Avatar Force Sub: UNSC (Halo)

[Shroom Man 777]

well remember they were not only trying to destroy the world tree, they were also trying to scare the crap out of the native army that had amassed so bad they'd never bother the humans again, They probably sent in the ground troops to clear out the natives that would be undoubtedly hiding in the jungle (remember they knew they were attacking a large force of natives)

also, the UNSC would have a similar view to the RDA, "we're attacking a force of 2000ish natives that probably know we're coming, which are very big and hard to kill, we'll be outnumbered on both air and land as they have flying creatures to ride on" and took what precautions they could with the forces they had.

The Na'vi are individually very big and hard to kill, but militaristically the RDA had every confidence of a military victory. And despite that, it's still not a reason to uncharacteristically arm their soldiers with abnormal amounts of heavy anti-tank and anti-armor weaponry when you're dealing with light half-naked infantry enemies unless they're expecting a shitload of very tough to kill supercreatures attacking them from everywhere. And they are NOT expecting that.

[PeZook]

I'd like to point out that the Na'Vi were not all that hard to kill. A short rifle burst did them in just fine.

[Shroom Man 777]

I meant compared to humans. Dogs, horses and pigs are harder to kill than people too. But that doesn't mean you'll bring in rocket launchers, even if they're armed with bows and arrows.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Check out the Stanchion.

Do I need to point out that we've only ever seen the M99 used once and it wasn't against the Covenant but well before them against human insurgents? Given the lack of prevalency of the weapons I don't think you can take it as a given that they have them.

[Shroom Man 777]

But I thought we were assuming that obscure or specialized weaponry that's normally handed out to designated soldiers per xyz-amount of troops was going to be distributed in abnormal proportions so that everyone gets Stanchions and Spartan Lasers and rocket launchers and Football Nukes so they won't get crushed by the unexpected tide of small arms-proof giant monsters that caught everyone by surprise because nobody was expecting it?

[Starglider]

This is ridiculous. It could be Na'vi vs Imperial Space Marines and Shroom would be 'oh, they wouldn't bother to bring anything bigger than a bolt pistol, despite having plenty of experience on sentient Death Worlds such as Pandora. The suprise dino-rhinos would squash them'. Let me guess, Stormtroopers die too? Clearly the RDA shouldn't have bothered with the Unobtanium, if they'd repurposed these supposed supermegakillbeasts as biological weapons they could push Weyland Yutani's weak little 'xenomorphs' right out of the market.

[Crazedwraith]

Nice Hissy fit there, Starglider. Real convincing.

Except you know; Halo is no where near on the level of WH40K and especially their ground equipment hasn't really been demonstrated to be vastly superior to RDA's. Certainly not on the level they would need to survive being swarmed by vast herds of Pandoran wildlife.

[PeZook]

This is ridiculous. It could be Na'vi vs Imperial Space Marines and Shroom would be 'oh, they wouldn't bother to bring anything bigger than a bolt pistol, despite having plenty of experience on sentient Death Worlds such as Pandora. The suprise dino-rhinos would squash them'. Let me guess, Stormtroopers die too? Clearly the RDA shouldn't have bothered with the Unobtanium, if they'd repurposed these supposed supermegakillbeasts as biological weapons they could push Weyland Yutani's weak little 'xenomorphs' right out of the market.

The Space Marines have their bolters as standard kit. Shroom is arguing that the UNSC wouldn't equip their soldiers with abnormal amounts of heavy equipment, beyond their standard kit. And he's absolutely right: if they simply *poof* replace the RDA goons, then they won't have any time to prepare at all. If they get some time to plan and prepare, they still don't know the planet will try to eat them, so they come packing the usual gear.

[Sarevok]

Maybe Pandora has telepathic powers. Anyone with effective weaponry will leave them behind so they become slaughter for planets bio defenses. Clonetroopers ? They will deploy without armor, no blasters, no LAAT gunships, no walkers or even speederbikes. I mean why would they wear bulletproof armor with sensors and carry droid busting rifles when there is nothing to shoot ? Even though Clonetroopers never deploy without their standard loadout they will make an exception for Pandora. They will actually be walking around without helmets, armor, no blasters and vehicles so they can be killed by native fauna.

