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    Wraith, Wraith War and Ancients Questions

    I had a few questions about some SGA details and hoped some of you might be able to help
    My main interest is in just how the Ancients ever managed to lose such a war, as certain things seemed strange to me. So..

    - One factor often cited as a key strategic advantage for the Wraith is that of greater numbers. How is this possible? Am I right in thinking that by the time the Ancients "created" the Wraith that their society was millions of years old and that they had visited at least three known galaxies? Because we know how ambitious they were, so surely they would have had dozens if not hundreds of colony's? In addition, the wraith's population is limited by the food supply (humans) and that supply must have been quite sparse back then, as the various worlds seen in SGA would have been relatively new and the Ancients themselves would have surely seldom been vulnerable enough to be eaten, as opposed to simply having their ships destroyed.

    - Another issue I have is the incredible level of science and technology the Wraith possess. How could this have come to be? Do we know how many years passed between their creation and the war? It seems unlikely they could have reached any great level of advancement or understanding on their own (given their hunter/savage nature of them individually and also their split, hive based society, which promotes warfare and conflict).

    - Lastly, SGA shows that the Ancients had the equivalent to WMD's - or at least weapons able to destroy numerous hive ships on a scale we see no evidence that the Wraith had (Drones/Defence Satellite).
    My main issue with this is that surely the Ancients had almost limitless resources, given their technology to harvest them and ability to reach other galaxies for them. An example of this is the Stargate program itself, literally hundreds of incredibly complex structures made from all manner of rare and exotic metals/resources. So surely they could have built an incredible number of such weapons?

    #2
    Originally posted by illyria View Post
    I had a few questions about some SGA details and hoped some of you might be able to help
    My main interest is in just how the Ancients ever managed to lose such a war, as certain things seemed strange to me. So..

    - One factor often cited as a key strategic advantage for the Wraith is that of greater numbers. How is this possible? Am I right in thinking that by the time the Ancients "created" the Wraith that their society was millions of years old and that they had visited at least three known galaxies? Because we know how ambitious they were, so surely they would have had dozens if not hundreds of colony's? In addition, the wraith's population is limited by the food supply (humans) and that supply must have been quite sparse back then, as the various worlds seen in SGA would have been relatively new and the Ancients themselves would have surely seldom been vulnerable enough to be eaten, as opposed to simply having their ships destroyed.
    well as you said they had a lot of colonies and they had been seeding humans across the galaxy so food was no problem for the wraith.

    - Another issue I have is the incredible level of science and technology the Wraith possess. How could this have come to be? Do we know how many years passed between their creation and the war? It seems unlikely they could have reached any great level of advancement or understanding on their own (given their hunter/savage nature of them individually and also their split, hive based society, which promotes warfare and conflict).
    they stole it from the ancients

    - Lastly, SGA shows that the Ancients had the equivalent to WMD's - or at least weapons able to destroy numerous hive ships on a scale we see no evidence that the Wraith had (Drones/Defence Satellite).
    My main issue with this is that surely the Ancients had almost limitless resources, given their technology to harvest them and ability to reach other galaxies for them. An example of this is the Stargate program itself, literally hundreds of incredibly complex structures made from all manner of rare and exotic metals/resources. So surely they could have built an incredible number of such weapons?
    if they werent prepared for a war then they may have lost a heap in surprise attacks.

    Comment


      #3
      I'm not sure how much tech they actually stole, since Wraith organic tech is quite different from what we've seen of Ancient technology. Also, war is the greatest spur for some kinds of technological development, at least until we get to the WMD stage.

      I expect that the Ancients in their arrogance simply underestimated the Wraith, and by the time they realized their mistake it was already too late. The Ascended Ancients could destroy the remaining Wraith any time they wanted, but they don't care enough about our plane of existence to do so.

      Normally, the Wraith hives seem fairly united, it's only when they're fighting over scarce resources that they turn on each other.
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        #4
        Originally posted by illyria View Post
        I had a few questions about some SGA details and hoped some of you might be able to help
        My main interest is in just how the Ancients ever managed to lose such a war, as certain things seemed strange to me. So..
        You've done a pretty good job of picking out all the main problems with the whole scenario here. To put it simply there is no good explanation for any single one of the problems you've pointed out. You might get some people trying to make excuses to explain away these points you've raised but I've been on here for years and I've never heard a believable one for any of them yet, and they've been raised plenty of times before.

        - One factor often cited as a key strategic advantage for the Wraith is that of greater numbers. How is this possible? Am I right in thinking that by the time the Ancients "created" the Wraith that their society was millions of years old and that they had visited at least three known galaxies? Because we know how ambitious they were, so surely they would have had dozens if not hundreds of colony's? In addition, the wraith's population is limited by the food supply (humans) and that supply must have been quite sparse back then, as the various worlds seen in SGA would have been relatively new and the Ancients themselves would have surely seldom been vulnerable enough to be eaten, as opposed to simply having their ships destroyed.
        The story as written asks us to believe that the Wraith either evolved from a mutation between bugs and humans or were found already in hibernation by the ancients on a single planet.

