sonofccn wrote:Mr. Oragahn wrote:Again, how long it takes before this measure gets implemented, say, at least, sector wise?
Days maybe before it sink through the layers of command that Replicators have a taste for boarding ship.
Seriously? Days? Nope.
For one simple reason. The GAR will only get the intel if the CIS gives them the information. The CIS will give them the information only if conditions X, Y and Z happen and that they bother do so in any reasonable amount of time measured in days.
And this perhaps *might* have a chance to happen if the CIS actually collects enough intel about the replicators.
Now, as we've seen from TPM, ROTS and TCWS, if any boarding or expected destruction is to happen, the basic solution, for any living creature (that leaves out the legions of droids) will be to reach for the pods. I'll cut on the fact that CIS leaders are presented as callous or cowards most of the time (thanks to TCWS that really makes the CIS so dumb and evil that there's no subtlety in the reading of the conflict).
What will begin as a chase for one single stupid droid or a bunch of them, supervised from the bridge by possibly the only fleshy people on board, will turn into an outbreak of more of these self replicating droids.
As usual, within the hour, hundreds of the critters will be crawling behind the walls and starting to disrupt some of the ship's systems. The rather obvious corridors and turbolifts will probably be transporting some of these bugs.
Most leaders would do anything to save such a big ship first, that is, seal doors and bring even more droids to the levels that matter.
Odds are that by the time they consider that they're dealing with a metal pest of some sort, they have to flee, which is most likely going to be too late. The bridge is on top of the ship, while the docking bays are at the equator. Simply put, the bridge is a bottleneck and is obviously going to be quickly cut from the ship's main body.
Thus, the only few FTL capable ships will already be hard to reach.
So that clearly leaves escape pods.
Those escape pods most likely don't have any FTL capacity, so they'll just keep floating in the system where the coreship was lost. Either they'll get destroyed, captured or left to rot.
Any ways, there's no realistic scenario in which a sufficiently complete level of information about what is going on will be reported fast enough.
And the OP is quite clear btw. The blocks on the surface just need to be reactivated (if they were destroyed, nothing the CIS troops would have brought back on board the coreship would have been functional). Heck, by the wording, it seems that they reactivated on their own after being brought up on board the ship.
Good enough, the Lucrehulk-class coreship happens to be full of dropships anyway, so they can send friends down there, and at the worst of things, recycle the metal from their former pals. After all, they look for materials to satisfy their main goal, to replicate.
In a way or another, days is pretty presumptuous in light of the odds stacked against the CIS ship. More than one week would obviously fit the bill adequately rather than days.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Certainly nothing says for sure that the 6 O'neills would be impotent even against the shielded ship, but it's also made very clear that the success of the interception hinges on the necessity of catching the replicator cruiser pants down, and we've seen that even in such a state, the cruiser still tanked several shots before going down
Nothing is really said either way at all, beyond T'ealc expressing some doubt, and all we know is the Asguard marshaled everything they had at hand and hit the ship at is most weakened. We can not make any projections how those ships would have faired in a "straight" fight because it never happens. Hence why I rose an eyebrow at your claim six O'neills couldn't threaten much a single Replicator ship.
They even failed to completely destroy the ship, despite how naked it was and spammed it had been. Actually what destroyed most of the ship seems to be have been some overload. The point is that ship, once shielded, would have been a considerable foe, and I doubt even one single O'neill would have been sufficient to deal with it.
In the end, Asgard ships are regarded as very potent, and superior to ships such as Ha'taks, which have demonstrated quite more than SW's most powerful warships, save perhaps the Supers and Executor-likes.
There is no doubt that that replicator cruiser would be a total rape against a small fleet of SW warships, especially if they're not Venators or Lucrehulks.
BUT... those cruisers may not appear at the beginning. So they'd be irrelevant at first, since if any containment or defense would fail early on, SW simply wouldn't have any edge to win even on the medium to longest end of the short term.
That said, we don't know the level of advancement of the replicators when they crashed.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:So I insist. That kind of ship would steamroll any warsian ship of the same tonnage, and easily take on a fleet, considering I see SW ships inferior to SG ships.
As I said if gateships have sufficent edge in firepower the Replicators will win.
They clearly do.
We've amassed sufficient documented evidence for a global firepower level for heavy capital ships in the terajoule range for most of them, possibly low petajoules for ISDs, which at best are only drawn on paper at this point.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:1. Since you don't try your best to actually make sure no replicator survives, you're leaving yourself open to them reproducing.
Yes.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:2. As you nuked the planet, the atmosphere will be full of ionized particles and, depending on the severity of the action, you may also kick up a few storms here and there. Basically, you'll be incapable of spotting anything on the surface, especially not small robots that naturally don't show up on thermal scanners and can quickly adapt to become automatically cloaked to your other scanners.
Well the storms have to stop at some point. Besides set scanners to look for areas vanishing from sensor readings.
And you set them to work through divination? Because as I pointed out, you can't see anything anymore, and the critters are already nigh impossible to spot. It's even worse if you're only leaving one probe, as you said.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:You're leaving yourself open to any unpleasant surprise, as you expect the bugs to take off the planet is some obvious fashion, as well as you expect them to behave the same way. But we know that they adapt : that's stated in the show that they form any shap/tool that would meet their needs, as since they're not totally dumb, after noticing that they're pinned on the ground, you'll have to be ready to have to deal with a shot solution out their sleeves.
I assume they will attempt to reach "swarm" levels and presumbly at some point try to leave. It is thier nature and Replicators can no more change their nature then I can mine.
Yes, but since you can't see that happen because you made a mess of at least the region where the coreship landed...
Let's remember that this is in the case the CIS manages to deal with the coreship, clean the system save for that single planet and have no replicators showing up elsewhere.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:You are assuming that the bugs, in the vicinity of any nuclear bombardment, won't decide to form packs as a nuke detonates. The light will just empower them, while they'll have time to assemble to deal with the overpressure. Since we've seen, from the incident at Orilla, that blocks can survive reentry and resume reproduction, your nuke-a-ton plan will soon prove worthless.
I see no reason to assume a one off trick performed at the command of a humaniod Replicator in part of a prepared plan to make landfall on the Asguard homeworld. Show me them being used as such in battle and I will change my mind.
As per "Enemies", they do form larger bugs.
A larger bug of the same overall volume, such as a
queen, proved that it wouldn't be entirely destroyed by a point blank detonation from a US frag grenade, a
M67 (speed of detonation: 8050 m/s). The extra mass of the queen was gone and the original bug remained, all pristine.
