Everything you ever wanted to know about Hiveships/Wraith.

[Crazy Tom]

Don't inertial dampeners sort of deflect the forces assosiated with acceleration, so teh ship woudl be "lighter" in hte sense that it wouldn't have as much inertia. Teh engines would have a far easier job, and it would explain them beeing able to fly in atmo witout blasting a crater with tehir engines.

[Mister Oragahn]

They compensate for the effects of acceleration inside the ship. Otherwise, if the compensation was applied to the whole ship, it wouldn't accelerate.
The technology would be an off shot of what is used to create artificial gravity, safe that the inertia dampeners would be dynamic and working with what engines output... while artificial gravity would, for example, consider the presence of gravity fields to nullify their effects inside a ship. That way, people don't fall towards a planet just because it's above them and the ship is in close orbit.

[Ouroboros]

To comment on the whole idea of the hiveship crash, yeah. The only thing we could come up with for why it would crash at a speed much slower than if it had simply fallen completely unpowered from orbit was to joke around that the ship's former queen had installed some sort of computerized emergency brake, sort of like those second brake pedals you find in driving instructor's cars. This would be to prevent her idiot underlings from flying the ship into planets while she was in the shower/asleep/on the can etc.

I think we're also going to have to come to the conclusion now that the post upgrade 304s are pretty much useless for deriving any sort of comparative performance benchmarks from. They're so absolutely over the top with wank and inconsistency in virtually all categories that it's better just to accept that they'll kill everything in 3 shots with their magical plot beams and focus on comparing everything else to get actual power levels.

[Mister Oragahn]

Hi people! It's time to bump this sweetie thread!

So, we are in season 5 now, and what did we see?

First, the Wraith have Queens, and the top Queen of a given alliance of tribes is a Primary, a goth beeyatch with a screen lifetime of approximately two to three minutes.
Her throne room was rather vast, and used as her personal quarters.

What we've seen is that all hiveships have not the same firepower. Basically, doing something as simple as firing, firing and firing again at another hiveship, while being the first to fire by a long margin, doesn't guarantee you success.

We also realize that whatever the hiveships in The Hive fired, it was certainly far far more powerful than the stuff exchanged by most hiveships thus far.

Moreso, Darts can be useful against hiveships, as they can still hit targets of choice, like, for example, hyperdrives, or even weapon batteries I suppose. However, Darts could certainly not kill hiveships.

We've seen that Wraith ships can transfer energy to hull regeneration back in season 4.

The destruction of the medial weapons array shook the hiveship bridge more than the direct impacts from the other hiveship's bolts, strongly suggesting that the bridge where Teyla and Todd stood was close to the ship's center.
It's very possible these batteries were lost due to the enemy Darts counter attacking, since they managed to outnumber Teyla's Darts 2 to 1.

6 drones fired by a puddle jumper can tip the balance and seriously damage a hiveship, so much that Teyla's ship suddenly got the upper hand. The destroyed hiveships didn't blow up in some giant fireball, but considering that Teyla's was severely diminished, it's not surprising.

However, it once again prooves that the Lanteans would totally rape any Wraith armada with even one single ship, without even a ZPM. The overkill is just there.
That's not even talking about what Auroras and other assault ships, as seen in First Contact, could do with ZPMs.

Fortunately, and probably in trying to patch a plothole, it was revealed that the Wraith can grow their ships from relatively nothing more than a virus. Then the host becomes incapacitated, although remains conscious, until the host' mental abilities become used to monitor the ship's growth. The growing system has its own self defenses. It shows agressivity against foreign elements, and uses tentacles to fend off the intruders.

The Wraith structure grows very quickly in volume, even without having access to the most minor power grid. The process accelerated once the "seed" started to tap into the local tower's electric grid, and even more when it reached the main conduits channeling ZPM energies.
This is where the ZPM makes sense now, as it's not only used to clones troops, but also to grow ships.

Although I'd like to point that the organic structure would still need to grow around and insane a metallic structure which still remains to be built, but obviously a great deal of the job is done automatically.
Destroying the virus in the host stops the structure's growth and kills it.

There's also the fact that Daedalus Variations has proved that subspace can be tapped for energy, which reinforces my pet idea that Wraith ships could do the same, but at a lesser scale, while travelling in hyperspace. Zelenka said that hyperspace radiations damaged Wraith systems during hyperspace trips, so they had to come out of hyperspace to cool down, or "rest".

We've seen more hiveships landed, which just shows how those behemoths can easily take off... without having to be powered by anything close to a ZPM (take that Atlantis and your nonsense lift off).

[EternalAlteran]

I doubt the Wraith have a subspace tap, it also doesn't tap only while in hyperspace. And it is my believe the Ancient lost because Wraith weapons are very effective against them.

[Ouroboros]

I'm thinking that the battles in the Ancient Wraith war were a lot more like swordfights than 12 rounds boxing matches. That's to say they ended fairly quickly and brutally.

We've seen time and again how effective ancient weapons are so that needs little explanation but Wraith weapons don't lag as far behind vs ancient tech as it might initially seem. If anything their weapons seem abnormally effective vs ancient tech as oppossed to something like the Asgard derived shields on the Daedalus.

There's the cityshield example, the beatdown on the ZPM equipped Tria, the stolen from ships that were using them ZPMs that powered the cloning machine and Travellers, which seems to imply that about 100 hits from Wraith cruiser scale batteries will result in total shield failure on an Aurora. 100 hits might sound like a lot but when you think about how the Wraith can fire several bolts per second we're talking give or take a minute to total shield failure here depending on accuracy.

As far as the hiveship growing thing it's not clear if some sort of a frame is required but I'm leaning toward no. Nobody mentioned one and they even seem to try and lead you into thinking that the metal looking portions of a hive are organic by talking about how it's got metallic elements in it and such.

My own personal pet theory is that hiveships are infact grown as full biological creatures but then undergo a sort of cybernetic implantation process to strip them of most of their intelligence, make them more controllable and generally less of a handful to deal with.

I arrive at this because I wonder why the intelligence created out of the hive virus would comment on how it hasn't recieved a designation yet when they ask it who it is after it's taken over Keller. This seems to imply that not only does the intellect play some sort of role that requires that it be given a designation that it needs to know itself for some reason, and the ability to understand and process of communication, but also that it has enough actual intelligence to understand concepts like having a name and the use of language itself. This seems rather unecessary if it's only task is going to be to grow the ship. It seems as if it has human level intelligence when it's growing but then it seems as if adult hives no longer do.

If they did retain that sort of intelligence then they wouldn't even require crews at all and would be both a truely nasty weapon and a potential problem. They could be turned out in mass numbers and used to spam the ancients to death but might very well eventually choose to just abandon the Wraith and live on their own... or turn on them.

