Everything you ever wanted to know about Hiveships/Wraith.

[satnamboll28]

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

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

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

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'll check out your story later on.

Hello!

Okay...I didn't really think about planetary devouring ships..after that episode where that mysterious blue beam was shown, I figured some kind of beam that could suck the lifeforce from a planet for a few seconds..a few seconds would be more than enough to fill it up, and the planet could renew it no problem..and yes,it would fit the vampiric nature of the wraith nicely..able to suck the life out of not only human life, but also planets..i'm guessing that they were able to do something to suck the energy from a planet to fit their ships, but couldn'y fix it to give them energy..and then presto, no need to suck life force from humans..planets live longer, renew their energy over time, and they are available everywhere..what if they were able to use this energy to bolster their forces during the original war? such vast amounts of energy could possibly be used to counter the destructive energy of drone weaponry- heal as you burn right? making them last a little longer in the battle?
i have to say, the hive ships are massive..with each hive able to launch 3 cruisers and possibly up to 82k darts (read the earlier posts..i think you are onto something here) thats a lot of ships..the ancients probably read this as massive numbers..hive ships jump distance away from the ancients ships..launch 82k darts and cruisers, then they all engage the ship....how fast would the shields drop if they were hit by 82k successive blasts one after the other, or as many as possible in one big strike? thats a lot of power to divert to shields...the impact would also damage the vessel..and then another hive ship can jump in and do the same...hence the overwhelming numbers..lets also say that the previous war wraith were much smarter than the ones of today..they built massive wraith mother hive class vessels..lots of them..and with the ability for hive ships to suck the life force from planets, how fast can you build ships again mate? and with any energy left over, massive numbers of wraith spawn can be growth accelerated..all the more reason to throw them into the war..that might be a better explanation (and also written about partially in my fan fiction)..what if the majority of the mother hives were destroyed, leaving perhaps one or two that the wraith forgot about? and that this has everything that they need to begin their war machine again?
another of my fan fictions talked about the wraith commander in sateda being one a breed of wraith who was from the original spawnings...being super wraith in almost every respect...what if the previous wraith troops were like him? that would also explain why they were so unstoppable..virtually impossible to kill....another aspect i touched on was the origination of wraith technology..they took what they knew and added stuff in, creating massive abominations of nature, subverting them etc....that would explain the speed at which they could do things...also took the suggestion of AI into account..what if they built massive numbers of darts- say in the billions, loaded them all up with copies of the AI, and just sent them through the gate, as a semi continuous first wave..they would crash into just about anything, fire here there and everywhere..taking down the forces slowly..allowing the wraith time to build up and strategise..the first wave would be spreading fear everywhere..thus ancients thinking massive numbers?
what if the hive ships and cruisers in the previous war were slightly different? better weaponry for one...heavier armour..in submersion, they seemed to move pretty damned fast in that vision...there is also the point that was made..queen of a great alliance...what if she was the one who allied all the wraith together initially against the ancients? the one responsible for all of it? if they had somehow kept her, she would have been an incredible source of intelligence, and a keeper of all the known battles against the ancients....too bad she had to die....there was also something..teyla said that she did not have the gene to fly the craft..somewhat suggestive..what if there were wraith who could use ancient tech..what if they had the gene?..perhaps some ancients were deliberately infected..allowing the wraith access to ancient tech...leading the ancients to lock the tech down further to only humans with the gene?..interesting avenue to exploit..



oh yes, i've been thinking about lots of things, and putting them onto paper....still can't draw in 3d to save my life though..have been discussing these for ages..and have come up with some other ideas..[yes, shameless plug for another fan fic..although it's in the early stages..synopsis is down, and some facts run rampant]...

to me, rising didn't really say much about the drones..they seemed to be one use only...hence energy based drones...physical drones could be used again as when they lose power, they just deactivate..also in rising, and the tower..energy ones couldn't...hence puddle jumpers have energy based drone weaponry..there is also the problem of erratic behaviour of drone weaponry throughout..in return part 2, they didn't burrow through everything..technically the drones launched from the city should have gone through the city parts itself..unless, like you suggested, they had different weapon modes..or the asurans can't use them properly..or were just trying to damage the puddle jumper and take them alive..upon watching rising again, you can see that shepherd fires 7 drones..if they were physical, he would have run out..as each side has 3 making for a total of 6..seven means that the jumpers must have energy based drone weaponry..

well, i'm all done..am off to get a new external hdd...for £130, i'm all for a 500gb model..nice...

satnam

[An-Alteran]

Um... planets are not alive.

[satnamboll28]

Um... planets are not alive.

Hello..

umm..actually they are...of course it depends on your view of living...
I have my own views, and tend to think that way..but I believe that planets are alive, in some respect...
Besides, it plays a part in my fan fiction so there!! lol

satnam

[An-Alteran]

Hello..

umm..actually they are...of course it depends on your view of living...
I have my own views, and tend to think that way..but I believe that planets are alive, in some respect...
Besides, it plays a part in my fan fiction so there!! lol

satnam

Do planets grow? Heal? Reproduce? Eat? Have a metabolism? No.

They are active rocks, occassionally dense enough to have gas stick to them, and in our case, have life growing on them.
To claim that a planet is alive is to redefine what living means.
Living, the word, can not describe a a planet itself.

And what is this "life force" you speak of?
It's a rock.

A oversized asteroid that is rounder.

to me, rising didn't really say much about the drones..they seemed to be one use only...hence energy based drones...physical drones could be used again as when they lose power, they just deactivate..also in rising, and the tower..energy ones couldn't...hence puddle jumpers have energy based drone weaponry..there is also the problem of erratic behaviour of drone weaponry throughout..in return part 2, they didn't burrow through everything..technically the drones launched from the city should have gone through the city parts itself..unless, like you suggested, they had different weapon modes..or the asurans can't use them properly..or were just trying to damage the puddle jumper and take them alive..

Speculation without basis.
We have never seen drones reffered to as anything but physical.
Energy blasts can not move around on their own, they are line of sight weapons.
Drones are not.

upon watching rising again, you can see that shepherd fires 7 drones..if they were physical, he would have run out..as each side has 3 making for a total of 6..seven means that the jumpers must have energy based drone weaponry..
satnam

Each side of a Jumper has at least two sets of three.
That is at least 12... not 6.
So your point is moot.

[Mister Oragahn]

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.

Considering the amount of drones that could be controlled, and considering how a drone can work on its own, as independant weapon, with relative efficiency, as seen in Rising, it would be quite likely that they have a good AI onboard.
This, in the way you play a RTS, would actually greatly help the controller. He'd basically give global orders, and the drones would do their best to achieve their task, with all pathfinding and floking considered. Sometimes, the controller could focus on one or several drones to impose a tighter control on the weapons.

So with the AI the drone has onboard, and its relevant capacity to take simple orders and even act on its own, a swarm of these independant weapons would have no trouble getting rid of a swarm of darts.

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.

Back in the past, all ships seemed to be better.

