Connor MacLeod wrote:Check me on this, but the quote says that a Covvie warship should be able to 'glass' an acre of ocean, up to a depth of ~1.8 km, within 15 seconds. If we assume "glassing" means boiling (as hinted at in some of the novels, though we could guess vaporization - that won't change the actual calc by an OoM ignoring inefficiencies though) I'd guess that the sustained firepower is hundreds of terawatts, perhaps a few petawatts (allowing for some fudge factor.)
The 15 seconds is for an average acre of land. It doesn't state how long it takes for ocean waters, just "considerably longer".
A single Covenant capital ship (CCS-class) is capable of ‘glassing’ approximately one acre of a planet’s sruface after an average of fifteen seconds of sustained fire. Understandably this action takes considerably less time when applied to open desert, and considerably longer when applied to deep ocean (> 1.8 km)"
Edit: Nvm, beaten to it.
Either way, it's interesting how much the power of Covenant weapons has changed over the course of Halo's development. While explicit timeframes and powers were not stated, in the early books, glassing was just that. Now, we have Covenant ship weapon unable to destroy buildings (unless I misunderstood Stark). I find it funny.
Coyote: Warm it in the microwave first to avoid that 'necrophelia' effect.
It seems pretty reasonable to assume from the wording of the minutes that the depth of the glassed surface isn't actually all that significant. I mean, if they're melting hundreds or thousands of metres of the crust, the AIs probably would have mentioned it. The AIs are generally pretty dismissive of the threat of 'glassing' anyway and, I think this bears repeating, picked the term glassing because it sounds scary, not because it is actually an accurate assessment of Covenant capabilities.
Just to cap this off, there's actually a journal from Halsey which has her being entirely incredulous of the idea that the Covenant glass an entire planet. She outright says that if they commanded that level of power then there would be no fleet battles, the Covenant would just instantly win every time, which isn't the case. Pointed jabs at whole segments of the fanbase or what?
I'm curious; does this whole glassing jossing have anything to do with the game events, or does it just seem that there was someone at Bungie bent on pissing off the fanboys?
"No, no, no, no! Light speed's too slow! Yes, we're gonna have to go right to... Ludicrous speed!"
[^] Of course, dissemination of this analysis to our creators would undermind the utility of ‘glassing’ as a galvanizing concept, and should be suppressed. [^]
From that quote, are we supposed to get the feeling that glassing isn't what was cracked up to be and that the "creators" didn't want people to know that? They just want people to fear the mighty Covenant planetary destruction capabilities and therefore unite against the Covenants?
ASVS('97)/SDN('03)
"Whilst human alchemists refer to the combustion triangle, some of their orcish counterparts see it as more of a hexagon: heat, fuel, air, laughter, screaming, fun." Dawn of the Dragons
[^] Of course, dissemination of this analysis to our creators would undermind the utility of ‘glassing’ as a galvanizing concept, and should be suppressed. [^]
From that quote, are we supposed to get the feeling that glassing isn't what was cracked up to be and that the "creators" didn't want people to know that? They just want people to fear the mighty Covenant planetary destruction capabilities and therefore unite against the Covenants?
All the texts found in the game are there. They suggest that a group of human created AIs are manipulating events in order to preserve humanity, and that they engineered the Human-Covenant war in order to prepare them for a bigger threat. Not a whole lot of sense, but there you have it. Sets up some sequels I guess. Whatever.
and that they engineered the Human-Covenant war in order to prepare them for a bigger threat.
In what datapad is this stated? There was something about an outside force that the Covenants were terrified about, but that was during the war, not before it.
So doesn't this imply that all the shit about Glassing one planet after another could just be UNSC propaganda? The Covenant doesn't actually use it as frequently as they think. The UNSC is losing the war mainly because of how much bigger the Covenant is rather than an immense technological disparity.
Wing Commander MAD wrote:Well the majority of the Covenant, barring a few individuals like the Arbiter and the Spec. Ops Leader/Shipmaster seem to leave alot to be desired when it comes to tactical decision making. Those two at least come off as more competant and intelligent than the rest, whether they are could be another matter entirely.
The Covenant is a society of religious fanatics. Devotion to the ideals of the Covenant is more important than tactical prowess. Since the Covenant also possess a much greater amount of military mass than the UNSC does, they can afford to just make one huge blunder after another and still have a ridiculous amount of resources to win the war.
