[quote][b]Posted by:[/b] Wolverfrog [quote][b]Posted by:[/b] tjal Ok... If you have read the books you would know that the pillar of autumn was refitted to board a cruiser with all the available spartan 2's. Capture the bridge before it self-destructed, get the nav data. Go to the home-planet, capture a so-called prophet (leader) and force a truce. Now... let me check this: they rebuild 1 single ship (fitted it with meters of titanium armor) AND put 30 spartan 2's inside it just to capture 1 cruiser. Yeah seems legit that they didn't try it before... they didn't try it because it was impossible.[/quote] No, they didn't try it before because the intelligence regarding prophets was relatively new - for many years, the UNSC believed only Unggoy and Kig-Yar were of the Covenant (that's been retconned slightly, but I still think the prophets were unheard of for a while.) As well as this, they'd never had an AI with the infiltration capabilities of Cortana before - as [i]Reach[/i] shows, she's been enhanced by Forerunner technology. The idea was for her to take over the Covenant network and disable any routines that would allow the crew to scuttle the ship. This is what she does with the [i]Ascendant Justice.[/i][/quote] I just stated the intention of the boarding. The reason they never captured a cruiser was because couldn't board or get to the bridge quick enough (spartans could) in time before they self-destructed. The prophets are kinda irrelevant to the capture-a-cruiser plan