Everything you ever wanted to know about Hiveships/Wraith.

[lord groovy]

The thing that bothers me with them is that they're so power vain and competitive and self important that you would think these factors would drive each and every one of them to want to have shinier toys then all the others. I mean imagine for a moment when Goa'uld number 2 comes on the scene. Is he really going to want all his ships, weapons and Jaffa to look exactly like those of Goa'uld number 1, potentially his hated enemy. Or is he going to want them to begin to reflect his own personal sense of vanity and "superior ideas about design/warfare/training" as soon as possible.

Yeah I always wonder how the Jaffa avoided friendly fire. They must have pretty good eyes to differentiate their head symbols from accross the battlefield.

Some kind of active Keeper conspiracy is the only thing that really makes sense now. The finale pretty much put a nail in the idea that the actual tech is capable of a hell of a lot more than they're letting on. The hints were even already present in episodes like allies as well. I can't really blame them either. They apparently do all the work and just wake the Queens and various other leaders up from nappy time, feed them, then put them back to bed.

They probably think they should be running things and it wouldn't surprise me if intentionally letting the other's tech stagnate and break down is part of that long term goal. Queens in general seem to be arrogant and smug in their position and unlikely to appreciate the actual crucial value of the sort of tech support the Keepers provide them. They're just repairmen who do all the dirty work her royal highness can't be bothered with after all. Since the keepers are Wraith themselves, and we know at least some of them are also females/queens, it's likely they would resent being treated in such a way given the reality of the power they know they hold.

The whole "lets see how smug that ***** is when her hyperdrive breaks down between star systems" idea.

Or when they swap and compare stories about how "I can't believe I actually got that dumb ***** to believe that 1 reactor was better than 14"

Now I'm beginning to wonder if all the Keepers are part of the same wraith tribe or clan or just acting independantly. Or even if they are not simply recruited among the smartest wraith. That would make people like Todd (and Michael after he encountered Atlantis team) good candidates and add a little twist to all the thing they have done in the series.

I've been fond of a lot of different potential origin stories for them over the years. There is definitely something missing from the modern Wraith to make them a credible threat to a galaxy full of ancients though, especially since they supposedly only started on one planet.

They should have actually done the reverse, with the Wraith ships and troops being qualitatively superior and the ancients having the greater numbers. Then the Wraith building a cloning machine would have made much more sense as a death blow as it would have removed the only advantage the ancients had.

Well if your remember the wraith soldier in "The Defiant One", the only way to take him down was with a direct hit drone. Compared to the more nice suit looking wraith, he is the pinnacle of badassery. Add some cloning machine and send them on an aurora. That will solve any problem that could arise.

actually i believe the ancient defeat had NOTHING to do with numbers, technology or power.

Industrial Capability.


lets look at ZPM's. throw some calcs. Atlantis could be powered for millions of years under normal circumstances. it also appears the ancients didn't like mass-production. and they didn't need to Massproduce ZPM's. why should they? by the time they built 1, the old one isn't even halfway depletion. Arcturus wasn't a way to get MORE power, it was to QUICKLY get more power. the ancients were doing nicely. blowing wraith out of the sky, their shields held along nicely. but there was something wrong: they expended drones faster than they could build them. ZPM's depleted LONG before they were originally expected. the wraith got their hands on ZPM's and put the final nail in the coffin: everywhere the ancients had to fight, any industrial capability was targeted first, and not even the Cityship shields could protect them from large armadas. Drones ran out, ZPM's ran out. slowly but surely, Aurora after Aurora blew up, their ZPM's depleted or their Shield generators molten long before that.

Good thinking!

[Mister Oragahn]

That doesn't add up. If drones numbers drop, you still have basic nukes and beam weapons which are way simpler to produce. Of course we'll never see a true laser weapon in SciFI (although it would be extremely easy to make one look cool without showing any beam whatsoever), but a beam weapon, once you have the hardware, will basically only ask for mundane fuel.
It doesn't even make sense because at some point the Lanteans were winning, and that with a few ships. So obviously the Wraith at that moment could not have been such a huge menace. Unless of course we're underestimating strengths and numbers on both sides.

