Forerunners Vs. the Galactic Empire

[Norade]

For this post I will be using Taz’s scenario 3, that information to be used can be obtained from Ghosts of Onyx and The Halo encyclopedia. Since Taz sent me a reply that an article from Halopedia I will use does not contradict the encyclopedia, it will come into play as well. Before I start my main post, I would like to address Norade on the subject of the canonicity of the books relating to the games. The whole concept of superior canon is explained here. “Often times, one source of canon may say something different than other sources. There are many reasons why this may be so; ranging from a typo to a line taken out of context.” (Halopedia). So, to discount the numbers given in the books as canon, we have to have a direct contradiction aka usually something written or spoken given in the game that disproves those numbers, because only spoken word is uncontestable fact. As we can see by the length of this topic, all contradictions brought up (which all deal with in game scenes, not spoken word from characters) are highly debatable and often come down to an individual’s unique interpretation of an in game scene.

Except you haven't actually debated my numbers, you have not shown that my numbers are wrong nor addressed the fact that the books and encyclopedia are wrong about each battle shown in the game. As admitted by Invader Taz they also fail to get dates right as well therefore making them unreliable sources and meaning we should check our numbers with the games before drawing conclusions.

What we do know is that there is no, undebateable statement in the games that proves that MAC rounds do not travel at .4c. When cortana, master chief, or any other character explicitly says that MACs have a maximum velocity of #, and that value is different from the one in the books, a contradiction with the superior canon will occur and I will concede anything dealing with MAC speed (unless that value happens to be higher than the one given in the books).

Except that visual evidence > dialogue you hat fucker. We see a Super Mac fire in Halo 2 and it is not going at .04% of c let alone 40% and in that scene it has no reason not to be firing all out so you are clearly wrong.

If you disagree, it’s ok because I am using scenario 3 anyway, but I just wanted to put out my 2 cents worth on canon policy. P.S. As for your covenant ship getting destroyed by sublight weapons scene I still don’t see it, even after watching your video (which I am already familiar with) twice. Please indicate the time frame and where in the scene said destruction occurs. Also, regarding xess’s crater calculation (which is correct mathematically) you are assuming that the MAC guns are firing at full power, which I already discounted in a previous post.

I don't need to show they were firing at full power, I simply need to show that they destroyer a shielded ship thus showing there is no reason for them to have a higher firepower mode while also showing the weak as piss nature of Covenant technology. The flood pod, and scenes from Halo 2, where in the ships shots must be doing damage as you don't fire a weapon at an enemy vehicle that can never do damage (ie. firing a machine gun at an M1 Abrams because your tank's main gun is reloading). Lastly I will not debate scenario three until you can prove that it uses numbers consitant with the firepower shown in the games, so enjoy debating nothing while conceding to me.

Ok let’s start the main post. I will attempt to prove, without a doubt, that in an armed conflict between the Forerunner race and the Galactic Empire, the forerunners will triumph. I will start this post with information on star destroyer capabilities from a more recent source than my first post (by popular demand), which is far more generous for the capabilities of an ISD, but as you will see, it won’t matter in the end. First, from http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Executor ... readnought, an executer class star dreadnought uses half of its power (3.8*10^26W) for its shields. Also, I’m going to be nice and assume the ship uses the other half on weapons (I will consider sensors, life support, maneuvering, etc as negligible because once again, in the end it won’t matter).

These numbers are agreeable to me. However claiming that you're being generous when we have sources for a ship being able to fire all reactor power through her main batteries is a blatant lie. I assume the rest of your statements will be equally bad.

From the same source, an Executer-class Star Dreadnought has at least 100X the firepower of an imperial 2. Being the likeable guy that I am, I will disregard the ‘at least’ and say it is 100x as powerful. (This will give the imperial 2 its maximum firepower). So, with the given 3.8*10^26W for the executer, an imperial 2 will have 3.8*10^24 W of firepower.

As shown above your weapons numbers are wrong, peak reactor output scaled down by one-hundred times is 7.73 x 10[sup]24[/sup] W with peak shields at 3.8 x 10[sup]24[/sup]. An ISD therefore has a peak firepower of >7.73 x 10[sup]24[/sup] W from her main guns. However a shown here such scaling isn't right and we should expect 1 x 10[sup]25[/sup] as a minimum total reactor output.

Now, from here http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Imperial ... _Destroyer, an imperial 2, henceforth to be referred to as an ISD for laziness, has >9.28*10^24W of power to spare. Hence, subtracting the firepower, it has 9.28*10^24W of shielding. This may seem a like disproportionate power difference between shields and weapons, but if you remember that I am disregarding other systems that require power and simply divvying it up between weapons and shields, it will inevitably result in one being kind of high.

Except I have shown that while your numbers are right your logic is flawed and looking below those numbers are butchered.

Now, an ISD has 70 weapons batteries (the technical answer is 64, but the amount of one type of battery was listed as 26+ so I just gave the total an extra 6 to make a nice even number instead of assuming 26). I am simply going to take the total firepower and average it out of 70 to give the ISD 5.4286*10^22 W of firepower per turret. You may ask why I am not distinguishing between light, medium, heavy, and ion cannon. The answer is that as you will see later, it will be very generous to the star destroyer, as all 70 of its weapons will be able to have a chance at getting kills as opposed to 33 heavy turbolasers and ion cannons (assuming ion cannon effectiveness on the forerunners) with overkill levels of damage and the remaining 37 being relatively ineffective. Now we will move on to the forerunner analysis.

No a single shot firepower per second would be >1 x 10[sup]25[/sup] leaving off 10% to run other systems such a shot could strike with a power of 9 x 10[sup]24[/sup] J or 2151 teratons of energy per shot. A far cry from the 12.9 teratons you claim.

We start, once again, with the MAC gun. A typical human warship MAC gun fires a 600 ton projectile at .4X the speed of light (halo encyclopedia).

As I have shown this is not the case. Until you can prove that this is the case and even remotely with capabilities shown by the games I refuse to accept this numbers. However, even should that be the case we know that a Star Wars vessel can fire on a stationary target and be expected to hit from a 10 light minute range meaning that it can kill your largest weapons while having 25 minutes to evade your incoming return fire. That is assuming you know they are there at that range.

The energy delivered by this weapon can be found by using the relativistic kinetic energy formula KE= mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) - mc^2. Using c=3X10^8 m/s, m= 600 ton=609628.2 kg, and v=.4c=1.2X10^8 m/s, the energy released by the weapon is about 5*10^21J of energy.

Look at those numbers we see that even could they hit, and even if they have that much damage, you would need to hit an Imperial I-class Star Destroyer with 760 such shots per second to overwhelm its shields. This as 3.8 x 10[sup]24[/sup] divided by 5 x 10[sup]21[/sup] equals 760. You also go to show that even your highest firepower is lower than the energy output of an outdated troop transport.

My analysis will diverge slightly from my first post now as I will use a new covenant ship, a covenant destroyer, because there is more information on it and it is the type of ship involved in the Ghosts of Onyx scene that I will soon discuss. According to halopedia, and with the assurances of Invader Taz that this does not contradict the halo encyclopedia (I don’t own it myself),

As Invader Taz has proven himself to be a liar and an idiot I demand that you quote your sources. I will not debate you any further otherwise.

a covenant destroyer’s shields can withstand two MAC guns or one plasma torpedo or one energy projector hit. Its hull can withstand one torpedo or 1+ (which I will assume 2 to make consistent with the first statement) MAC rounds. As such, we can see that one plasma torpedo delivers the equivalent energy of 2 MAC rounds, or 1*10^22J of energy. I will use this later, but for now what is important is that a covenant destroyer can withstand four plasma torpedoes, or 4*10^22 J of energy. Now I know what you’re thinking, that the ISD can 1 hit KO our covenant destroyer and you would be correct. However, a covenant destroyer is not what our ISDs will be fighting. They will be fighting something that is decidedly forerunner, if you get my drift. That comes in the next paragraph.

Even increasing energies to this point means that it would take 95 of these torpedoes per second to overwhelm a Star Destroyer's shields. I however dispute your energy numbers. Based on scenes from Halo's primary source and calculation preformed by Srelex and myself I would say that the UNSC and Covenant have weapons no more powerful than a single gigaton or 4.184 x 10[sup]18[/sup] J per shot at the highest end. Please note that on screen we never see better than 36 megatons of firepower for the UNSC so I am giving them nearly thirty times more firepower here.

Jake, as you have no arguments to disprove my math thus we shall use these numbers as an upper bound until you can show that my math or method was wrong.

That is firepower only though a Covenant vessel is over killed by and upper end calculation of at most 108 megatons of firepower in Halo 3. So we can assume that Halo ships are glass cannons able to take roughly 1/10th of what they can give.

In the book Ghost of onyx, a covenant destroyer captured by Spartans encounters some of onyx’s defense sentinels. 49 of these sentinels combine to form a ‘super sentinel’ (that’s my name for the compound sentinel, not the books) and the following happens:
“Back us off, Will,” he ordered.“Something’s happening,” Linda said.
The image in the viewer zoomed in on a cluster of the space-craft. Seven of them moved into a line. The view pulled back and revealed other identical formations. Seven of these lines stacked into an elongated triangle, and the Spheres within the forty-nine-craft pattern glowed red-hot.“Hard to port!” Fred cried. “Emergency power to shields.”The deck tilted.“Answering hard to port,” Will cried. A blast of golden light overwhelmed the image in the viewer. The frame of Bloodied Sprite resounded like it had been Struck with a hammer. The artificial gravity failed and Fred gripped the railing. Starboard side hit,” Will said. “Shields destroyed.” Fred moved his hand over his console and Bloodied Sprite appeared on the viewer. A gaping crater of blue hull armor smoldered white-hot. Crystalline electronics crackled, and severed plasma lines spewed fire. As the ship turned, Fred saw the hole was five decks across and had punched clean through to the port Side.

I'll ask for a page number, but otherwise will not dispute this.

Essentially, one supersentinel consisting of 49 individual sentinels fire a directed energy weapon that 1 hit KOs a shielded covenant destroyer and therefore puts out 4*10^22J of energy. But an ISD can counter with 9.28*10^24 J of shielding you say. It would take 232 supersentinels, or 11,368 sentinels to kill one ISD you say. Where can we possibly find enough sentinels to destroy the empire’s 25,000 ISDs? As the covenant would say, “ask and the forerunners provideth” (or something to that nature).

I dispute this, those 49 sentinels will, at most put out 9 x 10[sup]17[/sup] J, which is double what is required to kill a Covenant vessel, but would take 4,222,222 super sentinels or 206,888,878 sentinels to destroy a single Imperial-class Star Destroyer. This assumes that they get to fire and that such a swarm can even get within range of a Star Destroyer.

“Onyx shattered and the surface exploded into space. Obscured by layers of dust and fire, a blazing pattern of lines emerged from beneath: crosses and lines and dots. … The view on screen blinked and stepped closer-past boiling air, clouds, tumbling mountains- zooming to ground level, revealing a lattice of three meter long rods and half meter blazing red spheres that hovered between them, forming a crystalline structure. … The view pulled back and showed that this drone constructed scaffolding stretched over kilometers. . .they had been under every landmass, every ocean… under the entire surface, ordered linked rows like carbon bonds of an infinite polymer chain, or an immense colony of living, interlinked army ants. The drones were the planet Onyx. “There are trillions of them,” (GoO 377/8)

I dispute these numbers and would ask that you do the math showing that the entire planet under the crust was a solid ball of sentinels. I will also dispute dialogue as evidence as Halo characters are known to screw up what is and isn't beyond visual range and describe an exploding ball of plasma as a Super Nova.

So now we know that one forerunner shield world is actually trillions of sentinels. Lets try to determine how many trillion. The forerunner sentinels are described to be the planet onyx, so we can assume it is mostly drone. In fact, no mantle is described in the scene and onyx has no tectonic activity, so we can assume onyx is made up of a crust and drones. On earth, the crust makes up around 1% of the total volume of the planet, so I will assume that onyx is 99% drone.

This is a poor assumption, please prove that the planet aside from the crust was made entirely of sentinels. There is no reason to assume this.

The earth’s volume is 1.08321*10^15 m^3. Assuming Onyx has the same volume as the earth and that drones can be modeled as spheres with radius 1.75m, and using the sphere volume formula (4/3)*pi*r^3, we can calculated the number of sentinels as roughly 4.82513985*10^13, or 48.25 trillion sentinels.

Please show me how you are getting the fact that 100% of onxy that isn't crust is drones? Until you do so I will not accept these numbers. You also need to show that these drones are capable of moving faster than light at high enough speeds to threaten a Star Destroyer.

Now, with the information that 11,368 206,888,878 sentinels (or 232 4,222,222 supersentinels) are needed to take out an ISD, simple division states that the sentinels of one forerunner shield world have the energy capacity to destroy 4,244,493,183 233,216 imperial 2 type star destroyers. However, since there are only 25,000 star destroyers, forerunners using one shield world’s complement of sentinels can allocate 1,930,055,940 sentinels, or 39,388,896 supersentinels (with a few extra regular ones) to each ISD.

You may, at the highest end, have enough firepower to do the job, but to defeat a Star Dreadnought will take 422,222,222 super sentinels or 20,688,888,889 sentinels and to defeat the death star you would need 55,555,555,555,555,555,556 super sentinels or 2,722,222,222,222,222,222,244 sentinels, something even your highest end calculations fail to show existing. Thus by simply sending the Death Star to any suspected shield world the Empire can't lose.

Many imperial loyalists, however, will note that the ISDs will undoubtedly shoot back. This is all well and good, and I even calculated using a 1000 sentinel strong supersentinel’s resistance to energy projectors that one hit from one of my ISD’s average power turbolasers will destroy said sentinel. You can see why I averaged out the power among all of the lasers earlier, to give the ISD an advantage, since light turbolasers are now effective. However, the sheer number of sentinels mean that even an ISD with 70 one hit kill turbolasers does not have a chance.

An ISD has many more light guns than heavy guns you retard. Also Wookiepedia's numbers for the numbers of weapons on an ISD-1 or ISD-II are wrong. Looking at the model an ISD-I has only a few very heavy guns, lucky for use as I have shown even point defense lasers will defeat all but the most massive super drone balls and that assumes that them linking provides a linear shield increase. Thus many hundreds of light guns will, this doesn't even mention escort vessels or fighters each capable of dealing damage to your drones.