[Crazedwraith]

Sarevok; did you perhaps miss Pezook and mine's post? Or are you simply too retarded to attempt to come up with a reply that actually addresses our points?

We're assuming the UNSC will carry their standard load out. We're just not convince that they will take out abnormal amounts of heavy weaponry to confront a threat; they don't know about

[Themightytom]

They had walker robots in Avatar didn't they? So would that be replaced by a Warthog? (presumably not a scorpion because it would only be able to travel along the bulldozed road)

And isn't that all academic since the battle was won in the air? thats where the explosives were being carried, and the only way the assault was defeated was by dumping the explosives. They cut that right up tto the wire too, so as long as the USMC can do marginally better than what we saw using pelican and hornets, they still win.

I'm not sure that any advancement of technology, but not the type of equipment, would significantly alter the ground battle but the air battle was pretty close. The game is really "protect the shuttle until it drops its load" unless the OP allows for a wider range of technology, in which case, you might as well nuke it from orbit.

[Black Admiral]

Per ODST, Spartan Lasers were at least starting to come into general issue with Helljumper units as of late 2552, and it is likely, if they have some idea what they're dealing with, that the UNSC forces will adjust their loadout based on that.

That said, I don't see why the obsession with the Stanchion - in the first place, it's an extremely limited production run weapon, so there's no guarantee any'd even be available, and in the second, even if there are any to hand, they're not a weapon suitable for close terrain (and trying to fire from a Hornet would be somewhat ill-advised, as I understand things).

[Crazedwraith]

That is a good summation; Themightytom I mentioned before the ground battle was mostly superfluous.

Of course; I don't think Jake used optimal tactics either; I don't recall that he concentrated his force on the primary target very well. He seemed to drop dragons on all the gunships to confuse them and then try to get the bombs disarmed with a very small strike team.

If, as stated in the OP, Jake can alter his tactics in response to the swap over to the UNSC if he realises the UNSC drop ships are even more likely to fend off his dragon attacks. He might concentrate properly on the all important shuttle; which he managed to wreck with grenades in the air port quite quickly in the canon. With Better tactics; Ie) using the entire Ne'Va dragon force as meatshields for him. He should be able to take out the shuttle. Just try to get as many blue people on it as possible; with guns if he can wrangle it.

[Hawkwings]

Shroom: my point is that radiation and ECM do NOT lift mountains into the air. It might be a side effect of whatever DOES lift mountains into the air.

Anyways, if we assume the same tactics for both groups that appeared in the movie, then the ground fight remains superfluous, and the air fight probably goes the same way. If there's a Spartan around, then I expect him to be piloting one of the Hornets around, then ditch it and go hand to hand with Jake on top of the Venture Star, occupying him for at least a couple seconds and resulting in the first pallet of explosives being pushed off the shuttle.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Per ODST, Spartan Lasers were at least starting to come into general issue with Helljumper units as of late 2552, and it is likely, if they have some idea what they're dealing with, that the UNSC forces will adjust their loadout based on that.

Where do you get this? I know one of the ODST deployed with a Spartan Laser, but then they were also escorting ONI personnel on official ONI business. We don't know whether it is general issue or ONI & the UNSC decided to give them priority when it came requisitioning equipment due to the nature of their mission. One example doesn't necessarily mean they all are.

[Black Admiral]

Per ODST, Spartan Lasers were at least starting to come into general issue with Helljumper units as of late 2552, and it is likely, if they have some idea what they're dealing with, that the UNSC forces will adjust their loadout based on that.

Where do you get this? I know one of the ODST deployed with a Spartan Laser, but then they were also escorting ONI personnel on official ONI business. We don't know whether it is general issue or ONI & the UNSC decided to give them priority when it came requisitioning equipment due to the nature of their mission. One example doesn't necessarily mean they all are.

