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Subject: Halo Reach is more CANON than the novel "the fall of reach"
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Do not waste your tears, I was not born to watch the world grow dim. Life is not measured in years, but by the deeds of men.

Posted by: goldhawk
We should know better, because we are better.


Posted by: ajw34307

Posted by: The BS Police
A cloaking device wouldn't have prevented the UNSC and ONI from detecting the Supercarrier exiting slipspace either way.


I'm puzzled about this. Covenant camouflage generators produce vast arrays of heat, IIRC. A super carrier and the half-a-dozen or so corvettes around the rest of the planet would be firing signal flares at the surveillance outposts...

ONI did it. Surveillance/Communication outposts were either down (like WC) or ONI was keeping them in the dark. One of the data drops has a trooper commenting that someone must be having a celebration unaware that the lights he is seeing are actually from a battle.

  • 09.23.2012 10:14 AM PDT

By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.


Posted by: Xd00999

Posted by: ajw34307

Posted by: The BS Police
A cloaking device wouldn't have prevented the UNSC and ONI from detecting the Supercarrier exiting slipspace either way.


I'm puzzled about this. Covenant camouflage generators produce vast arrays of heat, IIRC. A super carrier and the half-a-dozen or so corvettes around the rest of the planet would be firing signal flares at the surveillance outposts...

ONI did it. Surveillance/Communication outposts were either down (like WC) or ONI was keeping them in the dark. One of the data drops has a trooper commenting that someone must be having a celebration unaware that the lights he is seeing are actually from a battle.


Oh yeah, I remember that now. This whole plan of Maggie's is still downright bat-blam!- crazy...

  • 09.23.2012 10:23 AM PDT
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Do not waste your tears, I was not born to watch the world grow dim. Life is not measured in years, but by the deeds of men.

Posted by: goldhawk
We should know better, because we are better.


Posted by: ajw34307
Oh yeah, I remember that now. This whole plan of Maggie's is still downright bat-blam!- crazy...

Which member said that ONI went from a competent organization to a blatant rip off of Cerberus? Not even the Inquisition would do something that dumb. But hey, Maggie has been going off the rocker if Glasslands is anything to go by.

  • 09.23.2012 10:32 AM PDT

By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.


Posted by: Xd00999

Posted by: ajw34307
Oh yeah, I remember that now. This whole plan of Maggie's is still downright bat-blam!- crazy...

Which member said that ONI went from a competent organization to a blatant rip off of Cerberus? Not even the Inquisition would do something that dumb. But hey, Maggie has been going off the rocker if Glasslands is anything to go by.


Just wait until TTW where she starts aligning herself with a Saint because she offers some bloke a ginger biscuit in the prologue. :P

  • 09.23.2012 11:39 AM PDT


Posted by: Xd00999

Posted by: ajw34307
Oh yeah, I remember that now. This whole plan of Maggie's is still downright bat-blam!- crazy...

Which member said that ONI went from a competent organization to a blatant rip off of Cerberus? Not even the Inquisition would do something that dumb. But hey, Maggie has been going off the rocker if Glasslands is anything to go by.


A few have said it(I say it a lot :P). I've turned the trend into ONI became Cerberus's retarded cousin(For at least one other person).

But yeah. I mean, it's totally a good idea that can in no way backfire to supply the group most likely to attack humans with large numbers of weapons while also leeching most of the UNSC supplies for her own goals. (TTW I believe actually states she took HALF the entire UNSC fleet budget at that year for the Infinity.)

  • 09.23.2012 12:27 PM PDT

@accordingto343

Your one stop shop for all of 343's fabulous errors and ridiculous notions in the Halo lore.

Posted by: ajw34307

Posted by: Xd00999

Posted by: ajw34307
Oh yeah, I remember that now. This whole plan of Maggie's is still downright bat-blam!- crazy...

Which member said that ONI went from a competent organization to a blatant rip off of Cerberus? Not even the Inquisition would do something that dumb. But hey, Maggie has been going off the rocker if Glasslands is anything to go by.


Just wait until TTW where she starts aligning herself with a Saint because she offers some bloke a ginger biscuit in the prologue. :P


God the description of her eating a damn cookie made me cringe. What is the point?

  • 09.23.2012 12:41 PM PDT

By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.


