The Anatomy of Halo

The Anatomy of Halo is a documentary series on Halo Waypoint. The videos concern certain aspects of the Halo Array, such as the rings' foundational structure, as well as facilities of importance, including the Library, the Sentinel Factory, the Flood Containment Facility and the Cartographer.

The Surface
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This video details the surface of the Halos, namely their varying environments, as well as the structures present and their functions, and the rings' honey-combed composition.

Transcript
Created by the Forerunners over 100,000 years ago, Halo was designed to be a wide-effect, neural-disruption weapon capable of destroying any sentient life which might perpetuate the Flood Parasites’ existence. But this wasn’t Halo’s sole function. The enormous Ring-world was also a structure ten thousand kilometers in diameter engineered to support life on its interior surface. This part of Halo’s architecture is believed to be of roughly the same constitution of a typical X Planet, with large geographic formations and enormous bodies of water. All of this contained within a climate-controlled bed of atmosphere roughly 318 kilometers from one edge to the other. While intel suggests that the seven Halo Installations representing the array each have their own distinctive environment conditions, the two best-documented installations, 04 and 05, offered a large assortment of flora and fauna across their surface. Towering mountain ranges, enormous canyons, and vast swaths of desert terrain occupied their interiors, comprised of a rich intermingling of ecosystems. To the untrained eye the facade of these ring-worlds looks no different than that of many life sustaining planets. Unsurprisingly, given their origin, the surface of a Halo ring-world is littered with Forerunner structures and technology: enormous beacons, soaring spires, and immense complexes. Still, for the most part, these individual structures’ overarching purpose and mechanism remain a mystery. And underneath Halo’s outer strata exists a honeycomb labyrinth of interior structures, interconnected by bridges made of hard light, complex tunnel systems, and a vast teleportation grid. The surface of Halo is no small marvel: its majestic architecture, its natural composition, and its sheer size offer only a hint at the Forerunners’ technological mastery.

The Cartographer
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This video details the Cartographer, its operation, and importance.

Transcript
Halo installations are vast superstructures roughly 10,000 kilometers in diameter. As expected, a construct of such size demands an on-site system which can offer visitors both locational and directional information. And therein lay the origins of the Cartographer. While the term "map room" refers to the specific compartment where the holographic map projection is generated, the Cartographer is, in essence, the entire complex which remains in constant communication with all parts of the ring. Unlike typical maps, the Cartographer is not bound by changes in structure of the ring, or its general performance, which is perhaps why the facility itself is referred to as a "map-maker". Every projection is in real-time and reflects the ring's precise state at the moment it is queried. When accessed by an artificial intelligence, it can be manipulated to an even greater degree of accuracy, identifying critical risks, and providing waypoint indicators where needed. Protecting the Cartographer are a number of security measures developed to prevent access by the Flood or another hostile species, safely locking the map room proper deep within the facility. The Cartographer's importance is unquestionable, as it provides all those who access it with the location of Halo's control room and the mechanism to fire the rings: the Library's Activation Index.

The Library
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This video details the Library, its structure, function, and database, as well as, perhaps most importantly, the Index.

Transcript
Deep within Halo, and protected by immense chasms and heavily fortified walls, is the enormous research facility known as “The Library”. As with other locations on Halo, the Library’s interior is a catacomb, a series of corridors and tunnels extending outward from a centralized hub. Outside the structure a vast gondola system interconnects a heavily guarded perimeter, while inside, a series of elevators gives those who enter it access to every one of its many levels. These dense but clustered compartments distributed across the structure’s enormous frame allow the library’s array of gliding sentinels to maintain and secure the site with relative ease. Accessible through numerous terminals and peripheral systems are the facility’s archives, an immense data-base holding the library’s numerous caches of information. This data ranges from the genetic sequencing of many species acquired throughout the galaxy to accounts of the Forerunner governance and their centuries-long war against the flood. As would be expected, knowledge on the parasite itself exists within the Library’s data-banks, though much of the actual research occurred within separate containment facilities buried deep within the ring. And at the apex of this structure is the facility’s most important mechanism: a key, known as the activation index. When reunited with the control room’s core by a Reclaimer, a Human, the halo ring would send a Harmonic Pulse throughout the galaxy, triggering the other six rings and destroying all sentient life within range. As the Forerunners prepared to fire Halo 100,000 years ago, they enacted an effort to save and catalogue as many sentient species as they could, providing shelter for them on the Ark in the event of the Array’s activation. The final stage of the conservation measure would result in these saved species eventually being returned to their to their own homeworlds: a single sweet note in what was otherwise a dark, and ultimately devastating reality. For this reason, the Library and its activation index were of great importance to the Forerunners’ plans, and they remain extraordinarily significant in the context of the array.

The Sentinel Factory
This video details the production of Sentinels and how they are used to maintain the installation.

The Contaiment Facility
This Video describes the various Flood Contaiment Facilities: their purpose, design, and fail-safes.