I am going to be honest this is pretty disorganized but whatever.

In my opinion there are three very separate camps to sit in on the subject of Mass Effect small arms.

They are, what we have been shown, what they probably should be, and G A M E M E C H A N I C S.

What we have been shown.

There are not a lot of quantifiable feats for ME firearms shown out side of gameplay/Codex.

Firstly we have Grunt's shotgun,

Grunt doing a ton of damage to a Threasher Maw.

Grunt blasting hole in a thick stone wall.

Though we should note that both of those were done with a Claymore shotgun which is known for its power.

Then we got Paragon Lost, the Mass Effect anime movie that you probably did not know about.

Watching this covers the majority of the feats for small arms. Though there is some stuff later on in the movie.

If you do not want to watch that here are some highlights,

• Blasting decimeter sized holes in rocks

• More of the above

• An AR blowing out smaller chunks of rock

• A sniper rifle cutting a Vorcha in half.

• As a demonstration that Paragon Lost was not the most consistently animated thing here is a shuttle's guns

There may be some that I am missing but this is a decent spread. I have not read any of the books so those might have some feats I do not know about.

Needless to say, these are all quite a bit more powerful than equivalent modern weapons.

What they probably should be.

Based on this quote ME guns probably should be is much closer to modern weapons in terms of power.

However, mass accelerators produce recoil equal to their impact energy. This is mitigated somewhat by the mass effect fields that rounds are suspended within, but weapon recoil is still the prime limiting factor on slug velocity.

• Mass Effect Codex Weapons, Armor and Equipment/Mass Accelerators

If recoil is the prime limiting factor and recoil is equal to their impact energy then unless ME soldiers are rather superhuman in order to have the guns be controllable their recoil (thus impact energy) must be similar to RL guns.

The logic for using mass accelerator weapons even if they are not considerably more powerful than modern weapons would be that it greatly simplifies logistics.

To me anyway this makes more sense than trying to reach for the large numbers supplied by the "shown" camp. It makes more sense in terms of physics and when you are only drawing assumptions from a single source it is very easy to be consistent.

G A M E M E C H A N I C S

With ME3's penetration mechanics we can get some really absurd numbers.

Armor piercing ammo can give one meter of penetration (vs any cover) at max level, the gun upgrade that boosts armor pen can also add 1.1 meters of penetration on top of that.

Seriously imagine a slab of steel as thick as you are tall. Just think about how fucking big that is. Then imagine a bullet flying through that entire thing and killing someone on the other side.

This camp is stupid. Do not be in this camp.