First off, we need the firing rate. From the beginning of A New Hope, we see about 15 turbo laser shots from the time frame 1:58 to 2:03. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASYW3P3t208) Assuming that this all comes from one turbolaser (which it obviously doesn’t, but I’m feeling generous), we see that a turbolaser can fire at a rate of 3 shots/sec. This means an entire ISD can fire at a rate of 210 shots/sec, and assuming perfect accuracy, destroy 210 supersentinels/sec. Remember that it takes 232 supersentinels to destroy an ISD in one salvo, so our ISD needs to destroy all but 231 or 39,388,665 for victory in the name of the emporer. The time it take to do this would come out to 187,565 sec or 52.1 hrs or 2.17 days. So, congratulations ISD, if less than 232 out of 40 million supersentinels get a shot off in 2.17 days, you win.

Given that you need millions of super sentinels to hurt a lone ISD the gunners can't possibly miss these super sentinels also firing down into the planet as they boil forth will kill many millions per shot lowering numbers further.

Not convinced yet? By act of Q all 25,000 ISDs are replaced by executer class star dreadnoughts. Using the already mentioned shield strength of an executor, it will take 9500 supersentinels to take one out. An executer class has 4750 TLs, (500 of these are point defense laser cannons but honestly it doesn’t matter). http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Executor ... readnought . Keeping all assumptions of the ISD, an executor class star dreadnought can kill 14,250 supersentinels/sec. It needs to kill all but 9499 or 39379166 supersentinels (note that for this I’m not even giving the sentinels the chance to fire more than once). To do this, the executor has to last 2763 seconds, or 46 minutes. So unless it takes 46 minutes for .02% of the forerunner force to fire, our 25,000 executer strong uber empire loses quite handily.

Bullshit as I have shown it takes billions of drones to kill a Star Dreadnought.

If imperial loyalists have any argument left, it will be there hyperdrive. It is fast, extremely fast. According to Solauren’s post in this debate, imperial hyperdrive allows their ships to travel at least 10,000 Ly/hr. Is it enough? No I don’t think so. In the final battle of the forerunner flood war, flood turned forerunner AI mendicant bias tries to reach the ark to preserve the flood from the firing of the halo arrays. In the sixth and seventh terminals of halo 3, (you can read it here: I recommend reading the seventh first, then the sixth, as this is chronologically correct http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Terminals) mendicant bias’s fleet engages the forerunner defenders of the maginot sphere under offensive bias in an attempt to reach the ark and stop the activation of the halo array. On the sixth terminal, a countdown to the activation of the ring is given at various points throughout the battle. At the beginning, if the battle, it is stated that the rings will fire in 12hr20min. For the most conservative estimation of forerunner ftl, we assume that mendicant bias does not expect a battle to occur and therefore thinks it will be a straight run to the portal to the ark. If this were the case, it would take a maximum of 12hr20 min to reach the ark, although in reality less, because he has to deactivate it when he gets there. Using this estimate, it takes 12hr20min to travel 2^18 LY, meaning forerunner portal ftl can reach up to 21,254.92ly/hr, which is twice the speed of an imperial hyperdrive. However, if mendicant bias expected a battle, which is very likely, and still expected to have time to reach the ark and disable it, it would suggest that forerunner ftl is even faster than this estimate. This also assumes that the battle takes place over earth, which was never stated, and if it does not, then mendicant bias has an even longer distance to travel before reaching the ark.

Of course 10,000 ly/hour is not an upper bound of hyperdrive speeds. Coruscant to Mustafar was done in under an hour and covered at least ten thousand light years. You also can't show that drones have the capability to match these speeds so your point doesn't matter anyway. I also don't see where you are finding your distances in your calculations and this casts doubt on your numbers.

Ok, to sum it up, the security drones that make up one forerunner shield world have the capability to destroy an imperial fleet as powerful as 25,000 executer star dreadnoughts and most likely still have trillions of drones intact. The only hope the imperials really have is their hyperdrive, and this hope really stems from the fact that the forerunner ftl capabilities are largely unknown. However, if my interpretation of the terminals holds any merit, then even this advantage is nullified 2 to 1 at the most conservative. To me, the empire in this forum is something of a bully. After kicking trek’s ass it thinks it’s the biggest kid in the playground, but in my opinion the forerunners prove that there is always someone bigger.

To sum things up, Jake is a retard. You also fail to note that we admit that many universes such as the Culture and Lensmen would curb stomp the GE.

Taz, you're next but my anti-retard capabilities need to recharge after that barrage of stupid.

Night_stalker, I agree, I'm not sure why I continue posting as the idiots here will never learn anyway.

[Xess]

The problem is that the book numbers are extremely hard to reconcile with what we see in the games. We have a flood pod punching through the hull of a covenant ship while it displays none of the properties we'd expect of even a hypersonic velocity let alone the thousands of kps that would be required for it to be as energetic as the teraton or so MAC shots of which two are required to do the same in the novels.

We have UNSC frigates shooting at the Keyship with megaton range weapons in the games. Why would they lower the yield by 5 or 6 orders of magnitude when the fate of the entire human species rests on taking out the Keyship, which for all the people in charge knew at the time would activate the Halos killing everyone everywhere? It's better to destroy Africa and start a nuclear winter, survivable with their tech, then face certain annihilation from the Halos. Pulling "Forerunner mystery tech" to explain away what we see is absolutely useless. Especially in "The Storm", since the portal that messed with the UNSC ships wasn't even active when the MAC shots were fired.

That's why Norade is disputing Scenario 3. Not because he's trolling for the Empire. And by the way Norade, in Halo 3 the UNSC ships shoot the Keyship but don't destroy it. They may have damaged it though as it wasn't in the fight for the Ark. I can't remember the mission dialogue that brings it up.

[Norade]

Then in that regard I am mistaken, I merely saw the scene that had it utterly engulfed in fire. That is the issue with analyzing these things out of context, at times, but it really doesn't change anything.

[Srelex]

As a side-note, hasn't there been a glimpse of space combat in one of the recent Halo Reach videos? If it would be considered helpful, I could dredge up a link...

[Norade]

Maybe, but until the game comes out it is promotional material and thus the lowest form of canon.

[Srelex]

It's an actual gameplay video. Then again, I guess you're right that it may be different in the final version.

[kouchpotato]

Said video was a demo of actual gameplay, but some parts are confirmed to be scripted in it and will be different for the final version.

Additionally, in regards to the actual debate, the Forerunner's have made/moved a star to a location several hundred thousand light years from the Milky Way. I don't think the Empire has displayed those capabilities.

[Invader Taz]

Give it a rest, you can't argue with stupid.

I am not arguing with stupid. I am showing that any contradictions between the books and games can be reconciled. So instead of saying I’m stupid point out flaws here and tell me if there is anything I have missed.

Let me go over this here: Start at the games and work down to the books, next take all canon events into account, compare them to the games and see that if what appear to be contradictions are contradictions between the two canon tiers.

Halo 2 - “I’m going loud.” Orbital Defense Platform Cairo and nearby ships open fire on approaching Covenant fleet. There is no sign of Covenant ships in visual range at this point. The nearby ships (ranging from frigates at 450 odd meters to the massive 1190 meter Marathon Cruisers) fire projectiles that are barely doing above 1 kilometer/s and there is still no sign of Covenant ships. Now it makes no sense for the UNSC fleet to be firing when the Covenant ships are clearly far beyond their effective range to hit a target given the Covenant ships can easily accelerate out of the way of such slow moving projectiles. This scene is clearly internally inconsistent at this time because the Covenant ships are still BvR once they enter the kill zone (which if we go with the projectile speeds and assume they are indeed MAC guns, which they may not be given at least some are fired from the side, can no be more than 7-8 kilometers and is more likely several kilometers shorter otherwise the Covenant ships would effortlessly dodge such slow moving objects).

Conclusions on the Halo 2 battle: It is an extreme low end and nothing more if we go purely by the speed of the projectiles and ignore the fact we can not see the Covenant ships. Until a novel comes out or we get dialogue/new cut scene that gives us the range at which the Covenant ships were at this can not be used.

Halo 3: The Storm - “All ships fire at well.” Admiral Hood giving orders to fire upon the Forerunner Keyship at close range. Now as already mention Hood would be doing this to provide cover to his ships so they can survive, long enough hopefully, to get off more than a single volley before being destroyed by the Covenant fleet. Now for the really leap: Did the Portal have an effect already on the UNSC ships just before it had a visible effect? That is the real question and it can not be answered with any certainty. But it does have support in canon based on MAC gun recharge times of 30-60 seconds. We see the frigates fire multiple shots in the span of a couple of seconds which lends support to the Portal being up to something given the consistent 30-60 second charge times for full power shots throughout the books.

Conclusions on the Halo 3 Cut Scene at the end of The Storm: This one is on shaky ground. The only thing that supports the Portal having any effect before it becoming visibly activate is the MAC fire rate. But it does solve the problem of any contradictions and reconciles lower and higher canon.

Halo 3: The Ark - “Ship Master! They outnumber us three to one!” - “Then it is a fair fight. All cruisers fire at well! Burn their mongrel hides!” A minor Elite reporting to the Ship/Fleet Master as they exit the Slipspace portal above the Ark near the Brute Fleet. Now is this conclusive on combat ranges? No. The Brute and Elite Ship/Fleet Masters have a very good reason to get into close range against each other as we see in GoO: The ability to take control of an enemy’s plasma torpedoes and turn them against back to impact the enemy. This is seen in the book being used by both Elites and Brutes in the battle near Delta Halo when a pair of Brute frigates engages a Reverence class-Cruiser and after the Reverence dodges behind a carrier, the Brute frigates move around it and the Incorruptible fired plasma torpedoes which were intercepted by a counter field, the frigates fought with the Incorruptible over control of the torpedoes until finally the Incorruptible reprogrammed the torpedoes to home in on the tracking signals from the frigates. Depending on how fast plasma torpedoes can be accelerated getting in close between their own ship types makes sense so you don’t end up in a drawn out tug of war - especially when the enemy outnumbers you three to one.

Conclusions: Its a battle between Covenant ships, given their ability to redirect plasma at each other it makes sense for the Elite Ship Master to get in close as fast as he can to make it harder to redirect the plasma before it hits.

Halo 3: The Covenant - “By the Gods! Brace for impact!” Elite Ship/Fleet Master as High Charity arrives from Slipspace several thousand kilometers away. Multiple Flood Dispersal Pod falls off of High Charity and fall through the atmosphere of the Ark at several thousand kilometers per second without any sign of burning up as you would expect and one heads right at the Shadow of Intent… and suddenly slows down to several kilometers per second also without any signs of burning up as you would expect and guts the carrier, next at 1-2 seconds when you look at the left side of the prow another Flood Pod simply bounces off the hull. We also see another smaller Pod near the end of the scene make a sudden sharp change in course right into the tower were the Master Chief is. Nothing that small before in Halo canon has ever shown the ability to do that. Ever. I do not recall even larger ships of any type managing to pull that sort of maneuver off besides UNSC ships with their massive Emergency Thrusters.

Conclusions: The Cut scene makes no sense really and is unreliable because it is not internally self-consistent, and the Shadow of Intent may have taken an unknown amount of damage to the hull in the battle above the Ark. At best we get a low-mid end here for an unshielded (no shield flare) Covenant Assault Carrier.

Now if I missed anything or misremembered an event here please point it out. As far as I can see the two canon tiers can be reconciled. Am I forcing the books on the games? No. I look and see if they can be RECONCILED. Which they clearly can be.

Except you haven't actually debated my numbers, you have not shown that my numbers are wrong nor addressed the fact that the books and encyclopedia are wrong about each battle shown in the game. As admitted by Invader Taz they also fail to get dates right as well therefore making them unreliable sources and meaning we should check our numbers with the games before drawing conclusions.

Scenario One: Forerunner vessels are low GT at best using Halo mid-low ends for Covenant and UNSC.

Scenario Two: Firepower and defense wise Forerunner ships are equal to SW vessels of similar size.

Scenario Three: We scale from Halo Enc. numbers and the OVS seen in GoO.

Scenario Three I believe is very clear: So please stop trolling now or be reported. Really, I agreed going strictly by the games alone this goes to the Empire, but you seem fix on just trolling what I expected would be an interesting debate.

Also just because it gets the dates wrong does not invalidate the entire source.

Except that visual evidence > dialogue you hat fucker. We see a Super Mac fire in Halo 2 and it is not going at .04% of c let alone 40% and in that scene it has no reason not to be firing all out so you are clearly wrong.

Visual evidence also tells us that the Covenant ships being fired at are BvR. Care to explain how we miss the giant fucking 5346 meter long Assault Carriers, that must be moving along at very sluggish speeds to even be able to be hit by something moving at barely over 1 kilometer per second appear several kilometers away? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

I don't need to show they were firing at full power, I simply need to show that they destroyer a shielded ship thus showing there is no reason for them to have a higher firepower mode while also showing the weak as piss nature of Covenant technology. The flood pod, and scenes from Halo 2, where in the ships shots must be doing damage as you don't fire a weapon at an enemy vehicle that can never do damage (ie. firing a machine gun at an M1 Abrams because your tank's main gun is reloading). Lastly I will not debate scenario three until you can prove that it uses numbers consitant with the firepower shown in the games, so enjoy debating nothing while conceding to me.

So how come we do not see the Covenant ships? Given their massive size we should see them at the effective ranges of weapons moving barely above 1 kilometer per second. Also I’m sorry but I believe how I described Scenario Three proves you either lack the critical reading skills you need for this debate (my one mistake Vs how many of yours now?) or are trolling.

As Invader Taz has proven himself to be a liar and an idiot I demand that you quote your sources. I will not debate you any further otherwise.

Quote me, right now, where I lied.

I dispute these numbers and would ask that you do the math showing that the entire planet under the crust was a solid ball of sentinels. I will also dispute dialogue as evidence as Halo characters are known to screw up what is and isn't beyond visual range and describe an exploding ball of plasma as a Super Nova.

1. Please quote where they have screwed up what is and what isn’t beyond visual range.

2. Quote please where they described an exploding mini-star as a super nova given that is what I called it, not them. I only used what canon gave me from the Encyclopedia.

Night_stalker, I agree, I'm not sure why I continue posting as the idiots here will never learn anyway.

Maybe if you had the necessary reading skills to understand what I say and properly reply and point out where I am making mistakes I would see any mistakes I have made.

And don’t give me any BS about snipping your post because I simply answered what was relevant to my post.

