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    surviving the wraith

    i want to create a civilization of about 50- 100 million people in the Pegasus galaxy , with base tech about 100 years a head of todays earth + reverse engineered lantean tech (shields , energy weapons, hyperdrive etc )

    how would such a civilization hide from the wraith ??

    i was thinking massive underground cities ( like the genii but way bigger ) about a 1km high and 20km wide with the roof mimicking the sky , or hallowing out an asteroid to the same degree . is that even possible at that tech level ?

    how would you do it ?

    #2
    Big issues you would have, is where do they get their food/tech and such from? A community of THAT massive size, should have pinged on the Wraith's radar quite easily.

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      #3
      Originally posted by garhkal View Post
      Big issues you would have, is where do they get their food/tech and such from? A community of THAT massive size, should have pinged on the Wraith's radar quite easily.
      i imagine they would have the tech from the start . just like the travelers . the rest they can get from just sending out teams like the sgc does .

      as for food they could just build vertical farms with gmo crops kinda thing .

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        #4
        What i am on about though is how would they have even gotten TO That level, just on sheer #s of people, let alone tech without ever dinging on the wraith radar???

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          #5
          Significant problems:

          Earth with almost a decade of experience fighting aliens had significant troubles dealing with the wraith, including developing tactics. The Genii were quite lucky because of the wraith's fairly predictable feeding times, but even then the level of cooperation and foresight required would be immense. Even in our own history few leaders ever had beyond-30 year vision (modern politics barely manages beyond-4 year vision) and the Genii's solution required at least half a century of planning ahead.

          Sociologically and politically it would be a truly immense undertaking to form such a society (let alone maintain it).

          Population-wise, 100 million people is a truly massive amount. You can't possibly build a single city underground that maintains that all (a dome 20km wide and 1 km high would require a level of engineering we won't even possess in a century). Literally everything needs to be processed, all while being stealthy to the Wraith. If the wraith even remotely suspected an advanced civilization was hiding, they'd stick around for two days and then everyone would do one of a list of things and either die or turn back on the machinery and die.

          That list being:

          *water in every conceivable form would have to be managed. Fog, humidity, sewer water, ground water, drinking and processing water, etc.

          *Air in every conceivable form would have to be managed. Air in the dome itself, in housings, in factories, in the atmosphere of the planet (pray that nothing even remotely indicative of civilization get there). This needs to be refreshed too (stuff will inevitably oxidize).

          *Maintenance would be absolutely hell. Because every conceivable aspect of your city needs to be regulated by machines, all that needs maintenance. Everything would need to be designed to be hidden from the wraith (e.g. tapping natural water and air sources), your own machinery would need to be shut down at a moment's notice (hell to the maintenance life of your machine) and if an air filter dies, your people start to suffocate. A water filter dies, your people get poisoned.

          *Food would be a challenge of it's own, since you would basically need one or two domes of equal size just to provide food. Truly massive amounts of land on earth are used to supply food. A city of 100 million would need 30 billion kilograms of food (300kg per citizen). At 16 tons per acre of traditional farming (4 tons nominal, hydroponics has about 4x higher yield) that's 2 million acres (or 8000 square kilometer). Your city would roughly have 20x20= 400 square kilometers. Assuming 10 meter per complete floor (3m technical area above and below the crop, 3m for the crop itself) you would need 20 floors, or 200 meters of area with absolutely nothing but crops, crops, crops. With above floor plans, it would be hell to work in (crowded, hot and moist, devastating to the machinery).

          *This also ignores industry, which would involve rigorous recycling.

          Considering all this, it would be plain better to build a few O'neill cylinders, stick a hyperdrive to it, mine a few planets during peaceful years, migrate to the middle of nowhere during a wraith incursion and hope that your expertise, resources and machinery don't give out halfway an important trip.

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            #6
            Additionally, you better hope what ever planet you DO build those domes under, has no tectonic activity..

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              #7
              Originally posted by garhkal View Post
              Additionally, you better hope what ever planet you DO build those domes under, has no tectonic activity..
              Nah. just make sure you're nowhere near a faultline.


              Really though, it would be a bad idea to make a single large dome. It would be much better to make a couple of hundred domes of a million people.

