The Assault Cells are a type of unmanned hovering weapons platforms.
Assault Cell
Overview[]
The Assault Cells were originally set up by the corporations to prevent any single corporation from gaining access to space, and therefore gaining an advantage over all the others. Unfortunately, the Assault Cells have, due to their huge numbers, completely blocked the path to space.
ORCA believes that the destruction of the Assault Cells is crucial to humanity's continued survival, and therefore has taken control of a series of anti-satellite cannons. Depending on the player's decisions, the Assault Cells may be destroyed by the cannons.
Appearance[]
Assault Cells, although not identified as such at this point in the story, appears in the mission "Take Back Cradle 21", in Chapter One. However, this is not readily apparent. In order to trigger the optional transmission with your Operator, the player must fly high enough to reach a certain point in the mission map. If successful, the Assault Cells, which are depicted as small, barely visible objects in the sky, will start firing downwards, although they won't aim directly at the player. They also appear in "Destroy Cradle 03," but oddly enough, will not fire at the player; in fact, upon closer inspection, it appears that they are firing upon each other, possibly because each major corporation made their own groups of Assault Cells, and that one corporation's Assault Cells tend to recognize the others' as targets.
Trivia[]
- Though appearing to be some sort of satellites, Assault cells are actually hovering in the upper stratosphere. This is demonstrated by by the image of Cells lined up in a perfect pattern, a pattern which would break the laws of physics otherwise.
- It is unclear why ORCA does not simply take control of one Cell and blow the closest other Cells apart, instead of relying on the Ehrenberg batteries, which requires enormous amounts of energy, Energy obtained by redirecting the Arteria energy transmitters. This then results in loss of power aboard the Cradles, in turn resulting in a massive disaster when the Cradles (which are loaded with around 20 million people each) come crashing down to Earth. One possible explanation for this is that the Assault Cells were made to be completely autonomous, and will fire at literally anything and everything that would attempt to escape the Earth's surface and reach outer space.
- One possible explanation is that if the Assault Cells were indeed in Earth's orbit and not hovering in the stratosphere, taking control of one Cell and blowing nearby ones apart would only result in massive amounts of debris littering orbit, starting a Kessler Syndrome. This would be extremely counter-productive as the mass amounts of debris resulting from this would be able to tear apart any ships leaving the planet. The Ehrenberg batteries could be the only thing that could completely obliterate the Assault Cells on a mass scale without leaving behind dangerous debris.