Ori Numbers? Are the Ori really all they're cracked up to be.

[Ouroboros]

For all the talk about how powerful and deadly the Ori were as a foe it always seemed to me that this was one area in which they were severely lacking.

We saw in the show that their initial invasion of the MW in Camelot consisted of 4 ships, which was a nice biblical allegory and all but the trouble was I don't really remember there being much of any follow up to it. I remember one other episode where they brought a few more ships through, and we did see them building more ships in their home galaxy, but still not that many more.

In the alternate reality episode we learn that they were attacking Earth with I think it was around 10 ships, and that this is apparently a force that they actually had to gather up for a while.

Basically the impression I got from the show was that the entire "Ori invasion" consisted of a fleet that numbered less than 20 ships, and probably even less than 15 and that this more or less represented the rate at which they could build them over the few years that the invasion lasted.

Is there any reason to think this wasn't the case? It seems downright wrong that 15 or so ships would constitute a galactic invasion force but SG has always had trouble with scaling these things so it wouldn't really surprise me.

The picture it painted for me was that the Ori were a power that was very advanced technologically but very low output in terms of industry. They make their ships on however many planets they hold in their home galaxy, which isn't likely to be many, using unskilled manual labor in fields with prior supervision and that those factors combine to make their manufacturing output absolutely dismal.

Why the Ori do things this way isn't entirely clear but it probably has a lot to do with them not wanting the secrets of their highest technologies to be known by anyone but trusted individuals like Priors who just tell the loyal worshippers what screw goes in what hole.

In any case though from looking at the series it looks like they're not anywhere near as nasty as they're cracked up to be in a fullscale war type situation. Their ships are powerful yes, but they have almost none of them and building new ones is apparently a long tedious process judgeing by how few of them they could apparently make. Compare them to a power like the Ida Asgard for example that had worlds with impressive futeristic cities and ships being built in technologically advanced drydocks on those worlds. It doesn't seem like they would have any hope at all at competing long term with such a power in a full on war conflict, or even a power like the Wraith that can grow new ships out of virtually nothing bypassing the need for infastructure, or one like the Asurans that can build them alarmingly fast from just a single industrialized world.

I would even go so far as to say that the united system lords at the height of their power with Anubis could probably hold off an Ori invasion for much longer than most people give them credit for. The Goa'uld and Anubis had anywhere from a low few hundred to around a thousand or more Ha'tak depending on where in the series you look. If the Ori only have 15 or so ships after building them for a few years of conflict it would seem like they'd be fighting against not the 3 or 4 to one odds we saw in the latter seasons, but odds of nearly 100 to one vs Ha'taks. The wide variance in Goa'uld ship numbers at differant points in the series also suggests that they can even build them pretty fast, likely from the more industrial advanced Goa'uld worlds we saw from time to time.

So what do you think. Was I missing some critical bit of dialog somewhere or are the Ori really not all they're cracked up to be once you look at the whole picture, namely their crippling lack of industry and the very slow rate of ship production this leads to.

[tinerin]

Well numbers really didn't matter since their ships were so powerful. 13 Hataks, 2 304's and an O'neill class Asgard ship couldn't even put a dent in the Ori motherships. A single shot from the primary beam weapon or a dozen or so shots from the secondary weapons could take out a Hatak. And a Hatak ramming an Ori mothership at full speed wouldn't even get past its shields either. Each Ori mothership also carries hundreds of fighters which are vastly superior to Death Gliders and Alkesh. Considering that the Ori wanted their victims to spread the word of how powerful they were, if you had to lose 500 Hataks in battle just to destroy a single Ori mothership, I'm pretty sure that would just help to get the word out...

[lordofseas]

And from what we've seen, the Ori society seems pretty agrarian. And I think they had the humans build it. The Priors obviously directed them, but it would be slow as they would have to mine the metals. After all, the ships are huge toilets. Lots and lots of metal.

[Rise Of The Phoenix]

Hi Ouroboros.

