99 réponses à ce sujet

[Juniper Mucius]

I think not having the Mass Relays would make it pretty interesting. Not having the relays, but still having FTL communications? And honestly, it'd make a lot of people much more safe. The traverse would be safer from the Terminus systems.

[Warhawk137]

Allworkandlowpay wrote...

Even without mass relays, a straight trip using FTL from one end of the galaxy to the other would only take 23 years, and nobody realistically needs to do that. What you will see at the end of ME3 is a lot of expansion shrinking, colony worlds becoming more independent from both the Citadel worlds and the System Alliance. Also, the SA will likely be no more, as many colony clusters who are in close proximity will decide to form their own governments, especially in the Traverse. Earth, being rebuilt, will have to deal with a massive immigration influx of Turians and Asari refugees who currently don't have the means to make it home.

It's a huge hiccup in the world of galactic progress, but the chains of destiny have been broken, and all civilizations are free to chart their futures for themselves, and not on the pre-determined route made for them.

Oh, I agree.  I'm not suggesting everything is all hunky-dory, but a "technological dark age" isn't the logical result according to the lore.  A lot of people would be seriously inconvenienced, and you'd have lots of refugees, and arguably some economic depression as a result, but in many ways the various problems associated with the relay network blowing would spur, rather than cripple, innovation.

Also, just to clarify on the comm buoy thing, those are chains spreading out from the relays... so without the relays, you don't have instantaneous communication across the galaxy (at least until a new relay system was built), but you'd still have instantaneous communication within each settled cluster.  Hypothetically you could string those things together on a trip between clusters, but that would be costly and probably impossible to maintain - they'd have to improve the tech.  Still, building a long-range comm buoy could very well be a fairly quick initial step towards building new relays that can transport ships.

Modifié par Warhawk137, 05 mars 2012 - 08:07 .

[Allworkandlowpay]

Warhawk137 wrote...

Allworkandlowpay wrote...

Even without mass relays, a straight trip using FTL from one end of the galaxy to the other would only take 23 years, and nobody realistically needs to do that. What you will see at the end of ME3 is a lot of expansion shrinking, colony worlds becoming more independent from both the Citadel worlds and the System Alliance. Also, the SA will likely be no more, as many colony clusters who are in close proximity will decide to form their own governments, especially in the Traverse. Earth, being rebuilt, will have to deal with a massive immigration influx of Turians and Asari refugees who currently don't have the means to make it home.

It's a huge hiccup in the world of galactic progress, but the chains of destiny have been broken, and all civilizations are free to chart their futures for themselves, and not on the pre-determined route made for them.

Oh, I agree.  I'm not suggesting everything is all hunky-dory, but a "technological dark age" isn't the logical result according to the lore.  A lot of people would be seriously inconvenienced, and you'd have lots of refugees, and arguably some economic depression as a result, but in many ways the various problems associated with the relay network blowing would spur, rather than cripple, innovation.

I agree. Furthermore, I actually think they are setting up ME4 (cus let's be honest, it's happening folks) with this as a way to introduce a new world and greater villain. I'd give all the races, or even a human group, maybe five years tops, before they are able to build their own Mass Relay, or rebuild one, and relink it to the old "system." I wouldn't be surprised if those relays are linked up to other networks of relays, maybe somewhere like Andromeda, and were locked out for a reason. I bet doing something like that would add a whole new galaxy to explore, or could just be a very very bad decision. Insert extragalactic invasion here.

[Juniper Mucius]

There's so much positive agreement in this thread. There's no mocking or hating. I want to protect this thread. Because guys, the Reapers are coming. They are coming to reap all the goodwill going on here. But I will defend it! I will defend the goodwill to my last breath!

[Bleachrude]

Allworkandlowpay wrote...

