Dreamt up last night and posted here for amusement value.

During the events of the first Starship Troopers film, a slipspace anomaly dumps the UNSC light cruiser Pillar of Autumn above Planet P.

The PoA is carrying all the SPARTAN-II's that were alive just before the Fall of Reach. They have the upgraded Mk V MJOLNIR armour and access to the cruiser's armouries.

The PoA is damaged by the plasma fire from the surface and deploys the Spartan's and supplies to the surface in twelve Pelicans packed with standard HALO small arms and ammunition. The Pelicans also carry a standard loadout of 70mm chain guns and rocket pods.

What happens?

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

Not well? Even given how much more competent Spartan-IIs are, there's simply not enough of them to actually matter. This is especially true when you realize that the Morita I and the MA5, the standard UNSC firearm at the time of Reach, both use the 7.62x51mm and required a significant amount of fire before downing a single Warrior.

How long are they supposed to hold out before relieved? They could fortify themselves using the Pelicans like wgons in the old west, and make a position that's very hard to breach. Then it's just a matter of how long their supplies and ammo last. Also how much fuel do the Pelicans have? Because if they are at risk of being overrun at one location they could move to another, and keep doing this for as long as they can.
They might even find an island or mountain position that the bugs generally can't reach.

So, what happens? It turns out that the crew left on the POA are able to do miraculous repairs, and recall the Spartans to the ship, where they then go off to somewhere else.
If the Spartans have the fire accuracy of the ST movie scientists (which they do) then they can easily kill individual bugs. Of course, the shear number of bugs can overwhelm them eventually.

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OK, revised scenario:

The PoA suffers moderate damage and the complete crew, including the SPARTANS and the ODST's areforced to abandon ship whilst Keyes soft-lands the cruiser as best he can.

The crew's Pelican's and lifeboats land in the vicinity of the PoA and all the troops are able to make it to the crash site before the Bugs arrive.

The SPARTANS, crew, Marines and ODST's now have access to all the weaponry and supplies of the PoA as well as having the PoA as a firebase.

The ST Human fleet is on it's way to answer the PoA's distress call. The HALO forces have to hold out for approximately one (1) week.

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

It depends if SPARTAN-IIs can hit the nerve stem or whatever on the Bugs for a instant kill. Additionally on Planet P there were huge flocks of the Bugs, including the air force-types, the flamethrower bugs.

EDIT: Wait, this may have been Tango Urilla that I was thinking about.

Have SPARTAN-IIs ever come into combat with those kinds of creatures? I've never played Halo so I wouldn't know. Additionally, what weapons do they possess? Which ones are carried by the PoA?

Big plasma Bugs could be destroyed in one shot by non-nuclear megaton-range (I think) bazookas. If all they have are machine guns and grenades, they won't last long against a swarm of Bugs. Better get to higher ground and hope that you can kill the bugs before they start building walls of their dead to climb and chase after you.

The Poa carried all the usual human goodies: pistols, assault rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers and grenades. The SPARTANS also had some special gear aboard, but this is never described IIRC.

And yes, the air-force bugs were on Tango Urilla, not Planet P.

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

How many bugs are we talking here? Do they have traps set (like the sinkholes on Klendathu) or what? I never got around to seeing the fighting on P though. Are they showing up at an outpost or just in an open field? How strong are the SPARTANS armor?

If all they have are those weapons, they are, to put it mildly, likely never to return. The Bugs will either zerg rush (KEKEKEKEKE) the SPARTANS or use combined arms tactics. The Bugs will take a fuckload of casualties but either way it's looking very bad for the SPARTANs.

The SPARTAN's also have the shipboard Marines and a company of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, who are apparently very good. The Autumn's crew is onvolved as well, and the crashed cruiser is being used as a firebase. So they also have Warthogs and Scorpions, and all the remaining Archer missile aboard the ships, and the 40mm autocannons used for point-defence, and possibly a few large nukes.

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

Nukes? NUKES?! Why didn't you say this before?!

The Bugs, if out in the open and hit by the nukes are goners.

As for the rest, they MAY be able to keep the Bugs away for a while but I'm not sure.

My memory is a bit hazy, but arent the UNSC fairly liberal with tossing around nukes in the fluff? I seem to recall hand grenade size nukes mentioned somewhere at some point on here, though its hard to say as I've not read any Halo fluff in years. Then again, I may be mixing up my sci-fi universes.

What is the PoA's load-out status in this instance. Does Reach still happen, or not? I ask becuase the Spartans' mission was to capture a prophet and the Covenant assualt on Reach screwed up the execution of that plan by what appears to be a narrow margin. Presumably they would have access to rare or even prototype weaponry for that mission, as it was described as a win or lose the war gambit on the UNSC's part. I also seem to recall Spartan units being used for field testing weapons systems and equipment from somewhere.

We may or may not see some more interesting toys depending on how the above plays into it. I doubt it will change the overall outcome simply due to the numbers involved on the Bug side, though it may make getting there a bit more interesting.

The Fall of Reach describes the Fury tactical nuke, which yields about a megatonne and is the soze of a football.

the Pillar of Autumn has all the weaponry she had after she undocked from Reach. This scenario posits that some slipspace event yanked the PoA from the outskirts of the Reach system just before the battle begins. So, she has a full load of about 300 Archer pods, her MAC gun, and quite a few nukes.

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

Do not forget that the Bugs are able to attack from underground : Troopers in both Heinlein's and Verhoeven's works have learned the hard way that not only can they dig tunnels, even into hard rock, and do it really fast, they also know how to use theses abilities in a tactically useful way.

I take for example the Clusterfuck of Whiskey Outpost (in the 1st film) :

Using bug-wave tactics, they forced the troopers to concentrate their efforts into defending the walls of the compound. Hadn't the Fleet came to rescue them, and even if the bugs didn't have the overwhelming number superiority they enjoyed in the film, the troopers would still have been deeply boned, forced that they would have been to cut their defensive efforts into two, dividing the amount of firepower they could direct to each front/attack vector (defending the walls and the hole in the middle of the compound where the bugs a flowing from).


So, we can see that it would be very difficult to hold static positions on the ground against the bugs. The corollary is that our hypothetical force of Spartan-II would need to be highly mobile, and to keep changing the positions they are defending, while never using the same defensive site twice (or at least not before having destroyed all the tunnels the bugs would have dug leading to it).

The biggest danger come from the immediate vicinity of the PoA drop-site : unless you have a way of destroying their tunnels, nothing really stand in the way of bugs simply surfacing right under the PoA while leaving you no surface targets to shoot at.

So, maybe the best use you could do of those nukes would be to detonate them underground the Pillar of Autumn drop site to make sure the galleries are destroyed. Preferably while the bugs are on the offensive, for maximum enemy casualties.

Sorry, should've worded that better. My question in regards to the load-out is not so much the PoA's weaponry, but the equipment for her ground troops and the Spartans. You have all the Spartans from prior to the FoR, yet we know according to Halo:Reach that the PoA was still being prepped for the missiion in drydock and that the Spartans were not aboard at the time of launch (according to Reach and FoR). Mind you rare, experimental, or UNSC branch specific weapons* might fall under the Spartans' special gear previously mentioned. My point is we may see some slightly better weapons than what we see in Halo:CE, such as the battle rifle, spartan laser, etc..

Note*: IIRC the DMR from Halo:Reach is described as a UNSC Army specific weapon, which would explain it's absence from the PoA's marine contingent.

I'm going with the PoA as described in the book "Fall of Reach," not the game. In the book, the PoA had loaded up and was heading out-system when the Covenant showed up.

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

There are some similarities between the bug attacks and the wave attacks of the flood, but I don't think the Spartans really have enough time to learn enough about the bugs here. They don't know about the brain bugs, and the tanker bugs, if able to fire ship killing plasma into ORBIT, can probably bomb the Pillar of Automn from a good distance away while the Crew is occupied with zounds of spiders. I'm sure some of the Spartans could escape and survive, but the P of A is way to sweet a target.

Maybe you could use the ship's crew (UNSC Marines + PoA Navy crew) to defend the PoA dropsite, while sending squad of SPARTAN-II / ODST in pelicans to attack the Plasma Bugs positions, as some sort of counter-battery fire ? Or hell, are the nukes mounted on missiles ? If so, you could always try to strike Plasma Bugs even before they start firing - if you have the mean to gather intelligence about where they are.

Do the PoA Combined Force (ha !) has the ability to send surveillance drones over the battlefield, or even surveillance satellites into orbit ? Else, they could just task their Longswords to battlefield-surveillance duty.

I almost want to go snag my Arachnid army book for this...

As was pointed out, and we've seen it in the movie, the bugs will come up from under the PoA and anything on the ground. I would even vouch that they'd simply excavate out the area beneath the PoA, letting sink a ways into the ground and then dig their way in. The big question is whether a soldier bug can sever a Spartan's armor or if tanker spit can melt it away.

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I've committed the greatest sin, worse than anything done here today. I sold half my soul to the devil. -Ivan Isaac, the Half Souled Knight



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