Everything you ever wanted to know about Hiveships/Wraith.

[Mister Oragahn]

The Wraith Empire's true war machine

Introduction

Here is a quick analysis on the subject of what the Wraith Empire's war machine really was ten thousand years ago.
Though this essay may contain material that is issued from former discussions about the Wraith with various people here and elsewhere, this essay should be seen as nothing more than my personnal thoughts, thusly it does not engage the opinions of any other members of this forum.

There are two main claims in that short essay.

- The hiveships were not the backbone of the wraith war fleet.
- The Wraith reached an impressive industrial capacity that is still completely underestimated.

There are several observations to list, which once looked at by meticulous eyes, let us reach obvious conclusions, and raise many questions.

• The satellite weapon: the perfect definition of overkill
  
  In Siege Part I, McKay, Grodin and Mr. Two-Words-A-Script used a Mark I naqahdah generator to gather enough energy to shoot down an entire hiveship. The amount of power gathered there was said to be enough to destroy three hiveships, according to the lantian database.
  The beam itself lasted so long, and so much was wasted that theoretically, it could have impaled even more hiveships if there had been any on the beam's trajectory.
  
  This impressive feature was achieved with a naqahdah generator which, once overloading, would only release 20 kilotons of energy (based on McKay's claim from the episode Hide and Seek). So this puts some kind of cap on the amount of energy such a generator can deliver when calibrated to go boom in the very purpose to destroy a city.
  That's barely 5 or 7 kilotons more than Hiroshima's event.
  
  This is showing that the satellite cannon uses an exotic mechanism that is more efficient than pure DET, and is able to utterly blast to pieces hiveships which are made of armor that can easily withstand several multiple gigatons of firepower per second. A Wraith hiveship can withstand a nuclear explosion that actually occurs within a fraction of a second, and yet be destroyed by a beam that needs several seconds to drill through same armor with a much less powerful weapon. Raw energy can't explain that.
  Just imagine what those satellites could achieve with active lantian power sources backing them up, or imagine what those beams would do when mounted on shielded warships.
  Total butchery. They'd tear gaping holes through planets.
  
  

  McKAY: According to the Ancient database, it should be able to take out all three when fully charged. Keep in mind that the Ancient technology was far superior – they only lost the war because they were vastly outnumbered.

  What would happen when those satellites would be fed by power sources far more impressive than mere naqahdah generators?
  Even without housing a ZPM, a satellite is as big as a Goa'uld mothership. Which means enormous one or several power cores. This could really mean gigatons of energy, if not many magnitudes more.
  Each satellite would be smoking entire garlands of tens of hundreds of hiveships within minutes!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Hiveships: relatively too fragile and not specific enough
  
  Though hiveships are devastating vessels on their own when used against less advanced societies, they still are extremely defenseless when it comes to engagements against lantian weaponry.
  Their weakness can only be compensated by greater numbers and smaller vessels, but by a factor that would be completely ludicrous considering how high it would have to be, since the hiveships can be shot down by all Lantian weapons in a few volleys, by devices like the pulse cannon seen in Trinity, or by multiple squid drones, if not by instant-shot weapon systems like the cannons mounted on the satellites.
  A siege strategy purely based on hiveships would be a waste of ressources and complete idiocy. The Wraith would have instead needed ships geared towards one single objective: be able to destroy any Lantian ship and base, and resist for long enough against anything they could throw at them.
  Hiveships are multi purpose civilian crafts, which many of their roles do not fit the requirements of war. They are nothing more than big flying Wraith colonies, massive population centers, filled with many thousands of Wraiths, and armed with a couple of big guns for good measure.
  
  To really pose a threat to a fully armed and defended Atlantis, the Wraith would have needed weapons that would deplete ZPMs even faster than what happened in Siege Part III, before being shot down by lantian weapons. In that same episode, we can see that while being several times the size of a cruiser, a hiveship can only bring to bear twice the amount of cannons of a cruiser.
  Sending those hiveships against the Lantian fortress would be the worst strategy one could come with. A pointless mass suicide. The Wraith would only see their brethrens killed in the hundreds of thousands everyday, as hiveships could be shot down by Lantian weapons with utter ease.
  No one can realistically imagine that the hiveships could pose a serious threat to fully active Lantian forces, backed up by ZPMs and many other power sources.
  
  Using a swarm of cruisers would be a far better tactic against the Lantians. There are two elements to consider here though. First, we know that the Tria, an Aurora class vessel, was attaked by Wraith cruisers and severely damaged as a consequence of this engagement. On the same hand, such cruisers have never been seen flying in dense formations. Finally, that lantian warship had a ZPM onboard, which may have been used at a last resort to gain extra power to escape.
  But then you see that in an episode like Condemned, a single drone fired by a crippled puddle jumper, which power was intermitent at best after McKay did some fine wirework, could still dig through far more than 100m or external cruiser armor.
  Such a wraith ship would stand no chance against a single lantian warship. Even a swarm of cruisers would be completely obliterated by an Aurora class.
  The obvious conclusion is that the Tria was taken by surprise, possibly with shields down during repairs, and possibly with no drones left (though the numerous cannons were probably still active and enough to keep the cruisers at bay to exit into hyperspace in time).
  
  So with cruisers and thus hiveships out of the equation, we're left to wonder what kind of ship could have really posed a threat to Atlantis millenia ago so the Wraith could actually maintain a real and constant siege over the city.
  
  The only advantage the Wraith had in this war might have been weapons as powerful as the ones used against Atlantis in The Siege Part 3, that is, weapons able to completely drain a ZPM within days.
  But that's like having tough guns made of paper. A few drones or energy bolts and the Wraith are toasted within seconds.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Those things do not look like hiveships at all
  
  The most blatant evidence against the use of hiveships on the front line comes from the holographic document seen in Siege part II, which displayed large wraith ships orbiting Lantia.
  All those massive silhouettes are the same in shape, but their schematic representation does not match the overall shape of a hiveship, that is, a long and rather flat superstructure:
  
  - The Wraith blockade:
  
  
  
  
  - Comparison between the two graphical displays: a boxy silhouette vs. a flat hiveship.
  
  
  
  
  
  You would expect the Lantians to actually know the shape of their enemy's most important warships after decades of battles against them, right?
  Even more, a simple elongated and flattened triangle would have been plain enough to represent the hiveships in a quick schematic way if they didn't want to waste time on graphics.
  
  But this is simply not the case at all.
  
  Bothering making a more complex 3D representation of a given class of ships which, in the end, does not even correspond to what a hiveship looks like, even with large artistic liberty, just serves to demonstrate that whatever the Wraith used during the siege over Atlantis, it had nothing to do with hiveships.
  
  Whether those ships were experimental or heavier warships, equipped with superior means of defense or weapons, it's up to anyone.
  I'd personally think that those ships did have defense systems that were largely beyond what the remaining Wraith forces use nowadays, possibly based on the culling beam that would be the perfect device against drones, and may have come with heavier long range siege cannons, possibly a very big one.
  They may have even been shielded to some point.

[Mister Oragahn]

• The Replicators, created to compensate for the Wraith main advantage: numbers
  
  

  NIAM: The Ancients, as you call them, were desperate in their search for a better way to fight the Wraith. Though greatly outnumbered, they relied on their technological superiority to give them a needed advantage. Soon, they succeeded in creating one.
  
  NIAM: Instead of building bigger, more powerful weapons, they chose to build smaller ones – microscopic machines designed to infiltrate and destroy from within.
  
  NIAM: In these tiny killing machines, the Ancients imbued an aggression that surpassed even that of their enemy. The technology allowed for organic assimilation and self-replication to increase their effectiveness ... and replicate they did.
  
  NIAM: They grew in numbers, evolving at a rate that took the Ancients by surprise. The molecular machines began interlocking, assembling themselves to form even more complex organisms, eventually evolving into the most effective and efficient form they knew of.

