Fans Tear New Mass Effect Book to Shreds

[SickBritKid]

Guns are not just about how much energy the projectile is moving with.
To actually make use of that energy, the projectile has to be able to transfer that energy to the target.
That's why people use hollow point rounds in weapons for use against meatbags.
Hollow point rounds basically go splat, transferring all of its energy into the target and shredding it from the inside.
An armour piercing round with the same amount of energy would just pierce the flesh and go out the other side, resulting in minimal damage.
A projectile the size of a grain of sand would have tremendous armour piercing capability, but it'd be terrible at causing any actual damage.
In fact, after a threshold depending on the size of the projectile, it'd actually start causing less damage with more energy, because it'd start piercing flesh so easily that very little energy is actually transmitted.
You'd just get perforated and highly uncomfortable rather than dead.

Except that anyone with basic knowledge of ME's lore knows that the sand-sized bullets fired from firearms in the game squash upon contact, transferring its energy straight into the target.

 

[Landis963]

However, the worst part isn't just the mistakes: If you read the doc in question, it outlines an egregious downturn in character quality:

"Gillian's visit to Afterlife - Afterlife is the most popular bar on Omega and people wait hours to get in (Retribution, Mass Effect 2). In Deception, Gillian enters immediately and without any trouble from the bouncers. [Error: Lore]"

"Tantalus Drive Core on a batarian ship - Though the Tantalus Drive is referred to as "standard," it was actually a highly secret, experimental drive core first used on the SSV Normandy. It?s doubtful that a dated batarian ship would have one. Additionally, such a core is by itself equivalent to the cost of an entire cruiser class ship. [Error: Technology]" (This ship eventually ends up in Gillian's hands)

"Gillian gets new biotic implants in a few hours-long (?) operation in a non-medical facility - Biotic implants interface directly with the nervous system and the operation to replace them is considered extremely dangerous, to the point that even biotics who have crippling side-effects from their implants are usually unwilling to run the risk of brain damage and other permanent, deleterious effects. [Error: Technology]"

"Characters use advanced biotic powers with no prior training - After getting her ?implants? changed Gillian is able to "reave" and biotically charge, abilities that, before, were advanced and mostly exclusive to Shepard. [Error: Techonlogy]"

"Gillian ?sensing? that a pair of asari strangers were capable of biotics - Biotic ability cannot be sensed in this way, and as all asari are natural biotics, it is not something she needed to do anyway. [Error: Technology]"

There are several others, all of which point to Gillian being turned into a Mary Sue through incompetent writing.

Note: All of these are quoted directly from the doc, with entry numbers removed for clarity's sake. (i.e. it would be confusing to have #12 in front of #2)

 

[AD-Stu]

*facepalm*

Ordered my copy from Book Depository last week, probably on its way now. At I'm forewarned... maybe trying to spot all the mistakes for myself will make it more amusing somehow

 

[Zen Toombs]

And thats coming from someone who spent the last 4 hours making orogami seals.

Props for that, by the by.

OT: Wow, those are some mighty big mistakes, especially from a veteran science fiction writer. Especially the "hand cannon o' relativistic doom" thing.

 

[Azmael Silverlance]

Man that is such an embarrisingly epic fail!
I bet BioWare saw this file and just dropped their jaws on the floor.
I wonder how do the writers feel after this insult to their work of creating the ME universe.

 

[WonderWillard]

I'm debating on reading it for the story, even if it is shitty, I have to know what happens, or just reading summaries online. I've already seen a few spoilers, so I'm thinking the latter... Plus, I don't want to support this novel with my money.

 

[khiliani]

Erm, point 4, I don't think you can make assumptions of the "science" behind ME, considering their magical crystal are "Element Zero".

For those of us who apparently don't know what science is, elements in the periodic table are numbered by the number of protons they've got in their nucleus. So, Element 1 (Hydrogen) has a single proton in the nucleus, while element 13 (aluminium) has 13. Element 0 isn't something that's physically impossible, it's literally nothing! You can't have nothing as your magical crystals!

And it's not like it's just called "Element Zero", but it's something else entirely, they go out of their way to say that's exactly what it is! I'm pretty sure this is the first thing you learn in chemistry classes these days!

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?)

