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This topic has moved here: Subject: How the UNSC could've beat the Covenant without Master Cheif
  • Subject: How the UNSC could've beat the Covenant without Master Cheif
Subject: How the UNSC could've beat the Covenant without Master Cheif
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NOW, as any Halo fan knows, the UNSC and Covenant are near equal on the ground. In fact, the UNSC may actualy be slightly superior because of the SPARTAN program, but Covenant Hunters and Elites are rivals. The reason the UNSC about lost the war is because of naval starship combat. The UNSC had better tactics, AI's and the MAC gun, but the Covenant outclassed them is every other category. Weapons, armor, speed, slipspace engine, and, most importantly, shielding. Covenant naval shields really made the difference, and life would've been a lot easier for the UNSC if not for shields, but they exsist. So, how could the UNSC have changed the tide of war?

- Forget Frigates. Frigates are absolutely useless versus the Covenant, and are a waste of resources and people.
- Archer missles suck, and why the UNSC never replaced them is a mystery. Their only use is launching them all to weaken shields, but than most of them were destroyed by Covenant lasers before they could do anything. Make them faster with a bigger bang.
- Shields. SPARTANS have shields, why not starcraft? If the UNSC had shielding, they would actually be BETTER than the Covies in space, because the UNSC now has better tactics, the MAC gun, AI's, AND shielding. Run, Covies.
- More MAC. Dual, or even triple, MAC guns would be incredible, as a single starcraft could gut 2 or 3 Covenant ships in less than a minute.
- Stop defending unimportant colonies with 1 or 2 ships. Throughout the war, I belive many Outer and a couple Inner colonies fell with only a couple UNSC starcraft defending it. Many times, the Covies OUTNUMBERED the UNSC. Either defend the colony with a real force or just abandon it. If these small, failed defences didn't happen, the UNSC would probably have an extra 100 ships in it's fleet during 2552, and may have spaired several colonies from glassing.
- NOVA bombs. These things could level the battlefield without any of the above 5 pieces of advice happening.
- Now were gettin' nerdy. Replace Titanium A with Tungsten Alloy. Covenant Plasma is about 3,000 degress. (Celecius oor Farenheit, I forgot) Titanium A melts around 1,700 degrees, so plasma boils and melts away UNSC armor. Tungsten alloy, however, melts at 3,400, so UNSC starcraft will better resist plasma weaponry.
- Attack. Not once in the whole war was the UNSC on the offensive with the exception of a couple of SPARTAN-III suicide missions and the Ark. You can't win wars by defending the whole.

  • 09.02.2011 2:51 PM PDT

Even though just a couple of ships that were defending a planet, retreated to a form a larger group. I don't think it would've made a big difference. In the Halo Wars Genesis, the UNSC Fleet destroyed a covenant ship by losing 13 of them. A pyrrhic victory.

  • 09.02.2011 2:59 PM PDT

*reminisces when the Bungie/Halo community wasn't made up of CoD kids*
*sighs*
*activates time-machine and sets the clock back to Nov. 9, 2004*
glory days here I come..
*vanishes*

Sabres had shields.

  • 09.02.2011 2:59 PM PDT
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Without the Chief, they would've called on Fred or a combination of Spartans.

  • 09.02.2011 3:02 PM PDT

Um, OP you are forgetting resources, research, and how ships work.

Having 2-3 MAC guns per ship wouldn't allow them to gut 2-3 ships in a minute. The guns are all still on the exact same facing, and thus ALL would be pointing at a single target.

That's forgetting power to charge and such.

  • 09.02.2011 3:04 PM PDT
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They did need the chief...

  • 09.02.2011 3:09 PM PDT
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I can see a number of your points which are valid. The UNSC tactics in an interstellar war were pathetic to say the least. Save for the exception of certain people such as keys with his loop and admiral cole.

