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Post by Ravensword on Nov 13, 2015 16:24:39 GMT -6
My only problem w/ this post is the presumption that they would use conventional thrusters to travel, as well as the fact that the trailer shows the ark outside the Milky Way Galaxy. Conventional thrusters are woefully underpowered to get anywhere in the galaxy, much less having to traverse the distance the two million year distance it takes light to travel from the Milky Way to Andromeda. Why wouldn't they just use FTL? Sorry, when I say conventional I mean conventional in the ME world - FTL thrusters without the mass relays. Light travels at 6 trillion miles a year. It would take three million years to get to Andromeda if you went the speed of light. However, we know that FTL engines DO to faster than light by quite a bit, even if it is quite slow compared to Mass Relays. Still, we are told in ME codex entries that it takes hundreds of years to cross the galaxy with conventional FTL thrusters. We can glean from ME3 that from the time the Reapers showed up at the beginning of the game to the point where the entire galaxy was bathed in RBG light was about a year. So if it would take hundreds of years going at conventional ME FTL speed to cross the Milky Way, it would be less than a percent away from the galaxy after just one year. And that's assuming there was a relay that ended right on the edge of the Milky Way. I just don't see how they could have gotten that far. And that's assuming they loaded up, supplied and manned with people the day the Reapers first showed on Earth. Heck, they wouldn't be all that much further (maybe around 2% of the galaxy's full size) if they left the day Shephard was named Commander of the Normandy at the start of the three year trilogy. Point being - the Relays allowed instantaneous travel all over the galaxy. And the RBG effects were spread at that same rate. For the effects to cover the entire galaxy, the radius between each Relay would have to cover thousands of light years in all directions. The logistics of it all strongly to suggest there is no way that the Ark could have gotten outside the range of the RGB blast unless there was some secret FTL drive the ship was equipped with that allowed them to travel faster than any other (non-Reaper) ship we are shown in the ME lore. Okay. That totally makes sense then. I'm not a mathematician or much of an astronomer (I do like to stare up at the sky form time to time), and so I could list that the diameter of the Milky way Galaxy is 100,000 light years, I did the calculations, and I could be wrong (I did say I wasn't a mathematician or an astronomer), but it would appear that the trip to Andromeda from the Milky Way would take 3,000 years at FTL speeds. I guess everyone aboard the ark will be in cold sleep, they're vitals being monitored by a computer. So the next ME game will take place in over 3,000 years (given enough time to colonize the galaxy and get settled in)? Maybe. Maybe they had a breakthrough in FTL research that allowed them to travel even faster than before, or they developed a new method of FTL, like a jump drive or some space-folding device. Maybe there's a wormhole that led to the outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy. Wormholes are very popular objects in sci-fi and really convenient, too.  That's about the only way that would work, otherwise one has to hope that BW has an explanation for this, or if it's just gonna be another plot hole. |
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