COzd 6 relay

They were an hour and a half from reaching the 'other' relay.... when using relays, you jump from one to another and some (due to distance) are only reachable by going through certain other relays [this is established in ME1 and ME2]. So the Reapers were
about to jump from another relay to the relay you blew up.... but since you blew it up, they have to make a much longer trip without relays or using other relays to get here.

Well, if you think about it, a relay just "shoots" a ship across light-years to a corresponding relay. If you were to slow down the rate of acceleration so that the projectile didn't enter the zero-mass corridor, and pointed the relay at a Reaper rather
than another relay, well...you see where I'm going with this.

According to the codex entry it was an 'alpha relay' powerful enough to open 16 other relays at once....

I think Bioware have left themselves an out. The only Mass relays that are destroyed would be relays that were active at the time and capable of transmitting the Crucible signal, right? Inactive or dormant relays may have been untouched.

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Now, in the ending I chose (Perfect Control), the Citadel was still intact (although it did appear to go dormant). With the Citadel being a relay itself, couldn't the fleets above earth use it activate those dormant relays? Obviously, doing this would be
a crapshoot, as one of the reasons those relays were left inactive is because they had no way of knowing what was on the other side of them (the reason the FCW was fought). But taking a chance on unmapped relays seems like a better alternative to starving
to death in orbit around earth.

[quote user="DecafKingRat"]

While I was a little let down by the ending, I have to question why so many fans think destroying a relay equals destroying a system? Remember the Alpha Relay that destroyed the Batarian system in Arrival was 16-20x more powerful than the standard relay.
Actually it acted as a normal relay until the Reapers made the setting changes that allowed them to hit 16 systems at once.........JMO

[/quote]

Yeah, the relays destroying their home solar systems wouldn't happen.

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However, just the simple fact that the relays are gone is a mess enough. The galaxy's basically doomed to a massive regression in every facet of life due to this. It's horrible.