Tactically the Covenant seem to be designed like an Army that wants to fight pitched Line Battles. Though they have begrudgingly accepted that their thinking is very old and hasn't evolved with their technology. They simply haven't fought anyone of their own weight class. The Covenant gives off the impression that historically they've just beaten much smaller opponents through sheer mass.
So the only reason the humans are in the fight is because their opponents are utter retards. Wow, thanks for makng the Covenant even less scary Bungie.
What was wrong with making the Covenant a competent foe? The humans are going to lose either way. But hongi, then how would the humans pull off those miraculous and heartening victories? Why not make the humans even more competent!
None of the stupid shit that we know now about the Forerunner or Covenant really started coming about until Halo started getting lots of shitty Expanded Universe stuff. Bungie pretty clearly had no plan for Halo beyond 1 game and just borrowed from the authors what things they should put in the story for the 2nd game. They cemented themselves pretty badly with Halo 2's story and 3 basically had no choice but to answer for a lot of stuff.
Astoundingly though you could solve a lot of the problems with Halo's narrative just by making it less pretentious.
The biggest charm of the first game was that the NPC dialogue made it rather obvious that it wasn't taking itself too seriously. The very nature of the Grunts itself points to this, along with things like Sgt "Kenny" Johnston repeatedly dieing and then reappearing as if nothing had happened, sometimes in teh same level. You hit the nail on the head with the Expanded Universe crap and the over the top pretentious nature the franchise took on, particularly in the marketing for the follow up games.
I'm not surprised that the company founder and half the original team up and quit half way through the development of Halo 2.
They quit because development of the game was basically dead in the water for 2 years. Bungie literally admitted that in 3 years they only spent 8 months actually developing the game and 2 years being totally fucking clueless as to how to 1-up their previous effort.
and that they engineered the Human-Covenant war in order to prepare them for a bigger threat.
In what datapad is this stated? There was something about an outside force that the Covenants were terrified about, but that was during the war, not before it.
Datapad 8. It appears to say that one of the AI confesses that they initiated first contact with the Covenant, instead of letting it happen randomly, and that this was the prior decision of the assembly majority.
The UNSC is losing the war mainly because of how much bigger the Covenant is rather than an immense technological disparity.
Disparity in firepower, you mean. Their FTL drives are still orders of magnitude faster than human ones, giving them a huge strategic advantage.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
The impression I get from the war is that the UNSC is a lot like Imperial Japan. They're facing an enemy with complete naval supremacy and are maintaining their remaining naval assets by keeping safely concentrated in bases away from the line. Meanwhile, they've proven they can fortify the shit out of planets heading into their territory. Forcing the Covenant into taxing sieges of one planet after another. No matter how fast the Covenant's ships are, they need to capture territory in a linear manner to support the movements of the fleets and armies. Besides that, they're compelled to kill human population centers wherever they are. Making all of their movements very predictable.
The UNSC is probably hoping they'll be able to spread the Cov Navy over a wide enough area and eventually will be able to inflict a Mahan-esque victory over a detached section of their fleet. Losing Reach is like losing Okinawa or the Philippines. It's fall constitutes the failure of the Navy to sustain the war.
912 ly/day is the Covy slipspace drives from memory, vs ~4.5 for human ones. Every human world should be within a jump or two's range for Covenant ships, but they don't know where they all are or which ones are important etc. From memory in Halo 2 they pop out on top of Earth without even realizing that it was their homeworld.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
The crux of the Reach datapads is that while the Covenant are clearly superior to the UNSC is basically every way, the disparity is clearly not intended to be so great that Covenant trivially have access to billions of times more energy. The Covenant always win, but Halsey's diary is fairly clear that if the Covenant were as powerful as UNSC propaganda claimed, then they would win much faster. The Covenant are almost cetainly hampered by their lack of information: they basically don't know where anything is, and the UNSC is extremely small.
That never really made sense to me; why can't they just send their smaller ships (of which they have hundreds and nobody but the UNSC to fight) and jump around, jump up, jump up and get down until they find them? Even if the UNSC is really spread out the Cov should have worked out what kind of star they prefer. With their speeds it really shouldn't take them that long to check out 100,000 stars.
Hell, why couldn't the Coevenant simply raise an antenna as they enter more and more Earth colonies and LISTEN to the closer stars for any ten, twenty, fifty, hundred year old EM chatter to point out targets to hit?
And if the UNSC is so damn small, why hasn't the UNSC in the long years of this war they think they are going to loose packed up fifty colony fleets, each with a million carefully selected people with orders to go a LOONNNNG way into deep space in random directions to ensure the survival of the human race? The fact that in HALO-3 'Earth is all we have left' is utterly crazy considering they have known for so long that the superior Covenant forces were playing for keeps.
