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This topic has moved here: Subject: SMAC and MAC
  • Subject: SMAC and MAC
Subject: SMAC and MAC

ok dont yell at me for this...i havent read any of the books but i wish i have, so how much bigger is a SMAC station compared to a MAC station. Say the 'Cairo' for example.....enlighten me

plus...how many of them are there?

  • 12.19.2010 7:20 PM PDT
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  • Exalted Legendary Member

UWG

My jokes, so I don't lose them (ignore this):
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For some reason, the number 24 rings out for Reach's MAC Stations. Or is it 12..?
Anyway, it's not as many as you'd think.

As for size... No idea. 2-3 times the size, I'd guess.

Posted by: Sigma617
over Reach, (supposedly) 20 SMACS in equatorial orbit.
I believe the specs of an SMAC state the rounds are 3000 ton (over 3 times the mass of a standard round) and the powerplant of the SMAC station can propel it faster than the given 40% lightspeed limit of the standard MAC.
also as far as i can tell Cairo Station is an SMAC.
Well, there you go. off the top of my head, I was close.

[Edited on 12.19.2010 7:30 PM PST]

  • 12.19.2010 7:28 PM PDT
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  • Exalted Legendary Member

UWG

My jokes, so I don't lose them (ignore this):
ZedFish's Opinion on Sgt. Foley.
ZedFish's Forerunner Rickroll.

Posted by: Sigma617
I haven't read that part of the novel in quite some time.
I haven't read any of the books in ages. I should get back to it sometime.

  • 12.19.2010 8:02 PM PDT
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I'm pretty sure it's 20, unless it's been changed in the Tor reprint.

  • 12.19.2010 8:09 PM PDT

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Posted by: opogjijijp
I'm pretty sure it's 20, unless it's been changed in the Tor reprint.


It's still 20.

  • 12.19.2010 8:37 PM PDT

On hiding dead bodies:
Posted by: Psuedo
Posted by: teh Chaz
Inside another dead body. It's the last place they'll look
A corpse within a corpse.
CORPSEPTION.
Win.

A 'MAC station' doesn't exist AFAIK, they're only installed on ships. However, MAC guns themselves (on Frigates, at least) are <478m long and powered by a reactor capable of providing 'terawatts' of power (able to, on its own, provide a substantial fraction of current UK energy demand).

Using this energy, they can magnetically accelerate a 600 ton projectile over a distance of <478m to 30,000m/s.

An SMAC platform has no on-board reactor, it is powered from the ground, using (IIRC) microwaves to transmit energy from the reactor to the station. This is an IRL method that could explain power delivery to an ODP.
However, with this dedicated reactor, it can accelerate a round 5 times as massive as the standard MAC shell (3000 tons versus 600), to a speed of 40% of the speed of light, over 4000 times faster than a normal MAC slug.
IIRC, they consist of a barrel running stem to stern of the station, with a living quarters-come-magazine near the base. The HBO chart states that it is something like 1366m long? That is longer than a UNSC Cruiser.

[Edited on 12.20.2010 7:52 AM PST]

  • 12.20.2010 7:51 AM PDT

RIP Ginger

Spring 1997 - 6 January 2012

This got me thinking, I wonder what several SMAC rounds would do high charity...?

  • 12.20.2010 8:04 AM PDT

On hiding dead bodies:
Posted by: Psuedo
Posted by: teh Chaz
Inside another dead body. It's the last place they'll look
A corpse within a corpse.
CORPSEPTION.
Win.

Posted by: Chris marines
This got me thinking, I wonder what several SMAC rounds would do high charity...?
So far as we know, High Charity has no shield. It is never mentioned AFAIK, and may be too large to shield the dome. The dome and 'spire' together are 380km+, after all.

As such, a single SMAC would completely obliterate High Charity, likely penetrating the dome from one side of the other which would do massive damage anyway, and also would explosively depressurise the dome's atmosphere. The High Charity defence fleet (towards the end of the war known as the Second Fleet of Homogeneous Clarity[?]) would also have nowhere to dock and resupply, having to move to other Covenant settlements, and without leadership.
However, if it is shielded, that is bad.
Unyielding Heirophant, a Covenant space station 27km long, had a shield capable of 'repelling a small moon'. Using the Martian moon of Deimos as an example, this is equivalent energy to around 70 SMAC slugs. Even scaling linearly, a massively conservative estimate, the shield alone on High Charity would need over 1000 SMACs to overload.

  • 12.20.2010 8:16 AM PDT

RIP Ginger

Spring 1997 - 6 January 2012


Posted by: JDYeash937 MkII
Posted by: Chris marines
This got me thinking, I wonder what several SMAC rounds would do high charity...?
So far as we know, High Charity has no shield. It is never mentioned AFAIK, and may be too large to shield the dome. The dome and 'spire' together are 380km+, after all.

