Lets say the Tau find Harvest instead of the Covenant?
How does first contact go down, how will each side react, and could they co-exist?
Assume that the UNSC is the first human contact.(ie this is the Tau pre Imperium contactand the Tau are in the Halo universe).
Would the UNSC be open to the ideas of the Greater Good? How about the Innies?
Tau and the UNSC aren't too far off. Odds are things would go ok until the Tau started trying to strip away our culture, in which case we'd blow them away with Spartan power.
The UNSC isn't monoculture. And neither are the Tau. The Tau worlds and septs have their own cultures.
Would the Insurrectionists try to find peace in the Tau's society? Or would they reject both encompassing governments and try to instigate war between the two as a means of destabilizing both?
That said, they do have some common ground: a love of railguns and power armor being an obvious case. UNSC does have AIs, though, so if the Tau try and fuck with them too much, they have the edge in intelligent computers. Then it's much the same as the Covenant, but a little different since the Tau would be open for diplomatic relations while the UNSC has to still fight the same fight with a technologically superior enemy who has an affinity for plasma and grav tanks.
Ultimately, it'd probably end with a stalemate and ONI takes precedence as both sides try and stealthily fuck each other over.
>Assuming Mankind doesn't just seduce the blue's womenz!
>Spartans with tech based on Tau stuff rather than covenant stuff
They wouldn't have energy shields, but what could they have?
It'll be a close battle, but seeing as the UNSC beat the Covenant, which was about as strong as the Imperium of Man (maybe a bit weaker), the Tau shouldn't be too much of a problem if shit turns south.
Oh wait, I forgot shield drones existed.
Anons, I was more interested in how they would likely see each other and would interact.
>Tau
>Sees a new species that has expanded very rapidly compared to themselves, lives longer (Tau live to about 60-80 depending), and yet still has a divide nature.
bump
They also have optional shield systems for suits and some vehicles.
Well, they do beat the Covenant by fucking them over on Forerunner places. And while they did score some decisive victories over them during the course of the Human-Covenant War, humanity was fighting a losing battle and ultimately would have lost had the Covenant decided to just keep glassing planets rather than fuck around on The Ark.
It's a fight between plot armor. Master Chief vs Shadowsun and Farsight
Yes but then humanity proceeded to also fuck over a viral species which were at one point essentially gods of death, and are currently in the process of beating the creations of the race who's technology they used to defeat the former two. The UNSC is HIGHLY adaptive and makes maximum use of everything they can. If the UNSC were in 40k they'd probably do some crazy shit like use a bunch of Chaos weapons to defeat the Tau, then the Tyranids when they showed up out of nowhere, then beat the shit out of the daemons in the Chaos weapons when they got uppity.
The Covenant only occupy a portion of the Orion Arm, at best they'd be a fifth the size and strength of the Imperium. They still vastly outclass the Tau Empire in size and scope because of this though. The Covenant glassed the vast majority of human colonies and were posed to do the same to Earth before the Chief and plot intervened.
Honestly the Tau and UNSC are probably on about equal footing when it comes to size. First contact would likely go well, with the Tau seeking to open trade and diplomatic relations. There'd be an exchange of technology and technical information, with ONI constantly working to ensure humanity came out the clear winner in this regard. You'd see SPARTANS equipped with Tau derived pulse rifles and battlesuit knockoffs like the one from Legends in no time thanks to having an entire Caste of actual engineers who understand their own technology to kidnap.
If it did come to conflict, it'd be over the Tau Empire seeking to convert rebellious UNSC colony worlds. Though I doubt it'd escalate to open warfare, more like an intergalactic cold war waged across the frontier of both sides colony worlds between ONI and whatever special ops group the Tau create to fight them.
If the extended material pre-Halo 4 is to be believed, the UNSC is kind of shitty. The higher ups would be very against giving up their power, especially to blue space gommies.
I feel like the ideas of the UNSC being fascist are more of a realistic take on "the evils of necessity".
People will defend even the High Lords of Terra as "doing their best" even though they're obviously senile, selfish, paranoid assholes. The people in command of the UNSC make hard decisions and are very centralist, but it usually seems that they have humanity's best interests at heart.
I'd trust in Lord Hood and hell even Halsey before I trusted even the slightest in, say, the Grand Provost Marshal.
I'm not very well versed in the extent of the Tau's naval capacity, but atleast early on like with the Covenant I think they'd outclass the UNSC. Perhaps not as vastly, but with an obvious tech advantage and a portion of their race evolved solely to act as the naval arm, the UNSC would have to realize it's a striaght up fight they can't win.
So they'd keep on doing what they've been up to for the past couple decades, squashing colonial rebels before they grow to the point of full blown now potentially alien sponsored insurrection. Using ONI and their SPARTANS to remove potential Tau sympathizers from positions of power in the colonies, or sabotage and subvert pre-Sept colonies elsewhere. Anything to buy time for the UNSC to both buildup its strength and close the technological gap.
They're not even quite fascist, the central authority is democratic at it's heart. They just treat all the outer colonies like resources rather than people, and the whole taxation without representation thing.
The tech gap is kinda unclear. UNSC small arms/vehicles aren't great, mainly because Bungie is more interested in making cool looking stuff than sensible and they seem kinda no guns. But their space power is pretty respectable. Their upper end MAC guns can do some serious damage, especially the ones they mount on the orbital defense platforms.
Well, also consider the same fights in which they fuck over the Covenant, they also fuck over the Flood. They fuck over a Covenant armada and kill the Flood outbreak with the destruction of 04, and they do much the same with 00. Not sure about 05, though, as they kind of just left and forgot about it while the Flood took High Charity for a joyride to The Ark. Also the retaking of Harvest which lost the Spirit of Fire.
Humanity has always been on the losing ends of these fights, and wins because Spartans or the Master Chief in particular pull some stunt that blows it all up at a vulnerable point.
Adaptable though they are, that adaptability is a response to the overwhelming brute force of their enemies. They had to adapt these new technologies in order to defeat a technologically and numerically superior enemy, and towards the end gained a few advancements beyond them while still lacking in the sheer scale of what the Covenant could bring to bear. MAC stations that can punch holes in Covenant capital ships still can't take on an enemy who has more ships to throw at you than you have stations to shoot them down.
Fuck it lets say we through in the Mass Effect races.
Mass Effect doesn't have hard enough numbers to define power levels IMO. Everything is left kind nebulous or based on the rules of the game. The actual energy your standard shield or gun puts out is totally unexplained. Not to even start with the ship based weapons.