Smellier than wank? Necrowank!

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Mr. Oragahn
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Smellier than wank? Necrowank!

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Jun 06, 2011 9:38 pm

Just reading this "new" thread, Necrons (Warhammer) VS. Replicators (StarGate), and just couldn't spare you that one:
Ben Who Devours wrote:I have seen Stargate, you know. And a bunch of lego spiders who eat everything are going to pose absolutely no threat whatsoever to the Necrons.

Seriously, what are they going to do? The Necrons just phase out when they get damaged enough, there's nothing to grab. Their technology is so advanced it makes Adeptus Mechanicus techpriests go violently insane from examining it. And without the Necron's technology the Replicators have no way to hurt them. Gauss weapons will just flay them at the sub-atomic level. For god's sake, humans with rifles can hold them off, Necron warriors will breeze through them. And in space, the Necrons have ships which can slap down whole 40k fleets. The only consolation for the Replicators is that the Necrons probably won't care enough to destroy them.
The normal human will simply be puzzled and hit the wall of incomprehension, reach the great divide of non-understanding.
They'll just not get it, and either keep looking for more evidence and theories, or just five up.
Besides, it's not like those techpriests were not wackos to begin with.

You know, if their tech was so advanced that merely looking at it with a microscope would drive you insane, don't you think that actually understanding their concepts after reading WH40K fluff would make your brain melt, have you foam and eat your tongue?
What's so maddening about the concept of metal that moves on its own like a pool of nanites, and which has various abilities like self repair and beaming away?

How long are they gonna pull that card, in some hope that it gives them any advantage in discussions?

Let's not stop here.
Deadguy2001 wrote: More importantly, Necron warriors have marched through 15 gigawatt lasers in Let the Galaxy Burn. I don't see anything that the Replicators can bring to bear having that level of firepower on an infantry scale.
Hardly. They get downed by weapons largely inferior in firepower, so let's not get fooled by such nonsense. The Necrons would not get through without going under specific circumstances.

Let the Galaxy Burn: Deus Ex Mechanicus wrote:
The massed fire of the Praetorians was overwhelming the south-west group, the red triangles dimmed in quick succession, some disappearing altogether. Only two of the Praetorian-cogs showed the solid black of non function, but even as Lakius watched one of the red triangles brightened momentarily and its shot turned another icon solid black. On the west the enemy was at the laser mesh, advancing through it in a tight wedge and destroying the spines with tightly controlled salvoes. Red lines flickered across the interloper's progress as detection beams were broken and the continuous energy flow of the mesh jumped to full output, searing through the ranks. Time and again the icons dimmed but recovered, they would soon break through. The northern group began to move.
Tripwires were broken and triggered the laser mesh. When the lasers were fired, the Necron warriors were destroyed. But they were also destroying the mesh's spines as well.
Let the Galaxy Burn: Deus Ex Mechanicus wrote:
If either the western or southern groups were not completely eliminated the foe would undoubtedly get a foothold inside the camp. The trouble was the Praetorians moving north to parry the third thrust numbered only six; for the first time they would not outnumber the enemy.
'Borr, set the northern face of the mesh to maximum sensitivity.’ Lakius said.
'But the spines will fire continuously, dissipate into the windblown dust!'
'Mica dust.’ Lakius corrected.
Borr grinned and began a rite of supplication.
They had a 15 GW laser mesh for the whole camp, powered by two groups of three generators. That's 15 GW divided across the entire periphery of the camp. It's the whole laser mesh which was rated at 15 GW, not the countless laser banks that were part of this deadly defensive zone. Units could walk through it, but would get taken down as they'd cut the detection beams. The Necron warriors would be repaired until they'd sustain too much damage.
Let the Galaxy Burn: Deus Ex Mechanicus wrote:
The Praetorians fought well on the northern side. They used a storm bunker to narrow the angles so they only fought part of the enemy at once. Clattering forward on armoured treads, a salvo of missiles scorched across the void-black sky and cut down two enemy machines as they emerged from the las-mesh. Lightning-crack discharges of plasma burned another, but a critical overheat damaged one of the servitors as his shoulder-mounted plasma cannon suffered meltdown. Five faced five. The storm bunker was being torn to pieces, its adamantium sheath impossibly burning with metal-fires. With a groan it collapsed in on itself, revealing more of the foe at the inner edge of the mesh. The Praetorians lost two of their number for only one of the enemy. Three armoured servitors were left against four skull-faced killers. The aliens grinned their hideous, fixed grins as they stepped forward. Without warning the laser mesh crackled into a frenzy of discharges. Gigawatts of energy were dissipated into the swirling dust particles, pointlessly scattering their power in flashes of heat and light.
The flashes were harmless, but powerful enough to temporarily blind the optics of the nearby skeleto-machines. Their fire slackened momentarily and the Praetorians used the opportunity to halt and let rip with every weapon in their arsenals; bolter shells, missiles and plasma carved through the silhouetted enemy.
Osil gaped at the scopes. A moment ago he had thought he was going to be killed, but instead they had won.
They had won.
No clear information is available to determine the size of the camp. I won't bother going for details and extrapolations. Let's just give some figures about the size of that las-mesh.
Explorators camp;
diameter : circumference

100 m : 314.16 m
200 m : 628.32 m
300 m : 942.48 m
400 m : 1,256.64 m

Plus, the laser may deliver only a fraction of energy into the material. 1 GW is 1 GJ per second. But the expansion of material as it's hit by the first photons will not wait a full second. It will begin within a fraction of it, and expand so fast that most of the laser will pass through a cloud of expanding gas and debris. Another pack of photons may manage to hit some more metal that's not been ripped apart yet, but it's still going to happen under a small fraction of a second.
So not only the overall power is divided over that much circumference (and details seem to indicate that the mesh is not just a wall but more like a no man's land zone, albeit narrow), but the amount of energy the Necrons will receive won't be anywhere close to a full second burst.

Plus such intensities would be ought to blast them apart and send the bits flying all over the place, since bolters are good enough to ruin them.
Yet the description of the battle shows that on the info-display, the triangles representing the warriors dim and even disappear, only to reactivate. That's more like each warrior is only gutted or amputated of a limb or something of the same vein. Nowhere like a full blast. I mean, even a multi-megajoule impact would produce so much heat, so violently, that a Necron warrior would be thrown into the air, rolling away like some rag-doll.



And then we come to the Replicators. I'm not saying they'd win. It's clear that the Replicators lack ranged weapons of their own. They borrow them from their enemies, and borrowing stuff from the Necron is very hard. Not impossible, but very hard nonetheless. It depends on the flavour of Necron forces.

Now, perhaps this may sound like a no limits fallacy, but what should think about the Gauss flayers the Necron warriors use? Those weapons rip apart atoms. Amazingly enough, the Replicators have been shown to withstand weapon fire from zat guns. Three bolts from one of those exotic hand guns can disintegrate a crate of a tall and muscular man and his gear.
In that, they're superior to the ARG weapons.
How long will it take for the bugs to start ignoring the Gauss weapons?

To a lesser degree, both kinds of Replicators have also adapted to devices that would disrupt the bond between their nanites, but since this is relative to a scale that's greater than of the atom, and probably involves a technobabble energy field of some sort, it's not as much relevant.

Replicators come in various sizes, although we've mainly seen the normal bugs. But there have been slightly smaller bugs, larger ones with a carapace. Then there have been the ships. Although the jellyfish cruisers (I named that way because they look like jellyfishes) are too big, we've seen the ships that look like Millennium Falcons with six legs (1). Bugships capable of reentry and landing, as well as hyperspacing while a couple dozen meters above the ground.
They don't shoot anything, but clearly can transport even more bugs very quickly. Those ships are capable of teleporting stuff.

Besides, regarding time dilation capabilities, it's true that they've not built one of their own thus far.
But would it be that hard? We can speculate that it requires neutronium, that is, a high density metal, but which isn't going to be absurdly dense and heavy anyway.
And they need to understand the working of this system.
Well, guess what? Not only have they understood the working of the time dilation device the Asgards used on Halla, but the Replicators modified it to suit their own need by changing the time dilation ratios, and they later on even altered it to produce a field allowing them to get free of a blackhole's attraction, which baffled Thor... well, his poker face didn't change much, it's what he said.
From that perspective, it's hard to argue that after having done all that, Replicators couldn't build one of their own.
The thing is, Replicators are quite straight forward but not overly complex. They can take control of alien systems, but they won't try to replicate them.
That makes them different form their cousins, since those humanoid Replicators from Pegasus actually had a motive and an interest in mimicking Lantean technology and way of living.

So, time dilation shouldn't be considered to be a tech the Replicators use, but it's equally absurd to consider that they just don't know how to build one.
They just don't build fancy stuff much because that's not how they operate. They are single minded parasites that multiply. If there's alien technology lying around, they try to take control of it and use it, but they generally won't reproduce it.

So if they were to ever capture some Necron structure, they'd use it as much as they could, perhaps attempting to expand its power feed like they did on Ha'taks.


In space, it's ought to be in favour of the Replicators.
Necron ships don't have shields bar a main super weapon, the World Engine.
All the better!
They also use energy weapons.
Replicator ships have shields, and the cruisers fire projectiles which are used to infiltrate targets. We've seen in the novels that the Necron ships don't really intercept anything.

