UNSC Ships Should End Planets | Lore and Theory
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ธ.ค. 2023
- In this episode: We discuss the physics at work that leads to UNSC Ships of practically every class, having the tonnage and velocity to be able to be used to destroy entire colonies.
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Let’s not forget about how one overheated reactor from a Halcyon-class cruiser, Pillar of Autumn, was able to rip apart Alpha Halo. Imagine that kind of destruction on a planet or even a moon…
Granted that reactor along with the weapons was upgraded as the Halcyon's original power plant kind of sucked. The armor is what made the ship pretty hard to kill. But the guns and engines made it pretty poor in a fight.
Not really, the reactor detonation destabilized the ring it was the centrifugal force of the ring the finished the job.
WHAT? THEY DESTROYED THE WIKI?
@@nobleman9393 *snort
😂😂what u mean a halo ring is 10k its small and it wasn't destroyed completely, I'd call it a Hiroshima boom
Honestly this helps puts into perspective why ONI and the higher ups in the UNSC were so concerned about the insurrection and the conflict around them becoming potentially destructive for humanity. When you take into consideration that simply influencing one captain with a moderate sized ship is a very real danger to every colonized planet, makes the paranoia a little more understandable.
Eh, only a little more.
@@graye2799 Planetary 911's
@@skepticalmagos_101 💀💀💯💯💀💀
@@skepticalmagos_101 the 2nd planets been hit :O
"the ships don't have a reverse" (shows diagrams of the ships with double sided engines for reverse thrust)
While the Halcyon and following Pillar of Autumn class cruisers have clearly defined reverse thrusters, even if you might torch off the turret battery forward of the exhausts; most UNSC ships seem to lack any form of clear reverse thrusters. Some designs, the first that comes to mind are the Halberd class destroyer and the Infinity, don't even look like they have the space or proper locations for reverse thrusters
They look more for maneuvering purposes to me, could be quite wrong though.
It's space, you just flip over 😅
^ this. The UNSC paid for all those fancy maneuvering thrusters for a reason.@@shitbeausaysofficial
but they have to. You cant have ships designed for interplanetary triips. The max speed to maintain an orbit would be passed relatively quickly with this kind of thrust and there is nothing at all to slow it down. @@hammer1349
In the words of Isaac Arthur, "There is no such thing as an unarmed spaceship." As far as the unlimited acceleration, the thing is that space is not a true vacuum. There are gas molecules and dust, albeit thinly spread. And while the Titanium A battle plate is tough as they get their speed up, each mote of dust will be hitting the force of a MAC round. And with their flat fronts, the force wouldn't be deflected instead going straight into the superstructure.
It almost doesn't matter whether their fronts are flat or not. At those energies it's almost impossible for any particle collision with your armor plating to be an elastic scattering one. Almost all the energy is going to deposit in the armor.
Or a nuke if you go fast enough
Emile: "but sir, you don't have the firepower."
Carter: "I've got the mass"
It's worth noting that the Marathon in that cutacene was likely traveling at whatever its equivalent of no-wake speed is considering how close to the Cairo it was operating. When it is in open space and doesn't have to worry about collisions, its velocity is much higher.
As for the "reverse gear", I imagine interplanetary flight looks something like the Expanse with the ship flipping its orientation and performing a reverse burn to slow back down for planetfall.
The book Fall of Reach specifically mentions that method of slowing down several times. I haven't read many of the other halo books but it makes sense.
You got it
Assuming a UNSC ship could constantly accelerate at 10gs it'd take a little over a week to reach a quarter the speed of light, comparable to the Infinity's MACs, & a little under a day at 100gs. However, given that UNSC sensor tech & infrastructure is advance enough to make system wide detections at the speed of light with good old radio, & given there really isn't much Human activity beyond the heliopause of stars, any such vessel would likely be blown up by MACs, lasers, & missiles before they had the chance to hit a planet.
Can macs and missiles actually target an object going at relativistic speeds though? Also if you hit it with a mac or missile then wouldn’t there still be a cloud of debris moving at 25% light speed towards the same target? Lasers would probably have no trouble hitting it since they’re also moving at light speed but you’d need a stupid amount of energy to destroy an entire ship with just lasers. I’m sure they would have no trouble detecting the ship but idk if any planetary defenses are equipped to deal with it
@@kosmickalamity7071 They could reduce the impact by breaking a large mass up into many debris which hopefully most of them could burn up in the atmosphere.
Maybe the mac cannons have enough force and in significant numbers does slow down the speed of ramming ships.
So it is possible to completely stop kamikaze ships but that would be hard to do.
Accelerating to 25%c comes with a lot of challenges beyond just the propulsion problem, mainly the fact that the interstellar medium is now slamming into your ship at particle-accelerator-like velocities. If the pure radiation hellstorm hasn't completely disabled your electronics, killed the crew, and snuffed out the reactor driving the ship, then even the heat generated from the interstellar medium starts to become seriously worrying at around 10^8 m/s, nearly akin to the conditions experienced by spacecraft reentering the Earth's atmosphere. In short the ship would be glowing red hot as it hurtled towards its destination, and its deck plating would be constantly boiling off.