I believe that if a larger bug can already cope with that kind of firepower, odds are that several large bugs won't have much of an issue to survive to some degree from the overpressure front of a nuclear explosion that will obviously be bound to fail reaching any tiny little spot or space behind a mound, rock or thick wall.
Plus, the reason why bugs get destroyed is that kinetic energy is applied to blocks in heterogeneous fashion. But when they're hit by weapons that are known to have a capacity to transmit momentum over a larger area, such as staff blasts, they easily cope with it (they are pushed back but keep working).
Which is why I'm convinced that you have no choice but to blast the damned surface thoroughly. Those blocks are made of top notch material, they come from Ida. Asgards don't use crap for their ships.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:It doesn't matter if you use proton torpedoes, LCs or TLCs. You have to be complete in the destruction.
I brought up proton torpedoes as an example of how even under defended backwater burges can pull atomic yields out of their rumps, considering the omnipresence of fusion tech to their society there are likely other less orthodox manners of making big booms as well.
Okay. However proton torps still have a limited blast radius ; they're what? near a kiloton in yield for those used by X-wings like in ANH, bound to make 50~60m wide fireballs in atmosphere for example.
You'll have to spend a crap lot of them, and I doubt those forces have the necessary quantities. So TLs will be the best option.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:In "Nemesis" we saw that they had no qualms about entering a planet's atmosphere full throttle.
Actually:
CARTER
OK now, there was a specific engine in the information recordings. It controls reentry.
THOR
The deceleration drive. Yes.
CARTER
We brought an explosive device that's enhanced with elementary naquadah. Would that be enough to destroy the deceleration drive?
They had their brakes cut, the ship broke up on rentry and a solitary Bug survived. Hardly a successful landing.
No, we see the ship entering atmosphere full speed, blazing and all that,
before they blast the braking system, and there's no way the ship could have accelerated that much under its own mass after the explosion (since it was formerly calmly orbiting Earth), so most of the speed had to be from the engines.
That tells quite a lot about what the replicators can do when stubbornly focused on eating your little world.
They can push the gas pedal, either STL or FTL.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm pretty sure that that they could handle something less extreme than that.
Considering it was the barest fluke one survived in the first place unless the Replicators have become suicidal lemmings I doubt they'll go with the smashing into the planet's surface.
No but they can clearly withstand a certain level of destruction. See the impact of an asteroid for example, in deep water, at a 10° angle, covering near 90 km/s.
One bug still got out of that, while many fragments of the ship were not vaporized.
You can try a variety of asteroid impact calculators, start at 60 km/s, 10° angle, iron for density and a size of 100 m.
Like
here.
>5 E18 J range, 565 psi overpressure like 10 centimeters from the point of impact. (Yeah, that's Stargate Earth, shit explodes above or falls from the sky, just another day.)
I mean eventually you may divide that by several dozens of multi-megaton impacts if you want, it still remains damn impressive.
That gives them a capacity to make a hard landing and still have several specimen come out unscathed.
Packs of blocks that rained from the obliterated cruiser made free-fall reentry and that sufficed for the colony on Orilla to get swarmed anew.
Now I'm not saying there will be blocks on the SW ship they control, certainly not, but that gives you an idea of how durable they can be, and what they can take.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:My question is to show me proof that the replicators are known to go against targets which were too big for them to take on.
Which isn't my argument. My argument is spreading around like a bad cold may get you on many worlds but if your still struggling to take your first city a single Venator is going to ruin your day.
Hence my question. Why would they struggle? Because they took on a too complicated target. So when did we see them do that?
As far as I can remember, never.
At best you have the attack against Orilla, and it still ended with Orilla swarmed. Plus Fifth and Carter were not on this ship. The Asgards didn't report any beaming down, only debris falling.
So they had to be on another ship, like one of those six legged Millennium Falconish crafts.
Plus, even if they go for something like, say, Coruscant, what's going to stop the ship from blazing in at full speed, into the atmosphere, too fast for any interception to take place before they can launch plenty of dropships full of bugs, even before the coreship made contact with the surface?
Mr. Oragahn wrote:For some reason, I doubt that they'll immediately go for the uber BDZ option right off the bat. Especially when what you're asked to do is to bring back to the dark ages one of the most singualr planets of the galaxy.
Why? If they've already stripped entire planets, raked clean civilization and make rather particuarly clear they are a horde of technological locoust why praytell is burning a doomed world so impossible to contemplate.
I'm not considering that stage yet.
If they have already "stripped entire planets, raked clean civilization", they're at a point where SW has
already lost.
SW doesn't have any of the magic tricks the Asgards can pull to eventually keep the bugs at bay (and they always failed to completely eradicate them anyway!).
I'm looking at a case wherein, for some dumb luck and despite the charts they'd have, they'd set "foot" on a planet quite massive to take on, with some massive cities, plenty of ships and large security forces.
Or even just a place like Anaxes, Alderaan or Chandrilla. Anaxes would be funny. The navy would hate to have to blast their most precious crown. Just like Kuat, who would equally hate to have to nuke their own planet and the stations spread all across their system.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:At least, we know that they can create energy "out of the blue", in that they don't burn fuel at all.
Where is this from?
Observation of evidence.
Did you see them use any form of fuel? The materials they use aren't suitable for fuel.
The bugs just needed to pile up against a pylon in a Ha'tak control chamber to dramatically boost its power production. The blocks that gathered after Hala's star was blackholed made a ship that was glowing at its center and was self powered.
There is not a single piece of evidence that they use any form of real space fuel whatsoever. Them tapping subspace either to get energy or extract some particles which they purge of their energy is the best explanation.
They'll obviously soak up some extra energy if they can find some, it's always a plus (like the AoT queen did).
Mr. Oragahn wrote:snip long diatrabe proving sci-fi writers have no sense of scale
I'm sorry a few hours to devour a planet...does not match what we see in the show I'm afraid.
I made an estimate for a crust, which represents the smallest portion of a planet, btw.
I'm sorry, but that's fact. And I was
very conservative because of the various impeding factors I added and the slow growth rate I used for the estimate.
It does not mean they'll always use it, but there's no reason why they wouldn't do it at some point. They do show some variety in their behaviour.
When they're on some new territory, dealing with new tech, they'll reproduce as fast as possible as to obtain swarming numbers, but they'll also spend resources on cracking the tech.
When they own the tech, they actually divert so much resources to reproduction that they put all the rest on a low priority. Hence why they approached Hala slowly after having captured the three ships.
