lore-and-universe

[prime mauve]

It would be a funny characterization for them to have!

[stoic hamlet]

“I say I say boy, you better nawt think about infecting the galaxy with an eldritch virus!”

[obsidian thistle]

I prefer the "not all humans are Reclaimers" approach. Or more accurately we all have different levels of it.

Spartan-IIs have near perfect or enough parts.

Regular humans on the other hand may not

(I go by the idea that Halsey when finding the SIIs unknowingly found the markers for Geas. So all Spartan-IIs are perfect, or close to it)

[frigid heart]

Who is a better starship captain?
Captain Keyes or the Captain from WALL E?

[normal cypress]

hello! i'm working on a halo inspired supplement for Traveller Second Edition by Mongoose Publishing, i just had a quick question about what the primary differences between og SPI and the Mirage Core in Infinite are? I'm a bit confused and i don't wanna just go on the wiki and get jargon'd to death, i was hoping you guys could help. thanks!

[tropic forge]

Mirage is an evolution of the SPI design, there are Semi-Powered versions of Mirage (like the original SPI) and Powered Assault Armour Versions, even a MJOLNIR version. We've never seen it use the photoreactive panels that SPI does but it does still seem to be stealth focused with the jammers of some kind. It's generally considered cheaper but still pretty good on the power armour scale as well.

The specifics of Mirage lore are as bad or worse than MJOLNIR lore, so I understand the confusion.

[normal cypress]

thank you so much

[prime mauve]

Keyes is too much of a reckless, lead from the front kind of guy (and his daughter Miranda inherited that and then some) but he is still a master tactician in ship combat, the Wall E captain's biggest feat was getting the ship into atmosphere and maybe a big weightloss program later.

[steel bloom]

Wall-E mentioned in the big 26

[vagrant ocean]

Almost as if it’s fantastic.

[prime mauve]

WALL E is short for Walter Leonard Evans. It is known.

[junior rivet]

If noble 6 had survived and made it onto the pillar of autumn how different would the timeline be?

[carmine sleet]

There would've been two active Spartans on Alpha Halo instead of one. Beyond that, we don't know how different things would've ended up, but I imagine not too different since nothing Chief does in CE would be dramatically changed by the presence of a second active Spartan

[thorn spindle]

Noble 6 and 117 would fight way through. Guilty Spark would split them up to test each by themselves. Maybe Spark would sabotage Noble 6 even more than he does 117, somehow. Idk i don't want this imaginary Noble 6 to die vs flood, maybe Flood + Spark. Maybe Spark would imprison him somehow, if you want 6 to survive.

Otherwise Flood overwhelm and take Noble 6 over, then the Flood Noble 6 hunts 117. Flood almost killed 117 in books, only Cortana saved him. 6 doesnt have an AI, so he is taken. Another reason to Autumn nuke the Ring (and 6) to take both out

[prime mauve]

I think 6's role if he somehow could make it to the Autumn and not endanger it at the end of Halo Reach (like if the game was closer to the Fall of Reach novel and the Autumn doesn't go back, and instead Carter, Emile and 6 flew the Pelican to meet the Autumn in space, but the other two Nobles still died), would go something like this:

The Pillar of Autumn: Waking 6 up might look very much like waking up in the co-op campaign. Both 6 and Chief would go meet Keyes and Chief gets handed Cortana's chip. Keyes probably says something like "Lieutenant, watch the Chief's back. We're counting on you both."

If there is only one escape pod like with just the Chief, it might be overburdened with both Spartans...but 6 locking his armor up could keep Chief held in place and the only Marine deaths would be from the impact, maybe saving a couple lives.

Halo: The Chief and Noble 6 pretty much do the same as canonically, it's just that Chief has a better Warthog gunner! They save the Marines, Foehammer picks them up, and Keyes' location is revealed at the Truth and Reconciliation.

[junior rivet]

crazy how halo reach to 3 is only the span of 2 years.

or is it more or less?

[prime mauve]

Less, it's all in 2552

[junior rivet]

wow

[prime mauve]

In between Halo and The Truth and Reconciliation, Chief spends some rest time at Alpha Base, captured and fortified by the ODSTs led by Major Silva and Lt. McKay. Here Noble 6 would be a wildcard. Maybe Silva would be more respectful with two Spartans around, maybe less.

The assault on the Truth and Rec is Silva's operation, but I don't think he'd change it much from the canon version with an extra Spartan in support. Keyes would still be rescued and returned to overall command.

Around the same time as the Truth and Rec raid, ODSTs go back to the Autumn for supplies and I'm sure that Silva would gladly exchange an ODST squad at the Truth and Rec for Noble 6 being there instead and the ODSTs instead going on the supply run.

The raid on the Silent Cartographer probably keeps Chief and 6 partnered up, though there I think a fun idea would be to have them sweep the beach in opposite directions to catch the Covenant in a pincer move.

Now for the attack on the Control Room is where they could be split off and have it make sense, because Keyes' raid to the "Weapons cache" Flood research facility could use a Spartan to augment the squad's capability, and both happen at roughly the same time.

[stoic hamlet]

Specifically August-December 2552.

From his POV, John only technically spends 12 days with Cortana until her death in Halo 4.

[prime mauve]

Winter Contingency and ONI Sword Base are still in late July

[prime mauve]

Maybe some more time with the time dilation stuff in First Strike?

[stoic hamlet]

That’s with the time dilation taken into account, actually.

[prime mauve]

Even counting Spartan Time and AI time perception it is very little time

[minor sky]

Totally possible that Six stays on board the Autumn while Chief escapes with Cortana

[prime mauve]

It is possible too but keeping Cortana out of enemy hands is priority 1 and Chief having backup supports that priority the most

[prime mauve]

So here I think 6 would go with Keyes, Johnson and Jenkins. There is a possibility that 6 would die to the Flood, but his death would probably buy time for more Marines to escape than just Johnson, and would give the First Strike team added manpower. It could lead to saving Keyes' life.
Otherwise there is a chance that, like Johnson, 6 could live and escape without changing the outcome in major ways, maybe saving a life or two more, but Keyes and Jenkins still ending up infected and going their canon routes. This one is the route I would go to have the least butterfly effect (and also because it adds another Spartan for First Strike and because 6 returning to Reach with the team to rescue Halsey would be kinda fun story wise).

So Chief would be doing his own thing while 6 would go the Johnson route and meet Pulaski and the other survivors, help out in First Strike and when they return to Reach, 6 can get a version of their Halo Reach death to let the others escape, if that is desired. They can also die with little glory at any point in First Strike like some of the Red(shirt) Team members did.

If 6 somehow kept surviving to return to Earth they could probably be added to Blue Team for the Battle of Earth and go on to Onyx, where an extra Spartan in Mjolnir (and upgraded to Mk. VI like Blue Team) could maybe prevent some deaths. Also it would be pretty damn awesome to see him reunite with Tom and Lucy and Kurt!

I think 6 is less likely to die in Onyx than in First Strike, then be trapped in the Dyson Sphere until rescued by ONI. Here 6 might end up staying with Blue Team and having a part in the Ferrets novels, or they can be recalled to ONI service and go back to what they were before Reach. Or when Jun is pulled to the Spartan IV program, 6 could also be given a leading role. Or maybe they could be the commander for the remaining Gamma Company IIIs that ONI took charge of eventually and we don't really know much about.

[stoic hamlet]

It depends on whether things work in a narrative sense or a realistic sense.

Post Onyx, there’s genuinely no actual reason Tom, Lucy and Saber remained with Blue Team. They only did so because of audience/out of universe purposes.

Logically speaking they’d just be reassigned.

The same would occur post First Strike as well. B-312 would likely be reassigned to a remaining III team (we know a few were active in Sol during the Covenant invasion) rather than stick with John.

It’s the whole “importance creep” aspect.

It’s the same reason Alpha-9 became these big shots. The original look for ODST was that they were just a random team of nobodies, indistinguishable from any other ODST unit.

But because everyone loved Buck and Doeherty (somehow) 343 made them some special secret ONI unit, even during the War.

[prime mauve]

I think that an in universe reason would be Fred fighting to keep everyone he fought with at Onyx together, arguing that they had become a cohesive unit and were better united than separated, and their deployment to Gao was Osman giving them a chance to prove it. And then they get separated after that as soon as Osman realized it was way too many Spartans for a single mission.

Essentially I think he would want to protect his whole team by keeping them together as long as possible. Apes together strong.

[prime mauve]

I think even in the game they were a cut above the average ODST fireteam, and Dare keeping them around for her own operations makes some sense (since Halo hasn't just given ONI black ops teams more of a presence) especially when Vergil was involved.

[stoic hamlet]

A case could be made equally that Saber and Tom and Lucy are better with Gamma Company though, not with Blue Team, considering they're more familiar and would work much better together.

It's like saying because John worked really well with the Black Daggers during Silent Storm, he should stay with them indefinetly.

[prime mauve]

True

I think that the merit of a mixed gen unit of Spartans being evaluated would have made a better story than Last Light if it was a more straightforward combat deployment.

[stoic hamlet]

I mean beforehand. Buck's sqaud was retconned into being an ONI unit in previous missions, when as far as the game itself presents it, his squad were picked by Dare just because of her familiarity with him via a short term relationship.

but Buck otherwise was just supposed to be any other ODST with no prior connection to ONI, mission wise.

[prime mauve]

Dutch being in that Prophet assassination team probably also connects him to ONI

Like at least in some minor way

Mickey's parents having been Innies could maybe have put him on their radar even a tiny bit

Romeo and Dutch's actions in Helljumper could probably get them noticed too, especially the part where they stole a Phantom

Rookie's team in the Dirt story was guarding a Forerunner artifact so there must have been some ONI oversight there.

(Before he went with Gage)

[stoic hamlet]

Rookie was part of a reinforcement wave, not part of the artifact team, and Dare at least wasn't aware of the rest of them, as she questions Buck about them when she first sees them.

[vagrant ocean]

Yee

[warm ridge]

Only certain humans count as Reclaimers, not all of them are.

[warm ridge]

Noble Six would've likely been tasked with protecting Alpha Base while Chief & Cortana do there thing. He may of even been part of the Keyes escort to the Flood facility that the Covenant just barely managed to contain.

@thorn spindle @prime mauve 👆
They would definitely not be together, especially with how spread thin the resources already were.

[prime mauve]

I think that Silva would gladly swap Six for the team of ODSTs he sent to the Truth and Rec so that there would be more of them for the supply raid on the Autumn

Using Six defensively for Alpha Base would make sense in hindsight, cause we know it gets attacked, but sending Six to the Cartographer does feel like a priority mission that could use more resources than what was used in canon

[normal cypress]

what’s the capacity for cybernetics in halo? i know kat and some other spartans have had cybernetic arms and legs and stuff and even unsc personnel have neural links, but what about other things? how cyber can someone get feasibly?

[modest marsh]

This isn’t exactly what you were looking for but I feel like this is relevant to your question insofar as the utilization of cybernetic implants
https://www.halopedia.org/KOBOLD_combat_drone_initiative

As far as other alterations made to the human body, we don’t have much in the way of evidence they exist beyond what can be inferred by Spartans and its competing super soldier programs, like Janissaries and the Executor

[normal cypress]

thank you

[warm ridge]

I don't think Noble Six would've joined Silva tbh, he'd be stuck at Alpha Base for a grand majority of the time as it was constantly being attacked. He wouldn't go to the Cartographer either, as that was Chief & Cortana. They aren't going to send 2 Spartans to do the job 1 Spartan can do just fine.

Best bet is he would've met his end right alongside Keyes when he was ambushed by the Flood, helping Johnson escape.

[prime mauve]

I was saying that Silva would not be sending ODSTs to the Truth and Reconciliation if he could send Noble 6 instead

[warm ridge]

Really don't think he would. He was against the Spartans and called Chief a freak, he would've thought the same about Six.

The only reason he decided to go to the Truth & Reconcilation was to find a way off the ring. At that point, he'd rather leave Six behind "uhh Six go here far away from us or something idk"

[prime mauve]

Silva wouldn't want him on ODST led missions like the supply raid because of that but I also think he'd still see the utility in deploying him

Because Six is the one that has the most recent knowledge of what to expect inside a Covenant ship

[warm ridge]

Dude he quite literally tried convincing Keyes that his ODST's should go to the Control room, not Chief. He wanted Chief to disappear (and when he did disappear he made fun of it, saying Chief was playing games).
If Six was there, he'd want him to disappear to. Probably even tell him to stay behind at Alpha Base & wait for orders from Cortana while he was planning to leave the ring completely.

[prime mauve]

For the Truth and Reconciliation I'm pretty convinced of my take on it, even with Silva's antagonism. As for the Cartographer, that choice would be Keyes' in the end.

[warm ridge]

Keyes would've definitely taken Six with him to the Flood facility 🤷‍♂️

[prime mauve]

Yes, I mentioned that since here

But that was simultaneous with the Control Room, not the Cartographer

[prime mauve]

Do you think Six would have survived that, like Johnson? Or would he have been taken by the Flood?

[warm ridge]

The point I keep making to you is Six would've been stuck at Alpha Base for a majority of it's defense. Especially for the 1st attack, the Guerrilla warfare, and definitely for the 2nd attack.

They aren't going to send out 2 Spartans to do a job 1 Spartan could do just fine with a squad of Marines.

[prime mauve]

Yes and here I am agreeing to disagree on that point, I am not really convinced.

[warm ridge]

Johnson barely made it out, Chief also barely made it out (this isn't seen in the game ofc but he was struggling hard). If Six was able to follow Johnson, there's no tellling whether he'd survive it or not.
Also there could've been more of a chance that Keyes could've survived to if Six was present to take out the attacking Flood. The problem would then be shooting there way out.

[worn wolf]

the flood would have taken one look at noble 6 and voluntarily fired the rings themselves because they know they dont wany any of that.

[prime mauve]

Lmao valid

[warm ridge]

flood: "tf is this? ok we're blowing up the poa"

[prime mauve]

Question for the people that have Fleet Battles: could the battle group formations mentioned for the game be taken into account when thinking about the smallest possible Covenant formation that could be called a "fleet"?

I have seen, mostly through Halopedia, that there's some small ship groups with 3 or 4 vessels

Could these be considered a fleet, since the Covenant don't seem to have battle groups or other fleet subdivisions?

I had a project some time back to try and figure out the base minimum number of Covenant ships involved in the war by getting the hard numbers of ships in each battle (because some guy in a server I'm at was using Regret's lines about having no ships to give to Ripa Moramee as a literal statement that the Covenant had lost 4,000 ships by the 2530's, which is just silly).

So my idea was to give at least 7 ships whenever a Covenant fleet was mentioned without giving it a definite quantity of ships.

[fading flume]

@frigid heart lawd he back

[frigid heart]

😭

[fading flume]

I thought the mods banished him

A) it’s against the rules to role play and the mods have made these rules blatent. B) U basically roleplaying a halo fan fic, and there is nothing wrong with that, you just can’t do it here. And C) Ai Elite is diabolical

[waxen basin]

My mistake, I had only seen the compressed format of the rules… my only goal is to engage in the discussion of Halo and where it may lead. The Combat Evolved and Campaign Evolved updates are fascinating and I have nothing against re-visiting the greats… it just seems that post 5 years of Halo’s newest release being Infinite and nothing more seems stagnant in the Halo universe.

[fading flume]

I mean, you do you my Brovadumme, just know that the mods likely won’t tolerate it

[carmine sleet]

Halo Infinite hasn't been out for 5 years yet

[stoic hamlet]

Saying the universe is stagnant is also quite inaccurate considering we’ve still gotten plenty of books.

[vagrant ocean]

To say Halo’s universe is stagnant is stupid.

Halo had gotten nonstop content since HW2. May not be games, but its content.

[carmine sleet]

Well, Halo is a book series with video game tie-ins /half joke

[waxen basin]

Correction noted: I mean the narrative that Microsoft and 343i have been forwarding into the screen via gameplay and the on-screen adaptations

[stoic hamlet]

There were more books than there were games since Halo CE, so is it really even a half joke?

[carmine sleet]

Fair point

[wispy pewter]

all stuck within 2559 since

[vagrant ocean]

But it’s still content.

And some chronicles are not in 2559.

[atomic stump]

We hit Peak Novel in 2018 when the 3 year moving average hit 3.00 books/year. It has slowed down in recent years.

[stoic hamlet]

Tbf, that’s very common in franchises.

40K, Star Wars, Star Trek, why should Halo be any different?

[vagrant ocean]

Of the 18 chronicles we have, only like, 2 are in 2559.

[wispy pewter]

I know im bored of Star Wars going back to the same time again and again. But the filoni shows were decent, placed in a timeline we dont know much about.

this is why I am not bothering with the Maul show

why is he not dead

[vagrant ocean]

Because this takes place before his death in Rebels.

