and headshotted an asari merc who had just regained her bearings and was about to hit her with a wave of biotics, a single 6.5x50mmsR round propelled to eight-point-nine kilometers a second killing her more or less instantaneously before she racked the action of her bolt-action rifle, peering downrange though it's iron sights and headshotted a krogan on an elevated walkway on the far side of the hangar. Shigure's shotgun meanwhile shredded another alien to his fate via eight gauges of buckshot, the unfortunate turian getting catapulted off the ground with his entire abdomen missing and onto his fellow mechanics to pin them down underneath the weight of his now mutilated and lifeless body.
Splinters of metal answered a second later from eezo-powered sidearms and other similarly asscociated small arms, pinging off cover and shields as the onces too far back to be sent to meet their gods early in a gory combination of either bayonets, bullets, or simple boot-and-shoe-inflicted blunt force trauma recovered their bearings enough to start returning fire, cracks of human slugthrower-type small arms intermingling with the static, magnetic pings of the handheld mass accelerators. Fubukis shields flared as a shot struck them, and so did Ayanami's, however they both didn't waste a second in knocking both of their attackers off the walkways they were on with single shots of 7.62x40mm and 6.5x50mmsR, Ayanami racking the bolt of her rifle a second time to chamber a fresh round and shot out what appeared to be a pressurized coolant tank, the single modern replication of an Arisaka bullet causing the punctured tank to erupt into a jet of escaping coolant powerful enough to knock over a krogan and sending the coolant tank toppling over, crushing to death two unfortunate batarians who were trying their best to lay down some suppressing fire using their coil-pistols. Myuki's battle rifle tore the head clean off a turian who was pointing a rifle at her, soon followed by a second who had a fist-sized hole punched clean through his kinetic barriers and armor, while she dropped behind some handy cover to release the magazine on her rifle now that it was empty and switched it out for a fresh one, bringing the designated marksman rifle back to bear and firing off two 7.62x64mm SAPHE rounds to give another pair of aliens a perpendicular exit. Amatsukaze in all of her fire-related hobbies found herself within point-blank range of a krogan and brought her assault rifle to bear, but instead of spearing him with a 7.62x40mm bullet her finger instead hit the trigger of the underslung flamethrower, sending in his face more than enough liquefied thermite-type liquids to turn hom into a krogan torch to burn out to death, slowly. In the meantime, Murakumo was also pulling off some tricks of her own, spawning in her hands a bluish ball of energy and letting it fly out of her hand and run smack into the face of a krogan about to go berzerk on her, the navitasium crystals making up her dark matter drive core spotaneously erupting into more than enough Bose-Einstein condensates upon impact to completely encase him in subzero flash-freezed ice that shattered into a million pieces a second later, the attack type of which she had come to dub the 'Cryso Blast', and indeed it was one. Turning towards her next target an instant later, she dodged as the turian fired a shot at her, before spawning her polearm again and bashed his skull in all the way, leaving him to crumple to the ground with his head looking as if it had been through a hydraulic press. Amatsukaze's next victim suffered a similar fate, only this time involving a jet of flame spurting out of her undersligned flamethrower and melting clean through his shields and armor as if a blowtorch to cheese, turning him into an animated humanoid torch to scream in agony while he roasted. Cleveland's assault rifle chewed clean through a batarian, spitting out it's spent bullet casings pinging against the ground below before she switched out magazines and blew clean through another with a well-placed shot to the forehead, Erin and Shigure meanwhile spearing a krogan each with their bayonets to leave them coughing up blood while Akatsuki speared another batarian through the throat with her bayonet, subsequently yanking it out and using her foot to bash his ribs in and completely crush his stomach and internal organs in one single karate kick.
Akatsuki lobbed a grenade down the far end of the hangar just like a Red Sox pitcher throwing the opening baseball at any major league event, the grenade sailing over the air and clattering against the wall to land smack in the middle of a cluster of unlucky aliens of multiple different races and take them all out in a shower of hypervelocity pellets and mismatched alien gore of various colors before switching to another weapon, an AM-99 anti-material rifle, the almost comically oversized weapon casually held in her hands sending downrange a visible shockwave and contrail due to sheer muzzle velocity alongside a single 15.5x200mm shield-and-armor-piercing high-explosive downrange propelled to some twenty-one kilometers a second that impacted against a support pillar with more than enough force to rip it in half and causing the walkway it was supporting to topple over, she then switched targets even as the walkway collapsed and nailed what appeared to be a support crane of sorts, the crane toppling over and straight onto another walkway and took it down alongside the pillar that was holding it up, causing all of them to collapse to the ground and crush half a dozen unfortunatees who were standing on or around it and got crushed as a result. Shigure, Amatsukaze, and Fubuki all leapt across the rubble with weapons raised and at the ready, the rest of them all following suit, Ayanami's bayonet splitting open the skull of an asari while Amatsukaze's underslung flamethrower torched a turian and left him to become a literal walking, running torch. Fubuki stabbed her bayonet into a batarian all the way to the barrel, twisted it, and left him to collapse with his internal organs spilling out while Murakumo's Cryso Blast shattered a batarian and a krogan, her polearm swiping in a semicircular path that smashed in the skull of another krogan and bashed in the ribs of a turian harder than an anvil falling from a ten-foot drop.
