Predator ship

[mickhhh]

I thinking instead of building the next 304 could our resources be better spent on a ship that is designed just to destroy other ships (mainly wraith) and nothing else.

I was thinking lets take away all unnecessary systems. 302 bays, all life support and all space for the crew. we would replace this with 3 or so asgard pods for people to control the ship virtually. this would make the ship cheaper and much smaller making the shied stronger and the ship faster. a bit like the defiant from star trek

with the saved resources we could give it stronger or more shield generators.

for weapons we could keep the asgard beams or if we can replace them with 1 big one like the ori ships design so if it ever need to it could penetrate a supper hive armour. plus for darts it could use power lasers to cut darts down.

plus it would work with a small cloaking ship that aways going ahead of it to make sure it does not get ambushed.

also we could try to get the matter energy patten storing system from The Ark so we could transport and beam stuff or people up

what to you think about this ship?
is it worth it?
how would u charge it or what would you add

[escyos]

how would having a smaller ship make them faster, stronger and better shielded? and what the hell is an asgard pod?

[Ouroboros]

All the next generation of Earth ships really needs to be is a flying Asgard beam with enough shielding to survive firing it a few times, which is all it takes to destroy 99% of what it'll run up against apparently.

The beams are such an over the top wanktech that you could probably even make a carrier type ship that launched some sort of short ranged gunboats armed with them. Then all the expensive stuff like the hyperdrive and fancy navigational computers and what not can stay on the carrier where they're safe along with most of the people. The gunboats only exist to cart an Asgard beam and a precharged battery for it into battle, fire it 3 times to destroy an enemy battleship thousands of times their size and resource cost, and fly home.

It's horrible and game breaking but you give those over the top beams to a designer concerned only with maximum exploitation as opposed to "rule of cool" and this is exactly the sort of thing you'll probably get.

Oh and the carrier'd be cloaked if there was enough left in the budget for it. So now it's not just an unstoppable fleet smashing death swarm of tiny Asgard beam ships, it's an unstoppable fleet smashing death swarm of tiny Asgard beam ships that can ambush you out of nowhere and return to a mobile and invisible home base so they can do it repeatedly with little chance of anyone stopping them.

[Mike.]

^One of the flying battery powered Asgard beams get shot down, damaged but not destroyed, the enemy reverse engineers it, now they have weapons as powerful as yours and thanks to superior numbers & ships built by enslaved nations/planets - you are now screwed. Good plan.

Lets not get wiped out like the Ancients were.

[deltaCain054]

The idea of a fully automated ship is nice, but you really need a crew. Automated ships can malfunction, and you need a crew for damage repair. However you could ditch the 302 bays, trade them out for additional generators, and mount 2 or 4 Asgard beam weapons. Put 2 drop bays for puddle jumper, ICE only. you could mount additional Asgard beams on the front as well, maybe trade them out for some rail guns and ditch the missile bays for more generators.

[mickhhh]

how would having a smaller ship make them faster, stronger and better shielded? and what the hell is an asgard pod?

less mass means less to move meaning it goes faster. smaller shield means stronger if supported by the same generator and power source.

the pod Oniel was in when he had access to the Daniel Jackson computer.

[mickhhh]

All the next generation of Earth ships really needs to be is a flying Asgard beam with enough shielding to survive firing it a few times, which is all it takes to destroy 99% of what it'll run up against apparently.

The beams are such an over the top wanktech that you could probably even make a carrier type ship that launched some sort of short ranged gunboats armed with them. Then all the expensive stuff like the hyperdrive and fancy navigational computers and what not can stay on the carrier where they're safe along with most of the people. The gunboats only exist to cart an Asgard beam and a precharged battery for it into battle, fire it 3 times to destroy an enemy battleship thousands of times their size and resource cost, and fly home.

It's horrible and game breaking but you give those over the top beams to a designer concerned only with maximum exploitation as opposed to "rule of cool" and this is exactly the sort of thing you'll probably get.

Oh and the carrier'd be cloaked if there was enough left in the budget for it. So now it's not just an unstoppable fleet smashing death swarm of tiny Asgard beam ships, it's an unstoppable fleet smashing death swarm of tiny Asgard beam ships that can ambush you out of nowhere and return to a mobile and invisible home base so they can do it repeatedly with little chance of anyone stopping them.

have you ever thought the asgard beams might just be a revolutionary weapon. maybe a bit like early world war 1 tank rounds compared to new rounds today.

