86 réponses à ce sujet

[Fulgrim88]

Bear with me this is kinda long. But i thought it to be one of the bigger plot holes in ME2 and i really want to know why that is, or what i am missing.

I guess most people still remember the planet from ME1, that, upon scanning, revealed a crater thousands of miles long and about 37million years old. And named a mass effect weapon glancing shot as the reason.
There was even a short mako mission on one of its moons, with the planet and its crater all over the sky.

I was amazed. 37million years? Weapons of that size? Am i seeing a silent whitness of the first battle against the Reapers, maybe even the battle between the Reapers and their very creators?
I was dying to learn more about it, yet ME1 didn't reveal anything.

Now to ME2, the briefing where TIM tells you to get the IFF from a derelict reaper. He tells you about how Cerberus found a dead Reaper floating in space (which is ridiculous in itself), plus the gun that killed it (and happened to leave a nice long planetwide crater in the process).
So, just as a reminder, theres a 37million(!!!!) year old crater from a glancing shot(!) covering half the planet and TIMs reaction upon finding the cannon that did this was like:
"Uh, yeah...so we found the weapon that did it. Happened to kill a Reaper too...go check for some IFF will ya?"
And i was like "But i have a bazillion questions!"
But my Shep was like "Will do"

.....are you kidding me, Bioware?

- It's likely the biggest and oldest weapon technology in space (why should anyone care..)
- it's been there for millions of years (why should anyone notice? It's not like theres a nice & working ME-relay leading right to it...)
- It killed a friggin' Reaper. Beings who are so rare that they're not even myths. Completely unknown as of ME1.
(Again, why should anyone care about a million years old, city-sized robot ship of unknown origin floating in space...)
- And why the heck didn't the Reapers remove it? It's not like leaving one of your own behind might prove lethal to a 50.000 year cycle of extermination, no one must know about....

Now i know that Bioware wants us to believe that Aliens need at least 2000 years for what Humans can achieve in 20 (like becoming a galactic power, or figuring out the Citadel & the Reapers), but still i can't believe how no one came across that Reaper before...

Modifié par Fulgrim88, 08 février 2010 - 09:33 .

[ydaraishy]

I don't remember anything about anyone saying they actually found the weapon that did it, just that they found the *target* of the weapon -- the derelict Reaper.

[Doug84]

He also said in the same breath "But the weapon was broken" and it seems like the Reapers would think to destroy such a powerful weapon before leaving.

scyphozoa wrote...

yup, the idea of a derilict reaper and derilict space weapon that no one found or investigated is absurd to me. TIM says the science team on the derilict reaper went missing and wasn't worth more resources - ITS A REAPER - ITS CLEARLY WORTH THE RESOURCES.

sadly, plot holes like this exist to advance the main story arcs and will never make sense or be explained or rationalized. Clearly TIM has the resources to invest in both the Reaper and the Weapon but chooses not to. TIM even says the weapon is defunct, but defunct means it cannot be reverse engineered???

Given Cereberus only numbers about 156 agents, it seems like the 100 strong science team would be a HUGE chunk of Cereberus' man power resources. We're not talking about a group that can openly and freely recruit here. Add to that, it was good odds they've been indocrationated, so any agents TIM sent would have been lost too - Shep was sent because a) they had no choice, and he's Shepard - he knows what he's doing.

[Mudzr]

Ever head of Checkhov's gun?


It took an entire fleet of humans and citadel defence to destroy just one reaper, is there any other way we can defeat an army of them.

I wonder who built these weapons though... the protheans?
It would be cool if the protheans that used the conduit to get the citadel somehow surived, maybe preparing weapons to destroy the reapers...
Maybe it was the creators of the reapers themselves...

Anyways I'm willing to bet that there are more of these guns.

Modifié par Mudzr, 08 février 2010 - 09:39 .

[The Capital Gaultier]

Fulgrim88 wrote...

...still i can't believe how no one came across that Reaper before...

An astronomical scale is a misunderstood term.  As Carl Sagan put it:

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding.  Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.

The Milky Way Galaxy is very roughly estimated to be 14,176,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic kilometers in area.  Good luck finding it.

Modifié par The Capital Gaultier, 08 février 2010 - 09:47 .

[Fulgrim88]

The Capital Gaultier wrote...

Fulgrim88 wrote...

...still i can't believe how no one came across that Reaper before...

An astronomical scale is a misunderstood term.  As Carl Sagan put it:

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding.  Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.

True, but we're talking about a system with a nearby Mass Relay here. That narrows the search a lot. Especially given the fact that there are traces of tech that old on Klendagon. Scientists would be all over the place

Modifié par Fulgrim88, 08 février 2010 - 09:43 .

