The funny thing is that we don't need to endlessly discuss the Forerunners and their grossly numerous advantages.
Oh wait, I have.
But what's interesting is not only that these advantages exist in the first place but just how many orders of magnitude these advantages exist outside of the scope of the Starcraft factions, so much so I can pretty much confidently argue that the Forerunners can not only win this fight, not only can they do so with a fraction, of a fraction of the available resources, such an insignificant fraction that it won't even make it on the news headlines but will be instead be covered by some obscure blog, but they can win this fight without taking a single organic casualty. Again, that's how insanely confident I am in the argument.
One side fights with hundreds of thousands of close-to-autonomous capital ships and potentially billions to trillions of autonomous small craft in singular engagements. The other distinctly doesn't, with fleets consisting of dozens to hundreds of ships representing substantial portions of their warfighting potential, and their projection power is limited to a few fighter equivalents.
One side can dictate engagements over light years and engage over light minutes using FTL transmission systems with sensors so sensitive they can discern the differences between organic molecules found in DNA from ten light years away. The other fights within visual range and can have their sensors occluded by clouds of dust.
Forerunner industry includes building stars, creating star systems, Dyson shells, and weapon systems capable of reducing the sentient population of a galaxy to zero in an instant. Their long-term ambitious mega-engineering projects include shifting the axis of a galaxy or mass aborting nascent universes to assembly line mass-manufacture stars.
All of this is to say that this isn't even a war for the Forerunners; this is a brisk afternoon between meetings.
Bawkdragon said:
I still am trying to understand how Greg bear forerunner fit with the forerunners who sentinels and promethean are mulch for the chief.
This is such an odd sentiment, because it posits that in 2011 the entire tone of the Forerunners as a technological hegemony shifted in such a dramatic manner it creates a gulf between the polities.
Because the first time we hear of the Forerunners, in the namesake of the franchise, is a 10,000 km mega-structure capable of depopulating a huge chunk of the galaxy with a single faster-than-light pulse.
Prior to 2011 they were literal world-builders (multiple sources) spanning the local galactic group, known for such works as Jupiter-sized factories (Halo 3) and 2 AU sized solid spheres (Ghosts of Onyx), capable of complex time manipulation and even limited time travel (First Strike, Glasslands), that could destroy, move or create stars (Ghosts of Onyx, Halo 3, Halo Encyclopaedia 2009 edition), manipulate time and space on a stellar level (Glasslands), create planet sized objects in a matter of months (Halo 3), teleport across trans-galactic distances (numerous sources), travel the gulf of the galaxy at millions of times the speed of light (numerous sources), communicate instantaneously across hundreds of thousands of light years (Halo 2) and direct FTL superweapon pulses across the entire galaxy and selectively wipe out any target across hundreds of billions of stars systems were absolute pushovers (Combt Evolved).
Half-Truths said:
The Terrans will be destroyed in an instant. I agree that.
However, the Zerg, who have billions of space assets comparable to the Forerunners
Zerg trans-orbital assets are typically light aircraft analogues, which are effective in part due to the poor sensor resolution capabilities of Terran vessels. These are, after all, organisms that use their own flatulence to propel themselves whilst comically flapping their wings in a vacuum with dozens being ample to overwhelm PD gunnery.
View: https://youtu.be/7shAQeCHPIg?t=124
(the crew literally did not sound the alter until the Zerg were in visual range of the observation deck)
That does not make them comparable to equal-tonnage Forerunner vessels, never mind the millions of multiple billion-ton vessels employed throughout the ecumene that can individually disgorge millions to even billions of parasite craft.
I consider their presence negligible. Naval battles aren't RPGs where one side of the screen aligns and exchanges attacks until their HP hits zero. True warships are simply faster owing to a combination of inertialess drives and vacuum-derived reactants, are covered in secondary and tertiary weapons protected by multiple repulsive physical barriers, and have no reason to even entertain getting within proximity of a Zerg cloud except to reduce them to a single long streak of bug juice. Heck, owing to their proximity, I hate to think of what a hyper-velocity cloud of annihilating energy would do when one member of the swarm is struck.