[carmine sleet]

Because George and Dave decided he wasn't dead so he could show up in Clone Wars

Heck, George wanted him to be the big bad of what he would've done for the sequel trilogy had he not sold the franchise to Disney

[vagrant ocean]

Also, Sam Whitwer is Dave’s BFF so that.

[carmine sleet]

Also that too

[vagrant ocean]

He out nerded Dave once.

And he shocked the producers of Force Unleashed during MOCAP.

With the saber building scene.

“Hey Sam, why do you look constipated?”

“This is how a Sith apprentice would think you meditate. Don’t you read?”

[wispy pewter]

Halo show should have been canon ngl

[vagrant ocean]

Are you huffing infusion over there?

[wispy pewter]

it should not be what it is rn, but canon

[vagrant ocean]

Ok.

I do like the design of Silver Team’s armor.

It is sick.

[wispy pewter]

Master Chief was not green enough

[carmine sleet]

If there's one thing I can say the show did right in absolute confidence, it was definitely the look of the armour worn by Silver Team

[vagrant ocean]

I also think they did the Covie weapons right. I saw a clip of a marine getting hit by a Needler and he popped like a gross balloon.

However I will always remember them failing to texture the plasma pistol prop.

[wispy pewter]

lol yeah during the first ep I think

[carmine sleet]

I remember pointing that out when I saw that first episode

Honestly, I have to wonder what led to them filming with the prop looking like that

[vagrant ocean]

I’m a film nerd and I always look at props to see if they donked something up.

[vagrant ocean]

The textures were prolly added in post and they forgor.

But it’s still so glaring.

[carmine sleet]

Yeah

[vagrant ocean]

Something that gets pointed out a lot is Glocks having a hammer being primed as a sound effect when it’s striker-fired. Or in the latest season of Stranger Things when a chick racks an M16 like a Kalashnikov.

[carmine sleet]

If it was just one shot of the Plasma Pistol looking like that, it would've been fine. But I recall there being multiple shots

[vagrant ocean]

I’m enough of a prop nerd that if you name a blaster that appears in Star Wars I can prolly name the firearm it’s based on.

[carmine sleet]

DL-44

[vagrant ocean]

Easy, Mauser C96.

Actually saw a screen used one go for half a mill at auction.

[carmine sleet]

Yeah, I had a feeling that one would be too easy

[vagrant ocean]

Gimme a hard one. I can take it. I’ve studied props since I was 13.

[carmine sleet]

EL-16

[vagrant ocean]

G36 platform.

I can’t tell you how many people have made E-11 kits for their Glocks or DL-44 kits for their ARs.

[carmine sleet]

Somehow I am not surprised

[vagrant ocean]

When the Glock has the SE-44 and the AR has the A280CFE and base A280.

And A300.

But then again, Sterlings are hard to get and nobody wants to invoke a collector’s wrath modding a C96.

Tho I would just make the greables for the DL-44 removable.

With a series of clamps and screws.

[stoic hamlet]

On a technicality the A280 wasn’t an AR originally, it was an STG-44.

But AR’s are obviously more common now, so…

[vagrant ocean]

No, the A280C is an StG.

Also known as the A295 in legends.

[stoic hamlet]

I’m not as up to date on my blasters as I should be, but I don’t think they ever distinguished the A280A-B-C from each other?

[vagrant ocean]

They did in several games and reference books. The A280C is the canon designation for the A295 (the StG one), all other weapons in the A-series of rifles are AR based.

The A350 is weird tho.

Cuz it’s based on the BAR and Armaguerra OG-43.

[prime mauve]

Speaking of gun props and the Halo TV show, did anyone else notice that the Commando-esque rifle used by the dudes in SPI armor was this airsoft gun? https://store.kwausa.com/product/kwa-ronin-tk-45-aeg-3/

And the rifle that Keyes uses at some point was this other airsoft gun? https://www.evike.com/products/68299/CSI-S.T.A.R.-XR-5-Advanced-Battle-Rifle-Color-Grey-Type-B/

[vagrant ocean]

Yup. Japanese shows do this a lot.

[prime mauve]

The Japanese airsoft industry is really strong

[prime mauve]

I think that these props could be modified a little to better fit if they wanted to add them to the main timeline. Like have the Commando-like gun become a copy like with the Bandit, and the Keyes rifle could be an AR manufactured to compete against the MA5 series that lost in trials but found a decent aftermarket with civilians.

[stoic hamlet]

I think even then they’re too contemporary looking.

The VK works, but that side ammo counter and funky upper is doing a ton of heavy lifting.

[prime mauve]

Yeah. They'd need a lot of visual tweaking to really fit.

Maybe like those Wernissage edits

[unique rune]

that XR-5 thing makes me think Titanfall

[fair hazel]

Bleh, that site wants ID verification

[prime mauve]

Weird, where I'm at it just has a "are you 18?" button to click

[fair hazel]

I think ill comment that the show's props were inconsistent, there was some quality stuff and some stuff that missed the mark

[vagrant ocean]

They could’ve just bought 100 Hi-Point HP-45s and modded the grips.

I’ve seen a build for it.

It was wack.

[prime mauve]

Hell yeah

That's the Magnum for the inner city

[prime mauve]

Yes extremely so.

[vagrant ocean]

I’m ngl, I’d use a 1911 to fight the Covenant.

[prime mauve]

2 world wars, one Jovian Moons campaign and one Insurrection, son!

[balmy crow]

i havent seen it so i cant comment on that specifically, but i do think its interesting given a number of films (and probably tv shows) have used halo items as props, all the way up to the big names like marvel

[prime mauve]

Yeah I think it's an Iron Man comic that straight up traced Spartans

[hearty whale]

once it jams youll have a similar fate to noble six

[vagrant ocean]

Never seen one jam.

[vagrant ocean]

During testing before adoption it ate 7,000 rounds nonstop with no malfunctions.

[ashen phoenix]

i'm imagining they belt fed the 1911, because that's a way better imagine than a guy reloading after the clip empties out

[vagrant ocean]

I mean, there’s no way to convert a mag-fed pistol to belt feed.

[carmine sleet]

I can't even think of a practical application for a belt-fed pistol

Like, if you need a belt-fed weapon, you're gonna want something bigger like a machine gun

[waxen basin]

It is interesting that you all have been discussing weapons and armament… as you all have been talking I have been trying to acquire further information about this “Halo Leak” that I have been investigating… I found some very fascinating fragments… But I wouldn’t want to impose or go against the rules as stated previously…

[carmine sleet]

I don't see any correlation between us discussing the impracticality of a belt-fed pistol and you trying to find leaked information (Which can't be discussed here anyway)

[waxen basin]

That’s the thing, Hunter, I don’t know if they are official leaks or not… from what I have found so far they are all connected in some way. What triggered my curiosity was that my roommate had received a strange email that couldn’t be traced but it was very “Halo” and since we both love the universe we got curious…

[boreal bane]

Not discussion of leaks please, real or fake

[stoic hamlet]

Leaks are not allowed to be discussed here.

[waxen basin]

Tracking… investigative leaks are a void-silence here.
I digress, in regards to Hunter’s and ADV Eon, the concept of a belt fed side arm would be unique but highly illogical… Side arms are ideal for mobility and stealth. To have “belted” rounds you would have aim thrown off by the excess weight, stealth would be compromised as a consequence of the rattling, and mobility would be slowed… Mag fed is the way to go for highly mobile ins-and-out counter strikes

[dense falcon]

Guys remember when the Chief had to explode the Pillar of Summer and he did it by using a belt-fed machine gun against the engine?

[waxen basin]

I cannot recall a “Pillar of Summer”… But I do remember the epic and explosive finale of Halo 1 where he uses grenades, rockets and heavy fire from the warthog’s machine gun into the engine cooling manifolds to destabilize the Pillar of Autumn and cause an incendiary chain reaction throughout the ship

[unique rune]

I preferred the time he blew up the Pillar of Winter with his bare hands

[carmine sleet]

I enjoyed the time he crashed the Pillar of Spring into the hangar of a super carrier so he could get a team of OBSTs to help get a Tiger Nuke on board

[frigid heart]

I remember that time he blew up the Pillar of the fifth season that isn’t real

It was really funny

[carmine sleet]

I thought that got retconned?

[waxen basin]

@frigid heart yes! You are referring to the Pillar of Shadow! UNSC is still trying to figure out how Master Chief did that one

[chrome cairn]

pillar of monsoon season

[worn wolf]

i cant lie i saw the akm in the show and for all the random stuff that showed up on the outer colony planet cant be the only one that could believe an ak would exist that far in the future

not even being manufactured just some guy in his shed, some 500 year old manufacturing instructions with the technology to make some and loan out to the local militia men

[chrome apex]

Do flat earthers exist in Halo?

[worn wolf]

flat reachers were a big part of the TFOR.

stands to reason that flat earthers also still exist as of 2552

[stoic hamlet]

I feel like you’re more likely to see Interplanetary or CMA gear, rather than an ancient AK, though.

[frigid heart]

What if the Koslovics produced them

[modest marsh]

Koslovics would’ve been the ones producing early Misriah weapons

[frigid heart]

Yeah I’ll admit I don’t really know too much about the interplanetary war

I just thought it was space commie militia vs space fascism militia

[worn wolf]

i dont think the type of militia men to be using an ak would be CMA or have any real recognition outside of like them and their mates deciding "yeah we'll train on saturdays"

[modest marsh]

It’s a little more complicated than that but my take has always been that realistically a lot of the iconography we associate with the UNSC proper would’ve been adopted from the rival factions in a more juvenile state

Weapons and equipment used in the 26th century come from Mars via Misriah Armory, to me I think the logical conclusion there would be that weapons development used by the modern UNSC would’ve taken aspects from the Martian faction regardless of their political affiliation

I also tend to assume that the Koslovics were the pioneers of the first viable combat exoskeletons

[worn wolf]

this is a dumb question but surely misriah on mars arent the only location producing weapons?

[modest marsh]

No, obviously

You can make weapons anywhere

It’s just where the main manufacturing hub is situated

They have centuries of infrastructure and institutional knowledge

[worn wolf]

that makes more sense

[modest marsh]

With the Friedens, I also think they also had certain ideas and techniques that would’ve been folded into the UNSC, mainly concerning biomedical and cybernetics research

(This is kind of why I assume they’re the cause for the Genetic Rights Act that effectively prohibits the development of super soldiers and cyborgs)

Worth noting that the first Smart AI was produced in the 2080s, 80 years before the interplanetary wars

[modest marsh]

To use a real world example, it’s kind of like how the StG-44 informed the design of the AK-47, or the Sten was essentially a reduced cost version of the MP-28

You take what works from your enemy and iterate on it

Important to note that with the Friedens, they were primarily comprised of the Jovian moon colonists whose primary industry was xenobiology research (since Europa especially was believed to be able to natively support life), which kind of informs us about what sort technology they specialize in

Couple this with their nationalistic/supremacist ideology that happens to parallel historical groups with similar beliefs, I believe they were interested in creating the “super man” that would be better adapted to occupy the harshness of non-Earth colonial life

Koslovics on the other hand were about industrial manufacturing from the beginning with a smaller emphasis on biotech or terraforming research since Mars is nearly as habitable as Earth (relatively speaking)

Friedens being the biotech guys also works well with the historical parallel of their predecessor’s casual use of stimulants and performance enhancing substances which was maintained into the 26th century with the use of stimpacks

[prime mauve]

That is really well thought out, very cool extrapolation of them!

[modest marsh]

I’ve put a lot of thought into this over the years, it’s just interesting to see the timing for certain things in the setting and how those things would seemingly interact

It’s a serious question as to why there’s been seemingly no real progress on transhuman technological development since the development of Smart AI, and I think it all neatly solves itself if there were attempts that ended badly and left a sour taste for generations to come

[modest marsh]

1A/3a: A human being shall be defined as a person recognized and accepted by a reasonable layperson as being human on the basis of form, behavior, or external appearance, and no authority shall be permitted to use any element of a genetic profile to exclude a person from that definition.
1A/3b: A human being shall not be restricted, selected, or subjected to discrimination on the basis of their genome or genetic profile, whether altered or unaltered.
1A/3c: A human being shall not be brought into existence with the intent of providing biological material or research data for the use, treatment, or benefit of another.
1A/3d: A human being shall not be subject to any commercial claim, patent, or restriction on the basis of any part of the genome or genetic profile, whether altered or unaltered.
1A/3e: A human being, regardless of any engineering of their genome or introduction of non-human or artificial DNA, shall not cease to be classed as human under any circumstances.
1A/3f: No human being shall be subjected to genetic alteration except with their express and informed consent, or, in the case of a person under the age of 18, with the consent of their legal guardian for the sole purpose of correcting a health defect in that child.
1A/3g: A human being or part of thereof may not be owned by any individual or organization.
1A/3h: A human being shall not be cloned.

From the Mortal Dictata Act, an expansion of the Genetic Rights Act of 2165 that was explicitly drafted in response to off-world biomedical research

And here’s the kicker:

In 2321 CE, the UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) created the ORION Project, named after the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Its aim was to build on bioengineering protocols developed during the Interplanetary Wars in order to generate tougher, faster soldiers. A handful of military candidates were "tested" and eventually seeded into the regular chain of command after the project was declared ineffective.

Developed by whom???

[waxen basin]

Has anyone considered how ground breaking and monumental a HALO MMORPG game could be?

[modest marsh]

https://www.halopedia.org/Titan_(canceled_game)

[waxen basin]

The universe is huge, the lore is deep, the weapons assortment is astounding, and the Halo community is vast… Some of the files I have found with my roommate’s help propose to allude to a prospect just as exciting… Imagine being able to play as an Unggoy Grunt and have tactical uses and advantages other than just being cannon fodder? Or a Jackal with their acrobatic-high-mobility style becoming a lethal assassin?

Halo so far has only explored the Player’s experience as a Spartan, ODST, or Sangheli Elite… gameplay wise, there is no difference between a Spartan and Elite for the Player’s experience… it is just an aesthetic change… What if there were distinct advantages and disadvantages to each Playable race? A unique way for these inter-alien-racial characters to work together and synergize as a tactical squad of Remnants who all share the same Spark but defy the logic of every opponent who believes they should be killing one another?

[unique rune]

sounds like a prime target for scope creep, bad decision making, getting bogged down in microtransactions, and ultimately crashing and burning while achieving very little in the long term

[waxen basin]

I understand the irritants of mtx and ‘pay-to-win’ concepts… the files I’ve been uncovering suggest a different approach… the architecture suggests tactical depth within a team or squad… the way a team plays with one another would actually increase their effectiveness, it rewards military grit, not the depth of one’s wallet…
As opposed to everyone spamming their own buttons and hoping it works out for the group… the Spark isn’t something bought, it is harnessed and refined through the Aeternal Forge…

[unique rune]

no

[frigid heart]

What are you TALKING ABOUT?????

[prime mauve]

MMORPG? No thanks. Single player RPG? Yes please.

[prime mauve]

Man, you gotta stop with the roleplay. Nobody finds it fun or compelling. Just talk like a normal person.

[hardy swan]

RPG is one of the moast popular genres but yeah

No one wants to play as an unggoy

[carmine sleet]

You say that but I've seen people saying they want a Halo multiplayer which allows you to play as Grunts alongside Spartans and Elites without thinking about why having Grunts there is a bad idea

Like, Grunts are meant to be easy to kill and that would have to be true in a PvP environment as well

Which basically means easy kills for the team who doesn't have Grunt on their team

[hardy swan]

spawns

dies

life of a playable unggoy

[vagrant ocean]

Over at the Halopedia server we think it’s AI.

[atomic stump]

Cut him some slack.

Grunts would be super easy to balance. Just give Grunts unlimited lives and Spartans/Elites 1 life.

I don't know what Messenger is selling but a class based halo shooter like Team Fortress 2 or Deep Rock Galactic could absolutely work.

[carmine sleet]

I think you've missed why people like Halo's multiplayer if you think it should copy the very distinct class/heroes that games like Team Fortress 2 does

Like, part of the appeal of Halo's MP is that we aren't playing as a named hero or someone with a very distinct kit within a roster of people with very specific sets of gear

[atomic stump]

Well I don't play Halo online multiplayer and have never played Halo online multiplayer. So I don't have strong opinions one way or the other. But just writing off ideas is a bad cycle to get into.