  What kind of higher numbers can we really think about, when we can see how easily downed wraith ships are?
  
  It is therefore obvious that the Wraith produced warships at such a high speed that the only solution the Lantians found was to develop the Replicators, extremely efficient, adaptative and fast self-replicating micro machines, able to withstand a large array of different types of weapons with much ease.
  The purpose of the Replicators was to even the numbers.
  The Replicators could not provide any major leap in terms of technology besides themselves, since they essentially borrowed their advantages from the Lantians' already existing technology. Their main advantage, however, was their capacity to reproduce in great numbers, even beyond the Lantians' expectations.
  We just have to look at what the lower models managed to do in the galaxy of Halla and the Milky Way, until they had re-evolved back to their best form, to see that such a "weapon" of genocide would only be created to destroy an enemy which warrants it.
  We've seen what Replicators can do. Give them a planet, and they'll convert its natural crust into raw material for replicator blocks.
  
  So when you look at it, it is just so obvious that the Wraith, ten thousand years ago, had much more ressources than they have now. We have yet to see the monstruous machines they used to complete that task.
  Right now, my own guesses would favor the idea of planetary devourers that eat matter with giant culling beams, and grow capital ships within their biomechanical "guts", with intricate networks of culling beams building the superstructures, only for the armor to grow over it after that.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• A demonstration of the Wraith powerful industry, part 1
  
  Let's start by looking at Atlantis' military ressources first.
  
  An episode like Progeny has shown that in time of war, the Lantians could dispatch like a good dozen of two different types of warships to entirely level the Asurans' world and propel it back to dark ages.
  
  Now, what would you expect the quick-to-turn-territorial Wraith to do against a lantian fleet as seen in Progeny, if even only the half of those lantian ships had a ZPM each, squids, pulse cannons (Trinity-like - we know that Auroras come with plenty of cannons), satellite cannons and other whatnots (like bombs for example)?
  
  Taking into account all the evidence presented above, and looking at the other elements previously gathered, please think about this:
  
  You can't realistically expect the Wraith to be a menace of any relevance when, even with unrefined and primal rushing tactics applied to small fleets of lantian warships, potentially powered by ZPMs (revealed to be possible in The Return part I... and hell, even us can do it for a 304 to boost shields and FTL drives!), and potentially equipped with multi-hiveship busting cannons (which for any concern of comparison, the one in Siege part III was only by powered by fancy terran made naqahdah generator and didn't even use all of its power), entire Wraith tribes would be slaughtered within short minutes once any engagement would start, no matter if the Lantians actually used those ressources during the very final years of the war.
  
  Please consider this: It would have still took days for a fleet of ten hiveships, and likely twice as much cruisers, in Siege Part III, to drain a ZPM's energy level to null, which may not have even been full to boot (though we know it was above 60% full, based on McKay and Mrs. Miller).
  
  All that time, and so many ships, only to drain a single ZPM, which was not even full to boot!
  So what do you really think would happen if a lantian warship got powered by a full ZPM and jumped in the middle of a massive wraith fleet that would mercylessly dwarf the one that attacked Atlantis in Siege part 3?
  
  Simple: the Wraith would be painfully owned, as a result of a completely one sided battle, though extermination would fit better.
  
  Above all, we know that the Lantians had at least another cityship, plus several bases and outposts all over Pegasus.
  
  Even overkill is not enough to illustrate the flabbergasting gap of power between both races. I cannot stress enough on how even the most basic military tactics would still allow the Lantians to utterly dominate their enemies.
  
  This is not even considering that the Lantians have proved being quite smarter than medieval peasants armed with fork spikes with no idea about organization.
  
  Yet, the Wraith won. As desmontrated previously, only a number crunching race was considered being the most logical solution to win against the Wraith.
  
  So now, let's just look at what defenses Atlantis could count on:
  
  

  McKAY: Not only has Teyla been able to ascertain that the Wraith are more interested in Earth than Atlantis, which is ... you know, terrifying, she realised that the hive ships will go right past the only surviving LaGrange point satellite.
  ZELENKA: The last of what we assume were dozens of defence satellites destroyed during the Ancients’ last stand with the Wraith.

  Which means between 24 and 96 satellites. Only that! It's only an assumption from Zelenka and co, but they probably have a very good reason to come to this conclusion.
  
  

  McKAY: According to the ancient database, it should be able to take out all three when fully charged. Keep in mind that the ancient technology was far superior – they only lost the war because they were vastly outnumbered.

  We're not beating a dead horse by insisting on how Wraith's numbers were far superior.
  
  

  EVERETT: Still, I would like to see for myself how the Ancients lost the first time, try to avoid their mistakes.
  
  SHEPPARD: Yes, sir, we could do that. [...] This is the status of the Pegasus galaxy, before the Ancients encountered the Wraith. The blue stars represent systems either inhabited by or protected by the Ancients. [He turns his attention to the controls, and the map is quickly engulfed with red.] Then, this is how it looked after they fought for almost a hundred years.
  
  EVERETT: Until Atlantis was all that was left.
  
  SHEPPARD: Yes, sir. That's when the siege began. [The display changes to the solar system, and a model of the planet drops down between them.] For several more years, the Atlantians were able to hold of their attackers, relying on the city shield and superior weaponry, including the weapon satellite system. [Wraith ships begin flying toward the hologram planet.] No matter how many Wraith ships they destroyed, more kept coming. They could win almost every battle, but they saw no way to win the war. So, they submerged the city, and left. [He turns off the hologram, and the lights come up.] That's it, that's the story. But the picture is pretty clear.

  Oh yes it is.
  During the ultimate siege against the remaining Lantian forces, the Wraith were able to send their biggest and meanest warships at high rate which managed to overwhelm the Lantians, replacing the ones which were destroyed, forbiding the Lantians from reversing the tide of war. Seeing how hiveships are easily annihilated, and seeing that according to dialogue, batttles between the besieged Atlantis and the Wraith fleet occured over years, with the Lantians relying on the weapon satellite system all that time, even if we're not talking about constant ground-orbit fighting, you just get an idea of how insane the amount of capital warships the Wraith were able to throw against the Lantians was.

[Mister Oragahn]

• A demonstration of the Wraith powerful industry, part 2
  
  
  If we had to come with a figure that would in fact appear far more conservative that what is even remotely believable, here's how I should go:
  Let's say that the Lantians had only one single satellite near Atlantis. Let's claim that they only used this system.
  A satellite's buffer could, at the very least, be charged up to a level of energy that would be enough to destroy three hiveships, before needing to recharge.
  Now, let's claim that despite the fact the Lantians possess a power conduit technology that enables them to deplete more than a half full ZPM within a few minutes, they still needed one day to completely recharge the buffer of a satellite weapon. That is totally absurd, but that's just to get started with a ludicrously low figure.
  That means that over the constant arrival of Wraith warships, three of them would be destroyed each day, with much ease. Actually, the Wraith ships could not even start to manoeuver and place themselves into close range before they'd get blasted to bits.
  
  Thus the Wraith could send 3 new capital ships of the level of hiveships every day.
  It means 1095 warships per year. High casualties on the Wraith side. Since the siege actively lasted for years, we have a minimal value of 2190 ships over two years.
  
  How could the Lantians not reverse the tide of war with such abusive Wraith raping weapons? And we're only talking about the satellite cannons here. Not the squids, nor the semi-homing pulse bolts as seen in Trinity.
  
  I'm not even evocating a scenario where a few warships would actually stand between the Wraith and the city, protecting the satellite cannons and shooting down the most fragile and little wraith ships.
  