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by thekillman View Post
                Significant problems:

                Earth with almost a decade of experience fighting aliens had significant troubles dealing with the wraith, including developing tactics. The Genii were quite lucky because of the wraith's fairly predictable feeding times, but even then the level of cooperation and foresight required would be immense. Even in our own history few leaders ever had beyond-30 year vision (modern politics barely manages beyond-4 year vision) and the Genii's solution required at least half a century of planning ahead.

                Sociologically and politically it would be a truly immense undertaking to form such a society (let alone maintain it).

                Population-wise, 100 million people is a truly massive amount. You can't possibly build a single city underground that maintains that all (a dome 20km wide and 1 km high would require a level of engineering we won't even possess in a century). Literally everything needs to be processed, all while being stealthy to the Wraith. If the wraith even remotely suspected an advanced civilization was hiding, they'd stick around for two days and then everyone would do one of a list of things and either die or turn back on the machinery and die.

                That list being:

                *water in every conceivable form would have to be managed. Fog, humidity, sewer water, ground water, drinking and processing water, etc.

                *Air in every conceivable form would have to be managed. Air in the dome itself, in housings, in factories, in the atmosphere of the planet (pray that nothing even remotely indicative of civilization get there). This needs to be refreshed too (stuff will inevitably oxidize).

                *Maintenance would be absolutely hell. Because every conceivable aspect of your city needs to be regulated by machines, all that needs maintenance. Everything would need to be designed to be hidden from the wraith (e.g. tapping natural water and air sources), your own machinery would need to be shut down at a moment's notice (hell to the maintenance life of your machine) and if an air filter dies, your people start to suffocate. A water filter dies, your people get poisoned.

                *Food would be a challenge of it's own, since you would basically need one or two domes of equal size just to provide food. Truly massive amounts of land on earth are used to supply food. A city of 100 million would need 30 billion kilograms of food (300kg per citizen). At 16 tons per acre of traditional farming (4 tons nominal, hydroponics has about 4x higher yield) that's 2 million acres (or 8000 square kilometer). Your city would roughly have 20x20= 400 square kilometers. Assuming 10 meter per complete floor (3m technical area above and below the crop, 3m for the crop itself) you would need 20 floors, or 200 meters of area with absolutely nothing but crops, crops, crops. With above floor plans, it would be hell to work in (crowded, hot and moist, devastating to the machinery).

                *This also ignores industry, which would involve rigorous recycling.

                Considering all this, it would be plain better to build a few O'neill cylinders, stick a hyperdrive to it, mine a few planets during peaceful years, migrate to the middle of nowhere during a wraith incursion and hope that your expertise, resources and machinery don't give out halfway an important trip.
                just what i was looking for thanks man

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by thekillman View Post
                  Nah. just make sure you're nowhere near a faultline.


                  Really though, it would be a bad idea to make a single large dome. It would be much better to make a couple of hundred domes of a million people.
                  start with one and build more as the population grows over the centuries and they become more advance and better at it . i imagine by the time the population grows to any size the wraith would think no one lives on that planet and stop coming .

                  Comment


                    #10
                    That depends on what sort of shielding they get for their tech.. Cause all the tech they would need for power, air etc, should show up to sensors.. That's why the Genni always shut their stuff down when wraith were near..

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Originally posted by blazze220 View Post
                      i imagine by the time the population grows to any size the wraith would think no one lives on that planet and stop coming .
                      That would never happen. The human population in Pegasus is free to use the stargate to move anywhere. The Wraith would systematically check all planets with stargates, and probably any habitable world just for good measure.

                      Judging by the artefacts in, for example, "childhood's end" suggests that the Wraith did check worlds defended by ancient technology. They just (previously) had plenty of food and didn't want to pay the cost of overwhelming such sites.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Exactly. Heck even the planet in Tower was periodically buzzed, to check if the locals had lost use over the drones or not... I am sure had they found that to be true, that planet would have been culled..

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Are you opposed to them utilizing Ancient technology to hide from the Wraith.?If not, that's the easiest way to go.

                          Some examples of technology that we've currently seen that could possibly accomplish that are as follows:

                          1) Merlin's device. Maybe it wasn't something he used his ascended knowledge to create. Maybe it was something that was developed in the Pegasus galaxy and these humans found one and learned how to use it to mask part of their planet (or maybe an Ancient did that for them).