The door leading towards the inards of the ship was more or less left ajar, apparently left forgotten in the chaos that had unfolded only moments prior. Fubuki immediately poked outside a corner sensor in both directions before motioning for her squad to follow through, weapons raised and held at the ready. They weren't improvising anything as of yet, at least for the moment, but that didn't mean that they weren't prepared to do so. So far, things had been going well. Too well, in fact.
"1st Squad here, status?" Cleveland's voice came over the COM as the sound of a firearm being used as a club could be heard in the distance. A shotgun, apparently, if her memory served her right/.
"5th Squad reporting," Fubuki replied, her tone flat and casual. "Hangar is captured successfully, minimal resistance. We did trash the whole place though."
"2nd Squad, checking in," Yūdachi called in via wireless. "We landed in an empty cargo bay and secured it, no casualties. It was completely deserted for all I knew; I could head to the cementry in the dead of night in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere and find more people there."
"4th Squad reporting, we got lit up by a heavy machine gun emplacement and some armor that gave us quite a few licks and bruises, but otherwise we're fine. Two bruises over here from me myself getting run over by a tank."
"5th Squad reporting, we've nothing," JS Aoba called over via the battlecommunications network, the guided-missile cruiser's voice slightly muffled as the clang of a box falling somewhere near her making itself known in the background. "Nada, nada, nothing, we landed in a deserted hangar, methinks...nevermind that sound, somebody bumped into a shelf and dropped a crate of something, hehe~..."
"...okay...?" Cleveland acknowledged as whomever still giving he squad trouble got splattered onto the walls and floor via shotgun, apparently. "Proceed as planned, we'll link up directly outside the bridge or when we cross paths, okay? If shit goes down south, improvise."
Within the void of cyberspace, a single human artificial intelligence snuck her way past firewalls and security measures without triggering them as she took them down, creating backdoor access panels and giving herself more or less free reign throughout the computer systems of the enemy dreadnought. That the computers had fairly crap and childishly primintive security measures wasn't helping, either, even when compared to Alliance computer technology during the time of the Second Inner Planets War. She snuck her way past a catchpha and deleted a subroutine that linked the ship's bridge to a system in particular, and began to recodify herself to split into dozens of smaller copies spread across the entire system. One went at the ship's computer systems and began to hack into it's encrypted database, and the others went to monitor the ship's systems and remain on standby. The hacking process went quickly and easily enough, the encryption got absolutely roasted in moments, leaving the AI with what essentially amounted to the keys to the place, and permission to run it as she wished. Creating herself a subroutine to lock the ship out of the communications systems and other similar aspects of the ship that allowed it to function, one by one, she cleanly shut them all down, completely and utterly deleting the firewalls as if it was a trivial affair for AIs like her. Which, in a sense, was indeed trivial.
She then locked out the bridge crew workstations and revoked their administrator privledges.
"Boarders detected across decks three, five, and seven!" Security reported as another readout appeared on his display. "They breached hangars 5, 7, 11, 8 and 4 and laid waste to those present in the area and are now proceeding to the bridge as I speak!"
"Then mobilize our marine detachment and deal with them!" Sorlak Brab'babar ordered over the din of chaos that was his flagship, the BCH Wings of Glory. "There's only fifty of them against a thousand of us—"
"Marine reserve is already mobilized!" Security cut him off as reports began to filter themselves through. "Marine teams are being routed one by one—Spirits, they're reporting heavy casualties Supreme Commander! Recieving reports of heavy usage of biotics and Spectre-grade troopers present within the enemy boarders! Almost all of them!"
"YOU SAID WHAT!?"
"Internal camera footage and reports show them overpowering our krogan mercenaries Supreme Commander! Even the asari ones with biotics didn't stand a chance, every move they try is countered before they even begin! Their slugthrowers are ripping through our soldiers and our guns can't even dent their kinetic barriers—the marines are nearly annihilated! Whatever combination of biotics and slughthrowers they are using is ripping straight through our troops! Entire sections have collapsed and—"
"Can you just VENT THE ATMOSPHERE AND—"
"I CAN'T EVEN TALK TO THE SHIP'S SYSTEMS AT ALL! I'M GETTING ACCESS DENIALS LEFT AND RIGHT!"