@@kosmickalamity7071 Dispersion, if you fragment a ship that located a million kilometers away with a nuclear missile, ship will simply turn into plasma, which It will fly in all directions at high speed, Only a small fraction of the cloud will reach the planet
@@kosmickalamity7071I really advise you to learn how the interception of munitions works and how they actually send probes to planets.
PILLAR OF AUTUMN’S ENGINES? IN ATMOSPHERE?!
That's one way to get their attention!
During the battle of reach , the autumn from the fall of reach book, Cortana made a full 180 at max thrust to fight the covenant carrier thru an asteroid field. It's scary how she was able to maneuver the autumn thru it.
unless its one of those dumb cloud of rocks type asteroid fields its not that big a deal.
@@MrJay_White i think what they were trying to get at is the internal and external forces applied to the superstructure and the crew must have been immense, because for a ship that big to turn on a dime like that... Damn... I interpret the "maneuver through it" part of the previous comment to be maneuver through the turn
It's fortunate that the UNSC don't actually want to obliterate planets.
Life is a touch dystopian but it seems humanity has moved away from obsessing over privacy, preferring the advantages being "linked" via neural connection
Like all things considered, humanity is pretty chill. They're not big on aliens trying to destroy them but they're not willing to stoop to their level of wholesale slaughter
@@ThommyofThenn they have made some planet cracking nukes, but as far as I'm aware only one has ever been deployed, and it worked.
Nova bomb says hello
@@andrewbutton2039 and @irishpotato that's true Andrew and you make another good point about how the weapons are used. While the capacity to destroy worlds is there, it's not a constant policy to use them. As opposed to other depictions of humanity that absolutely will destroy an entire planet or civilisation just cause someone there doesn't think like they do.
10:15 not to mention that she is overcoming wind resistance with a not so aerodynamic design.
Just imagine that acceleration in vacuum.
I heard over 9 km/s right ? that's over orbital velocity. we should see air burn to plasma round the ship
@evablouseblanche112 that was exactly my thought, that velocity in atmosphere would be so much resistance than even the space shuttle sees on reentry, so the in amber clad should have been a fiery streak
Another overlooked point about UNSC engines is that MACs by their very nature are more powerful and have longer range (remember in space range means time before enemy has the ability to dodge) the faster the ship is going.
So an UNSC Fleet pulling as many Gs of acceleration as the "inertial compensators" can manage to avoid turning the crew into paste. From the edge of the system to the planet would add more than enough kinetic energy to each and every one of their MAC rounds to be a guaranteed kill on any Covenant ship well before the Covenant energy weapons had the range to fire back.
That makes me think on how devastating the Keys Loop was to 3 Covenant ships, which was a destroyer and two escort frigates. And how effective the macs were at the end despite being fired last in the entire engagement, spearing through the two frigates and effectively gutting them. The destroyer got mildly rammed, hit by covenant friendly fire, and blasted by the ass of Keys' ship with the bunch of missiles as he zoomed by it, used the gravity of the planet to bring his ship back in line with the conflict, activate the nuke he'd left in wait for the frigates, EMP'd them and then Mac'd them.
Imagine how insane that would have looked from the ground, witnessing on the night side of the planet, the Iroquois screaming overhead to continue engaging the covenant because she is *the* only ship in the system at the time to even prevent or slow down the covenant from glassing the planet. Technically, there wasn't any real 'math' shown during the scene in the book, which has thankfully had someone craft a video of it, which is all the more amazing to witness in something beyond the pages of a book.
I really wish we were able to witness even more of Halo's space battles, in game and in more extended media.. Now I want a space battle based RTS or somethin along those lines with the universe of halo. That would be fun, no mods, just a proper dedicated game..
Not really, Plasma Torpedoes have confirmed speeds of 50% the speed of light and pulse lasers move at, you know, the speed of light. The UNSC has average combat ranges of 13,000-30,000 km while the Covenant can easily shoot you at 150,000 km.
Yes, but also remember about relativistic momentum. For relativistic speeds momentum is equal to “mass x speed / sqrt(1 - speed^2 / c^2)”
So at 50% lightspeed you’d have mass x 0.5c / sqrt(3/4) for a 15% multiplier on your momentum.
