You can’t be impervious to protoculture weapons because, so far as I’m aware, there is no such thing. The Flower of Life provides energy. The weapons use energy. Anything resistant to a particle beam is immune to the Mass Effect weapons (except maybe the mass effect field versions of the Cain and that black hole gun due to how they function). Firing a less energetic bullet is not going to work where a high energy particle stream failed.

The situation you’re depicting in this chapter is quite literally impossible. The wanzers’ firepower and defenses are dramatically inferior to what robotech armor and weapons are capable of facing. To say nothing of shielding, even if they didn’t have it before they surely would have equipped such to deal with micronian infantry and vehicle attacks.

Why does every writer but maybe one or two exaggerate ME tech and capabilities far beyond the lore? Especially in crossovers. Just because Mass Effect is almost at the bottom of sci-fi in terms of power does not excuse buffing them.

And it can’t be reapers behind this stuff, since the Reapers wouldn’t have the knowledge and technological base for doing so. Reverse-engineering is also not an excuse as it simply doesn’t work the way sci-fi loves portraying. It’s unfeasible/impossible unless you already are at the same tech level and even then the result is a shitty knock-off unless the only difference is a variation in what the researchers’ side already has.

This is a good story but stuff like this makes it difficult from time to time. And yes, I know the story is old. That is irrelevant.

Fertility isn’t the problem. The genophage has no impact on fertility. What it does instead is cause sudden infant death syndrome. So, the infants are born and a while later the die.

Lol, a friendly Death Star!

SCP…nope, not letting my mind wander there!

Transforming a veritech is fast enough to be basically instantaneous in the show. Not seconds. This is used extensively in the amazing dogfights. Almost a shame ME ships, even frigates, are dramatically less agile. Though dramatically faster for boom and zoom.

“They hadn’t been able to raise barriers in time”. Literally impossible. The barriers are automated.

The capture makes no sense at all. If they had a device that powerful then there would be no military vehicles in Mass Effect and one missile designed in the same fashion as that bazooka projectile would mission kill a ship. So, that device breaks the basic fundamentals of the setting. Might want to replace with some sort of shuttle-scale taser mounted on their shuttle. The projectile kind with wires.

Good for them. They’ve made a woefully inadequate mech with abysmal firepower compared to what the Terran armor is designed to protect against. By inadequate I refer to the Terran’s strength combined with wearing powered armor. Their mech surely cannot come close to compensating for that combination.

A shame for them they’re ignorant of veritechs, lol.

It’s very foolish of them to think they limited the Terran’s expansion when they know the Terrans both do not have any need for the Mass Relay network and possess FTL capabilities that are dramatically superior to the Mass Relays.

Congrats on being one of the only fic writers to remember eezo is not a power source.

They’re not vulnerable to mass effect weapons. How armor functions and robotech armor’s properties make it extremely well suited to defending against kinetic weapons. Especially bullets designed to squish or shatter, which is what armor is designed to do to incoming bullets (something Bioware totally screwed up on). And of course, their shields should have no trouble with the low-energy ME bullets considering they handle high energy particles just fine.

Oh, and ME bullets are shit anyway due to their low mass. The higher the mass, the more energy can be imparted to a target. And contrary to popular belief, mass does not increase with velocity. Weight does. Think of the target as “down” from the projectile as if the bullet were free falling. If mass changed with velocity, mass would not remain constant, yet it does, and the Periodic table’s atomic mass measurements would be useless and constantly in flux. Not to mention we would use thin, light bullets at high velocity. But we don’t because that isn’t how velocity and mass works.

So, ME bullets are low mass and therefore even if solid would impart very little mass into a target, they squish or shatter on impact which armor is designed to cause because unlike sci-fi claims it actually cripples a bullet’s ability to transfer energy and spreads out and disperses what little energy does transfer into the target, and their guns overheat easily even though the lore says this heat is mostly from shaving bullets off a block and so can be easily fixed by using pre-shaved bullets.