"ELECTR—"
"The mainframe is being hacked into by some kind of virus that's completely rewriting the codexes and operating systems to lcok us out and reroute control to an external source!" came the electronic warfare officer's response. "It's advanced...really advanced! It's almost salarian in terms of effectiveness!"
"Can you purge or wipe the computers and get rid of that!?"
"Like I said, the system's on lockdown, I can't talk to it at all! Access denials left and right—"
A dull thud cut him off and launched him into his console. "What was that—"
"I'm getting an override from the engine bay Supreme Commander!" the helmsman responded as he struggled to keep the ship under control with the now unresponsive controls now that the computer mainframe had been completely and utterly hacked into and placed under the control of a third party.
"Engineering!"
"I can't contact primary control officers Supreme Commander, they're either jammed or dead, or perhaps even both. The drive core's de-spooling...Supreme Commander, we're dead in the water, I'm afraid..."
Silence reigned on the bridge after that, other than the alarms and flashing lights, leaving to sink in the notion of boarders arriving to capture or kill them all. And it was rather obvious as to their motives, too. Capture the bridge crew, and especially him, alive. He didn't need a genius to tell him that, it was pretty obvious from the way they slaughtered his ship security team already as well as the way they were headed all for the bridge on seperate but converging paths, all of them looking as if they had full knowledge of the interior and thus exactly where to go. There was no sound to be heard other than breathing and the cocking of sidearms as the bridge crew eventually overcame the shock and resigned themselves to the upcoming battle. Weapons were drawn and ready, their muzzles pointed downrange as if to be ready to unload a volley of eezo-propelled metal splinters at any moment. And then...
Murakumo's Cryso Blast froze an asari as if she was naught but a block of ice for her to make a sculpture of that quickly broke off and apart into a million pieces while mist from the water vapor condensing onto the ice began to fill the corridor with a thick white haze, while her mast—a polearm that could extend from her hand with small spokes extending from it—whacked the skull of a turian in and left him to collapse onto the ground with a crushed head out of sheer blunt force trauma, before she speared a batarian with the fore end of the polearm and left him to collapse with his internal organs all liquefied from the g-forces inflicted by having a pole thrust into one's body with more than enough strength to dent in a metal wall. Fubuki slipped past her with her left hand sweeping in a karate handblade that left a turian a broken neck and a very, very early end indeed, while her foot connected with a krogan with more than enough force to send him tumbling away like a soccer ball and straight into a wall with more than enough force to completely and utterly dent it and leave a depression the size and shape of a krogan in full battle armor. Shigure's shotgun propelled another against the far wall with enough force to dent it, and Shepard's assault rifle got stabbed into an enemy at random with it's bayonet embedded into her victim all the way to the muzzle, leaving him to die in the worst pain of his life as she twisted it and pulled it out.
Ikazuchi's submachine guns in the meantime barked 5.5x30mm rounds downrange as she dumped half a a magazine in no particular direction whatsoever for simply the sake of close-quarters combat, the HW216 submachine gun letting off a distinct rat-a-tat noise as it dumped and poured lead into anyone dumb enough to even think of getting close (of which there was many), leaving dozens slumped on the floor and walls with holes punched into their armor and bodies while blood trickled from their mouths, but the destroyer didn't even give them a second thought as she let her shields tank a shot sent forth by an enemy with an oversized rifle and picked him off with the remaining rounds inside her magazine. Reloading it as soon as it ran empty, she brought it back on target to dump another burst of ammunition downrange and pop the shields off somebody with a single direct hit, before the second round pierced clean through his armor and left him to drown in a pool of his own blood as the bullet pierced clean through his lungs, causing him to quite literally choke on whatever liquid that was keeping him alive. Her next victim fell down crumpled moments later, the submachine gun sending metal casings to ding of the floor as the gun barfed both lead and brass, casings falling to the floor and bullets piercing through shields and armor alike. A krogan leapt onto her from the side, and she looked around just in time to see him coming, however, she then simply dumped a burst of rounds into him as she twirled herself around by a quarter of a circle and kicked him with a karate kick hard enough to cave his chestplate in almost all of the way.
