Alright, I’ve seen and heard a lot of stuff about ‘Why do the Forerunner defense AI platforms have human skulls? It is too cheesy.’ Well, think about this. Forerunner has absolute mastery over Hard Light. Forerunners projected Hard Light over nearly everything, just for looks. Hard light is the ammo and sword substance of these new Knights. The Watchers (possibly) use Design Seeds to rapidly produce Crawlers, another hard light process. The Cryptum/Didact scanned both the UNSC Infinity, and MC.
Where am I going with this?
Simple.
The new enemies are adapting to intimidate their specific opponent. THese same Knights were used to put down rebellions against MANY species, meaning that their physical intimidation would have to change rapidly.
I say that the Cryptum scanned the humans, then had all current defense AI platforms reconfigure their external hard light projectors specifically to frighten these newcomers.
Also, the Hard Light surfaces seen in the campaign are all ORANGE or RED. This is usually indicitive of Rampancy. The Didact, 343GS, and even Cortana at the end of the trailer, exhibit ORANGE LIGHT as an external sign of Rampancy, where as BLUE LIGHT indicates proper functionality. In the Spartan Ops trailer, there were BLUE LIGHT Knights. Since Spartan Ops takes place 6 months after the campaign, this might be proof that a Rampant AI or Forerunner was previously controlling the defense AI platforms.
How they changed from orange to blue might be because of:
Cortana
Didact’s restoration, rebalancing, or defeat
Different factions of Prometheans.
I wrote this rather late at night, I will try to clean it up in the morning. Thoughts?
I’m not exactly sure what’s going on, but this seems to make sense to me. It all seems pretty logical.
That’s a real nice theory. I feel bad for not reading the Forerunner books now. I just got so lost reading Cryptum that I never finished reading it. Now you made me want to finish it.
That’s a pretty neat idea.
> Alright, I’ve seen and heard a lot of stuff about ‘Why do the Forerunner defense AI platforms have human skulls? It is too cheesy.’ Well, think about this. Forerunner has absolute mastery over Hard Light. Forerunners projected Hard Light over nearly everything, just for looks. Hard light is the ammo and sword substance of these new Knights. The Watchers (possibly) use Design Seeds to rapidly produce Crawlers, another hard light process. The Cryptum/Didact scanned both the UNSC Infinity, and MC.
> Where am I going with this?
> Simple.
>
> The new enemies are adapting to intimidate their specific opponent. THese same Knights were used to put down rebellions against MANY species, meaning that their physical intimidation would have to change rapidly.
>
> I say that the Cryptum scanned the humans, then had all current defense AI platforms reconfigure their external hard light projectors specifically to frighten these newcomers.
>
> Also, the Hard Light surfaces seen in the campaign are all ORANGE or RED. This is usually indicitive of Rampancy. The Didact, 343GS, and even Cortana at the end of the trailer, exhibit ORANGE LIGHT as an external sign of Rampancy, where as BLUE LIGHT indicates proper functionality. In the Spartan Ops trailer, there were BLUE LIGHT Knights. Since Spartan Ops takes place 6 months after the campaign, this might be proof that a Rampant AI or Forerunner was previously controlling the defense AI platforms.
>
> How they changed from orange to blue might be because of:
>
> Cortana
>
> Didact’s restoration, rebalancing, or defeat
>
> Different factions of Prometheans.
>
> I wrote this rather late at night, I will try to clean it up in the morning. Thoughts?
Nice theory EXCEPT from memory, the only time hard light is ever mentioned in ANY of the books is Primordium where they use it to lock sections of the Halo 7 (i think) in place for the jump to the lesser ark.
All other “light”: i.e. weapons is plasma contained within an electromagnetic sheath (covenant weapons)
Can you provide any quotes saying anything different?
Certainly. Here is the Halo Wiki page on Hard Light. Specifically,
“Hard light was also commonly used in the composition of Forerunner structures and ships, either for aesthetic purposes or as a covering for mechanical and technological mechanisms, such as on the arms of a war sphinx.”
and
“Most Forerunner structures project a hard light decorative shell over the structural support elements of the building.”
and
“Many Forerunner ships use hard light technology to form its internal divisions and compartments. This allows a Forerunner ship to easily reconfigure its layout, furnishings or decoration at will”
and
“Additionally, any structures that possessed hard light decor only activated in the presence of Forerunners,[7] although the decoration in the Menachite Forerunner complex activated when a group of reclaimers entered”
All of these seem to say that reconfigurable aesthetic hard light surfaces, activated in the presence of Forerunners and Reclaimers, are quite common.
First ao all, it’s not a Human skull! I mean look at it, that’s not how a human skull should look like.
The different colors are probably different factions. Most likely the Didact and possibly Faber ( The Master Builder).
Well no, it isn’t anatomically PERFECT. But if you are trying to purposely intimidate someone or something, you would take their easily recognizable symbols (such as a skull) and warp them with hideous ferocity, with the intent of making them otherworldly. Think doll with coal black eyes, yeah? Just a few subtle changes make something innocent, horrific.
