[SG1]Anyone else find this frustrating (Possible Spoilers for Ethon/Inferno/Allies)

I agree with you but don't you find it anoying that they don't ever seem to really be trying to destroy their targets, even when they are supposed to be destroying their targets. In the Antartic fight, I don't think the Earth ship fired a single missile at any ships, just the rail guns, even once it was in orbit. And when the other ship fights the Wraith, we see that it actualy takes a while for the missiles to be intercepted and that a good spamming should get at least a couple of missiles through to the hulls of the hive ships.

anubis's ships shields were 40% less effective than normal, that set them at a level even below normal goa'uld shields they went down easily under the full weight of several ha'taks all fireing their secondary weapon arrays at once.

as for the prommie she didnt use enhanced nukes, or any nukes at all it was using simple air to air missiles refit for space. so far the only ships to use nukes was the daedalus who also has the largest track record of destroyed ships.

earth has the several goa'uld weapons but you also have to take into account that they need to reverse engineer those weapons and then build their own. the goa'uld weapons are complex comparitive to anything earth has so its only natural that they havent built their own yet, though its also somewhat annoying since you would think they would loot a ha'taks main cannon or something.

as for the length of time in space, the goa'uld have been around alot longer than 10,000 years. they were pushed off of earth 5000 years ago, and had been on earth for probably 5000 years before that. at that time they already had ha'taks, as it was stated in meridian that Ra had taken the gate in his Ha'tak. and didnt Thor once say that there was the alliance of the four great races against the goa'uld, not sure if he did i'll have to watch that episode again, but if he did that means the goa'uld have been in space for millions of years as the ancients left the galaxy 3 to 5 million years ago.

overall earth ships could be cool if they worked on them a little, even Vala only comented on the shields of earth ships, by they way she talked it sounded liek she thought the ships were fairly weak.

During the Anubis attack, they state somewhere weapons were knocked out, which is why Hammond did the RammingSpeedtm attack.

I don't think the Alliance was meant specifically against the Goa'uld, but since those 4 were the most advanced and generally most advanced, they just decided they'd be allies.

They weren't knocked out, they had expended all their ordinance.

I'm still thinking the Plasma weapon the SGC is developing will make an appearance soon. Once they have that their firepower issues should be resolved.

No proof the Ha'taks were firing their secondary weapons. All indicates they were firing all they had, which seems to be very little.

what i meant by secondary wasnt actually secondary weapons. from what i understand goa'uld weapons are somewhat wierd, you can either shift full weapons power to one weapon and fire slowly with large powerful shots or you can shift power to the full weapons grid and fire lots of weaker shots from different weapons emplacments. if this is the case then it is possible that the goa'uld weapons system is fairly advanced considering that any of their weapons ports can have full power diverted to it giving them a full firing arc of full power if need be.

the reason i can think of that ba'al used weaker but more instead of powerful but less amount of shots was that he had made a deal to leave the planet untouched. also he probably knew that anubis's ship wouldnt survive long and that he didnt need to use full power and of course he wanted to gloat about his victory. also i believe he asked for anubis's surrender, how do we know he didnt want to take the tech from Anubis's ship for himself. if that was the case he wouldnt fire full power weapons in the hopes of obtaining the vessel for himself.

there's just to many factors to gauge why ba'al used weaker than full power weapons. you also have to take into account that maybe if he used the weaker blast but was able to fire more it would acctually bring more firepower to bear than firing single large shots.

Perhaps he thought is would be better to miss with a low power shot than with a high one.

Another thing is that Anubis's shields would only be 40% as effective in the atmosphere. If Ba'al might have had an agreement not to harm the planet and may have wanted to leave the planet unharmed because he wanted to know what Anubis found so fascinating about this planet. Getting back on the topic of this post, the 40% could not just mean shield power, but also how quickly the shield oscillates. If the shields work like Goa'uld force fields, they can be run through in between oscillations if someone is fast enough, as demonstrated by SG-1 in the episode with those arm bands that increased their speed and strength temporarily. The holes could have been bigger on Anubis's ship and have lasted longer as well. Don't forget that we saw some blasts go through the shields and strike the hull while others were still being blocked by the shields. Maybe one of those blasts may have struck a hit on a shield generator and taken down the shield. That way, Ba'al can destroy Anubis's ship while leaving the planet unharmed.

from what we understand the shields used inside the ships and the shields used outside the ships are different types of shields. only natural considering that the goa'uld had to have scavanged several different types of shields over the years and used them in the areas they felt they would be best at.

im assuming that the blasts that went through the shields were hitting areas that shields were failing at.

