Key structures · 7:34pm Mar 17th, 2019
Technological Achievement Tiers
The Forerunners categorized the Technological Advancement of civilizations into Tiers. This system was later adopted by the Covenant. All life and civilizations in the Universe fall into one of the categories. The lower the Tier number, the more advanced the civilization's technology is/was.
Tier 7: Pre-Industrial
Tier 7 is one of the most common and stable states, with limited weaponry and environmental threats. Societies tend to be small and scattered, driven by subsistence farming, foraging, or hunter-gathering needs. Technology is limited to simple hand made tools, weapons, or agrarian implements and methods, but a very broad understanding of planetary and solar mechanics is not uncommon.
Tier 6: Industrial Age
Tier 6 is the outset for massive urbanization. Agrarian societies can remain stable in the pre-industrial stage, but Tier 6 population strain and mechanized food production invariably create political and economic pressures very few can balance. Moving past this usually promises advancement. Some societies improve environmental and medical understanding concurrently with mechanical and transport advancement. Those that do not are frequently doomed.
Tier 5: Atomic Age
Tier 5 species usually begin focusing on clean energy production. The occasional belligerent species will use atomic energy for weapons, often resulting in mass extinctions. In-atmosphere craft are a hallmark, often leading to manned space flight, albeit on a short-scale.
Humanity entered this age in 1945, when the first atomic bombs were deployed, and manned space travel was accomplished for the first time in 1961.
Tier 4: Space Age
Tier 4 species are intelligent enough to break free from their cradle's surface, creating artificial satellites, remote control probes, and functional spacecraft, exploring and expanding through their solar system and beyond. However, they are limited to sub-light travel and heavily rely on cryogenic hibernation chamber or other forms of suspended animation or stasis technologies for long distance travel. Their comfort-focused technology often includes medical advancements, attempts at genetic engineering and longer lifespans.
Humanity reached this level in 1957 when the first artificial satellite was launched.
Tier 3: Space-Faring
Tier 3 species succeed over coming the light speed barrier and inventing Faster Than Light Technology. Species in this tier have efficient navigation, fusion-based power generation, mass drivers, asynchronous linear-induction weapons and semi-sentient (though their creation requires memory transfer from the freshly deceased and/or) and direct-energy weapons in form of laser weaponry.
Tier 2: Interstellar
The species has the ability to perform exceedingly accurate Slipspace navigation, and man-portable application of energy manipulation, which include plasma-based weaponry.
Tier 1: World Builders
The species has the ability to manipulate gravitational forces, create AI with full sentience, fabricate super-dense materials, perform extremely accurate Slipspace navigation, the ability to create life, and the ability to create worlds.
Tier 0: Transsentient
As the had no examples of civilizations with technological accomplishments greater than themselves - with the exception of the - this is a theoretical ceiling. It is suspected that they can travel across galaxies and accelerate the evolution of intelligent life. Along with this the use of is suggested at this stage.
Line installation
A line installation is a Forerunner defensive outpost, part of the Maginot Line, with the intention of preventing enemy ships from reaching restricted areas, they are also used as an outpost.
It possessed a battery of powerful energy cannons capable even of downing capital ships in slipspace. The Installation presumably had its own Monitor in addition to a sizable force of Sentinels and special Gatherer units under its command. The Installation itself is a vast underground complex with tunnels and hallways reaching kilometers deep.
Maethrillian
Maethrillian, more commonly called the Capital, was the political center of the Forerunner ecumene. It was a massive structure that exceeded the scale of even the Halo installations. It housed a population of one hundred thousand Forerunners, mostly high-ranking Builders and the Forerunner Council. Trillions of ancilla served in the capital's metarchy, an enormous network coordinated by a Metarch-class ancilla.
The capital was composed of a series of perfectly circular "platforms" arranged in a spiral along a central rod. These platforms decreased in size toward either end of the rod, with the widest central one being approximately 100,000 kilometers in diameter. Each platform was covered with a "city" of structures and buildings, whose gravity was controlled individually by buffer fields.
