OK, who hacked Asuras?

[Mister Oragahn]

Seriously, the fall and destruction of Asuras has to be the worst case of planetary defense I've ever seen.

Let's consider what we have seen in all Stargate thus far:

• We've seen that newly relocated Tollans could, with a handful ion cannons and homing bolts, vapourize Ha'taks in no time.
  
  
• Earth, with one single outpost and a single drone platform, wiped out the entirety of Anubis thirty plus updated Ha'taks, including his superior Ha'tak.
  
  
• One single cannon, powered by the equivalent of a power source that could go as far as provide the power of two dozens of ZPMs, completely annihilated a Wraith fleet to such an extent no other Wraith fleet even bothered coming back.
  
  
• We know that Atlantis alone, with 3 ZPMs and a defensive system certainly not meant to do so, stretched its shield to cover a large portion of a planet.
  
  
• We've seen that a few drones powered by a puddle jumper can dramatically damage any Wraith cruiser and hiveship, and ignore near all tried shields.
  
  
• The Lantians had defense satellite platforms housing a beam weapon system, capable of destroying three Wraith hiveships in no time while powered by a measly naqahdah generator Mk I.
  
  
• The Asurans proved to be very adaptive after the Tau'ri's devastating surprise attack on their planet, with one of the most compact and effective weapons ever seen, the satellite-gate: small, barely bigger than a stargate, mounted with its own hyperdrive and shield generator, tapping from the energy sent through the wormhole and firing a low power beam still capable of bringing down Atlantis' shield in 29 hours, by draining its ZPM in a most mysterious way.
  
  
• The Lantians also built a sanctuary, a valley enclosed within a time dilation bubble that would literally rip apart, due to time tides, anything approaching it. Rodney estimated this place was running on one ZPM.
  
  
• In Inferno, we've seen that the Lantian shipyard/base could drive energy out of the magma to power a shield that would protect the planet from a Wraith fleet.
  
  
• The Asurans could obviously spare one ZPM and set it up to destroy anything in orbit of that planet. The Asurans' memories and knowledge were saved, as proved with Oberoth.

No matter the Asgard wank beams, how is it possible that, with having an entire fleet of Aurorags, said off show to be of poorer conception, but they can't be that bad really, and with a fleet of cloakable cruisers, plus a formidable industry... they failed that much?
Please consider the urbanization of Asuras: there were cities everywhere. Plenty of ZPMs to spare. Where we the gazillion puddle jumpers you'd expect there?

How didn't they come to fortress up their world in no time, as fast as we've seen them build their ships, since they proved to adapt smartly after the Horizon attack?
Where were the planetary shields? The drone outposts? The pulse-guns with homing bolts as seen in Trinity? The yellow/green slicing beams? The ZPM draining red beams?

If that lack of military defenses was not enough, how could it be that anyone could beam down without interference anywhere in their city, move freely without being stopped by sealed doors or internal shields, remain unspotted by internal sensors? How could someone have such a free walk in their buildings months after they got attacked by surprise with near teraton nukes?

I know, some of you would say they were dumb, but please, did they really look that dumb?
How could the Asurans, capable of having a discussion like any human, showing intelligence like any human, having their agressive code unlocked, and obviously possessing a lot of high technology, like in the medical field for example, not come up with a fraction of all the known Lantian resources they would know about in order to defend their planet, and yet still think, on their own, of building various warships?

So considering the completely unlikelyness that the Asurans were that impotent, I came to think that they got hacked on a massive scale in a way or another.

I've been initially thinking of Weir, but perhaps there was another program at play or some other force? A Wraith virus maybe?

[Xiphias]

Life isn't fair.

[Rise Of The Phoenix]

Besides your hacking theory Mister Oragahn I think maybe all the Asuran's available resources had gone into making their fleet, once that was built maybe they thought their city complexes were strong enough to withstand any attack made on their home world.
Perhaps with their knowledge of how Ancient shield tech works our guys were able to mod the Asgard transporters to beam through the Asuran's, but then surely the Asurans should have known we'd know that and alter theirs in line with that fact, I'd say this is a hole that was needed to be left open so that the plan could work to make BAMSR go off without a hitch.

I do agree that it seems like the Asurans would be perfectly capable of duplicating things like the Ancients Lagrange satellites, with the ability to produce as many ZPMs as they'd need they would IMO be more than capable of making some Atlantis style shield generators to shield an entire planet or build Drone platforms that could sweep their planet's orbit free of enemy ships a good few thousand kilometers but I guess if the Writers had made the Asurans too powerful then entering their system would have pure suicide for any of their enemies.
Maybe all of their excess Drones were being made ready to ship to the Auroras and that's when they got attacked by our guys.

I thought the Asurans would be the most well equipped of all advanced beings in the Stargate universe but I honestly can't think of any really good reasons why they didn't have anything besides their fleet attacking our guys in BAMSR, or why they didn't block people from getting to their planet or in the city, that does seem very silly to me, but hey I guess lazy writing was needed for us to win.

[Ltcolshepjumper]

It's a plothole. As well, the whole "the Asuran Auroras are weaker" is a plothole too, because the Ancient ships from the very beginning were far more powerful than the Hives, and we know the Wraith stagnated for 10,000 years. And the Asurans had the numbers to match that of the Wraith.

[Finger13]

To be honest it was lazy writing. The vast majority of Stargate's space battles are just sloppy, illogical and foolish.

If it was actually realistically written, then Hives would have been obliterated by drones immediately after coming into orbit. The Asurans had at least one Atlantis if not more, plus how ever many drones. It's even more hilarious that Shepperd mentions how they'll be firing drones from the surface, yet clearly they never do or else the attacking fleet would have suffered far heavier losses.

The battle was completely ridiculous and made absolutely no sense. It might have been reasonably acceptable if the attackers actually lost substantial forces, but all we have confirmed is one destroyed Traveller's ship and a heavily damaged Hive.

Stargate needs to seriously revamp its space battles, or else it should just leave them out entirely. I certainly hope SGU can put some credibility into their space scenes, and that it's not some Star Trek: Voyager where the ship gets raped every show yet continues on fine for several years.

Better yet, Stargate should get back to using real military strategy like they did in earlier seasons. Every space related battle in Stargate consists of ships sitting in one spot and shooting at each other, which might be fine if it weren't for the weapons involved. I mean in BSG it's certainly believable that the two ships would sit still and duke it out because all they do is spam each other with projectile weapons. But in SG where there are shields and lasers and such, and where realism is obviously sacrificed for visual pleasure, it's so foolish that they just park and shoot each other.

Ethon is an example of everything that I hate about Stargate's space writing.

[Ouroboros]

There was hacking going on certainly, in the writing room. Ba dum dum tssh.

[thekillman]

We've seen that a few drones powered by a puddle jumper can dramatically damage any Wraith cruiser and hiveship, and ignore near all tried shields.

nope. goauld shields and goauld based shields. nothing else.


i think weir indeed had something to do with it. remember that her faction wanted to be peacefull and not be hunted by the asurans?

also, the trinity guns cost an insane amount of power. the sattelite weapon was powered by the entire homeworld and to me, was a plasma bridge that acted as a conduit, allowing the asurans to send quadrillions of volts and wats down on the shield to bear, not damaging but rather depleting the shield.

most of the wank-stuff defence doesnt seem feasible to me on asuras, seeing their resources being pumped into ship design. only one thing bugs me. drones. if they had been massproduced, we'd be facing an arctic superweapon atleast. and though i dont think drones can penetrate our shields at all, just damage them, there would be enough drones to destroy the entire attacking fleet in 10 seconds.

i think they were simply too buisy on both the offensive and on figuring out how the hell we could track them

[Mister Oragahn]

nope. goauld shields and goauld based shields. nothing else.

I mentionned tried shields because many were seen without knowing if drones would work against them. Now you can count Asuran Auroras' shields being porous as well.
Another damning event btw: Sheppard fires drones at an Aurorag, the bots fire drones to intercept Sheppard's, but a few pass through, and seriously damage the Asuran ship.

also, the trinity guns cost an insane amount of power.

Nope. I mean, they were supposed to bleed off some energy, but I suppose that was only if you worked the reactor at an absurdly low fraction of its potential.

The gun was built there as part of the defense system. I suspect shields were there as well: the way the building's perimeter is so clean and the rest of the city ruined can only be explained by an exceptional event that put the Lantian building out of any weapon's blast effect.

There's no proof really that the gun was solely built to exploit the crazy power of the reactor. We're speaking of a reactor that could output the equivalent of many large main sequence stars per second.

The very fact that the gun, firing at the puddle jumper, didn't vapourize the entire field of debris the moment a bolt connected with a leftover from a Wraith hull section, and the fact that a puddle jumper flying some 50 m close to such small pulverized debris wasn't flash vapourized either, tells that the cannon could obviously fire very low yield bolts.

There is no doubt, however, that considering what it did to the Wraith ships, and possibly the rest of the place, it would fire incredibly powerful bolts.

The reality is that even a ZPM would be totally overkill to power such a weapon.

the sattelite weapon was powered by the entire homeworld and to me, was a plasma bridge that acted as a conduit, allowing the asurans to send quadrillions of volts and wats down on the shield to bear, not damaging but rather depleting the shield.

I think McKay only assumed that the Asurans used a certain limited quantity of ZPMs for this weapon. Whatever it did to the shield is bizarre, but obviously the shield has the capacity, in a way or another, to dump the massive energies into some limbo, because we surely didn't see the equivalent of septillions of Tsar Bombas hitting the asteroid placed there by F-302s.

most of the wank-stuff defence doesnt seem feasible to me on asuras, seeing their resources being pumped into ship design.

Earth, with its flimsy resources, can build warships in secret. The Replicators/Asurans controlled an entire planet and could expand on any colony if they wanted to.
I find it extremely unlikely they could not come with anything better than the few dozen ships they got.

When you consider their industrial capacity AND how fast they rebuilt the top of Atlantis' tower, really, it doesn't add up.

only one thing bugs me. drones. if they had been massproduced, we'd be facing an arctic superweapon atleast. and though i dont think drones can penetrate our shields at all, just damage them, there would be enough drones to destroy the entire attacking fleet in 10 seconds.

That, and it's equally amusing that the Asurans would not be mass producing drones since they were in the middle of a campaign to ravage all inhabited planets.
They'd just have to bend to pick up the drones being produced.

Hell, they precisely returned their ships to Asuras because they knew something was going on.
We didn't even see a single of those cloakable cruisers in the battle.

i think they were simply too buisy on both the offensive and on figuring out how the hell we could track them

I equally find it hard to believe that no one would spot the humans in their city, when we know they use internal sensors which, at least, can make a difference between machines and people, and can also track down the most minuscule virus possible (hence the quarantine scenarii).

Their failure is even more insulting to intelligence when you know that they understood the principle of trial and deciphering to crack the disruption field mechanism. They keps sending bots until they figured out, in very little time, how the damn thing worked.

Besides your hacking theory Mister Oragahn I think maybe all the Asuran's available resources had gone into making their fleet, once that was built maybe they thought their city complexes were strong enough to withstand any attack made on their home world.

I don't see how their buildings could be strong enough to take on any bombardment. They were the same Lantian flavour building, the "remarkable fragile" ones, pulverized by a mere drones.

Perhaps with their knowledge of how Ancient shield tech works our guys were able to mod the Asgard transporters to beam through the Asuran's, but then surely the Asurans should have known we'd know that and alter theirs in line with that fact, I'd say this is a hole that was needed to be left open so that the plan could work to make BAMSR go off without a hitch.

I do agree that it seems like the Asurans would be perfectly capable of duplicating things like the Ancients Lagrange satellites, with the ability to produce as many ZPMs as they'd need they would IMO be more than capable of making some Atlantis style shield generators to shield an entire planet or build Drone platforms that could sweep their planet's orbit free of enemy ships a good few thousand kilometers but I guess if the Writers had made the Asurans too powerful then entering their system would have pure suicide for any of their enemies.
Maybe all of their excess Drones were being made ready to ship to the Auroras and that's when they got attacked by our guys.

I thought the Asurans would be the most well equipped of all advanced beings in the Stargate universe but I honestly can't think of any really good reasons why they didn't have anything besides their fleet attacking our guys in BAMSR, or why they didn't block people from getting to their planet or in the city, that does seem very silly to me, but hey I guess lazy writing was needed for us to win.

But that's the problem. Instead of being honest with their very creation, and not dumbing them down, they should have given the Asurans what they should have had, and have the Tau'ri rely on some other plan and potential allies, and pull a CNP on Asuras for example.
I know it's absolutely awful writing in terms of credibility for a fictional universe, but at least trying to make sense of it would help.

I for one wouldn't mind a smart approach to this event with one of these SGA novels, which would bring far more background to the story and even borrow some sequences from the episode like Shadows of the Empire did for Star Wars' Return of the Jedi.

To be honest it was lazy writing. The vast majority of Stargate's space battles are just sloppy, illogical and foolish.

Indeed. Well, spacebattles are actually a recent thing in Stargate, and it's unfortunate that they had to happen at a time I think Stargate has been going down at a fast pace in terms of quality.

If it was actually realistically written, then Hives would have been obliterated by drones immediately after coming into orbit. The Asurans had at least one Atlantis if not more, plus how ever many drones. It's even more hilarious that Shepperd mentions how they'll be firing drones from the surface, yet clearly they never do or else the attacking fleet would have suffered far heavier losses.

Dang, Sheppard did mention the drones fired from the surface?
Wow. It actually helps the idea that something happened down there, since we know that the characters were, at least, not ignorant of what they were up against.

The battle was completely ridiculous and made absolutely no sense. It might have been reasonably acceptable if the attackers actually lost substantial forces, but all we have confirmed is one destroyed Traveller's ship and a heavily damaged Hive.

Indeed. You'll notice that they pulled the same thing with the Lantian ships used by the Asgards in Lost Tripe while exchanging shots 100 meters away from each other.

Stargate needs to seriously revamp its space battles, or else it should just leave them out entirely. I certainly hope SGU can put some credibility into their space scenes, and that it's not some Star Trek: Voyager where the ship gets raped every show yet continues on fine for several years.

Better yet, Stargate should get back to using real military strategy like they did in earlier seasons. Every space related battle in Stargate consists of ships sitting in one spot and shooting at each other, which might be fine if it weren't for the weapons involved. I mean in BSG it's certainly believable that the two ships would sit still and duke it out because all they do is spam each other with projectile weapons. But in SG where there are shields and lasers and such, and where realism is obviously sacrificed for visual pleasure, it's so foolish that they just park and shoot each other.

Ethon is an example of everything that I hate about Stargate's space writing.

And SGA's finale as well. It's most annoying because in some episode, like in Allies, they did show ships moving around. Even in Reckoning, although once again the ranges and speed of projectiles were quite on the ridiculous side of things. I mean, the amount of power used to fly around at a stupid pace in the vain hope of having a Ha'tak shake off another Ha'tak... whether they try to do it properly, or don't bother and just sit there and fire crap at each other.

Hell, even in Flesh and Blood, they have Ha'taks almost fight like fighters against the Ori toilet ships. And then you have Camelot, for which you wonder why they bother calling it a space battle when they obviously use only a non existent fraction of it.

[thekillman]

i loved the BAMSR battle as it was something i had hoped for. but why did these people not realise that they could just, uhm, toss a gate dialling a black hole into the sun and blow up the whole planet and solar system

[Ouroboros]

Does anyone still have that animated .gif of the drone so very obviously breaching the (presumably ancient grade) shields on the puddlejumper in the episode where the Asurans take over Atlantis?

It's the one where there was a huge argument about if the drone skipped off the shields or actually penetrated but just by sheer luck missed the ship underneath. The .gif made it very obvious that it was the second one once someone posted it.

[thekillman]

but we have ASGARD shields. and it has never been shown that it can penetrate. you could bring up todd's argument, but then again john wouldve docked via a jumper.

[Buba uognarf]

but we have ASGARD shields. and it has never been shown that it can penetrate. you could bring up todd's argument, but then again john wouldve docked via a jumper.

They may not penetrate outright but there's no reason to think they wouldn't do a lot of damage.

Also maybe Todd would have beamed sheppard aboard?

[thekillman]

how? do you really think the expedition would allow todd to beam him off the base?

or from a jumper? and then? make the jumper immobile and make it a pain in the butt to retrieve it? or maybe more people in the jumper, who can destroy the hyperdrive as the shields have to be dropped for beaming?

[Buba uognarf]

how? do you really think the expedition would allow todd to beam him off the base?

or from a jumper? and then? make the jumper immobile and make it a pain in the butt to retrieve it? or maybe more people in the jumper, who can destroy the hyperdrive as the shields have to be dropped for beaming?

I didn't say they would, I suggested thats its possible. Like you said Todd could beam Sheppard off the Jumper before its within the shield perimeter and even as soon as the Jumper leaves Atlantis.

Regardless I think its very likely that drones would be effective against Asgard ships, maybe not bypassing them instantly but still far more effective than say Wraith energy weapons.

[Mister Oragahn]

It's not even a question if they could be effective. Even a puddle jumper and an Ori ship were fended off by drones, and most ships of the fleet that "attacked" Asuras was composed of Traveller ships (inferior to Auroras and yet held on very well against Aurorags) and unshielded hiveships. There's no point even trying to know if drones were relevant or not.
The question is to know why when attacking Botland, 90% of the fleet wasn't destroyed within the first two minutes.