Fans Tear New Mass Effect Book to Shreds

[Hugga_Bear]

It's not really that sad to be honest. If you pay attention to detail (I know I do) then these things are just...obvious. They jump out at you. It's like when I watch sci-fi shows that try and use modern science, like 'A Town Called Eureka', the mistakes in both reasoning and understanding are very obvious to me and that's just because a) I pay attention and b) I know that stuff.
Having knowledge of the lore and noticing when they're off isn't necessarily sad, though I admit I wouldn't go to the bother of noting it all down and sending it off.

 

[TheCruxis]

You have got to be fuckin kidding me!! I got this book yesterday and now this...aargh! How can a game producer let this happen. Especially when you have three previous great books and a few comics released allready! I hate you Bioware, I hate you William Dietz and I hate EA (allthough I've always hated EA).

Well I'm taking this book down from my shelf, it is not worthy of standing among it's predecessors.

 

[Arppis]

Mass Effect fans are pretty fanatic of what I have seen. Some are even borderline psychotic about it.

But hey, every fanbase have those.

 

[Daverson]

Element Zero is just a name given to the star-plasma infused metal that makes Mass Effect possible. It doesn't necessarily mean that it has no protons/neutrons.

So way to fail.

Element Zero (Atomic Number 0, Chemical Symbol Ez), also known as 'eezo'...

the atomic number (also known as the proton number) is the number of protons found in the nucleus of an atom

Way to fail at calling a fail.

Let's do a little test.
A 5.56mm NATO round has muzzle energy of about 1700 joules, so that's what we're trying to achieve. A grain of sand has the mass of 1 milligram. If we use the formula for kinetic energy, the velocity required for a 1 mg grain to impact with the energy of a rifle round is 58,310 m/s. The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s, which means that the grain reaches 0.00019c.

If a grain of sand is launched at light-speed, as you said, it would have a kinetic energy of 44,937,758,936 joules, which the in-game weapons obviously don't. Guess the weapons aren't that relativistic after all!

*checks maths*

I made a mistake somewhere. You're right. There wouldn't be any noticeable relativistic effects at that sort of speed.

 

[Seneschal]

snip

I had to check it myself a few times because the velocity seemed alarmingly low. In any case, that killer-grain-of-sand wouldn't do much because it would not deposit all 1700 joules into one's body, the resolution of which is still an ass-pull in the games (how do you rig a fleck of metal to explode?).

However, the book's description of "relativistic" firearms is certainly wrong. If it were true, armour would be superfluous (you'd be just as protected naked), and a simple handgun could devastate a city. I think this is another case of sci-fi writers having no sense of scale [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale].

 

[Leftnt Sharpe]

Let me introduce you to the Leftnt Sharpe Tie-in fiction rating scale, starting from worse to best:

-Author needs to be punched in the face (C.S Goto goes here).
-Tie-in bad (Dietz is about here).
-Tie in average (Karpyshan here).
-Tie-in good (Karen Traviss goes here? Also Sandy Mitchell).
-Dan Abnett (Pretty self-explanatory)

It should be noted that when comparing tie-in books to actual works of literature they should be moved down one category. For example a book that is 'tie-in good' is merely average by normal standards and Dan Abnett would be reduced from 'God Emperor of tie-in fiction mancrush level' to merely good.

Please feel free to rip apart my life's work.

This system should come in hand in the future.
But what do I get to do to Goto if his work is compared to literature.

It is a fate that truly only the most terrible of hacks deserve and it is never spoken of in public.

 

[LadyRhian]

Let me introduce you to the Leftnt Sharpe Tie-in fiction rating scale, starting from worse to best:

-Author needs to be punched in the face (C.S Goto goes here).
-Tie-in bad (Dietz is about here).
-Tie in average (Karpyshan here).
-Tie-in good (Karen Traviss goes here? Also Sandy Mitchell).
-Dan Abnett (Pretty self-explanatory)

It should be noted that when comparing tie-in books to actual works of literature they should be moved down one category. For example a book that is 'tie-in good' is merely average by normal standards and Dan Abnett would be reduced from 'God Emperor of tie-in fiction mancrush level' to merely good.

Please feel free to rip apart my life's work.

This system should come in hand in the future.
But what do I get to do to Goto if his work is compared to literature.

It is a fate that truly only the most terrible of hacks deserve and it is never spoken of in public.

Author's face needs to be held in the Deep Fat Fryer?

 

[Robert Ewing]

I read it, and it was absolute trash.

Not just the inaccuracies either, it was genuinely a quite bad read. I really don't recommend it to anyone that hath been bestowed with the gift of sight.

 

[Strazdas]

If you establish some sort of rules in your universe (lore, physics, etc), make sure you follow them. Kudos to the guys who catalogued the errors.

wanted to said the same but he already said it /\

 

[Sampsa]

Not nessecarily bad thing those inconsistents. If there weren't so many I would never have read this article and thus become avare of the fact that new ME book has hit the shelves. Thenagain now I must contemplate whether it's worth buying.

 

[SirCannonFodder]

I read it, and it was absolute trash.

Not just the inaccuracies either, it was genuinely a quite bad read. I really don't recommend it to anyone that hath been bestowed with the gift of sight.

So you're saying the audio-book version is quite good?

