Here is what would be the Ha'tak related part, essentially.
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The firepower and defenses being proportionate, we know one will reflect the other.
So instead of picking one, I'll simply throw some things I've observed, plus other facts.
Getting figures for Stargate has been the hardest part, and that for ages, even if dialogue gave us plenty of clues about what naqahdah could do. The question was how naqahdah was used in Ha'taks.
So, what do we have?
First, there's the very first generation of Tau'ri portable naqahdah generators, the Mark-I, which we can look at. One such devices is particularly lightweight, even when pristine and ready to use. I wouldn't even rate them at 10 kg a piece considering how Carter can lift them easily. An used generator (couple months of use) could still deliver a 20 KT explosion on overload. I've done several calcs about their outputs, and it's clearly in the gigawatt range, with max outputs somehow being around the two digits gigawatts. Some even say it could be three digits high. Those things aren't big either, about 60 cm long, more or less.
As per Carter in that episode with the armbands, "Upgrades", we know ships use weapon grade naqahdah, and Carter's musings strongly suggested that this wg naqahdah could be directly used in a reactor.
Her comments upon the analysis of naqahdria on how they so needed that material to power weapons and defenses that would help them win against the Goa'uld has always been leading me to think that the Ha'tak would have to be tough. Tough as having defenses somehow high in the megaton range, perhaps even as high as a couple gigatons. Carter commented thusly twice.
And we saw how destructive a naqahdria powered nuke is, in comparison to a naqahdah powered one.
As for a reactor using naqahdria, based on my reasoning regarding the fact that a naqahdria core was necessary for a F-302 to achieve hyperspace travel, when it's obvious that they could have slapped several naqahdah generators Mk-I if they had been sufficient, it could easily tell us that a naqahdria core could easily be one or two orders of magnitude more powerful than a single naqahdah generator Mk-I. The naqahdria nukes, such as the gatebusters, would suggest that we would be looking at a difference of something between two and three orders of magnitude.
That's basically what Carter was drooling over.
We'll also notice that despite having naqahdah and racks of nukes on 304s, we've never seen a 304 ever threaten a Ha'tak. Now, the problem is that I believe a 304 carries 25~30 MT nukes at its default loadout, but you would still believe that they'd keep a couple Goa'uld busters, just in case. Yet, they never took a Ha'tak down, so once again, we could consider that a Ha'tak has shields up in the >4.2 exajoules range.
The SGC also considered that the missiles, which could go through a Ha'tak's shields thanks to some hypothetized exploitation of shield modulation (which never got proved later), would still need to be worth a thousand megatons each.
It would fit with the famous blue giant calcs from "Enemies", where a Ha'tak's hull could withstand the constant exposure to radiations for one full hour before leaking them internally.
The blue giant would have a photosphere intensity between 2.6 e10 and 3.9 e11 W/m². At an altitude of one radius from the star, there would be four times less that power.
Shield wise, for half the surface area of a spheroid that's about 700 meters wide and 315 meters high, we get 1,020,438.15 m² /2, or 510,219.075 m² (~5.1 e5 m²). At least that's 3.316 petawatt.
The ship could stay there for ten hours before the shields would fail (36,000 seconds).
Since such shields don't seem to recharge when taxed (they don't recover "shield points" at all during battles, and in "Lost City", the shields of Prometheus could only be recharged if they'd break off from the battle), logically, this would mean the Ha'tak had many exajoules worth of shielding.
However, if you don't think shields work with something like hit points, it still remains that the Ha'tak was continuously pumping out the equivalent of several megatons per second, and that could have kept going on like that for ten hours. So be it shields of total power production, we're still looking at copious amounts of gigatons in a way or another.
Also that was Cronus' flagship, so it's possible it was superior in some ways (although not in the FTL department, since it was inferior to Apophis' ships). But it was of the same size as any other Ha'tak.
Continuing, we have the Goa'uld busters rated at 1 GT each, which if they truly detonated, would have only delivered 400-500 MT to the shields anyway, but I don't think they really detonated at all. We know that even a failed naqahdah-powered pulse can knock off electric systems. Besides, if they did, the first missile would have probably damaged the second one.
We also have another element. In season 8, when Anubis took Dakara back, Carter doubted that their most powerful nuke would be able to dent a shield if Anubis had put one over the temple. At that time, they only had developped 1.2 GT nukes.
The juryrigged asteroid Anubis sent at Earth confirms the high levels of energy of naqahdah. It had a yield of a nova and at the minimal safe distance, it would have literally boiled off Earth's oceans. The difference with a nova is that the dense naqahdah would have delivered all that energy at once, instead of over a couple months.
I also made those calcs based on Beachhead and the yield of a gatebuster rated at 812 GT (some say it's more than that but... meh).
Those calculations are actually much reliable:
What I could add to them is that the Ori counted on their ennemies to provide more energy than what the stargate could deliver. We know that too much energy makes a stargate's wormhole hickup and eventually entirely jump to another stargate, distant or not. From "The Pegasus Project", we've seen that a shaped 26 MT nuke wasn't enough to make such a thing happen.Me, at Spacebattles wrote: Actually, as an extension of this post of mine, we may get an idea of the firepower.
