Glassing: Difference between revisions

Before bombardment commences, all Covenant ground operations cease and local forces are evacuated. The Covenant will then begin glassing the planet from orbit by moving their large warships close together, proceeding to blanket the world's population centers and the surrounding areas with a series of crisscrossing orbits to ensure that the planet is rendered uninhabitable.<ref name="fs130">'''Halo: First Strike''', ''page 130'' (2010 edition)</ref><ref name="doctrine" group="note">According to earlier media, such as the original printing of ''Halo: First Strike'', the Covenant glassed every square centimeter of a planet. However, later media show a more practical approach to glassing in which only part, perhaps most, of a planet is glassed in order to render it uninhabitable; the 2011 re-release of ''Halo: First Strike'' was [[List of rectified inconsistencies in the Halo series#Halo: First Strike|modified]] to accommodate this.</ref> The glassing of a planet by the Covenant is a very taxing process, and requires a massive amount of energy even for a [[Technological Achievement Tiers#Tier 2: Interstellar|Tier 2 civilization]];<ref>'''Halo: Evolutions''', "The Return", ''page 495''</ref><ref name="data10"/> Nevertheless, the Covenant are able to accomplish this feat in an effective manner.

Glassing a planet can take a great deal of time, dependent upon both the tonnage and class of the vessels involved and how many ships are within the fleet. It could take as little as two days<ref>'''[[Halo Legends]]''', ''Halo: The Story So Far''</ref> or as much as two weeks<ref>'''[[Halo: The Fall of Reach]]''' (2010), ''Adjunct - page 389''</ref> or longer to complete the process. While partial glassing can be accomplished in a matter of days, covering the entire surface area to the last centimeter would take a prohibitive amount of time. The [[The Assembly|Assembly]] believed that, were the Covenant to commit thousands of ships to the task, it would have taken them around thirty years to completely glass [[Earth]] alone; Earth's relatively small size, along with a myriad of other factors, would likely cause the thorough glassing of larger planets to take even longer.<ref name="data10"/><ref name="fleet" group="note">While the Assembly asserts in Data Pad 10 that glassing a whole planet is a feat too impractical for the Covenant to feasibly achieve, the rest of canon contradicts this. Numerous instances are listed in the novels where glassing and glassed planets are observed, as well as in ''Halo: Reach'' where the data pads are from, since Reach's burnt surface is the opening shot of the game. Possible reasons for this discrepancy may be that the Assembly had only observed low-altitude bombardment, which is much slower and precise, or that they had misjudged the size of the full Covenant fleet, since they had based their figures on a fleet the size of the UNSC's. While the Assembly never explicitly retracts its statement, it does however state in Data Pad 14 that terraforming on the first eight colonies lost could take up to 3 centuries, an unusually long figure if those planets' full surfaces were never scorched. Based on the sum of the canon, it is thus assumed here that glassing is indeed a true method of attack by the Covenant.</ref>