Everything you ever wanted to know about Hiveships/Wraith.

[Ouroboros]

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 .

Step 1: Gather human population you don't need to eat.

Step 2: Infect them with hive virus.

Step 3: Power them up a bit with a landed hiveship's reactor just until they grow an armored skin thick enough to survive step 4.

Step 4: Set them in orbit around the hottest most energetic star you can find.

Step 5: Harvest new fleet of hiveships in X amount of time.

That's how I'd do it anyway. You could make a virtually unlimited amount of them at once since the star isn't going to care how many baby hives are orbiting it, they'll all get the same energy, and as their surface area increases with their growth, they'll get even more.

Your only real bottleneck would be step 3 but even then you could use more hives to start them off, and keep using more and more to start bigger and bigger batches as you created more and more.

[webxro]

how about fusing 3 or more hives in 3rd step of you plan ?

[SGSargon]

I like you idea Ouroboros, but

Step 4: Set them in orbit around the hottest most energetic star you can find.

Aren't Wraith ships affected by very high levels of radiation?
I always wondered why the Wraith haven't just build cloning stations around stars. With a modified cullen beam generator they could scoop solar plasma and use it to power the cloning factories. And lets not forget that stars constantly generate bilions of tones of matter per second from fusion.

[Ouroboros]

I like you idea Ouroboros, but

Aren't Wraith ships affected by very high levels of radiation?
I always wondered why the Wraith haven't just build cloning stations around stars. With a modified cullen beam generator they could scoop solar plasma and use it to power the cloning factories. And lets not forget that stars constantly generate bilions of tones of matter per second from fusion.

The radiation thing was "hyperspace radiation". No idea how they'd react to the radiation of a star. Obviously there'd be something of a balancing act involved here to, IE get them close enough to get a lot of energy but not so close as to fry them completely.

You could even semi-automate the whole process. Instead of using a hiveship reactor for step 3 build some sort of space station around the star that is powered by it in the same way. Humans are delivered to the station by Wraith ships, infected with the virus, fed from the station's solar captured power at first until they're far enough along to absorb the star's energy directly themselves, then just set outside the station's airlocks and into orbit around the star until they grow into full sized hiveships.

[webxro]

Still will it be possible to fuse multiple hives?

[Crazy Tom]

Still will it be possible to fuse multiple hives?

I don't see why you would want to... their already massive, unwieldy beasts.

[Ouroboros]

Still will it be possible to fuse multiple hives?

If that organic stuff can keep on growing you could probably grow a Wraith tech death star or ring world with it eventually.

Now there's something I'd like to have seen in the series. A massive biological web of root like structures almost completely entangling the star that it uses to power its growth. A Wraith Dyson sphere type construct that's been growing in the same place for 10,000 years, maybe even growing out from and containing their original homeworld.

The scorching hot inner arms capture power from the star itself, while the outer ones are cooler, and serve as colonies of Wraith and as space for enormous factories/growing facilities fed from the star's power.

Of course the existence of even one of those things would imply the Wraith to be more powerful just via sheer numbers and industry than all the other non godbeing civilizations in the show added together. So it's introduction could pose a problem.

Be fun to watch the SGA team crap their pants when they saw it though.

[webxro]

and they thought that the hive was big , one of those installation could build hives

[Crazy Tom]

If that organic stuff can keep on growing you could probably grow a Wraith tech death star or ring world with it eventually.

Now there's something I'd like to have seen in the series. A massive biological web of root like structures almost completely entangling the star that it uses to power its growth. A Wraith Dyson sphere type construct that's been growing in the same place for 10,000 years, maybe even growing out from and containing their original homeworld.

The scorching hot inner arms capture power from the star itself, while the outer ones are cooler, and serve as colonies of Wraith and as space for enormous factories/growing facilities fed from the star's power.

Of course the existence of even one of those things would imply the Wraith to be more powerful just via sheer numbers and industry than all the other non godbeing civilizations in the show added together. So it's introduction could pose a problem.

Be fun to watch the SGA team crap their pants when they saw it though.

Wouldn't said structure be extremely vulnerable to hyperdrive detonations and RKKS strikes? Seems to me that just having a dyson cloud of power collectors would be enough.

[webxro]

did you even see what happened to the strength of the zpm hive , now imagine the full power of a star

[Ouroboros]

Wouldn't said structure be extremely vulnerable to hyperdrive detonations and RKKS strikes? Seems to me that just having a dyson cloud of power collectors would be enough.

