Mass Effect

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, to continue with H2G2: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

[Thursday Next]

There is no canon ending, that's the point of having the Andromeda mission launch before ME3: so you don't have to worry about what happened with that.

 

The effects were pretty instantaneous within the galaxy because they were traveling through the relay network, but the network doesn't extend beyond our own galaxy so any effect or information about it would be limited to the speed of light from there.  Andromeda is 2.5 million lightyears away, so it will be 2.5 million years before anything that happened in ME3 can affect the Andromeda people (assuming they don't send another ship back, but even then it's a 1200 year round trip so it's gonna be a while).

 

Didn't realise Relays were only inside the galaxy.

[deanb]

They're designed to get you to Citadel. If they let you leave the galaxy it'd be a fair bit against the Reapers plans.

[Mr. GOH!]

The Reapers are a Milky Way species and seem to focus their plans on the MW. It's possible that they go on a circuit of reaping such that while they're away from the MW, they're invading and reaping a different galaxy, but I do not think that's supported by any of the games or fiction. They generally just chill out somewhere in intergalactic space between reapings.

 

I kind of hope they're not a big feature in the next ME game. Time for a new threat.

[deanb]

 

Andromeda Thresher Maws.

[TheMightyEthan]

It's been confirmed that the Pathfinder mission launched the same year as the end of ME2, 1 year before the Reaper invasion.

[TheMightyEthan]

Bioware has revealed the Kett, the main antagonists of Andromeda. They said they worked really hard to make them different from and more alien than the aliens we're used to in Mass Effect. Which is weird, since they basically look like a less-alien version of the Collectors...

 

[deanb]

They even have two eyes. And butt cheeks.

 

I mentioned on Twitter something like the mimics would be a cool enemy, but animation would always be an issue.

 

I'm always confused by how so many have difficulty creating "alien" species when we have such a wealth of inspiration to draw from here at home. Last of Us for example managed to create a unique looking enemy over the usual zombie look by drawing from the real life cordyceps. 

[TheMightyEthan]

Apparently the first article I saw (on PC Gamer) was wrong, that was just an early concept.  The final version looks like this:

 

 

Still boring, and less alien than the Collectors, but at least they look more distinct now.

[deanb]

I was gonna make a complaint on last post about them just seemingly having an exoskeleton, and not wearing armour but hey that's changed so good. But otherwise no more "alien" than Krogans or err ...Garrus people.

[TheMightyEthan]

Turians

[Thursday Next]

They just look a bit like Protheans now. Not exactly crazily distinct, like the jellyfish dudes, or the big sloth guys.

[deanb]

 

Fan made but should hit the mark.

[TheMightyEthan]

I've always found the Mass Effect timeline to be implausibly fast, simply from an industrial standpoint, for the time period between finding the ruins on Mars and the First Contact War.  I mean, humans are supposed to have gone from having one little shitty Martian colony to having a fleet capable of engaging in meaningful combat with the Turians (even if we were losing) over the course of 9 years?  I find that highly implausible.  I think there should have been maybe a 30-50 year period of colonization after the opening of the Charon Relay before the First Contact War, that would have been much more believable.  It would explain how the Alliance would have had enough time to develop the industrial capacity to even remotely compare to the other Citadel Races.

[deanb]

Yeah until I saw this I hadn't really processed how quickly humanity had gone from thinking they're alone to become a council member. Like a lot of the important stuff all happens within Andersons lifetime n he's not exactly super old.

[Saturnine Tenshi]

I'm missing something. Why does Andromeda need its own timeline at all?

[TheMightyEthan]

Because once Pathfinder leaves the galaxy at faster than the speed of light they have no way of getting any news from the Milky Way until the signals crawl across the gap, which will take ~2.5 million years. So even though things are happening in the Milky Way they won't have any effect on Pathfinder for quite a while.

[Saturnine Tenshi]

So not necessarily another timeline, just so far removed it doesn't matter.

[TheMightyEthan]

Right.

[Mr. GOH!]

Actually, it would be a different timeline because relativistic speeds. If you can travel faster than light, you can time travel.

 

Wasn't there FTL communication in the original ME trilogy? 

[Saturnine Tenshi]

I get what you mean in that sense. Not a foreign concept. I guess I just always view different timelines as being alternate universes.

[TheMightyEthan]

But they're not actually travelling through spacetime in the relativistic sense because something something mass effect fields, so there's no time travel issues.

 

There is FTL communication, but only along special corridors of "low-mass space" set up by a network of communications buoys, and such a network doesn't exist to Andromeda.

 

Come on, doesn't anyone else read the codex entries?

[deanb]

Actually there's FTL communication in the form of quantum entanglement too. Though given there's likely nobody from Cerberus aiding the Andromeda mission I'm unsure that'll be something you get.

 

Anywho it's just how the graph has been split for purpose of highlighting Andromeda, I'd say it's less "timelines" per se and more Milky Way vs Andromeda. No "alternate timelines" as such, just basically the 3 possible endings from ME3 have zilch impact on Andromeda...maybe (it kind of is shown spreading quite quickly through the milky way though, far faster than mass accelerators would account for...in fact it travels faster than mass accelerators otherwise it wouldn't have hit Normandy II).

[Mr. GOH!]

It doesn't matter how you FTL; the relativistic effects remain. I don't remember any technobabble from the encyclopedia entries (all of which I have read) saying that mass effect drives allow FTL but still enforce causality, but I haven't read any for a few years and might be forgetting. I also don't remember any technobabble throwing general and special relativity out the window.

 

But, yes, the timelines are more just based on different areas. Like the comparative timelines in future history textbooks a thousand years from now comparing what went on in the UK and the USA in 2016 and how those events led to the end of Western Civilization.

Edited November 19, 2016 by Mr. GOH!

[TheMightyEthan]

IRL the relativistic effects remain so long as you're actually accelerating through spacetime.  Something like the Alcubierre warp drive (assuming it's possible to construct, which it probably isn't) would avoid relativistic issues because it would actually warp space around the ship, the ship itself wouldn't move, so there's no acceleration and ergo no time dilation.

 

Mass Effect is fictional, so it doesn't have to follow the IRL rules, and they kind of hand-wave it.  Eezo allows you to create "mass effect" fields which alter the laws of physics and allow you to get from point A to point B sooner than a light beam would without actually travelling through space at faster than the speed of light.   You're moving a bubble of low-mass space around, but the ship itself isn't really moving in the conventional sense.  This is how you can travel from one system to another and back faster than light without arriving before you departed.

 

The relays create narrow pathways of this low-mass space between themselves using mass effect fields way more powerful than what the citadel races can create, allowing ships to move ultra-fast between relays.  While the citadel races can't duplicate the relays, they were able to create a comm buoy system that uses the same principle to create similar pathways big enough to send a laser down, which is how they send messages from one system to another faster than light.

 

From what I recall the codex entries never explicitly mention time travel, but the fact that you don't have relativistic effects from FTL in the mass effect universe is implicit in the fact that throughout the games you hop all over the galaxy but it never seems to create any problems with linear time.

 

@dean: I had forgotten about the QEC.  That was supposedly something super secret and brand new developed by Cerberus, so they're probably just going to pretend it doesn't exist.

 

As far as the end wave expanding faster than the mass relays, I just assumed it was traveling at the speed of light, so when it ended up in the low mass space between relays it was travelling at the speed of light in that low-mass space, which is much much higher than the regular speed of light.  Even though the Normandy was also travelling through that space it was going slower than the speed of light in that space and so was overtaken.

Edited November 19, 2016 by TheMightyEthan