' Mass Effect has always been grounded by a basis in reality,' says the Mass Effect: Andromeda Creative Director Mac Walters, and nothing in Andromeda exemplifies this more than its spaceship design.

It's an outgrowth of the desire to make a space epic with sci-fi elements based in scientific truth. A one-way trip to a distant world, and infrastructure built in advance by the earliest pioneers, are only some of the details Project Andromeda shares with Elon Musk's prospective plans to colonize Mars.Īnd that's not a coincidence. Certain details of game developer Bioware's new space opera immediately stick out as fiction-like the aliens and interstellar faster-than-light travel-but it also has plenty in common with the harsh realities of space travel. This is Mass Effect: Andromeda, the fourth game in the widely loved space opera series, and the first to take place after the conclusion of its first trilogy, beloved by gamers and sci-fi fans alike. 'Mass Effect has always been grounded by a basis in reality.' This is the base from which they'll strike out to find their new home. Three similar ships, each one loaded with individuals of other alien races, have made the journey as well, and the quartet emerges from hyperspace to find a half-built and gargantuan space station, under construction with local resources. On a mammoth spaceship called the Ark Hyperion, 20,000 adventurous souls awake to their new home 2.5 million lightyears away after 600 years in cryosleep. Here's the pitch: The year is 2785 and humanity has just finished its first successful journey to a galaxy beyond the Milky Way. The ships of the video game franchise Mass Effect are no different, except for the subtle but serious constraints of the digital world, which are very much real.

From the centrifugal gravity of 2001's Space Station V to the handwave-y hyperspace capabilities of the Millennium Falcon, there is a delicate balance between possible and awesome, likely and ludicrous.

Humans have yet to travel beyond our own star, or even beyond our planet's moon, but science fiction–books, movies, TV–has given us countless visions of what it might be like when we do, with varying degrees of respect for scientific accuracy.

Sci fi ships concept art