If I had been left to my own devices, I would have assumed that the light bridges and the Covenant's shield technology was based off the same technology. 343i wanted them to be different, so now Hardlight is a technology only the Forerunner understand... but hardlight shields aren't visually distinctive from regular shields, and don't seem to perform any better.

: Whether
: it was made "hard" or a controlled force or whatever. So no, I
: didn't see "hard light" everywhere I saw blue lines, I saw blue
: energy everywhere I saw blue, implemented in various ways.

To me, glowing blue force fields are different from invisible countergravity fields that lets stuff float. Both are 'sufficiently advanced technology', but both have different appearances and applications, so they are different technology.

: So for me,
: seeing more officially labeled use of 'hard light' isn't a big leap,
: in-fiction.

Even if it looks completely different from previous incarnations?

To me, the old hardlight is the light bridges. The new hardlight is like if the chasm bridges in the level "Assault on the Control Room" appeared out of thin air.

Hardlight ammo? Hardlight seems to be a combination of hologram and force field. What makes it a decent projectile, and why does it require physical ammunition?
At least someone at 343i seems to have realized how stupid it is, since the weapon's use of hardlight has been retconned.

: They did rely on it, esthetically, far too much in Halo 4; and use of actual
: "hard light" in whatever manner (as you outlined) has of course
: increased dramatically for Halo 4.

: Here's where we differ, since you used "do-anything forerunner
: magitech" - to me, that's blu-glowy-energy, which has been around
: abundantly since Halo 1.

Sigh... but you're lumping every blue glowing aspect of Forerunner technology into one ball, when we don't even know if they /were/ the same process.

: I think of it like blue-energy was a hazy nebulous concept fictionally when
: Halo began, with rare instances used in 'hard light' form. As the universe
: was fleshed out, this Forerunner 'magitech' grew fictionally more refined
: (ymmv) and so 'hard light' is now referenced far more often.

I still don't see how it was ever applied to ANYTHING other than the blue force fields prior to Halo 4. The Hard Light in the Forerunner Trilogy seemed more refined, but still limited to structural material.

: If you can do this simple magichemistry (sorry) to jumpstart inert
: molecules into living organic mode,

Go down far enough, and it's all inert. There's no difference between a hydrogen atom in water, and a hydrogen atom bonding a DNA molecule together.

: So, um, in an effort not to derail this thread into an enormous discussion
: about Evolution, let's just leave it at our differences of opinion about
: the nature of life, and that we hold different standards about the
: plausibility of life being cloneable from raw material. :)

Oh, fine. Just root around your local university library and see if you can find anything about Steen Rasmussen.

: Cloning animals was done via test tube, using existing DNA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gene_synthesis
Here, grab the other end of that goalpost, and I'll help you move it. "Nobody has made a completely synthetic cell" seems like a safe place to put it for the moment.

: And we don't know Everything about biology.

To quote Edison, "We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything."
But we know enough to do some neat stuff.

: We only know what we observe, and
: theorize about what we believe is plausible based on our observations. We
: have not created life, only played with existing life in various ways to
: see what happens.

True, true. Those laws on human experimentation are a real ball-buster, to be honest.
I mean, um... science?

: Does that make us the Afterunner?

Fun fact: 'After' is the German word for 'anal' or 'anus'. Now think about how the following words sound to them:

Aftershave
Afterglow
Afterburner
Aftermath
Afterlife
Aftertaste
Afterthought

: but..but..but... we don't want more plausible strategies!

So, Crimson Typhoon is armed with three buzzsaws that inflict minimal damage... when they have a reactor three times as powerful as Gypsy Danger's, which we saw when GD used a weaponized bearhug.

Not surprisingly, Crimson Typhoon went down faster than any of the other Jagers. Darwinism, pure and applied.

It's a good movie, I'm just terrible at shutting off my brain, unless there's a REALLY sexy machine involved. Jagers didn't cut it, not even close. If there had been a ten-kilometer wide deiselpunk Nazi flying saucer*, things might have been different.

More power to you if you catch which movie said flying saucer showed up in.

PS: I said I went and saw it with an engineer? You wouldn't believe how loudly he objected to Gypsy Danger beating down a Kaiju with a freighter.