The fleets at the end of ME3 (SPOILERS)

[tautologico]

Yes, that's one more thread about the ME3 ending. If you don't care about it, don't read it. Also, heavy spoilers here, of course.

I've been thinking about the endings since finishing the game last week, and my conclusion is that it was a good idea with clunky execution. I don't love it, but I also don't hate it. But this is not the issue here.

Many people say that things are "back to the stone age" or such if the relays are destroyed, and that the fleets are stranded on Earth because of it. Every time I read this I thought "don't people remember the ships have Faster-Than-Light travel capability?" and then I wondered if it would be feasible to use FTL to get to distant places in the galaxy, without the relays.

(It's clear that the deactivation/destruction of the relays will NOT necessarily happen as in the Arrival DLC. The Alpha relay was destroyed externally, by an asteroid crashing into it. The relays in the ending of ME3 are deactivated by their creator, so it's quite possible they were intended to have a deactivation procedure that didn't kill everyone near it.)

It turns out that it is, indeed, quite feasible to travel the galaxy with FTL only, even if much slower than what was possible using the relays. The estimated diameter of the milky-way is around 120 thousand light years (source: Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way]). One important thing was knowing how many times over lightspeed could the ships travel. According to the Mass Effect wiki [http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/FTL] (apparently citing from the Codex) a starship with a mass effect drive can travel around 12 light-years in a day of travel.

This means that to go from one end of the galaxy to the other, starting from an edge, it would take around 10 thousand days or 27 years with the FTL drives in current ships in the ME universe. A long time, for sure, but well enough inside a human's life span (which the codex mentions that can last around 150 years at the time). And this is the time to cross the whole galaxy in a diameter, with nearer places being much quicker to reach. So it's completely possible to establish routes and get to many planets of interest.

Considering people have much more knowledge about reaper knowledge after the end of the game, it is even reasonable to assume they can eventually replicate the mass relays.

So there, the prospects are not so grim

 

[skywolfblue]

I don't know what the lore says about this exactly but:

Gameplay says that the Normady has trouble making it to the other side of a small cluster of stars before running completely out of fuel. I don't think they'd have enough fuel to cover the distance of the major mass relays even if they somehow managed to put all the fuel of the whole fleet onto one ship.

But maybe with the resources of a whole star cluster and some small improvements to FTL they could work some rudimentary colony-ship style interaction.

 

[spectrenihlus]

Let's no forget that ships have to disperse the stored static energy created by FTL drives into a gravity well otherwise they get fried.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Except that Mass Effect Drives operate on Reaper based technology. So they should stop working.

 

[tautologico]

I don't know what the lore says about this exactly but:

Gameplay says that the Normady has trouble making it to the other side of a small cluster of stars before running completely out of fuel. I don't think they'd have enough fuel to cover the distance of the major mass relays even if they somehow managed to put all the fuel of the whole fleet onto one ship.

But maybe with the resources of a whole star cluster and some small improvements to FTL they could work some rudimentary colony-ship style interaction.

That's a good point. I think the gameplay part is more concerned with creating challenge and therefore doesn't need to respect the lore, but I hadn't considered fuel. This may be a limitation.

 

[Jadak]

Except that Mass Effect Drives operate on Reaper based technology. So they should stop working.

How the hell does that make any sense? What are you talking about?

There's no reason scientific principles would become invalid, doing anything to the Reapers doesn't change physics...

 

[tautologico]

Except that Mass Effect Drives operate on Reaper based technology. So they should stop working.

True, FTL drives are based on the mass effect, but there's no indication that all Reaper technology stops working. The mass relays are explicitly deactivated. Except in the "destroy reapers" ending, the Reapers themselves appear to be still working at the end.

 

[Killertje]

I don't see how fuel would be an issue since in space you don't slow down when you stop your engine. You stop when you hit something really big or when you ACTIVELY decelerate.

 

[tautologico]

Except that Mass Effect Drives operate on Reaper based technology. So they should stop working.

How the hell does that make any sense? What are you talking about?

There's no reason scientific principles would become invalid, doing anything to the Reapers doesn't change physics...

True, for all mass effect drives to stop working would require the laws of physics to be altered in the universe, and I don't think that happens. The drives were not made by "Space Timmy" and shouldn't be deactivated by it at the end.

 

[Sexy Devil]

Yes, that's one more thread about the ME3 ending. If you don't care about it, don't read it. Also, heavy spoilers here, of course.

I've been thinking about the endings since finishing the game last week, and my conclusion is that it was a good idea with clunky execution. I don't love it, but I also don't hate it. But this is not the issue here.

Many people say that things are "back to the stone age" or such if the relays are destroyed, and that the fleets are stranded on Earth because of it. Every time I read this I thought "don't people remember the ships have Faster-Than-Light travel capability?" and then I wondered if it would be feasible to use FTL to get to distant places in the galaxy, without the relays.

(It's clear that the deactivation/destruction of the relays will NOT necessarily happen as in the Arrival DLC. The Alpha relay was destroyed externally, by an asteroid crashing into it. The relays in the ending of ME3 are deactivated by their creator, so it's quite possible they were intended to have a deactivation procedure that didn't kill everyone near it.)

It turns out that it is, indeed, quite feasible to travel the galaxy with FTL only, even if much slower than what was possible using the relays. The estimated diameter of the milky-way is around 120 thousand light years (source: Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way]). One important thing was knowing how many times over lightspeed could the ships travel. According to the Mass Effect wiki [http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/FTL] (apparently citing from the Codex) a starship with a mass effect drive can travel around 12 light-years in a day of travel.

