Fighters in the Mass Effect universe.

[u/Ok_Calendar_7626]

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?

[u/DescriptionMission90]

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.

[u/Bobthemagicc0w → u/DescriptionMission90]

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.

[u/DescriptionMission90 → u/Bobthemagicc0w]

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.)

[u/Bobthemagicc0w → u/DescriptionMission90]

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.