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

Cerberus would know since the funding behind it comes, presumably, from the same sources as the funding behind this 'initiative'.  Alliance command would know - who would let the chance to get the technology capable of freeing you from the shackles of the relay network slip?  They'd appropriate it right away.  And if all these people know then the Reapers would know as well.  Sovereign had been monitoring the activities of the advanced species for years before he made his move in 2183.  You don't think the Reapers wouldn't want this new technology for themselves?  You think they'd allow the target of the next harvest to flee?

The whole thing is nonsensical.

The same could be said about the moon landing or the exploration of mars. There is no economic gain in landing on them or in colonising them, yet we still put billions of dollars into space exploration. I think most trips are driven by curiosity, and the desire to learn more.

Perhaps we wanted to go to Andromeda to meet a new "dominant" alien species of a new galaxy.

But most importantly, and as someone has already pointed out: The writers didn't plan in advance to have us go to the Andromeda galaxy. In my opinion, it was a good call to start anew and dodge any position-taking regarding the ending of ME3  (the other option would have been a prequel, which is just ! bleh !)

 

Quite the opposite. Both the missions to the Moon and to Mars are reasonable. And we invest very little money in them compared to other areas. If you want a real life parallel to the Andromeda missions, it would be a mission to set a colony in Alpha Centauri.

And yes, it was a good call. When I play Andromeda, I'll just forget the Milk Way and pretend it's a reboot. And when I play the original trilogy I'll ignore Andromeda, as I understand, those the reasanoble thing to do (or headcannon a different galaxy than the one shown in the games).  

They could however have tried to come up with a better explanation that didn't hurt the original trilogy lore so much. And although it's as likely as the IT, maybe they did and we'll know when we play the game. 

I see what you (probably accidentally) did there... And partially answered the question too. They're a liability due to their fragility and requirements for sterile environments if they can't depend on their suits.

Plus there's the whole "privately funded" thing. They're unlikely to be able to pitch in with the funding, so any strays that are along could have been hired by the private backers. But the Quarians as a race aren't likely to be involved, neither in terms of being invited, nor wanting to flee. At this point in the timeline, their efforts seem pretty focused on a return to their own planet.

Infinitely less for an explorer. The people who set out to climb Mount Everest did so because it was the highest mountain in the world. Telling them to go climb a smaller mountain because it's easier is completely missing the point!

This expedition isn't about easy. If they wanted easy they could just use a Mass Relay and find a new unexplored system near that.

It's about being the first to do something extraordinary.

But there aren't explorer climbing the mountains on some planet in a star system 10 light years from Earth. That would be the analogy with the AI. 

If all you need are ships big enough to hold their own discharge facilities (how would that even work?  Discharge facilities appear to function as lightning rods for the drive discharge.  Discharging into the ship itself is supposed to be avoided!) then why hasn't there been a mass exodus to planets away from the relay network?  Garden worlds are rare and precious things.  There'd be a huge demand to spread out into the galaxy to find more of them, even if they took weeks, months, even years to get there.  And most of the races have been exploring space for over a thousand years.  Some for more than two thousand!

SUre some people would want to travel to Andromeda for the adventure, or because they can.  But others would still find adventure close to home:

Alliance to Attempt Contact with Alpha Centauri Colony

“An effort is underway today in the Alpha Centauri system as Alliance specialists work to establish contact with a lost colony of early human explorers who took an asari scientist prisoner. Mission Commander Jon Hayes said: "As near as we can tell, these people slipped through the cracks. They were considered missing when communication was lost with their ship after they left in 2075 and fell off the radar, so to speak. It's entirely possible they have no idea what's happened in the galaxy for the last 110 years. We're treating it as a first contact situation." Accompanying the military will be experts from a variety of fields, including sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, geneticists, and a host of supporting medical personnel. One anthropologist commented "It reminds me of those 19th century explorers who discovered tribes deep in the Amazon rainforest. The natives had no idea the wider world existed."”

The whole idea of static build up is kinda a silly one anyway. It doesn't happen just because you have an electric current going through something. It generally requires some kind of opposite force mucking with the static electricity inability to pass to another area. The whole idea that they never 'solved' it always seemed kind of stupid to me.

There's plenty of ways of diffusing or stopping static charge build up to begin with. Including making shit wetter, or just lining stuff with copper or whatever, avoid rubbers blah blah. I mean you could do something like the core has highly conductive nodes that stop the build up of static charge and direct that excess energy into battery stores that're used to power other other... stuff.

Though if I had to wager a guess to what BioWare is going for based off the ship designs? I have a feeling the 4 arm-thingies on the ship are the actual drive cores and they're separate from the ship directly. Or maybe they're just thrusters that double as the means to nullify the charge.