Exactly
I know this is halo but the unsc should have been able to deatroy the covenants witb their mac Canons, nothing in the universe will stop a mac shot
It worked on the bigger stations, as they had enough juice to empower the massive macs they got on them that could smash through most covie ships. The ships have more limits, kinda like how its an A10 warthog vs say a battleship, for most UNSC ships vs their mac platforms. @@dragoe7441
I get feeling that alot of the limiting factors on speed include safety margins and strength of the super structure and of course the squishy flesh bags inside are really sensitive to changes in direction at speed so it's probably best to keep them at a peaceful jaunt
Yeah and keep in mind these are all EXTREMELY conservative estimates. Based on context in the books, it sounds a whole lot more like a UNSC ship can go between Earth and Mars in a matter of HOURS, not days
Don't forget that he's using the "official" length of the ships to base his calculations. Instead of the true scale of the ships he determined in a past video. So the halcyon covered a longer distance in the same time.
@@thecruzking oh dude you're right! That just makes everything about this even crazier lol
Would it even be survivable to make the trip between Earth and Mars in a couple of hours? At the closest distance of 65M kilometers, it would take 45 hours of constant acceleration/deceleration at 1G (max speed 806.4km/h). Half the time requires 4x the acceleration. Making the trip in 10 hours would mean an average acceleration of 20G, with a max speed at the middle at 7222km/s or 2% the speed of light. Whatever ship that can make the trip that fast is not crewed by humans.
@@kerbodynamicx472 well, given that the UNSC incorporates advanced Gravitics technology into their ships, and are so good at it that even ships as small as Pelicans have artificial gravity on board, it would make a whole lot of sense if they were just using artificially generated gravitational fields to counteract the G-forces involved. Any engineer worth their salt would do so when they have access to that kind of technology. There's simply too much to be gained to NOT do so.
Considering that the construction of the ships has the engines at the stern (back) and not the stern(bottom) like the Expanse starships has me thinking that the UNSC is fully capable of grav drives and gravity control. The reason why no one worries about the destruction of planets from relativistic ships is that habitable planets are relatively rare, and no one in their right minds would actually do so.
Yeah, humanity does have a quite decent understanding of artificial gravity technology enough that it is used on a civilian level (gravball) which is probably how their frigates are able to hover in a gravity well. And it’s my belief that they use it to decelerate their ships. Though they aren’t capable of gravity drives like the covenant as evidenced by the infinity being the only UNSC ship to possess a repulsor engine with it being stated that the engine took years to develop.
And to be fair humanity does also have a good understanding of terraforming technology given that they were able to fully turn mars into a lush and habitable world.
....
- GA Humanity (for some example, for now, of any fellow GA chosen's (military choice) capabilities....): APEX types, those probable BT-7707 type/level weaponries', non-small arms type scalable SLEEPER SIMULANT type x-rays(?)/etc, 'HADES FLAME's(?), 'AURORA KNIVES'(?), non-small arms type Graviton Lance level firepower(?), etc other else(?) of those GA Human Causal-bound superweapons of pre-Collapse era.
- UCN/UCA/ISA(/ICSA) vs Hig 'empire' era Humankind (for example): ESCHATON type, 'Ethnic bullet' type bioweapons, irradiated type petrusite warheads, etc(?) superweapons.
- pre and during Human-forerunner war era Humankind: etc, etc planet-spanning superweapons (any concrete names yet finally being tagged on (halo universe's) ancient Humankind's military planetary cleansing type capabilities? or not yet?) of theirs back in halo universe's and galaxy's version of Humankind and this version's previous era of their interstellar might and experience. / UEG/UNSC/CAA era Humankind: NOVA type, etc(?) (perhaps I missed something else more from my own current recollections of UEG/UNSC/CAA era Humankind's planetkilling type WMD capabilities for here? or are said-UEG/UNSC/CAA era Humans still stuck on the power of the NOVA bombs'?) superweapons.
- IMC vs frontier militia era Humankind: their (clearly, 'not-'borrowed'-at-all', non-Human-made/originated) Fold type, etc(?) superweapons.
(etc other well-known and Underestimated/etc examples' out there across fictions)....
Another example of the humans of halo having a good grasp on grav plating, is phoenix class colony ships, ala the spirit of fire. They have 2 different sections of the hull at 30 degrees to the rest of the ship (Where the heavy landing ships dock) And both of THOSE sections are oposite each other. None of these different planes of gravity seem to affect the other.
It's also one of those small details that shows humanity was well on it's way to re inventing forerunner level tech, given time. Alongside their architecture, as shown in the bungie era, mimiking that of the forerunners without even knowing they existed.
With all the nukes on board each of the ships, alongside the other armaments like MACS, they could destroy planets. But engines? Now that is an interesting weapon the UNSC have. Imagine UNSC ships just flying straight through a planet's atmosphere just to basically nuke everything is passes over.
One weapon often overlooked, but is a thing in the Expanse and other franchises that have space travel very realistic.
@@WolfeSaber9933 As they say, there is no such thing as an unarmed space ship...
Like Hyperspace ramming from disney era star wars?
@@revolverswitchpretty much
Why fire the nukes when you can just send a ship full of warheads on a collision course with the planet and basically have a gigantic nuke
Like they say over on SFIA, there's no such thing as in unarmed spaceship.
