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| The datapads are wrong. *SP* | |
| Posted By: Jordan117 | Date: 9/18/10 11:02 p.m. |
In Response To: To both retinence and Jillybean (DHalo) : The data pads claim that the Covenant were never truly able to : fully glass a planet, just enough to change the atmosphere temporarily I : believe. Recolonization, however, is possible, as you can see by the : ending of the Reach. This is revealed in the data pads. Glassing was a : term inspired by a Committee of AIs, and they over-dramatized glassing by : making it seem more lethal than it really was. To quote the relevant pad (#10): [^] Earth, one of the smaller planets inhabited by our creators, has one hundred and thirty billion acres of surface area. Thus, assuming the Covenant possesses a number of ships equal to that of the UNSC, and assuming that all of those ships are capable of generating and discharging the required power non-stop for the duration of the process, it would necessitate the combined efforts of their ships in total for a minimum of 30.3801 years to 'glass' the entire surface of Earth. First, note that this pad was recorded in 2526, about a year after first contact was made with the Covenant. The Assembly AIs wouldn't have that much information to go on in terms of extrapolating their power. In absence of that, they base their estimates on a Covenant fleet equal in size to the UNSC, which is pretty clearly wrong. The Covenant had been spacefaring for centuries longer than humanity, and had the resources and manpower of multiple species to draw on (not to mention the windfall of Forerunner tech). They also have pretty powerful weapons -- in the Halo 2 trailer, they pepper the Western U.S. with nuke-like bombs that look 1-2x as big as the Tsar Bomba (the most powerful nuke ever detonated) and which could probably blow up half of Great Britain at a stroke. I think it's safe to say the Covenant fleet was far larger and more powerful than the AIs dared guess. Also, they define glassing as the total incineration of a planet's surface. This strikes me as overkill -- for one thing, they wouldn't really need to glass the oceans, and that alone accounts for 2/3rd's of Earth's surface area. If all they wanted to do was exterminate the human population and render the world uninhabitable (which is what I assume glassing is supposed to accomplish), all they'd have to do is take out the major cities and lay waste to the environmental foundations. So for a planet like Earth, they'd just need to bombard the big urban corridors, then set fire to the Amazon and Congo jungles and the forests of Canada and Russia. That would kill billions, cripple civilization, wreck the environment, and put enough soot and poison into the atmosphere to make it unbreathable. This process can be reversed (like we saw with Reach) and avoided (like we saw with Earth), but even those planets suffered huge losses, and were only partially glassed in the face of stout opposition. Given a few days with a defeated planet, I could see the Covenant totally killing a world, even if they didn't glass every square inch.
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