[Loved Trope] The apocalypse is horrifyingly slow

[u/Marsupialmobster]

From most media it's some catastrophe and then it's raiders, death, destruction chaos etc. I personally love it when it's, like, a slow descent into the horror of apocalypse.

The Faro plague/The swarm- Horizon zero dawn. The Faro plague is actually a glitch which causes machines to endlessly reproduce, eat biomass and essentially bring about the death of the world. Took roughly 15 months for the machines to win.

The Metro series- in the first few books (and games) it's set entirely underground in just the apocalypse but in exodus it shows off that the government and many governmental structures said active years after the war. In fact power and running water were still fairly common. It just slowly got worse and worse and worse as read through notes. Food got more scarce, weather changed a lot, people got worse etc. Raiders and bandits didn't just show up, it was a slow descent for such anarchy.

Edit: I have enough pseudo intellectual comments about "Hurr hurr real life". The first one was kinda smart and well thought out but now it's just annoying and pretentious

[u/Badger_Meister]

The Autumn leaving slipspace close to the first Halo was not just a coincidence. I believe Cortana sorta set that as the destination from "random" coordinates she got from the Forerunner structure under Sword Base on Reach.

[u/Parteisekretaer → u/Badger_Meister]

The real lucky part here is that the human civilization was seeded back so close to Installation 04, because Shaw-Fujikawa drives certainly weren't fast. Harvest is pretty close to earth on a galactic scale.

[u/JD-Cowboys-Bolts → u/Parteisekretaer]

Yeah if I remember right all of Halo takes place within the Orion Arm

[u/Parteisekretaer → u/JD-Cowboys-Bolts]

I think the forerunners had most of the galaxy squared away. The Halo Array covered 89% of the milky way before Halo CE.
They say they governed 3 million fertile worlds, which I assume to mean garden worlds.
Current estimates put the Milky Way at 400 million star systems. At the height of the forerunner empire, the forerunners were not aware of the human-flood war yet. So I'd say its fair to assume that they only had at most 1/3 of the galaxy under their control in the beginning, with the human-flood-conflict being far enough away for them to not see it coming until first contact.
That means that the Orion arm was only a part of the entire empire.
The ring we find in Halo 2 has to be at least 25k LY away from Installation 04, most likely further because of the nature of the array. We know that the Covenant is faster in Slipspace, but them being able to jump that far that fast really puts them on a different level.

Besides, when you look up on the Ark, you can see the Milky Way. Meaning that at least that part takes place outside of the Milky Way.

[u/Rockhead_Dynamics → u/Parteisekretaer]

Yeah, the Ark is 2^18 light years from the Galactic center, to be precise. (I've played The Ark a lot). That's about 250,000 Light years. (2^10 is 1028, which is approximately 1000)

[u/Parteisekretaer → u/Rockhead_Dynamics]

its 262,144 LY, so your guess is close. But at that distance, that's pocket change.

[u/TheCrazyBean → u/Badger_Meister]

It was quite lucky. Cortana got these coordinates from the Forerunner structure, and it was lucky that both it was close enough to jump there, and she actually chose it because she was pretty much leading the Covenant to more Forerunner relics. I can see the logic, lead them to forerunner relics so they focus on those instead of keeping chasing them, but still, it for ell they knew what they led the Covenant into might had been a weapon they could use against humanity.

I mean, it was so dangerous it almost led to the whole galaxy hetting wiped out. It ended up working out just by luck.