One moment of the covenant going all out with glassing I liked was in the animation of The Return. There’s a brief shot of a covenant ship glassing in the distance, miles away, and in like 3 seconds the wall of flames approached and incinerated the poor marine. I imagine this is how fleets go about complete planetary glassing, the epicenter of the bean leaves behind a dead canyon from the heat turning the layers of rock to air particles while for many miles all around the heat is so intense that virtually everything combusts.
Yeah, that's a big problem in Sci-Fi in general for me, Authors think that glassing a continent and evaporating an Ocean is equal to each other, while it's not.
In my head cannon the plasma the covenant use is the temperature of standard plasma, which is like around 14,500 F. This makes sense to me as in the lore spartan armor is able to be compromised after a few shots, and marines typically get one shotted by plasma bolts. It’s because even 2 inches of titanium still melts at a little over 3000F and boils at just under 6000F. Same with how easily covenant ships slice through meters of UNSC titanium alloy armor in space battles like butter. So 14,500 degree beams carving up the surface of a planet would honestly ionize the air and boil through most surfaces almost instantly. The surrounding heat would be also enough to melt anything until it dissipated to being under 500 degrees and even then the air is like an oven on high. I also think that some larger craft can dial up the power to much higher temperatures than even that but idk. This was a fantastic video as always, your content is what Ive thought about in halo for so long and to this day, realism and what ifs. thank you for your work
The data pad date detailing the glassing time is dated to near the start of the war, before humanity got solid info on Covenant abilities. IE, it’s estimated wre wrong due to incomplete and inaccurate information from not enough reliable data at the time of im-universe writing. Meridian, which we see in Halo 5, was a ‘rush job’, and yet had most of its surface turned to glass and its oceans boiled away.
Good video. Atleast the worst Covenant glassings and orbital bombardments aren't as powerful as the Imperium of Man's adverage exterminatus protocols and the UNSC's Nova Bombs. Those crack open continents like cracking open peanut shells. I would like to imagine though some Covenant ships like CAS, the Supercarrier, and the modified one the Banished brought with them come with higher destructive pay loads and higher energy outputs for their glassing beams. The Banish's were able to slightly damage some of the Ark's metallic structure so that has to mean something. The Banish were known for collecting Forerunner artifacts and outfitting them to their own weaponry like the UNSC were doing. So for some types and external circumstances it may vary more. Depends.
The Covenant still has one over the IOM because despite being somewhat retarded, at least all their soldiers, proud as they are, actually do seek cover. XD
@@VunderGuy I would say it depends alot on the Imperium regiment. As different Imperium groups have different experiences, training, and militaristic doctrines. But universally the Imperium military varies alot as the institution governing the military doesn't have absolute influence over enforcing a universal doctrine over all worlds at the same time and the Inquisition and it's branches and groups are quite busy weeding out other things.
I think most of the temperature increase of the planet would be due to the massive increase in Carbon dioxide in the atmoshpere due to burning of plants and infrastructure and such. although you would first expect a large drop in temperature for a few years due to all of the ash particles in the atmoshphere.
I may be mistaken but if memory serves right then even in lore it's mentioned that they don't usually fully glass a planet because that's not efficient at all. It's possible but better to glass important areas. The energy costs to glass a planet make it far less common than targeted strikes. My Halo lore is rusty however
It also may be that they don’t really need to glass an entire planet. The evaporation of the atmosphere will usually finish off anything left but I could be wrong
I remember this too. There's a side story in Halo Evolutions where a former Covenant Shipmaster returns to a planet he helped glass, where it was a specific glyph burned into the surface, but all that energy and heat imparted still left the planet as a desert
if we, completely disregarding the lore of halo in particular, assume that the energy required is produced via matter-antimatter annihilation (efficiency roughly 99%), then it's not far fetched at all. use E=mc^2 to calculate how much mass that would need converting into energy for, say, plasma balls or lasers. or use the full formula E^2=p^2c^2 + m^2c^4 if you wanna be REALLY efficient. the full formula takes into account that moving objects have different mass (like photons in a beam or ions in a plasma). because mass = energy, you hopefully get the idea.
