Ha'tak weapons! [Continuum spoilers]

[Dev Corvin]

Dont forget atlantis showed us cloaks can be turned into shields and vice versa with a minor amount of tinkering.

LANTEAN shields/cloaks.

Goa'uld / Asgard systems are likely not as easy to convert, due to the fact that Lantean technology - in general - is designed to integrate perfectly with other systems.

[Mister Oragahn]

It fires terrible plot hole particles.



The problem is that it's not a very good explanation. I was talking out of my ass, really. I am not aware of any particle that goes through shields - assuming shields are made of some form of energy or plasma - like gamma rays go through organic cells. The writers are supposed to give at least an explanation based on science, even if it extremely far fetched science. Alas, they give no explanation whatsoever.

In this very case, I'd rather they don't attempt giving any explanation whatsoever.

[thekillman]

ok now stop the nonsense:

the lantean weapon used a laser or particle weapon, and only used minimal power. so hey, slicing through a hive.

a hive took a nuke directly. not much of a feat however. largest part of the explosion would go into the direction of lowest resistance: space. and nukes arent exactly the most....energy efficient weapons.

the lantean beam wouldnt take out an ori vessel just like that. it has shields. the weapon used a kind of energy beam capable of slicing through a hive, through the middle. the massive hive is only like what, 1/5th of the normal thickness? or more like
1/6th.

plasma weapons measured in kilo and mega and teratons ar horrible. tons of TNT are horrible to measure them in, as they arent nukes. a plasma bolt wouldnt detonate like a
nuke. it would hit the ground and make a crater. not a massive nuclear crater. no, one as big as the bolt itself, maybe a bit bigger. plasmatic weapons aint nukes.

why they didnt use nukes. i dont have any idea. but perhaps cause they arent earth, who blows up anything with nukes. the pace at which earth fires nukes, is sufficient to force america to make more,, as they would run out too fast. nukes in the SG verse however, are terrible against shields, and hives can take em directly. so dont talk nukes.
plasma weapons drain shields, and thats what they are supposed to do. and why would goauld make weapons who can take out new york in one shot, wheras all they faced were villages taken out in one shot. whats the use?

[wise one]

a blast from a hatak didnt even manage to destroy a shielded alkesh in a single shot or collaspee the surrounding area of it, that just shows how hatak weapons are weak

[Mister Oragahn]

ok now stop the nonsense:

the lantean weapon used a laser or particle weapon, and only used minimal power. so hey, slicing through a hive.

It is not a laser, and yes, it did slice through a hiveship.

a hive took a nuke directly. not much of a feat however. largest part of the explosion would go into the direction of lowest resistance: space. and nukes arent exactly the most....energy efficient weapons.

That is a myth. At point blank range, you'll get almost half of the nuke's yield heating up any material in its path.
It even gets greater if nukes have focused heads, like we've seen in Pegasus Project.
We have seen 304s use multi megaton nukes, both in Atlantis' Siege Part III (which can go from 10 to 70 MT depending on how you gauge it) and in SG-1's Pegasus Project (initially superior but dialed down to a yield of 26 MT each). We've never seen nukes with lower yields used.

Even if only one or two megatons hit the hull with a nearby explosion, which means a high concentration of radiations over a small area, you're still utterly surpassing whatever the Lantian beam could deliver.

the lantean beam wouldnt take out an ori vessel just like that. it has shields. the weapon used a kind of energy beam capable of slicing through a hive, through the middle. the massive hive is only like what, 1/5th of the normal thickness? or more like
1/6th.

Normal thickness of what?
And who spoke about the Ori for crissake??

plasma weapons measured in kilo and mega and teratons ar horrible. tons of TNT are horrible to measure them in, as they arent nukes. a plasma bolt wouldnt detonate like a
nuke.

For sort of real world plasma weapon, there would be differences, notably in that the plasma would already be a dramatically heated up packet energized matter. It would act more like a high yield explosive napalm, but the transfer of energy to matter is extremely rapid nonetheless.

But now, talking about the Stargate typical plasma bolt: in an atmosphere, a plasma bolt explosion would still generate powerful shockwaves, due to the massive expansion of said plasma and sudden transfer of heat.
Plasma would seek only oen thing: expanding. Being almost pure heat, it would probably even be more efficient in certain aspects than nukes which do loose some energy through less harming radiations, even if the majority of those they release are destructive.

it would hit the ground and make a crater. not a massive nuclear crater. no, one as big as the bolt itself, maybe a bit bigger. plasmatic weapons aint nukes.

It is right that the crater would be smaller, since after all, a plasma weapon would splash more than radiate energy as photons and therefore heat up soil and air.
Now, it all depends what type of far fetched plasma we're talking of here. What prevents us from claiming that the plasma of Goa'uld weapons doesn't manage to turn into some exotic and almost perfect black body matter? I'm merely making an example here, not trying to pull a fact, but if what I said was correct, the heat would be radiated as photons extremely rapidly, and in the end would heat anything around. The major difference would happen to boil down to the frequency of photons.

Now, to come back to the crater, it would still be largely bigger than the bolt itself. 200 megatons of energy packed into a bolt barely bigger than a bus is still going to explode violently.

