Zat-Gun Capabilities

[First]

One shot stuns with great pain. That's cool.

Two shots kills. Makes sense, it's just an overdose of the first part.
The first two shots seem to be just an electrical charge, carefully metered so that one shot is not enough to kill a person.

Three shots disintegrates. WTF! that just goes way overboard in the believability stakes. It opens up a huge can of worms. For example:
If you shoot a wall or the ground three times does it make a hole in it?
If they have that sort of technology then they can invent a weapon that disintegrates in one shot. Make it a bigger 2 handed version and full auto.(obviously would be too unfair)

[First]

Or a massive Hatak-mounted zat that can stun everyone in the village!

[Evil_Genius_McKay]

Or a massive Hatak-mounted zat that can stun everyone in the village!

Good point!

[wise one]

if they made a planet wide zat weapon that could render the planet people to sleep

and if you turn it in the direction of a wraith ship, a few shots then bye bye wraith ship

[GStone]

One shot stuns with great pain. That's cool.

Two shots kills. Makes sense, it's just an overdose of the first part.
The first two shots seem to be just an electrical charge, carefully metered so that one shot is not enough to kill a person.

Three shots disintegrates. WTF! that just goes way overboard in the believability stakes. It opens up a huge can of worms. For example:
If you shoot a wall or the ground three times does it make a hole in it?
If they have that sort of technology then they can invent a weapon that disintegrates in one shot. Make it a bigger 2 handed version and full auto.(obviously would be too unfair)

The first shot stuns with a lot pain, acting much the same way as a stun gun would, but given the level of energy fired per shot, it's no wonder that it hurts like the Dickens. But, we have also seen that one shot also alters the electromagnetic field of a person. I forget the name of the ep, but it was the one where they were on a moon and they came across those energy 'bugs' that could pass through solid matter. This alteration, while temporary, was enough to act as a buffer a certain distance away from the individual (Jack, in this case) and could keep those bugs away.

Each resultant effect appears to require a short time between each shot, to act as an accumulative effect weapon. Killing with a zat probably isn't just overloading the body with enough energy that you cause a sever amount of damage. Otherwise, wouldn't we see burn marks on the exposed areas of the skin? The energy of each shot travels over much of the body, including the head and face, so you'd expect something, right? Even if it was some low grade sunburn-like things. You could say that the armor of Jaffa acts as something that would allow the energy little to no resistence, but you can't say that about the faces of Jaffa. And the closest I remember Tauri people having for energy weapon protect is the ceramic plating to protect against the plasma blasts of staff weapons that what's his name scientist was speaking of. And we aren't seeing any marks on SGC people.

Killing would be through an alteration of the electromagnetic field of the person, probably in much the same way one shot does it, but to a greater extent, so the organism can no longer function.

So, this says to me that the act of disintegrating something with 3 zat blasts is more a techi solution, coming from an accumulative effect, rather than disintegration through brute forcing your way through the bonds of the molecules and atoms.

That being said, I do believe there would be a mass limit to how much could be disintegrated with 3 shots alone. They did disintegrate the weapons they had in 1969, but I don't remember if they took out the truck it was in, too.

[Exiled Master]

;I've been wondering about some of the technical aspects of the zat guns. They established on the show that they are less powerful than the staff weapons and that is why Jaffa prefer to use the staff weapons. However a weapon that can disintegrate matter even in three blasts seems very powerful.

Some questions I have are?

1. Why haven't they made a larger more powerful version of the zat gun like they have a staff cannon,(larger more-powerful version of staff weapon)
2. What kind of materials can a zat-gun disintegrate?
I thought originally it must only be organic matter, because it seemed only useful against people, but that can't be right because everything on a person is disintegrated along with them, organic or not.
3. Could a more powerful zat-gun be used to disintegrate large vehicles like tanks and gliders?
Again takes us back to power-requirements and what type of materials it works on.
Just seems like the zat-guns have a lot of un-tapped potential and even the Goa'uld didn't have the capability to take the weapon further, surely we do now with the knowledge of the Asgard

If this has been talked about before please tell me. But I couldn't find any threads with Zat in the tagline.

Jaffa can barely hit something once (see stormtrooper effect). It makes sense that they would go with something that at best required a one shot kill and not a two shot kill.