As a reference, the planet earth has only 12,742 km of diameter
Cartographer
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Greater Ark
The greater Ark, also referred to as the Ark or the Beginning Place, was a Forerunner megastructure, and the first of the two Arks used to manufacture Halo rings. It produced the original Halo Array, comprised of rings 30,000 kilometers in diameter as opposed to the 10,000 kilometers of the final Array, which was produced by the smaller Installation 00 instead. Like Installation 00, the greater Ark was located outside the Milky Way galaxy, one-third of the way around the outer boundaries of the galaxy.
Though it shared Installation 00's flower-like shape, consisting of a series of curved arms extending from a circular central section, the greater Ark differed from the lesser Ark in a number of respects; it possessed only six petals, as opposed to the eight arms of Installation 00. Instead of an artificial sun, the greater Ark was illuminated by six shafts of plasma, each suspended over one of the petals, emanating from a tower structure in the center. These plasma tubes would dim and brighten cyclically, approximating a day-night cycle. Each of the greater Ark's arms possessed at least one petal station, from which Forerunner Lifeworkers operated.
Installation 00
Installation 00 resembles a massive wheel with a series of eight curved arms retreating from its centre, similar to a sea star and bearing similarities to a sun. The Ark Core is the stripped remnant of a material-rich planetoid, asteroid, or other celestial body used for the construction of the Halos, which the Ark constructs. The entire upper surface is terraformed and has a multitude of environments, with oceans, forests and even a large desert. At the time of construction, the Ark lacked its core and a livable surface with no land or water. The structure is the second largest known Forerunner construct, only dwarfed by the Micro Dyson Sphere and other Shield Worlds (such as Shield 0006) which has a diameter of 300 million kilometers. A simple inspection of the holographic representation reveals the Ark to be anywhere from 90,000 to 100,000 kilometers (55,890 to 62,100 miles) in diameter.
The three shown primary functions of Installation 00 are to act as a remote for activating the entire Halo Array network while safely out of the Halos' range, as an automated construction facility for the creation of replacement Halo installations (ensuring that the network continues to operate even if any rings are destroyed), and it has also been confirmed that the Ark was meant to be used to reseed the galaxy in the event of the Halo Arrays being fired. Held deep within its mysteries was a collection of every species the Forerunners had studied and governed over. How this plan was to be initiated is still unknown, although, gleaning information from how the Milky Way Galaxy was reseeded eventually, the same conventions and constructs would have most likely been used, such as automated data logs for the retrieval and reseeding of the galaxy through means of Forerunner Key ships which were found on several planets in the galaxy.
Halo Array
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the original network built by the main ark had three times the size and power, but being "impractical", the original production of twelve was stopped, and they proceeded to build only seven, and a smaller, 10,000 km, were destroyed in the war forerunner-flood , except one.
Shield world
Each Shield World is different in design, but they all share some common features. They have a planet-sized exterior shell, often with some amount of terraforming, presumably to act as camouflage. They all have Sentinel systems for protecting and maintaining the facility. Finally, each serves the same basic purpose: as a "bomb shelter" from the Halo installations.
Sarcophagus
Sarcophagus is a Dyson shell, a massive artificial structure encircling a star. At approximately two astronomical units or 300 million kilometers in diameter (corresponding roughly to the diameter of Earth's orbit), and weighing approximately 1.37 solar masses, the sphere is by far the largest known megastructure created by the Forerunners. According to Dr. Catherine Halsey's calculations, the internal surface area of the sphere is approximately 500 million times the surface area of Earth, or around 255 quadrillion km2. Despite its massive size, while inside the artificial planetary shell of Onyx, the structure was contained inside a slipspace bubble of compressed dimensionality, making its apparent diameter only about 23 centimeters.
The Portal
the forerunners developed innumerable forms of teleportation, among them, are portals, in the absence of a denomination that distinguishes it among other similar structures, there were few with the ability to connect two separate points of the galaxy, some could be the size of a single door others could occupy the size of a city, and few were the size of a continent.
The Domain
The Domain was a collective intelligence that the Forerunners used to access the ancient ancestral knowledge of their forefathers. The Domain was only accessible by adult Forerunners through their armor because only the adults were able to comprehend the knowledge which was fed directly into their central nervous system.