There are quite a few events where we see Ha'taks firing at a planets surface. All of them displayed very, very weak explosions. Very, very little damage. It wasn't just that episode.

There is no way in hell a nuke would do nothing to a Ha'tak. Since we've seen these ships be affected by subkiloton level firepower. And a 1.2GT mine would outright destroy the bloody things.

That's my point.

Ok.

Just to make a few points.

1. Missiles are designed to be used in mass satuation attacks to get around enemy point defences. Wraith Hiveships/Cruisers would easily die to any real attack by a Daedalus or Prometheus class ship (strangly Prometheus's missiles look to be significantly faster then those on Daedalus).

The Problem is Caldwell is an idiot who doesn't understand this. He fires two missiles at the Hiveships the first time he engages. One is shot down, one is stoped only by a Dart raming it. He then fires two again at an enemy alerted to the tactic and even then they get rather close, despite dozens of darts screening said hiveships and cruisers.

If he had just fired 4-5 missiles at once, he would have vaporised the hiveship easily. And we know they are nuclear tipped warheads. Hell, the fact that the F-302's in Allies can get right upto a pair of Hiveships should mean strike craft will have a field day. (I look forward to Wraith hiveships comming up against a wing of Al'Kesh who decloak right on top of them and bomb/straff the crap out of them )

2. The missiles *do* detonate on shields. It's just that Prometheus didn't use Nuclear missiles against the Ori weapons platform, nor did the F-302's which in all probability were just carrying standard anti fighter missiles. They didn't need to use Nukes initialy as the Platform was supposed to have no defences. Then they hesitated and got their weapons disabled by the first strike. And after that point, they were screwed.

3. Railguns on the ships are point defence weapons only. And they are DEADLY effective in that role. They are not designed for anti ship work, I have no idea why Caldwell keeps using them in that role. He is just wasting ammo afterall. But I guess he likes returning fire or something.

4. Oddysey fired on the three Lucian Ha'Tak's with railguns only because they wern't trying to destroy them. All they were trying to do was get their attention, get them firing on the Oddysey and thus split their firepower away from Ba'al's Ha'Tak, which they were trying to save (or at least delay destruction of).

The missiles on Earth ships are perfectly effective weapons systems. It's just that not one frigen person on said ships uses them effectivly as they should be used.

I blaim the Daedalus for that. She was the first time we *really* saw a Capital ship hodown with Earth ships. With her Asgard shields she was able to yawn at bombardments from ships an order of magnitude greater. The Writers at that point realise they have a monseter. If this Earth ship can laugh at a race that slaped around the Ancients, they have a problem. So they first nerfed the missiles by making Caldwell an idiot in using them, then they nerfed the Asgard transporter as a delivery system...leaving them nothing.

Enemies and Beachhead indicate differently.

Beachhead -

1st - No way to quantify the fire power of the Ha'taks.
2nd - IIRC When they first started firing the shield did not grown, only after the nuke of doom was activated (which provided most of the energy to engulf the planet with the shield) is when the Ha'taks fire had any effect on the shield at all.
So:
Ha'taks fire - no effect on shield. Ha'taks stop firing.
Nuke detonates - shield grows to extend IIRC 75% of planet.
Ha'taks open fire again - shield grows to engulf the planet.

Back to my first point, no way to quantify the firepower.

Enemies -

I don't remember any firepower display in Enemies that could quantify their weapons output.

Unless your talking about the shields withstanding the coronasphere of a local blue giant. What kind of power would the shields have to outstand in that situation?

Actually nope, the yield of the nuke can be estimated, Carter said that gave the shield 70% of the power it needed, the Ha'taks thus provided the other 30%, number of shots / ((Yield of nuke/ 70) * 30) gives weapons yield.

Depending on exactly which type of blue star it was, between low GT and low TT (IIRC on the high one). The most likely would be low-mid triple digit GT given apporximate guess on star type.

The problem as I stated above is that we see no change when they first fire.
The shield could very much so require energy on a exponantial decay type curve.
Ex: To get the shield from 0% to 50% you might require 100GTs/sec
from 50% to 60% 1GTs/sec
from 60% to 70% 10Mt/sec
from 70% to 80% 100Kt/sec
etc...

This type of interaction is supported by the first opening salvo of the Ha'taks, which did not change the shield at all.

