How come spartans and soldiers are always seen fighting on the ground in halo games, but you never see ANY battleships, covenant ships, or any water battles? Is it because space battles killed water? WHY?????
1. Covenant have no need for water vehicles, they have air superiority, what with their having spaceships the size of continents above Reach. 2. UNSC does not fight on the aquatic front. United Naval SPACE Command.
I think the short stories and comics addressed this at times. It is a different division than the UNSC that handles marine battles. I'm sure information can be found on the halo wiki about it. BT is right in that water confrontations were not essential to any of the main games story lines. Covenant had air superiority and ships that could glass a planet. Humans had either ground or space based MAC guns for defense so marine warfare was not important.
I don't think that they'd have reason to fight in the water. Theres never anything in the water that the covenant would want. And fighting in the water would place humans at a huge disadvantage. The Marines would be in the water, and the covenants would choose to attack from the air. this means that while a damaged phantom or spirit could retreat, where could a damaged navy vessel go? Only down, I doubt the marines could win a single fight against the covenant if it was Water vs. Air or even water vs. water
The above posts are right, but the real reason is probably that Bungie didn't want to mess with wave modeling and water physics in depth like you'd have to for true water-based combat. Plus it opens up a can of worms regarding a lot of their campaign and multiplayer maps - right now water is a natural boundary, what happens if spartans can swim or have water-going vehicles? They probably just didn't want to mess with it. It's kinda too bad though, I'd love to see one or two aquatic multiplayer levels. Some of the forged stuff has been alright (and I especially like using grids to turn vehicles into "boats" - I used that concept myself once). But it isn't as awesome as a fully developed water level made by Bungie probably would be.
I know that there are some hardcore battleships off in the distance on Longshore. Aquatic warfare in my mind would be pretty awesome.
Been said Basically Air vehicles have evolved enough to have complete superiority over naval vehicles. So vs covenant don't need naval vehicles and vs rebels i dunno if they have naval vehicles but any air vehicle would defeat it. Although it's not reach its still the UNSC in one of the halo campaigns i think there was a UNSC ship broken down on map somewhere so Navy might exist and on they might be on Reach.