118 réponses à ce sujet

[tomaltach]

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

It's all inconsistent.

If they're flying back, then they're doing something which is stated to be impossible, which is drive charge buildup frying everything.

If they're not flying back, and the camera is just panning, then where's the citadel sized mass relay they'd be sitting around to get back to the citadel?  Also, why would they all be facing towards the galaxy?  If they were going to be facing anything, they'd be facing the relay at their end, ready to enter when it was activated.

The relay could be anywhere the camera isn't pointing. The shot establishes that there are many, many Reapers, and that they are active. Having them face the galaxy is a way of indicating that their attention is on the galaxy (i.e., they know something has gone wrong). If they were facing their relay, it would appear as if they were ignorant of the situation and were waiting for the citadel relay to activate.

If they had a relay at their end though, they'd just be using that to catapult themselves to the Citadel, as per this explanation of how mass relays work.  They wouldn't need the Citadel to be active.

That codex entry merely indicates that there's drift when transiting a relay pair. If you only needed a sender, you could travel to any arbitrary point within the relay's range. Similarly, if only a receiver is needed you could travel to the relay from any point in the receiver's range.

[TheUnusualSuspect]

tomaltach wrote...

The relay could be anywhere the camera isn't pointing. The shot establishes that there are many, many Reapers, and that they are active. Having them face the galaxy is a way of indicating that their attention is on the galaxy (i.e., they know something has gone wrong). If they were facing their relay, it would appear as if they were ignorant of the situation and were waiting for the citadel relay to activate.

Oh, so they all decided to look menacingly towards the galaxy for dramatic effect, then? Even though no one could possibly observe them doing so.  It just makes them "feel better" to do that eh?  Great!  Thanks for that.  I'll go back to drooling now.

If they had a relay at their end though, they'd just be using that to catapult themselves to the Citadel, as per this explanation of how mass relays work.  They wouldn't need the Citadel to be active.

That codex entry merely indicates that there's drift when transiting a relay pair. If you only needed a sender, you could travel to any arbitrary point within the relay's range. Similarly, if only a receiver is needed you could travel to the relay from any point in the receiver's range.

That entry says and implies a heck of a LOT more than that.  Read it again and think on it.

Modifié par TheUnusualSuspect, 06 mars 2010 - 01:56 .

[superimposed]

Guys, don't forget that the closer you get to the speed of light the faster you move through time.



Going FTL means going exponentially faster through time. So while it might seem like centuries to them it will only be a fraction of that for us.

[Urazz]

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

It's all inconsistent.

If they're flying back, then they're doing something which is stated to be impossible, which is drive charge buildup frying everything.

Stated impossible by who?  If I recall wasn't it Vigil who thought it was impossible for the Reapers to fly back to the galaxy by standard methods and it could easily have been wrong since the protheans didn't know much about the reapers either.

And who knows, they may be able to go long distances before needing to discharge their cores or they may have other ways to discharge their cores.  Thing is Bioware can easily make it happen since the reapers are stated to be much more advanced than the current organic species.

Truth be told we don't even know how far into dark space they are in.  Even if they are somewhat close enough to make it by FTL methods without mass relays, it's not like people are actively looking for a fleet of ships/objects in darkspace

[FlashedMyDrive]

superimposed wrote...

Guys, don't forget that the closer you get to the speed of light the faster you move through time.

Going FTL means going exponentially faster through time. So while it might seem like centuries to them it will only be a fraction of that for us.

Good point, too bad that Mass Effect has already pissed in the face of Einstein plenty of times.

[TheUnusualSuspect]

Urazz wrote...

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

It's all inconsistent.

If they're flying back, then they're doing something which is stated to be impossible, which is drive charge buildup frying everything.

Stated impossible by who?  I

It was a rhetorical question borne out of my frustration in some other threads where I tried to express and maintain an open viewpoint on what might be possible within the game space.