They have no reason to sit there and let themselves be targets of attrition rather than using their superior mobility and acceleration, including their weapons ranges, to avoid getting in range of an organism whose primary mechanism for offense entails vomiting. Although that in of itself would be hilarious to envision, Forerunner starships can survive against the equivalent kinetic energy of their own mass excavating an oceanic crater visible from high orbit, ramming at even 100 km/s would most certainly be fatal to the Zerg unit in question (Zerg have been killed by civilian trucks, going at trans hypersonic velocities into a ship's shields would prove to be nasty) whereas passing through thousands of tons of biological material would not even qualify as a fraction of the energy that doesn't even tickle unshielded Forerunner vessels.
and the Protoss, who can bypass the defenses and immediately infiltrate the ship with infantry much stronger than the Forerunner infantry,
The latest guide notes that direct contest between infantry is regarded as purely ceremonial, because their MO runs in direct contradiction to the Protoss.
A key component of their modus operandi is the command and coordination of thousands to millions of autonomous systems varying from drones to weapons-ships, allowing for groups of Warrior-Servants to share data and coordinate millions to billions of craft in a single planetary and naval engagements.
The signal throughput ratio of individual crew to fighting units are frequently described as being hundreds of thousands to a million to one or greater depending on complexity, from thousands of strike fighters to hundreds of thousands of simpler drone constructs. With individuals having cadres of automated soldiers numbering in the tens of thousands at their local command, and the means of mass fabrication in-situ.
Meanwhile Venatores, who specialise in counter-intrusion, explicitly engage in geometric warfare, manipulating the internal ship geometries, teleportation systems and numerous automonous systems all whilst piloting Mecha designed to depopulate cities.
So it's feasible for systems such as Phaetons and likely similar sized weapon-ships to consist of phalanxes consisting of millions of units, with Naval rates commanding these at a ratio of one million weapon-ships to a single warrior. So whilst there are only 5,000 Venatores on board of a Sojourner, each one is likely operating a cadre consisting of hundreds of thousands of various scale drones and autonomous warriors implementing localized geometry warfare using their own teleportation mechanisms and force fields in addition to mounted weapons fabrication. They can make use of sub-systems capable of snatching a nuke in the midst of detonating and creating protective envelopes remote from the ship, or utilising aggressive programmable matter systems capable of their own mass to energy induction - staffed by Ancilla that consistently individually give UNSC Smart AI a consistent run-around in spite of those same systems being hard intelligence systems that can functionally operate on millions to one scales relative to human perception.
And in turn, why wouldn't the Forerunners also employ this when one of their modii with their equivalent of ground forces also employs teleportation and boarding actions intended to deploy massive contingents of forces? In reality, a Protoss warrior that attempts to board a Forerunner vessel will be lucky to encounter a wall of Sentinels, it could be teleported off the vessel and into the pathway of an antimatter beam, or crushed between two new apparent geometries.
And this of course assume a Protoss ship can even get within range of a Forerunner vessel to initiate such an attack. Is there a limit to their teleportation distance? Furthermore, what are you basing the idea that Protoss are stronger than Warrior-Servants on?
will be defeated in the end, but will at least inflict the damage of the Forerunner-Ancient Human War.
The Ancients however purposefully spent numerous years jealously building themselves to be near peers with the Forerunners in the pursuit of warfare, allowing them to throw tens of thousands of vessels at singular system battles with advanced weapons that allowed them to compete in Naval warfare for longer than a microsecond.
Again, the Ancients would beat the living snot out of the combined Starcraft factions with just their automated servants.
(Considering that the ancient humans and the Forerunners struggled even against the Flood in powder form at the beginning of the war, zerg spores and viruses are threatening opponents.)
The Forerunners never encountered the Flood in their post-hibernation form, so I'm not sure where you're getting this information. By that point they had achieved their full mutagenic stage.
Besides, can you explain in detail why the Forerunners would be vulnerable to mutagenic spores or viruses employed by the Zerg?
Amon, Hybrids and Xel'Naga relics are the key of StarCraft to fight equaly with Forerunners.
Please explain.
A few others have already handily dismissed this idiocy, so I won't go overboard, but there are a few points that were clearly missed that I would like to address in detail.
First, the Halo is by far not their largest structure; in fact, it's not even close to being their most structurally resilient structure in canon.
The Halo isn't durable or particularly well armed, in fact it's a minor plot point in two separate novels that her defences can not only be overwhelmed by craft that are smaller by over eight orders of magnitude, but passing near a planet is enough to rupture the super-structure and this was a built in, hard locked safety feature in the event of a hostile incursion.
Not even Contender-class Ancilla could overcome these systems, any unauthorised intrusion essentially resulted in the system essentially auto destructing by ramming the nearest body or just skimming too close.
