At least it's not heavy pollution... get it?
Spoiler :
LOL, this joke is reeeeeeeeally bad
Altered maps XI: Towards a New Decade!
- Thread starter Civ'ed
- Start date
- Status
LOL, this joke is reeeeeeeeally bad
Winner
Diverse in Unity
I guess this counts as an altered map:
Spoiler :
hoplitejoe
Top fun-poster
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2010
- Messages
- 5,470
No deep linking!
Winner
Diverse in Unity
TheLastOne36
Deity
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2007
- Messages
- 14,045
Where is Batarian Space, I've always wondered.
NedimNapoleon
Weird Little Human
Sorry guys I had to
The Kite's Nest, the cluster that contains Khar'shan, the capital of the Hegemony, is located on the edge of what is referred to as "Human Alliance Space" on the Galaxy at War map. I believe only two other clusters have been shown to have batarian colonies. One, the Viper Nebula (home of the Bahak system, where Arrival takes place), is also located within "Human Alliance Space", albeit closer to the galactic rim. The other, Lorek, is in the Fathar system in the Omega Nebula, which is located in the Terminus Systems.
The Galaxy at War map is clearly oversimplified in order to provide a basic and easy to understand depiction of galactic geopolitics. It doesn't really offer anything we didn't already know - from ME1, we already knew that the Attican Traverse occupies the "eastern" portion of the galaxy, and Alliance colonies the south/southeast, and from ME2, we can see that most systems described as being in the Terminus are in the north/northeast.
That's pretty modest, actually. You know, for a Slavic nationalist map.
---
I don't believe I've posted this here before. So have a map of the end of the classical age, right before everything goes to hell in the Greek oikoumene. Year 662 of the Seleukid Era, which would be 350 for us.
Spoiler World Map 662 SE :
Winner
Diverse in Unity
Isn't it the segment "under" the Earth space? The Batarians seem a rather tragicomic species, a sort of "galactic loser" who got screwed over due to its inability and bad luck.
In any case, don't the humans have too much space? They've only been present at the galactic stage for a few decades, I wonder why the neighbouring systems hadn't been colonized by the time they contacted the Council. (And yeah, I know that just a tiny fraction of star systems inside the "Earth Alliance" space is actually explored and/or colonized; it still looks like too much). I also thought that "council space" covered most of the Galaxy, here it hardly covers one third of it. The Geth aren't shown either.
Eh, I think it's okay so long as we keep in mind that it's a deliberate oversimplification. "Human Alliance Space" seems to include territories both only somewhat under Alliance control (e.g. the Skyllian Verge; the Horsehead Nebula in particular) and explicitly outside it (e.g. Hegemony space). This is just for the purposes of dividing up the galaxy into segments for the Galaxy at War feature.
Council space is described as "encompass[ing] most of the galaxy" in the Codex as far back as ME1 (or at least appearing to), but you can fudge that, since everything not in the Terminus Systems can be described as being within "Council space". Including the Attican Traverse. Virtually all those territories are at least intermittently patrolled, and very lightly colonized, by the Council species, and have been for much longer than humanity has been on the galactic stage. (Read some of the planet descriptions for Traverse worlds like the ones in the Phoenix Massing, for instance. Or note that basically all of quarian-ruled space, before the Morning War, was within what is currently the Attican Traverse, as are the rachni worlds.) It is only the "inner" and "outer" Council areas that have been heavily colonized and developed.
The geth are described as being "beyond the Perseus Veil"; effectively, given the location of the Veil in the galaxy, this confines them to a very small area on the edges of the Attican Traverse. Even including areas that heretic geth regularly attacked, patrolled, or mined from the events of ME1 and ME2 - such as parts of the Phoenix Massing or the Hades Nexus - the geth would still be pretty much confined to the Traverse and the Terminus. This is an acceptable subset of those regions.
It is quite possible that the bulk of Batarian space is in there, but I do believe that Kite's Nest is within Alliance Space. Of course it is a simplified map.
From what I understand is that humans were far more aggressive at colonizing than most other races (with a notable exception being the Krogans). Earth is also on the edge of what was Citadel space. It is possible that there was little colonized out that way before getting into Batarian space.
Winner
Diverse in Unity
Still, the Gods of the Mass Effect universe are clearly pro-human
It seems that the other species have been basically stagnant technologically for hundreds of years, while the rise of humanity was extraordinarily quick.Nevertheless, I of course understand that the map is a simplification. In "reality", what constitutes a territory of a species would be a hodgepodge of systems spread all over the galaxy, connected to each other through the mass relay network - and thus extremely non-continuous in nature. Something like a HRE in space
Though it may be possible that since the Local Cluster lies at the edge of Citadel space, humans had a lot of secondary relays to explore and thus an opportunity to claim systems previously inaccessible by other major space-faring species. Even then, to get hundreds of millions of people to numerous extrasolar colonies in what, 30 years, that's quite an achievement.
Describing the Local Cluster as being on the edge of the space that the Citadel species had explored by the 2150s seems to be inconsistent with the lore. The batarians are on the far side of the relays that go through that region, and they were known to the Council before humanity was. One also needs to use relays in human space to reach the rachni and former quarian worlds, too - unless one goes through the Terminus, which does not seem to be viable.
The extant explanation is sufficient; there are a helluva lot of cracks in even "inner" Council space, and humanity inhabited one of those cracks until it began colonization.