TBH I don't think the Ori's followers were all that poor at putting together their fleet, actually I think they were pretty good at it considering they don't appear to have started building their fleet until after Origins, I say this as the Doci says this famous (to Gateworlders ) line in that episode:

DOCI: Great holy armies shall be gathered and trained to fight all who embrace evil. In the name of the gods, ships shall be built to carry our warriors out amongst the stars and we will spread Origin to ALL the unbelievers! The power of the Ori will be felt far and wide, and the wicked shall be vanquished.

We then see this shot in Crusade:
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/dis...um=201&pos=355

Of course it depends on how much time past between episode 3 and 19 of season 9 of SG1 but even if they had six ships finished in the space of a year that's still pretty impressive IMO, perhaps not compared to the Asurans, although we have no specific, concrete evidence of exactly how many ships they had by the time Crusade had taken place only a shot of the six ships on the ground, with no one character saying that's all they had (not from what I recall anyway).
TBH we don't have any other evidence beside the pic link I posted above to come to a conclusion of many ships the Ori's followers could produce in whatever amount of time, for all we know it could have been equal to the Asurans and they just decided to send a few to test us out in the first place, maybe that seems a bit silly, but I certainly don't think it can be ruled out as a possibility, since they obviously had at least six vessels but only sent 4 in Camelot.

The Ori's followers could have littered a world with sites for producing ships if they wanted to, perhaps multiple Ori Galaxy worlds, the pic above shows it doesn't seem to take up much space to make those 6 vessels and six such powerful ships made over the course of what could have been a few months isn't all that bad IMO, it's certainly enough to deal a big dent in the MW, especially before the Asgard could come up with a weapon that can harm them and considering the only apparent way to reach them fast enough to strike back is by going through the Supergate which they controlled they should still be considered to be pretty damn hard IMO.

What I'd like some clarification on is just how many ships could the Asgard produce.
From what I remember we've only ever seen a maximum of 6 O'Neills in New Order, which was after a little under a season and half of safety from the Replicators and the Asgard had advanced site to site transporter tech, along with matter converters for almost instant component production and ore refinement.
Compared to the Asgard the Ori's followers seem much better at producing their ships at a faster rate than the Asgard can, with no visibly advanced methods of production.
If we go off of just the number of ships we've seen shown on the show at a single moment then the Ori's followers are potentially much better than the Asgard at least.
If we try filling in the gaps then we could say each side had multiple worlds producing their fleets, since both had interplanetary propulsion technology that's not impossible and a means of acquiring materials, fabricating components and then piecing everything together which appears to be more than adequate IMO.

[Ouroboros]

Hi Ouroboros.

TBH I don't think the Ori's followers were all that poor at putting together their fleet, actually I think they were pretty good at it considering they don't appear to have started building their fleet until after Origins, I say this as the Doci says this famous (to Gateworlders ) line in that episode:


We then see this shot in Crusade:
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/dis...um=201&pos=355

Yeah that's the shot I'm thinking of. Vala also indicated that there were doing the same on other words. Getting back to the shot though we can see what looks like incomplete outer hulls or frames of some kind propped up on some kind of wooden tresses in a canyon. There's also a few buildings scattered around with smoke coming out of them. The order of the day though seems to be manual labor, they're building these things with just raw manpower the way an ancient ociety might build something like a temple or Pyramid. There's obviously some kind of Prior magic at work here to though since there's no way they're refining the advanced materials for those ships in just those buildings or digging them all out of the ground in that canyon, let alone casting some of those gigantic pieces on site.

Of course it depends on how much time past between episode 3 and 19 of season 9 of SG1 but even if they had six ships finished in the space of a year that's still pretty impressive IMO, perhaps not compared to the Asurans, although we have no specific, concrete evidence of exactly how many ships they had by the time Crusade had taken place only a shot of the six ships on the ground, with no one character saying that's all they had (not from what I recall anyway).