Maybe that happened at some point in the past so now all hiveships have their brains and "organs" controlled by the organic brain yanked and replaced with machinery before they're launched.

[thekillman]

seems to me like metals are absorbed from the ground and put wherever needed by the hive.

as to intellect: ever heard about programmed cell death? as soon as growth is complete, the human host probably dies, ripping the hive of its intellect and continuing control on computers.

[Mister Oragahn]

I'm thinking that the battles in the Ancient Wraith war were a lot more like swordfights than 12 rounds boxing matches. That's to say they ended fairly quickly and brutally.

Especially when Lanteans would use ZPMs.
When you need days to deplete a "non-full" ZPM with an armada of 10 hiveships and around 20-30 cruisers, by shooting at a shield stretched over a whole cityship, not a smaller warship, there's no telling that a ZPM powered Aurora is a pure curb stomp, as it's built for combat, with like millions of years of experience added from the initial civilian design of Atlantis.

We've seen time and again how effective ancient weapons are so that needs little explanation but Wraith weapons don't lag as far behind vs ancient tech as it might initially seem. If anything their weapons seem abnormally effective vs ancient tech as oppossed to something like the Asgard derived shields on the Daedalus.

They are, but telling to what extent is very hard.

There's the cityshield example, the beatdown on the ZPM equipped Tria

But we know nothing about how the Tria was attacked, if it was in good shape to boot, nothing at all. People constantly think that the Tria was near 100% functional and had her shields up when she was attacked. I cannot for one second imagine this to be possible.
The Tria, despite being damaged, was capable of a deceleration of 23 gees. It sounds very low, in terms of SF accelerations, but let's remember that it was an acceleration measured outside of time dilation effect. In order for the Tria to achieve such a deceleration in little time, she'd be pumping teratons of energy via its engines. It's a bit wanky, but that's the way it goes, and with a ZPM, at least such powers would be easily accessible.
The idea that cruisers could represent such a danger to the Tria is not one I could buy anytime soon. Not to say how easily downed Wraith ships are, as again shown lately where the mere intervention of a ******* puddle jumper can completely turn the tides with a straffing run and 6 drones against a hiveship.

No, the point is rather clear. Whatever happened to the Tria, it was a finishing job, they already were on the run.

the stolen from ships that were using them ZPMs that powered the cloning machine and Travellers, which seems to imply that about 100 hits from Wraith cruiser scale batteries will result in total shield failure on an Aurora. 100 hits might sound like a lot but when you think about how the Wraith can fire several bolts per second we're talking give or take a minute to total shield failure here depending on accuracy.

Well, you say "a lot", but if you'd ask me, I'd say it's literally 0.0000000000000000000001% of what they'd need to put out to hope get the shields down.
The Orion herself, when damaged and sitting put in the hangar, could still get the shields up for 4.1 seconds as the supervolcano would blow up.
Later on, in No Man's Land, the still not so glorious Orion could withstand shots from a hiveship, before having her shields lowered for Zelenka and Lorne to shoot the drones in a frenzy.
Or you have the 10,000 years old derelict Aurora, which still managed to blow herself up in self destruct and vapourize two nearby cruisers, a blast so powerful that the 304 had to move away. This alone would be worth hundreds of gigatons, when you consider the still impressive volume of the Aurora, the distance of the two cruisers and those cruisers' very armour, at the very least.
There's just no question. Unless stroke by plotic whims, the Auroras are powerful ships, and ZPM onboard makes them total steamroll machines against Wraith forces.

But of course, it is a similar train of thought which convinced me that after First Strike, Asuras would be a hell of a bastion, with the whole Lantean wizzbang rolled out to welcome any intruder, and in the end, it was dumb.

As far as the hiveship growing thing it's not clear if some sort of a frame is required but I'm leaning toward no. Nobody mentioned one and they even seem to try and lead you into thinking that the metal looking portions of a hive are organic by talking about how it's got metallic elements in it and such.

But Seed did not feature a conventional ship growth. Looking at the high level pictures of hiveships, it's abundantly clear that the armour grows around and over a superstructure, which in some places looks like skyscrapers hanging upside down.
The whole way the thing grew on Atlantis' building highlights this. It grows inside to form many cavities, rooms and systems, it grows outside to form the main armoured exoskeleton, and it fuses with the metallic frame and other mechanized parts.

Where those parts of the ships are built is another question. Stargate, as a whole, has been regularly tame about the construction of ships, and somehow it's a good thing because I'm fraid that they'd hardly do any justice to them.
I'd barely be surprised if they showed the hiveships built in the Wraith equivalent of Trek's stardocks, instead of something much more original.

My own personal pet theory is that hiveships are infact grown as full biological creatures but then undergo a sort of cybernetic implantation process to strip them of most of their intelligence, make them more controllable and generally less of a handful to deal with.

I arrive at this because I wonder why the intelligence created out of the hive virus would comment on how it hasn't received a designation yet when they ask it who it is after it's taken over Keller. This seems to imply that not only does the intellect play some sort of role that requires that it be given a designation that it needs to know itself for some reason, and the ability to understand and process of communication, but also that it has enough actual intelligence to understand concepts like having a name and the use of language itself. This seems rather unecessary if it's only task is going to be to grow the ship. It seems as if it has human level intelligence when it's growing but then it seems as if adult hives no longer do.

If they did retain that sort of intelligence then they wouldn't even require crews at all and would be both a truely nasty weapon and a potential problem. They could be turned out in mass numbers and used to spam the ancients to death but might very well eventually choose to just abandon the Wraith and live on their own... or turn on them.

Maybe that happened at some point in the past so now all hiveships have their brains and "organs" controlled by the organic brain yanked and replaced with machinery before they're launched.

This could be possible without requiring Stroggification. It's very possible that the host dies or is absorbed once the construction is finished, therefore so does the brain. Only remain the main neural network, the various control rooms, numerous auxiliary control panels, and the central compucore.

As another point, I don't see any connection between the super mysterious and yet mega decisive Wraith weakness in their tech, and the recent endgame stuff we've seen.
It was very easy for the Lanteans to know the frequency Wraith used as far as their tech was concerned. Any downed ship with a hyperdrive would immediately reveal that information upon inspection. Atlantis even had a cruiser waiting to be looted down there.

[Ouroboros]

Especially when Lanteans would use ZPMs.
When you need days to deplete a "non-full" ZPM with an armada of 10 hiveships and around 20-30 cruisers, by shooting at a shield stretched over a whole cityship, not a smaller warship, there's no telling that a ZPM powered Aurora is a pure curb stomp, as it's built for combat, with like millions of years of experience added from the initial civilian design of Atlantis.