Shigure kicked an alien at random in the ribs at mêlée distances and sent him flying into the far wall with a sickening crunch while her shotgun was used to bash the head of his fellow krogan in and also similarly fling him against the wall just beside his fellow comrade, Shigure racking the action of her weapon and promptly shredded a turian to bits with the shotgun's payload with so much force that his armor practically crumpled under the forces of the blast and left him to collapse as a gory, bloody mess of himself. She then ducked as a krogan swung at her as he lunged at her from the side from where the intersection they were fighting in exposed her to the enemy, but she ducked, leaving the krogan to lunge at Myuki instead, her fellow destroyer now armed with an assault rifle for close combat but still having a bayonet on it nonetheless catching effortlessly her assilant on it like a chef catching on his chopsticks an onion dropped from above. Leaving the krogan to collapse onto the ground now that he had a blade-shaped cavity in his skull leading all the way through his brain and up down to his spine, Myuki armed the underslung grenade launcher and sent a 40mm payload down into the midst of yet more enemy security personnel rushing down the corridor to meet them in a classic flank-attack onto their position, showering the entire place in gore and flechettes which poked and punched themselves into walls and poked out of them like a thousand darts sticking out of a dart-board with nobody ever bothering to pull them out but just kept on throwing for the sake of the bullseye, leaving the place to look as if a box full of darts had exploded with it's contents under pressure. Myuki then speared a turian about to dump his whole rifle into her at point-blank range and with two swift steps had closed the range from point-blank to mêlée, stabbing her bayonet all the way in towards the muzzle and twisting it to leave him crumpling on the ground with his insides spilling out of his body from the grotesque and bloody wound made by the metal blade.
The sheer proximity of conflict meant that for Amatsukaze, guns wouldn't be needed, instead, she opted to spawn in her hands a pair of light-sabers each with two hardlight blades curving away from the handle and forwards like either an Indian dagger or an Elite's energy sword from the Halo video game franchise, each hand having two blades each like a scythe that left a distinct, visible gap in between each blade but with a 'bridge' in between them, close to the hand-guard, to prevent enemy blades from breaching the gaps and wreaking havoc amongst the user's hand. Ducking beneath the swipe of a turian as he tried to whack her with the butt of his rifle, she instead swept the hardlight blades of her weapon around in an arc and sliced him cleanly in half vertically at the torso, the light-saber cutting through the turian's armor like butter as she simply flicked her wrists around and cut him cleanly in half at the waist and sent him collapsing onto the ground as a pile of gore and guts. Another turian rushed at her with a knife drawn and ready to carve her up, but Amatsukaze simply sidestepped his charge and left him to slam face-first into a wall with a hole in the back of his body shaped like her weapon, the destroyer bringing one of the light-sabers upwards in a vertical slice and bisecting a third turian neatly at the waist, sending him collapsing onto the ground in a puddle of his own gore and guts. Another turian came at her with his fists ready to punch her, only for Amatsukaze to duck below his swing and impale him on her weapon as she plunged one of the light-sabers deep into his abdomen, before with a flick of her wrist sent him sliding off the blade and collapsing onto the ground as a pile of blood and guts, she herself switching towards her next unfortunate target and sliced his arm clean off with one quick swipe before bringing her other weapon to bear and slicing his head clean off, leaving an unsightly mess to contend with on the floor but otherwise paying no more attention to it, her glowing blades humming faintly as they cut through anything and everything in their path like nothing at all.
A batarian tried to sneak up on her from behind, only for Murakumo to whirl around and catch his fist with the end of her polearm, crushing it entirely with just the sheer blunt strength of her weapon before she disarmed him of the pistol he had and tossed it over her shoulder and away from him, and then with one single swift motion sunk the polearm into his skull edgewise like an axe and split his head open like a melon being cleaved in half horizontally, his corpse slumping onto the ground with his brains leaking out of his skull and a distinct indentation on it the shape and size of the polearm Murakumo wielded in her hands. Pulling it out of him, she then turned to catch the barrel of a turian's rifle with said weapon and held it in place, before with a simple twist snapped his finger right off and left him to howl in pain as he collapsed onto the ground, clutching his ruined hand. Using her free hand, Murakumo then grabbed his rifle by it's stock and slammed him across the face with it and sent him sprawling onto the ground, before with one simple downward motion speared the polearm into his head and left him to die with a hole in his skull leading clean through it and out the other side, leaving him to collapse onto the ground with a hole in his skull the exact shape and size of the polearm.
Now that she had linked up with the rest on their way towards the bridge of the enemy dreadnought, Kirishima also pulled out some licks of her own, a katana sword held in her hands like a samurai of old as she spun it around and carved clean through a turian trying to shoot her with his rifle, leaving him to collapse onto the ground with his torso cut clean in half at the waist with not even his armor able to protect him from the sharpness of Kirishima's weapon of choice, before she ducked below the swing of a krogan trying to whack her with his rifle and instead simply spun around on her heel and severed his legs clean off at the knee, the battleship bringing her katana around in a wide arc and bisecting the krogan at the waist before he even had a chance to fall over, leaving him to collapse into two separate parts that bled profusely and left an unsightly mess to contend with on the ground but otherwise she paid no more attention to it, Kirishima spinning her katana around in a flourish and then plunging it through the abdomen of a turian who dared get close to her, skewering him upon it as if he was a kebab being prepared on a stick and leaving him to collapse onto the ground as a bloody mess of himself with a hole leading clean through his body the shape and size of Kirishima's katana sword. She then spun it around again and sliced an asari neatly at the waist and sent her collapsing onto the ground as a heap of gore and guts, before she caught a salarian attempting to rush past her with her free hand and proceeded to crush his throat with one simple squeeze, rendering him to suffocate with his airways now crushed to all hell. All within mere seconds, in fact, done with more than enough skill and precision to make a samurai from the days of feudal Japan proud.
