Hello all,
I recently found myself trying to work out the classification of the covenant ships seen glassing the City in the Halo Reach Level “New Alexandria”. From afar they seem to be CCS-class, however I have always thought they seemed a little small.
Lengths of ships according to Halo wikis:
CCS-Class: 1,782m
CRS-Class: 300m
In order to reach the the cruisers in New Alexandria you have to convert your falcon/banshee into a pelican/phantom. After doing so we can attempt to take some measurements.
The wikis say that the width of a pelican is about 25m. I flew alongside one of the cruisers with the nose of the pelican perpendicular to it and counted the number of pelican widths that fit into the length of the cruiser. I got about 30-32. 31x25 = 775m in length. This is way off both classes. However, I am told that the Halo games do have size discrepancies when comparing in game models, so lets try something else.
Fortunately, at this point in the mission there is an objective marker with a distance attached. I noted the distance to objective at the nose and stern of the cruiser to be 3050m and 4550m respectively. Unfortunately it is impossible to make a calculation for the cruiser length without and angle. If I use 1,782m as the theoretical third side of the triangle, the angle at the objective corner of the triangle is about 25 degrees. However, it is incredibly difficult to decide if 25 degrees is an accurate angle. For the cruiser to be 300m in length, a very small angle would be needed. I would conclude that this method is not accurate enough to base a decision on.
I also considered trying to work out how long it would take Noble 6 to walk the length of the cruiser. while I didn’t do any testing, I reckon it would take 2-3 minutes to do so. If the cruiser is 1,782m, noble 6 would have to be walking at a pace of 9.9m/s to achieve this. Which is over 6 times faster than average walking speed. for 20-30 year-olds (1.45). If the cruiser is 300m, walking pace would be 1.66m/s, which is a little faster than average walking speed. As a spartan, noble 6 probably can walk at a faster pace since he is taller, stronger and has faster reactions than regular people. So using this method I would conclude that the cruiser is a CRS-class.
HOWEVER
Metres in game seem to be quite small in comparison to what I think they should be. After playing around with the objective waypoint and markers on the ground (e.g. bodies) I have concluded that 3 waypoint metres are about 2-2.5 actual metres. Maybe the cruisers appear smaller for this reason, and are intended to be CCS-class.
If the cruiser is a CRS-class, a CCS-class would be over 5 times longer. After comparing the cruiser’s visual size appearance to the Truth and Reconciliation (which we know to be a CCS-class) from the mission in Halo CE, the cruisers in Reach seem smaller, but not by over 5 times.
Therefore I have come to the conclusion that the cruisers in New Alexandria are intended to be CCS-class battlecruisers, but are a bit smaller than they should be. The cruiser that flies overhead on Tsavo highway has also caused me similar confusion (it looks too small to be a CCS-class). But again, in light of my conclusion with the Reach cruisers, I believe it is supposed to be a CCS-class battlecruiser, but is smaller than it should be.
Thanks if you read all my rambling!