[Doug84]

Mudzr wrote...

Ever head of Checkhov's gun?


It took an entire fleet of humans and citadel defence to destroy just one reaper, is there any other way we can defeat an army of them.

I wonder who built these weapons though... the protheans?
It would be cool if the protheans that used the conduit to get the citadel somehow surived, maybe preparing weapons to destroy the reapers...
Maybe it was the creators of the reapers themselves...

To be honest, if the Citadel species were willing to invest in a huge planetside gun, they could have the same effect - remember there is no upper limit to the kinetic energy a mass effect weapon can theortically send - and if its built on a planet, it can fire one hell of a fast bullet.

As for the creators, it was from long before the Protheans - TIM says something like "No trace can be found of the species that built it."

[Doug84]

Fulgrim88 wrote...

The Capital Gaultier wrote...

Fulgrim88 wrote...

...still i can't believe how no one came across that Reaper before...

An astronomical scale is a misunderstood term.  As Carl Sagan put it:

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding.  Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.

True, but we're talking about a system with a Mass Relay here. That narrows things down A LOT

Not really - we never even noticed that second set of rings around Satarn until someone accidently looked in the right direction.

And given the system wasn't particularly desirable, and the Relay was in the neighbouring star system , I doubt many people have gone to explore the space.

[1490]

Well the Reapers tried to destroy all the evidence of the previous species they exterminated, and they left their own technology (Citadel, mass relays) so new races would find them and be dependent on that technology. If the Reapers wanted to definitively control all sentient races, they wouldn't leave behind any technology that was capable of destroying them - they'd obliterate it.



I'm not sure why the Reapers would leave the corpse of one of their dead behind, but it's possible that the dead Reaper and the ship it was fighting killed each other at the same. With the type of guns both are using, destruction would be almost instantaneous and neither would have a chance to get off a distress beacon.



The dead reaper still gave off an indoctrination frequency after it was dead, so it's also possible that it was able to shield itself from scans and only able to be discovered after a cerberus ship got close enough to see it through a window.

[Doug84]

scyphozoa wrote...

also the reaper was in orbit around a planet and generated its own mass effect field... pretty hard to miss for 37 million years

No it wasn't - it was in orbit around a brown dwarf.

And how do you know it wasn't noticed for 37 million years? The protheans might have seen it and done **** onboard - sadly, you can't ask them to find out - and any Protheans who wondered around onboard it would have been indocrated and not raised an alarm.

[fortunesque]

What if the reapers are in civil war, much like the geth?

[Doug84]

1490 wrote...

Well the Reapers tried to destroy all the evidence of the previous species they exterminated, and they left their own technology (Citadel, mass relays) so new races would find them and be dependent on that technology. If the Reapers wanted to definitively control all sentient races, they wouldn't leave behind any technology that was capable of destroying them - they'd obliterate it.

I'm not sure why the Reapers would leave the corpse of one of their dead behind, but it's possible that the dead Reaper and the ship it was fighting killed each other at the same. With the type of guns both are using, destruction would be almost instantaneous and neither would have a chance to get off a distress beacon.

The dead reaper still gave off an indoctrination frequency after it was dead, so it's also possible that it was able to shield itself from scans and only able to be discovered after a cerberus ship got close enough to see it through a window.

I don't think it was fully dead. As for why they'd leave the corpse behind, we can assume the reapers don't care about each other, because they aren't exactly compassionate folk - add to that, the dead Reaper was useful in the end because it layed the IFF trap.

[Doug84]

fortunesque wrote...

What if the reapers are in civil war, much like the geth?

Possible, possible.

Maybe the original Reaper builders had 2 factions - those who wanted to become Reapers and those who didn't.

But even so, the gun itself wasn't remarkable from what I understand - it just happened to be HUGE - but used the same tech and principles of mass effect fields and kinetic energy.

[Daerog]

Well, Cerberus is studying the gun....



As for the Reapers not removing it: They are not 100% efficient in their methods, they missed Ilos in ME1, remember? They are also like "individual nations." They are not like the geth, they may not share all their data with each other. They might not even care that much if one of them goes missing somewhere. Maybe the Reaper who died was annoying and the others didn't care that it was missing. So, they might not know the gun exists? Or, even if they do, they seem very confident in themselves so far, only what happened before and after ME1 gave them a double check (they didn't expect the Protheans to mess with the keepers, and for Shepard's actions).

