Canon

Focus beam

From Halopedia, the Halo wiki

This article is about the Forerunner weapon. For the Covenant vehicle-mounted weapon, see focus cannon.
343 Guilty Spark firing his focus beam at John-117 during the Raid on Installation 08.

The focus beam is a Forerunner laser weapon employed by monitors and Facilitator-class ancilla.[1][2]

Overview[edit]

The focus beam appears to be a more powerful iteration of the sterilization beam commonly associated to Sentinels.[3] Though, unlike the standard sentinel beam typically mounted on Aggressor Sentinels, the focus beam is fired from the monitor's lens on its alloy carapace;[1] doing so turns the lens' glowing light from its default coloration to red.[4][5][6][7][8] As with all sterilization beams,[3] the focus beam could seemingly be tuned for multiple power levels; whereas 686 Ebullient Prism's focus beam disintegrated Reff 'Talamee's body, leaving behind only a heap of gore,[9] when 343 Guilty Spark turned on the UNSC-Sangheili team at Installation 08, his initial burst of focus beam only mortally wounded Avery Johnson, even leaving Johnson alive for long enough to assist John-117 in Spark's defeat.[5]

Production notes[edit]

In Halo: Reach Forge, the monitor's default biped weapon is the M'tara-pattern focus rifle, seemingly as a reference to the focus beam used by the monitors in fiction. Fittingly, the focus rifle uses reverse-engineered Forerunner technology,[10] particularly copying some aspects of the sentinel beam and the Z-510 focus turret.[11][12]

Gallery[edit]

List of appearances[edit]

Sources[edit]

  1. ^ a b Halo: The Rubicon Protocol, chapter 38: "Until the submonitor, that small orb of gray alloy and blue light, came barreling up the pass, focus beam raging from her lens, and everything faded away into black..."
  2. ^ Halo Encyclopedia (2011 edition), page 237: "Monitors possess a powerful offensive laser much stronger than those of the Sentinels, as well as access to local teleportation grids."
  3. ^ a b Halo Encyclopedia (2022 edition), page 326
  4. ^ Halo 3, campaign level Floodgate
  5. ^ a b Halo 3, campaign level Halo
  6. ^ Halo: Escalation, issue 10
  7. ^ Halo Infinite, campaign mission Connections: Conservatory
  8. ^ Halo Infinite, campaign mission Connections: Spire
  9. ^ Halo: Blood Line, issue 5
  10. ^ Halo Encyclopedia (2022 edition), page 293
  11. ^ Halo 4: The Essential Visual Guide, page 103
  12. ^ Halo: Official Spartan Field Manual, page 193