It's terribly unimpressive for a "galactic level power" like they're generally presumed to be. That's basically the reason for this thread. From watching the show it looks like they turned out somewhere between 10 and 20 ships total, there's no large groups of them seen, they seem relucatant to attack Earth in both this reality and the alternate one, their ships are usually encountered alone in in very small groups, the chracters make a big deal about them getting a few more ships through their supergate, everything points to very small numbers of overall ships.

TBH we don't have any other evidence beside the pic link I posted above to come to a conclusion of many ships the Ori's followers could produce in whatever amount of time, for all we know it could have been equal to the Asurans and they just decided to send a few to test us out in the first place, maybe that seems a bit silly, but I certainly don't think it can be ruled out as a possibility, since they obviously had at least six vessels but only sent 4 in Camelot.

Well there's 6 in the picture but we know they also held back some stuff in their own galaxy based on Ark of truth, it's possible the other two stayed there if they were even finished at the same time.

What I'm really wondering though is about some of the things Vala said about them building ships on other worlds. Namely stuff like this from Crusade

VALA: (VO) They are building ships and armies by the tens of thousands.

Tens of thousands of each or tens of thousands with both added together? I'd say it's the second one based on what we actually saw. So not many ships but carrying thousands of "armies". Given how empty the ships actually seemed when we'd see them though even that seems rather hard to justify.

Ori bluster giving Vala bad information? (and yes I know it's really because extras are expensive)

VALA: The village I am living in is one of many, on a world among dozens like it.

So the Ori have only "dozens" of worlds like the one Vala was living on each with many of those little medieval villiages on it. That's not exactly a galactic level power at all. That gives them less worlds that the Goa'uld, less than the Pegasus ancients pre Wraith, less than the free Jaffa, almost certainly less than the Ida Asgard, and possibly even less than the Lucian alliance. Given that these worlds are just medieval level worlds dotted with villiages to it's likely the Ori civilization also has less total population than just Earth by itself.

Even that small number of worlds would seem to suggest that they could build more ships than they ended up building though, since Vala's planet was building at least 6 of them that we saw from that 1 village. Maybe it's the Prior oversight that's in really short supply?

The Ori's followers could have littered a world with sites for producing ships if they wanted to, perhaps multiple Ori Galaxy worlds, the pic above shows it doesn't seem to take up much space to make those 6 vessels and six such powerful ships made over the course of what could have been a few months isn't all that bad IMO, it's certainly enough to deal a big dent in the MW, especially before the Asgard could come up with a weapon that can harm them and considering the only apparent way to reach them fast enough to strike back is by going through the Supergate which they controlled they should still be considered to be pretty damn hard IMO.

Yeah this is the other side of the puzzle. It looks from that pic like they should be able to build a decent number of ships even with only a few dozen worlds to work from. The only explanation I can really think of for why they didn't seem to be able to was that those ships are not nearly as finished as they seem to look. It might be possible for these primitive build sites to build things like shells and frames but the more techy stuff is going to require some kind of skilled labor. You can't exactly just command a bunch of medieval villagers to build you an FTL drive and giant plasma death cannon. If you want them too do so you'll be handholding them literally every step of the way and watching absolutely everything they do to make sure they do it all correctly. You'll also have to somehow get access to the advanced materials required to make parts for those things, then make the actual parts with tolerances that are unlikely be to possible with a blacksmith's hammer no matter how dedicated he is to his craft.

The only people I can see that might be qualified to do this type of stuff would be Priors using a combination of instruction and personal "magic". With them splitting their time between spreading Origen, leading the invasion as generals, and various other tasks, it seems like there weren't very many left to provide the crucial handholding required for shipbuilding after the first few were finished though. What you end up with then is a huge que of half finished ships waiting for a Prior to come along and tell people how to finish all the facy bits, and use his magic to make sure the entire hull doesn't leak air like a screen door in space, and to prevent the medieval workmaship level on all those fancier tech bits from turning the entire ship into a colourful cloud of plasma the minute he presses the start button.

