The Covenant (Halo) invade the Federation

[Mr. Oragahn]

1.17 TT, a low end for an UNSC ship? That's just silly.

Learn to read. I meant that the contradictions for 1.17 TT could be considered low-end, not the 1.17 TT itself.

Right. The "low ends" were rated in the kiloton range: a couple tens of km at best, projectiles massing hundred tonnes.
I'm used to have low ends sit like less orders of magnitude from the highest figures than there are fingers on one human hand.

It goes without saying that the Halo encyclopedia is the biggest pile of nonsense I've seen in ages in terms of official material. In fact, the Halo cannon is a perpetual sawtooth mess. Claiming teraton level guns for ships which only managed to pull artificial gravity very recently is just too laughable, too absurd to be taken literally, and just doesn't fit with the references. Of course Halo's numbers are all over the place. The encyclopedia makes the mistake of treating the high ends as standards.
It's also due to fans taking cutscenes at face value, and that since Halo 1.

That doesn't make it any less canon.

Doesn't matter. That it's canon argument is generally used by people who can't defend their claims or are too lazy to provide figures. If you're too lazy to find a solution to a problem, and are more interested in reciting the chapters of the newest Bible, you've probably found the wrong place.
Not to say that the newest anime, fresher than the encyclopedia, contain amusing details.

@ Mike

You can find local mountains that are as low as 300 meters on the wiki page. They just happen to sit in a region that's higher.
It's still impressive nonetheless, if we were to use the novelization. Which we don't have to.

[Mike DiCenso]

You can find local mountains that are as low as 300 meters on the wiki page. They just happen to sit in a region that's higher.
It's still impressive nonetheless, if we were to use the novelization. Which we don't have to.

Yes, but the wiki article gives fairly concise definitions of what a mountain is, and how big they should be. Locally people calling something that's only 300 meters tall a mountain is an outlier, and it wouldn't be much more than a big hill in most places, like where I live, in which the Foothills region has similar elevations, and are not considered mountains by any stretch, especially by comparison to the over one mile tall Santa Catalinas and Rincons nearby. The wiki article gave these definitions:

Height over base of at least 2,500 m (8,202 ft).

Height over base of 1,500 m (4,921 ft).–2,500 m (8,202 ft). with a slope greater than 2 degrees

Height over base of 1,000 m (3,281 ft).–1,500 m (4,921 ft). with a slope greater than 5 degrees

Local (radius 7,000 m (22,966 ft). elevation greater than 300 m (984 ft)., or 300 m (984 ft)–1,000 m (3,281 ft). if local (radius 7,000 m (22,966 ft). elevation is greater than 300 m (984 ft).

That's what I'm using, landform no less than 1,000 m in height over it's base. With the rough average being 2.5 km between all the given definitions. So the ST:TMP novelization, while not necessary, certainly would make for very impressive firepower for a single photon torpedo in that context.
-Mike