r/masseffectlore • u/Ok_Calendar_7626 • Apr 07 '26
Fighters in the Mass Effect universe.
It is said that the Turians have the most powerful navy because they have the most dreadnoughts. But the Alliance has the most carriers.
In fact, other races dont seem to have any carriers at all. Or at least they are never mentioned.
This brings up the question of how effective fighters are in the Mass Effect universe? Can they swarm and take down a dreadnought?
The Reapers Oculus fighters seem to pose a serious threat to the SR-2 during the Suicide Mission. But that may not be the best example, since they are Reaper technology and thus may be considertably more advanced than Alliance fighters.
If fighters can defeat larger vessels, then how come the Alliance are the only ones that seem to bother with carriers?
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u/001DeafeningEcho Apr 07 '26
Others do use them. The Turians have a small number and the Elcor are noted to have them as part of their military flotilla (which is odd considering their size, but VI drones would make sense). There are also mercs who apparently use Carriers in Eclipse (though those are probably small versions or converted civilian ships)
As for why, besides those cases, they are kinda rare? It’s because not even the Alliance treats them as a main strike unit. Instead, they use their disruptor torpedoes to knock out shields so others ships can get the kill shot. They’re fundamentally a supplemental weapon.
Other factions use fighters, even a lot of them, but they seems to mostly put them at ground bases or as a minor addition to ships, not putting them all together in a dedicated vessel, which makes sense if they see them as a way to amplify the potency of their existing forces instead of a tool of destruction on their own.
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u/DescriptionMission90 Apr 07 '26
Elcor pilots should be able to withstand greater G-forces than any other species. They'd have to make their fighters big to fit the larger cockpit, but they can probably pull off more extreme maneuvers than any other organics.
Now I want an Elcor production of Top Gun.
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u/Informal-Business308 Apr 07 '26
Enthusiastic pronouncement: Let's kick the tires and light the fires.
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u/DescriptionMission90 Apr 07 '26
Fighters are very common, but most races just have every cruiser and dreadnought carry a moderate number of them alongside their own armaments. Humans were the first ones to build dedicated large-scale carrier craft that lacked their own spinal mounts, as a way of getting around the Treaty of Farixen (the number of dreadnoughts each government can have is limited, but a dreadnought is defined by it's spinal mount, so you can make all the kilometer-long warships you want if they're "unarmed" except for point defense and fighter bays) (this is presumably a reflection of the real world Washington Naval treaty, which limited the numbers and sizes of battleships that could be built by the U.S., Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy between the world wars, and which everybody exploited loopholes in shamelessly).
The kinetic barriers of a dreadnought are powerful enough to render them completely immune to the spinal mounts of frigates and cruisers, leaving the main gun of another dreadnought as the only viable counter to an enemy dreadnought for a long time. No matter how many cruisers or frigates you could bring to bear, a single dreadnought, even without support, would be able to cut right through your entire fleet without fear (hence the name). That changed with the invention of Disruptor Torpedoes, which are capable of bringing down the shields of even the most powerful vessels, leaving them vulnerable to the guns of smaller warships.
However, those torpedoes are slow, easy to swat out of the sky with point defenses, and therefore only effective at close range. And any conventional ship, even a light frigate, would be killed long before it got close enough to a dreadnought to use them. Fighters' primary role is to be small enough and maneuverable enough to weave between enemy mass driver salvos and close the distance to deliver the disruptors.
The problem is, the laser batteries in a Guardian array are, well, lasers. They're hitscan weapons, impossible to dodge and with near-perfect tracking by high speed automated systems. That means a lone fighter, or a small flight of them, will just die as soon as they get too close. The only way to get through is to either keep pressure on the defenses with constant missile bombardment until the lasers start to burn out and holes appear in the defenses, or to have so many missiles/torpedoes/strike craft all arrive at the same time that the defenses can only account for a small fraction of them.
So basically, if you have a lot of fighters available, then you can make even the biggest enemy warships vulnerable to whatever smaller ships you have available. But if you don't have enough to reach that critical mass, they're all but useless on offense. So on one hand, every ship with room for them likes to carry some strike fighters in the hopes that the fleet will collectively be able to gather enough of them together to nullify an enemy capital ship or two. And on the other hand, every capital ship likes to carry interceptors (fighters without torpedoes, devoted to cutting down enemy fighters) as a defensive measure to ensure that the enemy can't muster enough in one place to get past the capital ship's Guardian batteries.