If that was the case the Milky way galaxy, which started with far more than one bug, would have almost immeditly been devoured yet this was not the case.
They do take their time, and they prioritize other tasks. But facts are facts.
When they're on a hurry to quickly grow their numbers, that is what they're capable of, and it has been demonstrated
several times.
They can decide to dramatically enhance the FTL capabilities of a starship for example. They can roam through the atmosphere of a planet like if they had planned to leave a city sized crater somewhere down there.
On the other hand, considering the speed of Asgard FTL drives and how quick they are to require assistance, and since the field was altered by the machines as to accelerate time by a hundred, the evolution the bugs went through must still have happened within a short time frame.
The calling signal constructed from Reese's protocols made the replicators remain on Hala.
Unnatural Selection wrote:
CARTER
We just came out of hyperspace a minute ago.
THOR
We dare proceed no further without risk of engaging the Replicators. You will have to continue from this point under your own ship's power.
O'NEILL
But you’re gonna wait here for us, right?
THOR
There is now another concern. Our long-range sensors have discovered that the time dilation device was indeed activated.
O'NEILL
Well, that’s good.
(pause)
It’s not good?
THOR
Time is now progressing faster within the field.
CARTER
They reversed it?
THOR
By a factor of ten squared.
O'NEILL
What is with you people? Time machines are nothing but trouble, even we know that.
TEAL'C
Clearly, the Replicators have discovered a means of utilizing the time dilation machine to serve their own purpose.
JONAS
Well, what would that purpose be?
O'NEILL
Well, I gotta tell you, this changes things.
(pause)
Carter, how does this change things?
CARTER
I don’t know, sir. I guess it doesn’t.
O'NEILL
You mean we’ve got the same problem we had an hour ago.
CARTER
Well, the difference is, in that hour, four days have passed for the Replicators. Depending on when they did this, relatively speaking, they could have experienced hundreds of years.
The trip to Hala, from Earth, took "many hours" (although O'neill speaks of one hour).
So four days passed, at least, inside the field.
Carter says at most a hundred years would have passed inside the field.
However, the last episode involving the Replicators was "Menace", the 19th episode of season 5, on a series of 22 episodes.
In the finale, "Revelation", Thor has to be rescued by SG-1 while helping Heimdall move an older Asgard specimen out from an underground lab. To force Anubis to flee, the Asgards sent 3 O'neill-class ships.
In that episode, we learn that the Asgards' most daring plan had not been put into motion yet:
Revelations wrote:
FREYR
Major Carter. General Hammond. I apologise for our absence of late but our war with the Replicators has reached a critical stage.
CARTER
Well, we might be able to help you with that.
FREYR
Yes, we received your message.
[O'Neill and Teal'c enter.]
FREYR
If, as you say, this android was responsible for creating the first generation of Replicators, it may well prove invaluable. However, it is not the only reason I have come. There has been an incident with the Goa'uld.
...
FREYR
Our ability to enforce the treaty in this galaxy will depend greatly on the outcome of our battle with the Replicators. However, in the meantime, we do have another problem. An Asgard scientist has been left stranded in the research facility beneath the surface of the planet in question. We would like you to mount a rescue mission.
...
HEIMDALL
We kept the laboratory in this galaxy to avoid the threat of the Replicators. Now we can no longer afford to wait. It is only a matter of time before the Goa'uld pinpoint our location.
...
INT—SGC BRIEFING ROOM
[Carter, O'Neill, Teal'c and Hammond are sitting around the table.]
CARTER
Their examination of the android must have yielded some positive results. Because it looks like the Asgard have finally gained the upper hand against the Replicators.
O'NEILL
What about Thor?
CARTER
They managed to remove the device from his brain but it may have been too late. Apparently he's lapsed into a coma. If they knew more about how the device works they might be able to help him. They're studying it now towards that end. Unfortunately, it's unlike anything they've ever encountered before.
Then we jump to mid-season 6, to the episodes that matter.
"Unnatural Selection", episode 12, happens right after "Prometheus".
Simply put, when they departed (perhaps one hour ago but it could be O'neill speaking in broad terms more than being exact), the field was not active, and still set to slow time down by a factor 10,000.
When they arrived at Hala, Thor was surprised that the field was up, and even noticed that things were worse, since the field was accelerating time by 100.
Considering that Asgard long range sensors are not crappy, that they easily found Prometheus the moment it flew out of the hangar and got lost in the middle of nowhere, and that the Asgards would obviously keep a constant tab on the evolution of the situation, then the idea that even a full day would have passed without the Asgards' long range sensors noticing the activation of the device is
extremely unlikely.
The whole point was to allow them to rebuild their civilization and research on the Replicators. How would their jeopardize their own new homeworld (Hala was the first planet they'd recolonize in the Othala galaxy, named after their original homeworld), their entire fleet and civilization for one big gamble on the most daring trap ever thought of, against their archenemy, the one they stated would consume the resources of their own galaxy and then take a bite at the Milky Way's, all that only not to bother keeping an eye on them 24/7?
Makes no sense.
The Asgards also are capable of sending hologram transmissions to Earth while flying in hyperspace towards another distant galaxy. They're also capable of simple long range transmissions.
Therefore, it would be rather surprising that they wouldn't have any probe of any sort constantly updating them on the situation, considering how easy it would be for them to do so in comparison to long range holo projections.
Plus the Asgards aren't liars. They're calm, cold, a bit too technical, and have never been bothered with taking pincers to explain the most sucking situation in clear, honest and straight forward terms, albeit polite, to the Tau'ri.
So Carter's high end estimation is best left out, for it has very little basis in reality. We'll notice that Thor didn't bother providing any supplementary information regarding when this field has really been activated.
The true high end is, at best, worth "many hours". That is, as long as the trip to Hala took, assuming that for some retarded reason, Thor would be incapable of knowing what's going on in the Halan system.
So that would be 23 hours of real time, 2300 hours of accelerated time, more or less 3.2 months.
However, since the Replicators were code-convinced that they were to remain on Hala, although it's not sure how long the message would last nor if it was a constant broadcast (although it was broadcast across
all known universe), the replicators would obviously do something of their blocks, and eat the planet to some degree.
Bug behaviour isn't always exactly predictable, but their abilities are known, and if they had nothing else to do, then according to their capacities, they could have covered the entire crust within a day without the TD device at all.
However, if they'd have better things to do, like capturing high tech, that is what they'd do first.
