Predator ship

[Ouroboros]

Wow, how you been, I haven't seen you around here in a pretty long time.

Actually if what we saw in "The Last Man" abou the Phoenix, it really does appear that when there's no ZPM to back them up, the 304s equipped with such weapons and Asgard cores could only fire a couple shots and that's all.
I think that's also the important point here: without the Asgard core, there doesn't seem to be any way to use the weapon efficiently, unless you manage to hit a ship which protection largely consists of a shield that needs to be raised first.

The Phoenix largely was ready for combat, and it managed to snipe an entire hiveship in two or three shots, but as the ship came close to another hive and fired, the beam in question caused minimal damage, and Carter had to get out of here via hyperspace.

The pre-charged beams is one possible explanation for that scene, Hive variability is another one. I personally favor the hive variability one because it meshes well with the "who gives a **** about performance consistency" approach they like to take, and seems fairly well supported by "enemy at the gate" where adding a new set of energizers to your hive is apparently all you need to boost performance 10,000% in every category that matters save for launch bay door resilience.

Without ZPMs, I don't remember seeing a 304 WTFPWN any Ori ship, nor do I remember a typical post-Unending 304 really owning anything worth its salt without help from other ships.
- We have two 304s trapping an Aurorag as it comes out of hyperspace, so shields could be down, and anyway I believe the design of the Asuran made tincans was inferior.
Now I don't think those 304s already had an Asgard core each, but catching an enemy ship pants down would surely allow them to win, almost by cheating in fact. Not something they could pull at will I suppose.

The Ori ships were all pwned by a ZPM boosted 304 I think. It's only the Hives and Auroras that got shafted by the super Goa'uld reactor of doom beams as I recall. You'd think that the Aurora at least would be roughly on par with the toilet seat but they seemed to die in less shots than even the hives did.

How smoothly does that slot into the whole ancient/Wraith war lore. Why smoothy enough that fans are forced to try and run with the idea that the Asuran Auroras couldn't have been "real" Auroras despite the fact they look identical and Asurans crank out ZPMs and Atlantis city structures like chicklets from a candy factory.

- We have a cruiser smocked by the beams, which isn't really too disgusting.

Well of course one could always say that for their size, the 304s should actually need to fire several time if only to get through the heavy and thick armour of a Wraith cruiser, since such a cruiser is of similar size.
But so be it. It's like the Breen weapons in Star Trek or the Shadow slicing beams, they're just that superior.

The real disgusting part of that scene was how they were able to just sit there and have a little casual meeting about what to do while the cruiser was shooting them constantly. This from the same show that tells us these cruisers are capable of threatening ancient Auroras with ZPMs on board, or even that one episode where a few cruiser shots do some pretty rapid shield reduction to an Aurora. I guess the 304's shields are just that much better than what you'd find on a top of the line ancient battleship in the middle of a war. Ugh. All must fall before the might of the urthwank.

In a way, we could even theorize that Caldwell wanted every single joule coming out from his ship poured into the cannon to blast the superhive in EatG, but putting the integrity of his ship at risk: we could argue that some systems overloaded, and he didn't have basic military thrust...
-> that's the much needed rationalization as to why he stood there, like a sitting duck, instead of, you know... dodging those slow ass bolts coming at him and his crew. Of course, the shields still worked, so you'll have to believe that for some reason, the shields' charge couldn't be diverted back to the engines...

I don't have a problem with buying Caldwell's hair brained "tactics" in universe. It's what everyone does. Earth even already lost a ship to this same exact stupid bull****, though to Caldwell's credit at least the superhive was a fully mobile adversary that could shoot more than once per minute.

Did McKay ever radio back to him "hey dudes this thing's putting out more energy at idle than this system's sun" or was that something he just decided to keep between himself and Shepard in the puddle jumper?

Of course Caldwell is the sort of guy who's been going nose to nose with 11km battleships built by the people who wiped out the ancients for years, so it probably wouldn't have made much difference to his approach of the situation if McKay told him the thing already had a cored out 304 as a hood ornament.

True. But there's a problem with that, since the weapon seems to need an Asgard core, and those things are rare and all we see about them is the visible hardware and the console. It's hard to tell how deep they run inside a 304's original power grid.
I don't see any of those cores being mounted on a gunboat. There's no evidence the Tau'ri know how to downsize them, nor would be able to build enough of them.

What has you thinking that the super beamz actually need the core to function? I always understood the core to just be more of a database and semi AI type interface deal than having anything to do with weapons. I don't think the Daedalus and other 304s even have one do they, isn't it just the Odyssey that does?

Mmm... yes, if you wanted to be truly nasty about it, you could go there. Get the cloaks of Goa'uld ships - the true underexploiters of all tech in the universe - and get some nice small sized ship there.

I could get a lot nastier just by switching out the wank beams for KKVs and cloaking the bombers to. Didn't someone calculate that that runaway death glider O'neill got trapped in early in SG-1 must have been doing some appreciable fraction of c. ? That sounds like the perfect time for a bunch of tungsten telephone poles to exit the cloaking field while the ship that dumped them heads on back to the carrier.

Now it's also an unstoppable, undetectable, fleet smashing death swarm that can perform a pretty convincing wipe of an entire planetary biosphere in a couple of passes.

Reminds me of this post of mine.

Yeah, I had a couple similar ideas in some of those old "design your own ship" threads. One I was particularly proud of was a cloaked ship that was primarily just a platform for mass amounts of hyperdrive equipped naquadria nuke missiles or similar WMDs. Basically a space going SSBN. You invade, piss off, or generally threaten our civilization and our fleet of these things moves silently into missile range and wipes out the population of every planet and installation we've got coordinates for in a retaliatory strike. We'll have coordinates for quite a bit to, since the attack sub analog of this thing equipped with axial mass drivers to snipe unsuspecting ships from under cloak, has been spying for years.

I think that the 304s, despite the first model, Daedalus, being a sister ship to Prometheus, were really a severe improvement over the X-303.
They could power shields which would turn the ships into little fortresses, even if that meant they were impotant on the assault front.
Heck, even back to the times of Prometheus, the Tau'ri had managed to build a naqahdria based generator. That alone would have allowed them to power beam weapons if needed.
And we've seen how underexploited the power grid is on a 304, considering what a ZPM allows such a ship to do.

They were improved primarily by "integrating all the alien techs from the beginning" as I recall. They were still designed with the Ha'tak in mind as their primary adversary though, using a mix of Goa'uld, Human and some older Asgard tech.

The power grid stuff is a series wide nonsense that only makes tenuous sense in the case of the superhive, since it's the only ship that could conceivably grow more robust components to handle the increased load on the fly. Purely mechanical ships should be bursting into flames when someone thinks all you need to make it go faster is to increase the power to the existing engines by a million percent. Even if the engines themselves are running way below max potential because they're Asgard made there's the problem of everything between them and the power source that was, like I said, made in Nevada sometime in the early 2000s.

They just need to paint 'em red at this point.

Red is to go faster, I'm not sure what the accepted protocol is to get more Dakka. Oh wait, it's just bolting on more guns. Look! There's a few spare inches there! Maybe the crew can lean out the hatches and fire more drones with slingshots!

Well on the other hand, when the Asgards had an entire Lantean library to look at, their own experience in fighting machines laughing at the Wraith, and had eternal life based on cloning tech and time dilation tech that would, in theory, allow them to spend insane amounts of centuries in labs to make any breakthrough while, to anyone living outside such time dilations fields, only seconds would pass, there's always the chance that what the Asgard found was just that good.

Or like I've said in the past. They can and do upload, download and store for extended periods, their consciousnesses in computers, but for some reason attaching arms and legs to those computers until they can work out this whole genetic decay thing is forbidden.

Thor even lived out a part of his life as a Ha'tak for f#cks sake.

Was Earth aware that the Wraith grew, and had been growing for at least 10,000 years, evidently perfectly viable clone/artificial womb drones of their own by Unending or not? I forget, because you know, they maybe might have wanted to share that information with a certain group of people who blew up their entire species because they thought they could never inhabit viable cloned/artificial womb bodies again.

Or maybe they just decided they wanted the fancy Asgard toys more than the actual Asgard.

Of course we know it's just a fan's way to try to cover the writers' lack of balance in their writing. >:|

Funny how many paths seem to end up in this same clearing huh.

[mickhhh]

I wonder if Asgard beams isn't the Asgards' trick of having a way to compress particles from a kawoosh into a beam. Sure, it wouldn't be anywhere as good as a kawoosh, but imagine just once that you could imbue about 1% of the wormhole based technology's effect - which is known to disintegrate anything and even eat an Ori ship easily - into a self contained plasma beam system.
Could work.

i always hoped we would see the ori attack the Nox and when the ori fire the nox they just put up a kawoosh shield around the ship. dont even bother to fire back. but pretty much just laugh at the ori until they leave.

or perhaps the asgard use time dilatation tech so they can keep the plasma in longer and heat it up a lot more.