[carmine sleet]

We're dropped in and have access to the same tools as everyone else. Yes, Halo has experimented with loadouts, but you don't need to play as a specific character or class to use things from different loadouts

[carmine sleet]

This isn't me writing off ideas. I remember the heavy pushback against custom loadouts in Halo 4, which is as close as we got to having a class-based Halo shooter. I very much doubt that pivoting even further into that would work out for the franchise, especially when class/hero shooters aren't as popular as they were 10 years ago

It's me recognising how the wider community reacts to even the smallest of changes

[atomic stump]

Let me put it this way. I have been playing Halo for 16 years. I have read 10 books. I have never touched online multiplayer because the mechanics do not apeal to me and I don't enjoy mechanical discussions about mutliplayer. I hopped in because you are dogpiling this guy and its not right.

If Halo did try something new like a class/hero/extraction shooter I might try it. But I have zero interest in the classic Halo multiplayer. I haven't touched it.

[carmine sleet]

What?

How is me explaining something "dogpiling"?

And I couldn't care less how long you've played or how many books you've read, neither of those things are important to this conversation

[modest marsh]

i have read 40 books so my opinion is 4x more valuable at least

[unique rune]

I’m just ragging on it because the RPing is weird, AI slop is bad, and it’s very easy to just sling “proposals” without much further thought

I’m also still slightly bitter about the Starfighter proposal getting killed

[hardy swan]

Halo doesnt fit the hero shooter genre

Maybe extraction shooter

but might as well play Tarkov

I rther have a story based game

Pragmata with Halo mods

[carmine sleet]

I think an extraction shooter mode could work, but it shouldn't be the main focus of the game

Like, keep the arena shooter side of things as the primary focus, then have the extraction shooter mode be a side mode which exists alongside it and the campaign

The big thing is how would you justify the idea of Spartan teams working against one another to grab whatever it is they're going after

Like sure we have Janissaries now which can be more easily explained for working against one another, but I would assume we'll be sticking with Spartans as our human super soldiers in multiplayer for future projects

[hardy swan]

Escape from Reach is my proposal

the enemies are other soldiers or aliens just trying to escape doom

the last pelican can only fit one bla bla

[frigid heart]

Truth nuke

[vagrant ocean]

Not even close to dog piling. Bro is cracked out.

[vagrant ocean]

It’d be interesting, especially with how well received the Sabre and Broadsword missions are.

[vagrant ocean]

This.

[prime mauve]

It is more about that dude just being weird about it. Personally I would much rather have a single player RPG because MMORPGs need to be much bigger by design and less focused.

[prime mauve]

We could have gotten something to fill that Ace Combat niche

I saw the messages disappear in real time

[frigid heart]

I read it and it was a dumb idea so I deleted it

[frigid heart]

Also I think Messenger left the server

[vagrant ocean]

Yup.

[sharp bough]

Let’s be serious here: Anyone who defends the storyline in Halo Reach, forget the books… please just explain to me how it is even consistent with the previous in-game lore

[unique rune]

I don’t like Reach but I don’t recall anything about it meaningfully contradicting anything in the games only

[tropic forge]

Yeah. you'd have to be more specific because it would actually fit much better with the game lore only.

[carmine sleet]

It's always been contradictions with the novels (Specifically Fall of Reach) which people took issue with

[prime mauve]

I think there are levels to its consistency and how much I can accept them. The early invasion being very secretive and the UNSC somehow managing to cover it up for the rest of humanity before the Long Night of Solace is revealed? Okay, we can work with that, the Winter Contingency protocol seems like it could do it. Dozens of ships being destroyed in Operations Left Jab and Uppercut? It could still be workable, the UNSC could reveal the operations later and honor the fallen.
The second fleet showing up and glassing a MAJOR city in Reach and somehow secrecy being held and Dr. Halsey continuing work and setting up a Mjolnir test, the Spartan IIs being called to Reach, and half the planet supposedly being unaware of the increased conflict level? It starts REALLY stretching it.
Halsey having split Cortana doesn't really contradict anything, and using data from the Babd Catha frozen Forerunner ship combined with the other Forerunner artifact to get Halo's coordinates is an okay addition, even if the game prefers implying it was only the frozen ship that gave the coordinates.
But the part here that is really, really weird is that Halsey knows the Pillar of Autumn will be on the surface getting repairs.
We never get any impression in game that the Autumn went down for repairs after the space battle vs the combined Covenant fleets, which is how Halopedia rationalized the timeline for August 30th, as the Pelican flight towards it seems to have been linear and all on Reach, no implied attempts at reaching the Autumn in space, where it would have been.
Also it is generally very silly that the Autumn would risk planetary reentry and then need additional booster frames to leave Reach again, and become a sitting duck for Covenant ships (which realistically could have torpedoed it with plasma from beyond visual range with zero chance for Noble 6 to stop that), instead of arranging a rendezvous in space.

[stoic hamlet]

By the time LNoS crashed, the entire planet should have known something was going on.

The amount of ash, soot, and etc would have major ecological effects, to say nothing of the glassings starting and going on and military build up.

A single volcano erupting in the 1810’s caused “the year without a summer” after all.

[prime mauve]

And Covenant cruisers attacking a big city like 5 minutes after that would have very much added to public knowledge!

[stoic hamlet]

Yeah.

Though, on that point. The game itself doesn’t indicate the planet is being misled or kept in the dark.

[prime mauve]

Yeah but if it was supposed to be consistent with previous lore it's a really big point against that

The one thing that I do think is really, really cool from adding more fleets and more engagements before Reach falls is that the UNSC defense is even stronger and more capable

Holding a planet against the Fleet of Valiant Prudence alone would have been tough, maybe even impossible for most planets and UNSC forces. Pushing back the Ministry fleet that showed up after it would have been damn hard too. But the UNSC held out and still managed to muster to meet the combined fleet led by Thel's Fleet of Particular Justice, and I think that is pretty excellent.

[sharp bough]

I mean cloaked 28 km long CSO super carrier kind of breaks space lore. Why are all the prophets and fleet admirals in the games shown in CAS class vessels when there are massive Super Carriers 50x larger? Also, there is absolutely no way UNSC forces could defeat a ship that large by any conventional means so one by itself could destroy all UNSC navy fleets. This is absolutely lore breaking

[unique rune]

I mean the CSO in and of itself isn’t really that big a problem
big ship, needs lots of resources to maintain
can’t have that many nor would it make much practical sense to do so

the cloaking thing is dumb though

[prime mauve]

Captain Keyes being kinda stupid and putting his ship at a risk that he didn't need to originally isn't really the greatest tradeoff for one month of human badassery

[prime mauve]

We had supercarriers in the books before the game, though

Xytan's flagship Sublime Trascendence was a supercarrier of unidentified type

So the precedent for an admiral having one was not pulled out of thin air

[sharp bough]

Aside from the lore breaking 28 km CSO super carrier, I don’t think the Reach game does anything to expand or explain lore. Eric Nylund’s fall of Reach book uses the story to explain what happened to the other Spartan II’s (most died defending Reach), it explains the importance of planet Reach (it was the main naval headquarters planet of the UNSC and second most important planet after Earth)…

The game doesn’t explain the significance of the planet at all, even depicting it more as a generic colony world with hardly any naval presence (a few frigates defending it and no orbital MAC platforms), and by focusing on Spartan III’s primarily, it never actually answers what happened to the rest of the Spartan II’s in Master Chiefs program. You literally get no explanations for any of these important questions if you are simply going off only game lore. The Halo Reach game doesn’t really expand much lore leading into Halo CE. Just tells a stand alone story about Noble Team with Master Chief and Cortana showing up at small parts of the game towards the end

[prime mauve]

The part they did pull out of their butts was in cloaking it.

[sharp bough]

Exactly, if personal elite cloaks work for massive ships as well then that tech would be used by so many Covenant vessels and just completely break space combat. The size of the ship is equally broken. Some of the books mention covenant super carriers but they never provide a size. I would assume them to realistically be maybe 1.5-3x larger than a CAS class, not 50x larger which is just a meme

[stoic hamlet]

Tbf, Halo’s ganes basically ignore Soace combat, though.

They don’t define or outline how it works at all.

[prime mauve]

The 2009 Encyclopedia had Sublime Trascendence being 32 km long, so even larger than the LNoS, but at least never implied it would hide

[carmine sleet]

You remember the spire we destroy during Reach's campaign? That was one of many cloaking spires used to hide the Long Night. The ship itself wasn't using its own cloaking to hide

Pretty sure I have that right, been an eon since I last played Reach

[tropic forge]

None of that is really inconsistent with the games only lore though, In fact most of that isn't touched on in the games before Reach. Reach gets a line or two in some game materials talking about how important it is, but we have no real frame of reference for that.

[sharp bough]

I think it is. It’s size makes no sense in Covenant fleet numbers. Based on everything we see in games and books the total covenant capital ship fleet can be assumed to be around maybe 3,000 strong of CCS class and only about 10 or 11 CAS class are ever seen or mentioned in the books or games. It was a very big deal to have one. So based on those numbers there is zero chance they would have the resources to build a ship 50x the mass of a CAS class. They would have just built dozens more of those instead rather than having maybe 15 of them max in their entire ship fleet

[unique rune]

I’d chalk up most of it to being poorly written but I don’t think it’s like, explicitly contradictory of anything that is established just in CE through ODST

mostly because the games actually establish very little of that

[prime mauve]

As for why the Prophets don't use supercarriers, they generally are in High Charity, in their seat of power, and the whole city could be seen as their flagship. When they move around, they generally do it with discretion, like Regret using Ripa Moramee's ships to visit the Forerunner fleet he intended to capture, or with apocalyptic fanfare, like Truth taking the Forerunner Dreadnought.

[prime mauve]

There's definitely more than 11 CAS carriers

[unique rune]

you say that but I’m not sure there’s any reason to believe that’s the case? especially if we’re just looking at what the games show

[tropic forge]

With the books, definitely not. Silent Storm Oblivion says that "Tethered to the stalk beneath the dome [of High Charity] were thousands of capital ships—a hundred the size of the Pious Rampage, and twenty even larger."

Pious Rampage is a CAS.

and that's just for fighting humans.

[sharp bough]

This is factually incorrect. That ship was created by Eric Nylund in his books and he never gave a length or size for it. It was first given a length retroactively in 2011 sources and at that point was just made to be consistent with the Bungie size for super carriers provided for Long Night of Solace in the Reach game. So that shows nothing about lore consistency since my point is that those numbers given for super carriers by Bungie team in Reach game and retroactively applied to previously named super carriers are themselves lore breaking

[prime mauve]

• Shadow of Intent (Kerel)
• Seeker of Truth (Kerel)
• Breath of Annihilation (Kerel)
• Resplendent Fervor (Kerel)
• Song of Retribution (Kerel)
• Enduring Conviction (Syfon)
• Day of Jubilation (Syfon)
• Solemn Penance (Syfon)
• Purveyor of Truth (unknown pattern)
  And that's just named ones, if we add in the unnamed ones from Halo 2, 3 and Reach we very quickly surpass 11 CAS carriers.

[unique rune]

even if we go with the idea of Hood saying “the fleet that destroyed Reach was fifty times this size” in H2 was an exaggeration and not something to be taken at face value, it at least suggests that the Covenant still had an expansive naval fleet composed of probably dozens of assault carriers, cruisers, and other auxiliary vessels

just during the invasion of one planet even

[prime mauve]

Reach released in 2010 so how can it retroactively alter the 2009 encyclopedi?

[vital mist]

I mean, we already know that's the case. The new Covenant led by Dovo Nesto is extremely large, I believe it's qouted to surpass the reach invasion force

[unique rune]

even ten times the size of Regret’s fleet would suggest the equivalent of like 20 assault carriers and over a hundred cruisers

[unique rune]

yeah I was just trying to go off an example with context from the games only, particularly what would’ve been known at the time of Reach’s release since I think that was part of the original premise of this whole discussion

[vital mist]

Oh, my bad. I just joined now

[sharp bough]

It wasn’t in 2009 encyclopedia. It was in the 2011 Halo: The Essential Visual Guide. And even if a number does show up in 2009, that would also be Bungie and not Eric Nylund who’s work the ship appears in in the books First Strike (2003) and Ghosts of Onyx (2006) where it is never given an exact size.

[vital mist]

I've been thinking about this for a while, but is there any source stating how big the Covenant Empire was? Be it systems under their control, planets, population etc

[sharp bough]

Erics Nylund, who created most of the original lore around space combat in Halo universe would have never given that ship a size of 28 km since that clearly destroys all other space combat lore in the universe

[unique rune]

I don’t believe we really have anything on that, but I think the idea is that it’s very expansive and official media has only really scratched the surface of it all

343/HS tends to prefer this kinda vague approach to keep more storytelling options open

[sharp bough]

By the way, The Empire in Star Wars that created 30 km SSD’s had a much larger empire than the Covenant did. Millions of planets and thousands of species. The Covenant had a couple hundred planets maybe and a dozen species in their empire

The same feat is not believable for them. Their Empire is smaller than Hutt Space in the Star Wars galaxy

[stoic hamlet]

Tbh, most of the post-covenant factions are absurdly small.

We don’t know how large the full empire wise, but the idea that any of these groups would even really bother with humanity seems asinine when the empire is so much larger.

[unique rune]

I think the key flaw in this premise is that Halo is not Star Wars

[vital mist]

I kinda hate it. I don't really like Dovo Nesto and his new covenant. Just let it go, please. It really feels like a desperate attempt to get some "Proper" covenant back in the story

[sharp bough]

But yet Bungie devs wanted to introduce a Super Star Destroyer in their final game before f’ing off to make a completely different game franchise

[stoic hamlet]

Okay, and?

Why can’t they?

[sharp bough]

Basically said: We don’t care if this breaks lore. Microsoft owns this game franchise. Let them deal with the implication of our final game and its nonsensical story

[vital mist]

How does it break lore?

It's just a big ship

[unique rune]

Yeah admittedly I'm not super up to date on the wider Halo universe but it's... certainly an approach. I can understand why they do it but it's definitely something I can see causing frustration for lots of people

[vital mist]

I mean, they basically did that with Destiny. The ships in Destiny are huge

[carmine sleet]

I think any space fairing empire would want some sort of large capital ship regardless of how big their empire actually is. It's not like Halo ever set any hard limits on how big a ship has to be

[sharp bough]

A big ship that makes all other space battles stakes meaningless and also makes no sense for the Covenant to have the resources to build a ship that size given everything else we see of their technology and fleet size

[unique rune]

I mean they have what is essentially a small planetoid that they can chug around in space

I'm not sure how "ship big bigger" is that difficult for them to make

[vital mist]

I hate Dovo Nesto, he's the oldest Prophet to ever exist, was controlling the covenant secretly from the shadows etc. He's such a gass pull that literally came from nowhere

[carmine sleet]

I think Nesto claiming he's as old as he is isn't meant to be taken at face value

[unique rune]

the dimensions on a CSO aren't actually that far off from Unyielding Hierophant even
kinda silly conceptually but not like, universe-breaking

[vital mist]

It being just scaled up is definitely silly

[sharp bough]

Even Star Wars had large capital ships before the Empires days… they just weren’t 30 km long. It makes sense for the Covenant to have super carriers… just not 30 km long

[vital mist]

It should have a more unique design

[vital mist]

I mean, it fits with the likes of Destiny and Warhammer. All have ships as big or bigger than that

[vital mist]

From my reading of it I thought it was pretty legit?

Or is there some doubt to it

[sharp bough]

Exactly. Another thing that shows they put no real thought into it. They basically just depicted is as an upscaled CAS Assault Carrier. You can’t just upscale a ship and have everything the same. The rooms would all just have very tall ceilings 🤦‍♂️

[vital mist]

Ehhh, actually the more I think about it the more I kinda agree

I guess I wouldn't mind if there was only one of them, or maybe each High prophet had one

[carmine sleet]

You're assuming the internals are exact same but larger based on the exterior only

[sharp bough]

You are comparing Halo verse to 40K? 😂

That universe is famous for being the most extreme power scaling of almost any scifi universe around. They have like trillions of planets. Covenant Space is nothing close to that lol

[vital mist]

The covenant are contained to the Orion arm I believe. Or at least the War is contained there

[unique rune]

Reach has a lot of problems but I don't think they are necessarily a problem in the context of what is established in the other games

[sharp bough]

I’m not against the idea of super carriers. But it would be more realistic as maybe twice the size of a CAS max and them having like 2-3 max

[vital mist]

The Imperium has over a million planets in its Empire with a population of Quadrillions. For reference the Forerunners had 8 million planets under their direct control

But billions felt the forerunners touch

I get the vibe the covenant must not be THAT much larger than the UNSC. I'd put them around a few thousand planets, they just have a better and faster production output due to their forerunner technology

[sharp bough]

The Covenant are not the Forerunners. They had but a tiny understanding of Forerunner technology. I’m not saying the Forerunner’s couldn’t build Star Wars sized SSD’s. Of course they could. They built entire ring worlds… The Covenant ain’t popping out Ring Worlds though haha

[vital mist]

Oh, I know. I'm just saying how large they are compared to the Imperium

[vital mist]

Because from what we can see, it really doesn't seem like the covenant put effort into colonisation, it seems mostly exploration. Most covenant colonisation efforts we see are just the various species going to planets in their local system

[sharp bough]

Yep. From the fleet battles we see in Halo EU material and from the size of the fleet defending High Charity, their fleet of capital ships can’t be larger than 3,000-4,000. They won fleet battles with dozens of ships because their technology gave them a massive edge in 1v1 with UNSC ships.

