I’d find a way into the Admech first chance I get.

Sure, now im an unholy monstrosity of meat and metal, but I’ve got a good chance at long life, a steady job at something useful, and a decent chance at progressing up the ranks.

The key here is standardization, how do you equip a trillion man army with the best weapons available when most platoons and regiments are hundreds of light years apart?

The Lasgun is actually a pretty awesome weapon, with individual pulses being ten times more powerful than a hand grenade at even low powered shots and so cheap and easy to manufacture that even the most backwater of planets can mass produce them from very basic materials.

Unfortunately, it just so happens that every other faction likes to standardize their troops with molecule thin shurikens, rocket propelled self-detonating .75 caliber bullets, plasma cannons, flesh eating maggots, holy napalm, daemon spirit spitting handguns, lava and even the tears of the God Emperor himself. In comparison, even an uber laser gun appears to be a futile gesture.

Neither would do very well in the Imperium

- Light Speed Travel – The Warp is Finicky

- Weapons manufacturing – The Imperium’s mechanics haven’t changed anything for the part ten thousand years.

See second dash for reason why Imperium has no light speed.

@L-W

Lets just say that not every soldier is worth a thousand grand to be equip with standard issues. And not all of the money of taxpayers goes to the highest bidder(Military equipment manufacturers)

“4) They have a good sniper rifle. And as every student of history knows, wars are won and lost on the basis of who has the better sniper rifle, not on the basis of something as inconsequential as overwhelming numerical, technological, and logistical superiority.”

Except of course that good sniper fire is all it takes to turn the Tau from organised fire teams and expert manouvers to disorganised and fleeing. An Ethereals death is a HUGE morale blow to the Tau, and with flying snipers who can get into a good firing position whatever happens, and with the ethereals having robes, no head protection and no personalised shielding, all it will take is one good shot and the Tau, at least the Tau under that ethereals leadership, will scatter.

Considering all Tau troops barring those under Commander Farsights command, are under the direct control of an Ethereal, that sort of advantage can’t be ignored.

The Covenant may have the same issue with the Prophets, but they at least have shielding and the intelligence enough to stay off the front lines.

As to the teleportation, Its not so much that as some sort of gravity well… but whatever it is that the covenant use to get ground troops from ships in space to the ground without breaking bones or having easily shot down troop carriers.

@L-W

Yes! At last I got the point! Now I know that my mind is not dried up…

“Never forget that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder” – CoD 4

I wonder how broadsides would far against a phantom…

1) “I wonder how broadsides would far against a phantom…”

If a 90mm tank round can punch a hole through a Phantom, a single broadside is literally going to turn it inside out due to the sheer force of the propellant created by a slug moving at relativistic velocities through the hull of a vessel.

Imagine if you will the contents of a box getting sucked through a small penny sized hole, and you gain a decent image of what would happen to a Phantom.

2) Hardly an exception to the rule, because it demonstrates that even without the overt psychic presence of the Ethereal in question (as claimed by the Fire Warrior novel), Tau soldiers can still maintain discipline on a squad based level, without losing their morale all together. The loss of the Ethereal merely grants the Tau the initiative on an individual basis, it doesn’t rob them of their will to live.

Although the sight of even the largest and most heavily armoured Covenant troops turning into a charred heap of briquettes as a result of a single burst from the standard issue Pulse rifle would be more of a morale booster than anything else.

3) A 1.7km vessel generally doesn’t posses a low profile, or offer much in terms of subtlety, does it? Do you really think that a Covenant warship is going to slip past the general orbital superiority of the Tau navy without alerting it’s presence to potential swarms of atmospheric fighters capable of stellar interdiction speeds, or that any landing attempt won’t suffer heavy casualties as a result?

As I said, the most logical solution would be to deploy and scatter Phantoms over a wide area, and enough of them to ensure that the Tau air force doesn’t turn entire legions into ionized scrap as a result. Whilst they transport fewer troops into a specific region, their low profile would make them harder targets; whereas dropping a Capital ship onto a planet (the UNSC lacked the firepower to repel this kind of incursion – the Tau don’t) is the equivalent of painting an Elephant luminous green and asking poachers to take pot shots at it.

4) The stealth technology of either party is not fit for direct battlefield confrontations, in fact the entire idea is so absurd that it goes entirely against the purpose of the technology in the first place.

