The Tempest thread (confirmed 100% weaponry free)

Gotta admit, I don't get the Olsen Twins thing...

Actually the Mass Effect lore states that a mass effect field can either increase or decrease the mass of an object within the field by subjecting Element Zero to an electrical current. The stronger the electrical current the stronger the effect of the Mass Effect field. It's not just a simple "Set it to zero" switch.

The problem is that a normal object having no mass poses some issues in physics to begin with, so we have to accept that at some point Mass Effect is already not making sense.

However what we do know is that ships move at different speeds and that the Normandy was one of the fastest ships, but we have to ask why. If all ships had no mass it would really only matter as to how much force your engines could put out meaning that the biggest engines would result in the fastest ships. However the Normandy was nowhere near the biggest, so why aren't Dreadnoughts the fastest ships in the Mass Effect universe? Not counting Reapers of course because they use advanced tech.


The conclusion is that the mass effect field would very likely need to work by keeping some mass on the ship but reducing it below the infinite that it's supposed to be at when going at the speed of light. It doesn't make a lot of sense but as I said earlier, we already have to accept that something in Mass Effect's physics isn't going to make sense.

Keep in mind that certain objects in space have very massive gravitational fields. The entire Milky Way still revolves around Sagittarius A*, better known as the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy. It's true that you wouldn't have much weight and you probably wouldn't notice it, but you would technically still have a minuscule amount of weight because you're still within the gravitational influence of it.

As to once you get outside of the galaxy, it's unknown if there is something that our galaxy revolves around.

No, people care way too much about internal consistency and common sense in a much loved game franchise. If they can make such a nonsensical decision about this, what else have they ballsed up?
That's where I'm coming from.

To be honest, that occurred because it was necessary to the plot. Kind of like how in To Kill a Mockingbird the father didn't attend his daughter's play at the end. Everything before in the book suggests he would never miss it, but he does so that the plot can continue.

I've been away from the thread for a few weeks so apologies if this was already discussed but, as I understand it, the Normandy was really fast because the drive was much bigger than normal for the size of the ship. So the speed is really about the ratio between the drive core size and the ship's mass.

In fact, the speed may actually be down to just how fast you can get the mass down to a small enough value. The quicker you can reduce the mass the quicker you can start accelarating at FTL and the earlier you start accelerating the less time it takes to get to the maximum speed and thus the further you travel in the time.

I don't think it's as simple about the Normandy going down to 0 mass anyway since everyone inside the ship is clearly not weightless. I believe EDI talks about the mass effect field forming a sort of bubble of space/time around the ship (which also protects the hull from damage from micro-particles). So whatever the field is doing it's not quite as simple as just making everything zero mass.

Well the original argument presented against me was that all ships in Mass Effect going at FTL speeds had zero mass with the thinking that since traveling at the speed of light means you have infinite mass even 0.000000000000000001 grams would instantly turn into infinite as you hit the speed of light.

I was pointing out that if that were true, it would make no sense for smaller ships to be faster since at that point the only factor in acceleration would be how much force you can exert on an object. This is of course ignoring all the other things you just broke by setting an object's mass to 0 =P

Though the Mass Effect codex confirms that inside the mass effect field they cheat the system by altering the speed of light, making it so that your mass doesn't go to infinite because you're not at the "increased speed of light" while reducing the mass of the ship to allow for easier acceleration but not actually reducing it to be completely massless.

OK, I know this is in the codex but I don't see any real world physics parallels that suggests lowering the mass somehow raises the speed of light since the speed of light is a constant for objects of every mass. Or why doesn't light travel infinitely faster than the current speed of light since it has no mass. It would have made partial sense if the mass effect field reduced mass to 0 even though that introduces more problems in physics. It would have been better if they had used an alcubierre drive like star trek since that has real world physics behind it. How else do you explain a 13 billion year old universe being greater than 40 billion light years across? And it is continuing to expand at FTL speeds.
I know its science fiction but that codex entry doesn't even try to use real world physics to explain it, at least partially. 

One of EDI's little musings in the cockpit was to theorize if there might be other universes in which physics didn't work the same way as their own Universe. Where, say, 1+1=3 and everything would be different.

That's almost certainly a nod to the idea that the physics of the Mass Effect universe aren't our world's physics.

'Miranda' was a name taken rather obviously from the play, The Tempest*: A girl raised with 'special care', by a powerful father. The name means 'to be marveled at' anyway. -- though the parallels kind of end there; as far as I know, ME's Miranda wasn't really isolated from the rest of the world, such that joining Cerberus was like entering a 'brave new world' for her. Or maybe it was.

Though in the case of MEA's ship, I really can't see what the connection could be; there's none, probably.



(*Of course I don't mean to suggest that there could be a 'connection' between MEA's ship, and ME2's Miranda)