I still think super carriers should be something that can realistically be harmed by a few Super MAC rounds from a space station size orbital MAC gun though (anything more than 2-3x the size of a CAS and you are basically saying its shielding would be impenetrable by any Human tech including Super Mac rounds)

[vital mist]

Yeah, like if we're going off scale, I'd definitely put the covenant pretty low in terms of Sci-fi Empire size. Id probably put them around the Tau from Warhammer. A few thousand worlds or so but with a population and infrastructure that makes them appear much larger

[sharp bough]

Also… look at the size chart of the Covenant ships that includes the CSO-class. It is dozens of times larger than even the post-War UNSC Infinity which was stated to be the most advanced ship in either Human or Covenant fleets and was built using covenant technology and knowhow as well. So this is another reason why such a massive SSD sized super carrier contradicts in-game Halo lore from every game outside of Halo Reach

[vital mist]

It also doesn't help the covenant completely burned 800 worlds are so. It's clear they have no intention of colonisation

[vital mist]

What is the most recent CSO to appear??

I don't recall them in any recent material

Even if I hate him I wouldn't mind if Dovo Nesto pulled one out for the big fight, would be a cool boss ship

[sharp bough]

I only know of the one mentioned by Eric Nylund (without a size given) and then the one in the Halo Reach game (with a Bungie size of around 28,000 meters). By that logic even the post-war most powerful ship in Halo 4 onward would lose in a one-on-one. This shows that the ship was so absurd that even Microsoft devs ignored it in later lore and just pretended it never even existed

[crude kite]

Hi, is it okay if I join the convo (might just read rather than text anything lol)

[vital mist]

Of course

[sharp bough]

I don’t even know if they could compete with a small faction like Tau in 40K just because of how extreme the scales are for 40K. Maybe they would be close to (but I think still weaker than) the Hutt Cartels

[vital mist]

Oh my god, completely unrelated. I assume you know about the mysterious alien race the elites encountered during the start of the covenant??

[carmine sleet]

The ones 'Crecka encountered?

[vital mist]

The Tau would definitely win simply due to their technology being better and having a higher population. Each directly controlled Tau planet has a population of trillions (8th edition codex) and they have roughly a thousand planets as of "Elemental council".

Tau shields are also genuinely insane. We're talking energy shields that could survive a glassing beam for a short time. Farsight gets attacked by a blast so hot it immediately turns his squad into molten glass, and his had a negligible drop

[vital mist]

Ehhh....I think?

The elites encountered them on the other side of the galaxy from their home planet. The aliens boarded the elites ships and killed them all bar one guy. The only description we have is they "spoke a brutish tongue"

[sharp bough]

The Tau also have giant mechs so would probably crush the Covenant on land battles as well

[carmine sleet]

Yeah, those are the ones 'Crecka encountered

[vital mist]

And there are no good culprits, the brutes didn't have space flight when this occurred

Though maybe that's an oversight

Saying " brutish tongue" seems oddly specific

[carmine sleet]

Saying something is "brutish" is often used to say something is not as civilised, it's not a reference to the Brutes

[vital mist]

A single Ghost keel solod a space marine Chapter monastery and no diffed every marine inside

Their suits are broken

[vital mist]

I mean from a writer point of view

These aliens are strong enough to kill elites in CQC and boarding

And spoke a language elites would consider barbaric

There's really only one culprit it could be

Unless of course it's a random alien

[carmine sleet]

My point stands, I don't think they're meant to be Brutes

Like, not everything needs to relate back to the same known aliens

Having the aliens encountered by 'Crecka be a species we haven't encountered is a fun little mystery, one which likely will never be anwsered as the identity of them is unimportant

[vital mist]

Sure, but at the time they would have been unknown to the elites. And it's not like anyone was alive that could later say "oh yeah, those new aliens that joined us attacked us ages ago"

The only thing I'll say is the October incident before the invasion of Earth with civilian id tags

I find it strange both of these mysterious aliens seem to be fans of boarding

Could be a potential connection

Though the October incident I have a feeling could be linked to banished. 343 is already adding them to a few things and confirming they were around quite early

[carmine sleet]

I don't think there's enough evidence to link the aliens 'Crecka encountered to the October 10th aliens

[vital mist]

Like the banished rescued Jega directly after he was blown up in that Evolutions short

[carmine sleet]

And I very much doubt they're going to retcon the October 10th aliens into being the Banished

[vital mist]

Oh yeah, I'm just saying it's a tad strange both of the mysterious incidents that have occurred involve boarding

[carmine sleet]

That story didn't have any confirmation of when it happened until it was confirmed that the Banished found Jega after the events. It's not that the Banished were retconned into existing earlier, it's that we got a solid timeframe for when that specific story happened opposed to a much larger one

[vital mist]

Makes sense though. The bashied raid human settlements, they'd definitely employ false tags. Either that or Innies

Most likely options

[carmine sleet]

Like, the Banished have existed since 2549, since the Battle of Argolis, that's late into the war

[carmine sleet]

If it was Banished, they would've identified the aliens involved. And Insurectionists wouldn't operate like that

[vital mist]

Side note but I do find it slightly unbelievable that the elites would send their ships on an exhibition... literally all die bar one dude

And not retaliate?

[carmine sleet]

They don't know where those unknown aliens are

Like, how do you retaliate against an enemy who you never knew about before and never saw where they went or where they are from after

[vital mist]

Everyone died though, the ship that was boarded was destroyed. In terms of ship identification, it could have been brute ships, the UNSC would have no log to identify them

[vital mist]

Check where they encountered them?

[carmine sleet]

'Crecka made random jumps to escape, he likely doesn't know how to get back there easily

[carmine sleet]

You know UNSC ships can communicate with each other, right?

[crude kite]

Idk what I honestly like about the covenant is how they seem more organic to me, like they're not enormously massive but they are still a threat to humanity yet they aren't impenetrable either.
Idk if I'm talking nonsense or saying something unrelated at all

[vital mist]

My guy, it was probably hectic as hell. Like look at Halo wars 2 when the banished attack the ark, the scientists are panicking and don't utter the word "brute" once

Isabelle literally just says "he's here" instead of telling the Spartans "there's a massive brute over there, don't walk in that room"

[crude kite]

Hadn't they had contact with forerunners and they understood their technology better than the covenant did or smth?

[vital mist]

Nah, I get what you're saying. Like the covenant are pretty believable all things considered. Like they're fully comparable and beatable on an individual scale

[vital mist]

Huh? Wym?

[carmine sleet]

You're jumping to a conclusion based on a lack of evidence. None of what happened during the October 10th incident makes sense to be a Banished attack and using the Banished wiping out the scientists on the Ark as evidence it could've been the Banished on October 10th doesn't make any sense, the two incidents are unrelated

[crude kite]

What were those aliens called? Cuz I might be confusing things

[carmine sleet]

We don't know who those aliens were

[vital mist]

What I'm saying is that your argument of "why didn't the UNSC say it was brutes" holds no water because we've seen that's not what's prioritised on that situation

[carmine sleet]

I didn't say that?

[vital mist]

.

[sharp bough]

Yep, due to the fact there are only a few species in the Covenant, it seems the galaxy is more sparsely populated by species than a galaxy like in Star Wars. Also, since the San’Shyuum are the ones that found the forerunner technology and conquered and lifted up the other species, most of them were probably one planet species before that and so just colonized other planets only since the period of the Covenant forming.

This implies the planets in their empire would have propbably not been very populated compared to Star Wars. There were no Ecumanoplises (outside of High Charity) either. So nothing like the population numbers we see with a similar sized planetary empire in many other scifi universes. Probably a few high population homeworlds (of species that’s homeworlds were not destroyed) and then a lot of colony worlds with less than 1 billion pop each

[carmine sleet]

Again, that's not me saying "The guys would've said Brutes". That's me going "They have communications between the UNSC ships, allowing them to learn an unknown species boarded and destroyed the Totem Lake

[vital mist]

We have the numbers for a few planets, all of them are around 5billion, though one (I believe Doisac" has a population of 12 billion

But overall, it's tiny

[crude kite]

It actually makes it feel more realistic and chaotic/imperfect because

[vital mist]

For comparison Earth in 40k has a population of quadrillions

And that's a single planet

[crude kite]

Would that even be possible?

[vital mist]

Possibly an unpopular opinion, but without space combat I do believe we could combat a covenant invasion.

[sharp bough]

I had one of the lore books but it only showed like under 10 worlds. How many actually named planets are even in Covenant space?

[vital mist]

Ehhh...I think a dozen or so? We have a population number for most of them

[sharp bough]

And also, how much of these populations are Grunts and Drones? I’m sure bug species like drones can breed in billions very quickly but not so for Brutes and Elites that operate the ships and vehicles

[vital mist]

That lifespan of a human on Earth in 40k is to the point where being 50 years old is considered genuinely ancient. I don't mean "oh, like the middle ages where babies died young" no, like legitimately the lifespan is like 25

[vital mist]

Ehhh..hunters is a few trillion

Drones I can't remember

But it's high

Grunts is low, most of their population is off world or dead

[sharp bough]

Right haha. How many of the worms are actually in hunter form though lol

[vital mist]

Oh yeah, it's specified that's each individual worm

[vital mist]

My favourite 40k number though is for the orks. There was a planet full of Orks on a planet in the middle of nowhere, with no way off it, they hadn't invented space travel

A massive derelict ship passed by the planet, so to escape the Orks built rockets and catapults to fire themselves at the passing ship

Like 50% of them miss or explode on contact with the ship

The Orks are then attacked by demons on the ship before it crash lands on a human planet, the crash killing 50% of the Orks

[crude kite]

I mean that's literally what humanity does in the halo universe lololol

[vital mist]

There was still billions of Orks alive

[crude kite]

Oh wtf

[vital mist]

It's kinda hard to judge because the UNSC uses modern gun calibers

But the propellant is better

How much better? No clue

It could be so much of a difference that we can't even drop an elites shields

[stoic hamlet]

Tbh they’d probably make them Endless.

Though honestly I kind of wish October 10th didn’t exist. It adds nothing to the setting.

[crude kite]

Yeah it's weird that In halo humans shoot with similar guns to those of modern days, like, 500 years ahead wouldn't we have better arm tech?

[carmine sleet]

Honestly, while it makes marginally more sense to do that, I still don't want it. Let them just be some unknown aliens we never learn the identity of

[vital mist]

One of the main characters in "Dawn of Fire" has a slave who's 50 years old and it's played off as "how is this guy still alive, he's ancient"

[crude kite]

LMAO

[stoic hamlet]

Earth is also an ecumopolis and is one of the worst planets to live on in the 40K universe.

Average life expectancy also doesn’t translate to actual life expectancy, to be clear.

[sharp bough]

I mean, I just tried to find rough estimates of pre-war numbers for Humans, Elites and Brutes. The Humans outnumbered the other two quite substantially.

I don’t know if these are official numbers or fan estimates but it came up with this for total populations (not soldier numbers) pre-war:

Sangheili (Elites)
~10–20 billion

Jiralhanae (Brutes)
~2–6 billion

Humans (UNSC)
~38–40 billion

So those are not much larger than Earth numbers of population sizes to draw soldiers from in the entire Covenant military

[vital mist]

Such is the problems with sci-fi as a whole. Bungie wrote futurist stuff for the time

But we've legitimately got better technology than the UNSC in a lot of regards

[sharp bough]

Basically the interesting implication is that if Humans had equivalent space technology at the start of the war they would be stronger than the entire Covenant (hence the prophets desire to genocide human worlds from space)

[vital mist]

No, I mean it's the literall human lifespan on Terra. It's not because people die young and it skews the numbers

You legitimately won't live past 50

[stoic hamlet]

You definitely can live past 50, lol

[vital mist]

The books explicitly states you can't though

[stoic hamlet]

Which book?

[vital mist]

Dawn of Fire

Dawn of Fire has a character that's 50 years old and he's commented on by the rest of the cast as being the oldest human they've ever seen

[stoic hamlet]

That doesn’t track even within 40K.

If no one lives past 50, how do you explain rejuvenat treatments? Most if not all the High Lords, senior adepts, Administratum workers, and etc have access to rejuvenate treatments to extend their lifespan. Anyone working in the upper echelons of Terran society would live well past 100.

Into their second or third century.

Yeah it’s not“natural” but “no one lives past 50” is blatantly untrue.

[vital mist]

That's literally the top 1% that no one else sees. On terra you literally live in your Spire or hablock and never leave.

The POV character is pretty well off, lives in a high spire and has a slave

He's still astonished by the guy being 50

Like the POV character says he's literally never left his spire, no one does

[stoic hamlet]

Aye. But the point stands.

And even then, Terra’s an outlier even among 40K planets. It’s a cesspit that sucks in resources and spits out refuse.

“This is Terra” as said in the Vaults of Terra series to explain it. It’s just a fact of life.

It’s arguably the worse planet in the imperium to live on.

But there are tons of others where you can grow old.

Alecto, for instance, is a good example.

Or any other major civilized world.

[vital mist]

Oh yeah, it's just most of humanity lives in hives

Like Terra contains a pretty significant amount of the imperiums population

[stoic hamlet]

Mhm.

Hives skew the numbers uo something fierce though.

And even then, not all Hives are the same.

[vital mist]

Oh yeah, sure there's a hive that's a massive walking robot

There's one that's under water etc

[vital mist]

Like the Hive just has legs and it walks around the planet

I wish Halo had more stuff like that

Just weird and wacky stuff that exists to be weird and wacky

[stoic hamlet]

But anyways, on the point about technology, I don’t/never understood the critique that “well they’re all idiots they should be more advanced”.

No one calls out Alien for its technology, which is even less advanced than Halo’s.

[vital mist]

Like the Admech think Goldilocks was a scientist from earths past who came up with the "Goldilocks zone" for planets

Being a pioneer for human exploration

[stoic hamlet]

I mean that’s more just societal drift/stories changing over time. It’s the broken telephone situation.

It happens even today. You can test it even, right now.

It’a one of the least out there things in 40K.

(That we lose things from the past and things morph over time).

[vital mist]

I wonder if any exists in Halo? Probably? Or with the technology do they have pretty much complete records

[stoic hamlet]

We don’t even have complete records today.

[vital mist]

BigE has Tesla's skull and his password is that one famous knock rhythm

[vital mist]

No, I mean does the UNSC. Because storing knowledge only becomes easier as technology gets better

[stoic hamlet]

For example, a lot of early automatic weapon designs literally cannot be built anymore. We’ve lost the technical data to build them. An Austrian Submachine Gun had this happen.

A ton of old computer code, as well.

A lot of systems are closed loop, made by very specific people in very specific times, and once they’re gone, you lose that knowledge.

[stoic hamlet]

Knowledge would be less centralized in Halo, due to how travel and communications work.

[vital mist]

It's also what happened with the moon landing. The factories straight up don't build the technology because it's been phased out

[stoic hamlet]

And a lot of Roman inventions.

Greek Fire, as an alchemical example.

Concrete, for a few centuries.

[vital mist]

Which commonly gets misinterpreted as "we lost the technology"

[stoic hamlet]

I mean it’s true and not.

Depends on the example.

In that instance it’s not true.

[crude kite]

Yeah and then we have ppl saying that means we've never been to the moon

Omao

Lmao

[vital mist]

You can literally SEE THE FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON 😭

It's insane

[crude kite]

Fr

One of my professors at uni believes we hadn't been to the moon LMAO

AT UNI

[vital mist]

This is a common thought in basically every conspiracy theory, especially the moon landing and pyramids

It assumes humans are idiots and can't anything for themselves

[vital mist]

Bro.....

I'm not joking when I say this but most of my class didn't believe it when we went through it in history

[crude kite]

And as an assignment we had to write a type of essay which is like kind of analyzing both sides of smth in a debate, I forgot the name of that type of essay but I chose the moon conspiracies and debunking them was so easy

Like I didn't even have to fully pick a side and yet just the evidence and data showed how even the "most sound" conspiracies were just pseudo-scientific and incomplete

Lol

[crude kite]

😭

[vital mist]

"why was the flag waving??" It wasn't, there was a metal pole holding it out.

