On Ancient incompetence (Stargate), and 'em vs 40K

[Mr. Oragahn]

Just killing some time. I wanted to add some comments to stuff I read at SBC. The thread's title asked:



Ancients (Stargate) and what races can match/defeat them?



Among other things, I bumped into those messages:

Any of the 40k powers including the Orks and Tyranids.

And they will do that how?

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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).

...

[Mr. Oragahn]

We've seen that a formerly damaged Aurora with shields almost entirely drained could sit on top of a multigigaton blast a tank it for about 4.1 seconds.
Same Aurora, called Orion by Sheppard, later barely put back on feet, was still capable of tanking several shots from a hiveship (that had enough firepower to short out the shields of the Daedalus and do this level of damage to a planet when manned by a human crew using 50% of its power), before exploding after several dozens of seconds of bombardment.
The ruin that the first spotted Aurora was (literally only the aft half remained) could still generate enough of a showtime critical-mass blast that it entirely vaporized the two nearby Wraith cruisers (the kind that can sit on the deepest spot of the seabed of an ocean for 10K years without breaking a sweat).
And on the other hand, you have the Destiny, some science pet project built during the Alteran era, was a ship which despite standing on its last leg (and flying alone for some million years), could still take a dive into a yellow main sequence star at a reentry speed, to recharge its batteries.

In comparison, we have those pesky solar flares that hurt IoM warships (and other things too so badly (for the reminder, ships can lose nearly shielding, and unshielded suffer damage). :]

I even remember my sympathetic and generous calcs:

How much energy would a flare from something like VY Canis Majoris emit?

It's likely not going to be stellar much. If it's more powerful, it also likely to start from a larger sun spot.

Could we even compare Sol to VYCM, with some random extrapolation?
You might fiddle with each star's respective intensity, volume, mass and power. It would give you a long list and plenty of factors which you wouldn't know can be used linearly.
Then you'd associate them with Sol' low and high end flares, and see.

For example, quick one: VYCM's power: 4.3 e5 L_sol on the average.
With Sol's most powerful flare being 6 e25 J, if the energy of the flare related to power linearly, you'd get a most potent flare of 2.58 e31 J.

Notice, though, that it's possible the author forgot to put 'square' in front of kilometers, since I suspect he had a "normal" and random star in mind, similar to Sol.
But you'd still get an intensity in the e8 w/m² range anyway, iirc.

Still, let's say that the flare's cross section is a disc.
200 e9 meters across: 3.142 e22 m² (this one would be the high end due to a lesser area providing a greater intensity)
999 e9 meters across: 7.838 e23 m²

So the high end intensity would be, here, of 8.212 e8 W/m².

Now I don't know exactly the size of IoM ships, but I think a destroyer can be found at 1 km long, right?
Say it's 1 km long, 500 m high and 500 m wide, and the shield is a rectangular prism of such dimensions.
The shield's total surface area is 2.5 e6 m².
1.25 e6 m² for the exposed side.

That's 1026.5 e12 J, all energies considered (radiation and kinetic - matter is ejected at more than a thousand km/sec).
245.46 KT.

If you use intensity it gets better as long as you use blue giants, but of course they're on the high end side of the spectrum.
That said, a flare is not a CME. A flare lasts and sort of remains in place. Perhaps it's a baby CME that failed to "take off", I don't know.

Then, we enter the kingdom of games mechanics. Considering that it's supposed to happen immediately, within one turn, the question is how long a typical BFG tabletop game lasts?

Anyway, a Sol flare lasts between 24 and 48 hours. Although it's clear this is not how long the ship will be exposed to the flare (it would be very stupid to say in place, you're looking at 86,400~172,800 times the power figure from above.
With the absolutely best parameters it would be 42,415,488 kilotons.

For some reason, I seem to remember that a round is supposed to be the equivalent of ten minutes. Perhaps I'm wrong, it doesn't really matter. That's 600 times the power figure, or 147,276 kilotons.

It also depends on how fast the ship is moving. Unless they have bad acceleration abilities or are just plain stupid, you wouldn't be stuck in a solar flare for very long, maybe a minute at most if it got you at a particularly bad angle.

Well even high accelerations wouldn't allow a ship to get out of the flare if the ship is already caught inside it, unless it's somehow on the rim of said flare.
I mean, the thing could be hundreds of millions of kilometers wide.
Notice however that the figures I gave are the high ones. For one, I picked the area which would provide the highest intensity. The lowest one is lower by one OoM.
I also extrapolated from Earth's most powerful solar flare. The weakest one is like 5 OoMs lower if I recall correctly.
Which would give a difference of 6 OoMs between the high end and the low end.
The middle ground would be tone down the numbers by 3 OoMs from the maximum.
We also assume that the shields really take the full blunt of the energy. That is, part radiations, ranging from microwaves to X-rays, to fast moving particles (kinetic energy).
The thing is, no matter the shields's shape, they will not act as a complete flat wall against the particles. In general when we make KE calcs for vs debates we always disregard angle of impact, which makes the work very different. In reality the shields would have to deal with a fraction of the KE hitting them, and the point of stress would be found where the stream hits shields perpendicularly.

