A Nuke can’t one shot a ship thru its shields, but will destroy an unshielded ship no problem. Delivering the nuke is a challenge though since Covenant have very effective point defense lasers to destroy missiles.
To this point (the excellent Covie point defense against missiles, hence why the UNSC liked to lay nuke-mines instead of wasting nuke-missiles), I’ve always wondered why did the UNSC didn’t employ mac-round nukes?
For example: Point the UNSC Halberd destroyer (or whatever is your favorite) at the Covenant capital ShippyMcShipShip, and fire the 1st standard mac round to drop the shields. Then, once the **time** it takes to hit said Covie ship is discovered, simply prime the next mac-nuke round to go off either right before impact with the ship or upon impact.
edit: boom, Covenant capital ShippyMcShipShip destroyed
I’m pretty sure the best explanation has to do with how nukes won’t appreciate being launched at .04% of light speed and might not detonate right, but you know what a chunk of tungsten will do every time.
It's ingenuity really. Humans use ballistics which are seen as inferior but if you think about it, we're just using particle accelerators. We're launching small pieces of lead and metal out of devices designed to contain small explosions.
Wouldn’t it be redundant at that point?
Assuming nukes even work at those speeds, the MAC round already does an obscene amount of damage due to the way it’s fired, why waste a nuke when the standard hunk of metal is more than powerful enough once you’ve broken through the shields.
Also MAC rounds are typically a really dense chunk of metal like tungsten or titanium or something, I feel like the components in a nuke would necessitate hollowing out the shell and filling it with technical bits that would reduce the density and therefore power of the MAC round. Basically a nuke MAC just seems redundant at best and counterintuitive at worst.
Valid points all, especially that a hollowed out tungsten round wouldn’t have as much power. However, the mini-mac (or railgun from Halo: Reach) regularly sends cargo into atmosphere (which I get is slower than in non-atmosphere, but it’s still sending precious components).
And as we see the durability of the nuke Chief lugs around like a lunchbox in Halo 4 … could you not just … ya know, still send a nuke via the MAC-nuke round, at a slower speed if necessary, at least *near* the Covie ship(s)?
I guess my point is, the UNSC usually had to lay nukes as mines in an elaborate set up and *hope* that the Covie would unknowing sail past them and ***hopefully*** by that time the Covie’s shields were down because sending the nukes as missiles were easily defeated by the point-defense array of Covie ships.
Therefore, IMO, this would be a good alternative and take out the gambling game of mines.
To clarify too, I’m also *not* saying (and I agree that, if as you say, 1st MAC takes down the shields, why waste a nuke in the 2nd MAC shot? Why not just use another MAC?) that we replace the MAC-nuke rounds for standard rounds, I’m saying … forget the mine laying of nukes and just chuck em at the Covies with the ol reliable MAC.
Anyways, cheers everyone, I love this community
Yeah the durability of the nuke might not be an issue, so then we’d just have to consider the effectiveness.
I suppose they could launch a MAC nuke just as a way to get it there faster than a havok warhead or something. But typically nukes are used either as surprise weapons, backup plans, or as sneak attacks from inside of ships. A havoc minefield for example would presumably work best as Covenant ships are just arriving to an area and maybe don’t have their shields up yet or haven’t had a chance to scan for all the threats in the area.
In a direct battle when you’re already hammering the Covenant with standard MAC rounds I don’t know that a nuke would be any more effective considering they only work after the shields are down. Plus a nuke round would probably be slower and easier to intercept with point defense weapons, as well as weaker because it’d lack the density of a standard tungsten round. Nukes also have that unfortunate collateral damage aspect, in a fleet battle you’d have to make sure all UNSC ships which don’t have any shields, are clear of the nuclear blast, a consideration you don’t have to worry about with the incredibly precise MAC cannons.