[2ndgenerationalteran]

or just build the asgard beam weapons with propulsion and navigation as well as targeting and launch dozens of those to fly in a randomized pattern, launch from 302 bay or better yet detach from the hull.

[Ouroboros]

Here's a terrifying thought. Can you scale the wunderbeam up?

The ones on 304s must be pretty small since they're not even visible from the outside.

[Mister Oragahn]

Wow, how you been, I haven't seen you around here in a pretty long time.

Well, been doing things. I'm keeping an eye on SGU and since the show seems to be going completely unnoticed by people who would otherwise watch SG, regardless of its quality, it makes me think it's not worthwhile to talk about SG these days. At least atm, because I actually enjoy SGU faaaaar more than SGA's season 2 and +.
Plus I'm spending a large portion of my spare time writing down crucial documents which will prove useful for next couple years.
Oh, and I've been permabanned from SBC.

The pre-charged beams is one possible explanation for that scene, Hive variability is another one. I personally favor the hive variability one because it meshes well with the "who gives a **** about performance consistency" approach they like to take, and seems fairly well supported by "enemy at the gate" where adding a new set of energizers to your hive is apparently all you need to boost performance 10,000% in every category that matters save for launch bay door resilience.

I can get the variability to *some* degree, but it's already a stretch to me to put most of your bucks on this one when we're comparing two Wraith ships from two different episodes, but this time it's literally comparing hiveships from the same episode, at the same moment.
That said, yes, variability could explain it.

I also start to think that the Wraith use the equivalent of a structural integrity forcefield, in that it's like strengthening bones and muscles. With hiveships which can obviously transform their own internals, as per "Infection" (2nd half of season 5), and can regenerate the hull, it's possible. It would also explain the difference between Todd saving the ill half of a hiveship and making a spectacular landing, and Sheppard's team pulling a rather mediocre ramming in "Spoils of War", where it takes very little for the hiveship to break apart and where it doesn't even dig itself into the ground.
I guess there would be something like specialized cell-nodes all along the superstructure which can strengthen bonds and increase density by infusing more matter between every single possible fibre and screw.
After all, it's pretty obvious as per "The Seed" that the Wraith biotech can literally grow matter out of nowhere. It's not as fast as the Borg do, but it's not that far either, and it's terrifying once there's a large power source to tap.

Eventually, we could literally claim that Sheppard completely fu**ed up with the systems and utterly lightened the ship and decreased its density to levels close to paper tissue.

The Ori ships were all pwned by a ZPM boosted 304 I think. It's only the Hives and Auroras that got shafted by the super Goa'uld reactor of doom beams as I recall. You'd think that the Aurora at least would be roughly on par with the toilet seat but they seemed to die in less shots than even the hives did.

And yet the Orion, despite completely crippled, could tank several bolts from a hiveship.
That said, it's not telling much, since the hiveships in "No Man's Land" were having a break to repair their systems due to hyperspace radiation, and they had maxed out their systems and hyperdrives in order to cross the galactic void.
That alone would also explain why it was so easy to finish one of with an alpha strike of megaton nukes up the tail pipe.

How smoothly does that slot into the whole ancient/Wraith war lore. Why smoothy enough that fans are forced to try and run with the idea that the Asuran Auroras couldn't have been "real" Auroras despite the fact they look identical and Asurans crank out ZPMs and Atlantis city structures like chicklets from a candy factory.

Yes but, really, if the Asurans were truly original, would have they have been caught pants down in "Be All My Sins Remember'd"?
I'm even tempted to believe that the satgate weapon was nothing more than something the Asurans had kept in a warehouse and was actually built by the Lanteans themselves.
You know the music. If the Asurans were competent, the code of their nanites wouldn't be bested by the will of a human mind, and Asura would have had such defenses after the Tau'ri "surfical strikes" that no one could have approached it in a radius of 10 LY: every possible weapon and defense the Lantean had would have been copied/pasted all over the Asuran system: shields, cloaking fields, phasing fields, satellite platforms and their yellow beams, generators and their red beams, ground to orbit blue pulse gun turrets, drones in droves, plus other obvious systems such as mines, hyperspace missiles and so on. Add every possible power souce the Lanteans were known to have, from ZPMs to geothermal energy, plus that source suggested to be antimatter in "The Shrine"...
Imagine the fortress.

And that's not talking about ground defenses: the ability to beam gun sentries anywhere needed, thanks to a teleportation grid; or mini drones, and of course, a wide variety of local force fields.
Then the Asurans, equipped with more than just guns, but with armour and shields (the kind seen in "Lost Tribe"). Hell, being blobs of nanites, they could have adopted any form to suit any function, instead of sitting the base ape 2.0 template.

Instead, the Asurans kept going on with their silly crusade, without giving a damn about their defense, despite having been shown how they were totally naked.

The real disgusting part of that scene was how they were able to just sit there and have a little casual meeting about what to do while the cruiser was shooting them constantly. This from the same show that tells us these cruisers are capable of threatening ancient Auroras with ZPMs on board, or even that one episode where a few cruiser shots do some pretty rapid shield reduction to an Aurora. I guess the 304's shields are just that much better than what you'd find on a top of the line ancient battleship in the middle of a war. Ugh. All must fall before the might of the urthwank.

Oh yes, that was just boring and insulting.

Michael: I guess we'll have to keep firing.

One year later...

That said, it would seem to fit with the fact that once a 304 puts everything into its shields, it can turtle but won't be able to do jack. After all, we have already seen the Daedalus sit there and tank shots from two hiveships ("The Hive"), go toe to toe with another one in "Allies", and still survive rather easily, without losing hyperdrive, when facing an armada of nine or ten hiveships plus their escort cruisers in "Siege Part III".

Besides, we can safely assume that the Wraith ships of now are just subpar models, most of the neat tech being lost or locked up somewhere. They use colony ships as warships, that's absurd, especially when they can't armour them considerably. They can't even rewrite the growth program of their ships as to fill those huge cavities with, I don't know, huge generators or shields generators (we know they do have shield tech).
They are stuck with their lousy tech.

I believe a wartime hiveship, or even a cruiser, would critically threaten a basic 304 in no time flat.

I don't have a problem with buying Caldwell's hair brained "tactics" in universe. It's what everyone does. Earth even already lost a ship to this same exact stupid bull****, though to Caldwell's credit at least the superhive was a fully mobile adversary that could shoot more than once per minute.

Well, it's true, we've seen the Daedalus already left to sit there and tank shots in "The Hive" for example. But we've seen Caldwell fly around hiveships in "Allies"... although that didn't prevent the hiveships from always hitting it... but it's not like the 304 was flying far from the hiveship either.

The loss of Prometheus in "Ethon" could largely be attributed to a critical underestimate of the power of a satellite built by lower tech people.
But since then, I'd have expected the Tau'ri to actually learn a thing or two about exploiting the range of their missiles and F-302s.
At least you still could begin to explain the loss of Prometheus due to a severe lack of experience and caution.

Tactics in "Camelot" were equally bad. Why didn't they park their ships around the supergate and even a tad behind it?
Were they afraid of losing their only chance at sending a peaceful message? ...

But "Enemy at the Gates" really takes it. There's just no way to explain Caldwell prefering to warn his crew of the incoming of sluggish bolts instead of even slightly banking to the right.
And of course, not a single bolt was fired in excess of what was just necessary to take the 304's shields down. :/
Dammit. The plot holes in that silly finale really hurt.

Did McKay ever radio back to him "hey dudes this thing's putting out more energy at idle than this system's sun" or was that something he just decided to keep between himself and Shepard in the puddle jumper?

Sshh...
They were dumbfounded.
Boy, that superhive is so 3P1C!

What has you thinking that the super beamz actually need the core to function? I always understood the core to just be more of a database and semi AI type interface deal than having anything to do with weapons. I don't think the Daedalus and other 304s even have one do they, isn't it just the Odyssey that does?

I verified the information on Internet, and it seems to be heavily implied that other 304s at least got the shareware edition of the Asgard Core, the one that's allowing some key systems to be used.
And don't they all need one at least, in order to use the beaming tech anyway? There always was an Asgard playing piano behind his/her console when such functions were called.
I would find it logical that a copy of the initial Asgard core would be needed to use the beam weapons.
It's possible that those cores wouldn't be as good as the original: the Tau'ri would be working from the blueprints from Odyssey's database, without necessarily understanding everything. It's possible that the Asgards built the best core aboard the Odyssey, and provided a "How to Build and Asgard Core for Dummies" guide so the oomans would have a chance at propagating a lower tech yet functional system on their other ships.