Was about to comment that..
So it wasnt the slip space jump that tore up Mombasa and the space elevator, it was the supersonic shockwave of the In Amber Clad 😂
Well, Covenant battleship, but still.
09:00 the marathon is also weaving arround Cairo, and other ships. This would mean that the speed may be slow, but stable and controlled. Like a residential speed.
At 10:46 you say that In Amber Clad is traveling 9,560 m/s, or basically Mach 28. Wild to consider giving the heating and aerodynamic issues today's aircraft experience at hypersonic speeds, like Mach 4-6. Going back to the anniversary cutscene, prior to accelerating to catch up to Solemn Penance, In Amber clad was going its length every 4 or so seconds (the bit in the cutscene where Miranda says "Not if we can help it Sargeant"), so about 125 m/s. Assuming the cutscene happens in real time, it takes In Amber Clad goes from 125 m/s to 9,560 m/s in 20 seconds, subjecting the ship (and its occupants) to over 900 G of acceleration. I can't fathom a ship (or a crew) that could survive either of these conditions.
Great video
warp drives is the only explanation
She’s also doing all that in atmosphere which is even more insane, clearly she’s using the old high school physics where you can ignore drag and friction
This is known in the general Sci-fi community as "The Kzinti Lesson" namely that:
"A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
-Larry Niven
Taken to its extreme, it is honestly terrifying. Take the Orion Drive for instance. (aka. "Nuclear Pulse Propulsion") The basic idea is to yeet small nuclear bombs out the back end of your spacecraft, and detonate them. Basically grenade jumping, but with nukes in space. This was a legit idea funded by DARPA in the 50's. It was calculated to be capable of an effective acceleration of 1G continuous. In the "Frontlines" series by Marko Kloos, the human space navy eventually hits on the idea of using the Orion Drive on *missiles*. These missiles accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light in less than a day, had a range of approximately 1-3 AU (astronomical units, the average distance between Earth and Sol) and impacted with the force equivalent to approximately 1 Tera-Ton TNT equivalent (one trillion tons of TNT, which is one sixth the energy of the Shoemaker-Levy comet impact on Jupiter, or 20,000 Tsar Bomba's, See the Boom Table from Atomic Rockets)
I'm gonna speculate that the cap in their current speed is how fast can a unsc battleship travel and safely maneuver without overshooting navigation points or tearing itsself apart
Thank you for this! MAC rounds are planet-killers based on the kinetics alone. I love your content!
Guess that explains why Mac rounds in atmosphere was so shocking to George...
@@mr.c1913 the air pressure and soundwaves from firing are what made them dangerous in atmosphere.
If the ship were also accelerating to target the mac rounds would also gain the extra velocity. I'd imagine they'd burn up in atmosphere, but would cause civilization ending weather phenomenon(like super sonic wind fronts).
If the UNSC knew the location of covenant homeworlds, then considered the cost of loosing 1 or 2 frigates compared to the losses of a space battle with the covenant. We’d have very different and much shorter games 😂
Reminds me of the Unlimited-Speed mod in Space Engineers.
So focused on getting there fast........Never thought on how to decelerate in time to not slam into the destination until it was too late
Makes you think the energy transfered when half of the invisible hand landed on the runway
Another happy landing
About the reverse gear at the end - Irl spaceships slow down by turning 180 degrees and pushing backwards with their main engine. They can also make smaller adjustments in any direction using small clusters of reaction control system (RCS) engines, although this is much less efficient
I said in the Mac video that they must fire on low power on the contested worlds, so not to cause extinction level events. Now there's this.
Some higher estimates for the blast yields of Shiva nukes imply that a single one could sterilize a planet surface given their frighteningly large blast radii and effectiveness against even Covenant shield tech in the vacuum of space. I wouldn't be too happy about someone firing a MAC at a planet surface at its highest possible yield setting, either. And let's not even entertain the raw destructive power of the UNSC's actual planet-busters, the NOVAs.
Shivas are only 30 megatons though, and novas 50 gigatons.
@@voomvoom4522 Those are the stated figures in some books. These are famously questionable numbers, like a lot of stated figures in science fiction. The actual yields based on the math of how they're used, namely as strategic-scale area denial weapons in space, means the true yield is probably actually in the teratons. This is due to the Inverse Square Law.
@@Phoenix-214 unlikely, considering that Covenant fleets travel so close together that there are multiple instances of a disabled ship crashing into another and taking out multiple ships.
@@voomvoom4522 Part of me wants to believe this is the case, but then you have other feats like the hundred-odd Shivas used to turn Viperidae into a brown dwarf for a short time during the Battle of Psi Serpentis. Pretty sure those nukes pack more of a wallop than the megaton range if they're turning a gas giant into a supernova.
@@Phoenix-214 wasn't that caused from the nukes igniting its atmosphere and cauing a chain reaction?
