Mass Effect 3 Message Board  

OH MY MOTHER .......... STOP SPECULATING!!!!! Dumb IGN!!

**walks away**

[Edited by ServiusTheBear, 3/22/2012 9:26:00 AM]

True story...

Give this man a medal.

@Shotgun: I was only using the AR as an example of the excess energy explosion.

The AR was designed to handle more energy than normal. Regular relays are only designed to handle so much. Think of a PC. Each component is designed to draw a certain amount of power from the PSU. They can handle a certain amount of fluctuation, but if you experience a sudden power surge you'll fry everything.

Not sure what you mean by the rest, so I'll leave it at that.

What I was mainly getting at is that the AR wasn't really all that special. It had more energy and was the oldest, but was never explicitly said to be capable of handling that energy any better than regular Relays. Even if the others are inferior in terms of handling that kind of input, there's really no explanation as to how all that energy is leapfrogging from point to point.

Your PC analogy is apt. As you said, a PSU getting a surge will bust everything up, not just a single component. If that massive energy spike from the Crucible was fed into the Charon Relay, there is only one sound explanation as to why it went from Relay to Relay rather than to all of them at once...

A wizard did it.

As for the last part, I found it rather disappointing that there was no "Shep, dude, bro, everybody's dead." And there certainly was no dance party ending. Come on, BioWare.

You hire Clint Mansell to compose the soundtrack and you don't even let him make funky-fresh Reaper Techno? I bet sentient machines would throw excellent raves.

Well, that's what I'm trying to get at. If the AR gains the ability to travel to more than just two points in space when you dial the power up to 11, then every Relay should tangibly be able to do that - given enough power, at least. I'm to the opinion that since the Charon Relay was not special yet still "accepted" the Crucible that AR was merely unique in that it could consistently draw more element zero to power jumps regularly rather than just being able to utilize more energy.

Think about it like O'Neill maneuver #12. Blast the hell out of something with a nuke and it probably won't destroy it, but will produce pretty significant feedback.

Go with the SG-1 logic a bit further. The Charon Relay inevitably had to expend far more energy starting a chain effect. I highly doubt any sufficiently advanced being would be dumb enough to look at what needed to be done, what the AR could do, and what they had, then proclaim that they were'a firin' their lazor beemz.

Single shots to each Relay in the network, or even shots that chained to fewer Relays would have strained them all far less - and since the AR wasn't (in my mind) the only Relay that could direct extra energy to firing greater distances then, in the very least, it could've fired twice. One shot to a closer Relay that chained once or twice, then the "I can only do this trick once" shot to chain to a larger number, then stop at a Relay that would work with the other.

Because seriously, even with FTL, anybody who has explored the galaxy a bit in ME1/2 should be pretty upset that they "saved" the galaxy by condemning half of it to die of starvation due to ultimately relying on Relay transit to keep most planets sustainable.

Oh italic . Humanity splintered and scattered amongst the stars? Dog-eat-dog universe in play? Mass transit via wormholes that spacecraft cannot replicate is generally pretty finicky?

Mass Effect is an alternate universe spinoff of Stargate.

I think we're both just reading far too much into it, and thinking far too hard about it.

All we need is for BioWare to make a "technology of ME" book, like all of the Star Trek/Wars technical manuals, which have highly detailed blueprints and parts and technical descriptions/specifications of things which don't exist.