And you aren't getting that with 343i's Halo. There's no exploration of what Covenant tech can do, there's no thought paid to how the UNSC has adapted existing technology to fight the Covenant, there's no intermediate steps between "Covenant has it" and "UNSC has it too, only better."

Where's the battalions of soldiers armed with captured Covenant weaponry? Where are the ODST suits enhanced with materials acquired by cutting Covenant armor apart? Where's the negotiations with the Covenant Fringe for obsolete starships?

: Halo started off
: as you describe, but considering realistically, over time why would it not
: be possible that humans can learn from Convenant and/or Forerunner
: technology and improve their own with it?

Yeah. That period of time is measured in centuries and millennia. The Covenant have spent 3,500 years researching Forerunner technology, and the Prophets put a considerable amount of effort into making their technology as hard to copy as possible. Even with the artificial intelligences that the Covenant don't have, it should take a long time to reach any sort of parity with the Covenant.

There's a long transition period full of compromises and good-enoughs. I don't want to see Humanity automatically achieve parity with the Covenant, I want to see the long progression of technology. And gradually-improving communications tech is part of that progression.

: They did with Infinity.

Because 343i is following the Marvel Mindset of Insufficiently Advanced Alien Technology, where the nuances of technology built thousands or even millions of years ahead of our own are perfectly comprehensible to mortal man. Where the difference between Human technology and alien technology is not measured in performance or ability, but the color of the metal and the presence of tron lines.

: So if
: aliens can presumably communicate FTL or have the tech to do so, why
: restrict humans from doing so at all?

Out of universe answer: Because it opens up opportunities for storytelling that Star Wars/Trek can't match without the tired "Radios are on the fritz again" plot device. Because the isolation and sheer vastness of the universe that light-speed delay emphasizes are nice themes that I'd like to see more of in Halo.

In universe answer: Because at Humanity's tech level, they need to build a particle accelerator around the moon's equator to fabricate the materials to build more tools to fabricate new kinds of materials to build different tools to (Add five more levels of bootstrapping) before they'll have the right materials for a quantum-entanglement ansible.

And that doesn't even cover the technical knowledge required to transmit a comprehensible message with quantum entanglement, which is ordinarily impossible.

: This is precisely what Star Trek TOS was .

Tried to be. Failed to be.

Not as bad as the later seasons, I'll give it that.

: Man vs Technology.
: In the science-fiction genre. :P

Insufficient. The defining feature isn't man fighting technology or being diminished by technology. It's quite possible to tell a story about man fighting technology without considering the full implications of that technology.

What I'm talking about is having a set of rules that the author builds off of by taking the implications of a technology or a limit on a technology and following through on them. If space warships can do X and ignore Y aspects of the Laws of Thermodynamics, then they're also able to do Z, ♆, and a little bit of ♇. Therefore, it is possible to do this and that, but fighter craft are ineffective in space combat and not used.

You could call Isaac Asimov an early practitioner. Positronic brains are pure technobabble, and he didn't concern his stories with hard near-future technology. But the Three Laws of Robotics exist, and the story was no longer in the robot uprising or the fight between man and his rebellious children, but in the edge cases where the Three Laws produced wonky results. A Robot may not harm a human, or through inaction, allow a human to come to harm... but define human. Define robot. Define inaction.

In The Caves of Steel, a character used the term "Asenion" to refer to robots bound by the three laws. We could use that.

Maybe "Axiomatic" would work as well? "Axiomatic" means "Self-evident or beyond question", and these stories are usually based upon a concept that can't be questioned without the whole story falling to bits. Ask not how the picowatt rocket engine operates without heat radiators, or space combat would revolve around capital ships shooting holes in each other's radiators. Ask not how the ships in Weber's Honor Harrington series generate their sidewalls, because they just do. Everything is extrapolated from that one keystone.

: Science fiction is more than just technology. It is fantasy.

There's no reason to be vulgar about it.

: Anyway I'm getting into an area where I may bite of a chunk bigger than I can
: chew; I'm a sci-fi fan, but not a fanatic ;P and starting to move into a
: genre discussion that's been debated by people far more knowledgable than
: I.

Ask not what the difference between fantasy and science fiction is, because those boundaries exist for all to see and are beyond question and that's how it must be if I want to sleep at night.