http://www.freewebs.com/navspecwepsection3/UNSC-Covenant-scalechart4.bmp Hope this helps.

Considering its weak firepower the fact that it is indeed a cruiser and it has godly amounts of damage it can take, id make it a command cruiser. What better a ship for it then something that can take an amazing beating in battle?

Well the problem here is of frigates, cruisers, and capships. I would definitely put the Cradle, the refitted colony class, and the Marathon-class as capitals, as well as a Pillar of Autumn-style Halcyon. However, the standard Halcyon is just slow and weak. It definitely fills the heavy cruiser role in SoaSE, where TEC has the Kodiak. And Fall of Reach mentions that Halcyon classes are the smallest ships ever to be called cruisers, being dwarfed by a Marathon. So I would put a stock Halcyon in the heavy cruiser slot, a Marathon as a capital, and the refitted Halcyon as a capital as well due to its overwhelming firepower. It would definitely be a battleship, however the cost and time of building one should definitely make the player want to not get them killed. It would not be a support capship at all, it is simply too deadly for that. The PoA styles are able to take out a Marathon in a 1v1 fight, I think.

As to the MAC/nuke question: This isn't going by canon or whatnot, just my own stupid ideas. MAC is definitely not a special ability due to it being the main offensive weapon of every UNSC ship that has one. Nukes are most definitely a more powerful weapon than a single nickel-iron slug. Besides, the books say UNSC nukes are superhardened to contain the blast for a bit longer allowing pressure to build up in the casing so you get a blast wave when the casing gets blown away. Besides, nuclear warhead are expensive and take lots of time to produce due to their complexity. MAC rounds are simply precision-machined balls of iron and nickel. You see a difference here? MAC rounds, after bringing down a Covie shield keep going simply due to massive kinetic energy. 1 nuke = shields down, large area. 1 MAC = Covie plasma will hit you and hurt while that split-chinned elite laughs at your miserable attempts to harm his ship. Covenant shields, if not drained, stay there and force the MAC to bounce off or disintegrate. MAC = ship's main gun. Nukes = WMD's. I don't see Marzas and Kodiaks needed AM to fire their main guns.

the halcyon class crusier is 1.17 kilometers long
the PoA's mac gun fire three succesive "shredder" rounds and has thousands of archer missiles it can keep going with a loss of 90% of their armor
only one other shift was ever refitted in a similar fashion and this was the PoA's sister ship the Dawn Under Heaven

still please go to the halo site and sketchup pages i requested and tell me whst you think

also the PoA kept going with only 1 secondary reactor, a hole bored in a spiral shape all the way through the hull, after having a couple hundred missiles detonating in their tubes.

you only be alowed two of these ships and they should be Capital Ships

the halcyon class crusier is 1.17 kilometers long
the PoA's mac gun fire three succesive "shredder" rounds and has thousands of archer missiles it can keep going with a loss of 90% of their armor
only one other ship was ever refitted in a similar fashion and this was the PoA's sister ship the Dawn Under Heaven

still please go to the halo site and sketchup pages i requested and tell me whst you think

also the PoA kept going with only 1 secondary reactor, a hole bored in a spiral shape all the way through the hull, after having a couple hundred missiles detonating in their tubes.

you only be allowed two of these ships and they should be Capital Ships

a marathon class cruiser is 1,192 meters long
a halcyon is 1,170 meters

so in the end size and length dose not equal tonnage

biggest capital ship the unsc could have would be is the supercarrier Trafalgar

That was the Pillar of Autumn, a singular ship. The Halcyon class was nothing like it, and infact was a shitty ship as has been stated. Slow, and weak, and big. It's only saving grace was it was a bitch to kill. Now I don't know about you, but I'd think a big slow and weak ship would fit better as improved cannon fodder, or more specificly, a "meat shield" (If it was living lol) for the other ships. It sure has HELL doesn't deserve anything close to a capital ship.

I'm also not sure we should have a "Refitted halcyon class" as a buildable ship, maybe make the PoA a "hero" ship that you can only build one of, but that's it. It kinda kills the entire point to make it spammable. It's like "Why build this significantly newer, and supposedly better warship, top of the line battle cruiser in the UNSC fleet. When you could build a refitted Halcyon, a ship that's many many years older then the Marathon, and is suppose to be shit, but it's actually far better". All you'd ever see would be massive fleets of Halcyon's and refitted Halcyon's.

Yeah unless we get hero ships for the expansion pack the Halcyon will unfortunately be left in its canon shitty state. BTW Thanks for that chart, its incredibly helpful.

Oh and All_Under_Heaven can you send me those links again?

