Everything you ever wanted to know about Hiveships/Wraith.

[Mister Oragahn]

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.

Anubis was an oddball. Such one, in fact, that he was condemned for unspeakable crimes against the Goa'uld themselves. That makes him off the norm.
Apophis and Niirti are more interesting, but it seems that their founds were of limited scale and, for some reason, their experiments seemed to have more to do with... a hobby?

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..."

He he that would be nice actually.

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.

Well it seems that if Inferno is anything to go by, when the Lanteans built a shipyard/base of some sort, it could be so well protected that there was zlich the Wraith could do against it.
The Wraith obviously didn't find all worlds, despite their overall grip on the galaxy. We saw several worlds where the Wraith had never gone, like the hostile ice planet Janis built his lab on, etc.

They obviously needed to have other stations or something, in order to build the defense platforms.

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.

Let's perhaps explain that, then, by the idea that the Wraith never managed to produce anything as good as a ZPM, and that the Lanteans did manage to find and destroy the places where the Wraith used the few they had stolen. Say, via suicidal missions, which would force the Wraith back to their pre-ZPM days, just with the difference that they had most of the galaxy to exploit in order to swarm Atlantis with crapastic ships built in systems not so far away (the same principle in RTS games where construction sites close to your enemy lets you cut on the displacement times). The Lanteans would have mounted those suicidal missions in order to prevent the Wraith from being able to exploit those ZPMs to such heights that they would prove threatening to Atlantis itself.

That way, we could argue that the ZPM "only" allowed the Wraith to break the balance in order to conquer many territories, but lost them too soon before they could safely exploit the moment in the long campaign when they'd come close to the system Atlantis was located in.
Those missions also were important because they'd prevent the Wraith from ever thinking about leaving the galaxy once the Lanteans would be definitely defeated and food supplies dwidling.
Hell, it's even possible the the Attero device enabled the Lanteans to destroy perhaps one or two super hives which had been using ZPMs.

* * *

[Mister Oragahn]

Pt. 2

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.

Clearly. I even had the impression that not all hiveships had the same amount of Darts, which would add to the idea that many of them solely used what they had left, largely counting on self repair to maintain actual systems.

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.

That's quite possible. In the show they say the Wraith chose to go into hibernation over long cycles after the war I think, but they clearly never closed on the door on the possibility that this wasn't the result of peaceful talks.
If there's been one civil war then, it could have easily been one far more violent after the Lanteans were, for all intents and purposes, defeated.

That's also a very good point of departure for further stories. You can branch out in many ways, like your older idea for example, have a few tribes begin an exodus towards another galaxy (Andromeda?) with ships full of humans to repopulate whatever world they'd find there, fleeing the slaughter, and perhaps changing their ways a tad on the trip.

The tribes which would have stayed would have destroyed their best assets, even more, forced again to build base model hiveships, cruisers and else.
Hell, there could even be a story about "traitors" actually trying to obtain help from the Lanteans, although for some reason that would have to fail in order to fit with SG history.

Then some truce would be made, and maybe it would be from then that the Keepers would be created, or obtain a totally new status.
The term Keeper, then, would be even more fitting, since they'd be keeping in check many things, from internal power and balance to external threats, plus technical management of ships and bases. It even gets better with that conspiracy thing -and it needs not be treated in some 12 years old retarded way- from the point of view that the Keepers considered it was a necessary mean to maintain peace forever, and prevent one tribe from ever developing a better technology that would allow it to trigger a new extermination by being tempted to use it to wage a war with the prize being more worlds to cull.
You could allow even a conspiracy inside the conspiracy, with a group being quite happy about the numerous Wraith deaths during the first civil war, and wishing to mount up a large enough power base to eradicate all possible Wraith. Some would have left that group after the truce was made, preferring peace after all, while some Keepers would have been convinced to join that group after the truce.
But that group wouldn't be sure of when and how to do it, and would not be powerful enough to engage all Keepers and Wraith into such a blood bath.

