Covenant spacecraft design

The Covenant have access to a large number of technologies not available to the UNSC. The most obvious of these are energy shields and faster slipspace drives, but the Covenant enjoy numerous advantages that laymen observers easily overlook.

Gravitics and paragravity
It goes without saying that the Covenant have a much finer understanding of gravity, and their control of it outstrips what UNSC scientists have ever considered possible. Far beyond simulating gravity in space habitats and starships, the Covenant can move massive objects with gravity lifts and lock them in place with tow fields. Otherwise impossible structures can be sustained with active gravitic support, and ships can endure otherwise fatal maneuvers with the aid of deft inertial control. Paragravity technology may be used for the most mundane of applications, but the Covenant's byzantine logistics systems would grind to a halt without them.

The Covenant possess gravitic weapons such as Brute hammers and gravity cannons, but the largest of these are mounted on small ground vehicles. Power and control requirements scale exponentially with size, and the Covenant simply do not possess the technology to build starship grade weapons. Gravitic starship weapons have been a holy grail of warship designers for thousands of years. Such weapons bypass shield and armor, and the Covenant have encountered Forerunner defense drones armed with such weapons. Usually fatally.

Weaponry
Like the hegemony's ground forces, Covenant starships mainly rely on directed-energy weapons. These include pulse lasers for point defense, both guided and unguided bolt-type plasma weapons (plasma cannons and plasma torpedoes) as well as beam-type plasma weapons (excavation beams, plasma beams and plasma lances). The most common projectile-based weapons are various types of missiles, most of them also carrying a plasma payload.

Energy spears / plasma torpedoes
Energy spears, or plasma torpedoes as they are known by the UNSC, are a category of guided, bolt-type plasma weapons. Rather than being conventional projectiles as their UNSC moniker might suggest, plasma torpedoes are composed entirely of superheated plasma held in a globular electromagnetic envelope projected from the ship. The individual torpedoes are fast, highly maneuverable, and difficult to dodge. As humanity quickly found out, they are also impossible to counter with kinetic point defense. The only reliable defense is to absorb the shot with a physical or energy shield or somehow remotely disrupt the EM envelope; early UNSC options included forms of chaff and superheated gas, while later developments focus on targeted magnetic gradients or point-defense missile screens with plasma-based payloads. Plasma for the torpedoes is drawn directly from the ship's reactor, and the weapons also have a highly variable yield that can be fine-tuned by the operator. Both this and the steering of the torpedoes is usually manually controlled, and skilled gunnery operators turn the fine-tuning and steering of energy spears into an art. Indeed, spear-steering is one of the most treasured martial skills within the Covenant fleet. At the higher settings, plasma torpedoes are devastatingly powerful weapons, easily gutting UNSC vessels with single hits.

Like their advantages, the downsides of the plasma torpedoes also come from their unconventional nature. The operational range of the magnetic field emitters used to control them limits the use of the weapons to low and medium combat ranges, though some patterns of energy spear sacrifice power for range. Another downside is the power drain their use imparts on the ship's overall energy budget, especially when used at higher settings, forcing shipmasters to balance between weapon effectiveness, shielding, and maneuvering. As they are held together by magnetic fields, plasma torpedoes are also sensitive to magnetic fields, ambient ionization and atmospheric turbulence, the magnetic fields used to hold them together unraveling upon encountering such disturbances. Anti-plasma torpedo point defenses seek to take advantage of this phenomenon, while in Covenant doctrine it is common to either attempt to move out of the way, absorb the bolt with the ship's shields, or even counter the plasma spear with another; doing so successfully is rare, but possible.

