I'm not about to spend the next couple weeks digging through footage to source stuff from a collection of shows that break twenty years worth of episodes between them. If you don't already know it, correct your own ignorance on the subject instead of going batty over unsourced information while sourcing a fan fiction book with a dozen conflicting reports from other books.
Ok, shields.
Lasers do not pass through ST shields. ST shields block phasers, thus ST shields block lasers. Whether using the original idea, or the current retroactive definition, this is true. They're either a less advanced form, or the exact same thing, EM particles. That it's illogical for light to pass through a shield, but not lasers is irrelevant. Either it's possible and we just don't know how, or it's not and shields are yet another magic technology that just works because they say it does. Kinda like the Deathstar turning a planet into particulate matter and scattering it to the four corners. You're only putting out enough energy to equal the heat of the Sun for a few decades, no big deal...
one: Lasers move at the speed of light. this is the maximum speed something can be sensed at, unless utilizing the as-of-yet-purely-theoretical Zero-point energy, of which I have never heard even mentioned in Star trek. these lasrs can then only be sensed when they hit physical sensors, thus meaning the ship. then the impulse from the quickly inoperable sensors must travel at a slower speed (electricity moves slightly slower than light through empty space, and I believe that ST never mentions anything other than electricity being used for power carrying) to a computer, which then must process the information, and send a signal to the shield emitters to become opaque. this leaves a considerable amount of time for the laser to do damage, relatively. as was said previously, phasers contain a matter portion, and thus can be blocked easily by a physical barrier, transparent or not. Lasers can only be blocked by an opaque barrier, or a reverse wave, canceling out the laser beam.
Shields do not prevent damage from ST weapons completely either. Most ships are already getting thrashed before the shields fully drop in ST. Phasers and disrupters start passing through the shields when they get low, torpedoes occasionally get through entirely. This helps explain the small explosions.
This damage reduction before the shields fall completely is also further aided by yet more magical technology, the structural integrity fields, probably the same technology that dampens inertia. What keeps you from becoming plasma when the ship accelerates from 0-80,000 km/s in a second or two would do wonders for preventing a nuclear blast. Little Boy was under 20 kilotons. Any system that keeps a massive starship together under such astronomical stresses makes such impotent things as nuclear weapons something to be amusing. Inner ship force fields also further prevent damage and atmospheric breaches. This makes the small explosions in the show really big booms by comparison. This is why the Covenant are really screwed on the defense front. If UNSC ships can pop them with simple nuclear warheads, they don't have such a technology. This is backed up by the comparably miniscule velocities of the UNSC guns that can hit them.
Little boy was a first generation atomic weapon. not even truly nuclear. current THERMONUCLEAR warheads range in the 50+ MEGAton range. For UNSC forces, 30 megatons is considered "low-yield". and the Shiva Nuclear Missile has many times the yield of the 30 megaton HORNET nuclear mine and the HAVOK nuclear warhead. The NOVA bomb likely is made up of nine Shivas, rather than HAVOKs, thus greatly increasing the NOVA payload.
If MAC cannons can hit anything in the Halo universe with their piddling 30 km/s velocity, yes, they're that low, the ships they're shooting at have almost no maneuverability by ST standards. It is stated in the Halo Wiki that they can snipe fleeing Covenant ships from 100,000km away. That means the relative acceleration rate of Halo ships is really really sad. This also explains why plasma torpedoes are referred to as highly accurate despite not being able to hit small targets. They're, relatively speaking, extremely fast weapons at 1/2c. This is vastly slower than phaser.
More humor, highly accurate weapons by TNG standards.
Phasers are shown to be capable of wiping out entire cities in a single shot in TOS, are at the least, speed of light weapons, and, also since TOS, have pinpoint accuracy capable of vaporizing a two meter arch from a very high orbit. Earth is almost 13000km wide. When a planet of similar gravity is fired on from a ship a few hundred meters long occupying a couple inches of real estate, and only shows up about twice as wide in the footage, it's showing pinpoint accuracy at a hundred thousand kilometers just fine. This is stuff seen in shows, as canon as it gets. Shooting down a fighter with them would be simplicity. By TNG standards, the weapons that far back wouldn't even be a threat, something to ignore while waiting for your enemy to get tired of shooting at you. They're probably even more superior to Halo tech than they are inferior to TNG. Phasers can also be sustained beams or short bursts, fire rapidly from multiple emitters on arrays, having 360 degree coverage on multiple emitter arrays. Yes, phasers too can be fired at warp. This was already done by the first season of TOS.
phasers may be able to wipe out cities, but if even half of the 20 orbital MAC cannons over Reach fired on a planet, it would be an apocalyptic event for nearly all multicellular life on that planet. and their reload time is 5 seconds. the total destructive power of a single volley from Reach would be equivalent to the energy released when the Chicxulub crater was formed. That's around 52 zetajoules total, 52x10^21 joules, or 52,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. a single orbital MAC canon has the power of 2.6 zetajoules in every shot. (for a list of the prefixes, go to
http://www.essex1.com/people/speer/large.html)
Warp speed and combat
Using warp to close with an enemy is nothing, I can do much better than that. Warp has been used mid combat while engaging at Impulse speeds. In one particular episode, they used an instantaneous activation of the warp drive to coincide with a torpedo explosion to appear destroyed. That was in an eighty year old ship taken out of the mothballs for an exercise, running on energy reserves insufficient to power the warp drive. The plasma torpedo isn't hitting squat.
They probably have a longer wait to recharge the phasers between shots while booking it, since there's only so much power to go around. Since nothing in Halo is likely to even be taking a single round of shots, it wouldn't matter anyway.
give me the reason that you "know" that the extremely superior structural integrity and design of Halo universe ships would be even disabled by a
single phaser shot. the linear ship design, most obvious in the Halcyon cruiser is extremely strong, as the strength relies very little on the lateral strength of the support beams. these ships were
designed to take a licking and keep on kicking. they have more back-ups than a russian boomer. This was because of the lack of shielding that the Halo technology was based around. with the quickly coming Covenant Civil war, the Sanghili fleet would quickly join the Humans, allowing the exchange of tech, such as shields, further strengthening the UNSC ships.
The mid-combat warp jump would have taken excellent planning and a lot of preparation. And it wouldn't exactly take a miniscule amount of energy to jump with such little preparation, and it wouldn't be nearly as accurate as it could be. The Halo Universe definitely has the advantage when it comes to software, as they can create smart AIs, such as Serina, Wellsey, and Cortana. the AIs are the lifeblood of the ship itself, able to react in a millisecond, rather than the seconds that a purely human crew would take.
Without warp speed, I doubt the Covenant could even get into range. For those of you with a thinking problem, range is not how far a weapon can travel. The range of a projectile weapon would be infinite. Range is how close you need to be before you can hit your target. Range changes based on the mobility of the target. The range of a MAC against a Federation starship wouldn't even make it into the kilometer range. The range of a plasma torpedo would probably be under ten thousand. The range of a phaser, against a ship that can be hit by a MAC from tens of thousands of kilometers away, is incomparably greater.
yes, we know it's not how far a projectile can travel. but they aren't that much use when you can't accurately shoot with them, aye? in fact, it's so irrelevant of a point that no one except you has bothered bringing it up. and I have never seen
any Star Trek ship taking true evasive maneuvers, except in small craft. mostly it's hiding, then firing.
MAC rounds move extremely fast, even if they aren't quite the speed of light. They still can easily hit ships that, though much larger, are much more maneuverable.
Plasma torpedoes are so maneuverable that there is only one way to completely escape them. to move so that the target ship is at an oblique angle to the gun barrel, as the magnetic field controlling the torpedoes extends from the gun barrel.
With warp capable combat, Iraq probably had better odds of winning the Gulf War than the Covenant do of taking down a single TNG era ship. TOS era, maybe ships were few and far between enough that they could have won by sheer numbers.
with
interdimensional travel, I think it's safe to assume that the Covenant would easily win an engagement one-to-one with a TOS Federation or klingon ship. and there are an estimated 5000 Covenant ships known and encountered by the UNSC. that doesn't count the unmentioned fleets in the games/books, and there are definitely going to be innumerable garrisoning fleets at the Covenant worlds, as there is a "heretic" movement, even if it's not a very large threat.
This is all assuming the Covenant shields work against transporters. The rectal bleeding if that isn't the case makes the rest of it look like a sporting match.
I think it's safe to assume that the shields from the two universes are very similar, as there is no proof otherwise
At least with Star Wars it's massively ridiculous firepower and, at the upper range of Lucas blather, equally massive transit speeds, against precision accuracy and the unparalelled combat maneverability of the Star Trek ships. This isn't a dig against Halo, it's just the natural result of a massive difference between the two settings. The technological scales simply don't compare anymore than they would between Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
I do however find people getting offended over Halo tech being antiquated junk in Star Trek to be quite amusing though. It further validates my view that Halo fans are mostly retarded people. I formed this opinion based on all the comments on how revolutionary the game was by adding in all those new things that other games had already done before. They weren't actually the first game to have vehicles for instance(for your own sake, don't show surprise over this revelation), they weren't even particularly well implemented vehicles.
the second sentence in this last paragraph invalidates all of your previous statements, as that is definitely flaming, thus extremely discrediting everything you say as being from an unreliable source. maybe it's just that my view is biased, but it seems that only the Star Trek side is flaming, and I can't recall any instance in this thread of Halo supporters flaming the Star Trek supporters. but bear in mind, if I'm wrong, that it may just be that my view is a bit biased as I favor the Halo universe.