By comparison, Shield Worlds can compensate and operate grossly within the Roche limit of multiple main sequence stars.
Why?
Something whose primary design functionality is to erase the concept of thought within 25,000 light years would be necessitate the use of a countermeasure, even if said countermeasure relied on a rudimentary fleet presence.
Second, what uncoupled the installation was its own rotational velocity. Note that a structure massing as much as a Halo with its demonstrated rotational velocity would have a rotational kinetic energy of something like 1E28 joules.
Why is this relevant? Because it's not inherently lethal to the structure. In Primordium, a bombardment of Zeta Halo manages to uncouple vast multiple hundred kilometer sections, producing craters comparable to that of the POA detonation. In Infinite, Cortana subjected the ring to a self-destruct mechanism that manages to mass scatter a portion of the ring hundreds of kiometers long - in both cases the ring was not subject to her own rotational kinetic energy and survived.
As to the Alpha Shard?
View: https://youtu.be/Wnf5UzGNIVU?t=4
The Alpha Shard wasn't destroyed by this event; the sole purpose of the blast was to eliminate the mutagenic deposits on the surface to prevent terrorists from using them again, at no point do they suggest this will destroy the Alpha Shard.
In the video you posted the shard wasn't even physically damaged, with zero ejecta.
And to further hammer this home, this is implied to be the section of the ring where the POA detonated, and in spite of being ejected into the opposing ring wall at thousands of kilometers a second it was able to teleport to a seperate star system and even regulate its surface to sustain life in spite of rotating in proximity of an energetic star.
Have the Protoss built a structure that can survive country sized section of itself slamming into an equally dense structure at over 1000 km/s and propel itself out, only to repair itself in spite of being subjected to the bombardment of a star?
Didact's Flagship get penetrated by SuperMAC. The official lorebook, Warfleet said Super MAC fires projectile at speed of few km per second. Not even better than the weakest-kiloton Yamato canon feat.
Well, for one thing, that wasn't an ODP; the MAC of the UNSC Infinity is noted to be a new, larger gun platform. In fact, it's noted that the defense grid had no measurable effect in stopping the ship.
Fleetcom Watch (COM): "Orbital Defense Command, this is FleetCom. Hostile inbound. Proceed to Condition Red."
Orbital Defense (COM): "This is Earth Orbital Defense! MAC defenses ineffective against enemy vessel! It's still approaching!"
That much should be painfully obvious given that the Infinity's MAC rounds span a distance of what appears to be several thousand kilometers in fractions of a second (again, a tired joke I admit, but you are awfully economical with the application of the truth).
Before proceeding with this analysis, we must first acknowledge two caveats.
A) The Mantle's Approach had no active shields at the time of the impact. As of writing this there have been countless bouts of speculation concerning the nature of the Didact's defensive systems during the Battle of Earth, however the one stalwart conclusion I can derive solely from the scene in question is that as of the Infinity's attack they were simply not active to repel her twin MAC impacts.
For a start, it's a notable fact in-universe that both UNSC and Covenant shields (both of whom derive their technology from reverse engineered Forerunner systems) flare with a luminous glow as a result of physical impacts and weapons fire. There are countless instances within the novels of Covenant vessels undergoing this phenomenon (which is likely a result of incandescence generated by the shields deflecting and dissipating converted energy from the hull - either via kinetic or thermal transmissions), not to mention the primary source material in the games, animated series and even trailers. In addition the UNSC evidently begin to adopt these systems (even in their Frigates) as of 2557, whereas it's notable that even Forerunner meditation chambers will glow with MAC round impacts. The shields of the Mantle's Approach notably emit a luminous pattern when exposed to the intense radiation generated by a slipspace portal. It's been speculated in prior debates that said shimmer was actually the observed effects of slipspace reconciliation, however these effects are notably absent in Forerunner craft ranging from Guardians to even the Keyship, the former of which appears to have no known shield systems in canon, the latter craft being a partially operational artefact re-purposed by a species with a less than total grasp of Forerunner technology.
This telltale flare was not at all present throughout the entire cutscene, in spite of the shields being purposefully animated in the prior scene. Furthermore, Lasky later notes that given sufficient clearance he could damage the hull plating:
Halo 4: Midnight;
John-117: "Infinity, the Didact just closed off our entrance to the Composer."
Lasky (COM): "We could try punching a hole in that hull plating, but Infinity won't be able to get a clear shot with all that flak."
