From the point of view of the covenant perhaps there is great difficulty in designing new ships since they are technologically more imitative than innovative as they have been using these same designs for centuries. Think of it in terms of EA games given one of two options to develop and release their next game, they either stick to an established title series and only make superficial changes over the predecessor but still largely the same game therefore guaranteeing a success or try the second option of starting from scratch and building a new idea that will take months if not years to develop and with many unforeseen difficulties with no guarantee of success. You can imagine that designing a city sized starship far more powerful than its predecessors from scratch would be and nearly impossible feat. This is one advantage the UNSC has shown throughout the Halo story not just to improve upon alien tech but to learn from it and make it of their own.
Even from before Halo reach we have seen how the Covenant re-use ship designs considering the vast selection of sizes their cruisers are seen in from the smaller CRS light cruisers to the larger CCS class Battle cruisers.
Who knows, perhaps they’re using the largest ever 3D printer and they could only steal a handful of our SOTP ship models, in 500 years let’s see what they do with it.
Why are you not employed by 343i as Lead Writer AND Lead Concept Artist?