Then come the humans and their Lantean gadgets.
Suddenly it ticks, all cubes and cylinders match their holes. They'll be the false flag, the big ass excuse. Very few Wraith would question this, too used to the peace, fearing to lose too much, not sure their current tech could handle another open war.
Soon some would understand what's happening, but it would be too late. The menace would be nothing more than extra galactic cousins of their favorite food inhabiting the city of Atlantis and using it as a beachhead with very moderate success, although having access to a greater technology.

It becomes very simple from there.
In the overall mess that this would be, opportunities manifest themselves, and Wraith kill each other over the control of feeding grounds.

Some Keepers rub their hands and twirl their... her... hairs?

What's fantastic is that you could always have the tribes that left Pegasus return at some point or do something very... politically correct to solve the whole show without ending it on a massive Wraithicide by the hands of the USA. Errr, I mean the Tau'ri.

There could be an all new show about the Andromeda galaxy, the other Wraith and the species they met there.

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".

Mmm I have a few problems with that one.
First, the Furlings seem to be a Milky Way race. Nothing to do with Andromeda. As a matter of fact, I don't even know what the Alliance has to do with Andromeda at all.
Secondly, the bits we know about the Furlings tend to present them as peaceful.
Thirdly, the Wraith clearly were a species which took from the Lanteans, so much that they actually "spoke" and wrote Lantean. That's a total odds with the Furlings. That's something I've observed and I don't even know if the show makers ever did it intentionally, but the Furlings' writings and symbols have nothing to do with Lantean, and are in some ways very close to some old Hindu alphabets.
That said, I like the idea that the Wraith became forced to kill humans in order to save themselves, as well as because they didn't manage to completely free themselves from a curse "cast" by the Lanteans. It makes the Lantean's decision very tragic, tinkering with science and bizarre near-ascension powers, although they couldn't have guessed that.
However it makes them sort of beeyatches once more, by proxy.
I think the whole "curse plot" can fit without adding the Furlings at all.
It could fit as a last ditch typical Lantean crazy pet science project, in the vein of exploding tumors (lol), although I'd prefer this last resort weapon to be something more fantasy oriented than purely biological, for reasons I explain later in this post.

Now, globally, the curse would help explaining how the Wraith could maintain great numbers for most of the war without coming to a halt due to logically expected considerable food shortages.

Add the Lanteans actually realizing how bad things became towards the end of the war and trying to find a cure, almost succeeding but just lacking some key elements where science alone wouldn't be enough.
They leave galaxy, bitter, knowing what the humans will be exposed to for the rest of their life.
Cue Beckett finding the notes in the database, continuing the tests, thinking that science can work, and applying it, too blinded by faith in Lantean biotechnologies and the idea that they were that close... with the disastrous results we know.

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.

I never agreed with the idea that because an insect ate one kind of food for eons, the insect would become half its food.
WTF?
Mosquitoes didn't turn into humanoids despite pissing us off at night since the dawn of times.
It cries genetic tinkering way too much, although I don't think I find the idea that Wraith did it on their own that charming, especially since it makes their insect side a thing that came late in the war, or even post-war with the Lanteans. It's also because I think there would be a need for another explanation that has more to do with ascension and life force.
I'd rather take the idea that the Wraith have a special link with ascension, something so "between two chairs", that feeding from mere flesh wouldn't be enough, and exploiting that near-ascension healing power, but on the reverse, in some kind of twisted dark irony, would be the only way they could survive, perhaps feeding some kind of eternally dissolving astral counterpart that could only be "refueled", and thus providing life, by the only source which was close enough to them, "astrally" speaking: humans.
This, since the life force concept makes no sense from a purely biological standpoint. It can only fit with the fantasy part of the Stargate.

You could always have the Lanteans trying to be nice, trying to find some kind of cure while making advances in ascension research, without being the progenitors of the original virus. Especially since if they made the virus one way, there would be little reason why they couldn't understand how to code it inversely.

Then, I ask you: have you ever played Legacy of Kain and Soul Reaver? It has a tragic back-story about the origin of the vampires, their begone enemy, a curse and a Chtuluesque hungry godlike entity devouring souls across time.

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.

Perhaps because the Lanteans used shields, and the drones were also shielded and ignored the culling beams. I know we both always wanted to see at least an attempt at using the culling beams as defense systems, at least, Robotech style.

