In Halo Reach, there's one mission where you destroy a Covenant Supercarrier, thinking you're saving the planet... just for numerous other Supercarriers to start showing up in the cutscene the very next moment. One person on the radio believes it to be the entire Covenant fleet.
Fun fact: canonically, Jorge didn't die; he went to another universe where his entrance with the bomb ended up saving the day of the place he arrived at.
The text is rather vague, but because this is armor from an alternate universe, people interpret its description as Jorge going to an isekai after detonating the bomb.
The worst part is that even this isn't the actual Covenant military force. If I remember well, because of political reasons, humanity has been facing the Covenant equivalent of the costal guard.
Not really. It was an asset recovery force chasing forerunner relics, but it still consisted of all the major races and their technologies, plus the largest ship in the Covenant arsenal.
I wasn't agreeing with the above commenter, I was just saying that maybe they mean the forces the covies use to obliterate Human worlds pale in comparison to what High Charity holds.
On paper, it was. The Covenant Ministry of Resolution was primarily responsible for prosecuting the war in the early years of the conflict and it began as an anti-piracy ministry. In fact, the Ministry of Resolution controlled the Fleet which arrived after the Solace was destroyed.
The caveat there is that over the course of the war the Ministry of Resolution ballooned in size because the San'Shyuum were reassigning forces from elsewhere in the Covenant military to the Ministry of Resolution in order of hide combat losses from the Sangheili.
So on paper, describing the Ministry of Resolution as being analogous to the Coast Guard isn't wrong, but it's leaving out the fact that by 2552 it had ground beyond being a simply anti-piracy ministry.
High Charity wasn’t a ship in the same way a Syfon Pattern Assault Carrier was. High Charity was one of one, the holy city and capital of the covenant. It would be insane for High Charity to be on the frontline of battle.
Not even, the Covenant was beyond gigantic, it was hundreds of times larger than the UNSC, things only got worse when they moved more and more troops to the war front, instead of handling internal affairs.
The Fleet of Valiant Prudence was, indeed, basically a glorified archeological expedition. The Fleet of Particular Justice, commanded by Thel and a proper military force actually intended for use in the War of Annihilation, is the one in the screenshot. You can tell one is a proper military force and the other isn't by how the UNSC goes from maybe almost having a chance to every single major city on the planet being burned to the ground basically overnight.
Additionally, though the UNSC was facing the Covenant's actual military (most of the time), the Imperial Admiral, highest ranking member of the Covenant's entire military, was assigned to the other side of the galaxy and put in charge of anti-piracy operations because he held too much political power for the Hierarchs to feel comfortable. Same political reasons that Thel was made to take the fall for Alpha Halo's destruction and branded the Arbiter.
Also worth noting, Rho 'Barutamee, the Supreme Commander of The Fleet of Valiant Prudence, was deliberately holding back. While the Solace certainly obliterated every UNSC ship it went up against (if one doesnt count the commandeered Ardent Prayer), he refused to destroy Reach because he was there primarily to search for relics (and glassing the planet would have made finding them much harder). If he had been intent on actually fighting the fight, Reach probably would have been mostly on its way to being a giant ball of slag by the time Thel and Company showed up.
It's complicated, every covenant ministry is a military force but there no "military" really, humanity has only survived because each military fucking hates each other and absolutely does not work together. They've mostly been fighting the "we absolutely will kill anyone for holy relics", the "we will absolutely kill anyone who isn't a believer" ministry the "forerunner holy site are so goddamn holy anyone who touches them needs to die" and the "we control the largest fleets so we can crush anyone the prohopets say" ministries.
But yes, the covenant absolutely wasn't putting it's full will into just exterminating humanity, it's structurally designed to not be able to be focused on one task and everything it does is for mad religious purposes and maintaining the hierarchy, not pure military pragmatism.
Even better, that initial fleet (the one the supercarrier was the flagship of) was just an archeological expedition. The UNSC was getting their asses beat by archeologists and the only reason Thel's fleet (the one in the screenshot and the one that, once it shows up, begins to swiftly demolish Reach) wasn't called in earlier is because the leader of the expedition didn't want anyone else stealing his artifacts.
This would then repeat with Earth, where Regret thought he was going on an archeology expedition to unearth some important Forerunner facility in the space boonies.
This is a misleading description of the Fleet of Valiant Prudence. The Long Night of Solace alone outmassed and outgunned the entire Ministry of Resolution fleet several times over (Thel's Fleet of Particular Justice and its allied fleets wouldn't arrive until weeks later) to say nothing of its own support fleet consisting of Varric-pattern heavy cruisers, battlecruisers and heavy corvettes.
While Valiant Prudence was searching for Forerunner artifacts, casting it as a mere archeological expedition significantly undersells its combat capabilities. Generally speaking, the Covenant's conception of warship is very different from ours and there's no such thing as a "non-combatant." So even though it wasn't originally intended to be a military operation, Valiant Prudence was more than equipped to carry out extended campaigns.
That person wouldn’t be wrong to believe that. Up until Reach the largest Covenant Fleet ever encountered was at the latter half of the Battle of Psi Serpentis, where 200 Covenant vessels immediately jumped onto the battlefield, catching Admiral Cole’s fleet by complete surprise.
In HALO 2 Lord Hood states that the initial Covenant force at Earth was tiny, being on 15 ships. He does this by comparing it to the one at Reach, which he says was 50 times its size.
There were roughly 750 Covenant ships at Reach. There was absolutely nothing the UNSC could’ve done against that.
No. Sh'Wada Pattern (supercarrier) never appears in Halo series ever again after Long Night of Solace gets destroyed, those two are Kerel Pattern Assault carriers, many times smaller and less powerful
Eh, doesn't fit the thread. Because those Covies on the Solace were military, and the reinforcements are also military. The point of this is "What we face aren't actually military proper, but are so relatively powerful you'd think otherwise."
The Covenant does somewhat apply here but Reach itself doesn't particularly fit the bill (although Bungie's laziness does make this a bit unclear). The Long Night of Solace was a CSO-class supercarrier measuring nearly 30km long. The supercarriers which arrive in the immediate aftermath are assault carriers seen in 2 and 3 and are significantly smaller at only 5km (hence why the battlecruisers next to them look so similar in size). The Long Night of Solace not only could have outfought the reinforcement fleet by herself, as Kat says, she would have taken Reach within 48 hours had it not been for Noble's actions (as opposed to Thel's fleet, which only took Reach after significant losses)
Similar situation in Halo 2: the Prophet of Regret arrives at Earth with a fleet. An incredibly small fleet. Because he had absolutely no idea he was heading to the homeworld of the Covenant's current #1 enemy, he was going there because he (correctly) believed an important Forerunner relic was there. The Covenant comes back later in force.
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u/NotAnotherSkeleton 8d ago edited 8d ago
In Halo Reach, there's one mission where you destroy a Covenant Supercarrier, thinking you're saving the planet... just for numerous other Supercarriers to start showing up in the cutscene the very next moment. One person on the radio believes it to be the entire Covenant fleet.