Great care was given to Baal's reckless tactics but if your numbers held such talk would be moronic in the extreme, they'd would have grown more ships than Baal ever could lose to them shorter than could be comprehended.
No because we also know that when they capture ships, they divert lots of resources towards increasing their numbers, at the expense of speed. We also know that when they're not attacked, they're not prone to be ultra aggressive. However, while it is important for them not to destroy a ship by eating too much materials from it, they can easily allow to eat a city in its entirety, since it doesn't need to move. They' probably keep some systems around though. Power plants, weapons, shields, sensors and other devices.
Replicators move to a place, use a moderate amount of forces to convert other resources
in situ and then build their numbers up while flying around slowly.
Plus at the time, the Replicators had no reason to go to Dakara since Replicarter didn't know about the place yet. So the replicators would merely eat ships and high tech places (they wouldn't even bother with low tech places at first), which means that their numbers' growth would be accelerated every time they'd capture ships.
But as Thor pointed out in "Nemesis", they'd sooner or later take on all the resources they could find. Space is still a vast place, and with many worlds to land on, plus all the Goa'uld secret locations, it's quite obvious when you think of it why it would take the Replicators weeks if not force-fed with enemy ships.
They certainly build numbers as fast as possible when they're invading a place that's quite far away or when they're exposed and therefore must quickly establish some kind of foothold.
Then there clearly is a plateau they reach. For example, they use a ship's power to increase their numbers faster, at the expense of any other task. Then they go look for the next place where artificial structures and high tech is known to exist. In "Nemesis", they went into the Milky Way for the first time (since their lineage was restarted in Ida). They went to Earth because that was a world stored in the Asgard databank, and for some reason, the only one (perhaps the Asgards or Thor himself had time to delete everything else?).
So in "Reckoning", the bugs would capture ships first and go look for traces of advanced civilizations.
Based on this methodology, they would
not eat a world.
It's even possible that they would have not eaten a single world until they'd have taken everything advanced enough that's to be taken first.
After conquering the Milky Way, they'd have access to plenty of locations holding treasures, including many Goa'uld databanks, plus the Terran databank. Most likely, there would be no reason not to know about Pegasus, Atlantis, and eventually Destiny and even the galaxy of origin of the Alterans, which at some point would bring them into the Ori's galaxy (ex-Alterans' galaxy).
A Destiny-related case would be particularly mad, because the ship (featured in SGU) had been hoping from a galaxy to another, and the Replicators would learn from the "signal from out there".
They'd discover the Planet Builders and all other races which were capable of space faring.
They'd also learn about other realities and time travel, which would mean an infinity of places to look for with more technology to munch.
Obviously, after the evolution of humanoids, ascension land would also become a tempting place to go, full of infinite knowledge, which the Replicators would absolutely drool over.
All the funky things in Atlantis would be taken by the bugs.
Atlantis would have its ascendo' machine still working, and we know the Asurans, who would obviously be merged back into replicatordom, were capable of building completely functional human bodies at will. So they could ascend clones upon clones.
But the replicators at that point would have already been interfacing with other creatures, including the Wraith, all their powers and tech.
I don't even know what they would have down with Dakara in their hands. Replicarter would have most likely wiped out anything that would have been a threat. Worse. Since we know that it can dismantle molecules, she could have literally used it to make the bugs' work easier at eating anything which could be touched by the pulse. They could eventually carry some stargates in their ships and use the Dakaran device in conjunction with any stargate, anywhere.
But, after all that, I can't be sure that they'd have even bothered eating one single world down to its core, despite the obvious presence of useful materials all over the place.
As to why we can only speculate but it is true none the less. The Replicators simply don't demostrate the full potiental implied otherwise Humanity, Gua'uld as well likely as the Asguard would have been wiped out long ago.
Yes.
Their priorities have always been different. When they have eaten enough of a ship without threatening its structure, they decide to move around. Sometimes they do both, but the point is that Replicator outbreaks have always been very short affairs in the show. Most of the time it seems they were contained by the Asgards in some way or another.
However, thinking that the galaxy was not lost is a tad delusional.
The attack took place within something like some few days at best. Replicators already were everywhere, and we only saw a miserable fraction of the attack taking place.
Check "Reckoning", you'll see that the overall attack happened in a very short timeframe. Considering the ways of the Replicators and the size of the target, it does fit.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Please define far away
Sure. two Ha'tacks in high orbit above a random alien planet. One controlled by Replicators and infecting the other, both visible on screen togather.
The infested ship fires on the other Ha'tak. They'll obviously send bugs for boarding after that, so the closer the better.
How does this make the enhanced and shielded SW ship a target that will get destroyed by a Star Wars ship that is blown up?
Mr. Oragahn wrote:We don't see everything of the battle. We don't see all the replicator ships either, yet we know that they came with several spider ships.
Occam's Razor. I can demostrate that when we see them fight they stand and slug it out like everyone else.
You're missing the point. I didn't say they didn't. That's how they use the ships they take over.
But you can't know everything, since Spider ships aren't seen doing anything, yet they were there as well.
We see only one land next to the temple. Plus we know that they either destroy enemy ships or at some point, eventually board them when their respective defenses are weakened by "traditional" fire.
They only fire darts from purebug cruisers.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Does not matter. The bugs could have completed their infestation procedure.
But it does. Your one actual observed example of them performing this "manuver" in fact doesn't show it. Fifth was happy to learn where the Asguard had set up home and hearth and steal Carter.
Fifth also was humanized and Replicarter disposed of him when she could. He was a soft and weak humanoid.
There's no reason that to infest a ship they will fire a dart in a different way. That's the point.
They behave differently between purebug ships and those they infest. For one, they use the weapons of the ships they infest, while purebug ships are seldom seen firing anything.
Only cruisers fire darts. They all seem to assume some carrier role, but then again we can't tell for sure what spider ships do in space. They could fire smaller darts, we can't tell. The one fired by the cruiser was quite large anyway, so it's possible they fire smaller ones. They likely have something to do in space other than fly around. It wouldn't be replicatorish if they wouldn't attempt to take over a spaceship in some fashion.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Apophis fired bolts but they were intercepted, while the other ship finally managed to pierce the Lok'ha'tak shields.
There's no doubt as to who won this battle.
If that is your interpentation so be but mine obviously differs and you can hardly hold it up as "evidence" for your theroy.
I can, for the reasons I gave. You just prefer to ignore them.
Apophis was
already losing in the opening ten seconds of the battle.
