Ive been wondering this too! I wouldve expected belt fed grenade launchers that are also flash bangs, smoke bombs, poison gas and EMP put together in one grenade with the explosion. Then again for gameplay reasons that would be OP......
Look at it this way, in the game itself, using this grenade launcher is one of the most effective ways to kill and disable enemies. Pick up one of these things, and you're tearing through enemies and bringing down falcons. Why would they dismiss such an effective weapon? "oh ****, we need to get rid of these, theyre SO last millenium" no. The bottom line is that the weapon is still very relevant in the halo universe.
We don't have a capacitor small enough to fit into a grenade that has the amount of electricity needed. You need a large area and something with a good constant (forget the name of it, but it is E sub something) between the plates, if I remember correctly. To turn a solenoid's magnetic field into a pulse big enough for this goal, you would probably need a solenoid that is larger than a grenade. In this diagram, notice the two curved lines on the top and bottom right? Those indicate a piece of wire that is much longer than shown. This mechanism would not fit into a grenade with our current tech.
Really that is the problem with the new generation of video game geeks, the don't care about the technicalities. Up your standards; better games will follow.
Hey I forget, what year does this game take place in? Oh yeah, 2552. That means that they have, oh, i don't know... 542 years to make it grenade sized? Obviously we can't make it with our current tech; that much is obvious. If we're going to have a discussion about hypothetical weapon technology 500 years in the future, don't base those weapons on current technology. The point I was trying to make is that we have the basis for these weapons at our disposal, if we give it 500 years to progress, who knows what people will come up with?
Not only do they have to make the EMP grenade sized, but they have to make it even small enough to fit in with the explosives and the radio device for controlling the explosion.
this thread is HILARIOUS. i'm honestly leaning toward voting for a lock on this at this point. i love how some of you think you know exactly what the future is going to be and what weapons we'll have. Look back at every piece of fiction from the past that takes place in the future: in 2001 a space odyssey, we were flying past jupiter 9 years ago. Blade Runner, which takes place 9 years from now, we have organic engineered robots and off-world colonies. 2 points: 1) Nobody knows what the future is going to be, so stop using your imagination as facts. 2) All these crazy things we've seen in past sci-fi haven't come to be because there's no need for such insane technology progression. im sure you guys will come back like WAH WAH we're talking hundreds of years here, which is a point sure, but proves to be nothing substantial because you just used your imagination combined with trends of the past when the bottom line is: this game takes place in a future you haven't seen. oh and by the way, it's fiction. if the fact that halo has a grenade launcher is below your standards, then go make your own superior sci-fi fiction. One more thing, some of you are showing ignorant flamy attitudes that should stay in youtube comments and bnet
I'll agree to a lock. Original topic: Seriously Bungie? You still have a grenade launcher? We are a bit off of that... AMAC, all I was trying to say in my first response was that, given our current tech and knowledge of physics and chemistry, it could easily take 500 years to hone the grenade launcher tech to Reach's level. Your first comment about this topic, to paraphrase, simply implied we would be way past that, to which I disagreed.