Gates and Power

[The_Asgard_live]

Besides from not quantifying the number of ZPMs needed to dial the gate from above, the two classes of ships are different indesign.

That is my point entirely. First you have to decide what you believe. Does a fully charged Destiny store more than the entire power requirements of a fully charged Atlantis city ship (3 ZPMs) or not. If not, then we can assume to dial Destiny likely requires 3 or less ZPM. If it does, then what the heck? A Destiny has to have more power than Atlantis? Constructed from tech million+- years older?
If the latter is the case than I question their ship design choices and tactics.

You seem to think the city of Atlantis was a warship. Well it's not. It was a city for people to live in. It just happen to have a shield capable of defending off the Wraith without the need to fly anywhere near a star.

This is why if I was in charge of this fake universe, my portrait would be in a gilded frame hanging up in the lobby of Atlantis as the man who defeated the Wraith, and you and your concerns about what does and does not constitute a retro-fit war ship and the quality of life of Atlantis's children would be a life-sucked shriveled prune.

Its a city ship that can store a cities worth of drones and power storage capabilities and has shields that are seemingly impenetrable based on how much power you feed them. Doesn't matter what its original design was, that is a heck of a war ship.

A one of a kind super city.

2 of a kind of you count its sister ship in 'The Tower' episode. 3 of a kind if you count The Nox version.

The city was above water taking in refugees, they only sunk it to pretend to be destroyed, and then left the galaxy anyway since who would want to spend the rest of their lives underwater. Your facts are mixed up.

What facts?

You're basing your figures on post war hive numbers. How many million years has past since then.

None? Hasn't it been only 10,000? And yes, I am using a number from the show to make my point, 60+ hives. But I don't have to, I could just as easily say, even if the wraith had 10 million hives do you know how hard it would be to set a trap around a random star when compared to the number of stars?

And why would any ship want to incurr this inconvenience? Who cares about going green. Just pull out a spare ZPM from the store room. A ship seems to function fine with 1 ZPM, so a room full of these would last any mission until they can dock back with the city to resupply. We don't know how easy it is to create a ZPM. They could be manufactured like AA batteries for anyone guess. So easy.

No we don't know how easy it is to create them, what we do know, is that of the 2 war ships we found, we never did find a battery (ZPM) storage room where they were dozens just sitting there. Nor did we find anything like that on Atlantis. In fact, if they were that plentiful, why didn't Janus just have Weir wake up in shorter intervals and replace them over and over.

I repeat, if your shields and hyperdrive speed are proportional to the amount of power you feed them, then why wouldn't you build war ships capable of storing massive (ZPM or more) worth of power if you have that tech. Power that can be replenished from any sun. In addition to keeping a ZPM on board?

[Abiron]

Do we have any evidence that the Aurora-class ships use a ZPM as a power source? I'm not recalling any, but I could easily be wrong on this.

[The_Asgard_live]

Do we have any evidence that the Aurora-class ships use a ZPM as a power source? I'm not recalling any, but I could easily be wrong on this.

I believe so, my memory is sketchy on it though. I think Todd related that information to McKay? Something about how ancient ships back in the day were wandering further and further away (from atlantis?), and they were able to attack individually, steal their ZPM and use it for their cloning purposes? At least that is what I am basing my facts on about the Aurora class power supply.

Though I could be imagining all that. If so though, yay for my imagination, thats pretty good.

[morbosfist]

Todd said that, early in the war, they captured three ships, each powered by a ZPM. The Tria also had a ZPM.

[Abiron]

I recall that...and Tria was using one to boost its sublight speed to just shy of c, but that was not "standard," if McKay was right. I suppose that the most we can be sure of is that an Aurora can tie a ZPM into its systems in the same way that the 304s can, but that it may not be their normal power source.

[pipi]

That is my point entirely. First you have to decide what you believe. Does a fully charged Destiny store more than the entire power requirements of a fully charged Atlantis city ship (3 ZPMs) or not. If not, then we can assume to dial Destiny likely requires 3 or less ZPM. If it does, then what the heck? A Destiny has to have more power than Atlantis? Constructed from tech million+- years older?
If the latter is the case than I question their ship design choices and tactics.