Chris OFarrell wrote:And if the UNSC is so damn small, why hasn't the UNSC in the long years of this war they think they are going to loose packed up fifty colony fleets, each with a million carefully selected people with orders to go a LOONNNNG way into deep space in random directions to ensure the survival of the human race?
We don't know if there were secret plans to do something like this. It seems logical there would be preparations of that sort. But we also don't know if such an effort would just be futile with the speed of Covenant ships vs human ones.
Chris OFarrell wrote:The fact that in HALO-3 'Earth is all we have left' is utterly crazy considering they have known for so long that the superior Covenant forces were playing for keeps.
I'm pretty sure Earth wasn't the only human planet left at that point. The novels do mention that the Covenant skipped over many colony worlds once they located Earth. That said, losing Earth would probably mean the end of any serious resistance from the UNSC, so in that respect, it is accurate to call it their last stand.
Stark wrote:Since I was talking about skyscrapers and cities, I'm not sure how you could have imagined I was talking about an underground cave. The Covenant don't even bombard it! We however see that buildings that ARE bombarded (like in NA) are largely intact and functional. I don't think a single fallen skyscraper is seen onscreen.
To be fair, I just finished the New Alexandria level, and there appears to be a large lake of molten something off in the distance as part of the skybox, surrounded with what I think is supposed to be collapsed bits and pieces of skyscraper, and a Covenant ship overhead. In motion, the skybox animation appears to show large scale weapons fire hidden by the clouds in the distance.
However, the game does not show any bombardment up close in that mission.
Darksider wrote:Actually, the ship in the finale is a cruiser, so it would have a larger power plant AND more weapons to use. Is any reason ever given in the supplemental materials like the shit in the legendary edition that might explain why it just sat there and cruised towards the Autumn at like four miles an hour?
And how the fuck did a piddly little mass driver like the one used (which was IIRC converted from something used for ship-building) when the larger, ship mounted guns need at least three shots to penetrate the shields of Covenant warships?
And speaking of shields, why the fuck didn't the Covenant corvettes seem to have shields at all? they can put shields on fighters, phantoms (the ones in the space level are shielded) and even infantry, but their support warships are SOL?
the mass driver did not have to brack through the shields. the CCS ship was charging its glassing gun, meaning that section of its shields would be down.
"There is no such thing as coincidence in this world - there is only inevitability"
"I consider the Laws of Thermodynamics a loose guideline at best!"
"Set Flamethrowers to... light electrocution"
It's not enough to bash in heads, you also have to bash in minds.
Tired is the Roman wielding the Aquila.
Chris OFarrell wrote:Hell, why couldn't the Coevenant simply raise an antenna as they enter more and more Earth colonies and LISTEN to the closer stars for any ten, twenty, fifty, hundred year old EM chatter to point out targets to hit?
Per Evolutions, that one actually had Admiral Cole stumped - his best guess was that someone within the Covenant hierarchy was preventing them doing so.
Darksider wrote:And how the fuck did a piddly little mass driver like the one used (which was IIRC converted from something used for ship-building) when the larger, ship mounted guns need at least three shots to penetrate the shields of Covenant warships?
It didn't penetrate the battle cruiser's shields - you've got to wait to hit it until it drops the shields around its underside energy projector to kill it (as the weapon reachs the power levels needed to fire).
"I do not say the French cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea." - Admiral Lord St. Vincent, Royal Navy, during the Napoleonic Wars
"Show me a general who has made no mistakes and you speak of a general who has seldom waged war." - Marshal Turenne, 1641
On a slightly random note, this is at least the third time in recent years I have come across the name Arcadia for a scene of a great battle and/or last stand. First in NuWho "Doomsday" - the Doctor "by fighting, n the front lines. I was there at the fall of Arcadia."
Now it's here in Halo, and it turns up in Modern Warfare 2 ("Alright, we're heading into Arcadia"). In that case I know it's a proper place, but still
Baltar: "I don't want to miss a moment of the last Battlestar's destruction!"
Centurion: "Sir, I really think you should look at the other Battlestar."
Baltar: "What are you babbling about other...it's impossible!"
Centurion: "No. It is a Battlestar."
Corrax Entry 7:17: So you walk eternally through the shadow realms, standing against evil where all others falter. May your thirst for retribution never quench, may the blood on your sword never dry, and may we never need you again.
