Everything you ever wanted to know about Hiveships/Wraith.

[thekillman]

the only correct answer can be: "because"


i have NO idea, but it's already ridiculously big and poorly designed anyway

[Ouroboros]

It's over a kilometer thick I'd guess, and gets pretty chunky toward the middle. An Asgard Beliskner is way thinner compared to its length if you ignore those stupid tower fin things.

The Hive as it's used is hilariously bloated though. It's just a big mass of empty space moving around. You could say the mass is there just to absorb damage from things like drones, and indeed that should actually work fairly well, but this is stargate, and in stargate every ship suddenly explodes like it was full of antimatter gasoline when it "dies" regardless.

Even a ship 11km long and massing god knows how many billions upon billions of tons will disappear without a trace let alone a wreck of any kind unless the plot calls for otherwise 9 times out of 10. That's why it must be antimatter gasoline you see, because regular gasoline could never convert that much mass 100% into invisible energy like this **** seems to.

[Mister Oragahn]

Yeah, and the only reason they did apparently stop it was because they couldn't stomach the human collateral damage. In other words they'd already set their minds to wiping out the Wraith and even built the machine to try and do it.

I'm inclined to think that it wouldn't have worked as the 100% perfect deathblow it was talked up as though. It would have been a hefty one yes, but it's not like a race of interstellarly telepathic creatures aren't going to notice fairly quickly that entire shipfulls of their kind suddenly stop existing when their ships go into hyperspace all of a sudden.

Once they're on to it it's just a matter of altering their drives to get around whatever makes them different from ancient ones and allows this thing to explode them. That would odinarily be a pretty insurmountable issue in itself if you're stranded in the middle of nowhere with no spare parts or drydock, but with an organic ship that grows and regenerates components for itself and a hivemind to compare notes through it's a lot less of one.

The Aterro device would probably allow the ancients to blow up a lot of stranded Wraith ships and retake some of what they lost before the Wraith cracked the problem and things resumed as usual. Unless they deployed the thing really early it wouldn't win them the war by itself though. The episode gave the impression, from what I remember, that it was some sort of last ditch hail mary type deal anyway so by that point the ancients were probably already more of less done.

I guess the only reason they never changed their ships so they'd be spared from the Atero device is:

1. they thought it was gone, and assumed it wasn't a danger.
2. they didn't know what to do anyway.
a. cause they had lost the technological initiative and were mostly reduced to users of their tech.
b. they simply were not capable of leaking that tech.

On another hand, this Atero tech makes me wonder if the Lanteans didn't bargain something the day they left. Like, you know, "OK guys, you've won, fine. But try to destroy our city or even put a foot in it after we're gone, and we have that nasty device which will prevent you from ever being able to move your ships, and destroy all stargates, effectively cutting you from even having a chance to cull worlds through by foot. Humans may die, but it will also mean you'll lose your source of food you so badly crave for."

Then they sink the city.

Eons later, humans come, the Wraith already woken up get a little nervous, and soon realize that nothing happened and they were fooled. But they're still worried that it may be a question of the humans just not having found it yet, so they're quite twitchy on the question. Then it actually does get activated.
Only veterans from the old days know what is going on...

[Ouroboros]

I guess the only reason they never changed their ships so they'd be spared from the Atero device is:

1. they thought it was gone, and assumed it wasn't a danger.
2. they didn't know what to do anyway.
a. cause they had lost the technological initiative and were mostly reduced to users of their tech.
b. they simply were not capable of leaking that tech.

The retarded thing with the Aterro device was how Todd apparently seemed to know exactly where it was located, if I'm remembering the episode correctly. Now, Todd has had at least 1 queen in the past so it'd seem to be a fair bet that this is not just personal knowledge of his. So what do we have then. The Wraith, or at least some of the Wraith, knew of the existence of a device that, if switched on, could spell the potential doom of their civilization and they just left it sitting there for 10,000 years for anyone who doesn't like them to find and turn on.

They left it there while they all slept.

It's not like the thing was heavily protected at all. It would have taken some cruiser a 5 minor detour at some point in the past to just flatten the whole complex and remove the threat forever.

Instead though, just like the powered down Arcturus rector and unshielded "Tower" city ship, it's not destroyed, captured, studied or even noticed by Wraith scientists for ten millenia.

The Wraith have time and again shown an advanced aptitude for using ancient tech so it's not like they couldn't hope to even understand these things enough to know they were dangerous enough to destroy...

[webxro]

The retarded thing with the Aterro device was how Todd apparently seemed to know exactly where it was located, if I'm remembering the episode correctly. Now, Todd has had at least 1 queen in the past so it'd seem to be a fair bet that this is not just personal knowledge of his. So what do we have then. The Wraith, or at least some of the Wraith, knew of the existence of a device that, if switched on, could spell the potential doom of their civilization and they just left it sitting there for 10,000 years for anyone who doesn't like them to find and turn on.

They left it there while they all slept.

It's not like the thing was heavily protected at all. It would have taken some cruiser a 5 minor detour at some point in the past to just flatten the whole complex and remove the threat forever.

