This is where I'm putting all the ideas that pop into my head that I may or may not make into stories. Anyone can take an idea if they want, just inform me in the comments and tell me what name you're going to use (mine are just what I think sounds best). You can also discard some of the components if you want, they're mostly just my ramblings so the ideas don't get lost after a few days.
Flight of the Valkyrie: In 2457, when the United Nations Navy Battlecruiser Valkyrie activated its new wormhole drive, its crew expected to go less than a dozen light years to Sirius, not to be stuck 20 thousand light years from home, make contact with a strange race call the Raloi, and fight slavers to defend their new allies. This is the tale of the UNNV Valkyrie.
Humanity develops a new FTL drive design after centuries of using eezo FTL, it works, but it has some bugs. The Valkyrie is a Battlecruiser similar to the earlier Battlecruisers (think HMS Invincible) of the 20th century, built to hunt down enemy Cruisers while, theoretically, being capable of fighting in a Dreadnought duel, but not recommended. Unlike those early Battlecruiser, the Valkyrie has something to even the odds, Javelin Missiles, which could allow the ship to beat a larger vessel at closer ranges, but it limited in uses due to lack of resupply, leading to the crew needing to be picky about when to use them.
The Valkyrie can out fight any of the Battarian Cruisers, and is far faster than the Battarian Dreadnoughts (which are not deployed at the start due to the weak fleet of the Raloi). A Dreadnought is a problem that needs to be dealt with, but the Valkyrie and Raloi fleet can mostly pick when to engage (when it's not attacking that which they cannot afford to lose), and have time to prepare.
The Raloi have multiple colonies, and have been expanding for the last few decades.
The Raloi fleet is like a turn of the (20th) century fleets, large cruisers not too far off from the main Battleships, with smaller Cruisers existing while early Destroyers act as fast attack craft. Their largest vessels (battleships), are considered somewhat small Cruisers by the Battarians, and their fleet is vastly outmatched technologically.
The only reasons the Raloi have not been taken over by the Battarians is that their homeworld is somewhat far from any known relays (10-20 light years away), and the Battarians have not deployed many resources due to the unimportance of the raloi (can change later in the story)
Mass Effect: Lords of the Traverse: Humanity is young, less than two centuries into orbit, less than three decades into the stars, yet they are insatiable. Once they meet others, they will learn and invent and build until even those who were like giants compared to man today, will bow down
Humanity finds the mars ruins a century early (though it is less expansive) and makes contact in the 2080s or '90s with an attican world. Humanity builds itself up over decades (unifying a few years after first contact)
Humanity starts very primitive (think mass effect isolation but worse), but grows in technology until reaching where it was in the trilogy after a few decades.
Good idea but i have no idea what i would do for the later chapters
Earther in a sea of Colonials: When joined the UNSC, I thought I was going to be defending humanity, instead I have a ONI collar around my neck, and a mission so FUBARed i'd think it funny if it didn't leave me surrounded by religious AI-hating humans from the middle of nowhere that shouldn't exist, an AI hidden in my head, and killer robots on our tail.
A Halo-Battlestar Galactica crossover focused on an (unwilling) ONI agent (no name yet) inserted into colonial society before the fall. He gets into the fleet and has to deal with all the problems that come with the situation.
Due to his expertise and his (falsified) background saying he went through the colonial military to pay for college, he is forced into the colonial military.
not sure about this part, mostly due to the flimsiness of the explanation, thinking of having it so they are forced in anyways due to expertise, joins to ensure the fleet's survival, or brought in to help Baltar (wouldn't that be fun).
Has a Smart AI in his head, not sure about how to explain it (maybe experimental tech, but why give it, and an AI, to a spy?)
Babylon Evolution: Growth of the Earth Alliance: In 2155, humanity made first contact with the Centauri, in 2257, Babylon 5 opened its doors. But what of the years in between? This is the tale of the growth of the Earth Alliance, from first contact to the end of the Dilgar War.
I have always wanted to know more about the years before the Dilgar War, when humanity was simply a minor race trying to rise to the top, this is that story.
Starts right after contact with humanity trying to gain new tech and deal with the problems that follow first contact.
