Halo Firepower Thread

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Mith
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Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Mith » Tue Oct 26, 2010 6:38 am

Just thought we might as well gather some of the sources regarding Halo firepower. We already know about the datapadds, but other things must also be taken into account. We'll start with higher canon first and work our way down.

Halo: Reach

As the latest game in the franchise, Reach offers us the most up to date data. Ironically, it'd be one of the first events in chronological events.

Source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAtPyUN9QRM

Our first display of firepower comes at 2:16, when we're told this:
Air Control: Frigate Three One Eight heavy is inbound, and MAC rounds have been authorized.
Jorge: MAC rounds?? In atmosphere??
Noble 1: One way to get their attnetion! Hang on to your teeth people!
*Grafton fires its MAC and destroys the tower. Seconds later, we see a blue plasma beam strike the ship and tear through it like tissue paper*
DOT: New Contact. High-tonage.
Jorge: No. No! Somebody tell me this ain't happening!
Air Control: UNSC frigate Grafton, do you copy?
Noble One: The Grafton is dust! We need to get out of here NOW!
First things first. The MAC round, which is seen firing at Spire One. The tower, just eyeballing it, looks to be 288 meters tall. We then see the Grafton fire its shell, it creates a fireball that is roughly 45 meters in radius (90 diameter).

Here's the BLU-82B:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_upy14pe ... re=related

Eyeballing a picture of some men on one, the BLU is about six meters tall. The parachute holding it appears to be about 6 meters in size as well. The parachute drops downwards and then explodes, creating a fireball about 9-10 times larger than the parachute was. Going with nine, that gives us a blast radius of roughly 27 meters (54 diameter). The BLU is a 15,000 pound bomb, or 7.5 tons.

This would make the MAC's round between the MOAB (11 tons) and the US estimated yield of the FOAB (16.5 tons, as opposed to the 44 tons they claim) for about 13 tons more or less. This would be rather telling for the shielding capabilities of the Covenant, assuming that the same yield is used against them.

The second important bit of dialogue comes later:
Kat: That thin's crushing us and we're waiting for backup? They'll be backing up a graveyard.
Carter: All our nukes are either out-system or went down with the ships that carried them. You're preaching to the converted.
So to destroy a super carrier, they need a nuke. Keep in mind that we did see a UNSC frigate during MISSION: Uppercut. And yet oddly enough, they didn't have anything that equaled the power of a nuclear weapon.

Unfortunately, we don't know what they mean by "nukes". We know of 30 megaton mines used in GoO, but let's keep in mind that most nuclear weapons are probably missiles. A mine is just a single bomb and can therefore afford to be much bigger because it doesn't need a large rocket to propel it against the enemy.

Now let's think about a nuclear missile. This is the US's W80 nuclear missile designed for both stealth and speed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W80_(nuclear_warhead)

It has a variable yield of 5-150 kilotons and is probably what we're looking for in a nuclear missile. According to Atomic Rockets, most weapons would probably be 1 kiloton for a space based nuclear missile. Given that the weapons that impacted the other ship were in the double digit ton range and managed to punk a smaller ship, larger ships having a handful of kilotons is probably a reasonable guess.

Also, found this:

http://www.5596.org/cgi-bin/nuke.php

Pretty cool.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by User1450 » Wed Oct 27, 2010 3:34 am

All of which you got from cherry-picking.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Mith » Wed Oct 27, 2010 4:00 am

Bane wrote:All of which you got from cherry-picking.
As in, per say what?


Also, as an aside, my yield for the MAC is actually wrong. It has to be higher than my original claim, since the yield of the weapon goes up faster than fireball size.

We are actually probably looking at something closer to 40 tons at least. But probably no more than 60 tons. Spock, do you have a more accurate way of calculating the blast?

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Picard » Fri Oct 29, 2010 5:52 pm

Halopedia has revised yields of PoA MAC to be 600 ton projectile at 30 000 m/s, and SMAC to be 3000 ton projectile at 12 000 000 m/s. But there are no data about yields of other weapons. Any help would be appreciated.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Mike DiCenso » Fri Oct 29, 2010 11:36 pm

Bane wrote:All of which you got from cherry-picking.
Hi, Bane and welcome to the SFJN board. Now, do you have anything to back up that Mith is cherry-picking his evidence?
-Mike

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Kor_Dahar_Master » Sat Oct 30, 2010 10:16 am

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Bane wrote:All of which you got from cherry-picking.
Hi, Bane and welcome to the SFJN board. Now, do you have anything to back up that Mith is cherry-picking his evidence?
-Mike
I suppose it depends on perspective, is Miths example the only quantifiable material we have is it the most up to date and as such are all prior examples over ridden?.

Bane you should really make a list with dates and sources along with a note to canon policy rather than just make accusations of cherry picking without posting evidence ect.

PS: Howdy.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Oct 30, 2010 10:47 am

I think there might have been one reference of a normal MAC firing at something close to c.
There are also calculations about glassing.

All of which don't really matter in light of the information in the datapads.

