50New review replies
While I have previously said that I would keep the review replies to a single authors note/chapter, only after reading through the previous one I'm realizing how much of a hassle it is to actually find the reply to your own review in that document. As such here is a new chapter for all reviews posted after the last authors note went up. Also as a side-note, can people please fill in a fake name, it doesn't matter to me if you log in to review or not, but I would like to be able to use a name other than guest to answer a review as after a while it becomes hard to see if I've replied to somebody already or not with 3 or 4 guest reviews after eachother.
Axccel: we get it, you dislike Trump for not taking shit and being against giving you free money. So, like anyone against truth, you make stuff up and believe it's true "because it is". Funnily enough, reality doesn't care. People can say all the crap they want but reality won't change for them. Like Trump silencing the press...the media is so loud and in-your-face no one can honestly claim that. Or that racism is big in the US when practically no one here has ever seen or experienced racism and they just claim its racist that the free stuff they're given is not on par with the things everyone else earns (it is, though, but they imagine white people have better everything).
And countries who only have social healthcare and more because another country gives them money can't contribute to anything in a meaningful way as they lack the economic strength to do so. Buying power would shrink drastically if that money was withheld. Which is why the EU is basically just handshaking and rules without substance.
Reply: Okay I think I've already replied to this one in a personal message but here is a relatively simple answer: I have expressly written into the story why I had America been the one to fall somewhat originally in the first version of the time-line and also the fairly simple fact that I needed at least some of the major powers to have economic issues simply to ensure neither another arms race is started in the 2020's nor another world war, as if somehow humanity survived both of them they would before discovering Mass Effect already have become not just equal but superior to the council quality wise outside of infantry shielding (as the problems of fully relying on Eezo tech force you to pretty much adopt a quantity has a quality of its own approach rather than actually being high quality in anything besides infantry gear) though their equipment would by that point be far less cost effective than the council's own.
I have never said anything about racist policies as that is mostly just people trying to get money through appealing to public sympathies as far as I know, but I neither referred to that in this story nor even insinuated it. I do dislike Trump personally a bit yes but that is mostly from recent times and just how damn little he explains why he thinks/does things rather than anything from the time where I actually wrote the time-line chapter.
Additionally the only way countries that have a social healthcare system pay for them depends in any way on international cash is trading, as most of those countries are in the top 20 of world economies and have a decently high GDP per capita. On top of that if you think the EU is just handshaking, then you haven't seen the actual consequences of crossing the line enough to get the Euro parliament angry. After actually answering your review it should be noted that you are doing exactly what you are accusing me of, making up stuff and believing its true ''Because it is.''.
Gruntsbreeder: Good chapter.
Reply: Thank you for the compliment.
Guest: Can't wait for more, keep up the good work
Reply: Thank you for the compliment.
Brother Bov: Nah man, you managed it well
Reply: Thank you for the compliment.
Guest: Just an fyi both America and Russia have had lasers capable of shooting down ICBM since the early to mid 70's though ridiculously expensive to build the maintenance cost is practically non-existent basically run off a supercomputer 7 lasers hit a mirror at an exact spot bouncing it up onto a mirror in upper atmosphere then bouncing off other mirrors until it is aimed down at the final target. The lasers aren't capable of destroying a tank as it is grounded and some of the energy is lost but of ruining the electronics needed to make the missile work or making liquid fuel explode.
Reply: Thank you for actually bringing that up, I was a bit surprised nobody that wanted to debunk the time-line as bad previously had brought it up because it is one of the few actually good arguments against it. I know those lasers exist however here is the thing, I said practical laser weaponry. As in laser weaponry you can put on tanks and send them into battle, or put half a dozen in an AA-battery and move it into position to shoot down hostile missiles. I've read results from the simulated tests of using those things, neither side has enough of them to wipe out more than 15% of all WMD weaponry that would hit them, nor are they intending to build a large number more as of this time. The laser tech the USA developed in this story is essentially a far more powerful, somewhat cheaper and more movable version of those things but with the problem of now having more maintenance costs. Meanwhile the laser tech of the EU is more on a different route and both cheaper, sturdier and far more mobile, but less powerful on an individual level.
Guest: The chapter seems to have jumped past several important pieces of information. For example who is the admiral teaching and how did he get the information. How come the Turians are inside the SOL system fighting on one of the planets? This makes the story clunky and confusing if you could clear this up in the next chapter that would be greatly appreciated.
Reply: in order. 1. The Admiral teaching is Cortana, or in other words, the UNSC AI that knows almost everything there is to know about ships in the HALO universe, if you have read the chapter you should also have read that she was the one literally teaching the class. The reason why they know about a lot of things of the council if you're asking about that on the other hand is relatively simple and was hinted at heavily in a previous chapter, which I didn't expand on here because people have been telling me in other stories that I explain far too much and need to leave things for people to figure out. But its fairly simple, in the sense that the forerunner AI, adventurous explorer, had placed hidden observational equipment 'near' all developing species home world's to monitor their growth and how they would turn out, meaning that with their superior computing capabilities and well, A.I., they can now easily infiltrate even the most protected portions of the extranet and just look everything up on the council side of things.
