Energy Sword Design

That still leaves the question why forerunners felt the need to design such impractical weapon?

Well, it weighs basically nothing and yeah you can just turn it off so it works fine as a back up weapon.

The grip is designed for something with two thumbs and two fingers in the middle, so the grip is pretty weird by human standards.

It also cuts through pretty much anything by virtue of what it's made of, so the actual shape is basically just for show. Though, thinking about it, it might be based on how it's projected from the handle.

The forerunner version is just a rectangle most of the time. The elite version is based on a traditional weapon shape wise as far as I know.

>The grip is designed for something with two thumbs and two fingers in the middle, so the grip is pretty weird by human standards.

Yeah, that probably justifies not needing a wrist stabilizer. If their wrist motion is also less, or they can "lock" their wrists somehow, that also explains why it's shaped like that instead of a normal sword.

It doesn't need a wrist stabilizer because the blade is weightless and passes through most matter with zero effort.

Watch Halo Legends, there's some explanations in there.

tl;dr: it's shaped like that because of the Elites' culture and the irrational choices of the Covenant in regards to how they use their Forerunner tech.

To explain some though, Covenant weapons work by using magnetic fields to collect plasma, then guide it to its target. The Covenant don't actually make the most effective use of this technology though. In Halo Legends we see Forerunner warriors using energy sword-like weapons which reach out with tentacles of plasma to strike targets and dodge attempted blocks. In one of the books, the Chief and Cortana along with some marines hijack a Covenant ship. That's when Cortana figures out how the Covenant plasma weapons work. She then discovers that she can use the magnetic fields to focus the plasma into a narrow beam, using it much more efficiently and effectively.

There's actually a lot of things that the Covenant could do with their technology but inexplicably don't. The way they choose to enter and leave slipspace so far from planets is one other example, but one not really relevant to this thread.

In another of the Halo Legends videos, we see two elites duelling with metal versions of energy swords, suggesting that they deliberately shape the energy swords the way they do to mimic those weapons.

Sangheli (sp?) culture seems to be a kind of bizarre cross between ancient Egypt and feudal Japan, and they duel with the swords in a similar fashion to the way that samurai use the katana in a duel: one quick strike, and then one way or another, it's over.

This actually fits with the gameplay too. Once your crosshairs are on a target, you hit the trigger and lunge for a kill strike.

Also of note, only the aristocracy is even allowed to use them. Anyone below that has to make do with physical knives or less ostentatious design.

they also have the honerabru thing where if they draw their swords they have to draw blood (err, carbon score?) an enemy with it.

>they duel with the swords in a similar fashion to the way that samurai use the katana in a duel: one quick strike, and then one way or another, it's over.
Movie trope.

Post in /k/ instead faggot if you want practicality.

Irrelevant, the point is that the sword is designed just fine for that particular use.

Fuck off retard.

>Lightsabers consisted of a plasma blade, powered by a kyber crystal, that was emitted from a usually metal hilt.

>starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lightsaber

>Irrelevant
You brought it up, remember?

You'd think the UNSC -and 343 for that matter- would realise that you could tweak the design to give people plasma longswords. Something with more reach and practicality. After all, you don't need to worry about weight or portability with something that's mostly just a hilt.
Nobody's buying the "ceremonial weapon of an alien culture" bollocks anyway. It clearly has use for those lucky enough to have energy shields and can bumrush someone before nipping behind cover for a few seconds before doing it all over again.

I think the "they could but they don't" thing comes from their lack of understanding of forerunner and to an extent their own tech.
They just mimic what they know works and aren't sure how to manipulate it.
It's one of the reasons that humanity is so OP in the setting, they keep taking apart ancient alien technology until they actually sort of understand it, and then make giant lasers out of it.
Doesn't help that the Covenant's main engineering race don't much like being their main engineering race either.

They also have those assassination arm blades you see in Reach that looks like a smaller version of the energy sword, except that the blade part is closed like a typical design. Not sure if they carried it over to future titles.

I'd have said that Elite martial combat -looks- like it's based on stabbing things, but if I remember correctly, the typical Elite sword user almost never stabs anything with the energy sword; the lunging slash, which comes the closest to what you'd visually expect the sword to be used like, is something unique to the player characters. Then again, with their level of strength in comparison to a normal human's, and an energy weapon powerful enough to gouge scars in Titanium-A, they can pretty much swing it however they please.

Halo Wars also has the otherwise unremarkable spear-like weapon that was only ever used to eviscerate their former Elite wielders, but those are probably not of Elite origin in the first place.

When is the human machete from the Halo demo making a return?

The ceremonial guards of the prophets also have those spears I think.

>Space wizards
>Logic
Choose one and only one

It's a ceremonial weapon and is not suited for open combat unless it's a last resort, it's also only used by elites that have earned it they don't just pass them out. Also no one ever accused the covenant of being practical half of their weapons can't be reloaded, and a few are using ammo that can only be found on one moon in the milky way.

they have to figure out how to charge the batteries first