Sarevok wrote:They are not any sniper rifles. Check out the
Stanchion. It has a phenomenal targeting computer that cane be linked with drones. The Stanchion was designed to kill targets hidden behind fortified structures at great distance. It's fires a bullet travelling at over fifteen thousand meters per second and no predator on Pandora will survive more than a few hits. The Stanchion can also be linked to UNSC drones so it can terrorize anything within several kilometers with pinpoint accuracy.
And UNSC Marines would be shooting at random animals that naturally inhabit the forest
why?
That's like the South African Defense Force fighting pygmies armed with arrows, and while they're doing so they are also shooting at elephants and rhinos "just to be sure".
The whole point is that the RDA (and the UNSC) did not expect any of the wildlife to intervene for the Na'vi and attack en masse. They were just animals. Did the US Army expect that Baghdad Zoo tigers would side with Saddam Hussein and maul soldiers?
The UNSC was almost wiped out by the Flood. They have plenty of first hand experience dealing with hivemind creatures and the danger they posses. The UNSC had been fighting aliens in a losing battle for decades. They are extremely paranoid and hateful of all things not human. If they are not already nuking Pandora from space they will land nothing short of a very heavily armed force.
They will land with nothing short of the forces specified in the OP.
1 ) The Flux vortex only affected RDA navigation gear. Radios worked, even Avatar links works. Hell even motion trackers worked. In any case UNSC sensors are way more advanced and designed to perform in a radition filled battlefield against an enemy with superior ECM.
Was that battlefield filled with enough radiation and ECM to
lift mountains into the air?
2 ) Neither Pelican nor Hornet weapons require a radar lock to work. They targeting system is sufficiently advanced they can use visual mode only. The UNSC pilots have a system similar to the TADS equipment on the Apache. In cut scenes you can see the helmet mounted sights. The pilot can aim, track and shoot just by looking.
Unless the pilot can use eight eyes to aim, track and shoot just by looking and his neck is mounted on a ball socket joint, how do you expect him to shoot at
an entire sky filled with fucking pterodactyls?
3 ) There is no reason to slowly bumble into the floating mountains. The Pelican was designed to come out of orbit at extremely velocity under serious surface to space weapons fire. The Pelican can very high speed passes slaughtering banshee riders, climb to high altitude and repeat untill they are all dead.
The question is not whether they can deal with banshee riders or not - the Scorpion gunships of the RDA were able to deal with them in the movie too. The question is whether or not they can deal with the banshee swarm that came afterwards. The OP is asking whether or not the Pelicans and other Haloid forces can escort the Venture Star to its target in the Soul Tree.
So, the question is, can the Pelican navigate in a weather that's partially cloudy overcast with a slight chance of rain, and with a sky that's full of not just Flux Vortexes but also floating mountains and with all those pterodactyls (the ones that aren't ridden) saturating the place in such numbers that you can't even see anything out of your cockpit.
You say that the Pelicans will simply move very fast. But can they move very fast in a place that jams their sensors, in a place where there are scores of flying mountains, and in a place where their vision is obstructed by craploads of flying dragons and where these flying dragons will
get in the way of their flightpaths.
You say that a pterodactyl will be reduced to a greasy smear when the Pelican hits it. But can a Pelican even fly through such a thick swarm of pterodactyls?
4 ) Even if it bumbles through sluggishly the Pelican is an armored dropship. Anything less than the red dragon won't even dent it. Infact I doubt even the red dragon is strong enough to wrestle a Pelican into crashing. Pelican engines are strong enough to haul a 60 ton tank to space and back. A banshee is probably fucked like a bug on a windscreen if it collides with a pelican.
What about two banshees if they collide with a Pelican? Three? Four? An entire sky full of them?
5 ) Finally the Covenant has flying drone caste and elites with jet pack armor. Pelican crews have experience dealing with airborne infantry that literaly flies and tries to board them.
Do they have experience in flying inside an entire swarm of hostile indigenous life forms that will obstruct their vision
and their flightpath, to the point where flying visually will be impossible and where they will keep on hitting lots of pterodactyls that keep on getting their way?
It's true that the Hornets are significantly better than RDA counterparts. Quite a few will be lost. Hiowever Pelicans are a different story. They are virtually invulnerable flying fortresses entering and exiting the battlefield at unfathomable speeds.
The Pelicans will be entering and exiting into flying mountains and swarms of banshees at unfathomable speeds, and crashing into them.
The UNSC infantry types are used to fighting very hard to kill aliens whether they be armored or unarmored. Hell the Brutes ran around practically naked untill they finally invented powered armor. Before that the Brute was a fast moving creature that can probably kill 3-4 Navi singlehandedly. The damn things could shrug off bullets like nothing. There is also the case for Flood combat forms. The flood have no armor but due to being a zerg ripoff are very hard to kill. The combat forms can lose limbs and not flinch. Frequently Flood combat forms get back up a few seconds after dieing.
So? The Na'vi are not the Flood, the Na'vi are not the Covenant. As far as the UNSC knows, the Na'vi are a bunch of stone-age jungle aliens armed with bows and arrows. Exactly because they're unarmored and armed with just bows and arrows, why would the UNSC infantry come in with anti-armor and anti-tank weapons? Would they also come in with anti-armor and anti-tank weapons if they were suppressing a Native Indian revolt, or a bunch of African pygmies, or a riot?
Would a police department send a SWAT team armed with assault rifles and door-breaching shotguns, or riot squads, when confronted by groups of people who don't have guns and just have sticks and stones?
Bottom line is the UNSC is not like real world armies. They have been fighting for decades against 8-12 feet tall dudes with armor, shields or hide so plain tough it ignores 50 caliber bullets.
And in this situation, they KNOW that their opponent don't have armor, shields or resistance to .50 caliber bullets. So why would they be packing anti-armor and anti-tank weapons? There is no intel that tells them that they'll be ambushed by hordes of giant wildlife. They'll equip themselves to fight the Na'vi, a bunch of half-naked primitives with knives and sharp sticks.
For all those guys suggesting MACs and Cyclops and Gorgons and Krakens and Gorillianoids and shit that's
not mentioned in the OP, why not just have the UNSC fire some Shiva nukes from orbit, while we're at it? Didn't they make a gas giant explode? They could blow up the planet Pandora's orbiting. Woah! FATALITY!
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