Suddenly the Wraith, after months of invasive advance from ZPM powered Auroras into their territory, manage to steal a few of their power sources, and hop! so they mass produce ships and clones, just like if they couldn't do that before, even their power sources weren't as stellar as ZPMs.
The only way for the Lanteans to be totally lost is for the Wraith to literally be invading all possible inhabitable planets in the Pegasus galaxy beyond what even high technology couldn't manage, and with the Wraith using each planet as a high breeding ground and production facility. Stuff on the level of the Replicators or any super swarming alien force you can think about from your favorite universe.

That would explain the line in Rising and take it absolutely literally: no matter how many ships they could smoke in even one shot, there just were too many coming in. It was pointless, the Lanteans didn't have enough resources left to destroy, say, the THOUSANDS of Wraith production centers on countless worlds.

Plus the Wraith had managed to build many special hiveships and cruisers, perhaps not as strong as the ZPM powered one we got in the finale, but not too far.
You've seen the Seed and how it was ridiculously easy for them to build new ships almost out of nothing.
You've seen that episode where they had vast facilities to clone troopers. The Wraith also are part insects so they would logically have high reproduction rates, beside the cloning program for the basic drones.

Imagine: Wraith tapping geothermal energy in ways almost as good as Lantean power sources. Wraith tapping the power of stars with vast ethereal nets spread over vast quadrants of their surface, obtaining thousands of petawatts, all of which would be channeled into seeds growing new ships and cloning facilities.

No supernova weapon could solve the problem. The vermin was just too rampant.

And then, for some reason, all those Wraith disappear, only to leave a couple of under-crewed and under-equipped hiveships and cruisers. All those Wraith who needed food, they're not there anymore.
Yes, because the food problem is also a major point of the war.
If we don't pretend the Wraith at some point managed to partially solve their problem, then there clearly were limits to how large their forces could be during an 100 years long war, when they don't even seem to be able to feed themselves when woken up all at once while all planets' populations had plenty of time to reproduce between the long space culling cycles.

Besides, I find it terribly sad that the writers never dared present a civilization where Wraith and humans coexist, having found a right balance of numbers between both populations so the Wraith can tap humans as part of institutionalized rituals, but in a way that is not hurting, either because the Wraith would have mastered a way to feed in minute-pulsed quantities that would not strain the human body, and perhaps with the additional use of pain-lowering drugs by the humans during the rituals. Or the Wraith would consume that drug which would mix with the enzyme. Or both would. Humans and Wraith would harvest that drug from plants, creatures, crystals or else (thinking out loud here). The ritual would be highly controlled, and a Wraith could only absorb a small quantity of life force from each human, but there would be so many of them that the sum of all would be much more than enough, and even prove even richer because of the variety, like if you were offered to eat 10 kg of the same burgers or 10 kg where each 100 g is from a different type of food.
There would be gains in keeping the Wraith alive. They could own parts of the technological advances, with humans largely being users, but the humans would outnumber the Wraith so much that the Wraith could never hope to control the humans. The old Wraith would be sources of immense knowledge and wisdom as well.
Each Wraith would act as a tutor to groups of humans, establishing special bonds with them. There would plenty of variations in the models of such a society, some more religious, other more behaving like schools or clans, etc.

Who would we be to dispute such societies?
Let's imagine that there may be something off putting, like one of those societies actually terminates people beyond an age of X, which would be seen normal, fair and extremely important (something akin to the nobility and honour of European chivalry and bushido). The Wraith performing the ritual would keep some of the life force, and spread the rest to x humans of the school or clan, so the next generation of humans would live longer and be healthier, and the same life force would be used to heal the ill and wounded.

Yes, I'm tired of giving what I deem good ideas for free, but seriously, was it that hard to imagine all that stuff?? I took pleasure doing so. How can people paid to do so can't even find time to imagine a fraction of that, pray tell???

[thekillman]

didn't read it all. DID remember The siege.

look VERY closely at the hologram. you see ships. how many? nicely spread ones. at those distances, at any time, 200-300 ships are orbiting the planet. and that's just the planet. we don't see anything beyond that. there could be literally thousands of ships.


"the ancients won every fight, but they lost the war". that's pretty much what's said. why? their industial capability sucked. lets look at the Asgard for comparison. Naquahdah, Trinium, Neutronium. abundance? pretty low. let's look at the wraith. Carbon. Nitrogen. Oxygen. Hydrogen. Phosphorus. Sulphur. probably some iron and other metals. all have an incredibly high abundance compared to Nq Tr Nm. the wraith have quadrillions of times more resources to choose from

[Control_Chair]

didn't read it all. DID remember The siege.

look VERY closely at the hologram. you see ships. how many? nicely spread ones. at those distances, at any time, 200-300 ships are orbiting the planet. and that's just the planet. we don't see anything beyond that. there could be literally thousands of ships.


