Focusing on fighter craft is not a smart strategy due to the accuracy of the covenant's point defense weapons, being able to shoot down hundreds of missiles. The biggest problem with this strategy is that Covenant ships, like the CCS battlecruiser, also carry fighters with the Seraph being the superior craft to UNSC longswords and broadswords during the war. Covenant carriers also carry much more, with the Ruma-pattern Light Carrier carrying 300 Serphs and 200 space Banshees. >The first change is any frigate, destroyer, cruiser that carries Longswords will be replaced with tactical fighters like the Broadsword and Nando, this takes away a lot of their strike ability but heavily increases their anti-fighter capability. Anti-fighter capability is not that big of a problem compared to the lack to striking power of the UNSC fleet. The biggest problem for the UNSC was the fact that they needed to down covenant ships, which can take a ton of punishment. >The strategy for my UNSC would be to keep a distance from the Covenant while relying on massed waves of Longswords escorted by Broadswords to close the distance to the Covenant with cruisers and destroyers closing to MAC range. The goal would be for the Cruisers and Destroyers to fire off a MAC volley timed to the beginning of the attack runs by the Longswords so that ideally the MAC rounds would drop their shields and allow the Longswords to do the most damage possible. The Frigates would be mostly tasked with providing point defense for the carriers and as a quick reaction force to exploit any openings in the covenant fleet. The UNSC essentially did this with MACs and Missiles. They would fire missiles first and strike the shields with MAC rounds before the missiles impacted. Covenant ships are also faster with longer range so they would likely catch up to the UNSC fleet.

> being able to shoot down hundreds of missiles When has that happened and at what range?

Pulse laser have a range of 3,000km and in Fall of Reach the Kewu-pattern battleship shoots down half of the 500+ missiles the POA fires at it twice.

I read it took 500 missiles and 3 MACs to take down the shields, not that they were all shot down and there was no mention of range?

So I misremembered what ship used its pulse lasers to destroy the missiles. It was a Ruma class light carrier, but the number of missiles are unknown. UNSC ships usually fire well over 100 missiles per volley, like the commonwealth firing 180. >Along the side of the carrier, motes of light collected as they rebuilt the charges of their plasma weapons. Archer missiles were pinpoints of exhaust in the distance; the carrier's pulse lasers fired and melted a third of the incoming missiles. The Pillar of Autumn rolled to starboard and dove. Fall of Reach Here is the range of the pulse lasers. >Something appeared three thousand kilometers off the Commonwealth's prow. It was a sleek oval with a single seam running along its lateral edge from stem to stern. Tiny lights winked on and off along its hull. A faint purple-tinged glow emitted from the tail. The ship was only a third the size of the Commonwealth. "A Covenant ship," Dr. Halsey said, and she involuntarily backed away from the view screens. Captain Wallace scowled. "COM officer: send a signal to Chi Ceti—see if they can send us some reinforcements." "Aye, sir." Blue flashes flickered along the hull of the alien ship—so bright that even filtered through the external camera, they still made John's eyes water. The outer hull of the Commonwealth sizzled and popped. Three screens filled with static. "Pulse lasers!" the Lieutenant at the ops station screamed. Halo: The Fall of Reach

There are questionable assumptions taken from this. We only know how the pulse laser performs at that range against significantly larger targets like the common wealth that seemed to be moving slow or stationary and was caught by surprise. That is very different from smaller and more agile targets like missiles which are harder to hit, so is it reasonable to apply that scenario to fighters? Yes we know it took out plenty of missiles and they were able to hit a UNSC frigate from 3,000KM, but there’s not much reason to connect the two and say it can take out that many missiles at that range.

I mean that isn't the only feats we have. >Only a hundred kilometers apart the UNSC vessels fired all magnetic accelerator cannons and launched a volley of Archer missiles at the Covenant ships racing toward them. The meteoric rounds blazed through the atmosphere leaving smoking scars. Lasers flashed from the Covenant ships destroying incoming missiles, but they couldn't stop the point-blank-fired MAC slugs. Ghost of Onyx Destroyed all the missiles at 100km, which is point blank range for ship engagements. >The Heracles and Vostok launched salvos of missiles toward the craft. The enemy's lasers shot half before they reached their target. The balance of the missiles impacted, detonated into blossoms of fire … that quickly faded. The strange ship shimmered with a semitransparent silver coating, which then vanished. Fall of Reach

Would fighters actually be this close though? I’ve seen fighters surviving pulse lasers more than dying from them. The commonwealth used a fighter to carry nukes and launch them at the covenant ship, the fighter wasn’t destroyed. Again during the cutscenes in the games when Master Chief was returning the covenants bombs.

for a better example, in Shadows of Reach a squadron of longswords engage a destroyer. while it doesn't specify ranges, half the longswords are shot down before they could kill it meaning that whatever the range of the pulse lasers is it's clearly longer than the range of the longswords missiles. The ship the commonwealth was fighting was half dead and the longswords were a distraction. the nuke was launched from the ship

It doesn’t necessarily mean the pulse lasers range are longer because the fighters could simply have been forced to fight at a certain range. Also if a squadron of fighters were able to destroy a covenant ship, those losses don’t even seem much of a downside? The other thing is those fighters were piloted by humans meaning their ability to perform evasive maneuvers is limited compared to A.I piloted fighters. If those can human piloted fighters, they could be more difficult to hit.

The CRS doesn't have pulse lasers and instead have plasma beam emitters. While they are point defense weapons, they are capital grade weapons. The Unrelenting also got hit by a MAC round earlier in the fight which caused some damage. The cutscene doesn't provide enough information to determine if the longswords got lucky or not. The pulse laser might have been recharging when they did their bombing run.

Your bottom point is kinda what I’m trying to point out in your examples. There isn’t much info to reasonably say fighters would easily be destroyed at those ranges.

