Headscratchers / Halo 3: ODST

• Just how high an altitude did the team drop from? They appear to be no higher than a few thousand feet above the clouds, and when they enter the clouds, you're told that you're "...15 klicks off the deck...". That's only 15 kilometers, or around 49,000 feet. But the ship the team drops from is a Marathon class cruiser, which can only operate in space, not in atmosphere. Finally, if they were in atmosphere when they dropped, why isn't the wrecked frigate that you pass by plummeting to the ground?
  • Bungie probably just shortened the drop so it wouldn't end up adding another ten minutes to the cutscene.
  • Who says the frigate wasn't falling? The pods looked like they were shooting down faster than gravity, and they had less surface area (read: air resistance) than the ship. Also, the cruiser probably just skimmed below orbit into the upper atmosphere to drop the pods and returned to space.
  • If you look at the space elevator just before launch, you can see it's not moving, therefore the ship is not moving, and a Marathon class cruiser can't hover in atmosphere, only frigates can. The frigate wreckage isn't moving relative to the space elevator either, so it's not falling.
  • Halo: Reach demonstrates a Halcyon class cruiser can hover in-atmosphere, and it's an older version of the Marathon cruiser. Therefore it's likely a Marathon can hover too. As for the floating frigate, it's possible it wasn't completely disabled and still had enough power to remain floating even though the crew was dead. The Titanic still had its lights on while it was still sinking and rising vertically.
    • The Pillar of Autumn was only able to hover thanks to huge disposable booster rockets. If the cruiser the team dropped from was hovering through the use of those, we would see the exhaust, which we don't see. As for the frigate, why would a ship that has been blown to pieces be producing power? The Titanic lost all power before the ship even split.
    • Not entirely true. The Pillar had both the disposable rockets and the magnetic antigravity frigates have. If only the rockets had been keeping the Pillar aloft, then it would have dropped to the ground the moment they popped off, rather than continued to rise higher into the atmosphere. As for the frigate, it wasn't entirely blown to pieces. It was only in two or three big parts that could have easily fit in the magnetic field the ship was creating if it was still on.
    • UNSC frigates do not stay in the air when they explode, Halo: Reach showed us this during Tip of the Spear, and where in the Halo canon has it been established that frigates hover in atmosphere through the use of "...magnetic antigravity..." and the Pillar of Autumn had this as well and couldn't have taken off through its disposable rockets alone?
• So Captain Dare somehow managed to open the stuck hatch on her pod, close it, and then escape without the Covenant that were already approaching her pod noticing?
  • They may have been distracted, were chasing her as she fled, or it might have been just harmless Huragok around at the time. After all, one of them got her helmet. It may have even been the one to open her pod door.
  • Given the Huragoks' natural inclination toward tinkering and fixing, it may have been that she got out somehow and the coiled/crouching/sleeping engineer in the vicinity stuck the door back on before laying down.
• Why did the Rookie try bending back the barrel on Romeo's mangled rifle? Did he really think that thing could still be fired, let alone with any accuracy?
  • He probably wasn't thinking that hard and just felt like bending it back. A mild case of wanting things orderly might be a trait of his.
  • The Rookie can rip turrets out of their placements and move unhindered while wearing a really big big flamethrower, maybe he was hoping that yes he could?
    • They said that was a gameplay/story segregation decision, they wouldn't normally be able to do that, Bungie just didn't want to alter the mechanisms of the existing game that much.
  • Hey, sometimes you just wanna try it, see what happens. Maybe it'll bend, maybe it'll snap in half.
    • I second this. The Rookie has a habit of playing around with some of the clues in the game out of apparent curiosity or just for the fun of it, like when he skips the detonator from the previous clue across the water, and when he tries to see if there's any biofoam left in the canister Buck used to treat Romeo's wound.
• How did Romeo not die anyway? Biofoam only packs the wound, numbs the applied area, and may or may not disinfect the wound. That's fair enough. But they clearly said Romeo had a punctured lung, and blood was spurting out of his chest so he was definitely bleeding a lot. He damn near suffocated in the process. But the thing is that just because the hole in his lung was sealed up doesn't mean that he didn't get blood inside the lung, or that the foam removed the blood out of said lung. So what had kept him from drowning with the blood still in his lungs?
  • A punctured lung usually doesn't cause fatal bleeding (there aren't any blood vessels in the lungs that are large enough). Death usually occurs due to the lungs collapsing as air enters through the puncture in the chest and fills the pleural space between the rib cage and the lungs. This is probably why Romeo was gasping for breath before Buck applied the biofoam. By using the biofoam to seal the puncture, his lungs wouldn't collapse anymore.
• How does Buck suddenly know where Captain Dare is? The audio flashback we hear just before Buck realizes where she is provides no new information, so she must have told him prior to the drop where she needed to go. If that's the case, why is he just now realizing that that's where she is?
  • He's realizing that the one place she'd go would be the one place none of the rest of the squad would see a reason to go to: while they're all trying to gather together and survive, like a close-knit squad, she- the ONI operative, trained in solo missions and ruthless efficiency- would move to complete the mission, no matter the loss and with no consideration for such "time wasting" as gathering the rest of the squad before doing so.
  • Resolved fairly satisfactorily in New Blood; Romeo's comment about the subways "swarming with buggers" makes him realize that typically they'd just glass the place and not set up home there. From this he puts together that they're looking for something, and from this that Dare is looking for this too. It's a bit of a stretch but you kinda have to consider that Buck does really care about Dare and he'd want to take any chance he could at saving her.
• IIRC, Rookie's story takes place more than 5 hours after the drop, at which point the only Covenant main ship left Earth, but there are still Phantoms flying over the city (slow ships meant for deploying infantry, and it doesn't look like enough of them to be an effective air defense). I know they say the Navy over Earth got it's butt kicked, but are there no remaining military bases in Africa that could send fighters? Have jets gotten much slower in the future, or it it explained somewhere why the army's holding back?
  • During the mission "Kikowani Station", which actually takes place 5 hours after the drop, you can fly up and see other Covenant ships. So apparently, there actually were other Covenant ships around. They would have kept any jets from getting too close. With the main Earth fleet either smashed or still fighting up in space, reinforcments simply couldn't get there yet. The game itself basically shows the ground forces losing the fight and retreating to more "secure" location. By the time Halo 3 rolls around, UNSC forces have consolidated enough to make an actual offensive push.
  • Part of the reason why the heroes are fighting Brutes and the only Elites they encounter are dead is because Truth sent reinforcements to Regret's location, whose Brute troops aboard had orders to kill all Elites in Regret's ranks.