                          2) Salvaged city ship shield generators. Say they find a damaged city ship, salvage the shield generators, and set them up on their planet, independent of the city. A city's shield can be extended over a vast distance. Its strength weakens the further out it goes but extending the shield to an area the size of South Korea (which has a population of 50 million) would (I believe) maintain its strength enough to withstand a Wraith attack. Can it withstand a vigorous prolonged attack (as would surely occur in an instance where there were 50 million people waiting to be eaten) though? That depends on their power source. The problem with ZPMs is that they have finite energy and this civilization wouldn't be able to replace them on their own. The problem with geothermal energy is that you run the risk of blowing your planet up if you tap into it to run the shields full time. Yes, the problem in the episode where that happened was that they were tapped into a super volcano but that's likely what this group would have to do as well. The only viable solutions are something we haven't seen before or them being the ones to perfect leaching energy from subspace time itself.

                          3) Salvaged city ship shield generators, plus jumper's cloak. Same as above, only it gets around the perhaps insurmountable energy issue by serving as an another hiding method. Unless a Wraith dart stumbles onto the location of a cloaked area, this would sufficiently hide them from the Wraith. The only issue is that keeping it up all the time runs into the same energy issue as above so they also need a method to track Wraith ships that way they can put the cloak up when a ship approaches. However, that's not too difficult as if they salvaged the shields from a city ship then you can also have them salvage the tracking tech.

                          4) Powerful energy weapon. The Wraith aren't in a position to send untold numbers against a single location any longer and 50 million people aren't worth losing half their limited fleet over. If you make it hurt enough, the Wraith will move on to softer targets in the same vein that they would occasionally check out planets protected by Ancient tech but not overwhelm them. In those cases, it was a matter of them losing a few ships (or a few darts even) only to recover a very small number of humans. The planet from "The Tower," for example only housed a bunch of villages from what we were told, so it maybe had a few thousand people. Technically, the Wraith could have taken the planet by sending in hundreds and hundreds of darts. Those with the Ancient gene likely wouldn't have been proficient enough to take them all out before some got through and slammed themselves into the tower. However, even if they could prevent that from happening, (or the Wraith wanted to keep it intact) doing so meant using one drone each against all those darts. At the cost of, at the most, a few thousand darts and their simplistic pilots the Wraith could have forced those people to use up all their drones on soft targets, while keeping their capital ships safe. However, it wasn't even worth that to them.

                          Thus, you can create a strong energy weapon that can one-hit a Wraith Hive ship and, even with 50 million people as the prize, the cost may be too great for it to be worth the effort. However, that's assuming that the Wraith have to give up scores of Hives and Cruisers. If they can use that same dart method described above to take out this weapon then I would say 50 million people would definitely be worth it. So this population can't just rely on a big powerful weapon. They also need a way to protect it from darts. However, you said they're a hundred years more advanced than Earth. In your vision of what that means, would they have shield technology that could protect the weapon? Or, since rail guns are a real world technology, maybe they built tons and tons of those (or something similar) to act as a defense screen.

                          Of course, your best option may be to create a new piece of Ancient technology rather than recycling something we've seen on screen.

                          Now, if you don't want to use Ancient technology, the easiest way to approach that seems to me to be via relocation. Someone suggested that the Wraith might search every habitable planet in the galaxy, even those that don't have a Stargate. I seriously doubt that as that's a lot of resources to devote find the rare technologically capable hider and those are resources that they don't really have. So I would go that route myself and if you choose to do so you have three methods to get a population to an off-the grind planet.

                          1) Sublight transport of a Stargate. We saw a planet that was able to build themselves up to space age level technology between feedings. You can have your people do that but instead of doing it to hide dematerialized people in a space station, they could do it to send a Stargate to what they believe to be a nearby habitable world that doesn't have one. Once the Stargate lands on that planet, they can send people through the Stargate from their homeworld to this new one and then build their population up to the 50-100 million number. Obviously, to do this they need to Stargate to a different planet, send the materials to build a sublight space ship through, and then both built and launch the spaceship from there. So the destination planet would need to be nearby this other world, not their homeworld. Some people would have to sacrifice themselves to isolation to do this since once the Stargate is gone they're not going to be able to gate home. Alternatively, they could be sent along in stasis or the launch could be automated.

