Boarding craft

Boarding Craft are a class of space craft designed for the purpose of breaching and boarding enemy vessels. Ship breachers are used extensively throughout the Covenant's history and to a lesser extent in Human history.

Ship Breachers
Ship breachers are purpose built craft that are piloted into the sides of enemy hulls and docking ports. Breachers will then bore into the hull with cutters or drills. The troop compartment then opens up if the compartment is pressurized, allowing boarders to pour into the target ship. Some types of breachers are designed to index with common types of docking ports.

Dropships
Although standard dropships can be used to land inside hostile hangar bays, this is especially risky and seldom possible. Both the Covenant and the UNSC have made use of modified specialty variants of dropships for the purpose of boarding hostile space craft. Modified dropships often carry their own suite of tools for breaching hulls as well as maintaining a local pressurized compartment. A more crude method is for the dropship to simply ferry EVA engineers to manually breach the hull, as is common humanity's early history of conflict in space.

D75-BC 'Pelican'
The venerable Pelican dropship could be be outfitted for hull breaching, making use of soft seals, engineers with cutters, and a platoon of marines. While this worked adequately against slow moving and poorly armed pirates and Insurrectionists, this solution was entirely untenable against the Covenant.

D98-BC 'Loon'
A small, stealthy insertion craft fielded by UNSC special forces from 2408, and in many ways resembling the newer D102 'Owl'. The Loon was purpose built to be vacuum capable and modular for a planned boarding craft variant. The D98 left much to be desired as it could not carry nearly enough troops required to make entry and clear well defended enemy vessels. The loon saw little to no use against the Covenant, however it was used during the Insurrection in spite of its shortcomings, to little acclaim.

R'sisho-pattern ship breacher
Known as the Type-28 Intrusion Vehicle, or the 'Tick', to the UNSC, the R'sisho was an especially large craft with a troop capacity to match. The R'sisho had three long prongs which could bore into the hull to keep it stable and reduce the probability of the craft being 'shaken off' the boarded vessel.

Lindur-pattern ship breacher
The Type-38 IV 'Flea', as designated by the UNSC, is a smaller cousin of the R'sisho, featuring just shy of half the troop capacity of the Tick. History wise, the Lindur is a three century old pattern most commonly deployed by the Covenant's more esteemed fleets, with many still bearing the marks of old conflicts. Covenant boarding teams often attach a sentimental value to these older, battle scarred breachers.

Brhi Xur-pattern ship breacher
A modified 'Spirit' dropship, the Type-47 'Leech' as classified by the UNSC, latches itself to docking ports and airlocks. The leech was used very sparingly during the Human-Covenant War due to the obvious incompatibility between Human and Covenant docking ports. Breaches with leeches often resulted in the compartment slowly depressurizing and would afterwards need to be manually sealed by engineers. The Leech was an otherwise unpopular choice for Covenant warriors.

Ogoro Workshop Tronto
The Tronto was a type of ship breacher used by the Jiralhanae prior to their integration into the Covenant. For a mere boarding craft, it was well armed and armoured, however it lacked shielding and used antiquated solid propellent rockets for movement. It saw use before the Human-Covenant War and after by Brute warlord factions.