A/N before we begin, Remember, If you recognise it, I probably don't own it. Mass effect belongs to BioWare and Microsoft.
.°
Chapter 2: A Report
High Admiral Samantha 'Firebird' Fulane, the most decorated Admiral in the SoCon Navy, youngest High Admiral, the greatest admiral ever, the dont-you-dare-call-her-hot Chief of internal affairs, was having a bad day. First she had to wake up at 3 in the morning, for a first contact situation. Now she was reading the report while sipping from her "Best C/O ever" coffee mug while grumbling to herself.
"Let's see, first contact report sector S8 with... 3 New species!… and ofcourse 2 of them made contact by firing at SoCon ships! Why can't I just get One night of Sleep!"
*ping*
"Who is it now?!"
She opens the email.
Oh, it's Donnelly from Archiving, let's see what she sent over... Oh, it's the Annual Logistics Report... But why is this so late! It should have been delivered 2 goddamn months ago!"
"Calm down Sammy, Calm down." She says to herself.
*ping*
"What is it now?"
She reads the message, it's not very long, and basically says that the council of five, want the updated Annual report on Logistics by 700hrs.
"Jesus Christ! Why do you hate me so!?" She shouts to the air. Then she begins reading through the report in a hurry.
June 11, 2300
Report no. 743
From:
Dr. Donnelly Mungwa, HOD SoCon Archives
To:
SoCon HighCom
This is the 7th Annual Logistics Report, Overview of our technologies and Resources.
Technologies of the Confederation
DEWs
Our standard military Armament, for heavy infantry and up, Energy weapons have come quite far since the early 21st century. Back then they were bulky, and required large vehicles, and could only be used for air defence in short bursts. However during WW3 saw great improvement in efficiency and energy storage solutions, thus allowing DEWs to be mounted on tanks and such.
Now due to miniaturization, and other advancements, heavy infantry units equipped with a fusion power pack for their exo Armour, can use DEWs. However we have not been able to miniaturize them enough for true handheld usage.
They are also standard Armaments of small to medium mechanized, tank & Artillery Divisions. As well as the Main Broadside guns of our naval ships.
DEWs utilized by SoCon are in 2 major varieties.
The most common X-ray based beam laser systems.
And the extremely rare yet devastating Plasma systems, utilized in the main spinal guns of our Largest ships.
Kinetics
Kinetics is the generalized term for all solid state projectile weapons that deal kinetic damage. They make up for all standard hand held weaponry and main guns of ships.
These too, have come a long way since the days of the 21st century. The biggest leap was when we realized that Prothean shielding emitters while inefficient as actual shields, make for perhaps some of the most potent projectile accelerators. This discovery made in the 2190s revolutionized the kinetics market as they could once again be competitive.
A modern SoCon 5.56 round is fired at somewhere around mach 9-11 (depending on the gun) and is equipped with gyrojet and tipped with either incendiary, explosive or armor piercing. The base 15gm round by itself has a staggering 71000 J of energy per shot. Higher and lower rounds exist and are utilized but the 5.56 remains the standardized round of modern infantry.
On our ships upto Cruiser scale the main gun is a magnetically Accelerated Cannon, enhanced with Planium for higher velocity. A cruiser fires a 300 ton slug of tungsten/depleted Uranium at roughly around 100 km/s. Each slug has the staggering kinetic energy of roughly 358 Kilotons of Tnt ie an absurd 1.5 million Megajoules.
Grav Systems
Grav Systems, i.e. systems that manipulate gravity come in many varieties and are widely implemented. From weapons that shoot micro singularities, and gravity distortions, to hover vehicles and inertia dampeners.
Shields
The primary types of shields utilized by SoCon are deflector-reactive shields or D-R shields. These shields work by deflecting incoming attacks to the closest exit vector not directed at the shield host. In simpler terms they change the direction of the incoming attacks to a vector that does not hit the body of the one using the shield. They are usually dual layered, one just above the surface of the wearer and another weaker field in a bubble around them. These shields can defend against both kinetic and energy weapons. And are far more energy efficient than Prothean model shielding.
However it is not the only for mof shields utilized by SoCon. The other type of shielding tech, known as Refractor shields are the more powerful, energy hungry cousins of deflectors. They are used to defend large areas like cities, entire installations and the largest ships. They work by absorbing the energy of the attack, and spreading it across itself which is a dome of hexagonal honey comb like structures. This makes it very energy hungry. But given enough power, they are far stronger than deflectors.
