Personally: I would just go with Hull/armor improvements and by the endgame most units are flying tanks but it seems like some people want shields. idk... I'll go with what the poll on the forums says  :NOTSURE: 

the group that supports shields already has two votes. The anti-shield group has no votes yet...

NO! Dont even bother. dont bother. We dont need no stinkin' shields.

By the way, where is the poll?

Not true. AI's grew very rare near the end of the war. In the book Fall of Reach the entire UNSC is impressed with Captain Keys after preforming a maneuver known now as the Key's Loop. What made this so astounding is that his destroyer had absolutely no on-board AI systems. Even Cortana was impressed after reading about the battle because of all the guess work and quick calculations that must have gone into it.

All ships DID have computers, but an AI is different. AI is known as Artificial Intelligence, or a being that can think for itself. While the UNSC didnt have true AI, they did have smart and dumb AI's. Smart AI's could think and do as they please with out much limitation, but they werent sentient and only had enough capacity for around 7 years of use at which point they would go rampant because they literally thunk themselves to death. Dumb AI's could make free choices and the same rapid fire calculations but they we're narrow with usually only one or two main functions.

If I had to guess id say about 1/3rd to half of UNSC ships had any AI at all. Perhaps 3-5 main capital ships had a smart AI and only one that we know of had more then one AI. Thats the Pillar of Autumn.

Oh and valiantofficer look on page 31

right here: Poll

Not true at all. All AI are sentient as in "I think, therefore I am.", including dumb AI (although they are a little limited when it comes to thinking outside the box.)

Cortana is the UNSC's most brilliant AI. Take the mind of Dr. Catherine Halsey, and put it in the form of a smart AI, and you have Cortana, a 20-year-old know it all. (I know she's not really 20, but that's how she acts.) Dr. Halsey herself said Cortana is her, just without a bunch of societal limitations, like tact and ass-kissing. I fairly certain Cortana could respond to your post with a bunch of scathing insults about your intelligence.

If you say Cortana isn't sentient, you don't know the meaning of sentient.

The theory of rampany in "smart" AI is subject to debate. Cortana's absorbed and processed more data than, I'm willing to bet, the entire UNSC AI group.

The 7-year life span is not an actual, factual limit to "Smart" AI. Rather, it is a best-guess by UNSC and ONI personnel. It has been shown that "Smart" AI are capable of descending into Rampancy, then coming back to a stable state. Cortana is one example of this.

I'd sit down and go into some long rants and explinations, but intead, I'll just post the link that can explain it all a bit better.A.I.

I believe in fall of reach it said humans had small shield ships that could protect small ships with a weak shield. Also the Hood class battlecruiser was being upgraded with shield tech and pulse lasers.

And everyone keeps saying that they couldn't reverse engineer it that fast and they didn't capture a covenant ship. Oni has pulse lasers, the Hood class was getting pulse lasers. There are just some parts that aren't explained.

Also mabybe you are looking at the personnel and ship shields the wrong way, maybe seems the UNSC know they are better on land they made the personnel shield, as I imagine it would be harder with those space restrictions.

I am pro shields but as a high tier research vessel(for small ships) and maybe the hood class with a weak one without a vessel *but this was coming after the end of the war.

Also just one thing, don't the shields in Halo have 100% mitigation?

Oh and BTW i think that an artifact should be a contender class AI

I don't think so. I read Fall of Reach, Halo, First Strike, and Ghosts of Onyx a few times, and I don't remember any mention of shields on any ships.

As far as pulse weaponry on ONI Prowlers, since ONI is responsible for attempted reverse-engineering any and all Covernant technology and weaponry. With that in mind, it would make sense that ONI ships reap the benefits first.

But I agree with Scorpion on that last bit. If it's possible to alter artifacts, I think we should look into throwing in some Forerunner relics, maybe a Monitor or a Forerunner AI, like Mendicant Bias.

I wasn't sure as i read it like 2 years ago, Im sure i read it somewhere though.

My point was if they could do it with pulse lasers why not sheilds?

Yeh with the artifacts i was thinking

Contender class- enhanced fleet sizes or acuracy or enhanced reactors

Metal-Doesnt need changing really-there is one were you get regeneration rates better ect.

Hurakagonk(i cant spell it)- faster repair rates.

Oracle-Does somthing for culture (like the manifest destiny)

Forunner reactor?- Enhanced antimater regeneration

No UNSC AI is sentient, only the forerunners where able to make sentient AI's. Even though cortana seemed sentient she still had a basic line of code to follow and had an average operational life span. However if we look at some of the lesser AI's (not the best) that the forerunners made, like 343 guilty spark for instance, we see that they can last hundreds of thousands of years even in a rampant state.

While Cortana can make her own choices and such like that she still cant entirely turn on her makers, that was the problem with mendicant bias. He was too smart and in the end was tricked into helping the flood instead of destroying it.

Have we forgotten something? Don't the UNSC themselves say that their A.I. are sentient? The basis of sentience is knowing one's self exists, and ALL UNSC A.I. know that. They have free will, even though in many cases is it inhibited by programming restrictions put in place by us because we're worried about something going wrong. While Cortana is prevented from betraying the UNSC, she can still do a lot of things, and one of the biggest things compelling her to help John is SHE WANTS TO, not because it is programmed in. The mission programming was for a mission that was scrubbed before it started due to the Covenant attacking Reach, so Cortana had to re-evaluate her directives on the fly and go from there. Remember, she sent the Pillar Of Autumn to Halo on purpose, simply because she thought it would be a valuable asset, not because her mission demanded it. She didn't even know there would be anything there. it was a random, speculative guess based on ancient crystal formations that the Covenant wanted. She disregarded Keyes's orders to set a random course to get them there. Cortana has a lot of free will, and she can and will use it.