@Jake: Those FTL speeds for the Forerunner are far to high. One of the things the Predecessors are mention to specifically have as a sign of their greatness was easy inter-galactic travel. The Flood needed the Ark Portal if they expected to get there to stop the Array in time.

The problem is that the book numbers are extremely hard to reconcile with what we see in the games. We have a flood pod punching through the hull of a covenant ship while it displays none of the properties we'd expect of even a hypersonic velocity let alone the thousands of kps that would be required for it to be as energetic as the teraton or so MAC shots of which two are required to do the same in the novels.

I completely agree. But if you don't have to throw out canon the better really. Though where in the novels do we see it requires two MAC rounds to go through an unshielded Covenant ship? As I recall the second MAC round that hit the Kig-yar ship in TFoR hit along the mid line broke through it's already weaken shields and went right through it and out the other side.

Pulling "Forerunner mystery tech" to explain away what we see is absolutely useless. Especially in "The Storm", since the portal that messed with the UNSC ships wasn't even active when the MAC shots were fired.

And that is why I said it is on shaky ground above. The real problem as I said is the fact we don't kow if the portal may have already started to become active before we see the effects take place.

That's why Norade is disputing Scenario 3. Not because he's trolling for the Empire.

Will it still seems like trolling to me really given Scenario 3 is cut and clear on the sources to be used for it. Forerunners scaling by games alone get stomped. Forerunners scaling from Onyx and Enc. makes the debate interesting at least.

Now its time for me to go to bed. Please point out if I missed anything.

[Norade]

Give it a rest, you can't argue with stupid.

I am not arguing with stupid. I am showing that any contradictions between the books and games can be reconciled. So instead of saying I’m stupid point out flaws here and tell me if there is anything I have missed.

You're not doing the greatest job at it ace. I'll respond to this post and then the one you posted earlier.

Let me go over this here: Start at the games and work down to the books, next take all canon events into account, compare them to the games and see that if what appear to be contradictions are contradictions between the two canon tiers.

That's the way it should work, but in each case you seem to look at the book, look at the game, look at the book again, point to a flaw that wouldn't exist if the book didn't.

Halo 2 - “I’m going loud.” Orbital Defense Platform Cairo and nearby ships open fire on approaching Covenant fleet. There is no sign of Covenant ships in visual range at this point. The nearby ships (ranging from frigates at 450 odd meters to the massive 1190 meter Marathon Cruisers) fire projectiles that are barely doing above 1 kilometer/s and there is still no sign of Covenant ships.

This is exactly what the game play shows so how do you plan to discard this? We look at evidence as if it was shot by a person on the scene unless a source that is higher or equal canon gives us reason to discard it. We have no reason to do so in this case.

Now it makes no sense for the UNSC fleet to be firing when the Covenant ships are clearly far beyond their effective range to hit a target given the Covenant ships can easily accelerate out of the way of such slow moving projectiles. This scene is clearly internally inconsistent at this time because the Covenant ships are still BvR once they enter the kill zone (which if we go with the projectile speeds and assume they are indeed MAC guns, which they may not be given at least some are fired from the side, can no be more than 7-8 kilometers and is more likely several kilometers shorter otherwise the Covenant ships would effortlessly dodge such slow moving objects).

Given that in the scenes we see them firing in MC is close enough to jump from a ship to a Covenant ship I can safely say you're full of shit. The easier explanation, and the one which allows us to keep our primary source of evidence, is that the Covenant fleet is just off camera and our view only shows us the UNSC fleet.

Conclusions on the Halo 2 battle: It is an extreme low end and nothing more if we go purely by the speed of the projectiles and ignore the fact we can not see the Covenant ships. Until a novel comes out or we get dialogue/new cut scene that gives us the range at which the Covenant ships were at this can not be used.

Except that as it is one of the highest forms of canon we must use it over books. Even if we don't know the range the Covenant at, and as I have showed they don't need to be far, the shots are still highest form canon and we can scale firepower from them.

Halo 3: The Storm - “All ships fire at well will.” Admiral Hood giving orders to fire upon the Forerunner Keyship at close range. Now as already mention Hood would be doing this to provide cover to his ships so they can survive, long enough hopefully, to get off more than a single volley before being destroyed by the Covenant fleet.

This would mean that it would be imperative for them to fire with the most firepower they can. That they can only manage in the low megatons or high kilotons speaks volumes. That it does damage says even more.

Now for the really leap: Did the Portal have an effect already on the UNSC ships just before it had a visible effect?

Unless you can find proof then you're shit out of luck and as there is currently none your theory is shit and violates Occam's Razor as it introduces an unneeded component as well as violates the numbers calculated from Halo 2.

That is the real question and it can not be answered with any certainty.

You have no proof so quit talking out your ass.

But it does have support in canon based on MAC gun recharge times of 30-60 seconds. We see the frigates fire multiple shots in the span of a couple of seconds which lends support to the Portal being up to something given the consistent 30-60 second charge times for full power shots throughout the books.

Or maybe the books are full of shit there too, that or they fired more weaker shots would do well enough to kill or heavily damage the Covenant vessel. In any case they had no reason not to fire a full powered shot first followed by weaker ones to finish it once the shields are down. As we don't see this we must assume that they were either firing at full power, or they expected more weaker shots to deal damage. Either option is damning.

Conclusions on the Halo 3 Cut Scene at the end of The Storm: This one is on shaky ground. The only thing that supports the Portal having any effect before it becoming visibly activate is the MAC fire rate. But it does solve the problem of any contradictions and reconciles lower and higher canon.

Except that the goal is to analyze the scene as we see, not add details until it fits with lesser canon. So you fail at two things here, making an argument and following standrd methods of analyzing sci-fi based on visual evidence and a tiered canon policy.

Halo 3: The Ark - “Ship Master! They outnumber us three to one!” - “Then it is a fair fight. All cruisers fire at well! Burn their mongrel hides!” A minor Elite reporting to the Ship/Fleet Master as they exit the Slipspace portal above the Ark near the Brute Fleet. Now is this conclusive on combat ranges? No. The Brute and Elite Ship/Fleet Masters have a very good reason to get into close range against each other as we see in GoO: The ability to take control of an enemy’s plasma torpedoes and turn them against back to impact the enemy.

This shows that they can't fight nearly as effectively at longer ranges. It also fits with ranges seen in Halo 2 and other parts of Halo 3.

This is seen in the book being used by both Elites and Brutes in the battle near Delta Halo when a pair of Brute frigates engages a Reverence class-Cruiser and after the Reverence dodges behind a carrier, the Brute frigates move around it and the Incorruptible fired plasma torpedoes which were intercepted by a counter field, the frigates fought with the Incorruptible over control of the torpedoes until finally the Incorruptible reprogrammed the torpedoes to home in on the tracking signals from the frigates.

These systems would likely fail to the massive ECM and ECCM the GE would bring to each battle and be near impossible to burn through given the lesser power generation numbers shown for Halo.

Depending on how fast plasma torpedoes can be accelerated getting in close between their own ship types makes sense so you don’t end up in a drawn out tug of war - especially when the enemy outnumbers you three to one.

It might also be because the munitions travel so slowly that they have issues hitting or being countered at longer ranges.

Conclusions: Its a battle between Covenant ships, given their ability to redirect plasma at each other it makes sense for the Elite Ship Master to get in close as fast as he can to make it harder to redirect the plasma before it hits.

This scene shows that Covenant ships fire slow and easily hacked AI driven weapons and must fight at close range for best effect.

Halo 3: The Covenant - “By the Gods! Brace for impact!” Elite Ship/Fleet Master as High Charity arrives from Slipspace several thousand kilometers away.

Funny, scaling it it can't be that far away as it would appear far smaller than the closer ship in the scene. This is clearly not the case; thus you're once again full of shit.

Multiple Flood Dispersal Pod falls off of High Charity and fall through the atmosphere of the Ark at several thousand kilometers per second without any sign of burning up as you would expect and one heads right at the Shadow of Intent… and suddenly slows down to several kilometers per second also without any signs of burning up as you would expect and guts the carrier, next at 1-2 seconds when you look at the left side of the prow another Flood Pod simply bounces off the hull.

Seeing as your claim of distances is bunk we can ignore this as more ass pulling. Also, the pod that bounces off is tiny compared to the other pod and hit with a different angle. This is a better explanation than simply trying to throw out evidence which can never be done if from a primary source.

We also see another smaller Pod near the end of the scene make a sudden sharp change in course right into the tower were the Master Chief is. Nothing that small before in Halo canon has ever shown the ability to do that. Ever. I do not recall even larger ships of any type managing to pull that sort of maneuver off besides UNSC ships with their massive Emergency Thrusters.

It actually hits something, breaks up, and bounces. There is no course change before that so once again you're full of shit and anybody watching can see that.

Conclusions: The Cut scene makes no sense really and is unreliable because it is not internally self-consistent, and the Shadow of Intent may have taken an unknown amount of damage to the hull in the battle above the Ark. At best we get a low-mid end here for an unshielded (no shield flare) Covenant Assault Carrier.

I have shown that your assumption of inconsistency is bunk and no matter what we do not throw out primary canon evidence in favor of things from books. You can't show how much damage it has taken and, as seen in Halo Wars, not all shield interactions are visible.

Now if I missed anything or misremembered an event here please point it out. As far as I can see the two canon tiers can be reconciled. Am I forcing the books on the games? No. I look and see if they can be RECONCILED. Which they clearly can be.

Except that trying to reconcile firepower numbers more than 10,000x different clearly doesn't work. You also constantly try to dismiss primary evidence as outliers or inconsistent when anybody can see this isn't the case.

Scenario One: Forerunner vessels are low GT at best using Halo mid-low ends for Covenant and UNSC.

This makes sense.

Scenario Two: Firepower and defense wise Forerunner ships are equal to SW vessels of similar size.

Provide proof as to why this should be the case.

Scenario Three: We scale from Halo Enc. numbers and the OVS seen in GoO.

Except that these numbers are bunk as the book they are from is so very wrong on many things. Thus until you can show it to be even close to events shown in the games I shall ignore it.

Scenario Three I believe is very clear: So please stop trolling now or be reported. Really, I agreed going strictly by the games alone this goes to the Empire, but you seem fix on just trolling what I expected would be an interesting debate.

I'm quaking, pussy is going to report me. Save yourself the effort, they won't give as shit seeing as Ghost Rider could have shut me down already if I was trolling. Instesd he told you to shut up with the shit and provide proof to claims and did the same to NS. You have done neither slavishly reposting and demanding I debate the book. This is a goalpost shift, your OP doesn't mention any books so fuck off you retarded cock eating ass raped son of a herpes infested semen receptacle.

Also just because it gets the dates wrong does not invalidate the entire source.

It also gets the way battles are shown in the books wrong and gets firepower grossly wrong, but your dishonest ass likes to ignore this fact.

Except that visual evidence > dialogue you hat fucker. We see a Super Mac fire in Halo 2 and it is not going at .04% of c let alone 40% and in that scene it has no reason not to be firing all out so you are clearly wrong.

Visual evidence also tells us that the Covenant ships being fired at are BvR. Care to explain how we miss the giant fucking 5346 meter long Assault Carriers, that must be moving along at very sluggish speeds to even be able to be hit by something moving at barely over 1 kilometer per second appear several kilometers away? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

I have already done so. Also, even if the Covenant are far away it doesn't change the fact that in an ambush where the humans are fighting all out these weak as piss shots are what gets fired. Stop trying to ignore evidence and provide sources for your higher firepower from the games.

I don't need to show they were firing at full power, I simply need to show that they destroyer a shielded ship thus showing there is no reason for them to have a higher firepower mode while also showing the weak as piss nature of Covenant technology. The flood pod, and scenes from Halo 2, where in the ships shots must be doing damage as you don't fire a weapon at an enemy vehicle that can never do damage (ie. firing a machine gun at an M1 Abrams because your tank's main gun is reloading). Lastly I will not debate scenario three until you can prove that it uses numbers consitant with the firepower shown in the games, so enjoy debating nothing while conceding to me.

So how come we do not see the Covenant ships? Given their massive size we should see them at the effective ranges of weapons moving barely above 1 kilometer per second. Also I’m sorry but I believe how I described Scenario Three proves you either lack the critical reading skills you need for this debate (my one mistake Vs how many of yours now?) or are trolling.

Scenario three is a goalpost shit, your OP never specified the books and again see above for why the Halo 2 scene still works. It also does nothing to help you if we toss that scene as we have two others in the same range to go by.

As Invader Taz has proven himself to be a liar and an idiot I demand that you quote your sources. I will not debate you any further otherwise.

Quote me, right now, where I lied.

You lie about what is shown on screen in cutscenes, shift goalposts faster than anybody, and refuse to accept evidence prefering to try and nitpick reasons to ignore it or trying to add things to the scene which can't be proven.

I dispute these numbers and would ask that you do the math showing that the entire planet under the crust was a solid ball of sentinels. I will also dispute dialogue as evidence as Halo characters are known to screw up what is and isn't beyond visual range and describe an exploding ball of plasma as a Super Nova.

1. Please quote where they have screwed up what is and what isn’t beyond visual range.

The battle in Halo 2, we clearly see ships within visual range as evidence by MC jumping to one with a bomb in hand.

2. Quote please where they described an exploding mini-star as a super nova given that is what I called it, not them. I only used what canon gave me from the Encyclopedia.

I may have been mistaken there, but if it is called a Super Nova by them they are dumb as are you for repeating it as fact. If not it is just you who are dumb.

Night_stalker, I agree, I'm not sure why I continue posting as the idiots here will never learn anyway.

Maybe if you had the necessary reading skills to understand what I say and properly reply and point out where I am making mistakes I would see any mistakes I have made.

And don’t give me any BS about snipping your post because I simply answered what was relevant to my post.

I have pointed out a few such as ignoring sections of my posts, lying about what is going on in cutscenes and shift goalposts. All of these make you either a retard, a lair, or a coward.

@Jake: Those FTL speeds for the Forerunner are far to high. One of the things the Predecessors are mention to specifically have as a sign of their greatness was easy inter-galactic travel. The Flood needed the Ark Portal if they expected to get there to stop the Array in time.

Finally a point that makes sense.

The problem is that the book numbers are extremely hard to reconcile with what we see in the games. We have a flood pod punching through the hull of a covenant ship while it displays none of the properties we'd expect of even a hypersonic velocity let alone the thousands of kps that would be required for it to be as energetic as the teraton or so MAC shots of which two are required to do the same in the novels.