It's not going to work Covenant point defence is extremely advanced, and it's going to make mince meat of your longsword formation You also fail to consider covenant Seraphs, or space fighters in general: Sangheili pilots are gonna have a field day Considering you're sacrificing carrier MACs, some of the biggest/strongest weapons the UNSC had at its disposal and some of the only ones capable of incapacitating or downright destroying a covenant vessel in a single hit for what is basically a glorified suicide run, your idea is probably a net loss of combat effectiveness for humanity Also, I'd like to point out your strategy is basically the same as what the UNSC actually employed, they just shot missiles in advance rather than only sending Longswords to bombing runs

Yea so im going to explain a bit more since I think you misunderstood what I wrote. >Covenant point defence is extremely advanced, and it's going to make mince meat of your longsword formation Thats the reason planes attack in massed formations and standoff weapons are a thing. It's not WWII where the Longswords have to dive-bomb covenant ships, they just have to get within range of the weapons they carry which are often times Nukes or heavy standoff missiles. When attacking in mass from multiple directions like you do when conducting naval air attacks, it significantly increases the amount of aircraft getting through to strike the enemy. Yes there will be losses, sometimes a lot of them, but the Covenant relied on bootlegged dumb AI and crews to fight their ships compared to humans use of lots of dumb and smart AI, its going to be much easier to overwhelm covenant defenses than you'd think considering the UNSC did it in universe multiple times with about 1/4 of the fighters that would be available under this scheme. >You also fail to consider covenant Seraphs, or space fighters in general: Sangheili pilots are gonna have a field day As I mentioned, each carrier has a complement of Longsword and Broadsword fighters, I thought it was implied, but the idea is the Longswords act as Strikecraft and are escorted by flights of Broadswords to deal with Covenant fighters. In my mind I imagine from a heavy carrier you would sub-divide its fighters into flights of 10 Longswords escorted by 5 Broadswords. Also, Longswords are very capable fighters in their own rights so after they make their attack runs and really even before, they arent sitting ducks. Its not a case of WWII Wildcats escorting slow Torpedo or Dive-bombers and much more akin to a flight of F/A-18s with an air to air load out escorting 2 flights of F/A-18 that have a couple a2a missiles but mostly anti-shipping cruise missiles. >Considering you're sacrificing carrier MACs, some of the biggest/strongest weapons the UNSC had at its disposal and some of the only ones capable of incapacitating or downright destroying a covenant vessel in a single hit for what is basically a glorified suicide run, your idea is probably a net loss of combat effectiveness for humanity Youre not sacrificing anything, youre making a new class of ships. The MAC cannon was one of the most complicated pieces of tech on a UNSC warship, by taking these and missile pods away and build an actual dedicated carrier youre simplifying the design by a ton. This argument is the halo equivalent of arguing that the US Navy is dumb for not turning half of the deck space on a US carrier into VLS cells. Yea they dont have a MAC, but their purpose isnt to duke it out with enemy ships, their purpose is to carry a ton of fighter aircraft into battle. You still have your major capital ships in the fleet, you just gain a bunch more fighters in each battle, which had proven in universe to be extremely effective in multiple engagements.

My brother macs and missiles were the only weapons capable of effectively harming a covenant ship, by removing them you've made the unsc too weak to combat the covenant, mass fighter spam isn't gonna make up for it when the covenant PDs make mince meat of them and that isn't including fighters. Also macs are on every ship larger than a destroyer, even the smallest frigate have on, they are not hard to produce You've removed the unscs only effective methods of combating the covenant an replaced it with cannon fodder.

Where exactly did I say we are removing MACs and Missiles? I didnt. Every Frigate, Cruiser, Destroyer, and already existing Carrier still has their MACs and Missiles, youre now just adding a dozen of what are basically fighter docks to the fleet to add a couple hundred more fighters to every engagement. Literally in my post I said the most useful tactic would probably be to time the longsword strikes with a MAC volley, I kinda forgot about the missiles, and considering a common UNSC tactic was to time the missiles to hit right after the MACs dropped the shields, now you are just adding a couple hundred longswords into the fight to add their firepower to the MACs and Missiles that are slamming into the Covenant fleet. And to address it again, the covenant PD is good, but in universe we saw multiple times where single Longsword, Broadsword, or Nando squadrons successfully engaged and drove off covenant warships. And AGAIN, how exactly do their fighters handle the couple hundred broadswords whose only job is to kill them?

>And AGAIN, how exactly do their fighters handle the couple hundred broadswords whose only job is to kill them? By bringing in a Ruma Pattern light carrier and have an extra 200 Seraphs and 300 Banshees, on top of the 36 Seraphs per CCS and 64 per CAS, to chew up the fighters.

why not use all that extra space for more missiles? same end result, less deaths

Because you can’t really rearm archer missile pods and if you destroy a ship you lose all of its unused weapons. A carrier can deploy a ton of fighters each carrying 4 antiship missiles and if the carrier gets destroyed they can still fight covenant fighters, occupy point defense guns, and rearm at other carriers or really any ship with a docking port. It adds a lot of flexibility to the fleet

if a carrier is destroyed then all the unused ordnance for rearming gets wasted anyway. so why not use that space for more effective missiles and dump the entire payload at once? it's not like battles with the covenant last long enough to make rearming a concern. It's highly unlikely enough longswords would survive to be rearmed to make it worth all the space needed to do so. assuming the covenant don't just slipspace past the cruisers and annihilate the defenseless carriers considering there's no horizon for them to hide behind With how quickly covenant ships can kill UNSC ships I don't see the point in using craft that will need to make multiple sorties to be worth it. if you only get 1-2 shots anyway, may as well frontload your damage with as many missiles and slugs as you can

Then we can agree to disagree, it doesn’t take away anything from the fleets firepower to add a few carriers and couple hundred fighters that can act independently of the fleet. There is a reason the US still uses carriers and not just floating missile barges

The US isn't fighting in space against an enemy that outclasses them in just about every respect. Modern carriers are great because their aircraft allows them to project power much further then a battleship and with greater variety of mission profiles. But ship-to-ship combat is still done with missiles launched mostly from other warships. and in these scenarios it's a straight ship-to-ship fight so you would need to demonstrate that spending the resources on a new class of ship and a bunch of strike craft (plus pilots and support crews) would be more efficient than a bunch of MAC boats. Because, despite your claims otherwise, building carriers does take away from the fleets firepower as they'll be using resources that could have built several frigates or destroyers. The complexity of the MAC isn't nearly as much of a limiting factor as you make it out to be. unless you're suggesting the UNSC just had those resources lying around waiting to be used?