"Kirishima, nice moves!" Ikazuchi commented, "You really ought to show us sometime!"
"I'm glad you liked them," Kirishima replied, "Perhaps I will."
Switching weapons from a shotgun to a pair of ten-inch combat knives after the last magazine for her shotgun ran dry, Shigure proceeded to dual-wield the combat knives like a knifefighter in an anime and proceeded to slash her way through the ranks of her enemies, blades gleaming in the artificial lighting overhead as she sliced clean through an asari with one swift horizontal sweep and sent her collapsing onto the ground as a heap of blood and guts, before she caught the barrel of a turian's rifle with one of her knives and then with one swift single motion sliced his hand clean off, leaving him to howl in pain as he clutched his bleeding stump and collapse onto the ground as a mess of himself, Shigure proceeding to leap onto him and stab both her knives clean through his shoulders and leave him pinned onto the ground like a butterfly on display, writhing and screaming in pain as she simply left him there to bleed out from the wounds inflicted onto him and paid no more attention to him. Another turian attempted to whack her with the butt of his rifle, but Shigure ducked below it's swing and then sliced him cleanly at the waist diagonally and left him to collapse onto the ground with a nasty wound in his abdomen, guts spilling out of said wound as he writhed and screamed in agony, before Shigure simply put him out of his misery with a quick stab to the forehead, sending him to collapse onto the ground as a heap of dead meat with a knife sticking out of his forehead.
"The lift to the bridge's right over there, someone go secure it quick!" Cleveland shouted over the COM as the corridor headed towards the elevator came into view after a quick right-hand turn, it's doors barely visible through the sheer amount of hostiles they were fighting as well as the splatters of blood from knives, swords, and energy swords gibbing away at enemies like no tomorrow.
"I'm on it!" Shigure exclaimed in turn, her dual-knives making an 'X' slash onto the chest of a krogan and left him to bleed his guts out with his internals spilling out while she turned to rush forwards to deal with the next few hostiles in her way.
Amatsukaze and Murakumo also surged forwards behind their fellow destroyer as well, polearm, Cryso Blast, energy swords with plasma linings around the edges of their blades smashing in skulls, freezing hostiles and breaking them into millions of smaller pieces, slicing them apart cleanly or simply igniting them into flames as they leapt forwards on zigzagging courses with their foots on walls or aliens at random, using them as launchpads to change course as well as smashing their heads into walls for added effect. Murakumo found herself within mere meters of smashing into a wall with a turian in front of her and posed her polearm in front of her, spearing the turian in the head and smashing him into the wall while she did a horizontal pole vault like an Olympic competitor with those bendy poles they often used, using her foot to connect into the torso of an asari and smashed her into the wall on the opposite end with her ribs smashed to all hell, and now, her spine as well. Amatsukaze's left sword sliced a turian's arm clean off while her right torched a batarian, leaving one to collapse with his arm gone and going into shock while the other turned into a flaming, walking, running torch that slowly burned to death as he tried to put out the flames but to no avail. They were already on Shigure by the time she got within half a dozen meters of the bridge elevator with scant inches to spare, with three hostiles guarding the elevator doors pressing a few commands into the interfaces probably to lock them from opening before turning to face them all with weapons drawn, but Shigure with one swipe of her knife let his head drop to the ground and roll away while his headless corpse tumbled and collapsed onto the floor, while Amatsukaze's energy swords cut the hostile on the left into three chunks and Murakumo's Cryso Blast rendered the final hostile a pile of shattered ice shards on the ground. Which, more or less, left them with an empty chamber with an elevator that was already snapped and jammed shut...
"Edi," Fubuki asked, once she had dealt with the last hostile and walked over towards the elevator doors, "Can you override the security measures on this elevator and let us in? Or is it manually, mechanically locked in place and we'll have to bust through it?"
"I saved you the trouble, Fubuki," Edi's voice came over the battlecommunications network as the AI, nestled within a biomech onboard a certain insertion prowler deep inside the interdimensional void, ran a few extra subroutines on the dreadnought's computer systems. "The security systems are all unlocked and ready to go, the access codes have been changed to 19-1-1-7 for ease of entry. The door to the bridge is locked, mind you—apparently someone fused the doors shut with bolts and thermite, you'll have to breach through that. But the elevator is for you, to make up for it."
"Right," Fubuki answered. "Fair point."