Personally I always felt it was weird how easy controlling an orbit is in sci-fi. A world where starships can be built should have the tech to lob ground weapons back up at the ship. I mean imagine a gun with the same generator as a warship just connected to a single particle/plasma weapon lobbing rounds at a ship in orbit. Holding an orbit completely should be a hard thing to do for any fleet
The problem is that while the generators and guns of such a defensive array could infact outgun the firepower and ammo stores of an invading fleet, the old adage of a ship's a fool to fight a fort being very apt, at even the lowest of reasonable low balls for the energy both the UNSC and Covenant routinely output in their weapons, the atmosphere around these guns becomes a problem and it only gets worse once we get into megatons and especially into the gigaton range. Basically, even if the weapons themselves are powerful enough to survive the backlash of a particle beam or magnetically accelerated macro projectile through hundreds of miles of atmosphere from sea level or below at relativistic velocities, you basically have to make sure there are no significant population centers that'd be adversely affected by the wake of the firing of these weapons which kind of narrows your options of where to place these weapons and kind of defeats the purpose of those weapons if they can't defend the very cities they're trying to defend by having to be placed so far away. For an invading force that also means they know exactly where those installations are likely to be before they even open fire. Even if you get past the issue of these weapons' wakes being highly disruptive to the lives of the people on a surface you're trying to defend by having that population base go into deep underground bunkers before an invasion or else shield their cities with theater shield domes and the defensive emplacements are both well hidden and numerous, once they start firing and an invading fleet knows where they are, like any static emplacement it's only a matter of time before the enemy manages to get a fleet big enough and with enough firepower to safely lob at those emplacements from beyond their stand off distance and coverage since ships can move and those emplacements stay in, well, place. Honestly, in a setting where you could just go to an asteroid belt and push as many as you'd need to bombard a planet at whatever velocity you desire like Halo, even the most protracted sieges could only ever end one way for a defending force without a relief fleet to bail them out.
@@VunderGuy I think it also matters the level of technology your universe has. Like how in star wars you can put up a shield around an entire planet then as long as you can fuel the shield or turn it on and off rapidly then you could hold out for relief longer or just outlast the resources of your enemy. Even just having a local shield to protect the major points of your world can be a major hassle. A major weakness of a sieging force is resources and outlasting the defense while also worrying about enemy raiding or counter attack. Most sieges ended in failure or a negotiated surrender since such things are more difficult than they appear Large weapons like canons are hard to place but in a world where you can have fighters and dropships fly up to space on the regular I could see it easy to use missiles near population centers; just have the silos a couple miles from the city and lob them out in swarms with the strongest warheads you could mount. I Doubt even a shield could hold off dozens of nuclear explosions if enough make it through. Said missiles could also stop asteroids even without a warhead. It is something we are experimenting with now but if an asteroid is coming towards a planet, it is possible to knock it off course by just hitting it with enough of force and if the missile survives it can use its engines to further push away the asteroid. Also in the Halo universe they have gravity tech on their ships so its possible they could put some sort of tractor beam devises to hold, push away, or even pull down enemy ships. I also could see other ways to defend like filling the upper atmosphere with magnetic particles to disrupt plasma weapons entering the atmosphere or mess up enemy sensors. Granted I do agree that all of this is dependent on the defending force having the tech to do this. There is also the issue of how serious the enemy is on taking the world. Something like this might be enough to get an enemy after conquest alone to hold back but if you have a force like the covenant that doesn't care about how many die or how long it takes to destroy or take over the planet then this is only delaying the enemy. Just feel that the covenant would be losing a lot more ships than they do in the Halo Universe trying to hold a planet long enough to glass it.
