Halo: death by the shiny

[kitty]

This is my first post, and I have had this stuck in my head for quite some time.
Halo is as far as I can tell one of the most cliche science fictions there are, but it now has a lot of back story around, and I feel it needs to be slapped in the face by actual physics and sane military tactics.
For those who never played Halo your not missing a whole lot new. It has your standard humans vs alien empire premise, and it seems as all the fighting tactics of world war 2 have rebounded in the century in question. You mostly play as master chief, last of a super solider program. You have a exosuit powered by a fusion reactor, and can apparently take on entire groups of the enemy alone. It was also mentioned you cost as much as a small space ship.
when your military considers this to be the best way to spend it's limited resources and funds it really has earned it's failure.
which brings me to the topic of this thread. Death by the shiny. Halo is a great example of this blunder. This is in almost every science fiction, game and it has dozens of examples in the real world. The ultimate weapon that was developed at the expense of everything else effective.
I really wanted to vent this after seeing it so often in my line of work.
Ask any military mechanic and normally the cooler the vehicle or weapon seems the more it has problems and the less it actually works.
But while this post is disjointed I will simply state that in the halo games you don't see any fire support till the fourth game, and even then it's marginal, and you never see mortar teams, attack drones, armored personal carriers, or even soldiers armed well enough to handle the huge threat posed by some enemies pose. No it's A automatic 7.62 rifle that seems to be a marginally advanced AK-47. My thought is the armorer handing a grunt a rifle and saying "your going up against a giant armored monkey thing, but we got these really cool rifles that show how many rounds are left in the clip on a giant LED screen on the front!" and the grunt thinking to himself how he is truly and well F$%ked.
thoughts?

[Batman]

Err-the 'coolness' of military hardware is entirely subjective so I'm not entirely sure how that is supposed to affect its functionality. Never having played the games I'm not touching the Halo side of this.

[kitty]

"coolness" is subjective, but generally most people see the F-22 or the Apache as "cool" but then you start digging into the machine's complexity and cost.
take the F-22, it requires 30+ hours maintenance per hour of flight time (using Wikipedia as a reference for that), and there has been a ongoing issues with it's air supply for the pilot.
star wars has a few great examples of this with the empire.

[MrDakka]

Why bother analyzing? Halo as a series is drive by rule of cool: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool

Its not about sound tactics and/strategy or even military hardware. Its about making you the player feel like a badass supersoldier taking on hordes of enemy soldiers by jerking you off with tacticool future military technobabble and humanity first manifest destiny thrown in for good measure.

That and a stupidly fun multiplayer component.

But if you want to nitpick stuff, take a look at what they call a tank. That should keep you occupied for a while

[Jub]

Halo is well documented for having stupid gear, but cool and high tech equipment isn't always a waste of time/money nor a cause for defeat. Take for example the F-22, it is currently the best fighter in the world and can take on many times it's number in lesser fighters, add to this the fact that it isn't and never was intended to be the sole fighter of the US air force and things seem pretty reasonable as opposed to the cost of reopening the old fighter lines and getting a less product for close to the same cost. The Apache is also a terrible example as it has a well defined roll and does it well. In these cases you can't do the same job with a platform that is significantly cheaper and less complex without exposing yourself to greater risks.

Now lets consider Halo again. The Spartan program was never meant to fight the Covenant, it was a program designed to create super soldiers that could swiftly crush a rebellion by striking hard and fast against their leaders. More star ships wouldn't have done this and much of the cost was in the training and R&D. Plus, they continued making Spartans throughout the war which could be taken to mean that they were effective enough to justify the cost.

On the other hand they still failed by not using the technology to enhance the average grunt and by failing to arm the Spartans with specialized weapons. Why not slap an ammo backpack on the armor and set the Spartans up with heavy weapons instead of giving them the same gear as a normal grunt? Why not make watered down power armor for the grunts so they can carry larger weapons? In the end the Spartan program is the least of the UNSC's issues.

