weaponless vessels in MEA2...?

You know if we could field a warship size ME cannon I feel like it would mess the Kett up something fierce. Their ships seem to rely on relatively slow plasma weapons. In open space the kett would be pulverized before they could get into range.

You make a good point about the Council. They definitely would have objected to armed vessels being built without their control. The Benefactor could have decided to not build military vessels to avoid Council oversight. 

That is true but I imagine the Council would still be worried if a privately funded project suddenly started building vast amounts of military ships. 

Naturally writers have full control over their imaginary political entities. Council can forbid AI to use ship weaponry, toilet paper and pineapples on pizza, if writers say so. It's just my personal suspension of disbelief.

Well, I hope the Turians get that sorted quickly. It takes a bit of time to get the supply chain running, refine resources in large scales, build shipyards and eventually warships. So what I would do as human pathfinder after the end of the story is help out the Turian pathfinder to get Turian colonies up running, because we're going to need those.

If the Kett Empire, or whatever it is that the Kett have, comes to the conclusion that all the species from the Milky Way are valuable enough to not only dispatch a small exploration force, as the one of the Archon, but to seriously move in, the Initiative and the Angara are pretty much screwed... they'll simply blockade all the planets and the Nexus, wait with their invasion until we're ripe for the picking, and there isn't anything we could possibly do about it. Eladaan might become a problem from the Kett's point of view, because the Krogan are pretty self-reliant and not likely to ever back down, thus from a Kett point of view I'd simply isolate it, focus on first the Nexus, the the other colonies and Eladaan last and when I come to the conclusion that it isn't worth the trouble, bomb it to oblivion and the see whether there is anything of interest in the scraps.

Thus, since it has been rough for the Turians, but they are still our best bet to get a solid navy up and running, I'd assist the Turians and see to it that they got whatever they need and push the establishment of heavy industry. Otherwise the Kett might catch us with our pants down.

As a historic example I looked up the Santa María, the ship captained by Cristopher Columbus as he crossed the Atlantic. Turns out that she was in fact armed. (Doesn't say anything about the other two vessels, but I doubt those were armed as well, given that they were even smaller than the Santa María)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Mar%C3%ADa_(ship)

Nah, I am sniggering already (because those are my exact thoughts when I heard that we get weaponless vehicles...hell, most of the hand-weapons we have seem to lack punch in this game as well (not even the Black Widow is a one shot kill, if the target has barriers))

Sorry, but if those damned criminals (talking about Sloan Kelly and company) can make their own guns, why can't we strap say the upper part of a Remnant robot (the largest one available that is not an Architect!) to the Nomad? - I thought ME-Technology was easily adaptable? Or do we have to wait for the Quarians to show up to tell us how stupid we are not to arm our ships and vehicles?)

Same goes for the ship...why not at least turn some of those Remnant weapons we research into turrets (if we can't mount a main-gun) and stick them onto the Tempest? (this way we can at least shoot down missiles, defend the ship from attack (while on the ground - I don't think anybody likes going up against ship-mounted guns while on foot!) etc. etc.

greetings LAX
ps: I'd love to exchange the Nomad for a MAKO (even with the wonky driving physics etc.!)

Basically this. Even if you don't want to put any sort of main gun on the Tempest (even a PAW), there's simply no reason why it couldn't have torpedoes and GARDIAN lasers. I really think it should have always had GARDIAN lasers, canonically. They're for defense, after all.

Regardless of if the Initiative should have had more armaments, they definitely need more now. It would be silly to rely on the Remnant fleet, even if they still use it.

They weren't armed to the teeth on the very first mission... you have a pistol and later on you find an assault rifle which has been brought in a crate or so...

Soon thereafter "gunfire" was established as the most efficient form of communication with the Kett and therefore, to let the diplomatic effort take its course, you started packing more communication devices.

This isn't serious response obviously. Of course he couldn't answer "because we built the plot around it".

The entire point of the game/expedition (explained many times in many ways throughout Andromeda) is that these are COLONISTS, not soldiers. They didn't come to fight a war, they came to settle uninhabited planets.

Upon meeting sentient life the were to use diplomacy, not warfare.

Its explained on Hab 7, again when you establish your first outpost (referred to later in the game) and the doubts about forming an active militia. Brought full circle at the last mission in the speech.

They didn't roll in to andromeda with warships on PURPOSE.

That's arguing semantics. The Pathfinder team is well armed, armoured and fully trained in combat. They're lead by an ex-N7 and have at least one biotic who can tear apart armed vehicles. It's not a team that's ill prepared for the worst during the exploration into alien territory.

As I said it makes no sense the ground team is ready for possible conflict but something as valuable to the Initiative as their Arks or even the Nexus itself are completely unprepared to deal with any worst case scenario. They're just sitting ducks to any hostile forces.

Except you are missing the fact that the Exiles becoming a militia and freeing Kadara port makes no real sense after they were curb stomped by the Krogan. It was discussed ad nauseum and, again, it happens solely because the writers wanted it so. But hey, for both THEM and the Krogan taking the violence approach worked uh? I wonder what would have happened if we all did that from the start!

The fact that the angara would distrust us pretty much is pointless, I will happily take their distrust and be able to defend myself over being able to hug them and sing kumbaya with them and so would any fucking sane individual. Oh...they angara distrust us? Oh...well whatever since we can defend ourselves they can be as distrustful as they like in time...if not, well, orbital bombardment is always a good way to make upitty little bastards calm down.

Speaking of sane individual, again this is Bioware shattering our suspense of disbelief. There are HUNDREDS OF YEARS OLD Asari who signed up for the initiative knowing they would be sitting fucking ducks....yep, including a legendary commando. Did they think that it was a good idea? Well....Bioware thought so....so why the fuck not. Bioware wanted X to happen maybe because they felt they wanted to be unique in some sort (because you know....everyone uses soldiers in videogames, we got to be unique snowflakes!!!!) so decided to fuck common sense and be lazy with writing hoping people would be too dumb to question it.

So yes you are right, the objective was not to send a badass space soldier somewhere dangerous, no, it was apparently to send completely unprepared people to be sitting ducks somewhere dangerous knowing full well how dangerous it all can be because our own place is dangerous as fuck!!

Omg...GENIUS!!!!

Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum.