My understanding is it kills all sentient life, not the flood itself, and starves them out? Is this correct?
also at the end of Halo 3 when they light the ring, does the ring actually fire, or does it self destruct from a pre mature firing?
“Kill all sentient life, not the Flood itself, and starves the Flood out” was the explanation given by Cortana in Combat Evolved. The catch is that post-CE media does often show the Flood getting directly killed by Halo’s pulses, and on top of that the Flood are shown to be “sentient” as well. So my take is Halos just kill everything.
Installation 08 was destroyed by its own firing due to its incomplete status at the time. As for if you can call a “pre-mature firing” an “actual firing”? That’s probably more about nit-picking words. The one sure thing is that it did not unleash the power of a full-fledged Halo, or else there should be no sentient wildlife left on the Ark, nor should there be any Flood suriving in High Charity’s remains. The former is described in Halo novels, and the latter is presented in the Halo Wars 2 DLC.
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> My understanding is it kills all sentient life, not the flood itself, and starves them out? Is this correct?
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> also at the end of Halo 3 when they light the ring, does the ring actually fire, or does it self destruct from a pre mature firing?
We see from the test-firings of Halos in Halo: Cryptum that the Halos do in fact kill all sentient life, including sentient plants. However, the original 12 Halos didn’t destroy the bodies of those killed, so the Forerunners developed a substance that they could spread which would interact with the Halos’ energies to obliterate all biomass killed by the Halos. In the story “Shadow of Intent” in Halo: Fractures, we learn that the Halos don’t evaporate the bodies, because even the atoms that made up their bodies aren’t present after the Halos’ energy passes (discovered via a test-firing of a Halo Prototype, most likely a prototype for the second set of Halos).
Origins 1&2 from the Halo Legends series shows that the Halos do kill Flood biomass, at least the complex forms… it’s possible that individual spores already reverted to their “innert” state might not be affected.
At the end of Halo 3, the Halo misfires, and the explosion kills large amounts of Flood, as well as creatures living on the Ark, but it doesn’t actually emit the pulse that would have killed everything within the 25,000 Light Year radius.
So, am I correct in saying the general conclusion is the halo ring kills everything sentient: human, flood, etc? And that CE is the only source that states it kills everything except the flood, in an attempt to starve it; meaning that explanation is retconned?
as well as 08s early firing in halo 3 more or less being a self destruct rather than a true firing of a ring?
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> At the end of Halo 3, the Halo misfires, and the explosion kills large amounts of Flood, as well as creatures living on the Ark, but it doesn’t actually emit the pulse that would have killed everything within the 25,000 Light Year radius.
The ATN Phoenix logs indicate that the Halo did in fact emit the pulse that kills sentient beings. Tragic Solitude left a log that explicitly says the Gravemind was destroyed by the “cleansing energies” of the ring. So to some degree the phase pulse was produced. Why seemingly only the gravemind was affected has not been explained, and is one of my primary issues with ATN as a whole.
In the guidebook that comes with halo 2 on original xbox it has a recap of the story of CE told by Cortana and she says there “The AI neglected to tell him however, that because the Flood consumes any suitable sentient host, Halo would make no distinction between the Flood and other life forms.”
This would mean that Halo was intended to kill the flood, but because they couldn’t just target the flood super cell, they had to target the nervous systems of all sentient life forms, as those could be potential vectors for the Flood. So no it doesn’t kill everything to starve the flood, that explanation was retconned as long ago as Halo 2. Now the explanation is that by destroying the nervous system of the host bodies that the flood infected it kills the flood, but since they can’t distinguish between non infected nervous systems and infected ones, everyone has to die.
The halo ring concept is too complicated for me. Just let me shoot things and I’m happy.
The way Halo works as explained in lore is by targeting and destroying the nervous systems of sentient life. This is why creatures without sufficiently advanced nervous systems will survive the firing and why hunters for instance would likely be totally unaffected were Halo to fire. In fact it’s likely the first Lekgolo worms encountered by the Covenant had been on that Forerunner installation since the first firing of the rings.
Something interesting and not often talked about is that it’s mentioned that Halo’s frequency can be fine tuned to affect nervous systems of specific levels of complexity, meaning in a way it can be used as a targeted (broad, but still targeted) weapon against species of a certain evolution level in their nervous system.