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Re: [Halo Waypoint] The Duel is online *SPOILERS*
Posted By: scarab	Date: 11/21/09 5:25 a.m.
: I think most people tend to forget an important point... Scarabs are : essentially hunters. That is to say, colonies of Lekgolo forming a : creature with four expenditures. So it's not at all out of the way to : believe "Hunters" could come in larger sizes. : http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Lekgolo And they could, perhaps*, be a lot smaller. Imagine a beam rifle, a small camo net or active camo power-up, and enough worms to carry them. I imagine that the worms can stick together because they have active Velcro skin (like Pete's finger tips in the first Spiderman film). They could climb anywhere! I hope I never see that in game. ;-) * talking about how small a Lekgolo colony could get... 1) I think that their biology is silicon based. They eat rocks and circuits, carbon based life generally eats carbon based food. And the Beastarium suggests that at least one lifeform mentioned has a silicon genome. This could refer to the Engineers but I think its referring to the Lekgolo. From the Beastarium: DNA/RNA/Silicon samples are encoded in this datastream. Reproduction of individuals for analysis is prohibited by this facility. 2) I don't think that they need to breathe. Have they not been found on airless worlds? How do individuals in the center of colonies breathe? Even if a colony has a shared circulatory system it would need specialized gas exchange structures. C02 (the product of respiration) is a gas, Si02 is a solid and so would present insolvable (or insoluble) problems for Si based breathers. (Unless they have mixed C/Si metabolisms and produce C02 waste) 3) How do they get rid of waste heat? They are very big and are encased in armor. I think that they can live in vacuum which is a great insulator. Maybe they are comfortable being hot. 4) So where do they get their energy from? From the h2 manual: Fuel Rod Gun is a useful infantry tool, designed to be used against smaller vehicles and personnel. Radioactive ammunition renders it particularly effective against Human ground forces Lekgolos have a radioactive weapon permanently bonded to their armor. OK, all Covies seem to be resistant to radiation but the Lekgolo/Radiation connection got be thinking. Our biology uses ATP as its energy currency. It is usually synthesized by creating an electrical gradient across membranes. There are protein complexes that create pores in the membranes that allow single protons to cross the membrane. The protein complexes use the energy from the proton to generate a single ATPmolecule. Anyway, maybe Lekgolo use ionizing radiation in their energy cycle. They eat rock, maybe life on their planet evolved underground in wet, radioactive rocks. It would be silicon based and gets energy from radioactive fission (amongst other things). They have compartments in their tissues that hold fissile material, this material generates gamma rays that interact with materials in compartment membranes that take some of the energy and generate electrical gradients across the membranes, and pores that allow ions to flow down electrical gradients to produce 'ATP'. OK, if we accept that: * they are Si based * they are comfortable being hot * they get their energy from radioactive fission Does this have any implications for colony size? It probably does. If your preferred temperature is hot and you fight in cold places then you want to be big. You probably don't get enough spontaneous fissions to generate enough gamma rays to be really useful. What you need is a reactor. You need to concentrate your fissile material so that neutrons created by spontaneous fissions can be captured by other nuclei in order to make those nuclei split. A single worm probably isn't big enough to do the job. But if several worms congregate in close proximity then neighboring worms can capture neutrons emitted by each other. A large colony becomes the reactor. So you would have a biological reason for worms to form colonies and the colonies would need to be big. The Hunter armor could be lined with neutron generating material. The armor lets Hunters be unnaturally small. The armor is a life support system for an unusually small Lekgolo colony. A Hunter would be the smallest possible Lekgolo colony found outside of living rock.

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