His ship already saw her shields holed, while anything that she fired was intercepted.
Perhaps you could consider using that same razor here?
Of course, there's always a 0.00001% chance he could win, like if for example the Replicator ship was struck by an undetected asteroid flying at 0.75c.
Occam's razor simply goes for the simplest explanation: Apophis' ship was steamrolled in little to no time, and from there it got infested by bugs.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:They were not impressed. They simply didn't consider using such a primitive weapon.
Not quite.
Small Victories wrote:THOR
The Asgard would never invent a weapon that propels small weights of iron and carbon alloys by igniting a powder of potassium nitrate charcoal and sulfur.
Thor is claiming they'd never would have invented what we would call a "gun". It isn't simply because its primitive its a design path they simply didn't go down.
He just said that they wouldn't build a primitive chemical mass driver.
They never said they wouldn't invent a mass driver at all.
He basically said that they'd never invent a weapon that propels crude projectiles at speeds limited by the obviously inefficient combustion of chemicals, which would also be greatly limited by their ammo stock.
Now let's see.
They use rockets, so they know about the concept of projected mass.
They build ships so they obviously know what it means to push something, with momentum and all that considered, and friction.
They have monitored primitive civilizations that use rocks, axes, bows and arrows.
They saw Anubis throw a big dumb rock at Earth. Were they baffled by this new esoteric super concept of momentum-based planet smasher? Nope.
They know about explosives, since they even have internal force fields preventing internal explosions from damaging their ships.
It's totally absurd, like if they wouldn't even know about impact hazards and some such.
They simply wouldn't care, bother or think about inventing a
primitive projectile launched anymore.
The point is that if they ever were to produce a mass driver, it would use funky force fields, antigravity somewhere and the projectile itself would probably be more complicated than a mere slab of iron or tungsten for example. It's just the way they do it. They simply wouldn't think of such a primitive weapon, at the infantry scale which is something they probably have not seen a need for since eons, as it would be
irrelevant.
And the best proof that it would be irrelevant is that, aside from SG-1's incredible luck and access to Dei Ex Machini, after knowing that bullets could damage bugs, they never built any rifle.
That's the proof that for what they know, which obviously is far more than the Tau'ri do since they fought the bugs constantly, they didn't implement such a thing because in the grand scheme of things, it's totally useless.
In fact, the Asgards are constantly proven right, especially in the end, since what did beat the Replicators was extremely advanced technology.
The show has demonstrated that even a base full of armed soldiers blocking corridors couldn't cope with replicators. The best humans do in all case is just defend a fixed position and unload their cartridges until they all go black, and then they're toasted, and yet would never stop the replicators.
Look at how long rifles are fired on full auto most of the time and how many bugs fall. Even a 50 rounds magazine with a 3 rounds burst mode would, in perfect accuracy and for a burst per bug, get over 16 of them down. In other words, hardly relevant.
How would that matter when dealing with invasions at the scale of starships if not cities or more?
Right, it wouldn't.
And as I pointed out, mass projectiles at the capital scale don't represent anything better than energy weapons because of shields and demonstrated capacity to cope with massive impacts.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:as I said many times to anyone who presented that argument, the rifles on the ground never won the humans any battle.
Define ground battles.
Skirmishes on the ground. Anything we've seen. We have never seen open battle fields nor how would bugs behave in such conditions. Replicators are more of an urban/close quarters warfare problem btw.
It worked for Thor's ship in Nemesis, try doing what they did with staffs and zats and see how long you'd last,...
You wouldn't last as long, that is sure. But the Asgards are not of the kind to fight the way we do. They go for intricate high tech weapons and large scale uses.
It only "worked" because SG-1 had access to Asgard techs and a complete briefing of anything they needed to know. Ultimately,
inside the ship, the humans were useless.
However, they had the idea to use explosives outside. Thor was too weak and isolated at that point to have done it alone, and the beaming devices were voluntarily sabotaged to be only capable of bringing objects inside, not outside.
The problem is that we don't know what led to the ship arriving to Earth beyond bugs getting on board and invading. We don't know how Thor got overwhelmed. The thing is, he knew what the bugs were capable of, but we don't know if it was the first time an Asgard ship was taken control of. We don't know if Thor then tried to use all forms of technology he had at his disposal to get them out of his ship. What he said demonstrates that he thought about blowing something up inside the ship, and that's pretty much all the could do. He barely had any control left over the rest of the ship.
For the Asgards, just like humans, they could have never destroyed all bugs even if the entire crew had used rifles, because the creatures' procedure is to eat the hull, move through holes, crawl behind walls, which are all the more places in starships which are absolutely shitty to reach and totally impractical.
Plus, remember that the replicators send wave after wave after they can produce lots of them. Before that point, they
avoid combat as much as possible and sneak around. See, the humans aboard the Odyssey, despite knowing very well what bugs could do, went looking for it in AoT, and couldn't locate it much. Of course, if they had rifles from get go, they would have destroyed the bug, but the bug itself was a sitting duck and formerly held inside a force field. Heck, even Carter said that it was a matter of time before it would get out of it.
So it does put into perspective the power that humans have when it comes to control an outbreak aboard their own ship.
Besides, unless I doubt the Russians carried no weapons aboard their submarine, it doesn't seem to have helped them much though.
It doesn't mean the bugs are invincible, there's always a moment when a whole potential new hive may never see the day. But the replicators tend to adopt a low profile before they get enough numbers.
... projectile weapons succesffully defended SG-command during the Reese fiasco ultimatly allowing O'neill to fataly wound the malfunction robot.
A staff shot would have actually destroyed Reese just as much. Reese was not a real replicator, just a sort of fragile factory.
The only reason behind the fact that O'neill could approach her is merely because she was talked into putting the swarming on hold, thanks to Daniel.
Words did it, in fact, not bullets.
Heck, Daniel was almost close to get the upper dialectic ground with Reese. And it was about time, because Reese was actually experiencing issues to control the bugs.
Other than that, the humans were at best only capable of avoiding being overwhelmed.
It is in fact because Reese could control them for some time that O'neill managed to move through the SGC and actually get a chance to shoot her down.
And it's a good thing that shooting her down actually deactivated all the bugs!
So, again, I'm not saying projectiles weapons don't have any effect. It's that they just don't allow humans to win against real Replicators without a considerable Deux Ex Machina in complement.
The ones built by Reese were controlled by a central system, just like the battledroids in TPM.
True Replicators would have simply not been stopped that way.
