Quote Originally Posted by Zeph View Post
No, their idea behind Spartan IVs is along the lines of the following:

Spartans held a physical limit on what their bodies could endure.
Spartan IIs overcame this limit through genetic enhancement. Experimental and high-budget prototype stage.
Spartan IIIs took lessons learned through Spartan IIs and applied them on a much larger scale. Lower budget test stage.
Spartan IVs are the perfection of the technique. Cheap as possible and pools candidates from entire human population.
I doubt they've made it that far into the future. Spartan-III's were already so cheap that ONI didn't care that there were 100% casualty rates for most of their large missions. Them along with all their equipment. I bet it'd be cheaper to train 50 Spartan-II's and have them all die.

No, these Spartan-IV's look even more like machines than the Chief. I doubt regular humans would be able to heft all that armour without augmentations, but they can't handle them in the first place. 343i is just creating Spartan-IV's to make it look like they are doing something new.