So I was just thinking, near the end of Halo 3 John and Spark agree that a “tactical pulse” of installation 04 would wipe out the local infestation of Flood but how? Sure the ring was out of range of all other ones ensuring a galactic genocide wouldn’t happen however no one except Spark knew the incomplete ring would shake itself to pieces and destroy the flood on the Ark that way. Everyone was under the assumption the ring would function as intended. So lets say the ring was complete and fully functioning. How would the flood have been stopped that way? After all halo rings don’t kill flood they kill their food “humans, covenant we’re all equally edible”. So the ring kills any human and covenant still left on the Ark but the flood would still be there and I’m sure there would be plenty of ships the flood can grab and take back to the galaxy. So how was this a solution?
This was an error on Cortana’s part, which was later corrected. Halo does kill the flood, along with its “food”. As for the ring, it was not complete.
“Halo…it’s so new, unfinished. I’m not sure what will happen when we fire it.” - Cortana
Yea I was always confused on how, when the rings went off and killed everyone/the Flood’s food, how everything got repopulated again years later if everyone was dead
well technically, the rings kill anything sentient. the flood are only included in this because each unit is part of the collective sentient gravemind as a whole. but we dont know if the ring actually fired. or if it tried to fire and destroyed itself. thats what 343 GS seemed to imply, and the reason he killed johnson. “a premature firing…will destroy this installation.” so either it correctly fired, killed all the flood, and then blew up, or it tried to fire, blew up, and the flood are at least mostly dead anyway. hopefully we will find out more when we go back to the ark.
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> Yea I was always confused on how, when the rings went off and killed everyone/the Flood’s food, how everything got repopulated again years later if everyone was dead.
It’s tough to use this as a reliable source as many of its entries aren’t considered canon, but Halo:Legends touches on this a bit. The Ark is so named because it holds genetic material of every sentient species in the galaxy. It is also completely automated, so once the rings go off, all the automated systems including all the different kinds of sentinels go out and reseed the galaxy. The “Origins” 2-parter shows this to some degree.
To add to the Ark topic, the Ark is also outside the galaxy, making it out of range of the usual halo effect. The only reason why it came under threat of being halo’d was because of the 2nd installation 04 it was building.
“But, once the others follow suit, this galaxy will be quite devoid of life, or at least any life with sufficient biomass to sustain the Flood.”
The way I always thought of it was that the Halo rings destroy anything that has a sufficient amount of biomass that the Flood can consume and use. Seeing as the Flood are actually made up of this biomass, they are destroyed as well.
Frankie confirmed ages ago that the Halos kill every sentient lifeform, including the Flood. (like in Origins Part I) It’s just badly explained in Halo: CE.
Note also that the last Halo 3 level was supposed to be a suicide mission. The Chief and the Arbiter were ready to sacrifice themselves, and then Johnson would arrive with the frigate (a few minutes after the level’s beginning). This story was cut and simplified.
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> Frankie confirmed ages ago that the Halos kill every sentient lifeform, including the Flood. (like in Origins Part I) It’s just badly explained in Halo: CE.
>
> Note also that the last Halo 3 level was supposed to be a suicide mission. The Chief and the Arbiter were ready to sacrifice themselves, and then Johnson would arrive with the frigate (a few minutes after the level’s beginning). This story was cut and simplified.
That makes Cortana’s line after killing Spark on the way out make more sense. “Of course! The Frigate! We still have a chance!” That makes a lot more sense with that deleted scene than what the final game had. The entire plan was to activate the Ring and get out on the Frigate and she totally forgets about it at the end? If Johnson and the Frigate showed up unexpectedly, it would make more sense for Cortana to not realize they could use the Frigate to escape Halo. That line always did bother me and now it makes a lot more sense.
As for the plot holes, there really aren’t any. It appeared that Chief expected the ring world work as intended, killing everything at the Ark. Spark was expecting more time for the Ring to be completed before firing. He didn’t even know there was a way to activate the ring from the bugged dialog you don’t hear at the end of The Covenant: “It will take some time to fabricate an activation index.” He didn’t expect Chief would recover Cortana, who happened to have the Index from Installation 04. When he learned they could fire it before it was finished, he informed them firing it early would destroy it.
As others said, the Halo rings kill everything with sufficient biomass, including the Flood itself so there wouldn’t be any left to take over an ships. Even if it didn’t kill the Flood itself, there were no other ships at the Ark. All the functioning ships went back through the portal and High Charity is all but destroyed. All that would be left is Forward Unto Dawn, but I’d assume that Chief and Arbiter would get to it and set it to self-destruct so the Flood couldn’t use it. Even if they didn’t destroy it, it would take the Flood years to make it back to the Galaxy. It takes a year to travel across Human controlled space at the start of the Human-Covenant war, let alone 3 galactic radii.
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> Yea I was always confused on how, when the rings went off and killed everyone/the Flood’s food, how everything got repopulated again years later if everyone was dead.
Do you know what the biblical Ark was? Think that, but with Forerunner drones.
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> Frankie confirmed ages ago that the Halos kill every sentient lifeform, including the Flood. (like in Origins Part I) It’s just badly explained in Halo: CE.
>
> Note also that the last Halo 3 level was supposed to be a suicide mission. The Chief and the Arbiter were ready to sacrifice themselves, and then Johnson would arrive with the frigate (a few minutes after the level’s beginning). This story was cut and simplified.
Oh I see. Thanks!
Halo energy basically kills anything of significant biomass as well as neural-physics infrastructure. Be inside a shield-world or get halo-lasered.
You also got to remember that they activated an INCOMPLETE ring. A normal ring could wipe out life like normal, but an incomplete ring is like a bomb. And since they blew up that bomb near the Ark, I’m sure it triggered an even more explosive result.
According to an Eleventh Hour report, the Ark’s fauna may have survived, though the remote contact teams sent by ONI were advised not to engage any of them. This suggests that Installation 04b may have acted not as a typical Halo, but more as a bomb (as suggested earlier).
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> According to an Eleventh Hour report, the Ark’s fauna may have survived, though the remote contact teams sent by ONI were advised not to engage any of them. This suggests that Installation 04b may have acted not as a typical Halo, but more as a bomb (as suggested earlier).
For those who are interested, the report in question is #4.