What I'd like some clarification on is just how many ships could the Asgard produce.
From what I remember we've only ever seen a maximum of 6 O'Neills in New Order, which was after a little under a season and half of safety from the Replicators and the Asgard had advanced site to site transporter tech, along with matter converters for almost instant component production and ore refinement.
Compared to the Asgard the Ori's followers seem much better at producing their ships at a faster rate than the Asgard can, with no visibly advanced methods of production.
If we go off of just the number of ships we've seen shown on the show at a single moment then the Ori's followers are potentially much better than the Asgard at least.
If we try filling in the gaps then we could say each side had multiple worlds producing their fleets, since both had interplanetary propulsion technology that's not impossible and a means of acquiring materials, fabricating components and then piecing everything together which appears to be more than adequate IMO.

The Asgard held off the Replicators for quite a decent amount of time as they lost their original galaxy so that does speak somewhat toward their industrial base. We also saw the first O'neill under construction in an advanced facility so it would seem like they make theirs pretty much like you'd expect them to, in a manner similar to how we would.

[Ouroboros]

And from what we've seen, the Ori society seems pretty agrarian. And I think they had the humans build it. The Priors obviously directed them, but it would be slow as they would have to mine the metals. After all, the ships are huge toilets. Lots and lots of metal.

I figure lack of materials and difficulty of getting them might go a long way toward accounting for the weird shape of the Ori ships with all of that empty space.

They're built to look artificially bigger and more imposing on purpose.

[Mister Oragahn]

The Ori arc was completely screwed.

Why the Ori do things this way isn't entirely clear but it probably has a lot to do with them not wanting the secrets of their highest technologies to be known by anyone but trusted individuals like Priors who just tell the loyal worshippers what screw goes in what hole.

The problem is that while this works as a principle for the Goa'uld, who really could only rely on their technology, the Ori had nothing to fear at all. They literally were divine beings.

The Goa'uld, with all the leaks and flaws of their system, managed to hold their dominions over hundreds of worlds and that for a dozen millenia if not more.

I can't see how the Ori, craving for power from followers, wouldn't have entire worlds populated by millions of primitives bowing everyday.
The Priors were not even a menace to the Ori. The Ori could form and break them at will. They had virtual free reign and divine powers.

There's literally zero reason why, even if using peasants to build ships, they didn't use that method over a hundred of worlds instead of at best a handful of them.
Secrets wouldn't leak. Priors could never turn against the Ori, and if anything really happened, the Ori would just burn the people for a nice reboot.
Their industry is not even a problem. The Ori are for all intents and purposes gods, with the same powers as other ascended people, notably the Alterans/Lantians, known for wiping clean the surface of a world of its civilization, destroying an entire fleet in space, and recreating an environment in pristine condition as long as necessary.
It didn't take them that long to make the peasants work and assemble those large ships and fighters after all, perhaps a year at best.

There were not even that many ships guarding their own side of the supergate. Actually none, iirc. They had like four ships peeing on the 304 though in AoT, but I don't remember where they came from.

Comparing them to the Asgards only hurt because I never understood why, in-universe, the Asgards would give up so quickly. Their power sources truly were fantastic, they even had the proper weapon to own the Ori ships, they could have large scale synthetizers which could be used to build whole swathes of warships and other controlled AIs. They even controlled time dilation at massive rates over light years, which would allow them to use a system and turn it into an entire fleet of AI driven ships in "real" days.

That's just part of why I don't try to insist too much on the Ori. They were poorly developped, somehow hit a cap for no reason between season 9 and 10, never were given anything better than badly equipped grunts and never built any conquest temple and never seen using other fantastic gizmos, and despite being ascended beings, they somehow were not allowed to use di ex machinis.
Look, the writers even had to remove the fast rate & speed pulse cannons the Ori ships had to give the Tau'ri and their allies even a chance.

