106 replies to this topic

[William Petersen]

Zakatak, on 08 May 2012 - 06:31 PM, said:

Naval Advantage: UNSC

This is all that needs to be said. It doesn't matter who wins on the ground when they glass your planet. If the UNSC couldn't fight them off with bigger and better ships than the SLDF had, the SLDF wouldn't stand a chance.

Lethewaters, on 09 May 2012 - 03:50 AM, said:

The same reason why the UNSC would win, determination.

The UNSC wasn't going to win, buddy. If the Prophets weren't author-sanctioned-stupid and kicked out the Sangheli, we'd have been cooked and the whole Galaxy along with us. The reason the UNSC "won" (If you can call losing practically every non-earth colony, almost your entire space fleet, almost all your home-world's orbital defenses, and a nice fat chunk of your homeworld "winning") was rooted in the fact that it was a story told by humans, so humans must triumph.

Edited by William Petersen, 09 May 2012 - 10:04 AM.

[Kenyon Burguess]

the covenant hover tanks are slow with poor maneuverability and are killed by guys in open top jeeps. their aerospace support consistanty gets taken out by helocopters. their troops get dropped off in clusters and left on planet with little support.

the SLDF deploys with support weapons, mechs and proper tanks. their aerospace is fast moving and they coordinate top cover and iron hand tactics.

i dont see the covenant pawning their religion in the BT universe anytime soon....maybe they can hang out with the transformers and robotech geeks.

Edited by Geist Null, 09 May 2012 - 10:05 AM.

[guardian wolf]

William Petersen, on 09 May 2012 - 09:58 AM, said:

This is all that needs to be said. It doesn't matter who wins on the ground when they glass your planet. If the UNSC couldn't fight them off with bigger and better ships than the SLDF had, the SLDF wouldn't stand a chance.





The UNSC wasn't going to win, buddy. If the Prophets weren't author-sanctioned-stupid and kicked out the Sangheli, we'd have been cooked and the whole Galaxy along with us. The reason the UNSC "won" (If you can call losing practically every non-earth colony, almost your entire space fleet, almost all your home-world's orbital defenses, and a nice fat chunk of your homeworld "winning") was rooted in the fact that it was a story told by humans, so humans must triumph.

With Naval Grade Anti-Orbital Guns, like used on the book Trial by Fire, which follows the Damocles Commando unit on the push into Jag turf. The SLDF I'm sure had access to tech that was similar, if not the same, and that took a side off of a drop ship with a single laser, now, get a battery of those firing on those Covie ships, and we'll see who's laughing.

[Trevnor]

William Petersen, on 09 May 2012 - 09:58 AM, said:

This is all that needs to be said. It doesn't matter who wins on the ground when they glass your planet. If the UNSC couldn't fight them off with bigger and better ships than the SLDF had, the SLDF wouldn't stand a chance.

I don't know about better ships... Like I was mentioning earlier, neither side in the Covenant/Human war used Lasers in ship to ship combat. Do you know if Covenant shields can refract or reflect the light of lasers? Because if they can't, then they are already screwed. Also, SLDF Warships had lots of armor, and can take more punishment then I've seen any Covenant ship take.

[Arctic Fox]

William Petersen, on 09 May 2012 - 09:58 AM, said:

This is all that needs to be said. It doesn't matter who wins on the ground when they glass your planet. If the UNSC couldn't fight them off with bigger and better ships than the SLDF had, the SLDF wouldn't stand a chance.

On what basis does the UNSC have bigger and better ships? The Marathon class heavy cruiser, if one is to believe the Halo wiki, masses 100,000 tons. This is one of the largest ships the UNSC fields, but that's literally equivilant to the smallest WarShips in the BattleTech universe get. The McKenna class battleships mass nearly two million tons. Moreover, while I don't have numbers, I doubt the UNSC can match the sheer numbers of WarShips, DropShips and AeroSpace fighters the SLDF could field.

The only way I can see UNSC ships being somehow better is if they have better maneuvering capabilities (Did they have inertial compensators or similar technology? If not, then this is not the case) or if their weapons were superior, which is certainly a possibility, though given the SLDF's apparent greater ability (and willingness) to deploy nuclear weapons in large numbers, I don't think it can amount to that much.

Edited by Arctic Fox, 09 May 2012 - 10:27 AM.

