Forum:Covenant Industrial Capacity

A user on Spacebattles.com recently made a series of calculations on Covenant industrial capability using High Charity as the reference. It gives a fascinating insight into how many ships the Covenant could have theoretically produced at peak capacity:

http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-halo-thread-time-was-your-ally-343.280593/page-43#post-12904803


 * High Charity was a mobile space station nearly 348 kilometers in Diameter constructed to serve as the capital of the Covenant when it was formed during the conclusion of the Sangheili-San'Shyuum war. This war ended sometime in 852 BCE and the San'Shyuum made High Charity its capital in 648 BCE. That means it took 204 years to complete the station.


 * Onward to the calculations!


 * Utilizing the formula volume of a sphere (4/3)pi(R)^3, I determined that High Charity was roughly 2.207e16 cubic meters in volume. However we must take into account that roughly half of the Station is nonexistent, so we will cut this number in half. So High Charity is roughly 1.103e16 cubic meters in volume.


 * Now assuming a linear construction time of 204 years, the Covenant was able to assemble nearly 5.4e13 cubic meters of materials per year.


 * With this type of Industrial Might, the Covenant should easily be able to build the following per year:


 * 1) 45 CSO-Supercarriers
 * or


 * 2) 15,2554 CSS-class battle cruisers
 * or


 * 3) 6,822 CAS-class Assault carriers


 * The lesson in this tale? DON'T FUCK WITH THE COVENANT!!

To summarise, even if the technological gap had been completely reduced, Humanity was absolutely boned when it encountered the Covenant. They would have been drowned in ships alone. It's really quite miraculous that they survived as long as they did.

(I do not claim authorship of these calcs or any had input into them whatsoever. I hate maths)

--The All-knowing Sith&#39;ari (talk) 17:04, 24 February 2014 (EST)


 * We know the bulk of the hemispherical bulb of High Charity was the vast city with the Dreadnought at its center. It was mostly empty space. Any shipbuilding that was going on was either below this area or was external to High Charity in the lower spine. Not sure how those calculations make sense or can give any kind of realistic measure of Covenant ship production capacity. Also, the time between the end of the San'Shyuum/Sangheili war and making High Charity the capital does not imply construction time, only the time at which it was decided that High Charity would be their capital. -ScaleMaster117 (talk) 20:08, 24 February 2014 (EST)

I always assumed the Covenant outmatched the UNSC in terms of materiel production, but for entirely different reasons. It's obvious that High Charity is a MAJOR exception, and that applying its standards to the entire Covenant is a bit too far. It's a political venture, the Prophet's flagship and housing the Keyship. Firstly, there's their faster slipspace speeds - shortened supply lines proportionally compared to the slower UNSC. Secondly, you get facilities like the Pegasi Delta and K7-49, one a prominent fuel refinery and the other a small planetoid shipyard. Thirdly, the volume of space the Covenant encompasses is probably vast - they've had a little over three thousand years to expand, after all, and I doubt a fast-breeding race like the Grunts would be confined only to Balaho.

Given all that, I still find it weird that the Covenant took so long to destroy humanity, when they should have steamrolled them incredibly quickly with their vast fleets and legions. I thought for a while that it might have been a human/forerunner situation, where you're only seeing a small sideshow in a much larger game, that the Covenant was already at war with something that we never got to see, and that humanity got what the Covenant could spare against them, and still came close to extinction. The presence of a sentient species that had investigated Alpha Halo long before the UNSC or Covenant is clear evidence that other spacefaring races exist, and we never did get much of an idea about what they were. But then, if that were true, I would imagine that we would have seen them by now what with the collapse of the Covenant into its successor states, and so far they've failed to materialise in five years, and their Elite allies haven't said a word about any kind of threat to humanity. --  Qura 'Morhek   The Autocrat     of Morheka   20:30, 24 February 2014 (EST)


 * Bear in mind what the Covenant fleet may have looked like before they encountered humanity. It seems like getting the other client races to join the Elites and Prophets was not really terribly difficult. If they'd come across many more technologically inferior races in the meantime they would probably also have been in the Covenant as well. So they may not have had an extensive fleet before encountering humanity. That's when I'd surmise that they really went all out on ship production and that probably took a while into the war. -ScaleMaster117 (talk) 22:35, 24 February 2014 (EST)


 * This Thread continues the debate on the scope and capacity of the Covenant. http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/post-war-unsc-vs-covenant.287315/page-10 ProphetofTruth (talk) 23:35, 24 February 2014 (EST)

While there can be all sorts of factors at play beyond assumed peak efficiency derived from simple mathematical calculations, I do agree that the Covenant's industrial output must've been absolutely ludicrous. One of the reasons I dislike the Kilo-Five trilogy is because that aspect—the sheer scale of the Covenant—got basically glossed over with no explanation apart from the disappearance of the Huragok. It shouldn't even be physically possible for a militaristic empire that has stood for over three millennia to fall apart in a few months, or for its iron heart to be degraded below humanity. Most of the UNSC's industrial base would've been devastated by the war, along with their populations and military centers. But how many Covenant industrial centers did the UNSC manage to touch? K7-49 and High Charity were major ones, yes, but beyond those? Most of their infrastructure would still be intact; this was already hinted at by the description for Assembly years ago: "The Covenant war machine continues its march to conquest; even with its head severed it is still dangerous." Makes you think about the postwar status quo and how powerful the Sangheili really are—or should be—in relation to the UNSC.

@Morhek: Halo: Ghosts of Onyx, page 342: "We have been slowly losing this war. Slowly, I think, because we had not been the main focus of the Covenant hegemony until recently. Now they have found and targeted Earth." Always wondered what that meant. Hmm... --Jugus (Talk  | Contribs ) 23:51, 24 February 2014 (EST)