Forum:The unidentified ship from the CEA terminals is actually Forerunner

http://www.halopedia.org/Unidentified_alien_vessel

I happened to be rewatching the Halo CEA terminals when I started thinking about what species the ship might belong to. At first glance of the actual look of the ship I thought it might be Covenant due to the green lighting beneath the cracks in the armor. But immediately after I realized that this crash landing took place tens of thousands of years before the Covenant were even space faring. This would mean that another space faring species, one tens of thousands of years more advanced than the Covenant, is out there in the galaxy and they just haven't been in contact with anyone (which is unarguably extremely unlikely). Unless this species somehow went extinct, there's really no possibility this space craft can belong to any species alive in the galaxy today--that is unless they are Forerunner.

When you look at the ship itself, it's obviously highly advanced, and it even resembles some of the ships we saw in Halo 4 showing scenes from the Human-Forerunner war. But as far as actual evidence goes, there's a few things I've managed to put together. Firstly, 343 Guilty Spark mentions that the atmosphere of the ship matches EXACTLY to that of the ring. He assumes that the species must have been moved to the ring during the firing of the Halo ring (and that's why the atmospheres match), but what may be more likely is that the atmospheres match because the ship IS Forerunner. We know that many species were moved to the ring and all of which would have had their own slight variations of atmospheres from their home planet (but similar enough so they could live on the ring). In designing the Halo rings, it would be much more logical for the Forerunners just to use their own atmosphere for the ring and move the species that could tolerate it all to that ring. It's at least more likely to assume that than to think that the species housed on that ring returned 60,000 years later by mere chance.

Now you're probably thinking how Guilty Spark didn't realize the occupants were Forerunner while decoding the distress signal. If they were really Forerunner, shouldn't Guilty Spark realize that since he was made by Forerunners and speaks the language? Well what we know is that the Forerunners speak multiple languages and live by a caste society meaning that the language the builders speak is different from what the warrior-servants speak. But that still doesn't show how Guilty Spark wouldn't have at least been able to detect that it was a Forerunner language, even if it was one that he didn't understand. The only way Guilty Spark could make an error like this was if he was going rampant, and as we know he pretty much is at this point in time. Admittedly, this part of the theory is a bit of a long shot, but there is one other thing that would make this more likely. There's the fact that the ship was only transmitting short range. Now why does this matter? Because perhaps the ship was trying to contact Guilty Spark. Perhaps there was some reason they couldn't exit their ship so they attempted to contact the monitor of the facility, but of course to no avail.

The major question in all of this is 'why'. Why would a ship of exiled Forerunners return to the Milky Way and crash land on the ring? This terminal video came out just before Halo 4--just when 343i was crafting the story line of the next Halo trilogy. I don't think it's any bit unlikely that 343i would start leaving bread crumb trails that would lead back to the story of the exiled Forerunners (which we can assume is going to be a major plot point in the coming Halo fiction). Maybe something went wrong some time after the firing of the Halo rings and a team of Forerunners came back to warn the monitor. It's impossible to say really, but we can say that though it seems unlikely this crashed ship is Forerunner, it's far less likely that the ship belongs to any other species.

Anyway, tell me your thoughts.

"Unless this species somehow went extinct, there's really no possibility this space craft can belong to any species alive in the galaxy today--that is unless they are Forerunner."

- Dustin

That you know of. If the Covenant are the only, or even oldest, spacefaring species in the galaxy after the Forerunners, I will be very surprised. Frankly, my own guess is that it was the first clue in a long game leading up to the introduction of another, new faction, one to give even the Covenant pause - perhaps the return of the Precursors, or a Flood resurgence. This is meant as a mystery that ties into the later events. And regarding the Halo's atmosphere - I recall Halo: The Flood stating that the atmosphere was Earth-normal. By your own reasoning, this ship may have been some surviving branch of Prehistoric Humans who escaped Forerunner devolution and the Halos. --  Qura 'Morhek   The Autocrat     of Morheka   06:17, 6 December 2015 (EST)