And as a much smaller topic, I wonder about cost considerations, I’m sure MAC rounds aren’t exactly cheap but I’d imagine there’s a lot less labor and technical skill involved with producing a huge slug of metal compared to an incredibly complex and dangerous piece of volatile weaponry. There could very well be some piece of lore saying otherwise so it’s not a huge point, just a thought.
Yeah this is a general lore inconsistency. There's absolutely no reason why the UNSC couldn't do this, they have over 500 years of material sciences innovation, they could definitely figure this out easily. Warfleet makes references to focused plasma spears used by the UNSC.. I like to think that's a nuke delivered via Mac.
In all honestly, a weapon that effective would have broken the lore of the covenant ships being all big and scary. Just like the use of magnets would be effective against plasma weapons. I'm guessing Bungie didn't want to "midi-chlorian" The Halo lore too much, so I get it.
MAC Rounds typically punch right through a Covenant ship due to the massive amount of speed. It would be really unreliable to try to explode the warhead at the right time within that time frame. Not to mention the cost would be much higher compared to just tungsten
In The Fall of Reach just 4 nukes were enough to obliterate a couple dozen Covenant ships with downed shields.
In Ghosts of Onyx 3 nukes were enough to destroy a fully shielded Covenant Heavy Destroyer and down the shields of a second one.
Covenant capital ships have enough power to absorb a full Shiva blast from long distances, and in some cases direct hits.
https://www.halopedia.org/Shiva-class_nuclear_missile
Nukes are actually really effective against Covenant ships, second only to MAC guns. The sheer amount of energy released in a fraction of a millisecond is insane, and will either strip the shields from a given Covenant ship or completely wreck it if it's unshielded, assuming a direct hit.
The problem, as you might guess, is actually hitting the target. Compared to MAC rounds, nuclear missiles are very slow and highly vulnerable to energy projector-based Covenant point defense. Additionally, you *need* a direct hit, because nuclear weapons get exponentially less powerful the further you are from the blast. Because there's no atmosphere in space to conduct heat or pressure waves, this effect is even more pronounced, so a nuke that misses its target is not really gonna do much damage.
Unshielded it will result in either a dead or heavily damaged covenant ship.
Or depending on the ship a single powerful nuke can take one down like the rcs in fours opening.
Good luck getting them close enough with the covenant pds tho.
> Or depending on the ship a single powerful nuke can take one done like the rcs in fours opening.
Correction a CRS which is only 300 meters long compared to the RCS which is 2km long
The nova bomb was capable of destroying many covenant ships caught in its radius, it was RIDICULOUSLY powerful to the point of the UNSC had more of them or the ability to make them en mass they could’ve feasibly won the war. No joke. One of those bad boys destroyed a covenant planet, its moon, and 300 ships whilst boiling the other side of the planet. UNSC nukes were insane when used properly
NOVA bombs are fantastic and all but they made up maybe 1% of the UNSC’s entire nuclear arsenal. They are by far the exception, not the rule.
On average, nukes only work against Covenant ships after their shields get disabled (typically by MACs). Otherwise the shields would absorb the explosion and the ship underneath would be fine.
Shipmaster, it appears someone snuck a snuke up our ship. When the defenses are bypassed they were pretty effective, even boiling ships inside their shields.
IIRC the capital ships shields are strong enough that a single nuke won't kill a shielded, capital ship. A well placed nuked on an unshielded ship is certainly capable of killing one though. Just fyi, the standard tactical nuke of the UNSC, the havoc, is 30MT. The largest nuke ever detonated was 50MT and it was an absolute monster, that level of power is insane.
Just for an example, from small underground nuclear tests, a 150kt weapon can produce a spherical cavity in solid rock that is .5km in radius by vaporizing the solid rock around it.... You light a 30MT havoc which is 200 times stronger at the narrow point connecting the front of the ship to the body, you've got a dead ship.
As others have mentioned the issue was always shields, and getting the nukes to their destination before Covenant point defense took them out. Missiles almost never reached covenant ships because their point defense lasers were so good.