                          2) Sublight generational/stasis ship.

                          3) They're the descents of technologically advanced humans who fought with the Ancients against the Wraith and, after the war, their ancestors found an out of the way planet without a Stargate to land on. Of course, with this option you then have to come up with a reason why they're only 100 years more advanced than Earth and have such a low population after 10,000 years. One possibility is that infighting demolished their older civilization and they've only just built themselves back up to that point in recent history. Another could be that the conditions on the planet are harsh and not capable of supporting a large population. Maybe, like with BSG, the planet is only habitable around the equator. As for technology; if warships landed sans factories and resources then a lot of things would have to be rebuilt from scratch and relearned over time. Having a warship doesn't mean you know how to rebuild one and by the time you built up industry enough to try to reverse engineer it, it probably would be lost to the ravages of time.

                          Another option is that they foresaw the inevitable so their civilization poured all their sources into building habitats on an uninhabitable planet and 50-100 million people is the number that they can support in them and any new ones they constructed over the years. To deal with the technology issue, perhaps they Stargated in. The planet could be uninhabitable because the Ancients didn't get around to terraforming it yet or because it became uninhabitable after the Stargate was placed there. It's reasonable to expect that the Wraith wouldn't bother checking up on such a planet. They might want to scavenge the Stargate but maybe not. In which case, the population may be too busy trying to maintain these habitants through mining and construction projects to focus much on technological development. Alternatively, maybe they didn't build them at all but the Ancients did and then relocating primitive humans to them. There's room to play around with different possibilities here.

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                            #14
                            Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                            Are you opposed to them utilizing Ancient technology to hide from the Wraith.?If not, that's the easiest way to go.
                            It more of that the SIZE of the population you are going for seems very outlandish.. Especially with mixing in lantean AND other tech into some sort of uber group...

                            Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                            1) Merlin's device. Maybe it wasn't something he used his ascended knowledge to create. Maybe it was something that was developed in the Pegasus galaxy and these humans found one and learned how to use it to mask part of their planet (or maybe an Ancient did that for them).
                            But so far, the ONLY evidence we have ON his tech, is his device found in his Cave in Glastonbury.. which he only worked on After returning from the Pegasus galaxy..

                            Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                            2) Salvaged city ship shield generators. Say they find a damaged city ship, salvage the shield generators, and set them up on their planet, independent of the city. A city's shield can be extended over a vast distance.
                            That it can, but however, do you even KNOW if the shield generators can be removed FROM a city ship? Let alone the ZPM power core...

                            Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                            The only viable solutions are something we haven't seen before or them being the ones to perfect leaching energy from subspace time itself.
                            So, they are more uber in making tech than the ancients?

                            Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                            3) Salvaged city ship shield generators, plus jumper's cloak. Same as above, only it gets around the perhaps insurmountable energy issue by serving as an another hiding method. Unless a Wraith dart stumbles onto the location of a cloaked area, this would sufficiently hide them from the Wraith. The only issue is that keeping it up all the time runs into the same energy issue as above so they also need a method to track Wraith ships that way they can put the cloak up when a ship approaches. However, that's not too difficult as if they salvaged the shields from a city ship then you can also have them salvage the tracking tech.
                            And unless they had found out about the switching of the shield to cloak method that WE did, how would they even know how to do it? It would also require they HAVE a shield generator (see above) and working jumpers to do so..

                            Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                            4) Powerful energy weapon. The Wraith aren't in a position to send untold numbers against a single location any longer and 50 million people aren't worth losing half their limited fleet over.
                            And where exactly would this 'powerful' weapon come from? SO far we have seen the Lantean langran point satellite.. It was easily destroyed after the wraith hung back.
                            Then there was that satellite built in Icon, but that was made with Ori knowledge...
                            So what else do you propose??

