Leaving from Earth with the Ark ships isn't going to work...

I want them all destroyed. You made your bed now LIE IN IT. }:‑)

A real image of Earth looks pretty consistent...



And why would Shepard's actions be in any way altered by 0.00001% of the population running for the hills?

He'd need to attend galactic version of Nobel Award ceremony for invention of intergalactic FTL first, because at the moment of ME3 only Reapers were known having such tech.

the whole QEC is actually the simplest to explain, immediately after getting into the ships they went into hyper sleep and the vi's took over driving because the biological bodies couldn't take the acceleration rate, its just that whilst the colonists thought they were heading to a non mass relay linked part of the milky way far enough away that they needed much faster drives to get there within 1 lifetime they couldn't survive the acceleration curve required, the ships orders were changed at the last second after most of them went into hyper sleep by someone on board all the ark ships sync'd up and off they went, so the QEC no longer works  what with there being nobody awake to answer it even if they were still close enough to turn around....

of course the science and exploration colonies are really a convoy of prison ships (so they didn't have to hide anything about their existence) who's mission was to establish a new penal colony in some otherwise uncharted area of space before the Andromeda project team steal them and disappear as the new version of Australia..... its the only thing that makes sense about the ships being giant hulks full of frozen bodies in such a short period of time .... and we already know the galaxy likes prison ships ....

The indoctrination theory has been around for a quite a while, actually. I have always hated the idea, personally. I want my Shepard to be a hero, not a patsy. I'm perfectly happy with it happening the way it was shown to happen!

Oh please read wiki at least.

well the normally accepted figure is 15ly/day which hasn't improved since the discovery of the mass relays ...

Hmmm I'm not sure if you are joking or not.

Even if every living being is chucked in Cryo immediately (which doesn't really make sense since they have never had to do this in other FTL in the series and seeing it takes hundreds of years to travel to Andromeda it isn't any faster) then they would still have advanced computer systems to monitor the situation and navigate. To suggest that someone wants to pour so much resource into this completely untested and perilous expedition involving at least hundreds of lives, to not account for basic possibilities is beyond insane. If there is any chance they don't need to proceed with the last 99% of the journey, and by far the most dangerous stage since systems are more likely to fail the longer they run, they wouldn't.

Even if they get to Andromeda they are then faced with a massive task and massive uncertainties just to survive. And they can never get back. To make the trip would require meticulous planning, genius levels of technological innovation, with extreme care and redundancy built into every possible nuance of the expedition they could conceive. I simply can't accept they would be able to accomplish this yet fall into the sheer incompetence.

Although its a bit unfair to make this statement without actually having seen the actualy writing, I highly suspect the way we get there involves a lot of handwaving and will not go into depth. In fact the explanation will most likely be extremely scant. I'm actually ok with that although I do believe there were much better ways of accomplishing the transition if they were keen to go with logical plot integrity.

Well, about them leaving at the same time... You have to read into the small details. Here, I'm talking about the kodiak shuttles that are seen transporting presumably people, although they could be transporting anything really.

I know that some of you are thinking that they'd just build 5,966 shuttles just to carry all of those people, weapons, supplies, etc to all ships at the same time. That's just not how it works in the real world though. They might build 700, and plan out what they are going to take up there and when.

Why? What are they gonna do with 5,966 shuttles after they've gotten everybody on board? What? Sell them? Sure, that would put a glut in the market. "Hey Joey, wanna buy my shuttle?" "Oh yah, how much? "10 credits!" "Nahhh, thanks. I've seen your thrusters. I can get one with better thrusters for 5."

Am I overthinking this?

To be honest if they are loading up people, supplies, equipment... general stuff... they won't be doing it in a shuttle
Yeah as above cargo ships etc., and just because the 'citadel' like ships have their 'arms' closed doesn't mean to say they don't have docking arrays on the outside
But also agree they are showing shuttles for familiarity but also maybe to inject a sense of 'last minute' rush to get to the Arks

Actually, bigger ships cause a higher drain on the ME core, which limits both their speed and their range. Ideally you want the most powerful FTL drive available in the smallest ship possible, which gives it amazing velocity and range.

Do they, though? We know they can traverse a few tens of thousands of light years of void at the edge of the galaxy in a few years, but that is a different thing altogether from travelling 2.5 million light years to a distant galaxy in 220 years.

If you think about it, intergalactic travel is a technological hurdle the Reapers weren't really designed to overcome. They don't need this capability because their victims, technologically corralled to develop a crippling dependency on the Mass Relays, completely lack the ability to flee the galaxy by design. That's one of the gripes I have with ME:A, because the idea of Milky Way species departing for Andromeda mid-trilogy flies in the face of everything the trilogy told us about the extremely limited spacefaring capability of the Milky Way species at the time.

The primary reason why I have immense doubts about the Reapers capability of travelling to Andromeda is because they have a speed limit - 30 light years a day, 2.5 times the speed limit of standard Council-era FTL drives. If their energy and fuel reserves were as immense as fans assume for them to make the journey to Andromeda, they would not limit their FTL drives to a measly 30 light years a day. That makes no sense whatsoever. There is no benefit to a "slow burn" drive - it requires the same amount of energy to get to Andromeda whether they go there at 1 light year per day or 10,000 light years per day.

As for the discharge problem, a lot of fans think they just don't have to discharge at all, but discharging is a rather integral part of how eezo cores work. I can't imagine a piece of technology that flat out eliminates the buildup of static - it would violate the law of conversation of energy. It's possible Reapers have a lot of heat storage and heat dissipation tech occupying hull space organics would use for living necessities such as growing food, processing water and recycling oxygen - but I doubt this is true since they don't actually need it, at the very least not enough to go to Andromeda. A more likely scenario is that the Reapers, purely mechanical and extremely resilient, simply lets the charge build up and take the electrical hit as the saturated core discharges into the hull, assuming they are unable to reach a proper discharge location in time. For obvious reasons, this won't work for an organic crew, and I don't think it'd be healthy for a Reaper in the long run - after the 220 years it would take them to reach Andromeda, they might arrive as incandescent chunks of molten slag.

But even assuming they are able to make the journey, what reason do we have to believe that we can adapt their technology and replicate their feat? A big reason why they are able to do the things they do is because they are giant, nigh-immortal murder machines, not soft, fleshy organics weak to hunger, thirst, fatigue, asphyxiation and radiation. Adapting Reaper tech isn't going to make us any less subject to organic weaknesses and limitations.

Just my 2 credits.