Tevos is the only one had been annoying here.
She want nothing more than to remained at top and treat others as pawns and second-class citizens. A pure b*tch beneath that face of her.

I feel superior as being human.
Why not feel sympathy about this? Our species is a cold bloody warmongering animals.
For thousand of years, we have advanced due to our sheer insanity and madness.
Cruelty is what make us stronger and fearsome than anything seen on this planet.
We are more devils than the devils themselves. We trade lives as simple as survival.
We as a species is driven to survive.
Not glory, not honor, not pride. But the means to see another day.

Oops, wrong fanfic

:(

Locke resisted the urge to roll his eyes, it had taken AI's a very long time to get accepted enough to be given gender monikers, it was a sign of disrespect to refer to an AI as 'it', it was as if the person who said it considered the AI to be an object, a thing, not a living being. " 'It' is going to speak to you to try and plead h- it's case." Said Locke, and as he retrieved Nikola's disk, it was a saucer-shaped object that was about as large as his hand.
-
I despise this scene in particular. Locke should have emphasized that Nikola was a HE not call him an "it" just because the aliens that fired on them were getting pissy about them humanizing the AI. You even say it was a sign of disrespect to do so and Locke had no reason at all to go along with the Admiral in agreeing that Nikola was an It instead of a He.

they wouldn't have responded with nuking world also your story is terrible

Bit too much of a human wank at points. The words brutal and intense are used too much, along with other similar words. Christopher McGraw is a horrid character who I find incredibly annoying. The SIGMAs are pretty much SPARTANS from Halo, but a little less interesting. Otherwise it’s an interesting read, but The Hopeless War is by far the superior read.

Heh warhammer references

Really? EARTH has been bombed, they attacked with no real reason on human home world and humans agree to decrease warship production?

Booo.
You should have destroyed it for real.

TODAY WE CELEBRATE OUR INDEPENDENCE DAY!

This story is more cheesy and goofy than badass, but I still like it.

Fantastic series. I couldn’t stop reading until I was caught up.

I'm a big fan of the Author from stories like The Hopeless War and Hearing the Call but this story is a bit of a dumpster fire he creates all kinds of advantages for Humans to the point where they are superior to the enemy meaning the enemy isn't a threat. People like Halo because the Covenant are superior but the UNSC is still able to hold its own this story doesn't have that balance.

So, you *admit* that you completely screwed the pooch on the “too slow for kinetic barriers” stuff, but see no reason to actually *change* it.

Interesting.

“and I am trying to rewrite a few things here and there to point out the flaws in Humanity’s military.”

And some of the early chapters do indeed have a little “[edited]” tag on them, which makes sense given that I am reading this thing in 2020 and its last activity was in 2014. Meaning that, originally, the early parts of it were somehow even *worse* than what we got.

Ok, so, even the story itself is now admitting that the quarians were the ones who started all of this (although it still omits the fact that the humans subsequently also opened fire on the turians without so much as a how-do-you-do). Good. I was worried you’d forgotten it completely. The idea that this miiiight just ever so slightly compress the high horse the humans have been jumping up and down on for the last five-odd chapters (while screaming) does not even seem to have occurred to you, though, so I won’t really call this progress.

Maybe it’s just admitting that the Quarians LIED to them, so how could the Stumans possibly be at fault when they were LIED to? Even though if they’ve read their own stupid codices, it specifically states what the Quarians did. Which undermines the whole “LIES, LIIIIEEEEEES” defence they were claiming.

Yeah, that sounds right.

Yeah, so much for the whole ‘admitting your mistakes and seeing reason’ bit, absolutely nothing is going to satisfy [Jason Whyte’s]/[the braying public’s]/[your personal] bloodlust aside from the complete destruction of Palaven.

There isn’t any reason *for* the humans to retaliate any more, but that’s all they’re talking about. If they’re worried the Citadel won’t listen to them, they can detain the quarian leadership and use them as bargaining chips; what, morally or strategically, do the humans even stand to gain by continuing a massive war of attrition against an enemy that has no reason to fight them any more?

Oh, yeah, and something else that occurs to me. The Alliance, in this universe, supposedly exists alongside the United Nations, and is operationally gimped to the point that it needs to rely on individual member states to fight the turians, but at no point does anyone from the UN get to vote on whether or not to continue this harebrained war, and for that matter the UN isn’t even briefed on this completely game-changing revelation of why the war was *started*.

In fact, Jason Whyney here seems to now be making every major policy decision in the Alliance entirely by himself, without consultation or approval from anyone. I’d call him an absolute despot, but even absolute despots have generals and advisers and inner circles to condense the information available to them into human-readable form and handle the micromanagerial aspects of making their will into law. Sometimes he listens to a radio transmission, sometimes nothing at all happens to prompt it, and then he makes some kind of rambling statement and that’s Alliance policy from this point forward. Sometimes I’m not even sure if anyone else is even in the room when he does this; he just addresses it directly to the narrative prompt! He’s like a cross between Azathoth and Markov Bible Verses, with a liberal seasoning of Grand Moff Tarkin.

