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

Sorry, but I asked Mac Walters this years ago to settle this very dispute on the Mass Effect wiki and he outright said they began FTL after ME1.





2.5 years between the end of ME1 and the Arrival DLC, that is. Between Arrival and ME3 there's a 6 month period where Shepard is being detained and the Reapers are wreaking havoc in Batarian space - this is evident when we see batarian husks being used in the initial invasion of Earth.

We don't have examples of them failing after centuries of uninterrupted use, either. Your just making assumptions, it seems to me.


It seems we've been arguing at cross purposes then, I had no idea that was the point you were making!

Given that the whole premise of the new game is that they do get to Andromeda I fail to see how you can argue that they can't. This is Science Fiction using entirely fictional science so I really don't see how you can say definitively what fictional science is capable of and what it is not capable of. Right now, the trailers would seem to be empirical evidence that it is perfectly capable!

Even if you were right and we somehow had proof that it wasn't possible then the only thing to do is to suspend disbelief so, even then, I don't see the point of this line of argument anyway. What does it achieve?

I don't need to make assumptions, we know entropy is a factor in Mass Effect. A closed system will never gain energy by itself, to gain energy it must gain it from outside sources. This manifests in this context as maintenance of the Ark systems using pre-stockpiled resources, but as I've explained in many, many previous posts, the efficiency and range of the FTL drive becomes worse the more mass it has to reduce, and 570 years of maintenance simply requires resources in the form of mass the available FTL drives of the time can't handle. It becomes a recursive problem.

The only solution is to increase the efficiency of the FTL drives, and that will take more than two years to develop. Even if they began developing this technology straight after Sovereign's death, there's just not enough time to finish it until the Reaper invasion begins.


I was merely drawing up a thought experiment IF they were able to travel there. IF that was possible, it would still take over two centuries, which is a ludicriously long time to be in transit, even for Reapers.


If this was the first game in the franchise, there wouldn't be an issue. But it's a sequel, so it has to abide by the rules and the lore set down by the previous games, manifested in Mass Effect as the codex. If you read the codex pertaining to spacecraft technology, they paint a very bleak picture about interstellar travel - going to different stars is really difficult even with powerful FTL drives, especially if they are hundreds or thousands of light years away. That's why they have adapted their entire civilization around the ultra-convenient Mass Relay network - they reduce journeys that would take impractical amounts of years down to weeks, days or even hours.

So, if long-distance interstellar travel WITHIN the galaxy is depicted to be so difficult that no one does it, why on earth should we believe intergalactic travel is easy or even possible? It's a whole different ballpark. There are no detectable planets or stars to discharge near or harvest fuel or power on. The galactic civilization considers a journey from one end of the galaxy - several decades long - so impractical that they haven't bothered to develop the necessary technology for it. In the codex for Ilos, it is mentioned several preliminary expeditions have been formed to find it, but they never materialize because the journey there would be so difficult.

Based on what the codex tells us, why should we believe a journey to Andromeda is possible?

And at this point is where all the idiotic "secret Cerberus tech" or "reverse-engineered Reapers" come in.


It proves BioWare wrong. It shows they're doing a bad job of writing their games. They're never going to improve unless people start expecting better of them, but alas, people's expectations after the ME3 ending snafu are so low that they will accept virtually anything, no matter how unscientific or borderline retarded it is, as long as it doesn't involve a ghostly kid telling them what to do.

Becomes worse at what rate, though? It may become worse at such an infinitesimal rate as to be irrelevant. Can you provide specific wiki/codex information which defines precisely how fast things will decay on such a journey so that we can deduce that the decay happens faster than the 600 odd years they'd need?

Or how much fuel would be required to get to Andromeda and why they would be unable to bring that much along?

Or a passage which specifically states that long journeys can't be done for reasons other than the practicality of the time periods involved?

Basically, in order to make the argument that Mass Effect's own codex entries actually precludes the Andromeda expedition I'd need to see the precise quotes that prove that. I'm not saying there aren't any but I'd need to see them!

No they can't. Mass Relays only work in tandem. If there is no second Mass Relay on the other side, the Mass Relay wouldn't work. 

No, that's not how Mass Relays work. Mass Relays work by making a corridor of mass-free space thus allowing the speed of light to become essentially infinite, thus ships travelling hundreds or even thousands of light years in an instant. If there is no Mass Relay, there is no way to form that corridor. Also, there is no Mass Relay powerful enough to do that. Secondary Mass Relays have a maximum range of a few hundred light years, and Primary Mass Relays have a maximum range of only a few thousand. Even the Citadel Relay only goes to the edge of Dark Space, which is only a tiny fraction of the trip. 

The reason for the First Contact War was because humanity playing with Relay 314 reminded the Turians of the Rachni War, which was caused by the Salarians doing the same thing and intruding into Rachni space. 

If they're not going to respect the extensive world-building of the trilogy, it shouldn't be called a bloody Mass Effect game.

Decay? Where did you get that from? I'm talking about the eezo core becoming exponentially overburdened by the mass of all the extra power cells, fuel and other resources they need to bring along to keep the Ark running for so long.

Sure, they could mosey along at a snail's pace compared to the galactic standard, but that doesn't jam with BioWare's established timeline of ME:A taking place 600 years after ME3. To travel to Andromeda in that timespan, they need to travel around 4380 times faster than the speed of light, which for all we know the galactic standard for civilian vessels. We get this number from a scene in Mass Effect 1 where Ashley mentions she travelled 12 light years between her posting at the Czarnobog Fleet Depot and her family's home colony Amaterasu in 24 hours. 


