> > A time jump will required eventually if 343i want to simultaneously maintain the threat level of the Flood whilst giving their characters even a slim chance of surviving in a believable way. If they don’t do it, then 343i can only either have the Flood encounters from here on out as small and isolated events that current humanity could deal with (Similar to what we faced in Halo Wars, Halo 2 and Halo 3, basically), or respect the scale of the Flood threat as implied by Silentium resulting in the deaths of everyone via the Flood or Halo array activation.
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> > The Flood invasion, as per implied by Silentium, will strike on a galactic scale and hence the defense of the galaxy will likewise have to be proportional, which is quite a number of years beyond current humanity. Unless of course we get some Gears of War 3 style Dues Ex Machina, which would be the height of laziness imo.
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> It’s not a matter of technology; short of something like time travel or reality-warping weaponry, no amount of sufficiently advanced technology can defeat the Flood once they get a grip on you, since now they also have your sufficiently advanced technology, and the difference is negligible. You either wipe them out in their infancy, or you’re Flood-chow. Having a time-jump to a more advanced time would be meaningless, the Precursors seem willing to test us rather than just outright destroy us, which is what they did with the Forerunners. So it isn’t necessarily about technology, it’s about worth.
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> Because the fact of the matter is, the only way the Flood has ever been defeated really is through some kind of a Deus Ex Machina win-button plot device (Halo).
It’s not the technology that’s important.
Wiping the Flood out in its infancy is important, and practically the only effective means of fighting it. This I agree with. The problem with the UNSC though is resources and influence, not necessarily technology. It’s far too small to possess the necessary reach and extent, as well as manpower and resources, to combat the Flood in its infancy if it strikes multiple points of the galaxy at once. The UNSC also has no way of watching for Flood incursions into parts of the galaxy because its intelligence network is confined to its own little small portion of the Orion Arm. If the Flood struck the opposite side of the galaxy in 2560, for example, and started feeding on some other unknown Tier 3 species, who out of the UNSC and Covenant would be guaranteed to know before the thing has already expanded far beyond the containment capabilities of the UNSC and Covenant? What would that knowledge matter anyway when the opposite end of the galaxy is weeks away for even the Covenant?
Advanced technology can be a liability if the Flood gets it, and really all you want to do is deny starships (Especially FTL capable ones), but it also affords a greater degree of time within which you can call a Flood threat “in its infancy”. The options that were open to the UNSC during Halo 3 when trying to deal with the Flood were much fewer and much less useful and reliable than the options that the Sangheili had to deal with it. The UNSC right now has little to nothing in the way of dealing with even a small contamination, as Rtas put it. It means that any Flood threat will have to be dealt with instantaneously by the UNSC before it passes the point where the UNSC can no longer destroy it, and that ain’t going to happen with the UNSC’s non-existent Flood detection network throughout the rest of the galaxy and its slow FTL speeds (Relative to crossing interstellar distances in the time frames required to stop a Flood infestation at their technological level).
The UNSC will have to advance to the point of being able to deploy ships to anywhere in the galaxy within days, thus will require very advanced FTL capabilities beyond what it currently has. It will have to advance its offensive and defensive capabilities so that it can handle larger infestations than ones previously encountered by it, such as by upgrading its weapons from ballistics to plasma based, especially on their starships so that glassing becomes an option when all else fails. Shields would be very useful as well, especially for their soldiers. It will have to have the economy, industry and population to support all of this, and to support being able to dispatch many fleets as required to infected sites. Most importantly, it will have to have some kind of awareness of the galaxy at large so that it knows when and where the Flood have appeared.
That is not going to happen in a couple of decades.
> Because the fact of the matter is, the only way the Flood has ever been defeated really is through some kind of a Deus Ex Machina win-button plot device (Halo).
Which is why it should be avoided before the third instance. With the first one it killed everything in the galaxy, and I think that the Dues Ex Machina there was not the Halo Array but the Conservation Measures. The UNSC, again, doesn’t have the capability to prepare something like a conservation measure, thus the Halo Array will kill everyone and finish life off in the galaxy for millions of years, or some Dues Ex will be invoked where only the Flood gets killed but no one else, like Gears of War 3’s anti-Lambent weapon.