John-117: "We'll take care of the guns."
No reference is made to the shields, which should in of themselves be notable given their decades of experience fighting capital ships that employ shields as their primary defensive mechanisms, in addition the Infinity likely utilises sufficiently complex sensors that can distinguish the presence of complex energy shields.
So where are the shields? Frankly, without further confirmation from the writers that will remain entirely speculative and has been since 2012. The Master Chief's sabotage of the central power node may have resulted in a local unremarked shield failure, it simply may be the case that each of the vessel's operations require at least a capable Ancilla supported crew; in fact according to Warfleet the standard crew complements consists of 825 Naval Officers and a single Commander, with only a solitary Commander. Even with their advancements in automation, it's likely that such a small crew would represent a considerable loss in operational capacity. With the Didact focusing his attention on a limited number of systems, it may simply be a case that monitoring the defensive fields may not have been a priority. Finally it may simply be a combination of the Didact's extreme arrogance given his knowledge of UNSC systems during the events of Requiem coupled with his ongoing mental instability induced by the Gravemind.
B) Whilst the hull is damaged, the damage itself is not notable relative to the scale of the entire vessel. In spite of the sheer violence of the impact, with the resultant conflagration creating a fireball in a vacuum over 16 kilometres across, launching solid debris at multiple kilometres a second from a crater nearly 100 meters in diameter through a plate that's only tens of meters thick, the damage from the impact seals within seventeen seconds of the breech being formed. Meanwhile, whilst the hole has a glowing incandescent jagged edge, no other debris or luminous ejecta appears to have formed within the cavity, neither have the sides. In fact, despite this being the region directly above the Composer aperture, it's notable that later on the doors show no visible damage.
So that leaves us with one final question, how powerful are the Infinity's MAC rounds?
First we have to quantify the known dimensions of her MAC rounds. Based on their approximate scale compared to the Frigates docked in the lower decks in the Infinity cross-section seen in Warfleet, each round appears to be 200 meters in length and 27 meters in width (comparable to the official bore width mentioned in Halo Mythos), placing the volume at approximately 114,511 m^3. Assuming it were to use a primarily ferrous composition with a density of 7.87 g/cm^3 - as opposed to the more common uranium/tungsten mixtures - each round would mass 881,734.7 metric tons. That's a combined mass of 1.7 million metric tons moving at sufficient velocities to span a distance of approximately three thousand kilometres in less than half a second, placing the final kinetic energy at 3.17E22 joules (7.5 TT), using a primarily more common tungsten composition would increase the kinetic energy of the impact to 18.7 TT.
Shadows of Reach gives us a more definitive figure for the UNSC Infinity in the following passage.
Halo: Shadows of Reach; ch. 20
The bridge lights flickered as the Infinity fired its first MAC, launching a three-thousand-ton slug toward the Banished cruiser at a quarter of the speed of light.
A 3000 ton round moving at 74,948 km/s would produce a kinetic energy of 8.425E21 joules (2.01 TT); two rounds combined onto the surface area of the plate would produce a total kinetic energy of 4.02 TT, sufficient to raze a large portion of a continent and eliminate a substantial portion of surface life on an Earth-like planet.
The fact that such an energetic impact would only result in a solitary, relatively thin, flaming section of the unshielded hull to be cratered would dictate an extreme tolerance to physical impactors.
Again, the Ark isn't even close to their largest structure.
Furthermore you can see in the video itself this portion is overlaid with the biome strata, with visible portions of the Refugia being hollow. In other words the weapon punctured ... dirt overlaying a scaffold framework.
For context this is the result of a Covenant energy projector, being used to glass a planet, coming into contact with the out layer of a submerged Guardian cradle.
Halo 5, Meridian Intel;
"Running a top-level deglass south of the populated area, and we hit some kind of metal we couldn't cut through. Ran a pulse, and we got echoes of a subterranean structure or something. I don't know, I'm not on the anthro team. The thing is, there's loose soil beneath it, so whatever that metal is, it shrugged off a direct plasma bombardment. Damnedest thing."
The Covenant managed to hit the Guardian site directly in error, no damage whatsoever.
As highlighted by others these are not Forerunner infantry.
