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This topic has moved here: Subject: Logically, how are the forerunners supposed to loose?
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Subject: Logically, how are the forerunners supposed to loose?
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Posted by: DecepticonCobra

We are all going to get banned aren't we?


Posted by: hotshot revan II
It's also worth saying that the Flood only conquered 12 star systems in those 300 years till the Timeless One joined the Flood,this is the moment when the Flood really go nuts

*waits for the new books*


He said another twelve systems on the forerunner edges of space

  • 07.18.2011 8:23 AM PDT

Fight Finished 2007

I thought it says in Cryptum that the forerunner tried to find out why the humans were expanding the way they were but the humans wouldn't say till after the war. As for the flood, yea I know we face the same flood as in species wise but the scale is so different and I recognize that your saying the same thing but calling it what it really is(a small infection), I just am trying to say that threat of their forms were greater back them since they had more to work with it.

  • 07.18.2011 8:29 AM PDT
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Posted by: DecepticonCobra

We are all going to get banned aren't we?


Posted by: Sparda Reborn
I thought it says in Cryptum that the forerunner tried to find out why the humans were expanding the way they were but the humans wouldn't say till after the war. As for the flood, yea I know we face the same flood as in species wise but the scale is so different and I recognize that your saying the same thing but calling it what it really is(a small infection), I just am trying to say that threat of their forms were greater back them since they had more to work with it.


Nope, they just fought without finding out why because they "though it was a cry of war". Fun fact, the humans fought the forerunners for 100 years on 1/3 of their population while fighting the flood.

I honestly think if the humans wanted to fight them they would have and they would beat the forerunners flawlessly.

  • 07.18.2011 8:32 AM PDT

Fight Finished 2007

Didn't humanity have 2/3rds of their population b/c they sacrificed 1/3 to the flood, also I don't think it would have hurt the humans to simply tell the Forerunner what was happening, instead of asking for help they just went and attacked. The humans back then were good but I doubt they could actually beat the Forerunner. They were working with the Prophets during the old wars so it's not like they had no help what so ever. I doubt they could take the few(I think it was 3 million) million worlds the Forerunner controlled.

[Edited on 07.18.2011 8:47 AM PDT]

  • 07.18.2011 8:45 AM PDT
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Posted by: DecepticonCobra

We are all going to get banned aren't we?


Posted by: Sparda Reborn
Didn't humanity have 2/3rds of their population b/c they sacrificed 1/3 to the flood. The humans back then were good but I doubt they could actually beat the Forerunner. They were working with the Prophets during the old wars so it's not like they had no help what so ever. I doubt they could take the few(I think it was 3 million) million worlds the Forerunner controlled.


They were already low,very very low.

If they were able to fight off "the almighty forerunners" for 100 years i am sure a full war would be pretty damn exhausting. The didact himself questions what it would be like and he was the one that fought them.

  • 07.18.2011 8:48 AM PDT

Fight Finished 2007

The Didact is the one who lead the attack on them(I assume you meant the humans with your statement). The humans had an alliance with the Prophets and the advantage of having Charum Hakkor, a planet filled with Precursor tech which made for a great defense considering nothing could break precursor materials. Besides the Forerunner would have to take each planet the humans took from them and others when the humans started their expansion.

  • 07.18.2011 8:57 AM PDT
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Posted by: DecepticonCobra

We are all going to get banned aren't we?


Posted by: Sparda Reborn
The Didact is the one who lead the attack on them(I assume you meant the humans with your statement). The humans had an alliance with the Prophets and the advantage of having Charum Hakkor, a planet filled with Precursor tech which made for a great defense considering nothing could break precursor materials. Besides the Forerunner would have to take each planet the humans took from them and others when the humans started their expansion.


Regardless of charum hakkor they couldn't take out the orbital defenses.

  • 07.18.2011 9:02 AM PDT

Fight Finished 2007

Charum Hakkor is the only time orbital defenses are mentioned and those defenses were placed on precursor tech. As for the time it took for the forerunner to win, I thought it was 1000yrs which still makes sense if you think of the time it takes to move and defeat each and every human planet along with the planets the humans took from other species and then the battle at Charum Hakkor.

  • 07.18.2011 9:06 AM PDT
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Posted by: DecepticonCobra

We are all going to get banned aren't we?

It was 100 years.

50 years of humans probing forerunner space, 50 years of fighting

  • 07.18.2011 9:15 AM PDT

Fight Finished 2007


Posted by: grey101
It was 100 years.

50 years of humans probing forerunner space, 50 years of fighting


Oh well, my mistake on the time frame of the war.

  • 07.18.2011 9:20 AM PDT

I think the real question is how the hell did anything beat the Precursors?