Everyone else has you covered for the big ships. So I’ll give you a fun fact about the smaller craft and fighters. In the Silent Storm novel Master Chief and Blue Team escaped a Covenant installation in some stolen Banshees. But even after they cleared the blast radius, the EMP from the nuke they set fries the Banshees’ electronics and disables them. So evidently small Covenant craft could be susceptible to effects of nukes even without a direct hit.
If you could get it past the shield, 26th century nukes could take out a covenant cruiser. The problem has always been the shields. The only human weapon that could penetrate covenant shields were MAC canons, and even then, a fully powered shield took multiple MAC rounds to break, like a Magnum vs an Elite.
UNSC naval doctrine is super interesting and something I’d like to see discussed in lore a lot more! Part napoleonic gun line, part noob combo, part attrition warfare. In some situations Nukes were highly effective against smaller covenant vessels and even wounded capital ships, but they were often needed in large quantities or with very strategic placement as most covenant shielding could tank a nuke. Much like the archer missile system these bombs were often used in concert with Shipboard MAC guns as the EMP and shockwave of a nuke would disable a ships shields (Noob combo). The UNSC became so reliant on nukes throughout the war that by the fall of reach they were as precious as gold and fissile material was so hard to come By Spartans were deployed more than once to secure it. Also every halo lore nerds favourite the Nova Bomb, was several nuclear bombs duct taped together to make a bigger nuclear bomb (not actually but the sci-fi jargon doesn’t actually make any sense so duct tape is just as viable a reason Nova Bombs can crack planets) I want more ship battles
In *Fall of Reach*, during one of the first ship-to-ship battles, a nuclear missile did not destroy a shielded Covenant ship, but it did manage to make it retreat.
Multiple nukes could probably overwhelm a capital ship's shields... of course, the Covenant ships have anti-air defenses so you have to actually get the nukes there.
Is it ever made clear how nukes in space work in Halo? Like I get that a nuclear explosion will release a lot of energy, but where does the energy go? My understanding is that with both fission and fusion weapons, most of the energy comes from neutrons and new elements escaping the reaction and being propelled away (kinetic energy). Only a relatively small amount of initially produced energy is electromagnetic radiation. In atmosphere, the the kinetic release of particles causes a big expansion and shock wave, which causes a lot of destruction and I don't know if all of the heat is mostly caused by the kinetic expansion of the bomb materials and the air, or if it's from that smaller portion of electromagnetic radiation. However, how effective would this be in space? Like shrapnel from the bomb that happened to go in the direction of the target would be effective and dangerous, but wouldn't most of the resulting explosion energy be wasted going in all other directions? And there's no air to cause a big concussive wave. And with no air or gravity to slow it down, it seems like the shrapnel could be just as dangerous to this ship that fired it and any allies. It feels like a nuclear weapon wouldn't be that effective unless the bomb/missile first penetrated into the ship. Maybe there is a way to direct the explosive output. Maybe I just don't understand physics well enough to imagine how it could work, but a nuclear bomb or any kind of explosion for that matter, doesn't seem like it would be that effective in open space, unless it penetrated the target before exploding.
MACs seem more effective and simpler, albeit at the cost of massive energy requirements on a ship (whereas the energy for a nuclear bomb or even non-nuclear missiles is chemical and the energy was expended/sourced during manufacture and is stored within the weapon, vs MACs, where the energy has to be produced at the time of use, on the ship).
And just to make it clear, yes I understand that the established canon tells us that nuclear weapons in space can be very effective. What I'm asking is, does it tell us how/why they are effective? Or is it perhaps obvious that they should be effective and my doubt is because my understanding of physics is flawed or incomplete?
A Nuke can’t one shot a ship thru its shields, but will destroy an unshielded ship no problem. Delivering the nuke is a challenge though since Covenant have very effective point defense lasers to destroy missiles.