                            Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                            1) Sublight transport of a Stargate. We saw a planet that was able to build themselves up to space age level technology between feedings. You can have your people do that but instead of doing it to hide dematerialized people in a space station, they could do it to send a Stargate to what they believe to be a nearby habitable world that doesn't have one. Once the Stargate lands on that planet, they can send people through the Stargate from their homeworld to this new one and then build their population up to the 50-100 million number. Obviously, to do this they need to Stargate to a different planet, send the materials to build a sublight space ship through, and then both built and launch the spaceship from there. So the destination planet would need to be nearby this other world, not their homeworld. Some people would have to sacrifice themselves to isolation to do this since once the Stargate is gone they're not going to be able to gate home. Alternatively, they could be sent along in stasis or the launch could be automated.
                            Do you know how long it would take for a sublight ship to reach a nearby habitable planet? let alone how long it would take a population to rebuild from one kulling, let alone keep their #s on the move??

                            Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                            2) Sublight generational/stasis ship.
                            And with how the wraith scan, those would be easily found..

                            Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                            3) They're the descents of technologically advanced humans who fought with the Ancients against the Wraith and, after the war, their ancestors found an out of the way planet without a Stargate to land on.
                            And if they ever did exist, why is there no mention of them in the lantean database??

                            A lot of your ideas are just too far fetched..

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Originally posted by garhkal View Post
                              It more of that the SIZE of the population you are going for seems very outlandish
                              Not necessarily. It *can* be done.

                              Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                              Are you opposed to them utilizing Ancient technology to hide from the Wraith.?If not, that's the easiest way to go.
                              Au contraire. So far all successful hiding technologies used by the Ancients have required extreme policies to maintain. Using Ancient technology is both difficult (the ancients didn't quite interbreed like they did in the MW, so the ATA gene is scarce) and signals to the Wraith that they're capable of resistance, which is usually the reason such races are exterminated first.

                              Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                              1) Merlin's device.
                              Plain impossible. The only known device was invented by an Ascended Being. It's not ancient technology as we know it.

                              Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                              2) Salvaged city ship shield generators
                              Considering we've seen two City Ships and all evidence we have suggests the Ancients had minimal presence in Pegasus (Since the entire point was to ascend, not to restore their civilization). The odds of finding a city ship that hasn't been destroyed is near-zero. Salvaging these shields is about the worst idea (you'd want the entire ship intact), and even if it was all achieved the Wraith were willing to bombard such shields for weeks to destroy them. It won't work.


                              Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                              3) Salvaged city ship shield generators, plus jumper's cloak.
                              Both energy and technology issues would make this unlikely. Even in The Siege it wasn't believe to work unless both Teyla messaged the wraith AND they fake-nuked the city. The Wraith are aware of ancient cloaking, they wouldn't allow any race with such technology to live.



                              Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                              4) Powerful energy weapon.
                              The only weapons we've seen that worked either defended absolutely nothing (e.g. Trinity) or a minor 10 000-ish people outpost. A 50 million population is -for Pegasus- massive and would most definitely see the Wraith try to get it. Earth's 6 billion is richer than an entire galaxy of people, where according to "Be All My Sins Rememberd" the average population is some 10 000 or so.



                              Originally posted by Xaeden View Post
                              Another option is that they foresaw the inevitable
                              Virtually impossible. "the Ark" suggested many human worlds had essentially no warning and even the Asgard did not anticipate the Ancients losing.



                              Really, the most advantageous scenario is actually that this race was facing Annihilation of some sort, spend a century fighting that and more or less by accident evaded the Wraith that way.

                              If you want them to flee to space, a cosmic threat (e.g. a rogue planet, but something more visible like a rogue star would be better) would do the job. Their telescopes would see the threat coming, they'd spend a century or so building interstellar ships and ever since they've been making do.

                              If you want them to go underground, biosphere annihilation (e.g "the Other side") would work best. E.g. the local sun becomes unstable and showers the planet in radiation, or perhaps a nearby supernova is anticipated. Either way, it needs to be sufficiently slow or should be predictable enough that 50-100 years are available for the population to react. All across the planet underground bunkers are built that are self-sufficient to prevent total annihilation.

                              In both cases, the Wraith show up and find a dead or dying world, and won't bother them any further. A generational fleet (of a properly designed kind, not the half-assed mess of the Travelers) would have my preference since it can continuously relocate, it can safely mine systems and flee the sector before the Wraith can track who mined it.

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