Reminds me of how the ships in the expanse accelerate and decelerate.
All ships have reverse gear. It's called turning the ship around 180. And since Halo has artificial gravity, I don't think such maneuvers would be a problem for the crew and internal structures of the ship.
But the plot hole that all ships are also super weapons is there in almost every sci fi universe, not just Halo. It's just a thing, like sound in space, which we choose to overlook. Otherwise living on a planet, or any object too heavy to dodge, would be a deathwish in sci fi.
Loved this video, would love to see you do a video about firing MACs at planets. I feel like a lot of people don’t fully grasp what the UNSC’s ships are capable of. Feats that make covenant glassing operations blush
About Cairo station and the marathon, we could also safely assume the marathon would have been moving much slower than capable considering the ship is basically in orbit or very near the orbit of earth. I don’t think you’d wanna be going almost the speed of light with a ship that size near a planet, and other space stations/ships etc.
I think it's mentioned in one of the novels that UNMC ships can reach about .7 the speed of light with sub light engines. But they rarely ever go this fast because time dilation becomes an issue. Standard cruising speed is about .2 the speed of light. And even less than that within a solar system. So actually their ships could hit with enough force to split a planet in half.
To my knoledge, the only ship in the UNSC to have visible engines meant to slow a ship down was the UNSC Pillar of Autumn.
And they weren't even used in a cutscene.
So... Imagine the UNSC Infinity doing it... Also what does this say about MAC cannons? Considering that they can be fired while the vessels firing them are traveling at "max" speed and yet the projectiles still move SIGNIFICANTLY faster than any ship we've seen in the halo cannon from ANY faction INCLUDING FORERUNNER... How fast are those slugs moving? And how much force are they actually impacting with?
I'm not sure about unsc ships lacking a reverse gear considering both the Forawrd unto dawn and Pillar of autumn have retrograde engines (they face backwards) specifically to slow down or be propelled in reverse.
Would love to see an armoury episode on the bulldog shotgun.
If I remember correctly, wasn't there a guy who rammed a Covenant vessel with his ship only for it to be finished off by other ships utilizing mac guns? I vaguely remember it being mentioned in The Cole Protocol. Even assuming the ship wasn't going full speed (because he was still alive afterwards) that means that Covenant vessels can take one hell of a beating.
There's another scene that something similar happens, in the Fall of Reach book. the UNSC destroyer, Iroquois, captained by Keyes, mildly rammed a Covenant destroyer, blasted it with many missiles while it was also getting hit by friendly fire due to a pair of covenant frigates that were escorting it and the carrier that had jumped in system. Keyes then used the gravity well of the planet to zoom around in a slingshot way, come out ready to blast the frigates, nuking them before hand so that they didn't have shields, gutting them.
Seriously, I've love to have witnessed something like this from a ground perspective. Because the velocity of the ship alone had her go from the missile blasting of the destroyer, around the planet and frigate blasting within a minute or so. I sadly cannot seem to find a size for Sigma Octanus 4.. Shame, I'm sure there's people out there who'd love to calculate how much gravity it has, how fast the Iroquois was going, just to see how much more devastating the MAC's were against the frigates.
I love the Winter Contingency music kicking in at 11mins
Happy to see all the recommendations to listen to Isaac Arthur. His upward bound series is fantastic
The Marathon's velocity seems slow in this example because it is slow, but not for want of thrust, it's in friendly space near other ships and stations. You aren't going to be going at full burn near other friendly ships and stations, especially as close as Marathon was to Cairo, because it'd be like a semi truck doing 70 mph in a truck stop parking lot
Glad to watch this, can't wait for more, and I hope more on the Ancestors.
I don't think UNSC ships actually get decelerated when they come out of slipspace, so they can stay in slipspace until theit speed nearly reaches light speed (assuming they have enough fuel), then they can probably obliterate (like using an NOVA bomb for example) a moon, if not a planet.
The Halcyon, or at least the Autumn II variant actually has forward facing reverse drive cones on its model.
I’d be curious to see a video on how the Ark works from a physics perspective
Love the new intro so cool
love your video's 00, look forward to the next one!
Did I just watch a pelican dock in and out of the engine of a halcyon? What was that scale between the pelicans and those cruisers in the beginning of the video?
That was an Autumn class heavy cruiser not a halcyon. Its based of the Pillar of Autumn.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Marathon to Cairo Station feat isn't actually that representative of anything other than a baseline. Marathons are big ships, ODPs are big, important infrastructure, and they were both assuredly not the only things flying around in the local space. Even if that Marathon had a place it needed to be with some urgency it would be moving at a safe and responsible speed relative to its surroundings. After all, something that massive moving at a high velocity can be quite difficult to stop or turn over a short distance and time.
