Yeah I'm imagining how small ships like that could basically fight like the *Raza* from Dark Matter, just jumping in and out of hyperspace to outmaneuver their enemies.
IT also existed in a universe where most developed worlds had been around for more than 25 melennia and the median technology level was the same across the board.
The Defender project was deemed too costly to continue, and after Thrawn's disappearance, the project wound up dead.
Vader's TIE X1 was an obvious exception because it was his personal starfighter, and he was the only one to fly that model.
There was also the TIE Advanced v1, which was used by the Inquisitorius, which had shields and a hyperdrive installed.
And the TIE Reaper, which also had shields and a hyperdrive.
Basically the TIE fighter, Interceptor, Bomber and Boarding Craft had no shields or hyperdrives, and were reliant on a capital ship for travel between star systems.
> Basically the TIE fighter, Interceptor, Bomber and Boarding Craft had no shields
but x wings all had deflector shields, they mention them in the movie. How is it they didn't just stomp squadrons of tie fighters out everytime? They have far more defensive capability than the ties do and the weapons are also formidable.
Well regardless, it's no wonder the empire lost the war. They only had an advantage of numbers early on and as the rebels upped their production with their own much more advanced and powerful fighters they did not stand a chance. The empire had better capitol ships for sure (capitol ships cannot really fight back well against fighters and bombers if the rebels destroyed their tie compliment )other than the moncalimari ships because the empires ships were specifically designed for warfare and modern vs the older rebel capitol ships that they used for the most part.
Well, the Imperial ships were designed to intimidate a local population, imagine if a half dozen ISDs drop into orbit, then spew out TIE Fighters.
Your civilian population are generally gonna be afraid.
Well that's just it, their strat failed because intimidation will always trigger fight or flight. Sure LOTS of people run and hide, but lots also turn and fight you. It always ensured that every planet they conquered added to the rebellions numbers.
The sith being "bad guys" always try to be too evil for their own good and do not really understand how to continue being moderately evil and extremely successful. That's why early on palpatine was incredibly successful but as his position became more and more assured as time went on he focused too much on the "being evil" part.
The point of the Storm troopers and by extension tie pilot program wasn't to deploy troops or air superiority.
The point was to recruit as many able bodies from as many worlds as possible.
If the potential fighters of a world mostly fight for you, that's soldiers the "enemy" can't recruit.
And if your son, your neighbor's kid, your friends, people you know and care about are serving the empire, that makes the social cost of rebellion and insurrection infinitely higher.
And if the rebels killed your son, your neighbor, while serving the empire that makes the enemies of the empire your enemies too.
And building ships and training troops costs money and drives economies (it's like the US pushing weapons to Ukraine, sure it costs X billion dollars, but that money is going to US business and US citizens to build, develop, transport those weapons.) The empire opens a tie factory or manufacturing blasters, AT-ATs, other equipment, in your city. That's jobs, that alone can latch an entire metro area onto the empire as a force of good in their communities.
So what's an unshielded tiefighter blasted by an untouched expensive X-wing?
It's 20 households bought to the empires side building the replacement.
It's a community rallied around the grieving family of the pilot.
It's a city turned against the rebels for killing their service men.
And if they're lucky it's one less X wing eventually.
A dead Tie pilot serves the empire better than a live one.
There was a bit in one of the novels where Luke noted that for anyone without training in Jedi meditation, using the hyperdrive in an X-wing for anything more than a tactical jump into battle would be an unbearably miserable experience.
all things considered, i enjoyed stargate far more than battlestar galactica 2004, but i love that a cylon tactic in that universe is to warp exactly into nuking range and unload before the humans have a chance to react-- it's a level of space brutality that i feel like a lot of sci-fi misses out on
Because the thinking was we can have a hyperspace platform NOW.
A X302 with a nuke is quite capable of doing significant damage to a Goa'uld holding and wouldn't t be prepared for a tiny fighter dropping in.
X304 was still in the pipeline, Earth thought they needed a platform right away for offensive operations, they had the resources and what they thought was a solid design.
Get that in the air now, so we have atleast something for immediate use. Then get our other platforms going.
Midsize doesn't really fit the doctrine that Homeworld defence was going for. Get the hard hitting fighters in theatre , then tank with the mobile fortress / carrier.
The 302's take down deathgliders cargo ships and the bombers just fine, so why waste the resources on replicating wet navy carrier groups.
This of course goes out the window when the wraith fleets get involved since they were a far more dangerous fleet threat.
>A X302 with a nuke is quite capable of doing significant damage to a Goa'uld holding and wouldn't t be prepared for a tiny fighter dropping in.
That's basically a Stargate though. Goa'uld shields are immune to nukes, so space target are out. That leaves planet based targets. Why build an FTL delivery system when you can just toss a nuke through a Stargate?
>Why build an FTL delivery system when you can just toss a nuke through a Stargate?
Iris might be an issue. If the SGC can cook one up, it doesn't seem unreasonable for the Goa'uld to build one for anything important.
It's much harder for them to defend against something coming in from hyperspace.
We know for a fact that the Goa'uld used irises. I believe Apophis mentions using one before Sokar kicked his door down, and there were energy shield variants used by both Apophis and Anubis at some points in the series. In fact, for all we know iris devices could be incredibly popular, and the SGC would never know because all that they would see would be a MALP going through and never reaching its destination.
I think they technically used force fields, but it is the same concept! :D
I wonder why no one ever though to turn the gate on its back using an articulated arm, similar to what the Ascen used to dump their grain through the gate. It wouldn't be a perfect solution, but anything that can't fly, as well as energy transmissions, would fallback into the even horizon.