[Ouroboros]

^One of the flying battery powered Asgard beams get shot down, damaged but not destroyed, the enemy reverse engineers it, now they have weapons as powerful as yours and thanks to superior numbers & ships built by enslaved nations/planets - you are now screwed. Good plan.

Lets not get wiped out like the Ancients were.

Reverse engineering something like that without the supporting techbase to understand it is a lot more difficult than you make it sound.

have you ever thought the asgard beams might just be a revolutionary weapon. maybe a bit like early world war 1 tank rounds compared to new rounds today.

No, they're just existing weapons turned up to 11 for no justifiable reason, and with no decent explanation, other than Earth needing to be superman.

A truely revolutionary weapon would be something like an anti ship missile with its own hyperdrive to extend its range enormously. Something like that would completely transform the way battles were fought. The Asgard beam is just the latest thing you can shoot at the other guy while sitting still a few kilometers away.

[Mike.]

Reverse engineering something like that without the supporting techbase to understand it is a lot more difficult than you make it sound. [...]

It it worth the risk ? It's a very dangerous mistake to make.
Once the Wraith got some ZPMs they were smart enough to use them is such a way as to win the war with the Ancients.
The LA inherited technology from the Goa'uld - who were the masters of stealing other races' tech and integrating it into their own. Most importantly the LA have experience with advanced technology (understanding and building it). Their learning curve would be much smaller compared to Earth who got everything quite recently. As gifts. From the Asgard who even installed the whole thing (and integrated it with our ship(s)). As we have seen in Aftermath the LA seem to have gotten quite powerful, even without us being careless.

[Ouroboros]

It it worth the risk ? It's a very dangerous mistake to make.
Once the Wraith got some ZPMs they were smart enough to use them is such a way as to win the war with the Ancients.
The LA inherited technology from the Goa'uld - who were the masters of stealing other races' tech and integrating it into their own. Most importantly the LA have experience with advanced technology (understanding and building it). Their learning curve would be much smaller compared to Earth who got everything quite recently. As gifts. From the Asgard who even installed the whole thing (and integrated it with our ship(s)). As we have seen in Aftermath the LA seem to have gotten quite powerful, even without us being careless.

It's probably lower risk than something like a doctrinal shift to say, simple large scale railguns and hyperdrive carrier craft.

If you're going to act super paranoid over tech capture the last thing you want is to give them ideas they can just emulate with their already existing technology. If you're really so worried about them copying you, making things as high tech and hard to understand as possible is probably the best bet.

You'd get way more mileage out of the low/existing tech doctrinal shift option though, like murderously killing everything while laughing in contempt until everyone was forced to emulate you to catch up.

The average engagement range in stargate seems to be like 10 km or so, and the primary weapon slow moving blobs. There's so many ways to improve upon that you could keep all the other powers chasing your tail lights for years.

[mickhhh]

No, they're just existing weapons turned up to 11 for no justifiable reason, and with no decent explanation, other than Earth needing to be superman.

A truely revolutionary weapon would be something like an anti ship missile with its own hyperdrive to extend its range enormously. Something like that would completely transform the way battles were fought. The Asgard beam is just the latest thing you can shoot at the other guy while sitting still a few kilometers away.

well there was no explanation to why there so powerful but theres no point in saying plot hole. it would serve us all to accept there powerful cos they possess some new tech. maybe they heat the plasma much easier or the beams are much more dense. or maybe they drain shields better.

the asgard deserved no less for a final weapon

[Ouroboros]

well there was no explanation to why there so powerful but theres no point in saying plot hole. it would serve us all to accept there powerful cos they possess some new tech. maybe they heat the plasma much easier or the beams are much more dense. or maybe they drain shields better.

the asgard deserved no less for a final weapon

I wouldn't have any problem believing them as the primary weapons of a state of the art Asgard O'neill with similarly state of the art Asgard power generators behind them. It's the tiny human ship cobbled together from scavenged pieces of different alien techs turning them into a 3 shot kill weapon against alien battleships dozens of times its size that stretches credibility beyond the breaking point.

[Mike.]

