Halo With Mass Effect Technology

[Jub]

Just as a thought exercise, could we explain the non-optimal tactics both the UNSC and the Covenant display in space by looking at their respective recent combat experiences?

The UNSC has no history of major space battles, as far as I know - they're fighting a persistent colonial rebellion as of series start, but the rebels, as far as I know, rarely/never manage to get control of warships. There wouldn't necessarily be any great body of experience in the UNSC high command telling them to maintain large separation distances or keep clear fire lanes, especially not in fleet battles. If most human fleet commanders don't survive their first engagements with Covenant forces, that body of experience might very well take a long time to build up, even in a war; for comparison, consider how long it took Earth militaries to learn that frontal assaults on machine-gun positions are a bad idea.

The Covenant, meanwhile, has an entirely different technological base than the humans do. The way shields work in Halo means that if you can take cover for a short period of time after being shot, you might be able to take the next hit on fresh shields, avoiding damage entirely where the two shots would destroy the entire ship if they'd hit close together. In that circumstance, close formations, or at least groups of ships close together, regardless of the separation between groups, might make sense; a ship under fire could hide behind one with fresh shields, popping back out when its shields were regenerated. This kind of casualty-averse approach seems like it would make sense in internal Covenant power struggles, where the winner would like to preserve as much materiel as he can because that materiel is, in a sense, what the entire struggle is about. Besides, their plasma weapons don't seem to move very fast; perhaps long-range engagements aren't practical for accuracy reasons?

That theory makes sense, but I find it odd that better tactics for the UNSC wouldn't come out of the war gaming that a fleet at peace would be undergoing, not to mention the theory crafting and simulated battles that should be going on in the UNSC officer training programs. Unlike WWI and WWII this isn't a rapid technological shift that nobody could anticipate, this is something speculated upon in fiction and put into practice in real life naval battles. Plus the ships must have been built with a certain form of battle in mind, and given the fixed nature of the main armaments there is no way that UNSC ships were designed with knife fight combat ranges in mind.

Tactics wise, if the Covenant ships are truly bad at long range combat, the UNSC should be doing everything it can to engage at long range and fight battles as a series of maneuvers to keep out of range of the enemy while staying within their own range. If this means retreating past a planet and letting the Covenant own the orbit for a while you do so; if you lose the battle the planet is as good as gone anyway. Strategically and weapons design wise this might mean opting for projectiles with less mass that can be launched at higher speeds to increase any range advantage even more. This should be possible with minimal changes to anything but the rounds fired.

[Esquire]

It does seem like the UNSC ought to have had more of a clue, you're right about that. On the other hand, (and it's been a long time since I read any of the books, so I may be missing critical details) look at how much good all the post-Vietnam speculation in the US military about how to deal with guerilla warfare paid off in Iraq and Afghanistan; just because lots of very smart people have anticipated and thought about a problem doesn't necessarily mean they'll have come up with useful answers.

Alternatively, it may well be that the UNSC could have managed a long-range manuever battle against somebody with similar ships; Covenant ships are faster as well as shielded, right? That, combined with the same close formations mentioned earlier might let Covenant fleets close the distance quickly, hiding any ship that happens to take a MAC to the face behind fresh shields, until they're too close for effective fire from the spinal guns. Or else use combat microjumps to do the same thing.

[Starglider]

The UNSC have computing power vastly beyond contemporary earth with realistic virtual reality. Ground warfare, especially against unknown species, and guerilla warfare are still difficult to model. However space battles are an almost ideal case enabling very realistic simulations. If they have invested the funds to build a significant fleet of giant space warships, it would be madness not to spend a small fraction working out how to actually use that fleet.

[Esquire]

Computing power is all well and good, but the essential lack of experience will still be a problem. A simulation is only as good as its programmers, and they wouldn't have any particular experience with space warfare either. They especially wouldn't have any experience with the kind of naval tactics used by a conglomerate of alien races using unknown weapons and defensive technologies, so any simulated fleet exercises - and you're right, those probably do exist - wouldn't necessarily help with engaging Covenant fleets.

[Jub]

Computing power is all well and good, but the essential lack of experience will still be a problem. A simulation is only as good as its programmers, and they wouldn't have any particular experience with space warfare either. They especially wouldn't have any experience with the kind of naval tactics used by a conglomerate of alien races using unknown weapons and defensive technologies, so any simulated fleet exercises - and you're right, those probably do exist - wouldn't necessarily help with engaging Covenant fleets.

If we have the same knowledge they do, possibly less, and they have better means of simulation, why are we doing a better job thinking up ways to fight the Covenant?

[Gaidin]

If we have the same knowledge they do, possibly less, and they have better means of simulation, why are we doing a better job thinking up ways to fight the Covenant?

Because we've literally seen the story that tells us how the Covenant ticks and can plan for that. Them? At best they've fought them for years and know their strategies and can form a battle plan around it. But have really only seen the fighting side. This whole thread's taking into account the covenant politics that I've not seen a reason for humans to know the guts of. At worst they've got a new enemy on the horizon and are possibly running with a stock formation to keep key units alive until they figure out just how the new enemy works. If that can be done within one battle, great. If that takes a few literal space brawls to get the analysts what they need, there might be a few wrecks in the skies. As people who read these books and play these games, we know a little bit more than we should, theoretically.

[Lord Revan]

from what I can gather by the time of Halo:Combat Evolved humans have very little knowlage on the inner workings of the covenant at the political level, they do know that the prophets are important to the covenant chain of command but probably don't know the details of their relation to the other races and by same token the humans probably know the names of the hierarchs (aka the leaders of the covenant) but don't know how that position fits into the inner working of the covenant.

[Esquire]

Computing power is all well and good, but the essential lack of experience will still be a problem. A simulation is only as good as its programmers, and they wouldn't have any particular experience with space warfare either. They especially wouldn't have any experience with the kind of naval tactics used by a conglomerate of alien races using unknown weapons and defensive technologies, so any simulated fleet exercises - and you're right, those probably do exist - wouldn't necessarily help with engaging Covenant fleets.

If we have the same knowledge they do, possibly less, and they have better means of simulation, why are we doing a better job thinking up ways to fight the Covenant?

Are we, though? We don't see many space battles, none at all (that I can think of) from a high-ranking perspective. For all we know the UNSC already tried long-range battle tactics and they didn't work for some reason. Combat microjumps, say, or swarms of fighters too small for effective MAC fire. We're offering a possible alternative to what we see the humans doing, but there's no guarantee that it would actually work.

[Corvus 501]

The main problem that humans seem to face, is that they are constantly forced into defensive battles. Human ships are unshielded, and they are facing an enemy that activly tries to glass planets, forcing almost all human battles to be matters of planetary defence. In open space, I suspect that haman fleets would have far more success, but the Covanent have vastly superior mobility, both tactically and strategically, allowing them to set the battlefields.
Given the chance for a battle in open space, supposing that the Covanent are defending, for example, than in that situation I suspect that human ships would fare far better than normal, because while lacking defensively, human ships had no problem when it came to offensive abilities. In a stand up fight (if humans had shields) human ships would probibly win most of the time, but in cannon, they required massively overpowered weaponry to even have a chance, simply because they where glass cannons.

[Corvus 501]

Tactics wise, if the Covenant ships are truly bad at long range combat, the UNSC should be doing everything it can to engage at long range and fight battles as a series of maneuvers to keep out of range of the enemy while staying within their own range. If this means retreating past a planet and letting the Covenant own the orbit for a while you do so; if you lose the battle the planet is as good as gone anyway. Strategically and weapons design wise this might mean opting for projectiles with less mass that can be launched at higher speeds to increase any range advantage even more. This should be possible with minimal changes to anything but the rounds fired.

This brings to mind the fanfic Halo: The Art of War by havoc_leginare, where opperation Red Flag goes off, with some more advanced technology, which humans had apparently horded until it could be used suddenly for maximum effect.
Anyways, one interesting weapon was a augmented helical railgun to replace the standard coilgun of traditional MACs, something that to me looks like the sort of weapon that you are describing, a somewhat lighter shell, as opposed to a giant 600 ton shell. Seeing that in Mass Effect, ship guns are ordinary railguns firing mass lightened shells, I suspect that an augmented helitical railgun (let's just call it an AHG) would have most, is not all the advantages of both a MAC and a mass accelerator folded into one package. Mass accelerators had a longer effective range than a MAC gun because of its higher velocity, but the kinetic energy of the shells was pitafull. MAC systems had shorter effective ranges because of a much lower velocity, but they had greater stopping power. An AHG style MAC would have most of the velocity of a mass accelerator, and would hit about as hard as a MAC (in the story they fired a lightweight shell at high enough velocity for the light shell's kinetic energy to match that of a much heavier shell) and with mass effect cores in the barrel, it would move as fast, if not faster than normal mass accelerators, because they would have a higher unmodified velocity. In Mass Effect, ships used normal railguns, here, where talking about a MUCH supperor base system, furthermore improved by the mass effect.

[Corvus 501]

BTW, the augmented part of augmented helitical railgun means that it uses plasma conduction to get around the whole friction issue that railguns suffer from, I think. At least in the fic that I grabed the weapon from seemed to say, but I could easy have been wrong.

[Jub]

@Gaidin, Revan, and Esquire:

You do raise good points in that we don't see much combat and what we do see are last stands to hold a world long enough to evacuate them. In such cases is may be that the tactics we see the UNSC using in the brief times we see them fight really are the best they could come up with to fight such a battle and that they would rather fight in some other fashion if they could ever force a battle that would allow it.

[Gaidin]

@Gaidin, Revan, and Esquire:

You do raise good points in that we don't see much combat and what we do see are last stands to hold a world long enough to evacuate them. In such cases is may be that the tactics we see the UNSC using in the brief times we see them fight really are the best they could come up with to fight such a battle and that they would rather fight in some other fashion if they could ever force a battle that would allow it.

I think you misunderstand my point(though correct me if I misunderstand yours please). We learned a lot about the Covenant as a political and cultural species in Halo 2 for all that it's regarded as the lesser of the series. The humans don't know this information at least while it's clearly a Covenant vs Human war. But we're accounting for it here when we're coming up with tactics.

[Jub]

@Gaidin, Revan, and Esquire:

You do raise good points in that we don't see much combat and what we do see are last stands to hold a world long enough to evacuate them. In such cases is may be that the tactics we see the UNSC using in the brief times we see them fight really are the best they could come up with to fight such a battle and that they would rather fight in some other fashion if they could ever force a battle that would allow it.

I think you misunderstand my point(though correct me if I misunderstand yours please). We learned a lot about the Covenant as a political and cultural species in Halo 2 for all that it's regarded as the lesser of the series. The humans don't know this information at least while it's clearly a Covenant vs Human war. But we're accounting for it here when we're coming up with tactics.

I'm not really taking that into account when speaking how to fight them in a one off space battle. My posts are more about how it seems like the UNSC doesn't play to their strengths in the space battles we see and how just based on the few battles we do see they should be able to figure out something better even if they started off from a position of inexperience.

[Simon_Jester]

Point defense screens. You want your detection and point defense systems to have overlapping lanes of fire, especially when your opponent likes to launch thousands of missiles at a time.

Point defense defends a point, namely the point it is sitting on. No individual ship is likely to carry enough point defense to stop thousands of missiles. Unless it is, itself, big enough to launch thousands of missiles.

What is needed in that case is area defense against missiles- ships that carry weapons that can intercept any missile that gets anywhere near the firing ship, and which can efficiently protect each other even at considerable distances. Such systems are far more likely to score kills on incoming missiles on a percentage basis than any last-ditch point defense weapons that cannot be used for mutual, interlocking defense.

Thus, instead of one ship defending itself, the entire fleet does- but in that case, the "area defense" antimissile weapons are going to be long-ranged by nature. Ships can cover each other from quite a long way off. And there's no point in trying to form this comical super-tight formation that looks suspiciously like a Greek phalanx IN SPAAACE.

The Covenant, meanwhile, has an entirely different technological base than the humans do. The way shields work in Halo means that if you can take cover for a short period of time after being shot, you might be able to take the next hit on fresh shields, avoiding damage entirely where the two shots would destroy the entire ship if they'd hit close together. In that circumstance, close formations, or at least groups of ships close together, regardless of the separation between groups, might make sense; a ship under fire could hide behind one with fresh shields, popping back out when its shields were regenerated.

Now that... is interesting. That might actually make sense from a certain point of view, giving the bulk of your fleet the ability to use other ships as cover. It's dangerous if your ships are seriously attempting to maneuver, but if they rely on these rapidly recharging shields for defense and are maneuverable enough to do this, it might be crazy enough to work if enemy fire is coming from a single well-defined vector.

The main problem that humans seem to face, is that they are constantly forced into defensive battles. Human ships are unshielded, and they are facing an enemy that activly tries to glass planets, forcing almost all human battles to be matters of planetary defence. In open space, I suspect that haman fleets would have far more success, but the Covanent have vastly superior mobility, both tactically and strategically, allowing them to set the battlefields.
Given the chance for a battle in open space, supposing that the Covanent are defending, for example, than in that situation I suspect that human ships would fare far better than normal, because while lacking defensively, human ships had no problem when it came to offensive abilities. In a stand up fight (if humans had shields) human ships would probibly win most of the time, but in cannon, they required massively overpowered weaponry to even have a chance, simply because they where glass cannons.

Spelling errors on "Covenant," "actively," "human," and "canon." At least "human" was only misspelled once, not the same way every time, that's good.

Anyway, bear in mind that there is a difference between being on the offensive strategically, having offensive firepower tactically, and having offensive weapons personally as equipment.

In terms of equipment, a World War Two soldier with a rifle is all offense, no defense- he can shoot bullets but he can't resist or deflect them.

But then, when you ask "how can we employ this soldier most effectively to bring harm to the enemy?" Well, it turns out the answer is usually "have him dig a foxhole and shoot anyone who comes near." This is a defensive tactic- the soldier is staking out a patch of ground and using his 'glass cannon' firepower to destroy anything that comes in range of him.

But then, you may think "wait, when and how will we deploy this soldier to use that defensive tactic?" And sometimes the answer is "march him forward into enemy territory, then dig in and hold that key piece of territory so the enemy can't use it." As in, 'capture that hill' or 'capture that crossroads.'

Just because the soldier's weapons are offensive and he lacks a defense against his own weapons doesn't mean he should be charging mindlessly because that is a more "offensive" tactic.

[Sky Captain]

I think problem is there that human forces can't force a battle to take advantage of their longer ranged but more cumbersome weapons. Covenant ships being faster and more maneuverable can rapidly close the distance and engage at point blank range which better suits their weapons and defences. Aiming MAC guns require whole ship to be maneuvered to point at enemy ship and if enemy ships are flying all over the place it would be very difficult to lock on specific target.

[Corvus 501]

Exactly. Human ships are designed to oneshot other ships, why else would you equip a ship with a stupidly overpowered coilgun? In fact, in Fall of Reach, when the Spartins are shown recordings of the first battle between human and Covanent ships, they are surprised that the MAC dosn't instantly gut he ship it hits, because that's exactly what a MAC round hitting a human ship will do. It seems to me that the MAC system was developed as a means to instantly end battles. Archer missiles can tear appart any unshielded ship, but both human and Covanent ships have good point defense, the Covanent with ling range pulse laser fire, humans with AI controlled autocannon. Both could intercept huge missle swarms, which probably was the reason that the UNSC launched missle swarms in the first place. The MAC was designed to end battles in a single shot, or force enemy ships into a certain vector. The MAC system ended up as the UNSC's only effective weapon totally by accident.

[Corvus 501]

Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that in cannon Halo, human ships where designed to oneshot other ships, but in this scenero, human ships where used to dealing with shields, and MAC systems where designed with shields in mind. They wern't designed to destroy a ship in one hit, but to knock down the shield. Rate of fire would have been more important from the start, as you need to knock down the shield and then kill the ship fast, otherwise the shield will regenerate again. That's why I think that by the time humans meet the Covanent, they will be using mass effect enhanced AHGs.
Between the faster slipspace travel enabled by the ability to manipulate mass, and the improvements to conventional UNSC technology, I believe that humans would be far better prepared for the oncoming Human/Covanent War than they where in cannon, even if they where already used to dealing with shields.

[Corvus 501]

edit: when i said "even if they where already used to dealing with shields" I meant "because they where used to dealing with shields."

[Esquire]

What is an AHG?

The alternative would be for the humans to go the same swarmy route the Convenant seem to have taken; if one MAC round will either knock down the targets shields reliably or, for unshielded ships, gut them like a fish... either build larger warships with a pair of MACs or focus the fire of small groups onto a single target.

Also, of course, cannon =/= canon.

[Corvus 501]

An AHG is an augmented helical railgun, a cross between a railgun and a coilgun that uses plasma conduction to get around the friction issue that railguns suffer from. Sorry for needlessly making up an acronym, next time I'll just copy and past.
In this setting, augmented helical railguns would be mass effect enhanced.

[Skywalker_T-65]

IIRC, most human ships have more than one MAC. Provided I remember correctly, it's only frigates and Halcyon-class cruisers- Pillar of Autumn -that only have one. I know for a fact Destroyers have two, it's the main difference between them and frigates- in addition to extra armor, as opposed to carrying fighters and such.

[Corvus 501]

What is an AHG?

The alternative would be for the humans to go the same swarmy route the Convenant seem to have taken; if one MAC round will either knock down the targets shields reliably or, for unshielded ships, gut them like a fish... either build larger warships with a pair of MACs or focus the fire of small groups onto a single target.

Also, of course, cannon =/= canon.

Also, in cannon, one MAC round WON'T knock down a shield, but multiple fast shots probably would, hence the reason to use augmented helical railguns, that, and the fact that the yield would be higher because the velocity is much higher, and the shell is far heavier than Mass Effect shells. (multiple tons, but probably not hundreds of tons)

[Borgholio]

Thus, instead of one ship defending itself, the entire fleet does- but in that case, the "area defense" antimissile weapons are going to be long-ranged by nature. Ships can cover each other from quite a long way off. And there's no point in trying to form this comical super-tight formation that looks suspiciously like a Greek phalanx IN SPAAACE.

That's how it works with modern naval fleets. They don't sail close together like you see in recruiting videos or promotional stunts. From one end of a carrier battle group to another, you can't even visually see the ships on the other side. The whole thing can be 20 - 30 miles across easy. Each ship has it's own short-range point defense (Phalanx) for last-ditch interception, but the ships all cover each other with medium and long range missile and (soon) laser defenses. The end result is that any incoming missiles or fighters have to deal with defensive fire from not just one ship, but half a dozen all at once. And then once they get through THAT, they still have to get past the short-range fire from whatever their target is. Sailing close together only concentrates targets and makes it easier to hit the whole fleet with a nuke or a concentrated missile attack that might only take out a few ships under normal circumstances.

In space, given the speed of laser or other energy weapons (and lack of a horizon), ships in a fleet can easily provide support for each other at distances of HUNDREDS of miles.

[Simon_Jester]

An AHG is an augmented helical railgun, a cross between a railgun and a coilgun that uses plasma conduction to get around the friction issue that railguns suffer from. Sorry for needlessly making up an acronym, next time I'll just copy and past.
In this setting, augmented helical railguns would be mass effect enhanced.

...Aaaand they're from a fanfic, not from canon.

That said, I'm sure the UNSC can design mass driver weapons that could benefit from mass-effect technology to some degree. The only question is how much, and the main issue on that is:

Is the limit on shipboard MAC performance that they can't fit a big enough MAC onto the ship, or that they don't have enough power to launch bigger or faster-moving shells? If power supply is the issue, mass-effect technology may provide limited advantages. If the problem is physically building a big enough gun, mass-effect technology will help rather more.