I have been puzzling about how exactly we get all the way to Andromeda. Using data from the Mass effect wiki, the fastest state of the art ships would take over 400 years to jump between galaxies. An order of magnitude improvement would still mean a trip of decades. Even traveling around within the galaxy using normal FTL would take months or years.
This is using the normal mass effect drives found on most ships, we all know the relays are faster, but they require a fixed entry and exit point. Now everyone in the Galaxy, from individual scientists to mega-corps to the council wants to research every scrap of Prothean tech that they find. But the most significant artifacts attributed to the Protheans, the Citadel and the Relays, are almost untouched despite being incredibly advanced structures that are still fully functional. I suggest (and I doubt I’m the first) that there is some extremely subtle indoctrination like effect that influences people away from looking to closely at these objects.
But with the Reapers destroyed/dominated/hybridized, the citadel damaged, and the relays blown apart then rebuilt, that influence may be gone. I suspect that there will be a push to study the advanced Reaper tech, particularly the mass relays with their ultra fast FTL.
In Mass Effect 1, the Normandy was a unique ship outfitted with a state of the art cloaking system, making it one of the most advanced ships in the Galaxy and giving it a convenient game mechanic of going where other ships couldn’t. It would be consistent to have our signature ship in Mass Effect Andromeda have some similarly enabling piece of bleeding edge technology. Given my previous points, I suggest that the ship will be outfitted with a “Relay Drive” that uses technology derived from the mass relays to travel at extreme FTL, without needing to have a relay at either end.
But there may be more. There are a handful of people who have studied or suggested studying the citadel/relays. We looked at the keepers in ME: 1 and the Arrival DLC was preceded by news of a team investigating the age of certain relays. One other person mentioned pushing for study of the relays and even building new ones: matriarch Aethyta. Now last we knew she was on the citadel, which in every ending is attacked by the Reapers, and in most endings gets blown up. So there is a very high chance that she died. But her daughter, Liara, got to meet her father and would certainly have had access to her father’s previous history. Liara might well have pushed for and maybe even sponsored this new relay drive ship as a tribute to her father. I’ll go one step further and speculate that the ship may even be named the Aethyta. Similar sounding names, like Athena, would also be possible. Given how long Asari live, I think there is a very good chance that Liara will appear in Mass Effect Andromeda in some capacity.
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