  Since the satellite weapon system was an integral part of the defense program the Lantians relied on during the whole siege (which lasted for years, again), it means that either the satellites could always destroy the Wraith ships before getting hit, or that the Lantians could always build new ones fast enough to replace the ones that had fallen.
  The Wraith would have to constantly push against the wall of defense raised by the Lantians, and would first have to destroy all satellites (and other ships) before even getting a chance at firing at the city. The dialogue tells us that the satellite perimeter stood, despite constant assaults over years.
  
  Obviously, the Lantians didn't have only one satellite, just as much as they also simultaneously launched drones to protect the satellites and shoot down even more enemy ships.
  They probably also used the remaining warships they had, both for defensive purposes and eventually to help position the newly built satellites.
  
  So with all those weapons combined, and with satellite cannons' recharge rate being logicaly higher than the tens of minutes Grodin needed in Siege Part I, we could easily claim that the Wraith were loosing like several dozens of major warships every hour, if the Wraith were constantly sending capital ships against Atlantis.
  And how could they not, since they had practically no other choice but keep swarming the lantian defenses until flood threshold.
  
  But even with only three warships lost every hour, it still leads to 72 warships per day, and thus 26,280 ships per year (low end).
  
  You think such a rate is absurdly high?
  So how long No Man's Land's battle lasted? Less than a hour, and it involved two hiveships against subpar vessels, a terran one barely having enough firepower to take one hiveship on its own, and a crippled Lantian vessel which could not shield herself and fire drones at the same time. This battle didn't even last more than a dozen of minutes in fact. In the end, one hiveship was destroyed and the other disabled and even severely damaged (though amazingly quickly repaired after that).
  'Nuff said.
  
  So now, just picture a full defense grid, with warships, satellite cannons, cloaked puddle jumpers and a cityship, and then dare to tell me that the Wraith won without insane numbers at hand.
  
  The dialogue even suggests that each new wave of wraith warships would outmatch the previous one in terms of sheer numbers.
  
  In the end, all evidence points to the fact that the Lantians had an impressive industrial capacity, even when completely besieged.
  And yet, even with those assets, coupled to insanely overkill superior technology, the Wraith were still able to have ships fight day after day, year after year, until the Lantians surrendered and withdrew.
  
  60 hiveships? That would be a minor defense fleet for an obscure backwater world, by wartime standards.
  

Conclusion

So questions remain: are there any supermassive and numerous Wraith shipyards, and how would they work exactly?
What are those unknown and large Wraith siege vessels seen on the holo?
How could the Wraith, as we know them today, defeat a race which, even if they had used the most simpleton-friendly tactic, would have still *****slapped them several thousand times?
Why have such ressources apparently disappeared, or not been used yet?

It's possible that the Wraith actually used extremely powerful ships against the Lantians, in the last years of the war, a kind of ship which actually nullified the need for an impressive industry, but then where are those ships?
They would have to be able to withstand both drone swarms and beam cannons, and be able to drain ZPMs even faster.
It's a simple situation here. The more you remove from one side, the more you add to the other. It's either about an insane industrial capacity, or about an insane war tech, or a good balance between both.
We're yet to see any of them though, but it has to be there. As long as you count logic as part of a good reasoning that is.

[Buba uognarf]

very interesting it's amazing what you can come up with if you think about something rationally...unfortunately i doubt the writers have put that much thought into the Wraith vs Lantian war so probably don't realise the huge plothole they've dug for themselves...

[Ouroboros]

It's worth confessing at this point I think that this latest article of Mr. Oragahn's was something we could never quite agree on, even as we were developing this.

See this thread is about discussion, even we don't agree all the time.

He's articulated his thoughts above better than I could sum up so I won't do that. Where we disagreed though was over the question of quality/quantity of Wraith ships.

Contrary to what Mr. O's made the case for I thought that it was easier to explain why Wraith ships seem to die so easily now by accounting for the 10,000 years of peace and potential doctrine differences between the Wraith and ancients.

Basically where we disagreed was Mr. O here thought the Wraith had bad ass industrial capacity back in the day and bowled the ancients over with massive waves of ships, I thought that their ships and tactics were better back then. Back before they all got softened up by 10,000 years of unchallenged complacency at the top of the food chain.

The way I see it the Wraith of today are the spoiled descendants of the Wraith back then and the 10,000 years of complacency has resulted in them largely readapting their fleet, and society, for peace rather than war.

Hiveships that might have once been actually filled with more effective military craft and countless thousands of Wraith troops and wokers now sit with hangers mostly empty save for a few darts, which are more like armed farm tractors used to harvest primitives than actual warcraft. The hiveship is a massive craft but looking at a modern one from the inside shows that most of it is just empty wasted space.

What I put forward is that all that space wasn't always wasted like that. Those ships were built back during the war as warships but now they've been adapted to a new role in peacetime. They've been filled up with harvester craft instead of combat ones and the large areas that once held machinery for manufacture, additional power generators for weapons or engines, or housing for troops and ground armies are now just large, empty stripped out caverns.

In terms of the doctrinal differences entering into how easily hiveships are destroyed I figured it's largely because, in addition to what 10,000 years of peace has done to the combat ability, they were enver meant for direct conflict to begin with. Basically my theory goes that war era hiveships were as effective against the ancients as they evidently were not because there were untold thousands of them but because they fought in a totally new way. They used carrier warfare.

Most ships in Sg (and sci-fi regretably) rely on the idea of closing on the enemy ship and blowing it to giblets with energy beams and what have you, typically from well within visual range. What if you realised that your ships were so outclassed by the enemies that you couldn't survive more than a few seconds at those ranges though. It obvious from episodes like No mans land that drones eat hiveships alive so this indeed seems to be the case in th Wraith vs ancient match up.

Well if you know that he can one hit kill your ships more or less the last thing you do is build huge resource intensive ships for him to one hit kill. What you do is build lots of cheap ones so that each one of his one hit kills becomes less significant a blow.

Now at first it might seem like the Wraith did the exact opposite with their huge clunking 11km hiveships, but what if we stop thinking of hiveships as "point and shoot" style battleships of traditional sci-fi and start to think of them as carriers. The pieces all start to fall into place then.

Hiveships are massive and we already know that they carry enough darts to cull entire planets like Sateda in a fairly reasoanble timeframe. We also know that the Wraith possess hyperdrive technology small enough to fit into their tiny scoutships which are not much bigger than a 302 fighter.

With this being the case the Wraith have all the ingredients for carrier warfare. They need simply fill their hives with scores of FTL capable craft like the scoutships and launch them en mass, through hyperspace, at hostile enemy ships while the hive itself avoids conflict with the enemy ship.

Used against the ancients this type of doctrine would have meant that an ancient warship, with it's many deadly weapons, would have spent the vast majority of it's time dealing with the Wraith eqivalent of torpedo bombers and not with the hive itself. A hive could send out patrols into distanst systems in search of ancient warships. When a patrol found one it would simply return to the hive or radio back and then hundreds or thousands of other atack craft would be launched. Operating in this manner it would be entirely possible that the ancient ship under attack would never even know where the hive attacking it actually was. It would just have to deal with wave after wave of attack craft slowly wearing it down until it was eventually destroyed or disabled for capture and lunch.

As such it would have been a question of doctrine not technology that would have allowed the Wraith to crush the ancients so completely. Their ships were infearior technologically but their superior carrier warfare doctrine at the time would have allowed them to win despite this.

The vast swarms of attack craft ancient warships would typically encounter would also give the impression that the Wraith were a very numerous foe, a foe that attacked out fo seemingly nowhere with huge hornet-like smarms of small ships. As you can see from my article earlier in the thread it's entirely possible that a single hive could have supported hundreds of thousands of attack craft. Going back to "before I sleep" again it also seems likely that a fairly small number of attack craft can destroy an ancient cargo ship large enough to hold 300 people in a very short time. If that's the case then it shouldn't take that many more to cripple or destroy a warship either, maybe 5 or ten times as many high end, well within the limits of what a hiveship actually using it's full capacity could be expected to carry.