  • 07.18.2011 9:39 AM PDT
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Posted by: DecepticonCobra

We are all going to get banned aren't we?


Posted by: SHAGGY1009
I think the real question is how the hell did anything beat the Precursors?


By attention in history class it isn't a hard concept at all if it is even true

  • 07.18.2011 9:41 AM PDT
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"but you already knew that, I mean, how couldn't you?

Only when no Human brick is left atop another, shall we be satisfied with your destruction.


Posted by: grey101

I fully agree that the terminals and cryptum go hand in and; don't forget IRIS ether.


I must admit I'm not very familiar with the IRIS stuff, I know it exists and that's about it.

Well in IRIS didact spoke of rethinking alliance's, but i think that was taking place before he was sent to his cryptum. i would need more info to find out what he meant by that statement.

Possibly reffering to (political/personal) alliances with other powerful Forerunner? Could he have been looking for opponents to Faber/Master Builder perhaps? We know he opposed the rise in power of the Builder-caste.

Regardless, could you try running numbers on the smallest nearby galaxy you could find? then cross reference that with andromeda or something.

Of course.

First off, let me just say we know nothing of the Flood's activity during their 10,000 year hiding, so this is just a little thought exercise.

There are a number of satellite dwarf galaxies around the milky way, I'll pick the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy (Link) as it's pretty much the closest, much of it lying within the potential blast radius of a halo infact. The galaxy is disrupted and trails a long "tail" of stars, meaning ships could spread along it without having to cross a great deal of purely empty void. It is 100 times closer than Andromeda.

It contains roughly 1 billion stars (1x10^9 stars assuming an american 'billion' is the meaning here) of which a disproportionate number are red giants.

Now, not much is known about any of these companion galaxies, they are very very far away, so i'm moving on to guesswork really, but it's all "back of the envelope" calculations anyway.

Let's assume only 1% of these star systems are of use to the Flood, that leaves us with 10,000,000 star systems that have some value to the Flood: biospheres/raw materials/energy gathering/whatever it is that Flood do when not killing things.

Let's make a couple of other assumptions:

The Flood start with only 100 surviving ships.
In the first 100 years the Flood have found 100 worlds and from them can build an extra 100 ships (or have stolen them from the locals!) We'll assume it takes a Flood ship an entire year to find a suitible world and then it builds a single sister ship) This is drastically slower than the expansion rates the terminals suggest.
[Basically doubling time is 100 years, for easy maths]


The formula for basic exponential growth is x=ab^(t/r)

Where a is the starting value (100 ships/100 worlds)
b is the positive growth factor (2 in this case, as the fleet is only doubling)
t is any given time (years)
r is the doubling time (100 years)

lets give the Flood 1000 years (they were gone for 10,000):

x=100x(2^(1000/100))

x=102,400 ships/Flood worlds


Well, we have 10,000,000 systems of use to the Flood, 100,000-odd is nothing!

Lets give them another thousand years.

x=100x(2^(2000/100))

x=104,857,600 ships/worlds.

Oh Dear. We have run out of dwarf galaxy a hundred times over in under 2000 years.

Lets scale back to sixteen hundred years:

x=100x(2^(1600/100)

x=6,553,600 ships/worlds

1700 years gives us 13,107,200 ships and Worlds.

So we can conclude that even if the Flood's spread is quite limited (by the assumptions at the start) then they could consume all the useful worlds in an entire dwarf galaxy in under 1700 years.

Bear in mind this is assuming the Flood can only build/steal *one ship* per world...


I doubt the Flood got to Andromeda, if they did why come back? Andromeda is bigger and has more stars than the Milky Way, presumably more planets and civilisations too.

I had initially thought the Flood "sleeper ships" described in Cryptum might have been the Flood sending out the equivalent of seed pods to other galaxies, but the prevailing theory seems to be it was the precursors messing around. I'm not entirely convinced on that one though.

  • 07.18.2011 12:24 PM PDT
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Posted by: DecepticonCobra

We are all going to get banned aren't we?

good good. so they could have infected several of the nearby galaxys before returning to finish the job.

I love math

  • 07.18.2011 1:06 PM PDT
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"Time was your ally human. But now it has abandoned you. The Forerunners....have returned. And this tomb... is now yours". - The Didact


Posted by: grey101

Posted by: hotshot revan II
It's also worth saying that the Flood only conquered 12 star systems in those 300 years till the Timeless One joined the Flood,this is the moment when the Flood really go nuts

*waits for the new books*


He said another twelve systems on the forerunner edges of space


"Another " wasn't said by him.

