Weapon Strengths

[Mister Oragahn]

No, it was just the alien crystaline material. Abydos had a city called Nagada though.

[Ouroboros]

Naquada wasn't named naquada in the movie but Ra does threaten to use it. I think he said "100 fold" to as I recall. As noted though it seems to have gotten better in the series. It now literally multiplies yeilds closer to a million fold not a hundred.

If it scales like that with kiloton nukes you've got to wonder why they never tried it with something like those 5-15 megaton warheads they used to have in the cold war. Those would theoretically end up in the teraton range if the multiplier remains the same.

This again means that logically there's no reason why the Goa'uld, Wraith Asgard etc shouldn't be running around with Teratons per shot. The visuals however never live up to those kinds of yeilds, even though given what's possible with naquada, they should be fairly easily within reach for any more advanced race.

[thekillman]

as to why aliens dont use nukes[especially naquahdah ones], there are two obvious reasons:

1: have you seen sg-1's chain reaction? an entire planet was turned to a ball of superheated plasma from a weapons grade naquahdah nuke!. imagine!. the planet had naquahdah in its soil, as it was a former goauld planet. asuras has no naquahdah, otherwise the planet wouldve been obliterated from the effects of six mullti gigaton nukes.

2: do you know the real-life gatebuster? its essentially a shaped watertank with some explosive cord. the water forces the explosion at the wal, blowing out a nice man-shaped chunck, while without the gatebuster, you'd need twice the amount of explosive cord.
a nuke would be plain old cord. a plasma weapon is the gatebuster. instead of having a force in every direction, the plasma weapon forces it into one. on impact, you dont have a supermassive explosion, but you do have a big centered impact. an asgard beam weapon would barely create a nuclear explosion, but would create a big hole.

[NoobTau'ri]

The reason why alien races don't use nukes is very simple. They fight and space and their ships are loaded with energy weapons that can destroy the nuke before it hits the target, making nukes redundant. What do you think Ronald Reagan's Star Wars project was? That's right: creating sattelites armed with laser cannons that would shoot down the nukes before they hit the U.S. So there you have your answer for why advanced alien races don't use nukes. In the case of the Asgard and especially of the Ancients, however, I suspect that pride has a little bit to do with it as well. For races as incredibly advanced as these, a nuclear weapon is just something too primitive and basic. They would feel kinda humiliated of stooping this low. The Ancients, in particular, probably evolved beyond this technology not even thousands, but perhaps millions of years ago. It would be akin to to us making a stone spear to fight our enemies. You need to understand that a species that is at least tens but probably hundreds of millions of years old has issues and sensitivites that a 4,000 year old civilization like ours doesen't.

[thekillman]

a very powerfull stone spear that iss

[Mister Oragahn]

The reason why alien races don't use nukes is very simple. They fight and space and their ships are loaded with energy weapons that can destroy the nuke before it hits the target, making nukes redundant. What do you think Ronald Reagan's Star Wars project was? That's right: creating sattelites armed with laser cannons that would shoot down the nukes before they hit the U.S. So there you have your answer for why advanced alien races don't use nukes. In the case of the Asgard and especially of the Ancients, however, I suspect that pride has a little bit to do with it as well. For races as incredibly advanced as these, a nuclear weapon is just something too primitive and basic. They would feel kinda humiliated of stooping this low. The Ancients, in particular, probably evolved beyond this technology not even thousands, but perhaps millions of years ago. It would be akin to to us making a stone spear to fight our enemies. You need to understand that a species that is at least tens but probably hundreds of millions of years old has issues and sensitivites that a 4,000 year old civilization like ours doesen't.

Oh, with the only negligible subtlety that Goa'uld don't use weapons which could shoot down missiles. As I said, they use shields for that.

As for the yields granted by naqahdah, from 375 KT to 1,000 MT, that's a factor of 2666.666...

It's an order of magnitude above the figure cited by Ra in the movie, so not too far.
Still, putting naqahdah in the full yield Tsar Bomba, as initially planned (100 MT), you'd get a 266.66 gigatons monster.
Of course, we have no certainty on how naqahdah amplifies the yield, and it's very possible that it does not multiply the initial nuke yeild at all per se, but uses the nuke reaction as a trigger to start a fusion reaction with the naqahdah, which in a way of speaking, will indeed enhance the final yield.

Which means that if you put the same amount of naqahdah present in a Goa'uld buster, but this time in the Tsar Bomba, it could be very possible that you'd still end with a final yield of 1000 megatons, eventually a bit more, like 1100 or 1200 MT.
You'd need a significantly greater amounts of naqahdah to obtain yields in the tens or hundreds of gigatons.
Maybe ten or a hundred times the amount put in the Goa'uld busters.