. . .

[Mister Oragahn]

Continued...

I could get a lot nastier just by switching out the wank beams for KKVs and cloaking the bombers to. Didn't someone calculate that that runaway death glider O'neill got trapped in early in SG-1 must have been doing some appreciable fraction of c. ?

Oh yes, Earth was really shrinking fast. Very fast. Perhaps not going at a full percent of c, but certainly not too far either. They were pretty far out in the system, with huge lag in mundane radio signal.

That sounds like the perfect time for a bunch of tungsten telephone poles to exit the cloaking field while the ship that dumped them heads on back to the carrier.

Well, that's a new way to recieve a call I suppose. The stingy kind.

Now it's also an unstoppable, undetectable, fleet smashing death swarm that can perform a pretty convincing wipe of an entire planetary biosphere in a couple of passes.

That, or just charge up your technomadjik "plasma" weapons with heavy liquid naqahdah and fire that stuff at the surface. At least you can do that from the living room of your Ha'tak, and enjoy the show on your full HD screen, with 3D glasses.
That's so cool.

Yeah, I had a couple similar ideas in some of those old "design your own ship" threads. One I was particularly proud of was a cloaked ship that was primarily just a platform for mass amounts of hyperdrive equipped naquadria nuke missiles or similar WMDs. Basically a space going SSBN. You invade, piss off, or generally threaten our civilization and our fleet of these things moves silently into missile range and wipes out the population of every planet and installation we've got coordinates for in a retaliatory strike. We'll have coordinates for quite a bit to, since the attack sub analog of this thing equipped with axial mass drivers to snipe unsuspecting ships from under cloak, has been spying for years.

Woo, nasty, yes.
Also, as there's no reason for ships to move in hyperspace, they can actually stay there while your 20 meters long hyperspace capable missiles go take a dive.

They were improved primarily by "integrating all the alien techs from the beginning" as I recall. They were still designed with the Ha'tak in mind as their primary adversary though, using a mix of Goa'uld, Human and some older Asgard tech.

The power grid stuff is a series wide nonsense that only makes tenuous sense in the case of the superhive, since it's the only ship that could conceivably grow more robust components to handle the increased load on the fly. Purely mechanical ships should be bursting into flames when someone thinks all you need to make it go faster is to increase the power to the existing engines by a million percent. Even if the engines themselves are running way below max potential because they're Asgard made there's the problem of everything between them and the power source that was, like I said, made in Nevada sometime in the early 2000s.

Well, logically, yes, but not necessarily in the context of Stargate.

We know the SGC/IOA always wanted to put their hands on better sources of energy. Carter kept drooling everytime she thought about naqahdria. We have several quotes clearly showing how she was convinced that only naqahdria would allow them to power weapons and defenses that would give them a chance against the Goa'uld.
We also see that as they never managed to get a stable naqahdria core, they never managed to threaten Goa'uld ships, even if the shields of a 304 were a few times better.
We even have Carter doubting one of their most powerful nukes (> 1GT) would punch through a shield if Anubis had put one over Dakara (thanks to SpartanElite from SBC for that one).

Now, we also know that systems can be over engineered. We also know that power conduits in Stargate are some kind of mystery, with top of the pop tech going from solid superconductors such as any naqahdah based systems (which can transfer truly god awful levels of energy - see what stargates can tank and transfer in to the wormhole) to possibly anything from high energy plasma to subspace (DHD <-> stargate, or the power conduits in Atlantis, which despite going through a physical tube of some kind, obviously were not blowing up nuclear style despite leaks which made a ZPM bleed like a gored cow).

So I think it's logical that in the prospect that the Tau'ri would one day find a better power source, they could directly plug it into the power grid. It also makes sense considering that the Tau'ri don't have many ships to boot, and not a big industry, and it could take much time and ressources to completely refit the power grid of one or more 304s.
Besides, we never had the proof that even when taping a ZPM, they really dented its potential much.

Finally, I don't think this unexploited potential is affecting the entire power grid. I think it's only applied to the main power conduits between the most power hungry systems (hyperdrives really being the powerhogs here, when you think about it).
All other secondary systems would be have transformators, filters and fuses ensuring that they get normal levels of energy.

Red is to go faster, I'm not sure what the accepted protocol is to get more Dakka. Oh wait, it's just bolting on more guns. Look! There's a few spare inches there! Maybe the crew can lean out the hatches and fire more drones with slingshots!

Then add them!
Talking about weapon slots, I've noticed that the beam weapons of a 304 are either fired from the "temples" on their side of the bow, or from some place under the "wings" of the main platform.
And there's perhaps some turret on a belly. I think I've seen a beam come from somewhere there.
There would be at least 4 beam weapon slots.

Or like I've said in the past. They can and do upload, download and store for extended periods, their consciousnesses in computers, but for some reason attaching arms and legs to those computers until they can work out this whole genetic decay thing is forbidden.

Thor even lived out a part of his life as a Ha'tak for f#cks sake.

But like I said in the past (), the Asgards seem to have grown some aversion towards such a method. Something about machines nearly destroying their civilization and them going all Butlerian, if you catch my drift.

That said, considering the lousy stunts writers have pulled, such as killing resurrectin Jackson on and on, or worse, the Beckett clone which was planned from the beginning (see, they had left clues in "Misbegotten"!), we can easily hope one day to have them pull Asgards back, as part of the final step of a trial which was to gauge the ability of humans to manage their stuff properly.
Considering how all their ships are still rampant with crossdressed Goa'uld and Asgard tech, I think unplugging all the neat toys wouldn't really be that hard.

One obvious reason for that would be the fact that despite having access to portable gigawatt power cores that would solve every single problem on Earth, synthetizers which can effectively assemble anything of the size of a violin (that's worth many rice bags or even more donuts)... yet *some* truly nasty and evil powers keep those things to themselves.
Oh, but see, if they reveal it, everything will go down the sh*tter.

Riiiiiigh.

This would probably require the writers to dump the whole SGC trope and move like 100 years into the future or something, with a planet Earth drastically different than what we know today.
It would also require a lot of originality and work.
That's also why I think the current Stargate era is really coming to an end. SGU is the last show, god knows what will happen to those SG-1 and SGA movies, but the more they keep going on with that absurd pretense full of cultural jokes that supposedly add a touch of genuineness to their universe - while it's only the mark of cheap and lazy writing in order to show how Stargate is *moar ree-ill* - how long before another show starts making references to Stargate? ... oh wait, no one gives a rat's arse about Stargate. Fwee! We're safe - the less their universe will remind interesting and credible.
It was fine when "we" were underdogs, but that's taxed and finished.

Was Earth aware that the Wraith grew, and had been growing for at least 10,000 years, evidently perfectly viable clone/artificial womb drones of their own by Unending or not?

I forget, because you know, they maybe might have wanted to share that information with a certain group of people who blew up their entire species because they thought they could never inhabit viable cloned/artificial womb bodies again.

Or maybe they just decided they wanted the fancy Asgard toys more than the actual Asgard.

I don't think so. "Spoils of War" came after Unending, if it get my chronology right. That said, there would have been strong suspicions that the Wraith had something close.
Mind you, who's to say that the Wraith's cloning system was better? All they have shown is that they produced hideous drones. We've never seen what a_copy_of_a_copy^47 would look like. My little finger tells me it would look closer to the dog pile you put your foot on a few weeks ago.

What I don't get is why they never managed to grow clones closer to the thirty millenia old Asgard we saw in "Revelations". It would have also made Asgard cheaper, since they could fall back on human+latex masks, instead of the whole animatronic thing. They'd have just to find skinny actors.

Funny how many paths seem to end up in this same clearing huh.

And I'm sick of cleaning up the place everytime I return. X|

Here's a terrifying thought. Can you scale the wunderbeam up?

The ones on 304s must be pretty small since they're not even visible from the outside.

Why not?
They'd have to give it an awesome name.

Begins with the... Mortal Blu-Ray

i always hoped we would see the ori attack the Nox and when the ori fire the nox they just put up a kawoosh shield around the ship. dont even bother to fire back. but pretty much just laugh at the ori until they leave.

Imagine a soda can with a kawoosh effect when you open it.

or perhaps the asgard use time dilatation tech so they can keep the plasma in longer and heat it up a lot more.

Well, in theory they could: Asgard cores have time dilation tech inside them, at least Odyssey's core does, and we've seen that a time dilation device can be as small as a melon.
But that would be a bit too much.