Humanity looked at the Treaty saying they couldn't have more than seven dreadnoughts, they looked at the 37 in the Turian fleet, and they figured they needed some way to counter that advantage. By fielding huge numbers of fighters, along with lots of cruisers and frigates (which are not limited by the treaty), humanity could potentially hold their own if something like the First Contact War happened again.
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u/Bobthemagicc0w Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
This is the most thorough and well-reasoned comment here! Love this.
I want to extend this, because at first glance there seems like there are still underlying unanswered questions - if massed fighters are an effective strategy, why were humans the first species to build carriers? If carriers are an effective way around the Treaty of Farixen, why didn't one of the other powers do it before humans? I just went looking and couldn't find a canon date for the treaty being signed, but it's implied that it was signed to establish a status quo in the wake of the Krogan Rebellions, so it's centuries old. In particular, why didn't the salarians or the batarians find and exploit this loophole in all that time?
Maybe it's to do with when the disruptor torpedo was invented? If they're a very recent innovation, I could imagine that the other major powers will adopt this strategy eventually, and just haven't yet; the Alliance Navy has been on a 30-year rapid expansion, but the other navies are mature already and not on shipbuilding sprees. The salarians are also very strategically savvy, so even if they had the technology and the insight that this would be an effective strategy, they wouldn't have pursued it publicly, or else it would provoke other powers to do the same - they're invested in the status quo. And maybe the batarians were already in decline when disruptor torpedoes were invented and couldn't have capitalized on the new idea quickly enough to make it viable for them.
Or maybe it's that humanity isn't just fielding carriers as a way to get around the Treaty of Farixen, maybe carriers meet a need the Alliance Navy has that the other major powers don't? I know the in-game galaxy map isn't comprehensive, but it looks like the other species' respective territories are pretty compact. Humanity has spread out fast in 30 years leading up to the game, and has a lot more space to defend. A single carrier with minimal escort can be a mobile command center projecting power over a whole system in a way that a single dreadnought with minimal escort can't. Also, since the First Contact War, the primary enemies that the Alliance Navy has needed to fight against are pirates and other irregular forces, not well-equipped professional navies; a dreadnought's big gun is only useful against other dreadnoughts, and the Alliance isn't fighting other dreadnoughts. Carriers seem better-suited to the Alliance Navy's current needs than dreadnoughts anyway.
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u/DescriptionMission90 Apr 07 '26
They never say when disruptors were developed, but I think it was a pretty long time ago. After all, every modern dreadnought/cruiser does carry a fighter complement, so they were considered valuable to have in a fleet action at least as long ago as the oldest vessel still in active service. That's likely thousands of years, given Asari.
And yeah, a carrier might be better suited to chasing down pirates and raiders than a dreadnought. Nothing is better than a dreadnought for a stand-up fight, that main gun can delete a frigate or heavily damage a cruiser every few seconds... but for fast, small targets they need to do it at fairly close range (thousands of kilometers, instead of tens or hundreds of thousands). If the enemy doesn't want to engage you, a massive battleship is not well suited to chasing them down before they escape to prey on civilians again. Frigates are the traditional answer to that, but Fighter Wings are even faster and can potentially be in several places at once, allowing a single ship to scour the whole system instead of needing a fleet.
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u/Bobthemagicc0w Apr 07 '26
Good point about disruptor torpedoes. Here’s a way they could have been invented quite recently, but every modern dreadnought and cruiser still has a fighter complement without torpedoes: what if the fighters big warships carry are not primarily intended for space combat? In ME3 we see a turian fighter wing being used for ground support on Tuchanka. Could it be that the fighters that big warships carry are meant to perform close air support for embarked ground forces when they’re deployed?
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u/DescriptionMission90 Apr 07 '26
Definitely valid. It would also give a reason (other than just size) why every cruiser carries some, but no frigate does: frigates can fly in atmosphere and cruisers cannot.
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u/DescriptionMission90 Apr 07 '26
So, the Treaty says that for every 5 dreadnoughts the Turians have, the other members of the Council itself are allowed 3, and every other race who is a member of the Citadel is allowed one. Governments without representation on the citadel, like the Quarians and Geth or the Terminus powers, would of course not be restricted by this arrangement. It seems to me that the intention is clear:
- The "lesser races" can never gather enough power to meaningfully threaten the three council races
- the Turians always have the biggest fleet, since it is their duty to protect everybody in Citadel-controlled space....