[kitty]

*laughs* true, but that's what makes it all the more fun to dismember it for it's designs and tactics.
as for the Scorpion, That thing makes the original design of the Bradley look good. "hey I got a great idea, the infantrymen can sit on the top of the treads and ride it in to combat without any protection from enemy fire!" and hundreds of other design flaws that would make even a soviet era designer label it a death trap.
but in all seriousness it's could be made into a cautionary tale of how shiny equipment is not what a military needs or wants.
Jub I would argue that the F-22 is not the greatest fighter, but I need to look up my refreneces, off the top of my head I know it hasn't been used in combat yet and with so few of them it can't be used for more than opening shots before they are hangar queens again.
The Apache is a hangar queen that was made too complex for it's job.
As for UNSC I have to agree about the spartan program being the least of their problems. At least the Spartans were created when they had the expendable resources and time to create a super solider.

[Guardsman Bass]

Some of the scarce resources for the ground troops probably comes from the fact that they're a distant second towards keeping the UNSC Navy supplied and fighting. They get whatever's left, aside from the Spartans.

[kitty]

That brings up the question that all the ships you see in the game and even in the books are one off independent cruisers.
again I'm dismembering a fiction for it's unreality so I shouldn't take this seriously, but it's fun to so hell with it. You know your enemy is coming to you and it's bigger and more well stocked than you. A better strategy might have been to turn each world into a trap thereby maximizing their losses while minimizing yours? And building more reliable and cheaper ships that relied on missile buses rather than a super expensive Coil gun? That last bit might be a point to argue, but if your ships go down so easy why would anyone build a ship that is a carrier, battleship, troopship and all around cruiser if the first hit knocks it out?

[Jub]

Jub I would argue that the F-22 is not the greatest fighter, but I need to look up my refreneces, off the top of my head I know it hasn't been used in combat yet and with so few of them it can't be used for more than opening shots before they are hangar queens again.

You're actually a lying shitstain, for using the 30 hours maintenance number from wikipedia instead of the proper 10.5 hours that was achieved in 2009.

"In the early years of its service, the F-22 required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every flight hour, with the total cost per flight hour of $44,000, however in 2008 this figure had been lowered to 18.1 hours, and 10.5 hours by 2009; this is compared to the original Pentagon requirement of 12 maintenance hours per flight hour. At introduction the F-22 also had a Mean Time Between Maintenance (MTBM) of 1.7 hours, however in the 7 years since this has been improved to 3.2 hours, exceeding the original requirement of 3.0 hours by 2010. But by 2013 the cost per flight hour had grown to $68,362, over three times as much as the F-16."

So it had some issue in the early years, as many aircraft do, and now the only issue it has is that it costs more per flight hour than an F-16 which is to be expected. So please explain why you picked the 30 hour number, which is only mentioned in the paragraph I quoted, instead of the correct number?

Also, do tell which other 5th Gen fighters have seen active combat thus far so we can see which plane you think is better than the F-22. Keep in mind that in combat trials the F-22 was able to go 144-to-0 against other US fighters and this was back in 2007 when the aircraft was still new and had more bugs than current models.

As for your first strike and then stuck in the hangers the F-22 had a 97% sortie rate in those same trials and in 102 sorties scored 144 kills. What nation could afford to lose at that ratio for any length of time? Now factor in the rest of the American air force and tell me how bad of a choice the F-22 makes for the intended roll?

The Apache is a hangar queen that was made too complex for it's job.

We tend to require sources around these parts so produce them or STFU.

That brings up the question that all the ships you see in the game and even in the books are one off independent cruisers.

Hardly the first time that a special operations team got specialist gear to do a job. The US has customized aircraft for special hostage rescues in the past and one off ships are hardly new things to most navies.

A better strategy might have been to turn each world into a trap thereby maximizing their losses while minimizing yours?

They tried this with orbital defense platforms and it rarely stopped the Covenant from gaining orbital control and making land fall.

And building more reliable and cheaper ships that relied on missile buses rather than a super expensive Coil gun?

Perhaps they went with coil gun designs as they tended to knock Covenant craft out far more quickly than the missile armed craft. This is rather important when your ships have low endurance under fire from the enemy.

That last bit might be a point to argue, but if your ships go down so easy why would anyone build a ship that is a carrier, battleship, troopship and all around cruiser if the first hit knocks it out?

How many of these capital ships were specifically built for this conflict? Carriers and such make sense for the common UNSC foes and larger ships are needed to mount weapons able to defeat Covenant capital ships. The idea being that if you can't survive an enemy attack with your best tech, make a ship that puts the enemy on the same footing.

