Forum:Covenant Industrial Capacity

Forums: Index → General Discussion → Covenant Industrial Capacity

A user on Spacebattles.com recently made a series of calculations on Covenant industrial capability using High Charity as the reference. It gives a fascinating insight into how many ships the Covenant could have theoretically produced at peak capacity:

http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-halo-thread-time-was-your-ally-343.280593/page-43#post-12904803

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) 6,822 CAS-class Assault carriers

The lesson in this tale? DON'T FUCK WITH THE COVENANT!!

To summarise, even if the technological gap had been completely reduced, Humanity was absolutely boned when it encountered the Covenant. They would have been drowned in ships alone. It's really quite miraculous that they survived as long as they did.

(I do not claim authorship of these calcs or any had input into them whatsoever. I hate maths)

--The All-knowing Sith'ari (talk) 17:04, 24 February 2014 (EST)

We know the bulk of the hemispherical bulb of High Charity was the vast city with the Dreadnought at its center. It was mostly empty space. Any shipbuilding that was going on was either below this area or was external to High Charity in the lower spine. Not sure how those calculations make sense or can give any kind of realistic measure of Covenant ship production capacity. Also, the time between the end of the San'Shyuum/Sangheili war and making High Charity the capital does not imply construction time, only the time at which it was decided that High Charity would be their capital. -ScaleMaster117 (talk) 20:08, 24 February 2014 (EST)

I always assumed the Covenant outmatched the UNSC in terms of materiel production, but for entirely different reasons. It's obvious that High Charity is a MAJOR exception, and that applying its standards to the entire Covenant is a bit too far. It's a political venture, the Prophet's flagship and housing the Keyship. Firstly, there's their faster slipspace speeds - shortened supply lines proportionally compared to the slower UNSC. Secondly, you get facilities like the Pegasi Delta and K7-49, one a prominent fuel refinery and the other a small planetoid shipyard. Thirdly, the volume of space the Covenant encompasses is probably vast - they've had a little over three thousand years to expand, after all, and I doubt a fast-breeding race like the Grunts would be confined only to Balaho.

Given all that, I still find it weird that the Covenant took so long to destroy humanity, when they should have steamrolled them incredibly quickly with their vast fleets and legions. I thought for a while that it might have been a human/forerunner situation, where you're only seeing a small sideshow in a much larger game, that the Covenant was already at war with something that we never got to see, and that humanity got what the Covenant could spare against them, and still came close to extinction. The presence of a sentient species that had investigated Alpha Halo long before the UNSC or Covenant is clear evidence that other spacefaring races exist, and we never did get much of an idea about what they were. But then, if that were true, I would imagine that we would have seen them by now what with the collapse of the Covenant into its successor states, and so far they've failed to materialise in five years, and their Elite allies haven't said a word about any kind of threat to humanity. -- Qura 'Morhek ^{The Autocrat of Morheka} 20:30, 24 February 2014 (EST)

Bear in mind what the Covenant fleet may have looked like before they encountered humanity. It seems like getting the other client races to join the Elites and Prophets was not really terribly difficult. If they'd come across many more technologically inferior races in the meantime they would probably also have been in the Covenant as well. So they may not have had an extensive fleet before encountering humanity. That's when I'd surmise that they really went all out on ship production and that probably took a while into the war. -ScaleMaster117 (talk) 22:35, 24 February 2014 (EST)

This Thread continues the debate on the scope and capacity of the Covenant. http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/post-war-unsc-vs-covenant.287315/page-10 ProphetofTruth (talk) 23:35, 24 February 2014 (EST)

While there can be all sorts of factors at play beyond assumed peak efficiency derived from simple mathematical calculations, I do agree that the Covenant's industrial output must've been absolutely ludicrous. One of the reasons I dislike the Kilo-Five trilogy is because that aspect—the sheer scale of the Covenant—got basically glossed over with no explanation apart from the disappearance of the Huragok. It shouldn't even be physically possible for a militaristic empire that has stood for over three millennia to fall apart in a few months, or for its iron heart to be degraded below humanity. Most of the UNSC's industrial base would've been devastated by the war, along with their populations and military centers. But how many Covenant industrial centers did the UNSC manage to touch? K7-49 and High Charity were major ones, yes, but beyond those? Most of their infrastructure would still be intact; this was already hinted at by the description for Assembly years ago: "The Covenant war machine continues its march to conquest; even with its head severed it is still dangerous." Makes you think about the postwar status quo and how powerful the Sangheili really are—or should be—in relation to the UNSC.

