The accident referred to is Anatoli Bugorski. His head entered the path of a particle accelerator and proceeded to take a proton beam to the face, skull, and brain. The energy of it, 76GeV, is comparable to the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier at speed, focused down to a subatomic scale. The guy suffered facial injuries and was expected to die of radiation poisoning, but made a near-full recovery. He kept working at the same lab for years, finished his PhD, and is still alive today. The accident happened in 1978 when he was 36y/o. He's now 79.
@@alertedcoyote7892 From what I remember hearing about it, the chamber housing the particle accelerator had a door with a warning light that was supposed to alert anyone entering if the system was on or if there was a problem, but the light wasn't working, so he thought that everything was turned off. I believe he bent down to pick something up, and just accidentally his head crossed into the beam.
@@Spar10Leonidas There was a couple other things that failed too. There was supposed to be a person watching the chamber through cctv but either the camera was not working or the monitor thought the accelerator was off. Also the door was suppose be locked if the accelerator was running, but that was hosed up too. Kyle Hill has a really good video on all the details.
The thermal clips makes sense in-universe, remove heat instantly by putting in a new heatsink, but they should have balanced it a little with the previous system. Instead of having to reload no matter what, they should have let your weapon to cool down if you stop firing (slower than ME1 just to balance the gameplay with the clip system). So trigger happy players will need to use a lot of clips. It would have given players a new strategy in a fight, go in kill all the enemies fast, but need to use more thermal clips and possibly run out, or be slow and steady to minimalize clip reload, therefore extending the "ammunition," but allow more enemies to bunch up on you.
@@bobspace69 Theoretically you could be ejecting it at failure point- have it be some incredibly thermally conductive material that absorbs heat by [technobabble here], but once it hits the failure point it loses conductivity and becomes effectively useless.
The thing missing was the ability to pick up clips after they cool off. If they are just ejectable heat sinks, then you should be able to use them again after they cool.
@@danspawn85 or building them so you could overload them and fire them like a thermal grenade - maybe exploding in your gun if you "cook" them too long, but rewarding players who risk it by scaling damage with heat levels. Heavily restrict how many you can carry at once and you've got a whole new layer of resource management considerations and tactical options. Do you cook off one of your heat sinks to quickly clear a room, or save it so you don't run out of them and get stuck with slow cooling later? Is it worth the distraction of watching the heat indicator to maximize damage, or do you eject it mostly charged and sacrifice a bit of damage for more safety?
Turian soldier: "He was armed with this weapon sir!" Turian Officer: "How primitive, your kind expects to win a war with this?" Captured human: "A bullet is a bullet" Turian Officer: "You have so much to learn, and when we conquer your Earth, I look forward to teaching you."
@@ADMNtek IIRC, on the ground humans weren't too far behind the Turians, apart from shields. Kind of like in Halo, where the humans managed to actually figure out how to fight effectively on the ground. But in both, human space navies were woefully behind the alien ones, and that's where the losses came from.
@@PaulGuy Turians have been doing it a lot longer when the First contact war happened (2157)the Turians had been a council members for over 1200 years. while the humans had only discovered the mass effect tech on mars in 2148 so 9 years prior. and the Turians started to drop asteroids onto human cities.
First of all, YES, Mass effect Mondays must become a thing. Second, In Mass effect 1, snipers overheat fast, so what I did is mod my sniper with all the mods that give it more damage, and makes it overheat faster. Overheating for 110% or 400% wont make a difrence, the cooldown is the same, but I now kill everything in 1 shot, most tanky enemies included, and I have infinite range.
I did this too, then gave my pistol seeking ammo and ALL the DOT power. Anything i couldn't one shot with the sniper (mostly because of cover) died of poisonous lead.
@@hyperrustynail same. Spectr sniper rifle is one of the best weapons. Though the Geth Pulse Rifle is almost as good if it wasn't for the warmup for full auto.
i used to mod my guns mostly for cryo damage as it made the guns cooldown faster think higher mods also had a slight firerate debuff but then I mostly just ran geth plusrifles with them getting the crazy fast fire along with high-level cryo rounds made it so I could just hold fire tell everything is dead and never overheat
Specifically: “The gel is a genetically-engineered bioplasm created by the Sirta Foundation, a medical technology megacorp based on Earth. Technically, medi-gel violates Council laws against genetic engineering, but so far, it has proved far too useful to ban.” And that’s awesome! Like the bio foam injectors in Halo! Both are great examples of someone’s idea of futuristic medical technology
10:30 An ME1 Lancer is obtainable in ME3 and it's one of the best weapons in the game. It never runs out of ammo, so it's the only weapon you need to equip, so your weight stays really low, which means your abilities recharge very fast.
Well actually if you want a real world example of shield proyecting something our ozone layer works similarly too shields as it protects us fro. Other harmful radiation .
Notably, that's pretty much how weapon and armor technology really works. Swords and knives never stopped being good for killing, and if anything they were arguably at their least efficient back when people used plate armor. A wider variety of bladed weapons actually emerged as firearms made armor increasingly obsolete, since that also made people more vulnerable to stabbings and such. But then gun technology eventually became too advanced to justify melee combat. Now, if we were to invent some kind of armor that's immune to gunfire as well as being cheap and practical enough to see widespread use, it wouldn't be particularly strange if we want back to using swords and axes, etc. I'm doing something similar with a setting I'm planning: Shields are immune to kinetic weapons and resist energy weapons for a while, but there's a type of powered melee weapon (energy swords, basically) that go right through shields. So it's sort of a rock-paper-scissors kind of thing: Shields beat guns, swords beat shields, guns beat swords.
The Thermal Clip change in ME2 was an improvement in combat pacing, but it did introduce some silly plot holes. Like one of the loyalty missions you track down a 'lost expedition' that has been gone for decades and without any contact with the Systems Alliance, but somehow still have and use thermal clips and thermal clip guns which was a recent innovation. No mention is ever made how a group out of touch of anyone in the galaxy for decades has the latest weapon technology.
@@michaeldalton1874 I do, too, from both a lore and gameplay perspective. The ME1 cool down system forced players to learn a military tactic known as "trigger discipline." The player, much like machine gunners, must learn to fire in bursts.
@@michaelmartin4874 Then they added the particle beam in ME3 which required sustained fire to amplify damage. So all you had to do was maximize "ammo capacity" then ignore all cover and strategy.
@@davidmcgill1000 Even with max ammo, you could still fire only so long. Personally, I found the beam, even at max damage, to be fairly slow, and completely useless at long range.
The reasoning behind the guns, in universe, switching to thermal clips, is actually grounded in real life ballistics: Rate of Fire over all. The guns in ME1 had a cooldown mechanic. This meant they could stop working in combat because they had to cool down after firing off a few bursts. The Geth were the first to realise that if you had a removable heatsink attached that could be replaced on the fly (the thermal clip) then the cooldown period was shortened from several minutes to mere seconds. Granted in ME2 the main motivation for this change WAS cover based shooters being popular.
True enough, but fix up a gun with Frictionless Materials in ME1 and you can pretty much just keep firing. I had a sniper rifle equipped that cooled faster than I could pull the trigger.
@@LabradorIndependent Keep in mind that gameplay mechanics for progression and levelling don't typically translate to canon. A max level Spectre Gun with max level parts is not representative of how guns in the ME1 universe actually performed. Especially since the Spectre X guns were end game weaponry specifically made to reward a player for hitting Max level.
To be fair to Mass Effect, in the ME3 Citadel DLC you can get an old style assault rifle which cools down instead of having the thermal clips. I also think Conrad Verner criticises thermal clips in ME3 saying they might as well have gone back to limited ammunition.
I think they said in mass effect 3 in a conversation with Conrad, after the Geth/Reaper invasion mass effect 1 they changed to thermal clips to increase fire power instead of letting the gun cool down and that they had to remove the function that allowed the gun to cool down was removed to make room for the thermal clip system
@@chenstormstout9456 Except that it works like a Call of Duty system, to the point where reloading with shots left will add them to your pool, despite you dropping the whole thing on the ground. The cooldown system has its problems, sure, but going to clips took the game towards being another shooter game. Also, the Citadel DLC explains and mocks the thermal clips in a conversation with Conrad Verner. Shepard explains that the clips let them fire faster, more powerful shots, and then quickly drop the heat. Conrad counters that, if there's no passive cooling, they've basically gone back to limited ammunition. And, in a strange point for Andromeda, you can craft a 'vintage heat sink' for ME2 and 3 style weapons.
@@Lyoko1309 ok well if the game itself mocks the thermal clip system, that feels like something he should’ve known. Or least put it in the fact bar below.
as far as I remember the thermal clip is reversed engineered Geth technology. personally, I hated the clip system especially as a sniper the basic sniper rifle in ME 2 has an ammo cap of 10 shots. funnily enough on PC, you could easily switch back to the old system by modding 1 file.