[Skywalker_T-65]

They don't go for 'Missile buses' because Covenant pulse-lasers can down so many missiles that it takes quite literally hundreds of the things to get a hit in, and even then they don't do much to the shields. This is brought up in the books IIRC...it is said that they use the MAC's (coilguns) to take down shields for missiles (though they do always hope the MAC alone is enough). Hence the reason that it was standard operating procedure (in the books) to shoot off swarms of missiles at the same time as the MAC.

Which brings another point...UNSC Archer missiles can be carried in the hundreds by even Destroyer-weight ships. Making a missile boat seems rather pointless if they can stuff that many on a standard warship, and they already aren't the most effective weapon out there.

[kitty]

Jub: Whoops, that's what I get for skimming the article. your right about the 10.5 hour per hour of flight time achieved in 2009.
sorry I kinda rushed that response and I'm a bit rusty with people who are intelligent and demand references, most of people who I have been forced to discuss with on hearsay. (demanding references is a good thing)
195 aircraft (177 production, 16 test aircraft, 2 development aircraft) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL31673.pdf pg pg 2)
the 177 production aircraft at 146 million a pop http://www.saffm.hq.af.mil/shared/media ... 04-081.pdf pg 55)
The figures on cost vary from report to report on how they are calculated that figure was from 2009 and some of the figures calculate.
so 177 aircraft that have conflicting reports about it's combat effectiveness.

negative http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/f-22-germans/
positive http://www.f22-raptor.com/technology/stealth.html

so at 146 million a aircraft we have a sharp if brittle scalpel.
I don't really see any 5th gen fighter seeing much in the way of combat. After over a decade of war the F-22 has never been deployed into Iraq or Afghanistan. The reasons are it's stealth capabilities are superfluous and it's too damn expensive when a A-10, F-16 can do the job.

note: I think the A-10 is what I personally like it's ugly, slow and has only one job, but it's cheap, durable and fixable and excels at what it's supposed to do. That's opinion but Wikipedia has references for this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild ... derbolt_II ignore this if you want to it's commentary not a argument point.

Jub: I shouldn't have put the apache in there. I don't work on them personally, but I have friends who do and they tell me horror stories about it. That's hearsay and I'll try to back up my claims from now on.


as for the halo orbital defense. I was thinking of the rocket punk manifesto about ground cannons. Can their plasma weapons go through all the layers of a habitable worlds atmosphere? I remember from the 3rd game where the ship had to get in close to torch the flood. Or was that because it wasn't capital ship class? Again halo isn't perfectly cannon and can be contradictory. Much of this was mental exercise to ward off boredom and insanity last year.

as to the MAC cannon and it's advantages: I kinda played devils advocate with that. I wonder if you launched dozens of missiles with whatever wonder fuel that could would be making constant high g maneuvers so that even a sub second light lag would be a pain to hit and accelerate them up to high speed as they close in you would have a damn good attack. The MAC cannon would be useful still since hits hard.... 64KT TNT equivalent of force ( http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Magnetic_Accelerator_Cannon holy shit well that puts the whole thing in perspective, and raises the question about the ship handling that kind of force) The MAC cannon I wonder if those rounds could be intercepted, especially at long range?

The war was 28 years long http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Human-Covenant_war and the fall of reach was at the end of the war http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Fall_of_Reach so the ships were specifically built for the war.
those references are a little sketchy, but fiction is harder to work with since dates and stories change.
and it's late, work is early and I need to go to bed, but I will say that I am really enjoying this. I haven't debated about this stuff for a long time.

[Sea Skimmer]

I don't really see any 5th gen fighter seeing much in the way of combat. After over a decade of war the F-22 has never been deployed into Iraq or Afghanistan. The reasons are it's stealth capabilities are superfluous and it's too damn expensive when a A-10, F-16 can do the job.

Patriot missiles and tactical nuclear bombs have never deployed to Afghanistan either, should we get rid of those? I don't see much use of the F-15C either, get the picture? Seriously if you don't believe anything else, look at basic reality. US builds F-22, China and Russia/India respond by building incredibly similar aircraft, and now Korea and Japan are angling the same way. What does that tell you about the value of such aircraft?

note: I think the A-10 is what I personally like it's ugly, slow and has only one job, but it's cheap, durable and fixable and excels at what it's supposed to do. That's opinion but Wikipedia has references for this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild ... derbolt_II ignore this if you want to it's commentary not a argument point.

