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I do not appreciate B.Net Group solicitation. If you ignore this and send me an invitation anyway, I will block communications with you.
Please don't take the following as if I'm writing off what you've said, because I'm not and I acknowledge their plausibility. However, now that you've pointed a big one out, there seems to be more than a few typo errors with Ghosts of Onyx concerning these dates that have somewhat put a shunt in the debatability of this particular point, rather than simply misleading words (including the "seven years of training"):
Posted by: TheCyberFreak
I would almost concede this point to you based on these facts. Except my own research has turned up further facts that raise some doubts.
It begins with this curiosity concerning the time required for Spartan III training. Consider this quote in referance to Alpha company from pg. 98 of GoO.
" Seven years Kurt had trained them, and grown to respect them. Now they were dead."
Kurt is experiencing this moment of contemplation during his briefing aboard UNSC Point of No Return on July 30, 2537, when he learns the fate of Alpha Company in Operation Prometheus. Except, Alpha Company touched ground to begin training on December 27th 2532. Which is only 5 years prior to the date of Kurt's briefing . So, if we consider that quote again, he is most likely not referring to seven years of training, since they didn't train for seven years but rather the seven years he's known them. The seven years he's refering to is inclusive of a 2 year period of selection and processing of the candidates prior to their being abducted and transferred to Onyx for training.
I'm not sure if you have a different version of the novel, but I have both the larger-sized and smaller-sized versions of GoO and the quote you're talking about is actually from p. 87 in both. Anyway, the issue with assuming that his mention of "training" translating to how long he knew them as well as a 2-year selection period is that this is contradicted of when we look at when Kurt was even assimilated into the S-III project to begin with.
Kurt's suit malfunction occurred on November 7, 2531. He was indoctrinated to run S-III by Ackerson on December 14, 2531 aboard the UNSC Point of No Return. He states "training" with Alpha Company for seven years on July 30, 2537 which in fact means that he could only have known about them for five and a half. This is further mucked up when we continue on to find that on December 27, 2531 --a mere twenty days later, it is stated that Kurt had, over the last six months, developed a training regime tougher than the original SPARTAN program, complete with obstacle courses, firing ranges, classrooms, mess halls, and dormitories, etc. -- twenty days =/= six months.
There is another huge inconsistency regarding the S-IIIs, specifically Beta Company's age based on Tom and Lucy:
I mentioned that Tom and Lucy are shown to be ten years-old in 2541. But in reading through the very first chapter in Ghosts of Onyx, which depicts the fall of Beta Company, they are twelve years-old in 2545 (GoO, p. 26), which also doesn't match up with the rest of the years.
Because of this, at the moment, neither your nor my provided quotes and analyses can prove nor disprove the indoctrination of Beta Company in either 2537 or 2539, but also consider regarding the new selection parameters that with an 'expanded selection criteria', the selection process would actually go faster as their requirements become more and more lax to encompass a broader population.
Regardless, given these slew of inconsistencies, it might simply help to throw Nylund an e-mail, since he seems to be relatively good with responding to fans about his novels. I might do this.
I should mention before you continue that someone earlier in this thread confirmed for us that the Spartan project that Yasmine was a part of in I Love Bees was indeed a subsequent class of Spartan-II soldiers, which has been amended to the OP posts for some time. So, if that is the point of pointing out these dates, you needn't. But I figured I'd continue on since, as I've mentioned, we have yet to have a definitive answer on whether I Love Bees is considered canon, and if so, what parts are being embraced (Frank O'Connor stated in a 1UP video show in 2006 that ILB was being "embraced as canon", but was then contradicted by Joe Staten in a 2006 interview with HBO's Halo Story Page, saying that they were working toward figuring out that question definitively).
I greatly appreciate your thorough responses.