The standard Halcyon class has close to zero offensive firepower and is slow. It has two uses that I can see. The "meatshield" as stated above and as a defensive ship around your planets to back up any defenses you might have. The Pillar of Autumn is a heavily and expensively modified Halcyon class that probably costs a lot more than a Marathon and what with secrecy being needed and all that it would take a lot of time to build in-game. The stock Halcyon itself is an expensive ship because of all that armor and bracing it has. All that Titanium-A costs money. And when you add in what ONI did to the Pillar of Autumn with those refits to the MAC gun, the reactor and its cooling system, the Archer bay, you have an expensive ship already waaaaayyyy more expensive and taking lots of time to build. I'm saying a refitted Halcyon would be way more expensive and take way longer to build than a standard Marathon. If a Marathon takes maybe 60 seconds to build, the refitted Halcyon takes about 120 seconds to build, and costs 2x as much. How's that for balance! In return for that expense of time and money, you get a ship as fast as a frigate and packing enough firepower to make the Covenant fear it. It would be perfect for hit-and-run assaults on Covenant positions with some frigates as backup. They slip in, smash some stuff up, lose a few frigs, slip out to nearest friendly planet.

Just make the refit weaker in armor and hull points than the normal Halcyon, but the refit can put out more damage. You don't have to make the hull points godly, just enough that it stands out if that makes any sense. Anyways a Halcyon spam would be effective against the Covenant's faster, well armored, dangerously armed ships, unless its 10:1 which would be unrealistic. And if the refit is a cap ship, couldn't the Covenant answer back with Assault Carriers? Fleet logistics and resources needed, especially metal, would be large. In conclusion the Halcyon shouldn't be godly in armor, but in resources needed.

P.S. CanadaMan, sorry my attempts at coding were a failure  , but I'm glad you got a better coder than I'll ever be  , I guess :NOTSURE: w/e

EDIT(DAMN  )

Besides "spamming" was the only way the UNSC could beat the Covenant so wouldn't it be a little more canon?

The UNSC did spam, as much as they could (Canonicly they were still outnumbered horribly). But spamming the PoA would be stupid, that's like making 20 Darth Vader's in a SW RTS. A refitted Halcyon is a hero, it's an extremely eparimental ship, one of a kind and doesn't make sense to have entire fleets with them. Pretty much Sparda hit the nail on the head why the PoA shouldn't be spammable.

currently with acolyte gone i don't even have a coder, i've been having to figure it out as i went along.

What about this idea: We have the normal meatshield Halcyons (the worst starting cap) but then at a super high research level you could turn them into refitts (the perfect endgame cap)?

idk tell me what you think about it

I personally want to stay as close to canon as possible, and the thought of a dieing empire that's running out of shipyards and resources building highly expensive refitted Halcyons doesn't seem right to me.

well it wouldn't really be dieing if it conquered the map but yeah i was wondering about it myself because i really wanted to include refitts but didn't know how. hmmm it might have to wait for the expansion pack

PoA was not a single ship i said it had a refitted sister ship called the Dawn Under Heaven

and here are the sites

google sketchup-http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=ab57262b3f53f02297287768fd1eea77

halopedia UNSC page-http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/UNSC_Navy

halopedia covenant page-http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Covenant_Navy

please read Halo: The Fall of Reach and Halo: Ghosts of Onyx for much for ship detail on all particularly the halcyon

CanadaMan that is an excellent idea for the research for Halcyon Refits (is that the name we might be using for PoA style Halcyons?). I personally believe they should be a researchable capital, be hugely expensive in terms of time and money, yet be worth it so they actually are usable and people don't spam Marathons instead. And I do believe that a Halcyon Standard should be a heavy cruiser ingame simply because it is nowhere near the level of firepower needed for a capital ship.

turns out i already have that CCS in my collection! Don't worry i'll be upgrading it and adding more detail (still need to ask permission though) but that will be in the mod's second release which will include the Covenant. The first release will contain only the UNSC and the vanilla races. Thanks for the wiki pages

thank you make sure you my unsc ship like carrier an assult carrier, super carrier, and my prowler dusk

Would the PoA be the "superweapon", the sixth cap ship, or the missing fifth?

i really like the research idea

Two exparimental ships designed for the sole reason of transporting the Spartans on a very covert mission doesn't warrant making it a spammable ship.

Maybe a good compromise that'd also help maintain "realism" in the mod would be to make the research of the refit EXTREMELY expensive, and make the ships themselves very expensive. So if the game turns out to be like the Halo universe, with the humans getting their asses kicked, it'd be far more efficiant to just build Marathons then trying to refit obsolete warships. But if they're winning and have the money, they can refit their old Halcyons to give them a bigger and better fleet.

and put a limit of two per person in game

I don't think you can put build limits in this game but the plan would be to make both the research and the cost of the Halcyon refits extremely expensive