Thread:Wormulon/@comment-4242472-20120718001843

I know valuing how advanced the Reapers are is tough but I have a few speculative theories as to their capabilities that arose when I leaned from the third game that thy have no discernable supply lines. Apparentyl each ship could run independantly.

They didn't just ignore the concept of allied supply lines; they never looted enemy supply lines and fuel deopts and only destroyed them.
 * Potentially powered by Zero-point/vacuum energy - 'hyperspace' appears nonexistant which rules out hypermatter useage.
 * Dark Energy siphons?
 * Matter/subatomic reconfigurement - it seems odd to use rely on 'grey goo' biological matter to build a 2km starship that can withstand the firepower of an entire tier-5 fleet
 * Temporary Krasinkov tubes - Mass Relays effectively compress spacetime to make very short distances when activated.
 * Negative mass - Element zero alters the intensity of an area of dark energy and increases or decreases the mass of its surroundings with a positive or negative electric charge repectively. Reaper dreadnaoughts can create powerful enough fields to land on a planet and 'jump' back into the air.
 * nanoscale technology and smaller - it is never specified how small exactly. This would also explain how a Reaper can maintain in premium condition after 50,000 years of hibernation.
 * biological(/chronological?) stasis - insect-like 'seeker' drones could inject organics with an agent that supposedly froze the victim(s) in time. They were aware and they could move theri eyes but nothing else. Whatever position they were in - no matter how unstable the pose - they would be frozen (and not topppling) for an unknown period of time.
 * infantry-scale particle beams
 * biological-technological conversion, biomechanical engineering - Reaper nanites don't just build cybernetics in a host body, they are able to convert an organic body into a quasi-robot, converting organs and internal tissue into electronics within a few hours.
 * Minimal emissions? - Unlike other ships in the setting, Reaper ships do not seem to discharge stored-up heat generated by the operating vessel within a large magnetic field (such as those created by gas giants). Within the setting this has to be done in order to prevent cooking the crew and frying electronics.
 * Superadvanced A.I. - Each Reaper dreadnought is a conscious entity with an apparent processing power beyond the scope of whatever Council-built quantum computers were capable of (In Mass Effect 2 EDI, the ship's cutting-edge A.I., was tasked to capacity creating firewalls and hacking into the mainframe of a Collecter vessel. The latter was capapable of creating more firewalls and launching more cyber-warfare attacks than EDI, a quantum computer, could).

Most of this stuff I am guessing while other technologies might not be so hard to achieve but were shown to be difficult or impossible (such as efficient particle beams weapons) by Council races. 