According to Cryptum the armor is composed of a series of hardened silvery plates interconnected via hard-light bonds and energy fields (very important considering that the armor is designed to be adaptive to the user), and is designed to resist bodily harm in a large number of environments. In fact, we learned in Halo: Escalation (part 10) that if a Warrior-Servant survives initial contact with enemy weaponry his or her armor will adapt to resist specific forms of assault, gradually becoming resistant or even outright immune by virtue of continued exposure mere seconds after the previous assault.
The Didact in his Combat Skin even notably withstood a direct automatic burst of 7.62x51mm without visible external damage (a round notable for penetrating half an inch of steel at similar ranges), several bursts of Z-180 Scattershot and Z-250 Lightrifle (the latter of which has demonstrated the capacity to instantly neutralize shielded Sangheili warriors) with practically little to no degradation in performance, until further adapting up until being virtually unfazed by a direct, extreme close quarters shot from a Z-110 Boltshot to the cranium. Finally, the particle beam weapon of a Monitor armature manages to briefly stun the Didact, however given that the aforementioned weapon has been known to repel 500kg armored bipeds in mid stride, reduce shielded Sangheili to char or cremate Kig-Yar this should not be underestimated - certainly when the shields of smaller combat droids are capable of withstanding Forerunner direct energy weapons with superior armor penetration capabilities to the 105mm HEAT warheads issued by the UNSC. Also, both Primordium and Escalation contain sequences which demonstrate the mechanically augmented strength of a Combat Skin:
Halo, Encyclopedia 2022, p.376
The Warden Eternal's defensive presence takes the primary form of a Forerunner Combat Skin, including the ability to manifest multiple avatars simultaneously.
In addition to other sources this demonstrates how motile Combat Skins are, allowing an artificial intelligence to pilot the suit without the presence of an organic Forerunner. The motive power to the armoured components is supplied by the bonded energy fields that retain the total unit cohesion in the absence of physical joints.
In a demonstration of how little concern Combat Skins have for UNSC small arms fire, the Warden's bodies march unimpeded through a wave of fire consisting of 8 gauge magnum rounds, 7.62x51mm FMJ-AP and 14.5×114mm; in spite of numerous impacts not one of the Skins is damaged or destroyed in their approach.
What's notable in this scene is that one of the bodies withstands multiple 14.5x114mm rounds to the chest without so much as flinching, suffering zero visible damage in the form of divots, gouges or cratering whilst the rounds are harmlessly deflected. To appreciate the power of this weapon, Linda's modification of the SRS99-AM - named Nornfang - can employ HVAP titanium jacketed DU rounds capable of threatening the shields and hull of an SSTO Seraph fighter.
Halo: Shadows of Reach; pg. 62.
Three status LEDs winked green, and Linda's S5 sniper rifle began to boom. John saw four muzzle flashes behind the waypoint in his HUD, perhaps fifty meters below the ridge crest, but did not look back to see if she had hit anything. She had. The only question was whether four rounds of Linda's special ammunition—titanium-jacketed high-velocity armor-piercing 14.5mm depleted uranium—would be powerful enough to punch through a Seraph's energy shielding.
---
Linda's rifle began booming again, and he glanced over to see the second rank of Seraphs peeling off above the ravine. One of them was trailing hot fumes, and another was wobbling. Clearly, her special HVAP rounds were capable of piercing Seraph shields.
In addition she sometimes employed APHE ammunition which produced greater damage than the standard SRS99-AM munition.
Halo Waypoint: Sniper Rifle;
Originally intended to be a special purpose anti-material rifle for use against light armored vehicles, parked aircraft, and comm-dishes, the SRS99 Sniper Rifle also proven highly effective against shielded Covenant infantry. Shown is the legendary customized variant, Nornfang. A master-crafted instrument of death and destruction Nornfang is a highly-tuned Sniper Rifle firing high explosive armor piercing (APHE) rounds that increases overall damage. In addition, modifications incorporated by Spartan-II Linda-058 ensure the Motion Tracker is visible even when using Zoom.
Similar to the MK211 Raufoss the APHE variant likely utilised a solid DU core with an explosive tip that would detonate on contact and provide an entry channel for the denser penetrator. However it's unlikely the Warzone variant is being employed during the events of Genesis owing to the lack of explosive effects that are visible in the former configuration.
At over 400 meters, the BS41 bullet - which uses a tungsten core - can perforate 24.5 - 25mm of ATI 500 MIL plate steel angled at 30 degrees. According to available Army documents, the 14.5x114mm BS-41 bullet is apparently also capable of perforating 40mm of steel armour (the properties of which are not specified, but assumed to be around RHA steel) at 100 meters at 0 degrees, and 32mm of the same steel at 0 degrees at 500 meters.
