You know i was wondering how other species could have survived
the first Halo blast...
Therefor i made me a picture of our galaxy with numbers i found at wikipedia.
Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years wide according to wiki. When i remember
correctly one halo´s blast radius was 25,000 ly.
Here is a picture with 7 radiuses placed randomly just to get a feeling for it.
As you can see there is quite a lot of space untouched.
(You don't have to cover the center of the galaxy because through radiation
and a super blackhole)



If GS has sad the truth about leaving nearly no life left in the galaxy. I only see two
ways the rings could do that.
1) to cover up most of the space the power of all 7 add up and bring the affective
radius up to 33ly or
2) the Halo´s shoot in a kind of array. Combining their power to one super-blast that
covers the galaxy. (Like the Deathstar in Star Wars did)

So 2) gave me a new idea... maybe only one ring fired a 100,000 years ago? Maybe
thats what went wrong and only one in line fired and that was the one where the Forerunners
where... nobody is perfect you know

nice picture, that does put it in perspective a lot better
maybe the earth had some sort of defence against the halo's because teh forerunners wanted humans to develope as a species.
the covenent are from an area outside the blast radius
it is possible only 1 halo was fired, but that would've defeated thier purpose... ill work on thinking the detail out on that later

I just noticed something going back to through the Halo cutscenes. The final cutscene before the credits there's a holographic projection of the 7 rings (I'm assuming that there are only 7, but who knows). When first activated all of the Halos are together almost like a ball and then they spread out to their respective positions in the galaxy. Also note by that point one of the rings has a red warning sign pointed at it, most likely the Halo Master Chief took care of in the first game. That aside my main point is the differing diameters of the Halo rings. I have no real evidence to suppor this, but what if the size of the ring affects it's effective radius. The first Halo encountered only had a 25,000 light year radius, what if the others increased the range, perhaps, to 30,000 or 35,000 light years, or larger. That may be able to explain a way to cover the blank space left over.

Nice work. I think I have seen this problem before, but I saw 6 of the Halos on the outside and one in the center.

Different sizes could solve the problem on covering the ground...
But the first two rings we have seen in the game seem to be quite the same size, i think.
Anyway that screen could just be a status screen and the different sizes are a perspective
misinterpretation (hope that makes sense at all^^)

I just placed the rings to cover most of the space that i could think of. As i sad as far as
we know there is no way something could life in the center of our galaxy. There is
a hell lot of radiation there and a blackhole that want's to be fed
But on the other hand you could sure just place them like that. That could make sense
in my "array" firing idea. 6 halos fire to the middle one in the center of the galaxy
with forms the actual super-blast that i talked about.

343 Guilty Spark said 3 radii of the Galatic center. The diameter of the Galaxy is 100,000 light years, so the radius would be 50,000 light years, so the range of the Halos was everything within 150,000 light years of the galatic center.

Cite

The relevant part:

Doesn't add up with the first info GS gave us then...
Maybe GS hasn't told us the hole story... again.

that doesn't mean anything. the highest concentration of stars is in the center of most galaxies, not just ours (especially a spiral type like ours). i don't know what "through radiation" is, but it doesn't exist. also, the "super blackhole", while being very massive (ie heavy), is very small. again, if the blackhole was a danger to nearby stars, then the center of galaxies wouldn't be bright.

At the end of H2, with the holo projection of the rings, 3 are blue and slightly larger, and 4, including the one with the red marker (presumably installation 04) are green and smaller. But either the 3 larger must have a vastly bigger range, or they work together to produce a larger blast radius.

the super black hole + the radiation at the center of the galaxy DO make it unihabitable
the light we see is teh gases on the edge of the event horizion of the black hole being superheated as tehy are sucked in