These last two episodes have got me thinking about the whole ZPM shield thing in another way. It's looking more and more like the ZPM itself is not really the point of failure most of the time and furthermore that smaller shields are actually worse than bigger ones. The "first contact" episode features a scene where a stargate explodes and they try to contain it with the cityshields which, in a special feature for this episode only, can now be wrapped around just the gate.

Now even though we know they've got a ZPM in working shape and that a stargate blowing up is no where near powerful enough to take out an entire planet, confirmed again in the same episode, the shield's still can't hold it and they fail. They're said to fail because the emmiters burn out. The ZPM obviously isn't depleted since they're running just fine afterward and yet the shields were made to fail.

This can go a long way toward explaing a lot of the seeming contradictions we've encountered before.

The Atlantis cityshield, when fully deployed around the city, is not only extremely effective because it has 3 ZPMs behind it but also becasue it's being held up by god only knows how many seperate emmiters. This allows them to spread the load out more of any attack so that they're not burned out as rapidly as the emmiters just in the gateroom were by that stargate blowing up.

This is what I figure is going on with lantian shields in general. Putting a ZPM on an Aurora isn't going to turn it into a little Atlantis because generating enough power to hold it's shields up isn't the only reason why shields fail. A ship like an aurora will have a lot less of those emmiters to spread a load out over which means each one of them will have to deal with more energy individually which can eventually lead to their demise.

This also explains why the Tria would still have a charged ZPM even though it'd been mauled by Wraith cruisers, without requring the assumpion that the crew was to stupid to use it. It'll also explain how 3 ZPMs fell into Wraith hands when the ships carrying them were captured. The Wraith didn't need to drain a ZPM to take each one of those ships, indeed if they had it would have defeated the entire purpose of doing so. They just needed to beat on the Auroras enough to cause the emmiters to fail and the shields to collapse.

It's also worth noting though that if Asgard derived shield emmiters don't suffer as much from this same sort of vulnerability, as we've seen 304s dramatically improve in durability when getting one, it could go toward further explaining why Wraith weapons seem to lose some effectiveness against them. If they're specially optmised to blow out ancient shield emmiters, maybe by saturing them with certain types of energy they're less efficient at handling, there's no reason that the Asgard shields would have the same specific vulnerability.

But we know nothing about how the Tria was attacked, if it was in good shape to boot, nothing at all. People constantly think that the Tria was near 100% functional and had her shields up when she was attacked. I cannot for one second imagine this to be possible. The Tria, despite being damaged, was capable of a deceleration of 23 gees. It sounds very low, in terms of SF accelerations, but let's remember that it was an acceleration measured outside of time dilation effect. In order for the Tria to achieve such a deceleration in little time, she'd be pumping teratons of energy via its engines. It's a bit wanky, but that's the way it goes, and with a ZPM, at least such powers would be easily accessible.
The idea that cruisers could represent such a danger to the Tria is not one I could buy anytime soon.

It never made sense to me that an ancient ship would be worth dozens or hundreds of Wraith ones and yet the Wraith would still win the war. There's a practical limit to how many Wraith ships could even engage a single Ancient one at a time given displayed weapons ranges.

Let us not forget also that at some point the Wraith destroyed an entire fleet of ancient warships by backstabbing them at some sort of mock negotiation. That's going to require some sort of at least rough "ballpark" type equivalency since I don't think the ancients would be stupid enough to think that the Wraith really required a force that outnumbered theirs by some huge margin just to conduct a negotiation.

Not to say how easily downed Wraith ships are, as again shown lately where the mere intervention of a ******* puddle jumper can completely turn the tides with a straffing run and 6 drones against a hiveship.

Well it was flown personally by Sheppard so you can think of those particular drones more as glowing manifestations of Earth's giant throbbing wankrod. Seriously, when he's involved all the tech being used by the SGC gets like that quake quad damage upgrade. Compare how Pheonix did vs the 3 hives to how even the old pre upgrade Daedalus did numerous times.

No, the point is rather clear. Whatever happened to the Tria, it was a finishing job, they already were on the run.

I'm thinking that between this new shield emmiter thing, the expendale nature of drone ammo, and the ancients bleeding territory and thus resupply bases pretty much since the outset of the war I've got a pretty clear picture of how they lost.

It's entirely possible given the late war setting of the Tria's engagement that it had long ago completely exhausted it's supply of drones. Once the ancient ships run out of drones they're lucky to draw pairity with a hiveship let alone superiority using only those secondary popguns. I could totally believe that a commander who'd been out on her own without resupply for who knows how long and was out, or nearly out, of drones would turn and run from a group of fresh cruisers.

This also makes it even more clear why the Wraith blockaded Atlantis.

But Seed did not feature a conventional ship growth. Looking at the high level pictures of hiveships, it's abundantly clear that the armour grows around and over a superstructure, which in some places looks like skyscrapers hanging upside down.
The whole way the thing grew on Atlantis' building highlights this. It grows inside to form many cavities, rooms and systems, it grows outside to form the main armoured exoskeleton, and it fuses with the metallic frame and other mechanized parts.

Where those parts of the ships are built is another question. Stargate, as a whole, has been regularly tame about the construction of ships, and somehow it's a good thing because I'm fraid that they'd hardly do any justice to them.
I'd barely be surprised if they showed the hiveships built in the Wraith equivalent of Trek's stardocks, instead of something much more original.

Who builds the superstructure though? They have no shipbuilding infastructure and don't even seem to have a worker caste to build said infastructure let alone, mine, refine and process metal into ship components. The Wraith don't seem to have any sort of manufacturing industry of any kind, everything they have is grown somehow. I'll agree that the structure does indeed look metallic but if it is then it's going to create problems. The simplest explanation is probably just "I can't beleive it's not metal" where "looking" like metal is all it does but it's actually grown just like everything else.

This could be possible without requiring Stroggification. It's very possible that the host dies or is absorbed once the construction is finished, therefore so does the brain. Only remain the main neural network, the various control rooms, numerous auxiliary control panels, and the central compucore.

It's just a pet theory of mine in any case. As far as plauability goes there's definately better options. That's just the way I'd take it were I writing it. I'd even have it that back in the war there were queens who could communicate telepathically with the hives as though they were just another type of soldiers. The old fully organic hives would be more powerful than the hollowed out frankenstiens of today as well. I'd explain the change by introducing the idea that the Wraith are still mutating. Every human a Wraith feeds shifts him infinitesimally closer to human and away from irratus bug. Over the course of 10,000 years this gradual drift caused the queen's ability to communicate with living hives to become increasingly weaker and eventually dissapear, forcing them to begin using ships that were no longer fully alive, compromising the original ancient designs in the process into something more mudane but at least usable.

