New page I banged together

[Brian Young]

Friends,

This is a new page I banged together a few months ago, not really as part of Babtech. I don't know what I'll do with it, but some of you may be interested in reading it.

Atlantis Replicator Beam

[Vympel]

Good to see you active again Brian, a great read. (I took the liberty of amending your URL tags a bit)

EDIT: However, do you have any better shots of the circled asteroid in AotC?

If one is unsure about the scaling of these asteroids, view the following image, which shows the frame of impact of another asteroid immediately below the Millennium Falcon

I really don't think there's an asteroid there. Its just a bolt/shield interaction, from what I can see.

[Brian Young]

Well, that is a whole can of worms. Do we know the shield interaction actually causes a perfect sphere? It would make sense, but I'm not sure we've seen that.
Also, why would the shields interact with a bolt that missed by a ship length?
It is possible but it seems more logical to me that the ISD was clearing asteroids in its path as it chased the Falcon.

[Brian Young]

Oh, also, note the bolt has not finished impacting.
Of course, the visible portion may not be the whole thing, etc. But still, this is the first frame we see this flash.
And I think we see it go down to red a few frames later, but I'm not sure. I could check on that maybe tomorrow.

[Vympel]

Well, that is a whole can of worms. Do we know the shield interaction actually causes a perfect sphere? It would make sense, but I'm not sure we've seen that.
Also, why would the shields interact with a bolt that missed by a ship length?
It is possible but it seems more logical to me that the ISD was clearing asteroids in its path as it chased the Falcon.

IIRC, Mike had a theory (has some support in the ICS) that the shields are a volumetric field that extend out with gradually reducing strength from the hull, rather than dropping to zero at a predetermined point. Combined with the 'angling' of the defelctors referred to in ANH, its possible that a bolt may interact with shields depending on the angle its coming it, with the probability of interaction approaching certainty the closer it gets to the ship.

The asteroids would have to be hardly reflecting at all though. I'd have to look at the film again, but IIRC we see TIEs causing similar interactions before they reach the belt.

Good point re the bolt not finished impacting though, it didn't occur to me.

[adam_grif]

Every time people bring up seismic charges, specifically, I become irrationally angry. I'm not really sure why. They just seem far too powerful than that which should exist, shattering asteroids greater than 1KM in diameter and then the blast going on seemingly unphased by that.

I always thought it would be a better explanation if they were not DET at all, but did some funky voodoo to break covalent/metallic/what-have-you bonds that they passed near, some kind of disintegrator. The smaller asteroids seem to just poof into dust, and the larger ones just kind of slowly drift apart after breaking up. There is no visible thermal effect present, nor is there any significantly imparted momentum that I can recall, and the wave does not appear to be moving at a relative velocity high enough to account for any notable kinetic energy transfer.

What do official sources say on the matter?

[NecronLord]

For what it's worth the Lando Calrissian trilogy has a scene where it talks about the Falcon's shields being adjustable, and being by default, a field that runs a few molecules inside the hull, but that can be adjusted outwards from this. That's certainly the most explicit source I can think of offhand that talks about the Falcon's shield and suggests that it is non-spherical. Of course Phantom Menace also depicts a fighter shield as conforming roughly to its shape.

[Ford Prefect]

I always thought it would be a better explanation if they were not DET at all, but did some funky voodoo

It's a space mine described as 'seismic' and has a planar 'explosion'. It obviously uses depleted Gandalf as the explosive material.

[adam_grif]

Obviously Galdafium was always intended to be part of George Lucas' Star Wars Saga, as evidence by its inclusion in the Special Editions in the form of the Death Star explosion.

[Xon]

Friends,

This is a new page I banged together a few months ago, not really as part of Babtech. I don't know what I'll do with it, but some of you may be interested in reading it.

Atlantis Replicator Beam

Stargate shields can be fairly funky at times. A lot of times we see really funky effects will work differently on shields compared to purely enviromental effects. Ref Ha'taks and stars. In 2x01, they detonate a nuke ontop of Atlantis' shields and them cloak once the fireball goes away to fool the Wraith into thinking they self-destructed. From scaling of Atlantis you should be able to figure approximately how much big the nuke was from the resultant fireball.

