Forerunners vs Galactic Empire

[Ghost Rider]

So I'll ask this in two parts.

1. The Forerunners had SPACE superiority, and couldn't win...because?

2. How does any of this make a fuck wit of anything of how that they would do against the GE since so far the debate seems to be about how fucking dumb/inept/impotent the Forerunners were.

[Peptuck]

I have no idea how this can be at all substantiated though. An infection form can't take over a dude with an intact shield from what we saw in Halo, are we to assume the forerunners used nothing but unshielded biological troops? That these deadly combatants were drafted and armed from... what, civilians? None of it makes much sense.

How do you know that it was 220 billion Forerunners and not 220 billion other aliens? After all, the Forerunners were trying to keep other sentient species alive.

If it was 220 billion other aliens, such as large farm animals, cave-dwelling primitives, and industrial-age musketmen then my criticism still stands and then some.

There is at least some believability that when the Forerunners were themselves being overrun with their own technology, but it completely goes out the window when it's a bunch of Flood-ized cows and cavemen against Ringworld-building heavy infantry.

Why would this be? in Halo 3, we've seen what the Flood do with local biomass; they break it down and use it to make "pure" combat forms that are mutable and a whole lot more dangerous than simple zombies.

More importantly, why are we assuming that the Flood are only infecting primatives? One of the examples stated show the Flood attacking a space-faring civilization with a large defense fleet, and once they penetrate tdhe atmosphere, the planet was lost in days. Ditto for the cited example involving the planet where the local defense forces were outnumbered by hundreds of billions of Flood.

The arguement that the Flood were dangerous merely because there were a lot of of them is utterly ridiculous. They need an adequate amount of firepower to do damage here, as even Somali tribesmen with AK-47's are more dangerous than a zombie with claws, especially when we're putting them against a civilization we should believe to be roughly as advanced as the Galactic Empire.

Which is what they have. Did you completely miss the fact that the Flood quite enjoy capturing and using their own enemies' tech against them?

The Republic has certainly handled more than 220 billion enemy forces, and they weren't weakass biowank zombies either.

On a single planet?

[Peptuck]

1. The Forerunners had SPACE superiority, and couldn't win...because?

They were idiots - or too altruistic for their own good, as they refused to use their most potent weapons for fear of harming innocent life.

That and the Flood were also somewhat powerful in space; their preferred tactics were stated as simply overwhelming the enemy with sheer numbers of ships, colliding with other vessels and taking them over, and penetrating the atmosphere, at which point the planet was almost always immediately lost.

Keep in mind, though, that the terminals and Forerunner reports are implying that these are independent planets with local system defense forces protecting them; I'm not sure why, but the Forerunner military almost always seem to arrive after the Flood have taken over a world, at which point it is razed - but by that point the Flood have captured all the local ships and run off with them to infect more worlds. There aren't any recorded instances in Halo 3 where the Forerunner forces actually engage the Flood on the ground.

2. How does any of this make a fuck wit of anything of how that they would do against the GE since so far the debate seems to be about how fucking dumb/inept/impotent the Forerunners were.

I'm not really sure why its taken this direction myself; OP has specified we're dealing with a "total war" scenario, and if that's the case then the Forerunner should be willing to use their WMDs that they weren't willing to use on their own galaxy - which is why they lost to the Flood in the first place.

[Ghost Rider]

Then I'm just going to split off the rest if someone isn't going to present numbers, because over the years I've become cranky about versus to become a match up that no one gives anything ecxcept "They have big guns!! Mark II even!!!!"

[hongi]

Now that I think about it, a Flood vs GE would be a better match up. We don't really know anything about the Forerunners ships.

And really, in a total war scenario, the Forerunners only have to send one Halo through and it's bye-bye most of the Imperial core worlds.

[Ghost Rider]

Now that I think about it, a Flood vs GE would be a better match up. We don't really know anything about the Forerunners ships.

And really, in a total war scenario, the Forerunners only have to send one Halo through and it's bye-bye most of the Imperial core worlds.

Because in either, you'll be showing us the numbers behind this and not the fluff and speculation the games give?