This is why if I was in charge of this fake universe, my portrait would be in a gilded frame hanging up in the lobby of Atlantis as the man who defeated the Wraith, and you and your concerns about what does and does not constitute a retro-fit war ship and the quality of life of Atlantis's children would be a life-sucked shriveled prune.

Its a city ship that can store a cities worth of drones and power storage capabilities and has shields that are seemingly impenetrable based on how much power you feed them. Doesn't matter what its original design was, that is a heck of a war ship.

2 of a kind of you count its sister ship in 'The Tower' episode. 3 of a kind if you count The Nox version.

What facts?

None? Hasn't it been only 10,000? And yes, I am using a number from the show to make my point, 60+ hives. But I don't have to, I could just as easily say, even if the wraith had 10 million hives do you know how hard it would be to set a trap around a random star when compared to the number of stars?

No we don't know how easy it is to create them, what we do know, is that of the 2 war ships we found, we never did find a battery (ZPM) storage room where they were dozens just sitting there. Nor did we find anything like that on Atlantis. In fact, if they were that plentiful, why didn't Janus just have Weir wake up in shorter intervals and replace them over and over.

I repeat, if your shields and hyperdrive speed are proportional to the amount of power you feed them, then why wouldn't you build war ships capable of storing massive (ZPM or more) worth of power if you have that tech. Power that can be replenished from any sun. In addition to keeping a ZPM on board?

It's no secret the Ancients were not war mongers and were actually a bunch of p***ies. So they chose peace and accention over fighting the Wraith. And they probably chickened out against the Ori too.

Back on topic, there is one factor that you have not considered into your hypothesis of how much capacity Destiny has to dial the gate home to Earth. And that is human error on behalf of whoever said there's enough energy to dial home.

Who quantified this amount? Are Destiny's instruments even measured in the same metrics? If the calculations are off by a 0, ohwell boom boom baby. There's probably no instrument capable to measuring the power required to dial the gate to Destiny from Icarus accurately. They always seem to over power the gate and cause the planet to explode. With only one successful dial from Icarus, you can't even derive an average of the power requirements. That and all the evidence and data went boom. Rush knew there were substantial power to 'try' to dial the gate but he by no means knows for certain that it will even work or work for how long. What if the power was not reversed and the gate tried to dial but failed on the 11th hour cause it fell short of power? You're basing all your power estimates on a Rush hunch. A pot shot. Even Rush was doubtful how long the wormhole could be maintained once it was established. Since Destiny's power even combined with the seeder ship would only yield a one hit wonder by best estimates this would fall short of being equivalent to a 3 ZPM city which can probably dial Destiny many times without sacrificing maintaining the city at the same time.

[Abiron]

Perhaps we're comparing two contemprary yet distinctly different types of systems here. Let's take a modern world example:

US Navy ships use one of two proven methods of power generation: Nuclear and conventional. Both are proven systems with advantages and disadvantages. Nuclear vessels rely almost exclusively on the nuclear plant for most of their power needs, and conventional ships do the same with their conventionally fuelled systems. One place they differ is that nuclear ships may have diesel fuel backup systems, but conventional ships do not have nuclear backup systems. Both, however, may have large battery backup capabilities.

So...let's say that the capacitors on Destiny are the equivalent of a conventional diesel system. How they get their fuel isn't an issue; Destiny draws from stars, and is able to convert the scooped starstuff into fuel. She may also be able to draw elements from a gas giant or other extrasolar bodies; we don't really know. But she can also draw power from another ship, so her systems do not require a star for power. I am assuming that the stars are simply the most easily accessible and guaranteed available power sources, and that her designers chose them on that basis.

Later Ancient designs like the Aurora class ships and Atlantis used the equivalent of a nuclear source: the ZPM. These provided a very compact and replaceable source of power with a very long lifespan, allowing significantly longer periods between refuelling (or ZPM replacement) than with "conventional" sources. But they are more complex, require more complexity, and may still have massive capacitor-type backup systems. But as we've seen, on a ship like Atlantis where ZPMs are the primary source of power, there is usually a big issue when the ZPMs are depleted.