So with the figures at hand, anything you also extrapolated in your post was pretty much high ends.

Also, other bits of dialogue tell a different story:

ANCIENT HOLOGRAM: .-In the hope of spreading new life in a galaxy where their appeared to be none. Soon the new life grew, prospered. Here - (Hologram continues speaking.)

BECKETT: It's a Hologram. The recording loops. This is my second time through

SUMNER: What have we missed?

BECKETT: Not much.

ANCIENT HOLOGRAM: ... exchange knowledge and friendship.

*Above her head a sort of map appears.*

ANCIENT HOLOGRAM: In time a thousand worlds bore the fruit of life in this form. Then one day our people stepped foot on a dark world where a terrible enemy slept. Never before had we encountered beings with powers that rivaled our own. In our over confidence, we weren't prepared and outnumbered. The enemy fed upon defenseless human worlds like a great scourge, until finally only Atlantis remained. This city's great shield was powerful enough to withstand their terrible weapons, but here we were besieged for many years. In an offer to save the last of our kind, we submerged our great city into the ocean. The Atlantis stargate was the one and only link back to Earth from this galaxy, and those who remained used it to return to that world that was once home. There, the last survivors of Atlantis lived out the remainder of their lives. This city was left to slumber, in the hope that our kind would one day return.

Yes. The guys who could just place themselves anywhere in the galaxy, on its fringe, or even return to some place in the Milky Way and that before the rise of the Goa'uld... these guys remained there, in Pegasus, and tried to win that way. it's not the idea of traveling back and forth had not crossed their minds, since they obviously planned to return. The recorded hologram precisely shown that they were not clueless about the advantage they had.

So when you add all of this, it gets a tad irritating of hearing about "Ancient incompetence" when, clearly, the writers unwittingly created a broken situation that has more unresolved questions than is sanely acceptable.

...

[Mr. Oragahn]

Yeah, we know, the Wraith can grow ships from tapping electricity from a tower, we've seen that. Got to wonder why they didn't park those growing seeds in orbit of a star and let the energy be collected to build... god knows how many horrors. Yeah, we know, they have all sorts of stun weapons, from guns to rifles to sticks that generates waves ignoring the Wraith, to large balls (still carriable though) which can stun the entire SGC. The carvings in the Athosian cave even suggests ship-scale stun weapons.
Yeah, a single culling Dart can hold a thousand humans inside its energy-matter collector. Yeah, we know they had sentient virii capable of self-reproducing/saving themselves and turning an alien ship such as the 304 and its Asgard systems into a death trap to its own crew.

But it doesn't matter, because the Lanteans had been winning the war at some point, and from what we saw in the show, the Wraith had nothing that would let them win.

The only thing that's given is "numbers", and all we see, 10,000 years after the war, is like 60 hiveships from something like a quarter of Pegasus, and their escorting cruisers.

Such "numbers" that the Lanteans were literally thinking of using Von Neumann machines to retake the upper hand.

SHEPPARD: You wanted to see me, Colonel?

EVERETT: I was told I could learn a lot about the history of Atlantis in this room.

SHEPPARD: We haven't used it much because of the power requirements.

EVERETT: Still, I would like to see for myself how the Ancients lost the first time, try to avoid their mistakes.

SHEPPARD: Yes, sir, we could do that. [He steps to the control podium. The doors close, the lights dim, and a map of the galaxy appears.] This is the status of the Pegasus galaxy, before the Ancients encountered the Wraith. The blue stars represent systems either inhabited by or protected by the Ancients. [He turns his attention to the controls, and the map is quickly engulfed with red.] Then, this is how it looked after they fought for almost a hundred years.

EVERETT: Until Atlantis was all that was left.

SHEPPARD: Yes, sir. That's when the siege began. [The display changes to the solar system, and a model of the planet drops down between them.] For several more years, the Atlanteans were able to hold of their attackers, relying on the city shield and superior weaponry, including the weapon satellite system. [Wraith ships begin flying toward the hologram planet.] No matter how many Wraith ships they destroyed, more kept coming. They could win almost every battle, but they saw no way to win the war. So, they submerged the city, and left. [He turns off the hologram, and the lights come up.] That's it, that's the story. But the picture is pretty clear.