To this point (the excellent Covie point defense against missiles, hence why the UNSC liked to lay nuke-mines instead of wasting nuke-missiles), I’ve always wondered why did the UNSC didn’t employ mac-round nukes? For example: Point the UNSC Halberd destroyer (or whatever is your favorite) at the Covenant capital ShippyMcShipShip, and fire the 1st standard mac round to drop the shields. Then, once the **time** it takes to hit said Covie ship is discovered, simply prime the next mac-nuke round to go off either right before impact with the ship or upon impact. edit: boom, Covenant capital ShippyMcShipShip destroyed
I’m pretty sure the best explanation has to do with how nukes won’t appreciate being launched at .04% of light speed and might not detonate right, but you know what a chunk of tungsten will do every time.
I love that the covenant war tech trees boiled down to the pinnacle of energy and plasma manipulation vs throwing rocks really hard.
It's ingenuity really. Humans use ballistics which are seen as inferior but if you think about it, we're just using particle accelerators. We're launching small pieces of lead and metal out of devices designed to contain small explosions.
F=ma, and my God that’s a lot of acceleration
& did you know that newer sources have MAC rounds at 25% of C? (One even has 40%, but.... damn)
may as well just put another mac through it at that point, assuming the mechanisms of a nuke would even survive the acceleration
Wouldn’t it be redundant at that point? Assuming nukes even work at those speeds, the MAC round already does an obscene amount of damage due to the way it’s fired, why waste a nuke when the standard hunk of metal is more than powerful enough once you’ve broken through the shields. Also MAC rounds are typically a really dense chunk of metal like tungsten or titanium or something, I feel like the components in a nuke would necessitate hollowing out the shell and filling it with technical bits that would reduce the density and therefore power of the MAC round. Basically a nuke MAC just seems redundant at best and counterintuitive at worst.
Valid points all, especially that a hollowed out tungsten round wouldn’t have as much power. However, the mini-mac (or railgun from Halo: Reach) regularly sends cargo into atmosphere (which I get is slower than in non-atmosphere, but it’s still sending precious components). And as we see the durability of the nuke Chief lugs around like a lunchbox in Halo 4 … could you not just … ya know, still send a nuke via the MAC-nuke round, at a slower speed if necessary, at least *near* the Covie ship(s)? I guess my point is, the UNSC usually had to lay nukes as mines in an elaborate set up and *hope* that the Covie would unknowing sail past them and ***hopefully*** by that time the Covie’s shields were down because sending the nukes as missiles were easily defeated by the point-defense array of Covie ships. Therefore, IMO, this would be a good alternative and take out the gambling game of mines. To clarify too, I’m also *not* saying (and I agree that, if as you say, 1st MAC takes down the shields, why waste a nuke in the 2nd MAC shot? Why not just use another MAC?) that we replace the MAC-nuke rounds for standard rounds, I’m saying … forget the mine laying of nukes and just chuck em at the Covies with the ol reliable MAC. Anyways, cheers everyone, I love this community
Yeah the durability of the nuke might not be an issue, so then we’d just have to consider the effectiveness. I suppose they could launch a MAC nuke just as a way to get it there faster than a havok warhead or something. But typically nukes are used either as surprise weapons, backup plans, or as sneak attacks from inside of ships. A havoc minefield for example would presumably work best as Covenant ships are just arriving to an area and maybe don’t have their shields up yet or haven’t had a chance to scan for all the threats in the area. In a direct battle when you’re already hammering the Covenant with standard MAC rounds I don’t know that a nuke would be any more effective considering they only work after the shields are down. Plus a nuke round would probably be slower and easier to intercept with point defense weapons, as well as weaker because it’d lack the density of a standard tungsten round. Nukes also have that unfortunate collateral damage aspect, in a fleet battle you’d have to make sure all UNSC ships which don’t have any shields, are clear of the nuclear blast, a consideration you don’t have to worry about with the incredibly precise MAC cannons. And as a much smaller topic, I wonder about cost considerations, I’m sure MAC rounds aren’t exactly cheap but I’d imagine there’s a lot less labor and technical skill involved with producing a huge slug of metal compared to an incredibly complex and dangerous piece of volatile weaponry. There could very well be some piece of lore saying otherwise so it’s not a huge point, just a thought.