An Aurora-class can use a ZPM to augment its power to significantly greater levels, but a ZPM is not required for daily or even occasional combat operations. So in the case of some ships, they have a "conventional-equivalent" system with the capability of throwing in a "nuclear option" for increased power. But the ship does not need them; they are an augment to its systems. It can still perform its duties without one.

In the end, using ZPMs on Destiny, even if they existed at that point in the Ancient tech timeline, would not have made much sense. They are a finite source of power, no matter how great, and cannot be easily manufactured (based on our inability to duplicate them, at least). Conventional, capacitor-type hardware can be recharged and does not rely on an exotic fuel source. I don't think that the planners of the Destiny mission would have wanted a power source that could not be replaced, any more than we would design a warship with a nuclear reactor if the only fuel it's likely to have access to during its lifetime would be conventional.

In other words, even if the designers of Destiny had access to ZPMs, I don't think they would have used them as a primary power source. Relying on simpler and more "conventional" systems makes more sense for a ship travelling far past any chance of convenient resupply.

That being said, I also doubt that the designers would have launched Destiny without the ability to dial home. So the question is, what did they put in place to make sure that she could dial back, and is it something we haven't found yet? Did they plan to bring ZPMs along with them when they finally boarded her, exclusively to power the gate for a homeward connection? And if so, is there a ZPM "terminal" somewhere in the bowels of engineering with an empty socket or 3?

[The_Asgard_live]

It's no secret the Ancients were not war mongers and were actually a bunch of p***ies. So they chose peace and accention over fighting the Wraith. And they probably chickened out against the Ori too.

Hippies.

Back on topic, there is one factor that you have not considered into your hypothesis of how much capacity Destiny has to dial the gate home to Earth. And that is human error on behalf of whoever said there's enough energy to dial home.

I did... earlier in the thread. I said something to the effect, we are assuming the dial was going to work, because at a minimum the science nerds on Destiny didn't seem to think there was any reason it wouldn't.

Who quantified this amount?

Rush dialed the gate twice, I'm assuming he has a rough idea about how much it needs. He and his imaginary companion recognized the seeder had enough. Independently Eli? Other science geeks did too. So I am assuming its a known quantity.

Are Destiny's instruments even measured in the same metrics? If the calculations are off by a 0, ohwell boom boom baby. There's probably no instrument capable to measuring the power required to dial the gate to Destiny from Icarus accurately. They always seem to over power the gate and cause the planet to explode.

Is that why the planets were exploding? You also have to take into account though that unlike Icarus planet's gates, Destiny was most likely designed to dial back to the MW. Icarus gates were jury-rigged by humans who were guessing. My guess is Destiny was made to be able to channel the power properly.

With only one successful dial from Icarus, you can't even derive an average of the power requirements. That and all the evidence and data went boom. Rush knew there were substantial power to 'try' to dial the gate but he by no means knows for certain that it will even work or work for how long. What if the power was not reversed and the gate tried to dial but failed on the 11th hour cause it fell short of power? You're basing all your power estimates on a Rush hunch. A pot shot. Even Rush was doubtful how long the wormhole could be maintained once it was established.

See what my assumptions are based on above

Since Destiny's power even combined with the seeder ship would only yield a one hit wonder by best estimates this would fall short of being equivalent to a 3 ZPM city which can probably dial Destiny many times without sacrificing maintaining the city at the same time.

Well there is some assumptions there too. We don't know what the power reserves were. We don't know how charged the seeder ship was. There was at least enough power on the seeder + on Destiny to waste at least enough energy to dial at least once and not exceed the point of no return (the level they were concerned about when the browns reversed the process). Or else they were being completely reckless.

[garhkal]

Knowing how and being able to do it are two very different things. They likely don't know how to do it, anyway, since much of Atlantis' database is still encrypted.

Yup. And even with what we know, we still do not know what the ancients called them.. HECK even when we discusssed with the asurans (reps) all they said is they had sufficient power... that and Jannus (before i sleep) asked wier what we called them.

Do we have any evidence that the Aurora-class ships use a ZPM as a power source? I'm not recalling any, but I could easily be wrong on this.

Some did at least... Todd said that duringg the ancient wraith war that they had acquired some ZPMs from captured Auroras which led to the practice of the ancients not going too far into the wraith territory..