Shepard motioned at Fubuki, Shigure, Murakumo, Amatsukaze, and Myuki, who had just got up to the front as well, and jabbed her thumb at the elevator. "You four get up there and extract the VIP, remember, blades or otherwise mêlée only. We don't want to shoot our hostage in the head or spine, okay?"
Bang.
Sorlak Brab'babar kept his weapon trained on the door as the engineers on the other side of the door began to force it open, threading his finger into the trigger guard as well as the fight was about to begin.
Smash.
Sensors also did more or less the same, alongside everyone else.
Crash.
The door came crashing open in an instant, the door itself flying across the bridge and slamming into the head of some unfortunate officer even as the rest of the bridge crew immediately opened fire into the entrance that was now opened, making way for a pair of those bluntly asari-like engineers to enter with weapons raised, swords or knives of some sort as they were clearly aiming for hand-to-hand combat as opposed to ranged duels with guns like them. Well over a dozen splinters of metal got propelled at them at hyper-velocity in the direction of them, only for them to simply dodge the shots as if it was something they were used to doing on a regular basis, before leaping sideways to make way for a trio of engineers to enter with weapons raised, blades meeting flesh in single, swift strikes that left many with gaping wounds as they slumped to the ground, shots hitting their attackers' kinetic barriers or equivalents to little avail while their opponents dealt horrendous injuries in mere seconds, slashes painting the floor and nearby consoles in sickly shades of yellow and blue. Sensors and Tactical went down almost instantaneously with their skulls split wide open, and Electronic Warfare went down a split second later after a pair of blades left him with two slash marks in his torso that formed a cross in the middle, allowing his innards to spill out uncontrollably. Navigation at least had the chance to get a shot off before getting summarily executed as a pole wielded, or extending, from the hand of one of the engineers smacked him in the head with more than enough force to break his spine with a sickening crack. Within the span of ten seconds they had completely wiped the entire bridge crew off the map save for perhaps him and his higher command staff, including his executive offiver, the fight a wholly one-sided affair that seemed almost comical. He kept his pistol drawn and fired wildly at the one closest to him, but the shots merely splattered pathetically against her kinetic barriers as she casually closed the distance with slow, delibrate steps and proceeded to, using a simple flick of her hand like an asari pulling off a nerve pinch perfectly, whacked him in the back of the head hard enough to send him completely into darkness.
Deep space, Lyrae Asteria cluster, 0731HRS Galactic Standard Time
Vulture-class dreadnought PFS Enforcer
Admiral Macen Arteruis remained calm and steadfast, unflinching even as the jolt of his flagship exiting FTL hit him and the crew of the Third Patrol Fleet's flagship, PFS Enforcer, fifth vessel of the Vulture-class dreadnoughts to be launched and commissioned into the Navy. Close to five hundred other vessels followed close behind in flashes of light as their mass effect drive cores switched from driving them at FTL speeds to just letting them cruise on normal sublight velocities, the fleet large and imposing just like any fleet of the Navy of the Hierachy of Palaven, patrol or not. They were turians, after all.
The Enforcer's banner bridge was alive with activity as the officers shouted out reports and commands at each other through the intercom system as temelentry and communications crews tried their best to keep the fleet coordinated and cohesive, gunnery crews preparing the ship's armaments for battle, sensor operators keeping vast swathes of space under their prying eyes, and Macen himself monitoring them all. The report of Superior Captain Desolas Arterius, his son, had been a revelation for him, although it wasn't completely unexpected. But still, he was a turian through and through, and he still had a duty to fulfill, questions could be left for later, when things were done and over with. And that duty right now natrually involved putting a gang of unruly slavers back to where they belonged.
He watched intently as a frigate and cruiser formation slid into the flank of his fleet in the diamond formation that turian fleets were so famous for, leaving bright contrails in the void of space from the boiling hot plasma exhaust that they were trailing. It was too far away for him to see physically through the viewports of the bridge, but the tactical display made short work of it nonetheless. Third Patrol Fleet formed up around it's flagship and pressed onwards towards Relay 314, trails of plasma left in their wake from over four hundred warships flying onwards gracefully in the interstellar void.
Despite that, however, something in the back of his mind told him that something was off—so far, if the attack on his son's detachment was of any indication—things had been going well. Too well, in fact, than he'd like to admit. Desolas had reported a vanguard of ships of unknown makes and designs using some form of othergalactically technology to defeat the batarian forces that had ambushed his detachment and allowed him to escape. He knew that batarians were many things—idiotic, slaving scum chief among them—but they weren't stupid enough to use unfamiliar technology against enemies that they knew everything about, let alone throw themselves against a turian detachment. Even if it was a small one. That was suicide by itself, and while they were suicidal, they weren't suicidally stupid.
