Ancients (Stargate) and what races can match/defeat them?
Among other things, I bumped into those messages:
Inquisitor Ryan wrote: Any of the 40k powers including the Orks and Tyranids.
Episky wrote: And they will do that how?
Numbers matter very little when there is such a great disparity between the technological levels of each respective side. Barring 40K wank, there's nothing really good enough to match what the Alterans or Lanteans can pull out if needs be.ian1246 wrote: lol, we ve never seen any real indicators that the Ancient population (at the height of their power) was significantly high. I.e. the city (Vis Urban or whatever) which was meant to be the jewel in the crown of their empire was made of stone... not exactly a good indication of a race with a huge-population.
Atlantis itself its fair to say is probably smaller than city's in existence today.... and that was the heart of the Lantean Empire (post plague).
There's a saying... quantity has a quality of its own. Trying to take on say... The Imperium of Man with countless trillions of people and countless Billions of heavily armed soldiers with a fleet in the 10,000's or 100,000's of strong I think would most definitely end badly for the Ancients.. especially if the Imperium of Man is magically transported to the same universe as the Ancients minus all its enemies... allowing it to concentrate everything against the Ancients.
Before looking at the 40K side, let's look at the Stargate one.
The Alterans are the ancestors to the Lanteans. The Lanteans formed the society which lived in the Pegasus galaxy, settled at least, and as far as we know, by the healthy inhabitans of Atlantis. This occured millions of years ago before our current age.
The Alterans, therefore, are those who lived before. Atlantis already existed at some point during their reign, although this cityship, which we don't even know if it were meant as a ship from the beginning, had an architecture quite different from a lot we saw from the Alterans.
The Alterans tended to prefer hiding their technology among noble and primitive materials, mostly stone. It was discrete and secluded.
When in their native galaxy, all we could see was some village stuck on the plateau of a mountain. When they left, their ship broke through the tip of the mountain. Many devices also had a more organic feel.
Let's take another example. The Dakaran device was encased inside a small rocky formation. Actually, the control chamber was somehow shielded, and the entrance hidden behind a rock wall.
A final one would be Myrrdin's (Merlin) cave. The device which would teleport the whole cave from world to world through a stargate was located inside a small stone altar. The cave itself hold nothing more advanced than, iirc, a stasis chamber, a head grabbing device and a small table which was actually used to assemble the Sangraal, from energy to matter from blueprints in one's mind.
Ian runs primarily on the certitude that if high tech exists, it must be seen everywhere, at every time. You are not, for example, allowed to have an Internet connection inside some "house" dug into a mountain.
However, based on the artworks of the now canned MMO, representing worlds which were said to be canon, we've seen a couple places which look much more like Atlantis. It's possible it was a mixed society, since there's no reason why it would be following a monolithic and dogmatic view in such domains as arts and architecture.
The Alterans disappeared as they were hit by a plague which they could do nothing about, and that despite their science and even evolutionary powers.
As such, there's little we know about them. They left some head grabbing devices here and there, and that's about it.
The Lanteans are different. They clearly moved towards a more outward display of technology.
Now this is a rough representation of the control the Lanteans had over their own galaxy:
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displa ... 71&pos=188
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displa ... 71&pos=189
Dots would likely represent colonies. I won't count them, but there's clearly way more than a hundred of them.
Small? Perhaps, yes, but spread all over the galaxy.
And most likely controlled worlds, since the Lanteans had spread life over a thousand worlds, of which at least a certain number were overseen through the satellite network and the Oracle consoles.
Sidenote: it seems that throughout subspace, there was no lag at all in communication. It's not surprising though, considering that they had built the personna swappers capable of instantenous intergalactic transmissions.
Now do the overpopulated worlds of 40K, a million, perhaps more, perhaps less, matter? Do the billions of footsoldiers matter?
No. First because they are footsoldiers, and the Lanteans, if threatened, wouldn't have to care about going down on any planet. Their level of technology would allow them to scorch any world and settle a base there or nearby after the cleansing. Their weapons and other high tech gadgetery is so advanced that nothing the 40K could bring in sufficient quantity could allow them to hope make a stand. It wouldn't matter.
Lanteans can make FTL drives so fast that they don't even need to settle on outposts particularly close to the enemy's worlds, if they're on a campaign of conquest against an obvious genocidal force.
Then, there is the fact that the Imperium of Man is a castle of cards, a glass house, only resting on the shoulders of Terra, the Astronomican and the thousands psykers the corpse Emperor eats with appetite to cast his mightly light only over 75,000 LY (and it gets rather hazy on the edges).
It's barely holding out against the Orks, Eldars, Tyranids, Chaos and Tau (yeah, no matter what some hammies might think, if the IoM was to dedicate the forces necessary to wage a full fledged war against the Tau, they'd leave themselves naked against many other enemies - I only listed the biggest ones).
Terra is so at the Lanteans' mercy it's absurd. If Earth can't be attacked head on, it still is extremely dependent of the production of many agriworlds, so that torching said worlds would screw Terra's population big times. Not to say that it would seriously rise the level of insanity: Chaos business opportunities would skyrocket. :)
It doesn't matter if every once in a while, the God Emperor has cast a super blast all over a system or what have you, because it's an outlier and, for all intents and purposes, has happened once, to an untold cost.
Anything that fails once can be retried a second time when you possess the means to repeat the operation several times.
What prevents the Lanteans from sending a ZPM to overload ontop of Terra and blast the whole system? Nothing. Perhaps some God Emperor Warp trick. Ok, let's do it again then. And again.
Terra gone, the whole empire falls. Only the worlds with moderate sized cities and able to be or become self sufficient in a short amount of time will survive.
All over the place chaos will break lose. Treachery, riots, lacks of funds and resources if only to simply defend a world, Chaos given free reign and IoM ships reduced to a crawling FTL speed, so slow you could call them immobile.
You could probably count on another couple Eyes of Terror here and there, and the Chaos Gods would be so powerful even the assumed all glorious return of the God Emperor as some kind of newborn Starchild or whatever they think would happen may not even suffice.
On that note, I'd really want to see more about all that stuff regarding the return of the GE if he dies. We know that he's fully conscious, and being quite a dick in promoting war all over his territory.
You can also let the Lanteans place stargates on key worlds and let them redo a Dakara. Perhaps they might work on a new design that allows for more ZPMs.
There are other nasty tricks which can be done through the use of stargates though. Aside from time travel, there's the rapid dying of a star by passing a wormhole through its core, or the induced supernova within less than 25 minutes by connecting that stargate to another one close to a black hole.
And that's for the brute force.
They're so insultingly post-scarcity that they could offer much more to the humans that the Imperium ever could.
We could suggest more schemy plots, like the copying and generilization of the pariah gene, since the humans' link to the Warp is only a 40K thing, and the Ancients are quite good at fiddling with life and even creating it.
Then, to finish;
Orks? Why bother? Cleanse worlds. Dakara device.
Tyranids? Spot the super fleet - Lanteans FTL sensors can scan over quite long ranges, beginning at 40+ LY as seen in "The Siege" trilogy - and just ZPM-blast or nova-blast the creepers (the nova, if they're in system). Or Dakara device. They can't "adapt" to, it's not even a virus.
That being said, some other things must be pointed out:
The Wraith. Quite a puzzle, these guys. It's obvious that as they were portrayed in the show, they could never seriously represent a decent threat.In season 1 of Atlantis in the episode "before I sleep":
"ALT-WEIR: The Atlanteans sent a delegation protected by their most powerful warships in the faint hope of negotiating a truce. One on one, the Atlantean ships were more powerful, but the Wraith were so many. After that great battle, it was only a matter of time."
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We know how "large" the Wraith fleet is... or at least can make a semi-educated guess that they probably have under 300 Hives & Maybe 1500-2000 cruisers (60 Hives detected within Atlantis's sensor range... which is what? maybe 1/5 the galaxy?)
That gives us a idea of just how small the Lantean Fleet would have been if they were outnumbered by that.
Now... I m well aware the "Lantean" era is *after* the great-plague virtually wiped out Ancient Civilisation in the Milky-Way and brought to an abrupt end their "golden" age.... which is what we are meant to be comparing other races against.
However... I can't believe that in the millions of years after the Ancients moved from the Milky Way to Pegasus they didn't have sufficient time to rebuild their civilisation or population back to pre-plague levels.... so I think trying to figure out the Ancients population or military capacity at their golden Milky-Way age would be reasonably fair to base it on what we see from the Lanteans in Pegasus.
Their mightest ships were so outclassed it wasn't funny. From the satellite weapon which could bust three hiveships with the mere charge from a naqahdah reactor Mk-I, to the fact a single drone fired from a damaged puddle jumper so badly damaged a cruiser that it had to flee, to the fact that a volley of drones against an enemy hiveship, from Sheppard's gateship, tipped the battle in favour of Todd's hiveship while he was actually being totally owned, etc.
We're facing the whole plot fiat of how a bunch of mutative cavemen suddenly managed to learn some of the best stuff from the Lanteans and kick them in the balls mighty hard.
Now, hard is all relative, because at some point, the Lanteans were winning the war ; although on the average, the Lanteans kept losing territories, but on the military side, they were always winning... it wasn't enough. They were winning the war but failing the pest control.
They had actually decided to equip their Auroras with ZPMs for overkill and send them deep into Wraith territory, and it took the Wraith months to actually capture a very few of them. Yes, Wraith did manage within months to capture ZPM-powered warships (that's just mind blogging).
We've seen what the Wraith could do with ZPMs. Todd said that they had problems to couple ZPMs to Wraith tech, due to some inherent principles to their own biotech, but once done, the superhive that one of Todd's lieutnants stole could tank drones and spot cloaked puddle jumpers.
It could also give Atlantis a run for its money, although we must be honest, Atlantis wasn't in pristine condition at the end of the show and wasn't exploiting ZPMs in the most effective way.
The Wraith were also capable of cloning Wraith drones at a high rate, with the help of ZPMs. Since the use of ZPMs is quite silly, the only thing they would provide being large levels of power, it's likely that the Wraith were literally turning energy into matter.
It also goes without saying that there's no reason why it should make a difference. All the Lanteans would have to do is put another ZPM on an Aurora or some other cruiser, all true warships (contrary to Atlantis) and beat that bad guy. Auroras with ZPM can cross the galaxy in no time, reach a sublight speed of 0.99999.... (it's said 0.999 in the show, but the time dilation factor proves that Rodney was just shortening the whole number) and decelerate at 23g as seen from the point of view of people not flying around that fast (just sitting there, in a city or a ship, actually).
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