[guardiandashi]

as I understand the universes

the haloverse the human did NOT have artificial gravity tech until they got it from the covanant
all human warships were armored with "titanium3 armor"
the pillar of autumn was an obsolete ship design refitted with bleeding edge tech and its point defense turrets were I want to say 50mm autocannons, it had its "special" MAC gun that fired 3 "light rounds" in rapid succession because it was significantly more effective against cov shields than standard ship MAC's, the archer missile pods the human ships used had conventional warheads and it could take literally hundreds of them to hurt/kill a covenant ship AFTER the shields went down I am not quite certain how big the "shiva" nukes are but they seriously do a number on covenant ships.

when cortana took over the covenant ship she did not manage to capture the operation programs for the covenant plasma cannons, so "improvised" during the program test phase she was commenting on how the protocols she managed to establish indicated that the cov plasma weapons use mode was garbage.... right before she blew up one of the cannons through an overload, and then used the cov placma cannons as a high energy particle beam cannon, and cut a cov ship in half in 1 shot right through its shields.

so I suspect that battletech naval lasers and naval particle beams might be surprisingly effective vs cov ships

[Catamount]

Lasers in general are a poor weapon to resort to, especially if fired from space. They're very heat inefficient, which is disastrous in space, because there's nowhere to dump the heat to, and since they're subject to the inverse square law, their range is going to be savagely limited (to the point that in the current military, the ATL loses power over ranges of just a handful of kilometers).

Arctic Fox, on 09 May 2012 - 06:57 AM, said:

Good question, what is the basis for determining exactly how much energy BattleTech weapons produce...?

Zakatak came up with what seems like a reasonable method for ballparking the energy output. Even if he was off by an order of magnitude (and if he's right in his basic premises, the margin of error shouldn't be that big), then we're still talking about weaponry orders of magnitude beneath covenant weaponry.


UNSC ships are capable of 64kt shots from their MAC guns, enough to mission kill a BT ship in one shot most likely if Zakatak is right and they are vastly, vastly inferior to Covenant ships.


If the SLDF deployed nukes, which means fitting every weapon they have on every ship with nothing but nuclear warheads (could they sustained such a campaign?), they'd at least reach parity with normal ship-to-ship weapons, if not the larger ordinances like the Covenant M/AM warheads

...which begs yet another question: In addition to seeming lack of power in BT weaponry, the SLDF uses nukes. Why? How could it possibly make sense to use nuclear weapons if just their run of the mill ship fuel has such a high enthalpy, that it literally contains more energy than is even physically possible for matter, by an order of magnitude, which would make said mundane fuel thousands of times more potent for warheads than nuclear devices? What could possibly by their motivation there?

These magical reactors are seeming a less and less parsimonious and plausible explanation for the stated propulsion efficiency.


Back on point, even if the SLDF employed nukes in gross numbers, it's not enough to match Covenant weaponry, which they still wouldn't do at the high end. They'd have to massively exceed Covenant weaponry, because BT ships don't have shields. As soon as the two enter combat, the Covenant ship is going to be shrugging off shots while the BT ship immediately starts taking hull and system damage.

That means that SLDF vessel is going to immediately be at a huge disadvantage, and even if they did manage to win an engagement with non-standard armaments, the SLDF as a whole will be at a huge logistical disadvantage, since even a victor would warrant considerable and time-consuming ship repairs (in short, whatever the Covenant can hit, destroyed or not, is taken out of the fight for a long time), while Covenant ships can just take shield hits and then recharge the shields, few, if any repairs required.

[Arctic Fox]

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 11:53 AM, said:

Lasers in general are a poor weapon to resort to, especially if fired from space. They're very heat inefficient, which is disastrous in space, because there's nowhere to dump the heat to, and since they're subject to the inverse square law, their range is going to be savagely limited (to the point that in the current military, the ATL loses power over ranges of just a handful of kilometers).

BattleTech lasers don't seem to have that many issues in space combat...

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 11:53 AM, said:

Zakatak came up with what seems like a reasonable method for ballparking the energy output. Even if he was off by an order of magnitude (and if he's right in his basic premises, the margin of error shouldn't be that big), then we're still talking about weaponry orders of magnitude beneath covenant weaponry.


UNSC ships are capable of 64kt shots from their MAC guns, enough to mission kill a BT ship in one shot most likely if Zakatak is right and they are vastly, vastly inferior to Covenant ships.

A Heavy Mass Driver delivers the equivilant damage of nearly one and a half Class III (50 kiloton) nuclear weapons in BT. Am I allowed to assume that they are broadly comparable weapons to the standard MAC and use that as a baseline? If so, something like a McKenna with its dozens of NACs, NLs, NPPCs and Capital Missile launchers is capable of putting out (and taking) far more damage than a UNSC warship. Without nukes.

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 11:53 AM, said:

If the SLDF deployed nukes, which means fitting every weapon they have on every ship with nothing but nuclear warheads (could they sustained such a campaign?), they'd at least reach parity with normal ship-to-ship weapons, if not the larger ordinances like the Covenant M/AM warheads

The SLDF was very fond of deploying nuclear weapons, as is nearly everyone in the BattleTech universe when it's not forseeably deterimental to them, so I do imagine they could sustain their use.

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 11:53 AM, said:

...which begs yet another question: In addition to seeming lack of power in BT weaponry, the SLDF uses nukes. Why? How could it possibly make sense to use nuclear weapons if just their run of the mill ship fuel has such a high enthalpy, that it literally contains more energy than is even physically possible for matter, by an order of magnitude, which would make said mundane fuel thousands of times more potent for warheads than nuclear devices? What could possibly by their motivation there?