Even without mass relays, a straight trip using FTL from one end of the galaxy to the other would only take 23 years, and nobody realistically needs to do that. What you will see at the end of ME3 is a lot of expansion shrinking, colony worlds becoming more independent from both the Citadel worlds and the System Alliance. Also, the SA will likely be no more, as many colony clusters who are in close proximity will decide to form their own governments, especially in the Traverse. Earth, being rebuilt, will have to deal with a massive immigration influx of Turians and Asari refugees who currently don't have the means to make it home.

It's a huge hiccup in the world of galactic progress, but the chains of destiny have been broken, and all civilizations are free to chart their futures for themselves, and not on the pre-determined route made for them.

This.

What we had was that before, no two places in the galaxy were more than a week or two apart from one another. Given that you didn't need a FTL ship to actually use the mass relays, travel was probably cheap as well. so in a word, more cosmopolitan.

Now, you're going to get more insular communtiies as visitors/traders outside of your cluster are going to be much rarer...

[Warhawk137]

Allworkandlowpay wrote...

Warhawk137 wrote...

Allworkandlowpay wrote...

Even without mass relays, a straight trip using FTL from one end of the galaxy to the other would only take 23 years, and nobody realistically needs to do that. What you will see at the end of ME3 is a lot of expansion shrinking, colony worlds becoming more independent from both the Citadel worlds and the System Alliance. Also, the SA will likely be no more, as many colony clusters who are in close proximity will decide to form their own governments, especially in the Traverse. Earth, being rebuilt, will have to deal with a massive immigration influx of Turians and Asari refugees who currently don't have the means to make it home.

It's a huge hiccup in the world of galactic progress, but the chains of destiny have been broken, and all civilizations are free to chart their futures for themselves, and not on the pre-determined route made for them.

Oh, I agree.  I'm not suggesting everything is all hunky-dory, but a "technological dark age" isn't the logical result according to the lore.  A lot of people would be seriously inconvenienced, and you'd have lots of refugees, and arguably some economic depression as a result, but in many ways the various problems associated with the relay network blowing would spur, rather than cripple, innovation.

I agree. Furthermore, I actually think they are setting up ME4 (cus let's be honest, it's happening folks) with this as a way to introduce a new world and greater villain. I'd give all the races, or even a human group, maybe five years tops, before they are able to build their own Mass Relay, or rebuild one, and relink it to the old "system." I wouldn't be surprised if those relays are linked up to other networks of relays, maybe somewhere like Andromeda, and were locked out for a reason. I bet doing something like that would add a whole new galaxy to explore, or could just be a very very bad decision. Insert extragalactic invasion here.

That or an MMO.  In any case, I came up with a randomly neat idea for a new villain the other day, although in retrospect it sorta sounds like I ripped off Stargate.  So, we know a lot of the galaxy, including a lot of the former relay system was unexplored.  We also know that the Protheans observed humanity quite a bit during their early development.  So, what if the Protheans didn't just observe humanity, but experimented on them, and maybe transported them to another world, one deep in the relay system which we haven't mapped, as part of some sort of biological engineering experiment?  I mean, we know the Protheans were fairly arrogant, I doubt they'd have problems experimenting on a pre-sentient/early-sentient species.  And those humans developed in a different environment along different lines than the humans from Earth, and maybe they enslaved some other races in their part of the galaxy, or something to that effect.  I dunno, it would be cool - we'd go from fighting these incomprehensible ancient synthetic beings in the original trilogy, to fighting, basically, ourselves in the next.  Plus it would be an interesting source of conflict for the Asari/Turians/etc. with humans, because of the similarity.  Maybe we could throw in a Turian civil war just for kicks.  There's plenty of potential out there.  It's a big galaxy, there's probably lots of things we could find.

