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Orientation of mass relays[]
According to the codex, the Presidium is rotating. Judging from the way it looks, the relay monument is fixed in the Presidium, and consequently rotates with the Presidium. Since the monument's tip points towards the center of the Presidium, the direction it points in also rotates (in a plane perpendicular to the citadel's axis of rotation).
This presents an interesting problem for the mass relay that it is an end point of. Judging from the relay design and cut scenes, relays work in a direction. The sending relay propels the payload along a "linear" corridor towards the receiving relay. (Are there codex entries about this?) It appears that for the relay to work, the receiving relay must be at the end of the corridor when the payload arrives. In addition, it looks like it must be aligned with the corridor.
Because the Presidium relay rotates, the transport of the payload must be properly timed, otherwise the relay endpoint would not be properly aligned on arrival. One way to achieve this might be to adjust transport velocity such that arrival is delayed until the relay endpoint is oriented as needed.
Because it is fixed to the planet, the sending relay on Ilos is also rotating. This may be a reason why there is only a limited time to use it.
For relays floating in space, this problem does not exist, since they can be rotated as needed.
- Presumably, since the Citadel and the relays were designed at the same time, they could have made the rotational axis of the presidium more or less parallel to the Ilos relay. Small fluctuations would still need to be accounted for, but the time window could explain that.--104.159.164.23 18:34, February 19, 2016 (UTC)Kriegmann
- What would making the axes parallel achieve? The citadel relay at least does not point in the direction of the axis of citadel rotation (I have extended the original argument to include this). --Lachnummer (talk) 18:03, May 1, 2017 (UTC)
- For the Monument end at least, I'd say that you can shoot something in a straight line across the galaxy, have a .01 degree cone, and still hit your target, no matter how far off it went. Can't comment on the planet one; the timing was definitely because it was going to close after transport (which actually doesn't make sense - mass relays work with a given amount of mass, and a Mako with people in it would be way more mass than it was prepared to throw... maybe that's why they crashed instead of calmly coming to a landing). I'll just MST3K Matra this one. Boter 17:59, March 5, 2010 (UTC)
- Well since mass relays create a corridor for a ship to travel through, how did the mako end up inside the citadel. The relays do not teleport so wouldn't the mako have just hit the outside of the citadel. And because the citadel is made of the same presumably indestructible material as the mass relays, the mako would either explode killing all 3 passengers or bounce off. Dtemps123 01:29, March 25, 2010 (UTC)
- Possibly the low mass field, which is created when the ship enters a relay and warps, created a "bubble" of lower-mass space and therefore pushed normal-mass space and the objects contained around the "bubble". This would ensure the traveling object doesn't run into something. This must be true with normal mass relays (and all prototypes included!) as with them, objects have a great chance of getting in the way of the two relays.98.151.6.237 01:36, August 1, 2010 (UTC)
- I agree with this. Even at sublight speed (let's say, 0.1c — which is awesomely fast enough), a 5g material can do horrendous damage (equivalent to approximately 0.5 kilotons of TNT). Now imagine what happened when said vessel hit a 100g chunk of comet... at 1c, the Newtonian kinetic energy is equal to a 1 megaton of TNT (not including relativistic effects which increase said comet-chunk's mass and all the complex maths for FTL etc) — Pepoluan 12:17, September 29, 2010 (UTC)