These magical reactors are seeming a less and less parsimonious and plausible explanation for the stated propulsion efficiency.

Well, there's a huge difference between producing that much energy and producing it all at once. Maybe the reactors can't do it, or perhaps the materials couldn't handle it. Or something like that. I suppose you could accelerate a DropShip to ~0.3c and smash a planet into rubble, but that wouldn't be tremendously easier than just using nukes (Though similar stuff has been done in the BT universe).

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 11:53 AM, said:

Back on point, even if the SLDF employed nukes in gross numbers, it's not enough to match Covenant weaponry, which they still wouldn't do at the high end. They'd have to massively exceed Covenant weaponry, because BT ships don't have shields. As soon as the two enter combat, the Covenant ship is going to be shrugging off shots while the BT ship immediately starts taking hull and system damage.

That means that SLDF vessel is going to immediately be at a huge disadvantage, and even if they did manage to win an engagement with non-standard armaments, the SLDF as a whole will be at a huge logistical disadvantage, since even a victor would warrant considerable and time-consuming ship repairs (in short, whatever the Covenant can hit, destroyed or not, is taken out of the fight for a long time), while Covenant ships can just take shield hits and then recharge the shields, few, if any repairs required.

If my previous estimation of damage is correct and we we follow the three-MAC-shots-per-ship rule from The Fall of Reach, a couple of McKennas could shred the average Covenant warship in minutes. Quicker if they use nukes, which had been demonstrated to be effective at taking out Covenant ships even without being deployed in mass quantities. That doesn't even count all the damage that their complement of DropShips and ASFs can do in the meantime...

Edited by Arctic Fox, 09 May 2012 - 12:37 PM.

[Catamount]

Arctic Fox, on 09 May 2012 - 12:37 PM, said:

BattleTech lasers don't seem to have that many issues in space combat...

If they're used in knife fight engagements, they wouldn't, but the further away one is, the less powerful they get, and it happens very fast.

Quote

A Heavy Mass Driver delivers the equivilant damage of nearly one and a half Class III (50 kiloton) nuclear weapons in BT. Am I allowed to assume that they are broadly comparable weapons to the standard MAC and use that as a baseline? If so, something like a McKenna with its dozens of NACs, NLs, NPPCs and Capital Missile launchers is capable of putting out (and taking) far more damage than a UNSC warship. Without nukes.



If my previous estimation of damage is correct and we we follow the three-MAC-shots-per-ship rule from The Fall of Reach, a couple of McKennas could shred the average Covenant warship in minutes. Quicker if they use nukes, which had been demonstrated to be effective at taking out Covenant ships even without being deployed in mass quantities. That doesn't even count all the damage that their complement of DropShips and ASFs can do in the meantime...

Covenant warships are also capable of putting out and taking far more than UNSC warships. That's why the UNSC's fleet is in shambles, because they have no effective way of engaging the Covenant.

It's not just a matter of being able to destroy the "average" Covenant warship in minutes, it's how much damage it'll be able to do back in that time. Again, one ship in this engagement will see reduced combat effectiveness from damage from the first shots fired, the other will not. Even brief engagements and skirmishes that aren't conclusive, where only light damage is taken, will take a far heavier toll on the SLDF and its ships than the Covenant.
I also wouldn't put much hope in dropships and the like adding to damage; it'd be a drop in the bucket. I wouldn't count on Aerospace fights or non-mass driver weapons either. Too little energy output.

Still, if they have such powerful weaponry as you say, and lots of nukes, they perhaps they could overcome the shield advantage by simply having more ships, since it sounds like at least it wouldn't be a total curbstomp. Any idea how big the respective fleets are here?

Quote

Well, there's a huge difference between producing that much energy and producing it all at once. Maybe the reactors can't do it, or perhaps the materials couldn't handle it. Or something like that. I suppose you could accelerate a DropShip to ~0.3c and smash a planet into rubble, but that wouldn't be tremendously easier than just using nukes (Though similar stuff has been done in the BT universe).

There's a lot of maybes being hypothesized here. It still seems far more parsimonious to simple assume odd propulsion tech, as it doesn't require all the additional variables to explain away all the inconsistencies the magical reactor explanation runs into.

[Arctic Fox]

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 12:48 PM, said:

If they're used in knife fight engagements, they wouldn't, but the further away one is, the less powerful they get, and it happens very fast.

Well, I suppose that's true. But wouldn't this apply to Covenant plasma weapons as well?

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 12:48 PM, said:

Covenant warships are also capable of putting out and taking far more than UNSC warships. That's why the UNSC's fleet is in shambles, because they have no effective way of engaging the Covenant.

It's not just a matter of being able to destroy the "average" Covenant warship in minutes, it's how much damage it'll be able to do back in that time. Again, one ship in this engagement will see reduced combat effectiveness from damage from the first shots fired, the other will not. Even brief engagements and skirmishes that aren't conclusive, where only light damage is taken, will take a far heavier toll on the SLDF and its ships than the Covenant.
I also wouldn't put much hope in dropships and the like adding to damage; it'd be a drop in the bucket. I wouldn't count on Aerospace fights or non-mass driver weapons either. Too little energy output.

