Bah, you don't need real life, you just need to keep on writing.

Yet they had the resources to produce the Infinity vessel ,they troop are more well trained ,then you have the spartans of the Infinity which has army of new generation Spartens ,the slip space tech gives them a extreme advantage ,and armor mods give the spartans a sever advance over the Alliance .they war protocols combat method are more advanced and deadly do to they war with the covenant and the Flood.

I'm enjoying this story immensely, and glad to see Hood is putting a leach on ONI. They're like their own mini evil government in canon.

And I'm loving the Garrus parts, I don't think anybody has gone about 1st contact like that.

Can't wait to see the 'official' 1st contact, so update soon please! :):):)

I hope this fic doesn't have the Citadel fielding carriers, or numbers attack craft, or much air support, or tanks, or much artillery, or medigel, or mechs. All of those were canonically introduced by humanity. In the case of tanks, canonically one Turian legion is about fifty thousand soldiers. They have half a dozen IFVs, four rocket artillery tanks, and two landcruisers. And no, there is nothing special about any of those vehicles. Their landcruisers are just hovering versions of modern tanks but use mass effect technology. Their rocket tanks are based on that. Oh, and sometimes they might have a couple fast-attack hovercraft. They don't use mortars or more artillery or a variety and their soldiers are rarely equipped with anti-vehicle or anti-air weapons. They also rarely employ heavy weapons in general or even squad support weapons. They don't use more than a handful of drones and only for reconnaissance.

Last I checked, this idiocy and horrible war practice is canon. Though, that may have changed. I do know that the description of frigates changed over the years after all. They used to canonically not have a spinal weapon, now they canonically do. Still, how the Turians are considered the best in the galaxy is inconceivable. Of course, we did kick their asses on (not above) Shanxi when it took four of us to gun down one Turian soldier and three of those four soldiers would overheat their weapons doing it. In the novel, on the ground. And our barriers didn't regenerate, we had to slap in a spare battery each time we lost our barriers. Despite that, on the ground we achieved a four-to-one kill-death ratio. In was in space and their orbital strikes that made the difference and we still got a few more kills than they did by the end of the Incident. In other words, the Turians suck at war. Which means all other non-human Citadel members/associates suck even more at it. Oh, and at Shanxi, we had less vehicle support than the Turians.

If you look at the canon explanations of how mass effect rifles, kinetic barriers, hardsuits, and mass effect-verse missiles work, it becomes clear that a modern day army would curbstomp them barring orbital bombardment and even then we could probably shoot their fire down judging from seeing their shots moving in space in cut-scenes.

Their hardsuits are ineffective against penetration (i.e. every modern bullet), their kinetic barriers (all who played the games know this) can only stop about five shots from a mass effect rifle but those bullets are a fourteenth the mass of a grain of sand.

Missiles used by ships in mass effect say they raise their mass a moment before impact to pass through kinetic barriers. Those same missiles require multiple hits to achieve a mission kill on a ship. Besides, Conservation of Mass and Conservation of Energy means those missiles would do the same amount of damage regardless of raising or lowering their mass. Only the missiles' speed would change.

Kinetic barriers work by countering the mass of whatever is impacting. Basically, they put up a mass effect field whose mass matches the incoming mass to act as a wall to tank the blow. This means that higher mass threats can surpass the threshold a given kinetic barrier can handle. This is explicitly how mass effect kinetic-kill missiles work. Infantry, ships, and everything in between have vastly different thresholds.

So, taking the threshold and the few shots it takes in-game to strip a soldier's kinetic barriers, modern bullets and missiles would pass right through the barriers of just about anything short of a ship or atlas. And an atlas wouldn't last long. It isn't a question of force, but of mass. An object that hits an immovable object of equal mass will transfer all of its energy into the second object. Being a mass effect field, it isn't going to move, thus the kinetic energy simply disperses on impact.

Also, given the size of the deck-guns used by the UNSC, their ships could quite literally gun down Citadel ships in droves. Besides which, archer missiles roughly match the range of a Citadel dreadnought. Technically, MACs have an even greater range but their move so slowly (30km/s) that they're pretty much useless for anything other than shots of opportunity, finishing crippled ships, and bombardment. The Covenant always just charged right in and didn't really bother dodging much so MACs worked fine against them. I doubt the Citadel would do the same.

What I stated in this review is not tech wank or biased. It is taking canon you can look up for yourself and combining it with well-know science. Specifically the Law of Conservation of Mass and the Law of Conservation of Energy.

Halo curbstomping Mass Effect isn't because of the UNSC possessing a technological superiority. Except for a handful of cases, they are far behind the Citadel technologically (not that those aliens earned any of it, though). It is because of the science of how the techbase of each franchise works. Halo uses high-mass, high-energy weapons. Mass Effect uses low-mass weapons and their defenses are specialized in dealing with only low-mass weapons and no defense against directed energy weapons. If the Citadel were to use bigger bullets, the UNSC would be in trouble (except for the fact they outnumber the Citadel by like, a bajillion. Just look at the number of worlds and human population in Halo).