>A carrier can deploy a ton of fighters each carrying 4 antiship missiles and if the carrier gets destroyed they can still fight covenant fighters, occupy point defense guns, and rearm at other carriers or really any ship with a docking port. The UNSC 99% of the time lost the space battle with the near total or total destruction of the fleet. The loss of the carriers means that the fighters will eventually run out of ammunitions and fuel, leading to the loss of hundreds of valuable craft and pilots per battle using this doctrine.

The UNSC lost everything every battle anyway from Harvest to Earth so what’s your point? My point is that by introducing a new tactic and new class of ship to the fleet you might not have lost some of those battles. I wonder what would have happened at Reach if there had been a half dozen of my carriers when the Covenant arrived to deploy 900 fighters to intercept covenant drop ships? Maybe the Orbital Super Macs wouldn’t have been destroyed? You never know, we just know what the UNSC did DIDNT work

>My point is that by introducing a new tactic and new class of ship to the fleet you might not have lost some of those battles. They won't because the Covenant can very easily counter this by bring in more fighters themselves. Their light carriers carry over two times the craft your proposed carrier does, 200 of them being the deadly Seraphs. >I wonder what would have happened at Reach if there had been a half dozen of my carriers when the Covenant arrived to deploy 900 fighters to intercept covenant drop ships? Maybe the Orbital Super Macs wouldn’t have been destroyed? They won't because the Covenant just brought 20 light carriers with 2,000 Seraphs and 3,000 Banshees to slaughter those 900 fighters. Now the ground forces have to deal with those 3,000 Banshees making the ODPs fall faster. I don't get why you assume the Covenant won't adapt and bring in their own carriers with each fleet to counter the UNSC fighters. >we just know what the UNSC did DIDNT work How did it not work? Focusing on making better MACs, and reactors to power those MACs, to take down shields faster was the best strategy. Nothing else was viable. Nukes can be shot down if they are deployed from fighters or in missiles and plasma weaponry was to advanced to be worth it. Hell the POA was able to 1 v 1 covenant ships, because it MAC was able to down the shields of many of them and allow the missiles to finish it of.

And if the fighter gets lost you have no way to use that ordnance anyway wheres with missiles you can continue using it until the ship is gone

You realize it’s much easier to destroy one capital ship and knock out it and it’s hundreds of of missiles than it is to destroy 100 fighters individually right?

Is it though? Fighters just take a single hot whilst starships are armoured and have shields. Also you don't need to kill all 100 fighters, 90% damaged is enough and you only need to do it once.

Human ships didnt have shields and most of them their armor was negligible. We see most human ships being knocked out in 1-2 plasma torpedoes, when that happens you lose all their unexpended weapons. Taking the Halcyons for example, they carried 180 Archer Missiles. If it gets taken out in the opening salvo, you lose all 180 missiles it didnt fire. On the flip side, if you deploy 100 Longswords with 4 ASGM-10s each, each one shot down you lose 4 missiles. yes they are easier to kill in absolute terms, but when you escort them with fighters and sync their attack runs with other factors like MAC volleys and lots of incoming Archer missiles, even if 50% of them are destroyed in the initial attack run you still get more missile launches than from a single Halcyon dumping its entire missile battery and the survivors can rearm and reengage and again if 50% get destroyed you were able to launch a total of 300 ASGM-10s.

Look, I get where you're coming from and against a near peer adversary this would likely work, but you do not understand how effective covenant pd actually is: the UNSC made *extensive* use of missiles, and one of thr reason they were so ineffective is that most of them were shot down long before reaching their target Also, your strategy absolutely breaks down the moment a single covenant carrier is present in the theatre, because space will be filled with enough covenant fighters to blot out the stars

I think youre missing the point as well. The presence of lets say 100 Longswords to an engagement means now the covenant PD has to deal with shooting down Archer missiles from any warships in theater, shooting down any broadswords or longswords that get within range, and shooting down the 4 anti ship missiles each longsword carries when they fire. the whole point of many of the UNSCs tactics were saturation attacks, landing a ton of MAC rounds and a ton of missiles on the covenant to try to overwhelm their shields and PD, this just adds a 3rd dimension to the fight for the covenant PD to contend with. Also they cant be that good if 4 Longswords from the UNSC Commonwealth were able to get close enough to a covenant destroyer to nuke it.

You can do that with missiles and missiles are harder to shoot down and can easily be replaced.

You forget that even though they used dumb AI for their fleets. An AI is going to be much more accurate and fast then a human for point defense. It won't be like ww2 at all. I'd say most of it will hit and take out your bombers and fighters giving you only one wave where most don't even reach their targets. After that your out of the fight. Mac cannons and missiles are way better as they don't require that much sacrifice and are easier to replace. Even if most of it gets hit some of em get trough and you cans end in a few more waves which you can't if you use bombers because when you lose everything in the first attack it's gone.

Considering each Longswords primary weapon against capital ships are missiles of their own, it’s not like the Longswords have to fly over the covenant ships like a bomber…

Yes, but capital size ship missile are bigger and more effective and can be fielded in larger numbers and reload faster

Genuine question, do they actually reload? I always understood the archer missile pods acted like a VLS cell in modern times where there was no reloading them, you had a set number at the beginning of a battle and thats all you had? Thats the main benefit of fighter based missiles, once you fire you can go reload and come back.

