The Little Things 2.0

Its been a long time since I had that happen, but here's how
masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Han_Olar

I just noticed the talking soda machine in ME2's Citadel for the first time.

Losers drink Paragade... winners drink Tupari.

If you want, I'm currently on a project to record all those minor conversations that happen during the game on hub worlds, plus all outcomes of not using Paragon/Renegade options durting some certain conversations. Here is the playlist if you're interested.

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkR5v2ZVWP91ke9c7Bpfw5xhVjirTib_a

My two favorite ones are those:

Was looking around Zaaed things and noticed a cigarette. Huh, who would've know...

The so called child prodigy Kasumi rescued is actually a hack fraud, ripping off tacky Asari "hotel" art.

I found that after the citadel coup, Liara scene can be triggered if two of these three died (Ashley/Kaidan/Garrus). If you recruit the VS, Liara will say something how she's glad nobody get hurt.

(... I'm still amazed how little Garrus existence matter in this game)

Asari clone: "Then the cold ones began killing the flesh that would tend to the next cycle."

Given the many times I've played ME1 you'd think I would have paid attention to the dialogue and that the cold ones were the geth.

Huh, no.  Maybe next time I do an MET run.  Just starting on ME2 so it might be a while.

I noticed that if you import your safe and play ME2 with Genesis DLC then the game will start with the comic that is way less interactive and the only major decision is choosing between Anderson and Udina. This results in the lack of question about this event from Miranda during her little evaluation of Shepard.

I always forget to remove the Genesis DLC when doing a trilogy run.  Since I always have the s/s romance mods installed for each game, Genesis sort of breaks when it gets to asking who I romanced.  Which is fine since the choices don't apply.

I had a nasty discussion today, debating the really weird statement that no FTL capable fighters existed before Cerberus created them. Now I can see that I could have ended it really quick with the counterexample of Legion's shuttle + some nuance I'll cover below... but I didn't and things turned unpleasant, with both sides accusing the other of utter ignorance, hectic Codex research and me breaking my principles and quoting the Wiki without knowing if it's correct just to provide an argument a common man will read as conclusive. Exotic statements unbacked by sources and involving lots of lore stretching are always hardest to strictly disprove.

Re-reading the discussion later, I realized that my final argument (other than that mentioned before) was in fact invalid, probably just too mathematically complex for my opponent to understand and respond (it involved asymptotic analysis). But one detail made my jaw drop after inspecting it closer.

To the point: there is a Codex paragraph that always looked ill-conceived to me, let me quote:
(Primary Codex/Ships and Vehicles/FTL Drive; bold mine). Those who had physics in high school know how exponential functions look like, for those who don't know: exponential functions take a finite value in 0 and then grow by a specified factor on each interval:



It's very quick for technical standards. In fact, "cryptographic security" is defined for practical purposes as ability to force an attacker to spend amounts of energy that grow exponentially with the so-called "security parameter", which can be for example password length. By analogy, moving heavy ships with mass effect fields is really fucking expensive.

Why I believed that this paragraph was ill-conceived: defining this power requirements growth as exponential looks like a big overkill, for example simple and comparatively slow cubical growth would prohibit using FTL on heavier ships as well without looking this radical.

But let's now see how the power requirement to mass ratio looks like:



(Scale is accidental, just look at the shape.) This function has a minimum on the zero-to-infinity range, its first derivative is monotonous on that range and it tends to infinity with its argument tending to zero or infinity. Translation:

– a mass exists that is optimal for mass effect fields use, that is moving a ship of this mass consumes less energy compared to its mass than if it was lighter or heavier,
– FTL is prohibitively expensive for both very light and very heavy ships.