Forerunners Vs. the Galactic Empire

[Ford Prefect]

It's not entirely clear how they could have got a foothold such that an entire (inter?)galactic empire couldn't just stomp on them instantly.

The Flood actually had a big intergalactic space fleet when the Forerunners first encountered them.

[Stark]

The entire Forerunner-Flood war lasted just 300 years.

And the halos have been abandoned with flood samples within for AI to study for way longer than that. So what? What purpose is fulfilled by not burning them? Hell, they clearly have the technology to just re-create the flood from records if they really needed a live one for some reason.

The Flood infect and gain strength exponentially, not linearly. And like any exponential growth, the first part of the curve is deceptively flat.

Is this more 'sector level threat in 3 days' nonsense?

But one Flood becomes two, two become four, four become eight... in just 32 generations you will have 4 billion flood.

MASS FROM NOWHERE

Unless you apply overwhelming force the instant you discover the Flood, they will inevitably overrun any conventional defense.

That's pretty funny since in the games the flood are a hazard - not a universe ending threat - after what I believe is many months. Oops. Turns out even against the shit-stupid forerunners they only had a chance because they stole ships to get tech parity.

[Darksider]

While the Forerunners Engineering feats are fairly awesome unto themselves, is there anything we can use to determine what kind of weapons they used, and how much firepower they have?

If it's on par with Covenant and UNSC ships they're going to be seriously outclassed in naval engagements. They can hide in their Dyson Spheres all they want, but it won't mean a damn thing if they lack the numbers and firepower to destroy Imperial warships.

And I honestly don't thing they would use something as universe ending as the Halos against the Empire. Conquest by an extragalactic Empire and the consumption of all life by a massive unstoppable hive entity are not one and the same.

[aaaaa0]

While the Forerunners Engineering feats are fairly awesome unto themselves, is there anything we can use to determine what kind of weapons they used, and how much firepower they have?

Sadly no.

For now, we can only speculate at what a civilization capable of building stuff like this would/could do with their warships.

That said, Greg Bear is in the process of writing a Halo Forerunner novel trilogy (which will be canon) and the first book is slated for release late this year or early next year.

I anticipate that these books will likely clarify the history of the Forerunner-Flood war, and explain the seemingly "stupid" behavior of the Forerunners.

[Darksider]

Then I suppose we'll have to put this debate on hold until that comes out, because at this moment the only forerunner weapons we've seen are the robotic drones and that retarded beam axe thing from Legends

[aaaaa0]

If it's on par with Covenant and UNSC ships they're going to be seriously outclassed in naval engagements.

To be fair, it seems more than a little silly to believe a civilization with such mastery of hyperspace and megascale engineering would have ships no better than the Covenant or the UNSC.

But yes, we're going to have to wait until more fiction is released before anything can be said definitively.

[Imperial528]

I'd suggest that their shielding/armor technology is better than both covenant and UNSC weapons, since in a cinematic in Halo 3 at least a dozen UNSC ships fire MAC guns at a Forerunner ship and they do jack. Of course the exact details I have forgotten.

[Stark]

If you mean the ark keyship, it's maybe 3-4 UNSC ships firing obviously subsonic fireballs. Not particularly impressive.

[Sarevok]

Forerunner megastructures like Halos are so fragile the Covenant never used orbital bombardment during their ground battle with UNSC. Infact I am told they never even used heavy anti ship weapons like plasma torpedoes against the Pillar of Autumn to avoid destroying the Halo with an accidental hit. And the Halo itself exploded in a chain reaction that tore the ring apart when a fusion reactor on the Autumn denoted. In ground warfare zombified humans can punch and destroy Forerunner Sentinel robots. I dont care how wanky flood is its still a human fist made of flesh and bone.

Needless to say Forerunner armor sucks terribly compared to the Galactic Empire.

[aaaaa0]

Forerunner megastructures like Halos are so fragile the Covenant never used orbital bombardment during their ground battle with UNSC.

The Halos had ultimate religious significance for the Convenant. They weren't going to use heavy ship weapons against a Halo no matter what.

And the Halo itself exploded in a chain reaction that tore the ring apart when a fusion reactor on the Autumn denoted.

...which had enough stored energy available to fire a wankery weapon capable of wiping out all sentient life in a radius of 25,000 light years.

In ground warfare zombified humans can punch and destroy Forerunner Sentinel robots. I dont care how wanky flood is its still a human fist made of flesh and bone.

You can't scale a quarantine robot intended to control localized Flood outbreaks up to the capabilities of a warship.