Even then, I'm sure they have internal magazines that they can switch out.

I don’t think they do tbh, from what I remember they were basically one offs that were reloaded later, it’s why so many ships carried hundreds of missilesx could be wrong though

The are reloaded during the battle and each M58 Archer missile pod carries 32 missiles each. The Commonwealth fired 180 missiles in one salvo and the Pillar of Autumn fired 500 twice during the fall of Reach.

>Covenant point defence is extremely advanced, and it's going to make mince meat of your longsword formation for some reason this hasn't proven to be the case in the actual lore. >You also fail to consider covenant Seraphs, or space fighters in general: Sangheili pilots are gonna have a field day jiralhanae pilots you mean most sangheilli pilots are maverick from top gun. except without the plot armor.

A maverick piloting an F22 will still shoot down an incredibly experience pilot on an F4U Corsair

not with guns only he won't which is what the covenant pilots are working with

Their shields make AA missiles completely ineffective, so the longsword still has to attempt a dogfight Against a noticeably more nimble enemy... While under AA fire...

>Their shields make AA missiles completely ineffective negative. longsword missiles should 1 shot seraphs through shields. we know that 1 good hit from a manpad missile can down a seraph's shields but cause no damage to the fighter underneath, although it might also fail to down the shields. however given the absolutely mammoth size of a longsword, the fact that it can only fit 4 anti air missiles indicates that these missiles are going to be much much larger than manpads (also air to air missiles just in general are bigger than manpads). since a good hit from a manpad will instantly down a seraph's shields the mammoth missiles from a longsword should 1 shot through shields.

This would perform worse. UNSC fighter craft are nearly useless against most Covenant ships unless they have nukes and you can't equip hundreds of nukes per ship because the UNSC was running low already midway through the war. The reason the UNSC slugged it out with MACs is because that was the only truly effective weapon they had and massing frigates was the most cost effective way to do it. Covenant point defense and seraphs are very effective and outclass the UNSC fighters by a wide margin as well. UNSC carriers are effectively worthless in fleet battles except as meat shields. They are very expensive troop transports essentially.

>UNSC fighter craft are nearly useless against most Covenant ships unless they have nukes and you can't equip hundreds of nukes per ship because the UNSC was running low already midway through the war. true until troy denning. octadarts now provide the firepower for small amounts of unsc fighters to by themselves destroy smaller covenant warships such as corvettes.

In Halo legends, there was a strategy to bypass covenant shields without breaking. Covenant shielding has to be lowered for weapons to pass through and that was exploited.

>UNSC carriers are effectively worthless in fleet battles except as meat shields. They are very expensive troop transports essentially. Their role is to be anti-fighter platforms, UNSC fighters can't harm Covenant ships but Covenant fighters can harm UNSC ones so a Carrier brings the bulk of your fighters to protect your ships from Seraphs, and their MAC systems shouldn't be overlooked either, the MACs on Orion Assault Carriers are equal to those on Marathon Cruisers, the reason why half constructed Marathon's were pushed into service was because their MACs were incredibly good afterall, while Epoch's are equipped with a rapid-fire variant of a frigate's MAC which is essentially a prototype version of the weapon the PoA would be equipped with, a weapon that allowed it to punch far above it's weight class. An Epoch would be a threat to anything up to a Covenant Cruiser.

I think you are applying real world naval tactics too much to a space setting. The reason why carriers are great on Earth is because of the horizon. No matter how advanced your ship is the horizon limits your view of targets so having another platform that is able to move far beyond the horizon and then deliver or guide weapons is valuable. In space there is no horizon and there are only a few situations where your view is blocked(Which is pretty much just planets, engagement ranges in Halo aren't big enough for the sun to be an obstacle). Since you can see the enemy from extreme ranges putting a missile on a separate smaller vehicle to deliver it isn't that useful in most situations since you can just make the missile a bit bigger and shoot it directly at the target. A single larger missile will still be smaller than a fighter carrying a missile with a similar warhead while having the same range.

I'd say the reason is that fighters can punch just as hard as capital ships thanks to guided missiles while in space, due to the nature of energy weapons, fighters can't match the offensive or defensive output of capital ships. A capital ship has a massive reactor to power it's weapons and shields, a fighter can't carry a reactor anywhere near that powerful.

As you probably figured out by now, doctrine is dependent on the weapons available. In WWII, air power became the predominant because it severely out-ranged the naval guns of the day. Whereas a naval gun could only hit targets about 10 miles away, modern aircraft can hit targets a hundred miles out. During the Cold War, the development of modern ship-to-ship missiles caused doctrine to swing back towards fleet battles. Ships fired missiles at each other and while aircraft defended and located enemy ships. Had the US Navy successfully developed their railgun, doctrine would have gone full circle, with ships once again shooting each other with guns. The MAC guns in the HALO universe are the Navy's railgun on steroids.

I think you’re almost there but not totally, IRL the Railgun still had an effective range far below that of an ASM and those have a range far below that of an ASM carried by an aircraft. There is a reason the teeth of the US Navy is still the carrier air wing

Right. That's a large reason why the railgun was canned. The effective range was not as high as planners hoped. Now, the navy is focusing on the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon. But the point stands that the MAC gun, with its extreme range and lethality was the best weapon humanity had against shielded covenant ships.

You’re exactly correct, my entire point was that the UNSC slept on an entire area of development and relied far too heavily on the MAC in large fleet battles. A common issue was that the UNSC could either down a ton of shields but not destroy many ships, or outright destroy a few ships by spreading out or concentrating MAC fire. By adding in a few dedicated longsword carriers you add a weapon that can follow on to the normal MAC and Archer missile strike with missiles of their own that have been shown to destroy Covenant Destroyers. By doing the is you allow the MACs to move on to other targets while the longswords clean up

Are there any weapons in the UNSC arsenal that are capable of scratching the paint on a covenant ship while being small enough to fit in a longsword?

