Super-Hive's strength

[Quadhelix]

three ways : if they could power the shield then why did the shield drop to 70% at the 1st few shots instead of, say, 99.9999% ? (latter figure being closer to what the zpm power levels should've been after the 1st volley)

I see: they stopped powering the shields because the first hit knocked the shield strength down to 70%. That raises the question of why knocking the shield strength down to 70% would disable two of the ZPMs.

My point, of course, is that you have not actually answered my question, so here it is again: if they could provide power for the ship to take off, why couldn't they power the shield?

which is quite a stretch, since the war itself stretched on for quite some time
this wasn't exactly a blitzkrieg

Unless the Ancients rebuilt Atlantis from scratch during the war, Atlantis would be using pre-war technology for the majority of its functions.

again, this is beyond surprising, this is plain preposterous. we'd expect at least some consistence within the technological capabilities of a civilization even within the context of TV sci-fi. this isn't DC comics.

For all your complaining, you have not actually pointed out the problem.

hell we don't even know if they had that many zpms to begin with, and everything points to the contrary (they were made out to be quite scarce throughout the show, and not even a few extras in atlantis itself, supposedly the last bastion of the besieged ancients) and it's not like zpms are just replicated

Rare? The Wraith managed to acquire three of them to power the cloning facility, the Tria had one, there was one on the Logan's run planet, one hidden by the Brotherhood, one powering the Tower.

And these are just the ones that still had power left.

(you need an enormous source of energy to begin with)

Where was this established?

btw where d'you get the matter/antimatter being less efficient than zpe ? matter/antimatter was never even mentioned in the show, that's a star trek thing

Actually, antimatter is a Real World thing, and it follows E=m(c^2). To get a one Gigaton explosion, releasing an energy of 4*(10^18) J, you would need 22 kilograms (about 48 lb.) of antimatter mixed with an equal amount of matter. However, unlike an overloaded ZPM, a one Gigaton explosion does not even come close to destroying a planet.

Therefore, despite the fact that the ZPM is much lighter than 100lb., it has a much greater output than a 100lb. mix of matter and antimatter.

if by "grown a hive for that purpose" you mean "added a cylindrical-shaped slot with + - poles", then maybe. imo it's a little more complicated than that.

Well, we know from "The Seed" that Wraith ships can grow incredibly quickly when they have access to ZPM-levels of power, and we have no idea what sort of changes had to be made at a genetic level to allow the use of the enormous output of a ZPM.

to start with this presupposes they knew exactly how zpms work.

No, it does not. Power is power.

otherwise this would be like building today's cars so as to be compatible with cold fusion cells. the equations for cold fusion may be known (partially) but this hardly suffices does it

Actually, as long as they could find the + and the - terminals on the cold fusion cell, they could make cars to run off fusion cells. After all, you do not need to know how the cells work, just how to get power out of it.

for the ancients to be so overwhelmed as they said this would imply a far greater ratio than this

Then where did all of those Cruisers and Hives go?

regardless, what I'm trying to say is that if the wraith had been so much more advanced (in terms of power efficiency) then I'd expect them to have either developed their own zpms (hell, even succeeded where the ancients failed : trinity !), or something in that league, or at the very least reverse-engineered whatever zpms they were able to capture

I'm not saying that the Wraith were as advanced as the Ancients, I'm saying that (with a few exceptions) the Ancients didn't give a pile of rat dung about power efficiency. They had access to ZPMs, which produce so much power that it could match anything the Ancients could conceivably need, even with absolutely criminal levels of waste.

same kinda analogy actually. such a transition wouldn't exactly be a piece of cake

Actually, as long as the nuclear reactor could charge the hybrid's battery (hint: it could), it would be a piece of cake. The biggest difficulty that they might have is a conflict between AC and DC, and that can be fixed with a few diodes and inductors.

making something more (that much more) energy efficient can mean completely redesigning the thing from scratch. this means more blackboard work (in other words "abstract" thinking).

I never said that the Wraith had problem with abstract thinking. I said that they would have focused their scientific endeavor in fields that they felt would give them military advantages. Quantum physics, especially the deep level necessary to discover ZPE, is not one of those areas.

and btw the wraith also had a damn good reason to invest in energy production tech since they had power shortage issues of their own

My point was that ZPE is along an entirely different line of research from where it seems they Wraith have invested their efforts. Biotechnology seems to be the Wraith's main field of expertise, and we have no idea whether a biological ZPE tap is possible, or even whether Quantum Physics (which is the basis for ZPE) even came up in their drive to develop warships to conquer their feeding grounds. In other words, we have no way know if the Wraith even realize that ZPE exists.

(hives breaking down during warp, power hungry cloning facilities, fleet of hives taking days to overcome a city-shield, etc)

None of that, however, is an issue unless there is a war. However, for the majority of the time that the Wraith would have had to develop their own Zero-Point power generators, they were quite happy with the status quo. No need to rush to get the their culling sites, no need to clone more hungry mouths to feed, no need to overcome the shields of their vanquished enemy.

In other words, no incentive to develop their own ZPMs.

as I was saying it makes sense that their tech may have been of somewhat better "quality" than their enemies, but uber advanced wraith hardware backed by uber primitive power sources?

Again, we are not saying that Wraith technology is "super advanced." Instead, we are saying that Ancient technology, due to the existence of ZPMs and thus the elimination of power as a concern, was incredibly wasteful.

[SoulReaver]

I see: they stopped powering the shields because the first hit knocked the shield strength down to 70%. That raises the question of why knocking the shield strength down to 70% would disable two of the ZPMs.

lol. actually that raises the question of why the shield (supposedly powered by 3 full zpms) was knocked down to 70% to begin with, because you know, that was kinda the whole point of this thread to begin with
nice try though

My point, of course, is that you have not actually answered my question, so here it is again: if they could provide power for the ship to take off, why couldn't they power the shield?

like I said the shield being knocked down to 70% is the 1st question that should be addressed but hey it's ok I'll be nice, I'll answers yours. and my answer is, there is no explanation as to why they couldn't power the shield because this makes no sense ! the exact same reason why the shield (supposedly at full power) was knocked down to 70% outright, this makes no sense !! and that was our point all along !!! your turn

Unless the Ancients rebuilt Atlantis from scratch during the war, Atlantis would be using pre-war technology for the majority of its functions.

damn, guess the ancients during all those millenia never heard of the word "upgrade" :/

For all your complaining, you have not actually pointed out the problem.

my bad, admittedly it's a long topic and even the scroll wheel can take a toll, so I'll sum it up here : the problem is 1 ship with 1 zpm easily owning another ship with 3 zpms, with the latter built by a supposedly far more advanced race at that. other problem closely related to the 1st are the explanations *some* ppl here have come up with to try & explain the 1st problem

Rare? The Wraith managed to acquire three of them to power the cloning facility, the Tria had one, there was one on the Logan's run planet, one hidden by the Brotherhood, one powering the Tower.
And these are just the ones that still had power left.

if these were so plentiful then it's not unreasonable to say that there must have been more than 1 powering the superhive during the battle

Where was this established?

with the very reasonable assumption that the ancients for all their science are not gods, and that even they are subject to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics :|

Actually, antimatter is a Real World thing, and it follows E=m(c^2). To get a one Gigaton explosion, releasing an energy of 4*(10^18) J, you would need 22 kilograms (about 48 lb.) of antimatter mixed with an equal amount of matter. However, unlike an overloaded ZPM, a one Gigaton explosion does not even come close to destroying a planet.

source ? because it's somewhat surprising that this does not depend on the type of matter (and antimatter)
it also depends in which universe we're talking about : RL, SG verse, ST verse. in the latter two for example, neutronium doesn't have the same properties. in the SG verse it isn't especially hard, in the latter it's more like adamantium. ST's quantum torpedoes also use ZPE yet their yield is nowhere near the effects of a detonating zpm. etc. different rules. that's why I asked where antimatter was ever mentioned in SG

Therefore, despite the fact that the ZPM is much lighter than 100lb., it has a much greater output than a 100lb. mix of matter and antimatter.

which is strange for such an energy source strong enough to blow up at least a planet (at most a solar system) yet barely enough to lift a city (mckay mentioning an overload in Critical mass))

No, it does not. Power is power.

so it's +- then. ok

Actually, as long as they could find the + and the - terminals on the cold fusion cell, they could make cars to run off fusion cells. After all, you do not need to know how the cells work, just how to get power out of it.

if it was +-. if only things could be that simple but they ain't (not even in sci fi )

Then where did all of those Cruisers and Hives go?

good question ! also what on earth or elsewhere were those wraith talking about when they said they overwhelmed the ancients with vastly superior numbers ?

I'm not saying that the Wraith were as advanced as the Ancients, I'm saying that (with a few exceptions) the Ancients didn't give a pile of rat dung about power efficiency. They had access to ZPMs, which produce so much power that it could match anything the Ancients could conceivably need, even with absolutely criminal levels of waste.

and I'm saying that such an attitude of theirs & such discrepancy between power generation on one hand & power efficiency on the other would be blatant PIS, all the more so than they had every reason to worry about it at least during wartime. besides as we both pointed out they were well capable of making extremely power-efficient hardware when they wanted to

Actually, as long as the nuclear reactor could charge the hybrid's battery (hint: it could), it would be a piece of cake. The biggest difficulty that they might have is a conflict between AC and DC, and that can be fixed with a few diodes and inductors.

amongst other things. also depends on form of current output (if it's AC), whether it's sine wave, square wave, etc. and how the circuitry of one system handles the output of the other system, including not only wave form but such nasty things as harmonic distortion etc. hell, my PC's own power supply has trouble enough with "simulated sine-wave" (finicky thing) so I had to get an online UPS (with perfect sine wave) instead of an in-line or offline one to ensure compatibility with that power supply, at wallet's expense :/

I never said that the Wraith had problem with abstract thinking. I said that they would have focused their scientific endeavor in fields that they felt would give them military advantages. Quantum physics, especially the deep level necessary to discover ZPE, is not one of those areas.

and I said they had every reason to focus their attention in those areas as well

My point was that ZPE is along an entirely different line of research from where it seems they Wraith have invested their efforts. Biotechnology seems to be the Wraith's main field of expertise, and we have no idea whether a biological ZPE tap is possible, or even whether Quantum Physics (which is the basis for ZPE) even came up in their drive to develop warships to conquer their feeding grounds. In other words, we have no way know if the Wraith even realize that ZPE exists.

true we don't, but since 20th century terrans are aware of it (including in the SG-verse) it's quite safe to say the wraith were aware of it. all the more so once they had captured their enemies' tech. after all efficient power production is always a military asset and I'm sure a space faring race would have no trouble figuring this out :| when investing in such fancy stuff as weapons & regenerative armour & FTL travel, focus on power production is not only a good idea, it's kinda crucial
about biotech being the wraith's main area, they were advanced enough to figure out a means of creating a forcefield that could permanently contain a PG humanoid replicator, which is quite a feat given the PG replicators' ability to adapt which surpassed even their MW counterparts (the writers apparently compensated this by dumbing the PG versions down to cro magnon levels - not that they had much choice though -)

None of that, however, is an issue unless there is a war. However, for the majority of the time that the Wraith would have had to develop their own Zero-Point power generators, they were quite happy with the status quo. No need to rush to get the their culling sites, no need to clone more hungry mouths to feed, no need to overcome the shields of their vanquished enemy.
In other words, no incentive to develop their own ZPMs.

true, none - until the war started, and lasted...millenia...not to mention that they wouldn't have needed to design their own from scratch once they got their hands on the real thing

Again, we are not saying that Wraith technology is "super advanced." Instead, we are saying that Ancient technology, due to the existence of ZPMs and thus the elimination of power as a concern, was incredibly wasteful.

oh but that's what they are basically saying, that it's super-advanced in comparison to the lanteans. it's the difference between the 2 that matters, and they're assuming that wraith tech was way more advanced (except for u know what) - or if you prefer, that ancient hardware was way less advanced (and let's not mince words, downright primitive. because decent power management would be one of the hallmarks of any "advanced technology" worthy of such appellation)
simple really, what I'm saying is to state that ancient stuff was so "incredibly" wasteful is to stretch credibility even beyond SG standards
and for the show's sake I sure hope that's not the explanation TPTB are gonna come up with :/

I can claim Todd is actually a woman and tell you you have to prove to me to my satisfaction that he isn't.

come to think of it the long hair & leather trenchcoats are kinda suspicious..

[Dr. Daedalus]

The city is -not a warship
-was built as not a warship millions of years ago
-requires power for weapons shields and drives at the same time
-it's shields also failed without the zpms being drained to an exploding stargate.

You have made some very good points. Next time the Presidential elections roll around the candidates should ask you and SoulRe@ver to advise them in their debates. However, I am not going to concede my point.

You are correct that the city was not built as a warship but it was designed to run on ZPMs. The Super-Hive was just adapted to use a ZPM.

To counter your second point during the battle with the Super-Hive the only major systems Atlantis was powering were the shield and the weapons. We have seen in previous episodes that it does not take too much power to fire the drones so the shield would have taken most of the power.

Now on to your third point. In First Contact when the shield was raised around the gate it was inverted. The inside of the shield was stopping the blast. We have seen that the inside of the shield is different than the outside of the shield. The shield was not designed to contain a blast from the inside so the shield emitters were overwhelmed, the shield failed, and the ZPM was not depleted. However, in EatG the outside of the shield was under attack. The shield is designed to block blasts coming from outside of the city by draining power directly from its ZPMs. If Atlantis was powered by all three ZPMs and the shield failed then the ZPMs must be depleted unless they were not powering the shield for some reason.

You just pulled "it takes 90% of their power to power the stardrive" straight out of thin air didn't you, and you state it as if it was a fact. Correct me if I'm wrong and you actually have some sort of dialog to prove this but if you don't then you can't do that.

You are right. I should have provided dialogue. McKay stated in Season 2 episode 17 that two ZPMs were not enough to get the city to fly. That gives us a number of at least 67% of the power of the three ZPMs the Ancients had. The Wraith (based on the Hologram room in Siege Part 2) had a massive siege fleet around Lantia, much more than the ten hives that engaged Atlantis in Siege Pt. 3. Those ten hives and their escorts drained the ZPM to 66% (based on McKay and Mrs. Miller) in 12 hours. Let us assume for a moment that 50 hives were besieging the planet. That would give the Ancients 14 minutes of shield time. Granted that is a lot of time, however, you have to assume that the third ZPM is only powering the shield and nothing else. That is not a good assumption.

I can claim Todd is actually a woman and tell you you have to prove to me to my satisfaction that he isn't.

Very funny. However, the reason what you said is true is because that claim
does not contradict previous episodes. Your explanation for the Super-Hive's strength contradicts previous episodes.

Shields failed in "First Contact" when the gate exploded. There's no need for the zpms to lose all power for shields to fail.

Already explained that above.


Dr. Daedalus

[Quadhelix]

lol. that actually raises the question as to why the shield (allegedly powered by 3 full zpms) was knocked down to 70% to begin with, because you know, that was kinda the whole point of this thread to begin with. nice try though
like I said the shield being knocked down to 70% is the 1st question that should be addressed but hey it's ok I'll be nice, I'll answers yours. and my answer is, there is no explanation as to why they couldn't power the shield because this makes no sense ! the exact same reason why the shield (supposedly at full power) was knocked down to 70% outright, this makes no sense !! and that was our point all along !!!

Actually, we know that the shield can fail, even when the ZPM powering it is not depleted ("First Contact"). Therefore, the shields were not knocked down to 70% because the ZPMs were loosing power, but because the shield generators could not handle the strain. In that case, it does not matter how many ZPMs are powering the shield.

damn, guess the ancients during all those millenia never heard of the word "upgrade" :/

Again, I'm sure that the city was upgraded over the millennia since it was built, probably even a bit during the war, but there is a vast difference between "upgraded" and "rebuilt from scratch."

my bad, admittedly it's a long topic and even the scroll wheel can take a toll, so I'll sum it up here : problem is 1 ship with 1 zpm easily owning another ship with 3 zpms, with the latter built by a supposedly far more advanced race at that. other problem closely related to the 1st are the explanations *some* ppl here have come up with to try & explain this

Explanation: Atlantis was a city built by a race of peaceful explorers. Hiveships were built by a race that eats peaceful explores.

if these were so plentiful then it's not unreasonable to say that there must have been more than 1 powering the superhive during the battle

Not so: it just means that the Ancients do not seem to have had a shortage of them. Whether the Wraith got their hands on any of those (besides the obvious three in the first war) is beyond our ability to determine.

with the very reasonable assumption that the ancients for all their science are not gods, and that even they are subject to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics :|

Except that ZPMs are not power storage units, they are power generation units, and the real issue is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (which Project Arcturus violates anyway).

I had gotten the impression (somewhere) that a ZPM worked, in a sense, by extracting ZPE from real space, but dumped the exotic particles in a pocket universe. When the pocket universe becomes saturated with exotic particles, it collapses, rendering the ZPM inert.

source ? because it's somewhat surprising that this does not depend on the type of matter (and antimatter) used

As a general rule, any antimatter reacts with any matter to release E=m(c^2). Type is not important.

it also depends in which universe we're talking about : RL, SG verse, ST verse. in the latter two for example, neutronium doesn't have the same properties. in the SG verse it isn't especially hard, in the latter it's more like adamantium. ST's quantum torpedoes also use ZPE yet their yield is nowhere near the effects of a detonating zpm. etc. different rules. that's why I asked where antimatter was ever mentioned in SG

Ah. It isn't, to my knowledge.

which is strange for such an energy source strong enough to blow up at least a planet (at most a solar system) yet barely enough to lift a city (mckay mentioning an overload in Critical mass))

Which highlights my point that Ancient technology is really, really power hungry.

and I'm saying that such an attitude of theirs & such discrepancy between power generation on one hand & power efficiency on the other would be blatant PIS, all the more so than they had every reason to worry about it at least during wartime. besides as we both pointed out they were well capable of making extremely power-efficient hardware when they wanted too

Note: the satellite, which was not designed to run off a ZPM, is incredibly power efficient. Atlantis, which was designed to run off a ZPM, is buoyant yet still needs a miniature supernova to reach orbit.

As for the issue of power efficiency in "wartime," I have already pointed out that Atlantis was not built during wartime. Why didn't the Ancients "upgrade" it with more power-efficient technology during the war? Because, as I have pointed out, that would require rebuilding the city from scratch.

and I said they had every reason to focus their attention in those areas as well

What reason would the militaristic Wraith for researching Quantum Physics, save to learn about ZPE? You might say, "ZPE is enough," save for the fact that they would have to know quantum physics to know that they needed to know quantum physics.

true we don't, but since 20th century terrans are aware of it (including in the SG-verse) it's quite safe to say the wraith were aware of it.

Not at all. We know about Quantum physics because we are naturally curious and eagerly investigate the abnormalities in our lab results. The Wraith seeming took the position that, if it cannot kill Ancients or make humans better food, it is not interesting.

all the more so once they had captured their enemies' tech.

Not at all. All that they would learn is that the Ancients could make crystals that put out a lot of power. How the crystals did would be shear speculation, unless the Wraith already knew about ZPE.

after all efficient power production is always a military asset and I'm sure a space faring race would have no trouble figuring this out :| when investing in such fancy stuff as weapons & regenerative armour & FTL travel, focus on power production is not only good idea, it's crucial

True, but all of this presupposes that they knew even the first thing about quantum physics. If they do not know about ZPE, then how can they develop their own ZPMs, no matter how much of an advantage such a technology would provide.

about biotech being the wraith's main area, they were advanced enough to figure out a means of creating a forcefield that could permanently contain a PG humanoid replicator, which is quite a feat given the PG replicators' ability to adapt which surpassed even their MW counterparts

Except that, from what we can tell, that field was being generated by...biotechnology! Also, the concept of "force fields" comes up under classical E&M, no need of quantum.

true, none - until the war started, and lasted...millenia...not to mention that they would've have needed to design their own from scratch once they got their hands on the real thing

A. The war lasted centuries, not millennia. This is, believe it or not, a big difference.
B. The Wraith had trouble interfacing ZPMs with their own technology, so they might have considered the "power crystals" to be a mere curiosity, outside the cloning facility.

oh but that's what they are basically saying, that it's super-advanced in comarison to the lanteans. it's the difference between the 2 that matters, and they're assuming that wraith tech was way more advanced (except for u know what) - or if you prefer, that ancient hardware was way less advanced (and let's not mince words, downright primitive. because decent power management would be one of the hallmarks of any "advanced technology" worthy of such appellation)

Why? The Ancients had no reason whatsoever to care about power efficiency. Any inefficiency could be made up for in spades by the enormous output of the ZPMs. I'm not saying that the Ancients couldn't build power-efficient technology. I'm saying that, once ZPMs came into play, they had no reason to, so they didn't.

Now on to your third point. In First Contact when the shield was raised around the gate it was inverted. The inside of the shield was stopping the blast. We have seen that the inside of the shield is different than the outside of the shield.

Okay, first, that assumes that the "outside" of the shield isn't the side that is across the shield from the generators, but rather the side not enclosed by the shield.

The shield was not designed to contain a blast from the inside so the shield emitters were overwhelmed, the shield failed, and the ZPM was not depleted. However, in EatG the outside of the shield was under attack. The shield is designed to block blasts coming from outside of the city by draining power directly from its ZPMs. If Atlantis was powered by all three ZPMs and the shield failed then the ZPMs must be depleted unless they were not powering the shield for some reason.

Also, this neglects whether they were able to completely repair the shield emitters after "First Contact." They were most likely not able to do so, making the shields more vulnerable to failure by overload in "Enemy at the Gate."

You are right. I should have provided dialogue. McKay stated in Season 2 episode 17 that two ZPMs were not enough to get the city to fly. That gives us a number of at least 67% of the power of the three ZPMs the Ancients had.

Which, of course, makes no sense. A ZPM can emit enough power to deplete itself in minutes, so unless Atlantis depletes its complement of ZPMs every time it takes off, there is another reason that it requires multiple ZPMs for takeoff.

[Ouroboros]

Ouroboros, how do you put up with this? Just reading what these people are saying makes me want to bash my head through a wall.

Run! Save yourself, it's too late for me!

Ok I did Dr. Daedalus first last time right so this time I guess I'll start with soulre@ver.

of course I haven't proved that it was because 2/3 zpm were unavailable (it could be 3/4, 4/5 etc.)
point is insufficient zpm juice is the only possibility, given what carson said
remember that this has nothing to do with the engines specifically, he's saying he can lift the city, he can fire weapons, but not do both. meaning this has nothing to do with losing power to the engines (or the weapons) but only with not having enough power for two or more systems simultaneously. hence a power shortage prob

well one of the NOs is correct :| maybe the hive did have only 1 zpm but in that case Atlantis didn't have the full power of 3 zpms (or maybe it did, but in that case the hive had to have more than 1)

Ok what specifically is your position here. You indicated support before for Dr. Daedalus "2 zpms were rerouted to the wormhole drive" position but now you seem to be saying something different. Be honest, do you even have a position other than "atlantis must be argued into actually being more powerful than the superhive".

hey I said we know that wraith have got their hands on more than 1 in the past. that's enough, imo

No, that's not enough. If that were enough I could also say that since Earth has possessed before at some point an Asgard core, an ascencion machine, merlins weapon, beam weapons, a time dialation device and a planetary scale phase cloak that atlantis actually had all of those things installed in the final battle as well but it still lost.

sure. though you can just say at what time in the ep he said it so I can check it out myself

1:17 for Todd "a very rare and powerful piece of technology"
1:25 for McKay "a zpm"
1:39 for Teyla "the zero point module"
1:53 Woolsey "the zpm"

I even gave you 3 other characters as a bonus, see what a generous soul I am.

mass is irrelevant, except in the first few seconds of the trip and possibly last seconds, when existing subspace. once at warp, the hive is moving at constant speed (without the need to slow down & reaccelerate, in the case of the superhive) and this is vacuum so there's no friction to compensate for. in other words once at constant speed mass no longer accounts for power requirements
ever tried moving a car ? it's quite hard at first, becomes easy as the car accelerates (it's still hard but only because of various counterforces due to friction, which is why it's hard to keep even a constant speed)
speed is also irrelevant (more speed = use more power, yes, but in a shorter time. for all we know this could also mean it used less energy overall)
in the end it's stil the hive's standard hyperdrive versus cityship's wormhole drive, the latter having been stated by McKay himself to use inordinate amounts of power to the point where the project was abandoned. so you can't apply the same thing to the hive

If this were true then ships could glide unpowered through hyperspace once they were in it yet this very same episode has atlantis drop out of hyperspace because something goes wrong with the hyperdrive, suggesting it's on doing something necessary to hyperspace flight and thus using power. Adrift/Lifeline even goes one step further and tells us specifically how they can only make a short jump through hyperspace because they don't have enough power for a longer one, hence greater length of trip = more power required.

the thing is, do you remember when you mentioned a "stupidity patch" to take care of all the holes & inconsistencies in the series ? well let's just say that if your scenario was right (hive 1 zpm vs atlantis 3 zpm) then not only would this not constitute such a patch, it would change the hole into a chasm, in fact it would give the final coup de grace to the series n terms of suspension of disbelief
see, basically I'm not saying your version is necessarily wrong, just saying that if it is right then this would make the finale the suckiest ep ever.

That hive could have been made out of green cheese and shot baby seals to defeat atlantis and this episode still wouldn't be worse than Irresistible, or even th SG-1 finale which included similar, but much much less justifiable, "supership out of nowhere" content.


Ok Dr. Daedalus now

However, I am not going to concede my point.

To counter your second point during the battle with the Super-Hive the only major systems Atlantis was powering were the shield and the weapons. We have seen in previous episodes that it does not take too much power to fire the drones so the shield would have taken most of the power.

You are right. I should have provided dialogue. McKay stated in Season 2 episode 17 that two ZPMs were not enough to get the city to fly. That gives us a number of at least 67% of the power of the three ZPMs the Ancients had. The Wraith (based on the Hologram room in Siege Part 2) had a massive siege fleet around Lantia, much more than the ten hives that engaged Atlantis in Siege Pt. 3. Those ten hives and their escorts drained the ZPM to 66% (based on McKay and Mrs. Miller) in 12 hours. Let us assume for a moment that 50 hives were besieging the planet. That would give the Ancients 14 minutes of shield time. Granted that is a lot of time, however, you have to assume that the third ZPM is only powering the shield and nothing else. That is not a good assumption.

Maybe you can convince yourself better than I can. These two seem to argue against each other pretty well, once you remember sublight drives were also in use in the superhive battle.

This second pargraph of yours here basically explains the whole superhive battle with little else needed except to detail how. If the city really needs to reserve 67% of the normal ongoing output of 3 zpms combined just to operate sublight drives to fly then I'd say that my earlier assertions about how ridiculously inefficient it is with power are stone cold proven now.

Given that the city is moving during the battle you're looking at that same sublight drive being active so there's where all your power is going. You've only got less than 35% of actual output to run the shields. That's not even taking into account any of the power that might have been required for weapons, inertial dampers or any number of other systems.

So it's really more like atlantis with 1 zpm vs a superhive with one zpm owing to how inefficiently atlantis uses power in its engines.

Tipping things more in favour of the hive still is that its defences come in the form of passive armour not shields. In otherwords its defenses don't require active use of power during battle to be effective, only if they want to start regenerating again midfight. What that means then is that they only need to split the zpm's available output between weapons and sublight engines, and since we know Wraith engines are already much more efficient than ancient ones (can lift a hive without a zpm instead of needing more than 2 to lift something smaller than a hive) that means you've really got a sitution where the vast majority of the zpm's output is likely going directly to overboosting the hive's weapons.

So to recap the hive uses its one zpm to

-provide the power needed to run comparitively much more efficient sublight drives
-power weapons
-other necessary systems that can ordinarily be handled fine by the normal vastly less powerful powersource, which may still be present as well as the zpm.

Where as atlantis uses its 3 zpms

-2 of them and some unknown part of the third one needed just to power the sublight drives
-some unknown part of the remainder of the third one not used by the engines divided between shields, weapons and other necessary systems

Atlantis is actually at a disadvantage in a fight then as its only using some fraction of a single zpm to power its shields where as the hive is likely using almost all of its single ZPM to power its weapons, and if the atlantis drives are anything to go by, it's weapons are likely making much more efficient use of the energy given to them than the atlantis shields are.

[SoulReaver]

Run! Save yourself, it's too late for me!

too late for him too. besides, the more the merrier

OK what specifically is your position here. You indicated support before for Dr. Daedalus "2 zpms were rerouted to the wormhole drive" position but now you seem to be saying something different. Be honest, do you even have a position other than "atlantis must be argued into actually being more powerful than the superhive".

of straw & men. I never mentioned the "2 zpms were rerouted" specifically, so talking about honesty...honestly...anyway I said Atlantis' power reserves were severely drained by the time it reached MW, how exactly we don't know nor do I care for that matter

No, that's not enough. If that were enough I could also say that since Earth has possessed before at some point an Asgard core, an ascencion machine, merlins weapon, beam weapons, a time dialation device and a planetary scale phase cloak that atlantis actually had all of those things installed in the final battle as well but it still lost.

well you could, actually - if you could show that all those gems literally littered ( ) the galaxy like zpms did

1:17 for Todd "a very rare and powerful piece of technology"
1:25 for McKay "a zpm"
1:39 for Teyla "the zero point module"
1:53 Woolsey "the zpm"
I even gave you 3 other characters as a bonus, see what a generous soul I am.

(never say that to a soul reaver)
okey I'll take your word for it. there was one zpm...at the time it was being tested ! in fact it makes sense not to hook up more of the things when you haven't even figured out how to make one work properly
edit> ok checked out the 1st one. since we're into semantics, todd also added "[...] piece of technology, one with which I believe you are quite familiar". now I dunno about you but unless this happened to be the same zpm that Atlantis had long ago, and unless that zpm was the only one they ever had in their possession, you can't be familiar with "a" piece of technology per se, only with the technology itself. using the well known & now much appreciated "(false => false) = true" rule of logic, this suggests that by "piece of technology" todd in fact meant the technology itself. and ipso facto the possibility that more than 1 instances of said technology were acquired. yes I'm being deliberately finicky, but hey you started :|

If this were true then ships could glide unpowered through hyperspace once they were in it yet this very same episode has atlantis drop out of hyperspace because something goes wrong with the hyperdrive, suggesting it's on doing something necessary to hyperspace flight and thus using power. Adrift/Lifeline even goes one step further and tells us specifically how they can only make a short jump through hyperspace because they don't have enough power for a longer one, hence greater length of trip = more power required.

of course it is using power (the real question is, how much). trajectory adjustment, for example. especially since an error of the order of a single micrometer, perhaps even less, can mean several lightyears off the course upon arrival when it comes to intergalactic distances. hell, even spaceships at sublight use their propellers. it's not just the hyperdrives, the computers on those ships must be going through hell given the near zero error margin they're allowed

That hive could have been made out of green cheese and shot baby seals to defeat atlantis and this episode still wouldn't be worse than Irresistible

yes it would have been worse, because for one thing a green cheese episode not only would suck but it would stink, literally
second because PETA would've sued
and third because Irresistible was the best SGA episode ever and I sure hope to see Lucius again
*shields on maximum*

Spoiler:

GW ladies> I was JK about that last part

btw

-2 of them and some unknown part of the third one needed just to power the sublight drives
-some unknown part of the remainder of the third one not used by the engines divided betwee shields, weapons and other necessary systems

the cityship has the size of a city...and just about the maneuverability of a yacht, in those instances movement being pointless it would normally be relegated to the bottom of the priority list. chances are they were a tad more focused on not being blown to high heavens and thus devoted most of their power to shields & defences
besides you're saying that it would need two (full !) zpms just to power the drive, which boils down to the same "ancient tech is incredibly^10 wasteful"

[SoulReaver]

Actually, we know that the shield can fail, even when the ZPM powering it is not depleted ("First Contact"). Therefore, the shields were not knocked down to 70% because the ZPMs were loosing power, but because the shield generators could not handle the strain. In that case, it does not matter how many ZPMs are powering the shield.

I knnnew you'd say that !
all well & good, 'cept that the cityship does not use a generator, as seen in the siege. so much for that
btw this would also contradict a point you brought up just 1 post ago, namely that zpms can be drained within minutes. given the energy stored within, this implies an insane maximum power output (and that's an insane understatement) & as such even 1 zpm would suffice to dispense with a generator, let alone 3

Again, I'm sure that the city was upgraded over the millennia since it was built, probably even a bit during the war, but there is a vast difference between "upgraded" and "rebuilt from scratch."

oh I'm sure some upgrading is all it would've taken just to optimize power usage. it's not like they would've had to crack the entire city open like an egg & change its hull & shape while they were at it. they could've done it in a jiffy if they had to. besides they were an advanced space faring race - the ancients no less - and it's safe to say that with such tech as matter replicators (amongst other things) an upgrade wouldn't have been a biggie. remember how quickly the borg could modify a captured ship ?
this ain't BSG. this is SG which just like ST has the magic reset button. creating stuff doesn't take much time in the SG verse, let alone changing or fixing it. ain't that kewl ?

Explanation: Atlantis was a city built by a race of peaceful explorers. Hiveships were built by a race that eats peaceful explores.

a race of peaceful explorers that came up with the most advanced powersource seen in the show as well as devised the 2 most powerful weapons ever seen in the series. got it (those blue asgard beams are a serious contender though, I'll give u that)

Not so: it just means that the Ancients do not seem to have had a shortage of them. Whether the Wraith got their hands on any of those (besides the obvious three in the first war) is beyond our ability to determine.

3 and a lot more during s4 alone. the ancients were getting pwned. they were losing. meaning as the wraith advanced, the ancients retreated. so unless they shrunk & crammed all their tech into Atlantis, or were able to somehow sabotage every single piece they abandoned, this can only mean that no shortage for the ancients => no shortage for the wraith either. or at the very least a few they could work with

Except that ZPMs are not power storage units, they are power generation units, and the real issue is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (which Project Arcturus violates anyway).
I had gotten the impression (somewhere) that a ZPM worked, in a sense, by extracting ZPE from real space, but dumped the exotic particles in a pocket universe. When the pocket universe becomes saturated with exotic particles, it collapses, rendering the ZPM inert.

um...nope. Trinity works the way you describe (except for the dumping exotic particles part) but not a zpm. don't even know how you could've got that idea, since it's been stated several times that a zpm extracts energy from a real pocket of space contained within it (or "self contained region of space time" as Mckay said himself, in fact right from the start in series premiere) the zpm thus contains the energy that powers it, meaning it's a power source. essentially a battery

As a general rule, any antimatter reacts with any matter to release E=m(c^2). Type is not important.

so 1 proton colliding with 1 antiproton would release the same energy as 1 electron vs 1 positron or 1 neutrino vs 1 antineutrino ?
ok whatever
we still don't know how much this means in SG verse though ^^ SG's zpe is way beyond ST's, I'd say there's a chance the same applies to matter/antimatter as well. in short, any attempt at numeric conjecture is pointless

Which highlights my point that Ancient technology is really, really power hungry crappy.

fixed. and even I'm being conciliatory. if it turns out that your side is right then we might as well drop the euphemisms

Note: the satellite, which was not designed to run off a ZPM, is incredibly power efficient. Atlantis, which was designed to run off a ZPM, is buoyant yet still needs a miniature supernova to reach orbit.

in other words, which was deliberately designed to be power hungry. interesting

As for the issue of power efficiency in "wartime," I have already pointed out that Atlantis was not built during wartime. Why didn't the Ancients "upgrade" it with more power-efficient technology during the war? Because, as I have pointed out, that would require rebuilding the city from scratch.

because, as I have pointed out, that last part is as plausible as the "ancients being both power-wise and power-foolish" part, in other words not plausible at all. like I just said we're talking about an optimization. and like I also just said this is SG, and those were ancients, not BSG colonials who relied on chain workers like 21st century terrans

What reason would the militaristic Wraith for researching Quantum Physics, save to learn about ZPE? You might say, "ZPE is enough,"

exactly it's enough. power is a sine qua non for every other piece of tech
and to paraphrase some1 in this topic, "power is power". so if you got power, you got The Power

save for the fact that they would have to know quantum physics to know that they needed to know quantum physics.

oh they knew it. if they didn't, then it's yet another nail in the series' coffin

Not at all. We know about Quantum physics because we are naturally curious and eagerly investigate the abnormalities in our lab results. The Wraith seeming took the position that, if it cannot kill Ancients or make humans better food, it is not interesting.

and to know QF they'd need to explore beyond their current scientific theories. which is basically what [serious] research is about. and to this end they'd need to have...the need. I pointed out that they already had the need. sure scientific theories can be a means & not an end. but it's safe to say the wraith became a space-faring race long before they actually warred with the ancients :| kinda strains belief (again !) to think they could build spaceships & all that follows including such things as teleportation & FTL - which defy general relativity - without a solid grasp of quantum physics, let alone an awareness thereof
btw about the curiosity part, the wraith are essentially human, I'd say curiosity is 1st & foremost a genetic thing (don't wanna hget into a religious debate though, so I'll leave it at that)

Not at all. All that they would learn is that the Ancients could make crystals that put out a lot of power. How the crystals did would be shear speculation, unless the Wraith already knew about ZPE.

rofl. terrans (earth's "1, granted) figured out a lot more than that. I say 10 to 1 the wraith could do a helluva lot better

True, but all of this presupposes that they knew even the first thing about quantum physics. If they do not know about ZPE, then how can they develop their own ZPMs, no matter how much of an advantage such a technology would provide.

so yeah, like I said they did know the 1st thing & well as many of the subsequent things
(then again QF was stated to be erroneous back in SG1 s1, so I wonder if even applying QF to the ancients let alone the wraith would make any sense in the SG verse -)

Except that, from what we can tell, that field was being generated by...biotechnology!

or maybe the bio stuff was only providing the power (and perhaps transmitting data. remember 8472 ?). what was that again about "power is power" ?

Also, the concept of "force fields" comes up under classical E&M, no need of quantum.

lol. the concept of a solid invisible wall that stops any object both metallic & non-metallic with the same force flies in the face of modern science, especially general relativity. I know this because my comrades & I asked our senior high physics teacher about it once (trekkies, we were) and he basically said that none of the 4 fundamental forces could account for the existence of such a phenomenon (he detailed the reason for each of the four, can't remember in detail now. I do remember that he said gravity was too weak, can't recall the rest) and finding a fifth force is "as likely as finding a new colour in the known spectrum"
of course this is SG so maybe EM is radically different just like QF (and zpe) could be different. which unfortunately would render the argument futile as well, in the absence of a relevant statement in the script

A. The war lasted centuries, not millennia. This is, believe it or not, a big difference.

oh well. centuries will do just fine. replace "millenia" with "centuries", I stand by my previous statements (btw was it 10 centuries ? just in case -)

B. The Wraith had trouble interfacing ZPMs with their own technology, so they might have considered the "power crystals" to be a mere curiosity, outside the cloning facility.

nah that was the goa'uld (even then, only ra-era goa'uld). humans also had trouble using those yellow things, didn't prevent them from quickly figuring them out for what they were.

Why? The Ancients had no reason whatsoever to care about power efficiency. Any inefficiency could be made up for in spades by the enormous output of the ZPMs. I'm not saying that the Ancients couldn't build power-efficient technology. I'm saying that, once ZPMs came into play, they had no reason to, so they didn't.

yeah, got you the 1st, 2nd & 3rd time. and as I said each time a discrepancy of such magnitude as what you're proposing would basically toss what little credibility is left in the show down the toilet. hey I've said it before and I'll repeat it as often as necessary even if I've to spam this topic to hell ^_^ (edit> or if tptb settle this before then -)

Which, of course, makes no sense. A ZPM can emit enough power to deplete itself in minutes, so unless Atlantis depletes its complement of ZPMs every time it takes off, there is another reason that it requires multiple ZPMs for takeoff.

thus, yet another inconsistency in the show (offtopic though)

[Dr. Daedalus]

. Think positively Ouroboros.

If the city really needs to reserve 67% of the normal ongoing output of 3 zpms combined just to operate sublight drives to fly then I'd say that my earlier assertions about how ridiculously inefficient it is with power are stone cold proven now.

I did not say that. What I said was that it took at least 67% of the normal outgoing output of the ZPMs to lift Atlantis off a planet. McKay said in First Strike that 90% of their power requirements would be used in the first 10 seconds of flight. It takes much less power to move the city when it is in space. We have seen one ZPM power the shield and the sublight engines in Lifeline.

So to recap the hive uses its one zpm to

-provide the power needed to run comparitively much more efficient sublight drives
-power weapons
-other necessary systems that can ordinarily be handled fine by the normal vastly less powerful powersource, which may still be present as well as the zpm.

Agreed except for the first point.

Where as atlantis uses its 3 zpms

-2 of them and some unknown part of the third one needed just to power the sublight drives
-some unknown part of the remainder of the third one not used by the engines divided between shields, weapons and other necessary systems.

That is basically my theory except for the part about the sublight engines using the power. As I explained above, the sublight drive takes at most one ZPM to operate.

Dr. Daedalus

[Quadhelix]

I knnnew you'd say that !
all well & good, 'cept that the cityship does not use a generator, as seen in the siege. so much for that

Wait. What? If Atlantis doesn't have shield generators, then what generates the shield? Pixie dust?

If you like, you can substitute "shield emitters" in place of "shield generators" in my statement, and you will see what I mean.

btw this would also contradict a point you brought up just 1 post ago, namely that zpms can be drained within minutes. given the energy stored within, this implies an insane maximum power output (and that's an insane understatement) & as such even 1 zpm would suffice to dispense with a generator, let alone 3

No matter how much power is available, you still need something to produce the field. In both "First Contact" and "Enemy at the Gate," the shield is failing because those emitters are getting damaged.

oh I'm sure some upgrading is all it would've taken just to optimize power usage. it's not like they would've had to crack the entire city open like an egg & change its hull & shape while they were at it. they could've done it in a jiffy if they had to.

Well, we know that a lot of their power conduits were integrated into the walls, so all the walls would have had to have been torn down and the wiring inside replaced. That, of course, is just for starters.

besides they were an advanced space faring race - the ancients no less - and it's safe to say that with such tech as matter replicators (amongst other things) an upgrade wouldn't have been a biggie. remember how quickly the borg could modify a captured ship ?
this ain't BSG. this is SG which just like ST has the magic reset button. creating stuff doesn't take much time in the SG verse, let alone changing or fixing it. ain't that kewl ?

Actually, Ring Transports and Stargates are the only pre-Ascension Ancient teleportation technology that we have seen, so it seems quite likely that the Ancients didn't have matter replicators.

um...nope. Trinity works the way you describe (except for the dumping exotic particles part) but not a zpm. don't even know how you could've got that idea, since it's been stated several times that a zpm extracts energy from a real pocket of space contained within it (or "self contained region of space time" as Mckay said himself, in fact right from the start in series premiere) the zpm thus contains the energy that powers it, meaning it's a power source. essentially a battery

My mistake. However, that does raise the question of how the pocket universe is generated. If the pocket universe is created "from nothing," then yes, all of the energy (and more) that is contained in the ZPM would have to come from some other power source. If, however, the pocket universe is "pinched off" from the "real" universe, then the ZPE extracted by the ZPM is already present, and the only energy input needed would be that necessary to "pinch off" the pocket universe.

so 1 proton colliding with 1 antiproton would release the same energy as 1 electron vs 1 positron or 1 neutrino vs 1 antineutrino ?

No, but I was going by mass. 1 gram of protons colliding with 1 gram of antiprotons would release the same amount of energy as 1 gram of electrons colliding with 1 gram of positrons.

ok whatever
we still don't know how much this means in SG verse though ^^ SG's zpe is way beyond ST's, I'd say there's a chance the same applies to matter/antimatter as well. in short, any attempt at numeric conjecture is pointless

1. Just because Quantum Torpedoes are weak than detonating ZPMs does not necessarily mean that ZPE is weaker in Star Trek than in Stargate. It means only that Quantum Torpedoes are a less efficient harness of ZPE than a ZPE.

Second, without any evidence to the contrary, I am going to assume that E=m(c^2) is still valid in Stargate, and thus that antimatter still behaves roughly the same way it would in the real world.

fixed. and even I'm being conciliatory. if it turns out that your side is right then we might as well drop the euphemisms

Power hungry=/=crappy.

If you could get a 10% increase in performance at the cost of tripling the power consumption, then most races would be absolute idiots to make such an "upgrade." Better the low power cost than the increase in performance. Not so the Ancients, because they had ZPMs. ZPMs, as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, eliminate power consumption as a concern. If a race capable of producing ZPMs could increase performance by 10% at the cost of tripling power consumption, why wouldn't they? They have more than enough power generation capabilities to do so.

because, as I have pointed out, that last part is as plausible as the "ancients being both power-wise and power-foolish" part, in other words not plausible at all.

I point out above why it actual makes a good amount of sense for the Ancients to build very power hungry equipment.

like I just said we're talking about an optimization. and like I also just said this is SG, and those were ancients, not BSG colonials who relied on chain workers like 21st century terrans

However, as I pointed out with regard to teleportation tech., we are talking about a group with the need to use chain workers.

exactly it's enough.

No, it isn't: they would not know about ZPE unless the did research into Quantum Physics. However, they would have little reason to put effort into researching electromagnetic anomalies (which would lead them to Quantum Phyiscs) unless they already knew about ZPE. You're begging the question.

and to know QF they'd need to explore beyond their current scientific theories. which is basically what [serious] research is about.

And when have we ever seen the Wraith as "serious" researchers. If it doesn't make their ships strong or their food tastier, they don't seem all that interested.

to think they could build spaceships & all that follows including such things as teleportation & FTL - which defy general relativity - without a solid grasp of quantum physics, let alone an awareness thereof

I am having trouble grasping why knowledge of General Relativity would imply a knowledge of Quantum Physics. The two are not only unrelated, but mutually exclusive.

Of course, I will buy the argument about teleportation.

yeah, got you the 1st, 2nd & 3rd time. and as I said each time a discrepancy of such magnitude as what you're proposing would basically toss what little credibility is left in the show down the toilet.

Except that you haven't explained why it is a discrepancy, just asserted that it is and pushed on by force of will.

[Dr. Daedalus]

Okay, first, that assumes that the "outside" of the shield isn't the side that is across the shield from the generators, but rather the side not enclosed by the shield.

Yes. Sheppard told Zelenka to collapse the city shield around the gate. That means that the inside of the shield was containing the explosion. The shield was not designed to contain blasts. It was designed to keep badguys out and air in.

Also, this neglects whether they were able to completely repair the shield emitters after "First Contact." They were most likely not able to do so, making the shields more vulnerable to failure by overload in "Enemy at the Gate."

If the shield emitters were damaged permanently it would have been mentioned in the episode.

Which, of course, makes no sense. A ZPM can emit enough power to deplete itself in minutes, so unless Atlantis depletes its complement of ZPMs every time it takes off, there is another reason that it requires multiple ZPMs for takeoff.

We saw in Critical Mass that without the ZPM failsafes a ZPM will overload if it tries to power the stardrive to take off from a planet. The failsafes limit a ZPM's power output. That is why you need three ZPMs.

Dr. Daedalus

[SoulReaver]

Wait. What? If Atlantis doesn't have shield generators, then what generates the shield? Pixie dust?