It’s amusing how outmatched they are. And the plot of this fic makes good sense, too. In some ways the Terrans are more believable than how Robotech and Macross went.

A few lucky shots wouldn’t matter, but I understand they’re a super arrogant bunch even without realizing it. From the size difference, mostly thickness and the necessary durability of their bodies and even their eyes and soft tissue, and compared to the damage of an ME bullet in the games so far as we can tell their weapons are useless against Terrans. It’s easy to forget their durability must increase with their size or else their soft tissue and skin would tear apart from their own mass.

Really? You expect us to believe their armor is vulnerable to kinetic impact but they don’t use much kinetic weaponry aside from missiles yet never used those weapons to take advantage of that vulnerability and neither did their enemies?

Bullshit.

Meh, the shields used in Robo/Macross should easily handle it. I’m more surprised they can power down their weapons enough to not instantly kill everything. Also, the ME barriers shouldn’t affect them. They technically can, but the lore says barriers are calibrated to ignore things below a certain size to prevent solar wind, radiation, dust, etc. from draining their barriers.

It always bothered me that we have things like the black storm and the Cain as man-portable weapons but no one built ship-scale ones (or used the first Cain’s ammo design in FTL missiles).

Heck, a ship scale omnitool or freaking ship biotics.

Because an enemy would totally limit its military strength if you do so.

Personally, I always ignored the casualties from the orbital bombardment. Humanity was obsessed with the fear of the looming alien invasion and so would definitely have prepared heavily for an orbital bombardment as well as military drafting and economic and industrial preparation for war. They even fought a world war to unite humanity specifically out of fear of a war with aliens. Which made the effectiveness of the bombardment quite shocking and nonsensical to me for both Robotech and Macross. It goes against humanity’s defining activities in the series.

Oh and also, why did you double the size of the terrans (compared to the original zentraedi) but left the zentraedi ships the same size? Wouldn't they need to build larger ships to accommodate the doubling in size? Or do they just deal with having the same amount of room for beings twice as big?

There's several problems I'm seeing that doesn't really makes any sense.

A problem I see with alot of stories that give humanity (terrans in this case) different drives than mass effect based is that for some reason they use the relays even when it's obsolete. They already shown themselves capable of traveling to nearby galaxies (closest is about 25000 LY from Sol) so they should be capable of exploring their nearby space reasonably fast as to not need the relays as it only turn their territory into swiss cheese. People don't seem to think about how far Shanxi (doubtful it would even be named that to begin with) actually is from Sol and how dumb it would be for them to colonize it instead of something closer. Especially seeing as they are quite capable of living on normally inhospitable planets and can terraform as necessary.

Also given how they were basically diehard isolationist not wanting to leave their star system, why did the relay make them do a complete 180? Now they want to colonize as far from their homeworld as possible instead of systems closer to them? Shanxi is likely to be at least 60LY from Sol (more than likely to be at least 1000LY) and within that there are over 1300 star systems with 133 likely to contain at least one terran-centric planet. With how hardy terrans are, there are likely thousands more that they could colonize. Yet they colonized Shanxi that doesn't even seem to be in the same solar system as a relay so that can't even be used as an excuse to why they found it (and still doesn't explain why the colonized it). The only thing I can think of is that you neuter the fold drive.

The interactions with the turians, both between themselves and between terrans and turains, honestly left much to be desired. I'm not saying that turians aren't capable of making stupid decisions but there's really no excuse for believing that the terrans were batarians. How the fuck do you become a general with such poor reasoning skills? Ships/mechs/transmissions that doesn't match any design and doesn't follow normal ship doctrine? Must be batarians.

And while it's not like the turians can really do much about their situation, they seem way too submissive and happy about what's going on. Like yes hostilities was initiated on their part, but the turians had no idea what the terrans actually wanted with them. News flash, people can lie. They could've just wanted them all on one ship so they can study the other ships without having to fight for it. Could have been deciding to experiment or eat them for all they know. They were even told the turians that the politicians have to decided what's done with the turians, basically invalidated anything they promised as it's not their call in the end.