User blog comment:James12708/Reapers VS. Forerunners VS. Angels from Darksiders VS. Humanity from Halo VS. Council and humanity from Mass Effect VS. Imperium of Man/@comment-4967682-20130116065115/@comment-4967682-20130123001859


 * Normal, non-relay ME FTL is faster than pre-4 UNSC FTL by a significant margin, and even post-4 UNSC FTL is far slower than the mass relays.
 * Independence Day fallacy. I can just as easily say that the Reapers/Geth/EDI/VIs can hack UNSC ships and it would make just as much sense. They're from different universes, hacking ain't gonna work.
 * Which matters for nothing. Canonically a single Archer missile can take out a non-cruiser UNSC ship in one hit and three MAC rounds can take out a Covenant battlecruiser (1 can take out a corvette or light cruiser). The most heavily armored UNSC ship still only takes one MAC round to down. And pre-4, they don't even have shields. The armor may as well not be there at all considering how ineffective Archers are shown to be.
 * So? They still outnumber the UNSC by a factor of several hundreds. It's really not comparable.
 * Once again, so? The Council has WMDs that would make the UNSC blush, just because they're civilized doesn't mean they won't hesitate to use them in a pinch (see: complete and utter extinction of the rachni). Hell, they could just throw moons at all the UNSC planets.
 * Uh, no? See the Rachni Wars. And even if that happened, it doesn't matter. A single Council race is so much more powerful than the UNSC it's not even funny.
 * It really doesn't matter. I don't think you get how much they outrange the UNSC ships; their range is effectively unlimited. ME ships are only limited to ranges of "merely" tens of thousands of kilometers because they're shooting fellow ME ships, moving at relativistic speeds. This is described in the codex. Against the weak UNSC, which fires powerful yet incredibly slow shells at 30 km/s, they'd be completely invincible while the UNSC would be unable to dodge. Same thing goes for the Covenant and their similarly pathetically slow plasma torpedoes. Hell, even the energy projectors would be severely outranged; with a range of 100,000 kilometers, they'd be outranged by mass accelerators which are only limited by how maneuverable their opponent is. And Covenant ships have been shown time and again to possess next to no maneuverability. See the Battle of Chi Cheti, where a Covenant ship couldn't dodge a UNSC MAC slug despite having over a minute and a half of preparation. How well do you think they're going to do against ME cannons, which fire projectiles that are over a thousand times faster?
 * So? First of all, do you know how utterly improbable it is that any ships would ever be close enough together that one SMAC shot can hit two ships? Second, the Reapers are described as having ranges beyond tens of thousands of kilometers... when shooting at tiny ships moving at relativistic speeds. What do you think they're going to do to these two kilometer long giant targets that can't move? And it's not lie the Reapers can't dodge; they could simply engage the SMAC at a range where it would take several dozen seconds for the projectiles to reach them, and dodging given that preparation is nothing to the Reapers.
 * Once again, that doesn't really matter. Three or less 64 kiloton MAC rounds can completely destroy a 1.8 kilometer long Covenant battlecruiser. From what the codex says of their durability, the Reapers would take a similar amount of punishment to put down (being generous, being ungenerous the UNSC can't even touch the Reapers due to ungodly reload times being much slower than a Reaper's barrier regeneration). Being generous and assuming that the UNSC Infinity has three times as much shields as a battlecruiser, that would mean it could take one, count 'em, one, 450 kiloton shot from a Reaper main gun to completely trash the Infinity. And remember, a Reaper capital ship can fire this 450 kiloton main gun every five seconds, as well as all thanix-equipped ships. MAC cannons take several minutes to recharge to full power.
 * Their paper armor and huge reload times make them just giant targets. Also, the UNSC and Covenant are both massively outnumbered. On the low end, the Reapers have 20,000 capital ships (they're over a billion years old) and the turians have between 10,000 and 50,000 ships (they have more ships than the geth per ME3, who have over 10,000 ships per the planet description for Charoum, but have less ships than the quarians, who have 50,000 ships). While few of these are dreadnoughts, by ME3 ALL of them have thanix cannons, making that irrelevant.

If the Covenant ever tried to go against the Reapers or the UNSC against any Council race, they'd get curbstomped extremely fast. And this is without factoring in the Reaper's many "I win" buttons. FTL missiles in the form of their Oculus drones that can bust planets. Solar system destroying bombs. Indoctrination.