Ad Astra per Aspera
is a Sufficient Velocity.com Forum Quest set in a Fusion Fic continuity of Mass Effect and KanColle.
It is 2176, and you are SSV Alan B. Shepard, the returned spirit of a Systems Alliance dreadnought destroyed at the disastrous Battle of Shanxi. You have been summoned to fight for humanity again, but you will face many challenges; from batarian pirates to political machinations and even to your own mental scars.
Ad Astra per Aspera provides examples of:
- Badass Adorable: Frigates. They're portrayed as girls and petite young women, and yet they have Super-Strength and come armed with enough firepower to level a city if they so wanted.
- BFG: In your ship form, your massive, powerful spinal cannon is one. Most ships (aside from Salla and Gdansk) carry one.
- Fantastic Racism: Humans (especially a lot of kanmusu, for obvious reasons) are far less charitable towards turians, to the point where Terra Firma isn't a fringe political party - it's the third largest in the Alliance parliament.
- For Want Of A Nail: The legacy of shipgirls and the Abyssal War has had a lot of long-term impacts on the Alliance's progression and, therefore, the galaxy as a whole. Overall, the Alliance is larger and singularly more powerful because it was founded several decades earlier. However, their relations with the Turian Hierarchy are frosty due to a longer, more brutal First Contact War.
- Nigh-Invulnerable: Shipgirls are the functional equivalent of their metal counterparts. Their actual biology is heavily metallic, with bulkheads, nuclear reactors, and electronic systems sharing body space with squishy bits like endocrine, excretory, and reproductive systems. Thus, they are extremely hard to kill even in normal human form.