> Well no, it isn’t anatomically PERFECT. But if you are trying to purposely intimidate someone or something, you would take their easily recognizable symbols (such as a skull) and warp them with hideous ferocity, with the intent of making them otherworldly. Think doll with coal black eyes, yeah? Just a few subtle changes make something innocent, horrific.
I still think it’s a Forerunner skull.
> > Well no, it isn’t anatomically PERFECT. But if you are trying to purposely intimidate someone or something, you would take their easily recognizable symbols (such as a skull) and warp them with hideous ferocity, with the intent of making them otherworldly. Think doll with coal black eyes, yeah? Just a few subtle changes make something innocent, horrific.
>
> I still think it’s a Forerunner skull.
Me too, plus theres this scene near the end of the trailer in this lava place where a Promethean Knight is holding an Elite, then throws him down and shows the “humanoid” skull, instead of showing an Elite skull. It being a Forerunner skull makes more sense to me.
I like your idea about the rampancy. I still think that it is probably a forerunner skull though. The forerunners wer apparently biologically similiar to humans or at least looked similiar to humans, and the skull in the Promethean knight seemed to differ slightly from a human skull.
For now, I still believe the theory that the forerunners placed their consciousness into promeathean knights and may have had their skulls implanted into machines. I don’t know their reasoning behind this but it could have been for a scare tactic, or it could have simply been they were “Upgrading” from their biological bodies into synthetic bodies and the skull is all that remains.
Weren’t Forerunners much taller than humans? Knights don’t seem to have a skull matching an 8 foot Forerunner, nor even close. Plus, the skull was lit up. I don’t know THAT much about Forerunners, but I don’t think they got LED lip piercings. Yes, it might be Forerunner inspired, but I don’t think it is a direct biological upgrade implantation.
> I like your idea about the rampancy. I still think that it is probably a forerunner skull though. The forerunners wer apparently biologically similiar to humans or at least looked similiar to humans, and the skull in the Promethean knight seemed to differ slightly from a human skull.
>
> For now, I still believe the theory that the forerunners placed their consciousness into promeathean knights and may have had their skulls implanted into machines. I don’t know their reasoning behind this but it could have been for a scare tactic, or it could have simply been they were “Upgrading” from their biological bodies into synthetic bodies and the skull is all that remains.
This idea about them transferring their consciousness into an AI body is interesting…
It could give another explanation as to how Forerunners might still be still around, aside from the Shield Worlds. Since the Halo Array was built to wipe out all sentient organic life, you could easily sidestep that by essentially turning yourself into an AI. We know that the Forerunners had this technology to do so as well, given the events and revelations in Primordium.
A very interesting theory…
> Certainly. Here is the Halo Wiki page on Hard Light. Specifically,
>
> “Hard light was also commonly used in the composition of Forerunner structures and ships, either for aesthetic purposes or as a covering for mechanical and technological mechanisms, such as on the arms of a war sphinx.”
>
> and
>
> “Most Forerunner structures project a hard light decorative shell over the structural support elements of the building.”
>
> and
>
> “Many Forerunner ships use hard light technology to form its internal divisions and compartments. This allows a Forerunner ship to easily reconfigure its layout, furnishings or decoration at will”
>
> and
>
> “Additionally, any structures that possessed hard light decor only activated in the presence of Forerunners,[7] although the decoration in the Menachite Forerunner complex activated when a group of reclaimers entered”
>
> All of these seem to say that reconfigurable aesthetic hard light surfaces, activated in the presence of Forerunners and Reclaimers, are quite common.
I see what you mean there, I have just finished listening to Cryptum again and heard the mentions of it there, but there is never any mention of hard light as a weapon. The closest thing that I could find was that the hardlight spokes on Halo can be used to focus the weapons effect.
Another slight hitch in the hard light weapon theory is if the covenant had access to a dreadnought and have reversed engineered many advancements from it (not to mention all their other ‘relics’)(not to mention all their other ‘relics’) to which they have implemented into their current ships, then why are they only using plasma?
I believe I read that the Covenant never mastered the hard light projectors, and could only power and maintain plasma based fields. Also, there were mentions of hard light as a weapon on the halo wiki. Something about the ability to focus multiple smaller guns into a single, larger beam.
I agree that the skull is for intimidation. If it were supposed to embody a Forerunner, I would expect the overall design of the Promethean to be more anatomical. Instead, there’s just this one small (and presumably malleable) element inside its helmet.
But it also seems intended to establish the history between humans and Forerunners, the extent of which isn’t really obvious (and might be completely unknown) to a casual fan. And the orange light might be similarly informative - just there to signify that it’s distinct from anything you’ve seen before. As far as rampancy is concerned, I don’t think the color is indicating anything of the sort. From what we’ve seen, AI change color to reflect a dynamic change in mood (as with Cortana in the control room in CE and Guilty Spark at the end of 3) not a permanent shift from normal function to rampancy. And Cortana herself doesn’t actually change color in the trailer - it’s just a screen effect that inverts all colors below a certain luminosity.