I personally believe that we don't yet really know what the Reapers are capable of, being a fictitious story and all that, much like your Vigil example.  There are plenty here who believe that unless it's been written down before and is wholly 100% consistent with a single-instance overly simplistic mind-numbingly specious interpretation of established in-game canon, then any deviation thereof for them is poor writing and inconsistent, despite my offering of numerous examples of how various things might be interpreted in an incorrect manner given a lack of complete understanding of how something works.  I argue the scientific logic approach, that just because you observe something and develop a theory on it, and even write it down, then while correct from what you know of the phenomena at that point in time, later on you may discover that you really didn't understand the full picture as more information comes to light.  Newtonian Mechanics vs Relativity is a perfect example of such.  That's real life, but for many here, this is somehow impossible to occur within a story.

Modifié par TheUnusualSuspect, 06 mars 2010 - 02:23 .

[TheUnusualSuspect]

superimposed wrote...

Guys, don't forget that the closer you get to the speed of light the faster you move through time.

Going FTL means going exponentially faster through time. So while it might seem like centuries to them it will only be a fraction of that for us.

Arguing along these lines is a bit silly.  By established Relativity Theory, FTL is impossible, and if it were possible, Relativity predicts that you'd travel backwards through time, and arrive before you left.

We just gotta run with what we're given, but attempting to apply real-world physics to fictitional physics breaks the validity of the fictional model outright.  You either accept the fictitional interpretation of how physics works, or you don't, otherwise a vast majority of what the game claims is possible is pure junk.

[superimposed]

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

superimposed wrote...

Guys, don't forget that the closer you get to the speed of light the faster you move through time.

Going FTL means going exponentially faster through time. So while it might seem like centuries to them it will only be a fraction of that for us.

Arguing along these lines is a bit silly.  By established Relativity Theory, FTL is impossible, and if it were possible, Relativity predicts that you'd travel backwards through time, and arrive before you left.

We just gotta run with what we're given, but attempting to apply real-world physics to fictitional physics breaks the validity of the fictional model outright.  You either accept the fictitional interpretation of how physics works, or you don't, otherwise a vast majority of what the game claims is possible is pure junk.

Lawl. That's bad science. FTL is not impossible, it's merely improbable given our present understanding. That my change, or it may not.
Secondly, the game never purports to be 'OMG GODLY SCIENCE REFLECTION'.
It's actually the fault of consumers and retail stores for not recognising the 'Fantasy Science' genre as opposed to 'Science-Fiction' which is supposed to be based on present understandings of it.
Finally, the time aspect still applies.

[Weskerr]

[quote]TheUnusualSuspect wrote...


Oh, so they all decided to look menacingly towards the galaxy for dramatic effect, then? Even though no one could possibly observe them doing so.  It just makes them "feel better" to do that eh?  Great!  Thanks for that.  I'll go back to drooling now.
[/quote]

We the players see them. It sends the message that the Reapers are coming, even after Shepard ruined their plans with the human Reaper. Dramatic effect is always meant for the audience, not the fictional characters within the story.

[quote]
[quote]If they had a relay at their end though, they'd just be using that to catapult themselves to the Citadel, as per this explanation of how mass relays work.  They wouldn't need the Citadel to be active.[/quote]
That codex entry merely indicates that there's drift when transiting a relay pair. If you only needed a sender, you could travel to any arbitrary point within the relay's range. Similarly, if only a receiver is needed you could travel to the relay from any point in the receiver's range.
[/quote]
That entry says and implies a heck of a LOT more than that.  Read it again and think on it.