As another point, I don't see any connection between the super mysterious and yet mega decisive Wraith weakness in their tech, and the recent endgame stuff we've seen.
It was very easy for the Lanteans to know the frequency Wraith used as far as their tech was concerned. Any downed ship with a hyperdrive would immediately reveal that information upon inspection. Atlantis even had a cruiser waiting to be looted down there.

I think they pretty much dropped that plotline. I like to just think that they found out about the cloning factory at a point where it was almost, but maybe not quite, too late to mount a mission to destroy it.

[Mister Oragahn]

These last two episodes have got me thinking about the whole ZPM shield thing in another way. It's looking more and more like the ZPM itself is not really the point of failure most of the time and furthermore that smaller shields are actually worse than bigger ones. The "first contact" episode features a scene where a stargate explodes and they try to contain it with the cityshields which, in a special feature for this episode only, can now be wrapped around just the gate.

Now even though we know they've got a ZPM in working shape and that a stargate blowing up is no where near powerful enough to take out an entire planet, confirmed again in the same episode, the shield's still can't hold it and they fail. They're said to fail because the emmiters burn out. The ZPM obviously isn't depleted since they're running just fine afterward and yet the shields were made to fail.

This can go a long way toward explaing a lot of the seeming contradictions we've encountered before.

The Atlantis cityshield, when fully deployed around the city, is not only extremely effective because it has 3 ZPMs behind it but also becasue it's being held up by god only knows how many seperate emmiters. This allows them to spread the load out more of any attack so that they're not burned out as rapidly as the emmiters just in the gateroom were by that stargate blowing up.

Let's note that the city shield was very efficient even with one ZPM only. That's basically how the Tau'ri repelled all attacks since day one, and the shield never failed.

This is what I figure is going on with lantian shields in general. Putting a ZPM on an Aurora isn't going to turn it into a little Atlantis because generating enough power to hold it's shields up isn't the only reason why shields fail. A ship like an aurora will have a lot less of those emmiters to spread a load out over which means each one of them will have to deal with more energy individually which can eventually lead to their demise.

This also explains why the Tria would still have a charged ZPM even though it'd been mauled by Wraith cruisers, without requring the assumpion that the crew was to stupid to use it.

I don't think it was a problem of not being smart enough to use it.
There's just too much unknown as to how the battle started, and why the Tria suddenly got issues against cruisers, while it could easily engage whole hiveships.

It'll also explain how 3 ZPMs fell into Wraith hands when the ships carrying them were captured. The Wraith didn't need to drain a ZPM to take each one of those ships, indeed if they had it would have defeated the entire purpose of doing so. They just needed to beat on the Auroras enough to cause the emmiters to fail and the shields to collapse.

It's also worth noting though that if Asgard derived shield emmiters don't suffer as much from this same sort of vulnerability, as we've seen 304s dramatically improve in durability when getting one, it could go toward further explaining why Wraith weapons seem to lose some effectiveness against them. If they're specially optmised to blow out ancient shield emmiters, maybe by saturing them with certain types of energy they're less efficient at handling, there's no reason that the Asgard shields would have the same specific vulnerability.

There's a big problem here, in that a warship would be designed with either better emitters (I think millions of years later, they could do that) or simply more, to allow the ship to carry its missions.
Besides, logic would probably dictate that the more area to cover for one emitter, the more weakened it would be. Pushing the logic even more, the more energy alloted to a square meter of shield, the stronger it would be.

I think we can look at this the other way round. The shield was shrank around the stargate. While all shields are meant to repel external strikes, the shield had to work differently and, this time, contain the energy from within its perimeter.

It's a critical difference, because it looses all of its strength by design. Even on a mere physical principle, it's way harder to collapse a bridge by hammering one of its segments with the force applied from outside, than sitting under the bridge and hitting a segment from inside.
Same for an egg.
Hell, all shields are actually meant to let stuff get out of them, so weapons can fire all sorts of stuff.
I'm actually very surprised that the shield even worked in containing anything, as it's not the way it's supposed to work!
It's almost like the emitters had to work the other way round all of sudden.

Besides, no matter how advanced or specifically anti-Lantean shield any weapon could be, it was made clear, across the five seasons, that the shield would fail when the ZPM (or any other energy reserve) would. The shield's lifespan has always been directly related to the power source's ability to provide energy.

Now, based on Zelenka's words, we know that the explosion was worth a dozen nuclear explosions, and that it was made of (most likely depleted) naqahdah, we're close to the Redemption case, with a boom in the 2-3 gigatons range.
If the shield would fail after an external strike of such a *low* power, a bomb stuffed with several kilograms of raw naqahdah would be capable of bringing down Atlantis' shield with utter ease. Think of three or four Goa'uld busters for example, or two of those 1.2 GT mines they used.
Err... nope. I don't buy it. :/

There's clearly a catch here, and I believe it has to do with the shield's polarity.

More amusing is how they knew the emitters would fry, yet they kept rerouting power to them.

It never made sense to me that an ancient ship would be worth dozens or hundreds of Wraith ones and yet the Wraith would still win the war. There's a practical limit to how many Wraith ships could even engage a single Ancient one at a time given displayed weapons ranges.

Indeed, but that's the way it calcs up I'm afraid. I don't dislike the Wraith, not at all, I have a very kind spot for those barely explored species turned into cliché hissing makeup jobs, but there's just an amount of fresh evidence that just brought me back to square one.
The way a drone barely powered by a broken jumper with intermitent power could seriously cripple a cruiser and force it to flee, and how 6 drones fired at a hiveship which got attacked first, by surprise, and yet was going to win rather clearly, finally got brutally raped, tells me that the drones, and that's drones charged by gateships, are such a weapon of wank that the writers really need to come with something very exciting about the Wraith industry beyond bigger numbers which will only allow the Lanteans to enjoy weapon with splash damage.

Let us not forget also that at some point the Wraith destroyed an entire fleet of ancient warships by backstabbing them at some sort of mock negotiation. That's going to require some sort of at least rough "ballpark" type equivalency since I don't think the ancients would be stupid enough to think that the Wraith really required a force that outnumbered theirs by some huge margin just to conduct a negotiation.

Well, when you look at how the Tria's captain behaved when the sweet puppy robots came back home, I wouldn't be surprised that some of them were downright naïve.
The Tria had a ZPM, which means that ship was sent for assault beyond the lines. And yet she was quite big headed and half a ****, caught pants down... as the enemy came and Atlantis' shield was down.
Besides, there's always enough room for claiming that the Wraith used a super weapon of some kind or took the Lantean ships by surprise by sacrificing a ZPM.
I keep my fingers crossed really.
I hoped we'd see super stuff for the Ori, we didn't. Same for the Wraith, we didn't.
There's still time to pull off some awesome weapons and show who's your daddy.