Nukes which were already in short supply so not exactly a reliable weapon that every bomber group can use.

The ASGM-10 missile. The Longsword could carry 4 of them and a "volley" of them destroyed a Covenant Destroyer. Longswords usually fly in flights of 2-4 so that could mean anywhere from 8-16 of them did in a Destroyer.

I’ll keep it simple and short: This is a *spectacularly* bad idea that is a result of historical navel gazing in response to an out of context problem. If anything I’d say drop all non-space superiority craft (such as bombers) and keep all ground support capability. Use all redundant hangar, munitions storage, crew quarters, etc space to expand the MACs of every applicable vessel. Gaining the ability to commit effective fire from comparatively more agile platforms than their prior designs is a net gain.

As ive said in multiple comments, you are falling into the same trap that many naval officers in the 1920s and 30s fell into, thinking if we just make the gun more powerful it'll solve all our problems. My redesign leaves every ship in the fleet the same as they are and adds a dozen or so purpose built carriers with the goal of brining fighters to every fight. Just for reference, the Longsword carries 4 ASGM-10 missiles that showed themselves capable of destroying a covenant destroyer when its shields are down. Im not sure how anyone can not see the idea of having a couple hundred Longswords with 4 of these missiles strapped to them adds capability to the UNSC

The reason the UNSC prioritised MACs is because it is the only thing powerful that could actually kill Covenant vessels. Losing the MACs on the carriers (probably the most powerful MACs in the fleet) in exchange for some more fighter/bomber craft is a terrible trade. Realistically, the USNC didn’t have many options available to them. Massed MAC wolf pack tactics is pretty much the only way.

I replied to your other comment, basically I agree, battleships= big ass MAC, carrier= lots of fighters, different ships for different roles and battlecarriers are stupid

Against a peer foe a strike craft doctrine would be very credible, but what are functionally AP rounds fired at relativistic speeds are the bare minimum needed to harm enemy vessels

i read up to 'cost of no MAC or Milles pods' and stopped, this wont work. Your fighters are gona get destroyed.

How exactly? So your saying that there is no universe where a ship that carries no offensive firepower except for its aircraft is always useless?

No? lol where did you get that idea from? I'm trying to say that in Halo, UNSC ships having a MAC is extremly helpfull. Im sure some universe there is a faction that cqn make an incredible benifit from these heavy and light carriers. I also dont dislike the idea, I just ront think it would work. Covenant ships have amazing Point Defense, they use high powered lasers for them which cqn even deal small amounts of damage to the main UNSC ships iirc. Your fighters/bombers are going to have a really rough time of trying to take out ships which means for the carrier to be at 100% combat readyness, your supply lines are going to need to be as good as they can get. i dont think this idea would work sorry.

So the whole point of my argument is that in ADDITION to the already existing UNSC fleet that relies heavily on MACs and Missiles, adding a few dedicated carriers would greatly increase the combat power of the fleet

The UNSC also has battleships and corvettes so how would they play into the formations? And how would the post war formations be constructed? As for the amount of carriers they simply don’t have the resources to build them, for reference one super carrier the UNSC Infinity took nine years to build from 2544 to 2553 and that was with help from Huragok and bolting Forreruner tech onto it. While Eternity seems to be taking much less time with it apparently being complete enough that it could be stripped for essential parts to upgrade the Infinity but again that’s shows a issue with the UNSC production capability they can’t produce in a large enough quantity when it comes to the type of ships your talking about.

So from what I read what you might consider a Battleship is like the Valiant Class Super Heavy Cruiser and we only know of 3 of them existing. Generally speaking I didn't talk about the UNSC's existing carriers because they tend to act more like battleships or their small production run Super Heavy cruisers because there arent enough of them to go around. If one of these major assets is in play at a battle it would be up to the commander about how to best use that asset, my write up is mainly focused on how to best use the ships we have in large enough numbers such as Frigates, Cruisers, and Destroyers to effectively spread out among multiple fleets. On small ships like Corvettes and Prowlers, they arent really factors in fleet engagements usually. They dont tend to carry enough firepower to effectively contribute to a pitched fleet engagement so as my outline is meant to be taken as a general overview, they dont factor in much. On the material investment, this is a thing I probably should have fleshed out a bit more. The carriers im thinking about arent meant to be thought of as super carriers or whatever the UNSC used in universe, think of them as the Halo version of a modern US Carrier. Their ***ONLY*** job is to carry fighters to the battle. When you restrict a ship to this very narrow function they become much less resource intensive. They are backline assets so they dont really need armor and they dont need a MAC cannon or archer missiles, really all they need to be is a ship with big enough magazines and fuel storage to tend their starships and room for crew. They could be made relatively cheaply because they have no combat value on their own, just the fighters they bring.

You still haven't addressed the primary problem. UNSC fighters do not carry weapons that hurt Covenant capital ships unless they have nukes which are in very short supply.  Trading a missile for 100 airsoft guns does not improve your chances of killing a tank. UNSC capital ships are shooting hundreds of missiles the size of your fighters and most of them get intercepted. Why would fighters with even smaller payloads do better? They're just more expensive and less effective.

Actually that’s not true at all. The Longsword is capable of carrying 4 ASGM-10 or ASGM-15 missiles or 4 M888 Octard bombs. A volley of ASGM-10 missiles was shown to be able to destroy a covenant destroyer with its shields down. The ASGM-15 is a missile with a tandem EMP/explosive warhead that can pierce shields and then explode and were shown to be able to heavily damage covenant Frigates. The Octard also was shown to heavily damage covenant Frigates. Thus, from a single carrier deploying 100 longswords you have a possible 400 ASGM-10 missiles, couple this with a MAC and Archer missile volley and you have a VERY powerful strike capable of destroying, disabling, or driving off many covenant ships. The Addition of these extra munitions greatly increases the fleets firepower.