        In both scenarios though the Wraith would start with a single planet and then somehow expand to drive back an entire galaxy of ancients. Even though the show paid a lot of lip service to the idea that the Wraith outnumbered the ancients that would only have been true later on. At the beginning it would have instead been the Wraith who were outnumbered massively, both in people, ships and territory.

        This would then seem to require a scenario where the Wraith were actually the ones who were qualitatively superior. In other words they had the better tech, it could have made more sense that way. The ancients accidentally awaken this horribly nasty enemy that has lain dormant for thousands of years and has even better tech than they do, and before they can catch their breath they've already lost huge chunks of territory, and this enemy is now even growing to outnumber hem. It's only a matter of time until they lose etc. I could buy that scenario. It even comes with a nice message about the perils of unrestrained curiosity/expansion/exploration, and shows that as powerful as you think you are there's always someone else out there who's more powerful. The series instead stubbornly clung to the idea of the ancients as being the ultimate zenith of mortal creation and tried to force feed us a scenario where they lose an entire galaxy to a group of people with inferior tech that started with a scant fraction of the resources. So to preserve the idea of them being technological gods they made them look like tactical and strategic retards.

        - Another issue I have is the incredible level of science and technology the Wraith possess. How could this have come to be? Do we know how many years passed between their creation and the war? It seems unlikely they could have reached any great level of advancement or understanding on their own (given their hunter/savage nature of them individually and also their split, hive based society, which promotes warfare and conflict).
        No one knows. It was never satisfactorily explained. In theory they must have advanced extraordinarily quickly to catch the ancients by surprise the way they did. If however, they can advance that quickly, why then did they hit a sudden brick wall 10,000 years ago and not advance one iota since, even with all the ancient tech spoils of their victory to study.

        In theory again a species that can live as long a they do and trade knowledge psychically should have some pretty nice advantages when it comes to advancing as a whole but it's never mentioned. They just got hive ships one day and killed the ancients with them, then apparently never upgraded or even changed anything for 10,000 years.

        - Lastly, SGA shows that the Ancients had the equivalent to WMD's - or at least weapons able to destroy numerous hive ships on a scale we see no evidence that the Wraith had (Drones/Defence Satellite).
        My main issue with this is that surely the Ancients had almost limitless resources, given their technology to harvest them and ability to reach other galaxies for them. An example of this is the Stargate program itself, literally hundreds of incredibly complex structures made from all manner of rare and exotic metals/resources. So surely they could have built an incredible number of such weapons?
        The Wraith as depicted in the series should not have been able to defeat the ancients as depicted in the series period. Something is missing. Either the Wraith were a lot more powerful back then, having super weapons and more potent ships of their own and have backslid drastically in the last 10,000 years, or the Wraith in the Pegasus galaxy do not represent the totality of the Wraith species, and there are other more numerous and advanced Wraith living elsewhere in the universe that represent the current state of the art for the species.

        If I were writing it I'd mix in a bit of both. The Pegasus Wraith are still living in Pegasus because they choose to live in the "traditional way" hunting humans for sport as their ancestors did with the same ships and tools their ancestors used, where as the majority of Wraith civilization has moved on elsewhere and had been sustaining itself with artificially manufactured/cloned food sources for thousands of years and advanced its tech and society at a normal rate since the war ended.

        Comment


          #5
          Wasn't it mentioned that the key to the wraith's greater number's was stolen ZPM's in a season 4 episode i believe? If i remember correctly, it was mentioned that with a ZPM plugged into some cloning facility, the Wraith were able to create thousand's of soldiers in a very short period of time.

          If number's are the reason the Ancient's lost the war, than it's clear the wraith no longer have those number's. Guess it's possible a large number of them died off after the war due to a reduced number of human's to feed on, or there are still a hell of alot more wraith still sleeping somewhere.

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by boyd22 View Post
            Wasn't it mentioned that the key to the wraith's greater number's was stolen ZPM's in a season 4 episode i believe? If i remember correctly, it was mentioned that with a ZPM plugged into some cloning facility, the Wraith were able to create thousand's of soldiers in a very short period of time.

            If number's are the reason the Ancient's lost the war, than it's clear the wraith no longer have those number's. Guess it's possible a large number of them died off after the war due to a reduced number of human's to feed on, or there are still a hell of alot more wraith still sleeping somewhere.
            Jep, so I remember too. It was short and only the number - and to me it makes sense because the wraith were going to "sleep" after the war with the ancients because they didn't have enough food. In Rising Sheppard woken up the wraith by killing their keeper.