[/quote]

I didn't see any mention of the conditions under which mass relays work in that link you provided. However, I remember reading in the codex that the Turians went to war with the Alliance because the latter was activating inactive relays, which the Turians and the Council thought was a dangerous thing to do because of the possibility of encountering hostile sentient races. How could the Alliance have done so without using an active "sender" relay? The distances between mass relays is too great for anyone to reach inactive relays via the non-relay FTL method within a practical amount of time. So I think you're probably right that there's a mass relay in dark space that the Reapers use to get to the Citadel. But if a "receiving" mass relay does not need to be active in order to use it, then why does the Citadel relay have to be active for the Reapers to use it? Maybe it's special in some way? Also, if the Reapers do have a mass relay on their end in dark space, why not use it to travel to a normal relay in the galaxy? Maybe their Relay was built to function only as as a conduit between it and the Citadel relay - like the Conduit relay the Protheans built on Ilos only functioned to send objects to the "Relay monument" on the citadel.

Modifié par Weskerr, 06 mars 2010 - 02:39 .

[TheUnusualSuspect]

Thanks Weskerr. Nice to know that someone else is thinking, rather than blindly trusting the possibly incorrect as written-by-humans-in-game codex. You've made my day!

Modifié par TheUnusualSuspect, 06 mars 2010 - 02:39 .

[Weskerr]

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

Thanks Weskerr. Nice to know that someone else is thinking, rather than blindly trusting the possibly incorrect as written-by-humans-in-game codex. You've made my day!

Since this is the internet I can't tell if you really mean that or not. If you do, thank you for the compliment. If not, I didn't mean to insult you. I think you meant it though, so thanks

[tomaltach]

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

tomaltach wrote...

The relay could be anywhere the camera isn't pointing. The shot establishes that there are many, many Reapers, and that they are active. Having them face the galaxy is a way of indicating that their attention is on the galaxy (i.e., they know something has gone wrong). If they were facing their relay, it would appear as if they were ignorant of the situation and were waiting for the citadel relay to activate.

Oh, so they all decided to look menacingly towards the galaxy for dramatic effect, then? Even though no one could possibly observe them doing so.  It just makes them "feel better" to do that eh?  Great!  Thanks for that.  I'll go back to drooling now.

*shrug* So it's for the audience's benefit. Yeah, things like that can be absurd like when one character explains something to another character that the other person should already know. I don't find this case all that silly. To me it's no different than a conqueror looking in the direction of a city he wishes to take even when the city is too far away to see.

If they had a relay at their end though, they'd just be using that to catapult themselves to the Citadel, as per this explanation of how mass relays work.  They wouldn't need the Citadel to be active.

That codex entry merely indicates that there's drift when transiting a relay pair. If you only needed a sender, you could travel to any arbitrary point within the relay's range. Similarly, if only a receiver is needed you could travel to the relay from any point in the receiver's range.

That entry says and implies a heck of a LOT more than that.  Read it again and think on it.

You're right. It also mentions that the magnitude of the drift is dependent on mass and distance. Mass relays work in pairs. There's a reason the Trans-relay Assaults entry says that "distance can't be chosen...".

[TheUnusualSuspect]

tomaltach wrote...
. Mass relays work in pairs. There's a reason the Trans-relay Assaults entry says that "distance can't be chosen...".

See, I look at that and I ask this:

Is the observed behavior of working in pairs by actual need, or by programmed design only?

That is the question that really stirs me up, and the example given just above of the Alliance activating one end of an inactive relay pair just adds to the weight that a relay just launches towards another, and this is only by design and/or convenience because presumably you want to be able to get back without travelling a few months to get to the nearest relay, and not by absolute necessity.  It may also be, as I suggested in another thread, a safety mechanism whereby the other end is there purely as a means of determining whether its safe to jump to that surrounding area, or both (safety and convenience).  I mean, there's not much point to a relay network that jumps you randomly into stars or planets 'cos you don't really know where you're going, and/or leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere, far away from any massive gas giants that will allow FTL travel within a reasonable period of time to reach the nearest relay.  That there's significant drift implies that it's not exact, that the other end relay isn't "bound" to the exit point unless a mass-relay can control ships from millions of kms away, which we observe to be false in-game.

That is what I mean by the implications of what's stated there....

Modifié par TheUnusualSuspect, 06 mars 2010 - 02:56 .