"the ancients won every fight, but they lost the war". that's pretty much what's said. why? their industial capability sucked. lets look at the Asgard for comparison. Naquahdah, Trinium, Neutronium. abundance? pretty low. let's look at the wraith. Carbon. Nitrogen. Oxygen. Hydrogen. Phosphorus. Sulphur. probably some iron and other metals. all have an incredibly high abundance compared to Nq Tr Nm. the wraith have quadrillions of times more resources to choose from

Plus there doesn't seem to be any industrial capacity inside Atlantis itself, if the Ancients industrial capacity was limited to a few off world bases then those would be the first targets the Wraith would attack, at least the Asgard had a huge industrial capacity on their own home world making much harder for an enemy to attack.

[Crazy Tom]

Ask yourself if they could even operate anywhere near a neutron star first, I'd say.

Autonomous drone and a slingshot orbit?

[thekillman]

autonomous crushed drone.

we're talking the sun's gravity in an object the size of a city.

[Crazy Tom]

autonomous crushed drone.

we're talking the sun's gravity in an object the size of a city.

Between inertial dampening and the sort of powerful gravity fields a hyper drive uses, I doubt it's impossible. A Ha'tak survived in a sun's - corona was it?

The gravity field wouldn't be as intense, but the ships was be a lot bigger.

[Mister Oragahn]

The pull is just beyond silly anywhere close to the surface of that kind of star.
It would require a technology and a power capacity which I have not seen the Wraith possess.

[Mister Oragahn]

The thing that bothers me with them is that they're so power vain and competitive and self important that you would think these factors would drive each and every one of them to want to have shinier toys then all the others. I mean imagine for a moment when Goa'uld number 2 comes on the scene. Is he really going to want all his ships, weapons and Jaffa to look exactly like those of Goa'uld number 1, potentially his hated enemy. Or is he going to want them to begin to reflect his own personal sense of vanity and "superior ideas about design/warfare/training" as soon as possible.

The problem is, they weren't thinking in terms of warfare. They were gaming.
Besides, they clearly didn't trust their men at all. It may even be some left over from the days of Ra's forced departure of Earth millenia ago. They realized that it was better keeping the Jaffa underarmed, etc.
There's the problem of an escalation of power. The power creep, to a level they couldn't manage. They may even lock themselves into a real war this time, and be forced to have to change their feudal system otherwise they couldn't defeat each other. The crap, too much to lose.
And the most obvious one: their science had reached a roof of some kind, one only Anubis for example proved capable of slightly surpassing.

Some kind of active Keeper conspiracy is the only thing that really makes sense now. The finale pretty much put a nail in the idea that the actual tech is capable of a hell of a lot more than they're letting on. The hints were even already present in episodes like allies as well. I can't really blame them either. They apparently do all the work and just wake the Queens and various other leaders up from nappy time, feed them, then put them back to bed.

They probably think they should be running things and it wouldn't surprise me if intentionally letting the other's tech stagnate and break down is part of that long term goal. Queens in general seem to be arrogant and smug in their position and unlikely to appreciate the actual crucial value of the sort of tech support the Keepers provide them. They're just repairmen who do all the dirty work her royal highness can't be bothered with after all. Since the keepers are Wraith themselves, and we know at least some of them are also females/queens, it's likely they would resent being treated in such a way given the reality of the power they know they hold.

The whole "lets see how smug that ***** is when her hyperdrive breaks down between star systems" idea.

Or when they swap and compare stories about how "I can't believe I actually got that dumb ***** to believe that 1 reactor was better than 14"

Indeed that's a possibility.

I've been fond of a lot of different potential origin stories for them over the years. There is definitely something missing from the modern Wraith to make them a credible threat to a galaxy full of ancients though, especially since they supposedly only started on one planet.

They should have actually done the reverse, with the Wraith ships and troops being qualitatively superior and the ancients having the greater numbers. Then the Wraith building a cloning machine would have made much more sense as a death blow as it would have removed the only advantage the ancients had.