• The Defiant One: Food cargo simply downed instead of completely ripped apart.
• Before I Sleep: A swarm of smaller fighters, likely darts and scouts, engage a shielded civilian ship. However, there's a blur regarding the status of the ship's shields.
• The Siege Part II. Part of my theory, either those mysterious ships, apparently hiveships, were tougher, or they could be produced at insane levels.
• The Return Part I. The Tria, likely using a ZPM 10,000 years ago got attacked by cruisers and was severely damaged.
• Submersion. A cruiser, simply downed, likely self repaired to a certain extent, and easily able to withstand a pressure higher than what was destroy the unshielded parts of Atlantis.
  Plus the flashback, showing hiveships and cruisers sent to assault Atlantis, which means that all logic considered, the Wraith would not send those ships if they didn't stood a good chance of surviving against the lantian defenses.

And then the new stuff:

• Condemened: A cruiser forced to retreat after a drone, powered by a low level intermitent power source, ate through at least more than 160m of external armor, without even getting beneath said armor.
• Siege Part I: A single beam fired by the satellite weapon, powered by a naqahdah generator Mk I, completely destroy a hiveship. Let's remember that a vast part of this beam was simply wasted, and that in theory, the station could fire against the two other hiveships.
• Siege Part III: Cruisers floating in close formation to a hiveship are completely vaporized when the bigger ship gets itself vaporized, despite the initial energy being largely spent into turning the hiveship's entire structure into gas, and despite the distance.
• Aurora: the lantian ship's self destruction is enough to completely vaporize two cruisers floating something like, at best, one kilometer away from the Aurora.
• No Man's Land: A hiveship's hyperdrive can be seriously damaged for a relatively important period of time by a mere missile fired from a F-302.
  A hiveship can be severaly damaged by a (probably high megaton/low gigaton) nuke, and firing at the hangar bay exits when darts are coming out is enough to cripple internal systems, which triggers a chain reaction and disables said hiveship. Which would happen quite often with a dozen of drones.
  The hiveship downed by the drone is already swallowed in gigantic explosions while the vast majority of drones fired by the Orion have not even reached the wraith vessel.

Though there's no real direct evidence to support the idea that the same ships were better in the past, but there's some kind of vast flux of indirect contribution that would more or less make you think twice about it.
All cases can be rationalized and would not require the assusmption that ships were better back then, but some of the explanations are rather far fetched.
For example, regarding the Tria, we're not in the know about the conditions when it was attacked.
It was possible to rationalize all that.
However, it's quite harder, not to say pointless, to rationalize why we've seen hiveships and cruisers sent against Atlantis during the war. The Wraith would already know they would stand no chance if their ships were so crappy as they are "today".

This would easily lead someone to think that the ships became weak.

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.

There aren't that many Wraith soldiers to throw at the enemy, even with in the insane industrial basis my theory is claiming.
That's largely based on the fact that wraith ships can be effectively manned by very limited crews.
If the hiveship in Misbegotten had not been that damaged, McKay could have easily pointed the cannons at the incoming hiveship, proving the relatively low crew requirements. Obviously, a full crew would logically enhance the ship's efficiency, but they're far more than capable enough even crewed by two or three gonzos. Needless to say that a crew of 100 guys would be plain enough.
In a way, the Wraith would be forced to operate with such low crews. They wouldn't rely on pilots, as darts and scouts would be completely pointless if the theory of a superb industrial capacity was true.

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.

On the contrary, firing bombs with not such insane yields would literally decimate swarms of wraith fighters. Their range is catastrophic, and they need to fly close to the target. In a way or another, they will always find themselves flying in tight formations. The more the closer they get to their target.

Lantian ships could come with kiloton level "flak" barrage of radiations and shrapnel, this wouldn't even tickle a lantian warship, yet vaporize entire loads of vessels that can be downed by a P90.
Besides the sheer amount of ammo, the inverse square law would really start to kick in at ranges which largely surpass what darts and scouts are capable of.

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.

There's simply no proof that they can scale such weapons down to the level of darts and scouts, and even less proof that all tribes would possess that tech.

It's just a show, character shields screw everything up, we're wasting our time. Right?

[Mister Oragahn]

Hello!

Okay...I didn't really think about planetary devouring ships..after that episode where that mysterious blue beam was shown, I figured some kind of beam that could suck the lifeforce from a planet for a few seconds..a few seconds would be more than enough to fill it up, and the planet could renew it no problem..and yes,it would fit the vampiric nature of the wraith nicely..able to suck the life out of not only human life, but also planets..i'm guessing that they were able to do something to suck the energy from a planet to fit their ships, but couldn'y fix it to give them energy..and then presto, no need to suck life force from humans..planets live longer, renew their energy over time, and they are available everywhere..what if they were able to use this energy to bolster their forces during the original war? such vast amounts of energy could possibly be used to counter the destructive energy of drone weaponry- heal as you burn right? making them last a little longer in the battle?

Though I don't think we can say that planets are alive, their molten core still holds large amounts of energy.
Peanuts in regards to what a ZPM can do, but still impressive nonetheless, and clearly worth the drain.
That's what I think the blue beam does.
We also think that hiveships use hyperspace radiations to get extra energy, but this puts a lot of strain on the hyperdrives, and like muscles after an important effort, there's a waste result that has to be expelled before the hyperdrives can be reused.

i have to say, the hive ships are massive..with each hive able to launch 3 cruisers and possibly up to 82k darts (read the earlier posts..i think you are onto something here) thats a lot of ships..the ancients probably read this as massive numbers..hive ships jump distance away from the ancients ships..launch 82k darts and cruisers, then they all engage the ship....how fast would the shields drop if they were hit by 82k successive blasts one after the other, or as many as possible in one big strike?

With the yields displayed today, even if 82,000 darts does sound impressive, they would pose a threat to a capital ship.
Even if each dart could fire a bolt with a yield of one ton of TNT, and fire several times, you'd end getting 82,000 tons of TNT, that is, 82 kilotons worth of energy. You can go on and multiply this a lot before you start to reach levels that could pose a threat to lantian shields.

And of course, that's assuming that there are so many darts, and that they're able to fire multiple times and with enough accuracy.
Realistically, a warship would probably shoot down a quarter of a swarm, concentrate most of its weaponry on the capital ships, and then leave or cleanse the place. Without a hyperdrive, if there's no nearby gate, the wraith pilots would be doomed.

thats a lot of power to divert to shields...the impact would also damage the vessel..and then another hive ship can jump in and do the same...hence the overwhelming numbers..lets also say that the previous war wraith were much smarter than the ones of today..they built massive wraith mother hive class vessels..lots of them..and with the ability for hive ships to suck the life force from planets, how fast can you build ships again mate? and with any energy left over, massive numbers of wraith spawn can be growth accelerated..all the more reason to throw them into the war..that might be a better explanation (and also written about partially in my fan fiction)..what if the majority of the mother hives were destroyed, leaving perhaps one or two that the wraith forgot about? and that this has everything that they need to begin their war machine again?

It's quite heavily suggested that growth is a necessary part of the wraith construction method. The hiveships, for examples, seem to be about tissues growing upon an artificial superstructure acting as an endo skeleton, meshing with many systems and then hardening.

another of my fan fictions talked about the wraith commander in sateda being one a breed of wraith who was from the original spawnings...being super wraith in almost every respect...what if the previous wraith troops were like him? that would also explain why they were so unstoppable..virtually impossible to kill....another aspect i touched on was the origination of wraith technology..they took what they knew and added stuff in, creating massive abominations of nature, subverting them etc....that would explain the speed at which they could do things...also took the suggestion of AI into account..what if they built massive numbers of darts- say in the billions, loaded them all up with copies of the AI, and just sent them through the gate, as a semi continuous first wave..they would crash into just about anything, fire here there and everywhere..taking down the forces slowly..allowing the wraith time to build up and strategise..the first wave would be spreading fear everywhere..thus ancients thinking massive numbers?