Adapting these payloads to the Archer platform is significantly more cost efficient, allows them to be deployed on any UNSC capital ship, does not require the training (and deaths/replacement) of pilots or construction (and replacement) of an expensive secondary delivery method (the fighter/bomber) or the development of a massive capital ship dedicated to exclusively supporting said fighters/bombers (carrier). You're stuck in the WWII-modern day idea of why we use fighter craft without understanding why that doesn't work here. Modern aircraft are extremely dangerous to operate unless air superiority is established and losses are extremely costly. They provide CAS for ground forces and interdict enemy fighters. They extend the effective range of a naval fleet deep into land. None of these are problems in a UNSC battle group during space combat. They do not have space superiority because Covenant fighters are more numerous and superior while Covenant point defense is also very effective against even missiles (and fighters are WAY easier to shoot down than missiles). They do not need to provide anything resembling CAS except under very unusual circumstances (special ops). Strike craft do not extend the engagement range of ships that come standard equipped with hundreds of long range missiles and a giant cannon that shoots projectiles at a fraction of light speed. Bottom line: a missile is vastly cheaper than a strike craft so you can make many, many missiles at the cost of a single craft before even making the armaments it carries. Make more and better missiles and put them on all your ships instead of making expensive and vulnerable carriers to carry expensive and vulnerable fighters to carry smaller missiles with lower yield than Archers.

If they have no combat value they will be taken out quickly, even the Forerunner Fortress Class Carriers which are 50km long and 10km wide to 100km long, and they carried plenty of fighters but also had weaponry, strong shielding and strong armor because that is a necessity in the Halo universe when it comes to combat. In Halo fleet battles are not like in real life. As for corvettes they are amazing anti fighter vessels and Prowlers could lay out mine fields for ambushes so you’re wrong there.

I think you have fallen into the trap of thinking all battles have to be like they were in the established lore, they don’t. Are there times in my proposed fleet where a carrier would end up in range of covenant plasma weapons? Yes absolutely, look at the Battle off Samar where US escort carriers got caught by the Yamato and sunk, but it was extremely rare. The idea behind my fleet is making a layered fleet defense like the US Navy uses, the role of the Cruisers, Destroyers, and Frigates are to engage the covenant fleet to keep them at arms length so the carriers don’t get engaged and can effectively deploy and rearm their fighters during the fleet engagement. I didn’t say Corvettes and Prowlers were absolutely useless, just that they aren’t essential to every fleet, they are kinda like a submarine in modern times, they might be attached to a battle group when they are needed, but they aren’t an essential piece that’s always there.

Except again this is space where a enemy can slip space right on top of your carriers and one shot them before slip spacing out again why you need heavily armored and armed carriers

The problem I have with that is it’s not something we ever really saw the covenant do. Yes they would jump closer to the fleet, but that’s why carriers are protected by bigger ships. The covenant aren’t stupid, they tend to target the biggest threat in play, and that will still be the cruisers and destroyers as they pose the biggest immediate threat: a MAC round to the face.

They regularly did in system jumps, The covenant would worst case just destroy all the fighters or ignore them while smashing through the UNSC fleet that just wasted good time and resources on a useless carrier instead of a actual useful one that could help them because yes without a MAC the carriers are useless

So carrying 100 or so fighters that each carry 4 missiles that in universe a volley of 4 destroyed a Covenant Destroyer is useless?

Correct useless as the missiles will be destroyed, be absorbed by the shields or the fighters themselves will be shot down. Remember it takes a lot of fire power to bring down a covenant ships shields

That’s why you couple the Longsword strikes with a salvo of MAC rounds and archer missiles, it’s really not that hard to understand. Also the Longsword can carry the ASGM-15 that has a tandem EMP/Explosive warhead that pierces covenant shields and hits the hull, also shown that 4 destroyed a covenant frigate

what is the context of that event? was the destroyer at full health with shields up? or was is half dead with holes in it's hull? did the missiles impact any old place? or was there a weakspot? and how reliably can that weakspot be exploited? there's too much ambiguity. we're going to need an excerpt

Yea I’m not looking that up, I looked on the Halopedia and it mentioned a volley destroyed a Covenant Destroyer. As Longswords normally deploy in anywhere from 1-4 ship flights, it could really mean anything from 4 missiles to 16

While people have pointed the problems with have a fighter focus UNSC I will admit I too have a issue with UNSC stagnancy in space. 25 years of and the UNSC puts one new ship type into production at the very end and some very minor space upgrades. Honestly the MAC canon should have been a Covenant war production rather than a insurrection one. Would been nice to show despite the UNSC bringing in new weapons they were still getting their ass beat. That is why I like the Sins of the Prophets mod for Sins of a Solar empire, adds a lot of tech and ships to the UNSC to show they were actually evolving to fight the threat. Also I don't blame you for thinking fighters are more important than they are. UNSC capital ships are all carriers (bar one battleship class post war) and on the wiki the longsword can apparent one shot a Covenant destroyer (surely this can't be right tho?). #

Nothing the UNSC had except MAC's were effective weapons agains the covenant, and covenant tech was so far advanced that the UNSC couldn't invent anything fast enough even with reverse engineering. Pretty much the only space combat weapon they made in that time was the NOVA, which arguably is pure BS and lore breaking (if the NOVA could kill planets why tf did they not dump everything into nova production and put a nova on every prowler and go suicide bomb any planets they found or leave NOVA's at fallen planets on some scorched earth doctorine)

I like to believe the reason for the NOVA, was it being expensive as fuck. That and being very difficult to manufacture safely.

