Sun Mar 17, 2019 10:20 am
The Halo 3 Elephant was never intended as a mobile operations base, hence its official descriptor: The M313 Heavy Recovery Vehicle. Clearly Bungie intended the M313 Elephant as a battlefield tow truck, hence the open front and rear to facilitate hauling battle damaged vehicles aboard. While a bunch of us, myself included, MOC-ed it up in attempts to make it more like the buttoned up, armored up Halo Wars M312 Elephant that was never Bungie's intent. When MB released the proper Halo Wars Elephant I actually removed most of the MOC features I'd added to our "War Elephant" as we now had a proper troop-centric alternative.
Interestingly the smaller, chronologically earlier (Ensemble Studios penned) M312 Elephant variant shares the same "Heavy Recovery Vehicle "descriptor. This despite the fact that for Halo Wars game play purposes the M312 was largely portrayed as a mobile troop base and its interior spaces are clearly too small to accommodate anything larger than a Mongoose or perhaps a Jackrabbit. Only towards the end of the Halo Wars campaign do we see the M312 employed in a fashion that matches its description. This when the M312 tows the Spirit of Fire's Slipspace drive on a purpose built trailer to the site where the SoF's drive will be used as a make-shift planet-cracking bomb.