Are the Kett technophobes?

The Mass Relay and "BOOHOO THEY BREAK LORE" argument is an escalation of the lack of knowledge of galaxies and clusters.

Gravity is gravity, whether it is emergent from normal matter or dark matter.

In fact, this is how scientists came up with dark matter: calculations on gravity amounts showed (in galaxies, for instance) that there is too much gravity for all of it to be emergent from normal matter (i.e., the stuff we can see), hence there must be other stuff that is also matter but doesn't reflect light.

It does produce gravity, however. So yes, gravity holds galaxies together and - yes - a dark matter disk is believed to account for the gravitational effect that stars near the edge of a galaxy rotate its center at the same speed as stars closer the center do (which can't be accounted for if calculating emergent gravity from visible matter in that galaxy).

Hope that clarifies matters somewhat...

Gravity is gravity, whether it is emergent from normal matter or dark matter.

In fact, this is how scientists came up with dark matter: calculations on gravity amounts showed (in galaxies, for instance) that there is too much gravity for all of it to be emergent from normal matter (i.e., the stuff we can see), hence there must be other stuff that is also matter but doesn't reflect light.

It does produce gravity, however. So yes, gravity holds galaxies together and - yes - a dark matter disk is believed to account for the gravitational effect that stars near the edge of a galaxy rotate its center at the same speed as stars closer the center do (which can't be accounted for if calculating emergent gravity from visible matter in that galaxy).

Hope that clarifies matters somewhat...

Which is doubly ironic considering these people didn't read the codex...but I guess that's for nerds.

I didn't miss the voiced codex at all. I hate it in MET - makes me not want to open it since the guy talks slower than I can read it myself. And every time you scroll by something old to get to something new, he reads it again.

More like gravity from both visible and dark matter, I'd hate to be one who sets anybody on the wrong foot about this.

Well, it's early here* and I really like science threads, so let me chip in.

In MET, one happily darted around the entire Milky Way galaxy: it contains anywhere between 200 to 400 billion stars and is roughly 100,000 light years in diameter. Traveling from one end of the Milky Way to the other end - as one did in MET - would take a very long time (it would take a photon at light speed 100,000 years). MET ships are mentioned as being capable of traveling ~5x the speed of light, so for those, crossing the entire Milky Way on 'normal' FTL would take roughly 20-ish years**. Hence the need for Mass Relays.

The Andromeda galaxy is even bigger: it's estimated to contain 1 trillion stars and is 220,000 light years in diameter. But in MEA, one only travels through a (very) small portion of that galaxy: the Heleus Cluster. Common star clusters contain 1000s of stars and are 'only' between 10 and 30 light years across. According to Kallo in the Instruction Video, the Tempest can travel ~4.75x the speed of light, 13 light years a day, to be precise. This means that the Tempest can cross the Heleus Cluster in a time span of between 1 and 3-ish days with normal FTL. Thus, no need for relays or ODSY...

*Any errors in this post are due to lack of coffee.
** My post originally listed cross-MW travel time on normal FTL in 1000s of years but those numbers were grabbed of the web and wrong. When I did the calculation myself, 20-ish years is what came out (100,000/13/365.25).

Talking about space travel is so much fun.
EDIT: FUCK I forgot to watch Spacex's update on the mission to mars thing.