I wouldn't have any problem believing them as the primary weapons of a state of the art Asgard O'neill with similarly state of the art Asgard power generators behind them. It's the tiny human ship cobbled together from scavenged pieces of different alien techs turning them into a 3 shot kill weapon against alien battleships dozens of times its size that stretches credibility beyond the breaking point.

I don't see why technology from different sources might be somehow inferior. This is a plus actually - you have the benefit of more sources of knowledge and the luxury to choose the absolute best that is available. In the hands of someone who knows what he's doing, like the Asgard, all these would be fully integrated with each other in a way that gets the most out of every component. Ignoring the obvious advantages of such a "best possible" setup seems a failure of imagination to me. The tech integration in Earth's 304s was designed and partially executed by the Asgard themselves. Considering all these elements as a whole - I find the awesomeness of Daedalus class ships perfectly plausible within the scope of the show.

Regarding size - this is completely irrelevant in sci-fi. Actually in real life as well. A 10 gram bullet can kill a 70 KG human, a torpedo can sink an aircraft carrier, or if it has a nuclear warhead can level a city (or several, depending on the yield and the area that needs to be covered). A malaria infected mosquito vs. a human => dead human if he/she doesn't receive medical attention. Hell, even a virus, some say that technically it's not even alive - can kill any (compatible) living organism once it has a chance to infect it. The examples are endless. Think. This is not even worth arguing...

[Ouroboros]

I don't see why technology from different sources might be somehow inferior. This is a plus actually - you have the benefit of more sources of knowledge and the luxury to choose the absolute best that is available. In the hands of someone who knows what he's doing, like the Asgard, all these would be fully integrated with each other in a way that gets the most out of every component. Ignoring the obvious advantages of such a "best possible" setup seems a failure of imagination to me. The tech integration in Earth's 304s was designed and partially executed by the Asgard themselves. Considering all these elements as a whole - I find the awesomeness of Daedalus class ships perfectly plausible within the scope of the show.

The 304 class was designed in an era when Goa'uld motherships were the primary threat and naquada reactors were the bees knees in terms of power generators.

Everything added to it since that point will need to be made to work with the original design specs which will inevitably require trade offs. The biggest one I can think of is that during all this its never once been mentioned, as far as I recall, that the 304 class received a reactor upgrade.

That's to say that it's still running on the same reactor that it had when nuclear missiles were going to be its primary offensive weapon. Nulcear missiles don't require reactor power.

Despite this though it somehow not only manages to power Asgard beams that can kill everything in 3 shots, but it does so while never experiencing a shortage of power for other systems like shields.

Contrast that to something like say, an Ori mothership, Aurora or Wraith hiveship, which has a reactor designed to meet the demands of its shields and energy weapons, or just weapons in the case of the hive, and which is built entirely using Ori/Wraith/Ancient technology. The 304 reactor on the other hand is built using a second hand human understanding of captured Goa'uld technology.

Despite this though the Aurora or hive ship can both be killed in a handful of shots by an Asgard beam powered by a reactor that was never intended to be used to power energy weapons in the first place.

So Earth can somehow make a ship with a knocked off Goa'uld reactor powering it, that was never even intended to power energy weapons, outperform two battleships from two of the most powerful races in Stargate. The Ancients, who's understanding of power generation technologies gave birth to the mighty ZPM, and the Wraith, the species that destroyed them despite that.

Regarding size - this is completely irrelevant in sci-fi. Actually in real life as well. A 10 gram bullet can kill a 70 KG human, a torpedo can sink an aircraft carrier, or if it has a nuclear warhead can level a city (or several, depending on the yield and the area that needs to be covered). A malaria infected mosquito vs. a human => dead human if he/she doesn't receive medical attention. Hell, even a virus, some say that technically it's not even alive - can kill any (compatible) living organism once it has a chance to infect it. The examples are endless. Think. This is not even worth arguing...

Size is relevant when you're comparing things like a typical stargate battleship from a similar tech level, since all stargate battleships have a lot of things in common that are directly comparable to one another. Nobody's changing the game by packing a tiny cargoship's hanger full of FTL capable anti ship missiles for example.

That's to say a big Goa'uld ship is going to have thicker shields and more firepower than a small one if they're both warships, because its larger size will allow for more weapon ports, bigger or more reactors, etc.