Anyway, I just want to draw an analogy here.  Scientific progress is often dictated by necessity and the willingness to expend funds, obviously.  We went from basically a concept to a moon landing in less than 10 years.  That's FAST.  If you want a modern-day analogy to developing a relay network, consider the idea of a space elevator.  That would save us a lot of money on getting things into orbit, but there's not a lot of need for it, because we don't really have a lot of places to go at the moment, and space colonization is a low priority.  Now, we don't have the tech right now - we just have the basic concept, and we have hypothetical structures of carbon nanotubes that would be strong enough (we haven't produce them yet, and the ones we have, which come up a bit short on the tensile strength, have only been produced in very small lengths).  But, if for some reason we decided we absolutley needed it, and got the government and the economy behind it, we could probably have one up in 10 years or so.

[ManualReplica]

What do you mean its not a "dark age"?

Mass Relays blow up, crippling transportation and trade between the systems.
Everyone on the urban worlds which are completely sustained by trading food are screwed and the development and spread of new tech takes forever due to the distance between each system.

Oame Gver man.

[granyte]

i don't think they will build new mass relay or at least i don't think they should they should go thier own way of increasing the FTL speed not constrained by a pre defined network
(procedural galaxy for the next game any one?)

[Juniper Mucius]

ManualReplica wrote...

What do you mean its not a "dark age"?

Mass Relays blow up, crippling transportation and trade between the systems.
Everyone on the urban worlds which are completely sustained by trading food are screwed and the development and spread of new tech takes forever due to the distance between each system.

Oame Gver man.

FTL still exists.

[Warhawk137]

ManualReplica wrote...

What do you mean its not a "dark age"?

Mass Relays blow up, crippling transportation and trade between the systems.
Everyone on the urban worlds which are completely sustained by trading food are screwed and the development and spread of new tech takes forever due to the distance between each system.

Oame Gver man.

Read some of the posts.  Colonies that are not self-sustainable would probably evacuate to the nearest sustainable colony - and in most cases it wouldn't be that far at conventional FTL, maybe a few weeks, or a couple months, for the more remote colonies.

What would be interesting in that situation is if, say, an Asari colony evacuated to a nearby human colony and they had to get along.  Or any other combination, really.

And once they have at least small-scale relays, spread of new tech doesn't take all that long.  Say 10-15 years at that point (based on probably transport time of the information, or even the pre-built relays ready to be installed) to get a basic, skeletal relay network that can transport people and small ships between at least the home worlds and major colonies. 

[ManualReplica]

FTL travel takes forever compared to the Mass Relays.

[Warhawk137]

granyte wrote...

i don't think they will build new mass relay or at least i don't think they should they should go thier own way of increasing the FTL speed not constrained by a pre defined network
(procedural galaxy for the next game any one?)

It's really the fastest solution, I would think, since they have a basic understanding of the tech already.

Maybe a vast network of massive relays wouldn't be the end result - talk about resource intensive - but the first step in getting galactic society back on track is setting up at least small scale relays between major centers, allowing for instantaneous communication between the VIPs of each civilization, and at least some level of trade as well, not to mention faster travel in general due to more "jumping off" places.  Once a very basic galactic network is in place they'd be more easily able to work on a long-term solution.

[Zeppex]

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't there some relays that are dormant. Like the one the humans found near Jupiter. Didn't the Council make it law that some would not be active, alpha relays or w/e? Unless when Reapers come they all activate or when ending happens they become active. Wouldn't the inactive ones be safe?

[Allworkandlowpay]

ManualReplica wrote...

What do you mean its not a "dark age"?

Mass Relays blow up, crippling transportation and trade between the systems.
Everyone on the urban worlds which are completely sustained by trading food are screwed and the development and spread of new tech takes forever due to the distance between each system.

Oame Gver man.

What planets are completely sustained by trading foods? Every planet we've seen appear to be self-sustaining. Even if they weren't, FTL drives still allow slower transportation. According to the Codex, FTL drive cores can propel ships upwards to 12 Light Years a day (0.5 LY per hour.) That's without Mass Relays. On the middle and outer rims of the galaxy, each star system is on average 5-10 light years apart. Meaning even if you had to hop through several systems, you could get from one colony to another in a couple days. A full end to end voyage(barring fuel constraints) of the galaxy would only take 23.5 years.

