The Yanme’e’s origin bugs me—pun not intentional—because it makes no sense at all. Insects on Earth are limited by both their exoskeleton and method of respiration. I won’t go into their respiratory system because, being aliens, the Yanme’e could have true lungs and a closed circulatory system for all I know. However, the problem with an exoskeleton is that the square-cube law creates problems for any giant arthropod: As the creature gets larger, the shell thickness would have to increase disproportionately relative to its internal volume. Eventually, the carapace would become so heavy that the creature wouldn’t be able to lift itself up off the ground. The problem would be even worse for a flying creature.
No problem right? The Yanme’e have antigravity gear that helps them support their weight in 1g; it even allows them to fly. Logically you would expect them to have evolved on a planet with much lower gravity than what we have here on Earth, or at least that’s what I was expecting when I went to read up on their backstory, but apparently, one of Bungie’s writers thought it was a good idea to write it into the canon that they evolved on a high g world; in fact, Palamok’s gravity is on par with Jupiter’s—this makes no sense at all.
343, if you’re reading this, there is an easy way to fix this: expand on their backstory by explaining that they actually evolved on Palamok’s moon (make it about the size of Mars). You could say that, for whatever reason, they had to abandon the low g moon and develop antigravity technology to help them cope with the much higher gravity of Palamok. No retcon would be needed, since one could argue that Palamok's moon is part of a binary planet system (the Palamok system). This would explain their skills in engineering as well as their antigravity devices quite well while eliminating the absurdity of a flying insectoid race evolving on a world with twice the gravity of the Earth.