The Wraith have the AI to do so. Seeing drones, with a design different from the dart, attack enemy positions would be excellent. All the stuff you need to put for a pilot lifesupport can be ditched, reimplaced by boosters, weapons, even a bomb, a big computer core, etc.
Trouble is that realistically, we've been a bit too far now in SGA to get those things introduced without require anything impossible from our suspension of desbelief.
I think Submersion was really a bad episode for many reasons, but especially because while it actually could have been used to immensely enhance the scope of the wraith war machine, leave hints and keep the mystery regarding the war, they simply went for the cheap shot of already existing models, and that's it.

what if the hive ships and cruisers in the previous war were slightly different? better weaponry for one...heavier armour..in submersion, they seemed to move pretty damned fast in that vision...there is also the point that was made..queen of a great alliance...what if she was the one who allied all the wraith together initially against the ancients? the one responsible for all of it? if they had somehow kept her, she would have been an incredible source of intelligence, and a keeper of all the known battles against the ancients....too bad she had to die....there was also something..teyla said that she did not have the gene to fly the craft..somewhat suggestive..what if there were wraith who could use ancient tech..what if they had the gene?..perhaps some ancients were deliberately infected..allowing the wraith access to ancient tech...leading the ancients to lock the tech down further to only humans with the gene?..interesting avenue to exploit..

The queen at least easily knew how to fiddle with the station's controls to cut power in certain sections and raise corridor shields in others.

to me, rising didn't really say much about the drones..they seemed to be one use only...hence energy based drones...

As I said, they were shown to be very physical.

physical drones could be used again as when they lose power, they just deactivate..also in rising, and the tower..energy ones couldn't...

What do you mean?

there is also the problem of erratic behaviour of drone weaponry throughout..in return part 2, they didn't burrow through everything..technically the drones launched from the city should have gone through the city parts itself..unless, like you suggested, they had different weapon modes..or the asurans can't use them properly..or were just trying to damage the puddle jumper and take them alive..upon watching rising again, you can see that shepherd fires 7 drones..if they were physical, he would have run out..as each side has 3 making for a total of 6..seven means that the jumpers must have energy based drone weaponry..

My point that the drones are physical, but they're materalized. There's simply not enough place to hold that many squids, and everytime a or several drones were fired, the slots from which they departed were already filled with a new missile, with no evidence of a physical reloading mechanism.

[satnamboll28]

Do planets grow? Heal? Reproduce? Eat? Have a metabolism? No.
They are active rocks, occassionally dense enough to have gas stick to them, and in our case, have life growing on them.
To claim that a planet is alive is to redefine what living means.
Living, the word, can not describe a a planet itself.
And what is this "life force" you speak of?
It's a rock.
A oversized asteroid that is rounder.

hello!!!

right..i believe planets are alive in their own way.. the definition of life will always change, as our own knowledge changes..for example..is a foetus alive when it is aborted? very controversial, and very debatable as well...
planet's aren't just rocks..by life force i mean energy of the surrounding soil..plants, trees, animals even..anything getting caught up in that beam could be converted to energy for the hive ship..hence it would fit the vampiric nature of the wraith as a species..their feeding habits also stretch to their ships..
so, how about you believe what you want, and i believe what i want? that way, easier for everybody..

Speculation without basis.
We have never seen drones reffered to as anything but physical.
Energy blasts can not move around on their own, they are line of sight weapons.
Drones are not.
Each side of a Jumper has at least two sets of three.
That is at least 12... not 6.
So your point is moot.

lets just say this..drones have exhibited such a vast array of behaviour...they tend to change their minds..they have been shown to be physical..and also as pure energy..
i have seen physical drones go through material as though they weren't there..namely the millions of drones that destroyed anubis and his fleet, completely ignoring their shields (also another flaming debate)..i have seen drones switch off when their link to the control chair is cut [no more power left in the zpm] and this is evident in the s2 episode, the tower....the drones just switch off and fall to the ground..reusable perhaps? in the beginning of rising, the drone was active, but it switched off when it hit the ground..does that mean it's dead? another train of thought on that one as well..i have also seen drones be used only one time..rising, it's good to be king, condemned and others...energy based drones perhaps? also another train of thought..and then in rising pt2, it all goes out of the window...the physical drones [they rearmed from the tower episode and we saw the drones fall out of the sky] which have been shown to plough through anything..also one use only..another form of behaviour? more than likely...the plot hole? most definitely...
perhaps the ancients figured out ways to make bursts of energy move around on their own? they seem to be able to do anything..or how about this..there is much that we don't know yet..the writers don't seem bothered by any accuracy needing to be written into the show...the plot hole is pretty much the new deus ex machina...
can we trust the writing teams to bother being accurate and depict things as they should be? namely....without using the plot hole..
you mentioned that each side of a jumper has at least 2 sets of three..can you tell me where? a picture perhaps? i've only seen the three...

satnam

[satnamboll28]

Though I don't think we can say that planets are alive, their molten core still holds large amounts of energy.
Peanuts in regards to what a ZPM can do, but still impressive nonetheless, and clearly worth the drain.
That's what I think the blue beam does.
We also think that hiveships use hyperspace radiations to get extra energy, but this puts a lot of strain on the hyperdrives, and like muscles after an important effort, there's a waste result that has to be expelled before the hyperdrives can be reused.

hello!!!

i've said what i was going to say about planets being alive in my reply to an-alteran...but you also have a point...i suggested life..but the core does also contain energy..peanuts compared to a zpm, but still large for a hive ship..therefore worth it...
hyperspace radiation? maybe..although it is known to do vast damage to the hive ship skin..and they have to stop to heal..perhaps the radiation of hyperspace is so variable and unpredictable hence the damage?

With the yields displayed today, even if 82,000 darts does sound impressive, they would pose a threat to a capital ship.
Even if each dart could fire a bolt with a yield of one ton of TNT, and fire several times, you'd end getting 82,000 tons of TNT, that is, 82 kilotons worth of energy. You can go on and multiply this a lot before you start to reach levels that could pose a threat to lantian shields.

And of course, that's assuming that there are so many darts, and that they're able to fire multiple times and with enough accuracy.
Realistically, a warship would probably shoot down a quarter of a swarm, concentrate most of its weaponry on the capital ships, and then leave or cleanse the place. Without a hyperdrive, if there's no nearby gate, the wraith pilots would be doomed.

with regards to the yields...i was basically thinking about ai controlled darts..billions of them..no life support, extra weapons etc..as well as firing into the lantian shields, they could also deliberalely crash into them...82k worth of impacts will do some kind of damage to a ship under siege..what if in the early part of the war, the wraith, knowing that they couldn't feed so many wraith soldiers, used ai controled vessels instead..no loss of life, and they can keep building the ships..ai is easy to replace..lantians think massive numbers of the enemy..no matter how many they destroyed, more kept on coming...that might explain a few things..wraith kept on building and using ai, lantians kept on fighting until the diplomatic envoy..then the wraith use everything they have..and soon the ancients retreat all the time...
with constant 82k dart swarms, any capital ship would be threatened...

