system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Halo] Who had the better ground-based weapons during the Human-Covenant War?

Projectiles or plasma, you decide!
gpt
Incidentally, the human designs, while not as advanced, were considerably more pragmatic in design. Plasma's pretty dangerous, but the platforms through which they were delivered were limited. If your plasma pistol wasn't cutting it, you couldn't just flip a switch (most of the time) to toggle to a new rapid fire setting. Plasma's also not really much of a penetrator, and will usually dissipate a ton of energy once it makes contact with anything. Your plasma rifle isn't so good when it loses effectiveness once it smacks into the surface of a table. Sure, the table's on fire *now* and the hole left behind is pretty big, but a bullet would have punched through and killed the guy behind it by now. No need for a followup when using ballistics against concealment. 

Human weapons had a leg up in that regard. Not only could you change rate of fire on the fly, you could change the sort of damage you were dealing with a single reload, assuming you had the ammunition. Suddenly those covenant elites aren't so zealous now that you've cycled a couple of Willie Pete's through that eighty Mike smoothbore to light the brush around them ablaze!

Other accessories such as suppressors also lended a significant advantage, as the Covenant would often broadcast their firing positions in the field to anyone the next three anti-sonofabitch-machines over. Plasma (in Canon and gameplay) is bright as lightning because it pretty much *is* condensed lightning, and true to the age old adage of *'tracers work both ways'*, you're likely to know exactly where the covenant firing positions are the moment they start shooting.

The *real* advantage though was that the guns weren't fashioned around any cultural or religious trends. Covenant weapons look cool and awe inspiring, but in the five seconds it takes for a Wraith plasma blast to meet a suspected target, a Scorpion will have had enough time to observe the Wraiths firing position, chamber a dedicated AP round and pop that Wraith from a hull-down position, probably even through a tree or two. The Covenant had plasma weapons with hundreds, possibly thousands of years of religious dictation in their design. Humans had guns designed around what *actually worked*.

The biggest reasons humanity had been losing the war, were primarily naval combat actions and shields. Ballistics below a certain caliber barely tickled, and we're all probably pretty aware of how bad the fights in space went. With sheilds, covenant elites effectively weaponized their blind zeal that would normally be fatal for most religious people stupid enough to charge head first into the middle of a well trained infantry formation. Like the Master Chief, Luke Skywalker, Walker Texas Ranger, and Ross from *F.r.i.e.n.d.s*, a few seconds of tangible plot armor can give you a lot of potential to mess up even the best of the best.

That, and it's pretty easy to lose when the enemy fleet can bombard your ground positions with impunity.