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This topic has moved here: Subject: Two things I noticed with the Orbital Defense at Reach.
  • Subject: Two things I noticed with the Orbital Defense at Reach.
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Subject: Two things I noticed with the Orbital Defense at Reach.


Posted by: MegaMuffin16
Two things I noticed with the Orbital Defense at Reach.That it was oddly non-existent?

It would have been cool to have finally witnessed the true power of the MAC canon. I guess Bungie didn't want to scare us. It's a shame really.


I too would have loved to finally see ODP's in action, as well as the UNSC Fleet. We never really did see a UNSC Supercarrier or even a Marathon class Cruiser in action...

At least I got to see a Frigate.. Well, three Frigates...

  • 02.03.2011 8:21 PM PDT

Don't worry, you're still your mom's favorite Bnet member.

Posted by: Sigma617
eventually Bungie will retcon those classifications too.

actually, why not just retcon the entire UNSC fleet itself?
We only had about a dozen or so Frigates the entire war. The PoA was just merely a prototype. and orbital defenses? what the hell is that?
NOOOOOO!!!!

  • 02.04.2011 12:00 AM PDT

Wow. There's quite a LOT that needs to be corrected:

- First, kinetic energy is merely the measurement of the velocity change of an object in motion; which means that unless the MAC round tunneled it's way to the core of the planet, it would expend almost all of it's energy once it hit the lake bed. This was CLEARLY not a 50 gigaton detonation, since the entire lake (and the surrounding mountains) wasn't turned to vapor in microseconds.

- Second, the object CLEARLY wasn't relativistic, and the fact that we see it in motion (rather than a column of light that burns your retinas out of existence due to sheer air friction) indicates that it was moving at several km/s at most. Unless the object weighed hundreds of thousands of tons it would not even qualify as a kiloton level impact.

- Third (and I'm shocked this has to be said - please for the love of God stay in school), but kinetic energy is still energy, which means that object with sufficient mass moving fast enough will still create an explosion - so yes, you will still get a lot of heat and light; after all what do you think happens when an asteroid hits the Earth?

In the case of a 3,000 metric ton shell moving at 12,000 km/s that is a LOT of heat and light, and a big explosion to boot. Even if the air and water failed to provide sufficient resistance, hitting solid Earth would cause it to rapidly vaporize, thus causing the expansion of superheated matter, otherwise known as an explosion.

- Fourth, the Corvette's structure failed to provide sufficient resistance to the MAC round. Thus since KE is measured in velocity change, the Corvette would have only absorbed a small fraction of the energy delivered by the MAC.

- And finally, how do we know that the "big" MAC figures haven't been retconned entirely? Reach has stymied all of our preconceptions of what glassing actually entails thanks to the data pads, has it not? UNSC material resistance has taken a nosedive to the point that gigajoule beams can cut through Titanium-A like wet paper? Right? Even the relativistic combat presented in Nylund's novels (where vessels engage one another at decent fractions of light speed at distances of hundreds of thousands to millions of kilometers) has now been reduced to World War II broadside combat where fighters and ships fight like their terrestrial analogues.

So by all logic, shouldn't all the big MAC figures be retconned if the universe were to have any internal consistency?

  • 02.04.2011 5:57 AM PDT

It was probably fired at low power to fire it in a striaght line but would have used gravity to accelerate it at approx 9.8 MS^-2 tthis would have meant it wasn't traveling at near to half the speed of light that the SMACs were capable and thus didn't vaporise sword base. But on that when jun and 6 discovered the 'invasion force' under the shield could they have MACed or Nuked it from orbit instead of sending in thirty warthogs and two falcons to counter attack? Reach was said to have between 150 to 300 ships in orbit at one time and 20 SMACs ( I think or is that how many earth has? ) plus they have slipspace monitoring stations and surely they would have detected a massive supercarrier fleet heading for reach.

  • 02.05.2011 2:57 AM PDT

Error 404:
-Error not found.

They used an 18th century cannonball for the MAC round.

  • 02.06.2011 8:41 AM PDT

What orbital defenses? There were no orbital defenses in Halo Reach. Then again, Reach isn't Canon. ; )

  • 02.06.2011 11:50 AM PDT
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I just play for fun. MLG can kiss my ass.


Posted by: The Seraphim
At the end of the first battle of ONI:Sword Base, I noticed two things about the MAC round that takes out the Corvette.

1. The Round merely put a hole through the ship, when in reality it should of vaporized it. It was seen at Reach when a ODP literally vaporized a unshielded Covenant Destroyer. In this case, a weaker and small ship was hit, as well as being un-shielded, yet it only holed the ship in its midsection.

2. The Round then immediately exits its target and hits a lake. There is no following explosion however. It was said that "the kinetic energy of a single shell from an orbital defense platform would be equivalent to almost 51.6 gigatons of TNT, 1031.08 times the yield of the current world's largest nuclear weapon ever tested."

I'm sure that the round, hitting bare land, would destroy Sword Base and the underground facilities, and a huge portion of the Viery territory.

Why are the MAC explosions and results so weak at Reach?!?!? And why is any sign of any UNSC Orbital assets almost non-existent?


The reason it didn't vaporize it is because it was probably a ship-borne MAC shot that hit it, and you're right about what would happen if an ODP shot it.

  • 02.06.2011 4:42 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.

It was probably a light round or something similar.

  • 02.06.2011 5:01 PM PDT

It was most likely a frigate or destroyer taking the shot instead of a defense platform. As for the platforms not being shown, that would be because in the book they are referenced as being in a single cluster, not surrounding the planet. The LNOS wouldn't have went into orbit in a spot it would be destroyed at.

And seeing how UNSC only win in battles with overwhelming numbers (space wise.) and the super-carrier is the largest ship they have ever seen, they wouldn't have deployed a fleet to kill it. Coupled with the fact that Kat brought up her plan which had very little in the terms of "what we would be risking."(Within hours of the supercarrier appearing.) makes even more sense they wouldn't move the fleet in an action that could possibly cripple the defenses.

[Edited on 02.06.2011 5:26 PM PST]

  • 02.06.2011 5:25 PM PDT

Adepto In Meus Campester
Posted by: ParagonRenegade
You were totally and absolutely correct in every way, I don't know why we were arguing, you're so amazing I should never have doubted you.

I wanted to see Trafalgar in action before it was destroyed.

  • 02.06.2011 6:25 PM PDT

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