...still dunno why they went with static charge build up. If that was an actual 'problem' it would fry the computer components of the ship making your ship fuck all useless well before it built up enough to fry people.

I don't know how the discharging facilities on the Citadel work but we know that they do. I assume that they are external to the Citadel itself. I envisage them being some kind of device that would be dragged along behind the ark ships or, perhaps, ejected from them for the discharging and then reeled back in again (or maybe they just have lots of disposable ones they jettison along the way!).

Or maybe it really is new tech that only works if you have a big enough ship. I'm not ruling anything out.

But I don't think there's any shortage of garden worlds or of new places to explore within reach of the Relays. I really don't see any reason why there would be a demand for this tech within the Milky Way as long as the Relays are functional. Especially if you have to bankrupt yourself in order to finance the building of the ships large enough to benefit from it!

It wasn't important to Shepard's story.

Or make an ending canon.

That would have gone over well i'm sure. 

Disclaimer, wrote this novel post as a summary of my own thoughts n things and I totally get if no one will ever read it (because it got frigging huge). But anyway, here we go:
First, I want to say that I really like the idea of going to Andromeda and to leave the old ME behind to a large degree. It avaoids messing with the choices of the old trilogy, looses the baggage of the permutations of the universe and give the whole series a fresh start. This post is stricktly about how the journy to Andromeda is implemented, not about the idea itself, which is a good one IMO.

The thread title is also my biggest question for the Andromeda backstory so far. I’ll get to it but first, I want to quickly go into two other question that also gnaw at me and that have been mentioned in this thread as well:

1. How to go to Andromeda? The project was started in 2176. I do assume that at that time, they at least had some sort of theoretical concept for how to travel, although they might have had to develop the exact drive and hardware over the next 9 years. However, by 2183, they have no viable way to efficiently fly between clusters within the milky way because of drive discharge and fuel.

So let’s talk about drive discharge for a second: You need a large magnetic field to discharge FTL drives periodically. In the milky way, these are fairly plentiful as there are lot’s of stellar bodies with massive magnetic fields (such as planets). However, even within the milky way, this seems to be an issue when trying to fly between cluster on certain routes as evidence by multiple codex entries (e.g. Illos). Between galaxies it is assumed that the distances between such bodies is huge, so that’s not an option.

However, as has been pointed out, there are discharge stations around the citadel and if they work, you could just bring a mobile version of those with you. However, we don’t know how those discharge stations work. It may be, that they actually use the Serpent nebula, that - according to it’s codex entry - seems to have electromagnetic fields of it’s own, strong enough to even be a navigation hazard. If they only work in the nebula, that would explain why inter-cluster travel didn’t use discharge stations so far.

However, if all you need is a magnetic field, those should not be too tough to create. Take a power plant, strap it to a huge coil of conductible material and you should be good. So in theory, mobile discharge stations might be expensive but definitely not impossible to build. I actually see more of a lore problem within the old trilogy on this one than in Andromeda.

Next Problem, fuel: Now, I saw someone here suggesting that you only need fuel to speed up and slow down. This however is not true for FTL travel as you need to keep pumping juice into the Eezo core to keep the ME field going that will enable FTL travel.
From what fuel requirements of the Normandy in ME2/3 suggest, the amount of fuel that you’d need to bring in order to keep FTL travel going for 600 years straight should be humongous! But I since we actually are never told specifics and since the actual numbers never really add up for anything in the ME universe, I am happy to just assume that somehow, we can take enough fuel along for the ride.

So, IMO, how we get to Andromeda is not really a big problem. My main problem is that it doesn’t quite add up with the limitations on travel that we are told exist in the old trilogy and to be honest, those limitations had sketchy reasons to begin with, so this might be on the older lore, rather than the new one. In defence of the old lore, it’s always bad to break with established stuff, especially when writing a prequel (which the history of the AI kinda is), so I split the blame for inconsistencies on that one.

So on to the next question:

Why do we go to Andromeda? As has been mentioned, the Reapers would actually have offered the writers a perfect reason to send us out there. However, at the moment, it looks like they’d rather go with “because we are explorers”. This really annoys me. I work in science and I know how tough it is to get money for anything that doesn’t provide a tangible or at least predictable benefit at a half way calculable risk. This is not the case here. It has been stated that from the get go, everyone expects this to be a one way trip and Mac Walters confirmed that there also will be no communication between Andromeda and the Milky Way (I guess, QRCs cannot last for 600 years or something).

So why should any Milky Way based organisation - no matter if private or public - fund this enormous expense?