To me, while impressive and having a long lasting effect, glassing seems like a huge waste of energy and also a waste of a whole freaking planet! If your objective is to annihilate humans, the first thing they should do would be destroy orbital defenses and ships so they can't fight back, then an orbital blockade to prevent them from escaping as well as receiving reinforcements, then you seal the blockade by destroying in priority the spaceports and space related facilities (space elevators, shipyards, fuel depots...), THEN you can target populations centers starting from the outside to the inside to maximise casualties. That should do at least 90% of the job, then you can take care of the rest via strategic atmospheric bombardment and/or sending troops. Your objective is completed faster, with less energy spent and most importantly, the planet is still (mostly) habitable. If the forerunners saw the covenant's glassing tactics, they'd just fire the halo array again.
Glassing is INEFFICIENT much faster for A civ capable of asteroid mining to just redirect asteroids or just use the MAC guns like on every significant UNSC ship.
@@HailAzathoth MAC guns would be placed on ships PRIMARILY for planetary bombardment. Ship combat would come second. MAC guns are CHEAP they are literally running at the costs of onboard power generation and cobbling together scrap of magnetic metal. Immediately fragging the satellite network and hanging the threat of orbital bombardment would be S.O.P. for an entity like the UNSC who keeps their "Indentured Colonies" inline at gunpoint.
Question: How powerful would Argent Energy from the Doom series be in the Halo verse? Would be powerful even by Forerunner standards since a small amount has temperature levels that are off the charts?
Considering the Human Covenant war lasted 28 years and ended in the glassing of tens of planets being glass, I think the propaganda number of 30 years was a bit optimistic.
One moment of the covenant going all out with glassing I liked was in the animation of The Return. There’s a brief shot of a covenant ship glassing in the distance, miles away, and in like 3 seconds the wall of flames approached and incinerated the poor marine. I imagine this is how fleets go about complete planetary glassing, the epicenter of the bean leaves behind a dead canyon from the heat turning the layers of rock to air particles while for many miles all around the heat is so intense that virtually everything combusts.
Yeah, that's a big problem in Sci-Fi in general for me, Authors think that glassing a continent and evaporating an Ocean is equal to each other, while it's not.
writers are usually not STEM-gifted, hence why they're writers. usually.
In my head cannon the plasma the covenant use is the temperature of standard plasma, which is like around 14,500 F. This makes sense to me as in the lore spartan armor is able to be compromised after a few shots, and marines typically get one shotted by plasma bolts. It’s because even 2 inches of titanium still melts at a little over 3000F and boils at just under 6000F. Same with how easily covenant ships slice through meters of UNSC titanium alloy armor in space battles like butter. So 14,500 degree beams carving up the surface of a planet would honestly ionize the air and boil through most surfaces almost instantly. The surrounding heat would be also enough to melt anything until it dissipated to being under 500 degrees and even then the air is like an oven on high. I also think that some larger craft can dial up the power to much higher temperatures than even that but idk. This was a fantastic video as always, your content is what Ive thought about in halo for so long and to this day, realism and what ifs. thank you for your work
The data pad date detailing the glassing time is dated to near the start of the war, before humanity got solid info on Covenant abilities. IE, it’s estimated wre wrong due to incomplete and inaccurate information from not enough reliable data at the time of im-universe writing. Meridian, which we see in Halo 5, was a ‘rush job’, and yet had most of its surface turned to glass and its oceans boiled away.
Exactly! The war itself was 28years and they glassed way more then 1 planet so earth taking 30 years is cap.
I’m halo wars during the take back harvest cut scene the covenant destroyer glasses right where the covenant troops r while the elite kills a marine 💀
Haha yah I always thought that was amusing
Good video.
Atleast the worst Covenant glassings and orbital bombardments aren't as powerful as the Imperium of Man's adverage exterminatus protocols and the UNSC's Nova Bombs. Those crack open continents like cracking open peanut shells.
I would like to imagine though some Covenant ships like CAS, the Supercarrier, and the modified one the Banished brought with them come with higher destructive pay loads and higher energy outputs for their glassing beams. The Banish's were able to slightly damage some of the Ark's metallic structure so that has to mean something. The Banish were known for collecting Forerunner artifacts and outfitting them to their own weaponry like the UNSC were doing. So for some types and external circumstances it may vary more. Depends.