I completely agree. But if you don't have to throw out canon the better really. Though where in the novels do we see it requires two MAC rounds to go through an unshielded Covenant ship? As I recall the second MAC round that hit the Kig-yar ship in TFoR hit along the mid line broke through it's already weaken shields and went right through it and out the other side.

No, that is not how canon works. You don't try to fold canon that is blatantly not fitting back in, you ignore it and move on.

Pulling "Forerunner mystery tech" to explain away what we see is absolutely useless. Especially in "The Storm", since the portal that messed with the UNSC ships wasn't even active when the MAC shots were fired.

And that is why I said it is on shaky ground above. The real problem as I said is the fact we don't kow if the portal may have already started to become active before we see the effects take place.

Then why mention it at all?

That's why Norade is disputing Scenario 3. Not because he's trolling for the Empire.

Will it still seems like trolling to me really given Scenario 3 is cut and clear on the sources to be used for it. Forerunners scaling by games alone get stomped. Forerunners scaling from Onyx and Enc. makes the debate interesting at least.

Scenario three is a goalpost shit using a book that violates canon in many ways and I refuse to debate it until you finish this debate.

Now its time for me to go to bed. Please point out if I missed anything.

May you never wake again you waste of flesh and bandwidth.

[Norade]

Because you have no evidence to show why we should even consider the higher end based on in game cutscenes.

My fucking thread idiot. I am the OP and have set up three Scenarios because you whine I can't do that to make an interesting debate becasue... I guess Star Wars might lose instead of a curbstomp. Or something. Or your doing is trolling at this point it seems.

Scenarios added after the fact count as goalpost shifting fucker.

Except that as shown in the collision scene from Halo wars those flashes don't always show up so that proves nothing.

Prove the fucking shields were up first. Given that Covenant ship wasn't in combat and the SoF took it by surprise it is more likely the shields were be down. Occam’s Razor favors me here given every other time shields are hit they flare.

Halo canon policy favors me as newer overwrites older. Also, why would a Covenant ship in a battle zone have shields down?

The same goes for the Spartan versus Elite fight from the same game as we know elites should have shields.

I'll have to watch the cutscene again later but as I recall they clearly didn't have shields on for some strange reason.

That or they just changed them to be skin hugging with no glow. As they have shields in all other sources this is the best way to go.

Except I'm not wanking, we know exactly how much firepower an ISD can put out and you can't show any numbers for a Forerunner vessel. Please provide one firm number or one scene we can calculate the power of a Forerunner vessel from. If you can't all we have to go by is the calculations that can be done for durability based on Covenant ships as they use much the same tech. Even if we assume Covenant ships are 100x better than a Covenant ship in toughness we get single digit gigatons at best based on the scenes that we see in the games, and that is at the high end.

The quotes on what happen to the Covenant Destroyers in GoO are a good place to start I'd say.

Except I dispute those numbers until you ca show them being remotely close to the numbers shown in the games.

Go fuck yourself, I have done math and you have provided nothing,

I have provided fucking quotes and links you idiot. I have pointed out how everything can easily be reconciled but you seemed to have been set on the low end retard numbers at least at first. Appears you have realized just how retarded it is for MAC's to be sub-KT.

Your reconciliations require outright magic or ignoring visual evidence so you can fuck off with that BS.

nor disputed the energy calculations that Srelex and I have put forth.

Your math is right. I dispute that these cuts scenes are accurate for anything but low to mid end because they two of them are not self-consistent and the other one is possibly being effected by a Forerunner relic.

I have shown all of this to be bullshit. Next!

You simply try to find any alternative you can to prove that the games have the same firepower as the books when it doesn't work that way.

Apparently you don’t have the reading skills needed to understand the English language and what I am saying: YOU TAKE INTO ACCOUNT ALL OF CANON AND WHERE THERE ARE CONTRADICTIONS YOU FIRST TRY AND RECONCILE THEM WITH HIGHER CANON BEFORE THROWING THEM OUT. I HAVE FOUND HOW EVERYTHING YOU HAVE PUT UP SO FAR CAN RECONCILE AND ALL YOU DO IS SAY WE SHOULD IGNORE THE BOOKS WITHOUT FIRST SEEING IF IT CAN BE RECONCILED WITH HIGHER CANON.

Except as I have said that is not how it works. As the books are nowhere close to the games firepower wise it is safe to toss their firepower numbers.

[quote

]We have to evaluate the books based on what we see in the games dipshit, yet you can't seem to get that simple point. I also could give a shit less about your shitty OP that nobody even discussed.

No numskull, you look at all of canon and try and reconcile both canon tiers first. If that proves impossible then higher canon wins. So far you have put up nothing that can not be reconciled. But given how dense your skull is and the lack of reading skills I expect you to not get the point.[/quote]

A 10,000x gap in firepower can;t be reconciled. Next!

Please explain how my firepower numbers derived from the Halo to scene was wrong?

The math is accurate but based upon a scene that is not internally self-consistent. When Cortana goes loud the UNSC fleet opens up at the same time and the Covenant ships are STILL BvR. Care to explain how these slow ass rounds can possibly hit anything at BvR without the crew of the Covenant ships being retarded beyond what we see in Trek and having the most piss poor acceleration in all of Sci-fi?

I have shown that the Covenant need not be as far away as you claim and shown proof from later in the same scene that they aren't that far away. No matter what you claim we can't ignore that scene as you suggest.

You claim of missiles or rockets is false as we don't see them accelerate once fired so they must be simple none powered projectiles of some kind. As they must be slugs of some kind, please show how my math is wrong with simple retorting with 'outlier' and using the books to claim higher numbers must be the norm.

All I did was suggest it might be the Fusion Rockets. But I will drop it since after checking the entry on Fusion Rockets I was mistaken on their acceleration rate. Also I can simply point out how it is wrong: When the SMAC platform opens fire along with the UNSC ships around it you can't see the giant multi-kilometer Covenant ships still.

Yeah, retard concedes a point! As for the SMAC's we may just have a bad angle on things.

Also which scene, the flood pod or the scene with three UNSC ships firing Mac guns?

The scene with the Keyship being fired upon.

That is shown to be around 100 megatons of energy put in at most.

They aren't the only explanation for a larger fireball.

Fine.

Yay another point won!

2. The hull was completely intact so there is no way in which anything could be cooking off. Idiot.

Another missed quote or bad typo by retard the wonder moron.

Which scene are you talking about? I can't debate you if you won't even tell me which scene we are discussing.

It should be pretty obvious I'm taking about the scene from The Storm given the Flood pod didn't cause a fireball.

Yes, but you should still be more clear so people not following closely can still understand each point.

I ask as we have thus far used two scenes from Halo 3, one of which, doing updated calculations was showed to have a 36 megaton per shot. That is still weak as shit, even going up and unreasonable 100x more we only get 3.5 gigatons which is child's play for an ISD to kill.

And 36 Mt is ok with me going strictly by the games. But you seem to be missing the whole point his debate was suppose to have moved onto the more interesting Scenarios 2 and 3 given we BOTH agreed even at best going strictly by the games the Forerunners ultimately get Bolostomped.

You don't choose when the debate moves, that is goalpost shifting and I still dispute the numbers used in the other scenarios.

Given that I've linked to both scenes I used you must be a dishonest fucker or a retard, I'm leaning towards both. If we use the scene with three UNSC ships firing then all we see is a fireball as the ship explodes. If we go by the flood pod then we see no real explosion at all.

The goddamn Keyship was COMPLETELY INTACT after that MAC strike. Where you keep getting the idea we ever see a ship destroyed by MAC rounds in the games I do not know. And once again let us note that standard MAC charge times are 30-60 seconds so the fact they fire multiple rounds in a shot period which supports that the Portal Artifact was already putting stress on their reactors.

I was wrong about it being destroyed, but it was damaged by the shots. Also quit bring up points you can't prove in this debate.

In that case we ignore dialogue and go by what we can see, or do you not know how to debate.

So first off I guess that thoese Covenant ships were not really BvR when the SMAC platform and fleet opened fire. I also guess we assume Keyes and the UNSC's most advance AI, and later a Vice Admiral, are complete retards and were wrong all those times they mention ranges and we are given numbers for how fast they accelerate across X distance. Guess what idiot, I have reconcile the distances we have seen in the games and we even have events play out similarly in TFoR to what happens in Halo 2.

I explained the SMAC and yes we need to ignore dialogue or otherwise justify it to fit what we see on screen. You also mustn't use book scenes to throw out evidence from the games. We use the games to cut things from the books.

Hint, you don't work from a preconceived notion and then adjust the evidence to fit, you look at evidence that can be viewed and throw out the rest that doesn't fit what you can see.

Isn't that pretty much what I've been fucking saying? I look at all the evidence and we see there that Halo 2 is similar to what happens in TFoR.

No, you're throwing out scenes from Halo 2 as they don't fit dialogue or the books which isn't how things work.

Once again using book battles and dialogue to try and prove that things aren't as they are clearly shown.

Apparently I need to put this in bold and underline it so you weak eyes can understand this events play out at the start just like what happen in Halo 2:

As the fleet wasn't fighting BVR you are clearly wrong.

And gasp! There are other battles that have this exact same thing happening in TFoR where the UNSC take up position and keep a relatively stationary position against Covenant ships for a time! The start of the Second Battle of Sigma Octanus IV and the start of the Battle of Reach where they were defending the planets! Who would have thought?

That clear enough for you now? Two battles in TFoR that have a UNSC fleet in defense of a planet with the ships holding position in a specific area as ordered. Sigma Octanus IV has the UNSC fleet hold position until the Admiral gives the orders to engage at well after the Cradle sacrificed itself to protect the Fleet from the Plasma bombardment. Start of the Battle of Reach is the same except there were 2-3 repair stations moving in front of the SMAC platforms and UNSC fleet before they broke to engage at well.

Once again trying to use books to reinterpret what we see on screen in Halo 2.

You will notice the battles we see are all fought within kilometers yet hey are supposed to be BVR, looks like the dialogue was wrong.

And care to explain why we can't see the Covenant ships in Halo 2 until they have already pass by? Because we can't see anything when they open fire last I checked. So either that battle supports BvR or it doesn't. Until we get a soild number from a book or 343 on this nothing is conclusive based on that scene.

Except that the scene I showed has, moments later, MC leaping from a ship and planting a bomb in another Covenant vessel close by.

You also can't use the books to try and show that the battles in the games are outliers as they are highest tier cannon.

Halo 2 - BvR targets are being shot at with weapons fire that barely moves above a kilometer per second.

Yes, this is the case. Except that the Covenant fleet isn't BVR.

Halo 3 - Hood moves the last of the UNSC Home Fleet into close range around the Keyship so the Covenant fleet can not risk destroying him without harming the Portal. Care to explain how that would be an outlier given it is a perfectly sensible to do so you don't get shot of the air at long range?

This isn't an outlier and in fact is a great place to calc firepower from.

Halo 3 - The Covenant Separatist fleet arrives above the Ark within visual range of the Loyalist fleet. The Separatist fleet moves in to engage and provide cover to the dropships that head to the Ark. This doesn't really need to be explain given they started out at close range as it was.

Yes, but the slow speed shots and firepower are clear here and if not an outlier you need to accept these numbers as fact.

It can all be reconciled with the books. You need to understand that you don't throw out canon if it can be reconciled. Find me one event in the games that is impossible to reconcile and I will concede.

Firepower 10,000x times apart, claims of BVR when the battle clearly isn't the case, and change dates in different sources. There, I showed three.

You fail to understand that visuals ? dialogue, games > books.

No, you faill to understand that you don't throw out canon unless it is contradicted in such a way that it can not be reconciled.

Except I have shown this to be the case.

Yes but coupled with all other cases we see them fighting close and firing slow weapons.

Yeah, I think I reconciled all that really.

No, you didn't.

No matter how you cut it these weapons were fired and expected to do damage and the games show them moving very slowly by the standards of a higher end universe.

And given the number of shots fired and the rate at which they were fired my position of power already being drain by the Portal at the start of the scene can stand. The only scene at this point that stands out is Halo 2 and given the fact at least some of the rounds we see fired are not MAC rounds but lighter weapons it can still be reconile.

No, your position fails to stand as you can't prove that it is the right answer using anything but conjecture.

Still doesn't explain how such slow shots deal killing blows when, if the books have any weight at all, we see sub 40 megaton shots kill a Covenant keyship.

You truly are retarded. WHERE THE FUCK DID THE SUB 40 MT MAC ROUNDS KILL THE FORERUNNER KEYSHIP IN THAT SCENE. ANYONE THAT ISN'T BLIND CAN TELL IT WAS COMPLETELY INTACT AFTER THAT STRIKE.

We see fireballs and then we don't see a ship anymore. That looks destroyed to me champ.

As we can also see they describe scenes from the games wrongly as well so anything in them must be taken with a grain of salt.

Quote where the books have described scenes from the games wrong? And slight changes in dialogue like in The Flood is not going to carry much weight for that claim.

BVR combat not being, change dialogue, incorrect dates, and inaccurate firepower numbers for a start.

Yes, but it is not a star as a star can hold together by its own gravity and the thing you showed us couldn't. It is a ball of plasma or a fusion reaction f some sort, not a star of any kind.

Fine, I'll just refer to it as a mini-star from now on so we don't get dragged into another semantics debate.

It was an important point as it was clearly not a star as we know them.

Yes, but has it ever been tested by them?

Not until Halo Wars. The closest thing we ever got to the UNSC creating a Nova is when Colo threw a 100+ Shiva Warheads into a gas giant that was just below the threshold to become a star which caused it to explode and take out a Covenant fleet of 200-300 ships, this left the planet in question a cinder. I don't have the book myself though so if you want the quote on this I'll have to go dig out the thread it was in.

Please do dig it out. Also Halo Wars does not show them destroying a star.

Except that the characters are clearly wrong as, if your assumption about how slip space works is right it should simply suck hydrogen and energy into another dimension and that would cause the star to disappear, thus a slip space portal can't cause a Nova so it must be another effect such as destabilizing the shield that holds the plasma together.

Slipspace does strange stuff a lot of times. I completely agree here, I just recalled that in First Strike when a Slipspace portal was open in the atmopshere of the gas giant Alpha Halo orbited it sucked in some of the atmosphere.

So you concede this point. Great.