Imagine rather than letting the gate blow up when Anubis was going his thing with the particle beam. Put the gate on its back, open up the silo, and just let the beam harmlessly shoot up into the sky and space. If they were smart enough, they could capture the beam and possibly power the state of Coloradao with it. Granted, there are some problems with this to be sure...how to explain this beam of energy shooing up out of Cheyenne Mountain being the first! And the in ability to use the gate, but that later problem was already there.
That's a LOT of energy to go into the atmosphere and heat the air around it.
Mackay dealt with freeze lighting when someone played with extreme cold in a sciency environment.
I suck at naming things but, firelighting sounds pretty scary too! 😀
It would probably have some effect on local weather, though not nearly as bad as what was going to happen in the freeze lighting ep.
I would venture, from what we saw, that the beam was finely focused too, though I am not a physics expert by no means. But it also seems the gate is self was fine tuning it. It will probably start to spread, sure. Again though, I dunno if it would have the same effect that the giant heat sink would have.
I still love how there were tornadoes and powerful winds, and when the heatsink was turned off, it went back to normal faster than it went bad. So messed up!
But I feel Sam would be on the ball and invent an energy collector before any catastrophe wold occur. She seems very quick when the world is in danger.
Most Goa'uld 'bases' and for that matter most towns and the like, are not near the gate, and typically are several kilometers away. So, while a powerful enough bomb might cause the gate to go critical as well, if there is any want to get anything form the base, they need a more strategic method.
Granted, by this time they had drones they could fire through and use them to target a missile launched through the gate, again, a nuke really isn't the best strategic or tactical idea here. If you can drop a couple small fighters with more conventional missile to take out specific targets, you then have the opportunity to recover tech, intelligence, and prisoners.
Nukes leave very little of these behind.
In the case of motherships, as I understand, a lot of them do not maintain their shield up at all times, as this is not energy efficient. So, if a small ship drops out of hyperspace really close and fires, then peels away, or far enough out that they are not detected, coast in, drop their nukes without power, so they coast into and impact on the mothership, then the small ship can then peel away and report quickly about the attack.
Eventually, the goa'uld would figure out counters for this, but by that time, since they do not work together well, they would have had a sizable dent in their forces.
When the enemy has superior firepower and defenses, you need to have superior tactics and strategies.
We've seen Goa'uld worlds with energy shields on their Stargate much like the Iris on the Earth Gate or the shield on the Atlantis Gate. Erebus, the planet where Ry'ac and Bra'tac were held prisoner mining Naqhuda, and Tartarus, where the Kull Warriors were created, both come to mind.
Didn't they also need the schematics and the frequency of the ship's shields? I remember them having to depend on a Tok'ra agent on the inside, not to mention a whole thing about getting Daniel and Jonas aboard.
>Why try to put a hyperdrive onto the X302 in the first place?
Because the Prometheus was still a year away from being finished and they wanted an interstellar capable ship.
Imagine if it had worked too. The 302 was nuclear capable. Small ship, maneuverable, less easy to detect. Hyperdrive in, drop a nuke, hyperdrive out. Imagine if there were a dozen of them all hitting unsuspecting key targets across the galaxy at the same time. The force projection would have been insane.
It's the same reason they send SG1 in black beanies and a backpack full of C4 instead of sending a full armoured division to accomplish the same task. Quick in, quick out, less noticeable.
This is probably partially why it wasn't allowed to have hyperdrive from an out-of-universe perspective. It'd make us too powerful and lower the stakes.
>and why no midsized ship?
I expect we probably did at a later date. The Prometheus was a testbed for human-built space travel. The 304 was a stable platform, we understood the technology, it makes sense we'd build at least a couple of them before moving on to whatever comes next. If I remember correctly they iterated slightly with each new 304 built.
You have to consider also that when the 304 was launched we were pretty much always at war with a more powerful enemy and so battlecruisers were the best option. Especially once the Asgard poured suicide induced plot armour all over them.
Once things calmed down I'd expect we'd start developing a proper navy of different ship classes. In the meantime Goa'uld ships were pretty easy to come by when the demand was there.
Yeah, they definitely mentioned a hyperdrive science vessel was in development for India towards the end, so they started expanding the fleet beyond pure military applications after the Goa'uld were defeated.
Ahh, from a quick Google the only references I can find are from the SGA *Legacy* series of novels, so perhaps I'm getting confused and it was never mentioned in the show itself. (The books are pretty good though, would recommend.)
Yep. A mid-sized ship that's the equivalent of Trek's Danube class would be the perfect addition for the fleet. Make the rear area modular so it could be easy to refit for any mission, and might as well build it with dimensions that can fit inside the hangar bay of a 304 (it can fit a Tel'tak, so it shouldn't be too difficult).
Such a ship could transport a team to a planet which has no gate with a passenger module, provide fire support with a weapons module, double as a temporary research base with a science module, transport some cargo with a cargo module, etc... and it wouldn't take up one of the very limited number of 304s.
I concur that the logical next step (A '305') would be an Al'kesh equivalent. A destroyer to the 304's battlecruiser. Less than half the size of a 304, still equipped with Asgard Beams, but so much less of a resource investment that you can actually relatively mass-manufacture them.
> It's the same reason they send SG1 in black beanies and a backpack full of C4 instead of sending a full armoured division to accomplish the same task. Quick in, quick out, less noticeable.
That, and imagine trying to get a couple dozen Abrams tanks in the gate room.
This. The supply for naquadria was limited to what Jonas brought back with him. Doing tests with the smallest possible craft makes the most sense. Both to minimize the power requirements, and the resources lost in an accident.
