User:Ahalosniper/Guide to Creating a SPARTAN-III

This might not be a guide so much as pointers. It just gives/directs you to the information you'll need.

ASniper's Guide to Creating a SPARTAN-III
It's likely that if you've been sent here from the talk page of your Spartan article (and I actually finish and deploy this as a blog), your character has been tagged Not-Canon-Friendly or at least given a heads-up there's something wrong. Well, fear not. Before you on the screen is a guide to help you make your SPARTAN character canon-friendly and able to fit seamlessly into the established Halo Universe. You should remember that even if you follow these guidelines, it’s still possible to be tagged NCF because of unrealism, godmodding, or some other problem. This guide simply helps you to fill out the SPARTAN Infobox correctly so you can use that information to continue building the article and the character without major problems.

The Infobox
On the left is the coding for the infobox, to be copied and pasted to your page. On the right is the result.

Isn’t it pretty? Headers colored the green of the Master Chief’s armor with ballistic-layer black between that will hold the information you enter into it. There are nineteen areas, not all of which are required, and I’ve seldom seen a SPARTAN article with a confirmed date of death. Consider this a walkthrough of each area, while simple to understand, there are a lot of catches that can run you into trouble.

Who Are You: Name, Spartantag, and Realname
Let’s start simple. Generally, your page’s title will be either SPARTAN-(letter and numbers) or Name-(letter and numbers). But, in the infobox, the area that says ‘name’ can be several different things. What you enter there will show up in bold white letters under their picture and caption. It’s your choice what you want to put there, whether it’s the character’s first name, or name and number, or even codename. It should probably just be what the character is most often called, for example his or her nickname. Also, keep in mind your character’s name will be a product of their background, and more on that later.

The Spartan tag is the number (and for IIIs, letter) they were given upon being selected for the program. For a SPARTAN-III, the tags range from –A001 to –A497, -B001 to –B418, or –G001 to –G330, depending on what training company they were part of. Keep in mind that you don’t want to contradict a canon Spartan’s tag, a list of which can be found, and you might search around this site so you don’t have the same tag as someone else’s fanon Spartan. The second part isn’t necessary, but it saves you trouble of changing it later if you want to join an expanded universe.

Realname simply means their full name before being conscripted. For example, was Kurt M. Trevelyan before becoming a Spartan-II, Riley-G311 was Riley Blake, and SPARTAN-G024 was Joshua Héroux. In the article, some choose to include a post-conscription name given to them, examples being Kurt’s last name changed to Ambrose, or Riker-012's surname changing from Abrams to Oakley.

The Details: Hair, Eyes, Height, and Cybernetics
More easy stuff. You probably already have a mental image of your character under the armor, so hair and eyes are easy. Because of the augmentations Spartans go through, you can get pretty creative with it, but don’t go overboard.

Height and weight are where we start paying attention. After the augmentations, they are a lot bigger than a standard human being, so keep it in mind. S-IIIs were generally smaller than the IIs, but even was 160 centimeters (5 foot 3 inches outside the metric system) at twelve years old, as one of the smallest Spartans. Carter, Kat, Jun, and Emile all stood about 6’10’’, so your character should be somewhere over or just under 200 centimeters, the largest and strongest of them going near seven foot or 247 cm. And you’ll want to have both feet and centimeters, while your used to someone saying “six-foot-ten”, the metric system is the way of the future.

While it's not in this infobox, weight should be a little over 200 lbs. or 100 kg., figure out the conversions yourself.

I assume you won’t really need help with gender.

Eye-Catcher: Image and Caption
You can easily find some random picture on a search engine, but that’s not what you want. Using a cool screenshot of exactly what you want them to look like in their personal MJOLNIR armor is more the way to go, or use a photo of an actor or famous person for them out of armor. It’s again up to you. If you need or would like help with screenshots, ask around. I’m sure there will be people willing to help you out.

For further help on using and uploading images, see Help:Images.

Captions are optional, and could take the form of a quote or saying that fits the character, or whatever short piece of text you’d like to have there.

Timing: Class, Homeworld, Birth and Death
Here’s where it gets complicated, there’s a different set of dates for each SPARTAN-III Company, so let’s break them up that way. The class section in the infobox is synonymous with what generation they were. So, an Alpha Company SPARTAN would have in their class section “SPARTAN-III Alpha Company”.

Homeworld and Deciding on a Company
Keep the years in which your selected company was conscripted in mind when it comes to choosing where they were born. When you decide on a planet, check to see when it was attacked and glassed by the Covenant. For example, a member of Gamma Company couldn’t have been born on Harvest; that planet had been glassed and abandoned by the UNSC before Gamma Company was born (barring some sort of long cryostasis). Also, most if not all SPARTAN-IIIs were orphans, their parents killed in the war. If a battle took place just before your company was recruited, that may be where you want your character to have grown up. But, if you’d rather not figure that out, Earth or Reach is a safe bet for a homeworld, both were undiscovered by the Covenant when Gamma Company was recruited.

Alpha Company
The first SPARTAN-IIIs were recruited in 2532, at ages four to six, making their birth years between 2526 and 2528. There were 497 candidates brought to the training facilities of on, and of those 300 graduated, the others washing out due to not being good enough or killed in their augmentations which likely had the highest fatality rate of any class. Wearing Mark-I SPI suits, they deployed in 2537 as a unit and active for seven months before their decimation at.
 * Born: 2527
 * Recruited: 2532
 * Deployed: 2537
 * Team Designations: Animal Groups? (Wolf Pack)

There, in Operation: PROMETHEUS, Alpha Company completed its objective of destroying Covenant ship building facilities, but was cut off from its exfiltration craft. Stranded, they were slaughtered by a fleet’s worth of Covenant ground reinforcements. However, a small number were, like Noble Team’s members, removed from the Company to serve in various other special ops units, such as the Headhunters, and may have survived on past the end of the war.

