PinionRobot

Mass Effect galaxy map - repainted and plotted with all known Mass Relay connections from the main series games.

Continuing work on my SW Armada conversion project to make Mass Effect ships and cards, I’ve now made cards for some of the OG Normandy crew. It’s been an interesting challenge trying to find good screenshots for paint overs by scouring game footage and diving into photo mode.

I’ve been working on a fleet wargame conversion (SW Armada) for Mass Effect and I need lots of character art for many of the prominent military leaders and officers, plus others. I’ve taken to doing paint overs like this Hackett piece of in-game screenshots or cutscene frames.

If there are LE screenshot fanatics or even people who render original shots using the game models, I’d love to see your stuff or even talk about working with you to get good shots of more obscure or rarely pictured characters.

Systems Alliance || Kilimanjaro-class Dreadnought

The Kilimanjaro-class dreadnought became the flagship of the Alliance’s fleets between 2180 and 2185. By the the time the Reaper invasion began in 2186, the Kilimanjaro-class’ predecessor, the Everest-class, had been retired as flagship of the Alliance’s various fleets and mothballed, awaiting decommission.

The Kilimanjaro-class was designed to be the most powerful warship ever built by mankind. Armed with a 1 kilometer long spinal mass accelerator typical of dreadnought class warships, the Kilimanjaro-class is also capable of deploying and maintaining major military operations such as ground invasions of entire cities.

Systems Alliance || Vancouver-class Cruiser

Successor to the Berlin-class cruiser which made up the bulk of the Alliance fleet in the early 2180s, the Vancouver rapidly came into service to help replenish the Alliance fleets after the losses it sustained during the Battle of the Citadel in 2183. By 2186, these starships composed the majority of the Alliance fleet’s cruiser class warships.

The Vancouver-class is a much more heavily armed and armored starship than its predecessor, boasting an extensive array of broadside cannons and nearly a dozen layers of protective ablative armor. As for primary armament, the Vancouver I-class features a standard pair of powerful spinal mass accelerators that span the length of the main hull.

(TL:DR Humans are sufficiently advanced and overpopulated enough to rapidly expand with the discovery of Mass Effect technology, plus a splash of space imperialism)

Humans discover Mass Effect physics on Mars in 2148. About a year later, the Charon Relay is discovered, leading to a rapid expansion period over the next decade. In 2152, Humanity founds its first extra-solar colonies, including Demeter, Eden Prime, and Terra Nova.

By 2157, Humanity has expanded beyond the Exodus cluster and comes in contact with a Turian military vessel, sparking the First Contact War. At this point, Humanity has established a significant presence within the region of space that will become known as Systems Alliance Space. The colonies are depicted as being highly urbanized, featuring permanent development beyond prefab habitats. This is likely a result of rapid adoption of Mass Effect technology, which may have been easier to translate into construction applications than deepspace starships and space stations, which were advancements heavily informed by data found at the Mars Prothean site. So it’s reasonable to think that urban development and construction (already 125+ years more advanced than our own) would be accelerated by the discovery of Element Zero and Mass Effect fields. This would make massive colony developments within a decade seem more feasible, if only by virtue of how Mass Effect technology works in the ME universe.

Humans must be rapidly advancing on their own by applying Mass Effect technology to already existing tech and machinery. Then consider that Humans have made contact with some of the most advanced alien civilizations in the known galaxy, the Salarians, Asari, and Turians. With access to galactic trade with other advanced alien civilizations, Humans can rapidly adapt and evolve their technologies to match that of their alien neighbors. This kind of rapid advancement can be seen in our own history today, having discovered flight technology and then landing on the moon just 70 years later. Mankind is capable of massive leaps in technology in a short period, especially when we can reference technology that has already been invented, such as weapons tech observed and adapted by opposing factions during war. Mankin’s technological growth seems feasible, if a bit drastic.

Over the next decade, Humans continue to expand and are given an embassy on the Citadel in 2165 in recognition of their growing power and influence. It has been 17 years since the discovery of Mass Effect physics. By now, Humans have expanded and colonized dozens of worlds and systems. With a massively overpopulated homeworld, estimated to have a population of 11.5 billion by 2183, it seems reasonable that there would be plenty of people able and willing to leave for the colonies to seed populations numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands on other worlds by 2165. We don’t have clear numbers of how many humans live beyond the Sol system, but its largest colonies have populations numbering in the low millions (>5 mil.). Many more colonies have populations in the hundreds of thousands. It seems feasible that a colonial exodus of a billion humans to the colonies could be done over 20 years, provided Human manufacturing and resource development could keep up to produce construction materials and starships to facilitate that level of deep space travel and interstellar colonization. Considering the potential for accelerated construction rates in the year 2165, having over 15 years to adapt Mass Effect technology, this kind of boom in infrastructure could be possible.

All this together makes Mankind’s explosive expansion seem plausible, at least within the Mass Effect universe. Given the armed conflict of the First Contact War with the Turians and ongoing conflict with the Batarians in our backyard as well as pirate threats in the Traverse and Terminus Systems, humans also have the classic motivator of military aggression to power expansion. Either to match political and military threats like the Turians or to muscle out pirates and slavers with force, humans have often expanded in the face of such threats, treating them like challenges. Imperialism has long been a human mentality and the Systems Alliance continues this on an interstellar scale.

Humans are essentially an amalgamation of traits found among the other species, namely the council races. Capable of technological advancement of each and as militarily capable as the Turians, and are even adept at trade and diplomacy. Humans are like softer Krogan but more advanced. It’s no wonder so many aliens are afraid of or despise humans, they arrived and expanded to a position of insane amounts of influence within the blink of an eye to some races and a single life time for others.

Eli, another commission for @capt-biglou

Eli, a turian commission for @capt-biglou

So naturally…

I have also always been interested in a Mass Effect conversion mod. The idea of playing through the Reaper War or even other conflicts from the Mass Effect series would be an epic experience. But no one has ever managed to do it because conversion mods are way more work and there’s only ao much to go on for the Mass Effect series.

Well, I want to give it a shot. Actually, this would make my second attempt at modding the game but there are new tools available to work with and I am much more patient and skilled than I was nearly 10 years ago.

So here are the first results of my learning the process of modding!

While from a player's perspective in a videogame we never see the realities of travel time in space in the Mass Effect series, the games do give some approximate information about how long it can take in various circumstances. Faster Than Light travel is said to be about 3 parsecs per day, or 12 light years. This is enough to travel between most stellar objects within a given (open) cluster. This means that it would have taken around a week to conduct a brief exploratory survey of a given cluster in any of the Mass Effect games, not including any planetary exploration or missions. This primarily accounts for the time spent traveling between systems. As for Mass Relay travel, things are much faster and distances travelled are significantly further. Information on Mass Relay travel times is much more vague though, described as taking as little as hours to traverse galaxy spanning distances. We could surmise from this that 1 kiloparsec per hour isn't unreasonable, still taking up to 3 hours on some of the longest relay connections to reach the other side.

All this taken together, with the likelihood that a combination of interstellar FTL and Mass Relay travel is necessary for the average journey across the galaxy, it can take at least a day or two to reach the furthest places in the galaxy from any given location. Possibly longer if Mass Relays are not found in the same system as each other in a given connecting cluster.