[quote][b]Posted by:[/b] Juen Teran What do you mean with that argument?[/quote] I probably could have worded that one a bit better, heh >_> I more or less meant that they're not mutually exclusive. IE; the two exist together and neither one is a "fake" story making the other the "real" story...I'm not sure that made any sense at all :/ It's not like one of the two is separate from the Halo story and thus wouldn't have happened (fanfiction you could say) and the other is part of the story and did happen. I was trying to say that they're both the same story (though told from different viewpoints) as opposed to one being untruth and the other being "what really happened". [quote]Please enlighten me, as I didn't have any problem with the battle book. In fact, the only problem some people (more like idiots) had with the book is the fact that Reach fell in a single day. Yeah, let's ignore this awesome story overall, Reach fell in a day, -blam!- Nylund, he knows nothing of the Halo Universe.[/quote] Gladly, here's a list of all the problems with the battle in TFoR that I am aware of. 1. Where was all of the UNSC air support planet-side? Skyhawks (armed with four 50mm cannons, anti-tank missiles), Longswords, Shortswords, Vultures, etc. All of these would have taken out any of the dropships the Covenant dispatched to the planet with absolutely no effort whatsoever. Yet there's no mention of any air support being deployed whatsoever. Aside from a bombing run of 1-3 Longswords that took out more of their own troops than the Covenant. 2. Why were the generators so poorly defended and only just then having bunkers and such built around/near them? These are some of, if not the most, important pieces of defensive hardware the UNSC has on Reach as they power the SMACs, the most powerful orbital weapons in their arsenal. Something as important as the generators should have had a permanent garrison of troops, armor, and defensive lines/bunkers/fortifications, etc. all around them. Yet in the book there's absolutely nothing there other than some hastily constructed defenses and only a few soldiers there holding the position. 3. How is it, the Covenant can overwhelm the generators, UNSC command and the main armory, with just hundreds of dropships within the span of an hour, 3 hours at most, when they do not know the location of either and have to travel from the poles where they were being deployed? Especially when the Covenant don't really know where any of the key UNSC structure or points of interest are and their numbers just got decimated coming into the planet. They take these positions without any time to regroup or take stock of who or what was lost coming in. 4. And how is it that they can swarm all over the planet and completely overrun some of the most important locations with only a couple hundred dropships (which can only carry about 30 troops each) getting through the UNSC fleet and then splitting up for multiple targets (three at least). 5. And how is that the UNSC High Command got overrun by what would only amount to about a hundred or so dropships? Possibly the most important place in the UNSC military and it's completely overrun in minutes by a paltry number of enemies. Where were was the air support, the anti-aircraft guns, the massive amounts of troops and armor that would be defending the location, and the fortifications? This would be a place that in any normal military would be able to last several [i][b][u]weeks[/u][/b][/i] against enemy forces...and it falls in roughly an hour. And all that's just the planet-side aspect of the battle. There aren't as many problems with the space battle aspect, but what ones there are are just as big, maybe even bigger, as the ones with the ground battle. 1. Perhaps the biggest problem with the space battle is the fact that Nylund can't keep his numbers straight, despite listing all of the casualties to each side as the battle goes on. The Covenant start out with about 314 ships, and then half of them get destroyed by a mine-field and I believe a salvo from the SMACs before they even open fire on the UNSC ships. So by the time they actually engage the UNSC their ship numbers are pretty much even, each has about a 150+ ships. Anyway, he lists the casualties to each side as the battle goes on and the numbers of active ships on each side stays fairly even. However, by the time Nylund has the Autumn showing up the UNSC is suddenly down 70+ ships for absolutely no reason at all. No narration explaining their sudden disappearance or anything at all to hint that they were destroyed, fled, or somehow rendered inactive. They're just gone. That's a pretty damn big plot-hole. 2. And harkening back to when I said that the Covenant and UNSC had roughly equal numbers of ships when the Covenant finally opened fire. The UNSC also has those 20 or so SMACs, which would count for about 3 UNSC ships each, imo, as they can completely gut a Covenant ship with one shot. So, counting each SMAC as three UNSC ships, there would be about 210 ships for the UNSC to the Covenant's 150+ ships by the time the two fleets actively engaged one another in combat. That's almost a 2:1 ratio in the UNSC's favor (if I did my numbers right, someone please correct me if I'm wrong, math is not my strong point), and we all know that the UNSC does much better in space fighting when they have more numbers than the Covenant. Plus factor in that a great deal of their greatest tactical minds would be there taking part in the space battle (such as Captain Keyes) so the UNSC would have stood a very great chance of stopping the Covenant in their tracks given the facts of what it usually take for the UNSC to win and all the evidence from past situations. So with all that in mind the space battle doesn't really follow the Halo universe's own rules/logic for how space combat tends to go down. So really the Covenant shouldn't have won, I'm not going to say many UNSC ships or defense would have survived intact, 'cause they probably wouldn't have, but the Covenant's initial assault would have been stopped and Reach would have one of the UNSC's many other Pyrrhic victories in the war. And whether the space battle would have lasted more than a day given [i]just[/i] the information from the book I can't say, but it would have lasted a great deal longer than the mere two (give or take) hours that it did in TFoR, it wasn't even a day, the space battle lasted almost less than an hour (which is very, ridiculous).