: That's one of the reasons why I like the history of firearms development so
: much. It's anarchic. Automobiles are interesting, but the heavy up-front
: investment for a new design mostly limits innovation to a few big players.
: But firearms... there's just so many people working on the problem of how
: to build a better gun, and no-one can agree what exactly constitutes a
: better gun. You can trace the origin of an idea and see how it inspired
: later designers. You can see the impact other fields have on firearms
: development, like shifts in tactical doctrine or advances in machine
: tooling.

On the point of innovation being limited to small groups, is the UNSC not also needlessly running the risk of stifling innovation in biotechnology by keeping it all under wraps and only applying it to one small group of "elite" soldiers, as opposed to distributing parts of the augments to other branches for development? Might they even be better off in the long run if they declassified some of the data for private companies to use in developing weaker publicly available technologies? As I see it, spreading it out beyond their own ONI Section 3 teams would increase the numbers of brains working on these technologies, and spread out R&D across several people's budgets rather than just one. These others would then be generating solutions that the UNSC could use and take forward, all without the UNSC spending their own budget on having to come up with solutions themselves. As far as my understanding goes, the UNSC seems to be trying to do ALL the work, when it possibly doesn't have to?

: We've seen what the UNSC fields when it has thousands of soldiers to armor.
: The ODST armor is rugged and has a few nice features, but it is strikingly
: primitive when compared to what Spartans wear. No shields, no automatic
: biofoam application, no power assist, no link to the user's nervous
: system.

I'm wondering where the SPI armour has went as well, which could have been nice for the ODST to use. Instead all the money has either went into the S-IVs or the Infinity. The UNSC could have used SPI as a base for outfitting the IV's and also several hundred more ODSTs at the same time with the spared up funds from not making hundreds of Mjolnir suits, and then added to SPI over time to eventually bring it up to the standards of Mjolnir as their fabrication techniques improved. Might that have worked better?

: Basically, it's because the UNSC has metaphorically gone from muskets and
: carbines with a few lever action breech loaders to general issue of
: self-loading battle rifles in the span of six years.

Judging from the Great Schism being a two month long affair, there's definitely a sense that things are being rushed.