Thing most terrifying is this is just unsc ships capable of doing things like this, now look at those moon sized forerunner carriers that could keep pace with a star road
Let’s not forget that, at least according to Cortana in the first halo, “Covenant ships have always been faster.” And let’s also not forget how much more massive Covenant Supercarriers are in comparison to even the UNSC Infinity. Makes you wonder why they didn’t just Kamikaze the human colonies that didn’t have forerunner relics 😅
so looked it up and judging by the amount of energy required to crack a planet as that is what is required to truly destroy a planet, causing enough damage to crack all the way down to at least the inner mantle, the ships humanity (in halo) have built would not be capable of planet cracking with ramming even at max speed, but it would be capable of devesting the surface to the point of magmafying the surface (probably). something to take into account is the laws of newton, to push tonnage you need a greater force in the direction so its logical to think that even with advanced thrusters the covenant have the speeds would get slower with more weight. eventually it would just make more sense to build a bomb or laser rather than sling moons
UNSC What's His Name: "I'm out of MAC rounds!"
Laws of Physics: *"Become the ammo"*
UNSC What's His Name: "oh, ok then"
Meanwhile, the K-Pg Impact, 66 Ma, had the equivalent energy of at least 2 million Tsar Bombas. Truly horrendous. Basically, imagine Mount Everest going 34,000 km/ph. Before the thing even struck Chicxulub, it's likely that the sheer overpressure alone blasted the shallow sea away directly below it as if it wasn't even there.
Tbf there’s a lot in the UNSC arsenal that should be absolutely cracked but it’s just not like the Gauss turrets on Gauss hogs, they shoot a 1/2lbs hunk of tungsten at about 45,000 feet per second which to put that in perspective you’d be able to aim at the nose of a 747 at cruising altitudes and speeds from ground level, fire one shot and immediately with no leading the shot or visible delay the entire front of the plane would erupt into a ball of fire as the energy transfer superheats the very metal of the plane into plasma. This gun should be able to kill any tank and anything short of a small battleship. But here it is playing second fiddle to the paltry 90mm on the Scorpion.
I don't have enough authoritative knowledge to add to the discussion, but ooooh love the new intro!
The title can be taken 2 ways, and I love it!
Late to the party here but my 0.02.
The thing about the Earth-Mars Time being slow is pretty understandable at least to me, you could probably get there much faster. But you have to flip the ship around and burn retrograde at some point to actually arrive at a speed where Mars could capture you. Going faster also means more heat, more energy, which means more water not just to improve the impulse of the torch drive but to keep it from melting itself. Then there's damage from particulates sputtering into your armor, it might just be a case where they have a "Optimal" time to reduce wear and use of consumables on the engines/radiator/hull. And in reality it could go much faster, just shortening the time between overhauls. Kinda like a plane's engines, just some food for thought. The rest? Yeah, KE is king in space. Anything with mass and velocity can become a nuke, just takes acceleration and time~
i feel like a nerd after watching these videos not in a bad way but how does he even find these thing out and i respect the dedication in the making of these videos
Great video as always! One that needs to be remembered is that I believe it’s the 2022 Encyclopedia that says it takes weeks to travel from Earth all the way to the edge of the Solar System. Given that it says weeks instead of months we are talking about traveling about 100,000 AU in just 2-3 weeks.
Which edge are they talking about? 100 000 AU is 1.6 light years, which is I guess the edge of the Oort Cloud. Reaching there in weeks would definitely require Slipspace since we're talking about speeds above the speed of light, so aren't really relevant to the actual propulsion capabilities of UNSC ships.
It's more likely they mean the edge of the planetary part of the Solar System, which is basically the orbit of Neptune. That's about 30 AU, which can be reached with 1g of constant acceleration in 15 days, lining up quite well with the Encyclopedia's 2 week estimate.
@@dsdy1205 “but ‘sublight’ travel times to the outer edges of a star system are still measured in weeks (e.g., Mercury to the Oort Cloud).” (Pg.39)
Nah man it specifically mentions the outer edges and then name drops the Oort Cloud.
@@Warlock_Lelouch The book could be talking about the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, which is still beyond the Sol system itself. At 1000 AU away, the UNSC ships need to reach 83% of c to get there from Mercury in, say, 2 weeks. If 3 weeks, then 54% of c. It should still be theoretically possible while still being 'sublight'.
“We have hundreds of Death Stars, but we can’t take out a few Covenant ships? What the hell are we doing?!”
I remeber that one episode of SW Clone Wars, when cruiser Malevorence go hyperspace and colline on full speed with random moon and now I wonder how much Ktn might go on there
I think the ships do go much faster, but the UNSC keep them at specific speeds during trips between specific planets to not overshoot them and also keeping mind deceleration
This makes rethink the scene of Infinity getting out of slip space and crusading that convie ship.
8:50
It sounds slow until you realise that cruiser is in tight quarters surrounded by fighters and frigates and Cairo Station. It’s not heading to a destination at average cruising speed it’s just manoeuvring into an attack formation.
