That's a nice Catch-22, and I would probably consider using it if I was going with the bleak horror story kind of campaign. For the flavor in this one, I'm trying to take the nice Space Opera sauce from ME and drizzle it over the current EP world. If you are doing your thing though, maybe you could really play up how chancy it is to be relying on the Prometheans at all, given that EXV infection could happen at any time. In such a game, I'd expect the Jovians/bioconservatives (of all people) to be the ones with the best chance at ME integration. In the same way, Firewall could be the antagonists walking a thin line between their hyper-advanced technology and a fate worse than death. Hell, Jovians might even value Citadel support against the other transhuman factions. Jovians: "We're fighting the borg and people who are too stupid to stop making more borg." Citadel: "We hate AIs and gene tampering, but we do approve of military Juntas." Turain Counsilor: "Indeed we do. But where are these *airquotes* /TITANS/ *airquotes* you are talking about?" Jovians: "They're in hiding or something." Turain Counsilor: "Ah yes... *airquotes* /hiding/." Citadel: "We cannot support you against your fellows without hard evidence of your 'TITANS' posing a threat to the greater galaxy." Jovians: "What the fuck? They destroyed our homeworld in like a year, and they're still down there somewhere like dread fucking Cthulhu, what more evidence do you need?" Citadel: "How do we know that you didn't just do that to yourselves? We can't help a species like that, go ask the Quarians if you don't believe us. Go get one of these 'TITANS' and then we'll believe you." Jovians: *cursing* Great game if you like bioconservatives, but I wanted to explore more of what it would be like if Transhumanity were an Outside Context Problem for the ME world. EDIT: typos and grammar.

Campaign update: Game 0 (included here for context): Exoplant transhuman colony world Shanxi, attacked by Turian warships, after a group of Titan University researchers accidentally activated the Mass Effect Relay orbiting the planet. Activating the Relay (cold-starting it) caused severe damage to the underfunded colony's power-infrastructure, and caused an outage on the Pandora Gate that serviced the colony. Firewall operatives dispatched after word leaks out about possible alien attack. Operatives arrive to find Turian warships conducting orbital bombardment of anything with a noticeable thermal signature. After coming through the Gate, the power station nearby gets hammered from orbit. Operatives resolve to get to space port. After they get there (fiction): [collapse] When we had last left off, the PC's were engrossed in trying to put together an effective resistance against the newly discovered aliens that were bombarding the planet from orbit. After a quick investigation of available data, the PC's realized that several dozen specialist personnel were not only on hand, but were also suggesting interpretations of data that had previously not been integrated into one place. However briefly, you all became the de facto leaders of the resistance, if only because you seemed to have gathered all of the specialists in one place. Looking at what you had available to you, your team finds itself too many options to pick from. The experts suggest plans, secondary plans, and all of the options quickly compiled down to two numbers: expected casualties, and expected chance of success. The numbers are disheartening, to say the least. Two plans stand above the rest. The first would incur tremendous casualties, but had a chance of bringing the ship down intact: use the Broom to burn holes in their hull, while flinging debris and nuclear warheads at them to prevent escape and force a landing. High casualties expected in all aspects of infrastructure as well as likely extermination in all facilities involved in flinging stuff into orbit. The second plan would have negligible casualties, but almost no chance of recovering any remnants of the aliens or their vessels: use the Broom to blind their IR sensors while Antimatter warheads are launched in their blind spots. ---- Thanks in part to the strongly vocal supporters from the Shanxi Research Institute, it is decided that you will conduct the first plan, and attempt to force a landing from the orbiting ship. The operating rationale gives a better long term survival prospect if we can get find out more about our enemies, even if it means short-term losses. Volunteers are taken, only the able-bodied, with a backup not more than a week old. In the hours before the plan is to take effect, volunteer and civilian alike take a few minutes to record a little message to themselves after they die, should their case not be recovered from the sea. "I told Zimy that she could go to Titan U. yesterday, don't give her crap about it. I don't have the time for the details but we had a long talk..." "The baby was born three days ago, in the middle of the power outage..." "Results of experiment C were inconclusive, rerun with 5% higher concentration of salts..." "Victor lost to me at poker last night, owes me a new coat, and the deed to his roller..." Even though you have been effectively immortal for decades, it's hard to stare certain death in the face. Some folks flinch away, but that doesn't necessarily protect them from what's coming. Saturation bombardment expected for 85% of available targets, remaining 15% will not be safe, but casualties can't be higher than one third, or else we won't be able to buy the required 18 minutes to ground the craft. All of you send off a recording or small object with the outbound courier. He will run for the Mimas Gate when it briefly powers back on during the blitz. Projections estimate