[aaaaa0]

Regarding the energy output that a Halo must have:

After thinking about it a bit more, I don't think people understand just how big a sphere with diameter of 50,000 light years is.

Clearly, a Halo is not a direct energy transfer weapon. That much is obvious.

But no matter what effect Halo uses, it still needs some amount of energy to work. Right? Everything needs energy.

Ok, so let us suppose that it requires a mere one joule per cubic kilometer of space for the Halo effect to work. Just *one*.

That's absolutely nothing right?

One joule will barely raise the temperature of one thousandth of a liter of water a quarter of a degree centigrade.

Well...

A sphere of diameter 50,000 light years is aproximately 5.5 x 10^52 cubic kilometers.

O_O

So for an effect as efficient as a single joule per cubic kilometer of space, the Halo must be able to generate 5.5x10^52 joules of energy.

The most generous measure of the power output of a Death Star that I can find is 10^38 joules, while it is discharging its main weapon.

That means Halo's energy generation capability has to be on the order of 10^14 times greater than the Death Star.

In other words, a trillion Death Stars firing their main weapon as the same time, would still be one hundred times less than the energy a single Halo requires to work, if the effect it uses requires a mere *one* joule per cubic kilometer of space.

o_O

Like I said before, a Halo has to make the Death Star look like a wet match for it to work anything like the way it is supposed to.

I don't think the GE stands a chance against the Forerunners.

O_o

[Stark]

You're a fucking idiot. It's OBVIOUSLY not a direct energy transfer weapon, since it MAGICALLY AFFECTS ONLY LIFE.

Having looked up the specific heat of water to try to look smart is just sad. 4.2J raises a mil of water one degree? SHOCKING STUFF, and totally relevant to a magic spell that kills life. Right? JUST LIKE HEATING UP WATER!

EDIT - For a lol, do you know how big the magnetic field set up by a single joule passing through a coil is? That's right, with sufficiently sensitive equipment you can detect it at whatever range! UH OH! 1J = 1km now! I KNO SCIENZ!!!

[aaaaa0]

You're a fucking idiot. It's OBVIOUSLY not a direct energy transfer weapon, since it MAGICALLY AFFECTS ONLY LIFE.

Maybe a Halo takes 1 joule of energy to fill one cubic kilometer with magi-rays that only affect life and are otherwise non-detectable. Who knows.

The point is no matter what the effect is, it needs *some* energy to function. And a sphere 50,000 light years in diameter is so big that the result is power requirements that seem like utter wankery to me.

[Stark]

You ARE a fucking moron.

After admitting you don't know how it works or what the efficiency is, you the declare it must use some huge amount of energy.

To highlight how stupid you are, what does the halo effect do to 99.9% of that 50,000 light years? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The effect doesn't disrupt planets, change orbits, or apparently even heat shit up. If it transfers no energy to that area, what is the energy cost? How much energy does it 'cost' to shoot a laser beam across 50,000 light years of pure vacuum?

PS? NOT ONE MILLION GIGATRONS.

[aaaaa0]

To highlight how stupid you are, what does the halo effect do to 99.9% of that 50,000 light years? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The effect doesn't disrupt planets, change orbits, or apparently even heat shit up. If it transfers no energy to that area, what is the energy cost? How much energy does it 'cost' to shoot a laser beam across 50,000 light years of pure vacuum?

You've already agreed that it's not a direct energy transfer weapon, and here you are comparing it to one.

Anyway fine, I withdraw the whole line of reasoning. Which I suppose means the way the Halos work is by magic, until the fiction says otherwise.

[Stark]

Try to learn, shithead. Seriously, think about the laser example; the beam spreads over distance, but only loses energy as it strikes things and heats them or is blocked. A sufficiently large reciever will pick up the full energy minus the energy lost along the way. Thus, your entire 'the Halo effect requires huge energies to do nothing to a vast area of space' idea is totally bunk; indeed if there WAS huge amounts of energy involved, where DID IT GO? What did it to?

[aaaaa0]

Seriously, think about the laser example; the beam spreads over distance, but only loses energy as it strikes things and heats them or is blocked.

The effect is not a laser. It is not an energy transfer weapon anyway. Besides ok you win, I've already withdrawn the line of reasoning, since there's no way to say anything about how it works until someone writes about it in canon fiction.

[Stark]

Listen to what I'm saying.

It's an EXAMPLE shitbrain to explain a basic physics concept.

If something does no work, how much energy does it use? If a device does 'nothing' over 'the entire universe', how much energy does it consume?