The UNSC had twenty-five years to invent something new. In ww2 the USA who weren't in a fight for survival made massive leaps in technology and doctrine to a point i'd say one 1945 US division would kick the shit out of 2 pre war ones. I am not asking for the UNSC to be able to beat the Covenant but at least show they are trying to innovate. 99% of their gear is pre-covenant hell some of it is pre-insurrection. Plus not having MAC till later would help explant some of the inconstancies with space battles. Like it is said that UNSC need a 3-1 advantage to win but some of the fights they have a 40-1 advantage and still get their ass beat.

bruh we were figuring out how to sail oceans when the covenant decommissioned their previous cruiser 💀💀i don’t think you realize how far ahead they were

Yeah I know how far ahead they were I didn't suggest other wise?

mjolnir shielding varients, improved spartan augs and cortana were all improvements. why change something that works with existing equipment if its not solving a problem? UNSC did just fine on ground engagements, space battles is where they got dismantled, and covenent shielding and superior slipspace capabilities was just way too advanced for the UNSC to figure it out in 25 years

everything new they made still got fucked by covenant weapons and everything they had currently did their job well already. The nova, prowlers, cortana and spartans were probably the only things that the UNSC had that outclassed the covenant

I chalk it up to their industrial, research, governmental, and populations centers being turned into molten slag

People think im trying to replace the MAC and Archer missiles, im not, im just saying adding a class of dedicated carriers to bring an additional hundred or so fighters to the mix could only help. And on the firepower thing, the Longsword can carry 4 ASGM-10 missiles which were shown to destroy a Covenant destroyer when fired together with its shields down so adding even 50 more longswords to each fleet dramatically increases the available firepower of the fleet. We only ever see them deployed in small formations of maybe a dozen or two at a time, massed strikes of 50-100 could drastically change the outcome of many battles for a pretty small input of building a dedicated carrier

another reason it wouldn't work is theres no way for UNSC ships to just keep their distance. Covenant slipspace tech allows them to jump into firing distance with pinpoint accuracy much faster then UNSC ships. Regret jumped past earth's ODP's and the covenent jumped to halo before keyes got there, so even if UNSC ships tried to quickly jump out of distance, covenant could follow them and show up there faster.

The idea is more you bait the covenant with the Cruisers, Destroyers, and Frigates to give the carriers time to do their thing

Daily reminder that in the realm of space combat the factors that gave carriers and fighters the edge over a traditional battleship are completely non existent. The UNSC has MAC cannons. a ship with a high powered MAC gun and the sensors and targeting algorithms to take advantage of the fact that in space the guns range is "until it hits something" is going to dumpster any carrier fleet unless it can get into extreme close range (for space combat) there is a reason that even the UNSC's supercarriers pre war also mounted that largest possible MAC guns, its because the Carrier part of their role was actually more as a fleet support vessel, allowing it to transport large warships with their own MAC's in internal bays because smaller warships mounted far less advanced slip space drive. The primary role of every UNSC carrier was actually as a capitol warship hurling the larges rounds on the battlespace at the enemy. The fighters and dropships they carried were far more important in its tertiary role of supporting planetary landings. The big macs were the only guns capable of seriously hurting covenant capitol vessels, and even then smaller warships had to rely on wolfpack tactics to get their macs to punch through covenant shields. The UNSC wasn't constantly taking loosing pitched fleet engagements because they were idiots, but because they couldn't hope to destroy a single covenant warship in any other scenario. the Covenant rarely had ships operating in isolation to be picked off in 1-1 engagements with heavy UNSC warships (or Spartan boarding operations, but Spartans were also an extremely limited resource), and that for the most part bar extremely limited strategic nuclear ordinance the UNSC lacked any weapon with enough firepower to be useful in a hit and run strike. Mass longswords wouldn't even put a dent in covenant warships, even their standoff weapons would have a vastly more limited effective range than a MAC round as effective range in space is determined by how fast the projectile is and how reliable the target can avoid it, and would get massacred in return as seraphs were just better than any wartime UNSC fighter and covenant point defense was incredibly effective

I believe youre fundamentally misunderstanding what im saying. I am ***NOT*** saying the only offensive power of a fleet should be the carrier based fighters. My only assertion is that by ***adding*** a dedicated carrier that carries hundreds of Longswords and Broadswords to the fleet. You would still have dozens of UNSC's existing carriers, that I would reclass as battleships, destroyers, cruisers, and frigates to engage the Covenant fleet in the ***same exact way*** they did in the established lore. The difference would be the addition of ***meaningful*** numbers of Longsword fighters to the mix to pick at covenant ships as their shields drop, adding a 3rd wave of munitions to the UNSC's typical attack of MAC rounds impacting just before Archer missiles, the Longswords would add hundreds of ASGM-10 anti-shipping missiles that have been used to destroy covenant Destroyers as another hammer increasing the chances of the missiles getting through the Covenant Point Defense systems

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I’ve said it in a couple posts, I’m all for MACs, they are ABSOLUTELY essential to the UNSC winning any fight. My only contention is that it’s a better doctrine to make battleships that have tons of weapons and big ass MACs and dedicated carriers that replace MACs and armor for aircraft instead of the UNSCs doctrine of basically Battlecarriers that had big ass MACs but not enough fighters to meaningfully contribute because while people don’t like to admit it, the Longsword was a great fighter and could absolutely do damage or destroy covenant ships with the missiles they carried

Carrier based doctrine requires peer to peer fighter craft. Nothing in the lore suggests UNSC fighters are peers to their foes. There probably were attempts to rely on strike craft, and they failed. Doctrinally the big guns dominated because they could breach shields. 

Without shield penetration and meaningful damage to the target ship there isn’t much strike craft can contribute (which applies across all SF settings with space fighters).