It's quite heavily suggested that growth is a necessary part of the wraith construction method. The hiveships, for examples, seem to be about tissues growing upon an artificial superstructure acting as an endo skeleton, meshing with many systems and then hardening.

i've seen that as well..what if the hive ships are basically a melding of light superstructure, and organic materials? the materials would wrap around the superstructure, and being bio engineered, they could be manipulated..making it easy to create ships from templates...another indication for the wraith mother hive asset?

The Wraith have the AI to do so. Seeing drones, with a design different from the dart, attack enemy positions would be excellent. All the stuff you need to put for a pilot lifesupport can be ditched, reimplaced by boosters, weapons, even a bomb, a big computer core, etc.
Trouble is that realistically, we've been a bit too far now in SGA to get those things introduced without require anything impossible from our suspension of desbelief.
I think Submersion was really a bad episode for many reasons, but especially because while it actually could have been used to immensely enhance the scope of the wraith war machine, leave hints and keep the mystery regarding the war, they simply went for the cheap shot of already existing models, and that's it.

true

The queen at least easily knew how to fiddle with the station's controls to cut power in certain sections and raise corridor shields in others.
As I said, they were shown to be very physical.

perhaps she knew more of lantian tech than present day wraith?

What do you mean?

in the begining of rising, the rogue drone deactivates back into it's normal physical state..does that mean that they are reusable?
a similiar thing happens in the tower..when the zpm runs out, the drones just switch off and fall to the ground.....another indicator that they are reusable?

My point that the drones are physical, but they're materalized. There's simply not enough place to hold that many squids, and everytime a or several drones were fired, the slots from which they departed were already filled with a new missile, with no evidence of a physical reloading mechanism.

their behaviour is all over the place...but from what i have seen, i've made these inferences..if anybody else noticed it, would they not make the same assumption?
what if the ancients had dynamically adjustable drone racks? when the drones take out the target, they come back, but they go to the back so to speak....perhaps another indicator that drones are reusable? hence no real need for the ancients to really make anymore..as long as they have power sources sufficient to power them that is...no zpms, then control chair goes goodbye...and drones just switch off....wherever they are..i had an idea that in previous battles, the drones would contine going on and on..until there was no more power...wraith would just ignore them...they just want to kill and eat..so what if there were places where these drones were fired, but there was no power source to continue activating them? interesting line of thought that...it brings up possibilities..have put this down in my fan fiction..but it's debateable you know? difficult to really sort out properly...

btw, did you check out my story asgard conundrum? i could use some feedback...


satnam

[Ouroboros]

Considering the amount of drones that could be controlled, and considering how a drone can work on its own, as independant weapon, with relative efficiency, as seen in Rising, it would be quite likely that they have a good AI onboard.
This, in the way you play a RTS, would actually greatly help the controller. He'd basically give global orders, and the drones would do their best to achieve their task, with all pathfinding and floking considered. Sometimes, the controller could focus on one or several drones to impose a tighter control on the weapons.

So with the AI the drone has onboard, and its relevant capacity to take simple orders and even act on its own, a swarm of these independant weapons would have no trouble getting rid of a swarm of darts.

Have we ever seen drones seek out multiple independant targets like that with anything approaching a decent success rate? The ships in Rising were all stationary blocking the gate so pasting them isn't much of an achievment really.

I'm not saying that the darts/attack craft are going to make it through a screen of drones with no casulaties, they'll take casulaties, but that's to be expected.

Drones are a finite weapon system and with most of the galaxy in Wraith hands finding places to refill magazines with them is going to be a headache for Acient warships. It might seem like firing off a few hundred drones would be a great way to stop a Wraith attack but how many times can you do that before you're out of drones and need to rearm at one of a very limited number of bases.

It might even be possible that this is what happened to the Tria. At the time it left the galaxy Atlantis was already under Wraith seige. It could be the case that the ship was almost completely empty of drones after who knows how many weeks being hounded by Wraith ships.

Back in the past, all ships seemed to be better.

That I won't dispute. I can't even think of one instance where it was made to look, circumstantially or otherwise, that the old ships were infearior to the new ones. This isn't even just a case of plot powered ships. The evidence pretty consistanty leans toward the idea that the old ships were indeed better.

Though there's no real direct evidence to support the idea that the same ships were better in the past, but there's some kind of vast flux of indirect contribution that would more or less make you think twice about it.
All cases can be rationalized and would not require the assusmption that ships were better back then, but some of the explanations are rather far fetched.

It's the consistancy of it that gets to me. You'd think that if they were jsut playign fast and loose with the power levels and not giving a **** about any of it that we'd get power levels that were all over the place regardless of time period. As it is though all the feats dealing with ancient Wraith ships suggest higher power levels where as modern evidence suggests much weaker ships.

There aren't that many Wraith soldiers to throw at the enemy, even with in the insane industrial basis my theory is claiming.
That's largely based on the fact that wraith ships can be effectively manned by very limited crews.
If the hiveship in Misbegotten had not been that damaged, McKay could have easily pointed the cannons at the incoming hiveship, proving the relatively low crew requirements. Obviously, a full crew would logically enhance the ship's efficiency, but they're far more than capable enough even crewed by two or three gonzos. Needless to say that a crew of 100 guys would be plain enough.
In a way, the Wraith would be forced to operate with such low crews. They wouldn't rely on pilots, as darts and scouts would be completely pointless if the theory of a superb industrial capacity was true.

Initially it would seem that that would make the sheer size of hiveships, especially given the hollowed out structures, one of the stupidest wastes of resources in all of sci-fi. If you're only going to be able to use a crew of 100 you could build the ship a a fraction of the time.

However. An 11km "arsenal ship" type design with a very minimal crew and a ridiculous amount of it's internal volume given over to weaponry/shields/engines could potentially make sense. This would mean that old Wraith ships were more or less flying stacks of guns and power generators with only the bare minimum of crew needed to operate and maintain them.

If we go with that then we can explain the empty caverns in the moderns ones as the result of removing much of this equipment to save on maintenance etc..

On the contrary, firing bombs with not such insane yields would literally decimate swarms of wraith fighters. Their range is catastrophic, and they need to fly close to the target. In a way or another, they will always find themselves flying in tight formations. The more the closer they get to their target.

Something like Galactica's flak barrier then only with bigger bombs? That seems like it could work given the pitiful ranges of modern darts. Then again though darts are an abysmal warcraft so I'd pretty much expect them to be eaten alive by any intelligently thought out point defence.

There's also another contradiction in play here regarding dart performance. It's one you're familiar with. The whole "how can they fly through fields of fragmented hiveship debris in space but still get downed easily by bullets which would have much less relative velocity."

There's simply no proof that they can scale such weapons down to the level of darts and scouts, and even less proof that all tribes would possess that tech.

I'm not aware of any significant difference between the "Dart blaster" and the hiveship blaster other than a difference of scale. If anything the junk shot by darts, especially earlier on, seems to much more closly resemble the "Falling star" type shiney bolts than the fireballs seen more recently.

