Halo reach major plotholes

[I'm the walrus]

1)how did the Covenant supercarrier, Long Night of Solace, make foothold on Reach without anyone batting an eye? It's a huge mass. I'm pretty sure the Remote Sensor Outposts in the region would've picked up something that large on their sensors in slip-space. It couldn't have been cloaked, because the Spires were needed to cloak the ship. So how did that ship bypass Reach's defenses?
And why didn't the Orbital Mac Guns rain hell down on Long Night of Solace? The UNSC had twenty of them.
Also, where the hell was the UNSC fleet orbiting Reach ?throughout the entire game we saw only, like, what... about five frigates? Long Night of Solace couldn't have wiped out the ENTIRE Eridani Fleet out, because the rest of the Covenant fleet hadn't arrived yet
2)that Forerunner structure below Sword Base. What was its purpose? What secrets were "unlocked"? Why was Cortana the structure's custodian? Does Cortana contain these secrets? If so, why didn't she reveal them to John-117 and Captain Keyes on Halo or to Lord Hood
3) Where were Kat's shield?
She had enough time to get her shields up after putting on the helmet, after all it was a needle rifle and not a beam rifle.

[★ Darth Bacon ★]

I think all of Noble team's shields were down because of an EMP blast or something like that; all their shields were down so a needle rifle would one shot Kat with e head shot.

[Biscuit]

Originally posted by ★ Darth Bacon ★:

I think all of Noble team's shields were down because of an EMP blast or something like that; all their shields were down so a needle rifle would one shot Kat with e head shot.

That's what I thought at first but nowhere in any halo was it said that spartan shield can be disabled for prolonged duration. I see no reason to assume that the emp before the elevator could've damaged the shields beyond repair.

[legallybrown]

#1 skewers the entire plot like a fire iron though a watermelon. It is beyond stupidity, it is REACH for ♥♥♥♥♥ sake not some dirty backwater planet infested with insurrectionists or a Agriculture world like Harvest on the fringes of UNSC space. It is impossible for a normal Covenant ship to even enter UNSC controller space while staying undetected. UNSC even uses special Slipspace drones to constantly scan the Slipspace to anticipate any Covenant fleet movements by the way of specialized stations in a UNSC held system.

Also, it is impossible to make Slipspace jumps inside the atmosphere of a Planet. For argument's sake let's say that Long Night of Solace somehow made landfall on reach undetected. However, how does one account for the fact that it becomes invisible only once it is grounded and the invisible pylons are setup? What happened when it arrived? It must've been pretty visible i'd say. Also, it's just not possible for such an enormous ship was able to settle cozily on Reach which seems to have pretty normal gravity.

[Define Brackish Water]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3BSVKhXoRE
It doesn't show the spartan shields being EMP'd. There's no visual effect. That's the logic in retrospect but I think this cutscene was originally planned to use the Halo 3 beam rifle. That weapon's role was replaced with the focus rifle which was designed so that it's never an instant kill on Legendary.

Point number one is the worst issue with Reach imo. In the then-available books after capturing a covenant ship it's discovered that the covenant can slipspace jump into objects without colliding with them like the UNSC's slipspace drives would. It would still probably end badly if they jumped into a very large object but small amounts and atmospheres are fine because it gets pushed away. It's chalked up to the Covenant stealing Forerunner tech and the characters suspect the Covenant didn't experiment with it more because then it would have changed their battle strategy. (In hindsight now that I'm older I imagine it would be a huge safety issue. Wouldn't want to accidentally destroy an entire carrier just because you jumped aggressively close.)

It can be argued that the Cortana that Noble Six carries isn't the Cortana. It's a separate instance. It's kind of sort of a smaller portion of Cortana that was copied out to do some other task and and then merged with herself once it returned. It also could just be Cortana. I don't think the Fall of Reach gets referenced in detail much more because of the book and game lore conflict. In the books this doesn't happen and there's just one Cortana (I think).

Maybe my memory of the Bungie-era book canon is fuzzy but I'm pretty sure in the original Fall of Reach novel the Covenant didn't know there was a forerunner artifact until after they landed. In the game I don't think it's mentioned at all but in the books it played a big role and even messed with slipspace warps pretty wildly. There was some information on the forerunner artifact that was being studied. When the Cole Protocol was taken to keep the Covenant from knowing where Earth was, Cortana decided to jump in a specific direction instead of a random one. That was how Halo was found.