So thats my take on the whole.

"Role of a hiveship during the ancient war thing" we couldn't seem to agree on.

Feel free to pick which ever explanation you like best or feel free to share one of your own.

[Mister Oragahn]

I'm glad we can actually show that we're not completely brain fused, like if one was just an alt of the other.

Now, there are points on which I do absolutely agree with.

First, scoutships likely appear to be able to engage enemy ships. The behaviour displayed by one of them in Aurora largely suggests that the ship is at least armed.
Heavily? We can't say. After all, Wraith appear a bit suicidal from time to time.

Secondly, the hiveships as they appear today are a vast waste of room. They house enorgmous vacities which could themselves contain a small town.
There's no question that if the ships have been built that way, there was a damn good reason for it, and seeing that the hangards are widely empty, it just points to the obvious suggestion: there was much more stuff there than now.

What this could be, no one knows. I find Ouroboros' ideas about many scoutships used for fast lightning assault logical.
I do consider that the whole swarm doctrine has the result of being a good strategy.

Using the hiveship as long range carriers for FTL capable bombers being very efficient.

But like all strategies, this one has its limits, and it's pretty easy to counter it.

1. Swarms vs. Swarms
   
   I'll repoint to the evidence of the destructive power of a single drone, powered in that case by one of the less impressive launching systems seen thus far: a puddle jumper.
   I won't spread myself over the status of the vessel itself when the drone was launched, but here's what the drone in question managed to do while it was active:
   
   
   
   Depending on the estimated lenght of a cruiser, and using the lower one here, this corresponds to a pure and non stop devastating drill through 160m of capital grade armor.
   
   This coupled to the evidence that drones can destroy ships and get out of them to acquire a new target, a single drone firing platform such as a cityship, an outpost or a warship would have absolutely no problem to make their drones destroy several fighters each.
   We've seen this happen in Siege part 2, with drones powered by a simple naqahdah reactor Mk-II, blasting through darts and still going on.
   
   This means that a swarm of wraith fighters, be they darts or scoutships, would never be a relevant nuisance for any of the drone firing platform mentionned above.
   
   Look.
   In Rising, Sheppard was piloting that puddle jumper, see, and while completely unexperimented, and sometimes firing several drones to shoot down only one dart, and above all letting the drones explode on contact instead of letting them acquire new targets, he still took care of ten wraith darts.
   That's it. Ten freakin' darts, shot down by a rookie wasting a puddle jumper's ammo.
   
   So let's just say that a swarm of wraith fighters wouldn't even last as long as a snowball in hell.
   
   
   
2. Limited firepower
   
   To begin, the very fact that darts prefered to ram Atlantis' shield instead of firing at it, even if they may have been shot down by doing this (which didn't happen at all), largely disputes the idea that darts are equipped with exotic weapons able to significantly drain any power source tied to high class lantian shields.
   Thus far, only cruisers and hiveships have shown such an ability.
   
   Now, for pure comparative purposes, an old Ha'tak had shields tough enough to withstand from several tens to several hundreds of gigatons of energy total, before the shields would collapse due to the energy output of a blue giant.
   That's not even talking about the hull itself, largely built upon a fair amount of naqahdah, which means a great deal of energy absorption. That hull was actually said to be able to protect the crew from same radiations for one hour.
   
   From this, here's what I have to say:
   
   First, two drones, fired by a puddle jumper (and not some super defense platform or massive warship), were able to drill through that armor, go through the ship and eventually hit a critical system.
   This largely demontrates how drones relying on a sole power source of minor capacity, such as the one found on a gateship, is already enough to drill through some of the most advanced forms of battle armor.
   This comes as no surprise that a spaceship's armor able to withstand hundreds of megatons of energy per hit can still be crippled by drones.
   
   Secondly, should we assume that ZPMless lantian warships can't even match Goa'uld level of shielding and armor, at the very least?
   Remember, when Anubis entered the game, with all the advantages he gained by using his knowledge derived from the Ancients, his supership was able to easily shrugg off the cumulative firepower of a dozen Ha'taks. His own Ha'taks were even able to engage Biliskners and win.
   
   All this to say that even if a single scoutship's weapon could fire extremely focused bolts, with a yield of one ton of TNT per shot (which is far unlikely), you'd need at least 10^9 wraith fighters, all firing at once and repeatedly.
   That's a swarm of a billion fighters.
   
   For one Ha'tak.
   
   Now try to picture what would be necessary to take down a lantian warship. When the Orion had her shields up, she took several hits from the nearest hiveship. Considering the fact that the hiveship was actually trying to shoot down the Orion, there's no reason to assume that the hiveship was farting around and used dialed down its weapons.
   So we're looking at shields able to withstand several gigatons of energy per second, at the very absolute I'm standing on one toe least.
   There's also the fact that the shieldless and already damaged Orion was still able to withstand more direct hits before being seriously destroyed.
   
   So here we are. You can already crank that low end figure, mentionned above, up to several billions of wraith fighters for a lantian warship.
   
   Now, this is of course a best case scenario for the Wraith, because large numbers of fighters will be shot down, so you probably need to increase that figure by 50% at the very least
   
   Which brings me to the second point.
   
   
   
   
3. Still an impressive industry
   
   In order to produce that amount of fighters, you're going to need huge industrial assets, from the lowest part of the chain, straight up to the higher one. That is, energy sources, important factories, raw materials, material transport and personnal.
   
   
   
   
4. Wraith pilots need to feed
   
   Now, to manoeuver those ships, you need pilots.
   And a good load of them.
   That's a lot of people to feed, and we're not counting the other Wraith.
   
   Trouble is that in Pegasus, there's little evidence that planets are widely populated. At best, you get worlds inhabited by a few millions.
   The vast majority of civilisations, despite having the oportunity to grow in size due to scarse and spaced cullings, often limit themselves to population centres up to small towns, or groups of them.
   
   This means there during the war, when all Wraith were active, there could not have been enough humans to feed upon intensively, especially with the ability to rely on spaced cullings, which is a luxury only available in times of peace.
   
   For a 100 years war, we're at best talking about one single generation to resplenish enough cattle numbers, which by all means would fall very short of what would be the strict acceptable minimum.
   
   To be able to come with the billions of billions of pilots necessary to engage all of lantian armadas to the extent of hoping destroying them, all of them needing to "eat" at the very least once a year (absurd conservative figure, since it's probably closer to once a weak if not more), we're at least looking at a massive genocide of equally high numbers of humans, a level of population that even worlds in the Milky Way never matched, and that's a galaxy which is not infested nor controlled by a race of space vampires seeing us as nothing more than tasty snacks.
   
   The hologram in Rising says the following:
   
   

   In time a thousand worlds bore the fruit of life in this form.

   They had humans grow on a thousand worlds, which hundreds of them were supervised through the satellites network.
   So that's not so many worlds to cull when you think about it.
   
   Now, we can always assume that before the war started, most worlds grew populations ranging in the millions each (the Keeper in Rising mentionned that her kind didn't enjoy a pool of preys as wide as Earth's since millenia), but that means a level of devlopment and urbanisation that is simply and completely lacking, even at the state of ruins.
   Only remote worlds, like Sateda or the one in Condemned, for example, managed to devlop beyond the vague medieval village. But there is proof that they did, because the cities and ruins are a testimony of their advancement.
   The world of Doronda doesn't count, since it was defended by the Lantians, and it was their own creation that ravaged this planet.
   
   The only way to minimize the need of live pilots would have been to rely on AI.
   I speculated that the Wraith would have largely been able to do so. The AI attacking and taking control of the Daedalus in Intruder is a demonstration of the Wraith's capabilities in that domain.
   But then, we're again looking at an asset which begs to be shown, and has not yet.
   