Well it was flown personally by Sheppard so you can think of those particular drones more as glowing manifestations of Earth's giant throbbing wankrod. Seriously, when he's involved all the tech being used by the SGC gets like that quake quad damage upgrade. Compare how Pheonix did vs the 3 hives to how even the old pre upgrade Daedalus did numerous times.

Let me remember... the Phoneix was in the beginning of season 5 right? I have most problems to actually remember anything from those passable episodes, notably when that mockery of Michael came out of the woods.
I suppose the Phoenix went down faster than usual...

Well I'll try to look at it in details later on. Just for the kicks.

I'm thinking that between this new shield emmiter thing, the expendale nature of drone ammo, and the ancients bleeding territory and thus resupply bases pretty much since the outset of the war I've got a pretty clear picture of how they lost.

But there's a problem there, because at some point, notably when the Lanteans were sending their ships with ZPMs onboard, they were very confident, which doesn't jive well with the idea that their industrial assets were harassed by Wraith raids.

If a single hangar can be allowed to tap into a planet's entire core energy to power a shield against Wraith ships, I'm really wondering what they'd put as defenses on their factories.
That said, they had no shields on their defense platforms... but put some on their outposts.
...

Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaahh!!!!!
X_X

[Mister Oragahn]

It's entirely possible given the late war setting of the Tria's engagement that it had long ago completely exhausted it's supply of drones. Once the ancient ships run out of drones they're lucky to draw pairity with a hiveship let alone superiority using only those secondary popguns. I could totally believe that a commander who'd been out on her own without resupply for who knows how long and was out, or nearly out, of drones would turn and run from a group of fresh cruisers.

This also makes it even more clear why the Wraith blockaded Atlantis.

That's still a stretch in my book atm. The only time we've seen Auroras using energy weapons was in... BAMSR, and they were dumbed down, and owned. In all respects, I don't use BAMSR as a template.
The whole setup was an hymn to robot idiocy.

I'm also very curious as to why they couldn't just pack a downsized hiveship-cutter beam, when you look at what one of them powered by a ridiculous Nq generator Mark I could do.
They obviously knew how to build weapons which could channel vast amounts of energy, since a single turret in Trinity fended off at least one hiveship, and I'm not going to believe one second that you'd need even a fraction of planet busting power to start threatening a hiveship.
That same turret, or something close, tied to a ZPM, with the same power conduit tech, would be a no-win situation for any Wraith ship. Even less for one or several cruisers.

So when you have Auroras bristling with turrets and having ZPMs onboard for some of them, it's just a time when you stare at the picture and go *boink*... because it's just impossible for me, when I put the pieces together, to see those ships going down against a couple of cruisers.

Who builds the superstructure though?

Midgets?

They have no shipbuilding infastructure and don't even seem to have a worker caste to build said infastructure let alone, mine, refine and process metal into ship components.

We've just seen a bit of the industry. You know, before The Seed, we had zero clue about how they proceded at all. All I can tell is that those building-meshes are not looking like they're grown.
They just look like Tokyo in Wraith armour.

The Wraith don't seem to have any sort of manufacturing industry of any kind, everything they have is grown somehow. I'll agree that the structure does indeed look metallic but if it is then it's going to create problems. The simplest explanation is probably just "I can't beleive it's not metal" where "looking" like metal is all it does but it's actually grown just like everything else.

Well, it's always possible that the metal plates is secreted like coral would be. The organism would sort out the metals of a local source, and something like a sac or mouth would chew it and slowly vomit metal plates or whole buildings. Or maybe they're grown into cocoons, then the membrane breaks and is reused or shrinks and solidifies to form the first layers of the external armour.

It's just a pet theory of mine in any case. As far as plauability goes there's definately better options. That's just the way I'd take it were I writing it. I'd even have it that back in the war there were queens who could communicate telepathically with the hives as though they were just another type of soldiers. The old fully organic hives would be more powerful than the hollowed out frankenstiens of today as well. I'd explain the change by introducing the idea that the Wraith are still mutating. Every human a Wraith feeds shifts him infinitesimally closer to human and away from irratus bug. Over the course of 10,000 years this gradual drift caused the queen's ability to communicate with living hives to become increasingly weaker and eventually dissapear, forcing them to begin using ships that were no longer fully alive, compromising the original ancient designs in the process into something more mudane but at least usable.

You know, there was the fact that if queens or lieutnants could pet Teyla, there would be no reason why queens could pet other Wraith. Yet this did never happen, just as much as we've never seen the Wraith ride beasts or control swarms of bugs or whatever. It was more important to divert budget to 304 renderings y'know.

I think they pretty much dropped that plotline. I like to just think that they found out about the cloning factory at a point where it was almost, but maybe not quite, too late to mount a mission to destroy it.

Yeah, bye bye. We can still cross fingers that the weakness involved a weak spot in a Wraith Deus Ex Machina??

[Ouroboros]

Let's note that the city shield was very efficient even with one ZPM only. That's basically how the Tau'ri repelled all attacks since day one, and the shield never failed.

I don't think it was a problem of not being smart enough to use it.
There's just too much unknown as to how the battle started, and why the Tria suddenly got issues against cruisers, while it could easily engage whole hiveships.

There's a big problem here, in that a warship would be designed with either better emitters (I think millions of years later, they could do that) or simply more, to allow the ship to carry its missions.
Besides, logic would probably dictate that the more area to cover for one emitter, the more weakened it would be. Pushing the logic even more, the more energy alloted to a square meter of shield, the stronger it would be.

I think we can look at this the other way round. The shield was shrank around the stargate. While all shields are meant to repel external strikes, the shield had to work differently and, this time, contain the energy from within its perimeter.

I think we've got a different picture on how shields are suppossed to work. I always figured it was some sort of "absorb and send to wherever" system as oppossed to something like defelction. In that sense each emmiter has to eat X amount of energy when a bolt hits the shield so if you have x divided by 10,000 it's easier on the individual emmiters than x divided by 2.

Your reversed shield theory is interesting to but I don't think it's really any more likely than mine and it's not like we'll ever get to know who's right is it.

Besides, no matter how advanced or specifically anti-Lantean shield any weapon could be, it was made clear, across the five seasons, that the shield would fail when the ZPM (or any other energy reserve) would. The shield's lifespan has always been directly related to the power source's ability to provide energy.