Also really vulnerable in its bombing-strafing role to anything modern. Everyone likes the A-10, but it is best used against people who don't have missiles, radar or fighters built later then oh, say, 1980. Weapons technology, both offensive and defensive, has made the strafing focus of the A-10 questionable in a major war, and without strafing the need for such a specialized aircraft goes away. Weapons like SDB-II and Brimestone, never mind Sensor Fused Weapon, make an utter mockery of the already impressive tank killing power of such a plane, while the focus on JDAM/LGBs for bombing CAS means the highly accurate low-slow bombing performance of a straight wing jet no longer matters. No surprise though given that original A-X request for proposal is now 43 years old! Were never going to see another plane like that again. For low tech threats you can build a much cheaper plane in turn anyway, like a Super Tucano.

Jub: I shouldn't have put the apache in there. I don't work on them personally, but I have friends who do and they tell me horror stories about it. That's hearsay and I'll try to back up my claims from now on.

Dote reports says the mission capable rate for AH-64D is about 84% in Afghanistan; which is about as good as your going to get in anything that complex in operational use. The earlier Apaches were indeed nightmarish by all accounts to maintain, when the thing was new in the 1980s the mission capable rate was under 50%, though its worth noting that 'simple' WW2 planes often had similar serviceability rates. How times change. They kept them going in the Gulf War by importing hundreds of contractors from the manufacturer; though end result was still massive numbers of sorties flown and massive amounts of damage inflicted. But that was some time ago, and anyway when Apache was new it was also a generation more advanced then any other helicopter, and more advanced then most nations jet fighters. You get what you ask for.

As for Halo weapons, everything about Halo is backwards engineered from a premise that a melee blow from a rifle butt onto an armored helmet is more deadly then a burst of bullets from that rifle. Of course its never going to make much sense. Nor is it easy to project how things 'should' be that far in the future, not even remotely. The US Army is presently working on a small guided missile, so small a Hummve can carry 135 of them in an adapted Netfires box, intended to shoot down artillery projectiles of all kinds over a several kilometer radius. What happens to war if every company has several of those hummves able to locally dominate airspace against every sort of threat? No more use of artillery or mortars, tank shells blown out of the air, and instead we send 5ft long 3in diameter snake robots squirming through the mud to blow the hummves up? Maybe that lack of Halo mortars and other indirect fire support isn't so unrealistic? The ripple effects of even this one new weapon could be massive; nobody really has a clear idea of where its going to lead, nor do game developers have any real reason to care in an FPS that was never intended to support large scale scenarios. All the novels meanwhile are trying to tie in with the games, so they can't massively rock the boat.

[Rekkon]

*laughs* true, but that's what makes it all the more fun to dismember it for it's designs and tactics.
as for the Scorpion, That thing makes the original design of the Bradley look good. "hey I got a great idea, the infantrymen can sit on the top of the treads and ride it in to combat without any protection from enemy fire!" and hundreds of other design flaws that would make even a soviet era designer label it a death trap.

While I certainly will not defend a fair bit of Halo's equipment, infantry have been riding unprotected atop tanks probably since they were invented. It is not the designers' fault they fail to get the hell off when shooting starts.

[Cykeisme]

From an out-of-universe perspective, HALO was designed as a first-person shooter intended to glorify a single infantryman (the player), and everything else was designed around it.
Admittedly, the lack of attention to realism and/or detail only exacerbated the problem that stemmed from that initial premise, but to a certain degree it was unavoidable.

Super soldiers that cost as much as starships is insane, but the alternative is the Call of Duty approach, where the player characters can sustain and shrug off large amounts of gunfire (until the plot calls for their death).. basically segregation of of plot and gameplay.
Note that I'm not comparing the enjoyment factor or production values of either highly successful game franchise, just pointing that one thing out.

The lack of prevalence of heavier firepower and combined arms in both the Covenant and USNC goes back to the initial point.. it's to ensure that the player feels like the most important asset on the battlefield, realism be damned.
The adolescent target audience is unlikely to identify the realism issues, anyway.

Also really vulnerable in its bombing-strafing role to anything modern. Everyone likes the A-10, but it is best used against people who don't have missiles, radar or fighters built later then oh, say, 1980. Weapons technology, both offensive and defensive, has made the strafing focus of the A-10 questionable in a major war, and without strafing the need for such a specialized aircraft goes away. Weapons like SDB-II and Brimestone, never mind Sensor Fused Weapon, make an utter mockery of the already impressive tank killing power of such a plane, while the focus on JDAM/LGBs for bombing CAS means the highly accurate low-slow bombing performance of a straight wing jet no longer matters.