I wasn't saying that the SLDF's WarShips are necessarily more capable than the Covenant's, I was just saying they're (apparently) significantly better equipped to deal with the Covenant than the UNSC's.

Oh, and why can't DropShips add to damage? It's true they didn't have Sub-Capital Weapons at the time, but they can still mount Capital Missiles and, as always, nukes. Same goes for ASFs, though they can only carry smaller tactical nukes. Each WarShip can carry several DropShips and dozens of ASFs into combat by itself, after all.

Also, the Mass Driver is one of the least efficient weapons in the BattleTech universe if you want energy output. A bunch of standard Naval Weapons can deliver far more, just not in one shot.

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 12:48 PM, said:

Still, if they have such powerful weaponry as you say, and lots of nukes, they perhaps they could overcome the shield advantage by simply having more ships, since it sounds like at least it wouldn't be a total curbstomp. Any idea how big the respective fleets are here?

The SLDF at the start of the Periphery Uprising had approximately 2,250 active WarShips and another ~1,000 mothballed, in addition to about 300 to 600 WarShips from Star League member states (Depending on whether you count the RWR's fleet). That's only WarShips, DropShips would far outnumber these, not to mention ASFs.

I don't have fleet numbers for the Halo universe, I don't know if they even exist. I don't know if the SLDF's fleet could outnumber the Covenant fleet, but at the very least I think it's a safe bet that it would far outnumber the UNSC's given the amount of ships they've demonstrated fielding.

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 12:48 PM, said:

There's a lot of maybes being hypothesized here. It still seems far more parsimonious to simple assume odd propulsion tech, as it doesn't require all the additional variables to explain away all the inconsistencies the magical reactor explanation runs into.

Except that the propulsion is specificially stated to be your standard heat reaction mass -> throw out of back. I don't see why being unable to generate as much power as you'd like because the materials will melt is less reasonable then assuming a magical propulsion system. It is, after all, an actual concern in real reactors and rockets, is it not?

Edited by Arctic Fox, 09 May 2012 - 01:22 PM.

[Ryokochan]

Don't know enough about Halo to say for covies but as of 2750 the SLDF had roughly 2000 active warships plus another 400/500 in mothballs. Also the Great Houses fielded about 500 or so each.

Another thing to consider is these are peacetime numbers and unlike the UNSC the Star League has a truely massive civilian industrial base to convert to war production. There are at least 100 worlds that could match Reach's output once the League went to total war footing.

It would depend on how long the war lasts IMO. A short war would favor the Covenent but a long one would allow the League to bring its industrial base and more open-minded research to bear.

Edit; Yes the prophets are stupid but so is Al Qaeda this often happens when religion rules.

Edited by Ryokochan, 09 May 2012 - 01:36 PM.

[Zakatak]

KING PINEAPYULA, on 09 May 2012 - 04:09 AM, said:

What will happen to a battlemech if it came up against a super scarab.

All you need to kill a Scarab is a Scorpion tank, which is basically an light tank with a single HVAC/5 on it (with a top speed of 40km/h no less). A King Crab would eat 3 of those things for lunch!

[Capt Cole 117]

UNSC MAC guns are about 2/3 the length of the ship that carrys them. SLDF PPCs, gauss rifles, and NACs are turret mounted and therefore far smaller then a MAC gun on a UNSC ship of similar size.

I doubt the writers of bt and halo put any thought or math into what the gigajoule output of a gun or reactor should be. That’s why I only compare based on size and visual depictions of a weapons effectiveness.

[Zakatak]

Arctic Fox, on 09 May 2012 - 10:24 AM, said:

On what basis does the UNSC have bigger and better ships? The Marathon class heavy cruiser, if one is to believe the Halo wiki, masses 100,000 tons. This is one of the largest ships the UNSC fields, but that's literally equivilant to the smallest WarShips in the BattleTech universe get. The McKenna class battleships mass nearly two million tons. Moreover, while I don't have numbers, I doubt the UNSC can match the sheer numbers of WarShips, DropShips and AeroSpace fighters the SLDF could field.

Well, first off, it isn't 100,000 tons. I know Bungie said this, but that is just plain wrong. The Marathon is a brick 1200m long, plated with 2m of ultra-high grade Titanium 50 ("strengthened to the atomic level"), as well as having plenty of trussing inside. Titanium weighs about 4.5g/cm^3, so I did a few not-so-accurate calculations. I would put the mass of the Marathon at 18 million tons, 15 million for the Halycon, 7 million for the Destroyer, and 2 million for a Charon. Their supercarriers are 3km long and have armor 10m thick, so at least half a billion tons.