[mickhhh]

Well, in theory they could: Asgard cores have time dilation tech inside them, at least Odyssey's core does, and we've seen that a time dilation device can be as small as a melon.
But that would be a bit too much.

maybe it has limits so it does no effect the rest of the ship

[Ouroboros]

I can get the variability to *some* degree, but it's already a stretch to me to put most of your bucks on this one when we're comparing two Wraith ships from two different episodes, but this time it's literally comparing hiveships from the same episode, at the same moment.
That said, yes, variability could explain it.

It could also be elements of both. The beams degrading over multiple shots and not all hives being equal anymore.

I also start to think that the Wraith use the equivalent of a structural integrity forcefield, in that it's like strengthening bones and muscles. With hiveships which can obviously transform their own internals, as per "Infection" (2nd half of season 5), and can regenerate the hull, it's possible. It would also explain the difference between Todd saving the ill half of a hiveship and making a spectacular landing, and Sheppard's team pulling a rather mediocre ramming in "Spoils of War", where it takes very little for the hiveship to break apart and where it doesn't even dig itself into the ground.
I guess there would be something like specialized cell-nodes all along the superstructure which can strengthen bonds and increase density by infusing more matter between every single possible fibre and screw.
After all, it's pretty obvious as per "The Seed" that the Wraith biotech can literally grow matter out of nowhere. It's not as fast as the Borg do, but it's not that far either, and it's terrifying once there's a large power source to tap.

The BAMSR battle has Todd ordering them to put more power into hull regeneration I think. It leads me to believe that that's their primary defense mechanism, rapid healing. Of course if you've got a more robust shell to start with it's going to require less healing. It also makes things like the super hive just ridiculous because not only can you barely damage it but even if you could it could repair itself mid battle. That's something that shielded ships can't even seem to manage. I don't think I've ever seen shields recover during a battle or recharge, only get weaker. Put that regenerating system in the hands of a competent commander and it gets even nastier in the land of slow moving blob mostly stationary combat. "We've taken a lot of damage" "Ok change facing to present fresh armour to the enemy, redirect power from all out of arc weapon facings to hull regeneration".

If you're only facing one enemy you could do that forever, really frustrating the hell of out them since it's very unlikely they'll be able to circle you faster than you can just turn in place. It also goes without saying that it's a great system to have when most of your people don't know how to manually repair the technology. Although it could be argued that it also encourages that sort of attitude to develop. The whole "I don't need to know how to fix this because it'll fix itself" attitude. Might be exactly what the ones that designed them wanted to.

Remember that old Keeper conspiracy idea?

And yet the Orion, despite completely crippled, could tank several bolts from a hiveship.
That said, it's not telling much, since the hiveships in "No Man's Land" were having a break to repair their systems due to hyperspace radiation, and they had maxed out their systems and hyperdrives in order to cross the galactic void.
That alone would also explain why it was so easy to finish one of with an alpha strike of megaton nukes up the tail pipe.

Well the Orion had non functional systems but I don't think the hull was really shot full of holes or anything until they did that whole, "trade the ancient ship to overkill one hive" stunt.

The 304 was the more expendable ship in that fight, especially after it already shot its entire wad of missiles. Would have been better to just beam everyone onto the Orion, Kamikaze one of the hives with the Daedalus, then drone the everloving **** out of the surviving one like they did.

That would basically be two guaranteed kills instead of the iffy bull**** they pulled with beaming the gas at the last minute. They knew the gas would likely not effect the queen ahead of time, so there was theoretically nothing stopping her from personally using those bridge consoles to find just a single still functioning weapon battery and killing them all with it.

She could even have shot them apart in a dart or scout ship. The Daedalus was so ****ed up at the conclusion of that battle the captured hive had to tow it home.

Yes but, really, if the Asurans were truly original, would have they have been caught pants down in "Be All My Sins Remember'd"?
I'm even tempted to believe that the satgate weapon was nothing more than something the Asurans had kept in a warehouse and was actually built by the Lanteans themselves.
You know the music. If the Asurans were competent, the code of their nanites wouldn't be bested by the will of a human mind, and Asura would have had such defenses after the Tau'ri "surfical strikes" that no one could have approached it in a radius of 10 LY: every possible weapon and defense the Lantean had would have been copied/pasted all over the Asuran system: shields, cloaking fields, phasing fields, satellite platforms and their yellow beams, generators and their red beams, ground to orbit blue pulse gun turrets, drones in droves, plus other obvious systems such as mines, hyperspace missiles and so on. Add every possible power souce the Lanteans were known to have, from ZPMs to geothermal energy, plus that source suggested to be antimatter in "The Shrine"...
Imagine the fortress.

The greatest post series stupidity for me now is how the Wraith apparently hijacked the Asuran command code but didn't use them as a ZPM and misc advanced tech factory for themselves. We know that the Wraith do desire ZPMs, they had the beginnings of a slave race to build them, but they decided to just leave them to sit there instead of continuing to compromise their hacked friend/foe programming until they were not just docile, but actively helpful. They could even have them just teach ZPM building to Wraith scientists, or hand over an ancient database, then terminate them all by exploding a ZPM on some remote part of their planet.

That said, it would seem to fit with the fact that once a 304 puts everything into its shields, it can turtle but won't be able to do jack. After all, we have already seen the Daedalus sit there and tank shots from two hiveships ("The Hive"), go toe to toe with another one in "Allies", and still survive rather easily, without losing hyperdrive, when facing an armada of nine or ten hiveships plus their escort cruisers in "Siege Part III".

There's variability in play there again, because when they got shot up in "The seige" (by nowhere near the entire fleet BTW) they lost a massive amount of their shields in just a few minutes. That, the jamming being developed on the fly, and the massive damage to the city shield later gives me a pet theory that that fleet was either being commanded by a Keeper, or had some Keepers in it, rather than just the regular queen+goons arrangement. Either that or it was some smart very ancient guy/Queen like Todd who had better toys than average.

The loss of Prometheus in "Ethon" could largely be attributed to a critical underestimate of the power of a satellite built by lower tech people.
But since then, I'd have expected the Tau'ri to actually learn a thing or two about exploiting the range of their missiles and F-302s.
At least you still could begin to explain the loss of Prometheus due to a severe lack of experience and caution.

It can be attributed to them thinking for some stupid reason that they needed to face of eyeball to eyeball with the satellite while talking to it's controllers on the ground, who might have been on the completely opposite side of the planet for all we know.

Tactics in "Camelot" were equally bad. Why didn't they park their ships around the supergate and even a tad behind it?
Were they afraid of losing their only chance at sending a peaceful message? ...

I would have just spent all that sitting around time having my ships clog the exit of the supergate with random towed in **** like asteroids and shipwreck debris so that the ori exit from the gate would look something like this one from mass effect 2. Only without the happy ending, and with a lot more nuclear mines spread around for extra flavor.

They wanted to try to make peace with them though. Turning them into a 4 ship pileup while we detonate nukes next to them and shoot the crap out of them from all directions would have been a lot funnier, and a great way to kick off their galactic invasion given their laughable shipbuilding rate.

But "Enemy at the Gates" really takes it. There's just no way to explain Caldwell prefering to warn his crew of the incoming of sluggish bolts instead of even slightly banking to the right.
And of course, not a single bolt was fired in excess of what was just necessary to take the 304's shields down. :/
Dammit. The plot holes in that silly finale really hurt.

I've always said that Wraith gunners are some of the most precise, forgiving and generous people in all of Stargate. The sort of guy's who'd shoot the earring off a mugger and let him run away unharmed.

These ones probably trained under the same instructor as the ones from allies, who were likewise able to preserve the Daedalus with 1hp left so it could be used to kill them and all their friends later.

I verified the information on Internet, and it seems to be heavily implied that other 304s at least got the shareware edition of the Asgard Core, the one that's allowing some key systems to be used.

The other ones got asgard upgrades but I think the core is a one shot deal. It's why they're hesitant about taking the Odyssey out of the garage now, because the core is a 1 off. It's also why only it can pull stunts like time freezing and cloaking.

[Ouroboros]

That, or just charge up your technomadjik "plasma" weapons with heavy liquid naqahdah and fire that stuff at the surface. At least you can do that from the living room of your Ha'tak, and enjoy the show on your full HD screen, with 3D glasses.
That's so cool.

Oh you just gave me another nasty idea. That beam weapon the Normandy fires in the ME vid I posted is a "hydrodynamic weapon" called the Thanix cannon. It basically fires streams of molten metal at fractional c velocities according to the codex (visuals are lies) which if you know anything about hydraulic accidents should seem pretty scary. I wonder how big a bang you could get using liquid naquada in something like that though. It amplifies energy hundreds of times so when it hits and all that ke gets converted into heat...