Dates are wrong, battles are described wrong, weapons yields are wrong, dates are wrong. Pretty damn much everything is wrong and thus the book can't be used as evidence. When a source gets as much wrong as it does right then you really can't use it as a source.

Point me to where it described the battles wrong (The Halo Encyclopedia as more recent canon CAN change how the events played out in the older novels such as the new versions of the first Halo trilogy coming out in a few months will) please point to where weapons yields are wrong beyond the stated MAC and SMAC speeds of 40% and 50% the Speed of Light. The only thing I have found wrong as I said is the dates, and depending on how you look at it the very retarded weapons ranges.

I have shown this above and don't care to repeat myself.

No, consider this shitty thread hijacked until you can refute a single claim I have made.

So you admit to being a troll and are now hijacking the thread? And I have shown how what we see is not conclusive.

Rereading the op you're shifting goalposts by adding new scenarios before concluding this debate.

You also can't prove how fast the slip space rifts can move,

I thought I already answered this? It is a static hole opened up in the very fabric of space-time in or near the target.

Ranges then?

how much mass they can effect,

Looking at the Terminals Forerunner Dreadnoughts are stated to be 37,000 tons.

So 37,000 tons as a known value versus an ISD-I which can, according to Wookiepedia carry 36,000 metric tons of cargo, essentially no mass compared to the size of an ISD.

or how far away from a ship they can travel.

At least hunderds to thousands of kilometers going by the books allowed in S2 and S3. And don't give me any more BS because S1 has the games overruling them (:roll:) and they don't go beyond a few kilometers because of that.

S2 and 3 are goalposts shifts with numbers in dispute, thus the only ranges we can use must be derived from scenes in the games. So we will take thousands of kilometers as a generous number compared to a maximum range for an ISD of 10 light minutes or 179,875,474.8 km.

The only thing that we do know is they take seconds to fully form. I can show numbers for Wars and you have nothing definitive even when you do try to use the Halopedia to define Forerunner tech.

I'd say at this point it is definitive enough.

So they have shit range, and can hardly effect any mass, and we still can't show them harming Wars shields. Excellent.

Except that we have seen cases where miniature black holes have been defeated. Besides, slip space can't by definition violate laws of physics so it must have limits based on energy put in, and size.

This type of Slipspace rift causes the laws of physics to break down near it. Though given what we know I agree the size is limited by how much energy the Forerunner ships could proivde for it.

Laws of physics can't break down, only be altered, and it is a no limits fallacy and plain bad physics to claim otherwise.

Sounds like they were too retarded to even do emergency drills and have plans for large scale disasters.

Yeah because an unknown enemy appearing out of nowhere with an amount of force we still know nothing about is so going to a disaster they were ready for.

Evacuating a planet should be a practiced drill as should rapid military response.

Not when they're that piss easy to beat conventionally by simply using two braincells.

Yeah, let me look at the Terminal and what happens once they have a Gravemind. Yep, their not fucking easy to beat conventionally because for each soldier you manage to put on the ground they still outnumber you a thousand to one or any other ratio.

Which is why you fight from space and have civilians evacuate.

Except that there are alive so they should be alive. What part of this is difficult?

None. What I am saying is the end results of what the Forerunner learned was that the Flood shouldn't be alived. It is nothing like any other known life form and as far they could tell.

Except that they couldn't have learn that they shouldn't be alive as they clearly are alive. It seems both you and them must share the same damaged braincell.

Yes initially they came with no tech and thus we can posit that in future invasions, should they happen they will likely do the same.

Only a fool makes that of mistake. You prepare for everything that could possible happen. That includes a second invasion that is backed up a more technological advance Flood with even more resources available at the start of the war.

Except why would you assume that the flood would do so? If they could do that why did they not do so in the first place? The US wouldn't send in naked men with muskets before sending in properly equipped soldiers. Nor would any other race or nation with a brain.

They should have nuked the first world before it spread to the point where defeat was inevitable. Thus they are retards.

The Flood first captured a science ship on an out of the way planet and from there landed on another world. The Forerunners were taken by surpise but didn't consider the Flood a great enough threat at that point to go all out and only did limited bombing at first. Of course they found out the hard way the Flood was far more deadly than they thought at first.

What you are saying here is the US should nuke one of it's major citites because there is a zombie out break without first evacuating as much as the population as possible out of the infected area.

So they critically underestimated the threat and failed to quarantine the infected world.

Also, yes quarantine and if there is now change you nuke it. In no case do you allow anything out until all signs point to no infection or no life.

There are no Forerunners anymore thus they lost after samples they were studying hacked a computer and broke out.

You are not even making sense at this point. Where did this happen? Please give me the quote to where the Forerunners lose because what they were studying broke out. MB was sent to learn the weakness of the Gravemind, a Gravemind which had an unknown but vast computing power from the minds of trillions of beings and any capture Forerunner computers/AIs. The Gravemind hack MB and turned him against them. The Forerunners mistake final mistake was overestimating how powerful their Contender class-AI was.

They were trying to study a defeated foe and it came back to bite them in the ass. That is what I was saying.

They are still limited by how fast they can expand and what fraction of the military they can take. Thus they should be easy to kill in space before they can land on a planet.

And the Flood expand fast enough at the start they couldn't keep up. The Forerunners rarely lost in space, but the Flood still manage to slip through orbiting ships by sheer numbers.

Then they should have fallen back to the next likely planets to be hit and engaged them again there or simply evacuated that world.

You find a planet hit by the flood, thus you jump to the closest worlds and look for signs of infection and start cleansing the planets. You simply need to form a ring around where you expect them to hit next and kill them before they land.

And have the Gravemind strike where your fleets are not located once it learns what you are doing. The Gravemind is not stupid.

This is the first step, after that you evacuate what you can to deny resources and scorch worlds behind you.

Funny, I'm the one doing math and not mindlessly quoting a book for all my numbers.

Funny, I'm the one who takes into account all of the canon and notes that nothing is completely conclusive.

I have shown you to be very wrong in all cases.

Well given that Occam's razor means we need to compenstae in the simplest way possible we must assume that the pods had some means of slowing themselves down instead off adding an effect never mentioned in the source or the effects of an artifact that has even less support. Quit making shit up and accept that I am doing the math the correct way and in doing so am showing the the numbers across the games are consistant.

Which of course explains why the pod did not burn up even slightly and why there was massive amount of heat visible from the sudden massive deceleration in atmosphere you would expect. And if you note I haven't said the math is wrong, I am pointing out the cut scenes we see outside of the Halo 2 one all either have Slipspace or a Forerunner relic involved in some form. And fuck off on the relic, in the scene where they attack the Keyship we see the portal have a visible effect on all the UNSC ships there.

Already addressed in the above post.

Except that the games clearly show battles, firepower, and many other things differently from the games and thus much of the books data must be discarded.

I'm sorry but I believe I manage to reconcile the sources.

Then once again you would be wrong. Please do ask an outside source if you don't believe me.

If they aren't all wrong, then ships can be damaged by sub megaton, or maybe even subkiloton attacks as a low end and killed by a trio of 36 megaton attacks at the high end. Either way that isn't impressive and means they lose to even Trek.

Another point ignored.

Yes and MC was more than a match for hundreds of them as we take gameplay on Legendary as the highest form of cannon. This they are not much of a threat.

Point me to where he faced hundreds at ONCE.

In all in many flood levels he must have dispatched one hundred in total. If he can do it n armor that is supposed to be worse than that of the Forerunners they should do even better. You are also a liar as I never claimed he fought one-hundred at once.

The flood shown in Halo have access to Human and Covenant technology and they can still be beaten back by those powers. They have less of an industrial base than what they fight against so even equal tech they still have less ships to fight with.

Barely. Even on Alpha Halo the Flood was overruning the Covenant and was forcing them to flee from the ring.

Yet MC was just fine and defeated hundreds of flood alone. A wonder that...

Yes, but you don't need to remove everybody even denying some mass and removing all the ships means they can't leave that planet in great numbers.

Slipspace teleportation tech. The Flood once they land can teleaport to anywhere pretty much like the Forerunners can and therefore cut off their escape route if they get there fast enough with enough numbers.

This must have known limits and such tech should be ordered destroyed or disabled once such a thing is known.

Except that we see that they clearly aren't BVR in the visuals so you have no point ass hat.

Halo fucking 2 the Covenant ships are BvR when the SMAC's and Home Fleet open fire.

Already commented on.

No contradiction, we see it fire, it has no reason not to be firing at full power, and we see a vastly sub c slug. Where did I go wrong again?

By missing the fact you can't even see the target on screen. They are BvR when the SMAC opens up so the speed this weapons are moving at can not hit a target unless the crew of the target is retarded and has the most piss power acceleration ever seen. You can't have your cake and eat it.

I have shown this to be false.

I would believe it more if I had ever done it and you hadn't ducked important points instead arguing in circles again

.
Sorry, still laughing here.

I have proof of missed point now number a half dozen in all and anybody can see you arguing in circles.

No, I have shown them to work and you try to use books and dialogue as proof of inconstancy even though that is not how analysis of a visual medium works.

I have shown that the Halo 2 scene makes no sense since we can't see the targets they fire against even with a clear view of the big void of space and yet nothing can be seen of what their shooting at. And the other two scenes are suspect simply for the fact the first one is possibly being effected by the Portal already, and the second one just isn’t working given the starting speed of the pod and also the fact we see another one bounce off along with the fact we have no idea just how much damage the Carrier took in the battle.

You're wrong as usual.

Which a cursory glance shows they can't be. You offered no reason why they should be rockets either simply stating that they may be with no further evidence.

And as I said above I was mistaken because I misremembered the acceleration rate given.

You're mistaken a lot in this thread it seems.

In fact that is how you have conducted this entire debate. You have no proof that isn't over ridden by game visuals so you have no fucking case.

Right. I think I've shown that no contradictions have to exist and their suspect at best in two of those scenes.

No you have not.

Except that it doesn't work that way, you don't average cannon, you work from games down analysising that as if the books don't exist and then you look at the books and see what fits.

And that stops us from also noticing that there doesn't need to be any contradiction between the two canon tiers how? Because it is rather easy to reconcile everything in those scenes.

If it was easy you would have convinced me that 10,000x firepower differences can be reconciled.

You argue that we should loom from the books up which is clearly wrong.

Wrong you waste of air. I look at both tiers of canon and note where there are what at least appear to be contradictions and see first if they can't be reconciled. If they can be that is what you do. If they can't higher canon throws out the lower source. You have showed nothing that can not be reconciled.

I have shown this to be way wrong many times.

1. This still does not even begin to answer the OP question. Which is placing the Forerunner's in SW and what will happen. So, are either of you chuckleheads going to give any examples? Or are we going to spew firepower numbers that are taken out of context?

I would like to point out he did just answer the OP since this is Forerunner Vs. GE. Also what firepower numbers taken out of context please? All those quotes from the Halo books are in context.

In context from a source in dispute.

So again we are back to square one. You two are making your own conclusions, demanding people agree and still not answering your own topic so you can circle jerk to mythical numbers of the Forerunners. Hell, this really is no different then what the most retarded of debators do. They cherry pick specific evidence, note singular examples, apply it everywhere without any notion of situation, and finally presume the opponents are essentially standing there ready to get raped without lube.

1. Making conclusions based off of canon information and for the scenario in question.

Except clearly you are not.

2. I have not demanded anyone agree with me. I point out that there are things that make no sense in the cut scenes and that this parts are suspect at best and are good at least as a low end until we get a conclusive answer either by reliable visuals (without it possibly being messed up by Slipspace or Forerunner devices) or dialogue.

You do so poorly and with outright falsehoods and unproven suppositions.

3. This is the point at which I point out Norade has openly admitted to hijacking the thread and is trolling at this point.

Except that any scenario besides this one is a goalpost shift as the books are never mentioned in the OP.

4. Please point to where I have made mistakes here. I will do what I can to improve my future posts based on it. As far as I can see at this late hour I have simply shown that the scenes Norade has used are no cut and clear once you look at all of canon.

You have done so poorly and with lies I can also point out a half a dozen missed points in your replies to my posts at this stage.

And of note? This the same race that lost to the Flood. Which as an enemy were not much better then space zombies. Really, they win rewards for failure given they had FTL and massive destructive capabilites but were unable to handle an enemy that had neither, which lead to their eventual suicide.

And as pointed in the OP the Forerunner have learned their lesson on not taking a space zombie outbreak seriously at first.

We don't have to accept that to debate in this thread. You should prove that Forerunners are even capable of learning that given their massive displayed retardation in many areas.

[Night_stalker]

Yeah, the Empire would win I suspect, given this evidence, but only at extremely heavy cost to themselves. They're tough, but in terms of technology, they're like infants compared to the Forerunners.

[Ghost Rider]

Yeah, the Empire would win I suspect, given this evidence, but only at extremely heavy cost to themselves. They're tough, but in terms of technology, they're like infants compared to the Forerunners.

So dumbass, care to back that up given the scenario is the Forerunners have to produce this shit from...their surroundings? Remember, they are the invading force without their massive economic and military structure?

Jesus fucking christ on a pogo stick, do you not read or do you think slamming on the submit button adds points to your dick?

[Night_stalker]

I do read the posts, and I believe the Forerunners would be intelligent enough to bring along a fair amount of Sentinels and Constructors with whatever forces arrive in the SW galaxy. Seeing how the Constructors were able to make a working Halo in nealry 2 months, that implies that the constructors are capable of great engineering feats. If the Forerunners have the good luck to arrive in some uninhabitated section of the Galaxy, they can begin reestablishing their Empire with minimal interference, and by the time the Galatic Empire runs into them, the Forerunners would probably have a well established infrastructure.

if they don't have that misfortune, and arrive say in front of a ISD group, I'm sure that the Forerunner dreadnoughts, all crewed by veterans of probably one of the biggest wars everwould be capable of doing incredible damage before being overwhelmed by a Executor-class Star Dreadnought.

[Ghost Rider]

I do read the posts, and I believe the Forerunners would be intelligent enough to bring along a fair amount of Sentinels and Constructors with whatever forces arrive in the SW galaxy.

Which means what dumbfuck? Just saying they will bring techocontruct A and Technoconstruct B without giving any idea of their production capabilities is no different then modern man going up to Alexander and telling him to buy a Sears toolbox set for his construction needs.

Seeing how the Constructors were able to make a working Halo in nealry 2 months, that implies that the constructors are capable of great engineering feats.