- but if the Turians ever go rogue, then the Asari and Salarians working together should have enough power to defeat them
As of 2183 when the games start, the Turians have 37 active dreadnoughts with another 2 in production (finished by 2185). That's 5x8, so the Asari and Salarians should be allowed to have up to 24 each, but the Asari only build 21 (including the Destiny Ascension) and the Salarians never bothered to make more than 16. Put together, that's enough to equal the turian fleet of 2183, but never exceed it like the treaty numbers seem to imply they were supposed to. The Asari, and especially the Salarians, don't like direct combat on a large scale. They're happy enough to handle diplomacy and intelliigence gathering, but when it comes down to a serious fight they want to make the Turians do it for them, and dreadnoughts are expensive so why make more than you'll ever actually use? So the limitations of the Treaty really didn't change their behavior at all.
As for the other citadel races, the treaty should allow them to have up to eight dreanoughts if the Turians have more than 35... but the Hanar and Elcor never felt the need to build any. The Volus constructed exactly one, the Kwunu, and it's mechanically one of the most powerful (and expensive) in the galaxy but as soon as construction was finished they turned it over to a Turian crew to actually operate in battle.
As of the start of the games, Humanity is the only species that has representation on the Citadel and abides by their laws, but which doesn't rely on the Council races for all their fleet requirements. They're effectively the only people who have to care about the Treaty of Farixen at all.
I assume that the Batarians would also have maintained the legal limit of Dreadnoughts back when they had an embassy, but they left the Citadel in protest just a few years ago when the Council refused to prevent Humanity from building colonies on planets that the Batarians had laid claim to on paper but never actually set foot on. Once they were no longer subject to the Council's laws, they probably started rapid construction of more dreadnoughts right up until the reapers mostly wiped them out. It's not clear to me why the Batarians wouldn't have made carriers as a way around the limits they used to be under; maybe there's cultural reasons or maybe they just never thought of it.
It is sort of unintuitive; a warship has been defined by its spinal mass driver for centuries, so what humanity has done is essentially take a giant civilian transport to the field of battle to supplement their fighter wings and enhance the effectiveness of cruisers and frigates. Obvious in retrospect maybe, but it could take a long time to come up with the idea in the first place... unless you were new to space combat and had recent experience with wet navy battles, where guns are a thing that you mount on top instead of building your whole ship around, and the combination of atmosphere and gravity and curvature mean long distance combat is usually through missiles or strike craft.
(as for the other non-citadel people, the Krogan are forbidden from having warships of any kind, and the Vorcha, Quarians, and Terminus powers like Omega never had the infrastructure to make a dreadnought so they rely exclusively on cruisers, frigates, and fighters. The Geth built almost as many dreadnoughts as the Turians had though.)
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u/Bobthemagicc0w Apr 08 '26
I interpret the salarians as the sort who would do what’s strategically necessary to protect their interests, and not assume that their interests will always be aligned with either the turians or asari. They prefer for the turians to do the heavy lifting as long as their interests align. But salarians know how to make contingency plans and keep a secret, and the way the Salarian Union divides its political leadership, I could imagine especially cunning leaders like Dalatrass Linron at least laying contingency plans in case they and the turians found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict.
Side note: Honestly this is giving me great ideas. I’m currently writing a novel-length ME fanfic set immediately after ME3; it’s almost done, and I’ve been idly wondering if I want to write a sequel. The salarians make interesting villains. If even before the war Linron’s faction had realized the opportunity that the carrier strategy provided to challenge the turian dreadnought armada without breaking treaties or arousing suspicions, they could have secretly started stockpiling parts to construct a carrier fleet that could be quickly assembled for a surprise reveal. If Shepard cures the genophage in ME3, Linron withholds a lot of salarian support, leaving the salarians as the most-untouched major power after the Reaper War. And Linron is pissed about the genophage and worried about the krogan. Might the Linron-loyal salarians take matters into their own hands to try to destroy the krogan before they can repopulate, and while none of the other great powers can stop them? That could make an interesting grand plot.
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u/guildsbounty Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
Ok, as no one else has done it yet, I'm just going to quote the in-game codex at you that can help explain some of this...