Crossroads of Broke Peoples: The refuge fleet fled from the 12 Colonies of Kobal, searching for safety with earth. The exodus fleet fled the Inner Sphere as it was no longer safe, trying to ensure they can't be used to butcher people by the billions and allow even a shadow of what the Star League built to live on. What happens when they meet.
This is 50% me wanting more BattleTech-Battlestar Galactica crossovers, and 50% me wanting to see a McKinna make sweet, sweet Particle Cannon love to a Cylon Basestar.
It would be interesting to see the reaction of the Colonials when they realize their salvation, earth and any worlds it colonized, make the nuked colonies look like a paradise.
BattleTech and BSG tech is a very interesting combination, relatively even (considering Autocannons are used), with similar FTL tech. It also has a relatively good explanation for how the colonials exist, Jump Drives work by bending reality over and fucking with it, and we have seen it mess up and send ships where they arent supposed to (think there was a ship that ended up 900 light years deep into the Periphery), so its not Too much of a stretch for a jump to go so wrong it sends a ship 2,000 light years away and thousands of years into the past, and its basically the rule in BattleTech that colonies without support regress.
I also want to see Kerensky (the old, good one, not the young, annoying one) and Adama (the old, cool one, not the young, annoying one) meet.
I'm thinking pre pre-Pegasus for the start, but I have no clue how to end it.
Fallout: Manswell Expedition: Victor Manswell saw the writing on the wall, Earth was going to die in nuclear fire. So he came up with a plan: 300 of America's best and brightest set off to Alpha Centauri in 2070, only a few years before the world ends. They make it, they grow, and then they wonder, what happened to the pale blue dot they once called home. So they send someone to check.
I was replaying ME1 when I noticed that the launch of the Manswell Expedition was before the Great War in the Fallout timeline, so this idea came to me. The story starts as mostly just Fallout (New Vegas to be specific), though with the Manswell Expedition having discovered eezo and some evidence of the Protheans. They have some eezo tech, but it is an order of magnitude less advanced than shown in Mass Effect (no artificial gravity and the ship they send to Earth is one of their first FTL capable ships, and can only go a few times the speed of light).
Later in the story, they discover the Mars Ruins and make contact with the ME universe (for convenience everything in Mass Effect is pushed back a few centuries).
When cycles collide: The colonials' spirits died when they found the dead husk of Earth, hope burned in nuclear fire millennia past. Yet, only a few light years away, they find another Earth, teaming with life and, most importantly, humans. The year is 2128, and two cycles shall collide, and both shatter.
The colonials discover humanity cases before the Mars Ruins are found, still more advanced than them in several fields, but lacking any way out of their system.
First few chapters are the earthers, colonials, and rebels dealing with the cylons, and than a few more of humanity's development. Around the same time as cannon, the Mars Ruins are discovered, but the humanity that finds them is far different. The Centurions have a place in society, or at least their own independent nation, Battlestars of the standard ships of the line, and FTL is far better than anything Mass Effect has ever seen (cylon FTL so it's double broken).
Just thinking what fun first contact would be (haven't decided if there should be a war or not) makes me want to end my current fic and start writing.
Old companions long forgotten: The Cylons are a middle race, far older than those who walk the galaxy today, yet young compared to their elders, yet they also hold strange and powerful technology. So when the Cylons begin hunting Minbari fleets during the war, Earthforce wants to know, and the Lexington can find out.
When the Centurion left at the end of the series, they were left to their own devices in a galaxy filled with other races. So they developed, evolved, and tried to ensure relatively little interference with their creators by other races (obviously failing a bit). They took a hands off approach with the humans once they came onto the galactic stage, observing, but not interfering. But after a few months of the Mimbari kicking humanity's ass, the Cylons divided that only they were allowed to bend mankind over backwards and fuck the over, so started attacking the Mimbari. Obviously, Minbari fleets being wiped out by small numbers of bioships gets a lot of attention. While the Mimbari think they might by fighting a Shadow thrall race, Earthforce tries to discover more by sending the Lexington and its courageous capitan to find out.
Of fleets and JumpShips: When the captain of the Borealis brought his ship to a middle-of-nowhere habitable world in a nebula to grab some food supplies, he did not expect to find a pair of Battleships and an entire fleet setting up shop.