“They’ll think our fears of alien species were true and know that we, as a young people, needed to do this in order to establish our standing in the Galaxy.”

“But destroying a A Class Five Colonized Planet wouldn’t bring the body-count I want to thrust upon the Turians. A Class two, or one, yes. A five? No, not even close.”

I thought I was being hyperbolic when I made the Tarkin crack up above. Is this, like, some horrid new variant of Poe’s Law, “Anything a reviewer intended as hyperbolic sarcasm, I can attempt seriously”? Because, somehow, this story manages to not just proudly admit to everything I accuse it of, but to exceed my accusations every. Single. Time. It’s amazing.

In fact, the Grand Moff Tarkin comparison is no longer even apt. Tarkin destroyed Alderaan because it was well-known and well-traveled and everyone could see the results; while Alderaan’s large population certainly influenced that it wasn’t his direct reason. This guy surpasses Tarkin.

I don’t know how this ‘fic manages to keep surprising me given that I already expect the absolute worst of it at all times, but somehow it still does.

Seriously, how do you write dialogue like this while continuing to think to yourself “Yes, these are the good guys in my story. Not better than something worse or set up for redemption, good.” Honestly it’s so over-the-top that if it wasn’t for the clumsily-maniulative “serious” scenes like the dead-baby one, I would legitimately be wondering if this entire ‘fic was not in fact some sort of expertly-crafted parody or deconstruction of the HFY genre. But those TEH SADZ scenes do exist, and just in general there’s absolutely nothing funny or self-aware or insightful about this story, so if it is some kind of deconstruction it’s relegated to the meager class of “I’m deconstructing by writing a bog-standard story where all of the tropes happen verbatim, but now it’s slightly more grimderp” attempts (which are second in worthlessness only to the vaunted “I’m deconstructing by writing a bog-standard story where all of the tropes happen verbatim, but now I will state by name that each trope is happening when it happens” variety).

Except this one also has a crapton of filler and random nothing-narrative in it. Hooray.

…

Or maybe the UN *does* do things, although I am not really sure how responding to a demand to destroy a planet by offering to destroy *two* planets qualifies as “talk[ing] them down“.

His actual plan is curious. So, so, they’re going to destroy one planet with a nuclear bomb, and then destroy another planet with… a different class of *also planet-destroying nuclear bomb*? What possible purpose does that *serve*?

It also occurs to me that the vaguely-Germanic “Eidesche” outpost that the quarians nominate for the Alliance to destroy instead of just an unpopulated planet is the same “Eideshe” where they massacred those ten thousand turian colonists in the backstory. Why are the quarians so obsessed with causing strife and bloodshed on that particular planet? Is there a Great Old One slumbering within it that they hope to awaken through vast, Aztec-style war-sacrifices or something?

Also, this makes it sound like the “destroyer of worlds” phrase was coined when nuclear bombs were developed; in fact, it comes from a Hindu religious text called the Bhagavad Gita.

Also that quote is really fucking overused and Robert Oppenheimer only brought it up after the Trinity test in the first place because it comes closely after a different verse that reads

” If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one…”

People who quote the one without mentioning the other deprive the quote of its context and turn it from something that describes Oppenheimer’s complicated response to a weighty real-world decision into bland, edgelordy posturing… so, yeah, I’m not at all surprised the humans are using it here. Why the fuck do people continue to think that this quote is a celebration of nuclear power and something that should be requoted every time?

Oppenheimer was ashamed and utterly terrified of what he created. Anyone who actually ever watched the clip where he says that little line will realize that the man never got over the way his research was used. I mean just look at it, he can’t even look into the camera while he talks about it and he’s basically just stuck in the moment he realized what his bomb could do. Though, really, the entire reason Oppenheimer agreed to work on the atomic bomb was to use it against the *Nazis*; given the Alliance’s bizarre obsession with its own birthrate, insistence on mass murder to avenge its leaders’ wounded pride, and obsession with arming absolutely everyone, he’d probably think they were much more worthy recipients than the turians.

…

Is the aforementioned planet-destroyer that “red matter” weapon that was used to destroy Vulcan in the first Star Trek reboot? Because it really sounds like that “red matter” weapon that was used to destroy Vulcan in the first Star Trek reboot.

Not sure *why* it needs to dig underground to do that, though. While the dynamics of aboveground and underground explosions are complex, 30 miles (wonderfully scientific units there, BTW) isn’t going to make much difference one way or the other to something that *destroys planets*.