Now, of course, when you consider the quantities the Goa'uld ship, farting gigatons at the face of their enemy should be a piece of cake.

[Ouroboros]

Oh, with the only negligible subtlety that Goa'uld don't use weapons which could shoot down missiles. As I said, they use shields for that.

As for the yields granted by naqahdah, from 375 KT to 1,000 MT, that's a factor of 2666.666...

It's an order of magnitude above the figure cited by Ra in the movie, so not too far.
Still, putting naqahdah in the full yield Tsar Bomba, as initially planned (100 MT), you'd get a 266.66 gigatons monster.

Yes, this is right. For some reason I was thinking of 300 kilotons to 1000 gigatons in the Goa'uld buster. See, there's a reason I don't like to do math very often.

Of course, we have no certainty on how naqahdah amplifies the yield, and it's very possible that it does not multiply the initial nuke yeild at all per se, but uses the nuke reaction as a trigger to start a fusion reaction with the naqahdah, which in a way of speaking, will indeed enhance the final yield.

Which means that if you put the same amount of naqahdah present in a Goa'uld buster, but this time in the Tsar Bomba, it could be very possible that you'd still end with a final yield of 1000 megatons, eventually a bit more, like 1100 or 1200 MT.
You'd need a significantly greater amounts of naqahdah to obtain yields in the tens or hundreds of gigatons.
Maybe ten or a hundred times the amount put in the Goa'uld busters.

Now, of course, when you consider the quantities the Goa'uld ship, farting gigatons at the face of their enemy should be a piece of cake.

If the naquada has that much potential energy that would also open the door to thinks like kiloton ranged hand weapons. Depending on how much naquada went into the Goa'uld buster to account for the addition to yeild you might be able to get Hiroshima out of a few grams of the stuff. The problem then though becomes setting it off since obviously' you can't build a nuke that small.

You could get one of those soviet suitcase nukes and make it a LOT scarier though, if the size of the initial nuke really isn't as importat to the yeild as the amount of naquada present.

[Ouroboros]

The reason why alien races don't use nukes is very simple. They fight and space and their ships are loaded with energy weapons that can destroy the nuke before it hits the target, making nukes redundant. What do you think Ronald Reagan's Star Wars project was? That's right: creating sattelites armed with laser cannons that would shoot down the nukes before they hit the U.S. So there you have your answer for why advanced alien races don't use nukes. In the case of the Asgard and especially of the Ancients, however, I suspect that pride has a little bit to do with it as well. For races as incredibly advanced as these, a nuclear weapon is just something too primitive and basic. They would feel kinda humiliated of stooping this low. The Ancients, in particular, probably evolved beyond this technology not even thousands, but perhaps millions of years ago. It would be akin to to us making a stone spear to fight our enemies. You need to understand that a species that is at least tens but probably hundreds of millions of years old has issues and sensitivites that a 4,000 year old civilization like ours doesen't.

Even the Goa'uld could stick a multi gigaton naquada bomb on a deathglider engine and end up with a missile that could cross a starsystem (ala the x301) at speeds far too fast for any energy blob to shoot down.

If it makes them feel icky with how non fancy it is they can make it glow in the dark for no reason.

I think whoever invents it would get over that pretty quickly though, when he can send one ship filled with hangers of these and wipe out entire rival fleets.

There's really no good explanation for why they don't do this other than "because the plot says so". Standard fare for sci-fi. The Wraith and Asgard should also each have starforge type technology. Boy I bet that sure would have helped against the replicators huh.

[Davidtourniquet]

I can't remember where i got it from but the website stated a weight for the stargate and the explosive power, so I worked out that the naquadah's power per kilogram is 129 kT.

[Mister Oragahn]

Yes, this is right. For some reason I was thinking of 300 kilotons to 1000 gigatons in the Goa'uld buster. See, there's a reason I don't like to do math very often.

No pb.

If the naquada has that much potential energy that would also open the door to thinks like kiloton ranged hand weapons. Depending on how much naquada went into the Goa'uld buster to account for the addition to yeild you might be able to get Hiroshima out of a few grams of the stuff. The problem then though becomes setting it off since obviously' you can't build a nuke that small.

You could get one of those soviet suitcase nukes and make it a LOT scarier though, if the size of the initial nuke really isn't as importat to the yeild as the amount of naquada present.

Good point.

There was that Davy Crocket device:

"One of the smallest nuclear weapons ever built, the Davy Crockett was developed in the late 1950s for use against Soviet troops in West Germany. Small teams of the Atomic Battle Group (charged with operating the device) would be stationed every few kilometers to guard against Soviet attack, using the power of their nuclear artillery shells to kill or incapacitate advancing troop formations and irradiate the area so that it was uninhabitable for up to 48 hours, long enough to mobilize NATO forces.