he has a 50:50 shot at making it through the gate to warn the rest of transhumanity. If he fails, we will only get a 2 Megabyte Quantum Farcaster transmission. One out of every three people on this planet will be dead in an hour, and another third of that will die from secondary effects like exposure due to lack of power during the expected 128 hours it will take for rescue teams to arrive from Mimas. "Collateral damage" is what the projections called it, but many are desperately trying not to notice that immortality just excuses atrocity. It may not be permanent per se, but it is no less terrifying. ---- Zero hour: You are in the middle of an industrial sized fur-coat processing plant, currently darkened and smelling strongly of sea-salt and mildew. You and your compatriots are standing in the facility shipping office, a small windowless room next to a fragrant vat of unprocessed fur-coats soaking in a nutrient bath that reeks of yeast. This room has been volunteered by "White-Rabbit Furcoat Co." as a makeshift "Security Coalition" command center. Stations 1 through 14 have reported in. Plan preparations are nearly complete, with only minor delays from an ice storm at Station 9, at Biblysbeck. It got hit first, but the storm is projected to hit some of the more important Stations within the hour. Since our plan requires at least 30 minutes of clear airspace for the lasers to work, our timetable needs to be pushed up 15 minutes. With the jamming still running, all communications are using the deep-sea ELF (Extremely Low Frequency, 3-30Hz) relays. Ancient technology from the Cold-war era on Earth, it consists of kilometer-long antennas broadcasting long slow signals into the hidden depths of the seas, like some kind of artificial whalesong. Primitive and slow, but reliable. It is a favorite of the aquaculturalists that dwell deep beneath the icy crust of Shanxi. From the command room, you can see one such farmer operating at the controls for the local ELF antenna. She is an unattractive woman of advanced years, with permanently cold-reddened cheeks, and large calloused hands. You all stand around watching the large digital clock up on the display counting down to mission start. The room goes silent as the leftmost digit rolls around to 0. "BREAK-BREAK. Callsign White-Rabbit Furcoat for Security Coalition Command, standby for synchronization. WAIT WAIT WAIT 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 SYNC. Plan Alpha go in 200 seconds. CLEAR." the old woman speaks into her mic. The computer display suddenly starts showing a growing list of side traffic as the Stations begin their own preparations. You all are safely ensconced in the communications hub, and not one of the high-risk primary targets. On the big board, there are 14 yellow dots forming a round ring around the planet. In thirty minutes only one of those dots will still be alive. Thirty seconds, and 90% of stations have called home to confirm they heard the message. Each little dot goes a happy green, one after the other. Ten seconds, and the last two stations are green. Five seconds, and the head of security for SRI is chewing on his chapped lips while his cup of coffee steams unnoticed in his hand. Zero. Nothing happens in the room. Eyes are glued to the screens anyway. No signal could reach your command center in anything less than ten seconds anyway with only the ELF equipment. Five seconds later, the lights in the factory behind you flicker back to life briefly. The stop-gap generators at the Broom have come online. They burn micrograms of antimatter to make power *now*. Expensive, and likely a glowing beacon to the orbiting ship. Ten seconds later, and the ULF chatter starts to hit your antenna. Stations 1-4 are active. Current status scrolls slowly next to their green dots on the main screen. Power is being restored across the board simultaneously, so as to confuse the ship. Thirty seconds later, and the machinery in the plant behind you begins roaring back to life again. Station 1's Broom generators must be running hot. 45 seconds later, and the last of the remote Stations has a green status light up. Station 1 should begin firing the Broom soon. 60 seconds later, and the machinery suddenly halts, and the fluorescent bulbs dim to a sad yellow. 90 seconds later, and all teams report green. Broom is operative and missile launch in progress. --- At this point, the logs will show, the plan hit its first major problem. While the plans had worked just as the projections had expected, when the Broom started boring through the wings of the alien craft, something unexpected happened. The alien ship that had been orbiting the equator at an altitude of 300 km, suddenly dropped off the radar. Technicians at several bases assumed sensor destruction, and brought up alternate sensors to the trajectory. Only to find that the place where the ship had been was quite simply empty, save for some small clouds of vaporized metals. Missiles already launched met only other missiles, as they exploded uselessly overhead. A rallying cry came suddenly over the radio, with the jamming stopped, Stations were broadcasting overwhelming success. The board was green, success without a single casualty. Power was diverted from the Broom to the Mimas Gate. Mission accomplished. --- After 120 seconds, one of lights on the board went yellow. A Station from the far side of the planet had failed to check-in. The old woman on the radio said "Sécurité, sécurité, sécurité. This is White-Rabbit Furcoat for Security Coalition Command, Station 14 is yellow on my board. Please confirm. OVER." "White-Rabbit Furcoat, COPY. This is Station 3, I have a yellow for Station 14. Last transmission 180 seconds ago. OVER." One by one, the other