The argument I'm seeing is oddly endearing, in a bad debate, pretty uninformed kind of way.
As a principle you should always be prepared to source statements and provide evidence to summarily satisfy the intent of your argument, not simply as a rule of the forum:
But the methodology of debating itself.
This is actually of importance because nothing you've posted adequately addresses any of the statements issued by Xcano from what I'm seeing.
It depends on what we define as colonization because in English vernacular, it's actually a broad definition across a multitude of contexts - however - using the formal Cambridge definition that contextually suits this scenario:
The Forerunners don't need to physically occupy every conceivable space, simply displacing any governing authority and the local population either via subversion or force meets the base criteria. The present Safeguard or human population could, therefore, still exist in extant to the Forerunners not even subjugated groups or even vassals, but if the Forerunners can establish conditions where they can readily displace natives at their discretion or dictate the terms of living space, either via the occasional living individual or however many quntillions of Ancilla they can apply to the task they would suit the definition.
In reality the City is something the Forerunners are likely to despise simply from a purely aesthetic standpoint. Even the most basic tenets of the Mantle would find the City abhorrent, so rather than exist within the City, it is a structure they will simply seek to curtail and minimize whilst displacing the organic population to safer locales in elected colony worlds.
When Britain colonized South Africa, only 4,000 Britons were employed in colonizing the cape; however, they displaced millions of black natives whilst taking up a fraction of the cape's land mass. It still met the criteria as a colony.
It's blatantly and transparently bad faith debating to conclude that it's impossible to fit a starship inside (although that depends on the starship in question, ships run the gamut from 300 km+ Fortress-class vessels to several hundred meter long Harriers) when another poster highlighted as much. Are these spaces consistent through 100% of the City? Of course not. But concluding that it is impossible is an admission that the certainty of identifying these spaces is tantamount to 0.0%, which is frankly absurdist mathematics on your part.
This is especially in poor faith when the series seems to consistently, to the point of being a staple in each chapter, frame individual scenes where Killy is utterly dwarfed by the volume of surrounding rooms to demonstrate the sheer absurdity of the architecture.
Quantum gravity is not the same a quantum entanglement.
QG merely incroporates both the principles of general relativity and quantum theory with regards to the effects of gravity on space-time. Entanglement is more divisive owing to how pop culture treats it, but in a highly simplified essence QEM is a process whereby energetically degenerate states cannot be separate and electrons or photons in these states are essentially indistinguishable.
The Forerunners seem to use remote quantum superposition theory to interact with distant bodies; essentially, their sensors work by "teleporting" similar degenerate states in the desired matter they wish to scan and can action said effect over distances where causality ceases to be relevant - therefore it needs to an action without locality process.
There's a fundamental flaw with regards to this however, and that's the Halo universe is strictly defined by the limitations of causality.
I've postulated this in the past (for context this pure fanon), but time travel exists in the setting in both a quasi and hard canon, and Forerunner technology allows some measure of manipulation of and reversal of time, it's just that the universe probably really, really hates it. Not only are the laws of physics incompatible with time travel, but when you try to cheat your way past those laws by side-stepping into a reality with incompatible rules, returning to a universe where those laws have consequences, as demonstrated by the number of occasions where effective time travel is consequentially fatal.
First, Halo as a setting is generally am example of pop sci-fi that acknowledges that travelling faster than light impacts causality:
In general terms, going four light years to the nearest star in an instant effectively means that the particles in your body have gone four years into the past, Silentium expounds on this further with the Iso-Didact noting that due to causality frames FTL signals from the Halo pulse have started arriving before:
In the case of a hypothetical virtual emission moving faster than light, there will be general inertial frames in which the emission was received before it could be emitted by the epicenter or source, so that the emission could be said to have moving backwards in time through 4D space. The fundamental rules of special relativity states that the mathematical laws of physics that prevent FTL travel are the exact same way in every inertial frame (thus light speed and gravitational fluxes are measured constants in physics - those constants remain the same on the edge of black holes or the intergalactic void). This means that if the Didact sends a signal to I-04 which moves at FTL in Didact's inertial frame but backwards in time in I-04's relative/subjective frame, and then I-04 transmits a pulse which moves at FTL to an observer on I-05 but backwards in time in Didact's inertial frame of simulated relativity by transmitting the data to the Didact slower than the pulse, it would mean that I-04 begins transmitting a pulse before Didact is even aware of having done so according to I-05. Not only does this break several fundamental laws or relativity and logical paradigms in mathematics, but causality is no longer equal to all observers occupying separate frames.
Hence why FTL breaks the laws of the universe, when a ship moves through slipspace and arrives at a distant point thousands of light years away it has violated causality be effectively being at two points in two distinct inertial frames.
Slipspace evidently allows for parallel inertial frames through particle reconciliation: Ships or signals moving tens of thousands of light years in mere hours or instants can share similar inertial frames without a temporal paradox occurring and clench tactics even seem to imply it's possible to use slipspace to abuse inertial frames of reference by effectively jumping ahead of the emission point, but the faster and further you go the more "damage" you do to space-time. So if the Didact jumps 10,000 light years in a few hours and disengages periodically, he's essentially allowing the data from the present point of emission to bleed into the background. The further and faster you jump in a single hit, the greater the discrepancy you create in the data points, because within the logic of an inertial frame you've jumped backwards.
