unforum

[TheBiggestSean]

[SPEC] Troy...

[firefox]

troy could have been another human ship, which was subverted by soem outside force---- pious flea strikes again?


it also suggests it was betrayed from within.
so far as i gather the ai is female right? maybe a male ai?

from the crewmembers talk though, i gathered something big happened on troy....

i read it again.

[Lysit]

I assumd Troy refered to the covenant homeworld, its gives you a bried list of the defenses there at the end of first strike and there pretty over the top.

[ste]

I almost, almost went for this...

But as I understand it, protecting Earth has to be the ultimate goal of the USNC. Since the first military conversation in The Operator's Monologue talks about letting Troy burn as an intelligence sacrifice, it makes no sense. It refers to "a bigger picture", but there's no bigger picture than the future of Earth.

[ToiletDuk]

[TheBiggestSean]

Planets can be recaptured. If you notice that the Covenant completely bypass all the Inner Colonies, allowing them to take Earth would do one very specific thing: it would contain them. It would force them to use an excessive amount of ships and supplies - especially if there is a specific item on Earth that they are after, besides our annihilation. The Covenant would have to poor resources into the capture and securing of Earth while the human forces could hop in and out of system and pick them to pieces. Not to mention the huge losses they would initially take. At the very least, it has the potential to exhaust their supply routes and stretch them too thinly, allowing the human forces to push back extremely hard, possibly blazing a path all the way to the Covenant homeworld itself.

And the UNSC's number one priority is compromised anyway: they probably know that Earth is only weeks or months away from being attacked, so they have to figure out how to continue the war without their standard C-and-C HQ. A lot of factors point towards the UNSC more as thinking of "defeating the covenant" at whatever cost. It wouldn't matter how long they held Earth if they allowed the Covenant to just swell up and come back. Their switching to an overt toe-to-toe defense, to a sort of retroactive offense. Let the Covenant over-commit due to their extreme zeal, and then pick them apart until you have the forces to blast the alien bastards half way across the Universe. Tried and true tactic.

I acknowledge that it's kind of a stretch but in their position, it's probably what I would do.

[accidentalsuccess]

sucks that we haven't succeeded (to our knowledge) in locating the covenant homeworld yet. . ..

I also suspect troy is an inner colony, not a code word.

[Tarrsk]

Some point by point rebuttals...

Troy is not a ship of any sort- you don't "glass" ships, you blow them up. Glassing refers to bombarding a planet until its very soil is melted into glass.

It is not a Covenant planet- note that it is specifically mentioned that Captain Greene has family on Troy. It is certainly not the Covenant homeworld, as first of all the humans have no idea where that is, and second, as we learned in First Strike, the homeworld has enough defenses that even the best ONI spy vessel would probably be detected and vaporized in a few microseconds.

You cannot "recapture" a planet that has been glassed... well, okay, I suppose you could, but what would be the point? It's a giant ball of glass. The only reason anyone survived the glassing of Reach was not through any human ingenuity, but because they were lucky enough to be hiding at the one part of the planet the Covenant were interested in, and DIDN'T subject to energy bombardment.

Lastly (and I admit this is my most tenuous position), I don't believe that Troy is Earth. If anything, I would guess that Troy was one of the Outer Colonies, one of many that were glassed during the Covenant invasion.

The reasons why are simple. Earth is NOT the human "standard HQ"- that was Reach, which has already been burned to a cinder. Therefore, humanity has already lost its most valuable military asset. The UNSC is already crippled- all they can do now is fight for their very lives. Earth is the only remaining human world of importance, as it undoubtedly has the highest population and is the closest thing humanity has left to a military HQ (as I'm sure it is at least as well-defended as Reach itself, minus the military infrastructure). The plain and simple fact is that if Earth falls, there will be no continuation of the war. Humanity will have lost. Therefore, it makes no sense for any UNSC officer to be talking about Earth being an acceptable loss. If Earth falls, all of the intelligence in the world isn't going to do the UNSC a lick of good, because there won't be any UNSC worth speaking of left.

[troy]

Just to put the kabash on any future rampant spec, I just want to make clear that I have absolutely nothing to do with the game. I did spend my high school years, however, enduring lame "sacking of Troy" jokes in English and Social Studies classes.

-Troy

[Shyndy]

Not sure why this hit me, but just started thinking about Troy. Mostly, about the trojan war. what if the captured artifact was almost gifted to the humans, made to look like they captured it but the covenant wanted us to take it, because it was a trojan horse, and perhaps it could have something to do with durga. Maybe the artifact is what the covenant use tactically to locate earth. How exactly do the covenant find earth anyway? Sorry if this is something thats been covered, im very tired, new to boards and i did look as much as a tired person can on the boards for such topics. I guess this is kind of OT too, just struck me reading this thread.

[leova]

[Stratus]

If earth is troy, and these transmissons take place after the distruction of troy, why would Kamal what his family to go to earth?

[Astald]

Troy is a colony off of Earth, beyond that, we don't know much more about it.

[whoknew]

I'm 50% sure that the books say troy was a planet that was glassed by the covenant. Also, I remember that the UNSC knew that the planet would be glassed, because they had broken a covenant code, but evacuating the whole planet would show that they had broken the code, so they just evacuated key people and let the planet be glassed, much like britain did in WW2 when they discovered a nazi code. Remember that I am only 50% sure of all these facts, because I am very tired at the moment.

[SpghEddy]