Error: Reach was invaded on July 24th.
Proof: All Halo media has always stated Reach fell in one day, and that day was August 30th.
Sources:Ghosts of Oynx, First Strike, Fall of Reach.
Error: Alpha Company was wiped out completely during Operation: PROMETHEUS in 2537. Carter, Emile, and Jun should not be alive.
Proof: Halo: Ghosts of Onyx goes into quite a bit of detail on Operation: PROMETHEUS. Spartan-III Alpha Company (comprised of 300 Spartans) were sent to K7-49 on a mission to destroy plasma reactors the Covenant were using to liquefy metallurgical components.
The operation was a success, but it is explicitly stated that it cost the lives of every Spartan-III on the asteroid because they got cut off from their Calypso-class Exfiltration crafts and completely lost their unit cohesion.
Halo Reach chooses to ignore this. Carter (A-259), Emile (A-239), and Jun (A-266) are a part of Noble Team when they should have been dead years ago; Bungie have given us no explanation on how they escaped at all.
Sources:
- Ghosts of Onyx, page 83-87.
- Halo Reach
Error: ONI's actions as well as the Cole Protocol.
According to the Cole Protocol, if any Covenant Forces are detected, then all NAV bases and ships should purge their computers of information to protect Earth and the inner colonies.
Proof:If Covenant are detected on Reach on July 23rd, how is it that a month later, there are still computers with information to Earth still active? If ONI hadn't taken more than a month, than Blue team wouldn't have been deployed to the Circumference, and James wouldn't have died, and Linda wouldn't have been in a coma. Infact, they would have been on Reach with Red team.
Sources:
Pg 289 of The Fall of Reach gives information on the purging of Info not complete.
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/United_Nations_Space_Command_Emerg ency_Priority_Order_098831A-1
Error: Carter, Emile, and Jun's age.
Carter is born in 2520. He was 11 years old when Alpha Company began their training. This puts him 5 years above the previously stated age, and it makes no sense at all. Why would they have an 11 year old on the same training regime as a 4 year old? It's too large of a difference, and it's an error that can be avoiding by simply changing his birthdate. This same thing goes for Emile and Jun, who are older than 6 years old at Alpha training.
Proof: Page 69(I'm doing this by memory, I may be wrong.) of Ghosts of Oynx states that all of Alpha Company was comprised of 4, 5, and 6 year old children that he was going to have to forge into the best warriors humanity has ever seen.
Source: Ghosts of Oynx, page 69.
Error: Lack of Orbital MAC's.
Proof: Reach had a number of Orbital MAC's that were used in the battle of Reach. They were present on August 30th, so they should have been present during the mission "Long Night of Solace" in Halo: Reach. Had they been present, they Jorge wouldn't have died. Where were they?
Source: Fall of Reach, First Strike, Halo: Reach
Error: Pillar of Autumn on Reach.
Proof During the final level of Halo: Reach, the Pillar of Autumn is on the planet, and isn't in space, preparing for the Prophet mission. This COMPLETELY destroys much of Halo's canon. If the ship wasn't in space, than the Spartans of Red Team would have never jumped to the planet, meaning that the 4 spartans who died, would have still been alive. Which could have hanged the outcome of the battle. PLUS, the space op to destroy the Circumference's NAV data wouldn't have happened. So Chief, James, and Linda had no reason to NOT be part of Red team. So the chief wouldn't have been on the Autumn, so Halo: CE wouldn't have happened.
Why schedule a mission to capture a prophet, when there's a full scale invasion of Humanities second most important planet?
Reach FELL on August the 30th yes, but that was merely the date when Reach was officially declared by the UNSC to be under Covenant control. Considering that Reach was humanity's strongest fortress world it would be ludicrous to assume that it could fall on the very day it was first invaded.
Some members of the S-III companies were re-assigned immediately after training, for example Noble 6. As for Carter, Jun etc, in a company of 300 known Spartans it's perfectly logical to assume that a few survived, and considering the entirely covert nature of S-III operations it's also logical to assume that any few survivors would be kept hidden if at all possible, in order to minimize the risk of their discovery by the Covenant or Insurrectionists. It's always handy to have a hidden weapon.
The third point isn't really an inconsistency, just an example of lax behaviour on the part of characters in the storyline.
The S-IIIs were also specifically designed to have less rigid prerequisites than the S-IIs for training, such as age and genetics. While 11 may be a fairly extreme age compared to say, 4, at Ghosts of Onyx specifically references S-IIIs continuing their training AFTER they received their augmentations, there is no reason to assume that Carter didn't simply receive his before the other Alpha Company members.
Since "Birth of A Spartan" shows Carter undergoing the Augmentation in decidedly different circumstances to the rest of the Spartans, alone in a large operating theatre, as opposed to one of many, in a much larger room divided temporarily into separate smaller theatres, we can assume that he was perhaps a 'trial run' of the Spartan III augmentation process, to determine if the less rigid protocols were indeed valid.
The Orbital Macs are completely irrelevent to Long Night of Solace, the point of the mission was to deliver a slipspace bomb covertly to the Covenant Supercarrier. Personally I find it hard to believe that what can only be described as a "huge space gun" could deliver a delicate bomb, covertly or otherwise, to a shielded alien capital ship, which would of course be 'parked', for want of a better word, outside the firing range of said space gun. As for why Jorge died, unless you were able to somehow use the MACs to shoot the bomb and detonate it, which would probably have unexpected and not necessarily positive results, not to mention the likely impossibility of such a feat, then Jorge's sacrifice still stands.
As for the last point, my knowledge on this point is a bit less accurate, but I think it could safely be said that while the Pillar of Autumn was indeed in space when the Covenant began their full scale attack, it descended at some point in order for for Halsey's package to be delivered. The mission to capture the prophet was planned BEFORE the Covenant invasion of Reach, not after.
[Edited on 12.02.2010 4:27 PM PST]