Every answer to their theory is "it wasn't", basically

"why no stars seen in moon landing???" Because it was daytime

Etc etc

[vital mist]

Everything is a conspiracy when you're dim as hell lol

[crude kite]

Fr

[crude kite]

Yeah it's just a way to say "I don't understand it so it didn't happen"

[vital mist]

Truth nuke

Speaking of idiots

Legitimately, why didn't Isabelle say ANYTHING to Red team? She just goes "it's him :0" like oh my god, warn them about the brute who's literally in the next room

[crude kite]

And I told my professor very respectfully that I might've believed in these conspiracies if I hadn't informed myself well and read research stuff which I did and that let me to understand how it occurred, so maybe she should do the same

[crude kite]

LMAO

[vital mist]

Like Isabelle, try uttering the word brute. Genuinely Red team should have deactivated her after that. It's on par with Marandas "to war"

Red team: Hey, happy to see you. What Covenant threat is here?

Idotabelle: Covenant?....he's here"

Red team: thank you, no further questions. Let's go into this mysterious room with a mystery threat and get beat the hell up

The whole interaction is lore breaking with it's stupidity

[vagrant ocean]

Not true. Even the UNSC has suffered the loss of a TON of records, specifically in regard to phase one of ORION in the 2300s.

[vagrant ocean]

The Hellreigel M1915.

[vagrant ocean]

Morons.

[vagrant ocean]

By 2558, the most important data on the first phase of ORION are either missing or lost to drive degradation.

Who knows how much data from our time will be lost to history by then.

[prime mauve]

If the Forerunners just let some Endless free so that they could become the October 10th aliens I will personally go and smack the Grand Edict around the head for incompetence

[vagrant ocean]

It’d be dumb. We’d have records of brutes boarding the vessels.

And the Banished were a known threat.

Why would the Banished use outdated civilian IFF codes?

[vagrant ocean]

It’s so strange.

[warm ridge]

Honestly, Marathon is basically Halo but slight mix of Hero mechanics turned Extraction shooter.

Each "shell" is basically a "hero" more or less.

[hardy swan]

Bungie is a failure

[warm ridge]

Wouldn't be surprised if something like this wasn't attempted for Halo Infinite during it's development. Given the fact that quite a bit of those Marathon devs are ex-Halo Infinite ones now.

[hardy swan]

a literal net loss for Sony

[warm ridge]

how is bungie being a failure a net-loss for microsoft

[hardy swan]

Marathon is not a succesful game

[warm ridge]

covenant has unlimited resources basically so not really that big of a issue
after all, this is the same covenant that set up a trap both the UNSC & Banished fell for on what was supposed to be a Covenant mining operation

[warm ridge]

and this affects Microsoft..how?

[hardy swan]

I mean Sony

[warm ridge]

what happened to the other Spartan II’s (most died defending Reach)
fyi this isn't entirely true anymore given we have the actual numbers on how many S-II's actually died during the Fall of Reach.
https://www.halowaypoint.com/news/canon-fodder-feet-first-into-fall

[unique rune]

I mean, sure? My point was just that it’d be a big enough resource sink that it wouldn’t be an efficient use of those resources outside of some niche applications and thus wouldn’t be especially common

most fleets could probably achieve what they need with a CAS or similar assault carrier and a handful of cruisers and would also likely be a lot more flexible with that sort of composition

[warm ridge]

Multiple references indicate the Covenant was spread throughout the entire Milky Way. With the main occupation force being near or close to High Charity's location.

The map Truth in Halo 5 actually has the entire Milky Way galaxy shown with multiple locations the Covenant knew about or had been to at some point. Likely colony solar systems.
We only know about a few worlds the Covenant had colonized.

[warm ridge]

We don't see this because the Covenant never bothered to colonize any of the Human planets. It was a glass 1st / destroy mentality. Any Covenant planets we do come across have already been fully terraformed & colonized (if they weren't already habitable in the 1st place), or just had massive gigantic space stations built on them.

The Covenant is thousands of years old. Even before the Covenant existed, the Sangheili had already been colonizing multiple worlds & were a space exploration species & knew what Slipspace travel was long before they ever met the San'Shyuum.

[sharp bough]

I mean, of course it changed because more books started adding stories with Spartan II’s. They used various ways to explain this. Some survived Reach. Other’s were actual washouts that really got secretly re-deployed by Oni. Some were MIA ones put on secret missions like Kurt-051 who was secretly re-assigned to the Spartan III program.

This still doesn’t change the fact that we are talking about book lore that the Halo Reach game contradicted anyways. Eric Nylund created the Spartan III’s and none of them were on Reach. He was training the third company on Onyx during the battle of Reach and the first two companies were entirely wiped out on suicide missions

Also doesn’t change the fact that the Halo Reach game - if taken in isolation from the expanded book material that it contradicts anyways - doesn’t tell us much of anything about the importance of Planet Reach or what the Spartan II’s were doing aside from Jorge and John. At least, the novel explains why from John’s perspective and that of the crew of the Pillar of Autumn at the start of Halo CE, he is the only surviving Spartan and thus a really important and special military asset, not just for the crew of the Pillar of Autumn, but for humanity as a whole.

[warm ridge]

Not trying to turn this into a space battles argument but..you do realize the Covenant freely deploys "blast" that are so hot it immediately vaporizes you into dust..right? It's called the Hunter cannon. Fuel rod cannons can do this to. Wraith's just shoot bigger versions of that.

Glassing beams from Covenant ships are so powerful they not only turn the surface of planets into glass, they vaporize the surface itself into super heated gas & generate a TON of radiation.

[sharp bough]

Covenant can only glass planets if they have full space dominance. I think the point is that the Tau are much more advanced than UNSC humans. They have shielding on their ships, which was one of the main factors for the UNSC losing most space battles.

Covenant could take at least two MAC rounds - one for their shield and one for piercing their hull - whereas human ships were taken down by a single volley of Covenant capital ship plasma rounds. So basically they had, at most, half the survivability of Covenant vessels.

Tau ships have shields so would automatically fair better than UNSC ships in space battles against the Covenant. And aside from in space, Humans actually did fairly well against Covenant in many ground conflicts, which is exactly why the Covenant resorted to using their space dominance and avoiding ground battles through glassing from orbit. If Humans did well in ground engagements (when not being glassed) and the Tau are more advanced in ground tech as well compared to UNSC, then they would also do pretty well against Covenant on ground.

Combined they would fare well against Covenant in both ground and space and had far higher numbers of soldiers. Their military size probably outnumbered the Covenant by at least a magnitude of 10

[warm ridge]

of course it changed because more books started adding stories with Spartan II’s.
Idk what novels you're referring to, because a grand majority of the novels only focused on the known surviving S-II's. Maybe 1 or 2 others tops?
That Halo waypoint article plainly list out which S-II's had fully survived the fall of Reach, which was completely unknown prior to it existing.

I am aware how much stuff from the Fall of Reach novel has been retconned or contradicted, some of it good, some bad, especially in relation to the Halo Reach game itself & many other things. The game isn't the only thing that retconned parts of the novel.
Thankfully we're getting a hopefully fully corrected novel with the Halo: Master Chief Omnibus collection.

I was just pointing out that a large majority of S-II's having died at Reach isn't canon anymore.

[sharp bough]

First off, you can never “correct” enough of the Fall of Reach novel to make the Halo Reach game make sense. The book had it as a major military planet defended in space by a massive fleet and orbital super MAC platforms. None of this is shown in the game. We see two, maybe three frigates in the entire game and in shots of space, no orbital MAC canons in sight.

Spartan III’s are not going to magically appear in Nylund’s version of the Fall of Reach either because he created Spartan III’s and his entire third novel has them being trained on Onyx during the events of Reach.

The idea of a super carrier with cloaked abilities was basically also completely dropped from books and from the future Microsoft Halo games because it is just a stupid concept that breaks almost everything else in Halo canon

I don’t see any of those problems being “fixed” to align with the Halo Reach games nonsensical storyline

Otherwise, Nylund never gave specific numbers of Spartan II deaths on Reach. He himself brought in Blue Team as survivors as well as Kurt-051 who was listed MIA before the battle of Reach even happened. Other material has more Spartan II’s surviving. Pretty sure Red Team from Halo Wars, are survivors of the Battle of Reach. And I think Glasslands novel introduced some new ones that were rehabilitated washouts and so expanded the roster from the original 33 Spartan II’s

[warm ridge]

ffs i accidently tried adding the https://www.halopedia.org/Rasus-pattern_interdictor link into the message in regards to the UNSC struggling against a Destroyer with 10+ ships shooting at it (somehow it got added to the text as a link which the bot immediately deleted)

anyways tl;dr you're greatly under estimating the Covenant's capabilities, and no 2 MAC rounds are no where near enough to take out a grand majority of Covenant ships. Majority of the time it required tons of MAC rounds from 10+ UNSC ships just to down the shields.

that's all I'll be saying in regards to comparing it against the Warhammer universe. This isn't the space battles forum.

[crimson oak]

How many Silverback Gorillas can Master Chief beat out of armor?

[prime mauve]

He would befriend their leader and make an alliance with them like he did with the Arbiter

[chrome apex]

Besides smaller hunter worms as individuals, did the covenant employ any smaller species in the covenant smaller than the grunts?

[strange pumice]

I guess huragoks
But they have mostly been slaved to the covenant, and they are not the military assets tho
So I guess grunts are the smallest species that covenant deployed ever

[vital mist]

The Tau have handheld standard issue weapons (their plasma guns) that completely turn tanks to slag in a single hit. Tau tanks fire a shot so fast and powerful and force of the shot can go straight through an Imperial tank , forcing everything inside the tank outside the tiny exit hole, including it's occupants

Again, I already mentioned we've seen Tau energy shields survive glassing with Farsight. His shields were negligibly damaged from a blast that turned his entire squad into molten glass instantly

[vital mist]

Yonhet, maybe?? But idk how tall they actually are

[vital mist]

Huragoks are actually very large and strong

They're strong enough to fling elites around without any issues

Like with what happened to Jul

[carmine sleet]

Yonhet weren't part of the Covenant, they were just a species they traded with

[vital mist]

They were part of the covenant, just it's fringe

[carmine sleet]

The Covenant Fringe doesn't mean they are part of the Covenant Empire

[vital mist]

Why would that be the case?

Is there a source that explicitly states that??

Because from everything I know, they are ultimately under covenant control, live in covenant space and believe in the Great journey

[vagrant ocean]

The fringe are not fully integrated. A good example is the Yonhet. They are very much like the Kig-Yar in that they’re known for their illicit activities and ability to source things, however unlike the Kig-Yar they rarely need to leverage force. The Dazreme are another example where they as a species have intricate knowledge of Forerunner tech and the San’Shyuum exploited that.

[vital mist]

Tbf, the Dazreme literally didn't have any interaction with the covenant really

They got occasional visits from covenant teams who were then all killed as to hide the dazerme

As far as I'm aware, they just chilled on their water planet without much interaction with the Empire

[vagrant ocean]

That’s why I called the San’Shyuum by name. They were pretty much the only species that knew them.

And as a result of the Schism the fate of the Sirens is unclear.

[chrome apex]

Yonhet are close but grunts are slightly smaller than humans to the top of the head, so Yonhet are to the head slightly taller.

As Yonhet are about the same height to humans or close to.

[modest marsh]

Grunts are overall larger than most humans in total volume and significantly heavier on average

Yonhet are just a Star Trek race

[chrome apex]

I mean specifically height

Top of head

[warm ridge]

The majority of Grunts we see in the Halo games are smaller because they're young af.
Literally kids being put on the front lines.

In reality the average Grunt can get as tall as 5ft 6in.

That's taller then the average height of human females. Barely 2 - 4 inches shorter then the average height of human males.

[vital mist]

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but Grunts need to made smaller in the lore

Like 3-4ft

Because the reality is grunts are huge. If you put them beside a marine in any of the games, they're literally the same size

However all the lore and games has characters refer to them as small and not take them seriously whatsoever

Like regular humans call them small little guys...which just doesn't really make sense

The weapon says "the smaller they are, they less they have to fall" about the grunt boss...even though it's the same height as a human? So does that mean she'd say the same thing if Chief blew a hole through an innies head??

[unique rune]

they could just be comparing them relative to the other Covenant core species

[prime mauve]

I think there should be life size Grunt plushies

[unique rune]

Unggoy are still small when everything else in the Covenant is like a 6+ foot monster

[worn wolf]

also probably the fact that grunts will flee and panic if their leader is killed or they just feel like it

[carmine sleet]

We've also always been playing as a Spartan or an Elite in the FPS games (With the exception of ODST), so Grunts do appear smaller to us because we're not playing as a regular sized human

[warm ridge]

Not really. Grunts only ever appear small in the games because you're a 7ft 2in tall super soldier. Way taller then most humans.

If you were a average human male, a Grunt would almost be your size in height.

[vital mist]

Did...did you read what I said???

I said regular humans and marines call grunts small

[warm ridge]

Yea, it's not concerning at all.
Grunts are called the small little guys because the rest of the Covenant is gigantic by comparison.

[vital mist]

Buck and Alpha nine call them a variety of insults for "short" in Bad blood and the helljumber comic

Even Sadie calls them "the little ones"

[warm ridge]

so?

You didn't read what I said earlier

[warm ridge]

The majority of Grunts we see in the Halo games are smaller because they're young af.
Literally kids being put on the front lines.

You've completely ignored this or are pretending to not see it, cause if you knew this then you'd also know most Grunts ever seen by Humans are around the height of 4ft 6in - barely 5ft tall.

By that point yes, most Humans are going to call them the small little ones regardless of whatever excuses you're trying to make.

[vital mist]

Grunts are constantly shown as smaller than humans by a fair margin in everything but the games, and weaker than humans too

The comics constantly have them chest height of a human

It's just not though

Look at literally any comic panel my guy

[warm ridge]

This doesn't happen anywhere lol

Also, it's never shown that Grunts are "weaker" at all, what?

[carmine sleet]

Comics have a habit of being inconsistent with their visuals

Which isn't meant as a knock against the comics mind you, it's just something which happens sometimes

[vital mist]

Halo Helljumbers comic has a grunt directly up against Romeo and Dutch, the grunt is only chest height.

Halo legends has grunts literally half the height of a human. ODSTs breakthrough grunts necks with seemingly no effort

[warm ridge]

yea if you compared a 5ft tall Grunt to a 6ft tall ODST Human, they'd only reach chest height. Don't see the issue.
ODST's are immensely strong, but how does this compare to a Grunt neck..huh?

[vital mist]

What lore "facts"? In Contact Harvest, the main grunt describes regular humans as "giants" right before he nearly gets beat to death with a fire extinguisher

He literally describes humans as strong and tall looking.

[warm ridge]

When every Grunt is anywhere from 4ft 6in tall to 5ft while the average Human male is 5 ft 8 - 6ft tall+ (and those humans are killing entire squads with headshots), you're going to believe they're giants to.

In reality Grunts could definitely over power most Humans if they tried.

[vital mist]

This goes in line with another common miscommunication, which is grunts being strong enough to rip limbs off. This literally has not happened at any point in the lore.

It's just a misunderstanding of that scene in contact Harvest. The grunt used his sharp claws to claw at the guy

He didn't use brute strength to rip an arm off

[warm ridge]

I think you're trying to find nonexistant problems in areas that don't exist ngl

May as well start saying it's impossible for an ODST to sneak up on an Elite & kill them at the rate you're going.

[vital mist]

Elites are in a really weird zone, and it's mainly due to power creep

As Spartans get stronger and stronger with each new armor, Elites get buffed along the way

The older lore definitely had Elites be more on par with Spartans, but that was with the idea Elites weren't encountered till Reach

But with the expansion in CH that mean elites were there for the whole war, it meant elites would have to be getting beaten by regular marines.

[carmine sleet]

The idea Elites weren't encountered until Reach was very quickly abandoned in the early days

Like, it's not just something which was forgotten about more recently, even back in the first few years of Halo as a franchise, that idea was quickly forgotten

[vital mist]

But it's not like Bungie really cared

They couldn't really give a rats bum about the EU or were extremely resentful about it

Like the way they treated the Halo Wars team was extremely unprofessional and petty

[vagrant ocean]

Compared to 8ft tall lizard men.

[carmine sleet]

That's not a lore issue, that's a Bungie issue

[vagrant ocean]

Legends is not great for 1:1 lore. It’s an exercise in artistic license, hence Halsey being a blonde.

[vagrant ocean]

Bingo.

[vital mist]

8ft+, elties are absolutely huge. I can't picture it in my head because it feels so off, but elites would be a good few inches taller than your average space marine

[vagrant ocean]

I know they’re tall, hence why I said it.