So yeah, it may take a couple months for trading routes to run their courses. So what? Do you know how long it took to travel from one end of the United States to the other just 150 years ago? about 3 and a half months.  How about crossing the Atlantic for trade? About 6 months. Surely nobody starved out because it wasn't instantious travel, right?

[Juniper Mucius]

ManualReplica wrote...

FTL travel takes forever compared to the Mass Relays.

12 lightyears takes a frelling day.  Clusters would be "cut off" from other clusters, but clusters themselves could become thriving.  In fact, this may open up the door to more exploration.  If clusters are cut off from one another, then exploring the clusters themselves could create a boom of sorts, which could lead to a technological revolution.  The denizens of the Mass Effect universe were inhibited by pre-established uber-tech.  Without this uber-tech, they will find different ways.

It's actually a brilliant set up to continue the series.

[Bleachrude]

ManualReplica wrote...

What do you mean its not a "dark age"?

Mass Relays blow up, crippling transportation and trade between the systems.
Everyone on the urban worlds which are completely sustained by trading food are screwed and the development and spread of new tech takes forever due to the distance between each system.

Oame Gver man.

Er, given that even without the Mass relays, the FTL drivecore makes the galaxy ONLY 33 years large a trip, not sure how tech development would be stagnated.

I imagine that the first order of business would be exploration and many of those turians and asari trapped on earth would be the first volunteers...

Take Noveria for example....

It's in the horsehead nebula which is 1500 light years from Earth. Using the accepted speed of 12 ly/day, this puts Noveria roughly 125 days away from Earth.

The journey on the silk road in Earth (arguablyt he most famous and most influential of earth's old trade routres) took 15 months.....

Yeah..that's not a long journey...

[Warhawk137]

ManualReplica wrote...

FTL travel takes forever compared to the Mass Relays.

Eh, 12 light years a day isn't that slow.  It's a downright pain in the ass, no question, and trade is pretty crippled for a while, but you'd still be able to exchange scientific progress on a time scale of a couple years.

The smart thing to do would be to figure out which major race home world was the most central location, and focus your scientific efforts on relay tech there, so that information can be gathered and spread faster between the various races by cutting travel time.

[Allworkandlowpay]

I love everybody in this thread. Everybody.

[Juniper Mucius]

Warhawk137 wrote...

ManualReplica wrote...

FTL travel takes forever compared to the Mass Relays.

Eh, 12 light years a day isn't that slow.  It's a downright pain in the ass, no question, and trade is pretty crippled for a while, but you'd still be able to exchange scientific progress on a time scale of a couple years.

The smart thing to do would be to figure out which major race home world was the most central location, and focus your scientific efforts on relay tech there, so that information can be gathered and spread faster between the various races by cutting travel time.

You know, keeping Wrex alive seems a brilliant decission for the krogan.  Making krogan scientists work on reinvigorating krogan soil seems like it will really pay off for them now.

[Bleachrude]

Illium would be far off the beaten track as being in the crescent nebula puts it over 5000 ly from earth, but Berkenstein in the serpent nebula (former home of the citadel) is only 650 ly away

That's less than 2 months travel...

I think many gamers forget how long distance we as humans used to trade and travel...As mentioned earlier in this thread, pre Modern age, several month long travel was the norm for the VAST majority of human existence.

Until the creation of modern ships and planes, travel was determined by natural factors such as wind and how stubborn the animals were....

[Allworkandlowpay]

Bleachrude wrote...

Illium would be far off the beaten track as being in the crescent nebula puts it over 5000 ly from earth, but Berkenstein in the serpent nebula (former home of the citadel) is only 650 ly away

That's less than 2 months travel...