Since it's c frac it would have much better range than everything else to.

Woo, nasty, yes.
Also, as there's no reason for ships to move in hyperspace, they can actually stay there while your 20 meters long hyperspace capable missiles go take a dive.

I wonder if you could build some sort of secret fortress of doom that's permanently in hyperspace.

Well, logically, yes, but not necessarily in the context of Stargate.

It just hurts my brain to see it depicted that way.

"My computer's too damn slow"

"Here, plug it into this here nukuler reactor!"

"Wow, now I can run Crysis maxed out on my commodore 64! Thanks a bunch stargate guy!"

"No problem, I can replace your heart with a Chevy V8 engine if you want to run faster to!"

"Can you!!!"

"Yep, you'll be faster than 300 horses!"

And there's perhaps some turret on a belly. I think I've seen a beam come from somewhere there.
There would be at least 4 beam weapon slots.

They come from completely arbitrary locations as far as I can tell. It's literally the FX guys drawing little pew pew lines like a 4th grader doodling a space battle in the margins of his school notes.

That's also why I think the current Stargate era is really coming to an end. SGU is the last show, god knows what will happen to those SG-1 and SGA movies, but the more they keep going on with that absurd pretense full of cultural jokes that supposedly add a touch of genuineness to their universe - while it's only the mark of cheap and lazy writing in order to show how Stargate is *moar ree-ill* - how long before another show starts making references to Stargate? ... oh wait, no one gives a rat's arse about Stargate. Fwee! We're safe - the less their universe will remind interesting and credible.
It was fine when "we" were underdogs, but that's taxed and finished.

The only thing stargate needs to maintain its series identity in my view is the actual gate itself. The gate itself needs to be somehow central to the story. I posted an idea here about what I'd do with a new stargate show at this point.

I don't think so. "Spoils of War" came after Unending, if it get my chronology right. That said, there would have been strong suspicions that the Wraith had something close.
Mind you, who's to say that the Wraith's cloning system was better? All they have shown is that they produced hideous drones. We've never seen what a_copy_of_a_copy^47 would look like. My little finger tells me it would look closer to the dog pile you put your foot on a few weeks ago.

Their hideous drones have been viable for 10,000 years though. Basically the interest would be that since the Wraith cloning tech developed independently of the Asgard one, they might have uncovered some different things the Asgard didn't along the way that could potentially be the key to saving them.

The Wraith for one thing don't seem to embark on the idiotic exercise of copying copies. They also excel at general biotechnology, opening up the possibility of creating some sort of Wraith/Asgard or Human/Asgard hybrid body sort of like the Michael Hybrids. If that worked the Asgard wouldn't have to use mechanical bodies and could likely return to a form more similar to their original one. Some of them might not like the idea of being half alien but I'm sure some of them would also like it better than suicide, especially considering a partly Wraith body could have a ridiculously long lifespan, making future cloning and transfers a lot less necessary.

[thekillman]

you should talk to Crazy Tom.

anyway, there are a billion ways we could've totally decimated any opposition by season 3 of SG1. but there's such a thing as "writers devices"

[Crazy Tom]

you should talk to Crazy Tom.

anyway, there are a billion ways we could've totally decimated any opposition by season 3 of SG1. but there's such a thing as "writers devices"

Killman, Ouroboros and Oragahn were my inspiration.

[Mister Oragahn]

The BAMSR battle has Todd ordering them to put more power into hull regeneration I think. It leads me to believe that that's their primary defense mechanism, rapid healing. Of course if you've got a more robust shell to start with it's going to require less healing. It also makes things like the super hive just ridiculous because not only can you barely damage it but even if you could it could repair itself mid battle.

Indeed, he ordered power to be diverted to hull regeneration.
One thing I noticed is that this could be requiring huge amounts of power.
In "The Pegasus Project", the SGC were trying to make a wormhole jump from a stargate to a supergate. They were using 26 MT shaped nukes to do so, but it wasn't working. The stargate was already being powered by a blackhole btw.
Then the Daedalus got chased by a hiveship, and both went close to the blackhole. A ship with shields would do fine, but flying through (or very close to) the accretion disk and the black hole itself would require the hiveship to increase hull regeneration.
What made the wormhole jump is that the good guys beamed one of those nukes inside the hiveship and counted on the destruction to hit the stargate hard.
Case in point, the explosion, which was obviously going to be omnidirectional, still had to throw more than 26 MT into that narrow angle. The energy necessary to do so would be tremendous, and quite in line with calcs obtained from the estimates about near-full vaporization of an entire hiveship.
The stargate's 6.7 meters wide. Say it was facing the hiveship when it exploded. That's a surface area of 35.257 m².
Now let's say that the center of the explosion was located something like 500 meters away (when a hiveship is actually several kilometers wide).
That's a sphere of 3.1416 e6 m². That's over 89,105 times greater. Multiply that by 26, and you get 2,316,730 megatons.
And that's just an absolute low end to reach the 26 MT over the event horizon's surface (we don't know how many megatons were necessary to make the wormhole jump, and the center of the explosion obviously further away, most likely more than one kilometer or two away: you'd get two digits in the teraton range).

One way to lower the figure is to remember that the hiveship was moving towards the stargate very fast, and therefore had a huge KE to deliver. Since it's a 11 km long ship that counts on dense armour for protection, we could easily be looking at dozens of millions of metric tonnes flying at several kilometers per second. A good fraction of that KE would hit the stargate hard, and therefore allow a reasonable multi-gigaton explosion to fit with the minimal requirements.

Regardless of what the hiveship was doing, Carter knew that they'd get their energy by vaporizing the hiveship that way. Obviously, the safest understanding of this is a mix of high KE and something like the fuel they use, or whatever they usually store, even if it's large amounts of energy from subspace or whatever, blew up or got released at once.
Perhaps Carter counted on the radiations to weaken some containment field or some such.

Sidenote: this would also give a low end for an Ori Crusader's shields.

That's something that shielded ships can't even seem to manage. I don't think I've ever seen shields recover during a battle or recharge, only get weaker.

Indeed. They always go down by full percents and need to get a break to recharge. Be it Prometheus in "Lost City", or the Odyssey in "Unending". And she had a ZPM backing her up, plus the Asgard core and whatever she used by default.
The shield system is quite a mystery though. In some cases, its efficiency seems largely dictated by the output of whatever source of power that's tied to it, and other times it seems to be working with a "shield points" system.
I'm wondering if the shield system hinges on two elements:

1. The first being the direct output from a reactor which can be thrown into the shield bubble against a threatening force. The shield projectors channel the energies.
   
2. The second one being the shield projectors/emitters themselves, running on their own stock of energy (from capacitors): you can't recharge those reserves until you stop using the shield.
   Namely, if you're taxing your shields considerably, you cannot lower, dial down or disconnect some projectors in order to recharge them.

But there's quite a limit to this idea I'm just throwing there, because I can't explain why a beam that hits the shield would drain the projector's stock of energy (the falling percentages) instead of simply taxing/draining the reactor's stock of fuel (or potential energy in case of a ZPM).

Mmm... perhaps by default, ships use the projectors' own stock of energy. So that's why they can drop by percentages, never to rise unless the ship leaves combat.

And then, eventually, it's possible to divert more power to shields: you're not recharging the projectors, but providing them with an alternate source of power, and as long as it's high enough, the shields will hold. But since you still need the projectors to handle that flux of energy, you can't disconnect the projectors to recharge them. So if their own capacitors have been dented, then you're running on whatever's left in the projectors' capacitors and what you're directly diverting to the shield bubble at the same time.

This theory assumes that a projector's capacitor can't be safely severed from its parent projector: they're not independent systems. Or perhaps they are to some degree, and you can swap capacitors, but the recharge rate isn't particularly stellar.

That system would seem to exist only on Asgard and Lantean shields.
I don't recall any evidence that Goa'uld shields can really divert large amounts of power to their shields directly; they seem to solely work on whatever amount of enerty they have stored.
Such has been the case of any report of battle damage to shields for Ha'taks, or for Prometheus. I think the shield upgrade by the Asgards came in before "Lost City", but there could have been strong limitations to whatever the Asgards could do with the Tau'ri first deep space craft.

Put that regenerating system in the hands of a competent commander and it gets even nastier in the land of slow moving blob mostly stationary combat. "We've taken a lot of damage" "Ok change facing to present fresh armour to the enemy, redirect power from all out of arc weapon facings to hull regeneration".
If you're only facing one enemy you could do that forever, really frustrating the hell of out them since it's very unlikely they'll be able to circle you faster than you can just turn in place.