[vital mist]

Like I'm painting the Halo models with a few space marines, they're taller than the marines

[vital mist]

I'm just saying you underselled them

They're like 8ft6ish

[vagrant ocean]

No I didn’t, I was generalizing.

Not underselling.

I’m not gonna be super specific when describing a height range.

That’d be pedantic for the sake of pedantry.

[vital mist]

This is a lore chat, we're pedantic by nature

[vagrant ocean]

Average height is 7’4-8’6, so I was correct.

[vagrant ocean]

Pedantry for the sake of pedantry isn’t common in this channel, I’ve been here for a hot minute.

[vital mist]

Not hot enough

[vagrant ocean]

You literally just joined.

I’ve been here pert near 2 years.

[carmine sleet]

https://tenor.com/view/leon-s-kennedy-leon-re4-resident-evil4-wheres-everyone-going-gif-21604833

[vagrant ocean]

lol

[stoic hamlet]

I was here longer… then got banned.

I got better, though~

[modest marsh]

This is a funny thing to suggest when in The Flood Chief shatters the spine of two Elites and explodes the head of another by punching them

[modest marsh]

Dutch does, who is just an abnormally strong guy for no clear reason

His height is exaggerated in Legends because his character fulfills the big burly heavy weapons specialist archetype

Halo is not strictly realistic or consistent with real world logic so similarly it will exaggerate the athletic capabilities of notably physically impressive humans for the sake of storytelling

[carmine sleet]

Pretty sure I remember that happening. Fun times, glad you recovered from the terminal condition of being banned

[stoic hamlet]

Indeed. There are those who said it could never be done. What are they to say now?

[sleek shadow]

has anyone read the edge of dawn? I just finished the book. I hope we get more books based on zeta halo

[stoic hamlet]

There’s Rubicon Protocol, and parts of Point of Light

And Silentium.

[sleek shadow]

yeah i already read those as well i meant i hope to get more updates on the story plots, etc

[warm ridge]

FYI Bungie had no issues with Halo Wars existing at all or the lore it created. The problem they had was a whole entirely different studio making an RTS Halo title which was Bungie's original idea in the 1st place before Microsoft pivoted them into making a 1st person shooter instead.

This also happened all without Microsoft ever telling or contacting Bungie about it at all. Yes Bungie acted a bit petty in there response, but was it attack on the lore? No.

In regards to Bungie not caring about the EU lore at all, this is also not true. Bungie loved the EU lore, when it happened on there terms & they got to control exactly how it was made. Plenty of things in the extended Halo universe got created under Bungie & were even used in the Halo games they made.

They hated the fall of reach novel because of all the problems & inconsistencies it created, largely cause Eric Nylund more or less had to make things up as he went due to the writers at Bungie not wanting to work with him at all (and again, this was a Microsoft contracted out project which Bungie didn't even know existed until later).

[stoic hamlet]

“Bungle” isn’t a monolith.

Some didn’t like the EU, some did. And tastes over time changed.

[warm ridge]

hopefully soon but it took this long just to get a proper sequel out of halo infinite's campaign in book form so who knows how much longer it's gonna take to get more 😭

[prisma sierra]

Another 10 years perhaps

[prime mauve]

I think generally when they show regular humans going against aliens it is just a victory if the humans are being more strategic and are one step ahead of the alien (Sergeant Forge rage baiting Ripa from their first meeting and leveraging that into making Ripa fight angrily and carelessly in their final fight, for example) or using close, well drilled team work (Alpha 9 vs that Chieftain. Bracktanus I think?). I could also see regular Marines winning if they are using vehicles and power weapons, or generally combining different battlefield assets to take away the shields and finish off the Elites or Brutes.

The ODSTs using the Noob Combo in the "Day at the Beach" video also shows how normal people can win with a good tactic and a bit of luck

[wispy pewter]

Humans would fare better against them aliens if they were given better standard issue weapons than peashooters

[vagrant ocean]

I wouldn’t call .308 a peashooter. It can go through most types of infantry armor plating.

Actually 4 games have grenade launchers, 2 of which being human ones.

Sorry, 5 games.

H5 literally has a grenade launcher.

You said only one game.

You were corrected.

It’s actually in 2 more games.

So 4 have human grenade launchers.

There’s also the M301 and XM510 in Wars and the XM250 from 5 and Infinite.

[prime mauve]

Does the sticky detonator count?

[vagrant ocean]

I considered adding that.

[prime mauve]

The Hydra I think also counts

[vagrant ocean]

But given its intent as a propelled remote charge, eh.

[vagrant ocean]

Those are rockets/missiles.

[prime mauve]

Wait you were probably counting it already

[vagrant ocean]

The wiki considers the sticky as a GL.

So 5-7 games include a human grenade launcher.

Almost a majority of entries.

[stoic hamlet]

Plus underbarrel ones we know UNSC troops make heavy use of in the novels.

[sharp bough]

“you're greatly under estimating the Covenant's capabilities, and no 2 MAC rounds are no where near enough to take out a grand majority of Covenant ships. Majority of the time it required tons of MAC rounds from 10+ UNSC ships just to down the shields.”

Umm, this is just untrue. In your earlier version of this message you asked where I am getting my information on UNSC space power levels from. I’m getting it from Eric Nylunds books (Fall of Reach, First Strike, Ghosts of Onyx), who did the most to actually flesh out space combat in the universe and even made a lot of major things that made it into the second game onward (like he is responsible for creating the orbital mac platforms in Halo 2 and he also created the ODST’s)

In space combat as described in the original books by Nylund, the strength of the Mac canon depended on the size of the UNSC ship. In order to take out a standard CCS-class Covenant capital ship it took about 3 shots from a UNSC Frigate (two for the shield and one for the hull), for a larger ship like a UNSC Halcyon class or Marathon class it took two (one for the shield and one for the hull) and for a super Mac platform it could pierce the shield and hull of a CCS-class with a single round.

UNSC destroyers, which are even smaller than Frigates, were not really large enough to take down a capital ship, or if so, maybe in massive coordinated volleys from like 10 ships, but these are not even really seen in the games and were not expected to take out enemy capital ships in the first place

As far as later books, I don’t know. I stopped reading them and being interested in the later lore when 343 took over. Really actually when Halo Reach came out and I saw that Bungie didn’t really care about consistent lore anymore either 🤷‍♂️

[sharp bough]

I see where some confusion can come from. If you only read the Halo Wars Genesis comic or the Halo Evolution story: “The Impossible Life and the Possible Death of Preston J. Cole” then you might have a skewed view of UNSC naval power levels. The battle you mentioned takes place at the very start of the Human-Covenant war over Harvest in 2526 when they went up against a Covenant super-destroyer (a fairly rare ship).

The fleet had a lot of destroyers, which were used heavily in the human Insurgency war but were essentially ineffective against larger Covenant ships. The UNSC also hadn’t yet mastered coordinated firing strats or effective fire vectors, nor did they know much about Covenant shield tech and that it recharges over time so you need to time shots correctly. This was an entire 25+ years before the events of Halo CE. Halcyon class ships common at that time also had weak MAC guns compared to later war ships. The Pillar of Autumn had to undergo major refits including to improve its MAC gun to be effective against Covenant in late war period when we see it in the first game.

So that particular battle on its own gives a pretty warped view of actual late war power of individual UNSC naval ships against Covenant vessels if taken as your only reference source

[modest marsh]

“CCS class” isn’t a thing in TFOR, that was a later designation

If you’re referring to Commonwealth vs Unrelenting, Nylund’s ships were unusually small compared to the current canon where a 20,000 ton Covenant ship was considered impossibly large

The Iroquois was 8000 tons

A lot of the power creep the setting has endured is a result of Bungie’s depiction of both UNSC and Covenant ships as ridiculously large yet still capable of absurdly fast acceleration, even in atmosphere, as well as trying to justify/square the implications of glassing with their naval combat power since they aren’t entirely divorced

You say that you stopped reading the books when 343 took over, but that happens to be when they began actually trying to reconcile these facts rather than ignore them

[sharp bough]

Well he didn’t call them CCS-class because that naming convention appeared later but one of them (Truth and Reconciliation) appeared in Halo CE so he certainly referred to that same class of ship in his books. He simply called them “Covenant battle cruisers” or something similar

[modest marsh]

They never designate the Unrelenting a specific ship class within the book

Silent Storm would retroactively have Cole refer to it as “frigate-sized”, and the current canon has stuck with it being a Zanar light cruiser, which to your credit is a miniature Battlecruiser

In any case, to make things less lopsided, the UNSC got correspondingly larger ships retroactively like the Punic and Epoch that could conceivably stay in the fight longer than a few seconds against the stronger Covenant ships and provide some counterpart to the likes of the assault carrier, because otherwise it would appear that the Covenant should win every battle just off of pure tonnage alone, since their ships aren’t just bigger, but orders of magnitude bigger

[orchid kettle]

I miss the lopsidedness but it's also understandable since you can't really have any prequels set before TFOR with the way it was originally written

Though there's probably still some unavoidable suspension of disbelief going on here when you have to accept that the UNSC has time to respond to any Covenant attack if a lightly defended colony can still fall within 48 hours.

perhaps this is the power of muh slipspace lanes

[modest marsh]

The “balance” was broken since CE because the Autumn had to contend with 12 battlecruisers of similar size and somehow not instantly explode, and even managed to disable a third of them

Like yeah the Autumn is a super ship with custom upgrades and piloted by Cortana, but that was the first “disruption” of any internal consistency with Nylund’s book

That’s before we even get into the fact that Nylund imagined the Autumn itself and the enemy ships it faced were far smaller than they ended up being in the actual game

[sharp bough]

I said that technically I stopped caring about the lore after Halo Reach which introduced a Super Carrier “Long Night of Solace” that was 28km long and totally breaks all space combat coherence for the entire Halo universe.

Nylund had mentioned a super carrier earlier in one of his books, called “Sublime Transcendence”, but never gave it a specific size. I assume he probably would have likely conceived of it as being 1.5-2x the length of a CAS-class or something. Not 28 km long…

That Halo Reach ship was so absurd it basically got soft retconned even by Microsoft devs after Bungie team left. I even saw that one of the later book authors was going to mention a second one of that class and 343 basically stamped that out and blocked them from mentioning anything else about that ship class

That’s what I mean by Halo Reach game being an absolute joke and breaking canon

[modest marsh]

I understand your clarification, my point is that was 16 years ago and not especially relevant to the current understanding of naval warfare in the setting which has veered towards a flatter hierarchy across factions

[sharp bough]

I think Nylund’s general space lore is perfectly serviceable. He knew the size of standard Covenant cruisers since one appears in Halo CE. That set a basic human and covenant ship size convention to build lore around (based on Pillar of Autumn and Truth and Reconciliation).

Nylund’s late war (Halo CE period) power scale is completely reasonable to me. A frigate, though much smaller than a Covenant cruiser, is essentially just a giant mass accelerator canon down the entire length. It makes sense that a rail gun that size can take out a CCS-class in three shots.

The weakness comes from having to recharge between each firing and basically having no defense against Covenant capital ship weapons. It can get one shotted by a single Covenant plasma shot and Covenant can firing them faster and multiple at a time. Meaning you need three cruisers firing at the same time to take out one Covenant cruiser and if there is more than one Covenant ship, those three frigates are dead before a second volley. This is consistent with the numbers seen in losses with Human-Covenant space battles in a lot of book lore. Making the Covenant ships even more powerful than that and you wouldn’t even have the Human space victories we do have in lore

[modest marsh]

Nylund may have seen CE before in a CRT but didn’t know how large anything was by scale because there would be nothing to compare it to

A lot of the information we got for how large certain things in the game are came from a community member by the name of Stephen Loftus who manually derived the actual size of objects from the game files, because I’m not sure internally Bungie even understood the scale

Like yes abstractly you can look at the cruiser in game and compare it to the terrain but that hardly tells the full story

They liked the idea of this looming purple aquatic creature looking thing floating in the sky and ran with it

Both the assault carrier and super carrier are consequences of this principle, just escalated

[sharp bough]

Doesn’t matter. He never gave ship sizes but talked about the strength of different ship classes instead. This is why his power scaling works but the visual depictions from something like Halo Wars Genesis, which he co-authored, are inaccurate. The visual depictions they used depicted UNSC frigates and Marathon class looking ships but he specifically mentions most of the human ships in that battle being destroyers and not frigates.

This is simply because we didn’t yet have a standard visual depiction of destroyers at that time, which got standardized in visual form later with the Halberd-class destroyer seen in Warfleet

[modest marsh]

He gave tonnage which is the more significant value

Each MAC round being several hundred tons would obviously result in ships only a couple orders of magnitude larger being severely damaged

That’s not as tenable when you substantially increase their size

Beta probe cycled back. The mass was still there and as solid as before. It was the largest reading Ensign Lovell had ever seen: twenty thousand tons. That couldn’t be a Covenant ship—they didn’t get that big. And the silhouette was a bumpy spherical shape; it didn’t match any of the Covenant ships in the database. It had to be a rogue asteroid.

.

Commander Keyes eased into his seat and detached the tiny monitor from the armrest. He read the hourly report from the Archimedes Sensor Outpost. The log of the large mass was curious. It was too big to be even the largest Covenant carrier . . . yet something was oddly familiar about its shape.

[sharp bough]

I don’t really care about random things like tonnage, which is just a scifi psudo-science estimation for ships. These are scifi authors and not structural engineers. Something like that can be changed later. General length of ships is good enough for me or just a reference about general class strength vs other classes of ship, which is what he also gives. He can’t really give tonnage for ships that haven’t even been designed yet.

But of your particular obsession is with tonnage then Bungie devs still broke all space combat coherence with the Halo Reach game by introducing the Long Night of Solace, which the wiki states is 152 billion tonnes… that’s why I gave up on trying to follow and make sense of the lore after the Halo Reach game came out 🤷‍♂️

[modest marsh]

Nylund imagined the largest covenant ship to be 1/5th the size of an aircraft carrier

[modest marsh]

The mass is extrapolated from its length since it’s largely similar in shape to the assault carrier iirc

https://www.halopedia.org/images/1/17/Cc_gravlift2.jpg?f0e99

“yeah that looks like the fraction the size of an aircraft carrier”

[sharp bough]

Again, obviously he just doesn’t understand how to use tonnage in scifi lore because the Covenant ship shown in Halo CE is larger than that and is physically represented in-game. So he clearly had visual representation for at least his two later books and probably had some visuals when writing the first. This is why tonnage is a dumb thing to obsess over but that seems to be your main issue is whether a scifi author gave the right tonnage for an imaginary ship…

You do you man. But for me, what is more important is that he established a general navy power scaling based on ship classes and certainly had the ships from Halo CE in mind when he created the scaling system (even if he got tonnage’s wrong for those ships)

And before Halo Reach the game came out, I think it was a pretty well established and believable scifi universe and lore based on the information in Eric Nylunds books and the games, up until then.

There was a large power difference in ship tech and size but human technology was still able to damage covenant ships and a giant space station sized MAC canon like that of the orbital Super Macs makes sense to be able to one shot a standard Covenant capital ship and makes human defense of strategic worlds somewhat believable. I was good with all of it up to the point that Bungie decided to add an SSD ship to the Covenant side, who were already believably superior to the human faction… at that point I just said: Ok, I’m out. I’ll just keep my head canon pre-2010 Halo universe 🤷‍♂️

[modest marsh]

I think you’re greatly overestimating Nylund’s awareness of CE

Tonnage is the most important characteristic of naval warfare because it determines things like how powerful your engines are, how thick your armor is, and how effective kinetic-based weapons are

I’m not saying Nylund was wrong, I think he had a different interpretation of the setting that was incompatible with the first game anyways

And for that matter, I think Bungie is also guilty of violating their own rules, even before Reach

Video games in particular are known to struggle with internal consistency

[sharp bough]

We can agree that we value different aspects of building out the scifi lore. You clearly seem very focused on the idea of using tonnage correctly for imaginary scifi ships - literally a pointless reference point for me when there are visual depictions of ship sizes on screen and the books are referencing this ships and ships relative to those that I have already seen on screen 🤷‍♂️

[modest marsh]

Okay what about speed

Nylund’s ships are monumentally faster than any depiction after

The Spartans reach 0.1c using their jetpacks alone which they barely catch up to the Unrelenting doing which feels extremely out of place

I think TFOR is fundamentally a different setting from what Bungie envisioned to begin with in 2001 and they selectively adapted ideas that the book first established and Reach was really no different in that regard as it pertains to the world building, what made the game different was shoehorning in a specific event that the book had already covered that definitionally couldn’t be preserved to make a 10 mission campaign using a totally different cast of characters without ruffling feathers

The super carrier is a massive escalation over the established precedent but you can kind of see the parallels to what Nylund was trying to convey thematically

[sharp bough]

Honestly, another irrelevant data point for me. Every author is making up random psudo-science data points that don’t really matter other than for cross-universe power scaling videos and stuff. All I need to know is that Covenant have superior ftl tech and can get from point a to b X times faster than a typical human ship. I think your autism is getting caught up on very minute details that will literally change with every author and don’t determine the larger picture of how battles play out.