Too bad the SOASE hard AI isn't that smart  

Reverse engineering the covenants weakest ship-to-ship weapon really isn't that far fetched. Not only did it take them like, 20 years minimum to do it. But in real life, we can allready use lasers. I'd imagine in 500 years it wouldn't be that hard to make it into a weapon using alien tech as a base.

But even with that in mind, even knowing how easy it'd be. It took them ATLEAST 20 years, since the covenant war lasted 30, was it? And their ships didn't have the lasers until near the end of the war.

Now shields, we have NO idea how we could make a shield, and they didn't in Halo either. They also never got any sort of covenant shield tech to aid them (Talking about ships here, not infantry.) So that made it all the more difficult. And if it took them 20 years to reverse engineer the weakest component the Covenant had on their ships, how long do you suppose it'd take to reverse engineer the strongest one they had?



Also, Canada, I can't log onto those forums. Says my email is allready in use but I havn't made an account. So just, when you tally up the votes, add an extra "No" for me.

Uh. Cortana would kick the asses of the devs with about 1 tenth of 1 percent of her processor power, and do that while hacking the Department of Defense because of the boredom.

Yes, she would. I'm not exactly sure how one measures sentience, but I'd imagine the ability to think and act on your own would be part of it, aswell as self awareness. If those three would be the criteria for sentience, then Cortana only has one of them. Since she can't think nor act on her own. She's a computer program, her programming governs her. Her programming allows her to learn and do new things, but in the end it's still the program that does it. And even then, she's still limited by the limits placed in the program. So to end this silly arguement, AI's aren't sentient, they mimic sentience and nothing more.

Hmm want me to make a profile for you and then give you the username and password

Hey, is there a progress report on this?

Drop the ficken Sheilded UNSC ship idea...

Sentient means smarts/ personality/ feelings. Cortana is sentient.

She is NOT, however, a sentient being

An example of a Sentient being, would be a human, or an Elite. Even MC. The only Sentient Being AI, would be something like a Forerunner Moniter. Im not so sure about the sentiniles tho.

I guess around 20% because i have alot of models for the UNSC but I need to skin them and get everything coded. Getting some models skinned as we speak though   

Cortana is most definitely sentient. On more than one occasion, she's accessed files that were "classified", "restricted", or just "Don't look", for the purpose of furthering her understanding of the world, her mission, and John. She looked over his file and immediately decided that if her loyalty was torn between the UNSC and the Chief, she'd stick with John.

That action, in and of itself, proves sentience. "Smart" A.I.s are not "programmed" so to speak. "Dumb" A.I.s are. "Smart" A.I.s are formed from tissue of the human brain, a complex organ that even the UNSC scientists didn't fully understand., with the tacked on command code that could kill the A.I. In actuality, the UNSC don't really have much of a clue on "Smart" A.I.s and their limitations. They just know that when an A.I. starts jacking with things they shouldn't and begin harming humans, they shut them down.

The reason keys didnt have an AI on the destroyer iroqouis was that it had jsut been comissioned and had been rushed into battle without recieveing the AI designated to him he wouuld ahve gotten one later on the war with the covenant and massive Naval casualties were depleteing AIs faster than they were being produced but the iroqouis would have gotten an AI its not that they didnt have one for it

The pulse laser is their weakest? Aren't the plasma torps? I mean apparently a Halcyon can only resist 1-2 lasers, where at the end of the first level of halo we saw the Autumn taking like 8 torps.

And at the end of Cairo station (halo 2)we saw a Marathon get badly damaged/destroyed by a pulse laser (granted it could have been hit by 50 before that-we didn't see.)

Are pulse lasers a standard size or do different ships have different sized projectors? Or maybe there are different variants (like MACs)


Who says you need to have an idea? Imitate?


Well for all we know they scaled it up from infantry big time or they got it some other way. We have to face that there are some gaps in the story like with the pulse laser, just go with what we know (and that is that the Hood class was getting sheilds)

We don't know how powerful they were ect.

I am pro shields (not voted though)but weak and a very high level of research and not on all vessels, as well as being slow regeneration.


Stronger =/= more advanced- look at MACs, they are fairly simple, yet they own archers which are more advanced (they need propellants, guidance, sensors ect)

Probably totally true.

One problem with that SpardaSon, Cortana is a fictional character...

Anyways, I think after Halo 1 many of her programming restraints were somewhat changed when she delved into the Halo system. Cortana also behaves much like a being we would consider sentient, so she could be sentient. On the other hand, The Fall of Reach states that Cortana was programmed with the determination to use her abilities. Although ai programming restraints could be somewhat compared to restraints placed on humans by society. Free will is not free if it is inhibited, the point of free will is to be uninhibited. Saying that Cortana is free but that there are restrictions placed on her is like saying that a caged animal is free. Her basic programming could be compared to the basic instinctual behavior in each human. In the end this isn't a truly answerable question, because even though we may write a definition for it we do not understand the full meaning of sentience. In my opinion, a full understanding of sentience would require an entity beyond sentience.

That's just my 2 cents.