Main-Forerunner.png

Jat-Krula

From Halopedia, the Halo wiki

Revision as of 07:56, March 23, 2013 by Tacitus (talk | contribs)

Template:New Content The Maginot Line,[1] otherwise known as the Maginot Sphere, referred to by the Forerunners as Jat-Krula,[2] was a Forerunner defensive line that protected the Forerunner inner colonies within the Orion complex. Constructed thousands of years before the Forerunner-Flood war and used in the Forerunners' many historical conflicts, the Line consisted of numerous Line installations, defensive outposts which could fire directly into slipspace and prevent ships from entering the line. However, the line was not impregnable and skilled Forerunner commanders were known to have bypassed its defenses during their past civil wars.[2]

During the later days of the Forerunner-Flood war, the Line divided what the Forerunners were able to protect from what they had to leave to the Flood. Its precise boundary is unknown; however, Earth was not inside it and neither were most of the worlds the Librarian visited in her duties. In the final days of the war, the IsoDidact worked in the Maginot sphere, frequently sending transmissions from it to the Librarian asking her to retreat behind it to where the Didact said their fleets could protect her. The sphere was breached when the Flood staged a massive assault led by the rampant Forerunner AI Mendicant Bias.[1]

Naming

"Maginot Line" was not the actual name used by the Forerunners to refer to the defensive perimeter. The Forerunner records describing the line were discovered using translation software so advanced that it incorporated idioms from the reader's own culture,[3] thus when Forerunner terms cannot be directly translated, the software replaced them with human terms of more or less equivalent meaning. Thus, terms such as "Eden", "fairy tale" and "Maginot Line" became the default usage in Forerunner terminals and transmissions when read by humans.[3] These words appear in brackets in the Terminals.

The translated name is a reference to the Maginot Line, a World War II French line of heavy fortifications, meant to repel an anticipated assault from Germany. Though it dissuaded a direct attack, German tank units maneuvered around the fortifications, bypassing most of them altogether, making the fortifications mostly useless and leading to the fall of France. When the Allies retook France, the Germans manned them, but again the majority of the lines were bypassed.[4]

List of appearances

Sources

  1. ^ a b Halo 3, Terminals
  2. ^ a b Halo: Silentium, String 7
  3. ^ a b Halo Encyclopedia, page 165
  4. ^ Wikipedia's article on Maginot Line

Template:Forerunner2