Also, as far a fuel goes naqaudah is amazingly safe. Just don't pump stupid amounts of current through it(which is how a naquadah reactor works in the first place) or expose it to some forms of nuclear radiation. And don't drop it on your foot, the stuff is fucking dense.

[Chris OFarrell]

Very nice work.

I would however suggest that there are some other facts regarding the Replicator beam that need to be looked at.

I would posit that the beam is NOT a direct energy transfer weapon, and not a weapon that does damage through direct weapons fire, like say a laser. I would agree -clearly- that it has a DET component to it, but that its PRIMARY 'damge' mechanism is an exotic one designed to somehow disrupt/directly drain energy shields in Stargate, with correspondingly limited effects on anything else as a result.

Consider;

1. The beam had massive effects on shield systems. The Apollo for example, with only a couple of seconds exposure, took major shield damage, far more then just about any other weapon directed against a 304, which when taken in context with what we've seen their shields able to withstand in other engagements, is rather pointed.

2. The big one; the beam simply does NOT transfer at all much in the way of energy into Lantias oceans. If this was a laser or something equally direct, it should have caused massive vaporization effects when we see it passing across the water on its way to Atlantis. It doesn't. It causes a tiny bit of steam, and makes a little bit of a wave, as if someone was dragging a stick through the water, but thats it. Even more interesting though, is that sinking the city has a minimal effect on the beam. The asteriod was clearly thick enough to stop the beam and force it to melt/vaporize/fragment its way through the whole thing, but the ocean had no such effect. The ocean should have been the ultimate heat sink, with a hell of a lot more material to get through, material that would be constantly replacing itself, yet we can see the beam arriving at Atlantis on the bottom on the ocean, probably a great many kilometers of water over it, and McKay announces that its only absorbing a very small fraction of the beams energy.

3. I would also suggest your assumption regarding the Naquadah reactor outputs are resting on several highly questionable assumptions, the biggest being that we don't know if Carter had the time to build more Naquadah reactors, or, the raw materials to do so. She had only a matter of a day or two in terms of the timeframe to get this whole thing working, saying that 'oh she could go and build more Naquadah reactors' is rather unreasonable. You could easily hypothesize that all Naquadah reactors on-planet that could be built were already tied into the grid, Landry himself comments that they had known about the ZPM's energy issues for some time and had been working on the contingency of being able to hook the US power grid into the chair platform after all. And saying that Carter could just as easily build a Mark II reactor is also flawed; we don't know if this alternate reality had even INVENTED them as yet, let alone if Carter had the time to manufacture more of them.

Honestly, we don't have any REALLY good answers for Naquadah reactor output. We know that you can rig one to overload and generate an energy release comparable to a 20KT nuclear detonation (~80 TJ) but its impossible to say exactly how the mechanics of that work; if the reactor is consuming all the Naquadah inside in a massive explosion, or if its just the peak instantaneous output of the reactor with nowhere for the energy to go, but as the Mark II reactor is stated to operate in a state of barely controlled overload and even THAT is barely enough to power the chair platform (they later use two of them in parallel on Earth) it suggests the drone platform requires that order of magnitude to operate. And the shields clearly require a lot more, as that still doesn't come close to what Atlantis needs to power its shields.

So I would put it out there that this weapon is NOT designed to kill its target through any kind of direct energy transfer per see, although it clearly has SOME direct energy transfer component to it which burned through that asteroid, but its primary purpose and mechanism is to have a disruptive and draining effect on Stargate energy shields, and has a far more limited effect on other things, including passing through water with very little effort (and certinally not causing gigantic vaporization effects along every meter under the ocean it goes). Indirectly, it is also the perfect weapon the Replicators can use to drain the Atlantis ZPM; as while the ZPM maintains the shield, its being sucked dry in less then a day.


With all that said, I do think the page is awesome, and your conclusions about the scaling of the beam, asteroid, effects on the asteroid and such to be very VERY well put together.