And in all logic, the yield of a SMAC would soon be retconned to something that *makes sense*. Even if the cannon was a thousand times bigger than a MAC firing at 64.53 KT, you'd get a yield in the megatons if powers scaled up accordingly. 64.53 megatons, in fact.
And the SMAC is nowhere a thousand times bigger (x10 on all three dimensions).

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Picard » Thu Nov 04, 2010 7:41 pm

Maybe, but:
1) Shipboard MAC yield is that of Pillar of Autumn MAC. It is stated to be able to fire 3 lighter (and presumably somewhat slower) shells at single charge. So MAC of Marathon class cruiser might be 2 to 5 times more powerful.
2) ODP's get their power from ground-based generators, which means that:
-each generator can have more fuel
-each generator can be much larger
-there can be larger number of generators per MAC than it is case with shipboard MAC

Having said all that, I still agree that shipboard MAC should be few megatons per shell.

And as for these "close-c" values, these are not canon anymore. It was 40% c for MAC and 50% c for SMAC.

Plus "glassing" should actually be called "burning" - just watch HALO:Reach cutscenes. You have it on youtube.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Nov 05, 2010 1:15 pm

Kilotons per shell you mean. Megatons, they'd completely rape Covenant shields now. And we know this is not the case at all.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Nov 07, 2010 1:28 am

Many references about UNSC ship firepowers and other hull capacities were posted in the following thread:

The Goa'uld vs the UNSC.
That's an "old" one.
Spartan_Elite notably proves many references. From the gigawatt cores to megaton omnidirectional blasts and chemical warheads, most of the material would fit with the Reach datapads calcs and the firepower seen disposing of UNSC warships in Halo:Reach cutscenes.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Picard » Tue Nov 09, 2010 5:47 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Kilotons per shell you mean. Megatons, they'd completely rape Covenant shields now. And we know this is not the case at all.
I found on Halopedia that shields of Covenant destroyer are resistent to 3 MAC rounds. Not sure if it is canon, thought.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Mith » Fri Nov 12, 2010 7:55 am

Picard wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Kilotons per shell you mean. Megatons, they'd completely rape Covenant shields now. And we know this is not the case at all.
I found on Halopedia that shields of Covenant destroyer are resistent to 3 MAC rounds. Not sure if it is canon, thought.
MACs are at most kiloton, and possibly less. That instance with the frigate in Reach was pretty bad, but the most damning was the instance in Halo 3, where we saw three MACs open fire and do absolutely less than a kiloton. Maybe hundreds of tons...but not kilotons.

And before you think otherwise, check the scene, the fireballs aren't all from the MACs either, but from the longswords that flew overhead just before them and started bombing the fuck out of the target.

Think about that. If those bombs aren't rated in the kilotons, then even attempting something that often exceedes more than a handful of megatons is retarded when compared to three MACs. Let's say each is 1 megaton. There were three ships. 3 megatons. That's 3,000 kilotons and 3,000,000 tons. Assume that each ship deliverd a payload of 25 tons. Now assume that they had say, 20 ships. That's .5 kilotons. You just delivered 0.0167% of the energy they delivered with the MACs and .05% of what each MAC would deliver on its own.

Does that in any way sound like a plausible idea? And before you even think about trying to counter that, remember that the largest conventinal bomb in US history is 11 tons and is a bitch to deploy. Longswords probably don't carry much more than 25 tons at best, given they seem to be designed to attack enemy craft.

Now take those same statistics and think what would happen if we made each a kiloton. Then suddenly, it's 50% of a single MAC and 16.67% of three MACs. It's much more sensible.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Picard » Fri Nov 12, 2010 1:17 pm

Actually, kiloton-level MAC is for PoA. Frigates could be 2-4 kilotons high end.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Mith » Sat Nov 13, 2010 5:16 am

Picard wrote:Actually, kiloton-level MAC is for PoA. Frigates could be 2-4 kilotons high end.
The highest MAC is probably a kiloton at best.

A SMAC is probably no more than 10 kilotons or so.

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Re: Halo Firepower Thread

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Nov 13, 2010 6:56 pm

The Halo 3 cutscene is problematic in many ways. Scales are fucked up. The explosions don't make much sense. And if the Longswords bombed the Dreadnaught first, then the yield of their bombs had to be low, otherwise those fighters would be dead. Now, it's possible they didn't give a shit about dying, but that's quite a stretch.
Then there's the point of firing in the atmosphere. There are plenty of reasons why this can't work well unless you bring the yields down very low.

The shell that destroyed the Covenant corvette (what is it called in fact?) wasn't particularly fast.
It clearly is a notch below the 30 km/s achievable in space as per TFoR. Since it's possible that MACs can be dialed up and down within a certain margin, the yields of HR don't necessarily contradict those of the books.
However, higher yields above the terajoule range are definitely out. So much that a SMAC would only be to fire a couple of petajoules of KE to completely bust the shields of the strongest Covenant ship.
Now, it's clear that Covenant ship aren't very strong once shields are down: both in H3 and Reach we see projectile smash through them effortlessly. The difference being that an Assault Cruiser remained functional, why that corvette went down.

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