M313 Elephant

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The M312 Heavy Recovery Vehicle, sometimes refered to as the Behemoth-class Troop Transport and commonly known as the Elephant, is a heavy UNSC Marine Corps Mobile Assault, Support, and Recovery Platform. .

Design details
The Elephant is a mobile command base and repair vehicle and is able to pull an entire Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine by itself. It is armed with a forward M41 LAAG on the top right and a AIE-486H Heavy Machine Gun on the mid left. It is a three-level vehicle with the bottom level, the respawn locale that opens out into the rear cargo tray, the second level, a walkway around the cargo ramp and leads onto the driver's cabin then a small, elevated third level where the M41 LAAG is assembled. It features a crane, numerous firing ports and elevated positions for defending it. It has four tracks set up on each side of the chassis. Its chassis is also as wide as they are high, providing stability. The Elephant houses a Mongoose in its lower bay, and can be made to hold up to an additional of three Mongooses in the front with two in the back with two Warthogs.

Halo 3
The Elephant appears exclusively in Halo 3's multiplayer map Sandtrap, located at each end of the map. It is completely invincible, and open-topped, unlike its counterpart in Halo Wars. The open roof is probably due to the fact that it is a service and repair station, not a troop carrier. Inside the elephant is a large screen which contains information on a Mongoose. While the vehicle itself cannot be destroyed, its slow speed and lack of armor for gunners render them quite vulnerable. Killing the driver must be attempted from behind, ideally in a vehicle like a Banshee. If you try to simply board the Elephant and kill the driver, he/she may notice you in third person view and counterattack. In objective based games, the elephant also serves as a mobile bomb plant/spawn site and flag stand. A Mongoose also spawns in the Elephant.

Halo Wars
The Elephant also appears in Halo Wars as an armored personnel carrier and mobile infantry barracks, capable of creating troops in the field and/or deploying them while defending itself. To operate as a barracks, the vehicle must first deploy. This unit can only be used when the player chooses Captain Cutter as their Leader Character in online play or skirmish.

Like other Halo Wars units this vehicle has been dimensionally altered, particularly as the bay on the rear has been shrunk (two people high to one person high) and the bogeys are now the same size. Similar to Halo 3's design, the Elephant still retains its crane, though the vehicle looks ill suited for repair and recovery. However, there are several design changes made in Halo Wars. The Elephant mounts three M41 LAAG weapons, one on the top of the driver's cabin and two at the rear on each side of the troop bay. It will also, if upgraded, sport a roof mounted cannon. The troop bay is enclosed and features a rear dropping ramp. The front also has an enclosed ramp along with deployable support struts.

Halo Wars stats
Upgrades:
 * Costs: 400 Resource units and requires two Population Cap and zero energy units
 * Capable of building SPARTAN-IIs and other infantry.
 * "Twin Engine": Increases the Elephant's speed by about 30%.
 * "Defense Turret": Adds a M247 GPMGT Autocannon defending the Elephant in deploy mode.
 * "Ceramic Armor": The Elephant can now take 25% more damage.

Halo 3: ODST
A variant of the Elephant appears in Halo 3: ODST. The Olifant is a civilian version of the vehicle designed for the purposes of waste management. New Mombasa Waste Management owned and operated these vehicles, using them as garbage trucks. Olifants are seen several times in Mombasa Streets. Veronica Dare and Vergil use an Olifant as an APC in the level Coastal Highway. This particular Olifant moves very fast and features shields, unlike other Elephants/Olifants, because of Vergil's modifications. While the shields could withstand small arms fire and some Fuel Rod Gun damage, they were unable to withstand the full might of a Scarab's focus cannon, forcing Dare and Vergil to abandon the Olifant.

In the meta-game Sadie's Story, Vergil used one to save Sadie Endesha from Police Commissioner Kinsler by slamming it into his Pelican, then proceeding to dump its payload of garbage on him. The Olifant was then used by Sadie and Mike Branley to move through Covenant-occupied New Mombasa, in an attempt to rescue Sadie's father. It was later destroyed by a Wraith after a salesman, who was also hiding in the Olifant, opened the top hatch and attempted to surrender.

It should be noted that Olifant is the Dutch and Afrikaans word for Elephant. It is also the term used to refer to elephants in the Lord of the Rings franchise.