Why does tonnage matter when it is basically irrelevant to the power of ships? I much smaller human ship (like a frigate) can use a larger amount of its space to house a main weapon to punch above its weight. A larger ship can have an outdated weapon or one that isn’t designed to go up against a specific enemy like the Covenant (which is why early Covenant war, even larger human warships like Halcyon class ships had weaker MAC canons that what we have in late Covenant war vessels)

So the thing you’re complaining about is literally one of the least relevant things

[modest marsh]

I’m not complaining

I mean, it’s a critique I guess, but I have no stake in seeing it corrected or anything because it imparts no significance to the story

If you’re going to mention power scaling though, and insist that an especially long/large ship is a problem, why do you not hold those same reservations for mass?

Saying tonnage doesn’t matter for a ship is no differently than saying weight doesn’t matter for a car

The ability for a kinetic weapon to even work is contingent on the ship housing it to be able to survive its firing since Newton’s third law is a thing

[sharp bough]

I’m not saying that about true mass. I’m saying it’s an irrelevant nit pick to discredit the relevance of a certain authors power scaling of ships SIMPLY because they got tonnage wrong for ships, some of which, didn’t even have designs yet in any visual media

Eric Nylund did so much to actually make Halo a believable universe. The Bungie guys didn’t want books written, didn’t want space combat expanded, didn’t even want ODST’s to show up in the game initially. These things had to be pushed on them by Microsoft people, and Eric Nylund was also a Microsoft hire, but these real scifi authors like Nylund getting involved are, I believe, what made it the interesting scifi universe it is today, that actually has youtube channels dedicated to it and full-conversion mods for other games (like Sins of the Prophets for SOASE… which doesn’t use the CSO-class super carrier from Reach btw)

If it was solely up to the Bungie devs this would have probably just turned into Doom but with space aliens, rather than a fully realized scifi universe. Halo Reach shows exactly what I mean. At least in the Fall of Reach book, Nylund tries to explain things like the origin of Master Chief and the Spartan II project; why MC is thought to be the only Spartan left at the start of Halo CE; Why Reach was such an important human world etc.

The game does none of that. In the game version, Reach is depicted like some generic colony world. I think you maybe see in total like 3 frigates defending the planet with zero orbital defense platforms in space. You never find out what happened to the other Spartan II’s (aside from 1) or even meet Blue Team because the game focuses on Spartan III’s instead, which are taken from another Nylund book and placed at the battle of Reach anachronistically. It’s just nonsense, and according to the Bungie devs, THAT’S the version of Reach they wanted for “their” story… which is why they retconned the most popular Halo book in the franchise 🤦‍♂️

[modest marsh]

I think Bungie did a lot to antagonize the Microsoft team unnecessarily and were resistant to adopting certain ideas from the expanded universe but I think it’s a bit of a gross mischaracterization that the studio as a whole was adverse to strong world building

We’re talking about the same people who made Marathon and Destiny

Their issue was with having to work with/around people outside of Bungie

When they got to do everything on their own terms halo 2 onwards, this wasn’t an issue

The friction reemerged when Bungie went back to being an independent contractor in 2007, and despite having creative control over the IP until their contract expired, felt that Microsoft was gearing up to wrest control from them which is where that animosity comes back into play

[sharp bough]

I’m basing a lot of it off this interview with Eric Trautmann, which not a lot of people have seen (only has 3.3k views). Basically he brought on Eric Nylund and talks about how the Bungie guys treated them horribly and didn’t want any books or ODST’s and actively pushed back against this stuff.

This interview made me rethink how I view Bungie and made me realize how much of what we got in the Bungie era games was actually created by non-Bungie guys and we would have got more cool content in that time if not for massive pushback from the Bungie team.

It’s a super eye-opening interview…

https://youtu.be/RbhoNpcXZ_k?si=Xu-EAbyN0zod0LSQ

[modest marsh]

I’ve seen this interview, yeah

I don’t doubt the substance of what Trautmann is saying but at the end of the day he’s only human and not impartial to what happened here, and thus doesn’t provide the clearest picture as to what was happening across the entire 10 year span of Bungie’s supervision of Halo

For one, the studio is not a monolith and there were differences in opinion

Differences in opinion between individuals, and those individuals changing their minds on certain things

I think where the story writing people were concerned, they were fully onboard with integrating Nylund’s work into the canon, which you can see from Staten’s own position circa 2004:

The books are, for better or worse, part of the canon. In the future we may choose to revise or flat-out ignore some of the less appealing ideas (Johnson's biological immunity to the Flood, for example), but folks should treat them as defining elements of the Halo universe.

http://halostory.bungie.org/staten102204.html

[sharp bough]

Even though Joseph Staten later wrote his own book “Contact Harvest”, I feel like they still never liked or appreciated Nylund’s massive contributions to the lore and it almost feels like Halo Reach’s story was really Staten depicting something more similar to planet Harvest that just got turned into Reach at the last moment.

The first level is you dealing with rural farmers (but reach is supposed to be a heavily populated military planet) and the game has it defended by a few frigates. That is believable for an outer colony but not for Planet Reach.

So my theory is he basically wrote a plot for a game on planet Harvest and then quickly changed some things to make it planet Reach instead - Ok, let’s just make the Covenant ship bigger and give it cloaking… now we can change the planet to Reach instead of Planet Harvest.

Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded a planet Harvest game instead that was attacked by a single ship but had light defenses because it was a small outer colony. It could have been a more realistic plot without retconning Eric Nylund’s Fall of Reach book

[modest marsh]

Frank O’Connor obviously was in favor of adhering to the expanded universe material considering he (in)famously ran the department responsible for integrating as much multimedia content possible into the franchise

[modest marsh]

The reason why Reach primarily focuses on sparsely populated areas of the planet initially is because the entire conceit of the game is that this is a vanguard force of the Covenant that had somehow secretly penetrated UNSC surveillance and defenses undetected

Even then, they do show us a mega city with New Alexandria

I actually really like the contrast here between the indigenous Hungarian rural settlers and the more Anglo-American coded urbanites

[sharp bough]

Yeah, but this is unrealistic on Reach. They basically had to invent lore breaking things to make this work such as a 28 km super star destroyer that has magic cloaking abilities not seen on any other capital ship in lore that later had to be soft retconned by 343 because the ship makes no sense. This is also clearly not the same planet Reach from Nylund’s book because that one was lined by oribital MAC platforms like we see at earth at the beginning of Halo 2. There are shots of space in Halo Reach game with no sign of any orbital mac platforms

Think about it. If you remove the lore breaking 28 km stealth ship, you could have had the same plot make more sense with a normal size Covenant ship at Planet Harvest where no orbital mac platforms were ever present, which would have likely only had a couple military vessels above orbit like how we only see a few frigates make an appearance in the entire Halo Reach game

[modest marsh]

To be clear, Bungie knew about the ODP platforms, considering that the only reason they appear in halo 2 is because either they or Nylund came up with them prior to the publication of TFOR

We also know that Bungie had intended to make generator defense a playable objective

[sharp bough]

Nylund came up with them and Microsoft forced Bungie to include them in Halo 2

[modest marsh]

Additionally, you have the radio conversations directly referencing red team from TFOR/First Strike

[modest marsh]

I don’t know about that, but even if that were the case, their existence was obviously preestablished

[sharp bough]

Well, the interview states that Microsoft forced Bungie to include ODST’s in Halo 2 and I know that Nylund also definitely came up with the ODP’s which show up in his first book that released alongside Halo CE

[modest marsh]

You’re extrapolating a lot from a single example

[sharp bough]

I’m using common sense based on data points we have available

[modest marsh]

While it’s true Nylund came up with a great deal of halo iconography and verbiage, you can’t just assume everything that first appeared in TFOR was a Nylund original because the novel itself was prepared using materials provided by Bungie per Trautmann himself

[sharp bough]

We know from Eric Trautmann that Bungie guys did not want to use ODST’s in Halo 2. This is in his firsthand account and he acknowledges that he and Eric Nylund came up with the idea for them

[modest marsh]

I would lean towards needing at least 3 datapoints before claiming a trend

[sharp bough]

Since ODST’s show up in Halo 2, it means that their ideas started showing up in that game. Eric Nylund created tons of ship classes for Fall of Reach to flesh out his space lore. I can almost guarantee that the idea for ODP’s and super mac guns came from him, even if that piece of information is not directly stated in that interview with Eric Trautmann

[modest marsh]

Like okay, what does halo 2 look like without ODSTs vs Halo 2 without ODPs

The former changes virtually nothing

Nylund did not invent the terms “frigate, destroyer, cruiser, carrier”, those are just existing nomenclature for naval ships for centuries already

[sharp bough]

I mean, just look at Halo Reach 😄

When Bungie took full control of the game story they ignored the existence of ODP’s and made nonsensically large stealth ship that magically appears and takes over the planet instead - with apparently a bunch of non-steath corvettes that were also not seen by the majority of planetary defenses 🤷‍♂️

[modest marsh]

Crucially, Reach had far fewer ODPs than Earth did, meaning their absence is a lot more easily justified if they’re targeting a region of lower strategic value and thus wouldn’t be protected by geosynchronous platforms

In any case, ODPs being in 2 is important insofar as justifying how the defending UNSC fleet doesn’t just instantly lose because the two assault carriers are about as problematic as the super carrier is in terms of being making the confrontation uneven

Reach doesn’t use the ODPs as a set piece because the whole point is that the battle is doomed, there is absolutely no chance of victory

Having fewer and smaller ships contrasted against the monstrously large one is a deliberate thematic choice

[sharp bough]

I mean, we don’t see any. And just look at the games plot. If we replace the absurdly large super carrier from Reach, half of the games plot basically maps onto the first battle of Harvest, where one Covenant ship shows up “Rapid Conversion” and basically destroys two human frigates…

It’s almost one for one the same general plot but tried to be forced onto Planet Reach instead, where this plot makes no sense. They have to remove the larger UNSC fleet presence that would have existed at Reach, make the Covenant ship stealthy, remove all planetary defenses from the second strongest human world, pretend that non-stealthy covenant corvettes are somehow attacking the planet without being noticed (or are noticed but the planet has been stripped of all realistic planetary defenses and capital ships that should be there)

I’m just asking you to use some common sense here. It seems like Staten started writing a game about the battle of Harvest and half way through switched it for whatever reason to a game about the battle of Reach instead but with hastily reworked concepts that don’t really make much sense if they are thought about for more than 2 seconds…

[sharp bough]

Why does that matter if they existed in lore? So you are admitting that in order to tell some emotional story they wanted to tell, they had to depict planet Reach completely different than how it existed in pre-established lore (and eerily similar to planet Harvest that just so happened to be a book written by the top Bungie story writer)

[modest marsh]

When did a big Calvary charge happen in Contact Harvest

Or space fighter dogfighting

Or the invasion of a giant mega city that ends with it being melted down

Like you’re very much stretching the context of Contact Harvest to be in a remote area of UNSC presence which the game itself acknowledges to be unusual several times

[1]: "Do you think the Army showing up in Pálháza is connected to the Visegrad hub going down?"
[2]: "Well, newsfeed says it was Insurrectionists. But if you're looking to make a statement, why hit a remote place like Visegrad?"
[1]: "You think it was UNSC goons? Like, maybe they found out the URF was running a pirate station out of the Visegrad hub?"
[2]: "If that was the case, why blame the outage on an Innie success? Why not apologize for a temporary outage and play up the futility of resistance?"
[1]: "Well, what do you think it is, then? If it ain't the Innies, and the UNSC isn't spinning it..."
[2]: "Nah, brother, don't even say it."
[1]: I'm just saying we should be prepared for the worst, is all. We should—"
[2]: "So you think the next logical step here is Covenant invasion? Those guys blow up planets, not shut down local carrier hubs."
[1]: "Visegrad isn't just a local carrier hub, though. It's one of the three hubs that connects the northern Alföld with the main complex down south, and thus the rest of the colonies."
[2]: "Okay..."
[1]: "I'm saying this is either a very ballsy and strategically-sound move on the Innies part, and we are in the middle of a coup d'etat..."
[2]: "Or?"
[1]: "Or the Covenant is here and it's already too late."

[sharp bough]

It was an outer colony that basically got reinforced by 3 UNSC ships (about the same amount that show up in the Halo Reach game, despite planet Reach being a planet that would have been much more strongly defended than a backwater outer colony world)

[modest marsh]

Do you think the amount of ships that appear onscreen is truly indicative of what Bungie internally believed to be the case in setting

I don’t think this is a conversation worth having if you’re going to take the maximalist position of only what is explicitly shown is what they intend and not just a byproduct of video game environmental design and in-engine cutscene limitations unless you expect them to put dozens of PNGs in the skybox arbitrarily

Implicitly we know there had to be more UNSC naval elements at play than 3 frigates but you seem really committed to that interpretation for some reason

I think understandably they wanted to limit the amount of naval assets the UNSC can leverage because what we’re meant to see is the UNSC at their most desperate while fighting with their hands behind their back because the wider force is blind and deaf about what’s actually happening

[sharp bough]

Well this explanation doesn’t hold because they were able to show a massive space fleet and ODP’s in Halo 2 which was made years earlier. There is literally no technical reason they weren’t able to show this

[modest marsh]

Where did they show a massive fleet in halo 2

(It’s a static PNG)

[carmine sleet]

If it's the High Charity Fleet, those were definitely tiny PNGs

Heck, I think I may have the exact PNGs laying around somewhere

[sharp bough]

Because if there were more, then why weren’t they all alerted to Covenant Corvettes flying around and attacking different parts of the planet? Do you have an answer for this other than they simply weren’t present in space over the planet?

[sharp bough]

They showed it outside the windows of the orbital platform you were on in the opening level as well as in the cutscene showing the orbital platform you start the game on

[modest marsh]

Halo has always had this problem of being Spartan-centric meaning any “important thing” has to be accessible to what is basically a footsoldier, and solving that problem requires making every other solution irrelevant or at least mitigating their usefulness

So when we are focusing on Noble Six’s or Master Chief’s perspective, in that moment, the other UNSC ships are not as relevant factors as they “should be” in most other situations

This is just a common thread among military shooter campaigns in general, not just halo, and definitely not Reach specifically

[sharp bough]

Stick to my questions and basic logic. And remember that you are not required to defend Bungie’s plot in Halo Reach. 343 and Halo studios themselves soft retconned things from that game like the CSO-class super carrier and didn’t let it get added to any new material

[modest marsh]

To be clear, if you take the skybox assets literally, then within 30 seconds you’d have a fleet that vastly outnumbers the stated number of vessels who are extremely close to the ODP which explicitly contradicts what the cutscenes and dialogue suggest

[carmine sleet]

Pretty sure a majority of the ships shown outside the windows on Cairo were PNGs as well

Like the ones we see up close during cutscenes weren't

[modest marsh]

I don’t think that Hornets and Falcons make up the bulk of UNSC air power either that dogfight with banshees

[carmine sleet]

But any quickly moving were not 3D assets

[sharp bough]

1. Why could they not even show other ships or ODP’s in pre-rendered cutscenes or when the sattelite looks out at space over the planet?

2. Why were no ships other than 1-2 frigates able to acknowledge and respond to Covenant corvettes bombarding cities if there was a massive human fleet sitting in orbit

Can you answer these questions?

[modest marsh]

The Paris class frigates in reach are notable because they interact with the environment

[modest marsh]

Reach has no pre-rendered cutscenes at all

They didn’t set aside any resources for it, seemingly all of that went into marketing

[sharp bough]

They have scenes from the perspective of a sattelite in space that shows Covenant ships jumping in but no human ships in space above the planet

[modest marsh]

How much do you know about visibility of objects in space

[sharp bough]

https://youtu.be/Q_4i-yOUmXY?si=SkQVx-IOIb_O9pH-

[carmine sleet]

Those shots from the perspective of the satalites are all in-engine, not prerendered

[sharp bough]

They can render covenant ships but not human ships. So much cope 🤦‍♂️

[modest marsh]

Like to be clear that scene is deliberately making it clear that they appear and are visible to a satellite but that is not evidence of the absence of an actual UNSC fleet

[carmine sleet]

What?