That's only in the case for the full sized cityshield as far as I can recall, and maybe the Daedalus shields. All the ancient ships that had ZPM got beat down and coughed up fresh ZPMs afterward. Now either they were all taken by surprise somehow, which I find pretty unlikely, or you can beat their shields without having to beat their ZPM in a similar way to what happened in first contact, by overtaxing shield emmiters.

Now, based on Zelenka's words, we know that the explosion was worth a dozen nuclear explosions, and that it was made of (most likely depleted) naqahdah, we're close to the Redemption case, with a boom in the 2-3 gigatons range.
If the shield would fail after an external strike of such a *low* power, a bomb stuffed with several kilograms of raw naqahdah would be capable of bringing down Atlantis' shield with utter ease. Think of three or four Goa'uld busters for example, or two of those 1.2 GT mines they used.
Err... nope. I don't buy it. :/

So about 1-3 Wraith bolts per your earlier misbegotten calcs? If we could make a guess as to how many emmiters were in play here we could get a picture of how easy they are to tax. Now it's very unlikely we'll ever be able to do that but even saying something like this was the work of 2 emmiters being strained to the breaking point makes it look like it'll still be entirely possible for a Wraith ship to blow out ancient shield emmiters with just the DET element of its weapons in a protracted assault.

Indeed, but that's the way it calcs up I'm afraid. I don't dislike the Wraith, not at all, I have a very kind spot for those barely explored species turned into cliché hissing makeup jobs, but there's just an amount of fresh evidence that just brought me back to square one.
The way a drone barely powered by a broken jumper with intermitent power could seriously cripple a cruiser and force it to flee, and how 6 drones fired at a hiveship which got attacked first, by surprise, and yet was going to win rather clearly, finally got brutally raped, tells me that the drones, and that's drones charged by gateships, are such a weapon of wank that the writers really need to come with something very exciting about the Wraith industry beyond bigger numbers which will only allow the Lanteans to enjoy weapon with splash damage.

Drones have always been a super weapon against everything, that's actually been fairly consistant. I don't think it's really fair to benchmark drone vs hiveship against a hiveship that was already in a battle against another hiveship though, even if it did seem as if it was going to win. The number of drones needed to kill one is probably variable mostly on where they hit it. The one in BAMSR took more or less an entire salvo and was covered in flames but evidently survived somehow. I'll grant that those drones are possibly infearior to the real deal but then you've got the hive in no mans land also taking probably dozens of hits before it started to really go down.

The point I'm making is that it can vary based on circumstances. This is one aspect that's actually fairly realistic given the way drones seem to work, penetrating armour and trying to destroy internal systems.

Well, when you look at how the Tria's captain behaved when the sweet puppy robots came back home, I wouldn't be surprised that some of them were downright naïve. The Tria had a ZPM, which means that ship was sent for assault beyond the lines. And yet she was quite big headed and half a ****, caught pants down... as the enemy came and Atlantis' shield was down.
Besides, there's always enough room for claiming that the Wraith used a super weapon of some kind or took the Lantean ships by surprise by sacrificing a ZPM.
I keep my fingers crossed really.
I hoped we'd see super stuff for the Ori, we didn't. Same for the Wraith, we didn't.
There's still time to pull off some awesome weapons and show who's your daddy.

If more awesome weapons appear you know who's going to be using them and it's not going to be the Wraith or the Ancients.

I don't buy the Tria was ambushed idea myself, I can't even really visualize how it would be possible for a bunch of Wraith cruisers to just sneak up on them and beat them that senseless before the shields guy can reach over and hit the on button.

Let me remember... the Phoneix was in the beginning of season 5 right?

It was Carter's attempt to "beamz" 3 hives to death but since shep was in another timeline and his protective wankfield had collapsed as a result, she got owned in about a minute instead, then blew up and killed everyone.

But there's a problem there, because at some point, notably when the Lanteans were sending their ships with ZPMs onboard, they were very confident, which doesn't jive well with the idea that their industrial assets were harassed by Wraith raids.

They were confident early on before the Wraith got the cloning facility operational. Probably because they thought their ships were nigh on invicible and could take on virtually unlimited numbers of enemy ones at once.

That's still a stretch in my book atm. The only time we've seen Auroras using energy weapons was in... BAMSR, and they were dumbed down, and owned. In all respects, I don't use BAMSR as a template.
The whole setup was an hymn to robot idiocy.

Indeed but there's some things to take from it surely. I don't think the Asurans invented those pulse weapons for example and I'm actually giving the Alterrans the benefit of the doubt in this. Other than these drones have been the only weapon we've seen an Aurora use. At least with these they're not completely helpless when the run out of drones, now that would be really laughable.

I'm getting images of some sort of twisted Benny Hill type situation where an Aurora chases a bunch of hives around shooting drones until it runs out and the hives start chasing it.

I'm also very curious as to why they couldn't just pack a downsized hiveship-cutter beam, when you look at what one of them powered by a ridiculous Nq generator Mark I could do.

That bugged me to. What the hell else is that giant asymetrical pod on one side supposed to be for. That should be the bloody giant deathbeam of death dammit and it's first target should be an "upgraded" 304 courtesy of Oberoth and friends.

"Hahaha foolish amatuears, feel the dreadful power of a true wankbeam! All the lights flicker every time we use it!"

So when you have Auroras bristling with turrets and having ZPMs onboard for some of them, it's just a time when you stare at the picture and go *boink*... because it's just impossible for me, when I put the pieces together, to see those ships going down against a couple of cruisers.

It looks the way it does because the CGI guys that made it thought they were making some kind of Earth tech level ship apparently. I wonder if any concept art exists for actual ancient ships pre Aurora. I always wondered what they were actually meant to have looked like.

Midgets?

Leather clad Midgets that'll FEED ON YOUR SOUL!

Hey, I wonder if the Wraith could mitigate their food problems by just growing all their future soldiers to half size. They should still have enough of a strength advantage to overpower humans and eat them.

We've just seen a bit of the industry. You know, before The Seed, we had zero clue about how they proceded at all. All I can tell is that those building-meshes are not looking like they're grown.
They just look like Tokyo in Wraith armour.

I think this is all we're getting. We got a half assed explanation of reproduction so why not shipbuilding to, got to keep things consistant right.

You know, there was the fact that if queens or lieutnants could pet Teyla, there would be no reason why queens could pet other Wraith. Yet this did never happen, just as much as we've never seen the Wraith ride beasts or control swarms of bugs or whatever. It was more important to divert budget to 304 renderings y'know.

Fool there's no animal life in pegasus aside from colourfully dressed villiagers who all speak English without contractions. Is it wrong that some portion of my sympathy for the Wraith is rooted in my contempt for the misc stilted bumpkins everyone's so concerned about them eating.