Fired at such close proximity HVAP rounds could penetrate tens of millimetres of modern military steel plate.
In spite of an incredible amount of penetration power the shell of the suit is utterly unphased, in order to do so would likely require a substantially denser material than depleted uranium or a longer and more massive penetrator.
I remember the Forerunner warship the size of over a hundread meter just get destroyed by UNSC bombs that are not nukes in Halo Wars 2.
The ship was literally in the process of being built and was simultaneously being loaded with explosives by the Banished because the Banished could not make use of it.
And whilst UNSC explosives have a high brisance, I can't imagine a satchel charge or two being enough to create a blast that punches over a hundred meters out and expands to fill the vat.
I imagine a totally optimised, purposefully shielded vessel of that size would be capable of repelling sufficiently more power, especially when we consider that Cortana considered the use of a 30 MT nuclear warhead against a vastly smaller construct useless without first disabling the solitary shield layer (which Forerunner ships make use of multiple overlapping fields).
If you feel it's downplaying Halo, then that's how Halo Fans treats SC. SC and Halo are no different, they both has low and high feats, but Halo Fans uses High feats and call them consistent, while ignoring SC high feats and say SC kiloton is consistent.
It's not so much downplaying as being purposefully obtuse on your part, which is problematic because a room full of people should not be able to call you out on your lies so quickly and with such vigour.
The issue is that even if there was only a total disparity in firepower (which can be discussed at some other point, it's honestly not worth delving into at the moment), the problem is that the more populous elements are isolated to a relatively small region of space composed of dozens of worlds versus a a polity with millions, with tens upon tens of millions of warships versus a few hundred.
I mean, let's weigh up the strategic considerations of each polity:
-The Terran Dominion, has maybe a hundred cruisers spread thinly throughout their dozen plus worlds (so thinly mind you that when the Swarm attacked they could not consolidate in force, rather they had to outright abandon their outer systems - the same couldn't be said of the Forerunners by any measure). These ships would be individually crushed by their Forerunner peers owing to the consistent use of shielding, superior ranges, superior sensors, superior acceleration and superior firepower.
-The Zerg Swarm itself has no warships to really speak of, just a fleet of transports designed to smack opposing ships and regurgitate acid. They can bulrush worlds, but owing to the limited timeframes for re-building their forces any substantial loss incurred in major set-piece battle naturally favours the attrition produced by superior warships.
- Amon's Forces are mostly Zerg and so again have no real fleet; his only naval assets are Tal'darim ones.
- The Protoss are more a nuisance at this point.
When the linchpin of your strategy involves an entity that mostly burnt itself out in canon by taking the fight to the Terrans and was defeated wholesale by 25 vessels that took Char from orbit.
This is why I always refer it to it as the "non-sexy" stuff, people obsess over "hypersonic Protoss" or billions of Zerg because from a narrative perspective that's the most engaging concept they can envision from the viewpoint of a layperson who doesn't necessarily grasp the totality of how a conflict works, but it's also fairly reductive and extremely simplistic view of how wars are fought and why logistics can ultimately be the deciding factor in any conflict – doubly so when attrition quickly becomes a determinate factor. For a brief historical analogue, in a number of the accounts I read the IJN circa WWII were convinced that the concept of Yamato-damashii could be a decisive advantage over American military, with the IJN often unwilling to entertain the concept of attacking logistics shipping because they considered it dishonorable (although privately some war games recounted that they found it boring).
As always it's the non-sexy stuff that wins wars, beans, bullets and bombs. The problem is that the non-sexy stuff are usually the topics that most people ignore, lending the entire topic to devolve into the banal.
I'm not a fan of leaning on consensus, but neither am I seeing anything that has changed radically since the last time we pitted them against a polity of broadly equal scale and standing with vessels who are generally nuclear resistant (such as the Citadel or Covenant).
The Forerunners has numerous orders of magnitude more resources with greater astrographical diversity, a massive fleet that dwarfs anything arrayed by the opposition, superior industry, the means of supporting a substantially larger military even in relative peacetime across regions of space measurable in tens of thousands of light years (they have more genetically augmented super-soldiers than the other side has people) and vastly superior warfighting capacity.
That Guardian scene happened only once. If you go like that, SC also has feat-a single Protoss Mothership destroying a planet easily, and throwing black hole.