Oh, they can bring along as much fuel as they like, but all additional mass makes FTL slower. Remember, it has to reduce the mass of EVERYTHING on the ship, including the power cells and the fuel reserves that you're using to . How much fuel they need depends entirely on the efficiency of the FTL drive and the mass of the vessel. The regular laws of physics still apply even under the conditions of FTL, which means you need a lot of energy to move very heavy objects. So you need more fuel to achieve the same desired speed, and you need more power to increase the speed of light so that the desired speed becomes achievable.

The single way of getting around this is to design an FTL drive that requires less power to reduce more mass.


The discharge problem alone makes it impossible.

Because the Arks are absolutely humongous, they need to discharge more often than once every 50 hours. But even if they could discharge every 50 hours, they would have to discharge 99,864 times on their way to Andromeda. This is a major problem because the intergalactic void is just that - a void. Yes, there are the occasional rogue planets, but they are so dark and cold that they cannot be detected, and even if they could be detected, they are so unfathomably far apart from one another that the Arks would be incandescent slag by the time they arrive near one. Add to that the caveat that being significantly larger than dreadnoughts, the Arks can only discharge near planets with magnetic fields, which are incredibly unlikely to exist on dark, cold rogue planets.

Ergo, the Arks cannot rely on rogue planets for their discharge needs.

Now, it would be a different thing if they could find rogue stars with planets  - however, the statistical likelihood of finding 99,864 rogue stars with planets that host a magnetic field, all lined up in a perfect line, exactly 50 FTL hours apart, from the Milky Way to the Andromeda galaxy, is basically nil.

And sticking Citadel discharge facilities on the Arks doesn't really achieve anything. A spacecraft in flight is a closed system, it can't magically delete charged electrons from existence by moving them from one part of the ship to another. The Citadel and other space stations are stationary objects with better capacity to transform and radiate accumulated static charge - and most importantly, they can do this because they aren't undertaking a 570 year long FTL journey in the intergalactic void. 

This is why literally everyone who wants Andromeda to happen latches on to the Reapers as the solution to our intergalactic woes, because they think Reapers never discharge their drives because of a codex entry. And they'd be right, if that very same codex entry didn't refute itself immediately after that line:


The codex is not a science text book with precise answers to every question, it's a glossary for lore nerds who want to explore the universe beyond what's depicted in-game. Still, it's still an authority on lore because every entry added to it was added for a reason. It's obviously a source of lore for BioWare themselves, since Mac Walters admitted to using it and the Mass Effect wiki to refreshen his knowledge about the universe while working on his writing. A practice he has obviously abandoned since.

Vigil hypothesized that, since he believes the Reapers hibernate in Dark Space and with the Citadel not an option it only took a few years for them to arrive. That said that hypothesis could be wrong. If say there was another Citadel in Andromeda, maybe the two are connected and thus you use one to get to the other. Or maybe there is a whole array of Mass Relays out in Dark Space allowing them to be further away. 

Hackett and Anderson might have believed, but whatever belief there was before ME3, it was in wishy-washy-land. Not enough to make any serious preparation concerning a possible reaper invasion, or the Alliance wouldn't have been caught with their pants down as it was at the start of ME3. But apparently enough to let Shepard avoid any serious consequences for the things you mentioned. If enough people with enough resources believed in the reapers, you'd think that there would have at least been some defense measures and evacuation plans, but there was nothing of the sort. Which means that it must have been a secret project, run by someone who implemented their own version of the Redeker Plan during the construction of the ark ships.

Arcian
your doubt that an ion scoop type affair would work doesn't preclude it from being possible or indeed from the space magic team from deciding to go that way...

that aside, standard tech in general use isn't the same as experimental tech shoved into a giant hail mary pass in an attempt to prolong the various mw races past the reaper extinction cycle...

we can speculate and argue about things that don't exist (but are theoretically possible) till the cows come home it wont change the fact that fantasy isn't reality and whilst a good fantasy storyline will mirror aspects of reality it should also have implausible things art its core.

the majority of people love the whole biotic's thing because its telekinesis on steroids and space magic combined.... we don't seriously think that its possible or even likely to be achievable but on the other hand it would be seriously cool so we accept it...

we don't question the omnitool lore that each one uses minuscule micro fabricators and mass effect fields to flash forge a blade or that every gun in the universe has zero kick back in space thanks to mass effect fields, but you question the possiblitiy that multiple small eezo cores could be used for mass negation in a large shell ....

i'd question why your so desperate to shoot down various options as not possible unless your the lead story editor you have no idea whats possible wihtihn the realms of the mass effect universe....

If they believed, why didn't they do something? When talking to Anderson in ME2, he will tell Shepard that its up to him/her to deal with the reapers. Where's the renegade interrupt when you need one? He never cared. It also said him and the Alliance wasn't doing anything or did anything.

Hackett has Kenson finding something, but that's with dlc.

In ME3, Anderson, at the beginning, will say to Shepard that all he wants is for her/him to help find a way to stop the reapers. Again where's the renegade interrupt when you need one? Why didn't he and the Alliance do anything for two years while Shepard was dead?

On Mars, Hackett and Liara pool their resources to find a way to stop the reapers. Why didn't that happen after the SR1 was destroyed? How hard would it of been to send or ask Liara to check out the archives? How hard would it of been to go back to Eden Prime to find more clues?

So they can believe all they want, but its not going to solve the problem if they aren't doing anything