You can overcome this with more advanced technology, like say a small ancient ship could still overpower a larger Goa'uld one because even though it does have more generators/weapons etc all of them are of inferior quality to what's found on the ancient one.

This falls apart with the 304 though since the vast majority of it is representative of humanity's second try ever at a spaceship, with various reverse engineered alien techs bolted on as they became available.

It's a case where less advanced technology and small size somehow manages to be better than larger size and more advanced technology.

The 304 has certain parts that are pretty advanced. Like the various Asgard bolt ons, but everything connecting those parts together was just made in a hanger under the Nevada desert sometime in the early 2000s. It's like a flintstones car with a state of the art anti tank missile bolted on.

Globally that shouldn't all add up to something that goes through Auroras and Hives like a lawnmower goes through grass.

The design should have serious shortcomings and weaknesses but none of that is ever seen.

It's simply, faster, better protected, and carries more firepower than anything else out there (let alone anything else its own size) "just because".

[Mister Oragahn]

All the next generation of Earth ships really needs to be is a flying Asgard beam with enough shielding to survive firing it a few times, which is all it takes to destroy 99% of what it'll run up against apparently.

Actually if what we saw in "The Last Man" abou the Phoenix, it really does appear that when there's no ZPM to back them up, the 304s equipped with such weapons and Asgard cores could only fire a couple shots and that's all.
I think that's also the important point here: without the Asgard core, there doesn't seem to be any way to use the weapon efficiently, unless you manage to hit a ship which protection largely consists of a shield that needs to be raised first.

The Phoenix largely was ready for combat, and it managed to snipe an entire hiveship in two or three shots, but as the ship came close to another hive and fired, the beam in question caused minimal damage, and Carter had to get out of here via hyperspace.

Without ZPMs, I don't remember seeing a 304 WTFPWN any Ori ship, nor do I remember a typical post-Unending 304 really owning anything worth its salt without help from other ships.
- We have two 304s trapping an Aurorag as it comes out of hyperspace, so shields could be down, and anyway I believe the design of the Asuran made tincans was inferior.
Now I don't think those 304s already had an Asgard core each, but catching an enemy ship pants down would surely allow them to win, almost by cheating in fact. Not something they could pull at will I suppose.
- We have a cruiser smocked by the beams, which isn't really too disgusting.

Well of course one could always say that for their size, the 304s should actually need to fire several time if only to get through the heavy and thick armour of a Wraith cruiser, since such a cruiser is of similar size.
But so be it. It's like the Breen weapons in Star Trek or the Shadow slicing beams, they're just that superior.

In a way, we could even theorize that Caldwell wanted every single joule coming out from his ship poured into the cannon to blast the superhive in EatG, but putting the integrity of his ship at risk: we could argue that some systems overloaded, and he didn't have basic military thrust...
-> that's the much needed rationalization as to why he stood there, like a sitting duck, instead of, you know... dodging those slow ass bolts coming at him and his crew. Of course, the shields still worked, so you'll have to believe that for some reason, the shields' charge couldn't be diverted back to the engines...

The beams are such an over the top wanktech that you could probably even make a carrier type ship that launched some sort of short ranged gunboats armed with them. Then all the expensive stuff like the hyperdrive and fancy navigational computers and what not can stay on the carrier where they're safe along with most of the people. The gunboats only exist to cart an Asgard beam and a precharged battery for it into battle, fire it 3 times to destroy an enemy battleship thousands of times their size and resource cost, and fly home.

True. But there's a problem with that, since the weapon seems to need an Asgard core, and those things are rare and all we see about them is the visible hardware and the console. It's hard to tell how deep they run inside a 304's original power grid.
I don't see any of those cores being mounted on a gunboat. There's no evidence the Tau'ri know how to downsize them, nor would be able to build enough of them.

The idea that a 304 could only use beams once to defeat any target before it would be toothless would also mean that only a ship that large could provide enough energy to generate those beams.
And in the case you really trim the design down to what would basically be a cannon and a reactor, the size you'd get would probably make the engineers wonder why they even need to put it on a gunboat that would still be large, instead of leaving it on the 304, protected by its superior shields.

It's horrible and game breaking but you give those over the top beams to a designer concerned only with maximum exploitation as opposed to "rule of cool" and this is exactly the sort of thing you'll probably get.