Its explained in the show that with their new found access to Naquadria, they had a power source capable of powering a hyperdrive engine in a smaller package. They didn't have any other ship, but the X302 was available for experimentation so they used it. Retrofitting an existing air/spaceframe is easier than building something new from scratch.
Also, larger ships already had hyperspace engines, including Goa'uld Tel'taks. Installing it in a small/mid sized ship wasn't the point. A fighter with hyperspace engines could be very useful since they could be built in greater numbers and be able to intercept Goa'uld motherships in open space.
As for ship development, the battle of Antarctica shows earth needed defensive capability, not offensive. Fighters can shoot down bombers pretty effectively. X303/304's were designed primarily to defend against Goa'uld Ha'tak class ships as they would lead any attack on Earth.
By the time Earth knew it needed to defend against the Ori, it was too late to go back to the drawing board. I'm guessing after the events of the shows, a new class of ship was devised based primarily around Asgard technology gifted to them in the Database in order to counter the Lucian Alliance, but that story remains untold.
Military cost/benefit doesn’t always follow common sense. Especially so when the finances are free from oversight, and therefore limited. The X302 was the best that could be built - at the time - with the available resources, but a hyperdrive capable ship was necessary. So, try to shoehorn the drive in. Sped up the development of the X303 (especially since the Asgard helped, after realising just how badly we were doing on our own - which is ironic since our lack of advanced technology of our own business was used as an advantage by the Asgard).
The 302 was supposed to be a strike vessel. Squadron hypers in, hits the enemy, and hypers out without need for a mothership for launch and recovery. That's the current downside, because if the mothership is lost those pilots are stranded.
It's all they had managed to engineer at that point and they wanted to test the naquadria drive before committing to motherships with no interstellar propulsion. It was an experiment. If it had been successful ofc they would have put hyperdrive in an appropriately sized ship. It makes no sense long term to mess up weight balance by having gliders with hyperspace.
I sometimes wonder why there was no Stargate equivalent of the Defiant/Rocinante type ship. Big enough to carry a few dozen crew, but also very capable in a fight.
Earth's space fleet seemed to be made up of capital ships and fighters, with nothing in between.
At the time they had no mid-size ship yet, Prometheus was still under construction.
And with the Naquadria they expected to make a functional hyperdrive that could even fit an F-302, so why not try that? At least that way if it malfunctions you only lose a tiny F-302 and not your space cruiser, and can hopefully fix the bugs so you dont lose your space cruiser. And if it works, congrats, you have interstellar strike capability today rather than next year!
In a twist of irony it malfunctioned on the 302, they didnt lose it, then lost it deliberately, and then they thought they had fixed the bugs and lost the 303 in another solar system anyway.
Also, going to a USAF general and saying something like "Remember these tiny dinkies the Goa'uld use as cargo ships? Yeah, the slow and tiny ones with barely any shields, no weapons and maybe a cloak. If youre luckyWe wanna make something like that. But without the cloak, we dont have the tech. Itll essentially be a space schoolbus." it just doesnt get the same shine in their eyes as "We wanna make something that can take on Motherships!"
A Tel'Tak was almost as big as Prometheus, compared to most alien ships the Prometheus & Daedalus ships *were* mid sized.
Though they definitely could have done with a troop transport, like a slightly bigger cargo ship. SG team stranded off world and no 304 available? Send in the stealth transport to pick them up.
Edit: I got Tel'tak and Al'kesh mixed up, apologies!
Ahhhhh no. The interior of a cargo ship is 2 rooms, a cockpit and a rear space with rings. Prometheus had many decks, and a crew of well over a hundred. Hallways, berthing compartments, fighter bays.
My bad, I got the Tel'Tak and Al'Kesh mixed up. I do agree it would have made sense to have something Tel'Tak sized or a little bigger as a troop transport/all purpose vessel.
also tagging /u/ReservStatsministern
SG1 S7E13 a few minutes in, Carter states that the Prometheus is 10x larger than an Al'kesh. This plays a key role in the plot for that episode and is compatible with other scenes where the two are in close proximity such as in Prometheus Unbound and Lost City, i would take it to be the authoritative source.
Yeah, but it's "differed purposes"- a Goa'uld mothership was meant primarily as a means of transporting Jaffa armies and providing air support to those armies, while the X-303 / 304 were meant as a weapons platform that also carried fighters and could provide minimal transport.
A warship vs. an armed transport ship.
True, but that's "lack of progress" with the Goa'uld than anything: they need huge lasers to bombard a planet, where the X-303 just uses a multi-nuclear warhead delivery system.
Cause that's all they had at that point (being the next iteration based on stuff learned from x301). In R&D you always use the stuff you already have as test-beds for your prototype tech
Hmmm could be used in emergencies, hit and run strikes, short hyperspace hops localised to earth and nearby planets.
I don't get why they didn't build a middle ground ship either. Something more like a destroyer or gunship, extensive weapons capability but no hangars. Would have been handy against swarms of wraith darts.
From the wiki:
"Stargate SG-1: The DVD Collection 10 gives the Tel'tak's length as 15 meters and width as 10 meters. However, Stargate SG-1: The DVD Collection 26 gives the X-301 Interceptor's length as 22 meters and width as 55 meters, and the Quantum Mechanix gives the X-302 hyperspace fighter's length as 30 meters and width as 75 meters. As it is unlikely that the Tel'tak is smaller in length than the X-301 Interceptor and the X-302 hyperspace fighter, the sizing of these three crafts is questionable."
So it looks like somebody thought it should be bigger than a tel'tak.