@@ADMNtek Hell, there is even an official weapon with that ME1 cooling tech which is added in by the Citadel DLC. It is in the archives, the M-7 Lancer. Also iirc the conversation with Conrad happens on the Citadel (in that docking area turned refugee ward) but not because of the Citadel DLC.
Anatoli Bugorski, who stuck his head in the partical accelerator, did have some damage. Oddly enough half his face doesn't age while the other half does.
So Hollow Points are designed to expand, and flower out, not necessarily fragment. Just that if the projectile is propelled too fast or meets enough resistance, it can over expand or the metal is broken off. It isn't inherently it's purpose but it happens. This does increase the wounding capabilities, but also reduces the projectiles penetration ability and thus allows it to dump more of its energy into the first thing it hits. Which is one of the big reasons why it is used as a self defense load since it is less likely to pass through the target. Great video though. Didn't know that the mass effect weapons were mass accelerators.
Bonus: If you miss your target, but hit a wall (common in urban areas), the bullet may not go through. This can help prevent innocent bystanders from getting hurt by a stray shot.
@@Lyoko1309 this is why they are standard for law enforcement. Also the reason they are banned from military use under the Geneva conventions, they make it incredibly difficult for a field medic to treat the wound.
@@AbyssalMerc That second part is not really true. What makes a wound more 'difficult' to treat from a medic perspective (I did an enlistment as a combat medic in the US Army) is mostly the size of the wound cavity -location is also extremely important, but that goes without saying. Pistol rounds, even hollowpoints, can only really cause damage from whats called the permanent wound cavity, which is the actual path the bullet takes through the body as it displaces tissue. What a hollowpoint does is attempt to increase the size of the permanent wound cavity by causing the bullet to flatten on impact and 'push' through the body with a larger surface area. Effectively its meant to emulate a larger diameter/caliber bullet, so you can get more wounding with a smaller round that has higher magazine capacity and less recoil. However, this pales in comparison to conventional rifle rounds like 5.56 or 5.45 which can create wounding from the temporary wound cavity in addition to the permanent wound cavity. This temporary wound cavity is like a 'shockwave' where the bullet dumps so much energy into the body that it actually exceeds the elasticity of tissue. As a result, rifle rounds can cause damage well outside the actual path the bullet takes through the body. Couple this with intermediate rifle rounds being designed to lose stability and tumble or fragment and it can lead to wounds where the entrance wound is small (same diameter as the projectile) but the exit wound is a massive gaping hole. THAT is what is hard to treat. The banning of hollow point ammunition in warfare came at the end of the 19th century back when they were called 'dum-dum' bullets and weren't very popular or well understood. At the time it was thought they would cause unnecessarily cruel wounds. However, the rifle rounds used by major militaries today aren't hollowpoints and yet are capable of causing much more catastrophic wounds, so at the end of the day its a bit of a silly rule. Consider that a decade or two after the Hague conventions were signed with the hollowpoint rules in them we had a full on world war with chemical weapons where 70% of all casualties came from artillery and those wounds were often absolutely devastating.
Was about to say this but thank you... Why it seems like the majority of people. Those who know nothing about firearms or hail from a country where the government says citizens with guns is very bad, get information as if they're playing whisper down the lane....
The thermal clip implementation was definitely a step backwards in terms of weapon design with regards to the established lore. I adored the unique take from the first game
hey carl the reason why in mass effect 2 they switched to the thermal clips is explained in game a bit differently than the shield up grade. it was said that the geth analyzed various tactics and switched to thermal clips because it let them put out firepower at a more consistent rate. after the council races noticed the geth switch and that they were much more effective at maintaining steady output of firepower in combat. basically bioware notice that people where spending too much time hiding in cover and wanted to speed thing up a bit. ME1 was fairly medium paced, but 2 and 3 where much faster paced and the reload actually made things go smoother. that being said my favorite weapons still ending up being the "old" rifle and the prothean particle rifle.
The thermal clips always bothered me. Particularly because they could have made it so they were optional. Gun overheated? Either wait or swap out the heatsink.
Yeah. It should've been. "if your gun overheats, you'll have to wait a few seconds for it to cooldown, or you can spend a thermal clip to do it instantly" kinda like how you could hide in cover for a few seconds to heal or use Unity to spend Medi-gel to do it instantly if the situation needed it.
They did that in a Mass Effect X Halo Fusion Fanfic I read, the termal clip alloweed the soldier to fire for longee periods of time and with better muzzle velocity, but if you abused them to much the clips gets damaged and became useless, still you could fabricate another one with the Omni-Tool, seriously, that guy merged the Halo and Mass Effect side amazingly well.
I remember feeling exactly the same way about about the weapon systems when Mass Effect first came out. Actually I was blown away by pretty much all the world building in general. Everything from how space travel worked to the individual species, the history, even things like the galactic government. All the lore in the universe not only clearly had a lot of thought put into it but it actually made a lot of sense when you really thought about it. I remember actively spending a bunch of time binging codex entries and loving every second of it.
While I preferred the guns of Mass Effect never having to reload, I understand the change starting in Mass Effect 2. It caused me to use different weapons and created scarcity, cause otherwise in Mass Effect 1 I just ran around with a Sniper with explosive mods and just had to use lift/throw to get enemies out of cover and then explode them. It was fun but too easy.
Honestly, Mass Effect explains most of its sci-fi elements super well. Like, you could honestly believe things in that universe working in even a logical sense.
So true. One of the things I always thought was cool is that larger Humans ships are built with the decks running vertical similar to ships in the expanse because that allows them better compensate for the recoil of the giant main mass driver that runs almost the whole length of the ship.
@@ADMNtek I always liked Legion's explanation of why Geth installations don't have windows, because space is empty, so why would you ever wanna look at it?
I also appreciate the codex stating the weapons' other big limit aside from waste heat: recoil. Every action, equal & opposite, &c. IIRC it's stated that ME fields are used to dampen the recoil force to something manageable for the shooters, but I imagine making it negligible would require even more energy and thus even more waste heat.
give us mass effect mondays! There's so much stuff in the codex of all the games it would take hours just to read it all. This is a way more fun and interesting medium to learn about the world building of mass effect
I am relatively certain that the rods from god are tungsten not carbon... A couple reasons: carbon is flamable... reentry is hot. Also this is a kinetic energy weapon and a comparable lump of carbon is roughly 1/15 that of tungsten.
Tungsten was the material of choice for that theoretical project. Tungsten rods the size of telephone poles causing the equivalent damage of a nuclear explosion without the radiation.
The mod system in the first game let you get the cooldown on the assault rifle so high that you could fire it basically indefinitely. The Specter variant of the weapon with two of the highest level cooldown attachments, and maybe cryo rounds was how to pull it off. Worked for the shotgun too because it fired slow enough that the cooldown out paced it. Funniest thing I did in that game.
Hollowpoint ammunition is NOT specifically designed to fragment inside the body to cause more damage, it is designed to mushroom upon impact to transfer more energy and to minimize over penetration
The damage of an object going at hyper velocities is based on the medium through which it travels. Any object shot at near light speed in an atmosphere will instantly turn into a plasma bolt.
I can say that I agree 100% with Karl about Mass Effect. Why get rid of infinite ammo? If you modded it right you didn't really have to worry about overheating.
I agree as well. I loved having a high damage/low rate of fire assault rifle that never overheated. Then like Karl said, I would have my sniper and shotgun overheat in one shot but do one hit kills.
The thermal clip isn’t ammo though. It’s specifically a disposable heat sink. The guns had a problem overheating so instead of having to wait or just be careful with how frequently you are firing the thermal clip system made it so you could just fire until the thermal clip was superheated slag and had to be ejected for a new one. Which is why when you “reload” the casing that pops out is glowing orange and steaming.
Small correction at 5:20 Karl; while its possible for a bullet of any kind to fragment in the body, hollow points are not designed to break apart in the body. Rather, the hollow point of the bullet allows it to expand on impact more than traditional bullets. This causes the bullet to slow down faster, delivering more of its energy to the target and prevents overpenetration. They are used by police and typically in civilian owned firearms used for self defense, as well as some hunters. Great job on the video, I really enjoyed it!
heads up, that's not actually how hollow points and most other ammunition work. hollow points are meant to expand in the body, not come apart. by expanding it would increase the size of the permanent wound cavity.
There's a weapon that was introduced in ME3MP called the N7 Typhoon. It's a great, big minigun type thing. When you fire it, it ejects ammo casings. The only possible explanation is that there's a dedicated micro-factory in the weapon that manufactures ammo casings just to eject them. Because it looks cooler.
If you think the concept behind rods from god are pretty cool, the gundam series "Iron Blooded Orphans" basically had that exact weapon. In universe it is called the Dáinsleif & using it is a war crime, so there's that.