Oh and the carrier'd be cloaked if there was enough left in the budget for it. So now it's not just an unstoppable fleet smashing death swarm of tiny Asgard beam ships, it's an unstoppable fleet smashing death swarm of tiny Asgard beam ships that can ambush you out of nowhere and return to a mobile and invisible home base so they can do it repeatedly with little chance of anyone stopping them.

Mmm... yes, if you wanted to be truly nasty about it, you could go there. Get the cloaks of Goa'uld ships - the true underexploiters of all tech in the universe - and get some nice small sized ship there.

Reminds me of this post of mine.

The idea of a fully automated ship is nice, but you really need a crew. Automated ships can malfunction, and you need a crew for damage repair.

The Prometheus did quite well. Daniel and Vala could handle it with a respectable efficiency and we know its weapon systems could be ran on a completely automatized mode.

have you ever thought the asgard beams might just be a revolutionary weapon. maybe a bit like early world war 1 tank rounds compared to new rounds today.

I wonder if Asgard beams isn't the Asgards' trick of having a way to compress particles from a kawoosh into a beam. Sure, it wouldn't be anywhere as good as a kawoosh, but imagine just once that you could imbue about 1% of the wormhole based technology's effect - which is known to disintegrate anything and even eat an Ori ship easily - into a self contained plasma beam system.
Could work.

The 304 class was designed in an era when Goa'uld motherships were the primary threat and naquada reactors were the bees knees in terms of power generators.

Everything added to it since that point will need to be made to work with the original design specs which will inevitably require trade offs. The biggest one I can think of is that during all this its never once been mentioned, as far as I recall, that the 304 class received a reactor upgrade.

That's to say that it's still running on the same reactor that it had when nuclear missiles were going to be its primary offensive weapon. Nulcear missiles don't require reactor power.

Despite this though it somehow not only manages to power Asgard beams that can kill everything in 3 shots, but it does so while never experiencing a shortage of power for other systems like shields.

Contrast that to something like say, an Ori mothership, Aurora or Wraith hiveship, which has a reactor designed to meet the demands of its shields and energy weapons, or just weapons in the case of the hive, and which is built entirely using Ori/Wraith/Ancient technology. The 304 reactor on the other hand is built using a second hand human understanding of captured Goa'uld technology.

Despite this though the Aurora or hive ship can both be killed in a handful of shots by an Asgard beam powered by a reactor that was never intended to be used to power energy weapons in the first place.

So Earth can somehow make a ship with a knocked off Goa'uld reactor powering it, that was never even intended to power energy weapons, outperform two battleships from two of the most powerful races in Stargate. The Ancients, who's understanding of power generation technologies gave birth to the mighty ZPM, and the Wraith, the species that destroyed them despite that.

I think that the 304s, despite the first model, Daedalus, being a sister ship to Prometheus, were really a severe improvement over the X-303.
They could power shields which would turn the ships into little fortresses, even if that meant they were impotant on the assault front.
Heck, even back to the times of Prometheus, the Tau'ri had managed to build a naqahdria based generator. That alone would have allowed them to power beam weapons if needed.
And we've seen how underexploited the power grid is on a 304, considering what a ZPM allows such a ship to do.

The 304 has certain parts that are pretty advanced. Like the various Asgard bolt ons, but everything connecting those parts together was just made in a hanger under the Nevada desert sometime in the early 2000s. It's like a flintstones car with a state of the art anti tank missile bolted on.

They just need to paint 'em red at this point.

Globally that shouldn't all add up to something that goes through Auroras and Hives like a lawnmower goes through grass.

The design should have serious shortcomings and weaknesses but none of that is ever seen.

It's simply, faster, better protected, and carries more firepower than anything else out there (let alone anything else its own size) "just because".[/QUOTE]

Well on the other hand, when the Asgards had an entire Lantean library to look at, their own experience in fighting machines laughing at the Wraith, and had eternal life based on cloning tech and time dilation tech that would, in theory, allow them to spend insane amounts of centuries in labs to make any breakthrough while, to anyone living outside such time dilations fields, only seconds would pass, there's always the chance that what the Asgard found was just that good.

Of course we know it's just a fan's way to try to cover the writers' lack of balance in their writing. >:|