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The Dominion vs the Reapers
theraven2378
Member Posts: 6,017 Arc User
This is a Star Trek vs Mass Effect dual, the rules are the war can be fought on both ground and space.
On one side the Gamma Quadrant's supreme superpower, the the other the all conquering Reapers, the debate begin.
On one side the Gamma Quadrant's supreme superpower, the the other the all conquering Reapers, the debate begin.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
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Reapers win.
Member since early 2011
On the ground. Probably the reapers. The Jem'hadar might be great warriors but no other planet could withstand the reapers attack.
I think the Reapers one advantage would be in FTL speeds, where mass relay networks let them cross the galaxy in hours or days, whereas Trek FTL speeds have only a fraction that speed. However without the relays, we really don't know Reaper slow-FTL speeds (unless its explained in ME3; i only played the first two) or if they can fight or maneuver at those speeds, whereas Trek ships can. If there were a functional relay network, the Reapers can move around far more quickly than anyone could counter, but if those relays get destroyed, they've got a real problem.
Stand-up fight, I think the Dominion wins by pure technological advantage. Protracted fight, I think Dominion wins by taking out the mass relays and turning it into a standup fight. Reapers wage a guerrilla hit-and-run campaign, repairing and rebuilding from out of the Dominion's reach (and somehow keeping the network from being destroyed), Reapers might do better.
Also a reaper could just crush the vessel.
Also, reaper weaponry is a combination energy/mass accelerator weaponry, ST shields can stop some things, but mass accelerator weaponry is going a fraction of the speed of light. meaning about 75k km a second, even ST shields would be pretty hard pressed to stop that, the kinetic energy alone would be massive, and reapers can 1-2 shot even some of the most massive ships in the fleet.
Plus on the ground, depending on if they brought troops with them (like the collectors, or other races they processed) the jem hadar lose, simply casue of the biotics many ME species can weild, and are usable even after being transformed by the reapers.
Reapers got from the depths of darkspace (as seen in the ending sequence, you could clearly see the entire galaxy from where they were) to the Sol System, in 6 months. and according to the in game codex, Mass relay travel is nearly instantaniously ( a matter of seconds).... so actually, they can cross the galaxy in mere minutes.
Reaper tech allowed a Collector base to be stationed at the galactic core, remember? It was stated that the core is filled with black holes and stars going super nova. To be able to station anything there for the long term would require powerful enough shielding to negate the effects. Also recall that a Reaper corpse was in close orbit of a brown dwarf, protected by nothing but it's mass effect field. I doubt transporters could penetrate that field, let alone the armor and shields.
Also, don't underestimate the power of the Reaper magnetohydrodynamic weapons. While not on the energy base as most Trek weaponry, molten metal moving at a fraction of the speed of light is going to do serious damage, even with shielding. No ships seen being fired upon by the main guns were shown to survive it. It was shown to take out dreadnoughts with ease. The size of the ships is also taken into account. The Dominion battleship was about 1200 meters in length, (correct me if i'm wrong here. It was stated to be twice the size of the Galaxy, which I believe has been pointed out as a little over 600 meters in length) where as Sovereign was over two kilometers. They could simply run over anything the Dominion put in front of them.
'If' the Reapers had access to the relays, they would be well off by themselves. The only thing strong enough to take one out was a freaking asteroid the size of a moon. Does Trek even have tech that can move such things around?
Reapers don't wage guerrilla warfare. They invade, indoctrinate, assimilate and move on. Speaking of which, indoctrination. Cause chaos among enemy lines would work greatly in the Reapers favor. Not sure what it would do to changelings, but most other species would fall to it.
Member since early 2011
On the subject of their kinetic barriers, in ME2 Joker did mention the fact that they can easily stand up to a dreadnought without much effort.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
the T'Kon are the only ones i can think of that could do that.
"Hah! You are doomed! You're only armed with that pathetic excuse for a musical instrument!!!" *the Savage Beast moments before Lonnehart the Bard used music to soothe him... then beat him to death with his Fat Lute*
nah, they'd more likely be brute style enemies...... that can cloak.
Now, source: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Reaper
The most powerful weapon the Alliance had was the main guns on their dreadnoughts. A single shot from this gun had a yield of 38 kilotons. These kinds of weapons did kill Reapers, if barely. Sustained fire from four dreadnought-class ships could collapse their kinetic barriers.
The main gun of a Sovereign-class reaper looks like a beam, but is actually a kinetic magnetohydrodynamic weapon - a mass driver that fires streams of molten metal. Its maximum yield is 450 kilotons, and was sufficient to destroy nearly any ship in the Mass Effect universe. It has short range lasers for anti-missile and anti-fighter point defense, and smaller weapons on their arms for cutting through hulls.
Now, a photon torpedo, in the 23rd Century, had a yield of 64 megatons. This is 1685 times as powerful as the 38 kiloton main gun of an Alliance Everest-class dreadnought. Remember how I said sustained fire from 3 dreadnoughts could take out the shields of a Sovereign-class reaper? Well, dreadnoughts fire every 2 seconds, so one photon torpedo is equivalent of over 56 minutes of sustained fire from one dreadnought, and almost 19 minutes of sustained fire from 3.
And that's from a TOS Constitution, before the scaling yield torpedoes in TNG, before quantum torpedoes, etc. And the Jem'hadar fleets absolutely manhandled ships with this kind of apocalyptic armament.