So that episode alone goes against what we've seen in about 7-8 other episodes where we can somewhat quantify ha'tak's weapons.

Another question, was the shields modified in anyway? Did Sam modify the shields?

no the shield wasnt modified, it was a standard ha'tak shield.

Sorry, but it doesn't work with the dialouge, Carter simply siad the nuke gave 70% of the energy, the others stuff the remaining 30%, thats of the energy required, not 'ran the shield up to 70% of capacity' of some such that could allow for it.

In almost every other case where Ha'tak fire has been seen, there are quite reasonable explanations for their lower level of firepower in ground bombardments (mainly stemming around a desire to capture the place intact). A couple of other incidents (Apophis intending to destroy Earth's cities in short order, Sokar's bombarding of Netu, Osiris blowing open the Asguard lab, etc) support the Beachhead level of fire.

Also of interest is the fact that the Beachhead derived firepower calcs at low, med and high, correspond almost perfectly to the Enemies shields calcs on low, med and high, ie, the weapons fire is of an order that corresponds to needing a certain amount of shots to break the shields, which amount is approximately what is seen on screen.

Nope, they just got them up, of further note is that Goa'uld ship hulls are made of naquada to a large extent, and said hull was able to protect them for 1 hour, the shields, conversely, provided 10 hours protection, now think of the energy the Stargate can store, scale up to a Goa'uld mothership (which is not pure naquada like the stargate, but has a large amount of it).

EDIT: Also, at the Trekkies 'preferred' level of firepower for SG-1 (not that you are one), the Goa'uld ships somehow are destroyed by energy levels much less than they withstand during standard acceleration.

thats because the trekkies are mad that theres another universe that can crush federation ships.

I've seen every single ship fight in this manner, no matter the commanding officer, fire a couple of missiles and continualy fire rail guns. The only two exceptions are when Hammond is in command and he doesn't use missiles at all, only rail guns. Then when only Carter is awake, or something, and everyone else is missing and she fires off five missiles, in rapid succession, at an alien ship that shoots the missiles down as fast as they're fired.

Indeed.

One thing that I've been considering as to why the Daedalus and the Odyssey may not saturate enemy starships with missiles is because they may still have a limited number of missiles and they won't want to waste them unless they absolutely have to. The Wraith ships don't have shields, but do have good point-defense systems in the form of Darts, so the railguns, while not nearly as damaging as missiles, are the weapon of choice since they could strike a weakness like a power relay or a weapons port. Caldwell can't afford to waste too many missiles if he doesn't have that many to begin with. Lack of available missiles could also explain why the Odyssey didn't want to use missiles against the Lucian Alliance Hataks. They just wanted to buy some time to get the gates and SG-1 out of Ba'al's ship, not have a protracted firefight against three Hataks where they'd be wasting valuable missiles they may need to use against Ori warships in the future. Firing the railguns got the Lucians' attention and the Odyssey's shields were able to stand up to the fire of the Lucian Alliance Hataks.

The Prometheus didn't have railguns at that point in time. Just some kind of more conventional projectile cannons.

Hammond DID fire missiles at Anubis's ships and the Gliders/Al'Kesh. To the point that they were completly out of ammo by the time they were on final approach to Anubis's Mothership.

It was before everyone went missing. It was also four missiles which were traveling absurdly slow compared to every other instance of Prometheus's weapons we've seen and even then they were barely shot down before reaching the target. Ronson also only fired four missiles rather then the six that were available.

You know Chris, "They had all of these awesome weapons and technologies but were too stupid to use them" is the kind of sad not-argument that Warsies are often ridiculed for.

They fired bright orange shots just like those seen from all of the rail gun shots in SGA and when the new ship fought, rather distracted, in the last episode. I had originally confused them with human made, Gou'ald based, weapons.

If you have shots of the ship firing missiles, I would be very very happy to see them. I'm not being sarcastic either, I would really like to see myself proved wrong in this instance. When I saw that battle, I took the out of ammo statement to mean they were out whatever their guns were using and I had assumed they never carried any missiles in that battle.

[edit] I'm suprised your site doesn't show specific example images of weapons fire for the new ship, since you have such images for the old design.
http://www.stargate-tech.net/starships/earth/x303.htm [/edit]

I remember there being very little space between the two ships and the only time I remember the missiles really hauling as is when missiles are fired at the Orii designed orbital weapon a couple episodes back.

Most annoying argument ever.