One ONI officer, and Captain Dare grabbed Buck's squad for two reasons; firstly, she's worked with the Gunnery Sergeant before, and second, they were geared up for deployment into New Mombasa already (per the ODST manual). They wouldn't have had time to get hold of any weapons that weren't already in their base ship's armoury anyway, since Captain Dare only showed up with their new orders literally minutes before they deployed.

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe Pandora has telepathic powers. Anyone with effective weaponry will leave them behind so they become slaughter for planets bio defenses.

Are you dense? Are you fucking retarded?

The RDA DIDN'T KNOW there were fucking bio defenses! NOBODY KNEW there were bio defenses! NOT EVEN THE NAVI expected the fucking biodefenses!

Unless the Haloids watched James Cameron's Avatar beforehand so they would know that Eywa would suddenly rush to aid the Na'vi, they WILL NOT EXPECT ANY "BIODEFENSES".

Clonetroopers ? They will deploy without armor, no blasters, no LAAT gunships, no walkers or even speederbikes. I mean why would they wear bulletproof armor with sensors and carry droid busting rifles when there is nothing to shoot ? Even though Clonetroopers never deploy without their standard loadout they will make an exception for Pandora. They will actually be walking around without helmets, armor, no blasters and vehicles so they can be killed by native fauna.

You're an idiot. Are craploads of lasers, rocket launchers and anti-material weapons the standard load for UNSC troopers? Or is the standard UNSC soldier equipped with, oh I don't know, a fucking rifle and some small-arms with only a few designated soldiers per squad being assigned specialist weapons like missiles and lasers?

PROVE that the standard loadout of the UNSC Haloids will be a significant disproportion of anti-armor and anti-tank weapons, PROVE that they'll be packing more rockets and missiles than small arms and rifles, PROVE that the vast majority of UNSC troops will eschew their battle rifles and "small arms" in favor of rocket launchers.

Don't you get it? A usual soldier isn't equipped with fucking missile launchers and laser cannons. Unless the main infantry weapon in Halo is the missile launcher, the vast majority of the Halo soldiers will be carrying their main battle rifles.

Or is this why we see most soldiers carrying TOW missiles instead of things like, uh, M16s and M4s?

So, normally how many Haloid infantry soldiers carry rocket launchers in proportion to the Haloid infantry soldiers carrying main battle rifles?

If like the RDA the Haloids did not expect the unpredictable intervention of Eywa and the ecosystem, then why would the UNSC give their soldiers abnormal and disproportionate and unusual numbers of anti-armor and anti-tank weapons?

[Shroom Man 777]

This is ridiculous. It could be Na'vi vs Imperial Space Marines and Shroom would be 'oh, they wouldn't bother to bring anything bigger than a bolt pistol, despite having plenty of experience on sentient Death Worlds such as Pandora. The suprise dino-rhinos would squash them'.

More like "oh, they wouldn't arm everyone with rocket launchers and plasma cannons and eschew their standard-issue bolters, when going on a mission against lightly-armed and unarmored primitives when they're NOT expecting any
'biodefenses' at all."

Let me guess, Stormtroopers die too?

If the Stormtroopers' on Endor had the standard usual loadout of stormtrooper gear, then maybe. If they had NON-STANDARD and unusual loadout of stormtrooper gear, like if most of them had proton torpedies and E-Webs instead of those blaster guns, then the situation would change.

But oh wait, a usual infantry force DOESN'T arm a disproportionate number of their infantry with HEAVY WEAPONS. And it will take a disproportionate number of infantry with heavy weapons to stop those surprise dino-rhinos.

Clearly the RDA shouldn't have bothered with the Unobtanium, if they'd repurposed these supposed supermegakillbeasts as biological weapons they could push Weyland Yutani's weak little 'xenomorphs' right out of the market.

If the Na'vi looked like ugly motherfuckers with acid blood, who reproduced by face-raping people and inseminating them with phallic larva, I think the milwankers would be less sore in seeing the defeat of a conventional military force. I don't think Aliens inspired so much crap, because their aliens were scary rather than fuzzy-wuzzy, so all the claws and acid blood made the military emasculation easier to handle and prevented months of milwanking in all the time before and after the movie.

