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originally posted in:Halo Archive
2/25/2014 1:58:36 PM
3
On Covenant Industrial Capacity
[created by Anton and moved over here]
This topic seeks to find out a sensible estimate for the Covenant's level of industrial power using High Charity as a baseline. We know the approximate dimensions of High Charity, the approximate dimensions of Covenant ships and the time frame within which High Charity was built. There are issues however which I can't resolve just now.
It was inspired by this post [url=http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-halo-thread-time-was-your-ally-343.280593/page-43#post-12904803]here[/url] on Spacebattles:
[quote]High Charity was a mobile space station nearly 348 kilometers in Diameter constructed to serve as the capital of the Covenant when it was formed during the conclusion of the Sangheili-San'Shyuum war. This war ended sometime in 852 BCE and the San'Shyuum made High Charity its capital in 648 BCE. That means it took 204 years to complete the station.
Onward to the calculations!
Utilizing the formula volume of a sphere (4/3)pi(R)^3, I determined that High Charity was roughly 2.207e16 cubic meters in volume. However we must take into account that roughly half of the Station is nonexistent, so we will cut this number in half. So High Charity is roughly 1.103e16 cubic meters in volume.
Now assuming a linear construction time of 204 years, the Covenant was able to assemble nearly 5.4e13 cubic meters of materials per year.
With this type of Industrial Might, the Covenant should easily be able to build the following per year:
1) 45 CSO-Supercarriers
or
2) 15,2554 CSS-class battle cruisers
or
3) 6,822CAS-class Assault carriers
P.S If anyone can find any problems with my calcs please show me the error and I will correct it.[/quote]
I did my own analysis ([url=http://i764.photobucket.com/albums/xx283/Anton1792/Games/368px-High_Charitypic_zps58de6cbe.jpg]here[/url]) and arrived at roughly similar numbers, albeit slightly higher (12.5 million cubic kilometres) because I included the tail section too.
As for his ship numbers, I'm not sure how he derived their volumes so I can't say much about them but an analysis [url=http://i764.photobucket.com/albums/xx283/Anton1792/Games/Project2.jpg]I did[/url] a while back gave me an Assault Carrier volume of roughly 4.3 cubic kilometres. Dividing the High Charity volume by that gives you the number of Assault Carriers that could be produced from High Charity's volume of material. Dividing again by High Charity's construction time of 204 years will give the annual rate at which these Assault Carriers could have been manufactured at. It turns out that, given these numbers, the Covenant could have pumped out about 14'000 CAS class Assault Carriers per year instead of High Charity, at that time.
An issue that I can't seem to reliably figure out for sure though is that High Charity is not a solid hemisphere. It has a hollow space within, but I'm not sure how large that space is and hence how thick it's walls are. This could impact these figures a lot. Would anyone here know how to solve this?
If I take a total guess, with the only reasoning admittedly being that such a large volume of gas in a vacuum will create a lot of pressure, then I could say that the walls are 1 km thick. That then gives the hemisphere section 189'138 cubic kilometres of material, changing the High Charity total to 1'689'138 ckm. Following through with the above line of thought regarding ship volumes, that then gives as an annual rate of 1925 Assault Carriers.
This was the Covenant at its dawn, right after a devastating war that almost annihilated both the Sangheili and the San-Shyuum. The Covenant's industrial power will have increased in the 3000 years since then.
I think there's a good chance that the corrections for the hollow space within High Charity will not in any way allow for the nonsense about the Covenant's level of power being so damn low following Halo 3.
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2 Replies[quote]You need to go back and re-read Nylund's work. During his biography of Preston Cole's life Cole theorized that an unknown faction within the Covenant hierarchy was purposely prolonging the war by preventing the Covenant from locating Earth and thus ending the war quickly.[/quote] Pariah Brought that up in another thread and i finally can put together why the covenant were slow to act. We all already know the answer. Datapad 4 [spoiler] << 2415 >> [^] Honorable members of the Assembly, consider this We represent the next step of human evolution, but not the final step. And although our existence was predicted centuries ago, we are still tragically misunderstood. [^][/spoiler] Datapad 12 [spoiler] [^] A careful rationing of intelligence and counter-intelligence will be required to sustain this conflict until our creators have closed the technology gap. Accordingly, the Assembly will have many difficult decisions to make for the duration of this conflict. However, our creators have already instituted several programs that will make acting on those decisions much easier. [^][/spoiler] Datapad 13 [spoiler] << As must be expected with any calculations, a number of non-trivial sacrifices will be needed in order to furnish the Assembly with the time required to determine the correct pattern – and then act upon it. Furthermore, once a site has been designated, its status must be obscured such that no individual, outside of this body, is fully aware that is has been designated. << << Primary criteria for choosing sites are as follows: remoteness, low population density, infrequency of communication. No designated site must be allowed to evacuate greater than ten percent of total population within two weeks of activation for any reason. << <2534:01:01-ZT>> AMD: evacuations precipitated by environmental and/or industrial disasters shall be allowed to proceed as normal. >> <2542:01:01-ZT>> AMD: some percentage of total population of chosen site may be relocated to designated green zones one Solar year prior to activation to lessen overall impact on genetic sustainability of species. >>[/spoiler] While the characters in universe think that the covenant is going to these planets by choice and just unable to find Erde, The actuality is the Assembly stalling them. We all were aware of this but from our perspective we probably added it to the list of why the covenant didn't wipe us out sooner instead of it being the actual reason. Each and every colony was found by Assembly intervention or by their luminaries. Reach was probably they first planet they found by themselves because the assembly had no control over the incident. Had the covenant not found installed a track unto the Iroquois how much longer would the war have lasted? We also have to keep in mind the Assembly pretty much implies that humanity could have one the war if they went all out. Generally this is nonsensical because humans are so far the covenant in terms of technology. But, in Halo evolution we learn that ONI was somehow able to get into High charity late into the war. There is also Halsey seeing High Charity decades before the war (Though not knowing what it was). So as the assembly stated, it seems humanity would have found some way to end the war if they weren't being directed by the assembly.
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1 ReplyBut would the majority of those Assault Carriers have been used for quelling uprisings? I really can't imagine the Covenant needing most of the 2,000 CASs to put down insurrection. Even considering the production power would have increased. It's weird how the Covenant could have used their production power of a year to crush humanity.
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* During the discussion we Brought up how it was constantly stated that the covenant were having major internal issues and that the ships would have been quelling those. *
