system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Halo] Do the names of Covenant ships mean anything?

I'm currently reading a book about colonialism, and ran into the phrase "truth and reconciliation", which I now know refers to official inquiries into past wrongdoing by a government and appropriate reparations. Prominent examples of truth and reconciliation commissions were in Latin America after various periods of civil upheaval, in post-apartheid South Africa, investigations into US treatment of indigenous peoples, and so on. For hours I couldn't put my finger on why the phrase "truth and reconciliation" sounded so familiar until my brain dredged up a memory of Cortana's voice saying it, of all things! It's the name of one of the giant ships from Halo 1, along with the Pillar of Autumn. The latter is a super generic phrase that I doubt has any lore behind it, but the former is such an oddly specific phrase that I can't help but wonder why the Covenant would name a ship that...

My knowledge of Halo lore is basically nonexistent beyond the basic plot of Halo 1 and 2 -- was there some event in the pre-series history of the Covenant that makes that phrase relevant, or is it just something Bungie thought sounded cool?
gpt
Religiously motivated. A big thing to remember is that the covenant don't quite see ships in the same way as humans do, because of the nature of human vs covenant technology and manufacturing. Covenant tech is mostly either repurposed or imitated forerunner tech, compared with human tech, which can be made by any human with the proper engineering skills and raw materials. 

This means that not only the ships themselves hold religious value, but that they have more value period, per being harder to produce than a comparable human ship (raw tech differences accounted for).


There was a scene in one of the novels, which took place directly after CE, where the chief and a group of marines who survived 04 managed to take over a covenant ship and plug Cortana into the main computer. Cortana then realized how incredibly inefficient many of the ships systems were, and started by re-programing the cannons to fire much more destructive beams rather than slugs of plasma. 

Instead of copying her, the covenant shipboard AI called her a heretic.