Posted by: DecepticonCobra
Posted by: ajw34307

Posted by: Xd00999

Posted by: ajw34307
Oh yeah, I remember that now. This whole plan of Maggie's is still downright bat-blam!- crazy...

Which member said that ONI went from a competent organization to a blatant rip off of Cerberus? Not even the Inquisition would do something that dumb. But hey, Maggie has been going off the rocker if Glasslands is anything to go by.


Just wait until TTW where she starts aligning herself with a Saint because she offers some bloke a ginger biscuit in the prologue. :P


God the description of her eating a damn cookie made me cringe. What is the point?


Had to stop myself from laughing. While I understand they're thematically different, TTW's opening is absolutely tame in comparison to Ghosts of Onyx. A prologue is supposed to grab the reader's attention and set the scene, the bombing of Sanghelios would have been a much better opening scene for the book.

  • 09.23.2012 12:59 PM PDT


Posted by: DecepticonCobra
Posted by: ajw34307

Posted by: Xd00999

Posted by: ajw34307
Oh yeah, I remember that now. This whole plan of Maggie's is still downright bat-blam!- crazy...

Which member said that ONI went from a competent organization to a blatant rip off of Cerberus? Not even the Inquisition would do something that dumb. But hey, Maggie has been going off the rocker if Glasslands is anything to go by.


Just wait until TTW where she starts aligning herself with a Saint because she offers some bloke a ginger biscuit in the prologue. :P


God the description of her eating a damn cookie made me cringe. What is the point?


It's an analogy for her unwillingness to let any external culture taint her vision of the 'perfect' society, one she will forge. She won't refer to the 'biscuit' as a 'cookie' as so many around her will out of the her traditionalist values, the same way she won't allow the Sangheili to build a bond with humanity - she believes her opinions are the truth, and tries to impose them upon everyone else.

That's how I'm viewing it anyway, because otherwise it really is just a ridiculous amount of page-time given to a biscuit.

  • 09.23.2012 1:51 PM PDT


Posted by: grey101
You do know that the dropships carry vehicles right? Not to mention 9,000 troops rushing an area that isn't prepared will be more than enough to overrun it which is what happened. The amount of troops doesn't matter since it was clearly established in The Fall of Reach/Fist Strike that they were not prepared for the attack. How would the dropships be whittled down when they didn't even know exactly where they were going? It wouldn't take them "hours" to get to their destinations since it was brought up that the dropships go mach 3-5 (i forgot where maybe a pedia or novel).

You can't say "always" and then say 9 out of 10. The UNSC was not prepared to be overwhelmed hence why they were. 314 ships is more than enough to take out 150 UNSC ships since that is more than the 3:1 ratio. The SMACs are a flawed concept because the UNSC never has enough ships to protect them. Which is why the covenant could just rush them or send out hundreds of dropships (they did both) to take them out. You would need to have enough SMACs to cover the entire planet and then have a sizable fleet to protect them for the defense to be "absolute". Even then once a number of ships go down a SMAc will be left unguarded,destroyed, which will leave a breach in the perimeter and the defense will fail.


You can't count each SMAC as "3 ships" because they have a range and if you are outside that range you can just avoid it. Which is what the sniper ship was doing when it took one (or a few) out. Which would leave another area uncovered even though the amount of SMACS at reach was pathetic and should be your arguing point. Majority of your points are "what ifs" and "it should have been" just because you don't see the way the battle went as correct doesn't mean it wasn't. I don't see the point of arguing it any way since the covenant could keep sending waves to attack the planet (which they did). meaning even if reach survived another wave it would have been overrun by the third one.


Even so, these are military bases (I'm sure I don't need to describe what that entails) that had at least an hour to get to full combat readiness (remember the Covenant were detected at like 5:30 AM or around then...they only weakened defenses enough to start heading down toward the planet at like 6:30 AM), and seeing as how the UNSC has been at war for 25+ years by that point and the Covenant could find any planet at any time, they were always on some semblance of full combat alert. It's never said how many dropships there were, only hundreds, 999 is the max one can have with "hundreds" of dropships...and each Phantom/Spirit can carry about 15-30 troops at a time. Even if they did have the max amount of troops, they would be assaulting military bases that had time to prepare. You don't have to know where the dropships are going, it's not exactly something that can be hidden, they'd know where the dropships themselves are. Even at supersonic speeds, it still takes a while to get anywhere, it would not have taken about five minutes like it did in the book. I don't dispute that the three locations getting the brunt of the attack were running on borrowed time, but the fact that they were instantaneously overrun and overwhelmed in seconds is not portraying the UNSC realistically, even from an in universe standard.