Yes, that would do wonders, although a competent commander could fly a 304 around a hiveship easily, as seen in "Allies".

It also goes without saying that it's a great system to have when most of your people don't know how to manually repair the technology. Although it could be argued that it also encourages that sort of attitude to develop. The whole "I don't need to know how to fix this because it'll fix itself" attitude. Might be exactly what the ones that designed them wanted to.

Remember that old Keeper conspiracy idea?

How could I forget it?
http://forum.gateworld.net/threads/3...Wraith./page11

Well the Orion had non functional systems but I don't think the hull was really shot full of holes or anything until they did that whole, "trade the ancient ship to overkill one hive" stunt.

The 304 was the more expendable ship in that fight, especially after it already shot its entire wad of missiles. Would have been better to just beam everyone onto the Orion, Kamikaze one of the hives with the Daedalus, then drone the everloving **** out of the surviving one like they did.

That would basically be two guaranteed kills instead of the iffy bull**** they pulled with beaming the gas at the last minute. They knew the gas would likely not effect the queen ahead of time, so there was theoretically nothing stopping her from personally using those bridge consoles to find just a single still functioning weapon battery and killing them all with it.

She could even have shot them apart in a dart or scout ship. The Daedalus was so ****ed up at the conclusion of that battle the captured hive had to tow it home.

Yes, the 304 was expandable, in a way. But it also was a ship the Tau'ri knew better, knew how to repair, and was in better shape to boot. And it could still tank hiveship shots. All they needed was a way to deploy more powerful nukes, in a more efficient manner.
With the Orion, they'd have kept a ship in constant need of repairs because there's little chance the techs would have understood everything about it. They didn't have the energy cannons, and the drones came in limited supply. From there, I can easily see why they preferred to go with the 304.
It isn't like they had an option either. To shoot the drones - the only thing the Orion could do that would be useful besides ramming - shields had to be lowered. So it was bound to be lost the moment they'd use it for offensive purposes. And the moment the shields were lowered, because they didn't have proper power, the Orion suffered critical damage and it was over.

The greatest post series stupidity for me now is how the Wraith apparently hijacked the Asuran command code but didn't use them as a ZPM and misc advanced tech factory for themselves. We know that the Wraith do desire ZPMs, they had the beginnings of a slave race to build them, but they decided to just leave them to sit there instead of continuing to compromise their hacked friend/foe programming until they were not just docile, but actively helpful. They could even have them just teach ZPM building to Wraith scientists, or hand over an ancient database, then terminate them all by exploding a ZPM on some remote part of their planet.

I don't think the Wraith managed to hack the low level code. It's more like they discovered a few high level functions, one of which was the shut down thing.
It took the SGC/IOA the entire Lantean database and all that they knew about Replicators to be able to assemble some bot of their own, and that by using the functions they had at hand.
I don't think the Wraith ever managed to go beyond that.

No, the stupid ones are definitely the Tau'ri. They had been making humanoid Replicators. Two of them got lose, but they were bad models. McKay and co made the cutie for BAMSR, and that seemed very risky, and only part of plan where all Replicators were targeted for complete annihilation.
The ****ty move was what they did with Weir and her bot friends. That was criminal.

There's variability in play there again, because when they got shot up in "The seige" (by nowhere near the entire fleet BTW) they lost a massive amount of their shields in just a few minutes. That, the jamming being developed on the fly, and the massive damage to the city shield later gives me a pet theory that that fleet was either being commanded by a Keeper, or had some Keepers in it, rather than just the regular queen+goons arrangement. Either that or it was some smart very ancient guy/Queen like Todd who had better toys than average.

They all had the jamming after that. Most likely a dormant tech they had to tune, and then they spread the word.
Now, it's true that they did take a lot of damage very rapidly in Siege, when they assaulted the armada of 12 hiveships and their escorts. These ships also were good at draining the ZPM. It's possible it was a "better" left over of the war. The whole military formation thing that would maximize forward and broadside firepower was quite impressive as well.

[Mister Oragahn]

It can be attributed to them thinking for some stupid reason that they needed to face of eyeball to eyeball with the satellite while talking to it's controllers on the ground, who might have been on the completely opposite side of the planet for all we know.

Perhaps that the Prometheus didn't have any decent long range weapon. It's also obvious that they had totally underestimated what the satellite was capable of. They didn't even think it would have shields. In their minds, it was an easy thing: if it looks at you the wrong way, shoot it down.

I would have just spent all that sitting around time having my ships clog the exit of the supergate with random towed in **** like asteroids and shipwreck debris so that the ori exit from the gate would look something like this one from mass effect 2. Only without the happy ending, and with a lot more nuclear mines spread around for extra flavor.

They wanted to try to make peace with them though. Turning them into a 4 ship pileup while we detonate nukes next to them and shoot the crap out of them from all directions would have been a lot funnier, and a great way to kick off their galactic invasion given their laughable shipbuilding rate.

A mark IX and some other gigaton nukes would have not hurt either. That said, those blocks were mobile, so I wonder if they Ori would have simply not moved the supergate away if they had noticed its exit was filled with crap.

I've always said that Wraith gunners are some of the most precise, forgiving and generous people in all of Stargate. The sort of guy's who'd shoot the earring off a mugger and let him run away unharmed.

They're good guys then.

These ones probably trained under the same instructor as the ones from allies, who were likewise able to preserve the Daedalus with 1hp left so it could be used to kill them and all their friends later.

In "Allies", didn't they leave as soon as they had the upgrade on the hyperdrives?
Besides, the 304 was holding well.
I think...

The other ones got asgard upgrades but I think the core is a one shot deal. It's why they're hesitant about taking the Odyssey out of the garage now, because the core is a 1 off. It's also why only it can pull stunts like time freezing and cloaking.

Yes, I think any other core, if there's any, would be Tau'ri made, by reading the blueprints, and that with materials they had. The Asgards had whatever cache of knacks they had on Orilla to do so, and they had a very good industrial base.

In my opinion, the Asgard core is not a guide for dummies thing, otherwise it would have never taken Carter 50 years to get something out of the core's time dilation functions.

Mind you, I think the Odyssey could soon turn out to be a curse. It's so full of treasures now, I'm sure some people on Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy would love to take control of it, and that could really cause much mayhem.
I can see the Odyssey being lost, either destroyed or launched FTL in some random direction and all contact interrupted.

Oh you just gave me another nasty idea. That beam weapon the Normandy fires in the ME vid I posted is a "hydrodynamic weapon" called the Thanix cannon. It basically fires streams of molten metal at fractional c velocities according to the codex (visuals are lies) which if you know anything about hydraulic accidents should seem pretty scary.

Considering the mechanics of penetration and vaporization of metal rods, such things already happen at low speeds worth of a couple of km/s, right there. A fractional c hose is just overkill and nothing more than a particle cannon at this point. The particles will react with the upper layers of the hull (say, contrary to a neutrino beam for example, but that one would be of limited use if used like a mere beam).
The c fractional speed really makes it a killer. I don't know how many kilograms are fired, and surely visuals makes it look like it fires tonnes of matter, but that doesn't fit with typical ME yields of that level of technology. In reality, outside of visuals, to stick with kiloton range weapons, the Thanix should fire something like grams, perhaps a few kilograms of matter. We certainly want to look at low fractional speeds though, perhaps 10% at best, otherwise the increase of mass due to relativistic effects require the ship producing amounts of power which are downright silly. Not to say that they make momentum a real problem.
Now, I don't think you would see much of the beam... more like a slit-flash that stick on the retina, with a big muzzle bang or so. Fortunately, with a mass worth of some grams, it would be so low that you wouldn't have to bother with countering a huge momentum much with the engines. Well, it would still be huge, but...

I wonder how big a bang you could get using liquid naquada in something like that though. It amplifies energy hundreds of times so when it hits and all that ke gets converted into heat...

Well, most logically you'd actually want to spend liquid naqahdah into providing energy to throw mundane matter at c fractional speeds. After all, the closer you get to c, the closer you get to annihilation yields.

Since it's c frac it would have much better range than everything else to.

Well, in the sense that what you see is what you hit, and even beyond, because if you can't hit a cow in front of you, firing at c-frac speeds isn't going to magically buff your accuracy.
We're yet to see something like a c-fractional weapon in TV "SF", as far as I know.

I wonder if you could build some sort of secret fortress of doom that's permanently in hyperspace.

Probably. Tap hyperspace energies and fly at a very low speed (speed has shown to be a factor in power requirements). Eventually try to be motionless relative to the closest gravity center. Ha'taks can go on for weeks at least, and that's while trying to get *somewhere*.

They come from completely arbitrary locations as far as I can tell. It's literally the FX guys drawing little pew pew lines like a 4th grader doodling a space battle in the margins of his school notes.

