Why didnt the ancients fly away?

[Gary83uk]

When the wraith were sieging atlantis why didnt they just up and fly away instead of leaving by stargate.

[Jeffer]

Because the Ships would have been Destroyed. also i'm not so sure they had any left at Atlantis

[Gary83uk]

In the city I mean

[Jeffer]

OH ok in Season 1 "Before I Sleep" The Ancients say they left the City there so that if one day they wanted to return they could and the Team that went there from earth has fulfilled the idea

[Wass]

In the city I mean

It would be difficult when you have hundreds of wraith ships surrounding the space around the planet. As soon as detected Atlantis is about to fly of the wraith would use all there force to stop it. Going through the gate was the safer option and also they left Atlantis in hop that one they could return.

[Gary83uk]

The shields could withstand everything the wraith had thrown at them for years, I really dont forsee a problem in them flying away in it

[Daniel-Jackson]

But then they could follow them, making it pointless.

[Jeffer]

It would be difficult when you have hundreds of wraith ships surrounding the space around the planet. As soon as detected Atlantis is about to fly of the wraith would use all there force to stop it. Going through the gate was the safer option and also they left Atlantis in hop that one they could return.

JANIS: We are about to evacuate this city in the hope that it will lie safe for many years and then, one day, our kind will return. (He looks at Elizabeth.) And they have. It is because of my experiments that we now have the opportunity ...

It was a combo of both of those reasons

But then they could follow them, making it pointless.

The Wraith Hyper Drive is very week they would have goten away easily

[MarshAngel]

My science might be iffy... but my theory is that they may have calculated that they didn't have enough power to maintain shields under bombardment, get the ship out of the atmosphere, and generate a city-sized hyperspace window at the same time.
Even the largest ships we've come across aren't as big as Atlantis. Generating and maintaining a large enough hyperspace window might take a lot of power.

I don't know if a ship can follow another one into hyperspace without generating a window of their own but it's a possibility we can consider. If that's the case, a lot of ships may have been able to follow Atlantis into a window of the size they'd have to generate.

[Ouroboros]

There's a couple of options I see

-It only had enough fuel/power to make one intergalactic trip

-It's engines were irrepairably damaged by the Wraith at some point either directly with ships or via sabotage. Maybe the planet it's on now wasn't even the one it started on. Maybe it was shot down.

-They can't run their sheilds and their engines at the same time. Turn off the shield and they all die a few moments later.

-The whole thing was really just a standoff with the Wraith trying to wait out the Ancients until they surrendered/starved to death because they wanted the city intact back then just like they do now. If the Ancients had actually tried to run though the Wraith would have attempted to destroy them rather than let them escape. The Ancients understood this so didn't provoke that outcome.

-Wraith ships have improved in the last 10,000 years and the original ones really couldn't hurt the city at all, as opposed to the current ones that can bleed out an entire zpm in a few days of bombardment. Since the Ancients were invincinble they just left the city there because they figured they'd come back to get it one day and they like leaving powerful technology laying around for potentially murderous species to find and use. (we all know that's true) The thought that the Wraith might break into it while no one was there watching/guarding it and hijack it to do god knows what to the known universe was evidently something they didn't really care about.

[the Fifth Race]

The shields could withstand everything the wraith had thrown at them for years, I really dont forsee a problem in them flying away in it

Maybe they feared that the Wraith might be able to follow there path to another galaxy and they did'nt want to risk it by another galaxy being overrun by the Wraith.

Or maybe they simply had perfected ascention and they could care less about flying away?.

[JMatthews]

I think that they left the city because they planned to return one day and I would think it would take along time to travel between galaxies in something the size of atlantis. So it made more sense to leave the city in pegasus and return via the stargate. They probably calculated that in would take thousands of years for the cities shield to fail

[SmallTimePerson]

I don't know if a ship can follow another one into hyperspace without generating a window of their own but it's a possibility we can consider. If that's the case, a lot of ships may have been able to follow Atlantis into a window of the size they'd have to generate.

they can go through the same window, the wraith ships did in letters from pegasus/siege or something. But i think it is a bit harder then just steering the ship into it.

[Dr Weir]

they can go through the same window, the wraith ships did in letters from pegasus/siege or something. But i think it is a bit harder then just steering the ship into it.

If that is possible, I remember each ship had it's own hyperdrive window, the wraith ships would have been destroyed while travelling as they are not designed to travel so fast, like with what happened to the cargo ship Jack modified. The ancients could have cloaked Atlantis when flying it out but that would have been really risky as it would have replaced the shield, but then the ancients could have done what McKay worked out in the seige part 3 and cloaked the city but I think by then ancients were really desperate and just had enough and wanted to leave. I think they just give up after 100 yrs of fighting the wraith non stop.

[Wandering Tamer]

I think the sea also gave them some protection, which is why the sheild wasn't under constant stress. With that, they knew the city could survive and that the Wraith couldn't touch it. And at that point, the Wraith didn't know about earth