[Brian Young]

Okay, this is a lot to reply to.
First, on the turbolasers, yeah I know the hypothesis about the shields being a volumetric effect, but when the Falcon turns to attack with "full power on the forward shields," several bolts pass much closer than this, and have no white sphere. So I'm not really sure about that hypothesis. I am not home now, but I hope to take a look at this later tonight. If the white sphere just disappears, I'll concede it is a shield effect. But if it spreads and turns red, then dissipates, it must be an asteroid. That is what happens to all of the asteroids. There are several of these "glowing white spheres" in that scene, so I'll have a lot to look at.

The seismic charges. They are interesting, aren't they? They certainly don't seem to exhibit effects known to modern physics. But why should they? We are talking about a mature galactic society, after all. This is obviously some form of superphysics we don't understand. Like the Death Star being millions of times more powerful than its own mass being completely converted to energy.

[Brian Young]

Just a note on the webpage itself, you are using the blue and purple colors for link and visited link. It makes the link text extremely hard to read with the black background.

I'd suggest something more like green and yellow, but anything with enough contrast to actually be read would be a nice helper there.

Thanks for the feedback. Duly noted for future reference.

[Batman]

Just to be my usual obnoxious self, the blue vs purple works perfectly well with the black background for me (and seriously, it does. Both are distinctively brighter than the background and easily distinguishable for me).
And something I noticed reading that page (nice work as always BTW, Brian)-is it me or is there a pattern of Naquada generators being generally just not powerful enough for some things but basically lasting forever, but ZPMs, while being more powerful while they last, routinely getting drained? When that should be the other way round? Naquada generators are self-contained units that run an a limited amount of onboard fuel and thus should have a limited service lifetime before they need to be replaced or at least refueled, while ZPMs don't what with them relying on Zero Point energy-they should theoretically be able to last forever. Yet it is ZPMs that tend to get treated as glorified batteries a lot of the time. Or am I merely not remembering enough of the relevant data?

WRT Atlantis and the Replicator beam, while I generally agree with Chris on the lack of interaction between the beam and the seawater it penetrated, were we ever informed just how deep down Atlantis was when on the ground? Because judging from memory (granted, not necessarily the most accurate way to do things) ambient lighting if nothing else suggested it wasn't more than a couple hundred metres.

[Brian Young]

Chris,

Long time, no see.

I think you may be over thinking the issue a bit with the beam. That is easy to do sometimes, but I always like to take a step back and look at the basics.
A laser, for instance, would travel right through the water as easily as we saw. Water is almost transparent, after all. But McKay hoped it would attenuate the beam a bit, not block it altogether. And it did, just a bit.
In scifi, we often hear of weapons designed to "drain the shields." But this really doesn't make that much sense. If it delivers enough energy to drain the shields, why would it NOT damage the city? And why wouldn't they just turn the shields off, allowing the beam to -not- damage the city?
If we apply Occam's Razor, the beam was simply enough to drain the shields, and there is really no need to outdo the writers.

With the Apollo, this simply demonstrates that Atlantis' shields are far more resilient. We don't know the power output of other beams used against that class of ship, but they must be less than the Replicators' beam.
That is a tough pill to swallow for those dedicated to Stargate, because it places the Ori, Replicators, and Asgard well below most of the other races we discuss here, where military prowess is concerned.
I just finished all 16 seasons for the first time (liked it), and watching carefully, I only saw one other thing that could contradict this. In late season 1 (I think), Earth launched 2 missiles at 2 Hatak vessels. Each missile was estimated at 1.2 gigaton yield. They failed to destroy the ships. They did detonate, because Earth was affected by EMP from the explosion.
But everything else lines up. Even Thor's flagship was powered by 4 reactors with low terawatt output. In other words, it couldn't power Slave1.
Same with Destiny, as it is powered by a few minutes of stellar radiation. It probably absorbed a few dozen terajoules, then uses that for weeks or months.
Also, note the Ori beams striking that mountain in season...10 I think. Did a lot of damage, but certainly nothing even close to, say, one seismic charge or turbolaser pulse.
The simplest explanation is that the Replicators' beam was simply among the most powerful weapons they had encountered, yet was insufficient to blast through an asteroid much less than 100 meters wide. Therefore, the asteroid was more resilient than Apollo's shields. This places all the weapons it can resist below that level.