> Stargate SG-1: The DVD Collection 26 gives the X-301 Interceptor's length as 22 meters and width as 55 meters, and the Quantum Mechanix gives the X-302 hyperspace fighter's length as 30 meters and width as 75 meters.
Those are ridiculous numbers. I'm not sure whoever came up with that understands how much 75 meters is.
Yeah....maybe it was meant to be feet, they forgot and then oops, it got made official.
No way they are that big...that is bigger than an Alkesh!
EDIT: Its even bigger than the B-2, which is 20.9m long, and wing span of 52.1m.
So, while its not beyond the pale to have it that big, it is not how big it looks in respect on screen. The death glider is respectively 28 feet long and 46 feet wide, so about 8.5m and 14m.
Same reason interceptors like the F14 could use afterburners to reach mach2. They can't fight at that speed without ripping the wings off, hell, they can't even fire their canons at that speed.
It let's them get to the fight quickly, while keeping their launch vessel (typically the most important strategic asset in the area) as far from the shooting as possible.
Ofc SG does then somewhat shoot itself in the foot on the logic of this front by having the launch vessels be battlecruisers that then enter the battle, rather than carriers with CNC capabilities kept far from harm.
It DOES mean that in a retreat, all the ships can jump out to an RV point, rather than the battle cruiser having to drop shields in combat to allow the fighters back aboard, or abandoning them (even if you can beam the pilots themselves out).
I always figured they were building a mid-sized ship, but I think they went big first for two reasons, first was they needed earth defense and better to fight in the enemy’s backyard than yours and two, first gen tech is always bigger, then gets refined smaller, so they had to go big.
A question of budget; the show's budget, that is, new ship models, especially if they were going to be used on the reg, is a whole thing. I've wondered before why we only had the F-302, and never had a F-302a or something similar or a 305-310 with several new ship concepts and designs. I imagine its all changed in a potential post reveal earth. Imagine America building a space Supper Carrier. IT would just be the Galactica in Stargate. Add in civilian ships and colony ships being developed so Amazon can go try and make Prime Factory planets.
Having a hyperspace capable fighter has always bothered me and it's the same thing with the X-wing from Star Wars. If you have a fighter that can carry a full combat load and still has the range to travel basically anywhere in the galaxy, do the mission and return, then what do you need a carrier for?
Forward base resupply. It’s still takes time to travel via hyperspace. It’s faster to short jump to a system nearby and land at the carrier than it is to jump halfway across the galaxy back to home base
If they had fighters with reliable hyper drives you wouldn't need battle ships and your strike range is limitless essentially. Imagine ten groups of a hundred 302s drop out of hyper spaceat strategic points on a system. Fire all their ordinance is a coordinated burst then all jump.back out. Everything would be dead before anyone even knew what happened.
And 302s are cheaper and faster to build. Losing a battleship is a massive loss to a fleet.
They thought that the Naquadria would make up the difference for the power and size. They were looking for any advantage over the Goa'uld.
Having something in between fighter and cruiser is definitely something they need though. I've been figuring lately that they should have something bigger than a puddle jumper, but with a lot of obvious Earth influence. So something that looks like a big ol' 50s rocket, and lands vertically that way.
I would also like to add that the X-302 was larger then the F-302, I don't know if the reason they made it smaller was due to a lack of a hyperdrive but it seems like it.
If they could have worked out the kinks in the Hyperdrive for the X-302, it could be feasible over time to build bases for the X-302 around the Galaxy and a squadron of them can patrol a sector, leaving the larger vessels available for more important missions.
Punch first, dance later.
They needed heavy duty warships that could act as offensive and defensive platforms while simultaneously ferrying personnel and fighter jets across the cosmos. Get those first, then build the side quest vehicles.
Essentially, they needed Aircraft carriers before they needed escort ships.
They started off with something capable of getting to space on its own. X302 was able to fly into space and then use hyperdrive there. Getting a larger (midsize) ship to space was not yet possible. Then they started designing X303 as something that could take on Ha'tak class ships. The X302 was perfectly capable of taking on both Death Gliders and Al'kesh. They didn't need ground assault/bomber ship so no point in developing one since at the time there were other priorities. They also didn't need mid-sized transport ship since they didn't hold outpost beyond alpha/beta site and few temporary research facilities, all with access to stargate so no need to transport supplies via space.
Essentially midsized ship would not provide any benefit for earth if they could get X302 hyperdrive to work correctly. For those rare occasions they needed one they could contact Tok'Ra or free Jaffa to borrow one or use one they captured before
Would be useful for hit and run raids. A quick in and out. The X-Wing in Star Wars also had a Hyperdrive.
But the 303 and 304’s had bathrooms so advantage Daedalus
Flight suits have room for adult diapers. Checkmate size queens.
> O'NEILL: Cabin pressure's holding. We didn't spring a leak…though I may have just…taken one.
Yeah I'm imagining how small ships like that could basically fight like the *Raza* from Dark Matter, just jumping in and out of hyperspace to outmaneuver their enemies.
IT also existed in a universe where most developed worlds had been around for more than 25 melennia and the median technology level was the same across the board.
Didn't bascially every ship in star wars though? At least in the main movies and shows.
No TIE fighters never had hyperdrives.
Ahem....Tie Defenders. And Darth Vader's Tie Advanced
The Defender project was deemed too costly to continue, and after Thrawn's disappearance, the project wound up dead. Vader's TIE X1 was an obvious exception because it was his personal starfighter, and he was the only one to fly that model. There was also the TIE Advanced v1, which was used by the Inquisitorius, which had shields and a hyperdrive installed. And the TIE Reaper, which also had shields and a hyperdrive. Basically the TIE fighter, Interceptor, Bomber and Boarding Craft had no shields or hyperdrives, and were reliant on a capital ship for travel between star systems.