Given they had more resources then here, and two you give no idea of how many. No different then a warsie fanatic going "Construct droids could build the DS2 in a fucking year!!!".

You do understand this shit, right?

If the Forerunners have the good luck to arrive in some uninhabitated section of the Galaxy, they can begin reestablishing their Empire with minimal interference, and by the time the Galatic Empire runs into them, the Forerunners would probably have a well established infrastructure.

And you build this presumption on the assumption that not only can they work in a vacuum of technology but that they would be able to construct up to their needs. Do have any fucking clue how technology build ups work or are you so fucking inept in your education that you believe sky fairies make machines simply come into being.

if they don't have that misfortune, and arrive say in front of a ISD group, I'm sure that the Forerunner dreadnoughts, all crewed by veterans of probably one of the biggest wars everwould be capable of doing incredible damage before being overwhelmed by a Executor-class Star Dreadnought.

Because you say so.

I can see why you agree with the wankers, you're of the same mold and intelligence.

[Jake]

Except you haven't actually debated my numbers, you have not shown that my numbers are wrong nor addressed the fact that the books and encyclopedia are wrong about each battle shown in the game.

I’m sure your numbers are fine, but can you prove these give maximum MAC power?

As admitted by Invader Taz they also fail to get dates right as well therefore making them unreliable sources and meaning we should check our numbers with the games before drawing conclusions.

Ok, so I miss a few dates on my Western Civ exam. Does that automatically mean I know nothing about history? The writers are only human.

Except that visual evidence > dialogue you hat fucker.

Where does it say in halo canon policy that game visuals take precedence over game dialogue? It doesn’t.

We see a Super Mac fire in Halo 2 and it is not going at .04% of c let alone 40% and in that scene it has no reason not to be firing all out so you are clearly wrong.

Ok, for the supermac, I think I do see what you are talking about (the yellow thing?), but it does not behave like a projectile. For one thing it does not look like a rigid object (it wavers) and it seems to fizzle out and dissipate as opposed to getting smaller and smaller in the horizon. As to what it is, I have a theory. When the gun fires it releases lots of gasses and dust particles (you can see this in the scene). My guess is that the temporary friction caused by the .5c round and these particles ignites said particles creating the yellow thing you saw. It is the same thing that would happen if fired in atmosphere, except that there are far fewer particles and they obviously disperse rapidly in space, which would explain the rapid fluctuation and dissipation of the yellow effect. If you don’t like this then we can simply use canon rules. Whether at full power or not, the halo 3 frigate mounted mac gun obviously goes faster than the halo 2 super mac gun (we can’t see the projectile for the halo 3 one). Since there is a contradiction here (a frigate’s mac gun should be slower than one on a massive orbital platform) the new game supersedes the old and the halo 2 scene is thrown out.

I don't need to show they were firing at full power, I simply need to show that they destroyer a shielded ship thus showing there is no reason for them to have a higher firepower mode while also showing the weak as piss nature of Covenant technology.

You still haven’t given me the time at which this occurs in the scene and I still don’t see what you’re talking about, so either give me a scene with the time that the event occurs or concede that you have no example of this.
The flood pod, and scenes from Halo 2, where in the ships shots must be doing damage as you don't fire a weapon at an enemy vehicle that can never do damage (ie. firing a machine gun at an M1 Abrams because your tank's main gun is reloading).

The whole firing weak weapons at tank thing, I lost where that was

The covenant have fighters that can be damaged by non mac guns, we even see one in the halo 2 scene here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1opGjdOwjs, at 1:11. The covenant also send boarding craft, which are specifically mentioned at the beginning of the level and you can see them throughout. They also most likely sent dropships toward the planet’s surface. All of these can be damaged by rail guns, autocannons and missiles. Furthermore, there are only 15 covenant capital ships in the attack, and the only way they manage to destroy some of the stations is by boarding them and setting bombs, which makes the boarding craft the primary threat, which means light weapons would play the largest role in this battle. As for the supposed flood pod I go back to my previous argument. Look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afhT2Mes ... re=related at 0:27. Then look at the same clip from 0:32 to 0:37. The types of flood pod are obviously different. Furthermore, look here at the picture here: http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Flood_dispersal_pod. Another different form of dispersal pod, used after the destruction of high charity. Considering we see three different forms of pod, is it so hard to believe the one that hit the shadow of intent could be crafted from high charity’s armor, or even be debris from the station and not a flood pod at all?

Lastly I will not debate scenario three until you can prove that it uses numbers consistent with the firepower shown in the games, so enjoy debating nothing while conceding to me.

Any proof for or against the correlation of the game with the books depends on the individual’s interpretation of the scene. As often happens in science, there can be different hypothesis to describe one event, often leading to different conclusions. Until we have more data we cannot discount either interpretation, and thus have three scenarios (although I don’t think scenario 2 is necessary) to acclimate different theories.

These numbers are agreeable to me. However claiming that you're being generous when we have sources for a ship being able to fire all reactor power through her main batteries is a blatant lie. I assume the rest of your statements will be equally bad.

I know it can do this, but then it has no shields, and since an ISD can already 1 hit kill sentinels at the power I gave them, the ISD will be even more screwed then before.

As shown above your weapons numbers are wrong, peak reactor output scaled down by one-hundred times is 7.73 x 10[sup]24[/sup] W with peak shields at 3.8 x 10[sup]24[/sup]. An ISD therefore has a peak firepower of >7.73 x 10[sup]24[/sup] W from her main guns.

Remember I said 100X the firepower, not 100x the reactor output. I then went to the ISD page to get its peak reactor output, then subtracted the fire power to get shield output, proving you either can’t divide or can’t read.

However a shown here such scaling isn't right and we should expect 1 x 10[sup]25[/sup] as a minimum total reactor output.

If you read the entire post before vomiting numbers, which I suspect you didn’t , Darth Wong’s information comes from the Star Wars Technical Journal, which was published in 1995. Wookiepedia’s sources on the other hand include Star Wars: Behind the Majic, which came out in 1998, and Star Wars: Complete Cross Sections, which came out in 2007. I therefore discount your number on the basis that my sources are more recent, and if you don’t think that newer sources take precedence over older ones, then fine, I will go back to here: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... ield2.html, which states that ISD shields can only absorb 9E20 J and an entire broadside only put out 6E19J.

Except I have shown that while your numbers are right your logic is flawed and looking below those numbers are butchered.

As I have just disproved that claim.

No a single shot firepower per second would be >1 x 10[sup]25[/sup] leaving off 10% to run other systems such a shot could strike with a power of 9 x 10[sup]24[/sup] J or 2151 teratons of energy per shot. A far cry from the 12.9 teratons you claim.

Based on your number from an outdated source.

However, even should that be the case we know that a Star Wars vessel can fire on a stationary target and be expected to hit from a 10 light minute range meaning that it can kill your largest weapons while having 25 minutes to evade your incoming return fire. That is assuming you know they are there at that range.

This assumes that the sentinels drop out of ftl 25 minutes away, when even the covenant display the ability to engage a slip space jump in a planet. You also obviously ignored stationary target.

Look at those numbers we see that even could they hit, and even if they have that much damage, you would need to hit an Imperial I-class Star Destroyer with 760 such shots per second to overwhelm its shields. This as 3.8 x 10[sup]24[/sup] divided by 5 x 10[sup]21[/sup] equals 760. You also go to show that even your highest firepower is lower than the energy output of an outdated troop transport.

If you would have read the entire argument before posting you would have seen that I explain this later, which also proves that you are so close minded you don’t even give me a chance.

As Invader Taz has proven himself to be a liar and an idiot I demand that you quote your sources. I will not debate you any further otherwise.

In your arrogant opinion. Although he has made some honest, debatable, mistakes, he has never intentionally lied. If you want to send me $30 to buy the encyclopedia, then I will check my source. However, since you yourself say that you don’t give a crap about the OP, requiring me to use the encyclopedia makes you a liar, an idiot, and a hypocrite.

Even increasing energies to this point means that it would take 95 of these torpedoes per second to overwhelm a Star Destroyer's shields. I however dispute your energy numbers. Based on scenes from Halo's primary source and calculation preformed by Srelex and myself I would say that the UNSC and Covenant have weapons no more powerful than a single gigaton or 4.184 x 10[sup]18[/sup] J per shot at the highest end. Please note that on screen we never see better than 36 megatons of firepower for the UNSC so I am giving them nearly thirty times more firepower here.\

1. You still haven’t read the whole post, jackass.
2. As I have said in almost all of my posts that they had to have fired at low power unless they want to make the extinction of the dinosaurs look like a tea party.

Jake, as you have no arguments to disprove my math thus we shall use these numbers as an upper bound until you can show that my math or method was wrong.

That is firepower only though a Covenant vessel is over killed by and upper end calculation of at most 108 megatons of firepower in Halo 3. So we can assume that Halo ships are glass cannons able to take roughly 1/10th of what they can give.

So the rest of your post is based on your lower estimate interpretation. (And yes, I have already read your entire post before reading this).

I'll ask for a page number, but otherwise will not dispute this.

232-233

I dispute this, those 49 sentinels will, at most put out 9 x 10[sup]17[/sup] J, which is double what is required to kill a Covenant vessel, but would take 4,222,222 super sentinels or 206,888,878 sentinels to destroy a single Imperial-class Star Destroyer. This assumes that they get to fire and that such a swarm can even get within range of a Star Destroyer.

9.28*10^24/4*10^22 = 232. If your disputing this, go back to grade school. More likely you are using your outdated ISD numbers along with your ultra low end mac numbers and not showing the calculation, assuming I’m going to go through your bullshit myself.

I dispute these numbers and would ask that you do the math showing that the entire planet under the crust was a solid ball of sentinels. I will also dispute dialogue as evidence as Halo characters are known to screw up what is and isn't beyond visual range and describe an exploding ball of plasma as a Super Nova.

Read the entire fucking post before you answer, idiot.

This is a poor assumption, please prove that the planet aside from the crust was made entirely of sentinels. There is no reason to assume this. Please show me how you are getting the fact that 100% of onxy that isn't crust is drones?

It’s probably my fault for assuming that you had basic knowledge about the books and earth science, so here we go. Ghosts of Onyx, page 123, UNSC survey team describing Onyx: “Notable Anomalies: No dectable tectonic activity…”. No tectonic activity. Tectonic activity is caused by plates in the mantle shifting over a molten core. Since there is no tectonic activity, there is no mantle and no molten core, which make up >99% of earth’s volume. So , for onyx, <1% crust, >99% sentinels. On second thought, you don’t need to know anything about science to get this. Part of my psot which you blatantly ignored, stated that the drones “were the planet Onyx”. Good enough noob?

but to defeat a Star Dreadnought will take 422,222,222 super sentinels or 20,688,888,889 sentinels and to defeat the death star you would need 55,555,555,555,555,555,556 super sentinels or 2,722,222,222,222,222,222,244 sentinels, something even your highest end calculations fail to show existing. Thus by simply sending the Death Star to any suspected shield world the Empire can't lose.

READ THE ENTIRE FUCKING POST. After I’m done with this response and have recovered from your idiocy, I will do another post on the death star, just for you. Also from now on, I’m not even going to dignify your ultra low end numbers, or assumptions that don’t take the entire post into account with a response.

Also Wookiepedia's numbers for the numbers of weapons on an ISD-1 or ISD-II are wrong.

Proof? What model? Point defense lasers with no quantification which are designed to take out fighters?

Given that you need millions of super sentinels to hurt a lone ISD the gunners can't possibly miss these super sentinels also firing down into the planet as they boil forth will kill many millions per shot lowering numbers further.

Why are you assuming the entire shield world? I’m only assuming the sentinels, already combined, in a pre arranged fleet as a forerunner military tactic to defeating the empire.

Of course 10,000 ly/hour is not an upper bound of hyperdrive speeds. Coruscant to Mustafar was done in under an hour and covered at least ten thousand light years. You also can't show that drones have the capability to match these speeds so your point doesn't matter anyway. I also don't see where you are finding your distances in your calculations and this casts doubt on your numbers.

If you fully read my post and the terminals, you would also see that my ftl was an extreme lower bound as well. I’m sure that the forerunner, who built shield worlds, halo arrays, the ark, and super-intelligent AIs would have the technological capability to throw a slip space system on a group of 49 sentinels. Or would you argue the empire can’t put a hyperdrive on a fighter because regular ties don’t have them? Also, the onyx sentinels were there to defend the shield world, so they didn’t need ftl. For the distance (2^18 LY): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzqe1sNB ... re=related. Start listening at 0:08.

To sum it up, Norade is an idiot. He also fails to admit that the few universes that can curbstomp the GE, like the culture with super intelligent AI’s that can end a battle in a second or Doctor Who, with masters of space and time, obviously have very unique abilities that allow this to happen (I have no idea what lensman is). Ghost rider, I will eventually get to your posts but my anti noob shields have to recharge after that full on assault of bullshit.

Night_stalker, I agree, I'm not sure why I continue posting as the idiots here will never learn anyway.

I agree too. It’s is kind of annoying to deal with people who don’t fully check there sources and can’t even read an entire post before responding with preconceived assumptions, or people who can’t seem to comprehend that a cgi scene can be interpreted in different ways, or people … oh, wait it’s only one person.

[Jake]

I messed up the quote button for the last post, but you should be able to tell what is mine and what is norade's.

[Xess]

2. As I have said in almost all of my posts that they had to have fired at low power unless they want to make the extinction of the dinosaurs look like a tea party.

The Frigates would have unleashed at most 5 teratons while the dinokiller impact was closer to 100 teratons. The UNSC also has superior technology to us with space based resources, they could survive blowing up Africa and the resulting nuclear winter. Given that Hood had no idea what Truth was doing, but knew that Truth was hell bent on activating the Halos and that Truth had spent a lot of effort to get to the artifact, there is a high chance of what he is doing is activating the Halos, an event which has a 100% mortality rate. He also knows it takes 3-4 1.2 or whatever teraton MAC shots to bring down a Covenant Destroyer, a much smaller less powerful ship than the Keyship. If he blasts at full power he'll cause environmental devastation, but with humanity's tech a survivable result and maybe just maybe do enough damage to stop the Keyship. If he lowers his weapon yield to the point where it won't cause massive collateral damage he also lowers his chance of harming the Keyship by at least 3 orders of magnitude going from teraton yield to gigaton (generous since we see 36 megaton shots in "The Storm"). Since there's a high chance of that the Keyship's survival results in the activation of the Halos and the death of all of humanity the full power shots actually has the better chance of keeping humanity alive than low-power environment preserving shots do.