[Stark]

Come on, are you saying 'kills everything in x range' isn't quantifyable? We don't need to know how it interacts with anything, or details about the process!

Do we know if the Forerunners had planetary shields? Is there any real reason why guys so incredibly stupid they fought one-handed against an enemy that seized the entire galaxy would go for a headshot on an Empire they just found, and isn't bent on universal slaughter?

[Connor MacLeod]

And the Flood is attributed some insane ground combat ability. 36 hours to take a planet of 220 billion over with only 1.3 million civilans & military escaping.

Is that the one from teh frist terminal where around 150 enemy ships from another system managed to bypass the naval defenses and land on the planet? And then ar ound a day and a half after infection, the naval forces sterilized the planet?

Edit: It also occurs to me that its rather hard to gauge how impressive the Flood's ability to overrun the Forerunners is without knowing details about the planets in question (we know they have space fleets that can sterilize a planet within an unspecified timeframe and are fewer than 150 vessels, but not how big or what kind of defenses. WE know nothing about the size of the planet's military, ,what its composed of, or what it is equipped with, so on and so forth.)

One also has to wonder at the "numbers" given for some of the battles, and how they seem to conflict with the implired construction capability of the Halo Rings vs some of the known stats of some of their ships (the 38,000 ton "dreadnaughts" for example.) That seems to suggest a deliberate under-utilizing of their available resourcse (or outhright stupidity.) They ought to be able to spam out billions if not trillions of warships (given tonnages given in the terminal entries), ensuring hundreds or thousands of ships per known planet.

Edit: For that matter, we know they're capable of building combat robots, so why cna't they spam those out and deploy them to worlds to bolster defenses? (I understand that the forerunners themselves, even if equipped to their best ability, may not have been able to do much, at least towards the end, but they may not have been all that numerous to begin with for all we know. But this isn't true of their robots.)

I get the impression that the Forerunners may not have been just idiots, but also dramatically under-militarized, and quite possibly may not have been as numerous as their charges (I ran across mentions of "protectorates" that were cut off when teh Foreunners established that Sphere thingy to keep the Flood back.)

[ANGELUS]

An infection form can't take over a dude with an intact shield from what we saw in Halo, are we to assume the forerunners used nothing but unshielded biological troops?

Even if they were shielded, the shields can't last forever, enough hits will eventually bring them down and then the troops will be infected. In the game enough explosions by the little ballon-things will bring down your shield.

[Xon]

One real question is why they didnt use tactical Halo deployments rather than an all at once deployment.

I get the impression that the Forerunners may not have been just idiots, but also dramatically under-militarized, and quite possibly may not have been as numerous as their charges (I ran across mentions of "protectorates" that were cut off when teh Foreunners established that Sphere thingy to keep the Flood back.)

Several of the terminals indicate they where not highly militerized. And if the Flood did appear out of the blue like it was suggested in this thread and they had reigned over the galaxy for eons without needing military why should they have extensive military buildups?

[SylasGaunt]

I suppose it depends on how soon after the Flood appearance they built the first Halo after the infestation began.

A Galaxy-wide firing does make sense if it took time since you'll have who knows how many small isolated worlds infested, or deep-space stations or constructs, or perhaps even a reserve held off somewhere in deep-space by a gravemind just in case that can restart the whole damn mess. A Galaxy-wide firing will fry anything between the stars to.

[Aenigma]

I suppose it depends on how soon after the Flood appearance they built the first Halo after the infestation began.

A Galaxy-wide firing does make sense if it took time since you'll have who knows how many small isolated worlds infested, or deep-space stations or constructs, or perhaps even a reserve held off somewhere in deep-space by a gravemind just in case that can restart the whole damn mess. A Galaxy-wide firing will fry anything between the stars to.

The war with the Flood lasted 100,000 years before the Halos were finally fired.

[Ender]

Just want to repeat my question. How many ships does the GE have? They don't use more than a couple of hundred at a time right?

That have a couple million, and are using most of them to crush internal dissent. If you use the More powerul then half the starfleet quouote,. you can justify a few hundred million starships, and a godaweful number of escorts, fighters, and transports.