"No matter how many Wraith ships they destroyed, more kept coming."
"They could win almost every battle"...

The "Lantean" system
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displa ... 71&pos=195
The Wraith ships
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displa ... 71&pos=197
One single type, no cruisers, and obviously not as flat as the hiveships
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displa ... 71&pos=200

When you see how easily destroyed hiveships and cruisers are in the current era, you may guess the implied might of the Wraith spatial war industry, and keep wondering.

We also have "numbers", as explained in "Spoils of War" precisely:

TODD: Doctor McKay is quite correct. It would be impossible for a Queen to breed so many warriors all at once, except by artificial means.

SHEPPARD: What are you talkin' about?

TODD: The Queen creates a handful of warriors, each of which is then reproduced thousands of times over. This is a cloning facility.

McKAY: That's why it was key to their victory over the Ancients.

(He walks closer to Todd. Ronon steps away and goes to watch the corridor.)

McKAY: We always knew they did it with greater numbers – we just never knew where they came from.

(John looks at Todd.)

SHEPPARD: Aren't there too many Wraith in the galaxy already? A couple of weeks ago when you were fighting the Replicators, it might have made sense, but why now?

(Todd doesn't reply immediately.)

DEX: Answer the man.

TODD: We didn't use this facility during the Replicator war because we didn't have the means to power it. The energy requirements are enormous.

McKAY: ZedP.M.s. He's talking about ZedP.M.s.

TODD: I managed to acquire a few before the Replicator planet was destroyed.

SHEPPARD: And I was all set to feel bad about killing you.

TODD: My intention was to create an army to wipe out the other Wraith, but I was betrayed by one of my crew. He informed another hive of my plans.

McKAY: The one that disabled your ship.

(Todd looks at him and nods.)

McKAY: This is good news, right? It means all we have to do to shut this place down is get our hands on the ZedP.M.s.

TODD: And I know where they are. I'm sure you haven't come all this way just to rescue me, but it would be in your best interests.

SHEPPARD: Let's go.

SHORTLY AFTERWARDS. Todd leads the team through the corridors, then gestures ahead.

TODD: Through there.

SHEPPARD: We'll see if it's clear. You stay here.

(He walks on ahead, Ronon following him. Rodney turns back to Todd.)

McKAY: There's one thing I don't understand. Back when you defeated the Ancients, how did you get your hands on a ZedP.M?

TODD: The Lanteans were powerful but careless. Believing their ships were unbeatable, they sent them deeper and deeper into Wraith- controlled territory, trying to weed us out. It took months, but eventually we were able to capture three of them, each one powered by a ZeeP.M.

McKAY: At which point you brought them back here.

TODD: Within weeks, our army had grown to hundreds of times its original size. From that point on, the tide of war turned in our favour and there was nothing the Lanteans could do.

So.. erm... all they needed were more dumb drones to win the war? The kind of things that walk with minimal armour, and only matter if they can feed on several humans, which then allows them drones to turn into some kind of walking tanks, before they still die because, after all, they're wearing minimal armour and not so good weapons and are still stuck on the ground? And that at a time when there probably weren't many humans left to eat anyway? When we know that Wraith ships can be manned by skeleton crews (in Stargate terms that means less than the digits on one hand) could take care of sensors, drives, weapons and hull regeneration?

As I said earlier on, we saw what a hiveship, adapted to run with a ZPM at its core, can do, but so what? I already said that it couldn't be better than a Lantean warship powered by its own ZPM, and the Wraith only had three, which they apparently used for troop cloning... when all that mattered was space combat... wtf?

And what's that stuff about the "Dark World"?
Why people always ignore that? The Lanteans woke up some stuff and it blew up in their faces. Said stuff could literally give them a run for their money. What the hell? Did they meet a whole army of Chtulhu clones or something?
Why is it that despite supposedly being the cross product of a bug and a human, all the Wraith actually bear that near ascension power that lets them transfer life - plus some other powers like mind reading, telekinesis and huge leaping for the most powerful - with the little snick that they actually need to suck life because whatever energy they draw out of someone (that literally ages them and all that) seems to wane after a time? In other words, why do they seem to be more like Ancients gone terribly wrong, with bits of insect in them, despite the official history?
Or how the frak did Beckett so quickly find a retrovirus?

And what should we do of the fact that current hiveships sport vast caverns which have no reason to exist unless to be stuffed with something other than measly Darts?
What about, say... huge power cores?
Perhaps were they cloning humans? Why is it never said? That would at least make each Wraith potentially more stronger if they could have a decent meal before fighting. As per "The Defiant One" or "Submersion", it would make a single Wraith become a true beast.
It would also solve the whole obvious bottleneck strategy forcing the Wraith to use the Lanteans' own stargates (who surely know their own toys better than the Wraith) or orbit planets with human populations and literally expose themselves to Lantean retribution.

