So what exactly is happening when a character is disintegrated in halo 4? For the knights it’s some sort of data purge. But for the elites grunts and Spartans, what exactly is happening? It looks similar to what happens when someone is composed by the composer. Also why does the disintegration effect only happen with certain forerunner weapons? Is there any cannon explanation about what is going on here?
Yes, I’m pretty sure they are ‘composed’.
Since they’re Forerunner weapons, they were designed to take on the Flood. The Flood are hard to kill, lots of shots going thru them and all, the FR’s wanted to invent weapons to elimenate Flood bodies, making sure they were dead and wouldn’t come back. So… yeah. Composition and/or Flood control. Or both.
That’s my crack at it.
Let the curiosity flow through you.
I’ll call the forerunner handgun pistol because my thing autocorrect it to Bolshoi a lot…
Suppressor
Lightrifle
They shoot hard light.
http://www.halopedia.org/images/2/24/H4-MP-Z130Suppressor-AmmoReload.jpg
You can see the recharge ammo is small. Small cylinders. The Lightrifle can pierce through a marine, it basically incinerates the area it goes through. Pretty powerful weapons nonetheless, better than covie/human equivalents.
Pistol shoots ionized particles.
The pistol’s recharge ammo is bigger but that may be part of the gun. It can still be overcharged though.
Now disintegration weapons.
Binary rifle
Incineration cannon
Scattershot
Pulse grenade
http://www.halopedia.org/images/0/04/H4-MP-BinaryRifle-AmmoPack.jpg
http://www.halopedia.org/File:H4-MP-ScattershotRifle-AmmoReload.jpg
They fire ionized particles. The pulse grenade is an ionization pulse thing. You can see the ammo recharge is larger compared to the number of rounds fired. The BiRi and incineration cannon bury antimatter particles within the ionized particles. It would likely be safe to assume the scattershot does too. These weapons completely disintegrate an enemy when it comes in contact.
Antimatter annihilate the enemy.
Composers are other things. This is just incinerating and disintegrating the enemy.
Wow never thought of anti mater as an explanation. That would make some sense I guess. Why the whole breaking down into orange snow flakes though? And why does this process look like what the composer does? Oh and also why does the anti mater not disintegrate the warthog? Also why do both disintegration and composition look exactly like a knight’s data purge?
> Why the whole breaking down into orange snow flakes though? And why does this process look like what the composer does? Oh and also why does the anti mater not disintegrate the warthog? Also why do both disintegration and composition look exactly like a knight’s data purge?
All of these are excellent questions! I wish I was more an authority on this but I will throw my hat in to the conversation. The “orange snowflake” effect would be due to the fact that the residual energies are cooling into ash. The start of “white-hot” then cool at a consistent rate. The technology for this effect would be similar in nature to the composer but without the composers digitizing effect. The knights are already composed so their “exit” leaves behind the data purge. As for the effect not disintegrating a warthog? Unknown, I should think that it would but some things get left out.
Hope this was a helpful post!
Scale master thought about it actually I believe. But it might just be due to specific matter being targeted.
> Wow never thought of anti mater as an explanation. That would make some sense I guess. Why the whole breaking down into orange snow flakes though? And why does this process look like what the composer does? Oh and also why does the anti mater not disintegrate the warthog? Also why do both disintegration and composition look exactly like a knight’s data purge?
I like all the science explanations and all the effort the previous guy put in to link all the stuff, but I honestly think that the disintegrating effects of some of the guns was just 343 wanting to make the kills look cool (in the context of the game). As for the vehicles, they probably just totally forgot about them. Or the sciencey answer, whichever you prefer.