Most of the defensive systems are manned by AI, and UNSC AI is probably the best out of all the science fictions. Point-defenses consist of an array of double barreled batteries, that are basically what I would describe as "Rotary Autocannon 10". They are high explosive, and 98% accurate under AI control. Most of these ships carry over a 500 Archer missiles, which are small nuclear missiles in the 2-digit kiloton range. They usually carry 2 or 3 Shiva missiles, which are 30 megatons. The frigate uses a 64.5kt main gun that fires 600 ton slugs, while the destroyer has 2 of these. The Halycon has a triple-digit kiloton main gun, and the Marathon carries 2 of these.

UNSC Frigates are capable of anti-gravity, and float in the air much the same way bricks don't. 1 billion internets if you got that reference. From the Halo Reach cutscene, the Pillar of Autumn can do at least 30g's of acceleration without the crew feeling any of it. So, in short, UNSC absolutely flatten SLDF ships in most aspects. I have no doubt in my mind that they could field many more ships, so their naval capabilities are equal at best.

Edited by Zakatak, 09 May 2012 - 01:46 PM.

[Catamount]

Arctic Fox, on 09 May 2012 - 01:18 PM, said:

Well, I suppose that's true. But wouldn't this apply to Covenant plasma weapons as well?

No, nor would it apply to most SLDF weapons (PPCs, NACs, Gausses, whatever), just lasers.

The inverse square law only applies to certain types of emissions, for all intents and purposes here, basically EM-based weapons. It's something I occasionally have had to deal with equally in flash photography, and trust me, distance is savage to concentration of EM emissions.

Covenant weaponry appears to be almost solely particle weapons. Particularly, they seem to favor propelling large, concentrated packets of charged particles, more like PPCs than lasers (only their cannibalized tech is so advanced, they've gotten those weapons down to pistol size).

Quote

I wasn't saying that the SLDF's WarShips are necessarily more capable than the Covenant's, I was just saying they're (apparently) significantly better equipped to deal with the Covenant than the UNSC's.

Oh, and why can't DropShips add to damage? It's true they didn't have Sub-Capital Weapons at the time, but they can still mount Capital Missiles and, as always, nukes. Same goes for ASFs, though they can only carry smaller tactical nukes. Each WarShip can carry several DropShips and dozens of ASFs into combat by itself, after all.

Covenant shields are very interesting (read: strange). Conventional wisdom says that a shield should be best knocked out by the highest wattage blow you can deliver to them. Regardless of how much energy you're tossing at them, you want it shoved at them at fast and in as tiny an area as possible (because that would be the hardest shot to block).

That said, MAC guns appear to best do damage in bursts, suggesting perhaps covenant shields either A: are designed to brief spikeups like Trek shields, but can't keep it up enough to shrug off repeated hits, or B: only locally block shots, and can be overwhelmed.

Or maybe the best explanation is something else altogether.

It's really hard to say, which makes it hard to say what would be effective. According to Ilithi, who's usually my go-to guy on this stuff ( ), UNSC swarm missiles don't penetrate the shields, so clearly it's not as simple as more = better.

My best guess is that Covenant shields are designed to shrug off big blows, rather than repeated blows in rapid succession (hence the burst-MAC effectiveness), but, that it takes a minimum of energy to actually notably perturb them. This would explain why neither single big MAC rounds or swarm missiles are effective, but that rapid-succession powerful shots are.

If true, though, it would still negate smaller weaponry on SLDF vessels. They'd "bounce off", if you will, as harmlessly as UNSC missiles do. So the SLDF would have to rethink their standard naval combat doctrine, because standard naval weapons wouldn't do much. Repeated nuke blows might if the Covenant didn't start mounting point-defense weapons, however the best tactic would seem to be mounting more mass drivers. Inefficient or not, I'm guessing their they're only non-nuclear ordinance that would actually affect Covenant shields.

Quote

Except that the propulsion is specificially stated to be your standard heat reaction mass -> throw out of back. I don't see why being unable to generate as much power as you'd like because the materials will melt is less reasonable then assuming a magical propulsion system. It is, after all, an actual concern in real reactors and rockets, is it not?

And the reactors are stated to be mere fusion, not magical Star-Wars style "hypermatter reactors".

It's not going to make sense whether it's magical engines or magical reactors, hence my use of the word "magical", but the engine explanation is a lot more parsimonious. Either leaves hardware doing something it shouldn't be able to, but there are fewer required variables with the engine explanation, because you don't have to concoct an explanation on why this miracle substance was never weaponized, or why SLDF ships aren't capable of at least solid exajoule range outputs on their weapons, which they should easily be capable of with such power generation.

In short, neither explanation is possible in the real world, but since only the engines seem affected by this magical tech, no explanation is required beyond the engines themselves, rather than trying to explain a magical reactor with magical outputs that affects engines, but magically somehow can't power anything else to the kind of outputs it would be capable of.

Quote

The SLDF at the start of the Periphery Uprising had approximately 2,250 active WarShips and another ~1,000 mothballed, in addition to about 300 to 600 WarShips from Star League member states (Depending on whether you count the RWR's fleet). That's only WarShips, DropShips would far outnumber these, not to mention ASFs.