[Ouroboros]

Anubis was an oddball. Such one, in fact, that he was condemned for unspeakable crimes against the Goa'uld themselves. That makes him off the norm.
Apophis and Niirti are more interesting, but it seems that their founds were of limited scale and, for some reason, their experiments seemed to have more to do with... a hobby?

The downside of you yourself being the only person in the entire force that knows anything of value about how the tech works I suppose.

He he that would be nice actually.

It's funny because if she did indeed get Ronon'd back to life by her underlings that keeper ended up with Shep's ancient scanner and all of the initial captured team's weapons.

"The ancients have returned! They're arming their human serfs with horrifying advanced weapons to send against us! They even had a ****ing puddlejumper!"

It's funny also because in Stargate land all those M4s and P90s they captured would seem like diabolically advanced weapons in terms of their sheer killing efficiency when compared to their own or the ancient ones we saw.

They'd even make sense as a weapon you'd hand out to serfs because, despite their terrible power, their limited ammunition would prevent any serious thoughts of their use against you while their low tech level makes them easy and quick to build, and disposable and simple enough to hand out in droves to primitive conscripts.

Well it seems that if Inferno is anything to go by, when the Lanteans built a shipyard/base of some sort, it could be so well protected that there was zlich the Wraith could do against it.

Unless they didn't add the defenses until after a bunch of them got wasted by Wraith attacks.

They had no reason to lay heavy shields over all their installations until the Wraith showed up. That's why I said that if they got unlucky early on and the Wraith found a bunch of these installations in their earlier attacks and either blew them all up or even took them over it could potentially have been a pretty nasty blow. For whatever reason ancient drives in galaxy weren't really dramatically better than the Wraith or Goa'uld ones it seems. If they got a bunch of their bases in a couple of strikes they could more or less black out a whole area of the galaxy. Venturing out there would be a pain since if you did get swarmed or ran out of drones or whatever you were faced with trying to limp your ship home and hope you didn't get attacked again.

That might actually be how the whole initial "Wraith territory" that the ZPM powered ships later penetrated was created. Some sort of initial rush, likely also using the gate network, that caught the ancients off guard and targeted all the various ancient research facilities and bases in a given region that were at this early point more or less undefended. Would have given the Wraith a lot of intel on their enemies to. That might even have been how that other Atlantis type city fell, and the reason why Atlantis now has a forcefield over it's gate.

They obviously needed to have other stations or something, in order to build the defense platforms.

They probably had other installations or larger stations in the Atlantis system that were destroyed before the siege was set in on the cit itself. I'm surprised the team never thought to look for things like that.

Let's perhaps explain that, then, by the idea that the Wraith never managed to produce anything as good as a ZPM, and that the Lanteans did manage to find and destroy the places where the Wraith used the few they had stolen. Say, via suicidal missions, which would force the Wraith back to their pre-ZPM days, just with the difference that they had most of the galaxy to exploit in order to swarm Atlantis with crapastic ships built in systems not so far away (the same principle in RTS games where construction sites close to your enemy lets you cut on the displacement times). The Lanteans would have mounted those suicidal missions in order to prevent the Wraith from being able to exploit those ZPMs to such heights that they would prove threatening to Atlantis itself.

You would think that would do little more than delay the inevitable though. If they'd already cracked the idea of building their own inferior ZPM knockoffs then blowing up the facilities that made them would just delay them until they could build more, especially sicne they likely just grow them like their ships. This is stargate though so they probably kept everything, all the examples, prototypes, notes and people that knew anything about it in one place. Then the ancients just blew that up and they were all like "damn forgot we were telepathic!"

They never really got across what a ballbusting nightmare that would be either. One queen discovers some technical flaw in one of your ship classes and before you know it all the Wraith in the galaxy are exploiting it to kick your ass until it's patched, which might even require you to recall all those ships.