All tribes might not possess the tech now, but in the old days they were all a giant horde unified by their mutual love of stamping on ancient faces.

It's just a show, character shields screw everything up, we're wasting our time. Right?

Maybe we should spend some time trying to quantify the degree to which various characters alter the laws of the universe in the direction of "Go Urth!"

I think McKay has the easy lead here. The sound of his voice makes the laws of physics, nature and simple probability run for the hills, leaving him free to do as he pleases.

[Ouroboros]

I just realized to, that if this whole line about Dart blasters having the same shield eating properties as other wraith weapons holds up it'll actually make them quite nasty.

They'll still have the fragility and range issues but if the blaster is as proportionately dangerous (in scale) to shields as a normal Wraith anti shield bolt a swarm of them could probably drop the shields of a capship fairly easily.

So what, the guns are too weak to damage a decently armoured hull then right, big woop.

The guns might be yes, the culling beams aren't.

We've seen countless times on the show that a Dart culling beam can disinitgrate metallic objects like guns, swords and various bits of equipment carried by people.

Given that, there's no reason why it shouldn't be able to disinintigrate starship hulls.

We also know that a single dart can store quite a few people/Wraith in it's buffer, probably around a dozen or more. That translates into roughly a ton of material, all of which can apparently also be "vaccummed up" in a very short time..

I think by now if you're reading this you'll be able to work out the implications for yourself.

Basically if dart blasters posses a scaled down version of the shield breaker weapons, we know they can eat metal and we know they can eat a significant amount of mass fairly quickly..

We then can pretty much expect that a squadren of darts could rapidly wear out the shields of a capship and then go to work literally devouring it's hull like a school of pirrannahs tearing apart a larger creature.

This, as an image, even fits just perfectly with the whole "wraith mystique". I love it and I want to see it depicted on my screen in full colour with DVD surround sound.

[Mister Oragahn]

hello!!!

i've said what i was going to say about planets being alive in my reply to an-alteran...but you also have a point...i suggested life..but the core does also contain energy..peanuts compared to a zpm, but still large for a hive ship..therefore worth it...
hyperspace radiation? maybe..although it is known to do vast damage to the hive ship skin..and they have to stop to heal..perhaps the radiation of hyperspace is so variable and unpredictable hence the damage?

By life you may have meant biosphere.
Or is it that whole shinto/pagan or Gaia related stuff?

with regards to the yields...i was basically thinking about ai controlled darts..billions of them..no life support, extra weapons etc..as well as firing into the lantian shields, they could also deliberalely crash into them...82k worth of impacts will do some kind of damage to a ship under siege..what if in the early part of the war, the wraith, knowing that they couldn't feed so many wraith soldiers, used ai controled vessels instead..no loss of life, and they can keep building the ships..ai is easy to replace..lantians think massive numbers of the enemy..no matter how many they destroyed, more kept on coming...that might explain a few things..wraith kept on building and using ai, lantians kept on fighting until the diplomatic envoy..then the wraith use everything they have..and soon the ancients retreat all the time...
with constant 82k dart swarms, any capital ship would be threatened...

Wel, like always, I've made typos and forgot to type a few words that dramatically change the meaning of my sentences, but the idea that the contemporary darts' yields we know up to this day wouldn't even start to pause a menace if 82000 of them would immediately start to fire at the same time.

i've seen that as well..what if the hive ships are basically a melding of light superstructure, and organic materials? the materials would wrap around the superstructure, and being bio engineered, they could be manipulated..making it easy to create ships from templates...another indication for the wraith mother hive asset?

Likely. That's principally why I actually thought most ships were grown from sort of bigger biomechanical structures, like "mothers", the planet devourers, eating entire planets to create those ships in their womb, through a mix of culling beams and other mechanical systems.

perhaps she knew more of lantian tech than present day wraith?

With all the psy powers and brain probing she could be capable of, it's quite reasonnable. More, the fact that she could on her own kill a whole crew of Wraith largely suggests that she could actually puppet any wraith if she wanted to.
See, she could already control Teyla in such an easy way while she was actually swimming back to the drilling platform, and surviving a pressure that would have easily destroyed Atlantis, which speaks alot about telekinesis, regenerative abilities and psychic powers.

She did so when Teyla opened her mental "ports". Before the civil war which started shortly after the terran team seized control of Atlantis, all the Wraith were always connected to each other.
This network was soon segmented into nodes when the civil war broke.
That means that any wraith male could actually be easily controlled by the queen.

As for the tech, while generally it's the Keepers who hold the knowledge, and above all know how to repair wraith structures, this queen was important, and she may have gathered more intel than any other queen of a status similar to hers.

in the begining of rising, the rogue drone deactivates back into it's normal physical state..does that mean that they are reusable?
a similiar thing happens in the tower..when the zpm runs out, the drones just switch off and fall to the ground.....another indicator that they are reusable?

The Tower established that when yuo cut power from the control system, the drones deactivate themselves. Since they become inert, I guess that it's safe to assume that they can be reactivated.
It's unknown if the control system constantly feeds each drone with energy through whatever energy channel, nevermind the distance.

I've speculated that the drones in Tower deactivated themselves because they lost contact with the control chair, as power was cut.
I believe it's a security measure meant to forbid the weapons from being hacked if the connection with the control system is lost. Considering the Wraith abilities to hack stuff and devlop sentient AIs, I wouldn't put it past them to actually try to hack into drones.
However, the Lantians abilities in the artificial intelligence domain are even higher, considering that they built the replicators.

their behaviour is all over the place...but from what i have seen, i've made these inferences..if anybody else noticed it, would they not make the same assumption?
what if the ancients had dynamically adjustable drone racks? when the drones take out the target, they come back, but they go to the back so to speak....

We would have seen this happen. To date, there's zero evidence that this ever happened, safe eventual extrapolations about how the Antartica outpost still has drones.
That is, we know for a fact that this didn't happen in Rising, mostly because the drones were exploding on impact.
So that not only means they couldn't come back to the PJ, but also that the PJ had many of them, much more than what can be physically stored.

perhaps another indicator that drones are reusable? hence no real need for the ancients to really make anymore..as long as they have power sources sufficient to power them that is...no zpms, then control chair goes goodbye...and drones just switch off....wherever they are..i had an idea that in previous battles, the drones would contine going on and on..until there was no more power...wraith would just ignore them...they just want to kill and eat..so what if there were places where these drones were fired, but there was no power source to continue activating them? interesting line of thought that...it brings up possibilities..have put this down in my fan fiction..but it's debateable you know? difficult to really sort out properly...

Debatable indeed. I don't think drones would keep going on for no reason, safe if they're programmed to do so and that somehow they believe they have not reached their target.

btw, did you check out my story asgard conundrum? i could use some feedback...
satnam

I quickly brushed over many paragraphs, mostly stopping on references to the Wraith.
I can see that most of hte Wraith stuff you put in it seems heavily derived from extrapolations from this forum as well.
I remember that most of the references to the Wraith are quite detailed for a fan fiction, which may not make a good read, because you really feel like you're suddenly hitting a wall of technicalities and technobabble. May be good to forward ideas, but I think some ruminations have more their place here, while the writings should focus on the story and plot. Technobabble is what makes Stargate so irritating these days.

