Edit: note that I provide further clarifications in the comments. I want to keep this more high-level, and delve into further details in the comments so as to not get bogged down explaining technical details.
Firstly, if you noticed, the colour order is wrong. It's BGR rather than RGB. That is a clear implication that the scheme is reversed from the normal: R = B, G = G, B = R. So Destroy is the Paragon flavour ending (because red is blue. Tricksy keepers). If you need further proof, think about the relays. BLUE energy. Clear as day. So the keepers are lying to you to try to make you make the wrong choice. Also, obviously, Destroy only destroys the reapers and the keepers. It was all a lie they told to try to survive. Shepard just goes along quietly so as to not raise suspicions just in case there's actually some additional security system. The container Shepard shoots at is familiar from the blueprints.
Now, Joker, he actually isn't in hyperspace. If you look carefully, the Normandy is accelerating, not cruising, and there are various relativistic artifacts still around. So what actually happened is that upon hearing Shepard is still around, he made a quick swoop down to Earth to get your friends and was coming to get you. Before he quite made it there, though, the Citadel started blowing up (because you chose Destroy, the Paragon ending) and he decided to floor it further away toward the system barrier, toward Charon, just in case.
So parts of the Citadel blow up (not the one you're on of course), and all of the remaining fleet is retreating in different directions – until they see that the relay is malfunctioning. It doesn't actually completely explode, obviously, since that'd destroy the entire solar system, but the energy wave released is huge and everyone flees toward the other end of the system. Joker was already close to Charon, and has no idea of the strength so he has to flip the Normandy around and try to accelerate into FTL even though it's very dangerous inside a system.
So anyway, the shockwave reaches them when they're almost at Earth: it's still powerful enough to rip them out of the FTL acceleration (which is actually a good thing because the trajectory would have had them clip straight into the gravitational well of Neptune which is on the opposite side of the sun at this point in the solar cycle, and that could have ended badly) and hurtle them onto Earth. More specifically, about 45 km inland from Halong Bay in Vietnam (see attached picture).
Halong bay area:
Fortunately most of the rest of the remaining fleets (they will have lost basically (10000 - EMS) / 100 * 1.125) percent of the fleet) were able to flee further toward the sun – and some even made it to FTL – before the shockwave came close to Earth, dissipating around the Mars region but destroying that planet. Edit: calculations from the comments indicate that the second moon is Jupiter's Ganymede, implying that Jupiter (and possibly the outer planets) was severely impacted. Ganymede ultimately became stuck in Earth's gravity well, becoming Earth's second moon, but unfortunately it struck some of the last-to-flee krogan-turian transports, and completely destroyed one of the quarian liveships (the two others sustained only minor damage, comparatively).
As for the energy beam and its related relay shockwave, fortunately it was logarithmically dissipative because the Crucible wasn't quite as powerful as everyone thought; essentially this means that approximately the 13th system that the energy beam hit did not suffer much in the way of ill effects while the earlier ones got some of the magnitude of Sol's shockwave (which is why it's good that the beam jumped from Charon first out to the Reaper relay in the Dark Space, and then returned from there via a previously unknown relay at the very end of a spiral arm as is clearly shown in the cinematic (and you people wondered why the graphic didn't start in Local Cluster) – which is where the reapers originally arrived to the Milky Way 6 months earlier – and had to make a couple more jumps before finally emerging at Aethon Cluster).
Unfortunately this also means that the beam's energy toward the end of the sequence was so low that it was insufficient to destroy all Reaper forces. It is estimated that approximately ((10000 - EMS) / 100 * 0.373 + 5) percentage of the Reaper forces are still functional, most of them near the galactic core in the Terminus Systems, and in the Valhalla/Shrike region. Their strategic capabilities are greatly diminished because of the huge losses in their overall networked intelligence, but they're still a dangerous force that needs to be wiped out. It's much easier, though, because the remaining Reapers are largely separated from eachother, and can't therefore use their overwhelming force advantage. Their core programming is also still restricting them to their harvesting process, so they can't retaliate by direct destruction, which makes it easier to attempt to clean them up when the fleets get reorganized.
Happily enough, if your EMS was sufficiently high, the Crucible functioned well enough that the Citadel was not entirely destroyed, even though the damage sustained was absolutely massive. Only two wards are somewhat functional; Zakera's bridge to the Citadel was entirely destroyed, and the other two have massive swaths of damage in the area between the Presidium and the ‘tips’, causing people to become stranded there for some time. Zakera was large enough to make it to Earth mostly intact even through reëntry, and unfortunately landed on Texas, obliterating the entire state.
Earth seems to be mostly alright, although the Reapers managed to decimate nearly 45% of the entire population, and the catastrophic tsunamis and explosions from the debris from Citadel and the fleets caused approximately another 345 million deaths, followed by another 100-250 million from exposure, famine, and disease, before the situation could be stabilized and supply lines reëstablished.
Unfortunately the heroic Marauder Shields, fighting indoctrination to the last, did not survive the Destroy. There's a statue for his sacrifice both on Palaven and in Tottenham.
Some detail about Shepard's fate later, I still have to analyze some footage, but suffice to say that the end with the old dude and grandkid is actually Kaidan reading to Shepard (it's his turn) while they wait for Shep to emerge from the medically induced coma.
The rest of it still makes no sense, of course.
Modifié par lillitheris, 11 avril 2012 - 11:46 .
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