stations began confirming. "MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY, Station 13 under assault! Power Station hit! ..." chimed the radio before breaking into rough static. That got everyone's attention. The model showed Station 13 was closest to Station 14, and they were both on the opposite side of the planet from where the ship had been. After several long minutes, the telescopes and radar acquired a ship on path from Station 13 to 12, dropping kinetic missiles. The astro-nav staff program point out that it was utterly impossible to have a ship move from where it had last been seen to the other side of the planet, it would have had to travel faster than the speed of light. Yet it was obviously the same ship. Visuals streamed in from orbit, as helpful computers announced that radio contact with observation satellites had been reestablished. On main screen, a composite image from an observational array showed a bright blue pulsation forming a lozenge shape several hundred meters long. The composite edits some of the blue shell away, showing a long shape made out of inelegant rectangles and spartan aesthetics. Unfamiliar symbols are painted on the side of a hull painted contrasting shades of gray and also gray. Some portions of the hull glow a dim red that IR images paint as radiating a great deal of heat. It's engines shed a vigorous blue-white light onto the tail sections of two stubby wings. Overall, the design looks vaguely like how a 1980's Volvo would look if allowed to be a rocket. While you watch, it shows a spike on the IR camera followed by a blue blur. High-speed visuals show it to be a spinning metal bar about 3 meters long, moving very fast. A camera follows its path as it reenters the thick atmosphere of Shanxi, to disappear in a glowing envelope of plasma. Seconds later, Station 12, a space port on the far side of the planet belches one last missile skyward before the incoming kinetic missile from the ship strikes the port and reduces it to a could of white debris. Sensors follow the chemical rocket as it slowly reappears from the white debris cloud, like a tiny flare fired out of a fog bank. It breaches the atmosphere, and steams straight towards the much larger alien craft. Apparently attempting evasive maneuvers, the alien ship pulls downward slowly, trying to duck beneath the incoming missile. The missile changes course as it drops its tail and ignites its final stage, and visibly jerks forward under the bright white torch of oxidizer and propellant. The alien craft fails to duck sufficiently, and is struck from above by the missile. A bright flash deadens the cameras temporarily, showing only a while blob in the center of the field of stars, until it slowly resolves back to show the alien ship returning to its original course. High-speed image analysis shows up on screen, and reduces everything down to a slow motion clip of the missile slamming energetically into the blue field surrounding the ship, and crumple slowly like a crushed can before exploding as the containment fails on the fuel tanks. It was stopped dead by the blue field, as if it had hit a brick wall. The field itself briefly shook as bright-white shockwaves radiated from the point of impact. --- Lacking the coordination and cohesion required by the original assault plans, the ship's defensive screen proved more than a match for the string of individual missiles launched at it by the ground stations on the other side of the planet. Station 11 went dark, and the big board noted detonation of its fusion plant. Six-hundred personnel were expected to be dead or irradiated. The survivors had little option but to run from the fallout into the depths of the frozen wastes. Other stations followed suite, firing their jury-rigged missiles at the ship, only be see the missiles explode uselessly against he blue halo around the ship. For its part, the ship moved almost leisurely from station to station, dipping down lazily to brush against the upper edges of the atmosphere to tickle its belly with bright white lightning. As the stations were crushed one after another from orbit, they set off screaming emergency broadcasts, crying blindly towards the heavens. From the indifferent blackness of space, came an unexpected response. "Break-Break. White-Rabbit Furcoat this is Bigface Tower, we have a ship inbound. ETA 2 minutes. Please direct firing stations to clear airspace around bogie. Repeat: inbound ship is friendly. Over." Our sensor systems didn't pick up anything resembling a ship, or a ship launch, but several seconds later a flight path was transmitted from Bigface. Apparently they had fired a ship off in a strange path to hide it from the alien ship. A visual came up on satellite: a barely visible dot, black against a the darker black of the starscape. Zooming in produced a sad picture indeed: an unpowered stack of cargo containers connected together like gigantic brown legos. No engines, no weapons, no shields, not even moving particularly fast. On the side of the containers, a dimly yellow logo read "Tsao-Dao Shipping". The old woman on the communication deck scoffed. Similar confidence must have been inspired in the remaining stations, as they began to fire with renewed vigor upon the ship. Their missiles no more effective than before, they were met again by intense bombardment from the alien ship. --- Quietly ignored by friend and foe alike, the stack of shipping containers from Bigface slid quietly down from above the alien ship. Closing to within spitting distance before it's radar signature distinguished it as anything other than space debris. Travelling slowly already towards the alien ship, the cluster of cargo containers fired off the first layer of canisters forward with a