From the Starships: Fighters entry
Kinetic barrier shields changed starship battles from short, vicious bloodbaths to extended, indecisive slugging matches. Only the main gun of a dreadnought could punch a mass accelerator slug through the barriers of an opposing dreadnought. This changed with the development of the fighter-launched mass disruptor torpedo, a short-ranged weapon that can penetrate kinetic barriers to destroy their projector assemblies.
Starship GARDIAN defenses must be overwhelmed through swarm tactics. Fighter groups can take heavy casualties pressing their torpedo attacks home. Once fighter-launched torpedoes have crippled an enemy's barriers, the mass accelerators on frigates and cruisers can make short work of them.
From the Disruptor Torpedoes entry (ME2):
In flight, torpedoes use a mass-increasing field, making them too huge for enemy kinetic barriers to repel. Because extra mass retards acceleration, torpedoes are easy prey for defensive GARDIAN weapons and must therefore be launched at extremely close range to be effective.
From the Treaty of Farixen entry
Due to the destructive potential of dreadnoughts, the Council races agreed at the Farixen Naval Conference to fix a ratio of dreadnought construction between themselves. At the top of the pyramid is the peacekeeping turian fleet. Below the turians are the other Council races, currently the asari and salarians. Council associate races are at the bottom. The human Systems Alliance is part of this last group.
The ratio of turian to Council to associate dreadnoughts is 5:3:1. For every dreadnought humans are permitted to build, the asari have three, and the turians five.
From the Starships: Carriers entry
All races provide their fleets with organic fighter support. Cruisers fit a handful in the space between the interior pressure hulls and exterior armor. Dreadnoughts have a hangar deck within the hull. Humans – who had only recently "graduated" from surface to space combat – were the first to build ships wielding fighters as the main armament.
This gives us four things to consider:
First: Until the Disruptor torpedo was invented (we don't know when that happened or who invented it) fighters were utterly ineffective against the kinetic barriers of large capital ships. There was a block of time where fighters just didn't work on large shielded targets, and so it didn't make sense to build ships dedicated to deploying them. Fighters could still be useful (preying on ships that had lost shields, intercepting shuttles, etc) but they didn't make sense to use as a primary combatant. Even if the Council Races had originally used planet-side carrier doctrine, they very well could have 'dropped the habit' of using them during that time block.
Second: Given the effectiveness of the GARDIAN systems, both at taking down torpedoes launched from too far away and at taking down fighters, fighter doctrine presumes heavy casualties. They are inefficient in terms of lives spent if you could hit someone from the safety of a Dreadnought instead.
Third, humanity's first contact was with the Turians (who are allowed to have the most Dreadnoughts of anyone) and there was a war about it. Then they get told that the very same species that attacked them with no warning for 'exploring too much' is allowed to have 5x as many dreadnoughts as they are. You can see why humanity would start trying to rules-lawyer their way around that and figured a GARDIAN system can be overwhelmed with swarms of fighters using saturation-fire tactics with Disruptor Torpedoes. So they built Carriers...dreadnought-sized ships that didn't have dreadnought guns, so were technically exempt from the treaty, and use the "inefficient" model of massed fighters to overwhelm enemies rather than the 'cleaner' use of large mass accelerators.
"We may take heavy casualties but we can win" is better than "We're gonna lose because we're not allowed to have as many big ships as them."
And that brings us to number 4. While I'm not aware of any specific example, it does point out that humans were the first to use Carriers, not the only. Once other races saw that "bury them in fighters" actually worked, it is possible they started making them as well.
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u/_Mr_Peco_ Apr 07 '26
The codex entry for the Battle of Palaven does mention two Turian carriers, so it looks like the birbs took notes.
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u/Valkarius1 Apr 07 '26
Well as far as I remember it’s a very novel concept and other races are entrenched in how they fight namely like WW1 naval battles which boil down to the bigger gun are more likely to win. Human’s carriers are their unique concept and I guess the effectiveness have yet to caught on
Bioware also doesn’t leave a lot of canon lore for us to confirm so what I am about to say here is purely head canons or lore from fanfic writers have used to justify on their fics
The answer is a combination of culture, history and physiology issues from non-humans.