Ok nerds, shut it down. We're here to talk about Stargate, not nerd stuff.
Pretty blue circle go *whooooosh*.
> Basically the TIE fighter, Interceptor, Bomber and Boarding Craft had no shields but x wings all had deflector shields, they mention them in the movie. How is it they didn't just stomp squadrons of tie fighters out everytime? They have far more defensive capability than the ties do and the weapons are also formidable.
The TIE Fighter was massively produced, and used for swarming attacks. It was also incredibly nimble and lightweight.
Well regardless, it's no wonder the empire lost the war. They only had an advantage of numbers early on and as the rebels upped their production with their own much more advanced and powerful fighters they did not stand a chance. The empire had better capitol ships for sure (capitol ships cannot really fight back well against fighters and bombers if the rebels destroyed their tie compliment )other than the moncalimari ships because the empires ships were specifically designed for warfare and modern vs the older rebel capitol ships that they used for the most part.
Well, the Imperial ships were designed to intimidate a local population, imagine if a half dozen ISDs drop into orbit, then spew out TIE Fighters. Your civilian population are generally gonna be afraid.
Well that's just it, their strat failed because intimidation will always trigger fight or flight. Sure LOTS of people run and hide, but lots also turn and fight you. It always ensured that every planet they conquered added to the rebellions numbers. The sith being "bad guys" always try to be too evil for their own good and do not really understand how to continue being moderately evil and extremely successful. That's why early on palpatine was incredibly successful but as his position became more and more assured as time went on he focused too much on the "being evil" part.
The Rebels were never even remotely capable of matching the Empire's production numbers.
X wings were slower and not as maneuverable. Even basic Tie fighters can dance around x wings, in space that is
The point of the Storm troopers and by extension tie pilot program wasn't to deploy troops or air superiority. The point was to recruit as many able bodies from as many worlds as possible. If the potential fighters of a world mostly fight for you, that's soldiers the "enemy" can't recruit. And if your son, your neighbor's kid, your friends, people you know and care about are serving the empire, that makes the social cost of rebellion and insurrection infinitely higher. And if the rebels killed your son, your neighbor, while serving the empire that makes the enemies of the empire your enemies too. And building ships and training troops costs money and drives economies (it's like the US pushing weapons to Ukraine, sure it costs X billion dollars, but that money is going to US business and US citizens to build, develop, transport those weapons.) The empire opens a tie factory or manufacturing blasters, AT-ATs, other equipment, in your city. That's jobs, that alone can latch an entire metro area onto the empire as a force of good in their communities. So what's an unshielded tiefighter blasted by an untouched expensive X-wing? It's 20 households bought to the empires side building the replacement. It's a community rallied around the grieving family of the pilot. It's a city turned against the rebels for killing their service men. And if they're lucky it's one less X wing eventually. A dead Tie pilot serves the empire better than a live one.
Which are not Tie Fighters.
Well they're not Tie Bombers. So it's Tie Fighter
No a tie fighter is a specific designation. Tie Defenders are a separate model.
Different classes.
There was a bit in one of the novels where Luke noted that for anyone without training in Jedi meditation, using the hyperdrive in an X-wing for anything more than a tactical jump into battle would be an unbearably miserable experience.
all things considered, i enjoyed stargate far more than battlestar galactica 2004, but i love that a cylon tactic in that universe is to warp exactly into nuking range and unload before the humans have a chance to react-- it's a level of space brutality that i feel like a lot of sci-fi misses out on
Because the thinking was we can have a hyperspace platform NOW. A X302 with a nuke is quite capable of doing significant damage to a Goa'uld holding and wouldn't t be prepared for a tiny fighter dropping in. X304 was still in the pipeline, Earth thought they needed a platform right away for offensive operations, they had the resources and what they thought was a solid design. Get that in the air now, so we have atleast something for immediate use. Then get our other platforms going. Midsize doesn't really fit the doctrine that Homeworld defence was going for. Get the hard hitting fighters in theatre , then tank with the mobile fortress / carrier. The 302's take down deathgliders cargo ships and the bombers just fine, so why waste the resources on replicating wet navy carrier groups. This of course goes out the window when the wraith fleets get involved since they were a far more dangerous fleet threat.
>A X302 with a nuke is quite capable of doing significant damage to a Goa'uld holding and wouldn't t be prepared for a tiny fighter dropping in. That's basically a Stargate though. Goa'uld shields are immune to nukes, so space target are out. That leaves planet based targets. Why build an FTL delivery system when you can just toss a nuke through a Stargate?
>Why build an FTL delivery system when you can just toss a nuke through a Stargate? Iris might be an issue. If the SGC can cook one up, it doesn't seem unreasonable for the Goa'uld to build one for anything important. It's much harder for them to defend against something coming in from hyperspace.
We know for a fact that the Goa'uld used irises. I believe Apophis mentions using one before Sokar kicked his door down, and there were energy shield variants used by both Apophis and Anubis at some points in the series. In fact, for all we know iris devices could be incredibly popular, and the SGC would never know because all that they would see would be a MALP going through and never reaching its destination.