A JumpShip going to New Caprica, a minor, rarely known planet deep within the Periphery, finds the colonials in the early stages of settlement. After a rather confrontational debriefing where the fleet learns of the fucked up mature of humanity, the JumpShip, the Borealis, begins working as a colonial proxy in the Inner Sphere, allowing the colony to gain nessasary materials and goods. To pay for this, the Viper becomes the hot new Superlight Fighter of the Inner Sphere, the production facilities of the Pegasus producing them in numbers equal to what most industrial worlds could (because BattleTech is BattleTech and manufacturing is SLOW and with minimal production numbers). The materials to operate at such a level being gained both through trade and the mining ships of the fleet.
For dealing with the Cylons, there are multiple ways it could be done:
A: The Cylons find New Caprica the same way as in the show. Not that interesting to me.
B: The Cylons stick to the peace and never enter the area of space with all the humans in it (which they don't know about), staying near the colonies for years to come. Somewhat boring, but convenient and somewhat plausible.
C: The Cylon Civil War happens earlier. Maybe the Centurion managed to break free of their enslavement and kill all the human-Cylons, staying away from the rest of humanity out of apathy. Maybe what happened to Number 7 gets leaked, leading to the Cylons fighting each other to the point that they either turn into a much more manageable threat, near extinct, or allies.
Or D: Cylons find the Inner Sphere and make the mega genocide humanity has had going for the last few centuries look like a picnic. No one wins; either the Cylons leave the Inner Sphere a broken husk of dead worlds and spends the next millennia hunting down the endless number of lost colonies across thousands of light years, or the Cylons die, leaving a devastated Inner Sphere right as the Clans come into the picture.
Enemy of my enemy is someone I should really stop shooting: Spectre Garrus Vakarian tried to warn them, but he failed. He tried to make them prepare, but he failed. Now the Reapers have arrived and the galaxy needs all the help it can get, even the Hierarchy's decades-long enemy, humanity.
The humanity that came upon the galactic stage was far older and advanced than the one that came in the original timeline, with hundreds of billions to even a trillion people being held within Sol. The First Contact War also became far bloodier, with humanity pushed from its newly acquired territory back to its home system, which the Hierarchy spent decades trying to take, failing quite spectacularly.
Humanity has made it to every nook and cranny of the Sol System, and its advanced technology allows it to turn it into an impenetrable fortress. From the endless maze of Pluto to the submarine cities of Europa, to the sprawling hives of Luna and the floating metropolis of Venus, all of humanity's dwellings proved near unassailable. While humanity lost everything beyond Sol before the 2960 (with first contact being in 2957), decades of fighting saw the Hierarchy gaining only a few tenuous footholds and asteroid colonies.
Shepherd also exists in this timeline, though she is closer to the Butcher of Torfan than the Hero of Elysium. The Legend-Breaker, Butcher of Luna, the person who has killed more Turian than any other individual in the galaxy, and Garrus's chaperon as he tries to convince humanity's government to help against the Reapers, or at least promise not to swarm into council space like the Mongol hordes is the Hierarchy redeploys its forces to fight the Reapers.
When Good Men Go To Die: Humanity was in a golden age, spreading across dozens of systems far from Sol. There was peace. But then they came, the things that burned man's worlds to the ground, taking all they could, technology, resources, or people. Now we go to fight, not to win, but to slow our demise until a solution can be found.
Based on Renegade Reinterpretation and the Great War of Halo, humanity is discovered, not by the Turians, but by Terminus powers, leading to a Halo-like conflict, with humanity pushed back until humanity can find a way to win.
Humanity can be more developed (one to four hundred years is a good range) or it could be less developed (i.e Mass Effect Isolation), though the second one would probably be best.
Spirit of Remnant: When the crew of the Spirit of Fire wakes, they find themselves in orbit of a strange world, one filled with with humans yet far from the humanity they knew. They shale build upon this world a home, hoping to create a way back to their first home to help those dear to them. A new player is in the board, one that will lead to either salvation or ruin.
Heavily inspired by Halo: Phoenix of Remnant (basically the same premise), UNSC Spirit of Fire ended up in orbit of Remnant and builds a colony. They stay hidden from the residents of the world and do some moderate infiltration. They are only fully discovered after or during the Fall of Beacon (though are suspected and known to vaguely exist a while before.