I think many gamers forget how long distance we as humans used to trade and travel...As mentioned earlier in this thread, pre Modern age, several month long travel was the norm for the VAST majority of human existence.

Until the creation of modern ships and planes, travel was determined by natural factors such as wind and how stubborn the animals were....

Right, and those numbers are only assuming that there is no progress made on FTL drives in from 1-5 AR. (After Reapers. That's gonna be their new calendar, right? can we canonize that?) 

They had really little reason to supe up FTL drives as it stood pre crisis, I'd imagine scientists would be quick at work pushing the boundaries of FTL drives.

Really the only thing that will hold back trade is fuel. Fuel consumption limits the type of ships that can do long distance runs. 

[Warhawk137]

Allworkandlowpay wrote...

I love everybody in this thread. Everybody.

I think some people (justifiably) dislike the endings because of what happens to the Normandy, so they, as a reaction, represent everything else in the endings as being a lot worse than it really is.  That's probably how the rumor that Element Zero tech no longer works got started - that's absurd.  The point of the destroy ending is that synthetic life gets annihilated.  Element Zero is a frickin' naturally occuring material.  It's not alive.  It's not even tech.  It would be like saying that we could no longer use iron, or oxygen.

[G3rman]

Sweet, we have ships that run on very rare resources that we no longer have the technology to find and mine!

Not to mention that the systems on these ships as well as our planets are all reverse engineered prothean *cough*reaper*cough* tech that no longer is operable.

Well this is a fine feathered morning.

[Warhawk137]

G3rman wrote...

Sweet, we have ships that run on very rare resources that we no longer have the technology to find and mine!

Not to mention that the systems on these ships as well as our planets are all reverse engineered prothean *cough*reaper*cough* tech that no longer is operable.

Well this is a fine feathered morning.

I am almost certain that Eezo doesn't deplete with use - FTL drives just run a current through it to change its mass.  They require regular fuel for local propulsion to make the drive work.

And no, the tech on those ships is not reaper tech per se.  It's not synthetic life.  Mass effect drives are just an electrical reaction with a core that consists of a basic element of matter, albeit one that doesn't exist in our world.

There are probably some places relatively close to earth that we could find some Eezo.  It's created by supernovas, so there has to be some white dwarfs close by.  I mean, there's a good 2 dozen star systems within a day's travel of earth by convential FTL, and probably hundreds within a week's travel.

Plus there's no reason we wouldn't be able to mine it anymore.  And, heck, if we need more Eezo, we can always just scrap some military ships.  Better than nothing, right?

Modifié par Warhawk137, 05 mars 2012 - 09:11 .

[Frenor]

G3rman wrote...

Sweet, we have ships that run on very rare resources that we no longer have the technology to find and mine!

Not to mention that the systems on these ships as well as our planets are all reverse engineered prothean *cough*reaper*cough* tech that no longer is operable.

Well this is a fine feathered morning.

  EZ0 is not a fuel source, its the primary material in the drive core. It occurs naturally from super novai an the like much like any other. Humans only got lucky because they found stocks of already refined EZ0 aswell as some drivecores to run designs off of. The rest of the galaxy has been mining/building their own for years upon years.

And as far as reverse engineering something its kinda like this. I'm gonna try to make it a 1+1=2 version. The reapers and the tech they are MADE with are networked toghether through space magic. Or atleast operate on the same frequency. Sentient species A finds a cache of Reaper tech. They look over it and rather than build their own ships from it just patch it into their stuff whole sale. Sentient species B finds Reaper tech, studies it, then builds their own variant of it.

Destroy ending happens. Anything that is currently a part of the reapers is shut down/destroyed. Relays, Geth, Edi and sentient species A's ships are fubar. sentient species B's are built wholesale by the species an thus are not still connected meaning that learned technology on the same frequency of sorts when the "wipe" signal gets sent out.

More dumbed down: The self made reverse engineered tech is on frequency 123 and the reaper tech is being destroyed on frequency 231.