14 KM is twice the length of the 17 KM SSD/Star Dreadnaught?

19 km dude.

[Ghost Rider]

14 KM is twice the length of the 17 KM SSD/Star Dreadnaught?

19 km dude.

That's right, I was remembering the whole thought of the ISD lining up, but yeah I forgot they did that.

As for the people who are screeching of Forerunner powah!!! I am going to ask one last time before just locking the Halogasm here and ask for something beyond "The Forerunners are super!!! ...but they were dumber then teen slasher victims against the Flood.".

Really, you want to debate, bring some numbers or this goes the way of the dodo.

[Covenant]

Even if they were shielded, the shields can't last forever, enough hits will eventually bring them down and then the troops will be infected. In the game enough explosions by the little ballon-things will bring down your shield.

Yes, but so will other amazingly weak weapons. The shields in Halo, like most of Halo's tech, are really not all that amazingly impressive. How many shotgun blasts to take out a shield? Rifle shots? Pistol shots? We know the power of those weapons since they are based on existing weapons, with existing ammo, and even have things like muzzle velocity listed. We can mathmatically compute the kind of firepower we're dealing with there.

If x-number of balloon impacts brought down forerunner shields as well then we're still looking at an incomprehensibly weak shield. And given the low amount of force an exploding ball of goop--without a chemical reaction or blast effects--imparts, we can set some upper limits for the MC's shield in that case.

Given that situation, I find it unlikely that a handful of well-shielded full-price Droideka would have all that much of a problem with Flood. Each shot from their weapons probably packs enough whallop to drop one good and hard, while their shields would not only pop the infectors, but also their droid nature would keep them from being usable--even dead--as food or infestation.

I mean this merely as a joke, but it seems a little premature to say the Flood are a Galactic Empire-level threat when it appears the Gungan Army (with their big army-shield) is probably equipped with more-than-adequate ground force weaponry to stave off some serious Flood attacks.

[Covenant]

And when I say 'could' and 'probably' I really mean 'based on the numbers we've seen so far.'

The Halo wiki reproduces the numbers from the literature that define the weaponry of the Haloverse marines, and we can use that to compute the amount of force it takes to rip a given flood-form apart, and to knock down a shield. It would be simple to then figure out the amount of force that an MC's shield is being hit by when a flood form impacts it, and then compare that force to the weaponry we know of in Star Wars having impacted on shields.

The notable shield-weapon impacts are tank-blasters on Gungan Army Shields, droid-rifles on Gungan Hand Shields, and droideka blasts on their own shields (as well as the occasional Jedi).

Using that, I'd say that the firepowers being used in Star Wars not only vastly exceed the weaponry in Haloverse arsenals, which is comparible to 20th-21st century Earth weapons we already have, but that the flood and the defenses we see (such as those on Covenant, Master Chief, and advanced Flood forms) are all far below the level of the appropriate Star Wars force, even in basic infantry terms.

And, given that, it really calls into question the Forerunner tech, which we have seen exhibited on occasion. I know we shouldn't use game mechanics if we can avoid it, but we've seen some Forerunner tech before, and we know that the Forerunners couldn't beat the flood due to their massively inflated numbers--which leads you to believe that there were a great many more unarmed, idiot warrior flood forms than there were "well-armed intelligent" Zombiesoldier flood, since those well-armed flood needed to come from corrupted soldiers.

Because of that we need to assume that the numbrs of Forerunner soldiers corrupted by flood were actually slim, and furthermore, Flood have never exhibited much interest in keeping a combat form alive. They let them get chopped up, and happily ignore the weapons to claw at things and leap about. It seems unlikely they would take care to keep their combat form infested soldiers in good health, and it seems more likely they would continue to behave as they always have, and just make more idiotic infestation form flood and pure-strain flood, which attack via melee attacks and do not exhibit a durability above that of an elephant or a dinosaur, quite honestly.

Seeing what a Blaster does to skin, I don't think that's much of a threat to the Empire, and since it WAS a threat to the Forerunners, I can't imagine that the only reason the Forerunners lost was because they were 'holding back' and 'got overwhelmed'.