Hi 00! I’ve been watching a lot of your content for a while now, and this is my first time commenting. I’m not trying to be judgmental here, and I get that you said that you’d be keeping the calculations in the video minimal, but I personally believe that it would be a much better video if when doing topics like this you go a little further in depth.
For example, in this video, you likely could have included slightly more discussion on orbital mechanics without adding too much complexity. Overall though, great video!
On another note, if you are even remotely interested in topics like this, I cannot recommend enough that you try either reading or watching a series called The Expanse. Even if you don’t have time for the full series, I’d at least suggest you look through a summary or two of it. I really think you would enjoy it!
Love the new intro!
I think something else of note with the marathon cruiser over Cairo station is all the obstacles. That ship was moving with a very tight escort of longswords. Also the many other ships in orbit along with the stations and satellites congesting space.
AND, this is all with lore-given sizes and mass. Imagine the numbers with 00's 2.65x larger (accurate) ship sizes
This is why most sci fi settings get ships very wrong. Isaac Arthur has videos on this subject, but essentially, each ship can be a gigantic MAC round itself.
Cairo Station should be traveling faster than Cairo proper on earth's surface because at orbit it has a further distance to travel to keep up. So as high as your estimates are, they're actually on the low side. Love your videos,
"Shipmaster, the human 'reinforcements' arrived for a millisecond and converted the Fleet of Particular Justice into various wavelengths of light."
The crusier passing Cairo station might not even be under full thrust, isn’t normal cruising speed for ships like a third to half speed. It can just me the speed potential is even greater
Spartan Locke seeing a Sangheili peacefully enjoying dinner: "UNSC ships should end planets"
“I’m just eyeballing it, so take it at face value”
Too late I trust you completely this is canon as far as I’m concerned
I believe the cross section of the Autumn shows retrograde thrusters near the bridge so they can slow down
Now that makes me scared as to what would happen if they took one of those old Odyssey class colony ships, and slammed that into a planet.
"There is no such thing, as an unarmed spaceship" - Isaac Arthur
"FLIP AND BURN!! This is a HIGH G maneuver!"
This video really makes you think about what kind of 9/11 & WW2 atomic bomb instances have happened in Halo lore prior to the human covenant war. 500 years have passed from present day, has a space ship ever crashed into a city and destroyed it? Or perhaps an aircraft that wrecked a space-elevator?
Considering the UNSC ships alone could end planets by ramming into them, it paints the whole conflict with the Covenant in an even grimmer light. Should the UNSC have managed to somehow defend a planet long enough - provided it had no Forerunner artifacts - the Covenant, tired of this nonsense, could have just easily just rammed the planet with any number of their ships. Or just built some space-torpedo type rigs and dumped them at the planet.
It's actually surprising that no faction in the Halo universe really seems to boast an arsenal of these sorts of planetary grade weapons of mass destruction. Despite being very expensive, the same "one use is all you get" mentality can be said about modern day nuclear weapons, which are incredibly pricey. Scaling up to the industrial and economic situation of space faring civilizations, having planet buster space torpedo "ramming speed!" style weapons would probably be a similar sort of investment (noting here that logically space faring warships are not cheap to keep operational either.) Especially with faster than light travel being a thing, the destructive power of having a very heavy object go really fast and slam into something could get pretty ridiculous. Rods from the gods on steroids.
"A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
Nice physics lesson also.
Love me some ship content. Thanks 00
I’ve always wonder many things about space travel especially in sci-fi movies and novels. The primary query I have is how do they decrease speed in order to avert an unforeseen collision with an asteroid or another combatant spacecraft? Reverse rocketry near the anterior of ship in both dorsal and ventral positions respectively is the only possibility I can deduce might work if that is even feasible from an engineering standpoint. The secondary inquiry I have is we see ships coming out of slip space travel at a low velocity subsequent to traveling superluminal speeds and I was just pondering how that is accounted for?
I've always been troubled by universes with semi realistic elements, especially when they seem to have newtonian movement but aren't built for it. For exemple, maximum speeds shouldn't be a thing, as long as ships have fuel they should be able to keep accelerating and get closer and closer to the speed of light.
Happy New Year everyone 🎉🎉🎉
The Marathon class light cruiser has reverse thrusters, but other than that I have no idea how the rest of the ships slow down. Gravitics maybe?
They slow down through the extremely advanced, futuristic method of turning the ship around so the engines are pointing forward, and then firing the engines.
That's how NASA did it, that's how SpaceX does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far.
I do believe that they do have retrograde engines. At least the (iirc) Halcyon class cruisers or whatever the PoA was. I distinctly remember seeing a blown up in universe diagram (almost like the one used to show the reactor) of one somewhere that showed retrograde and RCS engines tucked away in the “steps” of the cruiser.