The whole ZPM thing has always been stupid because it's just the Wraith getting their hands on some normal ancient power sources and then all of a sudden they're supposed to be unstoppable. It's like if during the invasion of Iraq the Iraqis had got their hands on a couple of aircraft carrier nuclear reactors and then somehow spun that into the total destruction of the United States and world domination.

The ancients must have had hundreds of ZPMs if their own yet 3 was all the Wraith needed to destroy them? To go from certain defeat to certain victory, nothing but some tech that their enemies already had more of?

The only explanation I can think of is that the Lantian's technology was superior, but they were inferior in numbers. However, they still were winning. The Wraith, despite their mobility, couldn't be fast enough with their FTL and would still take time to settle on a planet.

The Lantians possibly had plenty of ZPMs, but not the military industry to exploit them all.

Once the Wraith got their hands on a couple ZPMs, possibly while sacrificing a lot of their ships, resources and numbers on that, it gave them the range they lacked. Now they could build ships faster, settle more worlds at once, and above all have superships cross the galaxy faster and to greater distances without having to stop.
It's literally possible that the ZPMs even allowed them to attack key worlds which they had never managed to endanger before, worlds where there would be some Lantians bases. It could be possible that from there, they even got their hands on more tech, perhaps even a cache of more ZPMs, or some ZPM blueprints, which led them to manage to build their first own ZPM, perhaps a very crude and cumbersome model, limited in power and duration, but which could be enough to let a ship survive a drone swarm and, with a few of upgraded cruisers, hiveships and those other large ships we've never seen but shown in Athosian caves, managed to defeat Auroras. Unless I'm missing something with a date here or there, it could explain, for example, the Tria case, and how a couple cruisers proved deadly and could even surprise an Aurora. While current cruisers would be squished like mere insects and be limited in their FTL speed and range, upgraded cruisers could make longer jumpers and sustain an attack. Assuming Tria faced a great many of such cruisers, it could explain how, say a flotilla, managed to nearly destroy it.

The biggest problem here would again be about explaining where all that neat stuff went after the war.

[Mike.]

From what I remember they never learned how to build ZPMs, just obtained a number of them. Over time those were depleted powering cloning facilities, and any ships that were designed to use them would just be impossible to move afterwards with traditional power generation techniques.

[Mister Oragahn]

From what I remember they never learned how to build ZPMs, just obtained a number of them. Over time those were depleted powering cloning facilities,...

Well... depleting ZPM by growing clones...
Don't get me started on that. The only way it could make sense is if they literally built clones out of energy, E=mc² and all that, each kilo of drone flesh being worth many megatons.
And yet I can't even picture how, even that way, they could deplete even one ZPM.

... and any ships that were designed to use them would just be impossible to move afterwards with traditional power generation techniques.

So they would dumb them down, outstrip them. That would actually make some sense, and would explain the awesome waste of space that hiveships are. Without even the proper power sources, the ships's advanced systems would decay or some stuff like that, so they'd literally excise the dying advanced parts of the ship, and returning to the vanilla models.
It's not exactly a stellar explanation, especially since there's no reason I can think of about why a lack of super power would lead certain systems to decay. That is actually quite silly since we know Wraith ships and structures are very durable (see a cruiser resting on the oceanic seabed for millennia).
Perhaps they just removed those parts because they proved encumbering, pointless and adding unnecessary weight to ships, as well as preventing easy access to other parts.
Or perhaps some advanced systems are, again, biological systems which, without being fed with power, shrink in size. Therefore they'd only be waiting to be powered by super power sources again. I mean, I don't see why a hiveship's grow blueprint wouldn't have functions just waiting to grow the proper systems for the day some Wraith would plug a ZPM there.

Another problem though is that I don't get what's the circus about the ZPM being so essential. The hiveships are so enormous that you could turn one of those Dart immense cavities into one hell of a giant reactor and literally dwarf the power production of so many advanced ships we've seen in Stargate.

[thekillman]

actually each body has to be fully grown, the entire facility was powered that way, and by the way, i think they cloned much more than just drones. ships, for example. i mean, 3 zpm's, they deliver all the energy the Wraith need. also, the cloning facility was MASSIVE. and, as i said, it makes sense that the wraith would've used the power to grow more ships, but in Spoils of War they never got to that phase.

