Reviews for On the Illusion of Might
eregion7912 chapter 28 . 10/31
Excellent story and thanks for the update. It is an amazing crossover and I'm looking forward to more.
Darth Revan chapter 3 . 10/7
I don't like the idea about the Spirit of fire find by citadel ships I world like the Idea of the Spirit of Fire be at the ARK ok and this kinder ruined it bit in this chapter.

And if you think 3 spartan II vs Atriox was silly then you are wrong and yes it is a big deal. Sometimes I hate Reviews because they sometimes wrong and sometimes right.

But if you want to make it like that ok but this is you're story I am not stopping you from that it's just all I am saying is I world like the idea of the Banished and the ARK to be a part

And again I do not like the idea about the Spirit of Fire find by the Citadel so quick it just makes it feel like the halo universe small. So please remember that not everyone can make readers happy but sometimes stories make them feel sad angry or disappointed.
Aetherium21 chapter 28 . 10/2
Please keep writing! This story is great and has a lot more potential
Mericore chapter 28 . 9/27
When can we expect new chapter?
Guest chapter 12 . 9/18
"Hood's expression hardened and he narrowed his eyes as he answered, 'Not a damn bit. Reach was hit with 750 ships, took out a good number but fell on August 30th, 2552.'"

That number is a mistake. The 2010 reprint of The Fall of Reach said this, but they were taking Hood's mention of the fleet hitting Reach being fifty times the size of that attacking Earth literally, rather than the hyperbole that it likely was. The 2001, 2003, and 2011 prints all say that there were about 315 ships (including the Corvette "Ardent Prayer" and the "Long Night of Solace" supercarrier from Halo: Reach), which is a more reasonable number.
Guest chapter 12 . 9/9
Creo que una forma incluso mejor de plantear el contexto de esta historia sería que pasara ni después sino antes del final de la guerra Covenant
Anon52 chapter 1 . 9/8
Just a ramdom piece of lore to this really old fic
But Jorge-052 was a Spartan-II not a III
Not that it really matters ;-;
777 Arrays chapter 28 . 9/7
All I am waiting for right now is the moment when Council discovers Forerunner’s monitor and lose all hope of defeating Wardens.
KB.Caerbannog chapter 1 . 8/21
I'm a long-time fan of Halo and its lore/plot, though I stopped playing after Halo 3 due to time constraints. Same of Mass Effect, even though again I only played ME1. (Reading reviews about degrading quality for both series kinda killed my enthusiasm to tarnish my fond memories.)

That means I've read a lot of fan fiction for both. This fic? THANK YOU for writing it! Your love of the canon (those parts that weren't apparent garbage to be jettisoned), solid grasp of sci-fi tech and philosophy underpinning the sci fi genre really shine through. The author notes were great fun to read as well. Even the interweaving of tech between the two canons felt fairly seamless, something many authors can't pull off without making one side feel like boringly overpowered. Yes, the Wardens have a clear-cut tech advantage, but that's an issue of tension that was easily compensated for with all the political shenanigans and espionage.

Speaking of: far too many fics, especially war fics, have a horrible time getting a good high-altitude look at politics and peacetime intel-gathering, and how both actually progress. I honestly cannot remember a single other fanfic in either Halo or ME that handles politics so well from that broad perspective. Individual politicians? Political themes of corruption or perverse incentives? Sure. But you showed-not told-both sides here being unabashedly self-interested, factionalized, flawed, and deceiving the other side for ostensibly good reasons and higher ideals. Not to mention all the lesser independent actors like Atriox! Kudos.

