2+ million year old data?

What I'm getting is that you are either making up nonsense, pretending to be stupid, or just genuinely confused. I'll assume it's the last -- we've already go one thread today where someone's pretending to be an idiot, and it's getting ugly.

The idea behind the relay telescope is that you open up a corridor to Andromeda and bring current photons here at near-infinite velocity. We know that relays can accelerate photons as well as objects with mass, or comm buoys couldn't work. This is arguably a problem with the ME1 lore, but the mass effect is space magic anyway, so we can ignore that.

Easy enough to handwave this in some fashion. Say, the reason you need a pair of relays is to keep the corridor stable. Otherwise you have 30% of the particles randomized. Still works for scanning since you can just repeat the scans and sort the signal from the noise, but unacceptable for a ship.

The really hard question is why the writers bothered. A couple of million years ago Earth would have looked pretty much the way it does today, except for us.

Come to think of it, this really is Lazarus all over again.

If they knew about randomizing 30% of the particles (or whatever), there's nothing to try. But yeah, slip a sentence into the Codex about why it's unworkable,

I would argue that, to use your example, if this device is said to create green ice-cream on Tuesdays, it doesn't automatically mean the device can't create blue ice-cream on Friday. That isn't technically changing anything, just adding to it. We are only told initially that the device does a thing on a particular day. From that we can theorise and infer what it might do on other days, or assume it doesn't do anything else, but we don't have definite proof until the source says otherwise.

To use a Mass Effect example, take the jump-jets. People are complaining that in ME2, we never had jump-jets, and yet in MEA which is set in the same timeframe technologically speaking, we have jump-jets. In the MET we don't use jump-jets, and from that people have inferred that no-one uses jump-jets. But we're never given any information that actually tells us no-one uses jump-jets, it's just an inference from what we know about Shepard. And, actually, we do see other people use jump-jets in ME3, so it's reasonable to expect they were around during the time of ME2/MEA.

Same goes for the Andromeda Initiative itself. We don't hear anything about it while we're playing as Shepard, so we assume it doesn't exist. But nothing in the trilogy actually precludes it from existing. A real-world equivalent would be me telling you the capital of the Solomon Islands is Honiara.* I'd guess most people don't know that (unless they're from the Solomon Islands, obviously), but that doesn't mean that when I tell you, I'm "breaking the lore". I'm just adding information.

There are a couple things in Andromeda that do directly contradict what was previously said. The asari pronoun thing is the big one for me. But a lot of what I think people are perceiving as breaking the lore is actually just contradicting what they've inferred, not anything explicitly stated anywhere in the games. So as far as I'm concerned, that's not an issue.

*Wikipedia is my friend.

Ok frex98 maybe I should have been more precise. If I tell you that the ONLY thing SNAFU can do is make Green Ice Cream on Tuesday, and then later in the story I tell you it is making blue ice cream on Friday that BREAKS canon. We are told in MET that Mass relays ONLY work in pairs and thier only function is to travel from one place to another instantly. Suddenly they are being used to look 2.4 million years into the future without a second device on the other end. For me that breaks canon.

We have to infer ALL kinds of back ground world information because there is NO way for them to write a complete world. So we are left to infer lots of things based on our life's experience and knowledge. A good writer understands this, a good writer lives in this made up world as much as we do and will doing everything in his power not break his world.

I think a big part of the problem is that in a game world like ME and considering the story spans more then 10 years, Bioware ends up with lots of writers leaving and many more coming. There is no one image of the world they create. When new writers don't take the time to learn the WORLD they are writing in, ignore it or get lazy for the sake of story telling then that story starts to unravel. MEA unraveled it all.