On to building the naquadah reactors. Actually, as you said, they had known about the issue for some time, and were already preparing to plug the power grid in. If even a few naquadah reactors would do the trick, they would have done that during the "for some time" period, rather than inconveniencing the entire population.

Okay, maybe Sam wouldn't have had access right away to a MarkII reactor... But she would probably have known what they did to achieve it. Given the personnel they have, she is probably the one who did it! A few assumptions there I guess.
But in any event, MarkI reactors at least seem to be in steady supply in all the cases, and they didn't even try them. Even during that "some time" they knew they would need power. Therefore, the MarkI reactor's output must be well below the 700 gigawatts she needed.

[Brian Young]

Just to be my usual obnoxious self, the blue vs purple works perfectly well with the black background for me (and seriously, it does. Both are distinctively brighter than the background and easily distinguishable for me).
And something I noticed reading that page (nice work as always BTW, Brian)-is it me or is there a pattern of Naquada generators being generally just not powerful enough for some things but basically lasting forever, but ZPMs, while being more powerful while they last, routinely getting drained? When that should be the other way round? Naquada generators are self-contained units that run an a limited amount of onboard fuel and thus should have a limited service lifetime before they need to be replaced or at least refueled, while ZPMs don't what with them relying on Zero Point energy-they should theoretically be able to last forever. Yet it is ZPMs that tend to get treated as glorified batteries a lot of the time. Or am I merely not remembering enough of the relevant data?

WRT Atlantis and the Replicator beam, while I generally agree with Chris on the lack of interaction between the beam and the seawater it penetrated, were we ever informed just how deep down Atlantis was when on the ground? Because judging from memory (granted, not necessarily the most accurate way to do things) ambient lighting if nothing else suggested it wasn't more than a couple hundred metres.

It actually does seem that way. An excellent observation. As ZPMs require no discernible "fuel," they should last longer.

Why would the seawater absorb more of the beam than it did? I know in a book, turbolasers vaporized a poof of water, but those are again some form of superphysics, and are definitely not lasers.
The Replicators' beam was obviously not either, but still. The water is only so opaque. It is mostly transparent, and only absorbs a lot of light as you go deep.
I don't know how deep Atlantis was, because I haven't scaled the city itself. But the sunlight was still illuminating the city, so there was logically not enough water to attenuate a coherent beam.

[Brian Young]

I can provide a screenshot of Atlantis underwater with the bombardment if you guys would like. I think it will show the city illuminated by sunlight, therefore, a coherent beam would definitely penetrate that much water. I'll try to get to that later.

[Brian Young]

By the way, thanks guys for the intelligent conversation. I've been missing it.

[Batman]

A laser, for instance, would travel right through the water as easily as we saw. Water is almost transparent, after all.

In sufficient quantities (and with the impurities inherent to oceanic water) it is anything but that. If water were that transparent why can you hardly ever see the bottom of a pond more than a few metres deep if that? The US Navy has been working on laserlink communications with submerged submarines for a long time and to my knowledge hasn't made much in the way of headway due to the water absorbing most of the signal. Naturally a weapons-grade laser (especially of the power you posited) would have less trouble with that but there should also be a lot more in the way of noticeable side effects.

In scifi, we often hear of weapons designed to "drain the shields." But this really doesn't make that much sense. If it delivers enough energy to drain the shields, why would it NOT damage the city?

Presupposes that it does. I agree this should be the default position, but it's not the only one.

And why wouldn't they just turn the shields off, allowing the beam to -not- damage the city?

Presupposes they know that a)the beam will do nothing but deplete the shield and b)this actually being true. It's not either/or.
The beam could be massively more effective on shields than on matter but still do significant damage to the city (Ancient building materials, at least for interior partitions and such, can easily be breached with conservative amounts of what I presume to be modern day explosives).

If we apply Occam's Razor, the beam was simply enough to drain the shields, and there is really no need to outdo the writers.

I have to disagree there. If it was a simple DET weapon, there should have been considerably more interaction with the seawater
even if my speculation about Atlantis being nowhere as deep as Chris assumed is correct.

[Brian Young]

Even if mundane sunlight penetrated all the way to the city?

[Batman]

Even if mundane sunlight penetrated all the way to the city?