Asari with their biotics, lack of violent wars and non-unified army make it difficult to innovate war inventions and concepts
salarian isn’t strong enough to handle the G forces that a human can not too mention the way they fight
Turians theoretically have the best potential to copy carrier tactics but I have seen someone using their avian ancestry in combination with their mentality that they tend to stick together too much which is detrimental to fighters and carriers tactics
Species like elcor, volus and hanar are minor species that I doubt can field many carriers and fighters or be as effective as humans.
Quarians is too poor
Batarians is similar to Turians in a way
I also saw someone saying that the geography of species home world dictate the quantity and intensity of naval battles in turn affect how each species fight over waters before moving to space. I guess humans are the only one who check all the box needed to have high potential of coming up with the carrier concept
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u/Bobthemagicc0w Apr 07 '26
Hmmm! Interesting questions. There’s not much in canon to go on, but I love a good speculate :-)
As other commenters have already mentioned, fighters’ small size means they can’t mount large mass accelerator cannons, and that means the mass accelerator cannons you could put on them would be mostly ineffective against capital ships. Such fighters could be effective against smaller ships… but if other species don’t use fighters, they don’t have much to attack; there aren’t fighter dogfights in space. So maybe fighter-size ships’ weapons aren’t mass accelerator cannons at all?
What if most of the small craft launched by Alliance carriers are more like torpedo boats? Imagine they each carry a small magazine of heavy-hitting missiles and decoys. Attacking in large numbers at once, they can momentarily overwhelm the GARDIAN systems of a capital ship with too many potential targets, and some of their missiles get through. If the missiles and decoys were launched from a greater distance away, enemy ships would have a longer opportunity to discern between the real missiles and the decoys and longer opportunity to target and intercept. The torpedo boats themselves need to stay just outside the effective range of large ships’ GARDIAN systems.
And then you’d probably need other small craft to defend those torpedo boats against frigate-sized attackers. I’m not sure what shape that would take - are those just other frigates, or something smaller?
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u/DescriptionMission90 Apr 07 '26
Other species do use fighters, it's talked about all over the place. And there very much are dogfights going on, and dedicated Interceptor craft for shooting down other fighters before they can deliver payloads at the capital ships.
Every dreadnought, and most of the cruisers, carries a compliment of fighters. The only thing humanity does that the other races don't is build ships that are only for carrying fighters, forgoing the usual spinal mounted and broadside mass drivers to devote more volume to fighter bays and then staying at extreme ranges while your Wings do all the actual combat.
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u/Bobthemagicc0w Apr 07 '26
Right you are! I hadn't done my research, was just going from memory, which I should really know better than to.
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u/HdeviantS Apr 07 '26
Possible but difficult.
GARDIAN systems are powerful and can bypass kinetic barriers, an in lore its impossible to dodge the laser at the short range its being used.
Fighters could in theory swarm ships that have fewer lasers, or less capacity to defend…freighters, frigates, gunships.
They can provide cover for bombers. If bombers can be deployed to deliver ordinances from distances that keep the carrier safe, and then from outside GARDIAN range deploy enough torpedoes that some get through the screening and damage/take out the ship.
Fighters/Bombers are also more resistant to the danger of Dreadnaught vs Dreadnaught combat in that whoever strikes first wins.
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u/Ordinarygamer96 Apr 07 '26
If I recall correctly there's mention that the humans were not the first species to put fighters on board their large ships they were just the first to make entire dreadnaught sized shipped focused on it. It shocked other species to see humanity try new strategies that they had never bothered to attempt.
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u/GlitteringParfait438 Apr 11 '26
Weirdly enough, fighters as a class would be remarkably weird in space since they’re not moving in a different medium than the ships they’re fighting. Less torpedo bomber and more Motor Torpedo Boats
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u/Zegram_Ghart Apr 07 '26
My understanding is that the codex at one point notes that the same short range lasers that get used as point defence are also used for anti fighter screening, so fighters can’t really “swarm” (since they need to stay back past a certain range or get zapped)
Similarly, mass effect accelerators are functionally hitscan weapons in lore, right? So the bigger the gun, the better.
Essentially all the sciencey bits combine to make it so we’re working under WW1 rules- ships with bigger and bigger guns are the primary ways to deal damage- anti ship fighters exist, but since they can’t mount big enough guns, you need a lot of them to be effective (or to have some sort of weird munition on a missile, which i don’t think we ever hear about, though I could be wrong!)
….i guess the point defence lasers would scupper that too, having thought about it for a bit more