This is not only a feature of the Guardians, it's a feature of Forerunner weapons systems.
Halo Encyclopaedia; pg. 446;
When he refused, Cortana chose to make an example out of their kind, amassing a group of guardians around the Jiralhanae homeworld. The ancient machines unleashed a coordinated blast that completely destabilized the planet's core, rending it to pieces in one final catastrophic event.
Halo Encyclopaedia; pg. 397;
Guardians were capable of rending worlds into pieces and reducing entire civilizations to debris fields.
Halo Encyclopaedia; pg. 211;
Though their shattered world now slowly cools in the void, the Brute's thirst for vengeance has only begun to be stoked.
Meanwhile, a digitized essense of the Didact, upon accessing the systems of a Guardian, noted the power on hand, remarking it to be a planet killer:
Halo Epitaph; Ch. 23.
But once he grew accustomed to it and allowed his energy and light to populate through its intricate technology, the sheer capability and immense power generated by the construct felt almost euphoric. All this could be mine. A planet killer, all his own. How easy it would be to forget himself and simply immerse, to be like that cold, indifferent ancilla, content in its own matchless power.
Meanwhile Alex Wakeford, the 343i community writer highlighted the following query in a Q&A.
BigDeluxeOffice: If seven Guardians can combine to destroy planets, does that mean all other Forerunner warships can do the same?
The ability to combine in order to form more powerful units has been observed in a variety of Forerunner constructs. The trillions of sentinels that formed Onyx were able to gather in clusters that demonstrated the ability to eviscerate Covenant ships; war sphinxes could form larger combat-walker variations by combining together, and we see a number of warships in "Origins I" from Halo Legends combine their firepower to combat Flood-controlled vessels. This is, however, by no means indicative that all Forerunner constructs have this ability and planetary-scale lethality.
The Sojourner he is referencing is described as forming a trident to deliver "world-ending firepower".
I know Warfleet says that the most powerful weapon on the Didact's flagship, which is by far the most powerful in the Forerunner fleet, is... capable of destroying a continental plate. That's far from destroying a planet at all.
As noted the Mantle's Approach is noted to not be the most powerful ship in the fleet.
However, there's one obvious point people keep missing in that the properties of the projectile are noted to be unique.
Large planet crackers used by Fortress-class ships fire exotic matter. Now what's special about this brand of exotic matter? And why would a society that already uses ionized particle beams and antimatter use exotic matter? Especially if the latter can destroy planets?
First, a quick primer. There is a lot about physics that is frustratingly constraining, light speed is a constant in the universe for example and baryonic matter has to obey its laws. Under special conditions matter can disobey these rules. Exotic matter is a very broad term that can be used to describe various forms of matter that exhibit properties that are unlike those of regular matter and are not constrained by normal physical constants. Note that antimatter would actually be considered "regular" matter in this regard, since it behaves completely the same as our normal boring matter until it comes into contact. Examples can include degenerate matter (given the Forerunners could build materials denser than anything in nature, making a bullet with the mass of a mountain no larger than a grain of sand is within their wheelhouse - launch it at just under light speed and watch the space-time continuum get a new asshole torn into it), negative matter, dark matter or tachyons.
The leading assumption it was just a giant gun and that its ability to damage structures out of phase with reality was simply a byproduct of kinetic energy.
It's quite likely that by their very nature they're either simply obsolete for their primary task of planet killing or just part of a diverse arsenal of systems the Forerunners could use to kill said planets with far more devastating results – in effect the act of planet cracking simply either became more economical with time and necessity over 10,000 years (there is after all the same section that highlights that the Flood forced a shift in their Naval SOP – where instead of simply being optimised in killing or capturing opposing ships or suppressing opposing Forerunner groups there was an added necessity in destroying planets and solar systems to literally expunge the Flood who would be unconcerned with esoteric system attacks) and has allowed them multiple means of destroying biosphere supporting systems wholesale (such as Miners initiating planetary destruction obviously being a non-military application – but something not unique to their rate) or the adapted siege cannon which possibly has utility directly outside of the damage it can do to planets but arguably everything about it says otherwise.
Which angles them away from planet destroying systems being facilitated by the governing military leadership in limited numbers (i.e. something like Star Wars where planet scattering systems were relegated to Moffs, or a large number of settings where planet scale WMDs are a strictly "double lock and key" function) and more of a common industrial to military scale utility that a number of systems can practice – including warships working in concert with one another.