With the power levels and intensity involved? Yes, I think so. Sunlight is already pretty diffuse when it hits the surface so there's not much power that needs to be diffused, and it's being diffused over a large volume thanks to initially hitting a large area. The beam isn't going to.

And while Adam is right about transparency being frequency dependent, I'm hard pressed to find anything DET (at least using real world physics) that would basically go through all that water with little in the way of side effects yet still brute force the shield.

[Chris OFarrell]

Chris,

Long time, no see.

Its great to see you back in action, now can I preumse that all those 'coming soon!' pages on Babtech will be being updated soon?

I think you may be over thinking the issue a bit with the beam. That is easy to do sometimes, but I always like to take a step back and look at the basics.

Bah! Overthinking things, coming up with a theory that takes an easily explainable situation and involves an an overly elaborate and exotic mechanism, is what I do best!

A laser, for instance, would travel right through the water as easily as we saw. Water is almost transparent, after all. But McKay hoped it would attenuate the beam a bit, not block it altogether. And it did, just a bit.

I'm not at all sure of that, I know it would depend on what wavelength we're talking about, but if that was the case, if water was perfectly transparent, we should see the bottom on the ocean from a boat, no? Even a few meters of water absobs sufficent light energy to make it pitch black. Heck, if I recall my vauge secondery school science about this correctly, water is almost opaque to light in the RED wavelength like this beam, its the green/blue wavelengths that can actually penetrate.

But my main point is this;

If the beam is doing its damage through a direct application of energy (I'm guessing thermal?) then why isn't it flash boiling the water all the way down to Atlantis? The beam should have an enormous column of steam around it, its not a difuse, weak light source like sunlight, its a clearly coherent beam here focusing all its energy.

In scifi, we often hear of weapons designed to "drain the shields." But this really doesn't make that much sense. If it delivers enough energy to drain the shields, why would it NOT damage the city? And why wouldn't they just turn the shields off, allowing the beam to -not- damage the city?

Ah, but I never denied that there was SOME level of direct energy component to the beam, hence the (very small) amount of steam it generated when it hit the water, or its very slow drilling through the asteriod, just that it was a mostly incedental to its 'true' function and design.

If we apply Occam's Razor, the beam was simply enough to drain the shields, and there is really no need to outdo the writers.

Perhaps, but Occam's Razor can also be said to imply that *unnecessary* additions to a theory should be disgarded...but in this case I'm just saying we should look at the wider evidence and mechanics of this weapon, such as the non effect it has on water.

With the Apollo, this simply demonstrates that Atlantis' shields are far more resilient. We don't know the power output of other beams used against that class of ship, but they must be less than the Replicators' beam.

Perhaps, but we have other numbers for a 304 (and other ships in the same ballpark) shields, and they do suggest much higher numbers. For example, the catching of an extinction level solar event on its shields (albeit boosted by the Atlantis ZPM, dito 'Unending' with the Odyssey vs Asgard planet going boom) that would have fried the face of Lantia facing the sun, Daedalus's shields endurance from low orbit above a Red Giant in Daedalus variations, indirect firepower numbers from taking bombardments from Goa'uld Ha'tak with their own power calculations (based on events like Exodus, Enemies, There but for the Grace of God), numbers from 'Beachhead' with the combined firepower of the Mark IX and Free Jaffa bombardment vs the shield on the planet, and of course the fact that the SGC uses high yield Naquadah enhanced warheads for their primary missile systems.

That is a tough pill to swallow for those dedicated to Stargate, because it places the Ori, Replicators, and Asgard well below most of the other races we discuss here, where military prowess is concerned.
I just finished all 16 seasons for the first time (liked it), and watching carefully, I only saw one other thing that could contradict this. In late season 1 (I think), Earth launched 2 missiles at 2 Hatak vessels. Each missile was estimated at 1.2 gigaton yield. They failed to destroy the ships. They did detonate, because Earth was affected by EMP from the explosion.