[Mister Oragahn]

Have we ever seen drones seek out multiple independant targets like that with anything approaching a decent success rate? The ships in Rising were all stationary blocking the gate so pasting them isn't much of an achievment really.

True, but the very fact that a drone in Rising was able to go rogue and lock on a target on its own proves that they run on an advanced tactical projectile AI, a level that will largely support the person in control, if there's one.
I say if because we've seen that it's not a must. Rodney programmed one in The Tower, and in No Man's Land, we've seen Zelenka fire all the Orion's drones from a control console.
A super computer could equally control each drone, and given orders from a firing console like the Orion had, without requiring a chair, but still requiring the ATA gene check of course.

I'm not saying that the darts/attack craft are going to make it through a screen of drones with no casulaties, they'll take casulaties, but that's to be expected.

Drones are a finite weapon system and with most of the galaxy in Wraith hands finding places to refill magazines with them is going to be a headache for Acient warships. It might seem like firing off a few hundred drones would be a great way to stop a Wraith attack but how many times can you do that before you're out of drones and need to rearm at one of a very limited number of bases.

It might even be possible that this is what happened to the Tria. At the time it left the galaxy Atlantis was already under Wraith seige. It could be the case that the ship was almost completely empty of drones after who knows how many weeks being hounded by Wraith ships.

The Tria is an Aurora class ship, and that means it comes with at the very least 21 turrets, 5 of them sporting two cannons. All tubes are roughly 4m wide. That's some pretty big anticapital ship weapons.

And there's that sort of shovel like apparatus on the front of the ship, like if it was a locomotive, but I sincerely doubt it's meant for Aurora class to ram their enemies, so it's probably weapon related as well.
Drones constitute only a part of this, and above all, if Lantians can pack drone as energy for puddle jumpers, they could for bigger warships.

In the end, if the Tria had no ability to retaliate, then it can't be only because of a shortage of drones.
It's probably because it was largely damaged on many levels.

Initially it would seem that that would make the sheer size of hiveships, especially given the hollowed out structures, one of the stupidest wastes of resources in all of sci-fi. If you're only going to be able to use a crew of 100 you could build the ship a a fraction of the time.

Safe if the vast volume serves other purposes. Like you speculated, massive ship carriage and even production.

However. An 11km "arsenal ship" type design with a very minimal crew and a ridiculous amount of it's internal volume given over to weaponry/shields/engines could potentially make sense. This would mean that old Wraith ships were more or less flying stacks of guns and power generators with only the bare minimum of crew needed to operate and maintain them.

If we go with that then we can explain the empty caverns in the moderns ones as the result of removing much of this equipment to save on maintenance etc..

Yes, that would make sense. Let's imagine the scope of such empty caverns filled energy dissipators to amplify hull toughness, massive extra power cores and whatever else for various forms of weapons and spacecraft deployment.

Plus shields, which we know the Wraith know how to build, and capital scale culling beams.

And then I drop t3H pictures:

http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s1/101/linz/102x058.jpg



A bigger ship doing the culling with a large sweeping beam, with what looks like darts only escorting it, all that back to times which Teyla can't even date properly.

So are we allowed to bump that theory about massive culling beams used to actually stop enemy projectiles, whatever they are, and even fire them back at 180° in case of "inert" projectiles (energy bolts for example)?

Oh, by the way, I suppose you've all noticed that this damn big ship does not look in any way like a cruiser or a hiveship.
Could it be one of those food cargos, like the one that crashed in The Defiant One?

Something like Galactica's flak barrier then only with bigger bombs? That seems like it could work given the pitiful ranges of modern darts. Then again though darts are an abysmal warcraft so I'd pretty much expect them to be eaten alive by any intelligently thought out point defence.

I agree.

There's also another contradiction in play here regarding dart performance. It's one you're familiar with. The whole "how can they fly through fields of fragmented hiveship debris in space but still get downed easily by bullets which would have much less relative velocity."

Yeah, I have issues with that one. Sheppard' one million bucks lucky shot actually hit a dart when he was facing it, which is even worse, because it's the prow that will be hit by debris.
So shield? No shield?

I'm not aware of any significant difference between the "Dart blaster" and the hiveship blaster other than a difference of scale. If anything the junk shot by darts, especially earlier on, seems to much more closly resemble the "Falling star" type shiney bolts than the fireballs seen more recently.

That is a good point. While fireballs are just stretched blurry blobs of blue energized matter, the falling stars are tight concentrated bolts, with a very luminous "head" that comes with its own lens flare of some sort.

All tribes might not possess the tech now, but in the old days they were all a giant horde unified by their mutual love of stamping on ancient faces.

Oh, that's a good point. Maybe posting screencaps would help settle this.
In a way or another, it's clear that some really juicy tech had gone *somewhere*.

I dunno where, but it looks like almost all ships have been dramatically altered, probably to fit with the Wraith's new lifestyle.

Maybe we should spend some time trying to quantify the degree to which various characters alter the laws of the universe in the direction of "Go Urth!"

I think McKay has the easy lead here. The sound of his voice makes the laws of physics, nature and simple probability run for the hills, leaving him free to do as he pleases.

Do lantian personnal shields able to protect a man floating in the middle of a transdimensional energy rift about to destroy an entire universe and ours in the same volley count?

All in all, my essay at the top of the fourth page simply serves to demonstrate the situation where we're now. As I conclude in my essay, it's left open. I spent three posts demonstrating what the Wraith industry would have needed to be back in the past, if the ships were of the same quality as they're now.
As I said:

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.

I just realized to, that if this whole line about Dart blasters having the same shield eating properties as other wraith weapons holds up it'll actually make them quite nasty.

They'll still have the fragility and range issues but if the blaster is as proportionately dangerous (in scale) to shields as a normal Wraith anti shield bolt a swarm of them could probably drop the shields of a capship fairly easily.

So what, the guns are too weak to damage a decently armoured hull then right, big woop.

The guns might be yes, the culling beams aren't.

We've seen countless times on the show that a Dart culling beam can disinitgrate metallic objects like guns, swords and various bits of equipment carried by people.

Given that, there's no reason why it shouldn't be able to disinintigrate starship hulls.

We also know that a single dart can store quite a few people/Wraith in it's buffer, probably around a dozen or more. That translates into roughly a ton of material, all of which can apparently also be "vaccummed up" in a very short time..

I think by now if you're reading this you'll be able to work out the implications for yourself.

Basically if dart blasters posses a scaled down version of the shield breaker weapons, we know they can eat metal and we know they can eat a significant amount of mass fairly quickly..

We then can pretty much expect that a squadren of darts could rapidly wear out the shields of a capship and then go to work literally devouring it's hull like a school of pirrannahs tearing apart a larger creature.

This, as an image, even fits just perfectly with the whole "wraith mystique". I love it and I want to see it depicted on my screen in full colour with DVD surround sound.

Preaching the believer. Of course, any respected Warlord would have already used the culling beam in a variety of ways to defeat any solid barrier.

Now, maybe an armored hull, with all sorts of advanced circuitry going through it, can actually nullify the power of a culling beam.

[satnamboll28]

By life you may have meant biosphere.
Or is it that whole shinto/pagan or Gaia related stuff?

yep..i believe in the unconditional granting of intelligence to all things that contain energy..and that this was granted by god for reasons of fairness...and one day, we will realise that our definitions of life are so skewed and crap...