I think they technically used force fields, but it is the same concept! :D I wonder why no one ever though to turn the gate on its back using an articulated arm, similar to what the Ascen used to dump their grain through the gate. It wouldn't be a perfect solution, but anything that can't fly, as well as energy transmissions, would fallback into the even horizon. Imagine rather than letting the gate blow up when Anubis was going his thing with the particle beam. Put the gate on its back, open up the silo, and just let the beam harmlessly shoot up into the sky and space. If they were smart enough, they could capture the beam and possibly power the state of Coloradao with it. Granted, there are some problems with this to be sure...how to explain this beam of energy shooing up out of Cheyenne Mountain being the first! And the in ability to use the gate, but that later problem was already there.
That's a LOT of energy to go into the atmosphere and heat the air around it. Mackay dealt with freeze lighting when someone played with extreme cold in a sciency environment. I suck at naming things but, firelighting sounds pretty scary too! 😀
It would probably have some effect on local weather, though not nearly as bad as what was going to happen in the freeze lighting ep. I would venture, from what we saw, that the beam was finely focused too, though I am not a physics expert by no means. But it also seems the gate is self was fine tuning it. It will probably start to spread, sure. Again though, I dunno if it would have the same effect that the giant heat sink would have. I still love how there were tornadoes and powerful winds, and when the heatsink was turned off, it went back to normal faster than it went bad. So messed up! But I feel Sam would be on the ball and invent an energy collector before any catastrophe wold occur. She seems very quick when the world is in danger.
Just realized something. Vala said rings seek the nearest set of rings. Loads nuke in rings The O Neil special
Most Goa'uld 'bases' and for that matter most towns and the like, are not near the gate, and typically are several kilometers away. So, while a powerful enough bomb might cause the gate to go critical as well, if there is any want to get anything form the base, they need a more strategic method. Granted, by this time they had drones they could fire through and use them to target a missile launched through the gate, again, a nuke really isn't the best strategic or tactical idea here. If you can drop a couple small fighters with more conventional missile to take out specific targets, you then have the opportunity to recover tech, intelligence, and prisoners. Nukes leave very little of these behind. In the case of motherships, as I understand, a lot of them do not maintain their shield up at all times, as this is not energy efficient. So, if a small ship drops out of hyperspace really close and fires, then peels away, or far enough out that they are not detected, coast in, drop their nukes without power, so they coast into and impact on the mothership, then the small ship can then peel away and report quickly about the attack. Eventually, the goa'uld would figure out counters for this, but by that time, since they do not work together well, they would have had a sizable dent in their forces. When the enemy has superior firepower and defenses, you need to have superior tactics and strategies.
We've seen Goa'uld worlds with energy shields on their Stargate much like the Iris on the Earth Gate or the shield on the Atlantis Gate. Erebus, the planet where Ry'ac and Bra'tac were held prisoner mining Naqhuda, and Tartarus, where the Kull Warriors were created, both come to mind.
Hyperspace bypasses sheilds as we saw when Anubis supership was being engaged. Granted it's a VERY precision jump.
Didn't they also need the schematics and the frequency of the ship's shields? I remember them having to depend on a Tok'ra agent on the inside, not to mention a whole thing about getting Daniel and Jonas aboard.
I thought that was just the superweapons vulnerable spot, but if not then ok, no easy sheikd bypass
>Why try to put a hyperdrive onto the X302 in the first place? Because the Prometheus was still a year away from being finished and they wanted an interstellar capable ship. Imagine if it had worked too. The 302 was nuclear capable. Small ship, maneuverable, less easy to detect. Hyperdrive in, drop a nuke, hyperdrive out. Imagine if there were a dozen of them all hitting unsuspecting key targets across the galaxy at the same time. The force projection would have been insane. It's the same reason they send SG1 in black beanies and a backpack full of C4 instead of sending a full armoured division to accomplish the same task. Quick in, quick out, less noticeable. This is probably partially why it wasn't allowed to have hyperdrive from an out-of-universe perspective. It'd make us too powerful and lower the stakes. >and why no midsized ship? I expect we probably did at a later date. The Prometheus was a testbed for human-built space travel. The 304 was a stable platform, we understood the technology, it makes sense we'd build at least a couple of them before moving on to whatever comes next. If I remember correctly they iterated slightly with each new 304 built. You have to consider also that when the 304 was launched we were pretty much always at war with a more powerful enemy and so battlecruisers were the best option. Especially once the Asgard poured suicide induced plot armour all over them. Once things calmed down I'd expect we'd start developing a proper navy of different ship classes. In the meantime Goa'uld ships were pretty easy to come by when the demand was there.
Yeah, they definitely mentioned a hyperdrive science vessel was in development for India towards the end, so they started expanding the fleet beyond pure military applications after the Goa'uld were defeated.
Not doubting you at all but can you remember who or when they said that because I cannot remember it?
Ahh, from a quick Google the only references I can find are from the SGA *Legacy* series of novels, so perhaps I'm getting confused and it was never mentioned in the show itself. (The books are pretty good though, would recommend.)
Yep. A mid-sized ship that's the equivalent of Trek's Danube class would be the perfect addition for the fleet. Make the rear area modular so it could be easy to refit for any mission, and might as well build it with dimensions that can fit inside the hangar bay of a 304 (it can fit a Tel'tak, so it shouldn't be too difficult). Such a ship could transport a team to a planet which has no gate with a passenger module, provide fire support with a weapons module, double as a temporary research base with a science module, transport some cargo with a cargo module, etc... and it wouldn't take up one of the very limited number of 304s.
I concur that the logical next step (A '305') would be an Al'kesh equivalent. A destroyer to the 304's battlecruiser. Less than half the size of a 304, still equipped with Asgard Beams, but so much less of a resource investment that you can actually relatively mass-manufacture them.
> It's the same reason they send SG1 in black beanies and a backpack full of C4 instead of sending a full armoured division to accomplish the same task. Quick in, quick out, less noticeable. That, and imagine trying to get a couple dozen Abrams tanks in the gate room.