This means that to go from one end of the galaxy to the other, starting from an edge, it would take around 10 thousand days or 27 years with the FTL drives in current ships in the ME universe. A long time, for sure, but well enough inside a human's life span (which the codex mentions that can last around 150 years at the time). And this is the time to cross the whole galaxy in a diameter, with nearer places being much quicker to reach. So it's completely possible to establish routes and get to many planets of interest.

Considering people have much more knowledge about reaper knowledge after the end of the game, it is even reasonable to assume they can eventually replicate the mass relays.

So there, the prospects are not so grim

You also need enough eezo and food to last 27 years though, and that just isn't going to happen.

 

[Baradiel]

Theres always the issue with food and supplies for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of troops and crew that my Shepard brought to fight the Reapers. Tensions between races are already high. A resource war over a devastated Earth would not end well.

 

[tautologico]

I don't see how fuel would be an issue since in space you don't slow down when you stop your engine. You stop when you hit something really big or when you ACTIVELY decelerate.

This is certainly true for "slower-than-light" travel, but I don't know if it applies to FTL travel. Considering the FTL drive must keep a mass effect field while traveling faster than light, It seems there is a need to spend energy for FTL. Fuel could be saved while inside solar systems by just using momentum though, at the cost of traveling slower.

We have to consider how efficient are energy sources in the ME universe. A nuclear fusion generator can yield a lot of energy with little "fuel".

 

[PlowmanMk]

Everything said so far is fairly plausible. I'm still speculating whether or not the relays were destroyed in the first place.

Everyone has thrown speculation into how they interpreted the ending, although not many have realised how vague the ending was. We saw a few explosions here and there, but we don't know for sure what happened.

 

[tautologico]

You also need enough eezo and food to last 27 years though, and that just isn't going to happen.

Yes, but 27 years is the time needed to get from one point at the edge of the galaxy to the opposite point, along the longest diameter. Nearer places would be reachable in much less time. There would be other places in the galaxy with reserves of food and eezo, besides the possibility of scanning planets like we did in ME2

 

[tautologico]

It would be slow and difficult to travel across the galaxy, many would die in the way, settlements would be created by people who didn't want to travel further, etc. Didn't the "conquest" of the US West also take decades or something?

 

[RJ 17]

This was actually part of my modest "defense" of the ending of the game. Even if you pick Destroy All Reapers, it's not like you're destroying all technology. I suggested that if you pick Control The Reapers, it is quite possible that Shepard's will - now the driving motivation of the Reaper Fleet - could actually make the Reapers begin to rebuild the Relays.

But even without that, the Protheans managed to create the Conduit which is itself a mini mass relay. This shows that the relays are not some secret technology that only the Reapers could understand. The civilizations of the galaxy could eventually unlock the ability to rebuild their own relays. People say "we're back to the stone age" and that's simply not true. The infrastructure of the galaxy has been destroyed, but science and more importantly technology still exist.

 

[tautologico]

Everything said so far is fairly plausible. I'm still speculating whether or not the relays were destroyed in the first place.

Everyone has thrown speculation into how they interpreted the ending, although not many have realised how vague the ending was. We saw a few explosions here and there, but we don't know for sure what happened.

That's true. People also say that quarians and turians will die because they are stranded in a levo-protein planet (not necessarily true in the synthesis ending, everyone gets altered) and that the mass relays "explosions" would kill everyone around them, like the Alpha relay. But the Alpha relay was destroyed by colliding an asteroid with it, it's completely different than deactivating them (if this was what happened at the end).

Unless canonical sources clarify these points, it's all speculation. But even if the relays were deactivated, there is still a way to travel on the galaxy and the fleets are not doomed to stay on Earth.

 

[tautologico]

Theres always the issue with food and supplies for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of troops and crew that my Shepard brought to fight the Reapers. Tensions between races are already high. A resource war over a devastated Earth would not end well.

This is an important consideration. Nearer stations and planets would be reachable in amounts of time much smaller than the 27 years needed to reach the other end of the galaxy, so it could be possible to create a plan to take fleets in different directions with waypoints in the way that would have resources. Probably wouldn't be sufficient for everyone, but considering the fleets are military and they (most of them anyway) wouldn't want to get into another war, I think they could make plans for it.

Also there's the possibility of fitting ships with hydroponic farms and other ways to produce food. If they did it in Battlestar Galactica, they can do it in Mass Effect

 

[Casual Shinji]

Except that Mass Effect Drives operate on Reaper based technology. So they should stop working.

Yes, but in all three endings you basically get your hands on all the Reaper tech.

I don't really know what happens to the Reapers in the "Merge" ending. But in the "Control" ending the Reapers are your slaves so you could most likely have them rebuild the relays for you, right?

And even in the "Destroy" ending you've got hundreds of disabled Reapers scattered across the Earth and the Solar system. So obtaining the knowledge to create mass relays from all that tech shouldn't be too difficult.

Then again, I'm not an expert on the Mass Effect lore.

When thinking about the "Destroy" ending, it kinda reminds me of that mission in ME2 where you scope out a disabled Reaper and find out that all the scientists salvaging it went crazy, signifying that "even a dead god can still dream". Doesn't that mean that Earth's entire population will go absolutely batshit insane with all those dead Reapers lying all over the place?

 

[tautologico]

But even without that, the Protheans managed to create the Conduit which is itself a mini mass relay. This shows that the relays are not some secret technology that only the Reapers could understand. The civilizations of the galaxy could eventually unlock the ability to rebuild their own relays. People say "we're back to the stone age" and that's simply not true. The infrastructure of the galaxy has been destroyed, but science and more importantly technology still exist.

After surviving the struggle, the races in the galaxy also know much more about reaper technology than ever. So it is possible that they could recreate the mass relays in decades, and within one century have at least a small network of relays placed in key points of the galaxy.