- OrderedComa
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Posted By:ajw34307
What I've come to expect from these forums now, nothing but arrogant hostility...
Your haven't been strong in your arguments either, we don't have to have seen the HSB to know that Reach broke canon. The facts are there.
I'm not trying to be arrogant, sorry if I came across that way, I was merely stating what I had seen in your posts so far.
My weakest arguments have been with you over the HSB because there is not enough evidence regarding it to have either side have a strong argument. You can argue that there is evidence to say Reach messed up canon, however using the HSB as evidence weakens your argument and is flawed reasoning.
TFOR, First Strike, Ghosts of Onyx and Halo Evolutions state that the battle is 1 days long. The novels were all written with the HSB used as reference, now with Reach the Covenant arrive at Reach in July and the actual battle begins August 14th when the Fleet of Particular Justice arrive just after the Long Night of Solace is destroyed.
Yes they used parts of the HSB to write the books, but the games come from it as well, the HSB is a constantly evolving thing. TFoR used old information, and due to the nature of the HSB at the time of Halo's conception very little was constant at that point, I'm a writer, I know how the story conception process and early phases of the story work. And the extending of the battle makes much more sense than Reach falling in a little under a couple hours. Falling in hours makes the UNSC look like moronic apes with no knowledge of combat at all. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, having the SMACs which can gut a Covenant cruiser in one strike, almost their entire fleet present, great military minds such as Keyes present, and the Covenant fleet was in the proportions the books state the UNSC need to win. I'm not saying the UNSC should have won, but I am saying the fight should have lasted a hell of a lot longer than about two hours.
On the subject of the Long Night of Solace, how the hell did it manage to exit slipspace by the planet without being detected? It's a Supercarrier, it's about 27 kilometers long and none of the UNSC orbital stations managed to see it coming.
The Covenant could cloak thier ships. They are portraying the Covenant as being too intuitive now. If the Covenant had that ability, then ship-to-ship battles would be instant loses for the UNSC every single time.
Realistically, it would obliterate UNSC forces on the ground easily. Plasma launchers, tactical shield towers, trans-location devices, Radar jammers. It sort of defeats the image of an enemy constantly referred to as "imitative" who cannot create its own ideas for technology and apply them properly, who also rely on brute force to win rather than clever strategy and tactics.
We also have to assume that the Covenant somehow has perfected the process of a silent slipstream transition (Intuition and science that they do not have), otherwise that AC would have been detected.
With this technology, they could cloak an entire Armada, silently slip in-system undetected, use radar jamming to prevent further detection, position themselves and then decisively slit the UNSCs metaphorical throat.
I have no answer for how it got there, we just don't know yet, but that is not a plot hole, we don't know what technology the Covenant is capable of replicating off Forerunner tech, hell we know next to nothing about the Forerunners yet, advanced stealth tech is not out of the question, I don't think it's entirely likely though.
The cloaking field around the LNoS in Tip of the Spear was not being emitted by the ship itself, that the was the Spires, and when Grafton destroyed one the cloak failed and revealed the ship. The Covenant are not idiots, just because they do not invent new technology does not mean they are utter morons. And it is only in their use of technology that they are imitative and not strategy, they are brilliant strategists, relying more on brute force to win does not mean they are tactically incompetent, it means they have the better army and do not need to rely as much on tactics as they would against someone their equal in technological might.
And just because one ship might have stealth tech we've never seen before does not mean that they could easily apply it to all their tech, and even if they are imitative they would have to study the Forerunner tech before utilizing it, and that is not something they averse to, it is trying to improve Forerunner tech that they believe to be heresy.
We know that Halcyon-class ships aren't rated for atmosphere, it makes no sense for the Autumn to have been dry-docked when it should have had the Spartans preparing for Operation: RED FLAG on it, but no, RED FLAG can never have happened because Halsey was under SWORD Base with the Cortana fragment examining the "Latchkey" artefact which made absolutely no sense at all.
It had to go through a very long warm-up process. If it docked planetside (onto a planet in the process of being overrun and glassed, I might add) to collect nothing more than an AI chip, they would have left engines running, to leave at a moments notice. But no, it was docked there for over a day.
It had been there a very long time, and they were starting it up for the first time.
Think of it like pulling up outside a store and your friend going inside to buy whatever. Instead of leaving the engine running, you've turned off the engine and put the keys in your pocket. What for?
In case you don't remember, PoA came stupidly close to being glassed by a CCS Battlecruiser. If they had just 'pulled up' to pick up Cortana, then they would not have shut down the engines, leaving them open to just such a possibility.
The Autumn is on Reach after the space events depicted at the end of TFoR. After picking up Blue Team+marines from the Circumference op Halsey calls Keyes down to Aszod to retrieve the Cortana fragment. And this works because the Circumference Op occurs in the early morning of the 30th, between 0600 and 0630 hours. And then the last mission of Reach occurs at around 16:52 hours, which is about 5 o'clock civilian time. That's about a good 10 hour difference. And as for your claims about it being shut off, it wasn't shut off, it was fully powered up, there is a vast difference between a ship being powered down and starting up the launch sequence. I don't think ships of the Autumn's size even can be turned "off".
And Red Flag can have happened, and still does in the way it did in the book, Halsey would have gotten out and back in the same way you leave. Obviously the Covenant did not know about wherever that landing pad was, otherwise two Pelicans could not have been sitting there completely unharmed. Halsey easily can have gone and returned to finish overseeing the Cortana Fragment's research on the data from the Forerunner artifact.
Carter, Emile and Jun are 5 years too old to be Spartan-IIIs in Alpha Company. Kurt states that there were 470 children aged 4-6 that arrived on Onyx. Spartan candidates CANNOT receive the augmentations if they are in puberty, or finished with it. This was what caused all the deaths with ORION, and thus, Carter/Emile/Jun's age is solidified as a canon error - as they would have been in puberty when they received the augments.
Also, the Cole Protocol. In the case any Covenant are detected, all NAV bases and ships purge their computers of information to protect Earth and the other inner colonies.
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, then 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. In fact, they would have been on Reach with Red Team.
There was almost no military presence on Reach either. The novels always refer to it as humanity's military base, their most equipped bastion, yet in the game you are on a farming planet with a few small military bases scattered around.
You have to remember that none of the ages in Halo can really be taken completely literally because of Cryo freezing. Like Chief, he's about 40 something years old, but he's still young bodily because of time spent in Cryo. And also they had made big strides in the augmentation process by the time the IIIs were being made. If they can create Spartans with a 100% survival rate they can take in kids and augment them if they are close to puberty. And also take into account that people go into puberty at different times too, there is no clear cut line in the sand for when it starts.
My understanding of the Cole Protocol has been that nav databases were purged only when they were in direct danger of being captured by the Covenant, IE the Covies would be passing by the station/ship or if said object was in a battle ground, like there was still information within Castle Base when the Covies started trying to get inside it in FS.
The game does not need to show Reach's military strength because of the books and other media talking about Reach, and Bungie said that the game was not taking place anywhere near the areas depicted in TFoR and FS, so we wouldn't be seeing the SMACs or the generators. And the first level is never in any indication of what the rest of a planet is like, unless it's a single biome planet like Hoth or Kamino in Star Wars. Reach does not resemble a "farming planet" in any way, you see more military bases and installations and the military presence is far larger than any of the other games so far.
[Edited on 02.11.2011 3:47 PM PST]