"Halo 4: I Get a Woman!" - Sgt. Mjr. A.J. Johnson, RIP

[DarkHalo003]

@DarkHalo: Doesn't make sense even still. There would be back-ups on Earth, and between the glassing of Reach and the assault on Earth, they had time to retrofit shields onto the home guard, and the Pillar of Autumn herself should have at least had them. Same goes for the lasers. It just doesn't make sense that they went straight to a [large] man-sized form-factor but they didn't even test it out first on a larger platform...one more immediately in need to boot.

It makes sense only when put in context with Reach being suddenly attacked. There was no warning and a lot of that tech (because Reach was the planet where most of the military tech was developed) was buried since most of the human ships were destroyed before they could leave, not to mention Human ships travel significantly slower than Covenant ships in Slipspace. The Cole Protocol prevented any of those ships returning to Earth any time soon too. In reality, though, Human ships hadn't even changed that much since the new technological developments from Reach and it's been said numerous times through Halo fiction that Humanity could wipe the floor with the Covenant on the ground, but the Space battles simply were too much. As far as ground technology was concerned, Earth had a lot of that tech (think Spartan Laser) and since there were no SIIIs on Earth, well, you couldn't exactly use all of that tech anyways.

But yeah, I agree that the Super Mac Guns not being able to systematically destroy the Covenant ships was kind of bullshit. However, I did read that the ships needed to cool down/recharge after each shot and that there were just too many Covenant ships (given that it was the second largest Covenant Fleet). There were also those Covenant Sniper ships that took down those platforms from beyond the effective striking distance. All of this from reading Fall of Reach and First Strike, but Reach truly fell when the generators died.