Well at least, even if they have not bothered building the 3D models on the updated 304s, they seem to make the beam depart from the same places: on either sides of the bow (think of the "temples" of "head"), and somewhere under the "wings", which are the cornered edges of the flat main platform, somewhere between the main section and the pods... could be in front of the hyperdrive engines.
There's also one that's coming from underneath the central section, in front of the middle point.
That's the best we get.

The only thing stargate needs to maintain its series identity in my view is the actual gate itself. The gate itself needs to be somehow central to the story. I posted an idea here about what I'd do with a new stargate show at this point.

Drugs?
Now I understand that picture with the other Marilyn Monroe. You could make them Twi'lek slaves. At least it would be a tad more serious.
That said, what is there to do with the Ori? Plenty of things!

What I totally agree on is that the show has to be in the future, very far future if possible. It would be indulging my appreciation for irony if whatever grew out of Earth turned out to be a tyrannical feudal system.

I also like the idea of the Jaffa being a decrepit regime almost turned fanatical. They'd be a small force, concentrated on a few planets only, isolated in some corner of the galaxy, cursing the Tau'ri all day long.
You would see their ships to be completely broken, open carcasses of Al'keshes half covered by sand dunes. The Ha'taks would barely hold together, and all the interiors would have been completely revamped, with a grunge touch: instead of the slick and clean walls, you'd get dirty ones, planks of wood and steal holding some panels in place, large pieces of brown and used tissue covering other section or hanging form the roofs. Even lights wouldn't work everywhere, replaced by torches (which ironically would devour more of the oxygen, dramatically taxing on the life support).
By virtue of need, the Jaffa would be ruthless against the Tau'ri and would have compensated their lack of space superiority with greater techniques of combat. IT would be quite funny if at some point, one Goa'uld returned and promised them a better life, assuming a bit of brainwashing in exchange of technological support.

Their hideous drones have been viable for 10,000 years though. Basically the interest would be that since the Wraith cloning tech developed independently of the Asgard one, they might have uncovered some different things the Asgard didn't along the way that could potentially be the key to saving them.

Possibly, but I don't see much in that vein. I don't even see them bothering that much since I believe clones were largely used during the war, and the purebreed survived thanks to their "suck teh lifeforce" thing.
They would not really be encouraged to find the best cloning system ever, since their drones were largely expandable.

Those who would have helped, I'm sure of that, are Weir's pals. But when you see the total fu**ery this turned out to be, plot wise... of course, we know that if it had been dealt with logically, the writers would have had to deal with the serious consequences of the introduction of that technology to the Tau'ri's capabilities.
It's already a bad thing to think that because they must not blow the lid about the stargate program otherwise THE WORLD WILL GO BONKERS (yeah, whatever) that supposedly countries are still fighting over power for natural resources and energy when the SGC/IOA can solve that.

The Wraith for one thing don't seem to embark on the idiotic exercise of copying copies. They also excel at general biotechnology, opening up the possibility of creating some sort of Wraith/Asgard or Human/Asgard hybrid body sort of like the Michael Hybrids. If that worked the Asgard wouldn't have to use mechanical bodies and could likely return to a form more similar to their original one. Some of them might not like the idea of being half alien but I'm sure some of them would also like it better than suicide, especially considering a partly Wraith body could have a ridiculously long lifespan, making future cloning and transfers a lot less necessary.

Well, the Asgards clearly didn't hold their bodies in much high esteem at all, to the point of turning into distorted ugly midgets.
It's possible, indeed, that the idea of getting access to new humanoid bodies would be seen as incredible. That said, the hybrid plot is ripped off from X-Files !

[Ouroboros]

Indeed, he ordered power to be diverted to hull regeneration.....

Sidenote: this would also give a low end for an Ori Crusader's shields.

Pretty interesting stuff here. I never really realized you could get energy figures for that explosion that way. I'm not sure if I agree about factoring in the KE though, as it seems like any actual solid object hitting the event horizon would just zip through to the other side and the Ori ship didn't seem to get hosed with a bunch of hiveship parts, funny as that would have been.

Indeed. They always go down by full percents and need to get a break to recharge. Be it Prometheus in "Lost City", or the Odyssey in "Unending". And she had a ZPM backing her up, plus the Asgard core and whatever she used by default.

My own theory is similar. Some kind of part, be it a projector, a heatsink of sorts or whatever, wears out or fills up and can only be replaced when the shield system is turned off completely. If it is some sort of capacitor that stores the energy the shields take that could even potentially explain why gateverse ships seem so fond of exploding violently when destroyed.

Yes, the 304 was expandable, in a way. But it also was a ship the Tau'ri knew better, knew how to repair, and was in better shape to boot. And it could still tank hiveship shots....

Such a waste. That ship waited for 10,000 years for someone to find and restore her, one of the last of her kind, then these rubes get their hands on her, jury rig some bull****, and destroy her to protect some junky little bucket that can't seriously threaten a hiveship even when dumping it's entire missile payload from ambush.

The Daedalus of the time was a joke. It was target practice for hive gunners to perfect that "leave 'em with 1hp" trick since unless they did something terminally retarded (like launch darts out of the bays facing the enemy for instance) it couldn't actually harm a hiveship in any meaningful way. It could just sort of sit there taking shots on it's shields until they failed.

I don't think the Wraith managed to hack the low level code. It's more like they discovered a few high level functions, one of which was the shut down thing.
It took the SGC/IOA the entire Lantean database and all that they knew about Replicators to be able to assemble some bot of their own, and that by using the functions they had at hand.
I don't think the Wraith ever managed to go beyond that.

Probably something all those caretakers could have been doing while they were sitting around for centuries waiting for everyone to wake up.

No, the stupid ones are definitely the Tau'ri. They had been making humanoid Replicators. Two of them got lose, but they were bad models. McKay and co made the cutie for BAMSR, and that seemed very risky, and only part of plan where all Replicators were targeted for complete annihilation.
The ****ty move was what they did with Weir and her bot friends. That was criminal.

I still remember that episode. That's easily one of the ****tiest things they've ever done, and they've done a LOT of ****ty messed up things. SGA was like a non stop atrocity party but this still stood out from the bunch as it was something they did to one of their own.

They all had the jamming after that. Most likely a dormant tech they had to tune, and then they spread the word.
Now, it's true that they did take a lot of damage very rapidly in Siege, when they assaulted the armada of 12 hiveships and their escorts. These ships also were good at draining the ZPM. It's possible it was a "better" left over of the war. The whole military formation thing that would maximize forward and broadside firepower was quite impressive as well.

It would be hilarious if it turned out that that fleet was actually led by Todd and that original keeper after getting Rononed back to life like I said before.

Shepard: Ok Todd, now that you're on Earth you're going to have to stay in this cell forever, since I've still got no reason to like you enough to do anything else.

Todd: Did I ever tell you about the time I talked an angry Wraith queen you'd tried to kill out of blasting the supposed nuclear ashes of your suicided city into even smaller nuclear ashes just for spite.

Perhaps that the Prometheus didn't have any decent long range weapon. It's also obvious that they had totally underestimated what the satellite was capable of. They didn't even think it would have shields. In their minds, it was an easy thing: if it looks at you the wrong way, shoot it down.

It's funny how even back then they were getting arrogant about their tech superiority.

In "Allies", didn't they leave as soon as they had the upgrade on the hyperdrives?
Besides, the 304 was holding well.
I think...

No, they were hosed again. The episode even has Caldwell express surprise at why the Wraith left instead of just finishing him off. It's happened to him a couple of times and he can never understand why. It'll be the reason he goes nuts some day.

Mind you, I think the Odyssey could soon turn out to be a curse. It's so full of treasures now, I'm sure some people on Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy would love to take control of it, and that could really cause much mayhem.
I can see the Odyssey being lost, either destroyed or launched FTL in some random direction and all contact interrupted.

I'd like to see that happen myself. Have the LA try to steal it or something then have it get destroyed somehow when trying to take it back.

Then without the Asgard core to provide new parts and diagnose problems all the other super advanced Asgard wonder tech starts wearing out and needs to be used more sparingly.

Well at least, even if they have not bothered building the 3D models on the updated 304s, they seem to make the beam depart from the same places: on either sides of the bow (think of the "temples" of "head"), and somewhere under the "wings", which are the cornered edges of the flat main platform, somewhere between the main section and the pods... could be in front of the hyperdrive engines.
There's also one that's coming from underneath the central section, in front of the middle point.
That's the best we get.

Has anyone ever tried to count how many unique locations they were seen to fire from?

Drugs?
Now I understand that picture with the other Marilyn Monroe.