I would dispute that they detonated simply because there was no sign of a detonation when they impacted. No flash, clear energy release (let alone destruction of the second missile only a matter of a hundred meters or two behind). We see plenty of nukes detonating in space in Stargate, and they are preaty consistent in how they look when they go up, these impacts really jsut look like the missile smashing into the shield and going 'crump' without intiating. The EMP can be explained away by the fact that Naquadah can do really weird stuff when energized sufficently, the reactor in 'Hot Zone' generated a massive EMP when overloaded, the prototype reactor generated an EMP wave sufficent to set off alarms all over the SGC despite only a tiny amount of Naquadah being in the reactor, and that the two missiles were each loaded up with a chunk of Naquadah.

The EMP effect was also relativly minor, it disrupted some exo-atmsopheric Satellites, but didn't do anything noticable on the ground, certinally nothing to screw over the US for example.

But everything else lines up. Even Thor's flagship was powered by 4 reactors with low terawatt output. In other words, it couldn't power Slave1.

I don't really count that simply because its impossible to hear the full quote, and the full context, to say nothing of the fact that Thor IIRC doesn't give a power figure, just an energy figure. Quite specifically as well, the writers clearly intended for it to start talking numbers then Jack jumps in going 'yada yada yada'. I mean the full quote could have been 'Each engine outputs a maximum of one billion kilojoules per nanosecond'...not that I think thats at all sane of course.

Same with Destiny, as it is powered by a few minutes of stellar radiation. It probably absorbed a few dozen terajoules, then uses that for weeks or months.

Um, as far as I know, we are NEVER told how the magical solar catcher thing works, are we? For all we know it could suck energy directly out of the suns core or something, we are never told the mechanism, just that the ship 'is powered by the stars themselves, solar power, in the most literal sense'. There is no evidence one way or the other to suggest how it gathers the power, or how it extracts it. We just know those triangle things lower themselves out, glow for a while, and the ship is recharged.

I would point out a slight logical problem in assuming its just absorbing the energy around it though. If we assume the ship is gathering the local energy at 100% effeciency from the sun and only takes a few minutes to fill up from just about zero power ('Light'), BUT we know its spending a lot longer then that approaching the surface of the star, riding the surface of the star and getting away meaning its shields are absorbing a LOT more then that in terms of energy absorbed...don't we have a problem? Unless the ship is gathering way more energy then just the surface area * local energy intinsity.

Also, note the Ori beams striking that mountain in season...10 I think. Did a lot of damage, but certainly nothing even close to, say, one seismic charge or turbolaser pulse.

True, but we all know TV writers have no idea what orbital bombardments SHOULD look like. :p

With that said, it opens up yet another question, as we know the SGC are producing the Mark IX Naquadriah warheads which have yields in the hundreds of gigatons to the terraton, depending on the assumptions you make of course, range. We also know they have had for some time high MT/low GT yield enhanced nukes; and the ability to use them, so why didn't they just load up on said weaposn and bitchslip the Ori or Replicators across the Galaxy, if their weapons were literally orders of magnitude greater then any defense seen yet?

The simplest explanation is that the Replicators' beam was simply among the most powerful weapons they had encountered, yet was insufficient to blast through an asteroid much less than 100 meters wide. Therefore, the asteroid was more resilient than Apollo's shields. This places all the weapons it can resist below that level.

On to building the naquadah reactors. Actually, as you said, they had known about the issue for some time, and were already preparing to plug the power grid in. If even a few naquadah reactors would do the trick, they would have done that during the "for some time" period, rather than inconveniencing the entire population.

[/quote]

Perhaps, its also not impossible that Earth had withdrawn to some degree from Galactic involvement given how far more advanced their invasion appeared to be in this reality meaning they might not have had the resources (read Naquadah) to build more. Rebuilding the entire US power grid to hook into Area-51 is a WAY harder thing to do then to build some Naquadah reactors, given that they appear to be relativly easy and cheap to build in later seasons of SG1. Even if you needed to build 50 / 100 of them, it would be a vastly easier undertaking, especially given that on THIS world, the world is fully aware of the reality of the Stargate program and it appears alien based technologies are in full production.

Recall, the original purpose of this power grid upgrade was because the chair was low on power. We know said chair can be powered by 1 or 2 Mark II reactors, each of which can provide 500-600% power for a very short time. Which would suggest 10-12 normal reactors could power it indefinetly. The fact that they didn't do this suggests either they didn't have the materials to do it, or they were just idiots.