Especially given that there are way cheaper and more accessible alternatives right at their doorstep with the Milky Way explored by as much as 1%, this is not believable. It’s like Christopher Columbus organising a Mars mission in the year 1519 because the Europeans got bored with exploring/messing up North America already.

And before you start with our past showing humans inherent nature to explore, our past shows the opposite. There is no single endeavour undertaken in the history of mankind, that was done without some form of profit in mind for those that do not go themselves. This includes the expedition that discovered America, the moon missions and even Elon Musks proposed Mars flights (although, I will admit, he probably gets the closest).
And humans have been shown to be by far the most forward pushing species in the ME universe. it’s even worse for other species like the Asari, the Turians or the Salarians (although at least those were in interstellar space longer than 27 years at the time of the AI).

Now, the only redeeming point to this is that we don’t really know that exploration will in fact be the whole reason for going. It may be that there are other motives in play that we haven’t been told about yet. For example, the (IMO horrible) comic ME:Evolution opens a back door where the council species (and humanity) may already have some vague knowledge of an impending reaper threat in 2176. It may be that the AI is already a backup plan. I for one really hope they will incorporate some element like this because the exploration angle simply does not compute for me.

Now, finally on to the question that spawned this thread because it is a good one:

Why is the AI never mentioned in the the ME trilogy?

Obviously the answer is “because it wasn’t conceived by the writers yet at the time” but this is not really answering the question. Because any writer who wants to write a prequel story line (and again, that is what ME:A’s background is to the trilgy) needs to take this question into account in universe.

And as far as I cans ee, there is no good reason for it not being mentioned.

Suppose it was secret all along and hardly anybody but the people who actually came on board the ships knew. This would already mean that all the trailers and material we saw with the ark ships openly hovering over earth and the moon would have to be some form of simulation or whatever because otherwise, anyone on earth with a decent telescope would be able to spot the ships. It would also be a huge problem for Daddy Ryder, who seems to be a fairly famous guy all around to suddenly vanish (though that’s not a big deal with a proper cover story.

But more importantly, we know that it’s private groups how build those ships. So if it were secret it would be Cerberus level stupidity all over again. I’ll just link the good old “build a warship in secret” article here since it explains pretty well how unbelievable the idea of those huge private secret projects is.

So, let’s assume it’s not secret. This would be the major scientific and exploratory project that anyone would talk about, not just when it’s launched but for the entire development period. As someone said, this endeavor is comparable to someone today actually building a viable way to fly to and colonize Alpha Centauri. It would be astonishing, incredible. In ME1, when the characters first see the Destiny Ascension, they are in awe and they outright say that it’s the biggest and baddest ship around. They should rather be like “well yea, it’s big but hey, we almost finished the Hyperion as well.”

In ME3, when people frequently lament the possible extinction of all advanced races in the galaxy, someone should have said “at least the Andromeda guys might still have a chance.”

But most importantly, Shepard would have had the most convincing argument against the catalyst ever [obvious ME3 ending spoiler warning]! All s/he would have needed to ask is “What about extragalactic invaders?”

If the catalyst assumes that the development of a genocidal unstoppable artificial intelligence is inevitable in the Milky Way, the same should be true for any other galaxy. So if traveling between galaxies is known to be possible by the time of the ME3 ending, an invasion by a genocidal A.I. (ironically the same acronym as Andromeda Initiative) from another galaxy must be seen as inevitable as well.
In this case, resetting the galaxies socio-technological development every 50.000 years doesn’t help anyone because eventually, we’ll just face an extra-galactic A.I. that is 1 billion years ahead of us in terms of development.
Now the catalyst may assume (or have calculated or whatever) that there are an equivalent to the reapers in every galaxy but at the very least Shepard would absolutely have been required to make this argument, even if the catalyst would eventually not go for it.

So congratulations BioWare, you may have managed to make the ME3 ending even more stupid, which, to be honest is quite the achievement.

The mentioning and the ending issue are just two example of countless discrepancies of extra-galactic travel with the lore in the old trilogy.

In conclusion, given the information that we have at this point, you also seem to have written a very messy backstory for Andromeda, that doesn’t barely holds up when looked at in isolation and certainly doesn’t square with the lore that is already in existence.

But, as I said, we don’t have all the information yet. There is still a chance that we will learn additional information that can remedy some of these points (maybe even all fo them). I hope we will see those but frankly, given BW recent track record on logic vs. the “rule of cool” in their stories, I am skeptical.

This is a shame because I was hoping that BioWare would have learned from how their more ridiculous stories were received. With Andromeda, they had the opportunity to write anything they wanted. If they do not release further info to remedy the issues above, I’m afraid, i will yet again not be very happy with the route they chose to go.