I don't have fleet numbers for the Halo universe, I don't know if they even exist. I don't know if the SLDF's fleet could outnumber the Covenant fleet, but at the very least I think it's a safe bet that it would far outnumber the UNSC's given the amount of ships they've demonstrated fielding.

I'll see what I can find on fleet numbers later.

Zakatak, on 09 May 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

Well, first off, it isn't 100,000 tons. I know Bungie said this, but that is just plain wrong.

Actually, there's a lot of precedent for this. Halo canon gets a lot of things just flat wrong when it comes to very basic stats.

As I noted before, they even got something as simple as the density of tungsten and iron wrong for the S-MAC rounds, and when I say wrong, I mean those rounds are something like 100 times denser than either of those materials actually is.


Either way though, it sounds like Halo ships are bigger than BT ships, by volume. Weight is usually something arbitrary in writing, not typically very thought out, and contingent on factors that would affect the density of the ship (maybe one side uses super-awesome light and strong alloys?), and so isn't a very good way to determine size. Volume is a much better method.

The larger covenant ships are at least 1800m-2000m long, but coming up with volume figures might be harder. I might be able to do some very rough estimates for both later.

Edited by Catamount, 09 May 2012 - 02:03 PM.

[Arctic Fox]

Capt Cole 117, on 09 May 2012 - 01:32 PM, said:

UNSC MAC guns are about 2/3 the length of the ship that carrys them.

As do Mass Drivers, but the smaller weapons are still far better at dealing damage.

Zakatak, on 09 May 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

Well, first off, it isn't 100,000 tons. I know Bungie said this, but that is just plain wrong. The Marathon is a brick 1200m long, plated with 2m of ultra-high grade Titanium 50 ("strengthened to the atomic level"), as well as having plenty of trussing inside. Titanium weighs about 4.5g/cm^3, so I did a few not-so-accurate calculations. I would put the mass of the Marathon at 18 million tons, 15 million for the Halycon, 7 million for the Destroyer, and 2 million for a Charon. Their supercarriers are 3km long and have armor 10m thick, so at least half a billion tons.

If you're dismissing canon masses then you have to massively increase BattleTech's as well, as its ships have well known density issues. This is a plague of many science fiction franchises.

Zakatak, on 09 May 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

Most of the defensive systems are manned by AI, and UNSC AI is probably the best out of all the science fictions. Point-defenses consist of an array of double barreled batteries, that are basically what I would describe as "Rotary Autocannon 10". They are high explosive, and 98% accurate under AI control. Most of these ships carry over a 500 Archer missiles, which are small nuclear missiles in the 2-digit kiloton range. They usually carry 2 or 3 Shiva missiles, which are 30 megatons. The frigate uses a 64.5kt main gun that fires 600 ton slugs, while the destroyer has 2 of these. The Halycon has a triple-digit kiloton main gun, and the Marathon carries 2 of these.

AI? Forget defensive systems, the SLDF's SDS had the infamous and devestatingly effective CASPAR drones, fully automated WarShips. All backed up by automated ASFs, DropShips and other platforms. These don't seem to count against the SLDF's active WarShip fleet count above, BTW.

As for Archers, can you give me a source for those being nuclear? I haven't read anything beyond First Strike or played beyond Halo 2, but I don't recall them being mentioned as anything but conventional explosives. Big ones to be sure, but not nuclear. As for the MAC, I also haven't seen any references to triple-digit kiloton weapons.

In either case, an SLDF WarShip can carry hundreds of high yield nuclear weapons, in addition to its many-kiloton conventional armament. Each Killer Whale can be fitted with a 500-kiloton warhead, and there are even larger warheads for when you actually need them (but which we, sadly, don't have rules for).

Zakatak, on 09 May 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

UNSC Frigates are capable of anti-gravity, and float in the air much the same way bricks don't. 1 billion internets if you got that reference. From the Halo Reach cutscene, the Pillar of Autumn can do at least 30g's of acceleration without the crew feeling any of it. So, in short, UNSC absolutely flatten SLDF ships in most aspects. I have no doubt in my mind that they could field many more ships, so their naval capabilities are equal at best.

This is after many years of war with the Covenant. Did they have any of that technology in the beginning? And why would they have more ships when they've never demonstrated anything near the numbers the SLDF deployed?

Edited by Arctic Fox, 09 May 2012 - 02:20 PM.

[Capt Cole 117]

McKenna vs CCS battle cruiser
McKenna, 1405 meters, flagship, best of the SLDF navy
12 x NAC/40s
12 x NL55s
6 x AR-10 Launchers
48 x Heavy NPPC

CCS battle cruiser, 1782 meters, General purpose ship of the line
Estimate 14 plasma guns
Estimate 12 pulse laser point defense turrets
2 plasma projectors but cannot fire both at once or fire plasma guns while in use
Halo universe seems to prefer a few large weapons over numerus small guns

The CCS plasma guns have a slow projectile speed giving the McKenna an immense advantage at long range. However the CCS can enter slipspace and reemerge within 1000 meters to negate this advantage with little effort. The ships would then launch a full broadside. Having never seen bt ships fight its hard to judge how much penetration a heavy NPPC has but if there are 12 on each side a NPPC must be smaller than a covie plasma gun.