I actually really liked the addition of thermal clips. Obviously the change was a bit jarring and the lore for weapons in ME1 was badass, but it didn't _feel_ any different from a "laser gun" in game, or like a Star Wars blaster, to just shoot infinitely without any input. Besides, it's not a reload of "ammunition": since heat was now the big issue, weapons manufacturers figured out how to make a system to keep weapons cool by ejecting a heatsink instead of venting heat like a spaceship, and made a _universal_ "ammo" system that _every_ species and weapon now uses. There's no differences between anyone in what the guns eat, just a block of steel and heat sinks. Honestly, I think that's just as cool if not cooler than "infinite" ammo.
10:32 ackshually.... In the DLC for ME3 where Anderson gives you his apartment, and you end up in the archives, there's a ME1 Lancer assault rifle lovingly maintained by an expert gunsmith and ends up in the Citadel Archives (basically a big museum of vaults) so you can have a ME1 assault rifle in ME3 complete with infinite ammo. Plus that's a sidearm with a built in silencer that you can use when you enter an area and keep your squad back where normally after you shoot one of them it alerts all of them and they start attacking, but with the silenced pistol (it does a LOT of damage for a pistol) it will only alert NPCs facing your target so if you drop that one fast enough too, they won't alert the rest of the enemies and you can turn the missions into stealth missions
The legitimately tried to make an argument in Mass Effect 3, I think, of why they changed it, and it still doesn't hold up. Especially when Shepard is being forced to support it by the devs with the weakest arguments. "Why are we going back to reloading ammo? "We aren't, we just fond a way to get over overheated guns." "How is it different than reloading? It's literally called a clip? All you had to do was just wait a couple of seconds!" "Defensive tech was recharging faster than the guns could cool down." "Cool, but I'll just wait for it to cool down anyway." "Actually you can't, they took out the cooling systems to make the thermal clips be able to be removable." "Why?! Why can't they just compromise and have it be the best of both?" "Deal with it, It's the future." "The future is stupid!"
Fun fact, the guns of mass effects don't shoot projectiles fast enough to cause any damage at all. A sand grain is 0.06mm to 2.0mm and mass effects guns are stated to be supersonic which means they are not hyper sonic so they can not go over mach 5. Assuming the heaviest metal of osmium as a 2mm cube weighing 0.0274 grains and moving at a velocity of mach 4.9 or 5,514.10761 fps would equal 3 joules. A 22 caliber rifle shoots a projectile with 162 joules meaning unless it is not a simple equation, that I could kill everyone with a 22 rifle in mass effect.
Mass effect Mondays please. I need to watch more mass effect content while playing og Mass effect on the Xbox 360 original trilogy. Also fun fact that I just resintly learned from playing the second game. I talked to legion about sovereign and I shit you not. That name correction shocked me. Saren named a reaper after a French ranking for ruler. When sovereigns actual name is Nazara. Which means gloom and beauty. And no body ever calls Sovereign by his name, but by his rank saren save him. I will never forget that fact. So I'm wondering what every reaper in mass effect is actually called and real names are.
I like listening to you guys geek out about stuff you like, and you guys seem to love Mass Effect. So yeah, if you want to do Mass Effect Monday, I'm here for it. I'm also already subbed to the Untitled Side Channel, if you want to do it there. It sounds fun.
10:38 Zaeed Massani kept his and used it until it broke due to the overheating compensation system crapping out, letting the gun fire too long and cooking itself. Edit: how my brain conjured up "overheating compensation system" and not "cooler" is beyond me.
My favorite gun in the series is the M-7 Lancer, a heat based assault rifle found in the Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC. Always preferred the heat sink weapons.
ME1: Effectively unlimited ammo. ME2: 'Okay, but what if we went back to very limited ammo so you can easily run out in the middle of a battle and your gun turns into a strangely shaped club?' Glad to see I'm not the only one to find that change idiotic. If thermal clips were added on top of the current system, perhaps something that you had a limited supply of before you had to go back to pacing your shots to avoid overheating I could see that being an improvement but going from effectively unlimited ammo back to running out of ammo mid-fight being a very real concern always struck me as a terrible choice lore-wise.
I don’t know if it was ever confirmed but there was a ME3 leak that had an ammo concept that gave you several clips that could be reused but overheated quickly so you’d have to manage the heat of the weapons while still giving that fps feel. I was real bummed to not see it in the final game, seemed like a good hybrid between the ME1 and ME2 methods.
If you got the Citadel DLC, you could get a ME1 style assault rifle, was like the Prothean rifle, except when you hit the overheat limit, Shepard would hit the gun to eject the thermal clip, but because the gun doesnt use that system, they instead just burn themselves.
Aw yeah Mass Effect ! Of course Mass Effect videos would always be fun. And you have so much lore and things in general in that universe that you can plobally do videos for at least a year (probally more) Thanks for always making fun and interesting videos, keep it up and cheers from Brazil :D
10:11 - Is not that the gun runs out of ammo. The ME2 codex explains that the downside of waiting for weapons to cooldown is that it made harder to fight in prolonged firefights, so the thermal clip stores heat like a heatsink. SO if a gun overheats just pop that off and you can keep blasting (codex states that generally the side that can fire more rounds is the one who ends up winning)
I'll put in another vote for MEMondays, AND be that guy to talk about Rods From God, because I love the concept. Just imagine a projectile made of ceramic-coated tungsten carbide THE SIZE OF A UTILITY POLE being dropped at something like Mach 17, and the only accelerant used is the Earth's own gravity. Unfortunately, to be able to use the system to respond to threats quickly enough to be a viable option in wartime, there would need to be hundreds if not thousands of rod-dropping satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the planet, and the US government deemed the idea too expensive to implement, considering the cost of getting all the raw material into orbit to build the things.
The flaw in the design is that an object dropped from a satellite in orbit would stay in the same orbit as the satellite. The only way to make it "fall" would be to place retro thrusters in the rod to decelerate it to a point where it actually does in the direction of your target. At which point you might as well call it a rocket.
100% agree, Karl. The original means of fire of weapons in Mass Effect was far superior. I was dumbfounded when I saw the drastic changes to that and equipment customization from the first to second installment.
I'm designing a sci-fi setting and one of the things I wanted was ray-guns that never need to reload. The main reason being that as a kid I was under the impression that laser guns could just fire forever because they don't use bullets, and that was the reason I never saw laser weapons need reloading in cartoons and stuff. It made perfect sense to me at the time.
In 1986, the scifi pen and paper roleplaying game 2300AD posited that their squad assault weapon Rortmann LK-1 is a 'Plaser'. It's a block of lots of little discs that are shaped into a cone when the trigger is pulled. The process superheated it to a plasma state (due to the near instantaneous cone shaping action) and the internal laser used just the 'weight' of the laser to project it along the beam. When it hits the target it splashes an area in plasma which ignites the air with 10m. Its like being able to fire 3 large grenades a second without recoil (the only noise is the breaking of the sound barrier and the snap sound of the air around the muzzle being burned away). The other weapons in the setting are a few anti personal lasers (delivering 5mj per shot putting the target jnto shock), but 90% are ballistic weapons (caseless, cartridge, or gauss). Side note: everyone has Particles going through their head all the time.
pretty sure superglue was actually issued to field-fix scopes, binoculars and other optics, however, after a few soldiers stuck their fingers together trying, it then wound up being issued to medics for closing wounds, oh and it was actually discovered entirely by accident... twice..
Just to clarify a point on the design of bullets, a completely hard bullet that can't deform at all would still damage tissue around the point of impact and said bullet going faster will make that area of damage larger. To over simplify it quite a bit a bullet passing through an object transfers it's force in a cone. If the bullet is going faster the cone will be larger and more destructive. If the bullet is able to deform the cone gets shorter but the end of the cone doesn't change in size. This means a hollow point or otherwise deforming bullet dumps more energy into the target and less of that cone is wasted going out the other side. So a grain of sand going fast enough to pass through you would in fact not pass through harmlessly, it would blow a hole out of your back the size of a fist or worse depending on exactly how fast you are talking. The particle going through the guys head only did no damage because it's so small it literally passed through without touching much of anything inside him and therefore not being able to transfer much kinetic energy. It's a single piece of an atom we are talking about in that case.
I love seeing like lore or context about the stuff usually weapons in games, like destiny, like the last word and thorn are so deep in lore and I think all exotics even armour has a lore tab, but ye especially scout rifles(the shape) and trace rifles make no sense, also worm gun is a thing
Great episode! The guns were my favorite part about mass effect because of how real to life the concept is 😊 fyi: most bullets are not designed to break apart; most are either softpoint, full metal jacket, or hollwpoint with fmj making up the majority. FMJs don't generally deform much on impact, softpoints do to an extent, an hollpwpoints are designed for 1.5× expansion....so 9mm turns into 13.5mm. With that said, there ARE frangable bullets such as the famous R.I.P rounds, AND "penetrator" rounds designed for deeper wound channels. But yea your standard fmj just goes in and hopefully on the way out it accelorates tissue and the bullet plus the additional tissue leaves a large exit hole that causes bleeding.