But again most of his phrase wasn't heard by Born

  • 07.18.2011 1:07 PM PDT
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"but you already knew that, I mean, how couldn't you?

Only when no Human brick is left atop another, shall we be satisfied with your destruction.

It's hard to guess how many ships the Flood had near the end, the only hard number we get is the Fleet Mendicant Bias brought to breach the Maginot Sphere, which was only a single fleet, though probably a big chunk of the Flood's available ships:


Terminal 6
In support of 05-032's original 1000 core vessels is a fleet numbering 4,802,019; though only 1.8 percent are warships - and only 2.4 percent of that number are capital ships - I am outnumbered [436.6:1]


If they can afford to bring 4.8 million ships to a single battle though.... There must be quite a bit more spread out around the galaxy.

[Edited on 07.18.2011 1:17 PM PDT]

  • 07.18.2011 1:15 PM PDT
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Posted by: DecepticonCobra

We are all going to get banned aren't we?

That was all the ships, MB sent everything he had to the ark.

  • 07.18.2011 1:20 PM PDT
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"but you already knew that, I mean, how couldn't you?

Only when no Human brick is left atop another, shall we be satisfied with your destruction.

It was a sizeable counterattack, that's for certain. I'm not sure where you are getting that it was everthing the Flood had in the galaxy though?


It's not referenced much:

Terminal 4
D: We've confirmed your observations. Infected supraluminal ships are arrowing inward from several clusters. No more spiral growth. The thing is counterattacking. Suppression, Security and Emergency Circumstance fleets are all being recalled. Systems are evacuating.


This does confirm that the Flood was definitely present in local dwarf galaxies "several clusters" however the Forerunner had no way of knowing how much of the Flood's forces it was, just that it was pulling reinforcements from elsewhere in the galaxy and local star clusters.

  • 07.18.2011 1:32 PM PDT
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Posted by: DecepticonCobra

We are all going to get banned aren't we?


Posted by: Fin5434p
It was a sizeable counterattack, that's for certain. I'm not sure where you are getting that it was everthing the Flood had in the galaxy though?


It's not referenced much:

Terminal 4
D: We've confirmed your observations. Infected supraluminal ships are arrowing inward from several clusters. No more spiral growth. The thing is counterattacking. Suppression, Security and Emergency Circumstance fleets are all being recalled. Systems are evacuating.


This does confirm that the Flood was definitely present in local dwarf galaxies "several clusters" however the Forerunner had no way of knowing how much of the Flood's forces it was, just that it was pulling reinforcements from elsewhere in the galaxy and local star clusters.


Just re-read the terminals and that was talking about the flood feeding in our galaxy not that and more. The Didact drew a line and the flood ate what it could on their side.

The didact stated the flood had an unlimited number of resources on the ground but limited ships to travel with that they needed fro transport.

taking the situation into context i am sure that million ships MB had were all the flood ships.

  • 07.18.2011 1:41 PM PDT

-blam!- Was that actually blammed out? Or did I just type it? You'll never know.

By untightening I guess... I really don't understand your question at all.

  • 07.18.2011 1:42 PM PDT
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"but you already knew that, I mean, how couldn't you?

Only when no Human brick is left atop another, shall we be satisfied with your destruction.


Posted by: grey101

Just re-read the terminals and that was talking about the flood feeding in our galaxy not that and more.


I've read them all mate, they say nothing about the total fleet strength of the Flood or the Forerunners, we get a couple of snapshots of Forerunner fleets being unable to adequately protect worlds due to overwhelming enemy numbers and the final battle.

It seems the Forerunner Fleets were victorious most of the time they actually fought, but that the Flood simply sent ships elsewhere and went around the battle while it was occurring, and continued to spread.

The Didact drew a line and the flood ate what it could on their side.

This is true, they fell back behind some kind of defence system the so-called "Maginot Sphere" to protect the Forerunner's main worlds, abandoning the rest of the galaxy to the Flood, The Flood appears to have had the greater part of the Galaxy's volume at this point.

The Librarian actually berates Didact for hiding behind the defence line while their 'protectorates' (presumably client races) were consumed.

The didact stated the flood had an unlimited number of resources on the ground but limited ships to travel with that they needed fro transport.

Agreed.

"While the its resources on the ground are effectively limitless, it has a finite number of vessels of spread from system to system. Fortunately the majority of them are unarmed and unarmored, private and commercial craft"

taking the situation into context i am sure that million ships MB had were all the flood ships.

I'm just taking it without any assumptions, that 4.8 million number is for Mendicant's fleet, I don't think we really need to take it as anything more than that, it is what it is: The number of ships at that battle.

  • 07.18.2011 2:36 PM PDT

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