[modest marsh]

Why would the UNSC fleet happen to be in frame there

[modest marsh]

Like okay, to answer you more directly on the second question, I’m rejecting the premise because you don’t actually know from the game itself that there aren’t other confrontations that occur between UNSC and Covenant naval forces

We are given reasons as to why we don’t see an immediate response from the UNSC proper in the very first level

But that doesn’t preclude the UNSC from battling the covenant elsewhere

It’s kind of like how we have literally never seen a mechanized infantry battalion in halo besides them seemingly getting a nod in a map in Reach

You don’t just assume they didn’t exist and weren’t there fighting the covenant at earth just because they aren’t mentioned anywhere

We focus on the battles in which a ship cannot be more useful than a Spartan

[sharp bough]

I love this line from the Halo Wiki:

“During the production of Halo: Silent Storm, author Troy Denning intended for the under-construction supercarrier Hammer of Faith to be the sister-ship of Long Night of Solace - thus making it a Sh'wada-pattern supercarrier. This mention was ultimately removed from the book at the request of 343 Industries, leaving Hammer of Faith simply a supercarrier of unknown classification.”

https://www.halopedia.org/Sh'wada-pattern_supercarrier

Rare W from 343 Industries. They wanted nothing to do with more of these 28 km CSO-class super carriers ruining coherent space lore for the rest of the franchise outside the one Bungie dropped in Halo Reach right before peacing out from the franchise.

Bungie essentially: “You guys make this 28 km, 152 billion ton super carrier make sense with the rest of the Halo lore. We out!” ✌️

343i: “Nahh”

Lol

[prime mauve]

The Hammer of Faith is still at least 20 km long

[sharp bough]

Says estimated size on wiki. It’s not specified. That’s stated to be a fan theory

[modest marsh]

No, it’s estimated to be that large by Linda in the book itself

Linda studied the Banshee flight for a moment, then craned her neck to look at the huge ship again. “I see only one problem,” she said. “That vessel must be more than twenty kilometers long and hundreds of decks high. Even if the Banshees intend to set down there, we could spend days looking for them.”

In substance this is no different than if it was actually a CSO

Denning apparently deleted the post but it doesn’t look like 343 ever actually weighed in on whether or not it was one, he just left it up to them to decide in the future if it was ever an issue

343i/Halo Studios has more or less been steadfast in their commitment to making sure everything is canon regardless of the headaches it may cause, going as far as trying to incorporate stuff that was strictly non-canon and make it fit in somehow

[worn wolf]

in the end the keelbugs always win.

[worn wolf]

reach was always about reach, you can find the original hand written planning notes in a very rough state on marcus lehto's twitter or just by search "reach cut levels."

[sharp bough]

Ok, thanks for providing the actual line. Exactly why I don’t bother with the newer books. I wonder why 343i stopped him from making it a CSO-class if they still let him keep a line in about it being a similar length.

That line makes it the largest non-Forerunner ship by a long shot in the 343i era then based on what I’ve seen. But again, I don’t bother reading books from that era anyways because I don’t like a lot of story direction they went in under 343i era

[modest marsh]

They didn’t stop him, in fact they’re incredibly hands off

[sharp bough]

Then why do the wiki pages say so?

[modest marsh]

Can you quote what the wiki says that makes you think this

[sharp bough]

He claimed that he wanted it to be a sister ship to Long Night of Solace but 343i shot that down and made him make it an unknown class even though his idea was still to base it off of that ship in his head

[modest marsh]

“The CSO pic in Halopedia is what I was working from when I described it, and in mind, it was intended to be a sister ship to LNoF. But that's NOT official canon -- that decision is (rightly) for 343 to make."

[sharp bough]

I already did

[modest marsh]

This is from the deleted Twitter post

[sharp bough]

Here:

[worn wolf]

that also doesnt say 343 shut it down

[modest marsh]

Where does that say 343 told him no

I think in this case the editor of this specific article is making an assumption

[sharp bough]

It says it under production notes on the super carrier page

[modest marsh]

Yes I realize that’s what the wiki claims but the citation is this specific line from a deleted Twitter post

I think it’s possible 343 told him it couldn’t be a CSO, but if anything the ambiguity of this phrasing comes across as him simply avoiding giving a specific classification because he doesn’t want to step on any toes

It’s still functionally a CSO with nothing about it materially changing

[sharp bough]

Well either way, I’m sure I will never read his books if he thinks adding more of that size of ship to the Halo lore on Covenant side is a good idea…

[modest marsh]

Huh

Why does this even matter to you dude

[worn wolf]

as far as canon is concerned the thing you dont like is not canon until someone decides it is

[modest marsh]

Silent Storm as a story doesn’t live or die by the specific size of ships that are in it

[worn wolf]

this is a very odd tangent

[modest marsh]

Just keep in mind that while Halopedia is a super valuable and largely authoritative resource, there’s a lot of editorialization that has persisted on there over the years that I personally find disagreeable, especially on the articles with less information to form a harder consensus

[sharp bough]

No. I said much earlier in this discussion that my personal head canon and the lore that I enjoy in Halo universe ends with the Halo Reach game.

There are of course rules about what is officially canon, that doesn’t mean I enjoy everything that is officially canon. The Disney Star Wars sequel trilogy is official canon yet I don’t enjoy them or choose to include them in my Star Wars head canon. I prefer some of the Legends lore about post-Endor period more

As for Halo, I still think that many aspects of Halo Reach game conflict with established lore about planet Reach from the most popular book in the franchise and I prefer that book and Eric Nylund’s lore more than the story we got in the Halo Reach game. I think that’s a legitimate stance.

Other people can disagree and prefer the version on the game. Bungie devs said that game lore trumps all book lore so by that definition the Fall of Reach book gets retconned in favor of the Halo Reach game lore. I don’t personally choose to accept that as I think the book’s lore is more consistent and explanatory with regard to fitting in with Halo CE - Halo 3 as well. So yeah, I just personally choose to stick with Eric Nylund’s version of the lore

[worn wolf]

that message was in regards to silent storm

halo reach does deserve its criticism for how it fits in with the book even if im personally with bungie on this one - the games story trumps the books.

that said though the things you've taken issue with in the messages above i do find a bit odd? ive never seen someone say that because reach doesnt physically feature large human fleets or ODPs is to suggest that bungie felt they were unneeded. the game mentions those things in dialogue between noble members. they just dont get seen because thats not what the story is about.

[modest marsh]

As mentioned, large scale fleet actions would make the contributions of the player largely irrelevant

[modest marsh]

Which is pertinent, because that’s also the thesis of the book itself

The Spartan-IIs are utterly irrelevant to the outcome of Reach’s fall

But you need to give your squad of Spartans something to do

[sharp bough]

Not only are they unseen, their absence in helping out the ground defense when the planet is clearly under attack also seems weird if they were really in orbit. Not the orbital defense platforms, but a sizable fleet of ships.

I have multiple major issues with the way the story is told in the game. I’ll just lay all of them out. People are also welcome to disagree but I see these as flaws in story telling or else direct inconsistencies with the book Fall of Reach:

1. No major fleet or ODP’s depicted in the game whatsoever over the planet and no major human naval presence coming to aid ground forces aside from a couple frigates

2. CSO-class super carrier being much larger than I believe Covenant have the resources and tech to produce. There are only ever a few CAS-class Assault Carriers shown in the games which are represented as major flag ships, Maybe 10-20 names or mentioned ones in all of lore. How can they make a ship like 30x larger? And why would they need to against human forces? 30 additional CAS-class vessels would be far more useful and practical

3. Spartan III’s appear at Reach Anachronistically. They first appear in Nylund’s Ghosts of Onyx being trained on planet Onyx simultaneously with the battle of Reach. The first two companies are stated to have completely died in suicide missions. None should exist on Reach. And why not just show Spartan II’s which were already established to be there in the lore?

4. The game, if taken on its own, doesn’t really set up the events of Halo CE or offer as many explanations as the book (so what’s the point of it as a direct prequel?). You don’t really get the sense that Reach is the most important human planet after Earth (from what I remember). You don’t get an explanation of what happened to all the Spartan II’s, you just randomly start in a Spartan III company. Missed opportunity to focus on Spartan II’s and maybe get an introduction to Blue Team or something book related

5. The whole vanguard attacking the planet doesn’t really make sense. So the defenses are completely breached and then there is supposedly supposed to be the events of the book’s space battle afterwards? Doesn’t seem likely. They are basically two separate accounts of how the planet gets invaded. Working two invasions into a cohesive story doesn’t really work. Again, how are covenant corvettes operating unopposed and bombing cities and landing troops while a massive human fleet is just sitting up in space doing nothing?

[modest marsh]

A hundred thousand probes darted and scanned with winking electronic eyes across the void of tangled nonspaces enveloping the Covenant inner empire. They gathered data and emerged into the cold vacuum, where they were recovered by the hundreds of supercarriers and cruisers in station-keeping positions around the massive, bulbous planetoid that dominated the heavens. Not a single rock larger than a centimeter could enter this space without being identified, targeted, and vaporized. Authorization codes were updated hourly, and if any incoming vessel hesitated for a millisecond with the proper response, it, too, met unyielding destruction.

-First Strike, epilogue

[worn wolf]

an odp is featured in oni sword base, it destroys the corvette. the game tells you this and why it wasnt used earlier as to protect the sensitive site underneath the base (also probably danger close to the troops on site)

[sharp bough]

6. Depiction of planet Reach seems completely different. In the book it is depicted as basically a giant naval base with tons of soldiers and training grounds all over the planet. It is a military staging ground for human fight. In the game it just appears to be a regular colony world with tons of civilians. Not a giant heavily militarized planet 🤷‍♂️

[modest marsh]

Where does TFOR state that Reach’s infrastructure stretches planet-wide?

[worn wolf]

as for spartan IIIs on reach, unless i've mistaken something from another piece of media theres a part of the book where its outlined kurt tried to outline certain Alpha's and Betas for special operations instead of being used for the the suicide missions. - feel free to correct me there as the only line im able to recite is one about a spartan named kai and that kurt will struggle to justify his request to save him

the game has no need to set up Halo CE, but it also features the Pillar of Autumn, Cortana, and the epilogue cutscene shows a halo ring. you dont need the game to say what is already obvious

[modest marsh]

That was from the email conversations that was created alongside reach to smooth over some things

[worn wolf]

right gotcha

[modest marsh]

This is delving into speculation but I think as early as halo 2 Bungie wanted there to be extra Spartans participating in a defensive campaign against the covenant

This would’ve been the framing device for halo 2’s narrativized multiplayer content

Nicole-458 is an artifact of this

Reach is just them finally committing to the idea

[worn wolf]

im assuming by "breached" you mean that the supercarrier straight up just blasted past all of reach's defence fleet and odps but they snuck past

[modest marsh]

We know Staten and the other writers coordinated with Nylund for Ghosts of Onyx where these ideas would’ve been fresh

[worn wolf]

its again its mentioned in the game, the supercarrier was cloaked, and the covenant attack wasn't identified until noble encountered them while bringing back visegrad relay

[fair hazel]

Reading the chronicles

I feel weird since i ve already experienced MOST of the content of the book

so right now im just reading the new stuff

[modest marsh]

The limitations and efficacy of covenant stealth and counter surveillance tech has never been the most fleshed out but if I had to reconcile things I’d just say that the Ministry of Fervent Intercession simply has access to resources that allows them to do this

The game itself makes itself clear that the zealots are an unusual outfit to begin with

It’s not much of a stretch that the ministry tasked with acquiring forerunners assets has themselves forerunner tech such as cloaking and teleporters the other ministries lack

[worn wolf]

its a reasonable enough explanation

[worn wolf]

i would just say that for the way the game depicts it then yes id say this is just matter of opinion and theres no right or wrong way to feel about it

[modest marsh]

It’s important to also note that despite retaining the broadstrokes, reach’s plot is different enough from what they initially planned that it wouldn’t be inaccurate to suggest they meant it to correspond closer to the book including a tighter timeline of events

Narrative structure is beholden to gameplay goals though

Cutscenes are primarily a way to get the player from level scenario to level scenario

I recall someone suggesting once that reach’s original teaser seemed to align closer to the idea of Reach being a much more truncated event and I can’t help but think they were onto something https://youtu.be/s3MabEog3yQ?

(And hey, what do you know, they specifically mention the orbital defense grid by name)

[sharp bough]

Sure, this one is purely based in how I was depicting the planet in my head when reading Fall of Reach years ago. The way they choose to depict in the game, I don’t see Reach as distinguishable at all from another colony world like Arcadia that is not the main headquarters of Humanities entire military. That’s obviously subjective, I was just depicting more like MP’s patrolling instead of regular civilian police forces or things like that. But of course that’s subjective and just my internal depiction of it

[worn wolf]

reach doesnt feature civilian police at all in the game though

its just the army then the marines in the last level

[modest marsh]

Bungie era halo had a much more modest interpretation of human colonies

[sharp bough]

Oh, you’re right. I was totally mixing parts of it up with Halo 3: ODST. Whoops!

[prime mauve]

The waypoint one? It's out?

Personally I'm mostly interested in the London story just to confirm who was there. The rest? Maybe if I have a spare audible credit to burn.

[fair hazel]

No it's not out yet officially, i managed to get one though

I did read that story

I really like these new stories, they're honestly great, still reading

[prime mauve]

Nice! It's always fun when one gets a book ahead of time

[prime mauve]

I'll probably save the surprise to the official release but is it someone we know or original characters?

Like just a hint to build up some hype

[fair hazel]

No hints haha, when it comes out. There's something about reading these stories that has me diving in this universe at so many different points its really really cool. some of these stories are short and thats fine, it's really good writing too and i dont want it to end

[fair hazel]

You guys will love the new stories im sure! Cant wait for everyone to read them!

[prime mauve]

I got a few bucks on a bet of who the Spartans that saved Agryna are lol

[fair hazel]

im interested in your guess. once the book comes out officially there should be a discussion thread with spoilers more than likely.

[prime mauve]

Absolutely

My hope is that it's Naomi, Maria and maybe some Spartan III Gammas. Another guess is that it's Silver Team in this timeline, or Team Omega.

[fair hazel]

Interesting guesses!

[sharp bough]

What is Halo Chronicles?

[fair hazel]

im also looking forward to the eventual stage discussion

[fair hazel]

You know the waypoint chronicles theyve been putting out?

[sharp bough]

No. What is it? Like short stories or something?

[fair hazel]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSYtZvxAGvc&list=PLEiasGJGvBNBsHPULIAulGrzcXDlN3SZB

its a playlist link so that's the first of several

its these plus ten new stories, and some other bits from waypoint in print format

[sharp bough]

What is it? Is it a timeline of historical events retold or something like they did with The Star Wars: Old Republic datapads?

[fair hazel]

a collection of short stories from different perspectives, characters, and eras

from new and old characters

[sharp bough]

Ok. Is it fan made or an official thing like the Halo Evolutions anthology?

[fair hazel]

one of them deals with noble team with thom and rosenda on a mission, another expandsd upon some characters in spartan ops

official

[sharp bough]

So they’re kind of like Star Wars Tales of the Jedi stories but in written/audio format instead of illustrated/animated shorts?

[prime mauve]

They are blog posts they post every once in a while

They compiled them, added some new stuff, and are releasing them with a bunch of special narrators including Halo youtubers and voice actors from the games

[fair hazel]

Short stories posted online on waypoint

but an anthology format i suppose written/audio

[prime mauve]

Yeah

Personally I hadn't liked them on the first time around but the many narrators thing got me reconsidering it and willing to give them another chance, as they generally are very low stakes stories and even if I dislike the style they are inoffensive in general

[sharp bough]

Ok, thanks. I looked more into them. Seems most of the stories are focused on the later post-human covenant war, which makes sense because that’s the 343 era stuff. I’m not really a fan of that later Halo lore but I guess it’s a cool thing for those who are. I guess a Vol 1 book is releasing with new stories as well 🤷‍♂️

[stoic hamlet]

It can’t be anyone from Gamma. They never saw combat during the war.

There were other Spartan III’s active at the time on/around Earth, though.

[vagrant ocean]

Considering it gets posted on Halo Waypoint, it’s official.

[prime mauve]

Maria's retirement got a retcon so I don't think a team or two of Gammas would be impossible.

[vagrant ocean]

She’s still retired from active service in October of 2552.

[stoic hamlet]

There’s nothing technically retconned there.

We don’t know when she retired.

[vagrant ocean]

Just that she saw active combat on Reach.

[carmine sleet]

The window for when she could have retired simply got much smaller

[stoic hamlet]

But even then, I doubt they’re gonna retcon the OSFM. They’ve not retconned more obscure stuff.

Like Rosenda’s Spartan tag, or that Omega survived the war.

[vagrant ocean]

Yup. Probably late September.