If you like, you can substitute "shield emitters" in place of "shield generators" in my statement, and you will see what I mean.

good you answered the question. so you meant "emitters"
during battle the emitters are irrelevant when it comes to the shield power status, that only depends on the shield generators (which act like some sort of "buffer" between power source & shield emitter). in a cityship the zpm feeds the shield emitter directly (ie. no shield generator) meaning as long as there's juice left in the module the shield stays up
(now maybe ancient tech was dumbed down yet again so that now even 3 zpms can't provide enough output to dispense with a shield generator, but then the same sort of thing would've applied to the zpm on the superhive as well, meaning far weaker guns than what was shown)

No matter how much power is available, you still need something to produce the field. In both "First Contact" and "Enemy at the Gate," the shield is failing because those emitters are getting damaged.

odd, in the siege those emitters didn't take the slightest damage
a weakened shield has nothing to do with a damaged emitter anyway

Well, we know that a lot of their power conduits were integrated into the walls, so all the walls would have had to have been torn down and the wiring inside replaced. That, of course, is just for starters.

optimising power consumption of a system doesn't mean modifying all those conduits that provide power to that system. those are just conduits. like getting a better quality motor doesn't mean changing the car. and worst case scenario even if the lanteans had to do crack open their city, those are advanced aliens not terrans. this ain't 21th century earth this is SG, like ST. making stuff ain't a big deal, fixing it even less so
and that's assuming this even calls for an upgrade in the hardware department at all. hell you get shareware apps that optimise the cpu's power usage (so as to reduce cpu temp. good for inveterate overclockers). not saying it's the same thing of course but you get the point

Actually, Ring Transports and Stargates are the only pre-Ascension Ancient teleportation technology that we have seen, so it seems quite likely that the Ancients didn't have matter replicators.

teleportation <-> energy to matter conversion <-> matter replicators. not that much of a difference between the 2 types of tech. the asgard had these things long ago
besides the ancients did build The (original-accept-no-substitute) Replicators. remember those "self assembling buildings" projects that today's nano-scientists are in such a tizzy about ? same thing here only far more 1337. I say the ancients had no problem building big stuff quickly if they wanted to

My mistake. However, that does raise the question of how the pocket universe is generated. If the pocket universe is created "from nothing," then yes, all of the energy (and more) that is contained in the ZPM would have to come from some other power source. If, however, the pocket universe is "pinched off" from the "real" universe, then the ZPE extracted by the ZPM is already present, and the only energy input needed would be that necessary to "pinch off" the pocket universe.

your 2nd theory would suggest that all they'd need to make a zpm is to create an empty zpm shell (doesn't take much power) and just snap it shut, the space within would have all the energy. that zpm in turn could be used to make other empty zpms & so on. this would be ridiculously easy. they wouldn't even need Trinity as they'd already be extracting energy from (an enclosed portion of) normal space
a more plausible variant of this would be that the pocket space (taken from real space) would be somehow "charged", if that makes sense (kinda like compressing the gas when making oxygen cylinders) in which case a vast outside energy source is still needed
theory #1 is more likely, the miniverse is created ex nihilo like a mini-bigbang (meaning a maxi-source of energy to make this happen - maybe black hole ?)

1. Just because Quantum Torpedoes are weak than detonating ZPMs does not necessarily mean that ZPE is weaker in Star Trek than in Stargate. It means only that Quantum Torpedoes are a less efficient harness of ZPE than a ZPE.

even the maximum yield torpedos have ain't anywhere near as impressive as a detonating zpm which can destroy at the very least a planet and at most a solar system (depending on the ep & on who's doing the calculations -). besides zpe is zpe, so an explosion should be even greater with a torpedo since it's bigger than a zpm (which means that logically the miniverse within is bigger (unless the miniverse "size" is fixed hence all zpms having same size in SG in which case torpedos should at least have the same effect as zpms)
we know that matter doesn't always follow the same rules in the 2 verses, not so unlikely that the same disparity can be found in the rules that apply to energy as well

Power hungry=/=crappy.

going by the extreme scenario you & ouroboors propose yeah this sort of "power hungry" is definitely = crappy, in a craptacularly crappy sort of way. and I don't mean mouse crap in the face I mean elephant boulder crap right down the throat
crap, getting carried away. anyway :

If you could get a 10% increase in performance at the cost of tripling the power consumption, then most races would be absolute idiots to make such an "upgrade." Better the low power cost than the increase in performance. Not so the Ancients, because they had ZPMs. ZPMs, as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, eliminate power consumption as a concern. If a race capable of producing ZPMs could increase performance by 10% at the cost of tripling power consumption, why wouldn't they?

"why wouldn't they" ? because that would make this supposedly uber-advanced race even more idiotic than the "most races" you're talking about. I really dunno how else to explain this because this is so bloody obvious, imo. all the more so than in this case even their powersources although very impressive provided nowhere near unlimited energy (ie. zpms do not "eliminate power consumption concerns"). I'm not saying they would maximise efficiency like crazy but at least to a reasonable level; any smart race with a modicum of common would realize this was necessary just in case they found themselves in a tight spot & short on power since evn their best powersources will get depleted eventually, and get be depleted prematurely (this happened to the lanteans even before the war btw)
and just for argument's sake, even if they had unlimited energy (such as Trinity) they'd still have very good reasons to have some decent power management even in times of peace - simple security reasons for one thing. imagine two similar devices with the first requiring 1 megawatt to function and the second requiring only 1 kilowatt to achieve the exact same result. I say one of the two will be a lot safer than the other should the devices malfunction

I point out above why it actual makes a good amount of sense for the Ancients to build very power hungry equipment.

I point out above why it is no no no /Mckay

However, as I pointed out with regard to teleportation tech., we are talking about a group with the need to use chain workers.

??

No, it isn't: they would not know about ZPE unless the did research into Quantum Physics. However, they would have little reason to put effort into researching electromagnetic anomalies (which would lead them to Quantum Phyiscs) unless they already knew about ZPE. You're begging the question.

I'm only begging you to understand :| the way you put it this would be a vicious circle from which even (rl) humans would never have escaped. preposterous. thinking outside the box is the whole point behind research, all it takes is necessity & curiosity (ratio between those two can vary)

And when have we ever seen the Wraith as "serious" researchers. If it doesn't make their ships strong or their food tastier, they don't seem all that interested.

so what, we know there were wraith scientists. we haven't seen the tollan or even the asgard as "serious researchers" either (the former are supposed to have debunked quantum physics, so the latter probably did the same) in fact none of the aliens outside the ancients were depicted as such, yet for all of them their "mere knowledge of the universe" (to quote one of them) was way beyond terran level
this is sci-fi with limited airtime & budget, sci-fi series are not sitcoms (though given the plethora of inconsistencies in *some* sci-fi shows, one could wonder). come to think of it we've never seen alien toilets either not even ancient ones, but I'm sure even their pre-ascended butts needed relief once in a while

I am having trouble grasping why knowledge of General Relativity would imply a knowledge of Quantum Physics. The two are not only unrelated, but mutually exclusive.

? I said that striving beyond the former would sooner or later lead to knowledge of the latter

Of course, I will buy the argument about teleportation.

it's a step

Except that you haven't explained why it is a discrepancy, just asserted that it is and pushed on by force of will.

hey man I tried. but it's kinda hard to explain why blatantly absurd is absurd :/


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good news, I had one of our GW comrades (who's a member of Malozzi's blog) ask him to provide an explanation, hopefully this will soon be settled once & for all

[SoulReaver]

If the shield emitters were damaged permanently it would have been mentioned in the episode.

yup that too
in fact there I've yet to find an ep in SG or any other sci-fi where during a space battle the shield emitters themselves are actually damaged. imo this is most unlikely, unless of course caused by internal sabotage

[Ouroboros]

I did not say that. What I said was that it took at least 67% of the normal outgoing output of the ZPMs to lift Atlantis off a planet. McKay said in First Strike that 90% of their power requirements would be used in the first 10 seconds of flight. It takes much less power to move the city when it is in space. We have seen one ZPM power the shield and the sublight engines in Lifeline.

It wouldn't require any more or less power to provide the same thrust in space or atmosphere, though the ship would accelerate better as a result without atmospheric drag and gravity holding it back. If you could determine how much thrust was necessary to lift atlantis into orbit you could figure out how much thrust the engines could provide at the cost of that 90% rate of power consumption.

It's also worth making a point about power over time here. To make it clear I'm not saying that this will be atlantis draining 90% of the total energy out of those 3 zpms. Rather it will be atlantis utalizing 90% of the outgoing power wattage or whatever you want to call it to do so.

What this means is that only 10% will be left over for other systems but the zpms themselves won't actually be in danger of completely running out of charge. Think of it as hooking up two lights to a battery. 1 larger light uses 90% of the power of the output of the battery while the other uses the reamining 10%. The battery however can continue to power both lights for some time, even though 100% of the power it can output is being used.

Whether it's 90% or 67% though the engines are very clearly major power users. Even at low levels of thrust and likely even at idle they're going to have a very noticable impact on the total power that's potentially available for other systems.