That's just the problem. The writers wanted to up the ante, came with the absolutely unmanageable wank, in a scenario Tau'ri vs. Ascended beings, which was laughable from the start, and instead of at least having the big powers of the galaxy, the Asgards, hold the Ori off with lots of tricks and power (as described above), they HAD TO have Earth save the day, instead of using the Ori more like a looming menace in the background, while keeping the Tau'ri closer to the role of underdog it was legitimately supposed to hold, and engaging enemies at its own scale (Lucian Alliance, Aschens, etc.). But noooo, that would have been too hard to write. Too much efforts.
Basically, a waste of a fantastic opportunity.

The arc itself was poorly closed, and I think that it's better we don't try to wake the dead up. The more oen tries to explain it, the more complicated, infuriating and embarrassing it becomes.

[thekillman]

i wonder why, seeing the ori's power, they did not stay silent for a while, built a good fleet and then invaded en masse. immendiately annihilating earth and the asgard homeworld, and then calmly converting the rest of the world, while stimulating advancements and upping the numbers per planet to a few billion

[lordofseas]

I figure lack of materials and difficulty of getting them might go a long way toward accounting for the weird shape of the Ori ships with all of that empty space.

They're built to look artificially bigger and more imposing on purpose.

I think the shape had to do with origin, but not only that. Didn't McKay say either in EATG or something like that, that the reason that the Hive ships had the huge hole in the middle was that if they didn't, making the Hive switch directions would tear it apart? Maybe it's something like that.

[AtlantisRules!!!]

I dont think they had more ships because they didn't need more ships. We saw what 4 could do.

[Mister Oragahn]

i wonder why, seeing the ori's power, they did not stay silent for a while, built a good fleet and then invaded en masse. immendiately annihilating earth and the asgard homeworld, and then calmly converting the rest of the world, while stimulating advancements and upping the numbers per planet to a few billion

We know why but it has nothing to do with the Ori per se.

[stargater1990]

i disagree. the ori ships were obviously designed to be virtually immune to conventional plasma burst weapons and they knew that because of this they didint need large numbers to invade the galaxy. i mean all that they were concerned about was converting worlds and 4 ori ships could have converted dozens of heavily populated planets in a matter of months.

basically what im trying to say is that they werent building ships to fight an enemy of an equal technological level so they knew that they wouldnt need superior numbers to convert the galaxy.

and i have no doubt that if the ori truely wished to build a fleet of hundreds of ships then they would have been able to do that because thay have a ton of knowledge and just proboly thought that such numbers were unnessisary.

[Mister Oragahn]

How they could exactly know what they'd be up against, perhaps by reading Vala/Qetesh's memories, but that's just a mini fragment of what has to be known. For one V/Q wouldn't know a thing about the Asgard technology and their real resources.
The Ori pulling punches was just a plot convenience.

[Mister Oragahn]

How they could exactly know what they'd be up against, perhaps by reading Vala/Qetesh's memories, but that's just a mini fragment of what has to be known. For one V/Q wouldn't know a thing about the Asgard technology and their real resources.
The Ori pulling punches was just a plot convenience.

[Rise Of The Phoenix]

Yeah that's the shot I'm thinking of. Vala also indicated that there were doing the same on other words.

Which as you indicated below could mean they had more than just the one ship building site, possibly a dozen.

Getting back to the shot though we can see what looks like incomplete outer hulls or frames of some kind propped up on some kind of wooden tresses in a canyon.

Those ships look like they only required activation by the Priors too me and I think that fits with the fact they were due to be activated soon after that scene.

There's also a few buildings scattered around with smoke coming out of them. The order of the day though seems to be manual labor, they're building these things with just raw manpower the way an ancient ociety might build something like a temple or Pyramid.

See we have no clue as to what was actually used to manufacture each part of the ships, just because we don’t see anti-grav platforms and other advanced stuff in plain sight that doesn’t mean advanced means of component production aren’t in use somewhere.