 

[JamesStone]

Besides, I thought the whole point of the guns in ME was that the projectiles where part of a solid ammunition core that was broken off in minuscule amounts (say, less than a nanogram), and accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light to cause an equivalent amount of destruction to a conventional firearm. Yeah, if you accelerate something like an apple to relativistic speeds, it's gonna blow up half a major city (hand-wavy physics here! don't correct me by saying it'll only blow up a few blocks =p ), but obviously at a microscopic level, there's no nearly as much destructive potential. (think about it, light travels at the speed of light, but each photon that hits the earth doesn't wipe out everything, does it?)

The guns of Mass Effect operate by shaving off a piece of metal (Said to be the size of a grain of sand) and firing it at supersonic speeds. Certainly not "relativistic" as the novel implied and certainly not "less than a nanogram" as a grain of sand would at least weigh a few micrograms.

These facts come from the Mass Effect Wiki BTW, the same one Mac Walters said was "one of the best sources of information on Mass Effect". Too bad Dietz didn't think of using it.

According to some website I found on google [http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/MarinaTheodoris.shtml], the mass of a grain of sand is anywhere from a few tens of a microgram to a milligram, (so I was way off, sue me, still in the same order of magnitude of orders of magnitude, that's close enough for hand wavy science), realistically speaking, even if that were somehow travelling at the speed of light (ie, ignoring relativistic effects, to account for using the lowest likely mass of a grain of sand) the muzzle energy of such a weapon could be a few kilojoules, about the same as most rifles. (source) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_energy#Typical_muzzle_energies_of_common_firearms_and_cartridges]

SCIENCE!

For the record, and I'm not claiming to be an expert on ME science, but I'm pretty sure that element 0 isn't meant to be an actual element on the periodic table, or for that matter if it is then it likely just stands for "generic deus ex machina" element, the same as "chemical x" or something. I could be wrong as I haven't read anything outside of what's presented in the game. I thought it was more of some kind of complex chemical compound, if anything, that was prone to accidental explosions over human colonies.

I looked it up the wiki, it is. "Atomic Number 0", those are their exact words. I'll agree it's just magic rocks (kinda like Star Trek's Dilithium), but it just peeved me that they came up with this idea of what this fantasy element is, how it works and whatnot, then give it the dumbest explanation of what it actually is that could ever exist. Why not just say it's a stable isotope of an element that doesn't occur naturally? Any of them with a higher atomic number than Uranium would do. (case in point, XCom's Elerium-115)

I think they call it Element Zero because it isn't an actual element. It's the result of other elements when subjected to the energy of a star going supernova, and it's only present on asteroid debris that sometimes (rarely) end up collinding with a planet and it's big enough, or the planet's atmosfere is primitive/non-existant to not be vaporized. Not the best explanation, but it's still slightly possible, and it's handled in a smart way, so what more to ask?

 

[Robert Ewing]

I read it, and it was absolute trash.

Not just the inaccuracies either, it was genuinely a quite bad read. I really don't recommend it to anyone that hath been bestowed with the gift of sight.

So you're saying the audio-book version is quite good?

Haha, good point Depends on who is voicing it I suppose, a nice voice can just make it a nice experience. However, if it's anyone other than Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, or Stephen Fry, it will probably be toilet fodder.

 

[Erttheking]

This is why I don't bother with the EU of ANYTHING!

On another note, this is getting seriously out of hand, I'm starting to think that some of the more hardcore ME fans are three steps away from starting a riot.

 

[Arcadian Legend]

While there has been more errors since, it actually didn't take us long at all to make such a list of errors because they were so obvious and glaring at us in the face.

 

[Aptspire]

....HOLY S***! He was the one who started the Sangheili/Unggoy Names idea!(In Halo: The Flood)
...
You're right...He's a hack

I highly doubt he started the race names of Covenant for the Halo series, the lore for them was written long before the novels, and even if he did why would that have been cause to consider him a hack? It's not like the aliens speak english.

I meant the Thel Vadamee, Nal Urmamee types of names...

 

[Warped_Ghost]

Element 0 isn't something that's physically impossible, it's literally nothing! You can't have nothing as your magical crystals!

Okay, can't quite believe I'm getting into this, but that isn't exactly right. The atomic number refers to an element's number of protons, not the total mass of the nucleus. So Element Zero would just be an atom with no protons (cf neutron stars). It still doesn't make perfect sense, but it's better than, well, nothing

On topic... GOOD GRIEF. I spend an indecent amount of time keeping track of Mass Effect canon in my head (particularly how things would be changed by what happened in my playthrough), and I'm also an amateur author. Something like this just hurts...

But with no protons would that not mean that the substance would have no chemical properties. It would be something more like beta or alpha decay which I don't think would be considered an element so Element zero could be seen as being non existent.

P.S.
This is just based on my vague understanding i obtained in high school.

 

[Denamic]

Not nessecarily bad thing those inconsistents. If there weren't so many I would never have read this article and thus become avare of the fact that new ME book has hit the shelves. Thenagain now I must contemplate whether it's worth buying.

Worth buying?
It's not worth pirating.
Inconsistencies aside, it's just bad.
There's better forms of entertainment to spend your money on.
Like eating glue.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Im a big fan, not a fanboy, and i mostly let a lot of the tech stuff go over my head. But when you get obvious key things wrong with the races like the Quarians suits (im thinking he just saw a picture only) then you know he did no research. Just playing the two games would have corrected alot of the mistakes he made.