Mass Effect Thread: Leviathan is out, buy it, it's great

[lestatdark]

SecondWar said:

lestatdark said:

Strategyking92 said:

SecondWar said:

Just resolved one of ending plot holes. Never heard this bit whilst playing the game, but it does clear things up.

Was watching a youtube clip of the part where Shepard, his/her squad and the rest of Hsmmer are rushing towards the Citadel Beam. After Harbinger slaughters them all (minus Shepard and Anderson), you see Harbinger leave and the Sword Fleet commanders panicking as no-one made it to the beam to activate the Conduit. With the mission seemingly failed, the Commanders order a retreat, telling ships head for the relays. This explains why the Normandy was in the middle of a relay jump when the Crucible went off, although not why Liara, who was with me why i was going for the Citadel beam, appear unscathed after the Normandy crashed.

relays provide instantanous transport though, so there wouldn't be any travel time.

"Hailed as one of the greatest achievements of the extinct Protheans, a mass relay can transport starships instantaneously to another relay within the network, allowing for journeys that would otherwise take years or even decades with only FTL drives."

http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Mass_relay

I don't see why a lot of people think that the Normandy is amongst a relay jump. Not only the jumps are immediate, they also don't blueshift the surroundings as well. If anything, the Normandy was in midst FTL flight trying to outrun that energy wave thing, as every sign in that scenes point to FTL flight and not Relay jump.

 

Are we not using spoiler tags anymore? 

I've always found the opposite to be true. In the Mass Relay loading scences throughout the series, The Normandy approaches a Relay which catches the ship with a blue jolt of enery which then projects it onwards, with the ship envolped in the blue energy. That and the fact that on a galatic scale, it would have taken years for the wreakage of the Normandy to drift towards the planet it crashed on (I'll accept this could potentially be possible as no timescale is evident) lead me to believe that the Normandy is in the middle of a mass relay jump. However, it does establish another plot hole as the relay jumps are meant to be immediate. This is my interpretation of the ending, my brain had to do something to try and make more sense out of the mess that it was.

 

Damn sorry, I forgot about the tags >_<. 

There's indeed a rather quick blueshift caused when the ships accelerate towards extremely high FTL velocities during relay jumps, but there's no time lag in between jumps since jumps function by creating corridors of mass free energy between the relays. To cause such a sustained FTL flight it could only be done by the natural FTL engines of the ships. Also, during the cutscene, you see the expanding energy ball thing and that can't happen during a relay flight (that energy thing is propagated via relays as a normal ship or anything travelling through the relays).