Sovereign might be able to take a hit or two like this, but in a matter of seconds, from a single enemy, it would be taking fire equivalent to hours of bombardment by Mass Effect ships.
And fighting back, it would be almost helpless. It's most powerful weapon, at 450 kilotons, might cut the Destiny Ascension in half, but against Dominion shields, built to withstand weapons with yields of many megatons, it would be utterly helpless. Sovereign would need 142 shots to match the energy release of a single photon torpedo, and we regularly see Dominion ships surviving two quantum torpedoes (71.8 megatons at minimum yield, each), though rarely surviving four. A fleet of Reapers the size of the one that crushed Palaven would need to focus much of its fire just to take out a Jem'hadar attack ship.
On the ground, landed Reapers could be targeted by attack ships (which we've seen operating in atmospheres), with collateral damage from torpedos being a bigger concern than the Reapers themselves. The Jem'hadar's weak point becomes infantry. Better technology only goes so far when squishable organic bodies are in play, so at worst I think the Reapers would be on even ground in these fights.
However, both armies have shown themselves willing to sacrifice themselves on epic scales, and neither appears hesitant to burn a planet with their forces on the surface. And at that, again, the Jem'hadar dominate.
The biggest advantage the Dominion has isn't the firepower, it's maneuverability. Reapers don't have warp drive, they use their Mass Relay system. While it probably requires considerably less energy consumption than sustained Warp travel and is certainly way faster, it limits where they can pop up. The Dominion can easily position forces to attack anything coming through a Mass Relay, while hiding out in the space between clusters. They have a massive tactical advantage.
The best bet for the Reapers would be to make use of their Relay network in a different way. Pick off lesser warp-capable species first, like the Kazon. They can then integrate rudimentary warp drives and shields into their design and continue on up the pecking order closing the gap. The problem really comes in when the Borg take notice of the Reapers. By their nature, Borg would be immune to Indoctrination; any unit under Reaper control would be noticed immediately and cast off. Since Indoctrination is pretty much the Reaper's most noteworthy weapon when fighting Trek's universe, the Borg would be the real species to beat.
Can you imagine assimilated Reapers?
USS Stradivarius
NX-163292
Author of Reprise
The Reapers don't NEED the mass relays to move.... its shown in ME3 when they had to get into the galaxy from Dark Space using only standard FTL drives.
and since the entire fleet of Reapers can pop through the relay at the same time (It's not a "one ship at a time" thing). the dominion would only make it easier for the reapers as they wouldnt beable to concentrate enough firepower to work effectively before the reapers open fire.
I was thinking Reavers from Firefly.
They wouldn't even bother shooting the attackships, they'd just ram them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUFvb_FfdjY
And after watching that, I feel like doing a Mass Effect marathon run.
Seriously, it's a shame Mass Effect isn't a TV series. If it was it'd probably be up there with Star Trek, Doctor Who and Star Wars.
Daizen - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
Selia - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
Mass Effect's standard FTL is much, much less impressive than high warp. Mass Relay travel is way faster than high warp, however. It would be at least as disadvantageous to rely on their Ezo FTL drives as the other option. Their best bet would be, as you suggest, dropping an armada through a Relay, but proper positioning of the Dominion fleet plus their tactical superiority would make that a catastrophic plan. The Reapers' best bet is still use of Indoctrination.
USS Stradivarius
NX-163292
Author of Reprise
"The Borg - party-poopers of the galaxy" ~ The Doctor
The problem is that Mass Effect does not have shields in the same sense that Star Trek does. Kinetic barriers are designed to repel kinetic impacts. Energy weapons (such as GARDIAN point-defense lasers in the ME-verse, as mentioned in the codex) pass right through. On the other hand, as I've pointed out in previous versus threads here, ST shields are consistently bad at fending off kinetic attacks and attacks they haven't seen before. So an even fight is likely to be a draw that ends with both sides flattened.
In my mind it comes down to the strategic level rather than the tactical level. Reaper FTL speeds are an order of magnitude faster than anything in the canonical ST arsenal. Warp 9 in TNG (the fastest scale) was 1,516 times the speed of light, whereas the Reapers are stated in the ME3 codex as being able to travel 30 LY per day, or 10,958 c. Barring the Dominion getting ahold of something exotic like transwarp or quantum slipstream, I'm calling it for the Reapers because they can simply go around the Dominion forces and target the supporting infrastructure instead. (Incidentally, I made this exact same argument in the SWvST thread, except there the difference in speeds was in the low millions of c for SW.)
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
EDIT: So we're clear, I'd pick a similarly sized unit of US Marines over either side in the Siege of AR-588, because they have these nifty things called machine guns, and we saw all too often in the world wars the logical result of unsupported infantry charges against a prepared position with machine gun nests (i.e. what the Jems did at the end of the episode, except the Feds just had small arms).
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
reapers both space and ground. thousands of reapers vs thousands of dominion ships, torpedoes would be ineffective, beam weapon may help, but it would require some coordination in the battle from the dominion to even take one out in a timely fashion, by that time the reapers could of destroyed dozens or more from dreadies to bug ships. in a ground war, why even ask its already a onesided affiar with reapers, especially with harbinger on the ground with his op lasers.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
but in between ships within meters of each other? thats gonna be impossible.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.