@Morhek: Halo: Ghosts of Onyx, page 342: "We have been slowly losing this war. Slowly, I think, because we had not been the main focus of the Covenant hegemony until recently. Now they have found and targeted Earth." Always wondered what that meant. Hmm... --Jugus (Talk | Contribs) 23:51, 24 February 2014 (EST)

If the Covenant were facing another enemy we would have heard about it from the Arbiter by now. Also, I'm not at all annoyed with the collapse of the Covenant. Margaret and Serin make it clear what happened when they discuss how they need to order the Huragok not to improve anything without a direct order or supervision. The Covenant just let them wander around freely changing whatever they want. You wake up and suddenly all your furniture is anti-grav. You're not sure how it got that way, you don't really care, you move on. for 3,000 years they just let these guys aimlessly improve whatever they floated by. I see that causing major problems when suddenly you need to replace something but the last time you built it with your personal knowledge base was centuries ago. ProphetofTruth (talk) 08:12, 25 February 2014 (EST)

That is assuming the Huragok also performed all manual labor in Covenant industry, as opposed to sticking to the rare "innovation" and repairs to existing technology. For something as random as you described, you'd imagine the Covenant would be a technological and aesthetic mess, yet what we see is a very rigid consistency in their technology. This speaks of large-scale standardization and mass production as opposed to everything being accomplished through microscale tinkering solely by Huragok. Thus it's rather obvious that the Covenant had the capability to reproduce their technology through non-Huragok means, even if they didn't understand half the science involved. Although it bears noting that since the Kilo-Five series turned the Huragok from "good at fixing things" to technogods who can casually build anything anywhere out of nothing, very few things are actually certain. I also fail to see the logic in the Huragok simply disappearing from the hundreds of Sangheili-held ships still intact. How exactly did they "flee"? Did they hitch a ride out? Did they steal single ships? Did they teleport away? We may never know. --Jugus (Talk | Contribs) 11:13, 25 February 2014 (EST)

@ScaleMaster: going from a fleet designed to put down slave rebellions or heretics to one where you can throw fleets of hundreds at Reach and Earth is still a significant achievement, and is itself a testament to the Covenant's industrial capacity. Even over nearly thirty years, the sheer scale of a change of that kind is impressive.

@ProphetofTruth: I'd never thought about the Huragok that way. I think it's ingrained into our collective fan conscious that the Covenant's lack of understanding of their own technology was due to religious/political reasons, the Elites deeming any tampering heresy and the Prophets not trusting anyone but them with the knowledge. I'd never realised the effect of having the Huragok in that capacity would have. Interesting.

@Jugus: wow. That quote. I knew there was something lurking in the back of my memory, but all the way back to Ghosts of Onyx? It makes me think that the Covenant finally defeated whatever enemy it might have been fighting at the time, which explains the sudden increase of fleet numbers just as the UNSC was close to reaching technological parity, where you from engagements where a dozen or so ships is a daunting prospect to something like the Fleet of Particular Justice at Reach. Unfortunate for humanity though, but it would also explain why they didn't make a sudden resurgence when the Covenant fell. Once again, not saying I'm convinced that this is the case, but it is an interesting possibility, one which I hope 343 manages to incorporate somehow. -- Qura 'Morhek ^{The Autocrat of Morheka} 16:11, 25 February 2014 (EST)

Some of the Prophet of Truth's internal dialogue in Contact Harvest suggests that he didn't think the Covenant's heart would really be in a long, genocidal war - after all, they'd never done it before. Why now? It wasn't a if he could tell them the exact reason why he'd decided to launch one. Assuming no other external enemy the Covenant had to fight, this suggests to me that the Covenant basically fought most of the war with their pre-war force and nothing else. Perhaps there were a few build-ups, for example, the one that produced the massive fleet Truth assembled at the Unyielding Hierophant or the Fleet of Particular Justice, but not many. I imagine it was something truly drastic - perhaps a certain SPARTAN-III raid, or even something as late as the destruction of Installation 04 - that finally kicked them into full war production mode.--The All-knowing Sith'ari (talk) 19:17, 25 February 2014 (EST)

Still, given that more recent fiction has further emphasized the Sangheili as a military-only race when it came to their service in the Covenant, even their pre-war military must have been comparatively massive to accommodate the vast majority of the total Sangheili population serving there. Some could've obviously served on planetary garrisons in the absence of ships and many probably did, though the Covenant always struck to me more as the kind of faction who'd keep fleets of warships lying around as spares as opposed to holding back on production for pragmatic reasons. An absurdly powerful military with nothing to do is a good deterrent, if nothing else, especially if you're a hegemonic empire bent on enslavement. Then again you have to account for the issue of scale - what constitutes a modest patrol force to keep the client species in line to the Covenant would probably look like an unending horde of fleets to the UNSC. That's what a head start of three millennia tends to do. --Jugus (Talk | Contribs) 23:54, 25 February 2014 (EST)

