Since the story is so long, I should probably give my overall impressions so far, rather than waiting until I've caught up like I usually do.

I like the concept, and I generally enjoy reading it. I will admit that I found it a bit disappointing that it wasn't an alternative first contact story though. I love those.

Also, I found it less engaging once it switched from mostly original stuff to rehashing canon. Every story and its cousin does that, and it makes it much harder to make the story interesting.

(Give me something like Psi Effect any day, even without the X-COM crossover.)

Seeing how you're using it, I now get the impression that you intended the "terahertz locator" to be based on electromagnetic radiation rather than sound (since there's no air in space), despite initially saying that it was interfering with quarian ears.

Unfortunately, that doesn't help things. The terahertz portion of the electromagnetic spectrum consists of visible and infrared light. We already have terahertz scanners in real life. They're called LIDAR and they're used tons of different applications including mapping rainforests from the air and helping self-driving cars to see.

"supposedly wiped out the Protheans millions of years ago"

50,000 years ago

"You see, after the 9/11 attacks back in 2001, the CIA made great used of enhanced interrogation techniques to find the perpetrator, Osama Bin Laden. They worked pretty well, I've heard."

No, actually. Torture, as such techniques are classified as internationally, is only effective as a way to reliably get people to tell you what you want to hear, whether or not it's the truth... such as to give you a pretense to start a war your corporate donors wanted you to start so they could make more money on contracts for military hardware.

(Don't believe me? Search up a paper from 2014 named "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" and then look at the charts and tables of who's donating to whom on OpenSecrets dot org. If the paper is too dense, Vox walks through it in an article named "Study: Politicians listen to rich people, not you")

In fact, there was at least one time when they had Bin Laden cornered only months after 9/11, but the higher-ups wouldn't give them what they needed, so he escaped. Look up the Battle of Tora Bora. As a result, he escaped and it took nearly a decade to get him after he fled into Pakistan.

Torture is, in fact, illegal under both U.S. and international law and, in 2005, the CIA was found to have destroyed their tapes of their enhanced interrogation it would be "devastating to the CIA" and "the heat from destroying is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain.". The reason nobody was ever tried for it was because Barack Obama's administration decided not to prosecute them. (Something about looking foward, not backward)

To quote Wikipedia, "In July 2014, the European Court of Human Rights formally ruled that "enhanced interrogation" is torture, and ordered Poland to pay restitution to men tortured at a CIA black site there."

Around the same time, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report which found, among other things, that The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.

The "Panetta Review" (the CIA's own secret internal review) described techniques like waterboarding as "providing little intelligence of any value"... this is the people who *did* it saying it was wasted effort.

Also, something else to make you pause: The first occurrence of the term "enhanced interrogation" was in German in 1937 in a Nazi memo and involved many of the same techniques, though not waterboarding specifically.

In fact, since 2009, the U.S. has been ignoring their obligations under international treaties to try those involved for war crimes and essentially relying on the fact that they're such a powerful country that they could ruin the economy of any country that tries to hold them accountable.

I could go on but I think that's a good start.

"Terahertz Locator"

Sorry to say, but there's an upper limit to how fast air can vibrate and, from what I've read, it's around 3.4GHz. The higher the frequency, the faster a sound wave will die off. The same source said that, at 10MHz, it'll only travel about 0.1 millimeters. That's why animals like elephants use infrasound to communicate over long distances, not ultrasound.

Any attempt to force the frequency higher will just burn off the added energy as heat.

"What got my personal attention was the large garden world in the system. According to initial scans, it was about three times the size of Earth, had large oceans, and similar plant life."

Ugh. You were doing so well and now you give no indication that you understand how difficult it is to get a planet three times the size of Earth without a comparable increase in the gravity. That's the sort of thing you need to justify.

TL;DR: Math says make it smaller (maybe 2 times as big as Earth) and less dense, and explicitly mention that it has gravity comparable to Earth. If FFnet truncates this, I'll PM you the full version.

Let's assume the best case scenario, and that you're talking about the total surface area, because you said it had large oceans (which means you can't be referring to total land area). The formula for surface area of a sphere is A 4πr and Earth is close enough to a sphere for this kind of back-of-the-envelope math.

Reversing that equation and plugging in 510,072,000 km from Wikipedia gives us a radius of 6371.0 km, which matches the mean radius from Wikipedia, verifying that the math works.

Punching that into a Python prompt, that's (510072000 / 4 / )

Triple that surface area and you get 11034.9771 km radius, or about 173.2% the radius of Earth.

Now, since this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation, let's cheat a little and take the biggest shortcut I know. We don't need any fancy math to calculate gravity... we just need to know roughly how much *more* gravity your proposed planet has than Earth.

The volume of a sphere is 4/3 πr, so let's check that against the given facts for Earth to make sure the math is correct:

(4/3.0) * * (6371.0**3) 1083206916845.7535 which matches the 1.083211012 km on Wikipedia, so the math checks out.

For your planet, (4/3.0) * * (11034.9771**3) 5628632811541.959 or 5.628631012 km. That's 5.2 times the volume.

