Size comparrison?

Oddly enough, Old World cities have much higher population densities than New World, including New York. I just saw a doc on this. Paris is 2.3 million souls on 105 km2 for a density of 21.5k per km2. Cairo is 6.8 million souls on 374 km2 for a density of 18k per km2. India takes the cake for pop density, though. It's top two for land area and population. Mumbai is 12.5 million on 603 km2 for a density of 20.7k per km2.

40 km x 18 km x 5 = 3600 km2, 13 million souls, yielding a density of 3.6k per km2. A much lower density than a lot of Old World cities.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_density

It's a 600 years journey. It would make no sense to keep a crew awake for this long, this is not a blink of eye even for long lived species like Asari and Krogan. Best to keep everything automatized while the crew and the colonists sleep inside cryo pods until they reach destination.

ps: Remember that the Destiny Ascension had a crew of 10.000, so i don't think it would be too far fetched to think that the Arks can hold a lot more people than that.

I didn't say keep them awake during the trip. I'm talking about once they arrive. Once they're in Andromeda it would make sense for them all to get woken up. Someone was saying something about just a small crew waking up and the bulk stay in cryo while the small crew finds a home which just... didn't sit well with me. Hense me saying ti makes more sense, least to me, that everyone would be woken up.

Also I disagree about the 10k mark. Destiny Ascension looks like it's larger then the Arks. Arks seem to be about dreadnought size. Now maybe there a bit bigger, more dense and have room for 10k people sure but once they wake up they need a place to go with in that ship. That's 10k people who need a place to 'be', places to eat, get checked up by doctors upon being unfrozen/unstasis-ed or whatever.

Point is it can't just be a big ass box with a buncha cryopods with everyone fitting in like sardines. There has to be actual room for it being a ship. So if it's a dreadnaught, and you remove the gun running down the middle you could use that extra space for all those cryopods, while the rest is still being a ship - because it still has to function as a space craft once it gets to Andromeda, and that means a crew being awake and doing stuff.

It's hard to make any truly educated guesses about internal layouts, external sizes and crew numbers until we get solid figures on at least two of those three. As it is, we're trying to guess how many crew fit into which type of configuration in which size vessel. It's fun, but we're chasing our tails.

Going by what we know of the basic set-up so far, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that's exactly what they planned to do--here's a quote from the Game Informer piece:

Beyond the Pathfinders and their recon teams, thousands of other Andromeda Initiative volunteers remain in cryosleep, waiting to wake up to a new home.

We, the Pathfinders and our teams, are that 'skeleton crew', tasked with surveying prospective Golden Worlds to ascertain their habitability. Everyone else - beyond, I would presume, a small staff to run the arks in our absence, since the VIs probably aren't complex enough to keep managing things once we're out of the intergalactic void - remains in stasis until we find somewhere for them to live. 

I think this is a sensible way to do it for precisely the same reasons as you think it isn't, oddly enough. Since we've no idea how long it'll take to find a home, keeping everyone in stasis is the best way to make sure we don't run out of resources. And if the pods can last 600 years, they can certainly last 600 years and a few months. It also means the arks don't have to be designed with long-term living facilities for a large number of people, which leaves more room for cryopods, equipment and resource storage, a docking bay for the Tempest - since she presumably hitched a ride along with the Hyperion - and so on.

Yeah I guess so, just think it's a bit odd is all. Guess if you didn't want to be kept in cold storage till some asshole found your home for you, you went on the Nexus where that wasn't a thing.

Indeed. Any waking souls are mouths to feed. They'd deplete precious resources rather quickly, considering the fact that the Ark is floating in the black with no guarantee of finding fresh supplies. It's far better to wake only the essential personnel until colonizable worlds are found.

I wonder if Ark Hyperion will be damaged in a way that forces too many out of cryosleep too early, thus putting tremendous pressure on the search for a habitable world? That isn't exactly what was said, but it certainly wouldn't clash with what we know, either.

I'm very ready to play this game.

It depends how representative that pic truly is. If it's fairly accurate, they're all screwed.