sudden burst of pressurized gas. The first layer of containers rocketed forward suddenly, slamming again into the blue barrier. As everything else before them, they stopped with a visible crunch and crumpled up as they rebounded slightly from the barriers. At the same time, a dense cloud seemed to form around them, spreading like grey smoke. From your bird's eye view on the satellite, you could see the the four great canisters had spilt out a wide obscuring disc of chaff and smoke directly between the alien ship and the remaining cluster of shipping canisters. The ship had just been blinded. Just as that realization started to sink in, more jets of pressurized gas spurted out from the canister cluster. Already slowed to almost a halt from firing off their tip layer, the canisters slowly drifted into the cloud of chaff, and disgorged several smaller round objects. The computers chimed up and labeled them as Reaper morphs, and that they were dragging some kind of cables behind them. With a sudden start, the Reapers dove down to the surface of the enemy ship, and began to haul their cables to encircle the ship. Small turrets popped up from the surface of the alien ship and began peppering the nimble Reapers with fire. One Reaper went down immediately as it was mowed down on a wing, but the others kept encircling the ship. Several seconds later, the Reapers blasted off the alien ship at random, as the cables twisted and knotted together, forming an effective netting. The cables writhed as maneuvering jets blasted the long narrow column of canisters apart gently. What had been a stack of 2x2 containers became four long chains of canisters, all with nearly invisible black cables running down to the alien ship. With another blast of maneuvering jets, the columns separated down into individual canisters, each arrayed not to hit the others. They formed a rough circle around the ship, 24 in all, resting evenly spread outside of the blue barriers. "5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Touchoff!" blared the radio from Bigface. Like the sudden birth of a constellation of stars, the canisters blew their tails off with bright yellow-white gouts of fire. They jerked quickly forward, drawing the lines behind them taunt around the alien ship, and streaked towards the planet's surface. They dragged the thrashing alien ship down with behind them. [/collapse] Game 1: Warehouse/command center the PC's were in get hit by "earthquake", building collapses. They wake up in a resleeving facility, to find themselves face to face with a cryptic Exsurgent Bush Robot. Security footage from a nearby security camera shows them to have been subjected to horrific medical experimentation by the Bush-Robot which killed two copies of each of them already. Oddly, it lets them leave with only an injection of something unpleasant. Their ectos inform them they have new mail, a message from their boss: "Command has instituted FIRST CONTACT SCENARIO 2. Your mission objectives are as follows: 1) Ensure that Transhuman technology does not fall into alien hands. 2) Record all available data, with durant backups if possible. 3) Conduct basic reconaissence. 4) Begin Translator Bootstrap Protocol. First Contact deemed to be hostile, presume aliens organized military force for purposes unknown." They figure out that they are on a TITAN ship of some sort, and try to make their way to the nearest habitable planet. As they leave, they wonder why a TITAN ship has a well kept docking facility, full of human-usable ships. Blasting off shows them quickly that this TITAN "ship" is absolutely huge, some 5000km long by their estimates, and it is orbiting in the corona of a Blue-White star. When they land, (on Tuchanka, the Krogan homeworld), it happens to be adjacent to an active battlefield. Using the cover of darkness they try to pick off a Krogan for bootstraping the translators. They are nearly killed by some of the native fauna, before they realize that almost everything on the planet is potentially dangerous. After stealthing around for a while, they find a lone (juvenile) Krogan courier, and the biggest and beefiest of the PC's jump him. Trying to knock him unconscious without killing him proves very difficult for a species with a berserker reflex, and they wind up pumping him so full of various toxins (which I am nice enough to allow to work on the other species in my game) that he eventually falls prone long enough that they can tie him up. Result of game: PC's capture a Krogan so they can learn its language. Next time: The PC's realize their ship is very conspicuous.

I'll admit I put that together for storytelling purposes, with only an educated guess to back it. I don't know, when I look at the math it looks like any software that could handle satellite tracking could have figured out the speed of the alien ship without too much difficulty (lets assume a measurement error of +/- 5ms). Shanxi radius is ~6km, and adding MEO brings that up to ~36000km orbital radius; c = 2* PI*r; (other side of planet) c/2 = PI*r; c/2 = 113097km 113097km/ speed of light = 377.3ms Since FTL is defined in ME as being easily more than twice the speed of light, then it would only take 113097km/2c = 188.6ms Diff := 377.3 - 188.6 = 188.7 ms .: Diff >> 5ms Since the difference is much greater than our assumed measurement error (+/- 5ms), then it is plausible that they could have figured out the FTL thing using only this example. EDIT: Yes, I do realize its a gigantic ship, but it is meant as a TITAN toy (the real purpose of which I'll share later, but it rhymes with Tyson yarn). Also, the measurements on http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Aralakh show that it's only bigger than the first planet Durak.

Indeed: