Predator ship

[Rise Of The Phoenix]

One way it can sort of make sense is if the 304 was designed around the idea of eventually being upgraded to mount some sort of plasma cannon derived from Goa'uld technology.

Do you think that the 304 could be designed to just unplug and plug in new components around the ship?
You know with anything just being taken out of sockets that plug into the power grid of the ship and ports on the hull were just there already.

We know Earth was studying such weapons so the 304 class might have been designed with future upgrade space to mount generators for the weapons once they became available.

In that case all our guys had to do was take or beam off a trinium panel here and there and fix the new weapon system in.
Afterall having to remove a massive plate of trinium from the hull could mess with the overall strength of the ship's body.

That could explain where they put them, if they even exist, which isn't indicated anywhere. It doesn't however explain the ridiculously over the top performance. There's no credible way to explain that that doesn't also imply that all the other species, including the Asgard most of all, would be simply to stupid to employ the same methods on their own ships. So we're back to innate Earth supremacy for no justifiable reason again.

Teaching aliens the best ways to employ their own technologies.

I was thinking about this recently, if we look at how long each beam shot is fired for compared to their alien counterparts pulse shots.
A beam is like dozens of pulse shots being fired one after the other, without a gap inbetween each, I think we have to think about what all that stress is doing to the target, since shields in SG usually have regions that weaken when taking the brunt, now imagine you don't give the enemy long enough to reposition their ship so it's taking stress in one tiny portion of that region, rather than getting sprayed in multiple areas and unless you reassign the shields bubble to cover the areas you're hitting constantly after each equivalent moment of impact from multiple pulse and IMO this would explain the apparent power of the beams.

Since a 304 doesn't have to power multiple cannons to deliver this amount of damage it could just be shunting the equivalent energy used accross say half a dozen Hive shots or whatever into one weapon and that would deal as much damage as we're seeing the APBWs do to the targets we've seen them hit.

I just think what would happen if you fired all of a Hives cannons at the same point on a 304's shields, not just one side, but a pulse's width, or imagine double that amount of cannons all hitting the same point at once or directly after each other, without a break for a few seconds and I think the results could be very similar.
It's stress, over a small area and in a short space of time, which equals more efficient damage delivery to a target.

Afterall randrops wouldn't hurt as much as a jetstream of water.

TBH I wouldn't be surprized if a Goauld came back, changed his/her ships to using a few beam variants instead of pulse cannons that they'd have had a better effect on the Ori other ships, guess we'll never see that though.

[Ouroboros]

Do you think that the 304 could be designed to just unplug and plug in new components around the ship?
You know with anything just being taken out of sockets that plug into the power grid of the ship and ports on the hull were just there already.

In that case all our guys had to do was take or beam off a trinium panel here and there and fix the new weapon system in.
Afterall having to remove a massive plate of trinium from the hull could mess with the overall strength of the ship's body.

Modularity in anticipation of future upgrades would make sense in an environment of rapid tech development like the SGC. It's got its limits though. Eventually you're going to reach the point where you're better off just building a new ship rather than trying to slap on a bunch of fresh upgrades to an outdated platform.

The 304 series already seems well past that point as it's still lugging around nuclear missile tubes and fighter bays that are now utterly useless compared to its beam weapons, but still account for probably close to 50% of the thing's volume.

I was thinking about this recently, if we look at how long each beam shot is fired for compared to their alien counterparts pulse shots.
A beam is like dozens of pulse shots being fired one after the other, without a gap inbetween each, I think we have to think about what all that stress is doing to the target, since shields in SG usually have regions that weaken when taking the brunt, now imagine you don't give the enemy long enough to reposition their ship so it's taking stress in one tiny portion of that region, rather than getting sprayed in multiple areas and unless you reassign the shields bubble to cover the areas you're hitting constantly after each equivalent moment of impact from multiple pulse and IMO this would explain the apparent power of the beams.

Since a 304 doesn't have to power multiple cannons to deliver this amount of damage it could just be shunting the equivalent energy used accross say half a dozen Hive shots or whatever into one weapon and that would deal as much damage as we're seeing the APBWs do to the targets we've seen them hit.

I just think what would happen if you fired all of a Hives cannons at the same point on a 304's shields, not just one side, but a pulse's width, or imagine double that amount of cannons all hitting the same point at once or directly after each other, without a break for a few seconds and I think the results could be very similar.
It's stress, over a small area and in a short space of time, which equals more efficient damage delivery to a target.

Afterall randrops wouldn't hurt as much as a jetstream of water.

TBH I wouldn't be surprized if a Goauld came back, changed his/her ships to using a few beam variants instead of pulse cannons that they'd have had a better effect on the Ori other ships, guess we'll never see that though.

This breaks down against a moving target like a ship though. A beam hitting a moving target, more so a miserably slow beam like the Asgard one, will have more of a raking effect along a rough line in the shield unless the target ship is moving directly toward or away. There's also the issue of power/time. Say a beam holds 10 wankatons of energy and takes 3 seconds to fully hit the shield. In such a case squishing it down into a blob that can finish hitting the shield in 1 second because it's shorter stresses the shield 3 times as hard in terms of dissipation.

