Headscratchers / Halo Infinite

• How did the remaining UNSC personnel survive on the ring for six months with no logistical support?
  • You can find a lot of UNSC resources lying around in various areas, including MREs that are still in their packaging. The implication is that the Infinity dropped a lot of gear and supplies on the planet's surface, including survival gear. Most of the survivors are also trained marines in an Earth-like environment, so presumably they could live off the land to some extent.
  • The Brutes are apparently also big fans of human food, to the extent where they have fresh chicken and yellow bananas. The marines could've gotten somewhere with raids on Banished supply lines.
  • The Infinity was designed to be an Ark of sorts so lots of things would have been jettisoned before its destruction, the Banished make use of human rations and weapons AND the reason the Brutes like human food is that as primates both humans and Brutes can eat each other's food. Indeed for Brutes human food would probably be a quaint delicacy.
• How did Master Chief survive six months floating in space without oxygen, food or water?
  • It’s entirely possible that the Librarian’s “acceleration of (Master Chief’s) evolutionary journey” back in Halo 4 could be responsible for it. Alternatively, given the UNSC’s reverse engineering of Forerunner technologies, maybe the new Mjolnir armor replicates some of the life support abilities of the Forerunner’s own armored suits (which gave them close to immortality, even for the civilians). That, or maybe it put him into some form of cryosleep?
  • There's a bunch of stuff in the Halo novel First Strike about the MJOLNIR armor's systems, according to Halopedia, which does include survival systems built into the suit. Still, it's something that 343 has yet to explain, particularly since the Chief was just fine after six months in hard vacuum.
• So, Halo 5 was setting Cortana up as the new villain. Why was that dropped for what seems to be modified take on the original Covenant story-line?
  • I don't think this is really addressing your question, but I heard somewhere around the grapevine that the whole "created uprising" plot was very unpopular among fans. From my very limited understanding (which could easily be wrong), the "evil Cortana" thing might've mostly been scrapped as damage control against the backlash.
    • The story seems to be that after 343's troubles with the notoriously buggy Master Chief Collection and a rough fan reception for the multiple changes made to the franchise with Halo 5, they elected to make Infinite into a "spiritual reboot" that would take the series back to basics. As such, they effectively fast-forwarded past the resolution of Cortana's plot into its immediate aftermath, in order to make a game about the Master Chief going it alone against familiar aliens in a familiar setting. It's 100% Doylist.
• How exactly does Zeta Halo stay functional and maintain gravity when a chunk of it is missing? Installation 04 had a chunk blown out and centripetal forces caused the entire ring to rip itself apart. Yet Installation 07 has a substantial piece of it missing but the rest of the ring is fine. Shouldn't the same thing happen here?
  • The Harbinger? She's trying pretty hard to fix it.
  • Installation 07 is one of the original Halo Rings, and they seemed to have been a bit more robust. It already underwent significant damage during the Flood war and had to be downsized from 30,000 Kilometers in diameter to 10,000 kilometers in diameter.
• How did The Weapon not know she's a copy of Cortana? They look exactly alike, sound alike, and her self described purpose is to imitate and replace Cortana in the Created systems. Even if she thinks it's just a "skin" for her avatar, that premise still starts with creating a copy of Cortana. If she looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, she should at least realize she's waterfowl adjacent.
  • There are a couple of audio logs about it. Halsey programmed the Weapon as a fresh-out-of-the-box Cortana, but scrubbed any details that the Weapon didn't need to know in order to perform its mission. The Weapon only realizes it after interfacing with enough of the "data clusters," the remnants of the original Cortana, scattered throughout Zeta Halo.
    • So it boils down to The Weapon was never shown a picture of Cortana and a mirror? Well… that's… well ok then.
    • More like, the Weapon was cognitively blocked from having that revelation as she was supposed to be a one-shot tool who was destined to self-delete, until such a time as the original Cortana began to mess with her programming.