There's obviously some kind of Prior magic at work here to though since there's no way they're refining the advanced materials for those ships in just those buildings or digging them all out of the ground in that canyon, let alone casting some of those gigantic pieces on site.

By Prior Magic I assume you mean technology of some kind.
TBH I just think it’s a gap we have to fill in by saying some secluded, but advanced refinement and construction methods are in use, at least some kind of industrialised method in order for the advanced tech to actually work and be robust enough to deal with the stresses of space flight and intense combat.

It's terribly unimpressive for a "galactic level power" like they're generally presumed to be. That's basically the reason for this thread. From watching the show it looks like they turned out somewhere between 10 and 20 ships total, there's no large groups of them seen, they seem relucatant to attack Earth in both this reality and the alternate one, their ships are usually encountered alone in in very small groups, the chracters make a big deal about them getting a few more ships through their supergate, everything points to very small numbers of overall ships.

I just figured that’s coz small numbers are all that was needed against the likes of Ha’Taks and Asgard/Human ships, I mean it‘s not like they appear to have any threats in their own galaxy to deal with and even 10 to 20 would be pretty impressive IMO, certainly enough to deal with anything we could throw at them.

Well there's 6 in the picture but we know they also held back some stuff in their own galaxy based on Ark of truth, it's possible the other two stayed there if they were even finished at the same time.

What I'm really wondering though is about some of the things Vala said about them building ships on other worlds. Namely stuff like this from Crusade

VALA: (VO) They are building ships and armies by the tens of thousands.

Tens of thousands of each or tens of thousands with both added together? I'd say it's the second one based on what we actually saw. So not many ships but carrying thousands of "armies". Given how empty the ships actually seemed when we'd see them though even that seems rather hard to justify.

Vala’s comment is probably meant as you say it, but since each ship is a few times the size of a 304 maybe they only had 2 or 3 times our ship’s crews, so tens of thousands of people divided by say 600 per ship would mean around what 16 ships or something (if it‘s just 10000 people spread out amongst the ships), which given how well 4 performed against what we had in Camelot and the fact that nothing at our level or even the Asgard’s seemed able to dent their shields, those numbers would be all they’d need and it’s not like those Ori ships are slow in the FTL propulsion stakes either.

Ori bluster giving Vala bad information? (and yes I know it's really because extras are expensive)

Maybe the Ori did try to make themselves seem a bit more imposing than they actually were, in terms of numbers at least, but their ships were more than powerful enough to close any gap larger enemy ship numbers would impose.

VALA: The village I am living in is one of many, on a world among dozens like it.

So the Ori have only "dozens" of worlds like the one Vala was living on each with many of those little medieval villiages on it.

I see it as that’s all they needed, given the Human population of the galaxy.
Dozens of worlds with multiple villages capable of each producing in the neighbourhood of 6 ships could mean masses of ships, say 10 villages on each planet (that’s 60 ships per planet), then conservatively 24 planets could mean a total of 1440 ships.
That huge number may not be supported by what we actually saw, but even if only 1 village per planet churned out say 3 ships, then it’d still mean 72 ships, which IMO is more than a group of 6 Unending level upgraded O’Neills could handle united which is all the Asgard appear to have available (remember those things are uber fast) in New Order, maybe they had a few more by the time Camelot happened, but after New Order the Replicators were back on the scene and likely causing the Asgard more problems after the Replicators developed an immunity to the ARW tech.

That's not exactly a galactic level power at all. That gives them less worlds that the Goa'uld,

But the Ori’s followers would have nothing to worry about against the Goauld, coz their ships are much weaker than the Ori ones.

less than the Pegasus ancients pre Wraith,

To be fair we have no clue how many worlds the Ancients actually inhabited besides Lantia, the Tower city ship’s world and a few other outposts, the other planets were less advanced Human worlds, I don’t think it was implied to be in the Dozens.

less than the free Jaffa,

True but it’s the same as with Goauld.

almost certainly less than the Ida Asgard,

We have no evidence of this as all we’ve seen of Asgard’s planets is Othalla, Orilla and a few science outposts.

and possibly even less than the Lucian alliance.

