Sparhawk:

Leet_Master:

i totally agree, although i might have used stronger language......

I know what you mean... I was very exasperated and irritated at having to explain it again, it took trememdous will-power to with-hold my ... um... testy side.

Thanks for agreeing with me. 

I'm going to exasperate you even further, because logically, you must be wrong.  Its not like Johnson is some sort of super genius.  Someone obviously told him how to run it (if he didn't know, perhaps an elite told him?), or he was able to figure it out on his own (again, he isn't a genius).   The fact that you are getting so angry over a flawed assumption is ridiculous. 

Anyway, I think this really depends on which scarab is more canon.  If the scarabs we see in Halo 2 are the ones we will have in Halo Wars, then i think you're wrong. I think that basic controls can probably be recognized and applied to other vehicles.  A special unit like an "Engineer" can probably have the education and equipment (such as AIs) to help figure it out.  I would agree in this case as well, that maybe a scarab at the earliest stages would have been hard to figure out (also considering that it must be mind bendingly difficult to actually capture a scarab),   but later in the war ( And halo wars progresses to right before Halo) it would not seem so unreasonable, assuming you can get your hands on one.

 Besides, Scarabs in canon only begin showing up much later, and the earliest indication we get of their existence in anything else but halo wars (and we don't know "when" the demo was) is in First Strike (although i suspect these walkers are not scarabs, they seemed to weak in the boot).  I'd imagine by the time scarabs started showing up, we may have had the time to figure out some of the langauge, atleast the basic controls and such. I mean, some one knew. For years ONI had been secretly evacuating some worlds and not others because they had figured out which worlds would be attacked (Check Ghosts of Onyx). 

 What i propose in this case is you get an engineer ( assuming there is an engineer class, since there usually is in an RTS), and then you can upgrade him once you have your advanced structures so that he might be able to do things like pilot a scarab.

Also, the reason they didn't use the scarab in Halo 2 was because it was already a bad idea for them to bring the scarab into the city. there is no manuevering room, and there were more important things to handle.  Its like driving a tank through a shopping mall where half the people have rockets.  It won't work out as great as it sounds.

Sparhawk:

 plus if they could do that then why didn't the engineers in Halo 3 try to capture the scarab

 If it is Halo 3 however, close inspection of the new scarab reveals that they are controlled by Hunters (or atleast the worms that make them up).  I highly doubt there are any actual controls or a cockpit in the new scarab.  There fore, you are right in that we cannot capture a scarab for our own purposes.

Anyway, i'm just pushing your buttons. I don't think its a good idea that any faction can capture a scarab once its down. I think it should be dead and stay dead.