TODD: You've activated the Attero device. I need you to shut it down and give me its location immediately.

this is a very short response from SGA 5x11

[Ouroboros]

this is a very short response from SGA 5x11

Ok so he doesn't know where it is but he knows what it is.

It still looks pretty bad, this is the sort of thing you'd probably want to try a little harder to find in 10,000 years, or change their ships like Mr. Oraghan pointed out.

I was originally going to say that maybe since it was never deployed the Wraith never knew it existed as anything more than a doomsday myth, but that quote from Todd weakens that as well.

Looks like another average case of ancient super tech just left sitting around in their territory thanks to Wraith negligence/carelessness. Add it to the time bubble full of ancients doing god knows what, the arcturus reactor, the other crashed cityship, the entire asuran species, and the misc old warships, and ZPMs.

[webxro]

This is not about the ships is about the hyperdriver frequencies , and it the same in all wraith organic ships , they can't change it , and that's why it affects the cruisers and the hives , to make them invulnerable would mean to change completely the design of the drive .

Even if they could do that there is the problem that the ancients could just change the frequency of the weapon , so as long as they weren't using identical
drives there is no fix so why bother .

[Ouroboros]

This is not about the ships is about the hyperdriver frequencies , and it the same in all wraith organic ships , they can't change it , and that's why it affects the cruisers and the hives , to make them invulnerable would mean to change completely the design of the drive .

Even if they could do that there is the problem that the ancients could just change the frequency of the weapon , so as long as they weren't using identical
drives there is no fix so why bother .

If it's just "frequencies" or something like that that would make it a pretty lousy weapon. All you'd need to do would be set all your ships to a different random frequency.

It seems to jam some property of Wraith hyperdrives that Aterran hyperdrives don't have. To counter it they'd just need to isolate that property and change it to be either completely different or more like the Alterran version. Like I said originally, ordinarily that would be a big problem, but we're talking about organic technology here. Hives can change their internal structure on the fly and can apparently change certain parts of the hyperdrive to. In allies for example the two hives spontaneously grew nearly Daedalus level intergalactic level drives based on recovering some aurora mission reports and Earth's location, and apparently did so in something like a few hours.

Counting on them not to find a work around to this as your ultimate war winner seems like a bad idea. The ancients went through a lot of plans like this. Everything was always going to be the single ultimate weapon that would win the war until it proved useless in some way. Either because it was too dangerous (Arcturus, ascension machine, Asurans) the Wraith hijacked/countered it (Asurans again, ZPM powered warships) or it was just too stupid to ever see the light of day (exploding tumor machine).

The Aterro device would let them gain back some ground but I don't see it winning the war for them. If it was deployed earlier on maybe, and in combination with other things, but it honestly seems more like a nuisance weapon than an ultimate killer. It doesn't even destroy anything directly on its own aside from stargates, just forces all the Wraith forces to stay put until they find a solution to it.

It would yield a big advantage if you still had the ships to go around and pick off all these isolated little Wraith groups one at a time, but if you don't, it's more just a time stalling measure, unless someone's going to argue that the entire Wraith fleet would kill itself before anyone realized what was going on.

[The Flyattractor]

Just watched "The Seed" and this thought popped up.
Could a Wraith Cruiser be a younger version of a Hive ship?

[Ouroboros]

Just watched "The Seed" and this thought popped up.
Could a Wraith Cruiser be a younger version of a Hive ship?

It's certainly possible, if you subscribe to the theory that the entire ship is grown somehow. I personally do, but I think Mr. Oragahn favors the theory that the a Wraith ship's organic parts are grown around a sort of metal framework, which is why some parts of a hive look like exposed metal.

[The Flyattractor]

It's certainly possible, if you subscribe to the theory that the entire ship is grown somehow. I personally do, but I think Mr. Oragahn favors the theory that the a Wraith ship's organic parts are grown around a sort of metal framework, which is why some parts of a hive look like exposed metal.

How would that explain the superhive?

I thought the wraith were all but unable to build new ships?
Or is that one of those plot holes that are best left unmentioned?

[Ouroboros]

How would that explain the superhive?

I thought the wraith were all but unable to build new ships?
Or is that one of those plot holes that are best left unmentioned?

I don't think it was ever said that they couldn't build new ships. As for the superhive I'm not sure what you're asking about it exactly.

[The Flyattractor]

Didn't Todd say that put a zpm in a normal hive and it just
"grew" due to the extra power aplied to it?

[Ouroboros]

I think that was the gist of it yeah. That doesn't really say one way or the other if they can or can't build more hives though.

Considering that it seems as if hives grow out of a virus it's not like it'd be hard. Even someone who didn't necessarily understand all the inner science on how one functions could still plant one and watch it grow.

[SGSargon]

I thought the wraith were all but unable to build new ships?

Just like the wraith clone troops issue, the problem is energy. The hiveship that grew on Atlantis, in The Seed, tapped into Atlantis's power grid, and with plenty of energy it could grow much faster, so the power issue was solved. Or maybe this is a new type that can grow much faster, 'cause Beckett said he saw something similar in one of Michael's lab.
One hive is not much stress. Now let's try a small fleet. And no Atlantis power grid.
It could take years before it is fully grown. Hey, maybe that's why the hive from "Rising" was partially underground .