rocketdrive

General interest in physics and science, as well as sci-fi and video games. interested in role playing and debates due to the lack of good games at the moment.

Just found this in a forum recently and wanted to keep it somewhere:

Halo MACs are c-fractional, according to Halo Wars, but show gigajoule level effects in Halo Reach and Halo Wars, and terajoule level effects in Halo 3. Obviously, the difference in firepower is due to the fact that Halo 3 chronically ahead of Reach and Wars. What this means is that Halo MACs fire like 1 gram slugs at like 42,000 km/s during Reach/Wars and 4 grams slugs as of Halo 3.

We also know from Halo 2 that the Covenant use laser beams to destroy a Marathon cruiser, so their weapons on their capital ships, which we shall call laser beams because there is no name given in game, are light speed weapons. We know that laser beams are rated at gigawatt to terrawatt range as well as per the Halo Reach Data Pads wherein it notes that it would take roughly ~2500 ships 20 years to convert a planet's surface to glass using laser beams, as well as the glassings of New Mombassa and New Alexandria in Halo 3 and Reach respectively.

This means that, while lacking firepower, the Halo forces have a much greater range advantage; as per the Codex, the Mass Effect race's dreadnoughts can dodge 4025 km/s projectiles at "tens of thousands of kilometers". Being conservative for the Mass Effect side, we'll assume they only have an effective range of 20,000 kilometers, so that they need only 5 seconds to react. This means that the UNSC's MACs will have an effective range of 210,000 kilometers against Council races' dreadnoughts at the low end. If we assume that, for example, they have an effective range of, say, 90,000 kilometers, this number skyrockets to 945,000 kilometers. For the Covenant, a 5 second reaction time means a 1,500,000 km range at a low end and a 6,750,000 km range at the high end.

Another thing to note is that, despite such high muzzle velocity for HAlo weapons, ships in Halo engage at 200 kilometers at most, indicating 5 millisecond reaction times for the Covenant and .67 milliseconds for the UNSC. This difference can probably be attributed to the UNSC's superior AI, which is seemingly omnipresent in every Halo game.

For dreadnoughts in Mass Effect, this means that with their 4025 km/s slugs, they'd have to close within 20 kilometers to hit Covenant ships and 2.7 kilometers to hit UNSC ships.

Overall, I'd have to say that while the UNSC and Covenant have the range advantage, they lack the sheer firepower of the far heavier but much slower slugs of the ME races and while they'll dance around ME ships without issue, a single hit will completely vaporize them.