   
   
5. Swarm vs. Area Damage
   
   Seriously, how long do you think it would take for even the dumbest lantian general to realize that the best way to crush an annoying swarm of insects, and that finesse is the least of his concerns?
   
   Or are we going to argue that the Lantians, with all their hiveship blasting guns, star system busting power sources, explosive tumors, stargate destroying fancy devices and whatever else, couldn't come with the most obvious weapon for such a scenario...
   
   A big bomb.
   
   Oh, what a nicely packed formation of wraith fighters we've got there!
   Let's welcome them with a nuke.
   Fire. Detonate. Watch all those wraith pilots scream to death while the energy of your bomb washes harmlessly against your capital ship's powerful shields.
   
   Hey, we didn't even need to fire our drones, blimey!
   
   
   
6. Specific anti capital ship weapons?
   
   When? Where? How? I'd like to see that. It would make sense, but where is it then?
   That is, if this existed, we'd be talking about a weapon technology that is unheard of, yet very powerful, but complety lost. I'm not against it. It would actually make sense, but then where is it? What's the evidence that it existed?
   

[Mister Oragahn]

All that being said, there's another main point that I think is forgotten here.

The show itself established as a fact that the Wraith were sending capital ships against Atlantis. That's largely why I tried to rationalize this.

The swarming tactic is a good one in the void of space.
Tracking hiveships launching their attacks through hyperspace, over long distances, and despite crappy hyperdrives, would still be a pain in the *bip*.
Of course, it would mean that the Lantians would know how far such an attack could come from, because of the range and hyperdrive speed of those ships attacking them.
But they couldn't pin point the location of the hiveships and cruisers.

But that's where there's a massive strategic element that has been overlooked.
Not only I've quite pointed out that the Wraith, in the heat of the war, would actually have huge issues to find worlds to cull, but it would also be their downfall.

Simply because you know that they need food, and that they're going to look for the (most) populated worlds.

And the Lantians just have to wait them here. The Wraith won't be able to run on and on. Either they'll die of starvation, or they'll come to those worlds the Lantians themselves populated.

Basically, all the Lantians needed to do was to relocate the populations. Though this may have never happened, it's obvious that by the moment you start arguing that the Wraith engaged billions upon billions of individuals in this war, you have to think about food requirements.

However, this is not such an issue when you put the emphasis on wraith high technology instead of wraith population. I've been suggesting an impressive industrial capacity, but when you look at how many Wraith are needed to man a craft like a hiveship, and even have it shoot at a target, you clearly see that it's far more economic than largely relying on so many pilots.

And once you've looked at the wraith side of the equation, you pay attention to the other.

There's of course that whole myth about how the Lantians are either super twits, or overnaïve pacifists. They may not always make the best decisions, but there's a limit to that though.

So let's get the facts straight, ladies and gentlemen.

When you can build machines that need a damn insane level of organisation and mathematic logic, when you're known as anihilating mercylessly a race of sentient and artificial beings who've been begging for life and be recoded to hippie mode, when the Lantians have deployed so many different forms of weapons, ships and means of destruction, I find the whole idea that they're incompetent space hippies who had no clue about the most basic strategies to be plain absurd and out of phase with facts.

One of the most overused and tiring arguments is that the Lantians lost because they were stupid. I'm sorry, but they would have to be even more stupid than a banana (no offense to bananas).

This led both Ouroboros and me to discuss a lot about the Wraith, and expand our thoughts left and right. Between facts, rationalizations and extrapolations, we actually ended writing down various possible backgrounds for them.

The Lantians admitted being responsible of the Wraith's emergence, yet we always wondered how they could control a whole galaxy, keep an eye on all the populations, and not spot the Wraith suddenly poking their head out of their caverns, flying into space god knows how, and start kicking lantian bums left ant right across Pegasus, devastating human civilisations at the beginning of a 100 years long war.

We know that the Lantians had plenty of peaceful time to supervise the development of a thousand civilisations, since the day they arrived in Pegasus, after leaving the Milky Way "several million years ago".
Then things went pretty fast, when one day, the Lantians "stepped foot on a dark world where a terrible enemy slept. Never before had [they] encountered beings with powers that rivaled [their] own."

Wow, is she talking about... the iratus bugs?

Beckett's speculation was nice and all, but I think it was a *bit* shortsighted.

For all we know, there are much more chances that the Wraith are the result of generations of infected humans interbreeding, than bugs actually assimilating human traits and evolving to such a state that the bug part is almost completely lost.
But that would take a damn long time to happen, and how the Lantians didn't see this happening to one of the civilisations they actually developped is towing the line with plothole.
We won't even start to wonder how those first Wraith, or at least the first generation of the Wraith we know, managed to even leave the planet and conquer world after world, unimpeded.

Then there's the question about why and how the Wraith developped their powers. Be it natural, due to mutations and evolution from infected humans, or forced through technology, it's unknown.
But it baffling. Especially their FTL psychic network and real time exchanges.

Basically, regrouping various elements gathered from episodes relative to the iratus bugs, the conversions, the wraith castes, the missing technologies and all that, we realized that maybe the Wraith, as we know them, were just a variant of something bigger, older, and just more powerful.
Sounds a bit like lovecraftish there, sure. We went rambling about higher castes of purer Wraith, like vampires, who came to Pegasus some long time ago and whom, for whatever reasons, ended on one planet and got stuck there.
We speculated that due to the powers displayed by the Wraith and their uncanny similarity with humans (much than with the bugs as a matter of fact), they may just be an impure breed, a genetic variation of more powerful Wraith.

Point being, with such a vast universe and so many galaxies, it should be time to stop thinking that the Alterans/Ori/Lantians are the be and end all of Stargate's super civilisations, and that there may be other races, out there, who could give them a run for their money, anywhere, anytime.

[An-Alteran]

This is my Wraith history and war history speculation:

The Wraith War and the ships therein:
When the great plague hit millions of years before in the Milky Way Galaxy, most unaffected Ancients went into stasis for millions of years while the remaining unaffected scientists desperately tried to cure the disease. After a long while, All the Ancients were revived and they all spent nearly a million years constantly fighting the virus, which brought them to the brink of extinction on many occasions. Finally, five million years ago, the Ancients had lost the battle. They created a great device to restore much of the life in the galaxy that had been affected by the virus. The uninfected Ancients fled the Galaxy while the last infected Ancients allowed themselves to be wiped out by the device.

Nine Hundred and Twenty Thousand years ago, the Ancients had long established their reign in the Pegasus Galaxy. Being rather slow to progress technologically, culturally, and in many other areas, their race had remained mostly the same for literally millions of years.

They had dedicated themselves to a single goal: Ascension. The theory went that it was possible to cause the physical body to be artificially formed into energy and retain consciousness. This was discovered when the Ancients learned of a creature that existed as pure energy, and acted like an animal.

Unfortunately, they inadvertently killed the creature in their tests by accidentally sending an energy wave that cancelled the creature out. After millions of years of study, they were coming closer and closer to duplicating this form of life.

Few other experiments were being done, until some persons started becoming tired of this constant focus on Ascension. The once great civilization had become so rapped up in its philosophy that technological development and innovation had almost completely ground to a halt. Some scientists who were researching a strange bug that seemed to feed on the cellular structures that caused aging in creatures. The bugs began feeding on the human populace some time earlier, and the Ancients decided to study this process.

They found a human who had a bug attached to him and subjected both to experiments, partly to learn how to remove the bug and save the man’s life, and also to learn how the bug accomplished this.
Their experiments worked and they were able to separate the two with an intense form of radiation.
The bugs had an interesting cellular and shell structure that the Ancients found very intriguing.