Hahaha, holy ****. I stopped on this for like 5 minutes trying to figure out what the hell you were talking about but now I remember. I can't believe anyone else did though. She was just that sexy I guess.

You could make them Twi'lek slaves. At least it would be a tad more serious.

Honestly Twi'leks always kinda grossed me out. I don't get the fanboy love at all.

What'd I'd probably do with the Wraith in that future scenario though is have two more or less distinct groups. Those that had integrated with sprawling and expanding human society and accepted an identity as a "type of human" and those who still lived in the backwaters of the Pegasus and Andromeda galaxies on the edges of the human empire's interest. Both groups would be aware of the alternate food source but while the integrated ones would just use it as a means of getting by day to day, the ones in Pegasus would be using it to grow to huge numbers under a new unified leadership to "reclaim their rightful place in the universe"

Basically they'd be in full military dictatorship build up mode waiting for a chance to jump at the decaying human Empire's throat.

The series general climate would be one of a sort of an escalating cold war between this giant human empire which is on the downswing, and this resurgent "true Wraith" empire which is on the rise. The Jaffa would be more of a side threat and the Ori more socially and politically sophisticated opportunists with better tech than anyone.

I'd probably want a Wraith as a main character to give the insight into the species that never happened, and probably some sort of cryptic recurring Ori character who may or may not be one of the original "illuminated" priors.

It would be easy to make the Ori badguys as well but I think its more fun to have their reborn society actually turn out to be better for its citizens than the human derived one. They do after all have a bunch of immortal near godlike beings with a good portion of the universe's secrets and a new outlook on life helping them shape their future.

The old school type Wraith are a natural human enemy though. I just wouldn't go down the same idiotic path of painting the entire species with a single brush as SG is so fond of doing. So a Wraith serving in the new empire's elite guard will probably eat your face and laugh about it, Joe the Wraith who works at the small ship repair station on PX-7113 probably never ate anything actually living in his life and would be just as scared of the first guy as you would. And Jill the Wraith singer queen might even scream like a girl and hide under a bar table if you pulled out a gun near her.

You could have a lot of hilarious WTF type fun with this concept alone. Since Ellia shows that they really are just people that look weird, we're just not used to seeing them that way.

What I totally agree on is that the show has to be in the future, very far future if possible. It would be indulging my appreciation for irony if whatever grew out of Earth turned out to be a tyrannical feudal system.

I honestly can't see it heading in any other direction with the way they typically act. They'll use their current tech lead to build this giant Earth centric regime in the name of "home world security" or "preserving humanity's future" before they've even realized they've done it. Then the corruption will begin to set in.

I also like the idea of the Jaffa being a decrepit regime almost turned fanatical.

I like that visual picture you painted. I can't predict a sunny future for them either. I don't see them fully integrating with the human establishment, regardless of how big it gets, and I don't really see them doing too well on their own given how dependent they were on the Goa'uld for everything tech related. Some of them will likely just join the human empire for lack of better options, but there'll still be the hard line zealous types that'll refuse to ever do so out of pride. So just like with the Wraith's future in a lot of ways, only without the capability to really stand on their own as a civilization or update and adapt when exposed to new techs and ideas.

Well, the Asgards clearly didn't hold their bodies in much high esteem at all, to the point of turning into distorted ugly midgets.
It's possible, indeed, that the idea of getting access to new humanoid bodies would be seen as incredible. That said, the hybrid plot is ripped off from X-Files !

They must run through them pretty fast with the total lack of any kind of preventative measures to, like even wearing shoes.

I bet a lot of this degeneration was caused by Asgard just deciding to dump a body and get a whole new one every time they needed to clip their nails, or got a cold or mosquito bite.

The entire Asgard medical profession was probably reduced down to an automated booth that dispenses you a new body when you put in an Asgard dollar. Maybe you could even get one delivered to your habitation module in 40 minutes or less if you paid a little bit extra.

[Mister Oragahn]

Pretty interesting stuff here. I never really realized you could get energy figures for that explosion that way. I'm not sure if I agree about factoring in the KE though, as it seems like any actual solid object hitting the event horizon would just zip through to the other side and the Ori ship didn't seem to get hosed with a bunch of hiveship parts, funny as that would have been.

Factoring the KE is going to lower the overall figure, as you're actually driving energy towards the stargate. If we go with the omnidirectional burst only, as we see, we need an enormous explosion, one that's on the level of a dino-killer.
Now, call it dumb luck, but the stargate was spinning in such a way that by the time the hiveship was close to it and exploded, it precisely was "facing" it, in that it presented the largest surface area. What I mean is that the explosion didn't hit the rim like if you'd hit the edge of a coin. How lucky are we?
Obtaining the speed of the hiveship is the hardest part. I'm mainly working from a low quality FLV file, I'm lazy to pick the HD. Which means I must double tap really quicly to do some kind of frame by frame analysis of that. At best, I get about four stops per second.
But we can already notice something. By the moment the hiveship begins to appear (right after the camera cuts from Carter's "mark!"), it's a very small dot. I double tap. The next pause, it's an elongated dot. The interesting bit is that this dot has covered several times its own "length". The ship then brought itself about by ending its long curved trajectory, to solely face the camera. Obviously it didn't lose speed. So we can safely consider that the thing was moving at multiples of 11 km/s.

Also, I suspect the whole hiveship was largely vaporized. We've seen hiveships suffering the same fate in other episodes, when nuked from the inside:

• The Siege Part III: Orbital destruction shines more than a sun through the clouds. Here goes another one... and let's nuke some more.
• The Pegasus Project: From another website: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. OK, that's a bit circular, but we see the pattern
• Enemy at the Gates: Merry Christmas guys! Ok, that one was running with a super juicer. Still. We didn't hear about large debris falling into Earth's atmosphere and devastating entire nations, did we?

Even in Siege Part I, we've seen that the sattelite weapon's hit could trigger a chain reaction which ended with both halves of the ship self-vaping themselves.

Obviously only a fraction of the ship's mass is going to be hitting the stargate, but it will be very hot and very fast. If you look at this estimations of the weight of a SSD in Star Wars, we can easily see that a hiveship is ought to weigh more than a billion tonnes, easily.
1 bn tonnes flying at 22 km/s, that's a KE of 242 e18 J (~57.84 gigatons). There's more than enough here so that even a fraction of it will always be much more than the 26 MT focused nuclear warheads the Tau'ri were using against the stargate to make the wormhole jump.
Add the vaporization heat, and that's a lot of energy going into it.

Then, on the other side, we see that the Ori ship tanked that geyser for more than 4 seconds. People generally think that because it's space, the nuke is less useful and start talking about how the lack of blast will mean lost of the nuke's energy is wasted, generally pointing to those ratios. But the blast is produced as a side effet of the creation of the fireball. Gamma rays and hard X-rays will just go on unhampered (minus the casing being vaporized).
Considering that they were wondering about increasing the yield of the nukes by 5%, it's fair to assume that they placed them in the best position to exploit most of their energy. Most likely right in front of the stargate, like they did years before to disconnect the wormhole connected to a black hole (the small distance between the connected stargate and the targeted one, back then, would explain why it worked with a lower yield).
So even if the nuke's burst is omnidirectional, you still have almost 13 megatons going into the stargate, and obviously more depending on how focused it is. We could consider that the cone of emission - however they manage that - would be inferior to 180°.
So it's quite safe to assume that the vast majority of those 26 MT went into the stargate.

Now, the link I provide explains each step of the nuclear reaction. The later parts, when the fireball forms, occur in the microsecond range.
The earlier phase, the one that's relevant here, occurs in the nanosecond range.
It means that the stargate's EH could cope with that much energy, but with a power that's billion times superior (and let's remember the gate buster here as well).

If the wormhole jumping effect is related to power and not only energy, it means what got through that stargate as it hit the Ori ship was of some truly dramatic power.
But I think it's better we don't get there, because it makes the number just damn silly high, and even the mere thermal radiation from that geyser would have destroyer the Al'kesh.

That said, even if we forget the nanoscale for a moment, and consider that what made the wormhole jump was the process of channeling 26 MT per second, then the Ori ship tanked about four times that, at the very least.

My own theory is similar. Some kind of part, be it a projector, a heatsink of sorts or whatever, wears out or fills up and can only be replaced when the shield system is turned off completely. If it is some sort of capacitor that stores the energy the shields take that could even potentially explain why gateverse ships seem so fond of exploding violently when destroyed.

Yes, many do that. It's also such a flexible explanation that it can explain ships not exploding so violently. Then, again, some carry large amounts of naqahdah, which surely doesn't help if those stocks get subjected to temperatures much greater than at the sun's surface.