Quote Originally Posted by DarkHalo003 View Post
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.
You are thinking inside of the canon a bit too much. I'm not. If they aren't going to honour the validity of their own fiction, I see no reason why I should either. So instead, I'm going to bust holes into their logic, call them out on it, and apply more realistic physics. Before the Covenant invaded Reach, ships came and went all the time. They wouldn't have had to rush all those developments out at the last minute, because any sensible military would have copies of plans, redundancies for everything.

Also, if the Sabre could have shields, the big ships could have had shields. Sabre is proof of concept as far as I am concerned. And humans have more efficient fusion reactor designs than the Covenant, so they could have sustained power output even better with appropriately scaled up designs. The Covenant's brutish form of fusion is why they had a small window where their ships went dark after exiting slipspace that the UNSC could take advantage of.


And Cobby, if we're going to talk about heat in space with Halo, then shields will only be briefly sustainable if at all and you would get around heat in a laser by dumping that heat into a disposable sink that gets ejected after firing. Hell, maybe cold launch them with compressed gas at the enemy. And if we REALLY want to get uber real, then the ships either need to all de-armour, or become nothing more than gun barges that can teleport from point A to B through slipspace, with engines only there for finer positioning. Oh, and no artificial gravity without rotating sections, which according to the Halo Encyclopedia, most 26th century ships are supposed to have due to the inefficiencies of human gravity generators. And the military ships are supposed to turn the grav fields OFF during combat...which none of them seem to in the games or the books.