The bugs shell “armour” was very resilient, and capable of terrible blows without breaking, shattering, or piercing. This shell also rapidly repaired itself when damaged. The bug was very tough and capable of restoring a limb within days of losing it. A compound set of injuries would render this incapable of occurring. So if a bug was cut in half, it would die. Or if it lost a large section of itself, it would die. The shell and the internal structure of the bugs were both very resilient but operated almost as separate organisms, growing at different rates and in different ways. In fact the shell could live apart from the rest of the bug, but would die do to a lack of nutrients.

The Ancient scientists and engineers had been experimenting with the shell greatly. They learned that the internal aspects of the shell could survive in space easily. They started designing a way of mass-producing the shell materials with living aspects to allow for self-repair.
The Ancient’s experiment on the human and bug had an unaccepted result, what they did not realize was that the radiation had reacted with a chemical the bug process and had caused it to become a strange form of cancerous viral infection, which started transforming the human into a strange blending of the bug and human.

The bug had also been affected. Within several years the majority of bugs now caused humans they bite to turn into the blends. These blended human/bugs would have the intelligence of the human, pigmentation, senses, some of the instincts, and the amazing regenerative capabilities of the bug, as well as the strange telepathic capabilities of the bug. Since the chemical was a product of the bug and not the shell, the blends did not have true shells, but their physical structure was strengthened by some of the shell cellular structure over vital areas, especially bones.

The Ancients called them pesium irei unius, or “destroyed ones” because of the nature of their existence. The destroyed ones grew in number without control. The Ancients at the science post reported often and attempted to create a counter agent to the infections virus.

Eventually no human was left on the planet. And tens of thousands of the destroyed ones were left without food. The Ancients began intense experimentation on the destroyed ones, learning they were incapable of feeding on anything not living and humanoid because they are mostly human, non near-human cells cannot provide nutrients because the cells are incompatible.

The destroyed ones after several days without food began to die… they as a single group mind decided their was one course of action to take: They must storm the Ancient base, and eat them.

[An-Alteran]

After a few hours of fighting, the destroyed ones had overwhelmed their captors and the guards of the lightly defended outpost.

They learned much from the scientists before consuming them.
The more intelligent ones learned from the computers a great deal, and learned of the experimentation on the shell structure. The destroyed ones learned that with the right stimulation and nutrients the shells would allow for extremely rapid construction of ships. With the right manipulation, 90% of a ship could build itself. The Ancients had already done most of the research, and the destroyed ones simply began applying it.

The destroyed ones learned how to use the Stargate and started attacking human worlds as well as Ancient worlds. Within a few days they had an abundance of food and masses of recourses at their disposal. Rapidly the human worlds began referring to them as the linguistic equivalent of “the Wraith”. “The Wraith” captured several large human production facilities and started building relatively conventional ships that had non-living shells covering and intertwined with the ships. They rapidly began building a fleet.

The Ancients, never wanting to kill, decided not to intervene and allow the humans to deal with the Wraith.
They viewed the loss of several hundred Lanteans at the science post as tragic, but acceptable and not worth wiping out a new race of creatures. The Wraith grew to millions in number over a very short period of time. Certain growth hormones are used to force most Wraiths to grow to adulthood in mere weeks. These generally wind up being relatively unintelligent and poorly educated with limited telepathic powers. They are used as mass ground troops. Most Wraiths grown rather quickly anyway, but they take years to mature. These become the leaders, commanders, scientists, and engineers in the civilization. After a few dozen human planets were under their control, with the populace as a form of heard that they used as food, the Wraith stopped invading and started setting up an infrastructure. Deep in their minds they viewed the Ancients with twisted hate because of leaving them and their former human existence to fight on their own. The Wraith are not conscious of this, but it is there. So this inspired them to win at all costs.

The Wraith laid dormant for centuries on their worlds… waiting.
Meanwhile, the Lanteans were mostly pleased with themselves and content to let the Wraith sit there and rot. Or so they expected. The Wraith in total only captured three of their worlds. The initial research post. another post, and finally a manufacturing plant. A total of 3,215 Lanteans were killed. The Lanteans never retaliated.

Many Lanteans, especially the military wanted revenge. It never was authorized.
The Lantean scientists, engineers, and philosophers who made up the vast majority of the civilization felt that doing so would bring up natural tendencies of violence which needed to be shed to allow for Ascension. They were content in “forgiving the Wraith” and moving onto their research.
Hundreds of thousands of years passed. The Wraith had built a massive fleet that they hid across their industrialized worlds.

15,000 years ago the Lantean Defense Force who had wanted to eradicate the Wraith and free the humans were gaining support in the council. The Defense Force, aware that the Wraith had been building production facilities and experimenting with Lantean inspired energy systems and weapons based on the limited examples they had found (Lantean policy dictated that all equipment would be destroyed in invasion occurred. Most weapons and the like at the Lantean worlds was damaged or destroyed leaving the Wraith with little to build upon).

The council determined that no such action would take place and ordered the Defense Force to disarm their ships and store all drones and other weapons off the fleet. The Defense Force was outraged and rebelled. Both sides wanted a peaceful resolution, but that didn’t occur. The Lanteans and the Defense Force exchanged fire among some of the ships. The Defense Force lost a few ships, and several loyalist ships were destroyed.

The Defense Force and many likeminded scientists, and engineers left Pegasus for good.
This caused Pegasus to be mostly unguarded. The Defense Force took most of the ships, and almost all of the most powerful ones. Though, like they had been, the Lanteans were unconcerned. Their weapons and shields were powerful, they never expected to have difficulty in any combat situation. The majority of their remaining fleet, small to begin with, was made up of transports, science ships, scouts, and very old warships.

After a few more thousand years the Wraith decided they were ready. Entire fleets had been hidden as mere agricultural growths on planets thought absent of intelligent life.
Many millions were kept in hibernation, and when they awoke for battle, they consumed all remaining humans on their few worlds. The Wraith launched an all out invasion against human and Lantean worlds.

They captured dozens of worlds over only a few weeks.
Before they could react, half the Galaxy was already in Wraith hands.
Many more massive human factories and several Lantean ones fell into Wraith hands. These were all converted to constructing the Wraiths biological ships.
The true war ensued. The Wraith ships were easily destroyed by Lantean weaponry, and the Lantean shields gave their ships massive staying power. Large land facilities were defended with ZPM powered shields. Many Lantean Gates in facilities had been quickly equipped with shields to prevent assault after the first invasion hundreds of thousands of years earlier. This prevented the loss of most Lantean planets to Gate assault.

The Wraith lost nearly every ship-to-ship engagement, and lost hundreds of ships every time they tried to take a Lantean world. Yet still, the Wraith pushed on.
Then the Lanteans offered peace. They talked with the Wraith over hologram, and sent a delegation of their most powerful warships. These were mainly the newer ones the Defense Force had not left with. Several Rectoer (Master) Class ships came along with them. The Wraith devised a plan. They would send over a delegation one a ship filled with a powerful bomb. They met the Lanteans on the outskirts of the Pegasus Galaxy. Much to the Wraith’s delight, the Lanteans’ ships had their shields lowered as a sign of good faith. The Wraith delegates were to meat the Lanteans on, ironically, the Lantean flagship Pruedeantiea (Wisdom). The Wraith delegates, unarmed warriors, came aboard greeted by Lantean security who were to escort the Wraith delegates to the conference room… the Lanteans were confused.

Suddenly the hanger flew apart in violent explosion. The bomb tore through the ship, tearing apart its systems. The ship lay disabled as hundreds of Wraith escort ships opened fire on the unshielded Lantean Warships. Their shields activated and they started returning fire with their pulse cannons and Drones. Explosions filled the sky. Thousands of Wraith ships were on their way already, and after several minutes of fighting, arrived. They had been hiding behind a black hole that prevented any sensor scans from detecting anything specific. The Lanteans fought valiantly. Thousands of drones filled the sky, tearing apart Wraith ships by the dozens.