This meant either one of the following concepts that just weren't outright disproven a moment later, and one of which was much more horrifying that the other: that after activating Relay 314, the batarians had found a new, alien race behind it, and allied themselves with said race; or that the aliens had decided to use the batarians as test subjects for their new weapons against. Neither boded well, really. And if they ended up being as powerful as any other Council Associate Race on the Citadel, alone, then the galaxy might find itself staring down yet another galactic war by the time the year was over. Batarian slavers, especially the ones in the Terminus, made use of both their own ships as well as surplus warships of the major Council races, turians included, and if the slavers had turian ships inside their ranks the new species might as well mistake his fleet for enemy reinforcements and let everything slip out of control from there.
Macen shook his head. No, no need to jump to conclusions here. First they needed to secure Relay 314, then deal with whatever is behind it. Preferably peacefully, but he highly doubted that the batarians would allow such an opportunity to slip by, not that he cared, anyway. Then again, maybe this new species was already trying to establish relations with the Citadel Council and were using the batarians as guinea pigs in case the worst came to pass?
"We have completed our formation and are currently on approach towards the relay, Admiral," his telemetry officer broke his train of thoughts, preferrably for the better, as he spoke up. "Estimated time to transit: One minute, forty seconds. Should I order a fleetwide battle stations now, Admiral?"
"Do it," Macen replied without missing a beat. Battle stations wasn't so much of an actual alarm per say as it was a way to alert every single turian soldier aboard every single ship in the Third Patrol Fleet that they should expect a fight to break out sooner or later, and it was always better to be prepared than caught off guard, after all. "And inform the rest of the fleet. Have all ships link up their fire control systems with ours."
"Understood, sir."
Macen nodded, a shudder going throughout the entire bridge as the ship's crew prepared for battle, the bridge's bay doors opening for the bridge structure itself to lower into the armored confines of the ship itself, protected by meter thick alloy armor plates capable of resisting direct hits from capital ship weaponry. Outside, the rest of the fleet did likewise, the air within the bridge turning slightly chilly as the temperature dropped a few degrees as a result of the hull sealing shut around them.
"Vanguard is transiting the relay," Telemetry called out as the relay came to life, the glorified space catapult sending the vanguard of the fleet across space at superluminal velocities. He couldn't see it as the bridge was inside the ship already now, but still. He still got it nonetheless.
"Confirmed, vanguard is transiting the relay," Sensors called out as per protocol.
"Relay transit in twenty seconds, Admiral," Navigation reported as the Enforcer drew closer towards the relay.
Macen nodded. "Very good," he replied calmly. "Prepare for transit. All guns, charge cannons. Bring us in."
Navigation nodded before punching in a command onto the holographic interface that he was using, and the Enforcer surged forwards towards Relay 314, the rest of the Third Patrol Fleet following closely behind. They flashed across space faster than light itself, a burst of energy coming from the relay before it hurled them across space towards their destination, the vanguard waiting for them on the other side, ready to cover them during transit.
"Transit successful, Admiral," Sensors called out. "Fleet is fully accounted for."
Macen nodded. Good. "Excellent," he replied. "Get me a sitrep—"
Almost immediately, lights began to flash across all consoles and klaxons wailed all over the place as if they had jumped straight into a warzone, alarms of all types and sizes racking a massive cacophony worse than the trans-relay ambush scenarios that he had trained on in his days as a cadet at Palaven Command. And as far as he was concerned, it took exactly the amount of time needed for the data to load up onto the displays and consoles to tell him why.
He didn't like it.
Codex entry: Humans — Human sensor technology and equipment
Human sensors do not rely on a single unified method or system like Citadel ones, but rather, they are a term to describe multiple different technologies that are designed to fulfill different purposes, each specifically tailored to do one job and excel at it. While humans lack the Citadel's ability to combine functions into a single device, human sensor systems as a whole are very flexible in their use. This is made possible by how much effort and resources have been put into making them modular and easy to upgrade or swap out entirely for another type of sensor, which has the added benefit of making most of their sensors easier to understand and repair than their Citadel counterparts.
The various types of sensors used by humans and their constitute nation-states, in no particular order whatsoever, are as follows:
Radar: Short for RAdio Detection And Ranging, this is the most iconic method of detecting contacts at long ranges and is also the Council's base method of operation for their sensor systems. Radar operates by emitting an electromagnetic wave from a transmitter, which will bounce off any solid target in its path and return back to the radar receiver after traveling through space at the speed of light. The radar receiver will measure how long it takes the electromagnetic waves to travel between the two points, and based on that measurement can determine the distance between the radar transmitter and receiver, as well as the direction said contact is located relative to the radar's orientation. In space, due to the sheer ranges observed in such enviroments, radio waves will be boosted in speed via anti-gravity 'tunnels' (mass effect ones in the Citadel's case) to well past superluminal velocities to allow for detection and ranging of objects at extremely far distances away effectively, often on the order of light-days to light-years. Due to the nature of radar being a line-of-sight detection method, radar requires either clear lines of sight or a way to boost its signals enough to overcome the interference of space debris or planets getting in its way, with some radar installations having transmitters and receivers placed on opposite ends of a planet to circumvent this issue.