[open_sketchbook]

Course, there is a serious possibility that blasters or boltguns (or hell, even phasers on high settings) might put down those megabeasts where assault rifles and SMGs failed. Even if the E11 doesn't do it, odds are the big AotC rifles might.

[open_sketchbook]

Ghetto Edit : Also, regarding the UNSC, while they obviously won't be armed with a rocket launcher a man, they do tend to carry a disproportionate number of high-powered stuff, seeing as they tend to fight big nasty aliens who tend towards bulletproofness and shielding. There are a couple of times in the games (so take it with a grain of salt, obviously) you run into whole squads armed exclusively with rockets to kill tanks and hunters; fighting an enemy who fields large, armoured infantry, slowmoving armoured air skiffs, and lots of hovery combat ATVs has probably given them a pretty loose philosophy for the deployment of rocket launchers.

[Covenant]

No matter what group you throw into this situation, unless they've come in loaded for military action, it's not going to matter. Even a Cultureverse crew that lands without military weaponry is going to have to rely on escape as a means to survive a wave of enraged super dino-ponies, barring the ship itself being able to effectorize the swarm. There's no doubt that an actual military operation on Pandora could obliterate the critters, but that was never the situation.

You'll need to find a civilization whose basic approach to controlling aggressive wildlife boils down to BDZ, or someone whose average dropship or shuttle is an armored bunker. It's got more to do with sanity than technology.

The only people who actually come to do a bit of mining and mineralogical research with heavy anti-tank weapons are villainous organizations. If the force sub was Orkz from 40k then yeah, the planet is fucked, but almost no human faction regularly carries huge weapons when they have no reason to believe there will be a need for lots and lots of huge weapons. But the issue isn't what human faction we're talking about, but just the level of derangement necessary to land on a planet to do some anti-dinosaur security and tree-clearing and end up deploying an orbital fortress.

Alternately, any species that makes extremely heavy use out of orbital and dropship technology might do fine. The USNC uses starships, but they seem pretty much brainless about them, so they're a perfect force to get stomped by animals. They can barely handle braindead midgets with pistols. If the humans from Stargate showed up, with a starship in orbit to support them, they'd be fine. Beam up the humans from the planet surface, deploy some 302's or drop the starship into atmosphere, and you've got a win.

[Starglider]

And I optimistically thought I was joking with the characterisation of the Na'vi-wankers as 'Ewya will pown Stormies, Daleks, Xeelee, all of the above at once!'.

Even a Cultureverse crew that lands without military weaponry is going to have to rely on escape as a means to survive a wave of enraged super dino-ponies

No, because even normal drones can project ludicrously powerful forcefields, that easily hold up collapsing buildings. On the offense, we saw a special circumstances drone kill every human and most of the horses in a cavalry column in about ten seconds flat, using one knife missile.

barring the ship itself being able to effectorize the swarm.

Which of course it trivially would before blanketing the entire planet with EM strong enough to burn out every tree interconnection on the world (as described in The Wasp Factory). Not that the Culture would ever want to do that.

but almost no human faction regularly carries huge weapons when they have no reason to believe there will be a need for lots and lots of huge weapons.

Any civilisation with experience with sentient planets and group mind ecosystems, e.g. the Imperium of Man and arguably the UNSC, will likely be wary about nasty wildlife ganging up on them. Anyone with decent sensors, probably from Trek level on up, will detect the whole 'planet mind' thing from orbit and aren't likely to be surprised.

If the humans from Stargate showed up, with a starship in orbit to support them, they'd be fine. Beam up the humans from the planet surface

If teleport extractions followed by BDZ count as a win, any civ with teleportation should win, barring possibly Trek as their flakey teleports probably don't work in the target area.