Or Wraith society produces some kind of Napoleon, Alexander or even someone more limited in influence like the Red Baron thanks to a particular set of circumstances one guy or queen was exposed to forcing them to get much better than average. Then their expertise starts leaking to every other Wraith, ensuring that even if you one day do manage to kill them the ghost of their talents will still inhabit all their armies and be picked up quickly by fresh clones, and thus continue to butt **** you for the rest of the war regardless.

I'll have to respond to the rest later.

[lord groovy]

They probably had other installations or larger stations in the Atlantis system that were destroyed before the siege was set in on the cit itself. I'm surprised the team never thought to look for things like that.

I am more surprised by the Wraith leaving Atlantis solar system and any potential technological wonder once the city was sunken.

Just hijacking the ancient weapon platform in Siege would have prevented any future problem. Since the Wraith technology seems so different from Ancient technology, they obviously didn't take it. So who did?

[thekillman]

I am more surprised by the Wraith leaving Atlantis solar system and any potential technological wonder once the city was sunken.

Just hijacking the ancient weapon platform in Siege would have prevented any future problem. Since the Wraith technology seems so different from Ancient technology, they obviously didn't take it. So who did?

the wraith aren't exactly the smartest. i would've disassembled that sattelite. and atlantis was sunken, and since wraith weapons are crappy enough, they won't waste a ton of effort on trying to collapse the shield. which would mean the end of the city aswel

[Mister Oragahn]

Well, in the first pages of this thread, we considered that the Wraith had weapons which were capable of greatly affecting the Lantean shields, although not powerful enough, in terms of pure energy, to vaporize whatever ocean that would keep flooding the void left by the formerly vaporized water from nuclear-like bursts.

There's also another point I think explains why the Wraith didn't bother. Not only they had secured the galaxy for themselves, so that was pretty much a complete victory to them, but even if they had wanted to capture Atlantis, they could not do it once it would be sunken.
As we know, it's a remarkably fragile city. At the very moment the whole shield would fail, the entire water on top of the city would crush it.

Would the Lanteans ever return in the city, they'd be stuck, there would be nothing they could do.

Perhaps they thought that if they tried to learn about Lantean tech while wandering around in the city, they'd risk unleashing something upon them that would be too much trouble than which the capture would be worth.

Perhaps they didn't bother because they had developed a better technology of their own in several domains.
A technology which they would have somehow lost since the war.

[Ouroboros]

Perhaps they didn't bother because they had developed a better technology of their own in several domains.
A technology which they would have somehow lost since the war.

Well if the superhive is anything to go by their technology is demonstrably superior in several key areas, just not as broadly advanced across the whole spectrum as the ancient tech is, as well as being hamstrung badly by inadequate power supplies, at least in modern applications.

Even up the available power though and you get sensors that can see through ancient cloaks and pick up intergalactic transmissions, drives that rival Asgard ones in speed, weapons that can make a total mockery of even ancient city shields, and armor that seems not only able to completely block drones but even the dreaded Asgard wankbeams, oh and it heals itself. Might be what the ancients were talking about when they said the Wraith had "powers that rivaled their own".

In other words all the techs you need to make warships of doom seem to actually be better... if they can get the power generation behind them to see them realize their full potential that is.

It does kind of better explain why the anients lost. If the Wraith were mass spamming ships even a quarter as powerful as that ZPM hive was they would have been completely ****ed.

[asdf1239]

what are those dome things on the bottom of the hive? everything exploded violently when the phoenix rammed one. surely the wraith are smart enough not to put the reactors/exhaust ports in such an exposed position

[thekillman]

because the phoenix had enough kinetic energy to blast halfway through the hive, AND it had an overloading hyperdrive.

[Mister Oragahn]

what are those dome things on the bottom of the hive?

Tits.
Giants ones.

[asdf1239]

you know i knew i wasnt the only one to notice the innuendo

[Daryl Froggy]

... I'm sort of sad that you weren't the only one that noticed that.

Have we determined yet how many of those massive ground and destroying energy weapons there are on hives, and cruisers?

[asdf1239]

massive ground and destroying energy weapons?

[colbmista]

yeah that made no senses he coulda simply put how many energy weapons does the hives have lol

[Daryl Froggy]

You are absolutely right about my question.

Do we know how many energy weapons the Hives and Cruisers have?