[Pyrocitor]

Originally posted by I'm the walrus:

1)how did the Covenant supercarrier, Long Night of Solace, make foothold on Reach without anyone batting an eye? It's a huge mass. I'm pretty sure the Remote Sensor Outposts in the region would've picked up something that large on their sensors in slip-space. It couldn't have been cloaked, because the Spires were needed to cloak the ship. So how did that ship bypass Reach's defenses?
And why didn't the Orbital Mac Guns rain hell down on Long Night of Solace? The UNSC had twenty of them.
Also, where the hell was the UNSC fleet orbiting Reach ?throughout the entire game we saw only, like, what... about five frigates? Long Night of Solace couldn't have wiped out the ENTIRE Eridani Fleet out, because the rest of the Covenant fleet hadn't arrived yet

This is one of the biggest retcons between the novel Fall of Reach and Halo Reach. In Fall of Reach, a UNSC monitoring station spotted the covenant fleet coming, quite a ways off. They had stations which would launch a probe into slipspace, it would scan across the spectrum, then translate back into real space and broadcast it back to the station.
One of these picked up a huge mass moving through slipspace, the size of a moon, with bulbous spines poking out of the front end. Not immediately, they realised it's an immense Covenant fleet, with its mass blurred together in slipspace. So they rushed the data back down to Reach and had at least some amount of warning before the invasion arrived in the system, let alone into the planet's orbit.

The game retconned this and had a the LNoS appear like a month earlier, completely undetected, and made the rest of the fleet a surprise.

[🦜Cloud Boy🦜]

it has been cloaked, so they could not detect it.

[Haflip]

Originally posted by Define Brackish Water:

It doesn't show the spartan shields being EMP'd. There's no visual effect. That's the logic in retrospect but I think this cutscene was originally planned to use the Halo 3 beam rifle. That weapon's role was replaced with the focus rifle which was designed so that it's never an instant kill on Legendary.

That's always been my exact line of reasoning for that cutscene. It feels like a last-minute change. The Halo games stopped using live rounds in cutscenes after the first two, but they were still gameplay consistent whenever they could be, right up until we see a random needle rifle kill a Spartan at full shields. It kind of cheapens the dramatic moment they were trying to create.
Also, Halo's usual captioning problem is having dialog without subtitles but that particular cutscene has the rare issue of subtitles without any audible dialog. It adds to the feeling that the cutscene needed another pass but they just didn't get to it.

[I'm the walrus]

Originally posted by Pyrocitor:

Originally posted by I'm the walrus:

1)how did the Covenant supercarrier, Long Night of Solace, make foothold on Reach without anyone batting an eye? It's a huge mass. I'm pretty sure the Remote Sensor Outposts in the region would've picked up something that large on their sensors in slip-space. It couldn't have been cloaked, because the Spires were needed to cloak the ship. So how did that ship bypass Reach's defenses?
And why didn't the Orbital Mac Guns rain hell down on Long Night of Solace? The UNSC had twenty of them.
Also, where the hell was the UNSC fleet orbiting Reach ?throughout the entire game we saw only, like, what... about five frigates? Long Night of Solace couldn't have wiped out the ENTIRE Eridani Fleet out, because the rest of the Covenant fleet hadn't arrived yet

This is one of the biggest retcons between the novel Fall of Reach and Halo Reach. In Fall of Reach, a UNSC monitoring station spotted the covenant fleet coming, quite a ways off. They had stations which would launch a probe into slipspace, it would scan across the spectrum, then translate back into real space and broadcast it back to the station.
One of these picked up a huge mass moving through slipspace, the size of a moon, with bulbous spines poking out of the front end. Not immediately, they realised it's an immense Covenant fleet, with its mass blurred together in slipspace. So they rushed the data back down to Reach and had at least some amount of warning before the invasion arrived in the system, let alone into the planet's orbit.

The game retconned this and had a the LNoS appear like a month earlier, completely undetected, and made the rest of the fleet a surprise.

Did Staten write halo:reach or was he busy doing destiny stuff?
Either way whoever wrote the game made sure they events in the game totally contradict fall of reach.

[I'm the walrus]

Originally posted by Biscuit:

Originally posted by ★ Darth Bacon ★:

I think all of Noble team's shields were down because of an EMP blast or something like that; all their shields were down so a needle rifle would one shot Kat with e head shot.

That's what I thought at first but nowhere in any halo was it said that spartan shield can be disabled for prolonged duration. I see no reason to assume that the emp before the elevator could've damaged the shields beyond repair.

