: It's been mentioned many times in the novels (and borne out by the games)
: that the UNSC doesn't know how the Covenant recharge their plasma weapons.
: You'd have battalions of soldiers armed with plasma rifles and plasma
: pistols and so on with single-use munitions that would have to be
: discarded and then newer ones obtained.

True. And to quote the manual that shipped with Reach... huh. I recall reading a line somewhere about how Spartans view the Covenant as little more than walking armories, but it isn't in the Reach manual. Weird.

That said, the inability to recharge the weapons does place a restriction on their deployment, but I figure that the plasma pistol's power and hard counter to shields warrants issuing captured plasma pistols as a squad support weapon, or perhaps one to each fireteam if stockpiles of captured weapons are sufficiently large.

: Also, the gunnery sergeant on Cairo Station mentioned that the Chief's
: shields are more resilient than the old Mk Vs was, stating it was
: "much better than the Covenant tech" it had been adapted from.

I want to know in what ways MJOLNIR is improved over Covenant technology, because I can actually envision a few scenarios where that is the case. I imagine that Covenant technology is powerful, but poorly optimized and poorly programmed compared to UNSC technology. The Prophets may be good at what they do, they may live for hundreds of years and have centuries more experience than their Human counterparts, but there's no way they'd be able to match Smart AIs.

We know that plasma torpedo launchers can be turned into miniature energy projectors by an AI like Cortana. What could an AI do with a shield system?