The M-388 round used a version of the W54 warhead, a very small sub-kiloton fission device. The Mk-54 weighed about 51 lb (23 kg), with a selectable yield of 10 or 20 tons (very close to the minimum practical size and yield for a fission warhead) up to 0.5 kiloton. The complete round weighed 76 lb (34.5 kg). It was 31 in. (78.7 cm) long with a diameter of 11 in. (28 cm) at its widest point; a subcaliber piston at the back of the shell was actually inserted into the launcher's barrel for firing."

Put naqahdah into that and you have a transportable nuke.
An already used naqahdah generator Mark-I, and probably using a poorer variant of naqahdah, likely inferior to weapon grade Nq, could still be overloaded to a yield of 20 kilotons.

Sidenote: I invite you to read these estimations of portable naqahdah power outputs.

Other devices include the booby trapped chests, as seen in Resurrection (which warranted the evacuation of the whole Los Angeles' Orange County) and Bad Guys, or the small bomb in Cassandra, in Singularity, which triggered a nuclear reaction even when two particles of potassium and naqahdah were put together, proving that actually fielding extremely small nuclear naqahdah devices would be very easy, although it's possible that these reactions about the devices I cited were fission based.

Still, the test made in the room put the reading "off the scale", with a release of "gamma and particle radiation."
Carter said that "the object inside Cassandra could cause a nuclear reaction a million times bigger."
Which is a very quick estimation. It could be weaker or stronger, but considering past estimations based on naqahdah abilities, and the former thought that small yields would destroy stargates, "million" could be an understatement.

Now consider what 1 kg did to a service maintenance car in Kabul (another awful terrorist act unfortunately, 4 deaths :/), and when you look at what remains of the car, you know that the test in that room, considering the damage caused and how the distant camera was instantly destroyed, we can safely consider that we had roughly the equivalent of 1 kg of 4.184 e6 joules released there. Which means that an explosion a million times bigger would make it a kiloton ranged explosion.

Now we can remember the small naqahdah charges used by Imhotep's suicide bombers.
http://www.stargatecaps.com/sg1/s5/5...18%5F0190.html (actor?)

Thing being that no fireball we saw since the beginning of the show, generated by the destruction of a lump of soil or a structure on the ground, has even been in the kiloton range.

Yet Goa'uld obviously have ALL they need to cause much much more damage than that. In The Warrior, Sentinel, Homecoming and Lost City, low yields can be explained with enough success, fortunately.

A single huge fireball generated by a Ha'tak cannon would put this to rest once and for all.

[Mister Oragahn]

I can't remember where i got it from but the website stated a weight for the stargate and the explosive power, so I worked out that the naquadah's power per kilogram is 129 kT.

The stargate's weight comes from Redemption Part II, with the figure being 64,000 pounds:

O'NEILL
Is there anything else I should know?

CARTER
Well, there's some concern that the 302s may not have the fuel capacity to exit the atmosphere carrying the weight of the stargate.

O'NEILL
How is that possible?

CARTER
The engines were designed for a craft with an alien inertial dampening system that effectively reduced its overall mass.

O'NEILL
Yes, and…?

CARTER
Well, you'll be carrying a very heavy load.

O'NEILL
How heavy?

CARTER
The Gate ways 64,000 pounds, Sir.

O'NEILL
That's heavy.

CARTER
And you'll need to reach an altitude exceding 180 killometers.

O'NEILL
At minimum escape velocity before I release the Gate, or it'll fall back to Earth. I know, I know.

CARTER
Well, based on the X-302's rocket fuel capacity, even a full burn won't do it, which means the other engines are gonna have to get you part way up, hauling something that weighs six times greater than it was designed to carry.

O'NEILL
Yeah. Carter…

CARTER
Well, the whole rig isn't exactly aerodynamic either.

O'NEILL
Carter! I'm not so sure I want to know any of this.

Notice Carter says that the engines will be "hauling something that weighs six times greater than it was designed to carry."

Does it mean that a stargate is six times heavier than a 302 (a = 6b, therefore 10,666.67 pounds), or if the element stargate+302 is six times heavier than a 302 alone (a+b = 6b, which makes the stargate five times heavier than a 302, and thus the 302 weights 12,800 pounds).

