It reduces the mass of an object, such as a starship , to a point where velocities faster than the speed of light are possible.
With a mass effect drive, roughly a dozen light-years can be traversed in the course of a day's cruise without bending space-time and causing time dilation. The FTL drive of a ship refuses to fire if a significant object is in the path of a planned jump.
Removing this safety mechanism is nigh impossible because it is inherent to the FTL warm-up process. Cynical intelligence analysts note that the safety system was attributed to the Protheans whose technology was attributed to the mass relays.
However, one method to bypass the safety mechanism is to install an improvised FTL plotter with an archaic design no longer used in Citadel space, as has been demonstrated in the Vallum Blast on Taetrus.
The skillset required for bypassing the safety features is noted to be like finding a particle physicist who can also build a train. The precise maximum speed and the time this acceleration can be maintained varies depending on the exact type of FTL drive being used.
In general, the larger the drive, the longer the ship can run at FTL. When travelling across space, thrusters are applied in one direction for the first half of the trip, then the thrusters are reversed for the second half of the trip in order to reach appropriate speeds for arriving.
In , Commander Shepard can have a conversation with Marab on this particular point stating that several people who travel in space forget that the ship must be slowed as much as it was accelerated, hence it will start being slowed halfway to its destination. Kett starships use FTL drives with a radically unique design. When traveling across smaller regions, such as a star cluster, these drives function almost identically to Milky Way drives, but over longer distances, they function like Alcubierre drives.
This is similar to having an onboard mass relay , but compared to actual mass relays, kett drives are both slower and extremely inefficient. Traveling between clusters is still arduous enough that the kett rely on their own ark ships and stasis tech for such voyages. This charge steadily increases with the amount of time a vessel spends in FTL. Eventually, it must be discharged. The greater the difference between the objective exterior and subjective interior speeds of light, the greater the refraction.
As the subjective speed of light is raised within the field, objects outside will appear to redshift, eventually becoming visible only to radio telescope antennas. High-energy electromagnetic sources normally hidden to the eye become visible on the spectrum. As the speed of light continues to rise, x-ray, gamma ray, and eventually cosmic ray sources become visible.
Stars will be replaced by pulsars, the accretion discs of black holes, quasars, and gamma ray bursts. To an outside observer, a ship within a mass effect drive envelope appears to have blue-shifted. If within a field that allows travel at twice the speed of light, any radiation it emits has twice the energy as normal. If the ship is in a field of about times lightspeed, it radiates visible light as x-rays and gamma rays, and the infrared heat from the hull is blue-shifted up into the visible spectrum or higher.
Ships moving at FTL are visible at great distances, though their signature will only propagate at the speed of light. Stealth systems do not work at FTL speeds because that speed blue-shifts ship emissions into frequencies too high to capture in the hull sinks.
Modern high-end drive cores are capable of attaining speeds of 5, times the speed of light, equating to around 16 light years within a hour span. More common drive cores or those utilized in most non-fast packet public transportation vessels as of can cover only around 12 light years in a 24 hour time frame. Over the years, science fiction has found any number of workarounds for the pesky problem of actual real-life physics, from warp drives to faster-than-light engines to Adams' own Infinite Improbability Drive.
The mass relays are but a recent method in a very long line of ways to expedite travel through the vastness of space where so many things could go wrong, and in Mass Effect's universe they do so by creating a literal relay system through points in space that allow for travel between without the risk of destruction.
In order to accomplish this, the relays have a well-executed scientific design. With Mass Effect set strictly in the Milky Way galaxy it has a confined space, albeit a large one, in which to work. Even within the Milky Way there are massive distances to be covered between the star systems, and the relay system, along with the Citadel itself, created a galactic web of transit points, making it one of the most impressive sci-fi transit systems.
Despite the name, the "secondary" relays make up the bulk of the transportation system, as they function openly within the network for players to use. The entire name Mass Effect comes from the relays themselves, as they function by creating a near mass-free connection, or "corridor," between two relays in the galactic system. As many sci-fi works have showcased, the biggest challenge to space travel is mass.
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