Of course if Hood knew that the artifact would open a portal and not activate the Halos, and that the Covenant fleet would follow Truth through it rather than just start glassing Earth then it would make sense to preserver as much of the Environment as possible. But since nothing in Halo 3 shows that anybody knew that (Hood: "What just happened? Did he activate the rings?" from "The Storm" or "Floodgate") it still makes more sense to go for high power shots.

[Jake]

The Frigates would have unleashed at most 5 teratons while the dinokiller impact was closer to 100 teratons.

I got my dino killer idea from here: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/a.buckley/dino.htm. The website states, "If a 10km diameter object impacted at the point at which it struck it would have a velocity of roughly 100,000 km/h. At this velocity there would have been an initial blast (with an estimated force of many millions of tons of TNT) which would have destroyed everything within a radius of between 400 and 500km, including the object." When it said 'millions of tons' I assumed this was literal, and therefore any form of 'millions' is less than a teraton (10^12). However, I will do a calculation to see what it really is. Assuming the asteroid is iron with a density of 7870 kg/m^3, and the volume is (4/3)*pi*5000^3 m^3, then the mass is density*volume = 4.12*10^15 kg. Therefore the kinetic energy is .5*m*v^2 = .5*4.12*10^12*(1666666.7)^2 = 5.7222*10^24J. This is much more than the MAC, which is 5*10^21J so I guess your right, and the website just had the 'millions' thing wrong. Wikipedia also gives a value of 4*10^23J, which is probably more trustworthy than my calc, which means that the asteroid was around 80X more powerful than an MAC.

The UNSC also has superior technology to us with space based resources, they could survive blowing up Africa and the resulting nuclear winter. Given that Hood had no idea what Truth was doing, but knew that Truth was hell bent on activating the Halos and that Truth had spent a lot of effort to get to the artifact, there is a high chance of what he is doing is activating the Halos, an event which has a 100% mortality rate. He also knows it takes 3-4 1.2 or whatever teraton MAC shots to bring down a Covenant Destroyer, a much smaller less powerful ship than the Keyship. If he blasts at full power he'll cause environmental devastation, but with humanity's tech a survivable result and maybe just maybe do enough damage to stop the Keyship. If he lowers his weapon yield to the point where it won't cause massive collateral damage he also lowers his chance of harming the Keyship by at least 3 orders of magnitude going from teraton yield to gigaton (generous since we see 36 megaton shots in "The Storm"). Since there's a high chance of that the Keyship's survival results in the activation of the Halos and the death of all of humanity the full power shots actually has the better chance of keeping humanity alive than low-power environment preserving shots do.

Although 1.25% of the blast that wiped out a species is nothing to laugh about, I guess you are right that it would be the lesser of two evils. I actually sent an email to a bungie employee (the only thing higher than the games in canon) about the velocity of MAC rounds, but odds are I will get nothing back, so I'm going to call it quits and concede to you that the MAC does not fire at relativistic speeds. Congratulations on the convincing argument.

Of course if Hood knew that the artifact would open a portal and not activate the Halos, and that the Covenant fleet would follow Truth through it rather than just start glassing Earth then it would make sense to preserver as much of the Environment as possible. But since nothing in Halo 3 shows that anybody knew that (Hood: "What just happened? Did he activate the rings?" from "The Storm" or "Floodgate") it still makes more sense to go for high power shots.

I agree, Hood even calls the portal the Ark here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEQcNnZKtS4, at 7:50 or so.

[Norade]

Except you haven't actually debated my numbers, you have not shown that my numbers are wrong nor addressed the fact that the books and encyclopedia are wrong about each battle shown in the game.

I’m sure your numbers are fine, but can you prove these give maximum MAC power?

As I have shown I don't have to prove the highest end. I simply need to show that firing megaton power shots is enough to damage Covenant and UNSC ships. This is enough to show that they don't need to and likely don't have fire power 10,000x more powerful than we're shown in desperate fights in the games.

As admitted by Invader Taz they also fail to get dates right as well therefore making them unreliable sources and meaning we should check our numbers with the games before drawing conclusions.

Ok, so I miss a few dates on my Western Civ exam. Does that automatically mean I know nothing about history? The writers are only human.

Yes, if you have an open book exam and you have an editor checking your numbers.

Except that visual evidence > dialogue you hat fucker.

Where does it say in halo canon policy that game visuals take precedence over game dialogue? It doesn’t.

Holy fuck are you really that dumb? How else do you propose we analyze a visual medium? By assigning equal weight to dialogue shown to be wrong?

We see a Super Mac fire in Halo 2 and it is not going at .04% of c let alone 40% and in that scene it has no reason not to be firing all out so you are clearly wrong.

Ok, for the supermac, I think I do see what you are talking about (the yellow thing?), but it does not behave like a projectile. For one thing it does not look like a rigid object (it wavers) and it seems to fizzle out and dissipate as opposed to getting smaller and smaller in the horizon. As to what it is, I have a theory. When the gun fires it releases lots of gasses and dust particles (you can see this in the scene). My guess is that the temporary friction caused by the .5c round and these particles ignites said particles creating the yellow thing you saw. It is the same thing that would happen if fired in atmosphere, except that there are far fewer particles and they obviously disperse rapidly in space, which would explain the rapid fluctuation and dissipation of the yellow effect. If you don’t like this then we can simply use canon rules. Whether at full power or not, the halo 3 frigate mounted mac gun obviously goes faster than the halo 2 super mac gun (we can’t see the projectile for the halo 3 one). Since there is a contradiction here (a frigate’s mac gun should be slower than one on a massive orbital platform) the new game supersedes the old and the halo 2 scene is thrown out.

I don't know, if a projectile was fired that slowly it might be unstable especially if the barrel was so unclean as to have that amount of debris in it. Also given how bad you have shown yourself to be at analyzing scenes from Halo 2 (ie: claiming projectiles we see in the Halo 2 cutscene were missiles) I see no reason to trust your analysis over my own. We also fail to see any Covenant ships explode ever from these shots and if they were truly firing at 0.5c if we looked up for eight seconds it would have time to travel four light seconds, unless you're claiming that the Covenant are fighting at beyond four light second range, something they never do anywhere else in any canon material either it is fired slower than that or always missing. In fact no matter how long we look we never see anything explode so they must either be poor shots in which case we can see from this game that MAC gunners have zero accuracy or the shots are simply fired at much slower speeds and dodged.

I don't need to show they were firing at full power, I simply need to show that they destroyer a shielded ship thus showing there is no reason for them to have a higher firepower mode while also showing the weak as piss nature of Covenant technology.

You still haven’t given me the time at which this occurs in the scene and I still don’t see what you’re talking about, so either give me a scene with the time that the event occurs or concede that you have no example of this.

Look at that battle over the Arc in Halo 3 three UNSC ships fire, we see fireballs, and when they fade we see nothing. Thus I have proof they killed that ship. The flood pod shot, if it struck a better location, such as the reactor, could have also killed the Covenant ship.

The flood pod, and scenes from Halo 2, where in the ships shots must be doing damage as you don't fire a weapon at an enemy vehicle that can never do damage (ie. firing a machine gun at an M1 Abrams because your tank's main gun is reloading).

The whole firing weak weapons at tank thing, I lost where that was.

When Taz and yourself tried to claim that, in the Halo 2 scene, they were firing shots just to fire something while their main guns reloaded. I am pointing out that you simply don't do that.

The covenant have fighters that can be damaged by non mac guns, we even see one in the halo 2 scene here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1opGjdOwjs, at 1:11. The covenant also send boarding craft, which are specifically mentioned at the beginning of the level and you can see them throughout. They also most likely sent dropships toward the planet’s surface.

All I see here is a bunch of maybes, please provide solid visual proof or dialogue that this must be the case.

All of these can be damaged by rail guns, autocannons and missiles. Furthermore, there are only 15 covenant capital ships in the attack, and the only way they manage to destroy some of the stations is by boarding them and setting bombs, which makes the boarding craft the primary threat, which means light weapons would play the largest role in this battle.

Not really, killing the capital ships before they launched parasite craft would be the better option.

As for the supposed flood pod I go back to my previous argument. Look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afhT2Mes ... re=related at 0:27. Then look at the same clip from 0:32 to 0:37. The types of flood pod are obviously different. Furthermore, look here at the picture here: http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Flood_dispersal_pod. Another different form of dispersal pod, used after the destruction of high charity. Considering we see three different forms of pod, is it so hard to believe the one that hit the shadow of intent could be crafted from high charity’s armor, or even be debris from the station and not a flood pod at all?

The two pods from the same scene look the same to me care to highlight them and point out all the differences. Also just because they use different types of pods doesn't prove that these pods mass anymore than normal. Please provide proof to back these claims if you have any that isn't just speculation. Do recall Occam's razor and how it deals with unneeded information.

Lastly I will not debate scenario three until you can prove that it uses numbers consistent with the firepower shown in the games, so enjoy debating nothing while conceding to me.

Any proof for or against the correlation of the game with the books depends on the individual’s interpretation of the scene. As often happens in science, there can be different hypothesis to describe one event, often leading to different conclusions. Until we have more data we cannot discount either interpretation, and thus have three scenarios (although I don’t think scenario 2 is necessary) to acclimate different theories.

No, you don't have any proof for your alternatives, you have no theories of your own, and your points of contention are pure speculation and can't be proven.

These numbers are agreeable to me. However claiming that you're being generous when we have sources for a ship being able to fire all reactor power through her main batteries is a blatant lie. I assume the rest of your statements will be equally bad.

I know it can do this, but then it has no shields, and since an ISD can already 1 hit kill sentinels at the power I gave them, the ISD will be even more screwed then before.

Please show where doing this drops the ships shields asshole?

As shown above your weapons numbers are wrong, peak reactor output scaled down by one-hundred times is 7.73 x 10[sup]24[/sup] W with peak shields at 3.8 x 10[sup]24[/sup]. An ISD therefore has a peak firepower of >7.73 x 10[sup]24[/sup] W from her main guns.

Remember I said 100X the firepower, not 100x the reactor output. I then went to the ISD page to get its peak reactor output, then subtracted the fire power to get shield output, proving you either can’t divide or can’t read.

I'm using scaling based on reactor size as well as numbers from other sources to provide additional proof for my numbers.

However a shown here such scaling isn't right and we should expect 1 x 10[sup]25[/sup] as a minimum total reactor output.

If you read the entire post before vomiting numbers, which I suspect you didn’t , Darth Wong’s information comes from the Star Wars Technical Journal, which was published in 1995. Wookiepedia’s sources on the other hand include Star Wars: Behind the Majic, which came out in 1998, and Star Wars: Complete Cross Sections, which came out in 2007. I therefore discount your number on the basis that my sources are more recent, and if you don’t think that newer sources take precedence over older ones, then fine, I will go back to here: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... ield2.html, which states that ISD shields can only absorb 9E20 J and an entire broadside only put out 6E19J.

That isn't how Star Wars cannon works asshole, that is how Halo canon works. Also those numbers are stated to be very low end and can be discounted now that we have more proof to use. Those numbers also don't reconcile with his reactor power estimates and are thus again shown to be an extremely low estimate.

Except I have shown that while your numbers are right your logic is flawed and looking below those numbers are butchered.

As I have just disproved that claim.

You have given unfounded speculation and provided no proof for anything. You have no even speculated how much energy a flood pod with increased mass would have, nor how you derived these mass numbers so go fuck yourself.

No a single shot firepower per second would be >1 x 10[sup]25[/sup] leaving off 10% to run other systems such a shot could strike with a power of 9 x 10[sup]24[/sup] J or 2151 teratons of energy per shot. A far cry from the 12.9 teratons you claim.

Based on your number from an outdated source.

Star Wars canon =/ Halo canon you can't always discard older sources for new ones and even newer sources show the same numbers.

However, even should that be the case we know that a Star Wars vessel can fire on a stationary target and be expected to hit from a 10 light minute range meaning that it can kill your largest weapons while having 25 minutes to evade your incoming return fire. That is assuming you know they are there at that range.

This assumes that the sentinels drop out of ftl 25 minutes away, when even the covenant display the ability to engage a slip space jump in a planet. You also obviously ignored stationary target.

The planet is a stationary target no reason the Star Destroyers couldn't open up at that range. Also given the time it takes to create a slip space portal the Star Destroyers would have time to fire at those points to catch any ships trying to funnel through an already created portal. Not to mention that when the portal opens again you get a shooting gallery as they pour out by the millions right into your guns.

Look at those numbers we see that even could they hit, and even if they have that much damage, you would need to hit an Imperial I-class Star Destroyer with 760 such shots per second to overwhelm its shields. This as 3.8 x 10[sup]24[/sup] divided by 5 x 10[sup]21[/sup] equals 760. You also go to show that even your highest firepower is lower than the energy output of an outdated troop transport.

If you would have read the entire argument before posting you would have seen that I explain this later, which also proves that you are so close minded you don’t even give me a chance.

I read it all, but arguing along these lines any longer is no longer relevant as I dispute the numbers derived from the Halo books.

As Invader Taz has proven himself to be a liar and an idiot I demand that you quote your sources. I will not debate you any further otherwise.

In your arrogant opinion. Although he has made some honest, debatable, mistakes, he has never intentionally lied. If you want to send me $30 to buy the encyclopedia, then I will check my source. However, since you yourself say that you don’t give a crap about the OP, requiring me to use the encyclopedia makes you a liar, an idiot, and a hypocrite.

He as indeed lied about fusion rockets in the Halo 2 scene, about what is and isn't beyond visual range, that is in addition to his shifting goalposts, and trying to ignore the visuals from the games. It is not my job to provide you with materials to debate from, it is yours to make them available. Without them you can't debate so kindly fuck off until you get an actual source to debate from.

Even increasing energies to this point means that it would take 95 of these torpedoes per second to overwhelm a Star Destroyer's shields. I however dispute your energy numbers. Based on scenes from Halo's primary source and calculation preformed by Srelex and myself I would say that the UNSC and Covenant have weapons no more powerful than a single gigaton or 4.184 x 10[sup]18[/sup] J per shot at the highest end. Please note that on screen we never see better than 36 megatons of firepower for the UNSC so I am giving them nearly thirty times more firepower here.\

1. You still haven’t read the whole post, jackass.

Yes I have, I read it entirely before posting. Please prove that I didn't.