Kyle Hill has a great video on the guy who stuck his head in a particle accelerator & what happened to him afterwards. It's part of his Half-Life Histories series.
Actually the thermal clip dosent add ammo to the gun, they still work the same. the thermal clip just absorbs the heat and it can be quickly removed which removes the over heating problem.
Hollow point bullets were designed to "mushroom" out on impact so the bullet doesn't pass through the object so it expells all its energy quicker. The side effect is yes it breaks apart.
The weapon codex found in ME1 is why the change from 'no ammo needed' to 'heat sync required' in ME2, is why that change in ME2 just pissed me off as well. No ammo needed, to ammo required, is somehow an 'advance in technology'!? Plus there was a way to make an assault rifle in ME1 have a truly 'unlimited firing time' with the top tier heat reducing upgrades.
It's kind of sad that Mass Effect 1 had the most realistic future guns ever only for them to completely abandon it afterwards. Sure Mass Relays aren't real, but Railguns certainly are and at least in concept a Mass Effect style weapon using Railgun tech is terrifyingly plausible.
Fun face commercially available mass accelerators are available today. There just kinda week due to current capacitor tec but can still hit with the force for a 22. Bullet
My favorite part of the mass effet codex is if you read it, it will highlight that something is impossible with current tech, you will witness such a thing happening, and then more codex entry will explain what happened. My favorite is an early codex mention about starship combat in which it says that "directed energy weapon" (lasers) are used, but only as a point defense agaisnt enemy syarfigther because, while they are pretty much impossible to dodge (its focused light so it moves at light speed) and bypass kinetic shield (because its not kinetic), its very energy intensive and has a very short effective range. Since ship to ship combat is very long range, ships main gun are scaled up version od the infantry weapons you use in game (mass accelerated metal slugs propelled by ME field) In come sovereign, seemlingly shooting laser out of its tentacles at very effective ship to ship range... how? ME2 explains that reaper mains guns are also mass accelerators. They just replace the slugs with streams of molten metal
Is there a canon explanation to how a miniscule piece of metal traveling at near lightspeed doesnt immediately burn up or get massively slowed down in any kind of atmosphere? Because that sounds like a huge issue for this kind of firearm system.
Not Mass Effect specific but theres plenty of real world materiels that theoretically could survive. Stuff like tantalum carbide and hafnium carbide can survive 4,000 degrees Celsius which is 1,500-2,000 degrees from the suns surface. The slowdown is much easier to explain, the surface area of the "bullets" is so small and the speeds so high that atmospheric slow down is negligible.
It can be a good thing, too. If your bullets disintegrate after a certain distance, you don't have to worry as much about missed shots hitting unintended targets.
The codex mentions that the rounds are "suspended in a mass effect field" presumably that makes it so it's not in direct contact with the air long enough for friction to affect it before it inpacts it's target
I would also like to add on to the throwaway point about hollow point rounds they are more deadly to the person being hit but less dangerous to anyone around or behind the target as it has reduced penetration
Mass Effect Monday sounds good to me. The decision to switch to thermal clips is even mocked upon in ME3 by Conrad Werner in the random chat activations after Priority Citadel if i remember correctly.
Mass Effect 2 should have hybridized the firearm system. Meaning you can fire the gun to a certain point and either wait for it to cool down before firing so as to not use a thermL clip, or continue firing, breaking the thermal clip which needs to be ejected and reloaded, and using up a clip. That way it’s up to the player to decide how they want to manage their ammo inventory.
They actually, brought back the original gun from Mass effect 1 in Mass effect 3 you can get it in the citadel dlc, with the old ammo, it was litterally in the archives
Fun fact: Due to the fact that projectiles will go through their target exiting out the other side is the exact reason why it is legal for us police forces to use hollow point rounds so that the round will shatter inside the target more likely killing the target but not harming anyone behind the target... Whereas on the other hand it goes against the Geneva convention to use hollow point rounds during warfare, because the goal of war isn't necessarily to kill your target but to demoralize them enough to surrender, which can be achieved through numerous ways without actually killing the target... Therefore you would rather the soldier survive the war but go home with an injury demoralizing him and the group he was with in the process... There's no war in history that has been won by one military literally completely wiping out the other. Don't take my word for that you may have to look it up I could be wrong there may be one or two out they're somewhere that could be found. But they would be the exception to the rule. Unless guns are completely removed from the playing field all together, it is necessary for police forces in America to use hollow points to prevent the deaths of innocent.
To be honest, I think they should have modified the thermal clip system to be if you reload you get to shoot the gun sooner, but if you wait a while the gun would cool down and you could all the shots in the clip back, it would have been cool. It would give you the option to conserve ammo at the cost of having to sit in cover, or swap to weapons that are overheated, and if you ran out of clips you'd either have to play that way or run out in the open to get another to reload if you didn't want to wait.
so the reason that they switched to the thermal clip system is so they could do more damage with out overheating instantly ( in lore the avenger AR does more damage than a lancer it equivalent) this is tech that they adapted from the geth who had far supirer weapons to the rest of council space in lore anyways. People tend to forget the difference in lore and in gameplay for example I'm pretty sure that if you fired your gun the way we did in ME1 then you'd be replacing a lot of weapons and the removal of the cooling system also made the guns a lot cheaper and allowed more space for interesting designs like the salareun and asari weapons
I believe there are war related laws to bullets not shattering in real life. I think they try to use shockwaves starting the bullet tumbling on impact to do increased damage. Tungsten rods dropped from orbit. I'd like the old ammo system back.
I've played alot of mass effect but never really read the codex or anything specific about the thermal clips. It basically amounts to the same thing but I assumed that thermal clips were basically heat sinks that absorbed the heat and could be rapidly replaced instead of waiting for a weapon to cool down. I never imagined them to be actually providing material to fire. But like I said it really amounts to the same thing.
The rods from God were a replacement for putting nuclear weapons in orbit due to treaties. The whole idea was that if you put tungsten rods, not carbon, the size of a telephone pole into orbit, by the time they impact they basically can level a city without the fall out.
I am offended that Mass Effect Mondays isn't already a thing.
same.
I agree.
Agreed
Mass Driver Monday
Agreed you bosh'tet
Mass Effect Mondays! Yes please.
Hell yeah!
Double yes
I support this!
I also support mass effect mondays
I approve this message
"Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space" some sergeant on the Citadel.
One of the best lines in sifi.
I actually memorized that entire speech.
@@ADMNtek we all did
@@ADMNtek after all "No credit for partial answers"
@@MsTalia1 No credit for partial answers, maggot!
And that is why we don't "eyeball it"!
The accident referred to is Anatoli Bugorski. His head entered the path of a particle accelerator and proceeded to take a proton beam to the face, skull, and brain. The energy of it, 76GeV, is comparable to the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier at speed, focused down to a subatomic scale. The guy suffered facial injuries and was expected to die of radiation poisoning, but made a near-full recovery. He kept working at the same lab for years, finished his PhD, and is still alive today. The accident happened in 1978 when he was 36y/o. He's now 79.
Absolute unit of a man right there
How in the fuck does one's head "enter the path of a particle accelerator"? How much went wrong for that to even happen?
@@alertedcoyote7892 From what I remember hearing about it, the chamber housing the particle accelerator had a door with a warning light that was supposed to alert anyone entering if the system was on or if there was a problem, but the light wasn't working, so he thought that everything was turned off. I believe he bent down to pick something up, and just accidentally his head crossed into the beam.
76GeV is like 1e-9 Joules
@@Spar10Leonidas There was a couple other things that failed too. There was supposed to be a person watching the chamber through cctv but either the camera was not working or the monitor thought the accelerator was off. Also the door was suppose be locked if the accelerator was running, but that was hosed up too. Kyle Hill has a really good video on all the details.
The thermal clips makes sense in-universe, remove heat instantly by putting in a new heatsink, but they should have balanced it a little with the previous system.
Instead of having to reload no matter what, they should have let your weapon to cool down if you stop firing (slower than ME1 just to balance the gameplay with the clip system). So trigger happy players will need to use a lot of clips. It would have given players a new strategy in a fight, go in kill all the enemies fast, but need to use more thermal clips and possibly run out, or be slow and steady to minimalize clip reload, therefore extending the "ammunition," but allow more enemies to bunch up on you.
You should also be allowed to keep hold of it after ejecting it. It's kind of absurd that once it reaches capacity you just throw it away.
@@bobspace69 Theoretically you could be ejecting it at failure point- have it be some incredibly thermally conductive material that absorbs heat by [technobabble here], but once it hits the failure point it loses conductivity and becomes effectively useless.
The thing missing was the ability to pick up clips after they cool off. If they are just ejectable heat sinks, then you should be able to use them again after they cool.
Reloading early also returned unused rounds to the gun which was stupid
@@danspawn85 or building them so you could overload them and fire them like a thermal grenade - maybe exploding in your gun if you "cook" them too long, but rewarding players who risk it by scaling damage with heat levels.
