Human City Ship (Unending Spoilers and beyond)

[Finger13]

As far as power requirements go, although Atlantis uses massive amounts of energy, isn't the main reason that we can't power it because it's designed to be powered from the ZPM?

The satellite weapon was far more powerful than the Asgard beam weapons, and it was powered by a single Naquadah generator since it wasn't designed to be powered by a ZPM. So the power requirements, while great, might not be outside of our current abilities. Remember that a Naquadah generator is as powerful as a few nuclear power plants, or so I read somewheres.

As far as building it, well i don't think that would be necessary. If we could imitate Atlantis' shields, we'd have them on our 304's. So it stands to reason that the 304's shields are the most powerful shields that we have. And while they are powerful, I don't think they would be enough for the massive size of Atlantis.

As for the practicality of a city ship, we obviously have found that Atlantis works wonderfully as a base of operations in places far from home. Being able to fly anywhere in this galaxy, or others, would project our power across the Universe. No trouble building colonies, we could send out a city ship with supplies, vehicles and colonists already on board and, if we were able to power the gate, we could stream supplies back and forth from Earth to anywhere in the Universe.

So no, they aren't ineffective or unnecessary, they're just beyond our abilities as of right now IMO. Our shields wouldn't be powerful enough to protect such a huge object and investment, our engines probably wouldn't be strong enough, power would be an issue though probably not impossible, and the resources and costs would be astronomically expensive.

[thekillman]

yes we could. even compared to atlantis. powerrequirements would easily be met. point is: do we need one?

[cegrocks]

I think the main reason would be keeping a city ship quiet on earth, I mean the government has enough problems dealing with keeping the X-304s quiet when the manufacture them, building a city sized ship would be a lot harder to keep quiet. The other problem would be power, the X-304s are nice and small and don't require a lot of power (only naquadah level power is needed to maintain the systems). A city ship (like that of Atlantis) would require lots of ZPMs, of which we haven't found a way to manufacture yet .

[Rise Of The Phoenix]

As far as the need for a city ship(s) goes I think everyone's right when they say we don't really need one right now, but if the whole Stargate program goes public in the not too distant future and the public wants to live on other planets then a city ship could be quite useful in my opinion.

Cost doesn't have to be that huge as we've got Matter Conversion technology and it wouldn't take much to build small craft to use as construction ships.

Power requirements can be met by refining the subspace tap technology, if you recall that was meant to be able to produce ZPM levels of power and a city big enough to house even 500,000 people could have more than just 3, even though they're as big as a room.

As far as shield strength goes we don't have to think link the Ancients we could scale up the Asgard designed shield emitters, have more than 10 and even power each independently.

Knowing what we now know about hyperdrive technology I'm sure we could build an efficient one for a human built city ship.

Like I've said to Xannder above we don't have to jump straight into making one or more city ships as we could start with making smaller craft than that and call them town ships.
Multiple versions of these could lock together or be spread out across a planets surface to act as human outposts across the known Universe in the future.

My main points in creating this thread was to say that I think it's within our capabilities and you don't need to be a several million year old civilization to make one or more.

[Tetsujin]

Why would they not build a city ship is my question. A city ship based on Asgard technology in some ways would still be inferior to Lantean derived city ships but the potential gains would be immeasurable.

One glaring gain would be the end to the need for an alpha site, area 51, or even the current SGC base. You would have a mobile base of operations that would be very difficult to track down or attack, and would be impervious to humans on Earth discovering it since there would be no evidence on the planet.

With some tweaks it could even surpass the ability of the Lantean city ships. For example the addition of a secondary internal shield designed specifically to block stellar radiation and keep in atmosphere inside the ship could cloak while in space or while still remaining shielded in other situations. A major issue would be power generation however, while there are technologies within the grasp of the Tau'ri that could power the ship, none of them are comparable to a ZPM aside from the unknown upper limits of the subspace capacitor technology. That is the only current system I could think of that would allow continuous operation of the vessel although it would take numerous capacitors working in an alternating charge/discharge cycle.

Hyperdrive would be slower definitely due to lower power output, but Asgard hyperdrives are not so much slower that would be a problem.

Weapons would be everything the military could fit reasonably.

I dont really even think the Lantean city ships lived up to their full potential due to the writers inability or refusal to portray the Lanteans as they really would have been.