Yeah, bye bye. We can still cross fingers that the weakness involved a weak spot in a Wraith Deus Ex Machina??

I wonder what an actual Wraith dues ex machina would be.

Scientist: My queen we've uncovered a secret ancient lab that contains a magic box that when opened will immediately strike dead anyone who makes a smarmy wisecrack, unfunny childish joke or sarcastic comment.

Queen: We've all but won now...

[thekillman]

this are MGM scematics of a hive, wraith, and original aurora sketches

Spoiler:

[Mister Oragahn]

I think we've got a different picture on how shields are suppossed to work. I always figured it was some sort of "absorb and send to wherever" system as oppossed to something like defelction. In that sense each emmiter has to eat X amount of energy when a bolt hits the shield so if you have x divided by 10,000 it's easier on the individual emmiters than x divided by 2.

Your reversed shield theory is interesting to but I don't think it's really any more likely than mine and it's not like we'll ever get to know who's right is it.

I do think both work, the energy of the destroyed stargate was being sent elsewhere, likely some layer of subspace. Many emitters or stronger but fewer emitters could achieve same effects, with advantages for both I suppose.
But it's a fact that shields work, in 99.9% of cases, as one way devices, and that the Lantean cityshield bares all similarities to a solid shell once it's up, as long as there's no stress put on it.

To me, shields act like armour. They're cast, they stop projectiles and energy, they can flicker even like matter, and as any matter, they get charged up in energy, and thus need to dump that energy somewhere.

That's only in the case for the full sized cityshield as far as I can recall, and maybe the Daedalus shields. All the ancient ships that had ZPM got beat down and coughed up fresh ZPMs afterward. Now either they were all taken by surprise somehow, which I find pretty unlikely, or you can beat their shields without having to beat their ZPM in a similar way to what happened in first contact, by overtaxing shield emmiters.

So only Earth would be allowed to plug a ZPM into a mainframe which was not meant to use one, to deflect a stream of plasma and photons that would kill all life on a planet (stuff in the teraton range) but warships designed by the Lanteans themselves would not come with shields as good as Atlantis'?

There's the simple problem that overtaxing the shield emitters never happened before. Now we suddenly get such a case, precisely the only time the shield is supposed to contain a gigaton explosion from inside out? That's just too much of a coincidence.

On another note, I think the energy needed for the emitters is like the energy needed to channel the other energy from the attacks.
Energy A is the energy that hits the shield. Energy B is the energy used to create whatever equivalent of a containment field to transport energy A to point B.

Plus the energy that is needed to maintain the shield's shape and integrity against the violence of any attack. Some energy might get deflected, the other main bulk is transfered to a safe subspace layer where it doesn't harm anyone.

Like in most SF, the lack of capacity to store that energy is most puzzling. That's why is often better, when it can be said, that most of the energy is deflected; especiallr for space combat. In atmosphere, it's another deal.

The idea of emitters frying up is, I think, a good complement, however, to the idea that energy is used to power shields. But that's a complicated issue, because we'd have to debate about the way shields decrease or increase in strenght by percentages, seem to take a while to charge up, so much that the Prometheus had to leave to recharge shields, yet on the other hand, suddenly tying a better power source to shields, or rerouting power to shields can suddenly make them better. It becomes hard to say for sure if there's a pre-charged capacitor powering the shield, but logically there has to be some limited element which would correspond to 100%, and obviously the percentage cannot refer to emitters' integrity, as you don't recharge integrity.

Maybe some time later, I'll think a bit more about this and see how we can break shields in two main components, one to cast and maintain the shield, the other to flush energy somewhere safely.

So about 1-3 Wraith bolts per your earlier misbegotten calcs? If we could make a guess as to how many emmiters were in play here we could get a picture of how easy they are to tax. Now it's very unlikely we'll ever be able to do that but even saying something like this was the work of 2 emmiters being strained to the breaking point makes it look like it'll still be entirely possible for a Wraith ship to blow out ancient shield emmiters with just the DET element of its weapons in a protracted assault.

I'm not sure about the method, especially the documented records about the absolute lack of such events from external attacks against Atlantis.
I'm also fairly sure that a warships would have enough redudancies to allow emitters to kick in to help those which would fail, if they were to be.

As for Misbegotten:

Spoiler:

We can see the curvature now, which wasn't that obvious before. But still, the explosions were nowhere that powerful, they were faint white. I suppose that would put them in the low megaton range at best.

Really, the whole emitter shebang brings more problems than explanations, and frankly, the polarized shield easily reconciles everything about how the shield failed.

Now, I agree, the Wraith found a way to capture ZPMs from warships without depleting them. But remember...

McKAY: There's one thing I don't understand. Back when you defeated the Ancients, how did you get your hands on a ZedP.M?

TODD: The Lanteans were powerful but careless. Believing their ships were unbeatable, they sent them deeper and deeper into Wraith- controlled territory, trying to weed us out. It took months, but eventually we were able to capture three of them, each one powered by a ZeeP.M.

McKAY: At which point you brought them back here.

TODD: Within weeks, our army had grown to hundreds of times its original size. From that point on, the tide of war turned in our favour and there was nothing the Lanteans could do.

Obvious points:

The Wraith didn't have the upper hand back then. Based on their victories, Lanteans saw their ships as clearly and vastly powerful.
The Lanteans clearly appeared to steamroll Wraith forces. As such, they were careless. This revealed a weakness to exploit.
So did the Wraith. It took them months to capture three ships, each powered by a ZPM.

How is the question, but it's rather unarguable that large ship numbers would be necessary to do so, or tools which we've not seen.
It's rather obvious that we didn't seen everything about the Wraith. Over the years, we've seen they had several toys to play with, some appearing to be standard systems, others being more like experiments. The stunning giant ball and the stunner rods are just more proof of this. Up to the point I wonder if, with the smart use of hyperspace windows for forced tugging into areas of choice, which might force ships to drop shields automatically under certain specific circumstances... you know, some mumbo jumbo about a neutron star's radiations stuff, a black hole messing up with shields and possibly a virus of some sort, coupled to a massive planetary bound super stunner on steroids, with lots of efforts, pinpointed locations, predicted courses and cooperation, the Wraith managed to trap Auroras and get around their shields.
Now of course, since the Lanteans knew how to build shields which could stay up in hyperspace, this may ruin that pet theory, but maybe shields are weakened, maybe the Wraith attacked Auroras in hyperspace, or faked distress signals, mounted boarding parties after implanting probes in, or brainwashing the minds of Lanteans scientists they'd have captured.