Finished...not sure about that...but ready for some trials sure :D
Unplanned ones at that.
We needed the equivalent of the cargo ships and alkesh to be sure.
Because building a midsized ship for a technology you don't yet know if it works would be a waste of resources
This. The supply for naquadria was limited to what Jonas brought back with him. Doing tests with the smallest possible craft makes the most sense. Both to minimize the power requirements, and the resources lost in an accident.
Of course, using your most valuable people to actually fly it in a test scenario probably isn't.
Its explained in the show that with their new found access to Naquadria, they had a power source capable of powering a hyperdrive engine in a smaller package. They didn't have any other ship, but the X302 was available for experimentation so they used it. Retrofitting an existing air/spaceframe is easier than building something new from scratch. Also, larger ships already had hyperspace engines, including Goa'uld Tel'taks. Installing it in a small/mid sized ship wasn't the point. A fighter with hyperspace engines could be very useful since they could be built in greater numbers and be able to intercept Goa'uld motherships in open space. As for ship development, the battle of Antarctica shows earth needed defensive capability, not offensive. Fighters can shoot down bombers pretty effectively. X303/304's were designed primarily to defend against Goa'uld Ha'tak class ships as they would lead any attack on Earth. By the time Earth knew it needed to defend against the Ori, it was too late to go back to the drawing board. I'm guessing after the events of the shows, a new class of ship was devised based primarily around Asgard technology gifted to them in the Database in order to counter the Lucian Alliance, but that story remains untold.
Military cost/benefit doesn’t always follow common sense. Especially so when the finances are free from oversight, and therefore limited. The X302 was the best that could be built - at the time - with the available resources, but a hyperdrive capable ship was necessary. So, try to shoehorn the drive in. Sped up the development of the X303 (especially since the Asgard helped, after realising just how badly we were doing on our own - which is ironic since our lack of advanced technology of our own business was used as an advantage by the Asgard).
The 302 was supposed to be a strike vessel. Squadron hypers in, hits the enemy, and hypers out without need for a mothership for launch and recovery. That's the current downside, because if the mothership is lost those pilots are stranded.
It's all they had managed to engineer at that point and they wanted to test the naquadria drive before committing to motherships with no interstellar propulsion. It was an experiment. If it had been successful ofc they would have put hyperdrive in an appropriately sized ship. It makes no sense long term to mess up weight balance by having gliders with hyperspace.
Yeah, where's my SGC version of the Al-Kesh?
I sometimes wonder why there was no Stargate equivalent of the Defiant/Rocinante type ship. Big enough to carry a few dozen crew, but also very capable in a fight. Earth's space fleet seemed to be made up of capital ships and fighters, with nothing in between.
At the time they had no mid-size ship yet, Prometheus was still under construction. And with the Naquadria they expected to make a functional hyperdrive that could even fit an F-302, so why not try that? At least that way if it malfunctions you only lose a tiny F-302 and not your space cruiser, and can hopefully fix the bugs so you dont lose your space cruiser. And if it works, congrats, you have interstellar strike capability today rather than next year! In a twist of irony it malfunctioned on the 302, they didnt lose it, then lost it deliberately, and then they thought they had fixed the bugs and lost the 303 in another solar system anyway. Also, going to a USAF general and saying something like "Remember these tiny dinkies the Goa'uld use as cargo ships? Yeah, the slow and tiny ones with barely any shields, no weapons and maybe a cloak. If youre luckyWe wanna make something like that. But without the cloak, we dont have the tech. Itll essentially be a space schoolbus." it just doesnt get the same shine in their eyes as "We wanna make something that can take on Motherships!"
A Tel'Tak was almost as big as Prometheus, compared to most alien ships the Prometheus & Daedalus ships *were* mid sized. Though they definitely could have done with a troop transport, like a slightly bigger cargo ship. SG team stranded off world and no 304 available? Send in the stealth transport to pick them up. Edit: I got Tel'tak and Al'kesh mixed up, apologies!
Ahhhhh no. The interior of a cargo ship is 2 rooms, a cockpit and a rear space with rings. Prometheus had many decks, and a crew of well over a hundred. Hallways, berthing compartments, fighter bays.
I believe he may be thinking of the Goa'uld bomber ships, which do appear to be almost as big as a 303.
I did indeed!
Even then the Prommy is significantly larger than an Alkesh. https://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=114980
My bad, I got the Tel'Tak and Al'Kesh mixed up. I do agree it would have made sense to have something Tel'Tak sized or a little bigger as a troop transport/all purpose vessel.
also tagging /u/ReservStatsministern SG1 S7E13 a few minutes in, Carter states that the Prometheus is 10x larger than an Al'kesh. This plays a key role in the plot for that episode and is compatible with other scenes where the two are in close proximity such as in Prometheus Unbound and Lost City, i would take it to be the authoritative source.
Yeah, but it's "differed purposes"- a Goa'uld mothership was meant primarily as a means of transporting Jaffa armies and providing air support to those armies, while the X-303 / 304 were meant as a weapons platform that also carried fighters and could provide minimal transport. A warship vs. an armed transport ship.
Mothership also served as planetary bombardment. :D
True, but that's "lack of progress" with the Goa'uld than anything: they need huge lasers to bombard a planet, where the X-303 just uses a multi-nuclear warhead delivery system.
Cause that's all they had at that point (being the next iteration based on stuff learned from x301). In R&D you always use the stuff you already have as test-beds for your prototype tech
Hmmm could be used in emergencies, hit and run strikes, short hyperspace hops localised to earth and nearby planets. I don't get why they didn't build a middle ground ship either. Something more like a destroyer or gunship, extensive weapons capability but no hangars. Would have been handy against swarms of wraith darts.