They did usually have one or two ships defending alot of colonies because they were stretched out. They had two options;
1. Abandon the colony and amass a decent size fleet to effectively repel a covenant fleet attacking a colony
2. Spread your ships out over many colonies so thin that a single covenant ship could likely put them both out of commission before the planet had the slightest chance to evacuate.

Choosing option number 1 would lower morale and people would despise the UNSC, but when facing a threat on the scale of the covenant war, its what we, realistically, would have chosen. But instead, UNSC ship numbers dwindled as they were slaughtered defending colonies.

Ground engagements with the covenant should never have been a problem. Todays weaponry could decimate anything the covenant has, but apparently military tech for this situation went downhill mostly, i.e assault rifle.

Super mac's would have also saved dozens of colonies, if they didn't waste their time building frigates and instead used those MAC resources for more super macs....A covenant fleet of 10 ships wouldnt stand up to 5 super macs and a couple of destroyers.

  • 09.02.2011 3:27 PM PDT

I am alpha, i am omega.

I am the last of the primes.

.Titanium a does not have a melting point of of 1700 C you fool...

.More mac guns are useless if you cant charge them...

. Shielding tech was rare because it was VERY hard for the unsc to use, they only got it from jackel shields to use on spartan armpur... Shields also need a -blam!-load of power for them to be effective, power which would be taken away from mac guns...



  • 09.02.2011 3:29 PM PDT

Wow, just wow!

You are forgetting one very important thing- POWER.

Energy shields took a lot of power to maintain. Couple that with multiple MAC guns, and you're looking at a huge amount of power.

NOVA bombs also aren't as useful in space, as nuclear explosions feed off matter. With no matter in space, the explosions were only useful as EMPs or single ship destroyers.

Leaving the Outer colonies undefended would be a major problem for the UNSC. People would be turning against them in the middle of a war.

And the problem with attacking is that the UNSC had no idea where to attack. And our few attempts at attacking either failed before they got started, or required entire companies of SPARTAN-III's to pull off.

[Edited on 09.02.2011 3:52 PM PDT]

  • 09.02.2011 3:50 PM PDT
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How about giving MAC platforms and other orbital stations some point defense systems? A few archers missile pods and some auto-cannons could have reduced the threat of boarding. Maybe then Regret would have had a tougher time getting to Earth.

- Archer missles suck, and why the UNSC never replaced them is a mystery. Their only use is launching them all to weaken shields, but than most of them were destroyed by Covenant lasers before they could do anything. Make them faster with a bigger bang.

Well, I could see them being used to attack small stuff like fighters, boarding craft and those Phantom gunships, but they do seem to be almost completely infective(unless fired by the hundreds/thousands) against anything larger. Maybe if the UNSC upped their nuke production and put a nuclear warhead on most of them they would be significantly more effective.

- More MAC. Dual, or even triple, MAC guns would be incredible, as a single starcraft could gut 2 or 3 Covenant ships in less than a minute.

IIRC, Marathon Class Cruisers and Destroyers had two MACs

- Now were gettin' nerdy. Replace Titanium A with Tungsten Alloy. Covenant Plasma is about 3,000 degress. (Celecius oor Farenheit, I forgot) Titanium A melts around 1,700 degrees, so plasma boils and melts away UNSC armor. Tungsten alloy, however, melts at 3,400, so UNSC starcraft will better resist plasma weaponry.

Maybe. Frankie has said that Covenant "Plasma" is not real Plasma, but something much different and worse. Hard to know if Tungsten would be better than Titanium.