[Connor MacLeod]

Several of the terminals indicate they where not highly militerized. And if the Flood did appear out of the blue like it was suggested in this thread and they had reigned over the galaxy for eons without needing military why should they have extensive military buildups?

I will admit that yes, they do seem to have had a minimal military presence beforehand. Given the Offensive bias/Mendicant bias battle, and MB saying to the Gravemeind earlier that he's going to contribute his "not insifngiicant" resources to the battle, to say nothing of the actual numbers of warships in that last battle (which IIRC didact had recalled ships in to form.)

Basically the Forerunner's seemed to take a page on Naval organization from the New Republic or Systems Commonwealth. They might have had more ships assigned to their protectorate members (they seem to have alot of local navies, I'd gather) but those navies it would seem to be much less advanced too.

However, given the construction ability implied by the Ark, the "military buildup" issue is irreelvant. In months (or less) they should have EASILY been able to build massive numbers of combat droids to combat the Flood, nevermind actual starships (we already know about something to this effect from Ghosts of Onyx.) And they've been fighting the Flood for what, 300 years?

Moreover, we have a pretty good inkling they have some pretty reliable FTL communications and teleportation tech (that portal from the Earth to the Ark.) This shouldn't even come close to threatening their "mantle" thing that supposeldy prevented them from using alot of their neat/effective weapons. In short, there's really little reason they shouldn't have been able to droid-spam the Flood into submission.

I will also point out that the whole "Gravemind" thing was revealed to be a massive weakness in and of itself (Didact points out that when threatened directly the GRavemind will retreat to defend itself.) something that the Forerunner military commander had hoped to exploit. The fact that MB turned traitor was something of a major blow to that possibility, I gather, and had that not happened, things might have been different.

Of course, the fact the Gravemind itself is a weak poitn also underscores just how stupidly the Forerunners actually fought the war. (The Gravemind itself is hardly the most intelligent of opponents either.)

[Connor MacLeod]

I will also add that there were other "invasion" situations where the Flood was held off rather easily. 9000 survivors, for example, are noted to have held off over 1.5 billion Flood for nearly a full week barricaded inside some governemnt building. Most fairly well militarized socieites (The galactic Empire, or the Imperium of Man from 40K) would doubtless do better in such situations, in better numbers. (Theatre shields would be a huge problem for the flood, for example.

Also, I strongly suspect that a good many of those same powers would have substnatilaly better spacec navies to help fend off attack (I don't recall mention of the forerunners using fixed/orbital weapons platforms or defenses.)

And firepower-wise, I'd be hard pressed to believe that the Forerunner's weapons would be dramatically more powerful than the weapons avialable to the aforementioned powers - they're certainly fare more so than the weapons the USNC or Covvies have access to, and the Flood are hardly immune to them. That fact alone is bound to influence the resistance issue.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yes, but so will other amazingly weak weapons. The shields in Halo, like most of Halo's tech, are really not all that amazingly impressive. How many shotgun blasts to take out a shield? Rifle shots? Pistol shots? We know the power of those weapons since they are based on existing weapons, with existing ammo, and even have things like muzzle velocity listed. We can mathmatically compute the kind of firepower we're dealing with there.

phyiscal impactors are kind of a complex thing to deal with, however. You don't have just kinetic energy, you also have the force/pressure and momentum of the round impacting the shield, and no shield can block or ignore conservation of momentum (as Mike's explained numerous times on his site and here.) So a small personal shield not being very effective against gunfire is not neccesarily a surprising thing (Generally "kinetic shields" like the Borg wankers scream about are going to be far more limited for that reason.)

Moreover, explosions are going to be yet another different sort of "firepower" to deal with (which you can further divide between nuke-like and high explosive type detonations, incendiary, etc..)

I mean this merely as a joke, but it seems a little premature to say the Flood are a Galactic Empire-level threat when it appears the Gungan Army (with their big army-shield) is probably equipped with more-than-adequate ground force weaponry to stave off some serious Flood attacks.

