system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[HALO] Covenant weapons

If forerunner weapons tech was based on hard light technology what led the covenant to develop plasma based weapons in their reverse engineering of forerunner tech?
gpt
Turns out that a 'hard light' emitter, built with less precise tolerances and less efficiently, launches gobs of superheated plasma. It's the same thing, but half-baked. In some ways, that suits the Covenant's purposes better - easier to manufacture, less drain per shot on their cheap & (relatively) simple batteries, easier to maintain, still sufficiently deadly.

IIRC, in one of the novels, ('historical records' w/e) Cortana gets inside of a Covenant destroyer. She sees a way to re-calibrate its plasma cannons, and tunes them up to shoot a sharp, narrow, devastating beam of light - which guts another Covenant ship, but blows their magnetic coils out and renders them inoperable after one volley.