Heavily restrict how many you can carry at once and you've got a whole new layer of resource management considerations and tactical options.
Do you cook off one of your heat sinks to quickly clear a room, or save it so you don't run out of them and get stuck with slow cooling later?
Is it worth the distraction of watching the heat indicator to maximize damage, or do you eject it mostly charged and sacrifice a bit of damage for more safety?
Turian soldier: "He was armed with this weapon sir!"
Turian Officer: "How primitive, your kind expects to win a war with this?"
Captured human: "A bullet is a bullet"
Turian Officer: "You have so much to learn, and when we conquer your Earth, I look forward to teaching you."
and yet the Turians had slightly more casualties than the humans during the first contact war.
@@ADMNtek IIRC, on the ground humans weren't too far behind the Turians, apart from shields. Kind of like in Halo, where the humans managed to actually figure out how to fight effectively on the ground. But in both, human space navies were woefully behind the alien ones, and that's where the losses came from.
@@PaulGuy Turians have been doing it a lot longer when the First contact war happened (2157)the Turians had been a council members for over 1200 years. while the humans had only discovered the mass effect tech on mars in 2148 so 9 years prior. and the Turians started to drop asteroids onto human cities.
@@PaulGuy Actually in the First contact war ,Thew Alliance navy kicked the Turians ass twice.
First of all, YES, Mass effect Mondays must become a thing.
Second, In Mass effect 1, snipers overheat fast, so what I did is mod my sniper with all the mods that give it more damage, and makes it overheat faster. Overheating for 110% or 400% wont make a difrence, the cooldown is the same, but I now kill everything in 1 shot, most tanky enemies included, and I have infinite range.
I love putting explosive rounds and damage boosters on my snipers, I feel like I’m carrying the mako’s main gun on my back.
That's basically what I did as well. If it's going to overheat in one shot regardless, might as well pump the damage.
I did this too, then gave my pistol seeking ammo and ALL the DOT power. Anything i couldn't one shot with the sniper (mostly because of cover) died of poisonous lead.
@@hyperrustynail same. Spectr sniper rifle is one of the best weapons. Though the Geth Pulse Rifle is almost as good if it wasn't for the warmup for full auto.
i used to mod my guns mostly for cryo damage as it made the guns cooldown faster think higher mods also had a slight firerate debuff but then I mostly just ran geth plusrifles with them getting the crazy fast fire along with high-level cryo rounds made it so I could just hold fire tell everything is dead and never overheat
I love that MediGel is technically illegal but it’s so damn useful that it gets a pass
They just slap some MediGel on it
It's just a clotting agent bio resin and healing salves. Similar to what Halo has for Biofoam.
Specifically: “The gel is a genetically-engineered bioplasm created by the Sirta Foundation, a medical technology megacorp based on Earth. Technically, medi-gel violates Council laws against genetic engineering, but so far, it has proved far too useful to ban.”
And that’s awesome! Like the bio foam injectors in Halo! Both are great examples of someone’s idea of futuristic medical technology
and that Cerberus created a MediGel they deemed a failure because it healed an Alien Race better than it did humans
@@puzzledotgamer5461 oh dang your right I forgot about that one that was a side quest in Mass Effect 3 right
10:30
An ME1 Lancer is obtainable in ME3 and it's one of the best weapons in the game. It never runs out of ammo, so it's the only weapon you need to equip, so your weight stays really low, which means your abilities recharge very fast.
8:40 The shields from Dune work in a similar way, mostly to give the author an excuse to have dartguns and melee weapons in a space setting.
Quite many sci-fi shows, movies use this idea, I think it kind of makes sense. Reminds me the non-Newtonian fluid
Well actually if you want a real world example of shield proyecting something our ozone layer works similarly too shields as it protects us fro. Other harmful radiation .
Notably, that's pretty much how weapon and armor technology really works. Swords and knives never stopped being good for killing, and if anything they were arguably at their least efficient back when people used plate armor. A wider variety of bladed weapons actually emerged as firearms made armor increasingly obsolete, since that also made people more vulnerable to stabbings and such. But then gun technology eventually became too advanced to justify melee combat.
Now, if we were to invent some kind of armor that's immune to gunfire as well as being cheap and practical enough to see widespread use, it wouldn't be particularly strange if we want back to using swords and axes, etc.
I'm doing something similar with a setting I'm planning: Shields are immune to kinetic weapons and resist energy weapons for a while, but there's a type of powered melee weapon (energy swords, basically) that go right through shields. So it's sort of a rock-paper-scissors kind of thing: Shields beat guns, swords beat shields, guns beat swords.
The Thermal Clip change in ME2 was an improvement in combat pacing, but it did introduce some silly plot holes. Like one of the loyalty missions you track down a 'lost expedition' that has been gone for decades and without any contact with the Systems Alliance, but somehow still have and use thermal clips and thermal clip guns which was a recent innovation. No mention is ever made how a group out of touch of anyone in the galaxy for decades has the latest weapon technology.
I liked ME 1s guns better o hated the clips
@@michaeldalton1874 I do, too, from both a lore and gameplay perspective. The ME1 cool down system forced players to learn a military tactic known as "trigger discipline." The player, much like machine gunners, must learn to fire in bursts.
@@michaelmartin4874 Then they added the particle beam in ME3 which required sustained fire to amplify damage. So all you had to do was maximize "ammo capacity" then ignore all cover and strategy.
@@davidmcgill1000 Even with max ammo, you could still fire only so long. Personally, I found the beam, even at max damage, to be fairly slow, and completely useless at long range.
The reasoning behind the guns, in universe, switching to thermal clips, is actually grounded in real life ballistics: Rate of Fire over all. The guns in ME1 had a cooldown mechanic. This meant they could stop working in combat because they had to cool down after firing off a few bursts. The Geth were the first to realise that if you had a removable heatsink attached that could be replaced on the fly (the thermal clip) then the cooldown period was shortened from several minutes to mere seconds.
Granted in ME2 the main motivation for this change WAS cover based shooters being popular.
True enough, but fix up a gun with Frictionless Materials in ME1 and you can pretty much just keep firing. I had a sniper rifle equipped that cooled faster than I could pull the trigger.
@@LabradorIndependent Keep in mind that gameplay mechanics for progression and levelling don't typically translate to canon. A max level Spectre Gun with max level parts is not representative of how guns in the ME1 universe actually performed. Especially since the Spectre X guns were end game weaponry specifically made to reward a player for hitting Max level.
To be fair to Mass Effect, in the ME3 Citadel DLC you can get an old style assault rifle which cools down instead of having the thermal clips. I also think Conrad Verner criticises thermal clips in ME3 saying they might as well have gone back to limited ammunition.
And that rifle is one of the best in the game simply because it's stats are good and it never runs out of ammo
Also, during the final battle. You can hear soldiers talking about not having enough clips/functioning supply lines to even shoot
I think they said in mass effect 3 in a conversation with Conrad, after the Geth/Reaper invasion mass effect 1 they changed to thermal clips to increase fire power instead of letting the gun cool down and that they had to remove the function that allowed the gun to cool down was removed to make room for the thermal clip system
Well at least that’s an in-game reason and not “they wanted to be Call Of Duty” I really hate when he makes off-hand comments like that.
@@chenstormstout9456 Except that it works like a Call of Duty system, to the point where reloading with shots left will add them to your pool, despite you dropping the whole thing on the ground. The cooldown system has its problems, sure, but going to clips took the game towards being another shooter game.
Also, the Citadel DLC explains and mocks the thermal clips in a conversation with Conrad Verner. Shepard explains that the clips let them fire faster, more powerful shots, and then quickly drop the heat. Conrad counters that, if there's no passive cooling, they've basically gone back to limited ammunition. And, in a strange point for Andromeda, you can craft a 'vintage heat sink' for ME2 and 3 style weapons.
@@Lyoko1309 ok well if the game itself mocks the thermal clip system, that feels like something he should’ve known. Or least put it in the fact bar below.
as far as I remember the thermal clip is reversed engineered Geth technology. personally, I hated the clip system especially as a sniper the basic sniper rifle in ME 2 has an ammo cap of 10 shots. funnily enough on PC, you could easily switch back to the old system by modding 1 file.
@@ADMNtek Hell, there is even an official weapon with that ME1 cooling tech which is added in by the Citadel DLC. It is in the archives, the M-7 Lancer.
Also iirc the conversation with Conrad happens on the Citadel (in that docking area turned refugee ward) but not because of the Citadel DLC.
Anatoli Bugorski, who stuck his head in the partical accelerator, did have some damage. Oddly enough half his face doesn't age while the other half does.
It didn't age because his face was paralyzed on that side due to the nerve damage.
sorry, half my face is tired
So, the key to immortality is getting shot by high-energy proton beams? Interesting.
So Hollow Points are designed to expand, and flower out, not necessarily fragment. Just that if the projectile is propelled too fast or meets enough resistance, it can over expand or the metal is broken off.