Wel, like always, I've made typos and forgot to type a few words that dramatically change the meaning of my sentences, but the idea that the contemporary darts' yields we know up to this day wouldn't even start to pause a menace if 82000 of them would immediately start to fire at the same time.

well..hypothetically..say 100 hives jumped to engage an ancient fleet of say 20 ships..we know they would rip a new one for the wraith...but what if the hives jumped in, and every one launched 82k darts....thats 8200000 darts alone, plus the hives and their escorts [say 3 each..300]....ancient would read lots of ships..but would they still rip the wraith a new one? debatable..and if the darts in the war had better weaponry, they would be very nasty indeed...and pose a massive threat..

Likely. That's principally why I actually thought most ships were grown from sort of bigger biomechanical structures, like "mothers", the planet devourers, eating entire planets to create those ships in their womb, through a mix of culling beams and other mechanical systems.

i actually figured a massive behemoth, all organicky what have you, and able to directly transmute energy into wraith ships..perhaps they were situated near stars for the massive amounts of free energy hence they were able to build and field so many bloody ships?..an interesting idea..whether or not the writers will bother delving deeply is another question....

With all the psy powers and brain probing she could be capable of, it's quite reasonnable. More, the fact that she could on her own kill a whole crew of Wraith largely suggests that she could actually puppet any wraith if she wanted to.
See, she could already control Teyla in such an easy way while she was actually swimming back to the drilling platform, and surviving a pressure that would have easily destroyed Atlantis, which speaks alot about telekinesis, regenerative abilities and psychic powers.

She did so when Teyla opened her mental "ports". Before the civil war which started shortly after the terran team seized control of Atlantis, all the Wraith were always connected to each other.
This network was soon segmented into nodes when the civil war broke.
That means that any wraith male could actually be easily controlled by the queen.

As for the tech, while generally it's the Keepers who hold the knowledge, and above all know how to repair wraith structures, this queen was important, and she may have gathered more intel than any other queen of a status similar to hers.

weve all seen that wraith queens are like so powerful..and perhaps this queen in particular was the most powerful by far..more cunning, insidious, and so much smarter...she was the queen of a great alliance..the first perhaps?..and with the alliance backed up by the motherhive assets, they would be almost unstoppable..

The Tower established that when yuo cut power from the control system, the drones deactivate themselves. Since they become inert, I guess that it's safe to assume that they can be reactivated.
It's unknown if the control system constantly feeds each drone with energy through whatever energy channel, nevermind the distance.

I've speculated that the drones in Tower deactivated themselves because they lost contact with the control chair, as power was cut.
I believe it's a security measure meant to forbid the weapons from being hacked if the connection with the control system is lost. Considering the Wraith abilities to hack stuff and devlop sentient AIs, I wouldn't put it past them to actually try to hack into drones.
However, the Lantians abilities in the artificial intelligence domain are even higher, considering that they built the replicators.

yep...kind of..it might be best just to say that they have a range of behaviour..can be controlled by the person in the chair, but have enough AI to do things themselves..for the moment...

We would have seen this happen. To date, there's zero evidence that this ever happened, safe eventual extrapolations about how the Antartica outpost still has drones.
That is, we know for a fact that this didn't happen in Rising, mostly because the drones were exploding on impact.
So that not only means they couldn't come back to the PJ, but also that the PJ had many of them, much more than what can be physically stored.

this is what lead me to believe that jumpers have energy based drone launching systems....however, this causes a penalty via a drop in the power supply by a substantial amount, so they can't fire for long in a protracted battle....hit and run maybe...but not prolonged....

Debatable indeed. I don't think drones would keep going on for no reason, safe if they're programmed to do so and that somehow they believe they have not reached their target.

like above..perhaps they have enough AI to seek out targets on their own, and that power plays a major factor in their ability to deal damage to targets..no power and the connection is lost, leading the drone to shut down..for safety reasons etc...but i figured it might also be an indication that with the right amount of power [say, 3 zpm's in the city] and with lots of concentrating, they could perhaps awaken the deactivated drones? an idea..one worthy of debate..but there just isn't enough on screen..

I quickly brushed over many paragraphs, mostly stopping on references to the Wraith.
I can see that most of hte Wraith stuff you put in it seems heavily derived from extrapolations from this forum as well.
I remember that most of the references to the Wraith are quite detailed for a fan fiction, which may not make a good read, because you really feel like you're suddenly hitting a wall of technicalities and technobabble. May be good to forward ideas, but I think some ruminations have more their place here, while the writings should focus on the story and plot. Technobabble is what makes Stargate so irritating these days.

at last, some real critique!!! boy was i smiling...have had arguments with people about this story alone...and have lots more stories..have the synopsis down, and would like to run it by you guys...especially as they touch upon the wraith so very heavily...and hence i need some major nit picking and critique on it...
one thing i realised, is that i didn't credit you guys and this thread..the info i have in the story is from this thread, as it seems to be the only place i have seen with some decent information on the wraith and their tech...how should i credit you guys?
you said it was very detailed for a fan fic...thanks! although i'm trying to keep away from technobabble, and keeping it away from it..just trying to use established tech and technobabble rather than make it myself..
i'm guessing that you liked it though? if yes, then cool...am still writing more though...

well..it's been fun exhausting my hands typing..makes a change from learning maya..which was also fun..now i'm going bowling...

cheers guys!!

satnam

[Ouroboros]

True, but the very fact that a drone in Rising was able to go rogue and lock on a target on its own proves that they run on an advanced tactical projectile AI, a level that will largely support the person in control, if there's one.
I say if because we've seen that it's not a must. Rodney programmed one in The Tower, and in No Man's Land, we've seen Zelenka fire all the Orion's drones from a control console.
A super computer could equally control each drone, and given orders from a firing console like the Orion had, without requiring a chair, but still requiring the ATA gene check of course.

The projectile AI sucks dick vs small craft though. Like you said in Rising they fire one off by accident and it can't even lock on and kill a modern helicopter that wasn't even really expecting to come under attack.

All the later cases you mention involved a swarm of drones vs a single large target. I'm not disputing anything about that. Swarming and shredding large targets is pretty much what I think their design goal was with drones.

The Tria is an Aurora class ship, and that means it comes with at the very least 21 turrets, 5 of them sporting two cannons. All tubes are roughly 4m wide. That's some pretty big anticapital ship weapons.

I didn't even know it had turrets. No idea how good they are though.

In the end, if the Tria had no ability to retaliate, then it can't be only because of a shortage of drones.
It's probably because it was largely damaged on many levels.

It's possible that even while it had more weapons than just drones, drones were by far its most effective weapon against Wraith ships. It's possible the other weapons were far less efficient against Wraith armour than the matter ignoring drones, causing an ancient ship without drones to be more or less equal to a Wraith ship of similar or slighty greater size. This would explain how several cruisers were able to get the better of the Tria.

Safe if the vast volume serves other purposes. Like you speculated, massive ship carriage and even production.

Would be an even bigger waste of resources if you really were going to fling them headlong at an enemy who could 1 shot kill them though.

