Krogan and Asari security details during the long journey

I disagree that having krogan and asari guard crews would have been practical. Instead, the practical move would have been to have mech security details since mechs don't need the things organics do to survive so the cost in resources would be drastically smaller and still have all the benefits.

I'm not sure the Initiative was in favor of mechanical based involvement, given it was incredibly hard to get SAM units approved for inclusion in the mission.

None of the damage caused happened until collision with the Scourge upon arrival in Andromeda.
I assume all the facilities were fairly intact up until that moment.
Which should have been another reason to maintain an active crew or at least, revive one before entering the galaxy.
So many problems would have been avoided if there was a conscious pilot looking out at the path ahead and thinking "weird energy tendrils ahead, let's come to a full stop before we run into whatever that is".

I assume on ships built to house 1000s of people, maintaining a limited crew of 12 would have been quite feasible to support.
Given that there is at least one Krogan who considered spending 600 years fully awake, I'm assuming finding other individuals with the psychological fortitude to endure a century of isolation would be possible and much easier.
Also, it's not like they wouldn't exactly have nothing to do, they could spend years taking readings, scanning, doing research or whatever it is that might have been observed during an intergalactic trip.

The Nexus wasn't designed to house too many people awake for a long time, this is mentioned in ME:Nexus Uprising. The ship was supposed to be some sort of transity station to coordenate the colonization effort. In this book they need to start sending ships to scout close star systems because with the hydroponics down they couldn't feed or supply air to all the awakened crews for long and by the time the Hyperion finally dock 14 months later the situation was so bad they were shutting down whole sections to reduce energy consumption.

It would have made no sense to put a extra strain on their resources which could end up with pods being shut down to conserve energy in case of a emergency. The safest path was to keep everyone inside the pods.
Besides a pilot couldn't do much with a ship flying in FTL besides plot the course (any VI should be able to handle that) and even in subluminal speed there was also nothing (s)he could do to avoid the scourge because initially their sensors were blind to it.

No, it really isn't. It's only visible when active and even then it is dark. When inactive, it is black. A person can't spot a black thing in the blackness of space. Especially if said person doesn't know they should be looking for it. Plus you have to be really close to see something in space, and in this case that means it is already too late. 

For example the Ark Hyperion crew were awake before running into the Scourge, and they still hit it. 

So, spend tens to hundred(s) of years dealing with same extremely limited number of people as a "guard"? That would break most normal sentient beings. There is a reason why even a 6 month trip to Mars currently requires people being bottled up together on Earth to make sure they don't kill each other off. Over hundreds of years I suspect a number of these guards would go batshit insane and blow up the Ark, or at least end up presenting far bigger danger to it than automated systems do.

Again, the distances are colossal. In space you measure them in light-years, which is 9.500.000.000.000 KM. Even objects that are at shorter distances are measured in AU , which is still 150.000.000 KM.

So unless you are REALLY close to a few hundreds or thousands of KM you can't see anything from the naked eye and if the object is small or reflect little to no light the distance would be even smaller. For example Mars is big enough to be seen as a red dot in the night sky but you can't see neither Phobos or Deimos because they are too small.


Joker flew both Normandy from instruments, those windows in the SR2 "Cerberus version" were just there for pleasure view.



And same problems that were pointed out in previous posts: limited energy and resources. Why waste them when it is a easier and more safe solution to let the automatic systems(VI) handle the monitoring during the travel ?
Not to talk about the strain in their mental and physical health. Who would volunteer to wither away for hundreds of years in a closed environment?

But for the sake of a exemple let's just imagine that they tried that on the Nexus:

So they spend more than 600 years spending energy and both reserves of air and food (which can't be replenished since hydroponics is still down to save energy until the arrival) to maintain a few dozen skeleton crew.

Then by the time they finally arrive at Heleus Cluster, the Nexus end up crashing against the scourge because the phenomenon is invisible to their sensors. Some of  the Initiative leardship gets killed while the ship crew is awakened to deal with the emergency, and huge sections of the ship are destroyed or damaged like Hydroponics lab which should be up and running to supply the now active crew, so they will have to rely on what was brought with them at least until they can fix the problem with Hydroponics lab or until a habitable planet can be found. But to fix the damage or to scout for planets they need to awake even more people to do that.


Now can you see where this is going? Had they done that the Hyperion would have most likely found a dead space ship instead of a dying one which could still be saved.

as far as security patrols & the like would go, i'm fairly sure the feeling within the initiative hierarchy would be... there's nothing in darkspace, so there likely won't be much of a potential threat to the arks till they arrive in andromeda.