Either/or!

Okay, maybe Sam wouldn't have had access right away to a MarkII reactor... But she would probably have known what they did to achieve it. Given the personnel they have, she is probably the one who did it! A few assumptions there I guess.

But in any event, MarkI reactors at least seem to be in steady supply in all the cases, and they didn't even try them. Even during that "some time" they knew they would need power. Therefore, the MarkI reactor's output must be well below the 700 gigawatts she needed.

I've my thoughts above, but I just had another thought.

Perhaps we might be going about this the wrong way, putting the cart before the horse, as it were. Perhaps there is a better and more direct way to lock up the energy/power levels for the Naquadah generators.

We know that the Ancient weapons platform on Siege I could be powered by a Naquadah reactor, we also know that they planed to take out all 3 Hiveships with it. Which makes you wonder what they planed to do about the Cruisers, but hey.

Second fact, we know that the beam was capable of slicing right through a Hiveship, and we get a decent sort of visual which we can probably use to estimate the volume of material melted/vaporized and work up some numbers, probably highly conservative if we just use iron or something and assume a 90% empty volume. We also know the beam blew through the ship in a matter of seconds, even if the beam was sustained for some time after, but lets just ignore that. From that, we can get a number for the energy the station could deliver, then just divide it by 3 for each Hiveship.

Third fact. The Ancient OWP explicitly was said to have a capacitor in place that stores the energy output of the Naquadah reactor for the bigass gun. Groden comments that it was 90% charged when they started poking around for the reason why the weapon wasn't coming online. The timeframe between them plugging the Naquadah reactor in and this statement wasn't very long, we only get a sequence back at Atlantis of them finding Sergeant bates has been slapped silly by a Wraith and then taking him to Becket before we had back to the satallite, we can probably assume less then an hour quite conservativly.

So if you can make a guess at how much energy was needed to dice the Hiveship as we saw, assume that it was 1/3rd the OWP's total energy in the capacitor, and assume the Naquadah reactor took one hour to build up that much energy (ignoring that it was also powering the life support, sensors, artifical gravity e.t.c) you can get a power number.

It also gets a lot more silly if you take the later events where Groden gets stuck on board so he completly powers down the satallite so the Wraith won't realise its active and not just derelict, then powers it up at the last second, taking sixty seconds to power the main weapon to fire. In which case you may well assume that the system can generate that level of energy in about a minute...
Although I'm much more inclined to think that the weapon was fully charged, but all active systems were completly powered down, and it took 60 seconds to completly initilize the systems and fire.


Just a thought...

[adam_grif]

Even aside from the supernukes that SG-1 has, we know Naquadah is tremendously powerful because Anubis flung a partially-Naquadah asteroid at Earth and it was expected to deliver Nova level energies.

[Brian Young]

Wow. I can't keep up with you guys.
Anyway, I'm home now, and have those files I promised.
I'll cover one at a time.
[urlhttp://www.babtech-onthe.net/discuss/bigasteroids.mov[/url]
This video covers the asteroid/shield flash question.
I see 6 of these flashes. Each one starts as a white near-sphere, then cools to red expanding material, then dissipates, all within a few frames, just like all the other asteroid hits. In fact, they are identical in every way but on - we don't see the asteroids themselves. Of course, they may be dark in color, and this is in space, after all.
With Quicktime, you can easily go frame by frame by using your arrow keys, forward or backward.
Actual shield interactions do produce a bright flash, but they often appear as an irregular shape, and only last a frame.
These flashes quickly change to red-hot molten mass, so unless turbolaser bolts carry large quantities of mass, the effect involves a different object.
These flashes behave exactly the way the ones do when asteroids are clearly hit.
One does hit very close to the Falcon's aft, but we still have the molten mass, so either part of the Falcon was blasted off, or this involves another mass.
All of these flashes are in the general fight path of Avenger, and we had already seen one ISD clearing asteroids from its path.

Therefore, I remain convinced these are asteroid hits.

[Brian Young]

I'm gonna get this code thing working eventually.
That file is here: http://www.babtech-onthe.net/discuss/bigasteroids.mov