I look forward to more, regardless of when (or if) it gets posted.
WirelessDown chapter 28 . 8/8
Just a thought: why are the large ships of Mass Effect, cruiser size and larger, unable to land on a planet with Earth gravity. Also, some small landing craft, like the UT-47 Kodiak, cannot lift themselves into the air without the use of mass fields.
To answer this question, to which there is no clear canonical answer anywhere, I will try to follow the course of technological development after the discovery of Element Zero.
1) Space is huge, and navigating it is extremely difficult for beginning space races. Also extremely difficult obstacles for interplanetary flights in the early stages are the gravity of the planets themselves and the radiation that is present everywhere in space. But if humanity was able to find a solution to protect the ship and crew from radiation, then the question arises with the mass of the payload launched into orbit and the engine system. How much fuel does it need to fly to Mars and back? What thrust should its engines produce to take off from Mars and gain the second cosmic velocity to return to Earth? All this gives rise to major questions in the construction of interplanetary ships, when the payload will be 1-2% of the total mass, if not less than 1%. So, when humanity develops Mars as a future or already an active colony, they actively develop motor systems for interplanetary ships. The more cargo they want to deliver, the more efficient and powerful engines they have to design. However, what will happen after the reserves of the zero element and the disclosure of its property artificially "reduce the mass" of the object to the minimum values?

Then they can artificially reduce the mass of the ship several times. This will lead to the fact that they will not need such powerful engines and much fuel to take off and leave the planet. Engine technology is starting to lag behind. Human ships no longer need to have expensive and powerful engines on board, which also consume huge amounts of energy (not chemical engines, but the same thermonuclear or repulsor engines). It is much easier to reduce its mass to acceptable values, so that the ship can take off and land. Everything looks good until the moment when the development of propulsion systems finally lags behind the rest of the technological progress. However, by "reducing mass" to zero, humanity did not lose the ability to use FTL even with weak engines. And the more colonies grew, the more economic opportunities grew, the larger ships were required by the civilian and military fleet, and here something happened that revealed the lag in technological development of engines. Large ships ceased to be able to land on planets with Earth gravity.

Why is that?

Quite simple. There are several factors that prevent large ships from greatly reducing their mass when taking off and landing on the same Earth.
1) Size
2) Atmosphere
You see, the Earth's atmosphere is very heterogeneous and constantly moving. It is not something monolithic, unchanging, but a very changeable environment. Remember the footage on YouTube, which shows passenger airliners landing in strong winds. Have you seen how such planes are forced to land almost sideways to the runway? They are blown away, despite their much smaller size compared to the large ships of Mass Effect. Larger dimensions mean greater resistance to air movement, and therefore greater sail area. But still, if you take a small paper airplane and place it next to a passenger airliner, give them the same speed and oppose the wind, you will see how the small paper airplane will quickly blow away.
The answer here is in the mass. The greater the mass, the more inertia the body has, it is less susceptible to atmospheric and other vibrations. The same harbor tug will be subject to small waves, and a huge cargo ship will be almost motionless.
Therefore, large ships of Mass Effect are not able to completely "zero out" their mass in order to land and take off, otherwise they risk being simply blown away by wind currents in the upper and middle layers of the atmosphere. In order to descend and stay in the atmosphere, they vitally need sufficient mass, which would give the ship enough inertia to resist the movement of air currents.
But if they need mass to operate in the atmosphere, then the ships will be affected by gravity according to a simple formula from school: Fm*g, where m is the mass of the ship, and g is the acceleration due to gravity.
And here the question of engines arises - will the engines be able to generate enough thrust to make the descent into the atmosphere a controlled flight, and not an uncontrolled fall? And will this engine be able to lift the ship back into space?
And I think the answer is no. As what led me to this thought: the description of the UT-47 Kodiak also says that its engines are extremely underpowered and are not capable of lifting such a small transport into the air without using mass fields and reducing the mass of the transport. The Normandy SR-2 also could not naturally enter and exit the atmosphere like the SR-1 could, but in a pinch the SR-2 could still evacuate the surface of a planet. Most likely, for this maneuver, it burned a huge amount of fuel to get back into orbit.
All this also means that despite good maneuverability in space, the ships of Mass Effect are simply not capable of approaching objects with high gravity. I may be wrong about this, but it all depends on how the mass field generator works. Can it completely "zero out" the mass of a ship at sublight speeds without putting the ship into FTL? What are the mass reduction limits and how long can it operate at these limits? There is simply nothing about this. No information other than the fact that the engine operates for about 50 hours in FTL mode.
Vinyard26 chapter 28 . 8/7
Thanks so much for writing this story! I hope whatever projects you are working on right now have been really engaging for you.

As much i love where this story is going, please don't force yourself to write more if your interests are elsewhere!
Vinyard26 chapter 26 . 8/6
loved the interactions in this chapter. Really fun to read!
WirelessDown chapter 17 . 7/26
I believe that your decision to withhold information about the Flood could cost everyone dearly if the Council decides to experiment. The Flood is not just a biological threat. It is an entity that, at the stages of a fully formed Gravemind, will be quite capable of existing naturally in digital systems, just like AI, moreover, at the stage of formation on a planetary scale, the Gravemind will already surpass even the most advanced Forerunner AI in its intellectual capabilities. At this stage of development, it is unlikely that any of the known races will be able to stop it. By keeping silent about this fact, but only hinting at the importance of some worlds, as here, you simply incite the Council to explore these worlds, discover the Flood and successfully doom everyone to extinction. The Council wants to position itself as the only galactic government to which absolutely everyone must submit, and it successfully implements its imperialistic inclinations, at least until it meets the Guardians. And having discovered that these worlds are important... It's easier to say that the Guardians won't recognize the beginning of the total mess in time, and when they do, most likely the Citadel galaxy will already be burning, and the Flood itself will quickly spread to other Galaxies.
WirelessDown chapter 13 . 7/26
I think all ME ground weapons are complete crap. 1) At high speeds (over 7 km/s) mass will be decisive. First of all, because of how far a bullet the size of a grain of sand can fly before it becomes a clot of rapidly fading plasma and flies apart from its own speed. Let me remind you that large meteorites and comets, weighing tens of tons or more, entering the UPPER RARE layers of the atmosphere, leave behind a beautiful fiery trail, burning from air friction and not even reaching the surface. In addition to this fact, I will mention hypersonic missiles, which have a special ablative coating simply to avoid burning at a speed of 10 Machs, because they heat up to 3400C. 2) The idea of a grain of sand as the best way to penetrate armor is also absurd. Similar tests have already been conducted, accelerating a special projectile in the form of a small ball to 8 km / s. When hitting a pig corpse, the ball penetrated only the upper layers of muscle, causing little kinetic damage, but the site of injury was exposed to thermal effects, but the wound was far from fatal. But the ball did not make any through penetration. Why is that? Because the kinetic impact (impact, stopping power and armor penetration) depend primarily not on the kinetic energy of the projectile and its area of \u200b\u200bimpact, but on the ability of this very projectile to maintain its integrity at the point of contact, since the same kinetic energy of the projectile affects the projectile itself, trivially turning into heat. How long can a grain of sand last before it evaporates from a collision with armor at a speed of 4 km / s or higher? Almost instantly. Have ME fans ever seen a modern tank armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot projectile? Why does it look like a pointed dart? To minimize the area of pressure of its mass, effectively penetrating the armor. To penetrate the armor you need MASS. During the penetration process, the part of the projectile that is directly at the point of contact begins to crumble, split, melt, wear out, and so on until only the projectile that has lost all its energy remains in the armor in the form of fragments, or the armor is not penetrated and fragments of the armor itself along with fragments of the projectile hit the crew.
Axccel chapter 15 . 7/26
Time spent in slipspace is different from time out of slipspace. The FTL speed of ships in Halo is measured in how much time passes for the crew inside of slipspace. The lore has, to my knowledge, never explained how much time has passed outside of slipspace relative to the time spent in it and if it has, I doubt it was consistent. For example, the Covenant will attack a distant Outer Colony. The UNSC will mobilize forces from its naval bases, which are in its most developed territories. Their ships will move at ten light years per day and will spend weeks in slipspace. Which is why cryosleep is used, partly to slow aging and mostly to conserve supplies. However, they will arrive at the attacked colony in time to contest the invasion instead of to a world glassed weeks ago.

This also means that any Citadel people onboard a UNSC ship will be completely wrong about distance traveled based off of using time spent in slipspace.

Also, Titanium-A isn't really a titanium armor. It's as much a "titanium plating" as chobham armor is "ceramic". Technically yes, but actually very much no.
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