The Shield...(spoilers)

[fallenexile452]

These are my exact thoughts. It would make sense.

My question is though: How exactly can a shield not absorb a blast that only took out the windows of the control room? The gate exploding, in it's entirety, would have destroyed Atlantis five times over had there been no shield. So obviously, the shield can handle an awful lot. Why could it not, then, retain just that tiny (relatively) burst of energy at the end that blew out the windows? It didn't take out the walls.

I'm just saying, that in relative terms to the massive explosion when the gate first exploded, it should have been able to handle that little blast at the end.
IMO of course. I'm not an expert on Ancient technology you see.

I don't think it was the shield that failed it was the emitters, in a normal situation you would have a short term strain over many emitters but in this case we had a sustained and high powered strain over a few (how many i wouldn't like to guess), it was this that would have put more strain on them than they can handle = failure. The question is though did they just need time to recharge like the asgard type buffered emitters or will they need to be replaced leaving Atlantis without a fully functioning shield.

[AVFan]

I don't think it was the shield that failed it was the emitters, in a normal situation you would have a short term strain over many emitters but in this case we had a sustained and high powered strain over a few (how many i wouldn't like to guess), it was this that would have put more strain on them than they can handle = failure. The question is though did they just need time to recharge like the asgard type buffered emitters or will they need to be replaced leaving Atlantis without a fully functioning shield.

Yeah, I suppose. Is it a measure of how much it can take over a period of time (say a minute) and once it gets up to 100% of all it can take it collapses, even if it's on the downswing of the pressure? Like a culmination of net energy over a minute? Must be... IDK.

[Gate-builder]

Usually if you fire a nuke at the shield for example, most of the blast would be able to spread outward and a lot of the energy would be spread away from the shield. In this case the shield had to contain the entire blast as none of the energy was able to dissipate outwards, this would be a lot more difficult.

[garhkal]

Does anyone else think back to that SG1 Episode (season 6) where Anubis had activated that device that destroyed gates by overloading them...?? I wonder if that was made as a side tech to what the Atrro device did when the side effects it made was brought up?

[Konrad9]

These are my exact thoughts. It would make sense.

My question is though: How exactly can a shield not absorb a blast that only took out the windows of the control room? The gate exploding, in it's entirety, would have destroyed Atlantis five times over had there been no shield. So obviously, the shield can handle an awful lot. Why could it not, then, retain just that tiny (relatively) burst of energy at the end that blew out the windows? It didn't take out the walls.

I'm just saying, that in relative terms to the massive explosion when the gate first exploded, it should have been able to handle that little blast at the end.
IMO of course. I'm not an expert on Ancient technology you see.

By the time the shield failed (or was released or whatever) the explosion was exponentially weaker than it was when it began. Quoth the show in parsed-talk: "Every second it goes on the explosion gets weaker"
The shield was absorbing the explosion, and since the energy went in to the shield it continued to weaken.

The part of the explosion that brought the shield down was not *just* that little glass-breaking shenaniganry, it was the minute or so of the basically of hundreds of megatons of TNT going off in a tiny little space.
A small, very well reinforced concrete/titanium/lead bunker buried under 20 feet of dirt and rock would easily survive a nuke going off at 1,000 feet.
If you put that bunker on the surface and lean the nuke against the door, well...

[rarocks24]

The shield was doing something it wasn't designed for. It was designed to defend and entire city from attack. When they collapsed the shield to such a small area the blast was enough to damage the emitters. When you use something for something its not designed for it won't work as good. And also that blast was likely the most powerful blast the shield has ever felt and it was felt in a very small area. The shield did amazingly well. And as alot of people think. I believe Raddick dropped the shield and extended it over the control room when eminent failure was detected. The shield not having to CONTAIN something when it was designed to repel was able to defend the control room easily.

Err, the city's shield dealt with those coronal discharges every few thousand years, as revealed in S.3.