To be fair, the A-10's low operational cost, good loiter time, survivability, and ability to use crappy airstrips might still have a place in the Air Force.. but only after theater air superiority and suppression of air defenses has been attained by more advanced aircraft, which validates expenditure on 5th generation fighters like the F-22 anyway

[Sea Skimmer]

To be fair, the A-10's low operational cost, good loiter time, survivability, and ability to use crappy airstrips might still have a place in the Air Force.. but only after theater air superiority and suppression of air defenses has been attained by more advanced aircraft, which validates expenditure on 5th generation fighters like the F-22 anyway

The things, once you knock out all the serious air defenses, a Super Tunaco costs 1/10th what the A-10 does to fly per hour and its actually realistic to fly off dirt all of the time, while an A-10 is not. The A-10 is cheap to fly, but its not really cheap. Its slower, and less powerful sure, but the weapons load is similar to the A-37 Dragonfly which was very successful in Vietnam, and it can still fly high enough to be safe from MANPADS while dropping guided bombs. I'm not a big fan of buying such light planes in the present day, but once the A-10 is gone that sort of thing will be what takes over the role.

[Jub]

Jub: Whoops, that's what I get for skimming the article. your right about the 10.5 hour per hour of flight time achieved in 2009.
sorry I kinda rushed that response and I'm a bit rusty with people who are intelligent and demand references, most of people who I have been forced to discuss with on hearsay. (demanding references is a good thing)
195 aircraft (177 production, 16 test aircraft, 2 development aircraft) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL31673.pdf pg pg 2)
the 177 production aircraft at 146 million a pop http://www.saffm.hq.af.mil/shared/media ... 04-081.pdf pg 55)
The figures on cost vary from report to report on how they are calculated that figure was from 2009 and some of the figures calculate.
so 177 aircraft that have conflicting reports about it's combat effectiveness.

negative http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/f-22-germans/
positive http://www.f22-raptor.com/technology/stealth.html

so at 146 million a aircraft we have a sharp if brittle scalpel.
I don't really see any 5th gen fighter seeing much in the way of combat. After over a decade of war the F-22 has never been deployed into Iraq or Afghanistan. The reasons are it's stealth capabilities are superfluous and it's too damn expensive when a A-10, F-16 can do the job.

We don't have conflicting reports about how effective the F-22 is, it decimated in war games and the sort of low intensity conflict the US is currently fighting doesn't call for their deployment. It's like ICBMs, or the B-36 Peacemaker, weapons that have never been used but that serve a purpose. You have it for three reasons; just in case you need it against a foe that is peer to you, to force other people to spend on getting them, and to keep non-peers from even thinking of trying anything.

note: I think the A-10 is what I personally like it's ugly, slow and has only one job, but it's cheap, durable and fixable and excels at what it's supposed to do. That's opinion but Wikipedia has references for this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild ... derbolt_II ignore this if you want to it's commentary not a argument point.

It's also old, and as others have mentioned even cheaper planes can compete for the niche that it actually fills.

Jub: I shouldn't have put the apache in there. I don't work on them personally, but I have friends who do and they tell me horror stories about it. That's hearsay and I'll try to back up my claims from now on.

I know friends that work on cars and they have nightmare stories too, it doesn't mean that the complexity of the helicopter/car is a needlessly bad thing. It just means that some things have teething issues.

as for the halo orbital defense. I was thinking of the rocket punk manifesto about ground cannons. Can their plasma weapons go through all the layers of a habitable worlds atmosphere? I remember from the 3rd game where the ship had to get in close to torch the flood. Or was that because it wasn't capital ship class? Again halo isn't perfectly cannon and can be contradictory. Much of this was mental exercise to ward off boredom and insanity last year.