As well add Aphosis's ship in Enemies, no projectile weapons you don't live long enough to sabotoge the starship,...
They never fired a single bullet at the Replicators before they sabotaged the ship!
As a matter of fact, the moment they were seen as hostile (after the sabotage), they kept running away, shooting bugs running after them. So the moment they were shooting at bugs was completely irrelevant to the success of the sabotage, and they were so outnumbered that they had no choice but to flee as fast as possible. Had they shown any hostile behaviour before, they'd have excited the bugs and would have then been attacked, and either forced to quit the ship prematurely, or be stuck in some room and, sooner or later, killed.
as well convential weaponry allowed us to take out the Replicators on the Russian sub.
They were completely overrun in the submarine. O'neill and Teal'c were saved by a timely up-beaming.
The Replicators would have made another queen and perhaps did. But that one would be made of shitty Russian materials. :D
The only thing that stopped those replicators was the fact they'd be stuck on the sea bed, under considerable pressure, and they'd rust.
I suppose, beyond the episode itself, that the US may have decided to fire more stuff at the derelict, just to be sure.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:No need to overdo it. There is nothing brutal or savage about that.
I don't know, to charge towards the enemy as your ship rocks and heaves, to hear to sounds of battle ringing in your ear as your crew fights for their last minute, to close within spitting distance as your weapons heave city shattering volleys only to be torn apart by an all consuming geyser of light and energy...sounds brutal and savage to me.
You spoke of sacrificing that ship.
In fact, in "Reckoning", Thor was willing to blow his own ship while tailing the replicator cruiser, showing that they can think in such ways after all (just as in "Nemesis").
Carter's plan was very risky, and I'd say it only worked because CARTER!
The same CARTER! also worked against three hiveships in SGA in the most
insulting way.
To get back to Nemesis, there was no guarantee that all bugs would follow the O'neill, and there was no guarantee that they'd pick a new ship rather than the planet with the shipyard and all the construction tools which produced said ship.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Oh wait, the lolz. I completely forgot that in SW, if you surprise an enemy, you can actually land on their planet quite unmolested, as it happened at Geonosis and Coruscant.
Yep. Thank Lucas for that, or Flash Gordon but I digress, but at least Coruscant got the fleet blocked in. Better than what happened at Geonosis.
But you know, if that happened with Replicators, they'd be unstoppable.
Eventually, if they were to take control of the shield generators... damn, that's probably a worst case scenario.
They would actually survive a superlaser shot very easily:
We know that a superlaser shot that passes through a planetary shield is somehow disrupted to the point that it cannot blast a world anymore, but only scorch a continent.
Coruscant is said to have some multi-layered shield (although there was none between the fleet and the surface below, since debris from the space battle were falling and hitting the ground).
Besides, we know that a large multi-gigaton blast, the kind that would leave a big crater in the middle of Nevada, would only reinforce a bug-covered planet, and that's precisely what the levels of energy you need to scorch a continent from a single blast. Besides, the SW full planetary shields would most likely be enhanced by the Reps.
We could
speculate even further and consider that with so much bugs, they could transport the entire planet via FTL. After all, a broken Al'kesh could pass a 137 kg long asteroid through Earth.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:It is pretty much stated in the episode that the replicators launched an attack against the entire galaxy. If you watch the episode you found on Hulu, you'll see for example that Goa'uld ships were being lost in some quadrants, and Jacob said similar battles were taking place across the galaxy.
It is stated they invaded the Milky Way galaxy but we so no one else attacked but the snakeheads except Stargate command and unless you wish to make the argument that took up a signifigant amount of Replicator resources you have no grounds to dismiss the Gua'uld holding the line as a distraction while the Replicators conqure the galaxy.
I don't know what your point is, because you claimed that the Goa'uld were not useless despite using energy weapons.
If your argument is that they were useful because their ships could survive like a couple shots before being defeated, as we've seen when an infested Ha'tak attacked another Ha'tak, then I don't think we'll agree on the strategical relevancy of this capacity to hold the line for some handful minutes.
Besides, I initially pointed out that the Replicators attacked Dakara while attacking the rest of the galaxy at the same time, and Jacob had
never sent Ba'al or any System Lord any memo about not engaging the bugs. So it was an open war on all fronts. Holding the line means fighting for the defense. Leaving some worlds to be eaten is not holding the line, but that method would have postponed the complete conquest of the entire Goa'uld dominion. That was Jacob's point after all. That's why the more the Goa'uld would send ships to defend their planets and precisely hold the line instead of fleeing, the quicker the replicators would enhance their forces.
Now perhaps we don't agree on what holding the line means though, but I still consider that the Goa'uld, if fighting, would be useless.
They'd clearly bmore efficient by
not even coming anywhere close to the bugs.
Well, of course, they had no reason to believe this would be a smart thing to do, since few people in the whole galaxy knew about Dakara's little secret.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:And there are countless worlds like Naboo, barely protected at all, completely at the mercy of a warship, even more of a Lucrehulk that doesn't even have to transport living beings anymore, which will be enhanced and which can allow itself to crash to degree on the planet.
1. Yes there are.
2. No as a matter of course they do not appear to crash, what a waste of material, except by enemy action and two out of three have been fatal, or nearly so, for the Swarm.
The crash would be a waste to some degree, but it's still metal that can be eaten later on. It still allows for a massive zone of destruction and makes combat more complicated than with a clean landing, and still allows for a very large number of bugs to be deployed.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Not really. The problem with replicators is that you can't allow yourself to lose whole worlds.
You keep saying that but the episodes don't seem to agree. Baal lost several worlds, no doubt complete with cargo ships and of course the stargate, and he faired fairly okay all things considered.
Fairly OK? All Goa'ulds were losing their planets. How can that be fairly OK? Or is this just being absolute relativism of some sort, on the idea that as long Ba'al's fleet wasn't molested at Dakara, all things were fine, even if the whole world was falling apart?
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Intergalactic transit in SW is so mundane that thinking you can contain the replicators once they put fut on a world with even like a dozen FTL capable starships is absurd.
No more absurd than putting a modern city under lock and key to stop the spread of an infection.
You think you can lock a modern city from Replicators? I haven't seen anything in your random SW city that would allow for blocking Replicators.
This is also absurd.
Not to say that a planet's main city that only counts a dozen FTL capable ships is obviously going to be a modest city, for a modest planet. And a modest planet will obviously be an easy prey to the coreship or any other major ship, or even group of several cargo ships full of bugs as long as there's an equal tonnage on both sides. The bugs can even allow being outmassed, since they enhance ships.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Losing the entire galaxy within a month tops, not bad, eh?
Actually Jacob only says this in regard to the Galaxy's timetable.
Reckoning wrote:JACOB: The Replicators -- they've launched an all-out attack on the Goa'uld. If the Goa'uld can't find a way to stop them, the Replicators will easily overrun our galaxy in a matter of weeks.
However while explaining the situation to O'neill he says this:
Reckoning wrote:JACOB: The beacons stopped transmitting their signals, likely meaning those ships were either destroyed or taken over by the Replicators. (On the screen, another ship's beacon is lost.) Battles like the ones you just witnessed are taking place across the galaxy. Several Goa'uld territories are now entirely in Replicator hands. (Another ship disappears off the screen.) As I said, given the progress of these battles, the Goa'uld will be wiped out in a matter of weeks. (Another ship disappears.)
So either A) Jacob was hyperboling with the earlier statment O'niell to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation and skip his childish antics upon greeting Jacob or B) Jacob meant that the Gua'uld were the only thing hold the Replicators at bay and once they fell and the gorged bugs turned thier sights to the rest of the Galaxy they'd go off without a struggle a indeterminate time after the few weeks it took to kill the snake heads. Not overly inspiring considering how interconnected gateworlds are or how poorly defended.
Is there a point there?
Jacob says it squarely, and I don't even see what you're trying to get at there. It's quite simple: if the Goa'uld keep fighting like they do, in a matter of weeks it's all over.
How long the bugs would have taken to digest the galaxy isn't an issue, once all relevant resistance would be down.
Plus, fortress worlds actually are well defended, and their stargates blocked by codes and varying forms of shields. SG squads avoid them.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:And their inferior numbers is precisely what made the conquest projection so long, for the more you give to the replicators, the faster it goes. Jacob pretty much said it: the less you fight, the slower the replicators spread and conquer. Otherwise, their growth is "exponential"
As per the episode:
Reckoning wrote:JACOB: Jack, I'm sorry, but the more ships Baal sends out to fight, the faster the Replicators assimilate them into their own armada. Their numbers are growing exponentially. If we don't do something about it, by the time we do come up with a weapon to use against them, it may be too late.
Yes he does say Exponentially in refrence to their starships while Baal is fretting them away like a drunken sailor. I do find it interesting that even after taking worlds stealing Baal's ship is still an important factor to thier growth implying far from replicating a Replicators strenght lay in their stealing other peoples hardware.
No, it's because they take their time, especially after having taken a ship, they build their number while quite cruising towards the next target.
Once a world is taken, we don't know what they'll do. Jacob couldn't even know for sure, since the bugs' behaviour has been changing from one scenario to another. Actually all he can know is what the Tau'ri know.
Plus the galaxy being gone in a matter of weeks was not relevant, since Dakara would be gone in a matter of hours, or perhaps a day.
If the bugs had won, then they would have quite *some* time on their hands to go eat anything that could be found in 400 billion star systems and the rogue drifting objects flying in between.
The point remains that we only saw a fraction of the action that took place on a galactic scale. We don't know if they decided, after some hours of combat, to eat one or two worlds.
Reckoning wrote:JACOB: No, he's making a typical Goa'uld mistake. He's defending territory at the expense of resources. (He sighs.) We can send him a message through the undercover Tok'Ra in his midst. We could suggest a change in strategy.
O'NEILL: Like what?
JACOB: Typically, the Replicators are patient and slow-moving when not being engaged. If Baal stops aggressively fighting them and pulls back, it may give Sam more time to come up with the solution.
This strongly implies they take worlds, which Baal is aggressivly attacking, and that he still has worlds untouched by Replicators who despite having taken over planets by this point do not appear to have spread like a wild, raging infection.
It's in the text. They're patient and slow moving when not engaged. If they control a world, they won't be engaged. The Goa'uld don't attack, they only try to hold the line.
Besides, if the world they take is like a large variety of worlds in Stargate, with a few small cities or village miles away from the local stargate (if there is any), it's no wonder that it goes slowly. It's not like eating the galaxy was more urgent. It's not like we also saw all planets either.
And as usual, there's the question of how the frek the Replicator scourge could be completely eradicated with the Dakara device when the reach of the pulse was limited to the uppermost layer of the crust of a planet and its nearby orbit. Any ship in deep space, in hyperspace, outside of the galaxy, on a planet with an already active stargate, shielded stargate, broken stargate or sealed stargate, or no stargate at all, would never see the pulse.
...(over) analyzing "Reckoning" is really problematic on that point, and all people have agreed that the ending is a cheap way the writers came with to erase the bugs.
Its "resolution" literally defines Plot Fiat. Plus CARTER!,
again.
*sigh*
If at least they had written it like a ZPM was needed, and instead of a slow moving pulse, stargates simply shined very brightly, and all replicators instantly dissolved, and thanks to the ZPM, that would happen in a radius of 100 LY from any stargate, all spreading the pulse, and it would also reach subspace, then it would have made sense.
Instead we have that fancy blue pulse, just to show that something was passing through the bugs (huh, really, audience is too fucking dumb, isn't it?), and somehow the Earth populace didn't notice that blue wave passing all over the planet. Or what? It was stopped inside the SGC? Damn, that weapon is weaker than I thought.
For that, I loathe them. It's dumb and cheap writing, and that's the template we'd been used to for the rest of the franchise. That's why season 8 was really weak and should have been the last chance to end SG-1 and let the franchise breathe while the staff was rolled out.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:There's even more stuff and variety in the SW galaxy than in SG's Milky Way.
So there are actually much more reasons as to why the replicator campaign would be speeded up!
I would have to strongly disagree. The snakeheads' worlds are poorly defended indeed, how many times did SG-1 walk right up to a system lords starship factory,...
Stargates protected by shield or defenses only defeated by use of magitech.
homeworld, etc,...
The only "homeworld" we can speak of may be Chulak, at a time when Apophis was so weak that he had to find a new host by himself, going on foot through a stargate with a few Jaffa, and did it again later on, and was chased by Heru'ur (
he, who would use plenty of ships), etc.
Apophis wasn't even a System Lord, didn't have a single stargate shielded. That's quite a weak status for the one who once was Ra's nemesis and who, in a distant past, allied with Ra to actually kick Sokar while he was ruling Earth as some kind of Supreme System Lord. All that explains Apophis' survival this far is because the whole Goa'uld dominion was falling apart and the System Lords had bigger fishes to catch.
