Could a unsc cruiser or carrier tank a mac round from another ship?
Obviously it would depend on where the MAC round landed. You also need to specify whether it’s a regular MAC carried by Frigates/Destroyers or a Super MAC carried by Cruisers/Infinity-class ships.
A Super MAC round’s gonna completely wreck the target wherever it lands. A cruiser/carrier may survive one regular MAC round as long as it doesn’t hit the reactor/engines/command bridge. However the sheer momentum carried by the round punching clean through is gonna cause the vessel to go into a virtually uncontrollable spin, leaving it open to Archer missile bombardment or simply another MAC round, either of which would finish it off.
You have to remember that MAC cannons were considered overkill when it came to human vs human ship battles. Shortly before the Covenant War broke out, a single Archer missile was considered sufficient to combat most enemy human vessels.
To my knowledge, the hulls of UNSC ships are up to two meters thick, made of titanium of course. Generously, we can assume that Titanium can absorb up to two gigajoules of energy per cubic meter without cracking. We can also assume that during the impact of a MAC round, the energy is not absorbed by an area larger than 100 square meters of the ships armor. This is again reasonably generous considering the diameter of MAC rounds isn’t much more than a meter (as seen, e.g., in Halo 2) and the speed of impact. A standard ship based MAC round carries about 270,000 gigajoules of energy. The hull of a ship as defined above, on the other hand, requires only 400 gigajoules to penetrate. Meaning that, naively, you’d need over 600 layers of the these two meter thick hulls to stop the MAC round.
Of course, in reality the MAC round starts to spread as soon as it hits the ship, dissipating energy onto a larger area. Not to mention the material it pushes out of its way must go somewhere and absorbs some momentum and so on and so forth. So, it’s not like you actually need 1.2 kilometers of titanium to stop the MAC round. But the back of the envelope calculation above shows that the MAC round has no trouble making its way inside the ship, and once it does, it will either go all the way through, or dissipate a 60 kiloton nuke’s worth of energy inside the ship. In either case, the ship’s not doing very well.
MACs just kind of wreck EVERYTHING really. How’s that saying go? Sir Issac Newton is the meanest mother in space?
Though if UNSC ships can’t survive MAC rounds, then how was the Autumn able to survive and crash almost entirely intact, on Installation 04? Despite clearly initiating some kind of landing manuevers, the Autumn hit pretty hard and the entire lower hull should have been sheared off or otherwise flattened, with most of the internal structure heavily damaged.
A covenant glassing beam can take one down but I’m sure a glassing beam is way more powerful. But I’m sure a MAC round can if it hits the right place. Noble six took down a covenant carrier by hitting it in the right spot.
Tsassi gave the best answer to this but I’ll throw my two cents in with everyone else. Generally speaking, space ships are heavily compartmentalized for the purpose of minimizing damage from sections being opened up to space. This is true of space vehicles now and has been seen repeatedly with ships in the Halo universe. All those big bulkheads we walk through in campaign missions and MP maps can shut quite rapidly to prevent atmosphere from escaping.
So, as Tsassi pointed out, a MAC round can fairly easily punch through the armor of a UNSC ship and cause pretty significant damage. But if the MAC round punches through completely and exits the other side, so long as bulkheads around the damaged sections can seal off the area, the ship should still be able to function somewhat. Any major systems in the damaged section will likely be completely destroyed, so it really does depend on where the MAC round hits. But if it’s through a non-critical system, I imagine the ship could probably still be combat effective at a reduced level.
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> MACs just kind of wreck EVERYTHING really. How’s that saying go? Sir Issac Newton is the meanest mother in space?
ME:2, nice.
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> > 2533274907200114;4:
> > MACs just kind of wreck EVERYTHING really. How’s that saying go? Sir Issac Newton is the meanest mother in space?
>
> ME:2, nice.
It has, and always will, fit Halo IMO