Known Elephants

 * E-2073 46833-S - UNSC Elephant stationed on Sandtrap (it is interesting to note that both Elephants on the level Sandtrap are almost completely identical, including having the same identification numbers). They both have nicknames: one is called the "Behemoth", while the other is called the "Leviathan", and they both have different insignias painted on their sides. Another means of identification is that below the M41 turret at the front is the number 3 for the Behemoth and a number 5 for the Leviathan, also on the Leviathan is another number 5 on one of the panels at the top of the outer left hand side of the cargo tray.


 * Recon Team Lima - Commanded by Sergeant Forge in 2531, took part in the Battle of Shield 0459.


 * Recon Team India - Accompanied Lima onto the surface of Shield 0459, before being captured by the Flood and rescued by Forge and Red Team.


 * Recon Team Echo - Accompanied Lima onto the surface of Shield 0459, before being captured by the Flood and rescued by Forge and Red Team.

Easter Eggs

 * If by some chance the player does manage to flip over an Elephant, the usual "Hold RB to flip [vehicle name]" script dialog is replaced with "Hold RB to flip...wait, what? How did you do that?", referencing the fact that it is the biggest vehicle in the game and that it is seemingly impossible for it to be flipped. For more information, see Elephant Flipping.
 * On the left hand side of the Red Team's Elephant there is a spray-paint graffiti with text that reads "BEHEMOTH" and a red cartoon picture of a woolly mammoth. On the Blue Team's Elephant it says "LEVIATHAN" and has a picture of a blue, whale-like sea creature sporting a mean grimace and wearing a comically tiny golden crown. The Behemoth and Leviathan are two scriptural creatures that are enormous in stature and girth.

Glitches

 * There are many methods of achieving the flight of an Elephant on the mutiplayer map Sandtrap in Halo 3. The first, is the well known technique of filling the hull with explosives, set to instant respawn, and setting them off. This is a trial and error method, and achieves minimal Elephant flight, in which the player lacks control of the flight and trajectory of the vehicle. For more information, see Flying Elephant.
 * If you place a Covenant hover vehicle like a Ghost or Prowler on top of the cockpit, and then drive to the center of the Elephant, the vehicle will stay floating as if there were an invisible floor on top of the Elephant. This same glitch (or a similar one) is present in Halo 2, although with the Scarab instead of the Elephant.
 * Despite being a vehicle, the Elephant is not powered down by the effects of the Plasma Pistol, for obvious reasons.
 * Lag from standbying can allow a player to directly manipulate an Elephant in Forge. In some cases, lag on map variants with a lot of Elephants can have the same effect.
 * Even though the Elephant is indestructible, a spike grenade can and will penetrate the cockpit and kill the driver if thrown in just the right way from the front.


 * If you put an object in the Elephant that can't rise out of it (such as a Scorpion in the loading bay) and lift it, it will lift the Elephant.

Trivia

 * An elephant is a large, grey mammal native to Africa and southern Asia, in keeping with the UNSC's tradition of naming atmospheric vehicles after real animals, with the exceptions of the Cyclops and Gremlin, which are named after mythical creatures, and the Longsword, Shortsword, and Sabre, which are named after bladed weapons.
 * If you go to the bottom level of the Elephant, there is a screen which details about the vehicle's specification such as Mobile Assault Support and Recovery Platform Statistics and Environmental Analysts. It is interesting to note that it says there are two mobile turrets (that you can rip off) while there is actually only one. Perhaps one was removed for balance issues as there is a vacant spot opposite of the other.
 * The Elephant is the only drivable vehicle where players can place turrets on it without them moving when they drive off. If players placed a crate or two in the cargo bay of the Elephant and place a turret on top of them and then delete the crates, then players can drive the Elephant with the turret keeping place over the Elephant.
 * Gears of War 2's Derrick looks a lot like the Elephant. Similarly, it bears a slight resemblance to the Jawa Sandcrawler from Star Wars.
 * The windshield in front of the driver is capable of protecting him from any kind of attack (except Spartan Lasers) without damage; this is probably a balancing action, because the Elephant is so slow. In addition, the driver can only be attacked from the back; all other sides are completely protected.
 * The Olifant that is driven by Vergil on the level "Coastal Highway" in Halo 3:ODST (along with all others in the game) have the number 49 printed on their sides. This is another reference to Bungie's favorite number, as the square root of 49 is seven, or 7² is 49.
 * The Elephant was removed from SAND TARP, a variant of "Sandtrap", by Bungie.

List of appearances

 * Halo 3
 * Halo Wars
 * Halo 3: ODST

Related pages

 * Shadow - Covenant equivalent in Halo 2.