In effect, everything the Forerunners did, including their combat tactics, violated this universe and many others.
But according to the Iso-Didact in that very passage it is exhibiting traits similar to acasual communication owing to its incredibly high velocity. This doesn't mean you literally die before the wave arrives at your position*, it means that according to the external observer - you already have. So in essence, if you can observe the pulse at sublight, everyone else is also experiencing the same phenomenom simultaneously within range of the FTL movement.
* Although that's merely further confusing the point, since the wave isn't firing from a determinant perspective regardless of the observer. The relationship between the guy pressing the button, the pulse and the victim are all acasual and non-linear.
This is called the relativity of simultaneity. It would also dictate why signals need to propogate through discrete nth dimensional spaces distinct from real-space.
Assuming the exclusion of gravity is a thing, which we have no reason to believe because you've presented zero compelling evidence, it's apparent you missed this and the prior post because the resolution is not solely restricted to identifying gravitational forces.
Again, the Audacity is capable of scanning the contents of a planet from over ten light years away, analyzing the surface composition, atmospheric chemistry, trace organic compounds and even the genetic profiles of the inhabitants.
Meanwhile, the Didact's Planet Breaker is capable of utilizing extra-dimensional systems to interact with fluctuations in the motion of hydrogen ions to determine a path of occlusion that is five decades old simply based on aberrations of a magnetic field produced by a blue giant star - a path of occlusion that was so accurate that he could determine the original shape and position of the structure based on information that is both light days and tens of light years old relative to local causality.
For this supposition to work we would have to accept the presence of a field that creates uniform density, electromagnetic fields, and chemical cohesion and simply does not allow for dissemination between everything from the composition of hydrogen atoms to the subtle electric fields of a neuron - and then further posit the existence of a field that prevents the organisms from simply dying.
Because that is the conclusion we would have to derive.
Why?
Slipspace portals can interdict atmospheric near sea-level dense atmospheres:
View: https://youtu.be/JfE7IFki-XM?t=5
Open in normal gravitational and atmospheric conditions at sea level:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQcd13L2mdM
In fact incorrectly applied portals can open through the structure of 29 km CSO Supercarriers, and other than the abrasion produced by the interaction of slipspace fields with matter there don't appear to be any substantial interactions comparable to the fusion of a hundred billion tons of material directly over Reach.
View: https://youtu.be/LxARFTu7bOU?t=27
Any non-hyper-degenerate matter is unlikely to survive a slipspace portal interdicting through it, owing to the continued demonstration that between a slipspace portal and matter, the portal consistently wins by absconding with an effectively discombobulating the mass in question. This is due to the fact that teleportation in the BLAME! setting induces fusion at the point of contact, whereas slipspace navigation does not.
The purpose of the ships would be less of a feature to directly inhabit the selected portion but provide indirect fire support and C3 for what the Forerunners could charitably call a clean-up operation, where humans could be safely removed from the torturous conditions (hell, the Forerunners could likely simply broadcast a Geas to simply advise that they can offer food and sanctuary - in an environment where finding drinking water is hazardous the prospect of three meals and sunlight would be like winning the lottery) via teleporting drones whilst smartmatter assemblies deconstruct and re-fashion the interior to be less of a formless mess - meeting their aesthetic standards via exponentially grown, self-replicating swarms.
Normally the Forerunners would be compelled by the Mantle not to interact in such a fashion, but this is more like flattening the awful, overgrown, dilapidated mansion in your neighborhood than eliminating an ecology.
The issue is that there is nothing to address because nothing has been substantially proven.
"Prove the thing I have no evidence existing wrong." is not a compelling feature of a particularly convincing argument that has the merit of a substantive point. Generally when your argument starts with assuming the existence of a feature by proxy without the supporting framework of evidence, it ceases to meet it's own truncated standards by a wide margin - never mind the features of what constitute a formally structured debate point.
Assuming that the megastructure partially occupies (however it should be noted that the computer infrastructure is folded dimensionally as a virtual computer) slipspace, we would need to demonstrate that it occupies all of slipspace as slipspace isn't a single dimension, but rather a discrete number of non-spatial sub-domains.
Again, the premise of your argument is wholly unquantifiable, and at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, employed in bad faith.
It's pretty poor form to ignore a post that addresses this, but yes, it has been addressed directly to yourself.
Again, this is a single modus of detection of many demonstrated examples. One that is effective owing to the ability to garner data from non-local regions such as multiple light years distant, but we expressly have examples where a multitude of dimensions, including slipspace, can be used to observe non-local events in and out of realspace based on the discretion of the observed.
Keep them from being observed?
Did you just confuse the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment with the mechanics quantum superposition and then assume the observer is a literal sentient observer?
The "observer" in quantum mechanics is not a sentient being or a literal observer, instead it is anything that interacts with the system and causes the wavefunction to collapse. Presumably the wavefunction is this scenario would only thus collapse once the measuring ceases, because to entangle particles at range requires non-local manipulation of particle states.
If you measure the spin of the particle, the very act of measuring it (the interaction between the particle and the measuring device) would cause the wave function to collapse because you have to physically change the net. What the measuring devices say or what the humans operating them think doesn't change anything except what we measure in that system. It wouldn't make much sense if particles behaved differently depending on what we thought about them.
How would that work?
Radar is just radio waves reflecting off a surface to measure their return signal.
How would that apply to entanglement?
