- ROBERTO jh
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- Fabled Heroic Member
List of Reasons Why the Assembly Could Not Have Been Correct or Otherwise was Proven Incorrect by Later Canon Sources Regarding Covenant Firepower.
1) Terminology
a) If you actually take a close look at the way the Assembly Dissects the Covenant's claims of turning the surface of a world into hot glass, you need look no further. The Assembly is taking the Covenant's classic claim on a literal standpoint, as if the Covenant actually have the ability to turn a planet to glass, which they never did. They never once deny their ability to turn the surface of a world to molten slag, but only ever their ability to literally glass it.
b) This is further evidenced by the way the Assembly talks about regional glassing. They say of "glassing": Understandably this action takes considerably less time when applied to open desert. When sand gets superheated, it turns to glass, just like how the Covenant's always exaggerated claim spkoke of entire worlds. They say nothing of burning it to a cinder.
So in this regard, the Assembly are perhaps correct in a sense. People interpreting them are incorrect.
2) Lack of proper evidence
a) At the time this report was written by the AIs, nobody had ever seen a live glassing take place. Now of course, The Assembly's basis is the Covenant's weaponry used in space battles. But by 2526, nobody knew of the existence of the Energy Projector; it had never been used in combat and remained that way until an Assault Carrier laid waste to several UNSC ships with one in the 2552 Battle of Reach (Confirmed by Captain Keyes' reaction "a new weapon?"). So where would the Assembly have gotten its data from? The Covenant's only weapons used at that point (to the knowledge of any living human) were plasma torpedoes and pulse lasers, neither of which are used in a glassing process.
3) Contradictory evidence
a) The canon rules state that later material overrides the old material. Data pad 10 is found on Winter Contingency. Later levels, such as The Long Night of Solace, depict an entire Reach continent already burning to the bedrock as massive mushroom clouds arch into the sky and fire sweeps the land, and the glassing hadn't even started yet. Plus, the massive plasma torpedo detonations on the surface, calculated at several megatons, already cooked miles of surface area in an instant, significantly more powerful then the 1 acre per 15 seconds assumption made in the datapads.
b) The opening cutscene of Reach shows ash-blanketed landscapes, smoke-choked atmosphere, and burned plains as far as the eye can see. A once pristine, snow capped mountain now stands as a charred, rocky testament to the Covenant's power.
c) The multiplayer map Condemned depicts a significantly different scenario. When the UNSC's last remaining forces were still fighting in a hopeless attempt at revenge, half the planet is already glowing in a magmatic blaze of hellish nightmare. You can clearly see the atmosphere itself burning off as this helpless world succumbs to the power of the Covenant. This depiction is entirely canon, as it holds no sway over the map itself; even Factpile admits to this depiction being valid. It is 343i's Fall of Reach, in other words, the truth.
d) re-released, definitive editions of the original novel trilogy, Evolutions vo. I and II, and re-releases of the Return motion comic. None of the above "fixed" any of the "inconsistancies" that would be had 343i found the Assembly's hypothesis to be true, and are considered the overall newest canon.
But as I said above, the Assembly wasn't wrong. The people misinterpreting them were.