Theocrafting: Connecting the milky way to andromeda?

Would be cool to see the citadel being used as a relay to andromdea.

IIRC, in the AI briefing info they mentioned the goal of eventually being able to set up trade routes back to the MW with the cool, new shiny resources they discovered in Andromeda so that someone would make a killing.

It seems like the situation was meant to be something like the colony of Zhu's Hope. Funded and backed by Exogeni with the colonists looking for....stuff.

If it was about money and trade and trademarks for all these new resources, the kind of credits we're talking would be beyond imagination. However, the time gap would be a problem. Over 600 years. Civilizations rise and fall in that time. So, I don't see that as a viable plan unless the Benefactor, or whomever, had a lead on something. Some tech.

Or the Benefactor et al were just talking smack. Either way, it would not have happened in the lifetime of the first wave.

AI was definitely dealing in some very cutting edge, experimental, illegal and black market tech. Then, ofc, you have to wonder how long the AI, or an AI prototype group, has been working with such tech? What could they have discovered? What could they have tweaked? Built off of?

There are always going to be people and groups that race towards that sort of thing. Without public knowledge. Without "permission".

Let's not be ethnocentric. Asari can plan in that kind of timeframe.

Well, yeah, but I'm trying to think of it from an in-game perspective. 

Frankly, from an in-game perspective, they didn't have much reason to leave in the first place. Their whole thing was Explore. Vast majority have no idea about the Reapers. Was the AI secretly set up from the beginning to run from the Reapers? Or was that discovered later and they pushed the AI out with more urgency?

Just on that issue, there is no definitive evidence, no but all indications are that there are no working QECs around at the time of the game. If there are any, they must either be undicovered or kept secret, even from the highest echelons of power in the initiative (read: the pathfinders, so us). It is said countless times throughout the game that there is no contact with the milky way and that they have no idea how they went on. Heck, until Ryder recovers the memories and gets his father's logs, they didn't even know about the messages in transit.

The only time where this is called into question is a through-away new message, you can hear on the enxus, where they say that the name of a construction worker who died while working in space is withheld "until next of kin in the milky way are notified". But honestly, that news message is so weird, I chalk that one up to another writing snafu.

So yes, no definitive evidence but clearly, no one we know in the game has access to any sort of communication with the MW, therefore, I'd say it's a safe assumption that at least the QEC Alec Ryder used to receive that final MW message about the reapers has been destroyed or just didn't function anymore after 600 years. Given that we, today - at least to the best of my knowladge - can't make QE work for more than an hour or so at a time before we loose the connection due to external noise factors, I think it makes sense that you'd loose the entanglement after a while.

My ending is dead Reapers. Also, based on what Matriarch Aethyta says in ME2, I don't believe anyone knows how to make mass relays.

Here's a quote from Ian Frazier (Lead Designer on MEA) concerning QEC:

bsn.boards.net/post/804989/thread

"- Did each Ark and the Nexus have QEC's that connected back to the Milky Way?

We never directly state this in the game iirc, but the implication is that the Nexus (and perhaps even the arks) did have a QEC link back to the Milky Way but it went dark at some point while they were en route, for reasons that should be pretty clear if you've played ME3."

Agreed. I chose to assume that the MW end of most, if not all, were destroyed during the Reaper War. Decay is likewise a good explanation, but one you'd think they'd have anticipated. No doubt theyll find a functional QEC, or "establish contact", as soon as the writers wish.

It wouldn't surprise me if Bioware came up with an in-game explanation how to travel back to the MW without a 600year delay, with old-fashioned mass relays or otherwise. They have relied on Spacemagic^TM before to justify whatever plot device they wanted to use, so the how isn't so much the problem here as the why. I am pretty sure they intended the Andromeda galaxy to be the new stage for following titles. Hard to tell if the recent upheaval around ME:A has changed that. They might try to make a cut (again) and set a new title back in the MW, though I don't think it's likely, the galaxy the story takes place in never was the problem.
As to the "respecting the players' choice" issue regarding the ME3 endings, it's not only distance that separates any follow-up title from the MW, it's also a lot of time. A new game could take place even more than ME:A's 600 years later. Add a few centuries more (if even necessary) and the MW species might have recovered from the destruction caused by the Reapers and the loss of the mass relays, the Reapers themselves could have retreated into dark space never to be seen again in case of the controll ending. Synthesis... I never quite understood what implications that choice might have exactly, but I guess that part could be covered by new type of standard technology that integrates organic and synthetic components, even if you didn't take the green ending. That would level the ground for a new setting in the MW without outright contradicting any player choices (except the refusal ending, but how many people took that one, anyway?).
So Bioware could let the Andromedans reconnect with the MW, if they really wanted to go that route, hopefully with a bit more creative writing than my rough outline of possible solutions, without going against the player's choices from ME3, which seems to be the biggest hindrance for doing so.

Why weren't we allowed to ask the question in the game? The whole premise is ridiculous unless you accept they were running from the Reapers. So, if the AI personnel didn't know about the Reapers why didn't anybody ask how they were going to get the resources back to the MW?
I know it's a game but it has to have some sort of internal consistency. 100,000 people would take centuries before they were well enough established to have surplus resources to send back. So you're probably looking at a millennia before the MW investors see a return. And on hearing this every member of the AI said 'sounds legit'? Unless they all have Liam's ability for critical thinking it just makes no sense.

The Reapers travelled conventionally through dark space to the alpha relay in Batarian space then used that to travel to all the other relays in the milky way simultaneously. That's why Shep had to destroy the relay in Arrival. She found out that the Reapers were on the way to use the relay so she crashed an asteroid into it to buy the Milky Way more time. There are no relays in dark space, the Reapers didn't make them there. I assumed there was a science reason for that.