[The Unfallen]

Let me just say this. Apart from the fact that they are biomechanical organisms, we know nothing about them. Even the whole "Organism demolecularization into liquid to "grow" a new Reaper" reproductive process has not been confirmed. As of this moment, they very well could have "no beginning", and "no end", and could very well be a race of "infinite" possibility and capability, of truly godlike proportions. What if they are from some other dimension? I hope BioWare doesn't cop out and just make up something 'unoriginal'. I would like for us to be surprised. For example, what if we found out they were demons from hell? "Holy **** did not see that coming" would probably be my reaction. Something original like that would be appreciated.

[MonkeyLungs]

I honestly think you guys have thought more about this in this thread than Bioware has ...

[tomaltach]

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

tomaltach wrote...
. Mass relays work in pairs. There's a reason the Trans-relay Assaults entry says that "distance can't be chosen...".

See, I look at that and I ask this:

Is the observed behavior of working in pairs by actual need, or by programmed design only?

That is the question that really stirs me up, and the example given just above of the Alliance activating one end of an inactive relay pair just adds to the weight that a relay just launches towards another, and this is only by design and/or convenience because presumably you want to be able to get back without travelling a few months to get to the nearest relay, and not by absolute necessity.  It may also be, as I suggested in another thread, a safety mechanism whereby the other end is there purely as a means of determining whether its safe to jump to that surrounding area, or both (safety and convenience).  I mean, there's not much point to a relay network that jumps you randomly into stars or planets 'cos you don't really know where you're going, and/or leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere, far away from any massive gas giants that will allow FTL travel within a reasonable period of time to reach the nearest relay.  That there's significant drift implies that it's not exact, that the other end relay isn't "bound" to the exit point unless a mass-relay can control ships from millions of kms away, which we observe to be false in-game.

That is what I mean by the implications of what's stated there....

That's an interesting point, moreso considering the high precision mode activated by the Reaper IFF. The example of the Alliance activating dormant relays doesn't really add weight to any argument though. There's not enough information given. It just says the Turians found them attempting to activate a relay. It might have worked with extra drift, or it might have worked because the other end was already active. It might have not worked by design, or it might have not worked by necessity.

There's also the possibility that significant drift with an active receiver means enormous drift without one. This would effectively make an active receiver a necessity.

[TheUnusualSuspect]

tomaltach wrote...

That's an interesting point, moreso considering the high precision mode activated by the Reaper IFF. The example of the Alliance activating dormant relays doesn't really add weight to any argument though. There's not enough information given. It just says the Turians found them attempting to activate a relay. It might have worked with extra drift, or it might have worked because the other end was already active. It might have not worked by design, or it might have not worked by necessity.

There's also the possibility that significant drift with an active receiver means enormous drift without one. This would effectively make an active receiver a necessity.

Cheers.  Re: the Alliance activating, the game does make references to relays being able to be activated and jumping to the destination without the other end being found and activated first, but says that standard practise is not to do this (due to the Rachni experience) until the other end is mapped first by reaching it via FTL/standard travel. So, the game is telling us that it would work, without the other end being activated.

Given that historically the Asari and Turians were activating relays everywhere until they found the Rachni would tend to imply that the drift is not influenced by the remote end's activity otherwise there'd be high instances of death or people getting lost, which you'd reckon would be worth noting in the codex, and the Reaper IFF example would tend to indicate that drift accuracy is a function of the initiating end alone.  Not 100% conclusive, I'll grant that, but definitely more likely than not.

[tomaltach]

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

Cheers.  Re: the Alliance activating, the game does make references to relays being able to be activated and jumping to the destination without the other end being found and activated first, but says that standard practise is not to do this (due to the Rachni experience) until the other end is mapped first by reaching it via FTL/standard travel. So, the game is telling us that it would work, without the other end being activated.

