Tipsy McStagger wrote on Mar 30, 2017, 15:35:

Slick wrote on Mar 30, 2017, 15:20:

Also, how was the prologue stupid?

"I'm from the milky way! I can't understand you!"

Is one aspect of why the dialogue is horrendous.. You also wouldn't divert the resources to make planet fall without actually looking at the planet first, even the Nexus used satellites to scan planets first. Why would you make a ship without the ability to review options in contingencies? They obviously planned for issues with having pathfinders but none of the resources to do so?

They went to another galaxy without expecting to run into hostile aliens at all? Doesn't that seem a tad stupid?

They did go to a new galaxy fully expecting to encounter hostile aliens, hence all of the guns and krogans

Also, my main qualm about scouting Andromeda was that the light coming from Andromeda would be 2.537 million years old. How can they be surprised by stuff changing in 600 years, when they would have been observing essentially 2.537 million years in the past?

They do eventually explained how they circumvented this by some quantum FTL something observation method in the Milky Way, which I think was too complex/large/alien to mount on the Arkhs themselves. So as the Arkhs were getting closer to Andromeda, their only observation methods would still be constrained by the speed of light, which would mean that they're seeing into the past compared to the 600 year old glimpse they saw when they left the Milky Way. So even is SAM was programmed to scan for upcoming planets on their journey while everyone slept, he wouldn't be able to get any more up-to-date information than what the original scans were 600 years prior.

Well, technically near the very end of the journey he would get new information, you'd have to be traveling at 4228 times the speed of light to make that trip in 600 years. So you'd be travelling 11.58 light years distance per day. So that would mean that in the last 51 days of the journey, you'd be seeing newer information than the original Milky Way scans. With every day of those 51 days advancing the time of the observable scans by 11.58 years.

SAM could have seen the last 600 years worth of history a month and a half before they arrived, if the sensors could somehow sweep the entire star cluster, but it's not known if the Arkhs had that range of sensors. Seeing something 600 light years away in any detail on a mobile scanner is still a very tall order. Also, it's evident that at least the Tempest has to be in a local star system to even start scans of any kind, with the real scans happening when you're in orbit around the planet. The Arkhs would obviously have bigger and better scanners equipped, but it's 10 orders of magnitude from being in orbit around a planet, to 600 light years away. If we take the moon's orbit around Earth at 384,400 KM, compared to 600 light years, the sensors would have to be 14,766,961,498 times more powerful.

Plus the tendrils of the Scourge might have only formed in the last couple decades in the exact spot where the Human Arkh landed, as we were told that a "rogue arc of the Scourge Tendril" has pierced a space station at some point in the game, so it obviously doesn't stand still.

SCIENCE!

This comment was edited on Mar 30, 2017, 16:26.