Besides, the plasma weapons used by Goa'uld have properties which have nothing to do with plasma either. They're capable of piercing certain structures, that is, acting like solid projectiles throughout their travel until they hit something truely solid.
We don't even know if the bolts actually don't contain reactants which are only waiting to react violently in a nuclear way. Let's make it clear. The so called plasma bolts in Stargate have nothing to do with real plasma at all.

They're projectiles with well defined boundaries, bottled, and capable to retain their shape across vast distances. They also happily ignore gravity. The plasma part in it could, for all I care, be relative to how the reaction is triggered once the projectile hits the ground. It could contain a form of naqahdah which would amplify an explosion once the projectile's enveloppe is destroyed, and thus triggers the reaction. The plasma could even be just a kicker for the bigger reaction there.

why they didnt use nukes. i dont have any idea. but perhaps cause they arent earth, who blows up anything with nukes. the pace at which earth fires nukes, is sufficient to force america to make more,, as they would run out too fast. nukes in the SG verse however, are terrible against shields, and hives can take em directly. so dont talk nukes.

Hiveships don't have shields.

plasma weapons drain shields, and thats what they are supposed to do.

No. A plasma weapon by definition is not supposed to drain shields, especially since shields are imagined devices in SF.
Even within the realm of Stargate, there's nothing that says that a plasma weapon is supposed to drain shield anymore than a massive railgun, giant laser, super particle beam or nuke should.

and why would goauld make weapons who can take out new york in one shot, wheras all they faced were villages taken out in one shot. whats the use?

What about because they can?

Why use nuclear warheads twice on a country which had already surrended? You tell me. If humans are crazy and merciless enough to do so, what about the megalomaniac Goa'uld, posing as Gods?

Besides, since they do possess the easy ability to build ships, missiles, bombs and gigaton nukes, why would the Ha'taks, when battling each other, use peashooters instead of, you know, firing a good dozen of gigaton missiles at the face of their enemy?

The reasonning was that the plasma weapons they used made those weapons useless, with advanced bolts providing both equal yields, but with virtually limitless ammo as long as you had naqahdah at hand.

Of course, the fantastic writers and producers of Stargate, being the lazy arses that they are now and enjoying rewriting canon, didn't think so, and find it perfectly logical that the Gao'uld need a fleet of a hundred ships and three days just to turn cities to rubble.

I wouldn't do the calcs, but I wouldn't be surprised if even with the firepower displayed in the "movie", the Ha'taks wouldn't manage to complete their objective and destroy all population centers.

[JSPuddlejumper]

pointless to compare energy weapons to nukes

[s09119]

More pointless to compare plot-drained weaponry to plot-free weaponry.

[Mister Oragahn]

More pointless to wonder in such a forum where each episode is a plot. It doesn't provide anything really constructive to the thread though.

[s09119]

More pointless to wonder in such a forum where each episode is a plot. It doesn't provide anything really constructive to the thread though.

Snappy...

You know what I mean. There are some episodes where the plot drains the power of certain weapons and beefs up others. Then there are episodes where the weapons behave exactly as they always have. That's what I meant and it was fairly obvious. No need to be so... well... snappy lol.

[Mister Oragahn]

Snappy...

You know what I mean. There are some episodes where the plot drains the power of certain weapons and beefs up others. Then there are episodes where the weapons behave exactly as they always have. That's what I meant and it was fairly obvious. No need to be so... well... snappy lol.

Okay okay.

If you think the numbers keep going up and down, let's just try to get an average there, and leave the outliers... out.

Now, for those who've seen the latest flick...

Spoiler:

... what we saw was a load of nonsense. Well, in this case, I mean the sequence with the bombardment.

[s09119]

Okay okay.

If you think the numbers keep going up and down, let's just try to get an average there, and leave the outliers... out.

Now, for those who've seen the latest flick...

Spoiler:

... what we saw was a load of nonsense. Well, in this case, I mean the sequence with the bombardment.

They really do need to make up their minds... in some episodes, ha'tak weapons rip massive chunks out of other ships... and then we get things like "The Warrior" where the blast was hardly enough to destroy a common American one-family house.

[Mister Oragahn]

The thing is that up to this point, it was relatively easy to rationalize all cases. I really mean it.
Yu's attack (he knew about the resistance and could have sent troops over there way before if he wanted to, he merely wanted to scare them), Anubis and the outpost (he wanted the outpost, and you could even pretend that O'neill raised a shield, some speculation that could have found some place in some Stargate EU), Ba'al's attack above Langara (he had a deal to cause minimal collateral damage while taking care of Anubis' already crippled ship).
All of that worked, and it needed to be rationalized to fit with the rest, the large power of naqahdah, how far less than 100 kg of naqahdah would release more energy than the perfect annihilation of 100 kg of antimatter, the various crazy figures mentionned here and there, Sokar wanting to blast holes in Netu again to renew its fires, Osiris firing at the Asgard secret planet to dig a hole to an underground base, and globally all Ha'taks shooting each other while one could closely orbit a blue giant for 10 hours (which meant the ability to provide terawatts to shields, eventually from a buffer or directly from a reactor).