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            Comment


              #7
              The Wraith numbers advantage is very clearly explained the season 4 episode "Spoils of War".
              They stole 3 ZPMs off the Ancients and created that cloning facility, that is where their huge numbers come from.

              As to the Wraith's technology level. The same can be said for any of the races in Stargate, how were the Ancients able to build that inter-galactic ship they used to flee the Ori when they were living in a medieval style village? We just have to accept some things.
              But there are plausible explanations, The Ancients were active in Pegasus for millions of years, so the Wraith may have been around for a long long time before the war started. Also the Wraith are functionally immortal which would greatly speed up the gathering of knowledge as they wouldn't need to pass knowledge down to the next generation. The Wraith also possess telepathic abilites, it is possible they could have used these to gain knowledge from the Ancients.
              Last edited by D Toccs; 23 January 2011, 05:24 PM.

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                #8
                What probably happened is that whenever they had numerical advantage, the ancients won handily. When the odds were more even the ancients lost. They said they sent their most powerful warships at the final attempt for peace and got their butts kicked. In reality what transpired was not unlike a nube getting owned playing starcraft.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by D Toccs View Post
                  The Wraith numbers advantage is very clearly explained the season 4 episode "Spoils of War".
                  They stole 3 ZPMs off the Ancients and created that cloning facility, that is where their huge numbers come from.

                  As to the Wraith's technology level. The same can be said for any of the races in Stargate, how were the Ancients able to build that inter-galactic ship they used to flee the Ori when they were living in a medieval style village? We just have to accept some things.
                  But there are plausible explanations, The Ancients were active in Pegasus for millions of years, so the Wraith may have been around for a long long time before the war started. Also the Wraith are functionally immortal which would greatly speed up the gathering of knowledge as they wouldn't need to pass knowledge down to the next generation. The Wraith also possess telepathic abilites, it is possible they could have used these to gain knowledge from the Ancients.
                  I would guess the wraith intellegence is directly related to the food they eat. If you're eating Kaleks or prior like beings you will leap frog from an evolutionary standpoint.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    ^ I like that idea! Maybe that's also why they don't sully themselves by feeding on non-sapient animals. Just guessing here, though.
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                    Comment


                      #11
                      i see it this way....whe the wraith captured ancients they probed their minds and gained their knowledge(like wen that queen in ''rising'' probed minds and found out about earth),but wait, shudn't they already kno about earth from captured ancients?
                      they used zpm's not only to mass produce more wraiths but also more ships and remember they were not afraid to go kamikaze.
                      the wraith were not unlike the goual'd and no one knows the level of intelligence of those iratus bugs.when the goual'd took a host it gained all the hosts knowledge and memories.
                      they could have used the atero device to destroy the wrait but as todd said, wen it came down to it they just couldn't go through with it.......just as they did with the ori in AOT.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Another issue I have is the incredible level of science and technology the Wraith possess. How could this have come to be? Do we know how many years passed between their creation and the war? It seems unlikely they could have reached any great level of advancement or understanding on their own (given their hunter/savage nature of them individually and also their split, hive based society, which promotes warfare and conflict).


                        well how did the tauri who were defeat the replicators ,ori, and replicators in such a short time wen they were so far behind in technology?they did in 10 years what the much more advanced races couldn't do in thousands.
                        Last edited by Rosehawk; 12 March 2011, 06:42 AM. Reason: Fixed quote marks

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                          #13
                          don't even try to understand the Lantean-Wraith war. It simply doesn't make any sense. It's obvious the Lanteans lost the war because of their stupidity
                          Stolen Kosovo
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                            #14
                            After reading the Halo Encyclopedia all the way through, I asked myself how the Forerunners could have possibly not been able to contain the flood. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that both the Forerunners and Ancients were afflicted with an airborne virus that makes its victims stupid simply so something interesting happens thousands of years in the future. Either that or the plot was set up horribly.

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                              #15
                              I also wondered about this:
                              After Siege Part 3 the wraith are in the same situation as when the Ancients abandoned Atlantis. So why the hell didn't they go back to hibernation? They were all awake because the fought the ancients, there were massive numbers because of cloning and the food supply was probably even worse after all the years of war. It makes no sense that they fight now over their food source 'cause then they should have done so 10'000 years ago.

                              Something else that bothers me: There is absolutely no development in the wraith story, apart from Michael and Todd. SGA made a good attempt in S1 (Steve), in S2 it got lost a bit but came brilliantly back in S3 with CG but then again nothing, except for that ridiculous ep Queen. The idea of Queen was good but just it was so cheesy with that bow to the queen thing and change of power, if that truly would be their way, then the other queen would be on their guard, and that dumb speech at the end.
                              Blue is such a nice color, especially if you have wings.

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