Ship based satellite weapon

[patjsjr]

Every Ancient battleship seen on the series seemed to use drones as their only weapon. Wouldn't it have made more sense to equip them with the same weapon used in the Lagrange defense satellite? The satellite beam was able to destroy a Wraith Hive with one shot without even being powered by a ZPM.

[xandder]

I was always under the impression that they couldn't make the laser beams small enough to fit onto ships while keeping it effective enough against the wraith. I would imagine that's the reason that the satallite is so huge in the first place, who knows how the thing actually works, there could be hundreds of capacitors or what ever that when powered by a low energy source is able to output it at a considerable higher yeild. This would make it nigh impossible to adapt it to the Aurora class ships, which while they are big, the beam it self is HUGE, so there really would be any room on the ship to fit such a weapon, but that's just my opinion

[spinny magee]

It would make sense, they would need auxiliary weapons

[meo3000]

It goes to show how far the writers thought about about the background story of the Ancients. Ships couldve had smaller versions, phaser like, to destroy darts and whatnot.

Writers consistently drop the ball, like with Atlantis, the Ancients abandoned it leaving no advanced clutter behind, but they left the jumpers, for that matter, they left the city, they couldve fired up the stardrive and open a subspace window while under water. The earth expedition shouldve found a ton of technological stuff in the city, but no, not even a laser gun.

Really, Ronon, the guy that has been living like a caveman for 7 years, still have the best gun after 4 years in Atlantis?

Everyone says that if they had all of the Ancients stuff, they would be too strong, the series wouldve been boring, i disagree, it wouldve been focused on human interaction far more than Rodney saving the day almost every other day.

In the end, it was the writers fault.

[aeneas]

I find it hard to believe that the Ancients couldn't equip their ships with beam weapons, considering that the Asgard were able to fit the Odyssey with similar (if not quite as powerful) weapons.

[Ice Wolf]

I think the writers really did a great disservice to the Ancients with their work on Atlantis.

The Ancient ships should definitely have had the Satellite-type Weapons. After all they weren't that big, they were big in comparison to a Puddle Jumper, but they wouldn't have be that big to Atlantis or an Aurora-Type.

[Kratine]

When the weapons are to big for your ship, build a bigger ship.

But, hey we've only seen a handful of Ancient ship classes, who's to say they didn't build some dreadnoughts that could house such weapons.

[Bebbe777]

The Destiny seems large enough to possible house a satellite based weapon.

[captain simms]

it was stated in the episode that the satellite was the roughly the size on a hatak mother ship so imagine that attached to the aroura class haha

[Wib]

I always wondered why the reliance on drones rather than energy weapons, yes the drones look cool and they are likely to be more accurate given they are being controlled by the person in the chair, but eventually they run out, beams don't.

[Lantean General]

I always wondered why the reliance on drones rather than energy weapons, yes the drones look cool and they are likely to be more accurate given they are being controlled by the person in the chair, but eventually they run out, beams don't.

Drones can be more precise and possibly use less power.

[Ed]

A good way towrite it in would be to have that thing on the side be a smaller version but it cant kill hives because its smaller and has a really low ROF but enugh to 1HK crusiers

[Andru10]

Drones can be more precise and possibly use less power.

I don't think they require less power, we know that it takes a Mark 2 naquadah generator at barely controlled overload to power the chair while it only takes a standard Mark 1 generator to power the satellite weapon.
However I do agree with the fact that drones are extremely precise.
Not only that but we've seen that the satellite takes some time to charge up and when you're ambushed it's pretty ineficient to take out one ship, wait for the weapon to recharge fire again etc while being fired upon all this time. Drones are far more reliable in an ambush situation, and since the Wraith had really large numbers it's possible that in almost all situations the Ancients were outnumbered.
On top of that Wraith Cruisers are quite maneuvrable, we saw Micheal's Cruiser evade Daedalus's beam weapons in Kindred part 2.
So while Drones are limited, they never miss no matter how well a ship maneuvers.

[meo3000]

We also need to remember that the ancient were not a war like race so drones were probably used only as a last resort. You cant ascend if you consistently kill off people.

[RepliVeggie]

If you look at the drones used against Anubis. You'd think a secondary weapon system wasn't needed. They didn't seem to explode on impact but drive right through everything. Or maybe it was just the sheer amount of them they seemed to just pass through.