2. The Turian one is explained if you read the remainder of the chapter, there are no real Turians in the SOL system. It's a simulation, which a large portion of the troops participating didn't know of it was a simulation and with it being so realistic that even most of the non-AI personnel that knew it was a simulation started doubting themselves a part of the way through and instead started believing themselves it was real. Here I kept it a bit short partly because I wanted to keep some of the SA's capabilities a bit of a secret before the actual war against the council starts to get some hopefully interesting surprises in battles there and also because these things are mainly to show just what the SA is up to in the time between them meeting the UNSC personnel and their meetings with the Mass Effect non-human races. If you still want to read the starting portion of the simulation though I can give you a few pages full of it, as I had some things written down previous for it but decided on not doing them just to ensure people didn't guess that the whole thing was just a simulation from the start.
Guest: I get why you had trump be the "bad guy" but there are three things you may not have considered: 1 that you could have easily made it as if some unknown president won the 2016 or 2020 election as this is an au so some unknown/differnet president would work. 2. That laser weaponry isn't something we can use outside of incredibly massive power sources as you almost get a 3 watts in to 1 watt out at target granted that varies depending on range and laser type so from a military standpoint rail guns are far more versatile and powerful for what you put in. As in order for a laser to be effective you need to be in the megawatts range while for the same megawatts put in to a rail gun you get similar in and at target power. 3 coal power in the United states is actually cleaner for the environment than nuclear or wind power. This is done through air scrubbers and filters on the outflow as well as burning extremely hot to reduce ash where as nuclear power always has the risk of some natural disaster ruining the surrounding landscape for years like in Chernobyl or in the more recent earthquakes in Japan. While wind is actually quite deadly to flying creatures. Coal powers carbon footprint is similar to that of an electron solar panel but greater than that of a steam solar plant. It is also comparable to that of a wind turbine.
While everyone on the news will tell you that fossil fuels are ruining the planet and we are all going to die if we don't get carbon neutral within the next what ten years now. In America the emissions test for using fossil fuels of any variety puts out a smaller carbon footprint than many of the new carbon/environmentally friendly green new car power whatever you choose. A Prius has a 3 times larger carbon footprint than a hummer over the course of 10 years or 200 thousand miles whichever comes first. Over 90 percent of the carbon emissions worldwide are not man made well 78 percent if you take out forest fires which may or may not be man-made. What I'm saying is that to much panic is being placed on carbon emmisions where we should focus is not on catbon emissions but on oxygen emissions. If we can get those to match then we dont have anything to worry about. It's not that suddenly we shot up in how much carbon we produce if anything we leveled off what changed was the amount of trees to absorb and eat the carbon and let out oxygen and damage to oceanic bacteria that has slowed down and made the problem look much worse than it is.
Reply: Thank you for the well argued points, I will answer all of them to the best of my capabilities. 1. If I made an unknown president the leader of the USA everyone would have guessed Trump instantaneously. Also I had most of the pre- 2040 time-line written for another story where the world essentially descended into a somewhat more heated version of the cold war by the 2040's with the USA, China and China's communist/socialist allies including roughly half of India vs the EU, the other half of India and the EU's allies in Africa and the America's. Now its simply that so many people have already read it that I'll get complaints no matter what I change about that portion.
2. I would like to point out that in 2016 when I came up with the idea in general, there was an ongoing project to make laser weaponry that could be used on tanks and small ships not only as an anti-missile defence but also as an actual offensive weapon against IFV's, tanks and lightly armoured ships shared between the UK and the Netherlands which had shown a decent amount of promise, but that one was cancelled sometime early during the Brexit as far as I know. I just had both the USA and them continue development for that by starting it a year or so earlier. Also all prototypes and early versions of things need far more power than later versions in comparison so the thought of somebody making a breakthrough in development of turning it into a more useful ratio isn't too strange. Meanwhile Rail guns have their own fair share of issues, including that they actually need ammunition and that as far as I know the current versions have horrible recoil that makes it nearly useless from a practical standpoint on anything other than large naval vessels, meaning that far more research is needed into that (Keep in mind that almost every time I put something as a discovery there now is a practical version of it that can actually efficiently be used in combat as more than a gimmick, such as the USA having railguns that can be used as the turrets on tanks by the 2040's.)
3. I would like to point out that while Chernobyl was horrible, the problems at the nuclear plant in Japan killed literally one person, even though the reactor was an aging one and its effect on the surrounding environment was relatively minimal. The problem of coal and other fossil fuels, just as much as the fact that they would be a problem because of carbon emissions, is the fact that if we were to continue using them as we are now especially with the USA's increase in using them, we will run out of their reserves within the coming fifty or so years. If beforehand we have not mostly switched to something else we might very well get a fallout games style scenario, only with less Vaults and far less government testing on if you can turn humans into what are essentially zombies capable of thinking for themselves and caring for others and far more countries with decent anti-WMD defences still fighting on somewhat whole while half the world is a nuclear wasteland with billions of deaths before it ends with nothing truly being achieved besides our technological capabilities to kill eachtoher and power devices that kill eachother being strengthened. Also a large portion of carbon emissions are not manmade, yes, however we are the ones tipping it over the edge of if it is safe or not for organic life on the planet to continue existing for long periods of time in the future.
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Okay that was all the answering of reviews done, if anyone has more questions, please ask them.