Everyone else was fine.
Would have been much more fitting if the covenant glassing beam directly glassed her.

[legallybrown]

Originally posted by I'm the walrus:

Originally posted by Pyrocitor:

This is one of the biggest retcons between the novel Fall of Reach and Halo Reach. In Fall of Reach, a UNSC monitoring station spotted the covenant fleet coming, quite a ways off. They had stations which would launch a probe into slipspace, it would scan across the spectrum, then translate back into real space and broadcast it back to the station.
One of these picked up a huge mass moving through slipspace, the size of a moon, with bulbous spines poking out of the front end. Not immediately, they realised it's an immense Covenant fleet, with its mass blurred together in slipspace. So they rushed the data back down to Reach and had at least some amount of warning before the invasion arrived in the system, let alone into the planet's orbit.

The game retconned this and had a the LNoS appear like a month earlier, completely undetected, and made the rest of the fleet a surprise.

Did Staten write halo:reach or was he busy doing destiny stuff?
Either way whoever wrote the game made sure they events in the game totally contradict fall of reach.

I think he had left Bungie by then.

[Pyrocitor]

Originally posted by legallybrown:

Originally posted by I'm the walrus:

Did Staten write halo:reach or was he busy doing destiny stuff?
Either way whoever wrote the game made sure they events in the game totally contradict fall of reach.

I think he had left Bungie by then.

Peter O'Brien was Writing Lead on Reach, Staten was Writing Director.[www.halopedia.org]

[CNAMonkey]

Originally posted by I'm the walrus:

Originally posted by Pyrocitor:

This is one of the biggest retcons between the novel Fall of Reach and Halo Reach. In Fall of Reach, a UNSC monitoring station spotted the covenant fleet coming, quite a ways off. They had stations which would launch a probe into slipspace, it would scan across the spectrum, then translate back into real space and broadcast it back to the station.
One of these picked up a huge mass moving through slipspace, the size of a moon, with bulbous spines poking out of the front end. Not immediately, they realised it's an immense Covenant fleet, with its mass blurred together in slipspace. So they rushed the data back down to Reach and had at least some amount of warning before the invasion arrived in the system, let alone into the planet's orbit.

The game retconned this and had a the LNoS appear like a month earlier, completely undetected, and made the rest of the fleet a surprise.

Did Staten write halo:reach or was he busy doing destiny stuff?
Either way whoever wrote the game made sure they events in the game totally contradict fall of reach.

I think that was on purpose actually since I remember Bungies old mindset was if something was in a halo book but got put into a game. The game version is cannon instead of the book automatically.

So I'm sure they read that and changed as many things as possible to make theirs the definitive telling of what happened on Reach haha

[Haflip]

Originally posted by CNA Monkey:

Originally posted by I'm the walrus:

Did Staten write halo:reach or was he busy doing destiny stuff?
Either way whoever wrote the game made sure they events in the game totally contradict fall of reach.

I think that was on purpose actually since I remember Bungies old mindset was if something was in a halo book but got put into a game. The game version is cannon instead of the book automatically.

So I'm sure they read that and changed as many things as possible to make theirs the definitive telling of what happened on Reach haha

Yeah I remember that, too. They said something about the games being 100% cannon, even if the book that the game contradicts came first. It's goofy but that would mean the Covenant were undetected until first reported by Noble Team.

[Pyrocitor]

Originally posted by Deathscare:

Originally posted by Haflip:

Yeah I remember that, too. They said something about the games being 100% cannon, even if the book that the game contradicts came first. It's goofy but that would mean the Covenant were undetected until first reported by Noble Team.

Is it wrong if I prefer the game to be canon?

The idea that the UNSCs "flagship" military colony, second only to Earth, surrounded in satellites and relay stations and orbiting shipyards, plus a massive standing fleet, just let this massive covenant supercarrier and a heavy corvette (Long Night of Solace and Ardent Prayer ) rock up and have infantry on the ground before anyone even noticed they were there?

[I'm the walrus]

Originally posted by Deathscare:

Originally posted by Pyrocitor:

The idea that the UNSCs "flagship" military colony, second only to Earth, surrounded in satellites and relay stations and orbiting shipyards, plus a massive standing fleet, just let this massive covenant supercarrier and a heavy corvette (Long Night of Solace and Ardent Prayer ) rock up and have infantry on the ground before anyone even noticed they were there?

I am missing some context since I have never read the book.

even if you have not read the book the story of reach on its own is pretty rocky