(In case you think I'm suddenly applauding their ability to write good sci-fi, I should point out this is blatantly plagiarized from Wh40k's shuriken weapons [http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Shuriken#.TyhVMoHnOwM] =p )

I always sorta interpreted element zero to be some sort of psudo-higgs boson, the particle that gives atoms mass, and they are some how able to fiddle with that. I realise that doesn't explain the mining of it or anything, but it makes some scientific sense

 

[Seneschal]

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!

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!

 

[Epic Fail 1977]

The Mass Effect franchise is consistently inconsistent.

 

[Souplex]

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...

so it would be a just a neutron...

that's disappointing. let's interpret 'element zero' metaphorically and say they called it that because it's the foundation of galactic society.

Let's think of it from the writing perspective: Element Zero is magical sci-fi goo. Since this is hard sci-fi, everything has to make scientific sense with the conceit of said sci-fi goo.

 

[Rad Party God]

Even I'm pissed off by this book and I haven't read any of the Mass Effect books yet!, but I've read every single nook and cranny that the codex offers for both Mass Effects.

Why did I chose not to play ME3?...

Spoiler: OH, right.

Could you not get it on a console?

Trying to not sound fanboyish here, nope, I don't want to buy another console, I already had a 360, but as a long time PC gamer, I just couldn't see a single thing or benefit that couldn't be done better in my PC and I simply sold the console a few months later.

Economically speaking, in my country, console games are very expensive, a new game sells at roughly $78 US dollars, heck, that's exactly what Super Mario Galaxy 2 still costs. One of my main reasons of why I'm a PC gamer, it's because it's much more feasable, heck, if I wanted to, I'd pre-order Mass Effect 3 right now, because it seems that EA has different prices for my region and Mass Effect 3, in Origin's page and I'm not kidding, sells for roughly $38 US Dollars. And no, that's not like a pre-order discount we're used to see in Steam's page, that's exactly what every single game from EA costs in my region (through Origin), Battlefield 3, Crysis 2, both Dragon Ages, Dead Space 2, you name it.

If their games are so damn cheap in my region, why the heck I'm complaining about?, because I don't like Origin, simple as that.

 

[salfiert]

element zero could be a lot of things, there are all kinds of matter that can exist without protons, which as stated above defines atomic number rather than the atoms mass, it could just be neutrons, or any other kind of exotic matter made up of the other baryons or mesons we know not that much about, calling it nothing is just plain wrong

 

[Frank_Sinatra_]

Dietz's novel was the weakest in the Halo series...

"Weak" is an understatement.
His style was flat and dull, he couldn't set up a scene to save his life, and even for a game based off Halo, the dialogue was pathetic.
One of my friends had me read a Twilight book, and I can say without hesitation that I'd rather re-read a Twilight book rather than Dietz's book on Halo.

/rant

Seriously, how do you fail that hard?

 

[duchaked]

William C. Dietz...yeah he wrote The Flood for the first bunch of Halo novels. Seemed a bit off with a few things (Master Chief's personality), but I'm not about to dig up little details and junk lol

 

[paragon1]

So it turns out Biotics were just Saiyans all along, who'd a thunk it? I bet that makes training interesting.

"Teacher, I just can't seem to lift anything heavier than 2 kilos."
"Okay, off to the getting-nearly-beaten-to-death-so-you'll-become-stronger-room with you."
"Score! Level 3, here I come!"

So, so dumb.

 

[SirCannonFodder]

[blockquote] 10. Batarian pirates slave-raid on the turian homeworld of Palaven - while not impossible, this is incredibly unlikely due to the militaristic nature of turian society, one consequence of which is possession of one of the largest military fleets in the galaxy. And even if there had been a raid on Palaven, the turians would have likely responded with overwhelming military force. [Error: Lore][/blockquote]

It's actually mentioned that most of the Turian fleet was destroyed in the Battle of the Citadel by the Geth... soooo... this actually isn't wrong.

What? No it wasn't, they only lost 20 cruisers [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NkGp18Rous]. They have almost twice as many dreadnoughts [http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Dreadnought#Dreadnoughts] as that.

 

[PBMcNair]

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.

 

[GundamSentinel]

I just read the whole doc. God damn. I am not going to touch that travesty with a 12-foot pole.

Amen to that, some of those errors are really terrible. The only part of Mass Effect lore I know is ME2 and I still think this is pure horror.