- ROBERTO jh
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Posted by: dahuterschuter
Posted by: Ktan Dantaktee
First of all, that ship crashing was a desperate attempt,
More excuses. Shouldn't matter if a single spore could supposedly destroy a species.
had the Gravemind gotten enough time to come up with a strategy and use his more powerful Flood forms, Earth would be completely under Flood control.
What more powerful Flood forms? More powerful than the pure Flood forms? Like what? And what could be more effective than sending an entire Covenant ship filled to the brim with Flood?
He didn't anticipate that 2/3 of Earth's army would be in that exact area,
You don't know that. In fact, the slipspace drives on Covenant ships are extremely precise. It's more probable that he sent them to that exact spot in order to assault and distract their forces. After all, his main objective wasn't Earth.
he didn't expect for the Sangheili to show up, and he didn't have powerful enough Combat Forms to take Voi.
Again, it's more probable that he fully expected that and what more powerful forms are you suggesting than Pure forms?
I'm talking about the Flood that fought the Forerunners and nearly won, the Flood that could rip tanks apart, the Flood that could bring battleships out of the sky.
He used the most powerful forms that were established in the canon at the time and he didn't take Earth. And again I point you towards the original comment, which is not even dealing with numbers of Flood, but a single Spore. Even a larger scale infestation was contained, completely refuting the single Spore statement.
Secondly, still talking about full-power Flood. Full power Flood would have taken High Charity in about 1-2 days.
That's certainly a strong theoretical assertion. But then you can say this and that "would have," done whatever in retrospect. No more powerful Flood forms existed at the time though, so tough -blam!- bro.
And of course what dictates from where everyone is starting? This only works if we're starting the Flood at a point where they've already gotten ahold of a whole lot of biomass, which would have to have come from the Haloverse.
Ignoring the obvious fact 40K would probably win, I'm just going to go ahead and point out a few things here, the first of which being the Gravemind was trying to lure the Chief with Cortana's messege, not to take over the planet.
1) It can destroy a species. Forerunner protocol was (at a time when the Flood was at the height of their power, something that has never truly been seen before) that upon the report of a single Flood landing on a populated planet, all evacuation efforts cease in areas near the landing, and the Forerunners would destroy either the planet, or turn their weapons upon the local star if it was a system-wide infestation.
From just 1 landing, Forerunners, who anyone with an operational brain stem and has read Crytpum would attest to being terrifyingly overpowered, saw the only way to stop an infection from spreading was complete destruction of a planet...because of one landing.
It even eventually got to the point where if a physical Flood presence was reported as having been established in any form in a system, even if it were just a planet, then in the opinion of one Forerunner commander, the entire system was to be deemed lost, and that the near by star should be supernova'd in order to vaporize the Flood's forces.
2) This is what I mean by "we've never seen the Flood at their fullest potential." The Flood, as I've stated countless times, is composed of a unique cell type called the FSC, that act sort of like building material. They can be formed to create anything the Flood might need, anything at all, including creatures of any size, so long as the resources allow it (bio-mass). I often look at the monstrosities from Origins I as an example of the kind of creatures True Flood, as I call them, had at their disposal.
Talk of resource management for the Flood also leads me into my next point. I call this the Coruscant Paradox. Flood infection and invasion effectiveness is determined by the amount of biomass available to them in an invasion.
It's simple math, really, that 50 Flood fighting 50 sentients will find less converted Flood forms then a force of 50 Flood v. 100 sentients. Which is why I call it the Coruscant Paradox. In this theoretical engagement, Coruscant is the most populace planet in the SW universe, possibly one of the most populace in all of sci-fi, which is why it's perfect for this analogy.
A more densly packed forest of trees will fall faster to a wild fire, which will grow as fast as the forest falls, then a wood of more sparsely laid trees.
Coruscant is the most defended, heavily armed, and populated planet in the galaxy. Which is why it, ironically, will fall easier to the Flood then Tatooine or Naboo. The Flood acts under the exact same principle as a wild fire. If so much as a single Flood spore starts the infection, Coruscant would fall in a matter of days. Entire buildings are consumed in minutes, ships are stolen right out of the hanger by thier infected owners, the orbiting military vessels can't discern the difference between infected and not infected until its too late. These ships, flying off of the city planet like pollen to a flower, ram the military vessels above and dump their unholy cargo until eventually we have infected vessels and non-infected vessels all firing at each other, with only ever more infected vessels of any ilk flying up and raming uninfected ones.
In the cacophony, the defenders of Coruscant fall to their own weapons
Suddenly, the Flood have a truly remarkable base of operations, with more biomass in one planet then the Flood ever got in the Halo trilogy.
The exact same principle is applicable here, with the Imperium's Hive Worlds. Coruscants unto themselves, Hive Worlds would fall exactly the same way as Coruscant would in SW.
And by extension, with a universe of uncountable quadrillions of creatures, the same principle is applicable to the 40K galaxy itself.
Flood steals their technology, their truly devestating techynology, and turns it on their makers. What worlds the Flood can't take for whatever reason they destroy with the weapons of extermanatus. Fleets of Flood ships stolen from infected worlds, far too many for the guns of a military fleet to target*, even unarmed freighters, are used to crash into military vessels at full speed to dispose the infection, which consumes the ship like a wild fire.
40K guns are once again turned on their makers, and their targets are soon to be dead or likewise infected, and then their weapons turn on their former allies as well.
As this continues in an ever repeating cycle, the Flood become ever more powerful and even more unstoppable until they are mathematically incapable of losing.
This is what makes them so dangerous. Ironically, an inferior military force, like the UNSC, holds a better chance of defeating the Flood because the Flood are limited only by the resources of their victims. The UNSC, being likewise limited, use their own limitations to their advantage. They don't have a dense population, and in the case of voi, their were few humans or living creatures left anyway so the Flood could not spread as easily (which wasn't their goal in the first place). This gave Rtas more time to wait for John and Thel.
But in 40K's case, where technology is taken to extreme extremes, and an infinitely more dense population of biodiversity, the Flood would actually have an easier time with it.
This is why it's statistically almost impossible to defeat them. All of those grand advantages defenders of the other side bring up, like vast armies, overpowered weapons and superweapons and what have you, are invariably disadvantages when the Flood arrive and serve only to fuel the parasite's war effort. This makes them, unfairly I might add, a wild card race.
What the Forerunners, in all of their Culture-tier might, cannot defeat, the Flood statistically can. What the Flood cannot defeat, the UNSC/Covenant probably could (barring all non-baryonic races that is, which is why I say this is a tie or in favor of 40K, as the Chaos Gods are non-baryonic).
This cycle of events, with the Flood/Contemporary and Flood/Forerunner relationship, makes Halo arguably one of the most dangerous universes composed of baryonics in sci-fi.
And that doesn't even include the Precursors.
*Note: Before you say that Imperial Fleets are composed of thousands of ships, which they probably are, and so could easily target all the Flood vessels, this is another example of population overcrowding. A military Fleet of that size is proportional to the number of ships available to the general populace, which is always much more. Oversimplified example: a fleet of 100 military vessels is dwarfed by the proportional might of a fleet of 10,000 non-military vessels which are used as battering rams. Non-military ships are disposable rams. Military ships are used as fire support craft, creating a barrier the Flood's enemies cannot escape.