True. The larger the sphere of space your territory emcompasses, plus the proportionally larger number of heavily-populated colonies, the more ships and troops needed to patrol and control them. Plus an exponentially larger three-dimensional frontier to patrol. -- Qura 'Morhek ^{The Autocrat of Morheka} 00:44, 26 February 2014 (EST)

This is supported by the Walk in the Park cutscene in Halo Wars. Prophet of Regret: "The war with the humans will require a great deal many more machines than we can currently muster." Ripa 'Moramee: "I will take what we have!" Prophet of Regret: "And leave us defenseless? No. The Ancients will provide for us." It was this cutscene that gave me the impression that the Covenant were being over precautious with their ships.Sith-venator Wavingstrider (Commlink) 01:52, 26 February 2014 (EST)

Given all that, I still find it weird that the Covenant took so long to destroy humanity, when they should have steamrolled them incredibly quickly with their vast fleets and legions. If the Covenant really wanted to exterminate humanity without giving them a chance at all, all they'd have to do is drop antimatter bombs from orbit and destroy their planets one by one. Battles shouldn't have even happened thanks to orbital bombardment by plasma. Much of the chances at all came from the Covenant's own honorific arrogance. Tuckerscreator^(stalk) 15:34, 26 February 2014 (EST)

Plus the "Forerunner relics" that they were hunting for. Anti-mattering those might earn the wrath of the Prophets. In fact, I'd love to know what kind of impact the relics they found during the war had - did that improve their tech base any? Can the jump in fleet numbers be attributed to that? -- Qura 'Morhek ^{The Autocrat of Morheka} 16:13, 26 February 2014 (EST)

Interesting idea. It'd be cool to see proof of their weapons or ship designs expanding as a result of these discoveries. Granted, it'd be partially stunted as, not being Reclaimers, they wouldn't have full access to the relics' abilities.

It shouldn't even be physically possible for a militaristic empire that has stood for over three millennia to fall apart in a few months, or for its iron heart to be degraded below humanity. From what I've read of empires' falling despite having worldwide might, it's usually because they were already rotting away from the inside to begin with. That doesn't seem to be the case with the Covenant. There were political disputes and Grunt rebellions but overall the system they had was working and they were at the height of their military splendor. The overthrowing of the Prophets was a major blow to the Covenant, but even so that that should realistically be merely the beginning of the end, not the end itself. Perhaps that's why Jul 'Mdama's faction is still referred to as "the Covenant", because the empire itself hasn't really ceased to exist, just become highly fractured. Tuckerscreator^(stalk) 21:08, 26 February 2014 (EST)

It's not unlike the post-RotJ scenario in the Star Wars universe. The death of the Emperor and destruction of the second Death Star doesn't magically make the rest of the Empire and their military assets disappear, and neither should Truth's death. --Jugus (Talk | Contribs) 00:48, 27 February 2014 (EST)

It shouldn't even be physically possible for a militaristic empire that has stood for over three millennia to fall apart in a few months, or for its iron heart to be degraded below humanity. From the perspective of military output, one possibility for this collapse is that the Engineers set up some kind of manufacturing plants operated by Yanme'e, and run by Prophets. We have seen that the Yanme'e were often used as manual labor, and the prophets had an extreme role as managing, and perhaps micromanaging. If these three species, the Engineers, Yanme'e, and Prophets, were lost, then, according to this rather improbable train of events, it would be more than possible for the covenant to collapse. just an idea. 343i really has a lot of explaining to do about how the covenant really got to be the way it did. I'm glad that Karen Traviss wasn't able to completely screw over the transition. --Weeping Angel (talk) 00:13, 27 February 2014 (EST)

I would count the simmering, decades-long tension between the Elites and Brutes as a definite source of cultural rot - the long-time resentment of the Brutes at being denied the status they feel they are entitled to, and the suspicion and contempt the Elites have at what they saw as usurpers. Add to that unresolved issues between Jackals and Grunts, and stretch it out across a vast empire, and you have a perfect storm for imperial over-extension. -- Qura 'Morhek ^{The Autocrat of Morheka} 00:40, 27 February 2014 (EST)

The status quo presented in the Kilo-Five novels would have been more plausible if the events had been moved a year or two forward in the timeline; other silly things like the introduction of the MJOLNIR Mark VII only months after the Mark VI would've been more justified (there wasn't much point to the offhand Mark VII mention anyway, since it didn't go anywhere). But the Sangheili war machine fracturing completely only 3-4 months after the Schism began? I don't buy it, even if we were to assume their industry collapsed completely with the Huragok/Yanme'e. And the question of how exactly all those Huragok on Sangheili ships just spontaneously disappeared is still up in the air. It's mentioned in passing, but no one ever adequately explains how their apparent mass migration happened. --Jugus (Talk | Contribs) 00:48, 27 February 2014 (EST)