We can consider that all ships fired for five minutes non stop at the shield. This firepower helped close the shield fast, while before the detonation of the Mark IX and the bombardment, it grew slowly (one limited expansion every 30 minutes, probably after building up enough energy). So the firepower did contribute a lot to the energy the shield needed. The energy the shield was getting from the stargate would only be minimal in comparison.
Now, it doesn't matter if the shield absorbs a tenth or a hundredth of what hits it, because when you divide the fraction of the gatebuster yield which hit the shield by ten or a hundred, you will have, later on, to multiply whatever number you may obtain by ten or by a hundred at the end, to get the real firepower of the ships.
Say the shield had to cope with a third of the gatebuster yield, which I believe would be rated at 812 GT.
That's 270.667 GT.
The gatebuster brought 70% of the energy the shield needed.
So the ratios are:
100% = 386.667 GT
70% = 270.667 GT
30% = 116 GT
There are 300 seconds in five minutes. So on the average, we get a firepower of 386.67 MT/s.
Prometheus didn't fire as soon as the Ha'taks. Prometheus used missiles, which unless they were rated gigaton levels (zero evidence for this) would logically be, at best, rated at a couple megatons, just like the missiles used by 304s, which comes around 20~30 MT.
This would actually mean the Ha'taks were providing more firepower than the Prometheus.
What can be done, though, to lower the number is to claim that the shield had to cope with a smaller fraction of the gatebuster, and that perhaps the ships fired for more than five minutes.
Divide the gatebuster's energy which reached the Ori shield by two, and you work with 30% = 58 GT.
Multiply the bombardment duration by two, which makes 600 seconds, and you get a firepower of 96.67 MT/s.
Now that's the firepower per second.
There were several ships there. We see three Ha'taks and the Prometheus.
- Video link edited out, thanks YT >:[ -
So they fired for one full minute, which made the shield expand ahead of schedule if I may say, then they stopped, and resumed when the gatebuster exploded and the shield violently expanded. They fired for less than two minutes, more like 1 minute 40 seconds roughly. As said earlier Prometheus joined 30 seconds later.
So by simplifying this and dividing firepower by four, you'd almost get between 100 and 25 MT/s. We know that the Ha'taks, having been the ships firing the most, and since Prometheus' nukes wouldn't be more than two dozens megatons, surely the Ha'tak firepower per second would be a notch above those numbers.
The stargate was maintaining a wormhole between the Milky Way and Pegasus, by tapping a nearby and small spinning black hole (which was powerful enough to mess up with sensors): the 26 MT were likely an extra over what the stargate was using. We could count on the Tau'ri to be smart enough to fire most of the shaped nuke's energy into the even horizon, by placing it right in front of it. Logically a vast portion of the nuke's radiations would fly through the stargate. We see that a nuclear pulse can "dislodge" a wormhole. Power is probably relevant as well, since Anubis managed to overload Earth's stargate in "Redemption" by slowly charging it.
It was deemed that the stargate's explosion would relase 2~3 gigatons. It was stated by Jonas Quinn that the stargate's naqahdah would amplify the blast, but it's also obvious that it would be minimal since in all logic, the naqahdah used to build hulls and stargates would be depleted first. So eventually, we could consider that a high fraction of those couple gigatons would be about the energy stored inside the stargate itself.
In "First Contact", the activation of the Attero device made Atlantis' stargate overload. Zelenka stated that the explosion would be worth a dozen nuclear detonations. It's quite vague, but gives an idea of how powerful it is. The explosion was contained by shrinking the city's shield over the stargate. When the shield emitters failed, the energy still left destroyed that level of the tower (but didn't make it collapse).
Other than that, we've had a planet's entire surface turned to a ball of plasma (because of residual mined naqahdah being set off) in "Chain Reaction" and that didn't make the wormhole jump, nor did the wormhole jump when a stargate was thrown into a G class main sequence star at 5% of c and remained inside the star for more than 23 minutes, as in "Exodus". And in "Beachhead", the stargate survived the nearby multi-gigaton blast and the wormhole didn't get severed either. An Ori Prior had formerly used his own shield to protect the stargate, and the stargate was glowing (but still perfectly functional, that's tough) but even if he let 1% slip through, then what the stargate would have been exposed to would have been far greater than 26 megatons.
That said, it may not be surprising, since Merlin said that a gatebuster had to placed behind the EH of a stargate in order to destroy one (supposedly when it's connected), meaning that otherwise, it can easily cope with that multi-gigatons warhead.
So with that in mind, when we return to "Beachhead" and three Ha'taks firing at the Ori shields, with Prometheus reluctantly joining in later, and considerably increasing its expansion rate, it's obvious that they were providing per second much more than what a stargate could safely channel into the Ori shield.
As a result of the first time the Ha'taks started firing, the shield grew faster ahead of the predicted next expansion phase.
No matter how you look at it, this absolutely proves that the Ha'taks have a regular, constant and high rate firepower capacity in the megaton range.