  • 09.02.2011 4:05 PM PDT

Sure you do have some valid points but here's my counter to them:
1. In some way yea, but they were cheap and faster to produce. Would you want 20 cruisers or 60 frigates?
2. This one I mostly agree with. Though in massive numbers they can do damage to unshielded Covenant ships.
3. 2 reasons why this didn't happen, 1 power; 2 they hadn't developed it yet to apply to ships.
4. Once again, power though Marathon Cruisers and Destroyers have 2 MACs
5. Yea maybe, but don't forget it would lower morale, they need resources from all the planets, they would be so many refugees that would over flow the so called important planets.
6. They were experimental and only a few were made in 2552, all which were on Reach though as proven in GoO, they would have changed entire battles.
7. As Dr. Halsey said, the plasma the Covenant use is different then the plasma we know so we don't know if that would change much.
8.Yea true though with only a few exceptions, the UNSC didn't know any Covenant planets.

  • 09.02.2011 4:33 PM PDT

Weapon of Oppression

-blam!- master chief.
All the Unsc has to do is zerg rush covies with Spartan III's and we win.

  • 09.02.2011 4:39 PM PDT

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The UNSC probably, I should not ven say it, should I?

  • 09.02.2011 7:53 PM PDT

Error 404:
-Error not found.

Here's my idea.

No frigates, no destroyers, no. Nothing.


The entire ship is a seriously dense and heavily defended powerful as hell mac gun, with it's reactor and minimal spacing for it's crew. Most of it goes to armor, defense armament and housing it's mac gun. Oh, and the crew is mostly repair engineers.

There. The ship has terribly slow movement because it would be powered by great buff guys working out in a gym supplying power to the tiny plasma engines in the back.

Also, to compensate for covenant slip-space jumps, they have great maneuverability.

And not to mention the superior long-range firepower.

[Edited on 09.02.2011 9:26 PM PDT]

  • 09.02.2011 9:12 PM PDT

No the covies kicked the UNSC's ass on the ground, I remember reading in on the books that they called in air strikes on the grunts and had to flank the jacks with snipers to them'em while the chief used hands.

  • 09.02.2011 11:49 PM PDT

Or something like that.


Posted by: Chester Duncan
No the covies kicked the UNSC's ass on the ground, I remember reading in on the books that they called in air strikes on the grunts and had to flank the jacks with snipers to them'em while the chief used hands.


+1

scorpion > Wraith

but

banshee > hornet.

If you rule the skies, you rule the battlefield. Simple battle logic. If you take the battlefield, it forces enemy units to retreat to a safe area.

Keep pushing, safe area becomes smaller. Smaller safe areas become easier to target no matter how many MAC guns you have.

Covenants win.

Master Chief is pretty essential.

  • 09.03.2011 3:28 AM PDT
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OP you seriously need to rethink everything you said by looking at everyones comments.

Fact for you: Chief ended the war by stopping Truth and the firing of the Halo's, Can you please explain to me how the ships would stop him? Other than a MAC i don't think they could. The chief stopped Alpha Halo, Delta halo and all the other Halo's being fired... End of.


In my opinion the UNSC Frigates were quite useless in every way except in Atmosphere support, Should they have scrapped the idea of Frigates once the War started i think they should have secrety worked on a Group of 10 UNSC Super Carriers like the Trafalgar.

The Traalgar could stand Toe to Toe with another covenant ship and had Dual MAC Cannons (Imagine if those MAC's got upgraded to 3rd Generation MAC's like the PoA did with those extra new reactors, 3 shots per gun = 6 Macs with extra power)... If i remember rightly it was the pride of the UNSC Fleets?

Super-Carrier Defence group, Nuff said.


(Quick reminder, Even with all that new stuff the UNSC fleets would be like paper to the High Charity defence fleet of Covenant Super-Carriers, They would tear through the UNSC like they are nothing)

[Edited on 09.03.2011 6:22 AM PDT]

  • 09.03.2011 6:14 AM PDT

they didnt have the shielding technology. the biggest they were able to get one is the size of the cockpit. actually i guess that increased a bit because of the sabres

  • 09.03.2011 6:20 AM 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.

No.

The UNSC could have never won the war without Spartan's. On the ground the UNSC won, but at horrible costs and were almost always outnumbered by Covenant.

  • 09.03.2011 9:10 AM PDT