Given that historically the Asari and Turians were activating relays everywhere until they found the Rachni would tend to imply that the drift is not influenced by the remote end's activity otherwise there'd be high instances of death or people getting lost, which you'd reckon would be worth noting in the codex, and the Reaper IFF example would tend to indicate that drift accuracy is a function of the initiating end alone.  Not 100% conclusive, I'll grant that, but definitely more likely than not.

Interesting, do you remember where it says this? Nearest I could find is along the lines of dormant primary relays being left inactive due to the possibility of opening a passage to a possibly hostile species. This doesn't imply anything about the ability to go through the relay to a dormant receiver. Indeed, to me it implies that current galctic thinking (which may be wrong) is that activating the local end enables a potentially hostile species at the remote end to come through.

If I were working from the assumption that the remote end need not be turned on, then yes the lack of high instances of death/disappearance would indicate that drift is not influenced by the remote end. However, that is not quite what I was saying. I was considering the possibility that sending to an inactive relay could have an extremely large drift such that it was effectively necessary that the remote relay be active. In other words, by design the receiver must be active for transit to occur. Of course, in this case there are questions about the expansion of galactic civilization, since the remote end must be activated somehow.

As for the Reaper IFF example, in that specific case both relays are active, so the accuracy could be influenced by the sender, the receiver, or both.

[Moleculor]

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

and the Reaper IFF example would tend to indicate that drift accuracy is a function of the initiating end alone.  Not 100% conclusive, I'll grant that, but definitely more likely than not.

Not at all 100% conclusive, since you're forgetting that it is -guaranteed- that relays talk to each other, and not just their separate pairs, but across the entire network (as the Citadel can be used to shut down every relay in the entire galaxy). The IFF could tell the Omega-4 relay to send a signal to the 'catching' relay and say "Hey, pay attention and catch this ship 'better'", and have nothing to do with how the Omega-4 relay sends the ship. Or a combination of the two.

Which brings us back to the whole discussion of "do relays need both ends to be active to work".

The answer? Yes.

How do we know this? The Reapers sent the signal to activate the Citadel so that they could arrive.

Recieving end not active? No Reapers.
Recieving end active? Reapers.

It's the fundamental, most basic plot point of the entire first game. If you're going to start throwing that out, we might as well start assuming that Mass Effect's universe is nothing more than the deluded imaginations of a Lyrium addled Templar in Dragon Age's universe, and at any moment flying unicorns are going to save the galaxy from the Reapers.

What's the deal with the Alliance and activating relays, you ask? Simple. Activate one end, the other end activates as well. Which goes back to that obvious communication between relays. Which also explains how the Conduit was dormant until the Ilos end was activated.

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

I personally believe that we
don't yet really know what the Reapers are capable of,

No, we don't know their full capabiliities, but we DO know what they've done over the last 1500-1600 years. They've NOT come back to the galaxy. If they could do that from darkspace, they would have.

Modifié par Moleculor, 06 mars 2010 - 07:04 .

[Trenrade]

Fluffeh Kitteh wrote...

The Angry One wrote...

If they had a backup then they wouldn't be wasting time on a plan as convoluted as making a baby Reaper out of human slush.

The human-reaper could have simply been a separate project though...

the Human-reaper was created as a replacement to sovereign, it was being built as another vanguard.

[Gemini1179]

I don't see why the Reapers don't simply wait it out another hundred years, Shepard will be dead, and the Galaxy will be utterly convinced that she/he was on crack seeing as no attack came... yet. *shifty eyes*

[Moleculor]

Gemini1179 wrote...

I don't see why the Reapers don't simply wait it out another hundred years, Shepard will be dead, and the Galaxy will be utterly convinced that she/he was on crack seeing as no attack came... yet. *shifty eyes*

I suspect they're getting desperate for some reason or another. Running out of fuel or organic foodstuffs or something.