The explosive yield, I don't know where to get it from. Stargates amplify blasts, but how much. Obviously, we can't look at the destruction of Apophis' ships, one of them which had a stargate.
Either explosion of the ship destroyed the stargate, or the SGC never considered, back then, that it would sill be intact, and has therefore been propelled somewhere across our system and been drifting for a decade towards some place we don't know. It would be very funny if it had landed on one of our planets. It could even be worth an episode, maybe another stargate related problem episode (they're cool).
There's huh, A Hundred Days, with a small asteroid landing before the stargate and burying it.
24 Hours, with I think the stargate snapping despite being connected. It's been retconned because a single Al'kesh crash plus the flimsy explosion of a DHD and its fusion core didn't release that much energy, yet the stargate, which we partially saw, did break. Chain Reaction has the stargate float in a mass of plasma for at least more than 38 minutes.
Full Circle supposedly had the Abydosian stargate targetted, but the destruction of the pyramid hardly looked even nuclear in yield.

So I can't tell where to get a reliable stargate explosion which could be gauged.

Besides, I tried to figure out how much energy it takes to destroy a connected stargate.
A gatebuster is needed, BUT they are omnidirectional devices.
So based on a 22 feet wide stargate, conservative volumetrics and an initial yield of 812 GT for a device placed in the midle of the stargate, I obtained 221 GT to vapourize a stargate. This is an absolute low end.

[NoobTau'ri]

Even the Goa'uld could stick a multi gigaton naquada bomb on a deathglider engine and end up with a missile that could cross a starsystem (ala the x301) at speeds far too fast for any energy blob to shoot down.

I got to disagree here. We are talking about energy weapons here, and energy moves at the speed of light. Unless you can prove that Einstein was wrong about his theory of special relativity - in which case I foresee a Nobel in physics for you -, then there is no reason to assume that an energy weapon won't be able to shoot down any missile. Besides, you are forgetting that shields are massively strong. I mean really, really, really strong. Remember that ha'taks have the weakest shields of any vessel in Sgverse, and yet we've seen the shield of Apophis ha'tak take a 1 gigaton nuclear explosion in point blank and nothing happened to it besides that it shaked a little bit. If such a weak shield can resist a 1 gigaton explosion, then there is no reason to assume that mid to high gigaton nuclear explosions will take out the much stronger shields of Anubis' ha'taks, of Asgard motherships and Ori warships. The way to bring down these shields is not by brute force, because only probably a supernova or hypernova has the capacity to bring down those shields by this method, but rather to use specific beams composed of specific energy particles that make the shield oscilate, and concentrate all that power in a single spot until it collapses. Shields, even the weakest ones, are simply to effective at deflecting energy per square inch/foot of surface to be brought down.

[NoobTau'ri]

a very powerfull stone spear that iss

Not really, no. A civilization like the Ancients, who might be as much as 1,000,000 years above us, is able to produce energy at least in the large supernova and maybe as much as in the hypernova level. This is evident by the fact that a ZPM produces energy enough to vaporize two planets like Earth. Not to destroy, but to vaporize. This also means it can destroy an entire solar system. Since the energy necessary to vaporize a planet like Earth is in the jota joules range(10x22 joules) it puts the Ancients' power capabilities into clear perpective. Then there is Project Arcturus, which completely dwarfes that, and according to Zalenka could theoretically sap the energy of the entire freakin' Universe. To a civilization like this, a nuclear bomb is nothing. Compared to the energy a ZPM draws, the largest thermonuclear bomb would be akin to the fire of a match compared to Castle Bravo. And compared to the Arcturus Device, the largest thermonuclear bomb would be akin to the fire of a match next to a red giant. Again: stone spears.

[jnadreth]

Yet nuclear weapons are capable of blowing up Wraith Hive ships rather easily while the Ancients used rather inneficient Drone weapons. Drone weapons are admittedly powerful but are an ammunition based weapon that is hard to produce hence why there is precious few drones in Pegasus. Its easier to kill a hive ship with nukes than to build drone weapons let alone ZPM's. As I have said before building an entire fleet which is ammunition dependent restricts the time the ship is operational for before re-load especially when they have very powerful energy weapons at their disposal yet are not installed aboard warships. The Ancients had science but they did not understand war as the Taur'i or the Asgard do

[Crazy Tom]

Yet nuclear weapons are capable of blowing up Wraith Hive ships rather easily while the Ancients used rather inneficient Drone weapons. Drone weapons are admittedly powerful but are an ammunition based weapon that is hard to produce hence why there is precious few drones in Pegasus. Its easier to kill a hive ship with nukes than to build drone weapons let alone ZPM's. As I have said before building an entire fleet which is ammunition dependent restricts the time the ship is operational for before re-load especially when they have very powerful energy weapons at their disposal yet are not installed aboard warships. The Ancients had science but they did not understand war as the Taur'i or the Asgard do

Young JD's right, a naquadah explosive in a drone casing, one drone and all your have headackes will vanish.