The Covenant still has one over the IOM because despite being somewhat retarded, at least all their soldiers, proud as they are, actually do seek cover. XD
@@VunderGuy
I would say it depends alot on the Imperium regiment. As different Imperium groups have different experiences, training, and militaristic doctrines. But universally the Imperium military varies alot as the institution governing the military doesn't have absolute influence over enforcing a universal doctrine over all worlds at the same time and the Inquisition and it's branches and groups are quite busy weeding out other things.
5:22 you can see a lake on reach the looks like the the caspian Sea from Asia
I think most of the temperature increase of the planet would be due to the massive increase in Carbon dioxide in the atmoshpere due to burning of plants and infrastructure and such.
although you would first expect a large drop in temperature for a few years due to all of the ash particles in the atmoshphere.
I may be mistaken but if memory serves right then even in lore it's mentioned that they don't usually fully glass a planet because that's not efficient at all. It's possible but better to glass important areas. The energy costs to glass a planet make it far less common than targeted strikes.
My Halo lore is rusty however
It also may be that they don’t really need to glass an entire planet. The evaporation of the atmosphere will usually finish off anything left but I could be wrong
@@bservr8484
A great solution to this is to use planetary volume rather than surface area. Much harder to glass them all.
I remember this too. There's a side story in Halo Evolutions where a former Covenant Shipmaster returns to a planet he helped glass, where it was a specific glyph burned into the surface, but all that energy and heat imparted still left the planet as a desert
if we, completely disregarding the lore of halo in particular, assume that the energy required is produced via matter-antimatter annihilation (efficiency roughly 99%), then it's not far fetched at all. use E=mc^2 to calculate how much mass that would need converting into energy for, say, plasma balls or lasers. or use the full formula E^2=p^2c^2 + m^2c^4 if you wanna be REALLY efficient.
the full formula takes into account that moving objects have different mass (like photons in a beam or ions in a plasma). because mass = energy, you hopefully get the idea.
Authors always tend to lowball the insaneamounts of energy needed to pull things like this off.
This, this is why Europa seems like a much more sane option to colonize than reach.
Oh there is a game bit where you see the orbital bombardment. Long night of solace cutscene 3 (Jorge getting the bomb)
Personally I always felt it was weird how easy controlling an orbit is in sci-fi. A world where starships can be built should have the tech to lob ground weapons back up at the ship. I mean imagine a gun with the same generator as a warship just connected to a single particle/plasma weapon lobbing rounds at a ship in orbit.
Holding an orbit completely should be a hard thing to do for any fleet
The problem is that while the generators and guns of such a defensive array could infact outgun the firepower and ammo stores of an invading fleet, the old adage of a ship's a fool to fight a fort being very apt, at even the lowest of reasonable low balls for the energy both the UNSC and Covenant routinely output in their weapons, the atmosphere around these guns becomes a problem and it only gets worse once we get into megatons and especially into the gigaton range. Basically, even if the weapons themselves are powerful enough to survive the backlash of a particle beam or magnetically accelerated macro projectile through hundreds of miles of atmosphere from sea level or below at relativistic velocities, you basically have to make sure there are no significant population centers that'd be adversely affected by the wake of the firing of these weapons which kind of narrows your options of where to place these weapons and kind of defeats the purpose of those weapons if they can't defend the very cities they're trying to defend by having to be placed so far away. For an invading force that also means they know exactly where those installations are likely to be before they even open fire. Even if you get past the issue of these weapons' wakes being highly disruptive to the lives of the people on a surface you're trying to defend by having that population base go into deep underground bunkers before an invasion or else shield their cities with theater shield domes and the defensive emplacements are both well hidden and numerous, once they start firing and an invading fleet knows where they are, like any static emplacement it's only a matter of time before the enemy manages to get a fleet big enough and with enough firepower to safely lob at those emplacements from beyond their stand off distance and coverage since ships can move and those emplacements stay in, well, place. Honestly, in a setting where you could just go to an asteroid belt and push as many as you'd need to bombard a planet at whatever velocity you desire like Halo, even the most protracted sieges could only ever end one way for a defending force without a relief fleet to bail them out.