I suppose it's a question of what's more important. Stressing dissipation or cross section, but it still comes back to the same general suspension of disbelief failure. If beams really were better than blobs for whatever reason you might image, then why do all the other species use blobs. Why were none of them smart enough to switch to beams before the weapons installed on the tiny little Earth ship if they were really THAT much better.

[Rise Of The Phoenix]

Modularity in anticipation of future upgrades would make sense in an environment of rapid tech development like the SGC. It's got its limits though. Eventually you're going to reach the point where you're better off just building a new ship rather than trying to slap on a bunch of fresh upgrades to an outdated platform.

I guess if Earth improved it's methods of making the hull of the ship, to be stronger and a more efficient use of resources then limits would of course be there in the older platform, but if the 304 can just have it's power grid replaced with ease to be more efficient and handle more power, then retiring our current ships doesn't really seem necessary, especially considering how long it's taken Earth to get it's fleet to the numbers it's currently got.
BTW I realize next to real life building times the 304s haven't really taken long to make, but for what we need and next to our enemies Humans are still pretty slow.

The 304 series already seems well past that point as it's still lugging around nuclear missile tubes and fighter bays that are now utterly useless compared to its beam weapons, but still account for probably close to 50% of the thing's volume.

I know their robustness is unrealistic but APBWs are pretty terrible in that regard.
Nukes are still useful as are 302s as a back up, tbh I wouldn't see them going in a while, hell even the Ancients had Puddle Jumpers and a mixture of energy weapons and projectiles in their society.

The Goauld also had explosives and fighters, but their pulse based energy weapons seem more reliable than teh APBWs.

This breaks down against a moving target like a ship though. A beam hitting a moving target, more so a miserably slow beam like the Asgard one, will have more of a raking effect along a rough line in the shield unless the target ship is moving directly toward or away.

In terms of moving speed the APBWs are not really different than their blob counterparts, they do deliver more material over a shorter space of time and they don't give a break, unlike pulses which do.

There's also the issue of power/time. Say a beam holds 10 wankatons of energy and takes 3 seconds to fully hit the shield. In such a case squishing it down into a blob that can finish hitting the shield in 1 second because it's shorter stresses the shield 3 times as hard in terms of dissipation.

The APBWs don't take 3 seconds to deliver their stream, it's about a second and a half, maybe 2 max, next to a single pulse which takes about half a second from firing to hitting and has about the same amount of a time gap inbetween the next hit.
The heat build up from trying to throw that much energy out of the weapon in a split second could be impossible for another race to try and emulate with a big blob, so delivering the power over a 2 second stream of the same kind of energy could be a safer way to make the principle work.

I suppose it's a question of what's more important. Stressing dissipation or cross section, but it still comes back to the same general suspension of disbelief failure.

See I don't see the issue, Stargate ships appear to have their battles at close in ranges and don't appear to move at relativistic speeds which would be a nightmare for real world battle scenarios.
These ships move slow and the APBWs aren't really any slower than their blob counterparts, plus they're delivering more damage in the amount of time it would take our enemy's to fire a volley of shots, mainly because there's no gap per amount of damage delivered, that could make a world of difference in a battle scenario.

If beams really were better than blobs for whatever reason you might image, then why do all the other species use blobs. Why were none of them smart enough to switch to beams before the weapons installed on the tiny little Earth ship if they were really THAT much better.

We didn't design them though did we, we got the designs from a race much older than most, even the Asurans.
It's probably a matter of heat build up and the materials used to deal with the stresses such a weapon could place upon itself by trying to fit that much energy/matter delivery into short space of time as it takes the APBWs to fire off all of their stuff.

Unless shown how to make them or given the technology to do so with ease it could be impossible for any other race to make such a weapon with their present level of technology.
Though the Asurans did have that satellite, which did terrible amounts of damage to Apollo's shields.
The Goauld and races that used their ships don't seem to have been shown the beams in action, only Pegasus races.

[McAvoy]

There are real world examples of reaching an upper limit of how much you can refit the ship without practically rebuilding the ship from the keel up. The USS Midway was a straight-decked ship when designed, and was heavily refitted back in the late 1960's, early 1970's to be as near as the super carriers as possible. Yet, she had her limits. She was a much wetter ship (sat lower in the water compared to the deeper hull supercarrers), was marginally slower and could not operate F-14 Tomcats which were the latest fighters at the time and had to resort to using F-4s. One of the reasons was because of the hangerdeck ceiling level. The ship rolled pretty heavily which limited her in launching and recovering aircraft.

I can easily see the 304s reaching the limit of their design either now or very soon. Yes, you can modify the ship during the construction, but there is a limit on what you can do even then before you practically have to redesign the ship. Another real world example is the difference between the USS Nimitz when commissioned about 40 years ago, and the USS George Bush commissioned a few years ago.

[nathan MCD]

build a self destruct function?