[created by Anton and moved over here] This topic seeks to find out a sensible estimate for the Covenant's level of industrial power using High Charity as a baseline. We know the approximate dimensions of High Charity, the approximate dimensions of Covenant ships and the time frame within which High Charity was built. There are issues however which I can't resolve just now. It was inspired by this post [url=http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-halo-thread-time-was-your-ally-343.280593/page-43#post-12904803]here[/url] on Spacebattles: [quote]High Charity was a mobile space station nearly 348 kilometers in Diameter constructed to serve as the capital of the Covenant when it was formed during the conclusion of the Sangheili-San'Shyuum war. This war ended sometime in 852 BCE and the San'Shyuum made High Charity its capital in 648 BCE. That means it took 204 years to complete the station. Onward to the calculations! Utilizing the formula volume of a sphere (4/3)pi(R)^3, I determined that High Charity was roughly 2.207e16 cubic meters in volume. However we must take into account that roughly half of the Station is nonexistent, so we will cut this number in half. So High Charity is roughly 1.103e16 cubic meters in volume. Now assuming a linear construction time of 204 years, the Covenant was able to assemble nearly 5.4e13 cubic meters of materials per year. With this type of Industrial Might, the Covenant should easily be able to build the following per year: 1) 45 CSO-Supercarriers or 2) 15,2554 CSS-class battle cruisers or 3) 6,822CAS-class Assault carriers P.S If anyone can find any problems with my calcs please show me the error and I will correct it.[/quote] I did my own analysis ([url=http://i764.photobucket.com/albums/xx283/Anton1792/Games/368px-High_Charitypic_zps58de6cbe.jpg]here[/url]) and arrived at roughly similar numbers, albeit slightly higher (12.5 million cubic kilometres) because I included the tail section too. As for his ship numbers, I'm not sure how he derived their volumes so I can't say much about them but an analysis [url=http://i764.photobucket.com/albums/xx283/Anton1792/Games/Project2.jpg]I did[/url] a while back gave me an Assault Carrier volume of roughly 4.3 cubic kilometres. Dividing the High Charity volume by that gives you the number of Assault Carriers that could be produced from High Charity's volume of material. Dividing again by High Charity's construction time of 204 years will give the annual rate at which these Assault Carriers could have been manufactured at. It turns out that, given these numbers, the Covenant could have pumped out about 14'000 CAS class Assault Carriers per year instead of High Charity, at that time. An issue that I can't seem to reliably figure out for sure though is that High Charity is not a solid hemisphere. It has a hollow space within, but I'm not sure how large that space is and hence how thick it's walls are. This could impact these figures a lot. Would anyone here know how to solve this? If I take a total guess, with the only reasoning admittedly being that such a large volume of gas in a vacuum will create a lot of pressure, then I could say that the walls are 1 km thick. That then gives the hemisphere section 189'138 cubic kilometres of material, changing the High Charity total to 1'689'138 ckm. Following through with the above line of thought regarding ship volumes, that then gives as an annual rate of 1925 Assault Carriers. This was the Covenant at its dawn, right after a devastating war that almost annihilated both the Sangheili and the San-Shyuum. The Covenant's industrial power will have increased in the 3000 years since then. I think there's a good chance that the corrections for the hollow space within High Charity will not in any way allow for the nonsense about the Covenant's level of power being so damn low following Halo 3.