The Covenant tend to glass worlds when they start to be defeated on the ground, so signs point to them having weapons that can smash through atmosphere. I'm also pretty sure that we even see shots going from space to ground in the actual games. Not to mention the fact that I'm sure the Covenant have missiles or bombs if they need them.

as to the MAC cannon and it's advantages: I kinda played devils advocate with that. I wonder if you launched dozens of missiles with whatever wonder fuel that could would be making constant high g maneuvers so that even a sub second light lag would be a pain to hit and accelerate them up to high speed as they close in you would have a damn good attack. The MAC cannon would be useful still since hits hard.... 64KT TNT equivalent of force ( http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Magnetic_Accelerator_Cannon holy shit well that puts the whole thing in perspective, and raises the question about the ship handling that kind of force) The MAC cannon I wonder if those rounds could be intercepted, especially at long range?

They clearly don't have magic missiles as we've seen in the books, so that question isn't really relevant.

As for 64KT MAC cannons, those are actually sort of weak. They could use larger bomb pumped lasers, or even just overwhelm the shields with radiation from a normal nuclear weapon. We know the Tsar Bomb broke 50MT IRL and could have gone larger but the Russians pulled a stage as they had fears about the plan escaping the blast.

At long range maybe they could be intercepted, but you'd need to be looking for them and know which arc they're coming from. In any case, you're best off dodging long range STL attacks if fuel reserves allow for it.

The war was 28 years long http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Human-Covenant_war and the fall of reach was at the end of the war http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Fall_of_Reach so the ships were specifically built for the war.
those references are a little sketchy, but fiction is harder to work with since dates and stories change.
and it's late, work is early and I need to go to bed, but I will say that I am really enjoying this. I haven't debated about this stuff for a long time.

Okay, then they obviously were thought to have a use. We don't see many fleet actions to know what role they are intended to fill so we shouldn't write them off as worthless.

The things, once you knock out all the serious air defenses, a Super Tunaco costs 1/10th what the A-10 does to fly per hour and its actually realistic to fly off dirt all of the time, while an A-10 is not. The A-10 is cheap to fly, but its not really cheap. Its slower, and less powerful sure, but the weapons load is similar to the A-37 Dragonfly which was very successful in Vietnam, and it can still fly high enough to be safe from MANPADS while dropping guided bombs. I'm not a big fan of buying such light planes in the present day, but once the A-10 is gone that sort of thing will be what takes over the role.

I'm picturing drones taking an even bigger role once the A-10 comes up for replacement. Even assuming you need a human over the target you could have a more advanced manned plane flying with a drone wing made up of cheap bomb trucks. If you don't need a man physically there you do it as it's being done now. In either case the day of the A-10 is coming to a close.

[Sea Skimmer]

Drones are nice, but the Reaper manages somehow to cost six times as much to fly per hour as the Super Tunaco while having the same maximum bombload, though it can fly about four times as long without refueling. So far we've had a lot of luck making drones do missions humans can't, but doing so at lower cost has been a very elusive goal.

[Jub]

Drones are nice, but the Reaper manages somehow to cost six times as much to fly per hour as the Super Tunaco while having the same maximum bombload, though it can fly about four times as long without refueling. So far we've had a lot of luck making drones do missions humans can't, but doing so at lower cost has been a very elusive goal.

The A-10 isn't dead yet so I can picture them stringing it along for long enough that they can afford to full replace that roll with drones. And as you've said, even if that doesn't manage to happen there are already cheaper craft that can do the same job for less.

[kitty]

Now this is interesting! alright I don't have much time to write tonight, work was long enough today and the week's only started.
first I never heard of the super tunaco! looked up the specs and I like it. It has what you want for low level and close infantry support. It makes me think of Kiowas actually, but safer and cheaper. any rotor craft with a single engine gives me the shudders just thinking about flying it. I could see this being a bargain for air force and it would be a most loved and hated combat aircraft. I just want to nickname it right now the "tuna can" for no other reason that it makes me giggle.

So the aircraft like the tuna can are great work horses. These are what are needed in MOST combat situation in conventional and non conventional warfare?
and now I will say that my mind has been changed about the F-22. I was picking it as a boondoggle more that I wanted a conversation. I had other machines and aircraft in mind (I'm looking at you F-35) but it seemed too easy.
The F-22 capabilities would really be the anti anti aircraft role. That does justify it's expense if it's being put to that role, and despite it's expense and small number it can be used as the shield breaker along with the B2 may it ever come to war with another peer country.
I think Cykeisme and jub made the best argument.

Halo:death by shiny was a thread I intended to talk about that engineering performance over endurance and repair ability leads to broken weapons and useless equipment. I look at things from a maintenance perspective because I often see what often doesn't work in the long run. I really hope to apply this perspective later in life designing the same things.