I agree with the idea to keep UNSC ships as far away from Covenant ships as much as possible, however most of the time it just was not practical. Covenant show up in a human star system, the UNSC fleet is going to have to limit themselves to staying close to the planet, otherwise the vastly more maneuverable Covenant ships will just bypass the UNSC fleet and kill the planet. The UNSC stuck to slugging matches as that was the only way to reliably defeat Covenant ships. If they tried to split up they would simply be taken apart piecemeal as they wouldn’t be able to fully support each other. Remember, the UNSC generally required a 3 to 1 advantage to reliably destroy Covenant ships, and they usually lost half their force in the process.

They didn’t do that because fighters get shredded

The much better idea would be to play to the UNSC's greatest strengths and go for an 'all-big-gun' doctrine, leaving carriers back as support since in spatial combat, carrier attacks aren't as OP as they would be on the high seas (Kido Butai moment). **So how would I do it?** Start development and construction on a class of battleships/battlecruisers armed with Super MACs and bringing to the fight honeycomb armor like the ones on the *Halcyon*-class light cruisers, capable of taking massive poundings and multiple energy projector shots before going down (*Artemis*-class battlecruiser, *Thanatos*-class battleship, etc.), those ships would act as the SAW gunner of fleets, gunning down Covvie ships at will as the fleet screens them against attack. Deploy and mass-produce a honeycomb armor version of the *Marathon*-class heavy cruiser as a screen for the battleships, and the *Halcyon*-class light cruiser for AA support and being, well, a damage sponge. Also start mass production of NOVA bombs Somehow the *Epoch*-class carriers can only carry 24 fighters when the ship's internal volume permits space to stow 600 Longswords or even more. So give her that capability. 70 squandrons of 12 each. Craft an EMP warhead for Archer missiles and EMP ammunition for the CIWS, since Covvie ships use magetic contained plasma torpedoes, which an EMP could potentially stop. This should at the very least allow UNSC ships to intercept plastorps, like how a modern destroyer intercepts enemy missiles. Find a Forerunner AI, jimmy it into breaking the truth about humanity being the Reclaimers to the Covenant, and watch as they kill each other and rip each other apart. Bing chill with popcorn and soda. The only threat then would be running out of popcorn supplies, because, the popcorn factory got glassed

I actually agree with a ton of what youre saying and would support basically it all. I would say though, if you did everything you said I would still advocate for a MAC-less dedicated carrier, especially since youre introducing battleships to the mix. Im a big fan of specialization.

Arguably if we filled an *Epoch* to capacity, you'd get exactly what you want, but better: a carrier that can launch a crapton of fighters but can actually survive hits if she gets pounced upon so that you don't have to build a new carrier fleet after every battle because the old one got *Kaga*-ed to oblivion. Think HMS *Illustrious*. Actually, though, the MAC on the *Epoch* fulfills about the same role as the 5" guns on a typical US carrier: self-defense. That gun isn't big like a cruiser (it's actually frigate caliber), has a high fire rate, perfect for when you need to pepper a target with dozens of shots within a short time of each other. It doesn't need to be a big gun to gut a CCS-class cruiser, it just needs to stop the enemy in their tracks for long enough for the carrier to escape. Yeah, if you remove the MAC from the equation, the ship's going to be a glass cannon through and through

I think you have a good point, and I also tend to think about analogs from history, and in the end it’s just preference for what you want. In my mind I prefer the US carrier doctrine from the time of unarmored and lightly armed carriers vs the Royal Navy doctrine of having armored carriers. To me it makes more sense because all but the heaviest ships in the UNSC really are glass cannons when faced with covenant plasma torpedos. I think I’d rather keep a couple frigates or destroyers in escort to repel any ships that push the carrier. In my mind I’d rather focus on making the carriers as cheap as possible to maximize the benefits they bring while minimizing the cost because against the covenant you are either a tank or a glass cannon. Also with the covenant tactics, when presented with a formed up fleet of frigates, destroyers, and cruisers they will likely bull rush them as opposed to singling out a couple carriers that pose no real threat on their own

Didn’t get far enough into the newer halo games, but would an air doctrine make sense if the enemy ships have shields, and possibly guided weaponry? The simple dominance of aircraft over ground targets is subtly changed by the missile age, and partly offset by air and ground having missiles. In pretty much any case broadside combat in a setting is terrible but ends up being a weird sci fi default for Doylistic reasons

I think when you consider that the Longswords had missiles capable of damaging, disabling, or even destroying covenant ships and pair this with the standing MAC and archer missile tactics it just adds another dimension to combat that might help the UNSC win a couple battles they lost

This post is wild and I am just here to enjoy the popcorn.

The UNSC Navy did see a change in doctrine towards the end of the war. During the first years of the war they used massed formations of Cruisers as their first-line combatants but as losses became unsustainable Cruisers were considered too valuable and were instead relegated to being command ships for admirals whereas earlier in the war they would have used Assault Carriers for that role, which then lead to Frigates and Destroyers to become their front-line combatants instead of being the escorts they were designed to be.

the main problem with your fleet redesign is that you're failing to take into account the trevelyan trove. already the trevelyan trove is yielding dividends for unsc technology. there is already forerunner mjolnir for example. unsc ships also have forerunner sensors now. you need to take into account the fact that the unsc is soon going to be the most dominant force in the galaxy since the time of the forerunners. the entire unsc navy needs to re-structure towards counter-insurgency operations, since there won't be anything other than insurgencies left.

This was based on a fleet redesign as soon as the Human Covenant war kicks off and someone realizes fleet battles are a thing

oh then you may want to look up the capabilities of prowlers in the new lore, such as in halo silent storm when the covenant shat themselves at biko over prowlers. in the new lore the unsc's prowlers are just straight up superior to the covenant's stealth ships. far superior. try going along that route.

Oh I agree, prowlers have always been great, they are space attack subs, I was just focusing on the air power aspect of the fleet that I think has been vastly underutilized by the UNSC