[wingsabre]

Its not about the generation though, its about the storage. So this begs the question. The ancients 1 million years ago give or take, built ships that when fully powered had the power by your calculations of 'several' zpms. 1 million years later their ships are powered with tech less powerful than a single zpm? Aurora class?

In other words, a fully charged destiny with shields should be able to hold off an attack by the wraith for how long? Why wouldn't they just fly Atlantis into the sun, park it there, use the scoopers and never leave. They could fend off an attack as long as the sun was viable, indefinitely.

Its like there is a disconnect, power supply/storage got less efficient the more advanced they got? and not just like 20 or 50 years, but 1,000,000 years advancement

I understand what you're saying, but there's a few things you haven't considered. First off, I think the Destiny as a whole uses less power and if it's at 100% will have the capacity of a hand full of ZPM. It's not that the Ancients regressed through the years, it's the facts that Ancients too follow Moore's Law. The computing powers and function of their most advanced ships and cities require more power. Their hyperdrives utilizes more power, being able to travel through an entire galaxy in the matter of minutes if enough power is supplied. Their shields as a whole are more powerful, and of a different design. It seems like they form a bubble around the ship instead of hugging the ship.

An analogy you could use to compare the Destiny and Atlantis is the tortoise and the hare. The Destiny is slow and consistent. It's able to predict it's energy consumption from a daily or yearly basis. It does not demand that much energy as the equipments utilizes relatively little energy. The gates can only dial in a limited range, reducing the energy demand. It's sensors may be relatively limited, relying on information forwarded by seeder ships to plot their course instead of using it's long range sensors. Additionally, from what we've seen so far, it's shields are relatively weak and is not built for prolonged combat or exposure to radiation. In Intervention, the shields were about to fail, before they were running out of power. This implies that the shields can only hold so much stress before it begins to fail, and is not completely dependent on the power supply. As a result, if Ancients were to maintain such technology, they won't be able to continually rest their ships on the surface of a sun and still combat their enemies. In terms of combat, the Destiny seems to do very little, and instead maintains their shields until the countdown clock runs out of time, and they jump to a new location. Utilizing both the shields and weapons seem to take too much out of the system.

Atlantis in contrast, utilizes a great amount of power. It's hyperdrives are able to traverse entire galaxies in the span of minutes. It's Shields can withstand a nova, and as a result can withstand being on the surface of the sun. Several ZPM running in tandem also seems to last longer, and supply a greater amount of power. In addition they're significantly smaller, especially when you have to compare it to the solar wings of Destiny. This means that Atlantis only needs to devote less than 1% of it's mass to power supply, whereas Destiny is utilizing what I'm assuming is about 30% of it's mass to collect, store and generate power. Tortoise generally carry a large mass in a form of defense, and much of it's energy supply comes from fat storage. A hare in contrast have lean mass and utilizes glycogen as it's main supply of energy. As a whole, they're simply two different functional designs.

[wingsabre]

Yeah, I agree, we should really drop the line about "needing 100's of ZPMs to connect to Destiny." The truth is, we don't know how many it would take. It's unclear exactly how many ZPM's Earth has now, and how much energy they have left (or whether Earth would even want to risk draining them to establish a wormhole to Destiny, or take them from whatever else they are needed for). All we know is that the Ancients could manufacture ZPM's, so obviously connecting to Destiny wouldn't have been an issue.

Could have easily just taken a dozen ZPMs. I'd guess more than one, though, heh. Jack's makeshift device from a staff weapon could dial another galaxy, and a single ZPM can dial another galaxy fairly easily. If we assume Destiny is 40+ galaxies away, and each ZPM can dial another galaxy 5 times (very low estimate), then they'd only need 8 ZPM's.

That's the thing too, Ancients used ZPMs in parallel, and not in series. It was when they left Atlantis that Janus modified it to work in series so as not to drain all the power. I'm assuming that 3 ZPM can be enough to dial to the Destiny with out any problem. The Destiny is most likely 10,000,000 galaxies away, assuming it's able to traverse a galaxy a year.