[Ouroboros]

The problem is, they weren't thinking in terms of warfare. They were gaming.
Besides, they clearly didn't trust their men at all. It may even be some left over from the days of Ra's forced departure of Earth millenia ago. They realized that it was better keeping the Jaffa underarmed, etc.
There's the problem of an escalation of power. The power creep, to a level they couldn't manage. They may even lock themselves into a real war this time, and be forced to have to change their feudal system otherwise they couldn't defeat each other. The crap, too much to lose.
And the most obvious one: their science had reached a roof of some kind, one only Anubis for example proved capable of slightly surpassing.

Nirrti also had some pretty interesting ideas on how to elevate herself, as did Apophis a couple of times and Baal as well. They do show a desire to grow more powerful through superior technology, they just seem really bad at actually doing it.

Indeed that's a possibility.

Makes you wonder what they're waiting for though, maybe having all the Wraith wake up at once and start starving to death was part of the plan. Get them all weakened by the inevitable civil war then swoop in and clean up the mess. The wakeup call was triggered by a keeper afterall, a keeper who thanks to their typically shortsighted writing in the finale, now stands about a 99% chance of actually still being alive.

Makes for a pretty good conspiracy. Little keeper conference call after Rising to see if they can spin that one waking up her guards into all of them collaberating to wake up everyone.

"Do you think they'll actually beleive you alone can and should wake up everyone in the entire galaxy automatically whenever you get attacked by some nuisance humans?"

"Only one way to find out..."

The only explanation I can think of is that the Lantian's technology was superior, but they were inferior in numbers. However, they still were winning. The Wraith, despite their mobility, couldn't be fast enough with their FTL and would still take time to settle on a planet.

The Lantians possibly had plenty of ZPMs, but not the military industry to exploit them all.

It occurs to me that actually building ships to use the ZPMs in might have been a major limiting factor. If they followed an Ori type model of human seeding then without something like Priors to help the process along with magic no way are any of their subject worlds going to build ships for them. They'd have to rely on facilities like Atlantis almost exclusively and if the Wraith were smart enough, or the ancients unlucky enough, and a lot of those got found out early on it could really end up screwing them over.

Once the Wraith got their hands on a couple ZPMs, possibly while sacrificing a lot of their ships, resources and numbers on that, it gave them the range they lacked. Now they could build ships faster, settle more worlds at once, and above all have superships cross the galaxy faster and to greater distances without having to stop.
It's literally possible that the ZPMs even allowed them to attack key worlds which they had never managed to endanger before, worlds where there would be some Lantians bases. It could be possible that from there, they even got their hands on more tech, perhaps even a cache of more ZPMs, or some ZPM blueprints, which led them to manage to build their first own ZPM, perhaps a very crude and cumbersome model, limited in power and duration, but which could be enough to let a ship survive a drone swarm and, with a few of upgraded cruisers, hiveships and those other large ships we've never seen but shown in Athosian caves, managed to defeat Auroras. Unless I'm missing something with a date here or there, it could explain, for example, the Tria case, and how a couple cruisers proved deadly and could even surprise an Aurora. While current cruisers would be squished like mere insects and be limited in their FTL speed and range, upgraded cruisers could make longer jumpers and sustain an attack. Assuming Tria faced a great many of such cruisers, it could explain how, say a flotilla, managed to nearly destroy it.

If they were cranking out near superhive level ships at any point that would be pretty much all she wrote for the ancients. It then starts to swing the toher way though, and you have to wonder how a squadren of Wraith uberships didn't just obliterate atlantis rather than bother to lay seige to it. I'd agree that it's all but certain their ships were more powerful back then than they are now. Even now the performance is all over the place in the same ship classes. Michael's pitiful cruiser vs those from seige for example. This suggests to me some sort of degradation that's either happened directly to the individual ships themselves as a result of neglect and shoddy repair/replacement, or to the class of ship as a result of multiple generations of knock offs of the original design each cutting more corners than the last.

The biggest problem here would again be about explaining where all that neat stuff went after the war.

I personally figure the Wraith/Ancient war was just a warm up for an even larger Wraith civil war that would have occured almost right after it. There was almost no food left and now there was no common enemy left. It seems almost inevitable that they would have turned on each other in those circumstances.

Before we depart entirely from the topic of my potential Wraith origin stories as well, I hit upon a pretty good one a while ago in another thread. Mind as well add it here for posterity.

From the Wraith/Furling alliance thread where I pondered "what if the species we now know as the Wraith are the Furlings".