Body Armor
Body Armour is made of layers of titanium based alloys and graphene. Effective against energy and projectiles. Heavy Infantry use exo suits which are a type of power armor that has ablative self repairing armor utilizing nanomachines.
Armour on ships, aircraft and tanks also have this type of ablative self repairing armor as well as standard fixed armor underneath.
Propelled Artillery
Propelled Artillery and missiles come in many varieties, alongside old gunpowder artillery most commonly used systems include the ion torpedo, Plasma missile, and the nuclear variety. More exotic systems include disruptor torpedos (which are frankly inefficient as hell), and Neutron bombs.
Biotics
Biotics are a special branch of the SoCon military. They are usually specialists with 1 in 7 soldiers being a Delta Biotic or more. Only the Strongest Biotics A detailed section on it is provided later in the report.
Genetic Engineering
Self explanatory. All our soldiers and most of the population have some level of advanced genetic engineering, in the form of gene mods. Specialists have top of the line genetic upgrades, and are truly transhuman.
Cybernetics
Similar to genetic engineering, cybernetics are a crucial part of SoCon society and military. As such all individuals are enhanced with neural implants, and other cybernetics are taken by choice. Individuals are not allowed to have cybernetics before the age of majority (20) except in cases of medical need.
Artificial intelligence
AI has advanced a lot since the chatbots of the 21st century. Most individuals have atleast one Ai companion/assistant, with some having multiple. While not quite AGIs, higher level AIs have shown barebones levels of sentience. This has caused a renewed push into AI research, in hopes that soon we would have truely sentient companions.
Even though SoCon doesn't have truly sentient AI, the bill of Sentient Rights passed in 2234 guarantees Ai rights in case they ever become sentient.
Nanotech
Nanotechnology is perhaps the most important discovery of the 21st century, as it completely revolutionized the industrial sector, and was the key to the post scarcity society that humanity enjoys.
Drones
Drones are the most common and widely used units both for space and ground combat. Oftentimes little more than a gun strapped to propulsion systems, they are cheap, expendable and easy to replace. They are usually deployed in "swarms" of around 80-100 controlled by an Ai.
In the civilian sector, drones make up for the majority of the menial workforce, completing works in days that would take humans weeks to build.
General Medicine.
Generalised medicine is still prevalent even though most individuals have medical nanites in their bloodstream. This is because medical nanites, while capable of fixing scrapes, bruises and minor wounds, cannot solve/repair major damage to the body.
Amputations and fractures can be easily fixed by Medi-pack . Which is an injection of undifferentiated stem cells that fix most physical injuries, and is utilized by Paramedics, EMTs and Military personnel.
More specialized injuries may require dedicated medical procedures and surgery.
Transport
Most terrestrial transport is carried out in public rails and buses. Cars, both flying and grounded are fairly common, but are not utilized as much as the 21st century due to most amenities that cannot be manufactured right at home, being in walking distance, and public transport being easy, fast, comfortable and efficient for longer travel. Cars are only used for recreational purposes and by personal choice.
Out tanks and personnel carriers come in both grounded and hover variety, while artillery is always grounded.
Aviation
Aviation has long ceased to be a separate field of transport outside the military as a lot of cars can fly.
The military maintains this division due to the Atmospheric and exo-Atmospheric fighters that it employs.
Energy production
Though Fusion based reactors continue to make up the majority of energy sources, many other energy sources are also widely used. Still Fusion reactors themselves have undergone many upgrades and as such large scale fusion generators can keep up fusion till reaching iron.
Other major energy generation sources are the Antimatter reactors, utilised in the largest ships and the experimental black-hole reactor. Geothermal, wind and solar energy are also used, but not in vary major capacity.
Starships
Any vehicle capable of interplanetary travel is considered a starship, (yes, including liquid fuel propelled rockets). Private Starships while common, have limits of hardware, and are unarmed except for barebones shielding, and point defence lasers. Though they are allowed to get as large as their owner wants. SoCon has also maintained a complete and comprehensive list of all individuals who are in possession of an FTL drive, despite the proven fact that attempting to ram anything more than 5 times the size of the ship in FTL just makes the ship implode and shatter 0.0671 seconds before impact, without dealing no considerable damage and hence poses no threat.