[Covenant]

Haha, I'm not an Ewya wanker--I'm neutral on the OP's situation, and not fan of the movie or Na'vi to begin with. I was trying to say that the conditions of this force sub is such that few people are going to prepared with: human faction is swapped non-military personnel into a situation they are not prepared to deal with via intel or hardware, and their only reliable intel points towards roughly humanoid opponents with primitive mounted cavalry, and not given an opportunity to retain Ultimate High Ground or establish a presence according to their normal MO. Essentially, there was a Na'vi side force sub at the end--with the Na'vi furry light air cav replaced by the Zerg--and the humans are still getting shafted. That's why I said you need someone who brings high power stuff standard, because otherwise the whole thing boils down to laughing at X civilization as they fall under an endless swarm of dinosaurs because they are denied the intelligent steps that would have avoided this situation getting as bad as it had.

Now, if this force sub takes place earlier in the movie (such as after Sully has begun to turn) or takes place after the movie with the force sub being the 'Earth' force attempting to re-secure some assets, the whole thing changes entirely--as said. Also, if you use 40k as an example, who takes the place of the security forces? Guardsmen? Swapping in Astartes for a bunch of PMCs in very light kit doesn't seem right. Swapping in Star Trek Redshirts makes sense, but unless they're allowed to use their massive orbital doomship (in Avatar terms the Enterprise would be) then what do we allow them? Shuttlecraft only, with the big ship being a runabout? If the USNC were ACTUALLY to go to Pandora, not just be force subbed, they'd have a much better spread of force than what the force sub said. That's really the issue--the force in Avatar was basically NASA with a few Blackwater PMCs as security, not a legitimate interstellar empire, so any force sub should let the interstellar empires retain their advantages.

Special Circumstances is, obviously, special. Most people don't go around with knife missiles or nanoweapons imbedded, and while a drone can easily smash up a bunch of dinosaurs it's not likely a single non-weaponized drone would want to, and not all ships contain a mind or AI or powerful effectors--and the Culture is about as powerful as they get. If a mind ship decided to poke around on Pandora it wouldn't even need the humans, nor would it be troubled by the existence of a primitive planetary intelligence. In reality, the cultureverse wouldn't need to mine anything anyway, due to displacers, it was just an example. I agree they wouldn't want to.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Special Circumstances is, obviously, special. Most people don't go around with knife missiles or nanoweapons imbedded, and while a drone can easily smash up a bunch of dinosaurs it's not likely a single non-weaponized drone would want to, and not all ships contain a mind or AI or powerful effectors--and the Culture is about as powerful as they get. If a mind ship decided to poke around on Pandora it wouldn't even need the humans, nor would it be troubled by the existence of a primitive planetary intelligence. In reality, the cultureverse wouldn't need to mine anything anyway, due to displacers, it was just an example. I agree they wouldn't want to.

Most Culture Minds would probably try to communicate directly with the planetary intelligence or alternatively inform the Contact section and and leave it to them. I agree that a normal Culture ship would not have SC level weaponry, since in most cases such extremes are unnecessary and the standard Culture stance is defensive rather than offensive. The defensive resources of most ships would be quite sufficient to make the situation survivable for all Culture sentients if we assume the megafauna attack still takes place for some reason. In any case and as Starglider and you noted, planetary resources are irrelevant to cultureverse high level involved civilizations including but not limited to the Culture itself.

You are incorrect, however, about the Mind and AI thing. Even modules have a drone level AI (i.e. clearly more intelligent than most humans but not godlike as the Minds) and all actual starships have a Mind by the time of the Culture novels. The only actual starship that does not have a Mind is the ancient bucket that appears in Matter and it still has an AI, which is hinted to be similar in capability to modern drone AIs by the time of the events.

[Vendetta]

You are incorrect, however, about the Mind and AI thing. Even modules have a drone level AI (i.e. clearly more intelligent than most humans but not godlike as the Minds) and all actual starships have a Mind by the time of the Culture novels.

Some have several. Larger GSVs have up to three Minds in residence (Remember, GSVs are the "cities" of the Culture, Orbitals and Rocks and the odd planet are hicksville.