There’s not enough info available to say for certain who would win however 2 CCS ships would certainly beat 1 McKenna. Also the CCS is much more common in the covie fleet then a McKenna is within the SLDF fleet. The slipspace drives let the covenant chose where and when to fight.

Edited by Capt Cole 117, 09 May 2012 - 02:36 PM.

[Catamount]

Okay, so during the fall of Reach, the Covenant deployed no less than 341 vessels, and apparently the newer edition of the novel states it to be over 700. Other fleets of hundreds of ships are also present, including the Second Fleet of Homogenous Clarity and Combined Fleet of Righteous Purpose.

That means that even if you bent over backwards so far you came back around between your own legs, anywhere from 1500-3000 ships should be the absolute smallest possible estimate for Covenant ships, and when I say bend over backward, I mean assume that those fleets are literally all the Covenant has (as opposed to the Reach fleet being maybe, say, 5-10% of the fleet, which would still be a HUGE naval commitment) So what would a more reasonable, middling estimate be, 5000-10000 perhaps?

Capt Cole 117, on 09 May 2012 - 02:36 PM, said:

the CCS can enter slipspace and reemerge within 1000 meters to negate this advantage with little effort. The ships would then launch a full broadside.

If this is true, it would be awfully hard to hit these things with large nuclear warheads, certainly far harder than it would be for the Covenant to fire back a M/AM warhead and just make an SLDF ship, well... go away.

Edited by Catamount, 09 May 2012 - 02:42 PM.

[Arctic Fox]

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 01:55 PM, said:

No, nor would it apply to most SLDF weapons (PPCs, NACs, Gausses, whatever), just lasers.

The inverse square law only applies to certain types of emissions, for all intents and purposes here, basically EM-based weapons. It's something I occasionally have had to deal with equally in flash photography, and trust me, distance is savage to concentration of EM emissions.

Covenant weaponry appears to be almost solely particle weapons. Particularly, they seem to favor propelling large, concentrated packets of charged particles, more like PPCs than lasers (only their cannibalized tech is so advanced, they've gotten those weapons down to pistol size).

Kinetic weapons and missiles obviously wouldn't have decreased damage at range, but charged particle weapons (The PPC too) should be susceptible to blooming. Also, IIRC the Covenant's plasma weapons rely on being shaped and guided (somehow) by a magnetic field from its firing ship, which I doubt would remain perfect over distance and time.

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 01:55 PM, said:

Covenant shields are very interesting (read: strange). Conventional wisdom says that a shield should be best knocked out by the highest wattage blow you can deliver to them. Regardless of how much energy you're tossing at them, you want it shoved at them at fast and in as tiny an area as possible (because that would be the hardest shot to block).

That said, MAC guns appear to best do damage in bursts, suggesting perhaps covenant shields either A: are designed to brief spikeups like Trek shields, but can't keep it up enough to shrug off repeated hits, or B: only locally block shots, and can be overwhelmed.

Or maybe the best explanation is something else altogether.

It's really hard to say, which makes it hard to say what would be effective. According to Ilithi, who's usually my go-to guy on this stuff ( ), UNSC swarm missiles don't penetrate the shields, so clearly it's not as simple as more = better.

My best guess is that Covenant shields are designed to shrug off big blows, rather than repeated blows in rapid succession (hence the burst-MAC effectiveness), but, that it takes a minimum of energy to actually notably perturb them. This would explain why neither single big MAC rounds or swarm missiles are effective, but that rapid-succession powerful shots are.

If true, though, it would still negate smaller weaponry on SLDF vessels. They'd "bounce off", if you will, as harmlessly as UNSC missiles do. So the SLDF would have to rethink their standard naval combat doctrine, because standard naval weapons wouldn't do much. Repeated nuke blows might if the Covenant didn't start mounting point-defense weapons, however the best tactic would seem to be mounting more mass drivers. Inefficient or not, I'm guessing their they're only non-nuclear ordinance that would actually affect Covenant shields.

That's assuming Covenant shields work that way. In either case, you're just arbitrarily deciding that a Mass Driver would penetrate the shields and, say, NPPCs or N-Gauss weapons wouldn't, despite them being fairly devestating in their own right. Is there anything to support that?

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 01:55 PM, said:

And the reactors are stated to be mere fusion, not magical Star-Wars style "hypermatter reactors".

It's not going to make sense whether it's magical engines or magical reactors, hence my use of the word "magical", but the engine explanation is a lot more parsimonious. Either leaves hardware doing something it shouldn't be able to, but there are fewer required variables with the engine explanation, because you don't have to concoct an explanation on why this miracle substance was never weaponized, or why SLDF ships aren't capable of at least solid exajoule range outputs on their weapons, which they should easily be capable of with such power generation.

