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halo.wikia.com wrote:The Operational History of the Spartan-III Program has been marked by success and tragedy. Many of the operations undertaken by the soldiers were suicide missions, but were listed as successes by the UNSC.

2536 - 2537

* Spartan-III Alpha Company is activated
* Spartan-III Alpha Company quells Insurrection at Mamore - Success
* The Battle of New Constantinople - Success
* Operations in the Bonanza Asteroid Belt – Success
* July 27, 2537 - August 2, 2537 - Operation: PROMETHEUS – Success, all members KIA
* Note that there are also currently six successful unnamed battles in which Alpha company participated.

2539

* Spartan-III Beta Company is selected

2545

* July 3rd, 2545 - Operation: Torpedo – Success, mostly KIA, two survivors

2545 – 2552

* Spartan-III Gamma Company is selected
* October 31, 2552 - November 3, 2552 – Battle of Onyx

halo.wikia.com is a very reliable source, and I don't think there's any reason fluffwise that S-3s would be on Reach.

I'll just quote someone else's thoughts on the subject:

Louis Wu wrote:Tom and Lucy were 12 years old. The only thing Ghosts of Onyx says definitively about survivors of the battle is this:

"No one had survived. They had checked all the COM frequencies, searched the shoreline, fields, and hills on their long silent hike back. No one else was alive."

So they didn't find anyone, and nobody was broadcasting for help. Lucy was badly hurt, and Tom was more concerned with getting her out than he was with finding 298 bodies.

The idea that none of the other Spartans could have possibly survived is absurd.

There are several reasons why S-IIIs could be on Reach. It's risky business treating all past evidence as 100% reliable and irrefutable. It's one of the reasons people get so butthurt over ever scrap of new, apparently conflicting information.

The thing is that the S-3s aren't meant to survive, so no information about them would be leaked. Those that were lucky enough (Tom and Lucy) were held back to train the next generation of S-3s.

IIRC, not even Dr. Halsey was informed of their existence; they were created by a radical branch of ONI, led by that Ackerson guy.

Also, consider that Tom and Lucy's company charged headlong into a massive Covenant factory, garrisoned with thousands of troops, and the S-3s didn't even have personal shields. That was meant to be a pure suicide mission.

Oh, and do tell me if I'm going overboard here, as I'm a bit of a fluff nut.

No that seems to be right from what I remember from the books. I am a true Halo Fluff nut so yes I have all the books and yes I like them all. I also have enjoyed EVERY halo game including Halo wars and ODST. And that's my opinion and nothing you say will change that. I am also perfectly fine with you not liking them no one is holding a gun to your head to force you to play them.

I too am a fluff nut.

On three everybody.....

1.....

2.....

3.....

TO THE FLUFF MOBILE!!!

Anyway, I have only read Fall of Reach and The Flood novels, I've been meaning to pick the others up. Which are the best so I can get to those first instead of
wading through less then stellar ones?

GES, you should read Contact Harvest. It's about how humanity made first contact with the Covenant, and how the war started. It stars Sergeant Johnson as the main character, which is awesome.

Well if you've got The Flood, that's the worst (IMO) out of the way. Contact harvest is good, and Ghosts of Onyx is pretty much required reading if you want to have any idea about the Spartan IIIs. The Cole Protocol is pretty decent, nothing outstandingly bad about it that I remember. First strike is the last of the Chief-centric books, and follows on from Fall of Reach and The Flood.

What I can recommend very highly indeed though, is the short story compilation Halo: Evolutions. It's very well written.

The Dreadnote wrote:Well if you've got The Flood, that's the worst (IMO) out of the way.

Agreed. The Flood wasn't a bad novel, but it didn't have enough flavour. It just felt like I was reading the game's script half the time, but the bits about the Marines and ODSTs outside of the game's main storyline were nice to have in an otherwise Chief-centric book

Im going to go out and by some Halo books!

I love fluff, I never realised Halo had soo much, I will be looking at Halo.Wiki now.

If you want all you can get, I can also recommend the Halo Graphic Novel, and Uprising, the comic book series from Marvel. You can get the complete series in a single hardback edition.

I will look into that.

I just looked through the entire article on Flood, and my eyes, hurt Im reading through the Spartan II info and will start on Spartan I.

In the trailer for Reach, there are five spartans?

This is strange because there were 30 spartans on reach, and a squad of five would be super powerful.

They probally have different armour depending on their roles, If you read the armour descriptions in Halo 3, it says different armour for different roles etc.


EDIT: OMFG, Sergant Johnson is a Spartan-1!

The 6 spartans we see in the Reach trailer are a bit mysterious at the moment. Jorge, the big guy, has a number less than 150 and so can safely be assumed to be an S-II. The Lieutenant on the other hand is strongly suspected to be an S-III. Carter and Kat have numbers above 150 and so are a complete mystery at the moment, and the other two have no known names or numbers yet.

The only thing I can recommend at the moment is to hold off on making assumptions based on info in The Fall of Reach. Right now we don't know where Noble team fits into the picture, but time will tell.

I cant imagine a S-III being around S-II, I thought they would probally never meet.

Well, they already did in Ghosts of Onyx Anyway, with such a top-secret group I imagine they could end up in plenty of places you wouldn't expect.

What happened to the S-III's who escaped onto that Shield world, are they still their, are they dead, did they return?

Never been visited since, like so many of Nylund's plot threads

Ahh, Im reading all about the Forerunners Al Biased fight. I wonder what an Al looks like .


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Its a shame their are soo any holes in the fluff, maybe Bungie will sort them all out when they stop making Halo games.

The S-2s kept their original numbers even after augmentation, but there only 75 of them originally, some of whom were killed or crippled by the augmentation process.

Maybe there were more candidates than 150 originally, and they kept their pre-selection numbers after becoming S-2s.

Lord-Loss: Forerunner AIs have two known forms at the moment, the Monitors (of which only five are still alive, as 343 Guilty Spark was destroyed by John-117 and 2401 Penitent Tangent was presumably destroyed along with Gravemind when High Charity was blown up), and the other form of AIs are 'true' AIs, who don't actually have a physical body. The only ones that I know of (I haven't read the Halo Encyclopedia or a couple of the books yet) are Medicant Bias and Offensive Bias. Mendicant is actually in Halo 3, and speaks to you through the Terminals. From what I can gather, his avatar (and presumably that of other Forerunner AIs) is a large holographic eye.

The Dreadnote wrote:If you want all you can get, I can also recommend the Halo Graphic Novel, and Uprising, the comic book series from Marvel. You can get the complete series in a single hardback edition.

Also check out the Helljumper comics from Marvel as well. It follows the characters from ODST (not Rookie though.)
You also get a look at Cheif as he's a teen (No face though.)


I didn't particularly like the Grapghic novel,as it didn't have stories about marines that really worked for me.

Lord-Loss wrote:
Its a shame their are soo any holes in the fluff, maybe Bungie will sort them all out when they stop making Halo games.

Try figuring out the story for Marathon and how it may or may not fit in with Halo's story(especially H3's ending).

Halo is nothing compared to how good Bungie has been in the past at confusing us with the story(I've been a Bungie fan since back when they were producing Mac only games).