Again it’s the same as with the Goauld and Jaffa and from what we know the Jaffa and Lucian Alliance don’t appear capable of replacing whatever ships they may lose in battles as they‘ve never been said to have Goauld knowledge or their own advanced tech developments for that matter.

Given that these worlds are just medieval level worlds dotted with villiages to it's likely the Ori civilization also has less total population than just Earth by itself.

Only a fraction of the Earth’s population is actively taking part or knows about anything to do with the Stargate, so that limits our vessel production greatly as you know to about 2 every two years.
The Ori’s followers (except for children, handicapped and maybe some weaker individuals) can all pretty much take part in some area of ship production provided they’re given the right info, which could easily be given to anyone the Prior’s are told to give it to, they just have to oversee or train some people to oversee construction and check things out before the ships are switched on, which wouldn’t take that long to do given a Prior‘s abilities.

Even that small number of worlds would seem to suggest that they could build more ships than they ended up building though, since Vala's planet was building at least 6 of them that we saw from that 1 village. Maybe it's the Prior oversight that's in really short supply?

That’s of course a possibility, but we don’t know just how many Priors existed, it could have been at least one per village, if there were 10 villages (a pretty low estimate IMO) per planet then that’d be at least 240 total, which seems a pretty low number IMO, especially given that they’d need to keep the Ori’s presence felt all over the galaxy.

Yeah this is the other side of the puzzle. It looks from that pic like they should be able to build a decent number of ships even with only a few dozen worlds to work from. The only explanation I can really think of for why they didn't seem to be able to was that those ships are not nearly as finished as they seem to look.

That may work although depending on when Vala’s flashback scene happened it may have only been a few months before the vessels were launched for the Milky Way.
I guess it’s possible some more intricate, internal things needed finishing, but it seemed too me like they were ready to be activated very shortly after that scene happened.

It might be possible for these primitive build sites to build things like shells and frames but the more techy stuff is going to require some kind of skilled labor. You can't exactly just command a bunch of medieval villagers to build you an FTL drive and giant plasma death cannon. If you want them too do so you'll be handholding them literally every step of the way and watching absolutely everything they do to make sure they do it all correctly. You'll also have to somehow get access to the advanced materials required to make parts for those things, then make the actual parts with tolerances that are unlikely be to possible with a blacksmith's hammer no matter how dedicated he is to his craft.

The Priors had already instructed a fairly primitive race of Humans on how to make advanced weapons and shield tech in the events prior to Ethon, the Ori’s existing followers had been believers for all of their lives and their ancestors before them for who knows how long, certain groups may have already been trained in the production of certain parts of each ship to the point where they were very proficient should the time arise where uber powerful ships were needed, perhaps with the Ori leaving a few pieces of info out here and there to prevent their followers from making whole ships and stuff on their own.

The only people I can see that might be qualified to do this type of stuff would be Priors using a combination of instruction and personal "magic". With them splitting their time between spreading Origen, leading the invasion as generals, and various other tasks, it seems like there weren't very many left to provide the crucial handholding required for shipbuilding after the first few were finished though. What you end up with then is a huge que of half finished ships waiting for a Prior to come along and tell people how to finish all the facy bits, and use his magic to make sure the entire hull doesn't leak air like a screen door in space, and to prevent the medieval workmaship level on all those fancier tech bits from turning the entire ship into a colourful cloud of plasma the minute he presses the start button.

Those are all good points, although we have no clue exactly how many Priors existed, remember we only saw maybe a few worlds from the Ori’s galaxy and we don’t know whether or not certain pieces of information, skills and necessary technology are constantly kept a secret from the general public in case a war needs to be fought.
Perhaps the Priors had used technology in secret to make the more advanced components and produce them as gifts from the gods to further enforce the Ori/Gods are great mantra.