Now before I stink too much of oil I have one last question for the group. Halo is not even my most guilty video game pleasure (that title goes to gears of war, it's dumb, loud and nonsense all the way through, but I love playing it, just like I love playing halo every now and then).
Do you want to take Halo machines and tactics in the game the best way humans have figured out how to deal with such a threat as the covenant and to why each weapon or tactic is useful in such a universe? Many of you actually did turn what I thought was nonsensical upside down and offered a different perspective. Such that Counter indirect fire would be so responsive and effective it would render it useless.
or
should it be taken that since it is just a game and fiction that there are better weapons and tactics that could be used instead of the one shone in the game, books and movies? Many have pointed at this as well. the tank included.

[Sea Skimmer]

Overall I think Halo does a much better job then most games of choosing justifying its choice of weapons, vehicles and equipment then the typical shooter game, and they knew when they were causing problems. Like the quad tracked tanks cannot pivot steer, stupid, but at least we know the game designers understood this would be a problem and did it for intentional style. Fixing the problems of Halo weapons, well the human ones, does not require throwing out everything and starting from a clean sheet.

As for what is the best, my understanding of the novels is that what we see in game is how it was supposed to be, humans were consistently defeating the covenant in ground fighting but simply lacked the space power to prevent earth from being invaded anyway. So building better ground weapons may not have ever gotten proper attention even though the war was going on for some time; though certainly they seemed to need some kind of MICV, and more effective man portable missiles. In the future MANPADS and small anti tank missiles are likely to be one and the same.

Evaluating what should be built is difficult because once you have a highly developed space force it would become very easy to blow away massed enemy mechanized forces. End result may be people just don't build them, and combat like what we see in Halo, between small highly mobile forces focused on destroying each other and capturing key objectives, rather then clearing and controlling large areas, becomes the rule and not the exception of ground fighting. If your main fire support comes from space, and so does your logistical support, then you'd want to be very focused in what your ground troops actually carry because mobility is life, and you expect help when you need it, you don't carry every possible gadget in case you are suddenly encircled by two regiments of communist tanks while insurgents blowup the only bridge you can get ammo over. A modern armored division meanwhile can eat 3,000 tons of supplies per day fighting. That's kinda hard to provide even when nobody is attacking the supply lines, let alone vaporizing them from orbit.

But on the other hand, mobile ground defenses might be effective enough to withstand orbital attack, and you still do have massed forces, but they are in a situation like Egypt was in 1973 on the right bank of the Canal, pinned in place by fear of moving outside that umbrella of protection. Such a force then only moves around in short hops as it shuffles the defenses about. Then were back to the idea that only very small forces operate outside that umbrella because the enemy can land anywhere on the planet. It goes on an on. Halo doesn't ever seem to make it clear if such defenses are really possible or not. They would be bound to be very expensive, and very bulky. Anyway I think I stopped having a clear point, except that, we should not assume that warfare in the space age will simply resemble a more advanced version of conventional WW2-Cold War fighting. It really shouldn't.

[kitty]

I was thinking of hardened mac cannons being used to repel orbital bombardment of a city so they would use ground forces to lessen the loss and then that superior ground fighting would be a advantage. Actually now thinking about it that might have been the set up for the humans which is what led it to be such a prolonged fight.
I have no assumption that warfare in the space age would remotely resemble today's warfare. I think the best scifi book on that subject was the forever war.

[Sea Skimmer]

MAC cannons work for defending a fixed point, it doesn't seem plausible that such a weapon could be mobile or even relocatable in a period measured in days of disassembly and reassembly because of the immense foundation you'd need to handle the recoil. A sufficiently large ship might be able to pick it up, and if you got crazy enough you could literally have really giant boxes full of dirt and rock to hold it down as was done for certain British siege howitzers in WW1 as a means of limiting the transport weight. I suspect said box will end up holding a small pyramid. Still, very limited.