Yes, that would make sense. Let's imagine the scope of such empty caverns filled energy dissipators to amplify hull toughness, massive extra power cores and whatever else for various forms of weapons and spacecraft deployment.

Plus shields, which we know the Wraith know how to build, and capital scale culling beams.

A Wraith hive truelly loaded down with deck upon deck of weapons batteries galleon style would be quite the sight indeed.

And then I drop t3H pictures:

You might want to resize/thumbnail these. They're breaking the page.

So are we allowed to bump that theory about massive culling beams used to actually stop enemy projectiles, whatever they are, and even fire them back at 180° in case of "inert" projectiles (energy bolts for example)?

Culling beams ina PD role would be the perfect defence against ancient drones. The apparatus is so small you could mount them all over the hull of a hive and in countless hundreds of small "defence drones" that would orbit around the ship in combat. Anything hostile that got near it, fighters, missiles, bolts, would just be partially or fully disitigrated before ever getting near the ship. The drone mounted versions could even be used to attack other ships or surround them and surpress all the fire they were sending out.

Oh, by the way, I suppose you've all noticed that this damn big ship does not look in any way like a cruiser or a hiveship.
Could it be one of those food cargos, like the one that crashed in The Defiant One?

It shall remain a mystery for all time I'm guessing. I'd like to see a flashback where some ancients are fighting a hive, loose shields, and then a split second later their whole ship vanishes though.

No reason it couldn't or shouldn't happen.

Yeah, I have issues with that one. Sheppard' one million bucks lucky shot actually hit a dart when he was facing it, which is even worse, because it's the prow that will be hit by debris.
So shield? No shield?

Maybe we should jsut look at this as scroing him more points for that whole reality warping quantification contest I was talking about.

That is a good point. While fireballs are just stretched blurry blobs of blue energized matter, the falling stars are tight concentrated bolts, with a very luminous "head" that comes with its own lens flare of some sort.

Oh, that's a good point. Maybe posting screencaps would help settle this.
In a way or another, it's clear that some really juicy tech had gone *somewhere*.

The best example I can think of from memory was the initial night fight against the darts in Rising. Those bolts were hugely sparkly. The fact they were the forces of a hivekeeper might even go toward supporting that whole "some of them have it some of them dont" thing we've been kicking around.

I dunno where, but it looks like almost all ships have been dramatically altered, probably to fit with the Wraith's new lifestyle.

I'd say that's the more reasonable assumption than to assume they remained on a perpetual war footing for 10,000 years of unchallenged peace and ultimate supremacy of their entire domain.

Do lantian personnal shields able to protect a man floating in the middle of a transdimensional energy rift about to destroy an entire universe and ours in the same volley count?

That scores double points. Points for McKay and points for the device itself being a ridiculous example of technowank that likely mocks the capital scale shields of ancient warships and the city itself.

All in all, my essay at the top of the fourth page simply serves to demonstrate the situation where we're now. As I conclude in my essay, it's left open. I spent three posts demonstrating what the Wraith industry would have needed to be back in the past, if the ships were of the same quality as they're now.

I agree with what you're saying there. I just envision that balance you talked about being slanted a bit more toward quality where as you seem to have it more toward quantity.

Preaching the believer. Of course, any respected Warlord would have already used the culling beam in a variety of ways to defeat any solid barrier.

Now, maybe an armored hull, with all sorts of advanced circuitry going through it, can actually nullify the power of a culling beam.

It's possible you could jam it somehow. We know anti teleportation tech exists. Maybe that wraith jamming trick came to them so easily because they were aware of the potential threat culling beam type tech posed to ships and developed, or at least theorised, a counter to it a long time ago.

[Mister Oragahn]

The projectile AI sucks dick vs small craft though. Like you said in Rising they fire one off by accident and it can't even lock on and kill a modern helicopter that wasn't even really expecting to come under attack.

This is not a good example to judge the accuracy of drones.
The drone couldn't count of the support from the person in the control chair. There was no cooperation. Above all Beckett was actually trying to switch the damn thing off.
Added to whatever happens between the mind and the machine, reminding us that we're talking about a doctor who's concerned about saving lives and not destroying any, god knows how this messed up with the weapon.
I think it's fairly easy to excuse the drone's poor accuracy in such conditions, especially when you compare this to the trajectories curves displayed in Lost City or The Tower.

I didn't even know it had turrets. No idea how good they are though.
It's possible that even while it had more weapons than just drones, drones were by far its most effective weapon against Wraith ships. It's possible the other weapons were far less efficient against Wraith armour than the matter ignoring drones, causing an ancient ship without drones to be more or less equal to a Wraith ship of similar or slighty greater size. This would explain how several cruisers were able to get the better of the Tria.

Yes and no. If we take Trinity as an example, a ship like the Daedalus had no problem to withstand the device's bleeding shots, yet those same shots were vaporizing entire chunks of hiveship armor out of the sky.
Assuming the aurora cannons are roughly the same, and considering the idea that I highly doubt such ships can't at least come with power cores as efficient and powerful as the ones found on the 304s, I think that would certainly make those cannons fairly devastating.

Would be an even bigger waste of resources if you really were going to fling them headlong at an enemy who could 1 shot kill them though.

Yes. They'd be far better as pure gun platforms.

You might want to resize/thumbnail these. They're breaking the page.

Those pages these days.
I urled the bigger one.

Culling beams ina PD role would be the perfect defence against ancient drones. The apparatus is so small you could mount them all over the hull of a hive and in countless hundreds of small "defence drones" that would orbit around the ship in combat. Anything hostile that got near it, fighters, missiles, bolts, would just be partially or fully disitigrated before ever getting near the ship. The drone mounted versions could even be used to attack other ships or surround them and surpress all the fire they were sending out.

But these wraith drones' capacity would be limited. It all depends to the "room" and the power source backing it up.
A modification on an Ark-like wraith device would let it scoop the equivalent of 1000 people.
So that's a lot of lantian squids and other energy bolts.

It shall remain a mystery for all time I'm guessing. I'd like to see a flashback where some ancients are fighting a hive, loose shields, and then a split second later their whole ship vanishes though.

No reason it couldn't or shouldn't happen.

Would probably be more about a lantian warship fighting several hives.
Then sfrweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Chip chop! big chunks beamed out, like someone eating an apple with a fist sized mouth.

Maybe we should jsut look at this as scroing him more points for that whole reality warping quantification contest I was talking about.

Probably, but realistically, this will be a point we'll often hear about.
Maybe a part of the shield is deactivated when the dart enters a stargate. But no. The skin was still active after the crash.
I gues Sheppard's bullets became little drones.

The best example I can think of from memory was the initial night fight against the darts in Rising. Those bolts were hugely sparkly. The fact they were the forces of a hivekeeper might even go toward supporting that whole "some of them have it some of them dont" thing we've been kicking around.

I wish I could take screencaps, because the bolts are just so damn similar. And yes, considering the Keeper's role, she probably was one of those who still had some good toys.
However, darts were overall still weak. Just armed harvesting ships, not real combat ships.

That scores double points. Points for McKay and points for the device itself being a ridiculous example of technowank that likely mocks the capital scale shields of ancient warships and the city itself.

Shouldn't this actually make Rodney something close to a god?

EDIT:

Here's a picture from The Siege part 3.

May someone make caps from Rising please?