I won't bother with the usual silly yields. I'll just point out that a Ha'tak, which is quite a powerful ship on its own, by far much superior to what you'd obtain if you scaled up the usual subpar crafts the Jaffa get, still pales in front of a Replicator ship power. See, a mere pile of bugs stacked onto a control rod, inside the power control room of a Ha'tak, were providing far more power than the Ha'tak itself could, and that allowed the ship to return to the Milky Way from some distant galaxy in a hour or less, while it would have taken 125 years if I recall correctly.

With its shields up, a Replicator cruiser would have been extremely hard to take down, explaining why the Asgards used 6 O'neils to take down one single cruiser... and even that didn't prove enough.


There are more puzzling claims.
Deadguy2001 wrote:
Vlad III wrote: Were you watching the same show as me?

The replicators have shown to adapt to any energy shield in existence in short order until they could just walk through them. It never took more than a hour to do so and that was done by a SINGLE replicator with no hive mind or brothers to help.

alguLoD. Necrons have shields and what is so special about Necrodermis? It has been shown to be destroyed. It is enough.
Not by the relatively weak sauce weaponry of the replicators. Tell me, how many Replicator ships have landed on a main sequence star?
Land on a main sequence star? Is he stupid or what?
Besides, even a Ha'tak can stay in close orbit of a blue giant for hours, which means it can easily cope with taking a bath into a photosphere. Even the hull could offer enough protection for an hour. Heck, Death Gliders have flown relatively close to a main sequence star slightly hotter than ours without getting damaged.
And a mere Goa'uld shield strapped onto a stargate could protect said stargate from entering the photosphere of that same star, at 5% of c, and the gate kept working for more than twenty minutes.
The crippled Destiny flew into the photosphere of main sequence stars, bright yellow and blue ones.

Are we seriously going to think that Replicator ships can't cope with anything like that? When by definition, they actually do very well when it comes to absorbing radiations and heat from plasma on hull contact?
Just to put things into perspective, a single bog standard bug can tanks just as many shots from a serpent staff as it wants. It just drains the energy, and that no matter the dialed yield of the weapon in question, which on the average are hard to aim with, but quite potent (at times they even break boulders, go through people in impressive geysers of flames, and put fist sized holes in metal, stone and concrete).

In fact, is there any proof that whatever the Necrons fire at the Replicators will harm them, be it those energy arcs powered by solar radiations, or those "star pulses"?
I doubt it.
The lightning arc is literally stored solar energy. Thank you, the Replicators will eat more of that.
Star pulses are just energy. Thank you, again.
Gauss particle whips are some fancy mix of energetic particles and magnetic fields. Again, thank you for the coffee.
Portals: totally useless. Not only Replicators can block teleportation, but they only work when shields are down. Not to say that there's not much space inside a Replicator ship to begin with: the ship is just blocks stacked together, with at best, for all we know, one single, small and cramped room capable of house like a dozen humans.
Sepulchres will be totally useless, there's nothing to do with a weapon that frightens people via their minds.

In fact, with all this evidence laid before our eyes, all Necron ships will be largely impotent and easy preys.

See here for more info on Necron ships.

As long as the Replicators can win in space, the rest is just a matter of pest control.

I also noticed a certain reliance on game mechanics. I thought this was a big no no, but apparently when it comes to Warhammer 40000, anything is good in order to win.
Still, let's notice that necrodermis is less of a wonder when it comes to solid impacts :
REACTIVE HULLS
Necron ships are made of a unique sentient
metal. To represent these factors all Necron
ships with a reactive hull are immune to
Damage, Leadership and Movement modifiers
from solar flares, radiation, gas clouds and blast
markers. All Necron ships are Armour 6,
representing the difficulty of targeting them,
and in addition receive a special save against
each hit to represent the hull’s adaptive
qualities. The save is 6+ for Raiders, 5+ for
harvesters and Scythes and 4+ for tombships. If
the Necron vessel uses Brace for Impact then
the save is modified to 2+ but its stealth
properties are instantly compromised. A Necron
ship on Brace for Impact orders is reduced to
Armour 4. Last, but by no means least, all
Necron Critical repairs are made on 4 or more
as the sentient metal attempts to self repair.
Good thing that the Replicators essentially do that: fire large darts at enemy ships.
Also, let's again remember that other civilizations' ships suffer from gases and solar flares.
Besides, the old Asgard ships had a capacity to disable the systems of the SGC. Replicators would therefore already be capable of dealing with such systems. That's in regards to the old "Energy Drain" weapon, which seems to have been left out of the official online BFG supplement.
Replicator acid is also capable of dissolving metals quite faster than a mere solar flare can damage a hull. Living or not, it's going to be a meal for the critters.

On another note, a gigatonne level explosion managed to get rid of the Necron tomb in the Caves of Ice novel. Just saying, in case some would like to argue that Necron structures can cope with that kind of energies or more.

Finally, there won't be many creatures to Harvest when dealing with the Replicators.

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