As such, a single SMAC would completely obliterate High Charity, likely penetrating the dome from one side of the other which would do massive damage anyway, and also would explosively depressurise the dome's atmosphere. The High Charity defence fleet (towards the end of the war known as the Second Fleet of Homogeneous Clarity[?]) would also have nowhere to dock and resupply, having to move to other Covenant settlements, and without leadership.
However, if it is shielded, that is bad.
Unyielding Heirophant, a Covenant space station 27km long, had a shield capable of 'repelling a small moon'. Using the Martian moon of Deimos as an example, this is equivalent energy to around 70 SMAC slugs. Even scaling linearly, a massively conservative estimate, the shield alone on High Charity would need over 1000 SMACs to overload.


Good points, I was thinking about it because iirc it talks about a SMAC round doing damage to a continent-sized area on Halopedia, but yh thanks for your thoughts :)

  • 12.20.2010 8:51 AM PDT

a SMAC round would do more than damage a continent, you could be talking an extinction level event on a planet, and thank god someone else actually realises that shipboard MACs don't fire rounds at % speed of light. when i did the math the energy released by a standard MAC round is around ~82 kilotons of TNT, so around five times more energy than the hiroshima bomb, in a single shot..! also i for one believe that unyielding heirophant being able to stop a super MAC round is total 'writer tosh', since the energies involved are beyond insane, but since we know how it works (unlike all the star wars number-gasms) its within the realms of possibility. but seriously, a station surviving a 3,000 metric ton projectile, travelling at (halopedia) 12,000 km/second, thats crazy amounts of energy.

  • 12.20.2010 11:42 AM PDT

On hiding dead bodies:
Posted by: Psuedo
Posted by: teh Chaz
Inside another dead body. It's the last place they'll look
A corpse within a corpse.
CORPSEPTION.
Win.

Posted by: PLUT0NIUM 235
a SMAC round would do more than damage a continent, you could be talking an extinction level event on a planet, and thank god someone else actually realises that shipboard MACs don't fire rounds at % speed of light. when i did the math the energy released by a standard MAC round is around ~82 kilotons of TNT, so around five times more energy than the hiroshima bomb, in a single shot..! also i for one believe that unyielding heirophant being able to stop a super MAC round is total 'writer tosh', since the energies involved are beyond insane, but since we know how it works (unlike all the star wars number-gasms) its within the realms of possibility. but seriously, a station surviving a 3,000 metric ton projectile, travelling at (halopedia) 12,000 km/second, thats crazy amounts of energy.
On a very basic level of comparing energies, the shield of Unyielding Heirophant would be capable of repelling several dozen SMAC rounds. However, this would not be the case due to the pinpoint pressure nature of their impacts, and their sheer velocities. In fact, their velocity is so great that some of the round's energy begins to convert into additional mass, making it an even heavier projectile.

Plus, due to the laws of the conservation of momentum, a round impacting at such velocity would cause the target ship to accelerate so much that the G-forces involved would either tear the ship asunder, or simply kill everyone aboard, and the shield would still be intact.
There is a point where realism begins to kill any possible fun from the story, and this is it.

  • 12.20.2010 12:08 PM PDT

Posted by:ScubaToaster
Posted by: HipiO7
This man, this man right here put it so eloquently that I actually cancelled my own 2000+ word long post.
/slow clap for respect


:)
The person who said participating is important, not winning, obviously never won anything.

In Halo 2, Cairo Staion (the whole first mission) is based on a Super MAC Orbital Platform.

It can obliterate pretty much any vessel known. Covenant or Human.

  • 12.20.2010 12:30 PM PDT

You do know that a single shot from a Super MAC has the equivelant energy of around ~51,625 megatons of TNT (51.6 gigatons or 0.516 teratons), bearing in mind the 50 megaton tsar bomb produced similar to 1.6% of the sun (a main sequence star) output. so a single Super MAC round produces a staggering fourteen and a half times as much energy as our star puts out (overall) in a second, so fourteen and a half seconds worth of solar output. now im sorry but that is in the absolutely rediculous scale, thats around ~600,000 times more powerful than a single standard ship MAC round. which by my calculations have around 87 kilotons worth of energy for each round.

Unyielding Heirophant isn't that large, where in the name of jesus is it 'claiming' to get that amount of energy from, cause i'll tell you what, its not fusion, bearing in mind the sun consumes millions of tons of matter each second in fusion. the only possible method i can think of for generating that amount of energy is matter/anti-matter reaction, and thats assuming one hundred percent efficient. since the Covenant don't possess matter/anti-matter reactors we can assume its absolute balls.