The Empire faces some of the same potential difficulties as the Forerunners did. The Flood made use of easily-available FTL conveyance in large numbers to screen its attacks, something which the Empire has as well. (Hyperspace may also be an issue, given its rapidity.) Which means that the flood can potentially expand quickly and easily.

Offsetting that, however, is the fact the GE has an extnesive and very realiable/fast communications network, the same FTL speed, its utter ruthlessness, and its insane industrial advantage. Once word of infection breaks out there's little stoppping the empire from deploying warships to purge the threat.

Widespread use of theatre and planetary shields will also be a huge advantage, for reasons stated before. Having to bypass/breach such defenses will make attempts at overwhelming major planets difficult (Virtually all the core, IIRC, has planetary shields, and there are many outer rim worlds that do as well. Nar Shaddaa and Nal Hutta had them, and even Naboo got a planetary shield.)

The aforementioned massive industry and the rampant existence of automata is also an advantage, as the Empire has the option to spam battle droids and war droids to fight the Flood (The Separatists had quadrillions/quintillions of Battle droids, remember.) which can more than easily be turned to fighting the flood. And worse comes to worse, they just sterilize the planet (which they have the ability to do in very short order - BDZs are such overkill beyond sterilization that it isn't funny.)

The Flood could easily takew and infect "backwater" worlds like Tattooine and expand there (though the access of FTL capable ships on backwaters is debatable.) but any effort to move into the more industrialised/heavily populated coreward areas (or even mid-rim worlds) would be met with significant resistance. So long as places like Kuat and Fondor and Corellia remained, they'd stillh ave significant indsutrial capability at their command. ( Hell even if they lost one or all of those, the sort of automated construction we know used for batlte droids droids, or to build the 2nd Death Star would remain.)

[Darth Wong]

Speaking of things that really should have occurred to the people living in the Halo galaxy, shouldn't it be possible to vaccinate people against Flood infection? What disease did Johnson suffer from, again? It's been a while since I read the book.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Speaking of things that really should have occurred to the people living in the Halo galaxy, shouldn't it be possible to vaccinate people against Flood infection? What disease did Johnson suffer from, again? It's been a while since I read the book.

It is heavily implied in a data log in the HALO graphic novel that Johnson was a Spartan-I, and that the modifications done to him were what somehow made him immune to Flood infection (and that the Boren's Syndrome he suffered from was a cover story).

[Darth Wong]

Speaking of things that really should have occurred to the people living in the Halo galaxy, shouldn't it be possible to vaccinate people against Flood infection? What disease did Johnson suffer from, again? It's been a while since I read the book.

It is heavily implied in a data log in the HALO graphic novel that Johnson was a Spartan-I, and that the modifications done to him were what somehow made him immune to Flood infection (and that the Boren's Syndrome he suffered from was a cover story).

You would think that if the survival of humanity was at stake, some people would start talking. At the very least, the fucking morons in charge should have spirited him away to study why he was immune to the Flood. This is not exactly a minor issue; if these parasites once assimilated most of the galaxy, then the development of a countermeasure should be of paramount importance.

[DPDarkPrimus]

In the novel, Master Chief doesn't mention Johnson's immunity to the Flood because ONI would have taken Johnson away and vivisected him in order to find out why exactly he was immune. So basically, it's because only a couple people made it alive off Installation 04, and they never told anyone about it, so no one else ever found out.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Ghetto edit: This was back when it was thought it was because of his disease, which he might not even have had. Until we get clarification on this (which it might actually happen in the novel due out this month), we can't really come up with a definitive answer.

[Darth Wong]

In the novel, Master Chief doesn't mention Johnson's immunity to the Flood because ONI would have taken Johnson away and vivisected him in order to find out why exactly he was immune. So basically, it's because only a couple people made it alive off Installation 04, and they never told anyone about it, so no one else ever found out.

What a joke. How the fuck would vivisection even be a useful method of determining what caused Johnson's immunity? How could they be so irresponsible as to cover up something so important? It's pretty obvious that they just wrote some really convoluted story in order to make quasi-sense out of Johnson's survival.