Talk:Sagittarius Arm

Onyx

Can we really assume Onyx's supposed placement in the Sagittarius Arm in the Warfleet map is exact? We know Zeta Doradus is a mere 38 LY away, an insignificant distance by galactic standards and hardly far enough to put it in another spiral arm than Earth. Halo has been known to adhere to real-world astronomy even when it would make sense to move stars around a bit (e.g. Epsilon Indi being 11 LY from Earth and the long trip to Harvest being caused by the alien geometry of slipspace), so I don't see why this case would be an exception. I think it would be much safer to assume the Warfleet map shows a rough ballpark for these Forerunner sites and maybe depicts them a bit further apart than they really would be for the sake of visual clarity, rather than to assume that Zeta Doradus has been relocated well over a thousand light-years away. --Tacitus (talk) 01:56, 10 September 2018 (EDT)

Crap. You're right. In real life it is close to where the Orion spur shoots off, but is still definitely within Orion.~~TheEld

The Warfleet map is not to scale and should not be used (as a map) except in the most broad, general sense of where Forerunner/Human objects are relative to one another. I fought hard to get the map more accurate or removed entirely from the book, but it was determined it would remain. I did get a few things nudged here and there but in reality, the galaxy is a HUGE place and you can't with any accuracy use giant icons on a 2-page spread and determine where things are. My hope is this page will mostly be ignored. - ScaleMaster117 (talk) 11:52, 10 September 2018 (EDT)

Thank you for the info. I'm not a huge fan of some of the decisions on that map myself so it's good to have my reservations about its accuracy substantiated. --Tacitus (talk) 12:38, 10 September 2018 (EDT)

Thanks for the info. The huge icons aren't showing where things are, though. They have lines connecting them to dots. I'm sort of baffled why the dot couldn't be placed more accurately in this case for Zeta Doradus.TheEld (talk) 13:05, 10 September 2018 (EDT)TheEld

To TheELd, what I mean is the dots as a white circle with the black circle around them are still covering a space on the map about 500 light years in radius, which is about the general area of all the known Halo fiction stars so far that we know with a few outliers. It's hard to show even stars relative to one another on a map that size. They knew that at that scale Earth and Onyx would be pretty much touching, but they wanted to show an overview of items on the map, but it wasn't feasible to do so, which is why I wanted the page axed. I have the beginnings of a Halo map that portrays the known Haloverse and real stars with a 500 light year radius and I have about 300 stars on my map. Earth isn't even well-defined in the Warfleet map as it has no dot. -ScaleMaster117 (talk) 17:52, 10 September 2018 (EDT)

Holy shit, I would love to see that.TheEld (talk) 19:23, 10 September 2018 (EDT)TheEld

(Indent reset) So I take it by all means the only stuff we should care about from said map is

• Symbols of forerunner locations
• Names of stuff
• And it being used as a very broad map that is not 100% accurate.

That said I still need to source (which I have a semi-answer on twitter https://twitter.com/GrimBrotherOne/status/900142990433296385?s=19 ) that our real life galaxy is not accurate to Halos. With stuff not being 1 to 1. (That isnt even considering the "minor" 500 year shift in stuff)-CIA391 (talk) 04:15, 11 September 2018 (EDT)

Even if 343 came out and said that the Halo galaxy isn't 1:1 with the real-world, I think it's reasonable to believe at least the basic orders of magnitude apply in regards to distances. Since all of the human sphere could realistically fit in a small dot on the Warfleet map (a fact I think 343i even brought up in their Warfleet stream), that kind of rules out the notion of colonies existing as far out as Onyx is depicted on the map. Especially when we do have an established distance for Zeta Doradus and several others. And besides, we kind of have an implicit limit on the size of the human sphere. The 2010 reprint of The Fall of Reach removed a reference to Beta Centauri (a star 350 LY away) housing a human colony. Since the change would otherwise be pretty random, it can be surmised that it was due to the star's distance; especially when most of the real-world stars identified in Halo fall within tens of light-years of Earth (with 23 Librae, IIRC, being the furthest out at 83 LY). The quirks of slipspace do muddy this up somewhat (as notoriously shown with Harvest), with things like slipspace "eddies" or the transit nodes introduced in Silent Storm, but again, I don't think 343i would've changed the Beta Centauri reference if their approach had been totally "anything goes" in regards to distances. --Tacitus (talk) 05:02, 11 September 2018 (EDT)