- PLUT0NIUM 235
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- Honorable Member
MAC rounds don't continue to accelerate once they are heading toward targets, they only accelerate down the length of the barrel. also im under the impression that the smaller MAC (the ones on frigates, destroyers) fire six hundred ton projectiles at some 35,000 m/s, thats not even a fraction of light speed. though its obvious that longer cruisers could have longer MAC barrels, therefore higher muzzle velocities i doubt they could ever reach anything like 1% of light speed (3,000,000 m/s).
however i doubt battles in halo are carried out at great distances for a number of reasons, firstly plasma looses energy and cools rather quickly once its left the ship, its not some magic material that stays hot forever. also MAC rounds are the fastest weapon the UNSC employ, archer missiles are just well...missiles so there range would be somewhat limited. think the battles are carried out at ranges of hundreds to thousands of kilometres, tops.
another thing worth noting, the nukes are likely going off in very very close proximity to the ships, like metres to hundreds of metres, what would be the point otherwise? another thing worth noting is maybe the UNSC nuclear weapons are directed, more like shaped charges, theoretically its possible to 'shape' a nuclear blast? also its impossible to judge how nukes are so effective against shields without understanding how they truely work, one can speculate but at the end of the day shields are probably the most fiction aspect of the haloverse which makes this question very hard to answer.
i for one thing that human ingenuity would prevail in the end against the covenant, because their technology is more scavanged, like the gou'old in stargate and the UNSC technology is our own, what happens when shields hit shields? could a shielded MAC round penetrate the shields of a covenant ship? or is there a way to modify a shield generator to generate a field that lets one pass straight through covenant shields? shields are afterall some sort of field, fields generally interact well with other fields, magnetic fields for example can interact with other magnetic fields without damaging either field. so maybe a shield could simply pass straight through another shield...?