Stuff like Predator drones where you can fly high above the enemy and drop bombs and rockets on them. I know in Halo Wars 2 the sniper does have some kind of spotter drone alongside him but I can’t think of anything beyond that.
I know Halo is grounded in 80s sci fi so, in practice, the technology is actually less advanced than what we use today. Is that a correct picture or do you think it’s more that the games are focusing on the Spartans and Marines rather than all the heavy weapons they do have?
As an aside, for any military buffs out there. If a military today had a Smart AI like Cortana, how big a deal would that be and how would that interact with technology we have already like drones?
1 Like
I don’t think drones are used too much in Halo, the UNSC seem to prefer crewed aircraft, like the Longsword, Broadsword, or Shortsword (creative right?). There are things like orbital surveillance, but I wouldn’t really call that a drone.
You’re absolutely right when you say that Halo is set in 80s sci-fi. It embraces a very unique style of retro-futurism and sticks closer to the rule of cool over actual practicality. Badass pilots from Top Gun are generally cooler than an automated drone.
Edit: although drones do appear in Halo 3 ODST, somewhat regularly too.
3 Likes
Yes, they use drones - drones were featured in ODST, tangentially, and seemed to indicate a fighter variant of the drones in use in that particular story. It is reasonable to assume that other forms of drone are in use as well, especially as the games continue to pick up themes from more modern military settings (i.e., bullpups aren’t everything and thus we get the Commando…)
I think the game focuses on the infantry and infantry vehicle side of the UNSC since that’s where player interaction takes place.
If the military had a smart AI, a lot of the use would come into sensor analysis and systems integration. Currently, our militaries worldwide struggle with integrating data from one system and integrating it with another, and each system struggles to interpret the data it does gather to ensure its information is accurate and useful. So, for instance, you’ve got radar systems that struggle to feed data to anti-missile defenses, and both the radar and anti-missile defense systems struggle to identify if the target they’re tracking is indeed a valid target, and struggle to identify if/how they can engage it. Algorithmic interpretation of sensor data is a heavy topic in today’s defense industries, especially in areas such as identifying a valid signal amongst a noisy data set.
3 Likes
I really can’t remember the drones in ODST. Was one of them the memory mission triggers?
Yeah there’s not many call in fire support missions. Usually you are the support.
How much of a deal would that be if you had all that stuff working together? It kind of goes understated in the game. Like in Infinite where you take Mortal Reverie and the Weapon suppresses the Battlenet in that location; allowing the Pilot to land safely without being shot down. Not to mention just being able to snoop on all of their communications and troop movements.
Yes, it was the trigger for Dutch’s mission I believe.
For current day militaries it’s one of the largest hurdles facing us. We have tons of data - but it’s not interlinked, nor interpreted. Having everything communicating data through a centralized system that can interpret the data and ensure the appropriate information is shown to the parties who need it and extraneous information is filtered out - that would be a legitimate force multiplier. I’m a car guy, so I like car analogies - it’s like having a tuned Hellcat motor putting out insane horsepower, but you’ve only got skinny tires and can’t put but a fraction of that power to use for forward momentum - it’s completely wasted.
1 Like
I think the tricky part is they want chief to be the ‘special military thing’ for obvious reasons. As such, the only tech that gets kinda high tech is the ships, otherwise the military is fairly barebones.
Yeah, whilst the Banished are all “drive closer so I can hit them with my hammer”. Not sure that’s a winning strategy against 50 cal machine guns and drones with missiles. 
There’s a lot of dramatic license. If anything I felt the books suffered from trying to rationalise and make the human characters too self aware of that. Like there’s one bit where a sniper picks off a gold armoured elite and he’s all huh huh, dumb aliens for wearing bright colours. Little too close to deriding the source material. But then later on the UNSC do weird cartoonish things like form an infantry square. The Flood was a weird book from what I recall.
The Flood is not the best book in the EU, for sure. I find it best to generally disregard that particular book, IMO.
The Flood was a really odd book, by an author who would go on to write and even weirder mass effect novel.
I don’t really have a problem with characters pointing out flaws in the enemy’s patterns. The covenant does a lot of things in the most bizzare way, and there’s only so much you can do to make the UNSC just be okay with that.
2 Likes
Looking back it’s a nice change of pace from “the Banished are this unstoppable force” because they use hit and run tactics. To which there is no counter because they’re using big brain tactics where the Covenant was dumb. 
Hit and run tactics that involve the deployment of capital ships, tanks and aircraft to invade planets. 
Where they have soldiers whose job is to run at you like berserkers with fists. What ever shall we do against such reckless hate?
I ll be curious about how Rubicon Protocal is going to explain away some of this. For example the way the audio logs describe it they just send a horde to the Mortal Reverie and overrun it. What stops a few 50 cal machine guns and mortars stopping that in its tracks? I guess they will have wraiths but at that point why aren’t they just glassing it from orbit?