Basically the issue becomes, you have this very high value fixed target now. MAC cannon doesn't fire fast enough to engage enemy ships while also engaging lots of stuff attacking it, nor would they seem able to ever engage anything close or on the planets surface or near surface. So it'd have to have lots of other lighter defenses stacked around it so an enemy helicopter squadron or commando regiment, or just a bunch (like thousands) of very cheap cruise missiles can't just sneak up and blow it away after deorbiting out of line of sight. No matter how hardened it might be, its going to be vulnerable to that sort of attack because how much armor can you really expect to put on a giant gun barrel or the silo door for said barrel? You have an additional problem because if you fire a weapon like that inside an atmosphere you'd get a huge concussion from it, like massively building flattening, so these MAC gun sites would need to be located well away from anything else of value. That increases the defensive problem simply because the defended area gets bigger.

End result is, building the MAC gun system is really expensive to make effective. As one does not get the impression that Halo earth is ultra wealthy relative to the land area it has this will be a damn serious investment to make. Such defenses are going to be in direct competition with building more starships, as well as defenses which are in orbit where they ought to be more effective gun for gun. At that point they might not bother at all, because if the enemy fleet gains control of orbit, they'll most likely have the firepower to overwhelm the isolated shore batteries one by one anyway. If they did get built, they'd surely be rare.

[Guardsman Bass]

Some of those problems are likely why the UNSC put their MAC cannons in orbit, instead of planet-side. I have no idea how they handle the recoil issue with that, but Halo was never hard on its space opera physics. Maybe they just have rocket engines that fire simultaneously to keep the MAC guns in position once they start firing.

The whole "fast, light forces" makes extra sense for the UNSC because the primary use of ground troops was to buy time to evacuate the civilian population off a colony planet before the Covenant got tired of using ground troops for fun/artifact hunting and burned all human settlement from orbit. You need military forces and equipment that can be quickly evacuated once that mission is done.

That said, they usually have more lead-in time before a Covenant ground assault arrives, so there's no excuse for them not making better advantage of ground fortifications (provided any heavy ground weapons can be either removed quickly or left behind at a cost-effective rate).

[Sea Skimmer]

Rocket engines seem likely, or else a dedicated counter recoil system using the same EM gun tech to fling out a much larger mass at a much lower velocity. You could use sand for the mass, so even if the counter charge is aimed at a planet's surface it will all safely burn up in the atmosphere. Early recoilless rifles on aircraft worked kind of like this, using buckshot bound together with grease as the counter charge. It would depend on how much ammunition you have for the MAC gun vs how high thrust/velocity of rockets you can make as to which option would work better.

Fortifications of all sorts make obvious targets, so the incentive to dig in is limited when the enemy controls the sky with overwhelming power. Even in the world wars when weapons accuracy and reconnaissance was a shadow of what it is today it was often found to be most effective not to dig in with artillery because you just had a much lower signature to be spotted in the first place. If the enemy can strike across the entire surface of a planet it'd be awful hard to have fortifications where you need them except in the heart of urban areas which are specific innate targets. They might otherwise be created primarily for deception operations. In any event the main point of fortifications is bound to be as hide positions rather then fighting positions. Building really heavy anti orbital defenses doesn't seem like the kind of thing that could be done with less then years of lead time.

[Me2005]

MAC cannons work for defending a fixed point, it doesn't seem plausible that such a weapon could be mobile or even relocatable in a period measured in days of disassembly and reassembly because of the immense foundation you'd need to handle the recoil. A sufficiently large ship might be able to pick it up, and if you got crazy enough you could literally have really giant boxes full of dirt and rock to hold it down as was done for certain British siege howitzers in WW1 as a means of limiting the transport weight.

Reach has you using a mini-MAC "Onager" (also called a mass-driver? There's supposed to be a distinction?) on a turret to disable a Covenant cruiser. That's impressive since the thing isn't anywhere near the size of the ones that the starships mount. Apparently, it's mobile enough that it may have been deployed specifically to defend the Pillar of Autumn from the incoming attack.



If I'm remembering right, it's just sitting on a scaffolding-like platform; which I can only assume is made out of the same stuff used to build the space-elevator.

Halo 4 has you using another mini-MAC to take out lighter craft. It's mounted on a Mammoth, which is basically a Juggernaut.

Super-MAC orbital platforms are all over the place; the start of Halo 2 has you fighting on them. They don't seem to do much good defending Earth there, but then, they are surprise-attacked by something like an entire battlegroup. According to the fluff I'm reading, the super-MAC's fire 3,000-ton iron/tungsten rounds. Ship based apparently fire 600-ton rounds, and the Onager from Reach fires 15-cm rounds (no weight mentioned).