It isn't inherently it's purpose but it happens.
This does increase the wounding capabilities, but also reduces the projectiles penetration ability and thus allows it to dump more of its energy into the first thing it hits. Which is one of the big reasons why it is used as a self defense load since it is less likely to pass through the target.
Great video though. Didn't know that the mass effect weapons were mass accelerators.
Bonus: If you miss your target, but hit a wall (common in urban areas), the bullet may not go through. This can help prevent innocent bystanders from getting hurt by a stray shot.
@@Lyoko1309 this is why they are standard for law enforcement. Also the reason they are banned from military use under the Geneva conventions, they make it incredibly difficult for a field medic to treat the wound.
@@AbyssalMerc That second part is not really true. What makes a wound more 'difficult' to treat from a medic perspective (I did an enlistment as a combat medic in the US Army) is mostly the size of the wound cavity -location is also extremely important, but that goes without saying. Pistol rounds, even hollowpoints, can only really cause damage from whats called the permanent wound cavity, which is the actual path the bullet takes through the body as it displaces tissue. What a hollowpoint does is attempt to increase the size of the permanent wound cavity by causing the bullet to flatten on impact and 'push' through the body with a larger surface area. Effectively its meant to emulate a larger diameter/caliber bullet, so you can get more wounding with a smaller round that has higher magazine capacity and less recoil.
However, this pales in comparison to conventional rifle rounds like 5.56 or 5.45 which can create wounding from the temporary wound cavity in addition to the permanent wound cavity. This temporary wound cavity is like a 'shockwave' where the bullet dumps so much energy into the body that it actually exceeds the elasticity of tissue. As a result, rifle rounds can cause damage well outside the actual path the bullet takes through the body. Couple this with intermediate rifle rounds being designed to lose stability and tumble or fragment and it can lead to wounds where the entrance wound is small (same diameter as the projectile) but the exit wound is a massive gaping hole. THAT is what is hard to treat.
The banning of hollow point ammunition in warfare came at the end of the 19th century back when they were called 'dum-dum' bullets and weren't very popular or well understood. At the time it was thought they would cause unnecessarily cruel wounds. However, the rifle rounds used by major militaries today aren't hollowpoints and yet are capable of causing much more catastrophic wounds, so at the end of the day its a bit of a silly rule. Consider that a decade or two after the Hague conventions were signed with the hollowpoint rules in them we had a full on world war with chemical weapons where 70% of all casualties came from artillery and those wounds were often absolutely devastating.
Was about to say this but thank you... Why it seems like the majority of people. Those who know nothing about firearms or hail from a country where the government says citizens with guns is very bad, get information as if they're playing whisper down the lane....
The thermal clip implementation was definitely a step backwards in terms of weapon design with regards to the established lore. I adored the unique take from the first game
hey carl the reason why in mass effect 2 they switched to the thermal clips is explained in game a bit differently than the shield up grade. it was said that the geth analyzed various tactics and switched to thermal clips because it let them put out firepower at a more consistent rate. after the council races noticed the geth switch and that they were much more effective at maintaining steady output of firepower in combat.
basically bioware notice that people where spending too much time hiding in cover and wanted to speed thing up a bit. ME1 was fairly medium paced, but 2 and 3 where much faster paced and the reload actually made things go smoother. that being said my favorite weapons still ending up being the "old" rifle and the prothean particle rifle.
The thermal clips always bothered me. Particularly because they could have made it so they were optional. Gun overheated? Either wait or swap out the heatsink.
THIS! Exactly this.
It would have been beneficial to the feel of game play in so many ways.
Yeah. It should've been. "if your gun overheats, you'll have to wait a few seconds for it to cooldown, or you can spend a thermal clip to do it instantly" kinda like how you could hide in cover for a few seconds to heal or use Unity to spend Medi-gel to do it instantly if the situation needed it.
Just do the Alan Wake battery system. It charges on its own, or you can quick swap in a pinch
They did that in a Mass Effect X Halo Fusion Fanfic I read, the termal clip alloweed the soldier to fire for longee periods of time and with better muzzle velocity, but if you abused them to much the clips gets damaged and became useless, still you could fabricate another one with the Omni-Tool, seriously, that guy merged the Halo and Mass Effect side amazingly well.
I remember feeling exactly the same way about about the weapon systems when Mass Effect first came out. Actually I was blown away by pretty much all the world building in general. Everything from how space travel worked to the individual species, the history, even things like the galactic government. All the lore in the universe not only clearly had a lot of thought put into it but it actually made a lot of sense when you really thought about it. I remember actively spending a bunch of time binging codex entries and loving every second of it.
While I preferred the guns of Mass Effect never having to reload, I understand the change starting in Mass Effect 2. It caused me to use different weapons and created scarcity, cause otherwise in Mass Effect 1 I just ran around with a Sniper with explosive mods and just had to use lift/throw to get enemies out of cover and then explode them. It was fun but too easy.
Honestly, Mass Effect explains most of its sci-fi elements super well. Like, you could honestly believe things in that universe working in even a logical sense.
So true. One of the things I always thought was cool is that larger Humans ships are built with the decks running vertical similar to ships in the expanse because that allows them better compensate for the recoil of the giant main mass driver that runs almost the whole length of the ship.
@@ADMNtek I always liked Legion's explanation of why Geth installations don't have windows, because space is empty, so why would you ever wanna look at it?
@@vahlok1426 also they are structural weakness.
@@ADMNtek That too.
I also appreciate the codex stating the weapons' other big limit aside from waste heat: recoil. Every action, equal & opposite, &c. IIRC it's stated that ME fields are used to dampen the recoil force to something manageable for the shooters, but I imagine making it negligible would require even more energy and thus even more waste heat.
give us mass effect mondays! There's so much stuff in the codex of all the games it would take hours just to read it all. This is a way more fun and interesting medium to learn about the world building of mass effect
I am relatively certain that the rods from god are tungsten not carbon...
A couple reasons: carbon is flamable... reentry is hot. Also this is a kinetic energy weapon and a comparable lump of carbon is roughly 1/15 that of tungsten.
Tungsten was the material of choice for that theoretical project. Tungsten rods the size of telephone poles causing the equivalent damage of a nuclear explosion without the radiation.
As I recall, the tungsten was exactly why it was just a concept:
It was simply not cost effective / possible to get those heavy rods up there.
The mod system in the first game let you get the cooldown on the assault rifle so high that you could fire it basically indefinitely. The Specter variant of the weapon with two of the highest level cooldown attachments, and maybe cryo rounds was how to pull it off. Worked for the shotgun too because it fired slow enough that the cooldown out paced it.
Funniest thing I did in that game.
Fact fiend types its thumbnails perfectly
Finally some one that noticed!
Do Mass Effect Mondays. Please for the love of god. This franchise needs to be talked about more
The rods of god are a terrifying concept, a rod of tungsten coming down with enough force to break the sound barrier several times over.
Yes please, my love of sci-fi made my oldest friend recommended the world of mass effect that blew me away
Hollowpoint ammunition is NOT specifically designed to fragment inside the body to cause more damage, it is designed to mushroom upon impact to transfer more energy and to minimize over penetration
The damage of an object going at hyper velocities is based on the medium through which it travels. Any object shot at near light speed in an atmosphere will instantly turn into a plasma bolt.
I can say that I agree 100% with Karl about Mass Effect. Why get rid of infinite ammo? If you modded it right you didn't really have to worry about overheating.
I agree as well. I loved having a high damage/low rate of fire assault rifle that never overheated. Then like Karl said, I would have my sniper and shotgun overheat in one shot but do one hit kills.
The thermal clip isn’t ammo though. It’s specifically a disposable heat sink. The guns had a problem overheating so instead of having to wait or just be careful with how frequently you are firing the thermal clip system made it so you could just fire until the thermal clip was superheated slag and had to be ejected for a new one. Which is why when you “reload” the casing that pops out is glowing orange and steaming.
Small correction at 5:20 Karl; while its possible for a bullet of any kind to fragment in the body, hollow points are not designed to break apart in the body. Rather, the hollow point of the bullet allows it to expand on impact more than traditional bullets. This causes the bullet to slow down faster, delivering more of its energy to the target and prevents overpenetration. They are used by police and typically in civilian owned firearms used for self defense, as well as some hunters. Great job on the video, I really enjoyed it!
Loved tricking out the heavy pistol on the first as infiltrator.
Especially in new game plus, where you can get to the point of being able to fire infinitely without overheating with the right mods
@@bsti112590 haven't checked the newest but that sounds good.
Rods from God was to GREAT EFFECT in the anime, World's Finest Assassin... Which the first place I learned if it of places.
Call of Duty: Ghosts did it first and was the more devastating I believe... but, it was still badass in that anime as well.
It's actually kinda scary, because we have treaties against arming satellites with nuclear weapons and such, but they don't apply to big heavy rods.
heads up, that's not actually how hollow points and most other ammunition work. hollow points are meant to expand in the body, not come apart. by expanding it would increase the size of the permanent wound cavity.