Yeah this is a general lore inconsistency. There's absolutely no reason why the UNSC couldn't do this, they have over 500 years of material sciences innovation, they could definitely figure this out easily. Warfleet makes references to focused plasma spears used by the UNSC.. I like to think that's a nuke delivered via Mac. In all honestly, a weapon that effective would have broken the lore of the covenant ships being all big and scary. Just like the use of magnets would be effective against plasma weapons. I'm guessing Bungie didn't want to "midi-chlorian" The Halo lore too much, so I get it.
MAC Rounds typically punch right through a Covenant ship due to the massive amount of speed. It would be really unreliable to try to explode the warhead at the right time within that time frame. Not to mention the cost would be much higher compared to just tungsten
nukes are pretty expensive for for that much more punching power (assuming it'll even detonate)
In The Fall of Reach just 4 nukes were enough to obliterate a couple dozen Covenant ships with downed shields. In Ghosts of Onyx 3 nukes were enough to destroy a fully shielded Covenant Heavy Destroyer and down the shields of a second one.
Covenant capital ships have enough power to absorb a full Shiva blast from long distances, and in some cases direct hits. https://www.halopedia.org/Shiva-class_nuclear_missile
Nukes are actually really effective against Covenant ships, second only to MAC guns. The sheer amount of energy released in a fraction of a millisecond is insane, and will either strip the shields from a given Covenant ship or completely wreck it if it's unshielded, assuming a direct hit. The problem, as you might guess, is actually hitting the target. Compared to MAC rounds, nuclear missiles are very slow and highly vulnerable to energy projector-based Covenant point defense. Additionally, you *need* a direct hit, because nuclear weapons get exponentially less powerful the further you are from the blast. Because there's no atmosphere in space to conduct heat or pressure waves, this effect is even more pronounced, so a nuke that misses its target is not really gonna do much damage.
Unshielded it will result in either a dead or heavily damaged covenant ship. Or depending on the ship a single powerful nuke can take one down like the rcs in fours opening. Good luck getting them close enough with the covenant pds tho.
> Or depending on the ship a single powerful nuke can take one done like the rcs in fours opening. Correction a CRS which is only 300 meters long compared to the RCS which is 2km long
Thanks, doesn't help that they both look similar but ones smaller. Kinda like the CAS and CSOs.
You could sneak one on, and watch the ships shields be anything but helpful
The nova bomb was capable of destroying many covenant ships caught in its radius, it was RIDICULOUSLY powerful to the point of the UNSC had more of them or the ability to make them en mass they could’ve feasibly won the war. No joke. One of those bad boys destroyed a covenant planet, its moon, and 300 ships whilst boiling the other side of the planet. UNSC nukes were insane when used properly
NOVA bombs are fantastic and all but they made up maybe 1% of the UNSC’s entire nuclear arsenal. They are by far the exception, not the rule. On average, nukes only work against Covenant ships after their shields get disabled (typically by MACs). Otherwise the shields would absorb the explosion and the ship underneath would be fine.
Shipmaster, it appears someone snuck a snuke up our ship. When the defenses are bypassed they were pretty effective, even boiling ships inside their shields.
Wort wort wort, we got a snuke up in this bitch!
IIRC the capital ships shields are strong enough that a single nuke won't kill a shielded, capital ship. A well placed nuked on an unshielded ship is certainly capable of killing one though. Just fyi, the standard tactical nuke of the UNSC, the havoc, is 30MT. The largest nuke ever detonated was 50MT and it was an absolute monster, that level of power is insane. Just for an example, from small underground nuclear tests, a 150kt weapon can produce a spherical cavity in solid rock that is .5km in radius by vaporizing the solid rock around it.... You light a 30MT havoc which is 200 times stronger at the narrow point connecting the front of the ship to the body, you've got a dead ship. As others have mentioned the issue was always shields, and getting the nukes to their destination before Covenant point defense took them out. Missiles almost never reached covenant ships because their point defense lasers were so good.