To me, the Wraith didn't do this with sheer firepower. They were just smarter and had a stronger resolve to survive and work around impossibilities, while the Lanteans were complacent and solved all with ZPMs.
Finally, the error of Lanteans was to concentrate too much power in single ships, while the Wraith used this power to grow more numbers. Eventually replicating whatever method they used to capture the three ships, but this time with more numbers, they were sure to win, no matter the casualties.

And I'm fairly sure that the Wraith, with access to ZPMs, could do more than grow more of the same.

Drones have always been a super weapon against everything, that's actually been fairly consistant. I don't think it's really fair to benchmark drone vs hiveship against a hiveship that was already in a battle against another hiveship though, even if it did seem as if it was going to win.

But these six drones, however, penetrated the hiveship from a side which was totally unharmed. Sure, it already sustained damage, but the point is how 6 drones effortlessly went into a previously undamaged section of ship and turned the tables so quickly.

The number of drones needed to kill one is probably variable mostly on where they hit it. The one in BAMSR took more or less an entire salvo and was covered in flames but evidently survived somehow.

I don't remember that incident. I would be, once again, another of those examples where Asurans can't get **** from weapons which regularly own hiveships in all other conditions.
If I really wanted to be a *****, I'd ask why they didn't ram hiveships, considering how that absurd slow crash was enough to destroy one, when it was sacrificed to destroy a Wraith base on the ground.

I'll grant that those drones are possibly infearior to the real deal but then you've got the hive in no mans land also taking probably dozens of hits before it started to really go down.

Yeah but as a whole, hiveships seem capable of exchanging many bolts before blowing up. However, some of them are clearly more powerful. Sometimes a bit, like in The Queen, where there was a difference but not so vast, sometimes a lot that after a few bolts they'd down, as in The Hive.

The point I'm making is that it can vary based on circumstances. This is one aspect that's actually fairly realistic given the way drones seem to work, penetrating armour and trying to destroy internal systems.

In the end, I think we again get lost in a sort of versus.


...

[Mister Oragahn]

If more awesome weapons appear you know who's going to be using them and it's not going to be the Wraith or the Ancients.

Ah... yes... this aspect of the show.

I don't buy the Tria was ambushed idea myself, I can't even really visualize how it would be possible for a bunch of Wraith cruisers to just sneak up on them and beat them that senseless before the shields guy can reach over and hit the on button.

Timing. After all, it took the Wraith months just to capture three ships. The Wraith are quire capable of ambushing ships coming out of hyperspace, as per Allies.

Who knows? Maybe they had a whole stun/ion mine field and a **** load of cruisers waiting around, they were sacrificing some ships to actually draw the Tria into a certain sector, faked a massive reunion or something, or a culling, or whatever else, and boom. With a bit of luck and obstination, they got what they wanted, that is, damaging a ship before it could put her shields up.
Now, again, that's based on the idea that Auroras can't have shields up in hyperspace.
But I'm sure that with enough imagination, as a writer, you can come with any good reason why the Wraith, after months of coordinated efforts and sacrifices, would finally manage to outwit a Lantean crew and own them.
What if the Wraith captured a puddle jumper? They're certainly not as hard to capture as warships, and they have cloaking devices and even drone weapons. This is not to say that their drones would go through Aurora shields, but it's certainly a good thing to have such weapons with you, especially since they can go through a real Aurora's armour rather easily, as seen when Wraith boarded the Travelers' Aurora.

It was Carter's attempt to "beamz" 3 hives to death but since shep was in another timeline and his protective wankfield had collapsed as a result, she got owned in about a minute instead, then blew up and killed everyone.

I see that one, the ship starts farting internal fires left and right from the moment a single hiveship enters the dance.

Let's just say that Michael found some Wraith tech he used to upgrade his hiveships.
I loved how that blue donut of doom destroyed the two other ships. How fortunate that they both were on the planar path of that holy ring.
That said, the missiles she fired clearly damaged the hiveships. One had a gap with jumping glowy yellow arcs (you can see that before she rams one).

Indeed but there's some things to take from it surely. I don't think the Asurans invented those pulse weapons for example and I'm actually giving the Alterrans the benefit of the doubt in this. Other than these drones have been the only weapon we've seen an Aurora use. At least with these they're not completely helpless when the run out of drones, now that would be really laughable.

I'm getting images of some sort of twisted Benny Hill type situation where an Aurora chases a bunch of hives around shooting drones until it runs out and the hives start chasing it.

And then the Aurora wears a wig and the hivesips pass in front if her and Aurora busts off... then the hiveships run the other way round.

That bugged me to. What the hell else is that giant asymetrical pod on one side supposed to be for. That should be the bloody giant deathbeam of death dammit and it's first target should be an "upgraded" 304 courtesy of Oberoth and friends.

"Hahaha foolish amatuears, feel the dreadful power of a true wankbeam! All the lights flicker every time we use it!"

And what's even worse is when you think of the size of an Aurora, they could easily pack the whole satellite core on the side of the ship, without the pointless antennae and all the jazz. Maybe the cannon would be 2/3 less powerful, but that's always far more than needed to bust an entire armada.

It's just... eh... hello? HELLLLOOOO???

It looks the way it does because the CGI guys that made it thought they were making some kind of Earth tech level ship apparently. I wonder if any concept art exists for actual ancient ships pre Aurora. I always wondered what they were actually meant to have looked like.

Wait, that's behind the scene official stuff? They thought they were doing Tau'ri ships?
I've seen artwork, but I think it's both a late one and it looks crude and ugly. Plenty of angled structures, chisel this and chamfer that. In 2D. Very far from even a rough Aurora.

What annoys me more is how we see nothing about the Lantean cruisers. There are virtually no shored cruisers, despite the fact that some of them were used to destroy the Asurans by NDF them with drones, the only way to be sure I suppose, and certainly the only way I rationalize the lack of devastation.

Leather clad Midgets that'll FEED ON YOUR SOUL!

Hey, I wonder if the Wraith could mitigate their food problems by just growing all their future soldiers to half size. They should still have enough of a strength advantage to overpower humans and eat them.

Oh sure, there's a good plan to look for there. That said, it will be worse for humans. Male humans.

I think this is all we're getting. We got a half assed explanation of reproduction so why not shipbuilding to, got to keep things consistant right.

I'm going to adopt a sort of neutral position on this. In the worst case scenario, they can at least make half their ships in no time.

I wonder what an actual Wraith dues ex machina would be.

Scientist: My queen we've uncovered a secret ancient lab that contains a magic box that when opened will immediately strike dead anyone who makes a smarmy wisecrack, unfunny childish joke or sarcastic comment.

Queen: We've all but won now...

Oh fcµk, this is the end!