There's a weapon that was introduced in ME3MP called the N7 Typhoon. It's a great, big minigun type thing. When you fire it, it ejects ammo casings.
The only possible explanation is that there's a dedicated micro-factory in the weapon that manufactures ammo casings just to eject them. Because it looks cooler.
one of the things I liked in Mass Effect Andromeda is you could switch your weapons to vintage heatsink removing the need for a clip.
If you think the concept behind rods from god are pretty cool, the gundam series "Iron Blooded Orphans" basically had that exact weapon. In universe it is called the Dáinsleif & using it is a war crime, so there's that.
I actually really liked the addition of thermal clips. Obviously the change was a bit jarring and the lore for weapons in ME1 was badass, but it didn't _feel_ any different from a "laser gun" in game, or like a Star Wars blaster, to just shoot infinitely without any input.
Besides, it's not a reload of "ammunition": since heat was now the big issue, weapons manufacturers figured out how to make a system to keep weapons cool by ejecting a heatsink instead of venting heat like a spaceship, and made a _universal_ "ammo" system that _every_ species and weapon now uses. There's no differences between anyone in what the guns eat, just a block of steel and heat sinks.
Honestly, I think that's just as cool if not cooler than "infinite" ammo.
10:32 ackshually.... In the DLC for ME3 where Anderson gives you his apartment, and you end up in the archives, there's a ME1 Lancer assault rifle lovingly maintained by an expert gunsmith and ends up in the Citadel Archives (basically a big museum of vaults) so you can have a ME1 assault rifle in ME3 complete with infinite ammo. Plus that's a sidearm with a built in silencer that you can use when you enter an area and keep your squad back where normally after you shoot one of them it alerts all of them and they start attacking, but with the silenced pistol (it does a LOT of damage for a pistol) it will only alert NPCs facing your target so if you drop that one fast enough too, they won't alert the rest of the enemies and you can turn the missions into stealth missions
The legitimately tried to make an argument in Mass Effect 3, I think, of why they changed it, and it still doesn't hold up. Especially when Shepard is being forced to support it by the devs with the weakest arguments.
"Why are we going back to reloading ammo?
"We aren't, we just fond a way to get over overheated guns."
"How is it different than reloading? It's literally called a clip? All you had to do was just wait a couple of seconds!"
"Defensive tech was recharging faster than the guns could cool down."
"Cool, but I'll just wait for it to cool down anyway."
"Actually you can't, they took out the cooling systems to make the thermal clips be able to be removable."
"Why?! Why can't they just compromise and have it be the best of both?"
"Deal with it, It's the future."
"The future is stupid!"
Fun fact, the guns of mass effects don't shoot projectiles fast enough to cause any damage at all. A sand grain is 0.06mm to 2.0mm and mass effects guns are stated to be supersonic which means they are not hyper sonic so they can not go over mach 5. Assuming the heaviest metal of osmium as a 2mm cube weighing 0.0274 grains and moving at a velocity of mach 4.9 or 5,514.10761 fps would equal 3 joules. A 22 caliber rifle shoots a projectile with 162 joules meaning unless it is not a simple equation, that I could kill everyone with a 22 rifle in mass effect.
Mass effect Mondays please. I need to watch more mass effect content while playing og Mass effect on the Xbox 360 original trilogy. Also fun fact that I just resintly learned from playing the second game. I talked to legion about sovereign and I shit you not. That name correction shocked me. Saren named a reaper after a French ranking for ruler. When sovereigns actual name is Nazara. Which means gloom and beauty. And no body ever calls Sovereign by his name, but by his rank saren save him. I will never forget that fact. So I'm wondering what every reaper in mass effect is actually called and real names are.
I like listening to you guys geek out about stuff you like, and you guys seem to love Mass Effect. So yeah, if you want to do Mass Effect Monday, I'm here for it.
I'm also already subbed to the Untitled Side Channel, if you want to do it there. It sounds fun.
10:38 Zaeed Massani kept his and used it until it broke due to the overheating compensation system crapping out, letting the gun fire too long and cooking itself. Edit: how my brain conjured up "overheating compensation system" and not "cooler" is beyond me.
My favorite gun in the series is the M-7 Lancer, a heat based assault rifle found in the Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC. Always preferred the heat sink weapons.
It was a nod to the original game and I love that they added it. It even sounds very similar to the og assault rifle sound.
ME1: Effectively unlimited ammo.
ME2: 'Okay, but what if we went back to very limited ammo so you can easily run out in the middle of a battle and your gun turns into a strangely shaped club?'
Glad to see I'm not the only one to find that change idiotic. If thermal clips were added on top of the current system, perhaps something that you had a limited supply of before you had to go back to pacing your shots to avoid overheating I could see that being an improvement but going from effectively unlimited ammo back to running out of ammo mid-fight being a very real concern always struck me as a terrible choice lore-wise.
I don’t know if it was ever confirmed but there was a ME3 leak that had an ammo concept that gave you several clips that could be reused but overheated quickly so you’d have to manage the heat of the weapons while still giving that fps feel. I was real bummed to not see it in the final game, seemed like a good hybrid between the ME1 and ME2 methods.
If you got the Citadel DLC, you could get a ME1 style assault rifle, was like the Prothean rifle, except when you hit the overheat limit, Shepard would hit the gun to eject the thermal clip, but because the gun doesnt use that system, they instead just burn themselves.
Aw yeah Mass Effect ! Of course Mass Effect videos would always be fun. And you have so much lore and things in general in that universe that you can plobally do videos for at least a year (probally more)
Thanks for always making fun and interesting videos, keep it up and cheers from Brazil :D
10:11 - Is not that the gun runs out of ammo. The ME2 codex explains that the downside of waiting for weapons to cooldown is that it made harder to fight in prolonged firefights, so the thermal clip stores heat like a heatsink. SO if a gun overheats just pop that off and you can keep blasting (codex states that generally the side that can fire more rounds is the one who ends up winning)
I'll put in another vote for MEMondays, AND be that guy to talk about Rods From God, because I love the concept.
Just imagine a projectile made of ceramic-coated tungsten carbide THE SIZE OF A UTILITY POLE being dropped at something like Mach 17, and the only accelerant used is the Earth's own gravity. Unfortunately, to be able to use the system to respond to threats quickly enough to be a viable option in wartime, there would need to be hundreds if not thousands of rod-dropping satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the planet, and the US government deemed the idea too expensive to implement, considering the cost of getting all the raw material into orbit to build the things.
The flaw in the design is that an object dropped from a satellite in orbit would stay in the same orbit as the satellite. The only way to make it "fall" would be to place retro thrusters in the rod to decelerate it to a point where it actually does in the direction of your target. At which point you might as well call it a rocket.
You guys are the reason why I know anything about Mass Effect.. Please do Mass Effect Mondays.
100% agree, Karl. The original means of fire of weapons in Mass Effect was far superior. I was dumbfounded when I saw the drastic changes to that and equipment customization from the first to second installment.
I'm designing a sci-fi setting and one of the things I wanted was ray-guns that never need to reload. The main reason being that as a kid I was under the impression that laser guns could just fire forever because they don't use bullets, and that was the reason I never saw laser weapons need reloading in cartoons and stuff. It made perfect sense to me at the time.
In 1986, the scifi pen and paper roleplaying game 2300AD posited that their squad assault weapon Rortmann LK-1 is a 'Plaser'.
It's a block of lots of little discs that are shaped into a cone when the trigger is pulled. The process superheated it to a plasma state (due to the near instantaneous cone shaping action) and the internal laser used just the 'weight' of the laser to project it along the beam. When it hits the target it splashes an area in plasma which ignites the air with 10m. Its like being able to fire 3 large grenades a second without recoil (the only noise is the breaking of the sound barrier and the snap sound of the air around the muzzle being burned away).
The other weapons in the setting are a few anti personal lasers (delivering 5mj per shot putting the target jnto shock), but 90% are ballistic weapons (caseless, cartridge, or gauss).
Side note: everyone has Particles going through their head all the time.
Well yea but not at light speed lol
Yes mass effect Mondays. Love all your videos dealing with mass effect lore and there is so much more to covered and yall are just the ones to do it
pretty sure superglue was actually issued to field-fix scopes, binoculars and other optics, however, after a few soldiers stuck their fingers together trying, it then wound up being issued to medics for closing wounds, oh and it was actually discovered entirely by accident... twice..
Mass Effect 1 is a great example of "details first" sci-fi.
Really professional quality! Got to the end and realized it was an independent channel.
Just to clarify a point on the design of bullets, a completely hard bullet that can't deform at all would still damage tissue around the point of impact and said bullet going faster will make that area of damage larger.
To over simplify it quite a bit a bullet passing through an object transfers it's force in a cone. If the bullet is going faster the cone will be larger and more destructive. If the bullet is able to deform the cone gets shorter but the end of the cone doesn't change in size. This means a hollow point or otherwise deforming bullet dumps more energy into the target and less of that cone is wasted going out the other side.