Make it so the Furlings were the last race contacted by the alliance, traded tech and resources with them, signed treaties etc only after a short while the alliance began to worry about them. They multiplied too fast consuming entire worlds worth of lifeforms, their innate long range telepathy enabled them to share ideas and information species wide and advance their sciences at an alarming rate given what the others had shared with them, and they were a bit more aggressive and predatory than was initially thought.

I'd have it so that the Wraith/Furlings didn't always need to feed only on humans, but that this was rather something that the ancients did to them during an initial war before the one the ancients lost. The idea would be that the ancients and other species started to freak out that the Furlings/Wraith were spreading out all over the place and eating everything in sight, even encroaching frightfully close to the planets of other alliance races. Eventually a war broke out over that issue and to end it the Ancients infected the Furlings with a bioweapon that changed their bodies so they could from then on only feed on each other, thus dooming their species to a gradual extinction.

That resolved the initial war, and for several thousands of years the Furlings/Wraith lived in exile as nomads. The once great Furling civilization dwindled from a power that once spanned most of the Andromeda galaxy to one that consisted of just a few isolated tribes wandering the outskirts of that galaxy, or seeking refuge in its satellites like Pegasus. These tribes lived apart from one another, preying upon other tribes of their own kind for food, the original Furling nation shattered into a myriad of individual fleets each led by a queen or warlord. In time though the Furlings either adapted naturally or managed to modify themselves with genetic engineering to partially undo what had been done to them by the ancient weapon. They still couldn't eat all living things again like they had in the past, but now in addition to each other they could also eat ancients, and things close to ancients, like their beloved human surfs. They had become the Wraith, a name bestowed to them by the human populations they fell upon.

Spurred on by this new reality they immediately sought vengeance against the ancients, rising up in unison for the first time in millenia to reap a bloody retribution against their hated foes in the most grisly way imaginable, by hunting, killing and consuming their populations as food, sharing with their enemies the fate that had been forced on them.

With the Furling's having lived for thousands of years preying on one another for food, and the ancients having spent just as long as meditative scientists and scholars pursuing ascension, even though the Furling numbers had dwindled to the brink of extinction, the outcome of the war was ultimately a forgone conclusion. In the end though the Furlings went too far, they didn't simply defeat the ancients but their virtually universal species wide hatred of them drove them to destroy the ancients entirely, scouring the entire region of their presence and effectively making them extinct as a civilization. It wasn't until the smoke had cleared that the Furlings realized the full magnitude of what they'd done. By wiping out the ancients, and most of their human creations so completely, they'd damned themselves to return yet again to the same kind of perpetual species wide starvation they'd only just emerged from.

Newly reunified in the wake of the war however, the various Furling tribes came to an agreement. They would never again resort to preying upon one another for food. Some of the ancient's human offspring still remained scattered about the galaxy and it would be on these that the Wraith would feed from henceforth on. The leaders of the various tribes agreed. They would create a new political entity, one that was not loyal to any one tribe but that served the interests of all Furlings. These individuals, these "keepers", chosen from the best nominees put forth by each tribe, would be responsible for watching over all of the others as they went into species wide cryogenic suspension in the hopes that the decimated human populations of pegasus would one day again grow to sufficient size to sustain them.

Thinking about it now I'd also make the discovery of the Irratus bug in the Pegasus galaxy the thing that allowed them to modify themselves back to begin able to eat ancients. The Irratus bug was a creature that fed like they do, one of very few in the universe, and by studying how it fed on ancients and humans they'd captured they were able to re engineer that capability into themselves. It would also account for the presence of Irratus genetic material in the Wraith.

[Ouroboros]

The pull is just beyond silly anywhere close to the surface of that kind of star.
It would require a technology and a power capacity which I have not seen the Wraith possess.

Or a longer ranged culling beam. Always did wonder why they never weaponised that. Its a beam that turns matter into energy on the spot. At the very least it's a "kill anything without shields instantly" beam, and at the worst you actually get the explosive yield that would result from just instantly transforming that quantity of matter into energy.

Shoot a rock and cause a nuclear explosion in other words.

[thekillman]

supercarriers, with humongous rooms, filled with Data Storage Devices, and as they launch, thousands of Beam emitters activate, sweeping in powerful fighters. then the cullbeams re-direct and swoop up railgunfire and nukes.