@@VunderGuy I think it also matters the level of technology your universe has. Like how in star wars you can put up a shield around an entire planet then as long as you can fuel the shield or turn it on and off rapidly then you could hold out for relief longer or just outlast the resources of your enemy. Even just having a local shield to protect the major points of your world can be a major hassle.
A major weakness of a sieging force is resources and outlasting the defense while also worrying about enemy raiding or counter attack. Most sieges ended in failure or a negotiated surrender since such things are more difficult than they appear
Large weapons like canons are hard to place but in a world where you can have fighters and dropships fly up to space on the regular I could see it easy to use missiles near population centers; just have the silos a couple miles from the city and lob them out in swarms with the strongest warheads you could mount. I Doubt even a shield could hold off dozens of nuclear explosions if enough make it through.
Said missiles could also stop asteroids even without a warhead. It is something we are experimenting with now but if an asteroid is coming towards a planet, it is possible to knock it off course by just hitting it with enough of force and if the missile survives it can use its engines to further push away the asteroid.
Also in the Halo universe they have gravity tech on their ships so its possible they could put some sort of tractor beam devises to hold, push away, or even pull down enemy ships.
I also could see other ways to defend like filling the upper atmosphere with magnetic particles to disrupt plasma weapons entering the atmosphere or mess up enemy sensors.
Granted I do agree that all of this is dependent on the defending force having the tech to do this.
There is also the issue of how serious the enemy is on taking the world. Something like this might be enough to get an enemy after conquest alone to hold back but if you have a force like the covenant that doesn't care about how many die or how long it takes to destroy or take over the planet then this is only delaying the enemy.
Just feel that the covenant would be losing a lot more ships than they do in the Halo Universe trying to hold a planet long enough to glass it.
Never knew we have new metric prefixes.
7:19 Dinos killed by 420 ☠
i have no clue what glassing is or who you are but i like this video so have a sub
Haha UA-cam can't seem to make up its my mind lol, I make Halo videos where I relate stuff to real world military and engineering applications!
@@TheBigCabezon ooooh that sounds super interesting, defo gonna have to stick around!
Glassing is a technique that the covenant use to destroy a planet.
To me, while impressive and having a long lasting effect, glassing seems like a huge waste of energy and also a waste of a whole freaking planet! If your objective is to annihilate humans, the first thing they should do would be destroy orbital defenses and ships so they can't fight back, then an orbital blockade to prevent them from escaping as well as receiving reinforcements, then you seal the blockade by destroying in priority the spaceports and space related facilities (space elevators, shipyards, fuel depots...), THEN you can target populations centers starting from the outside to the inside to maximise casualties. That should do at least 90% of the job, then you can take care of the rest via strategic atmospheric bombardment and/or sending troops. Your objective is completed faster, with less energy spent and most importantly, the planet is still (mostly) habitable. If the forerunners saw the covenant's glassing tactics, they'd just fire the halo array again.
So what you're saying is... 6 is alive in a cave waiting for a UNSC rescue team
Glassing is INEFFICIENT much faster for A civ capable of asteroid mining to just redirect asteroids or just use the MAC guns like on every significant UNSC ship.
MAC guns would be terrible for planetary bombardment, roids way more effective
@@HailAzathoth MAC guns would be placed on ships PRIMARILY for planetary bombardment. Ship combat would come second. MAC guns are CHEAP they are literally running at the costs of onboard power generation and cobbling together scrap of magnetic metal. Immediately fragging the satellite network and hanging the threat of orbital bombardment would be S.O.P. for an entity like the UNSC who keeps their "Indentured Colonies" inline at gunpoint.
So much power does a plasma beam put out?
Question: How powerful would Argent Energy from the Doom series be in the Halo verse? Would be powerful even by Forerunner standards since a small amount has temperature levels that are off the charts?
Cool
Considering the Human Covenant war lasted 28 years and ended in the glassing of tens of planets being glass, I think the propaganda number of 30 years was a bit optimistic.
First!