... and the Replicators have demostrated the ability to bypass gate defenses.
Only the iris as far as we've seen. There's no evidence that they'd have deactivated or walked through shielded stargates right after stepping through the event horizon. That said, they may send several waves until they'd "understand" the shield.
If your idea on thier rate of spread was correct...
It
is. It's demonstrated. I presented evidence. "Small Victories", "Enemies", "Menace", "New Order", "Ark of Truth".
All we can do is consider the strategies on a broader horizon while finding case by case conditions.
... the Gua'uld most of all should have fallen in a heartbeat,...
That's not the way the Replicators work.
It's totally possible that while Dakara was being attacked, Replicarter decided that some worlds would be eaten.
What kind of argument could be used against that? We'd never ever see the end of a planetary lunch anyway!
Plus Replicarter was put on standby at some point, which means that several attacks have been put on halt, allowing the Goa'uld to, at least, destroy other infected Ha'taks and some other smaller ships, effectively pushing back some of the invasion.
Besides, since all the replicator collective was being used to assimilate the technology, they could only apply minimal capability to deal with the regular task of invasion. You realize that the assimilation of this level of knowledge was so taxing that it effectively allowed Daniel to disrupt the bugs before they could finish computing some data and recalibrate downward the amount of processing power needed for the assimilation, allowing themselves to function normally without being at the mercy of Daniel?
It's like a PC. There are tasks that take so much memory that if you try to shut them down nicely, it takes a while before the CPU usage and memory gets properly freed. Besides, when the computer is almost on the verge of freezing, even passing simple orders to violently terminate some tasks remains atrociously laggy.
... tens of thousands of bugs pouring from their gates while shuttles slammed themselves out from the sky.
Which is possibly what happened on several worlds, as long as there were enough bugs. But again, they were just doing basic spreading while assimilating a fuckton of knowledge from Daniel to find the thing Replicarter needed.
Thing is, the SGC was attacked through the stargate, some other worlds with a stargate but no defense could have been as well. There are several worlds which had Goa'uld bases or others where there were other advanced civilizations.
The bugs would go to any world known to have Asgard relics, like Cimmeria, which had an Asgard hammer.
They'd sooner or later find about those other places. To name a few: Altair, Agnos, Bubastis, Euronda, Galar, Hebridan, Latona, Orban, etc.
Conquered small cargo ships and spider ships would have been landing as well.
... bear in my we are not talking about a single partially assimulated ship we are talking about a war fleet and it still was to take weeks to bring the snake heads to their knees.
Goa'uld ships take a couple weeks to travel very long distances (tens of thousands of c for FTL max). If the bugs just go cruisin' and multiply and keep slow-moving as long as they're not attacked, that is what would happen. Again, we don't see all, so we can't tell for sure if they didn't really push it hard on the conquest part.
However, Dakara, that was being dealt with more rapidly.
It's all up to what there was in Replicarter's head after all.
And that was under Baal's "let send fleet after fleet at the problem even through the previous waves were entirely destroyed/captured and hope something differnt happens" plan.
Ba'al was not the sole major Goa'uld and there are plenty of places for which there's no reason they should be public knowledge. There's more than many chances that several hideouts would have taken some time to be found. Explaining, alongside the slow-moving part if the Replicators are left alone most of the time, why it would take weeks for the entire Goa'uld dominion to fall.
But quite clearly, the core that would matter would easily be taken down faster than that.
Most likely, if the bugs were to eat some planet, they'd still have to find all Goa'uld places on their own. Jacob was only concerned about the Goa'uld methods on the very short term because he knew that they needed to buy time. Although it would still take weeks to get the whole galaxy conquered, that conclusion was only the logical extension of what would happen if the bugs were left to spread. But just like anyone else who was concerned about Dakara, there was no reason for him to care beyond the reality of statistics, for all would be sealed either for one side or the other in very little time. He was just pointing out what would happen, but no one would really care.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Citizens in Star Wars, like pretty much any citizen anywhere safe in Grim Dark Uhr Dur, will not want to gloriously die like heroes, nuking their ships with nukes they don't have.
No, they'll just run away, most ladies will do what they do best: screaming at the little critters, and that is all.
If eventually, with lots of bending, you may convince one or two people that some super efficient and well organized army would be able to contain the replicators despite them or their enemies being completely taken by surprise, you'll have a hard time convincing anyone that civilians will be capable of doing anything worthwhile.
Civilians are the complete trojan horse in this scenario.
Okay now this is just silly. I say up front I don't expect Civvies to offer much fight and than I posulate that if I expected such an occurance that the problem would be a trival matter because it wouldn't go anywhere. You now babble about Civvies sacrificing themselves as if I honestly expect them to.
Mm, seems I didn't read your paragraph right. Now, are you admitting that civilian ships in SW will just make matters worse? There's potentially countless millions civilian ships which are FTL capable, compared to the much narrower numbers of warships.
If Earth's military/civil ratios are of any relevance, we get a very good idea why using civilian ships will be the end of SW's galaxy in short order.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:To take over a whole galaxy, hardly damning. Plus we saw them come through some stargates. It happened right at Earth, in the SGC.
No to defeat the Gua'uld who never should have time to devise any response according to your logic. Snakehead worlds don't lack for al'keshs, tel'taks, Ha'tacks or of course stargates, all of which the Replicators should have captured and spread themselves across the galaxy before anyone knew what the hell was happening.
My logic was no more than proving that by their technical abilities, taking over a planet, if they wanted to, and turning its crust into blocks, would happen fast.
They
can do it, but would they do it? Hard to say. We never saw enough. They use high numbers to obtain great technology. Once they have numbers, they proritize the acquisition of high technology (they're easily lured by high tech), and may rush or not to get it. Once there's not much super tech left, it seems that it is then that they exploit every bit and bob to make more of themselves at an extra rate.
Their strategies are not absolutely perfect either. They're not adapting and exploring all strategies imaginable. They swing between seeking numbers and seeking technology or interesting materials.
However, we've seen that their numbers always reached a cap because they were stuck inside a ship they couldn't/shouldn't destroy.
When they spread through the SGC ("Menace", "Reckoning"), their numbers were growing very fast and continuously.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:The Eclipse is post ROTJ. It's a bit far in the future. :D
I did say years of warfare before they began being built now didn't I? :)
But I tend not to validate claims which clearly appear erroneous, therefore I leave them aside.
Like "years of warfare", when it's
decades in fact.
Besides, next post will be streamlined. :)