[FlintlockJazz]

I think people are often misled by sci-fi as to how hard it is to reverse-engineer something. Lets say you gave a modern day PC to scientists in the 1940s, it might help them confirm certain theoretical principles, but in order to back-engineer it they would first of all need to develop tools that enable them to analyse it, somehow develop whole new technologies in doing so, and then work out whole new technologies in order to build the tools to build PCs themselves.

In short, they might work out how it works in principle and guide them along the right paths, speeding up technology, but they won't have the tools needed to make them themselves.

Modifié par FlintlockJazz, 08 février 2010 - 09:59 .

[Fates end]

Perhaps the reason the corpse was left by the other Reapers was this: The only thing stopping it from falling into the Brown Dwarf was the Mass Effect field it generated. I doubt the other Reapers thought it had enough power left after being KO'd to keep a Mass Effect field up. They just assumed it fell into the Brown Dwarf.



Bah, just speculating on my part.

[Giantevilhead]

The ability to reverse engineer technology is a bit inconsistent in this game. The Asari/Salarians/Turians have been studying the mass relays for centuries and they still can't replicate the technology. However, the Turians were able to reverse engineer one of Sovereign's guns and adapt it to their technology in just two years.

[Fulgrim88]

Doug84 wrote...
I don't think it was fully dead. As for why they'd leave the corpse behind, we can assume the reapers don't care about each other, because they aren't exactly compassionate folk - add to that, the dead Reaper was useful in the end because it layed the IFF trap.

I don't see any use in laying an IFF trap. The trap was there in the first place, why put another trap in the means to avoid the first? While that may sound like the tricky scheming everyone believes the Reapers capable of, at the same time it opens a tremendous flaw in their extermination cycle, by telling everyone that they exist.

Even with the derelict Reaper's system being small and undesirable, Scientists would be all over Hawking Eta once they found out about the rift on Klendagon. Not just ours, but every decent scientist of the last 37million years. At least the scientists i've learned to know in my time on university

I can't believe that they all lost their curiosity once they left for outer space.

Then of course, there's indoctrination. But such a thing is only a drawback for a small secret organisation like Cerberus. If it would have been an official alliance team, chances are low that upon loosing contact, nobody would have cared.

Then again, the one thing ME tells us about galactic governments is how amazingly ignorant they are. Maybe really no one would have cared...

Modifié par Fulgrim88, 08 février 2010 - 10:01 .

[Dethateer]

I actually expected TIM to keep talking about that gun.

[Alien1099]

TIM says the weapon was defunct. I'd have liked more information on the weapon system as well. I'm sure they'd sure as hell study it even if it was "defunct," but 37 million years is a long time for something to "decay" even in the vacuum of space. It could have collided with a planet or moon or asteroid. Small pieces of debris colliding with it every so often and it may have seen battle damage itself when it was used to ventilate the reaper found near the brown dwarf, which again brings me to another point.



37 million years is a long time for objects to drift apart like the reaper and gun in opposite directions from the planet hence why they weren't found there.

[FlintlockJazz]

Doug84 wrote...

1490 wrote...

Well the Reapers tried to destroy all the evidence of the previous species they exterminated, and they left their own technology (Citadel, mass relays) so new races would find them and be dependent on that technology. If the Reapers wanted to definitively control all sentient races, they wouldn't leave behind any technology that was capable of destroying them - they'd obliterate it.

I'm not sure why the Reapers would leave the corpse of one of their dead behind, but it's possible that the dead Reaper and the ship it was fighting killed each other at the same. With the type of guns both are using, destruction would be almost instantaneous and neither would have a chance to get off a distress beacon.

The dead reaper still gave off an indoctrination frequency after it was dead, so it's also possible that it was able to shield itself from scans and only able to be discovered after a cerberus ship got close enough to see it through a window.

I don't think it was fully dead. As for why they'd leave the corpse behind, we can assume the reapers don't care about each other, because they aren't exactly compassionate folk - add to that, the dead Reaper was useful in the end because it layed the IFF trap.

Yeah, but they are incredible careful to remove all traces of their existence except for the relays and the citadel as part of the trap, more likely they just didn't know there was a dead one there/couldn't move it (it is still a reaper after all, maybe they would have had problems dealing with it too)/thought the brown dwarf sun would hide it well enough. 

[RampantBeaver]

Thinking about it, no doubt in ME3, we are going to some way have to defeat the reaper fleet. You could say "we're gona need a big gun," so I can imagine this will be explored in ME3

[Dr. Peter Venkman]

I did some research on this very subject and as it turns out it was a German design that was fired during the first WWII (roughly 36 million years ago before history started repeating itself). On the extranet I located a picture of it and the dead species. It was humanity's 5th restart. Anyways, here is the picture:

Modifié par Dr. Peter Venkman, 08 février 2010 - 10:09 .