Issues with the overly rapid human colonization are overblown - there haven't been "hundreds of millions" of humans, except in one particularly weird case that is probably just a lore oversight (Anhur) - but still represent a rather enormous undertaking all the same. Humanity probably colonized too fast, but not as disastrously quickly as some have described.
The extant explanation is sufficient; there are a helluva lot of cracks in even "inner" Council space, and humanity inhabited one of those cracks until it began colonization.
Issues with the overly rapid human colonization are overblown - there haven't been "hundreds of millions" of humans, except in one particularly weird case that is probably just a lore oversight (Anhur) - but still represent a rather enormous undertaking all the same. Humanity probably colonized too fast, but not as disastrously quickly as some have described.
Winner
Diverse in Unity
Meh, there may be primary relays that allow ships to skip "Earth Space" to get there. Conventional galactic geography matter little when there are relays that allow to jump over tens of thousands of light years. The fact that Batarians were known to the Council doesn't really mean that much.
That would be a pretty, pretty large crack. I deem it more probable that until the humans opened some relays from their side, many of the areas now claimed by Systems Alliance were inaccessible/too far from "civilized" space for anyone to care to chart alternate routes. I doubt other species would just ignore so many juicy garden worlds if they could get to them easily.
I meant more that they just hadn't settled out that far, not that they hadn't visited it. It is a fair distance from the homeworlds of the major species. Another note is that initially humans were entering various sytems that the council had not yet been to because they First Contact War was supposedly started because the humans were opening up a pile of relays without knowing about the destination.
These two statements are directly contradictory. First you state that what eventually would become Alliance space could be easy to skip with some mass relays (incidentally, relays that are not ever shown on the galaxy map in-game), then you state that the Sol system is too big a "crack" for the Citadel races to plausibly have missed humanity for such a long time. You can't have it both ways; either it's easy to skip such a crack, or it isn't.
Whereas the use of mass relays through what eventually would become Alliance space does not mean that all mass relays through that area are well known and charted by the Council (remember, especially after the Rachni Wars, that the Citadel races were extremely careful about opening up mass relays), and thus my explanation leaves a plausible gap through which BioWare could fly an ignorance of any number of species, not just humans.
Anyway, while it is always fun to have an argument about Mass Effect lore, I think it is getting a bit off topic for this thread. I posted an actual altered map earlier if anybody wants to discuss that...:3
Winner
Diverse in Unity
More maps while we're at it:
Spoiler large! :
Winner
Diverse in Unity
No. You say that the SA space was basically a crack inside the Council space. I say that it was outside it, on the fringe/frontier of civilized space. As I understand the scarce canon info, humans expanded into largely unclaimed space until they run into the Batarians, who had the same idea. At that point, the two races clashed in the Verge. The Council was lenient (perhaps even supportive) of early human expansion because it meant an extension of Citadel space further "east", without them having to invest in it.
As for the in-game map, you said it yourself - it is a gross simplification. A primary relay only connects to one other relay if I am not mistaken, but in-game you're jumping across the galaxy like crazy, without having to cross the distances between unconnected primary relays.
Suit yourself.
To hell with this.
You're viewing this stuff as though these "borders" are meaningful. Civilization isn't based on gross distance from a given reference point, e.g. the Citadel, it's based on distance from a mass relay that has been opened and properly charted. A proper map of Citadel space would show little islands around certain mass relays, with smaller islands within easy traditional FTL transit of those mass relays. So the notion of having a very large portion of the galaxy that is very poorly colonized and explored - leaving this proverbial "crack" - yet still regularly transited by Citadel vessels and large-scale trading is completely natural.
As the Codex all the way back in ME1 said, the Terminus isn't really a region of the galaxy with easily defined borders. It's just all the territory outside Citadel jurisdiction - so it encompasses basically all uncolonized and unclaimed worlds, many of which are within the region of space described as "Council space", in addition to worlds controlled by organized polities that claim to be independent from Council control, primarily in the "northern" section of the galaxy spinward from the Citadel and the homeworlds of the Council species. Even within the Apien Crest, home of Palaven and several other early turian colonies (e.g. Digeris), the overwhelming majority of star systems have not been claimed by the Council, let alone explored and colonized; they fall under the term "Terminus", despite being in the heart of what, on the Galaxy at War map, is described as Council space.
So describing a whole region of the galaxy as the "fringe" is silly. No one region is a "fringe" of explored space. They are all very poorly explored and colonized, especially once one ventures away from the charted mass relay network. Hence my comment about the "cracks" between relays. In reality, these aren't cracks at all, but oceans compared to the tiny atolls of civilized space near mass relays. If you teleported between already-explored atolls and never actually sailed a ship between them, you'd never know that there might be other islands out there in the ocean, too. Same with the relay network.
The "gross oversimplification" refers to the Galaxy at War map, the only one that shows any borders. The in-game galaxy map on which Shepard plots the Normandy's course is not the same thing. It depicts the route, via mass relays (some of which lie in systems the Normandy can't even visit, so we know that this is the actual route, not an oversimplification), that the SR-1/SR-2 takes to get to any given cluster. For all intents and purposes, the depiction of what mass relays the Normandy uses to get to any given destination on the galaxy map can be regarded as canonical.
Also, nice headcanon-map-that-is-directly-contradicted-by-Mass Effect 3.
Where'd you find it?
NedimNapoleon
Weird Little Human
I've started a project, I'm drawing Europe in 1391, I'm done with the outline of Europe but now I have to draw the countries so I drew some with a pencil and I was hoping you guys would take a look if you can see the pencil lines, germany is going to be hard.
- Status
Similar threads
