: On wednesday, during our weekly warzone get together with the customs crew
: Inhuman and I had a lengthy disussion about Halo: Reach and how 343i has
: shaped it into the canon. Inhuman mentioned multiple times that most of
: the events taking place in the first half of the game are canonically
: nothing more than ONI propoganda. That they created a secret stealth
: invasion to make it seem that the covenant had to use covert ops and
: stealth to take on the UNSC version of the Pentagon, Reach. This fleet
: also consistes of a CSO class supercarrier, a ship that Inhuman also
: stated isn't a real thing and is also ONI propaganda. So, as I do, I
: harnassed my inner Ahab and went after my white whale, the elusive Fleet
: of Valiant Prudence and its flagship the Long Night of Solace.

: First here is the link to the stream where we had the conversation
: 1:42:15-1:50:50
: Aslo, thanks Vagueness for streaming all of our conversations, it makes
: things a ton easier.

: A quick and very brief correction on my part, I was confusing the CSO
: supercarrier with the CAS assualtcarrier. The ship Regret took to New
: Mombasa in Halo 2 is a CAS assualtcarrier not a CSO super carrier, which
: led to our confusion when we began to talk about Halo: Fleet Battles
: because both the CSO and the CAS have been made as models, so I mistook
: the CAS as a CSO. Also, look at the craziness that is the CSO model
:
: That litte ship in the bottom left is a CAS in the same scale.

: So its easy to say that the CSO is on a whole other level to most covenant
: ships and the only on screen mention of this massive ship is as the
: flagship of the Fleet of Valiant Prudence which was apparently an artifact
: retrieval fleet sent ahead of the main Fleet of Particular Justice to
: Reach. Based on this information it is quite plausible that the Fleet of
: Valiant Prudence is completely made up from an in universe perspective.
: This quote is pulled directly from the Halopedia article about the CAS
: "A further testament to this vessel's survivability is that it was
: selected by the Covenant alongside the much larger CSO-class supercarrier
: to serve as the Hierarchs' personal flagships when they were not aboard
: the also heavily shielded High Charity."
: Perhaps this means that the prophets would exclusively fly CSO's as their
: flagship but due to Regret's small fleet sent to Earth he only used the
: smaller CAS instead. Either way, the fact that the CSO looks like a blown
: up CAS and that our only in universe appearence of this massive ship is in
: Reach, its quite possible that the CSO doesn't exist and is purely a
: result of ONI performing damage control after the Fall of Reach.

It's certainly an interesting question, in-universe as well as the lengths people dislike Reach's changes and want to reconcile them :P

The COS does seem to run up against the size issue of sci-fi that plagues things like the Death Star, in that they don't seem possible, let alone feasible. The Long Night of Solace is essentially the volume of 148 already-massive CAS assault carriers, and unlike the Infinity I don't see where one giant ship would actually be more effective at the covenant's mission than that many smaller ships (and unlike the Long Night of Solace the Infinity is basically only larger than most large UNSC ships by a factor of three to five.)

Then there's the question of how you marshall the resources to build something like this. The amount of resources involved in making a super carrier is essentially that of strip-mining entire moons. But even if you get the thing built, how are you going to staff it and fuel it? A Nimitz-class aircraft carrier costs around 8.5 billion dollars, and it costs roughly a quarter of that cost to substantially refurbish one, including refueling its nuclear reactor. I can only imagine when we get into ships of that size, especially ones that are designed to be a nucleus of the entire fleet, that costs skyrocket vastly, and I don't think Engineers could solve that problem. We see in the post-Covenant world that it's difficult for anything other than larger Covenant splinter factions to be able to field a CAS, which makes me wonder how the Covenant could have run it even at full strength, let alone multiples of them.