In terms of an Icarus type planet, it really does seem like they only use a superficial amount of energy to dial the gate, and what really happened is the process of dialing the gate caused an unstable cascade reaction to occur and the planet blew up as a result. If anything, it may be that the use of a Black Hole would be enough to dial the Destiny. The only downside is, to build a space station near a black hole would be open target. Same is with a ship. A planet could be viable in terms of protection. Icarus was build inside a mountain.

[wingsabre]

Just wanted to say something about ZPM's. If we take ZPM as our equivalent to a battery, and the Ancients used it as such, they probably had a way to generate power on a permanent level. I know it wasn't mentioned, but using batteries to work all their tech would be pretty inefficent. I know a ZPM can power our Cities for years, though ancient tech will need a lot more. Atlantis itself at use of the Ancients, couldn't have taken more then some months to deplete 1 ZPM. So what would be more efficient? A battery you have to change every x months or something durable?

But it looks like almost everything in the Stargate Universe is battery powered. Naquadah generators are essentially a battery. They use Naquadah as a power supply, and they can run out of power. We've seen them run out of power multiple times.

[garhkal]

..SNIP...Tortoise generally carry a large mass in a form of defense, and much of it's energy supply comes from fat storage. A hare in contrast have lean mass and utilizes glycogen as it's main supply of energy. As a whole, they're simply two different functional designs.

That was a rather nice write up and analogy..

[Quetzocoetl]

Edit: NVM, wingsabre said what I was going to say, only better.

[Mister Oragahn]

Not all of the energy from an Iccarus type planet or outputted by a star goes into dialing the 9 chevron address to Destiny.

I apologise I am about to get a bit technical

The gravitational binding Energy of the Earth is about 2.24×10^32J, then the TOTAL amount of energy supplied by the Naquahdriah core had to be greater than this amount to destroy the planet (assuming Iccarus base planet was of a similar size to the Earth because of similar levels of gravity). This figure is roughly equal to how much energy the sun puts out in one week.

Now multiple dialing of the nine chevron address where planed by both Iccarus base and the Lucian Alliance so only a fraction of this power was being tapped each time. Also in Earth only a fraction of the Energy output of the star was being harnessed to dial back to Earth.

Conclusions:-
Dialing the ninth chevron address requires significantly less power than planet busting levels that can be supplied by ZPM’s, so theoretically a fully charged ZPM should be capable of dialing Destiny multiple times before it is depleted, however the few ZPM’s in Earths possession are almost depleted so why waste what little power is available to dial Destiny when other sources like Iccarus planets are available.

It depends on the size of the power core the Alterans built on those naqahdria filled planets. After all, the more power you try to get from a given amount of naqahdria, the more unstable it is. Therefore, if you can obtain a small amount of energy, but from a larger quantity of naqahdria, you can avoid the instability threshold, in theory. And, in theory, using the entire planet would paradoxically be the safest thing to do. However, I can see problems here, namely the possibility that if you run into problems, those problems spread to the whole planet, and exceptionally enough, it happens that said planet precisely is a bomb in the waiting, because of the exotic ore it contains.

So, we just don't know how the naqahdria is gathered and used by the device that provides power. It's likely, though, to be bigger than, say, the core on a X-303.

That said, we've seen near trans-universe connections established during SG-1's Ori arc, and I don't think it's beyond what a ZPM can easily provide even without being depleted.
Yet, the problem seem to be so.

And that's without going into the fact that a ZPM seems to hold enough energy to vaporize a whole planet many times (Carter even thought one could destroy the entire Solar system), and can entirely drained under controlled conditions at a max rate of 2%/second.
But again, with those funny exotic particles, you don't actually know how much of that energy is actually exploitable by the ZPM. Namely, how much power does the ZPM really delivers, in comparison to what it can blow up when it goes critical.

I also think that naqahdria, due to the amounts of energy it can provide, is an ore that really cheats the laws of physics and could be a "natural" ore that's halfway between naqahdah and an Arcturus core.
As I evidenced a while ago, the naqahdria bomb which killed Daniel via radiation poisoning, unleashed what looked like a heat distortion wave across the entire lab. An effect very similar, although pancaked, to the one we saw in SGA's episode Trinity, when the exotic particles leaked through the walls and killed a scientist.
I think we even saw something similar when Carter and that little girl experimented the first portable naqahdah core, and created an EMP pulse throughout the SGC.