In the end only one Lantean warship escaped, a Rectoer Class ship, after the delegates beamed aboard, and a few smaller ships that were there including several scout ships and science ships modified to carry more drones were destroyed, but a few escaped with the Warship. The rest of the fleet fought on and were destroyed. The Wraith lost thousands of ships in the fight, nearly all the ships they sent, but they won.

The Wraith launched every remaining ship they had directly at the Lanteans.
Few Lantean ships remained, and the Wraith were able to bash threw the defenses of many human and Lantean worlds. Eventually only a hand full of ships protected Atlantis and a handful of the most well defended worlds.

The Wraith were winning. They moved in on Atlantis. The system that Atlantis was in was heavily defended. Dozens and dozens of satellites were spread around the worlds in the system. The Wraith lost hundreds of ships to the satellites. And thousands more fell to the Ancient Drone systems across the Atlantis planet. The satellites one by one were destroyed. Finally the Lanteans submerged Atlantis under thousands of feet of water. The Wraith weapons were unable to effectively penetrate the water, but dispersed into the water. The Wraith left a fleet there which shot down many ships returning to Atlantis. The Wraith campaign was moving more slowly now. Hundreds of ships were lost in every encounter.

The Wraith sent a fleet to a world, after destroying the ships there and the satellites, communications was lost and they were never heard from again.
The Wraith had conquered almost every system in the galaxy.
There fleet fluctuated in numbers by the thousands.
The fleet was being spread out, chasing after the Lantean ships in the galaxy.
And then, suddenly, a large fleet of the remaining Lantean warships attacked the most well defended Wraith factory world and destroyed all the ships there and decimated the world. The retaliation campaign succeeded in the destruction of almost every Wraith factory world. The remaining worlds were all severely damaged. The Lantean fleet was finally broken apart. The few ships that remained fled in all directions. One ship apparently received information that would show a fundamental weakness in Wraith tech that would win the war. The Wraith learned of this and sent a fleet after the ship.

She was found repairing her hyperdrive, which was damaged after the attack on one of the last Wraith worlds, and was low on power and drones. She put up a valiant struggle, destroying several ships before being shot to pieces. In a last ditch effort, they opened a hyperspace window in a Wraith cruiser and rammed the ship. The Lantean ship was presumed destroyed, as no trace of it was found.

The Wraith learned that only Atlantis remained and all Lanteans were being recalled to travel through the Gate to an unknown destination. The Wraith sent much of their fleet to Atlantis to blockade the city. Few ships got through, but the Wraith lost hundreds of ships in the last months of the war. At one point, a strange energy was detected and a Lantean Gate Transport appeared out of nowhere. It was quickly shot down and presumed destroyed, then after a few days… silence. No life forms were detected anymore from Atlantis. The Wraith left ships for several hundred years… no life was detected again. The Human populace was devastated in the Galaxy. Few humans survived, none remained with any form of infrastructure.

The Wraith were left with no way of truly rebuilding their once great manufacturing potential. Many Wraith wanted to leave the Galaxy and search for food, a few wanted to remain and cull the worlds left, though few and few humans were left on them.

The Wraith were divided. And so they decided that those who wanted to leave would do so and separate from the main colony. The rest became fragmented between rival Queens after the main Queen was killed in an explosion assumed to be an accident.
They remained with few Hive ships, and only a few times more cruisers.
The rest of the fleet left in search of food…


What do you all think?

[Buba uognarf]

Ancient + Wraith history

and you were complaining to me about...baseless speculation ha!

[satnamboll28]

Hello there

Very interesting debating..I have to admit, I have done something similar with a friend of mine..we both suspected that there had to be a wraith motherhive class of vessel, to build such large numbers during the original war..we came up with such a ship..capable of building any wraith vessel...the last one being lost in deep space etc..my fan fiction has the wraith finding the last vessel..
another fan fiction that I'm writing in conjunction with somebody else, has pretty similar battles..
although the reason for the lanteans losing so much ground so quickly was due to a massive loss of production facilities...the delegation being lured into a trap and being ambushed by an absolutely massive wraith fleet....numbers of course being difficult to pin down..I have to agree, the writers didn't really think about this too much..
I also wrote in something about the truth behind wraith technology and their feeding capabilities....
about there being a different type of wraith, wraith hiveship etc during the original war years..and that they were responsible for pushing lantean forces back so effectively...
it's all very complicated, as I'm currently putting it to together....I'd be happy to share the info with you, as you guys seem to have a much better grasp on the wraith background than I do...

I also believe there are two different classes of drones..energy drones (fired from puddle jumpers) being one use only, and physical drones (grodin checking one out in rising, and used pretty much everywhere else) being reusable, and able to go through virtually anything..although this has been prone to inconsistent portrayal by the writers...

I can't really say much else, apart from you are right in pretty much all of it...there is so much info...
i have written about the wraith destroying the diplomatic delegation deliberately to destroy the last heavy ancient battleships etc..
do please check http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/s...writers-forum/
it's called asgard conundrum (yes, shameless plug..soz)
i could always use more feedback..but there is some info that i would like to run by yourselves with regards to ancient battle craft, and engagements with the wraith..
satnam

[Mister Oragahn]

What do you all think?

Sign here.

More seriously, there are things I like, and things I dislike (like how the Lantians sent a whole fleet of their best warships and, of course, had them lowering their shields, after fighting for years against a relentless and savage enemy decimating any world inhabited by humans).

I will try to adress the points in detail later on.




EDIT: What I was afraid of happened. The latest episode of Stargate did show fleets of hiveships and cruiser head for Atlantis.
I so hoped TPTB to actually think about it and introduce something new.
After more than two seasons of SGA, I hoped things would evolve in a fresh and teasing way.

But no, they just reused the old models, pissing over two years of canon depicting wraith ships as weak, and apparently want us to think that magically, those ships could suddenly hold ground against Atlantis, lantian ships and a full satellite based defense grid, despite the fact that cruisers can be seriously damaged by a single badly powered drone.
Sure.

So now, more than a half of the stuff I've written above is definitely screwed. Yeepee!

The latest episode does not contradict the part about the imbalance of power, nor the wraith ships' fragility against lantian weapons, but it clearly puts it as a fact that those ships were used to attack Atlantis.

So the only rationalization I can come with is that those ships, back then, were far better than they are now.

Let's see what they'll come with.

[Mister Oragahn]

Hello there

Very interesting debating..I have to admit, I have done something similar with a friend of mine..we both suspected that there had to be a wraith motherhive class of vessel, to build such large numbers during the original war..we came up with such a ship..capable of building any wraith vessel...the last one being lost in deep space etc..my fan fiction has the wraith finding the last vessel..
another fan fiction that I'm writing in conjunction with somebody else, has pretty similar battles..

What was it exactly?
I've been dreaming about planet devourers (see posts at the top of this page).

although the reason for the lanteans losing so much ground so quickly was due to a massive loss of production facilities...the delegation being lured into a trap and being ambushed by an absolutely massive wraith fleet....numbers of course being difficult to pin down..I have to agree, the writers didn't really think about this too much..

And apparently believe it's necessary to insist on how cruisers and hiveships are the cream of wraith naval forces.

I also wrote in something about the truth behind wraith technology and their feeding capabilities....
about there being a different type of wraith, wraith hiveship etc during the original war years..and that they were responsible for pushing lantean forces back so effectively...
it's all very complicated, as I'm currently putting it to together....I'd be happy to share the info with you, as you guys seem to have a much better grasp on the wraith background than I do...

Actually, from what you're telling, you seem to have spent a good load of time thinking about it and pasting pieces together.