2. As I have said in almost all of my posts that they had to have fired at low power unless they want to make the extinction of the dinosaurs look like a tea party.

Given the things we see damage and destroy Covenant ships in the games we can only assume that such fire power will be used against the GE and its ships and that similar energies can destroy ships when fired from GE vessels.

Jake, as you have no arguments to disprove my math thus we shall use these numbers as an upper bound until you can show that my math or method was wrong.

He ignores this direct challenge. As he is a dishonest fucktard.

That is firepower only though a Covenant vessel is over killed by and upper end calculation of at most 108 megatons of firepower in Halo 3. So we can assume that Halo ships are glass cannons able to take roughly 1/10th of what they can give.

So the rest of your post is based on your lower estimate interpretation. (And yes, I have already read your entire post before reading this).

Yes as you provide no reason that I should use your higher numbers when they are in dispute and conflict with everything we see in the games.

I'll ask for a page number, but otherwise will not dispute this.

232-233

Holy shit, he actually provides proof for something!

I dispute this, those 49 sentinels will, at most put out 9 x 10[sup]17[/sup] J, which is double what is required to kill a Covenant vessel, but would take 4,222,222 super sentinels or 206,888,878 sentinels to destroy a single Imperial-class Star Destroyer. This assumes that they get to fire and that such a swarm can even get within range of a Star Destroyer.

9.28*10^24/4*10^22 = 232. If your disputing this, go back to grade school. More likely you are using your outdated ISD numbers along with your ultra low end mac numbers and not showing the calculation, assuming I’m going to go through your bullshit myself.

I have already shown my numbers, and ISD has at lowest end a reactor able to provide ~7 x 10[sup]24[/sup] W of power at highest, which I don't use, 1 x 10[sup]26[/sup] W. Also, unlike you I have scaled the energies seen in the games so I am using those numbers.

I dispute these numbers and would ask that you do the math showing that the entire planet under the crust was a solid ball of sentinels. I will also dispute dialogue as evidence as Halo characters are known to screw up what is and isn't beyond visual range and describe an exploding ball of plasma as a Super Nova.

Read the entire fucking post before you answer, idiot.

Keep claiming this with no proof you tard.

T

his is a poor assumption, please prove that the planet aside from the crust was made entirely of sentinels. There is no reason to assume this. Please show me how you are getting the fact that 100% of Onyx that isn't crust is drones?

It’s probably my fault for assuming that you had basic knowledge about the books and earth science, so here we go. Ghosts of Onyx, page 123, UNSC survey team describing Onyx: “Notable Anomalies: No dectable tectonic activity…”. No tectonic activity. Tectonic activity is caused by plates in the mantle shifting over a molten core. Since there is no tectonic activity, there is no mantle and no molten core, which make up >99% of earth’s volume. So , for onyx, <1% crust, >99% sentinels. On second thought, you don’t need to know anything about science to get this. Part of my psot which you blatantly ignored, stated that the drones “were the planet Onyx”. Good enough noob?

The outside of Onyx could be a solid layer which would explain the lack of observed tectonics. Also a lack of tectonic ability could be explained by the core having cooled and stopped moving as well. No need for it to be made of drones as you claim. While the drones may make up that percentage of Onyx, which I doubt, can you provide any proof other than no tectonics = 99% mass is drones?

but to defeat a Star Dreadnought will take 422,222,222 super sentinels or 20,688,888,889 sentinels and to defeat the death star you would need 55,555,555,555,555,555,556 super sentinels or 2,722,222,222,222,222,222,244 sentinels, something even your highest end calculations fail to show existing. Thus by simply sending the Death Star to any suspected shield world the Empire can't lose.

READ THE ENTIRE FUCKING POST. After I’m done with this response and have recovered from your idiocy, I will do another post on the death star, just for you. Also from now on, I’m not even going to dignify your ultra low end numbers, or assumptions that don’t take the entire post into account with a response.

You can't just ignore numbers which you don't like asshole, I have proof for my numbers you have none. You also skipped other parts of my post and my challenge thus you already conceded to using my numbers.

Also Wookiepedia's numbers for the numbers of weapons on an ISD-1 or ISD-II are wrong.

Proof? What model? Point defense lasers with no quantification which are designed to take out fighters?

The model used for filming in the movies you tool. The numbers on Wookiepedia make no mention of the Heavy Ion Cannons and Heavy Turbolasers clearly shown on the model and thus those numbers must be wrong. Not to mention the point defense lasers have been shown to fire with Terajoules of energy.

Isard's Revenge:

pg. 7 "Two New Republic Assault Frigates, the Tyrant's Bane and Liberty Star, cruised in toward the Golan station. Though each ship was less than a third as long as the station, they bristled with fifty laser cannons and poured terajoules of coherent light into the Golan."

pg. 111 "Moonshadow was coming up and turning to port, its port-side batteries firing Direption's aft shields. Red and blue laser and ion cannon fire pumped terajoules of energy into the shields, but somehow they stayed up."

There you have your proof that these lasers fire at between 1E12 to 1E15 joules per shot. These are also far smaller ships than an ISD.

Given that you need millions of super sentinels to hurt a lone ISD the gunners can't possibly miss these super sentinels also firing down into the planet as they boil forth will kill many millions per shot lowering numbers further.

Why are you assuming the entire shield world? I’m only assuming the sentinels, already combined, in a pre arranged fleet as a forerunner military tactic to defeating the empire.

So though they have slower FTL than the GE you expect them to make a first strike while the Forerunners are still building a new economic base as per the OP.

Of course 10,000 ly/hour is not an upper bound of hyperdrive speeds. Coruscant to Mustafar was done in under an hour and covered at least ten thousand light years. You also can't show that drones have the capability to match these speeds so your point doesn't matter anyway. I also don't see where you are finding your distances in your calculations and this casts doubt on your numbers.

If you fully read my post and the terminals, you would also see that my ftl was an extreme lower bound as well.

As proven by a poster below me you're full of shit on this claim. You also failed to quote these entries for me as evidence.

I’m sure that the forerunner, who built shield worlds, halo arrays, the ark, and super-intelligent AIs would have the technological capability to throw a slip space system on a group of 49 sentinels.

Please provide proof that they do this.

Or would you argue the empire can’t put a hyperdrive on a fighter because regular ties don’t have them? Also, the onyx sentinels were there to defend the shield world, so they didn’t need ftl. For the distance (2^18 LY): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzqe1sNB ... re=related. Start listening at 0:08.

Doing so would be retarded as we have stated examples of Imperial fighters with hyperdrives, you have no such sources for FTL drones. Also, if your drones don't have FTL then how will they destroyer any ISD's let alone all of them?

To sum it up, Norade is an idiot. He also fails to admit that the few universes that can curbstomp the GE, like the culture with super intelligent AI’s that can end a battle in a second or Doctor Who, with masters of space and time, obviously have very unique abilities that allow this to happen (I have no idea what lensman is). Ghost rider, I will eventually get to your posts but my anti noob shields have to recharge after that full on assault of bullshit.

[/quote]

Yes and those races could also win through sheer firepower as well if they needed to. Also, why do their methods matter? They still win don't they?

In short, fuck off you barely literate mouth breather.

EDIT:

I messed up the quote button for the last post, but you should be able to tell what is mine and what is norade's.

Wow, I'm debating an idiot who can't even preview his posts before hitting the button...

The Frigates would have unleashed at most 5 teratons while the dinokiller impact was closer to 100 teratons.

I got my dino killer idea from here: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/a.buckley/dino.htm. The website states, "If a 10km diameter object impacted at the point at which it struck it would have a velocity of roughly 100,000 km/h. At this velocity there would have been an initial blast (with an estimated force of many millions of tons of TNT) which would have destroyed everything within a radius of between 400 and 500km, including the object." When it said 'millions of tons' I assumed this was literal, and therefore any form of 'millions' is less than a teraton (10^12). However, I will do a calculation to see what it really is. Assuming the asteroid is iron with a density of 7870 kg/m^3, and the volume is (4/3)*pi*5000^3 m^3, then the mass is density*volume = 4.12*10^15 kg. Therefore the kinetic energy is .5*m*v^2 = .5*4.12*10^12*(1666666.7)^2 = 5.7222*10^24J. This is much more than the MAC, which is 5*10^21J so I guess your right, and the website just had the 'millions' thing wrong. Wikipedia also gives a value of 4*10^23J, which is probably more trustworthy than my calc, which means that the asteroid was around 80X more powerful than an MAC.

Jake learns why mindlessly quoting things leads to poor results.

The UNSC also has superior technology to us with space based resources, they could survive blowing up Africa and the resulting nuclear winter. Given that Hood had no idea what Truth was doing, but knew that Truth was hell bent on activating the Halos and that Truth had spent a lot of effort to get to the artifact, there is a high chance of what he is doing is activating the Halos, an event which has a 100% mortality rate. He also knows it takes 3-4 1.2 or whatever teraton MAC shots to bring down a Covenant Destroyer, a much smaller less powerful ship than the Keyship. If he blasts at full power he'll cause environmental devastation, but with humanity's tech a survivable result and maybe just maybe do enough damage to stop the Keyship. If he lowers his weapon yield to the point where it won't cause massive collateral damage he also lowers his chance of harming the Keyship by at least 3 orders of magnitude going from teraton yield to gigaton (generous since we see 36 megaton shots in "The Storm"). Since there's a high chance of that the Keyship's survival results in the activation of the Halos and the death of all of humanity the full power shots actually has the better chance of keeping humanity alive than low-power environment preserving shots do.

Although 1.25% of the blast that wiped out a species is nothing to laugh about, I guess you are right that it would be the lesser of two evils. I actually sent an email to a bungie employee (the only thing higher than the games in canon) about the velocity of MAC rounds, but odds are I will get nothing back, so I'm going to call it quits and concede to you that the MAC does not fire at relativistic speeds. Congratulations on the convincing argument.

Yet my math, which is the exact same proves nothing to you. You're a dishonest sack of shit you ass eating motherfucker.

[Xess]

Although 1.25% of the blast that wiped out a species is nothing to laugh about, I guess you are right that it would be the lesser of two evils. I actually sent an email to a bungie employee (the only thing higher than the games in canon) about the velocity of MAC rounds, but odds are I will get nothing back, so I'm going to call it quits and concede to you that the MAC does not fire at relativistic speeds. Congratulations on the convincing argument.

Well I hope you hear back from him, might shed some light on the whole mess. I also hardly think a 5 teraton blast is something to laugh at, it would reap severe devastation, it's just better than total devastation. You'd kick yourself pretty damn hard after you found out it just opened a portal though, even if it was the lesser of two evils based on the information you had at the time.

[Norade]

Although 1.25% of the blast that wiped out a species is nothing to laugh about, I guess you are right that it would be the lesser of two evils. I actually sent an email to a bungie employee (the only thing higher than the games in canon) about the velocity of MAC rounds, but odds are I will get nothing back, so I'm going to call it quits and concede to you that the MAC does not fire at relativistic speeds. Congratulations on the convincing argument.

Well I hope you hear back from him, might shed some light on the whole mess. I also hardly think a 5 teraton blast is something to laugh at, it would reap severe devastation, it's just better than total devastation. You'd kick yourself pretty damn hard after you found out it just opened a portal though, even if it was the lesser of two evils based on the information you had at the time.

A better question to ask would be to have him explain the scenes in question and show that they can have the energies they are quoted to have. To simply ask, did this shot from a scene you're probably not looking at when you typed your reply as fast as I'm asking that it is.

[Jake]

Yet my math, which is the exact same proves nothing to you. You're a dishonest sack of shit you ass eating motherfucker.

It wasn't only the math that disproved my claims. The math was correct from what I can tell. The problem with your posts, which I have had to explain to you almost every time I respond, is that there was previously no way to prove that the MAC wasn't simply firing at a low power level, the result of which your math would have yielded. What Xess did that you did not was prove this fact. I said that they would fire at a low power level to avoid catastrophic environmental damage. However, Xess asserted that this would be the lesser of two evils when compared to the firing of the halo arrays from the ark, which Hood had mistaken the portal for. This makes perfect sense (even the destruction of Africa is better than the death of every species in the galaxy). The only thing needed was proof to cement his argument that Hood thought that the portal was the ark, which he provided. I tried one last time to review the evidence, but I then found the scene which I linked in my concession post that has Hood actually calling the portal the ark. This is in game dialog and can not be disputed. Therefore, Xess's claims are correct and the math that you provided is an upper estimate if anything. Therefore, in my previous posts, which are based off of the assumption that the MACs travel at .4c, the forerunners lose.

[Norade]

Yet my math, which is the exact same proves nothing to you. You're a dishonest sack of shit you ass eating motherfucker.

It wasn't only the math that disproved my claims. The math was correct from what I can tell. The problem with your posts, which I have had to explain to you almost every time I respond, is that there was previously no way to prove that the MAC wasn't simply firing at a low power level, the result of which your math would have yielded.

Except you would need to show a reason why they weren't firing at full power. I can't prove that they aren't firing at full power you retard.

What Xess did that you did not was prove this fact. I said that they would fire at a low power level to avoid catastrophic environmental damage. However, Xess asserted that this would be the lesser of two evils when compared to the firing of the halo arrays from the ark, which Hood had mistaken the portal for. This makes perfect sense (even the destruction of Africa is better than the death of every species in the galaxy). The only thing needed was proof to cement his argument that Hood thought that the portal was the ark, which he provided.

Given that this was all unnecessary anyway I saw no reason to do so.

I tried one last time to review the evidence, but I then found the scene which I linked in my concession post that has Hood actually calling the portal the ark. This is in game dialog and can not be disputed. Therefore, Xess's claims are correct and the math that you provided is an upper estimate if anything. Therefore, in my previous posts, which are based off of the assumption that the MACs travel at .4c, the forerunners lose.

Yay, we have a concession as well as definitive proof that every book that describes above megaton level firepower is full of shit.

[Jake]

Except you would need to show a reason why they weren't firing at full power. I can't prove that they aren't firing at full power you retard.

I HAVE PROVIDED THIS REASON IN MULTIPLE POSTS, EVEN THE ONE YOU JUST RESPONDED TO. Firing a mac at .4c in atmosphere would cause catastrophic environmental damage.

[Jake]

Yay, we have a concession as well as definitive proof that every book that describes above megaton level firepower is full of shit.

All of these books were written before halo 3. They would have no way to conform with in game evidence that didn't exist yet.