Then, finally, there's the alternate reality famous 200 MT quote, with the Goa'uld having weapons so powerful that if they had shot at the SGC, the people down there would have died without even having time to feel what hit them. It's a yield that's confirmed indirectly by the billion casualties and the vast damage caused to Europe and other parts of the planet.
I dismiss the silly claims of grenade firepower as seen in "The Warrior" since it's absolutely clear they're meant to scare people. They're even contradicted by higher levels of firepower such as in "Continuum", "The Sentinel" and "Homecoming", which easily are in the low to medium gigajoule range.
The only recent oddball could have been "Continuum", which SG haters love to use to dismiss higher figures and nerf Stargate. That's without counting on details of importance.
First, SBC's two related threads:
http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?t=135275
http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?t=137060
Basically, the argumentative questions that debunk, by their own rhetorical value, any attempt at nerfing the power abilities of Goa'uld ships, are:
- If they have so miserable firepower, how come Earth, and its kiloton-megaton-gigaton nukes, has never been able to take down a Ha'tak and didn't even believe they could threaten some sort of theater shield Anubis would have deployed at Dakara?
- How is that an Al'kesh with battle shields (not the mere atmospheric ones they have by default that barely protect against Death Gliders' fire) can tank just as many bolts fired from a Ha'tak in orbit, as a Ha'tak does when being fired at by another Ha'tak? Or, how come a ~30 meters long ship has defenses as good as those of a 700 meters wide Ha'tak?
- If power production is so weak, how could Teal'c use a gate dialer on a stargate and open a wormhole to a planet that's farther than Abydos? We know the stargate SG-1 and Teal'c men used, taken by the Russians, had never been used before (meaning that it was certainly not precharged by the incoming wormhole, which is the explanation generally brought forth in order to explain how Thor could dial Ida from Earth, for example).
- Why have a hundred plus ships to bombard Earth when we know each one would easily carry some considerable supplies of naqahdah, enough as to have the equivalent of several gigatons of energy to release on Earth? Obviously, you'd be able to dispatch several hundreds of gigatons all over Earth, possibly a couple of teratons in total doing so. That would be a proper mass extinction event.
- Why not go grab asteroids from the nearest belt and throw them at Earth? We know that hyperspace piggybacking is possible (tugging some object through hyperspace by increasing your bubble). It was so easy that even a scout ship could do that to a 137 kilometer long asteroid, pass it through Earth, and that with damaged systems.
- Why not dial the Russian stargate and pass some gigaton nukes through it? We know the Goa'uld have nukes.
- Why simply not use those nukes instead?
- What about the fact that the cumulated firepower of a Ha'tak, over three days (the time limit Qetesh had fixed), with that ROF and that strength, would only be of ~2.6 MT? This is absolutely ridiculous.
Some people think the ships weren't even using their main weapons. But I'm never been absolutely firm on this argument. I've seen low yield bolts depart from points on a Ha'tak superstructure which were the same as the points of departure of what would generally be considered for heavy bolts, since used against enemy capital ships, and it wouldn't make sense in light of "Camelot" and the Lucian Ha'taks using those cannons on the Ori ships, if they were of low yield.
That said, they could have done so to draw ther Ori's attention. However, the bolts were still the same during the rest of the battle, and didn't make the usual terror sound, so it's confusing.
So perhaps, in "Camelot", they were heavy firepower bolts after all.
Yet, no matter what, it's clear, for someone with a memory for those details, that we did see the heavy bolts be fired from random positions on the black scaffolding structure, throughout SG-1. Even in "Camelot", or during the battles that took place at Dakara in "Reckoning", or during the engagement beetween the Ha'tak of the Lucian leader and that of the alien bounty hunters. Or probably again in that episode wherein a clone of Ba'al was stealing stargates.
And we did see low yield shots depart from gun emplacements located on either sides of the domes, such as in "Exodus" for example, where it was very clear as the Al'kesh was strafing the Ha'tak very closely.
Besides, back in "Continuum", as I said, Qetesh gave them three days to complete their task. Why go for the low yield guns instead of the much more powerful ones? The rate of fire of the "small" ones would hardly compensate the vast discrepancy in firepower. What supports the idea that they were the low yield guns is that the production team decided that those bolts would make the typical noise of the terror bolts, not the "chomp!" noise of the bolts fired against other capital ships, or the Ori planetary shield.
It would tie very nicely with "Homecoming", wherein Ba'al's small fleet attacked Anubis' ship, and had the cannons firing low yield bolts that were making that very unique noise, the same as in "Continuum", "The Sentinel" or "The Warrior".
Besides, it seems that recently, the production has decided to settle the question of where the heavy bolts should come from. It was visible in SGU's premiere: the bolts were fired from close to the small circular structures (which is where it's been thought the heavy bolts were fired from) and other emplacements which were found on all ships, not random points as it was usually done before.
Notice, though, that those CGI models were updated. They are the original Ha'tak CGI models, but with more lighting work, and those circular nodes placed on the dark superstructure.
Before that, only the newer models (which supersrtuctures have more pointy edges) had domes.
So, why simply not consider that Ba'al nerfed the vessels of his vassals? It's just the most logical solution, and would explain that fleet being forced to use those gigajoule terror guns.