Also a single Super MAC round hitting the surface of our planet would be an extinction level event, the Barringer crater in Arizona was caused by an asteroid around 50 metres across, travelling at 12.8 kilometres/second and the crater is three quarters of a mile across, a Super MAC round is 3,000 metric tons travelling around a thousand times the speed..!
another event worth noting is the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter, one of the fragments (fragment G, non of the pieces was estimated to be greater than 5km across) created a 12,000 kilometre diameter scar on Jupiter, releasing an estimated 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (six teratons), or 116 times the energy of a Super MAC round, but still if the size of the crater/scar is directly proportional to the amount of energy, a Super MAC would still create ~104 kilometre wide scar on Jupiter, could you imagine what that would do to the Earth? also it further reinforces why I think there is no way Unyielding Heirophant could survive being hit by a SMAC shot.

I personally think that keeping to realistic physics, etc. is essencial in maintaining the level of realism in science fiction, it should be grounded in the realms of actual physics and not absolute fiction, thats why I dislike Star Wars because of their rediculous number-gasms, things like Star Destroyers have weapons capable of a teraton/shot, one sixth the energy released by fragment G of Shoemaker Levy 9.

  • 12.20.2010 1:42 PM PDT

On hiding dead bodies:
Posted by: Psuedo
Posted by: teh Chaz
Inside another dead body. It's the last place they'll look
A corpse within a corpse.
CORPSEPTION.
Win.

Posted by: PLUT0NIUM 235
You do know that a single shot from a Super MAC has the equivelant energy of around ~51,625 megatons of TNT (51.6 gigatons or 0.516 teratons), bearing in mind the 50 megaton tsar bomb produced similar to 1.6% of the sun (a main sequence star) output. so a single Super MAC round produces a staggering fourteen and a half times as much energy as our star puts out (overall) in a second, so fourteen and a half seconds worth of solar output. now im sorry but that is in the absolutely rediculous scale, thats around ~600,000 times more powerful than a single standard ship MAC round. which by my calculations have around 87 kilotons worth of energy for each round.
Too late for me to bother checking it, but your math looks about right to me. You must be using a different value for TNT energy output, because using Wikipedia's values, I get 71Kt.
Unyielding Heirophant isn't that large, where in the name of jesus is it 'claiming' to get that amount of energy from, cause i'll tell you what, its not fusion, bearing in mind the sun consumes millions of tons of matter each second in fusion. the only possible method i can think of for generating that amount of energy is matter/anti-matter reaction, and thats assuming one hundred percent efficient. since the Covenant don't possess matter/anti-matter reactors we can assume its absolute balls.There are 1000 twelve-terawatt fusion reactors aboard Unyielding Heirophant, which is a power system dedicated to the shield.
Page 305 of First Strike - "Each lobe has 500 12-terawatt reactors similar in design to the pinch fusion reactors aboard their ships. This energy is used to power a shielding system capable of repelling the collision of a small moon"
Also a single Super MAC round hitting the surface of our planet would be an extinction level event, the Barringer crater in Arizona was caused by an asteroid around 50 metres across, travelling at 12.8 kilometres/second and the crater is three quarters of a mile across, a Super MAC round is 3,000 metric tons travelling around a thousand times the speed..!
another event worth noting is the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter, one of the fragments (fragment G, non of the pieces was estimated to be greater than 5km across) created a 12,000 kilometre diameter scar on Jupiter, releasing an estimated 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (six teratons), or 116 times the energy of a Super MAC round, but still if the size of the crater/scar is directly proportional to the amount of energy, a Super MAC would still create ~104 kilometre wide scar on Jupiter, could you imagine what that would do to the Earth? also it further reinforces why I think there is no way Unyielding Heirophant could survive being hit by a SMAC shot.
I did say in my last post that even if the shield could withstand the shot, the ship itself or at least the occupants most certainly wouldn't.
Also, I remember reading somewhere (probably Halopedia) that a 20-round barrage from ODPs would recreate the extinction event created by the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
I personally think that keeping to realistic physics, etc. is essencial in maintaining the level of realism in science fiction, it should be grounded in the realms of actual physics and not absolute fiction, thats why I dislike Star Wars because of their rediculous number-gasms, things like Star Destroyers have weapons capable of a teraton/shot, one sixth the energy released by fragment G of Shoemaker Levy 9.Well, space combat in of itself isn't realistic.
Here's a good read as to why stealth doesn't exist in space.
The ODPs certainly don't operate in regular physics. Since they fire at 40% speed of light, they will encounter relativistic effects during flight, in which some of the energy of the round will convert to mass, and thus slow down the round.
In space combat in Halo, ships commonly travel at great speeds in the millions of kph, and a Prowler's top speed is inferred as 40 million kph, and a Frigate's weapon range can be reach from a distance of 80 million km within one hour at maximum speed.
The reactors of UNSC Frigates are also capable of producing a sizeable portion each of the UK's current energy demand today.

There's more, it's too late for me to discuss them.

[Edited on 12.21.2010 7:45 AM PST]

  • 12.20.2010 3:27 PM PDT