FTL Systems
The standard FTL drive used on SoCon ships is the Arya-Alcubierre Warp drive, aka the AA-Drive. It was designed quite early on after the discovery of planium. Over the years many improvements have been made to it. It starts out slow and then accelerates to absurd levels of speed, such that it can travel from one end of the galaxy to the other in just a week.
It is also far more efficient compared to the prothean based stream drive. As unlike A stream drive, it does not require a line of Planium running along the entire length of the ship, instead it just requires concentrations of Planium at the fore and the aft of the ship. It also lacks any sort of Size limits, allowing for ships both military and civilian to get as large as they want. It follows an inverse cube square law, where if the size of the ship is cubed, the ammount of Planium is squared. Thus allowing for massive ships to use relatively lower amounts of Planium.
It's speed usually depends on the amount of energy being supplied to the drive system, by the ship. This makes it so that larger ships can attain faster acceleration speeds in FTL. It works like an arithmetic progression of (Speed = 1 + time in hrs x 7.52) for a Corvette size ship. It starts out at 1 LY/hr, and keeps accelerating by about 7.52 LY/hr^2, this allows it to reach speeds of upto 1256.84 LYs/hr in just 168 hours. Time dilation, which was theorised to be a major issue, doesn't seem to affect the ships because of some peculiar property of Planium.
The Prothean based "Stream" drive is still used, but rarely and only by private collectors and enthusiasts. This is because not only does it have a hard limit on how fast one can go, (a measly 48 LY/day at best), it also is very Planium inefficient, and has a maximum size limit on how large one can build.
Wormhole based FTL is the stationary standard commercialised model of FTL. It works by connecting two locations, through a set of Quantum Entangled particles, which are then turned into wormholes using Planium. These wormholes are then contained and stabilised by giant structures called "Stargates" a term taken from an old Earth fictional series of the same name. These gates are stationary, and have an exponential increase in energy requirements with increase in size, but can link up to provide for instantaneous travel to anywhere with an existing gate. Over the years many problems with the linking has been solved, like the multiple hours of time that used to be required to link gates, and linked gates being out of phase. This has allowed for a reliable form of System to system transportation method which has led to many civillian freighters to not require FTL drives for Interstellar travel. This not only saves costs in purchase of an FTL engine, it also saves Planium for other uses.
Stellar Structures
Dyson swarms exist around 21% of all stars in SoCon territory.
O-Neil cylinders are by far the most common stellar Structures and account for up to 47% of all stellar constructions. Around 15 kms on the smallest and above 90kms for the largest, they house a large part of the population.
16 star systems have shipyards though the Saturnine Shipyards continue to be our largest manufacturer (a bit above 38%). Closely followed by the ones at Reach (23%), and Copernicus (8%).
Only 2 Stellar lifters exist, one is Sol and another in construction at Tantalus (formerly HD 63433)
WARNING Restricted Section
Category 4 or above Authorisation required.
Access Granted
Welcome Lord Admiral
Project Shiva
The ultimate trump card in the SoCon Arsenal, it's dedicated to the development and viable use of Antimatter weapons for warfare. So far it has met limited success so far.
Project Aegis
Project Aegis is dedicated to replicating the indestructible nature of the relays for armour. It also has a sub project of creating true energy shields. Tangible progress is being made, and are estimated to succeed within 30 years.
Project Nyx
…..xxxxxx…..jjejissplsnxjkd….. DATA LOST…
Project Jedi
Hisjvzjbdzjdjsbkzk….kbsjdibkzkbibshkavsvjsvi….sbzkbkkbkbs…..ARTIFICIAL….ejzvkvsvjjvsbjvsbbksjbsj…..jgsidhshohxoIGJVSOB...-#;+$+($?$!$;+$!*POTENTIAL….jgufydycikhkgfjychvibhi…..uggusjvvxjs…..SUCCESS…..gdchjvvjbkb)#(+";[[(#-&*- +(($)/..hffhgk…DATA CORRUPTED
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What the hell you mean data corrupted! How the hell does someone manage to corrupt data on the most secure and high tech data transfer line in SoCon?! I don't have time for this shite! Damn you Donelly!
-~~~-~~xxxxxx~~-~~~xxxxxx~~~-~~~xxx~~~-
A/N
The corrupted bits are a surprise, to be revealed later. And I've given enough hints on project Jedi I believe. Hell the name is a dead give away.
Edit: Someone asked why they were not using the standard eezo stream drive. So I added a section on FTL.