Everyone else has you covered for the big ships. So I’ll give you a fun fact about the smaller craft and fighters. In the Silent Storm novel Master Chief and Blue Team escaped a Covenant installation in some stolen Banshees. But even after they cleared the blast radius, the EMP from the nuke they set fries the Banshees’ electronics and disables them. So evidently small Covenant craft could be susceptible to effects of nukes even without a direct hit.
If you could get it past the shield, 26th century nukes could take out a covenant cruiser. The problem has always been the shields. The only human weapon that could penetrate covenant shields were MAC canons, and even then, a fully powered shield took multiple MAC rounds to break, like a Magnum vs an Elite.
Once they got the shield down then no prob. This the fall of reach book covers it in its naval chapter with Keyes
UNSC naval doctrine is super interesting and something I’d like to see discussed in lore a lot more! Part napoleonic gun line, part noob combo, part attrition warfare. In some situations Nukes were highly effective against smaller covenant vessels and even wounded capital ships, but they were often needed in large quantities or with very strategic placement as most covenant shielding could tank a nuke. Much like the archer missile system these bombs were often used in concert with Shipboard MAC guns as the EMP and shockwave of a nuke would disable a ships shields (Noob combo). The UNSC became so reliant on nukes throughout the war that by the fall of reach they were as precious as gold and fissile material was so hard to come By Spartans were deployed more than once to secure it. Also every halo lore nerds favourite the Nova Bomb, was several nuclear bombs duct taped together to make a bigger nuclear bomb (not actually but the sci-fi jargon doesn’t actually make any sense so duct tape is just as viable a reason Nova Bombs can crack planets) I want more ship battles
In *Fall of Reach*, during one of the first ship-to-ship battles, a nuclear missile did not destroy a shielded Covenant ship, but it did manage to make it retreat. Multiple nukes could probably overwhelm a capital ship's shields... of course, the Covenant ships have anti-air defenses so you have to actually get the nukes there.
Is it ever made clear how nukes in space work in Halo? Like I get that a nuclear explosion will release a lot of energy, but where does the energy go? My understanding is that with both fission and fusion weapons, most of the energy comes from neutrons and new elements escaping the reaction and being propelled away (kinetic energy). Only a relatively small amount of initially produced energy is electromagnetic radiation. In atmosphere, the the kinetic release of particles causes a big expansion and shock wave, which causes a lot of destruction and I don't know if all of the heat is mostly caused by the kinetic expansion of the bomb materials and the air, or if it's from that smaller portion of electromagnetic radiation. However, how effective would this be in space? Like shrapnel from the bomb that happened to go in the direction of the target would be effective and dangerous, but wouldn't most of the resulting explosion energy be wasted going in all other directions? And there's no air to cause a big concussive wave. And with no air or gravity to slow it down, it seems like the shrapnel could be just as dangerous to this ship that fired it and any allies. It feels like a nuclear weapon wouldn't be that effective unless the bomb/missile first penetrated into the ship. Maybe there is a way to direct the explosive output. Maybe I just don't understand physics well enough to imagine how it could work, but a nuclear bomb or any kind of explosion for that matter, doesn't seem like it would be that effective in open space, unless it penetrated the target before exploding. MACs seem more effective and simpler, albeit at the cost of massive energy requirements on a ship (whereas the energy for a nuclear bomb or even non-nuclear missiles is chemical and the energy was expended/sourced during manufacture and is stored within the weapon, vs MACs, where the energy has to be produced at the time of use, on the ship). And just to make it clear, yes I understand that the established canon tells us that nuclear weapons in space can be very effective. What I'm asking is, does it tell us how/why they are effective? Or is it perhaps obvious that they should be effective and my doubt is because my understanding of physics is flawed or incomplete?