So a grain of sand going fast enough to pass through you would in fact not pass through harmlessly, it would blow a hole out of your back the size of a fist or worse depending on exactly how fast you are talking. The particle going through the guys head only did no damage because it's so small it literally passed through without touching much of anything inside him and therefore not being able to transfer much kinetic energy. It's a single piece of an atom we are talking about in that case.
Fucking hell, I need Mass Effect Mondays and I didn't realize it until now. Please do this Karl!
Hollow points shouldn't fragmentize. The idea is that it expands to slow down and dump as much kinetic energy into meat stuff
I love seeing like lore or context about the stuff usually weapons in games, like destiny, like the last word and thorn are so deep in lore and I think all exotics even armour has a lore tab, but ye especially scout rifles(the shape) and trace rifles make no sense, also worm gun is a thing
Great episode! The guns were my favorite part about mass effect because of how real to life the concept is 😊
fyi: most bullets are not designed to break apart; most are either softpoint, full metal jacket, or hollwpoint with fmj making up the majority. FMJs don't generally deform much on impact, softpoints do to an extent, an hollpwpoints are designed for 1.5× expansion....so 9mm turns into 13.5mm.
With that said, there ARE frangable bullets such as the famous R.I.P rounds, AND "penetrator" rounds designed for deeper wound channels.
But yea your standard fmj just goes in and hopefully on the way out it accelorates tissue and the bullet plus the additional tissue leaves a large exit hole that causes bleeding.
Kyle Hill has a great video on the guy who stuck his head in a particle accelerator & what happened to him afterwards. It's part of his Half-Life Histories series.
Actually the thermal clip dosent add ammo to the gun, they still work the same. the thermal clip just absorbs the heat and it can be quickly removed which removes the over heating problem.
Hollow point bullets were designed to "mushroom" out on impact so the bullet doesn't pass through the object so it expells all its energy quicker. The side effect is yes it breaks apart.
The weapon codex found in ME1 is why the change from 'no ammo needed' to 'heat sync required' in ME2, is why that change in ME2 just pissed me off as well. No ammo needed, to ammo required, is somehow an 'advance in technology'!? Plus there was a way to make an assault rifle in ME1 have a truly 'unlimited firing time' with the top tier heat reducing upgrades.
It's kind of sad that Mass Effect 1 had the most realistic future guns ever only for them to completely abandon it afterwards. Sure Mass Relays aren't real, but Railguns certainly are and at least in concept a Mass Effect style weapon using Railgun tech is terrifyingly plausible.
Fun face commercially available mass accelerators are available today. There just kinda week due to current capacitor tec but can still hit with the force for a 22. Bullet
My favorite part of the mass effet codex is if you read it, it will highlight that something is impossible with current tech, you will witness such a thing happening, and then more codex entry will explain what happened. My favorite is an early codex mention about starship combat in which it says that "directed energy weapon" (lasers) are used, but only as a point defense agaisnt enemy syarfigther because, while they are pretty much impossible to dodge (its focused light so it moves at light speed) and bypass kinetic shield (because its not kinetic), its very energy intensive and has a very short effective range. Since ship to ship combat is very long range, ships main gun are scaled up version od the infantry weapons you use in game (mass accelerated metal slugs propelled by ME field)
In come sovereign, seemlingly shooting laser out of its tentacles at very effective ship to ship range... how?
ME2 explains that reaper mains guns are also mass accelerators. They just replace the slugs with streams of molten metal
Hollow point ammo is more about I don't want to shoot the person behind you, the "do as much damage as possible" is just a byproduct
Is there a canon explanation to how a miniscule piece of metal traveling at near lightspeed doesnt immediately burn up or get massively slowed down in any kind of atmosphere? Because that sounds like a huge issue for this kind of firearm system.
Not Mass Effect specific but theres plenty of real world materiels that theoretically could survive. Stuff like tantalum carbide and hafnium carbide can survive 4,000 degrees Celsius which is 1,500-2,000 degrees from the suns surface.
The slowdown is much easier to explain, the surface area of the "bullets" is so small and the speeds so high that atmospheric slow down is negligible.
It can be a good thing, too. If your bullets disintegrate after a certain distance, you don't have to worry as much about missed shots hitting unintended targets.
The codex mentions that the rounds are "suspended in a mass effect field" presumably that makes it so it's not in direct contact with the air long enough for friction to affect it before it inpacts it's target
I would also like to add on to the throwaway point about hollow point rounds they are more deadly to the person being hit but less dangerous to anyone around or behind the target as it has reduced penetration
Mass Effect Monday sounds good to me.
The decision to switch to thermal clips is even mocked upon in ME3 by Conrad Werner in the random chat activations after Priority Citadel if i remember correctly.
Mass Effect 2 should have hybridized the firearm system. Meaning you can fire the gun to a certain point and either wait for it to cool down before firing so as to not use a thermL clip, or continue firing, breaking the thermal clip which needs to be ejected and reloaded, and using up a clip.
That way it’s up to the player to decide how they want to manage their ammo inventory.
Mass Effect Mondays! I will watch every single one of those, I will like each video.
They actually, brought back the original gun from Mass effect 1 in Mass effect 3 you can get it in the citadel dlc, with the old ammo, it was litterally in the archives
"precisely timed electromagnetic attraction", I hear gauss rifle. It's nice to know that we already have those.
There is one assault rifle in ME3 that doesn't use thermal clips but it was only found in the Citadel DLC and it's basically the best gun in the game.
Fun fact:
Due to the fact that projectiles will go through their target exiting out the other side is the exact reason why it is legal for us police forces to use hollow point rounds so that the round will shatter inside the target more likely killing the target but not harming anyone behind the target...
Whereas on the other hand it goes against the Geneva convention to use hollow point rounds during warfare, because the goal of war isn't necessarily to kill your target but to demoralize them enough to surrender, which can be achieved through numerous ways without actually killing the target...
Therefore you would rather the soldier survive the war but go home with an injury demoralizing him and the group he was with in the process...
There's no war in history that has been won by one military literally completely wiping out the other.
Don't take my word for that you may have to look it up I could be wrong there may be one or two out they're somewhere that could be found. But they would be the exception to the rule.
Unless guns are completely removed from the playing field all together, it is necessary for police forces in America to use hollow points to prevent the deaths of innocent.
The guns from Mass Effect are basically The Gauss Rifle. Loved that shit in Crysis 1 Multiplayer.
Zaeed kept his old gun Jessie. He kept trying to update it, and fix her, but she eventually just failed.
I'm so down for Mass Effect Mondays. It's such a creative and deep universe.
To be honest, I think they should have modified the thermal clip system to be if you reload you get to shoot the gun sooner, but if you wait a while the gun would cool down and you could all the shots in the clip back, it would have been cool. It would give you the option to conserve ammo at the cost of having to sit in cover, or swap to weapons that are overheated, and if you ran out of clips you'd either have to play that way or run out in the open to get another to reload if you didn't want to wait.
so the reason that they switched to the thermal clip system is so they could do more damage with out overheating instantly ( in lore the avenger AR does more damage than a lancer it equivalent) this is tech that they adapted from the geth who had far supirer weapons to the rest of council space in lore anyways. People tend to forget the difference in lore and in gameplay for example I'm pretty sure that if you fired your gun the way we did in ME1 then you'd be replacing a lot of weapons and the removal of the cooling system also made the guns a lot cheaper and allowed more space for interesting designs like the salareun and asari weapons
I just started playing Mass Effect for the first time so this is exciting to learn about :)
Do a deep dive on the codex entries in the game. Such great world building. You won't regret it.
I believe there are war related laws to bullets not shattering in real life. I think they try to use shockwaves starting the bullet tumbling on impact to do increased damage.
Tungsten rods dropped from orbit.
I'd like the old ammo system back.
I've played alot of mass effect but never really read the codex or anything specific about the thermal clips. It basically amounts to the same thing but I assumed that thermal clips were basically heat sinks that absorbed the heat and could be rapidly replaced instead of waiting for a weapon to cool down. I never imagined them to be actually providing material to fire. But like I said it really amounts to the same thing.
The accelerator was meant to be turns off and safety precautions were malfunctioning
fully loving the idea of Mass Effect Mondays
The thermal clip would be okay if it was an IF your gun overheated then it’s like “manage your thermal level or suffer standing around reloading”
The thermal clip system would have been fine if it was a heat over ride they added to the origonal game style
You should TOTALLY do Mass Effect Mondays!
The rods from God were a replacement for putting nuclear weapons in orbit due to treaties. The whole idea was that if you put tungsten rods, not carbon, the size of a telephone pole into orbit, by the time they impact they basically can level a city without the fall out.
So the clips aren’t actually ammunition but they are like radiators. The clips are what now disperse the heat more efficiently
I *NEED* Mass Effect Mondays