Agreed except for the first point.

The one about the hive engines being more efficient, why not? The hive can take off/land without difficulty on its normal well below ZPM power sources. It can do this despite being significantly larger and thus heavier than the city. Which part of this do you dispute exactly? It's a pretty direct comparison of capabilities where they hive is shown as being clearly superior in how much power its engine need to do something. You can also take the example of crashing, where even half a diseased hive can still coax enough power out of its engines to turn an uncontolled verticle plumet from orbit into a survivable glide and subsequent landing on water.

That is basically my theory except for the part about the sublight engines using the power. As I explained above, the sublight drive takes at most one ZPM to operate.

How you you arrive at one zpm from 67% and 90% you posted. That would seem to imply at least 2 full and part of a third in both cases, or are you counting the shield as part of the 67%.

In any case though you do now agree that atlantis has some hefty power use issues to consider that don't really make this a totally clearcut case of 3 zpms vs 1?

of straw & men. I never mentioned the "2 zpms were rerouted" specifically, so talking about honesty...honestly...anyway I said Atlantis' power reserves were severely drained by the time it reached MW, how exactly we don't know nor do I care for that matter

So now you're essentially saying that you're not even really basing this belief of yours on anything other than "atlantis must have been low on power somehow otherwise it never would have lost so since it did lose it was therefore low on power somehow." So basically you don't think atlantis should have gone down as easily as it did so something must have been wrong with it, you don't know what it is exactly, don't really care anyway, and you certainly can't prove anything actually was but something must be wrong or else it never would have lost so therefore something was wrong right.

That's classic circular logic.

Why should I even continue to reply to you given this is how you're approaching this? Or to put it another way. "What kind of proof would I have to be able to show you to make you believe you were wrong" because I've got to say this really just sounds like you're going to continue to believe this same thing regardless of what anyone tells you, and without any direct proof, just because thats what you're personally convinced happened. So if that's the case it's literally not worth arguing it with you.

If there's nothing I can say or demonstrate to prove my point to you it's entirely pointless for my to waste me time trying.

If you don't agree then just tell me what it is exactly that you would need to see demonstrated in order to accept that your theory on this was wrong.

[Dr. Daedalus]

It wouldn't require any more or less power to provide the same thrust in space or atmosphere, though the ship would accelerate better as a result without atmospheric drag and gravity holding it back. If you could determine how much thrust was necessary to lift atlantis into orbit you could figure out how much thrust the engines could provide at the cost of that 90% rate of power consumption.

We have seen one ZPM power the shield and the stardrive in space. When the Super-Hive was pushing Atlantis into a lower orbit the city did not need 90% or 67% power output to pull back up. Since Beckett said he did not have enough power that means that at most one ZPM was available to take power from.

It's also worth making a point about power over time here. To make it clear I'm not saying that this will be atlantis draining 90% of the total energy out of those 3 zpms. Rather it will be atlantis utalizing 90% of the outgoing power wattage or whatever you want to call it to do so.Whether it's 90% or 67% though the engines are very clearly major power users. Even at low levels of thrust and likely even at idle they're going to have a very noticable impact on the total power that's potentially available for other systems.

I explained above why that would not occur.

The one about the hive engines being more efficient, why not?

You are right on this one. My mistake.

How you you arrive at one zpm from 67% and 90% you posted. That would seem to imply at least 2 full and part of a third in both cases, or are you counting the shield as part of the 67%.

In the Episode Lifeline the city was able to use sublight engines with one ZPM.
The sublight engines were not at full thrust but they could be used with one ZPM. In space you do not need to use full thrust all the time.

In any case though you do now agree that atlantis has some hefty power use issues to consider that don't really make this a totally clearcut case of 3 zpms vs 1.

Not quite. You are right in saying I do not believe this is a clearcut case of 3 ZPMs versus 1. However, my explanation for why it is not is that most of the power output of the ZPMs was still tied into the wormhole drive and was unavailable during the battle.

Dr. Daedalus

[SoulReaver]

Not quite. You are right in saying I do not believe this is a clearcut case of 3 ZPMs versus 1. However, my explanation for why it is not is that most of the power output of the ZPMs was still tied into the wormhole drive and was unavailable during the battle.

Dr. Daedalus

yup that's another good explanation

either
- the wormhole drive depleted the energy reserves
or (as you suggest)
- it didn't deplete them but was still using (most of the) power

2nd solution is equally viable
unlike the rest of ancient tech, we do know that the wormhole drive was a major powerhog so much so that the project was abandoned
in other words no inconsistency in this case

You are right on this one. My mistake.

not necessarily
the zpms have some sort of failsafe. but without it a cityship can take off with only 1 zpm in fact it can even take off with 1 zpm & its shields up as long as shields aren't under too much strain (such as with replicator antishield beam)
also we don't how how much bigger (normal) hiveships are compared to cityships, if they're any bigger at all. in EATG the superhive was definitely bigger but much not by that much

So now you're essentially saying that you're not even really basing this belief of yours on anything other than "atlantis must have been low on power somehow otherwise it never would have lost so since it did lose it was therefore low on power somehow."
So basically you don't think atlantis should have gone down as easily as it did so something must have been wrong with it, you don't know what it is exactly, don't really care anyway, and you certainly can't prove anything actually was but something must be wrong or else it never would have lost so therefore something was wrong right.

well yeah actually. though I get the impression you misread my post entirely. what matters is that we know why it was low on power, who gives a ff about details such as how exactly that happened ? maybe 2 of the 3 batteries were out or whether all 3 were drained albeit less so, whatever, this is in fact irrelevant especially since we don't even know how exactly this works. it's not like you or anyone else has been sparing on the fridge logic either, this is bloody sci-fi. lol
btw I'm not saying anything was wrong with it (just cause a car is low on fuel doesn't mean it's broken)
in fact it is you who's saying that something was wrong with it - ok, you're saying "it wastes a lot of power" (****loads of it). to such an extent you might as well be saying something is seriously wrong with it. and with those who built it. lol

That's classic circular logic.

absolutely

Why should I even continue to reply to you given this is how you're approaching this? Or to put it another way. "What kind of proof would I have to be able to show you to make you believe you were wrong" because I've got to say this really just sounds like you're going to continue to believe this same thing regardless of what anyone tells you, and without any direct proof,

there's no direct proof for my version anymore than there is with yours, I'm saying the evidence onscreen & onscript is more than enough TY. the only time we'd have definite proof either way would be when the tptb stepped in to settle this once & for all. I asked one of the forum members (who regularly posts on his blog) to forward the question but unfortunately he hasn't been online lately

just because thats what you're personally convinced happened. So if that's the case it's literally not worth arguing it with you.

and you on the other hand seem either very convinced by your own version, or simply hellbent on sinking the show by proposing an "explanation" that would only add another layer of inconsistency & kill whatever little credibility is left in the series. if it's the latter then I can actually understand this since going by your previous posts on other topics you didn't exactly appear to be a die-hard fan of the show. but in this case you could at least come clean & admit it

If there's nothing I can say or demonstrate to prove my point to you it's entirely pointless for my to waste me time trying.
If you don't agree then just tell me what it is exactly that you would need to see demonstrated in order to accept that your theory on this was wrong.

you're talking like I want to be proven wrong. lol. I could ask you the same question (here : I'm asking it)
what I'd need to see or hear is either 1) a line in the script clearly stating that the bad guys had 1 & only 1 module powering their ship (especially during the battle) and another line stating that the good guys ship was fully powered during that same battle, or 2) one of the writers (or JM himself) opting for this version
of course this would also have the unfortunate side effect of tossing all remaining credibility out the airlock, so you'll understand that I don't really want to see this "demonstrated". see that's the difference, I'm trying to salvage whatever sense is left in the ep so as to avoid having a series that ended in a total flop by providing a very simple and plausible explanation. you on the other hand, I'm not sure if you're trying to do the same or just trying to dig the final nail in the show's coffin, because if your version turns out to be right then that's exactly what's gonna happen :/

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good news, we should find out fast. I asked one of the GW members who regularly posts on Malozzi's blog to forward the question, hopefully the matter will be settled soon enough and we'll know once & for all