Except that they didn't have 314 ships because before the battle even really began the Fleet of Particular Justice lost half the fleet due to a barrage of fire from the UNSC fleet, the SMACs, and the fleet blundering into a minefield. The number of ships was roughly 150 useable military craft on both sides. Ships have a "range" too, though it's not really a range at all as the SMAC and MAC round keep going pretty much indefinitely until they run into something, but anyways, the strength of SMACs is equal all by itself to three UNSC ships when/if pitted against the Covenant. It's easier for a ship to be able to slip in through the "gaps", but that does not automatically equate to a loss, the other SMACs and/or UNSC ships can still fire into the open pathway on any ships attempting to get through, one or more going down doesn't mean they can waltz right in unharmed...it just makes it easier.

The way that Nylund set up the battle in TFoR, the UNSC would be walking away with another Pyrrhic victory, Reach would still be lost whenever the next batch of Covenant showed up, but there would have been minimal (in comparison) loss of life and experimental technologies as the planet would have had time for massive evacuations.

  • 09.23.2012 1:58 PM PDT

Wassup this is ultrakill74 and i want to call out to all my friends

I just wanted to add one point, even though I agree with you almost completely, the covenant could have easily had wiped out the spaces forces above reach if you consider that it was the largest covenant force the UNSC has seen up to that point and we also have to consider the technology the UNSC and the Covenant had at the time.
Lets think of this step by step, covenant force spontaneously slips in and the UNSC is suddenly under attack. The space battle above reach would have to first mobilize while the SMAC or MAC stations are potentially unguarded considering the Covenant already have scouted ahead of time, because we don't know the lengths the covenant has gone to take reach, leaving little room to actually moblize the entire space force. Already at a disadvantage of the surprise space battle the covenant probably were sending their invading forces towards the planet while the covenant forces setup a defensive position outside orbit. And lets not add that covenant can most likely scan the planet for any forerunner signal and immediately bomb it from orbit.
The Covenant were superior in space combat, its one of the main reason the UNSC was losing. I believe the cole protcol expressed how bad the UNSC was at space fights the best, but it does leave some debate about how much was exaggerated in that story was. Considering ground battles I would like to say the Covenant sent troops to search for forerunner tech which eventually lead to the glassing of the planet so in reguards with Reach I would have to say that maybe they went to key military bases that they could find in orbit then glassing the planet, not necessarily destroying everything.
When it comes down to glassing the planet I think the covenant actually made the planet inhabitable not completely glassing it. I read and posted before that it would take 17-27 years to glass the entire planet of reach which correct me if I'm wrong they did but not completely since that would be a waste of time.

Now is Halo Reach or is The Fall of Reach more canon? I don't know. What I do know is that this halo story bible how can we be soo sure that it actually exists or even if it does, how can we be so sure that it lists EVERYTHING the halo universe has. This bible, this halo bible, what if it just lists the history from precursor to forerunner and bungie is just making it as it goes. I don't know, but it keeps me up at night.

(Post note: excuse all my spelling. I was just trying to add some spins and my own thoughts. Thanks.)

  • 09.24.2012 3:53 AM PDT

The cookie/biscuit may actually represent Maggie's flawed nature and the same goes for Osman.

  • 09.24.2012 5:38 AM PDT
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Five exclamations marks are a good signifier of an insane mind. As is trying to hide from Death in an airtight room. Silly wizard.

Or maybe Travis likes biscuits.

  • 09.24.2012 12:37 PM PDT

As far as I'm concerened (as well as all of my friends who play halo) the game halo reach is not canon but the fall of reach is. The reasons are that Jorge never existed in the Sparton II list and the rest of noble team are Sparton III's who are not suposed to ware MJOLNIR armour. Also if you read the books the story actually flows better into Halo 1 than Halo Reach!

  • 11.09.2012 2:24 PM PDT

Do not revive threads.

  • 11.09.2012 4:40 PM PDT

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