So, why no one ever mentioned the Andromeda Initiative in the trilogy?

It was against galactic law to even have too many dreadnought class ships, which are puny compared to the Citadel. Remember that nobody with influence actually believed Shep about the Reapers, so building such a ship would have likely been viewed as hostile by every other species.

and once they show up, all resources went into the Crucible.

OK Arcian, master of lore, correct me if I am wrong and...well I probably am...but I thought the idea of discharging drives was supposed to do it in places where it wouldn't exactly effect anything, ie middle of space, atmos of gas giants... wouldn't the inter galactic void be a perfect place to discharge ones drive?

So option 1. everyone is aware of it and they chose not to talk about it for reaons I already discussed.  Or option 2 very few people know about it, or know the details, and hence no one would have a reason to talk about it. 

Do we know the Arks are actually that advanced? Where have they said that? All we know is they have cryogenics capable of reaching another galaxy.  Cryogenic technology was even on the original Normandy. 

Then they should own up to it and call it a retcon.

Because, yes, it is offensively lore-breaking without a damn good reason for why this tech exists, has apparently existed for years (the project apparently started in 2176, years before ME1) despite the codex stating that wide tracts of space without discharge capability are a barrier for exploration.  


And nobody thought to bring such a massive project up when even a delusional volus looking for "beings of light" gets a mention.

Rationalize anyway you want to and more power to you for blindly accepting Bio's willingness to throw any piece of halfbaked logic at you.

- The time period that the initiative happened was when Shepard was, at the latest, under house arrest or, at the earliest, dead or was operating with Cerberus to stop the collectors.  Shepard would be seen as liability under any of those instances thus Shepard was not brought into the loop (When Shepard took down the Shadow Broker the Illusive Man learned the location of the base due to the tracking devices on the Normandy so that is a very high risk).

- They stated it was privately organized, Cerberus was able to build the SR-2 and revive Shepard without anyone finding out aside from the Shadow Broker (and that was only because they had to get Shepard's body from him).

- There are people who believed in Shepard's warning about the Reapers so enough of these people are capable of putting the initiative together.

- Of note there was also the special Task Force that investigated the mysteries of the Universe that Shepard had no knowledge of until Leviathan DLC in ME3 so you can keep large secrets if you try.

- The Citadel archive in the Citadel DLC revealed that the council believed the Reaper threat but hid it under the guise of takeover attempt by Saren, again showing how easy it is to deceive people about what is actually going on.


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Also remember, the was a holo of an Arc in the Citadel Archives so it could have been a subtle hint to the next phase and we just didn't interpret it as such. 

The galaxy at large doesn't know, but that doesn't mean a team of scientists, say, with access to Sovereign's drive core, couldn't have figured it out while the superstructure for the AI ships were under construction and modified them accordingly.

The real problem is not even that they retconned the original trilogy in a colossal way, making many things irrelevant and greatly shattering the coherence of the universe. I can just pretend (in a way it's not really pretending) Andromeda don't exist when I replay the trilogy.

The problem is, what can we truly expect for Andromeda from the people who thought this was a good idea? What kind of story they can deliver?

Giving them the benefit of the doubt here. The story, and the game itself, could even be decent, but, from the trailer, i almost get the impression that "Mass Effect" is just gonna be the name of the game. Much like Fallout 4 (good game, not really a Fallout)

As far as the trip itself goes, you don't actually need fuel for a 600 year trip. You need enough fuel to get up to speed, slow yourself down once there, and then a little bit to get around and find some local fuel.

99% of the trip would involve drifting through space with your thrusters turned off. Since there's no friction to slow you down, you'll eventually get there.

As for discharging that depends on if the mass effect field needs to stay up the entire time or not. The whole thing becomes theoretical because once you're going faster than light our current physics model falls apart, but changing the mass of the ship after it's already up to speed shouldn't matter and you theoretically should only need the mass effect fields while accelerating or decelerating provided you want to travel in a straight line.

Mass Effect has never really stated how well this works or not though and like I said, it's all theoretical because going faster than light has a habit of breaking everything we know about physics.



How does that break anything though?

Nothing in Mass Effect lore ever said it was impossible to build bigger ships. Everything we know about physics right now in addition to the rules of the Mass Effect universe suggests that it should be fairly easy to build ships bigger than Dreadnoughts if you have the money.

The money as well as the treaty would be the two main factors stopping you from building such a warship prior to the Reapers showing up.