As I said before, the Tau are the worst possible enemy for the Covenant to face: its strengths (superior firepower, disciplined troops, rugged and heavily armed warships, robust and mature technologies with the common implementation of AI, highly mobile ground forces capable of rapid deployment) play directly to the Covenant weaknesses (almost complete dependence upon orbital superiority, technologies with built-in weaknesses such as their inability to harness the true potential of their imitated firearms, poorly armoured and egg shell thin warships, reliance on cannon fodder, limited mobility, zero initiative or AI assistance). The key here is mobility, the Covenant work best against bogged down or entrenched positions where they can overwhelm them with sheer brute force alone, Tau doctrine is designed for mobility, thus making them a particularly tough army to face off against.

Well, in their own universe, it would be brute force, superior technology and firepower, air superiority ant the likes.

Against the Tau… I’d say brute force…

@ Megafire

Brute force…ha.. ha ha … HA HAA HAHAAHHAAAAA… man that is good!

See Greater Knarloc.

On the subject of Covenant firepower, I posted some calculations on a previous thread. Here they are if anyone is interested:

During Halo: First Strike, an asteroid three kilometers in diameter is struck by a Covenant energy beam, which according to the text took several seconds to bore a hole through the main structure and shatter the remainder, leaving behind several hundred tonnes of visibly ejected globules (Presumably a combination of molten iron).

The passage says the asteroid was shattered through “uneven internal heating”, ie thermal expansion. If the beam had just punched straight through it wouldn’t have fractured through “uneven internal heating”, it would have exploded due to shock. We don’t get a beam punching through, shocking the surrounding rock and causing it to fracture. We know the asteroid wasn’t shocked, so the beam can’t have cut through the rock faster than the speed of sound in iron. This puts a burn time of 0.6s as the absolute minimum. 0.6s of contact with a 500 gigaton beam should have delivered 250 gigatons into the rock. More than enough to completely vapourise it with a surplus of excess energy to spare.

We get a beam striking the asteroid, its surface being “heated to orange, yellow, and then white,”, note that it takes a noticable amount of time to change through the colours, the asteroid spraying molten debris long enough for its rotation to change, the beam cutting through a “wide arc” of the asteroid, and then emerging from the other side. There are five visibly distinct phases there, orange, yellow, white, rotating, and finally exploded.

Let’s do that in more detail. We know the asteroid was white hot in patches. This gives a temperature of 6500K. From this we can work out the average KE per mole, and by extension, the momentum of ejected gasses. In a best case scenario, this works out at 2500kgm/s per kilogram. The moment of inertia of the asteroid is 10^17kgm^2. The average moment generated by a kilogram of ejecta will be 1,875,000kgm^2/s (well, actually it’ll be less than that, because it’s not all concentrated into a tangential jet, but that’s just another thing that makes this calc rather conservative), meaning 5.3*10^10kg needs to be ejected in this fashion per radian/sec of momentum change. That’s half the total mass of the asteroid. Let’s assume a single degree per second of rotation due to the ejected mass. That’s visible, but practically crawling around, it being six times slower than the second hand on a watch. Still need to eject 10^9kg of material. Let’s assume a 5m wide area. Given that the beam is supposed to be “laser fine”, this again is very conservative. This would require vapourising down to a depth of 2 km. Problem: The average speed of the ejecta was only 3km/s. With an absolute lower limit of 0.4s to burn down to a depth of 2km, it would still have taken another 0.66s for the last of it to escape, meaning a contact time of 1.07s is a very conservative lower limit. Oh, look, you’ve just dumped over 500 gigatons into a rock that only takes 33 GT to shatter. The gunner was Cortana. An AI who was described as using plasma beams “like a scalpel”. “Like a scalpel” implies very fine control, ie that she turned off the beam the moment it penetrated with very little waste.

The asteroid was the size of the firing ship, and had a much higher moment of inertia. If the plasma did have significant momentum, we’d see ships firing it be pushed around. Quite noticeably. The impulse required to duplicate the asteroid-spinning is enough to make a ship of that size recoil at 800m/s (assuming only 90% empty space, and a density of iron, which given how unfeasibly spacious Covenant ships are is something of an underestimate). We don’t see Covenant ships firing plasma beams being pushed around or put into spins by the recoil, even when they’re firing off axis, so they don’t have enough recoil to matter.

Quite handily, this actually puts a 16.5GT/s upper limit on the firepower of that beam, with an excess of 27 megatons to shatter the asteroid itself.

- – -

Let’s not forget that this was a Cortana enhanced beam designed for optimum efficiency (according to her, the Covenant were neglecting the optimize the brute firepower of their plasma cannons to any degree), as earlier in the novel the Ascendant Justice is surrounded by four Covenant cruisers, two of which she detonates from a lancing strike from the laser like plasma weapons similar to the energy projector, which shares properties similar to the beam used to cut through the asteroid.