Bit of an overcomplicated way of analyzing whether it's possible. Not only are most UNSC warships complimented with nuclear armaments but also MAC rounds. While the nuclear warheads are Clean Bombs(As in, minimal to no nuclear fallout occurs from their detonation except for at the explosion site) if I recall correctly, they can still do a shit ton of damage to a planet's surface, population, infrastructure, etc.
Most ships usually don't carry enough missiles to completely destroy a planet in Halo with them all being Clean Bombs. You'd need multiple ships which *technically* still fits the phrasing though, not the spirit of the subject we're talking about. If you want to completely destroy a planet with a single ship then, as long as the rounds are rated for re-entry which, IIRC, they are, you can just fire a MAC cannon at several key geological points across the planet such as fault lines & volcanos as examples in order to completely fuck up the planet's crust.
All that aside, I still find the numbers of how fast UNSC ships travel with their sub-light thrusters to be very intriguing to say the very least! Another great video as always! :)
UNSC ships are a paradoxical representation of limitation and sci-fi super technology. They have: simple, imaginable and already somewhat tangible deuterium and He3 based fusion reactors, a minimalist skeleton, an economical metal hull, no shields (most in sci-fi where applicable you wouldn’t expect to even have on outside of a combat ready status because of how dangerous, complicated and taxing they are), consideration for invoking internal gravity, recoilless ballistic cannons and point defenses, missile/torpedo launch systems, limited size + space + load + speed + layouts from imperfect construction techniques and technology which prompts very minimalist working and living spaces and access corridors; slip space is a very iffy concept with unstable means to manipulate it safely. This shows Halo isn’t just ‘Murica Star Wars, with the same message against unchecked cloak and dagger eggheads, first off and secondly for the lore, it establishes that the UNSC is very technologically grounded like if Earth society just rolled along 80 years into the future we’d have this kind of stuff, specifically, to some capacity (minus the impossible physics); go 500 years and we’ll have full utilization of these things as we anticipate with contemporary ships in real life when they are built and more importantly that the UNSC is at a very big disadvantage against the covenant which seems to be a million times more advance with a million times more territory, ships, fanatical warriors, planet splitting ship weapons, shields, flawless utilization of slip space. However UNSC ships also have MAC cannons which at most deployed sized can just make a planet disappear at full power, some do have shields, slip space marches along, the ability to launch futuristic thermonuclear warheads on their torpedos and missiles for targets on a planet’s surface and in space which are capable of blasting say half of Earth’s surface, they seem to be on par with covenant ships of the same size in terms of speed, firepower and shield strength despite the different in fundamentals or maybe it’s weirder that Covenant ships are only as powerful as UNSC ships. The speed department I can assume a ship is capable of slowing down instantaneously like a Tesla whether or not they need breaking engines and basically can’t go as fast as they do the closer to the atmosphere and gravity of Earth they get. I prefer the former system because explaining why you don’t have or can’t do something is less of a headache than explaining why you have something you shouldn’t have while having no idea how it works.
While having the ability to continually produce thrust, while I don't think it's stated, either there is the ability to recycle the energy back into the system (Since plasma vector thrust is just diversion of fusion products in this case in particular, along with secondary propulsion mass) as well as potentially using the vector flaps and focusing cones combined with magnetic inversion to alter the vectoring as well as slow down at similar speeds to how quickly they can accelerate. In theory. Also with the flaps and cones, as well as technology showing in other sci-fi settings, using system that routs thrust in reverse. Though the speed at which a UNSC ship can travel is terrifying when considering a 'cruising speed' strike even if you were to take atmospheric drag into account.
10:49 and that was in earths atmosphere and it didn't melt from the friction.
Also, the lack of reverse is not a problem when you can change the attitude of your ship to point your engines into the direction of travel
Cool video, and interesting because it highlights the problems that come about when SciFi universes come under scrutiny using real world rules, in this case space flight.
The reality is that the Halo Universe doesn’t show space flight accurately at all, in fact it treats it more like an extension of the sea that can be traversed in all directions.
It’s worth mentioning that I absolutely love Halo, especially the Bungee games (a mate and I are working through LASO now), just wanted the throw my 2 cents in.
If anyone wants to have a nerdy chat about the difference between space flight in halo and real life then as away!
The in amber clad also accelerated to that speed in atmosphere. Imagine the acceleration with no air resistance
All it takes is one at sufficient velocity. The SpaceBattles forums knew that for decades.
....it is a sobering thought to open up SB and realise the thread you are reading is older than many of the people you might have just chatted to on instagram.
This really puts into perspective why the UNSC gets so nervous about the Insurrection. Each ship they have is a nuke waiting to happen. A 9/11 style attack with these ships would devastate an entire colony.
There is a simple adage for this: No spaceship is unarmed.
One line comes to mind
HERE COMES THE GANTRITHOR!
I love all of you absolutely beautiful lore nerds for bringing even more examples and nerdy lore. Let’s fucking go!!!!