> This may seem like an obvious question, but I’m going to ask it anyway- Exactly how far has the UNSC fleet advanced since the events of Halo 3 in 2553?
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> During Halo 3, Lord Hood states that he has only a handful of ships left; these are later shown to be a few frigates and Longsword fighters. At this time, the Infinity is half-built and lacks its Forerunner tech (a feature later added thanks to Dr. Halsey), and a few ships are presumably left in systems away from Earth. Aside from this, though, the UNSC essentially has no Navy.
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> Fast forward to 2557 onward; the Infinity is now complete and in action, and is being hyped as an invincible force and humanity’s ultimate power. However, it really isn’t enough to ensure human dominance by itself. It’s only one ship, and not even the biggest out there.
> 343 has over-focused on Infinity in its media (games, books, comics, etc.), and as a result we’ve learned very little about the UNSC’s reconstruction efforts elsewhere. Presumably the Navy is rebuilt and improved, aided by Huragok and Forerunner technology; does anyone else know exactly what assets and ships the UNSC has available now?
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> I did notice a small clue in Spartan Ops; when Infinity arrives at Requiem and engages the Storm Covenant there, it deploys a number of frigates as escorts. When one of these frigates is hit by Covenant fire, energy shields can be seen flaring along its length.
> Does this mean the UNSC has added shields and similarly improved technology to all of its ships? How large of a fleet does the Navy have aside from Infinity and its battlegroup?
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> If anyone can help me out with this, thanks…
It is possible that the UNSC had hundreds of ships left during the events of halo 3. Some might have been months away protecting some of the serving inner colonies or in petrol or were still in slipspace in route to earth. The UNSC didn’t have the fastest FTL and it took a long time to get any where.
About post war, they upgraded big time.
Strident class heavy Frigate, the one you see being deployed from the Infinity. Its equipped with a heavy MAC and not a light MAC like the charons and tge biggest of all the other frigate classes.
Autumn Class Heavy cruiser, essentially the pillar of autumn but 300 meters bigger and probably wity energy shields as stridents are equipped with shields. And the Infinity is escorted by 13 of this things (Battlegroup Dakota).
Sahara class heavy prowler. 281 meters long, 155 meters wide and 62 meters high. It has Pulse lasers, shivas and Hornet mines. And the Infinity has a hanger large enough to fit one in with allot of left over space, allot.
We also see a few unknown cruisers in requem deploying spartans after halsey got kidnapped. So either they managed to get to requem in under a day like the Infinity or were in route for a while. If they did get to requem in under a day or a few, the UNSC is now have way better FTL drives.
And we further see more unknown ships taking fire and being blown up by the didacts ship when you are told to disable the Particle Cannons. As well as a crap ton of Broadswords on the back ground.
In the Thursdays war we have Pelicans upgraded with slipspace drives thanks to some Huragoks.
And about the Huragoks, the UNSC would have every ship in the fleet by 2558 equipped with a compartment of Huragoks. It was in mentioned in the Thursdays war.
The Infinitys MACs are capable of engaging the didact at a range of over 5000 thousand km and hit under a second. So the Infinity either has ship SMAC’s or something close to it.
About Fleet strength, unknown. Could be in the hundreds or even in prewar numbers. It might have seam like the UNSC was on the wrong end of the stick by the of the war. They really weren’t. They had a ton of surviving colonies. And with the war over they can concentrate on rebuilding and not mass producing everything to ship out and to get destroyed by the Covenant. In 5 years they could have fully recovered, in terms of ships numbers, as they are not getting blasted a week after leaving the ship yard.