The Andromeda Initiative will be launched in 2185

Awesome, that means we are not an Alliance pigdog anymore, WOO!

I know exactly what I'm in for and have been since ME3 - a damn good co-op multiplayer TPS experience.

As long as they deliver on that, the rest doesn't matter.

I still remain hopeful that they have a bit better reasoning than what is apparent. I don't expect watertight logic but they could at least make an effort. The big problem with what they are presenting so far is the motivation. Going to Andromeda for resources???? Completely nonsensical. The distance and difficulty is just too great and there are massive untapped resources much closer and easier to get at.

Removing Reapers as the reason for leaving, makes the motivation more difficult to justify. I'm not familiar enough with the lore outside the games, is it possible that back when the Andromeda Initiative was founded that someone else knew about the Reapers? I understand the Illusive Man did, but someone else?

Another possibility is that there is actually a refugee from Andromeda desperate to return who is the puppet master behind the entire initiative. It would help with the technology as well. The problem with that is actually convincing people from the milky way that going to Andromeda is a good idea.

I'm completely fine with all of this.

I like that it leaves during ME2, it gives enough in game time for me to buy 'studied and used reaper corpse to advance tech' for the getting there problem.. . Is it a perfect science? No but its good enough and in the end the game is about what we do when we get there, not the detailed blue print of how we got there.

I also have never had a problem with the leaving the Milky Way. So what only 1% of the MW is known. We still have parts of our own planet left unexplored but we went to Mars, and only a tiny fraction of Mars is mapped but we sent probes to Jupiter. People have always run before they could walk.

I've said this before but ideally I would like to see the private company setting up the Arc project but on a smaller scale as a vanity project of some mega rich explorer type, then ME1 happens and parts of the Council believing Shepard then get involved and it becomes a much bigger in scale private/council races funded endeavour. With ME2 happening (specifically Arrival) it looks more and more like we are going to lose so the Arcs are launched.

We predicted this would happen YEARS ago, it was the obvious bail-out card to avoid ME3 galaxy-spanning choices & consequences.

Perhaps that could be one of the reveals of the game, that Jien Garson was one of the few aware of the threat and started preparing her own countermeasure (in a far more civilized way than the Illusive Man).

We know it's not impossible. The Andromeda Initiative was founded in 2176. TIM learned of the Reapers in 2157 and Saren got news of Sovereign around 2165. In fact, the whole plot of the original trilogy was based on Shepard not being the first person to know about the Reaper threat.

I don't get why it's so unlikely. Throw enough money in and you can build a big ship. What's the big deal? Put enough people on it and you can build it really quickly.

Is there some Codex entry that says humans can't build big ships or anything that says how long it takes to build them?

If there's some contradiction of established ME lore then I'm not aware of it.

I think this one was explained over the course of the series. There were clones to harvest organs from, cybernetics were used to reconstruct his skeleton, both reconstruction of his skin and the blood flow was was done (quoted from Lazarus project lore) in order to support the organs harvested from clones. I mean what else do we need? This was explained.

You know as a paramedic there's a saying: The person isn't dead until, they're warm and dead. Shepard's body was on a planet that was -22 degrees Celsius, which I would assume preserved his corpse.

Just because it's standard practice to keep accelarating until the mid point doesn't mean they have to. I don't see why they can't stop the thrusters once they get fast enough and then restart them again in reverse nearer the end.

If the fuel requirements are largely for the thrusters rather than maintaining the ME field then there's no reason to believe they can't bring enough fuel with them.

As for discharging, we know that large structures like the Citadel can provide their own discharging facilities and the Arks are easily big enough for that. Maybe they can even recycle the power from the discharge into powering the Core again!

I'm not convinced there's any problem with them having the tech to do this. The size of the ships could give them the ability to be self-sustaining where more conventional ships might struggle.

Because I would assume they just used a clone's brain. The only thing mentioned around Shepard's brain is the illusive man didn't want to use a control chip fearing Shepard's personality could be affected. There was never any mention that they used the original brain. The clone in citadel DLC thought it was Shepard why couldn't the brain they used also believe it was Shepard. The clone said Cerberus created it for the use of spare organs, the brain is an organ, so is the skin and any other cells that is said to be reconstructed in the Lazarus lore. They used Shepard's original body held together with cybernetics and clone organs. It was explained.

Ding ding ding ding ding!

To the top, if several random posters on the internet can come up with this idea practically independently of one another, than surely the damn writers of the game could as well.

To the bottom, well, you'd think that'd be obvious. But never assume.