On a personal note, though, I dislike that excuse, as it makes the story of PROMETHEUS less meaningful to the growing number of survivors. I do have an idea for a workaround in which maybe a little under half of Alpha survives, scattering across K7-49 and regrouping for a daring rescue by a single Navy vessel, but I’d have to generate enough interest to think about something like that. So, if you’re Alpha, keep your ear to the ground. RP might be in the works.

Beta Company
Alpha’s successors included future Gamma drill instructors Tom-B292 and Lucy-B091 (which I still think is a reference to The Littles), Catherine-B320, and the infamous SPARTAN-B312. You’ll have to see what the status of that last character is in your universe, but I prefer to keep it ambiguous myself. Mentions of “Yeah, I knew B312”, and expanding the Noble 6 mythos without actually identifying the character. But back on topic.
 * Born: 2531
 * Recruited: 2537
 * Deployed: 2543
 * Team Designations: NATO alphabet (Foxtrot, Tango, X-Ray)

Beta Company was composed of 418 candidates, with 300 again making the cut. Recruited sometime after 2537, their birth years can be a little more ambiguous. We know Tom and Lucy were 10 in 2541, so plan accordingly. Deployed likely in 2542-44, and served until July 3rd, 2545 and Operation: TORPEDO.

After the last mention of an operation, this one just sounds like so much fun, doesn’t it?

Like Alpha before them, most of Beta Company was slaughtered at Pegasi Delta, the only known canonical survivors being Tom and Lucy, while Kat and B312 had already been pulled out of the program for Noble and other similar teams beforehand. Survival is still possible, though the area where the Company was fighting was mostly vaporized. The exfiltration craft survived the explosion, and provide a possible way off the planet for them.

Gamma Company
Gammas are my personal favorites, because they’re easy to work with numberwise and because they’re the ones with something to prove. They were twelve on average in 2551 when they went through augmentations, making their birth years around 2539, and were likely recruited around 2543-44 after Beta Company was deployed. All of the 330 candidates survived the augmentations, and were in the mind of Kurt Ambrose the finest Spartans ever. In the book Ghosts of Onyx, when Sentinels started showing up Kurt mentioned he wished it had happened a week earlier, when there would have been 300 Spartans on Onyx, so they were deployed in late October, 2552 just before the Battle of Earth.
 * Born: 2539
 * Recruited: 2543
 * Deployed: 2552
 * Team Designations: Swords (Saber, Gladius, Katana)

There can be exceptions to this, for example having a Gamma team on Reach for equipment testing or some other reason for the Fall of Reach, or an early deployment to fight Insurrectionists, but remember Gamma was just being augmented in February 2551 and needed a long time to recover.

While they get in a little late in the war, the major advantage of a Gamma is there wasn’t some huge disaster in which every Spartan in the unit was killed, so there’s no major competition over numbers in each universe.

Washouts
One idea I’ve been trying out is the SPARTAN candidates of Alpha and Beta Companies that did not graduate. They were kept on Onyx and served as drill instructors for the next generations. However, Kurt had been working on getting them to see deployment, and it’s possible he found a way. Taser-A399 is an example. So, a washout would have the same sort of information as any other Alpha or Beta, but their history would unfold differently, perhaps not seeing action until after Gamma Company graduated in 2552.

Where You’ve Been: Status and Battles
Status is simple, at the last time they’ve appeared chronologically, were they alive, wounded, or dead? In ‘battles’, you can list and/or link to the most major conflicts they’ve participated in.

A Place in the War Machine: Specialty, Rank, and Affiliation
The first of these is probably the most fun. What’s your Spartan good at? A methodical and precise sharpshooter? A gifted and inventive explosives expert? Or perhaps a brilliant leader? A Spartan’s specialty often ties into their personality, so give the connection a bit of thought. And, if I can suggest, you should look for something no one’s done before, or approach something in a way that hasn’t been seen yet. Cliches are terrible things. You might search the military’s MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) list on wikipedia (See ‘Sources’ below).

You are not Brigadier Grade 3. First off, ‘Grade’ is in the game only.

Second, all Spartans are trained by the UNSC Navy, giving them Navy ranks, but there is the rare exception to the rule. Noble Team, for example, was attached temporarily to the UNSC Army during the Fall of Reach, but still held Navy ranks. This ties into affiliation, which can become complicated.

Third, Spartans are special forces operatives meant to be on the ground taking out high-value targets, not sitting in a command room leading armies. Most Spartans start off with a rank of Petty Officer Third, Second, or First Class, in ascending order. These are enlisted ranks, and Spartan officers are rare, only promoted under special circumstances, for example Kurt-051 and. Wikipedia has all the information you’ll need on rank structure, which is assumed to be the same as the one used by the US Military.

Affiliation can be a tricky part, but during training all SPARTAN-IIIs were within the UNSC Navy, Office of Naval Intelligence,. For Alpha and Beta Company SPARTANs, I recommend to stay with your company until PROMETHEUS or TORPEDO, respectively, because if ONI abducts too many for super-secret projects, it'll be a great tragedy that seven or eight died on those days in total. Instead, they could survive it and be assigned a new branch/unit. You might have them join Navy Special Warfare Command (NAVSPECWAR), which oversaw the S-IIs, or be recruited by an ONI officer as an agent. With my own characters, I had them assigned to the Army's Special Warfare Command, aka SPECWARCOM. If you're particularly determined to join the Marine Corps or Air Force, you'll have to figure it out for yourself.

Examples
Three examples of successful SPARTAN articles using the template properly filled out:, , and.