In short, neither explanation is possible in the real world, but since only the engines seem affected by this magical tech, no explanation is required beyond the engines themselves, rather than trying to explain a magical reactor with magical outputs that affects engines, but magically somehow can't power anything else to the kind of outputs it would be capable of.

Again, just because you can produce that much total energy does not mean you can get as much power as you'd like out of it. BattleTech's engines never display an excessive amount of power, just total energy (And it's only the really big ones as well, so it's easy to rule out things like ridiculously powerful fusion bombs). It's just the same as if it would be a Matter/Anti-Matter reactor, just because you can try annihilating it all at once doesn't mean you can actually get anything out of it (except death).

EDIT:

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 02:38 PM, said:

Okay, so during the fall of Reach, the Covenant deployed no less than 341 vessels, and apparently the newer edition of the novel states it to be over 700. Other fleets of hundreds of ships are also present, including the Second Fleet of Homogenous Clarity and Combined Fleet of Righteous Purpose.

That means that even if you bent over backwards so far you came back around between your own legs, anywhere from 1500-3000 ships should be the absolute smallest possible estimate for Covenant ships, and when I say bend over backward, I mean assume that those fleets are literally all the Covenant has (as opposed to the Reach fleet being maybe, say, 5-10% of the fleet, which would still be a HUGE naval commitment) So what would a more reasonable, middling estimate be, 5000-10000 perhaps?

Yet the UNSC held them off for, what, 25 years? If the SLDF could do as well, it could build up an absolutely humongous fleet, and I don't see a reason why it couldn't.

EDIT 2: Not to mention the SLDF's fleet is ~3,000-4,000 WarShips in addition to the whole mass of CASPAR drones, DropShips and ASFs. So it's not as if it would be that outnumbered, if at all.

Catamount, on 09 May 2012 - 02:38 PM, said:

If this is true, it would be awfully hard to hit these things with large nuclear warheads, certainly far harder than it would be for the Covenant to fire back a M/AM warhead and just make an SLDF ship, well... go away.

The SLDF ship could launch a dozen nuclear warheads and annihilate it at the same time, no? Also, much like K-F drives, Slipspace drives don't work in regions of high gravity, so jumping next to a ship in orbit around a planet is next to impossible. I'd say a far greater impact of it is the fact that the Covenant's slipspace drives seem to be a whole lot faster than the K-F drive.

Edited by Arctic Fox, 09 May 2012 - 02:54 PM.

[Catamount]

Arctic Fox, on 09 May 2012 - 02:42 PM, said:

Kinetic weapons and missiles obviously wouldn't have decreased damage at range, but charged particle weapons (The PPC too) should be susceptible to blooming. Also, IIRC the Covenant's plasma weapons rely on being shaped and guided (somehow) by a magnetic field from its firing ship, which I doubt would remain perfect over distance and time.

Oh, I have no doubt there's some degradation. Is it even remotely close to dissipating by the square of the distance? We've certainly seen no evidence of that.

Quote

That's assuming Covenant shields work that way. In either case, you're just arbitrarily deciding that a Mass Driver would penetrate the shields and, say, NPPCs or N-Gauss weapons wouldn't, despite them being fairly devestating in their own right. Is there anything to support that?

It's not remotely arbitrary; it's based on the observed behavior of smaller weapons against Covenant shields, even in downright massive numbers. Would you mind explaining how that amounts to being "arbitrary"?

You said mass drivers produce energetic outputs in the dozens of kilotons. That should affect Covenant shielding, because it's similar to a MAC gun. But if mass waves of missiles from UNSC ships didn't do anything to Covenant shields, then why do you expect what you yourself describe to be mass numbers of smaller weapons on SLDF ships to have any more effect?

Quote

Again, just because you can produce that much total energy does not mean you can get as much power as you'd like out of it. BattleTech's engines never display an excessive amount of power, just total energy (And it's only the really big ones as well, so it's easy to rule out things like ridiculously powerful fusion bombs). It's just the same as if it would be a Matter/Anti-Matter reactor, just because you can try annihilating it all at once doesn't mean you can actually get anything out of it (except death).

And you could hypothesize that somehow this was some sort of absurdly energetic material, but that somehow, magically, that energy can only be released slowly, even though that makes no sense with nuclear fusion, but you're still replicating variables unnecessarily.

M/AM reactors can have their energy pulled as fast as one wants, as long as one can contain that energy output. So what's stopping BT reactors? Anything you answer that question with is an unnecessary added variable, hence, the explanation is not parsimonious.


Moveover, even if this was the case, clearly this would not be a superior form of energy to M/AM as you claimed, because it would mean M/AM reactors can be efficient and high wattage, not just efficient but very low wattage.

Edited by Catamount, 09 May 2012 - 02:56 PM.