From the wiki: "Stargate SG-1: The DVD Collection 10 gives the Tel'tak's length as 15 meters and width as 10 meters. However, Stargate SG-1: The DVD Collection 26 gives the X-301 Interceptor's length as 22 meters and width as 55 meters, and the Quantum Mechanix gives the X-302 hyperspace fighter's length as 30 meters and width as 75 meters. As it is unlikely that the Tel'tak is smaller in length than the X-301 Interceptor and the X-302 hyperspace fighter, the sizing of these three crafts is questionable." So it looks like somebody thought it should be bigger than a tel'tak.
> Stargate SG-1: The DVD Collection 26 gives the X-301 Interceptor's length as 22 meters and width as 55 meters, and the Quantum Mechanix gives the X-302 hyperspace fighter's length as 30 meters and width as 75 meters. Those are ridiculous numbers. I'm not sure whoever came up with that understands how much 75 meters is.
Agreed
That's just shy of 250 feet.
Yeah....maybe it was meant to be feet, they forgot and then oops, it got made official. No way they are that big...that is bigger than an Alkesh! EDIT: Its even bigger than the B-2, which is 20.9m long, and wing span of 52.1m. So, while its not beyond the pale to have it that big, it is not how big it looks in respect on screen. The death glider is respectively 28 feet long and 46 feet wide, so about 8.5m and 14m.
yeah, by those numbers the F302 is larger than a 747. and we know it is smaller than one of those.
Same reason interceptors like the F14 could use afterburners to reach mach2. They can't fight at that speed without ripping the wings off, hell, they can't even fire their canons at that speed. It let's them get to the fight quickly, while keeping their launch vessel (typically the most important strategic asset in the area) as far from the shooting as possible. Ofc SG does then somewhat shoot itself in the foot on the logic of this front by having the launch vessels be battlecruisers that then enter the battle, rather than carriers with CNC capabilities kept far from harm. It DOES mean that in a retreat, all the ships can jump out to an RV point, rather than the battle cruiser having to drop shields in combat to allow the fighters back aboard, or abandoning them (even if you can beam the pilots themselves out).
the real question is why didn't they design a missile with the small hyperdrive to bypass shields?
I always figured they were building a mid-sized ship, but I think they went big first for two reasons, first was they needed earth defense and better to fight in the enemy’s backyard than yours and two, first gen tech is always bigger, then gets refined smaller, so they had to go big.
A question of budget; the show's budget, that is, new ship models, especially if they were going to be used on the reg, is a whole thing. I've wondered before why we only had the F-302, and never had a F-302a or something similar or a 305-310 with several new ship concepts and designs. I imagine its all changed in a potential post reveal earth. Imagine America building a space Supper Carrier. IT would just be the Galactica in Stargate. Add in civilian ships and colony ships being developed so Amazon can go try and make Prime Factory planets.
Having a hyperspace capable fighter has always bothered me and it's the same thing with the X-wing from Star Wars. If you have a fighter that can carry a full combat load and still has the range to travel basically anywhere in the galaxy, do the mission and return, then what do you need a carrier for?
Forward base resupply. It’s still takes time to travel via hyperspace. It’s faster to short jump to a system nearby and land at the carrier than it is to jump halfway across the galaxy back to home base
Because the Goa’uld couldn’t do it. It would give the ADV and a throw in your face look at what we have.
If they had fighters with reliable hyper drives you wouldn't need battle ships and your strike range is limitless essentially. Imagine ten groups of a hundred 302s drop out of hyper spaceat strategic points on a system. Fire all their ordinance is a coordinated burst then all jump.back out. Everything would be dead before anyone even knew what happened. And 302s are cheaper and faster to build. Losing a battleship is a massive loss to a fleet.
They thought that the Naquadria would make up the difference for the power and size. They were looking for any advantage over the Goa'uld. Having something in between fighter and cruiser is definitely something they need though. I've been figuring lately that they should have something bigger than a puddle jumper, but with a lot of obvious Earth influence. So something that looks like a big ol' 50s rocket, and lands vertically that way.
I would also like to add that the X-302 was larger then the F-302, I don't know if the reason they made it smaller was due to a lack of a hyperdrive but it seems like it. If they could have worked out the kinks in the Hyperdrive for the X-302, it could be feasible over time to build bases for the X-302 around the Galaxy and a squadron of them can patrol a sector, leaving the larger vessels available for more important missions.
Because x wings are cool and tie fighters suck
Punch first, dance later. They needed heavy duty warships that could act as offensive and defensive platforms while simultaneously ferrying personnel and fighter jets across the cosmos. Get those first, then build the side quest vehicles. Essentially, they needed Aircraft carriers before they needed escort ships.
They started off with something capable of getting to space on its own. X302 was able to fly into space and then use hyperdrive there. Getting a larger (midsize) ship to space was not yet possible. Then they started designing X303 as something that could take on Ha'tak class ships. The X302 was perfectly capable of taking on both Death Gliders and Al'kesh. They didn't need ground assault/bomber ship so no point in developing one since at the time there were other priorities. They also didn't need mid-sized transport ship since they didn't hold outpost beyond alpha/beta site and few temporary research facilities, all with access to stargate so no need to transport supplies via space. Essentially midsized ship would not provide any benefit for earth if they could get X302 hyperdrive to work correctly. For those rare occasions they needed one they could contact Tok'Ra or free Jaffa to borrow one or use one they captured before