Technologically speaking, energy spears are relatively similar to linear-fire plasma beams. The nature of bolt-type plasma weapons such as the energy spear (as well as ground weapons, e.g. plasma rifles, plasma pistols or plasma mortars) has perplexed human researchers, mainly because it appears very counterintuitive to all prior forms of human research into directed-energy weaponry. As demonstrated by Cortana's example on the Ascendant Justice, it would seem more straightforward to simply make a weapon that strikes its target instantly, rather than going through the added effort of generating and maintaining self-sustained bolts of plasma in individual magnetic envelopes. Although much more technologically convoluted, this has some benefits: plasma torpedoes can curve around obstacles, for example, though in the reality of space warfare, this is rare. Indeed, the Covenant do have access to such technology in the form of their beam-type plasma weapons, though they do appear to be a more recent discovery. Some scientists have speculated that bolt-type plasma weapons may have originated as an early synthesis of two distinct Forerunner technologies: ranged precision magnetic field projectors and some form of industrial plasma emitter. Others suggest that they were indeed sourced from a type of Forerunner weapon, but perhaps one more versatile than the Covenant's largely function-fixed weapon systems.

It is apparent that bolt-type and beam-type weapons, despite their similarities, are part of two entirely distinct technological lineages. It has been suggested that, due to their restrictions on AI and high-level computing, the Covenant simply never made the connection due to fixed patterns of thinking in regards to the two categories, or were unable to; on the Ascendant Justice, it took the immense processing power and pattern-recognition ability of a specialized smart AI to do so. Post-war experiments with sympathetic Concord shipmasters have confirmed this; without a military-grade "smart" AI, plasma spears cannot be reconfigured into scalpel-type beams without extensive hardware modification. Some lines of research have suggested that the process involved might be automated by a purpose-built "dumb" AI, but Concord commanders' reluctance to allow AI on their ships has slowed progress.

Under the Covenant, plasma torpedoes were entrusted technology, with High Charity's formal institutions reserving the rights to their manufacture and maintenance. In practice, however, over the last millennium several wealthy guilds, kaidons and regional lords have had access to the manufacture and maintenance of many types of energy spears, though they remain uncommon outside the ministerial armed forces.

The UNSC term "plasma torpedo" arose in the first years of the Human-Covenant War. The weapons the Covenant used were plasma-based, difficult to avoid, and were used to gut ships, so Navy crews called them torpedoes. For some time, it was not even clear which of the torpedoes had a physical core and which ones did not. Over time and more data from engagements, distinctions arose as ONI identified more types of ship-to-ship weapon, but "plasma torpedo" persisted for some time as a general name for guided Covenant starship munitions. Formally, "plasma torpedo" came to refer to magnetically contained vapor-core energy munitions, while "plasma missiles" were defined as solid-core guided projectiles that could be physically countered. Other UNSC categories, like "energy projector", are similarly ambiguous. In theory, the term refers to plasma lance emitters, but it has been used in reference to anything from energy spear projectors to excavation beams due to the rather similar technological nature of the weapons. Part of these ambiguities is simply the UNSC's difficulty in categorizing Covenant weapon systems, which can vary quite drastically between different ministries and based on the age of the weapon; as the Covenant frequently recycle technological components, some weapons or their parts can be thousands of years old.

Missiles
Guided solid-core starship weapons are generalized as "missiles", with plasma missiles being the most common subtype. Other types of payload include antimatter, fuel rod, subanite, and even nuclear explosives. All but the most advanced types of missiles are sanctioned technology and manufactured by armories across the Holy Ecumene.

Plasma missiles are the Covenant fleet's all-rounder weapons. They can strike at medium to long ranges, and many are built to have some resistance to laser point defense through the use of iridescent refractive coatings. However, as the Covenant quickly found out in the war with humanity, they are vulnerable to kinetic point defense which UNSC ships largely rely on. As a result, they experienced a steady decline in usage throughout the human campaign, with Covenant fleets favoring energy spears against human ships, while the missiles remained a staple weapon in the Covenant's internal conflicts. Unlike plasma spears, firing missiles has virtually no energy cost for the ship, but as a downside, they also take up more space and add mass on the ship. Most mainline patterns of plasma missile are self-guided, and therefore less precise than plasma spears due to both the missiles' limited propellant reserves and the Covenant's limitations on autonomous intelligence. Some missiles are known to have been built with embedded wavespace links for guidance, but these are rare and expensive.