Gravdar: GRAVity Detection And Ranging. This system does not use a beam of focused radio waves (or similar) as opposed to radar, but instead emits a spherical pulse of amplified gravitational waves (hence the name) at timed intervals to detect mass concentrations within its range. Gravdar is massively less accurate compared to radar, even obsolete sweep-array systems much less the more modern phased-array systems used on almost all ships within both the Alliance Naval Arm as well as the Kaiserliche Marine, but it's ability to detect and scan massive amounts of contacts at once as opposed to having to sweep the area in question to be able to see it massively offsets this disadvantage. Gravdar is thus often paired with radar systems in a spotter-sweeper combination where the former detects a target within a few thousand kilometers' worth of an error margin, and then radar arrays train onto that location to 'paint' the exact location of it for targeting or evaluating. This allows for both systems to compliment each other to the best of their ability by pairing both the accuracy and precision of radar systems with the sheer response and detection time of gravdar.
Slidar: A portmanteau of SLIpstream and raDAR, slidar systems are essentially gravdar systems but sending pulses of gravity waves into the void of the interdimensional slipstream to detect prowlers lurking in it's darkness in a fashion no different from how a sonar system might work on water, hence the 'Slipstream' part of slidar. Slidar systems are primarily employed by navies to detect prowler forces sneaking up on their own fleets without them realizing it until it's too late, paired up with disruptor torpedoes launched often from destroyers to intercept them before they get close enough to launch their payloads, although it also serves as an early warning system to detect ships in FTL as well. The system can also work in reverse, allowing prowlers hiding in interdimensional slipstream space to detect approaching vessels themselves and plan accordingly. Slidar systems are also used alongside gravdar systems on larger warships, especially dreadnoughts, to serve as a double layer of security against prowler forces attempting to board said ships.
Optics: Intrestingly enough, human ships do not rely on their sensors, passive or active (the former of which work almost exactly as their Citadel counterparts and are thus not listed), for aiming or fire control of their armaments except for their missiles and torpedo systems or defensive armaments designed for short-range actions, due to the fact that both humanity and their main nemesis, the Abyssals, possess one of the best and most powerful electronic warfare systems and doctrines as seen before in the galaxy, capable of not only blanketing vast expanses of space in jump interdiction fields that make jumping out of FTL impossible to massively hamper frigate wolfpacks and carrier wings using microjumps to attack larger targets at close range to powerful, long-range jammers that make radar-based fire control systems almost impossible to use. Missiles can home-to-jam, but are still vulnerable to being shot down by point-defenses nonetheless, which leaves the larger magneto-plasma accelerator cannons, humanity's equivalent to shipborne mass accelerators, incapable of being used with traditional sensors and targeting equipment. Instead, humanity ended up reverting to an older concept, one that had been used during the days where ships sailed the oceans of their homeworld and fought it out with cannons using chemical propellants, namely, cordite. Using a very powerful telescope with a searchlight that would shine through a dedicated anti-gravity 'tunnel' to allow it to monitor targets at vast distances in real time, human fire control systems when aiming via optics would, in normal circumstances, 'ladder-aim' their shots, as in, firing one round slightly high of the target and the other lower of it, using the visual data returned from the optics to consempate for their next volley until the shots straddled their target, at which all guns will fire on target at full speed. This system is not the best, but it certainly works despite enemy electronic countermeasures and jamming, and thus is humanity's to-go method for shipborne fire control.
On average, it takes three volleys for an Alliance or Imperial ship to aquire a targeting solution, with one shot aimed at the target plus a pre-selected offset angle to the top, and the other at a the target plus a pre-selected offset angle to the bottom. Once the ladder distance was confirmed after the 'tracers' from the shots fired crossed their targets and missed, as expected, the ship will adjust their aim based on that information and continue to ladder-aim until the tracers straddle the target itself, at which all guns will be given permission to fire on target and unleash a withering salvo of magneto-plasma shells upon it. While this is nowhere near as efficient or accurate as say, Citadel ships relying on their sensors for fire control, it works nonetheless and allows humanity's capital ships to fight it out regardless of the conditions thanks to their EW systems and doctrine. It also permits human ships to fight in areas where natrual interference would render sensors useless—a gas giant's magnetosphere, for example.
A/N:
Imagine the reactions on the faces of the turians when they see the clusterfuck that unfolded behind Relay 314 lmao