OK, for this to be even remotely viable, we need to reduce the density of the planet to avoid crushing people. I don't have time to read through theoretical papers to figure out how un-dense rocky planets can get but, if we take Mars as an example, being the least dense rocky planet in our solar system, then you're going from a mean density of 5.514 g/cm on Earth to a mean density of 3.9335 g/cm, or 71% as dense as Earth.

First, we need to match up our units... the simplest way is to just toss both numbers into a unit converter. I used the Linux "units" program, but Google Calculator or Wolfram Alpha should also do.

5.514 g/cm3 5.514e12 kg/km3
3.9335 g/cm3 3.9335e12 kg/km3

Again, let's check our math against Wikipedia's information about Earth. 1083206916845.7535 * 5.514e12 5.972802939487485e24. Not quite a match for the 5.972371024 kg mass from Wikipedia, but close enough for our purposes, so let's try Mars density on your planet.

5628632811541.959 * 3.9335e12 2.2140227164200298e25

...and, to put that 25 at the end into perspective, lets divide that by Earth's mass to get it as a percentage:

3.7068403877560554

...which means that, in the best case scenario I'm aware of, with your planet being only 71% as dense as Earth, it's still going to have 370.7% as much mass (that's 3.707 times as much mass).

Finally, we calculate the approximate surface gravity. The equation for that, according to Wikipedia, is m / r, where m is mass as a multiple of Earth's, and r is radius as a multiple of Earth's, giving you gravity as a multiple of Earth's.

3.707 / (1.732**2) ~1.2357

Assuming I didn't mess up the calculations somewhere, that means that, in the best possible scenario, with a density like that of Mars, you're still dealing with a surface gravity of 1.23g, so a 100-pound person would still weigh 123 pounds on this planet of yours. I'll admit I expected it to be significantly higher, but that's still not pleasant, and, while I don't have any academic papers handy on the effects of hypergravity environments, I imagine it would lower your life expectancy by putting strain on your heart similar to obesity, and you might need to wear special clothing to prevent blood pooling in your feet if you spend an extended period of time there.

My advice would be to make it more like twice the size of Earth and explicitly have them be excited that scans are showing it to be less dense than Earth, producing comparable surface gravity.

halo 3 hell yea

Drack! My man! Nice surprise there :)

So that took a turn I didn't expect, though I probably should have. Never underestimate a Batarian, especially Balak.

Things are moving :)

Large scale tactical deployment of nuclear weapons, oof. Makes perfect sense though, given the scale of things.

nice

Took a while for me to get around to reading this! I would blame the various issues I've had irl, but honestly I've just not been much in the mood for reading lately /

I rather enjoyed this. Particularly the scenes where Lydia 'saved' EDI, and the ending leading up to the execution of ol' TIM stood out as highlights, they were very well written.

Looking forward to the continuation!

The stories title decided to read it's here at this time huh? of course it will, everything was going to right now, too good, I knew something was going to happen but didn't think it'll be Cerberus, I hope Lydia is okay

Would you have the "Cycle of Extinction" end in this 50k years? I mean with the 2 protagonists technically are introducing new tech that the Reapers didn't guide or got based on of them...

if I didn't know better I would think that Dr. Michael and Dr. Ford would end up in a relationship, and not a professional one, lol I'm getting spoiled by fanfics

well if that doesn't happen then Lydia, with a body, could, I mean he hits a thing with robot chicks right? sigh, who am I kidding this is probably just me talking, if you didn't include that tid bit I wouldn't even have thought about that possibility, I mean look at the other games with robot chicks or AI, either from people or actual AI, with bodies! they always look nice, mostly, lol anyways what the hell am I saying, overall I don't really care about romance, I just want to see how you change the plot and what new things would pop up, I do wonder how having those two in this time period affects the Reapers, isn't there like 2-3 years until they actually show up?

If his nightmares and whatnot problems, him bring hunted by the past, becomes a plot point in the future it'll be more cliche than a protagonist getting a power up in a time of need... not exactly complaining, mind you

From what I got Dan's sister was pretty smart, I mean she got to Harvard, so maybe she got recruited for a top secret project? maybe to find out what happened to Dan? or maybe this is all a conspiracy and she found out about something or had a lot of classified info and she got "taken" cared of? (go away morbid thoughts) anyways I hope it isn't something actually bad,

Damn I was partially right... I really hope Dan doesn't go rogue or whatever he seems nice, though it's common in story lines like this,

Anyways this chapter was... nice, quite emotional, Especially Sean's Part ..

So I'm guessing they'll have the tour and catch up on information in their respective fields? maybe bad a little and check out the others too? to see how much they advanced?

I just read both of your stories. While the first one the odd ones out really did need some work it has a good flow to the story. I think a major rewrite could have fixed it I actually started to like the plot behind the story. Now the second story Murphy's law is a great story I can tell that your writing style has improved immensely. This last chapter with the illusive man the chapter was a little short I was expecting the illusive man to put up a bigger fight at the end maybe a surprise mech assault or something. as a plot line goes it is a little long but with a good pace to it. Maybe a recap chapter to help people to refresh their memory it has been 94 chapters after all. Keep up the great story thank you