Vyrexuviel
Know what you're doing yet?
- Joined
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Shanxi was the Turians Okinawa, or perhaps one of the other small islands in WW2 for the US military was: It convinced their higher-ups that traditional storming-in tactics would result in disproportionate casualties, -unexceptable- casualties, should they try to go for a harder nut to crack, IE: Earth.
They might still have pressed forward, but they would have been -far- more cautious about it, and would -definitely- have used orbital bombardment to soften up "centers of resistance" (cities) prior to starving them out and finally going in with boots on the ground. Even so, I don't doubt that humanity would have thrown -EVERYTHING- at them to prevent them even reaching Earth Orbit, up to and including civilian asteroid miners throwing rocks at them and following up by ramming. And using several dozen meters of ablative armor (an asteroid) to shield the asteroid tug from point-defense fire until it's too late might be a viable method of attacking turian starships.
Not to mention that there's a -bloody reason- why most hard-SF books I've read use nukes in space: they might need to get relatively close to the target to deal damage, but the radiant energy output can literally vaporize the hull of a starship, which in ME is -really fucking bad news-, since 1) kinetic barriers do jack-all to stop that sort of weapon, short of keeping it from going off in contact with the hull, and 2) they tend to use KBs in place of redonkulously thick hull-armor, which you'd -need- to have the ship survive a nearby nuke going off and avoid getting mission-killed because the crew is now dead, due to either explosive decompression, flash-cooking, or extreme radiation poisoning causing rapid organ failure.
And even in the mid 22nd century, I have a feeling there's still a lot of nukes on Earth, especially with the turians spurring massive re-armament. Hell, there's thousands of nukes on earth -right now-, and hundreds of times more than enough to trigger a nuclear apocalypse, should Humanity decide to 'take the invaders with them'.
They might still have pressed forward, but they would have been -far- more cautious about it, and would -definitely- have used orbital bombardment to soften up "centers of resistance" (cities) prior to starving them out and finally going in with boots on the ground. Even so, I don't doubt that humanity would have thrown -EVERYTHING- at them to prevent them even reaching Earth Orbit, up to and including civilian asteroid miners throwing rocks at them and following up by ramming. And using several dozen meters of ablative armor (an asteroid) to shield the asteroid tug from point-defense fire until it's too late might be a viable method of attacking turian starships.
Not to mention that there's a -bloody reason- why most hard-SF books I've read use nukes in space: they might need to get relatively close to the target to deal damage, but the radiant energy output can literally vaporize the hull of a starship, which in ME is -really fucking bad news-, since 1) kinetic barriers do jack-all to stop that sort of weapon, short of keeping it from going off in contact with the hull, and 2) they tend to use KBs in place of redonkulously thick hull-armor, which you'd -need- to have the ship survive a nearby nuke going off and avoid getting mission-killed because the crew is now dead, due to either explosive decompression, flash-cooking, or extreme radiation poisoning causing rapid organ failure.
And even in the mid 22nd century, I have a feeling there's still a lot of nukes on Earth, especially with the turians spurring massive re-armament. Hell, there's thousands of nukes on earth -right now-, and hundreds of times more than enough to trigger a nuclear apocalypse, should Humanity decide to 'take the invaders with them'.