Scarab

Armament

The defining system of all Scarabs is their focus cannon—a nearly capital-scale energy projector capable of either mass destruction or delicate stratigraphic excavation depending on tuning and the operator’s expertise (the Lekgolo alone have no fine control over the beam).

Most (but not all) Scarabs feature turret-mounted heavy plasma cannons and emplacement points for crew-served weapons for embarked defenders. Scarabs that lacked secondary heavy plasma cannons were often fitted communication and proselytization arrays in their stead, though the significance of this is unknown, and their role (if any) in Covenant military operations remains a subject of research within ONI.

Variants

Five Scarab variations have been type classified by the UNSC, though only three are known to have been encountered by human forces in any number.

Type-29: Rarely encountered, the Type-29 Ultra-Heavy Site Excavator appears to have been a special-purpose excavation machine in Covenant service, deployed to reveal deeply buried Forerunner facilities, with limited combat utility; it could not self-deploy and had to be assembled on-site due to its delicate components and sheer size. The Type-29’s scarcity and the reverential language used in Covenant records indicate it may have been an ancient design used only to reveal particularly momentous reliquaries. Whatever its antiquity, the Type-29 was fitted with the most powerful focus beam of all known Scarabs.

Type-36: Almost certainly a field modification, Type-36 Ultra-Heavy Siege Platforms are fitted with a massive Class-4 plasma cannon, analogous to those fitted on the Type-27 Mantis platform. These vehicles used a range of different chassis designs, though their performance characteristics were nearly homogenous.

Type-47: Synonymous with “Scarab” to UNSC forces, Type-47 Ultra-Heavy Assault Platforms were type classified in 2547 despite occasional encounters as early as 2527. Rarely employed against the Outer Colonies, the Type-47 began to be fielded in large numbers near the end of the Covenant War to crush UNSC fortifications on Inner Colony worlds. Of special note is that due to a quirk of UNSC administration, two Scarab chassis types were designated the Type-47; unprecedented numbers of both permutations were deployed during the invasions of Reach and Earth.

Type-47B ‘Deutoros’: The most commonly encountered Type-47 Scarabs were autonomously operated by the Lekgolo contained within, effectively functioning as an exoskeleton for the gestalt intelligence of the inhabitants. Fitted with a focus cannon and secondary heavy plasma cannon, heavily armored, and surprisingly agile, the Deutoros rightly struck fear in the hearts of UNSC forces.

Type-47A ‘Protos’: Of unknown origins even to the Covenant forces that were issued them, the Protos towers roughly fifty meters into the air, dwarfing the Deutoros design. Rather than a single large plasma cannon as a secondary armament it used two separate suspensor-mounted heavy plasma repeaters optimized for anti-aerospace use. Covenant forces almost never used the Protos Scarabs for direct combat, and later analysis of Covenant records confirmed it was classed as a specialized artifact-retrieval vehicle, with a fine-tunable focus cannon and specialized sensor arrays that human forces rarely had the opportunity to observe as it burned its way through their defenses.