I also believe there are two different classes of drones..energy drones (fired from puddle jumpers) being one use only, and physical drones (grodin checking one out in rising, and used pretty much everywhere else) being reusable, and able to go through virtually anything..although this has been prone to inconsistent portrayal by the writers...

Actually, Rising established from the get go that gateship's drones are just as physical as the ones stored in the cityships' silos.
As for the different behaviours, I always put it on different weapon modes.

I can't really say much else, apart from you are right in pretty much all of it...there is so much info...
i have written about the wraith destroying the diplomatic delegation deliberately to destroy the last heavy ancient battleships etc..
do please check http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/s...writers-forum/
it's called asgard conundrum (yes, shameless plug..soz)
i could always use more feedback..but there is some info that i would like to run by yourselves with regards to ancient battle craft, and engagements with the wraith..
satnam

I'll check out your story later on.

[An-Alteran]

and you were complaining to me about...baseless speculation ha!

Your speculation was baseless in that thread. Mine is a story driven introduction to a fan fic, not a pure speculation.
I felt it nicely outlined a basic idea for how the Wraith developed.
Apparently I should have kept to the basics when posting it, but I felt my fantasy could easily be divorced from the actual speculative ideas.
I didn't adjust it for this thread, obviously that was a shortsighted mistake.

Most is made up, as I admit, as it is the introduction to a made up story.
I felt certain aspects proposed an idea of how it may have occured.
Not how it did occur.
I titled it wrong by the way, it should have read:
Speculation and personal Story framework.

Sign here.

More seriously, there are things I like, and things I dislike (like how the Lantians sent a whole fleet of their best warships and, of course, had them lowering their shields, after fighting for years against a relentless and savage enemy decimating any world inhabited by humans).

I will try to adress the points in detail later on.

Cool. I wanted a good critique.
You would be the perfect choice for the Critiquer.

Them lowering their shields was first: To allow the Wraith to enter the hanger without compromising the shield entrance fields (IE: So they wouldn't be able to fly their ships through the shield like a Puddle Jumper).
And as a sign of good faith.
It was a stupid mistake, it was meant to be... maybe a little too stupid.
Though these Ancients are supposed to be the naive Scientists, after the military was exciled for the Co'up.
Well, that is my story anyway.
How do you recomend I improve that?

The Actual events in the show probably would be more like:

A few stock Aurora ships pop out of hyperspace.
A bunch of Hives and Cruisers appear.
The Auroras sit there.
The Wraith fire.
Inexplicably the Anmcient shields fail after a couple shots to make the sequence cost less money... the Ancients lose.

[Ouroboros]

I'm glad we can actually show that we're not completely brain fused, like if one was just an alt of the other.

Now, there are points on which I do absolutely agree with.

First, scoutships likely appear to be able to engage enemy ships. The behaviour displayed by one of them in Aurora largely suggests that the ship is at least armed.
Heavily? We can't say. After all, Wraith appear a bit suicidal from time to time.

Secondly, the hiveships as they appear today are a vast waste of room. They house enorgmous vacities which could themselves contain a small town.
There's no question that if the ships have been built that way, there was a damn good reason for it, and seeing that the hangards are widely empty, it just points to the obvious suggestion: there was much more stuff there than now.

What this could be, no one knows. I find Ouroboros' ideas about many scoutships used for fast lightning assault logical.
I do consider that the whole swarm doctrine has the result of being a good strategy.

Using the hiveship as long range carriers for FTL capable bombers being very efficient.

But like all strategies, this one has its limits, and it's pretty easy to counter it.

Good, now we'll finally get some discussion going on up in here.

Swarms vs. Swarms

The truth of the matter is drones exhibit a wide variety of behavior. Sometimes they fly through things, somtimes they blow up, sometimes they're fast sometimes they're slow.

There's a few immutable facts about them though.

They're finite in quantity.

They're controlled by a single guy in a "Drone chair".

These two things, especially working on concert together, are going to seriously undermine their usefulness against persistant large packs of small ships that suddenly appear. The guy in the chair just isn't going to be able to keep track of that many small eslusive targets at once. Bashing swarms of drones into reltively small numbers of capships is pretty much what the chair seems to have been designed around. Then there's also the fact that episodes like return show that it's possible for a skilled pilot to elude several drones, even when flying something comparitively slow and clunky like a puddlejumper.

[*] Limited firepower

I'd agree that dart firepower doesn't seem up to doing this level of damage in DET terms. That's part of the reason why I postulated the existence of more war oriented craft in my theory though. Darts are simply not built like a war oriented craft. They're a harvester that flies through stargates. A real war oriented bomber type ship would have no need for an onboard DHD or culling beam to capture fleeing humans. This would be space that could be given over to weapons, engines or making the ship even smaller.

The idea of explosive yeild scaling directly with shield penetrating performance also doesn't work in stargate for reasons we've already gone into here. Your article on hiveship firepower already shows the vast, orders of magnitude discrepancy in performance between hive weapons vs the lantian city shield and hive weapons vs the surface of the misbegotten planet.

Since we know that hives and cruisers have variable weapon effects vs shields and amtter it's entirely likely that darts, or the smaller warcraft I postulate, would share this capability.

The numbers you generated for the hives vs the cityshield make it possible for a single bolt from a cruiser to destroy the shields of what, 1000 Ha'taks or so? Given that kind of overkill performance scaling it down to fighter sizes would still leave us with one hell of a nasty anti shield weapon. Certainly something more than capable of worrying standard ancient capships when employed in large numbers.

[*] Still an impressive industry

Indeed, but my resource requirements still fall well short of yours.

[*] Wraith pilots need to feed

This was actually a point I was going to bring up as a huge problem for your theory. Mainly, how are you feeding all those Wraith soldiers you're throwing into the meatgrinder by the millions.

The problem is much less pronouced in my case. My theory still calls for large numbers of Wraith but nowhere near what yours does. Going by how fast the Wraith blockage evicerated that supply ship in "before I sleep" and how a group of Wraith cruisers evidently drove off and crippled the Tria it seems Wraith weaponry, however they deliver it, is quite up to the task of wrecking ancient ships. Or at least it was back then.

As such I think you're seriously overestimating the numbers of ships that would be required to actually crush the ancient fleet in pegasus. The satellite network is one such example. You base your assumptions on the idea that the Wraith will simply throw themselves against a wall of these things loosing capship after capship WW1 style.

In actual fact the satellite we saw seems to have suffered reletively minor but surgical damage, almost like it was taken out of action by a fighter or other small craft against which it's huge overkill deathbeam would be unweildly and wasteful.

That's the whole core to beating the ancients in my view. They love the huge wanked out overkill weapons, so you choke them in swarms of cheap **** you can build by the bucketload.

As far as feeding my pilots goes, we know that the Wraith had dedicated "human supply ships" in the war that they don't seem to use anymore so I'd imagine that there was large scale culling going on behind Wraith lines to feed the warmachine at the front. This might actually be what decimated the Pegasus galaxies population and eventually forced the Wraith to abandon their seige and hibernate.

[*] Swarm vs. Area Damage

Space is huge and a single big bomb is probably the most wasteful way to go about taking out a spaced out group of fighters. Because of the inverse square law, unless you bomb is packing a truely perverse yeild you're going to need to get close proximity hits to kill anything.

There's also nothing stopping the wraith from inventing big bombs of their own, fastening them to missiles, and bowling them in by the hundred with their fighters from all directions.

Hyper in, launch missiles, Hyper back to the hive for a reload while the next wave heads in.

That might create a need to fire a few drones, in a desperate last ditch point defence effort.

[*] Specific anti capital ship weapons?

Just scaling the shield penetrating weapons you got for the capships down to fighter scale would work more than well enough for wearing out the shields of normal ancient ships.

I'd prefer to think they had some more interesiting weapons that just the omni present "glowing ****" that everyone fires but this would work as the lazy FX way.