The way I'm envisioning it it would be a sort of a net within a net within a net etc, of strands that would look fairly thin individually from a distance but combined, would overlap enough to almost completely blot out the sun at the center.

Think of it almost as a star inside a giant furball.

Independent platforms would work just as well or better but you'd have to set them all up separately and set them into stable orbits. This thing you could more or less, just let grow wild on its own.

Any single section would likely be supported by a lot of others all tangled and joined together so it shouldn't be overly vulnerable to anything short of an exploding ZPM. Anything else would simply be way to small scale to seriously bother something that size. You'd be talking about something millions, if not billions, of times the size of the entire Earth, assuming a sun-like star at the center and depending on how many "layers" there were.

It'd be an awful lot like talking all the inhabitable planets in a galaxy the size of the MW and jamming them together in a single star system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

[Crazy Tom]

The way I'm envisioning it it would be a sort of a net within a net within a net etc, of strands that would look fairly thin individually from a distance but combined, would overlap enough to almost completely blot out the sun at the center.

Think of it almost as a star inside a giant furball.

Independent platforms would work just as well or better but you'd have to set them all up separately and set them into stable orbits. This thing you could more or less, just let grow wild on its own.

Any single section would likely be supported by a lot of others all tangled and joined together so it shouldn't be overly vulnerable to anything short of an exploding ZPM. Anything else would simply be way to small scale to seriously bother something that size. You'd be talking about something millions, if not billions, of times the size of the entire Earth, assuming a sun-like star at the center and depending on how many "layers" there were.

It'd be an awful lot like talking all the inhabitable planets in a galaxy the size of the MW and jamming them together in a single star system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

But having a solid weave of these strands would pose huge demands on energy for dynamic support, say for the forcefields that hold them together over longer distances, solar plasma sails to keep the whole thing from imploding under gravity, thrusters to make up the slack from the plasma sails.

There's also the problem of getting all the mass for a total enclosure.

It seems to me that a more practical version would be an open net, made of thicker main strands that branch into smaller strands that hold things like solar plasma sails and antimatter traps (which capture the antimatter the impact of the solar wind on the plasma sails creates). Heck, maybe even lower a few Destiny-style solar power scoops, say for example, you plant the seed into an orbiting asteroid and it uses solar power to grow said power collector, then it uses all that extra energy to grow more asteroid tugs and uses those materials to encircle the star.

[Ouroboros]

But having a solid weave of these strands would pose huge demands on energy for dynamic support, say for the forcefields that hold them together over longer distances, solar plasma sails to keep the whole thing from imploding under gravity, thrusters to make up the slack from the plasma sails.

Materials strength will always be an issue with these kind of mega constructs but I don't think any of that other stuff will be necessary. As far as I know the concept of a normal dyson sphere doesn't require anything like that.

There's also the problem of getting all the mass for a total enclosure.

Likewise always a problem with mega constructs. It's more or less the reason why their existence implies civilizations of incredible power. It'll be helped along in this case though by the fact that it seems as if the Wraith organic material can grow additional mass for itself so long as it has access to energy. That's what it did in "the seed" anyway.

It seems to me that a more practical version would be an open net, made of thicker main strands that branch into smaller strands that hold things like solar plasma sails and antimatter traps (which capture the antimatter the impact of the solar wind on the plasma sails creates). Heck, maybe even lower a few Destiny-style solar power scoops, say for example, you plant the seed into an orbiting asteroid and it uses solar power to grow said power collector, then it uses all that extra energy to grow more asteroid tugs and uses those materials to encircle the star.

The idea would be to create some sort of lattice type structure with the various threads that would be self supporting and stable. It's also a given that some of the tendrils probably would extend into the star itself to scoop more energy.

This is getting kind of off topic though with this theoretical Wraith construct. I didn't really intend to get into the nitty gritty of defending as plausible something I thought would look cool on the show. Especially not when I opened by saying that even introducing it would completely break the power balance of the entire fictional universe.

[Crazy Tom]

The problem is that any sort of speculation will inevitably run into the writers' bad logic in terms of tech application. I personally find such theoretical constructs refreshing instances of logically used technology.

[Ouroboros]

The problem is that any sort of speculation will inevitably run into the writers' bad logic in terms of tech application. I personally find such theoretical constructs refreshing instances of logically used technology.

Yeah, no kidding. If that Wraith Dyson web actually did exist in SGA a 304 still would have come along and destroyed it in 3 shots.