Earlier it is demonstrated that the Ascendant Justice was resistant to several plasma torpedoes, and was reduced to only 67% of her shield capacity before Cortana took control and began to steer the ship towards Threshold, when another cluster of torpedoes fired from the pursuing covenant dropped the shields, gutting parts of the hull.

@ the_man_with_the_Answers

No…. just no.

Heck, throw in the Culture, the Xelee, the Q, the Cosmocrats, Downstreamers and the Time Lords and you’ll have one hell of a shin dig, but that’s not the point of the statement.

It’s to illustrate that from a tactical and strategic standpoint, Covenant strengths are nerfed by those of the Tau; why would I include other civilizations when the purpose of this thread is to discuss only the two presented?

I don’t think the Tau are the wost for the Covenant to face, though they are high up there. Wouldn’t the Imperium be much worse of an enemy to face?

The covenant will embrace space communism and their numbers mysteriously decreasing within the next 50 years the tau will outnumber other covenant species with the possible exception of the grunts and hunters.

We could pit the covenant against stargate earth at the start of the series for them to finally be on the advantage?

@ i dunno

” the ONLY way the covenant can win would be to drop thousands of elites from orbit right on top of the tau ” – Which might be difficult considering the Covenant’s current political landscape.

” vehicles: the tau have hover tanks, as do the covies. the tau have f*cking railguns mounted on their tanks, the covenant have plasma mortars, which are ok ” – You forgot the kick ass battle suits… and the Greater Knarloc.

” the tau are terrible at naval combat, ” – Terrible? They were outnumbered for Christ sakes and the fact that they could even stand against an Imperial Fleet makes them vastly superior to the Covenant’s fleets.

” of course, the kroot arent too shabby as far as melee goes. ” – Believe me, they would beat the shit of the Covenant if it went Hand to hand. The Kroot have been able to go toe to toe with the Orks, which is quite a feat considering the capablity of the average ork to smash heads around.

i always think of the covies in a pre schism context, when the elites were evil and the brutes were unheard of, i mean the halo 1 covenant. damn, those were the days…

even if the tau were outnumbered by the IOM navy, they were still developing naval warfare.

and since when was the greater knarlock a vehicle?! and the battlesuits sort of bridge the cap between infantry and vehicle.
kroot = instant win

about half the enemies the tau face would be capable of beating the living crap out of the entire covenant army in about a day, so i think we can say that the tau win this one.

“@ i dunno

” since when was the greater knarlock a vehicle? ” -Since Dawn of War Dark Crusade, bitch.”

Because Daemon armour was completely fucking overpowered. Damn DW1 Squiggoths.

@Tom
So then the Shade turret is a bit stronger than the standard issue pulse rifle for the Tau. If we were to compare the shade turret to similar Tau weapons you would see just how much of an advantage the Tau have in firepower. For example their railgun is capable in taking out a Leman russ or land raider in one shot, whose hulls are made of plasteel and admantium which are much more durable then the materials used by the Covenant

@ Tom

All of this has been considered and the outcome is the same… Tau win.

@ Tom

Well… that’s FactPile and thats Warhammer 40,000 – The most brutal and violent fictional universes ever conceived.

The Tau would get screwed if the Elites were flying the BCs. remember- one Elite fleet has the battle prowess of 3 brute fleets.
But we would also need to know if Tau fleets are susceptible to slipspace rupture slaughter. If so, all the covvies need to do would be to jump into the Tau fleet and then open uninterrupted slipspace ruptures. From there on, it’d be a downhill wormhole ride for the Tau.

“I want the Forunner Trilogy to come out. There is alot unkown about them and from what everyone’s seen, the forunners look pretty damned impressive. Especially the whole building/transporting planet sized weapons in less than a year that can kill everything within 2500 light years.”

i suggest you go read L-W post about forerunners on page 6, i believe, on the flood vs chimera thread, its both funny and true.

The only disadvantage being that it requires a ship with a slipspace engine to use it and has a “ground zero” firing range of zero.

Can we wrap this up? We’ve proven beyond a doubt that the Tau are more mobile and tactical with better technology.

And they dont charge Spartans with spears.

Nominate the Tau for the Fact Pile award.

you had me confused for i minute, you meant sean0931 but used my way of spelling the name.

its no problem, and your not the first and most probably wont be the last.

you just used my spelling instead of his, its worse when people think its me thats the one that has posted, and i get blamed for his rubbish, hell i can create enough rubbish of my own, before taking someone elses.