The poor Wraith.

[Shipperahoy]

Please try to debate this topic without resorting to personal insults. If someone disagrees with you and you want to argue your side that's fine but keep it civil please.

Shipperahoy
Gateworld Moderator

[jenks]

Also Hive ships have sheilds didnt thats why the weapons of daedulus did nothing to them.

Why do you say that as if where fact? there is no proof the hive ships have sheilds, if i remember rightly it said that the missiles were getting intercepted miles from the ship, if didn't say they were being obstructed by a sheild...

[aAnubiSs]

A bullet hitting a human head has about 20,000 G IIRC

[Furling God]

It makes sense to me that till now their vessels had no shield. That was because they didn't go to war, they went like fishing shrimp or harvesting vegetables: there was no opposition to mind about.

I am more concerned that they get shot by bullets. That's like throwing stones at an aircraft carrier. The darts should even be flying FASTER than the bullets....

[Peoples_General]

Just because a vessel flies in space doesn't mean its immune to small things like bullets. Im sure a P-90 can do significant damage to something like.... the space shuttle. Think of it that way.

Maybe those darts are built with heat resistant (for space flight and atmospheric entry) but brittle material such as the heat tiles on the shuttles.

[Tain]

Well the spaceshuttle is not a craft built to engage in combat, nor has it been built by beings with over 10 millenia of advanced technology to exploit. Also, the spaceshuttle would probably take a heck of alot more punishment than that dart did

[Ouroboros]

Just because a vessel flies in space doesn't mean its immune to small things like bullets. Im sure a P-90 can do significant damage to something like.... the space shuttle. Think of it that way.

I would be extremely surprised if, short of using an obscene amount of ammunition, you could shoot down the space shuttle with anti personnel weapons as it flew overhead. You might be able to put a few holes in it but they're going to be noticed by the mechanic on the runway later not by the pilots as they crash into the ground and die because of it.

There's also the issue of speed. The space shuttle is still in danger from things like micro meteorites in space even at the comparitivly low speeds it flies. None of the alien craft in Stargate have ever been indicated to have such a vulnerability and they fly a lot faster in space than the shuttle, even on sublight engines. So unless the Wraith are weaker in this regard than everone else, f-302s included, something's kinda bogus here.

[1138]

Some possibilities:

Dart shields (which they seem to have, judging by that energy field that deactivated in Duet) are much more effective in space. Similar to Anubis' shields being less effective in the atmosphere in season 7's Homecoming. Not sure why, but there are precedents in the Stargate universe for this.

Dart armour and shields are built to withstand thermal and directed energy weapons rather than kinetic energy weapons. I'm unsure of whether this would explain their ability to travel on a ballistic collision course with Atlantis while still being vulnerable to small arms.

Small arms rounds travel slower than the dart shielding system's kinetic energy threshold. Similar to Go'auld personal shields that can be penetrated by slow moving objects. I don't much like this theory, because it doesn't explain why they don't get blown to bits in space unless they're always traveling fast enough that space debris is above the threshold.

[lethalfang]

Space is remarkably empty. The chances of getting hit with something, anything, is remarkably small when you are in the vast emptiness of space.

[Ouroboros]

Small arms rounds travel slower than the dart shielding system's kinetic energy threshold. Similar to Go'auld personal shields that can be penetrated by slow moving objects. I don't much like this theory, because it doesn't explain why they don't get blown to bits in space unless they're always traveling fast enough that space debris is above the threshold.

Doesn't it seem like a really bad idea to you for the Wraith to set their threshold for this high enough that things that can still kill the dart will be allowed through. I mean I know the show tries pretty hard to make them look stupid sometimes but this is a bit much even with that in mind.

I don't think they have shields at all though. The cockpit thing doesn't mean they have shields just a fancy cockpit.

Space is remarkably empty. The chances of getting hit with something, anything, is remarkably small when you are in the vast emptiness of space.

That chance goes up pretty fast when you start blowing peices off enemy ships though, as darts often try to do. Since we've never seen a Dart harmed by crashing into a tiny gib of starship hull material that it (or something else) blasted off in a space battle, bullets shouldn't really hurt them either.

[1138]

Doesn't it seem like a really bad idea to you for the Wraith to set their threshold for this high enough that things that can still kill the dart will be allowed through.

It's not that they're stupid. Maybe that's a limitation of their technology. Again, we have precedence in the Stargate series: the Go'auld personal shield allows you to kill them with an arrow.

I don't think they have shields at all though. The cockpit thing doesn't mean they have shields just a fancy cockpit.

Well the energy field covered the entired ship, or at least what was left of it after it crashed. It wasn't just around the cockpit.