- anton1792
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- Noble Legendary Member
"Find where the liar hides, so that I may place my boot between his gums!" - Rtas 'Vadum
Posted by: OrderedComa
Carter says "All our nukes are either out of system or went down with the ships that carried them." implying that the home fleet was either sent against the Supercarrier and devastated, or it picked quite a few of them off, or a third option nukes were already launched at it and picked off en-route. Either one of these options explains why a nuke was not a viable option.
This does not do Reach justice. This is one Covenant starship.
If the entire home defence fleet was savaged by one vessel and there was insufficient nuclear payload to destroy this thing then Reach is not a fortress world. If a sizeable Nuclear payload cannot touch or do damage to this thing in addition to an entire fleet of vessels, then there is no reason why 20 of these things should not faceroll Reach onto oblivion, or even 50. First Strike says that the Covenant possesses hundreds of Supercarriers. In this instance the war would have been over years ago. Surely the Covenant are not stupid enough to overlook such massively powerful assets right under their noses?
This also implies that Reach has no groundside reserves of Nuclear weaponry. Fortress world...
Posted by: OrderedComa
And as for the frigates, there are three that you can see, there're two on Tip of the Spear. And anyway, you're on the planet most of the time, you're not going to see that many ships planet side, you never really do in any of the other games either.
My primary point is that there were no ships there to deal with this threat in the first place. (3 Frigates would hardly pose a threat to a single Assault Carrier) Reach was utterly defenceless to a lone Covenant vessel for days. Fortress world...
Posted by: OrderedComa
It never says anywhere in Reach that the SMACs were inoperable or anything else at all similar. They wouldn't be used to take out anything planet side, because that basically amounts to nuking your own planet. And the Supercarrier would not park itself near the SMACs either, the Covenant aren't complete idiots after all, and putting your ship there is tantamount to committing suicide.
I know that using the SMAC's on dirtside targets would be ridiculous. The presence of the unchallenged Supercarrier and "Covenant controlled Space" over Reach somehow means that they were unavailable for use. That does not mean that they were inoperable, just that they were not there for some reason. I do not know why not, because they obviously have thrusters to counteract the reaction force from firing their guns which allows them to move, and in TFoR they were re-positioned to face the Fleet of Particular Justice.
The fact of these being inconsistencies or not is not really the issue here, at least not for me. Whether or not they fit, they deal a horrible sucker-punch to what Reach was supposed to represent.