That said, it isn't like the Citadel can't harm the UNSC. A UNSC frigate MAC delivers about twice as much energy (in joules) to the target than the newest Alliance dreadnought (whose name escapes me, it is the 1km one, not the older 800m). But it fires far more quickly than any UNSC ship (excluding ships with the Pillar of Autumn-inspired upgrades). Ok, so, the Citadel is kinda screwed in space and Archers have enough mass to mission-kill a Citadel ship even without detonating so it definitely can go through ship barriers considering Citadel kinetic-kill missiles require multiple missiles to do the same. Archers are also fired in exponentially greater numbers so the Guardian grid won't make a difference.

On the ground, though, it'd basically be both sides weapons are effective. The infantry and vehicles of the UNSC aren't well protected against Citadel weapons and the Citadel infantry and vehicles are just as vulnerable if not more so against UNSC weapons. UNSC has greater numbers and is already on a total war economic and industrial footing. UNSC quickly surrounds and destroys any Citadel ground forces. UNSC Navy roflstomps the Citadel Navy.

Please don't try to "balance" them and claim that you're just not being biased or avoiding tech-stomps or something. It is a curbstomp in favor of the UNSC but not because of technology. It is because of the science backing each side's methods. Like both sides use muskets but side A has bullets and rifling and numbers and steel body armor while side B has musketballs and smoothbore barrels, lower numbers, but has ballistic vests. Side A is the UNSC, side B is the Citadel. FYI, steel body armor went the way of the dodo because of the gun.

Normally kinetic barriers pose a problem for missiles to a degree. But, as we know from Halo 4's mission to blow up a covie cruiser while on the Forward Unto Dawn, Archer missiles are huge. The sheer mass of even one would smash through or at least severely weaken kinetic barriers on Citadel ships. Then there is the fact they can destroy a 300 meter long Covenant cruiser (yes, their main swarming ship is called a cruiser, 300 meters long, and non-shielded) with just one Archer (which begs all sorts of plot holes in the human vs covenant navy battles). So, a Citadel ship would be fucked.

Well done, It's nice to see a well reasoned outlook on the state of the UNSC after the war. While I do enjoy the occasional "Humanity! F*ck Yeah!" Story where the UNSC is just an unstoppable juggernaut, stories like this are much more realistic. Humanity is basically stuck between a rock and a hard place now and we all know when humanity is backed into a corner, interesting things are bound to happen. I look forward to your next update.

Good reasoning for how they would do.

I highly doubt that if war were to actually break out the the unsc wouldn't use exotic (chemical, biological, nuclear) weapons. A few precision strikes important worlds with nova bombs should shock them into maybe thinking war is a bad idea. There is also the fact that the citadel has to rely on relays for practical travel speed and unless I missed it in your story the majority of unsc space doesn't have relays. There is also the fact that the former covenant species would provide us some support in a war scenario. (Even if they don't actually participate in the war they would probably sell weapons to the unsc to boost their economy, and the novels have shown how powerful covenant weapons are in the hands of humans)

This is just wrong, unsc has a much larger fleet. Just compare the games! Even better, the codex and halo books. The unac has more cruisers than all the species had dreadnought combined (they're both equal in length). That's not to mention carriers, which often had MACs on them.

Then there is population. The unsc is four centuries ahead of where the alliance was, and the alliance was said to have reached par with the taurians. Just simple population growth graphs will tell you the unsc must have a population as big as the council.

The only problem I have is with the asset denial thing.

Even if they are super expensive the UNSC could just stockpile enought NOVAS to blow up all the major planets of the Citadel species in a space version of "the nuclear option" and before someone goes "The humans are not genocidal crazys" they are, if push came to shove and they had to choose between themselves and some aliens they would chose humanity

Huzzah! Two of my followed stories update this morning. And it is nice to have a story that isn't some simple HFY and gives a different sort of perspective.

I haven't finished the chapter yet, but let me just jump in and mention BEST AI PERSONA EVER. Story fav'd & followed for that alone (although the rest certainly deserves it, too. Props for the non-standard/cliche Halo ME contact!)

Going to follow this for now and if it keeps going the way I think it will (or some other but equally awesome way) then I will definitely favorite it. As for the question a few chapter ago about Garrus feeling off. i feel that he seeks just generally more angry in this, in the games he always stayed light hearted even when he wasn't happy about something, and he didn't really harden until after ME1 when he became archangel. He also doesn't seem as sarcastic as in the games, but both of those could just be from me remembering him wrong, been a few years since I played mass effect

I just wanted to say that this is my favorite Halo/Mass Effect cross over and that I really enjoy the story so far.