There's no way to know for sure who won the battle since the movie doesn't cover some major points that would determine this:
1) How many Reavers are there?
2) Were there Reaver reinforcments close by?
3) Was the Alliance able to complete the victory?
I would say that the Alliance at best won a tactical victory over the Reavers, but without knowing how many more Reavers there are makes it impossible to say they were reduced significantly in numbers. Maybe the fleet over Miranda was just a small detactment. Could there be hundreds of thousands of more Reavers on the edge of the 'verse that simply weren't able to participate in the suprise battle?
In fact, you could consider the battle over Mr. Universe a stragtigic stalemate considering the damage sustained by the Alliance. Yes, the Reavers lost a lot of ships too, but it's not known exactly how many they lost (you could see them capturing many Alliance vessles and retreating so the loss could have been mitigated, and I doubt they lost their capital ships).
If you look at the shape of the Alliance fleet after the battle, it's unlikely they were able to penetrate into the ION cloud to wipe out any remaining Reavers (again, total numbers unkown). And in fact, if the Alliance was forced to withdraw after the battle, you could consider this a stratigic failure for the Alliance.
These are questions that may have to be answered by a sequel75.198.225.236 15:10, October 13, 2010 (UTC)
- Initial Reaver population,
- According to the recording on Miranda there were 30,000,000 people on Miranda, The noted infection rate of 1/10th of 1 percent would put the initial Miranda reaver population at 30,000. 111.217.210.134 11:36, February 17, 2011 (UTC)
- Not to mention that insanity, near-suicidal combat tactics, and willing exposure to lethal levels of radiation don't exactly contribute to stable population growth. So "hundreds of thousands of more Reavers on the edge of the 'verse" seems extremely unlikely. 70.249.153.116 13:25, May 5, 2011 (UTC)