It would explain why, suddenly, Reaper plots are getting more obvious. The Rachni? Not so obvious. We're only just now figuring out that one, and that was 1500+ years ago. The whole Beacon/Saren/Conduit thing? Look at how it ended COMPARED to how they were trying to do the Rachni wars: Nazara, out in full display of the military might of the Alliance, right there at the heart of civilization.

If we reversed the roles, and made the Citadel the evil empire's main base, and the Reaper and Saren are the heroes, the audience would be asked to believe that the plan to hit the Citidel in this way was VERY risky, but "necessary". And it WAS risky. And the Reapers, being 'supposedly' eternal, have no need to take risks unless the need is great.

Then you have the latest plan, which is slow, and obvious enough that the galactic news system was actually picking up on the fact that SOMETHING was happening. That's not the "sneaky, never know what's going on" Rachni Wars, that's "Oh crap, SOMETHING out there has it out for us, what is it? Lets investigate!" Which is also risky.

So they're probably getting desperate.

[TheUnusualSuspect]

Moleculor wrote...

Not at all 100% conclusive, since you're forgetting that it is -guaranteed- that relays talk to each other,

By design or necessity?  Which, and prove it.

Ultimately it comes down to whether or not they have a relay at their end in Dark Space, and if they do, why don't they just use it to jump back to a different relay if they all work the same?  The fleet jump article was inferencing that the other end does nothing at all to really "catch" the other end, since it varies over such a huge range of error.  At best, it's working as a locational beacon, and that's at best in terms of your comment of being "guaranteed- that relays talk to each other".

Alternately, it is absolutely insulting to believe that such an intelligent race would not put up a secondary relay, such as one behind the Omega-4 relay area, to be able to get back into the galaxy.  If you want to talk about fundamental writing issues, that one's absolutely enormous and defies belief.

What it comes down to is that the Citadel transported them there to Dark Space, and it's the Citadel, and only the Citadel that can bring them back.  Having a relay at their end would just defy belief that they could be so utterly, mind-bendingly phenomally retarded such as to not have a back-up relay in the galaxy to transport to.  So yes, either the relays do work in the manner as implied by the articles, or the reaper's supposed intelligence is an utter sham, and that would be a plot hole so incredibly massive that it makes believing that the Citadel can transport them to/from DarkSpace seem like a minor plot wrinkle.

Modifié par TheUnusualSuspect, 06 mars 2010 - 08:01 .

[T1l]

Moleculor wrote...

Which brings us back to the whole discussion of "do relays need both ends to be active to work".

The answer? Yes.

How do we know this? The Reapers sent the signal to activate the Citadel so that they could arrive.

Recieving end not active? No Reapers.
Recieving end active? Reapers.

It's the fundamental, most basic plot point of the entire first game.

I just wanted to say this is one of the most interesting threads I've read on these forums in a long, long time. Thank you everyone for posting your thoughts intelligently.

I quoted the above because after reading the entire thread this particularly blew my mind. Everyone seemed to be content believing that Reapers could just warp instantly to our doorstep, but Moleculor is right. It's the fundamental plot point of the first game that they can't. So, in re-reading the original post about how long it's going to take a Reaper to get to the Milky Way, I'm really interested to see what Bioware does to get around this.

I hope it's not lame, but after a Reaper in the shape of a giant T-800/101, call me sceptical.

[tomaltach]

TheUnusualSuspect wrote...

Ultimately it comes down to whether or not they have a relay at their end in Dark Space, and if they do, why don't they just use it to jump back to a different relay if they all work the same?  The fleet jump article was inferencing that the other end does nothing at all to really "catch" the other end, since it varies over such a huge range of error.  At best, it's working as a locational beacon, and that's at best in terms of your comment of being "guaranteed- that relays talk to each other".

Primary relays have fixed one-to-one connections so any primary relay connects to one other primary relay. So again we're back to design or necessity. If by design your question stands, if by necessity then they can't jump to another relay.

I'm also not sure I'd consider the drift range all that huge. At the upper end you're talking about a few light-seconds to light-minutes drift across a distance of thousands of light-years.