*Can* it destroy planets, though? The narration says it contains “ten pounds” of antimatter (more wonderfully scientific units…), which would on impact release around 41017 joules, or approximately 97.4 megatons-TNT-equivalent. That sounds like a lot, but is not even twice the energy output of the Tsar Bomba nuclear test (indeed, the Soviets could have produced a 100 Mt bomb, but were worried about the fallout it would have generated and the fact that the bomber delivering it would not be able to escape the explosion in the time it would take to fall), and less than one one-millionth of the energy of the Chixculub asteroid impact. Both of those events actually happened on Earth and we’re still here, so, no, a planet-destroyer this is not.

In fact, the Tsar Bomba only had a lethal blast radius of less than 70 miles (115 kilometers) in the air (that’s how far away the delivery plane was, and it survived), so if this thing was buried 30 miles under the ground I’m not entirely sure if it would harm *anyone*.

In fact, just *getting* that far underground would require far more energy than the bomb’s payload would produce. This “digger class laser” would have to, presumably very quickly, in order for it to be useful, evaporate 602,880 cubic m of crust material, which would be around 1,627,776,000 metric tons. Given that most of the crust (60 percent ish) is SiO2 it would have to be brought up above 2950 degrees C. …That is unlikely, to say the least, and is far more terrifying than flinging antimatter at planets. If we take into consideration the innate inefficiency of laser generators, and atmospheric losses the final output would have to be in the exawatt(at least) range. The waste heat alone should turn the bomb (not considering the antimatter) and every ship near it into a rapidly expanding cloud of monatomic gas. Then there is the effect of the silicon gas explosion. That alone might cause catastrophic damage all over the continent… assuming the light and gas pressure didn’t just propel the bomb *away* from the ground instead like some kind of stupid DARPAfied version of Jules Verne’s moon cannon.

Anyway.

…

I have said it before, and I will say it again. The Council Races, as a whole, are not idiots. If Gary Stumanity’s OP technology could have been developed from first principles, then they would have developed it unless there was a clear advantage to available Prothean-inspired designs (which, for that matter, the Protheans themselves had to have developed from somewhere, for some reason).

I’d like to say I’m surprised by your odd fixation on the genophage and other sterilization methods in fighting *against* the Council, but given the amount of dick-waving and bizarre red-pilly statements in the rest of the ‘fic, yeah, I’m really not. Although, according to the Salarians’ rationalization, the genophage was a better alternative to complete and total genocide. If the stumans start ruining Council homeworlds – even the oddly-reviled turians’ – the Salarians won’t go for the balls this time. The stumans’ AIs will have plenty of time to think up a cure after everyone’s died from a straight-up engineered plague.
You aren’t winning this one, Grand Moff.

Great work on the groundgame in Tokyo, by the way, if of course we’re using First War’s unique language where words sometimes mean the opposite of what they usually do, because the groundgame in Tokyo was incredibly confusing and also *boring as balls*. Apparently, you’re willing to allow the turians semi-portable gun emplacements that can take down spacecraft as they enter the atmosphere… but you still have their *ships* be unable to reliably do the same thing and also has them be surprised at the existence of the human Cairo Station ripoffs- which are larger and more cumbersome but seem to have the same or lesser impact on the turians compared to these guns which flat-out make getting near Tokyo impossible.

It suddenly occurs to me that these guys apparently knew the ship was there but were unable to get close to it (which is… very strongly reminiscent of the Voi mission from Halo 3, now that I think of it), but still made absolutely no attempt to communicate with it even after learning that the war was started under false pretenses.

Speaking of things ripped off, I really hope this “John Doe” guy doesn’t stick around, because he’s basically just the Master Chief from Halo with less personality and a tendency to kill surrendering turians even after that one Navy drone made the big long speech about how much better the humans were because they took some prisoners; recite weird mantras that imply women are living creatures and men are inanimate; and nearly teamkill his own guys. Where does the name ‘SIGMA’ come from, in-universe, anyway? What’s sigmoid about them? If it’s an acronym, what does it stand for? I don’t think even any of the stupid pointless codex entries answered that question.

And after that, a “General Shin Somal” (ooh, now it’s kind of a mix of Sinic and Hebrew!) gets POV’d and wonders why the human troops are jumping out of their shuttles “to their death”. Because apparently, in their multiple thousands of years of mechanized, airborne combat, the Turian Hierarchy never employed aerial insertions, or even invented *parachutes*. Even though the turian Armagier drop-troops are a canonical thing. This isn’t even insulting to the turians any more, it’s just ludicrous in defiance of all basic common sense. Do you assume that the turians are worse at aerodynamic math because they have three fingers and humans have five? I’m sure someone will get OUTRAGED! over it soon enough. I’m not sure how the turians can see them at *all* when the Spartan-knockoffs can turn *invisible* but that’s a minor quibble at this point, as is the fact that the SIGMAS treat wingsuits as a new development when they’ve been commercially produced since the 1990s.

Damn. You might as well rename this "Warhammer: Rise of the Imperium."