And if they had better tech, where did it go? Why only Keepers, plus a handful Queens and perhaps some high ranking males know about the tech and must keep an eye on it?

Why is that the death of one single Keeper, killed by humans who may have borrowed some Lantean tech (a mere life detector, oh boy the Wraith were done!), was a good enough excuse to wake up the entire race, when we know they had forced themselves into centuries-long hibernation cycles because there wasn't food, fully knowing that it would, above all, trigger a civil war because of food scarcity... which precisely happened?
Why all this turmoil, especially since we do know for a fact that said Keeper could have been revived, as per "Common Ground" and "Enemy at the Gates"?

It's just too funny how writers who seem to have a very superficial idea of what SGA should have been, may have unwittingly laid down the ground work for quite some complex shadowy political intrigue of cloak and daggers.

Points to note:

Vis-Urban = Meant to be the Milky Way Capital... it was made of stone. A major indicator of a *small* population.

Atlantis = Probably a similar size to a mid-sized city in RL Earth (Maybe smaller). I.e. 2 or 3million people maybe? Could be even just 100,000-200,000.... So...another indicator of a comparatively tiny population.

The Ark of Truth = We see the *entire* Ancient Population leave the Ori-galaxy on a single ship (albeit possibly a earlier version city-ship) heading to the Milky-Way galaxy.

My Point? We get 3 different pictures from 3 different era's (Pre-Milky Way Civilisation, Height of Milky-Way Civilisation, Post-Milky Way Civilisation)... all of which are strong indicators of a consistently small population.

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If anyone wants to try and say the Ancients have a huge population or infrastructure I d ask they point to bits in the show to support this.

Right now they d be hopelessly outnumbered by any of the 40k races.... including the Eldar (after their fall). Odds are the Imperium of Man could probably field 100+ships to every 1 ship the Ancients have... and its entirely possible the Imperial Guard (unknown Billions) would actually outnumber the amount of Ancients in existence... let alone the other countless trillions of humans....

When the numbers are more a problem than a solution, when they're for the most part dismissible cannon fodder, and when they're certainly a logistical nightmare, it's not a problem when the efficiency of one ship can easily counter all that.
I already gave other details earlier, so it's not a problem.

Indeed, they are no Forerunners. They don't build huge "dumb" things. No point. If they have to move to another galaxy, and not just some close distance from the Milky Way, they don't need to build a huge portal.
If they want to cover a planet with metal, they know Von Neumann principles, thank you.
If they want to cleanse a galaxy, a Dakara and some billions of stargates will still represent a far less massive weight of artificial structures than rings.
If they want to destroy one, in theory, it's possible that they could crack the fabric of space by hitting subspace where it hurts.
Leaving in a world stuck in a pocket, as some kind of bunker? A mere Goa'uld scout ship can hyperspace a 137 km long asteroid through Earth, and there's no need to go at any speed (the slower you go, the less power it takes btw). Don't tell me they couldn't put an entire planet, if not a whole star system into subspace or even their own invented subspace pocket, as they do with ZPMs (plus, remember the white ZPMs).
Heck, a single keyboard sized device with some terwatts of power can put an entire planet out of phase. The same device can also render an object invisible.
Warships? At least they're not shaped like swords, breaking under the feeble gravitational stress of an artificial star which even a refitted UNSC ship can graze at full speed.

Also... how exactly would the Ancients deal with other aspects of the 40k universe i.e. Chaos and its demons/general hellish creatures etc.....

Warp, even if it were to exist in other universes, would not benefit form the same link the Old Ones imposed to so many species in 40K, including the humans.
Essentially, all creatures from all other universes outside of Warhammer 40000 are blanks.
With the bonus effect of being naturally repulsive to 40K humans.

So that seriously limits the danger of anything Warp related. The Warp, outside of 40K, would most likely be considerably calmer, at least far more neutral instead of stupidly grim dark, and there would be far less incursions into realspace since even in 40Kverse, those were minimal before and/or outside of the Eye of Terror.
Any Lantean in 40Kverse wouldn't be a vessel to Daemons, because they're not connected to the Warp.

And thankfully, it seems the Gateverse distant equivalent of the Aether realm, the ascended plane, is much more stable than anything in 40K ,considering the influence of emotions... and above all, belief, regarding the bigotry of the Ori and what it generated in realspace, that is, nothing such as the Eye of Terrible Fear and such odd things.

Of course, if we start to bring the Chaos Gods to the table, perhaps should we take a look at ascension?
Moros/Myrrdin brought back a funny thing from that plane of existence, which I'm sure they'd find good use of.