I could be spitballing here but the Mass Relays may vary in destructive power, ranging from one extreme - supernova, to the other extreme - so low that its not worth measuring. Now we have one reported incident, the Arrival incident which allegedly went supernova. We were treated to a small cutscene that shows that the relay did indeed produce a large explosion but we don't know for sure that it did in fact produce a supernova scale explosion. But for this exercise I'm going to assume that the resulting explosion was in fact supernova scale, or close to it.
A relay is assumed to be able to produce the supernova explosion because of the large quantities of energy being managed by the relay itself. However we do know that when a ship activates the relay it charges the relay, allowing it to essentially throw the ship across the galaxy, using insane amounts of energy in the process. Again this is speculation. Could the Arrival incident then be attributed to the fact that in that particular situation there was no energy release? And that in fact when that asteroid impacted the relay all that stored up energy had nowhere to go and the relay had no way to contain that energy. Hence the energy release and the large explosion.
So, assuming the above facts are true, why did the relay have so much energy stored up? It couldn't be the Normandy using the relay as the relays are instantaneous, unless the plot dictates otherwise but thats a different topic all together. In this case then the plot would dictate that the relay had sent the Normandy to the Sol relay instantly. All the energy from the relay would have been fired out in a directed manner to throw the Normandy through the mass corridor, so in short the energy levels in the relay have gone back to normal.
So with that in mind it's fair to assume that a normal level output from a relay is then capable of producing a supernova scale explosion. Contemplate on that for a second.
A relay at normal energy levels handle energy on a scale capable of producing a supernova scale explosion.
I personally don't believe that though. Lets go back to the Arrival incident. A huge asteroid is heading towards the relay. Normandy at this point is gone, through the relay and is now sitting safe on the other side of a relay. But as we can see in the last cinematic of the relay, there are arcs of blue energy coming from the relay and hitting the asteroid. I always assumed this was cosmetic, to make the whole scene look pretty and cool, but maybe it wasn't. Think about it. We know barely anything about the relays. The relays were built by hyperadvanced beings that had expected these devices to run possibly up to billions of years. They have formiddable defences, for example having incredible shielding that can, for example, save the Mu Relay when it was hit by a supernova. So they can survive being hit by incredible force.
So it's possible that the relay had safety protocols that came into action when the relay detected a large unidetified object on a collision course with it. I believe that when the relay finished firing the Normandy, it prioritised the asteroid as a threat. I believe that it was attempting to prepare itself to fire the asteroid along a mass corridor, away from itself. We know that the relay has sensors of some kind, and it's likely these sensors are advanced enough to automatically calculate the mass of an incoming object. So that could be why the relay exploded so violently. It was charging up to launch the asteroid elsewhere, it just didn't have time. Considering the Normandy just used the relay and the amount of charge the relay would have had to build up to launch the asteroid, it likely didn't have enough time to build up a suitable charge and launch the asteroid.
Which is where I come to the relays at the end of Mass Effect 3. The relays had built up a charge when the beam of energy impacted it. The charge was then spent on launching the shockwave across the galaxy. The leftover energy would have been less than what was previously there. We can see that the relay had to work in overtime to launch the shockwave. This leads me to two conclusions.
- First, the shockwave leaves energy in the relay. The rotating rings could be some sort of containment field to keep the energy being created by the relay stable. With them offline the energy can't be contained and we have an explosion. However in the Arrival incident the relay was charged, in this case it was not. Or if it was, it was not as charged as the Arrival incident. The shockwave was not as large as that incident.
- Second, the energy beam for destroy and synthesis hits the relay and is fired, to the next. This causes me to assume that the next relay then fires the beam to the next and the next and so on. The issue though is how the relay then transmits the energy as a shockwave. This is where the exploding relays come in. An explosion would carry the energy in a shockwave, so the mass relays must be destroyed to create this shockwave. It's possible that this is wrong of course and I'm more inclined to disregard this conclusion as the control ending is only a shockwave. No beam of energy.
In the control ending as well we see that the relays are not destroyed. I've considered this and I think I know why. In destroy and synthesis there is an energy wave being fired at the relay, on that can destroy or fundementally change everything. With control we see a shockwave but I don't think this is a traditional shockwave like an explosion. I think this is a control signal that is sent out across the galaxy, using the relay's as a galactic communication system. The relays can be used for communication and all they are doing is sending a new signal across the galaxy.
This raises the question of "Why can we see this signal as a shockwave?" I believe it is because it was a visible shockwave in Sol, however we see no shockwave in other parts of the galaxy. We do see blue shockwaves distributing across the galaxy on the galaxy map but these could simply be visual representations of the signal for humans to make sense of it. The next point would be "But we saw Joker get hit by a large blue shockwave." which is absolutly correct. We did see Joker get hit by a blue shockwave. I don't have an answer to that, though I do think it's most likely the remanants of the shockwave from Sol being carried through the relay. It would have some power to it and it was able to disable the Normandy, spitting it out conveniently by a garden world capable of supporting life.
Anyway I've written way too much and I'm going to leave people to ponder this for a while. I may be spitballing and making mountains out of molehills or not even make coherent sense. This may be rubbish or it may not be but its my thoughts on the matter. In short though, unless you chose control, the relays are destroyed, but they did not go supernova. It's likely they exploded large enough to spread a shockwave across a system or cluster, but not strong enough to do devastating damage (except to the Reapers if you chose destroy).
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