That's right - zero + inefficiency. If you're claiming the halo effect a) uses giant amounts of energy somehow and yet b) doesn't transfer any energy to anything ever, that's a very interesting theory.

[aaaaa0]

If something does no work, how much energy does it use? If a device does 'nothing' over 'the entire universe', how much energy does it consume?

Since we don't know how it works, we don't know if no work was actually done.

I've withdrawn my line of reasoning (you win ok), and I've resisted speculating any further about the Halo effect because you very rightly pointed out we can't conclude anything about how it works.

But if you really want, then just assume the effect actually propagates in hyperspace, and does lots of work there, but the net effect in real-space is zero, unless there happens to be a living being there. It's MAAAAGIIIIICCCCCC.

[Stark]

... Are you listening?

You said it 'must' use a lot of energy because it affects a large volume, and now you're saying we don't know it doesn't do anything to the vast amounts of nothing in space.

You've resorted to just making shit up to try to support your claim that it requires trillions of gigaquads to do ... nothing... to a whole lot of ... nothing.

But you're right. MAYBE the halo effect works by condensing quantum stalagtites all around the universe and STABBING EVERYONE TO DEATH, requiring mass-energy conversion and passable melee skills! INFINITE POWER!

[aaaaa0]

You said it 'must' use a lot of energy because it affects a large volume, and now you're saying we don't know it doesn't do anything to the vast amounts of nothing in space.

You've resorted to just making shit up to try to support your claim that it requires trillions of gigaquads to do ... nothing... to a whole lot of ... nothing.

But you're right. MAYBE the halo effect works by condensing quantum stalagtites all around the universe and STABBING EVERYONE TO DEATH, requiring mass-energy conversion and passable melee skills! INFINITE POWER!

Like I said, you win. I've withdrawn the whole thing, because there's no way to know what it does.

[Imperial528]

I would venture a guess that it uses slipspace to deliver amounts of radiation which is sufficient to kill anything the flood could eat (but somehow not to Flood) among an uneven spread in its radius, concentrating on star systems but still delivering enough to empty space to kill off ship crews.

How it could do that is unknown, and IIRC no one in the Halo universe seems capable of blocking off slipspace, so unless they find an area of realspace which slipspace cannot be accessed they're screwed.

'Course, any ship at warp or in hyperspace would be fine. Or maybe if they were in a long wormhole, or that "weird" slipspace which was encountered in one of the Halo novels. Although, if a ship were to isolate itself in slipspace like the Forerunner Dyson sphere inside Onyx was it might survive as well.

[Stark]

Why would it need a giant ring for that, though? The thing on Earth could make a giant slipgate just fine. Its implied that the effect is indiscriminate, but since they've never been fired everyone is just talking from fear. If the effect disrupted the laws of physics to destroy organic chemistry, that might do it, and the flood would just mass-from-nowhere back after the effect passed. I'm not sure how the flood is supposed to starve if they'd captured ships fulll of forerunner tech and should have been able to either hibernate or recreate life, but... nobody said the Halo story made any sense.

[Ford Prefect]

There's a nebulous criterion for being killed by the Halo effect, which is generally described as 'sentience'. The idea appears to be killing anything an infection form can actually use to develop tool usage and technological know-how, while actually preserving enough simple life in the galaxy to ensure the rise of life in the future. This is extremely arbitrary.

[Junghalli]

Try to learn, shithead. Seriously, think about the laser example; the beam spreads over distance, but only loses energy as it strikes things and heats them or is blocked. A sufficiently large reciever will pick up the full energy minus the energy lost along the way. Thus, your entire 'the Halo effect requires huge energies to do nothing to a vast area of space' idea is totally bunk; indeed if there WAS huge amounts of energy involved, where DID IT GO? What did it to?

You are correct, but I just feel like pointing out that if the effect was indeed omnidirectional it would be subject to inverse square law, and a sphere 50,000 light years across would have a pretty insane surface area (about 7 X 10^35 km^2 to be precise if I got the math right). Using a unit-appropriate version of aaaaa0's arbitrary figure (1 joule per km^2) it'd be about 3 orders of magnitude less than the estimate he gives for the Death Star, but that's still a pretty huge amount of energy (equivalent to decades worth of energy output from our sun).

Of course the whole issue is moot anyway because the mechanism is completely unquantifiable, so this is just me indulging in calculating what an insane amount of energy you'd need to distribute 1 joule/km^2 evenly over a 50,000 light year sphere.