Mith wrote:Well, the thing is that the Goa'uld have better ships, but the problem is that they don't have alot and they aren't really made for the sort of war that would be required to take the Empire. Their military is more for show than actual fighting and although their aim is generally better (amazingly...most of the time) and the Jaffa are stronger, the problem is that the Empire has better equipment.
Still, the Goa'uld have too many ships for the Empire to take without a dedicated effort, and even then ships would be slow to be taken off other fronts and they'd still need to be establishing routes while the Goa'uld are hitting them hard.
If the Goa'uld can shock the Empire enough they might be able to politically force the Empire to give up territories to satisfy them, while bluffing that they have more ships, they could hold their own. But if Palpatine gets a new Death Star or still has the first, it could change the entire game.
As for Earth, their ships are stronger, but unless they decide to throw off the hidden program bullshit and really start pushing themselves to getting a mass industry for starships up, the Empire will eventually be able to drown them with ships. If however, they can keep their low numbers hidden and shock the Empire with enough firepower and maybe play some diplomacy games, they should be fine. Especially if they have Atlantis.
As we now know, it would take the Empire quite some time and some efforts to have its warships capable of getting anywhere at a strategically sufficient speed.
The tech the Tau'ri have acquired is just enough to bluff the Empire: menace to overload a ZPM, build an overloading mini-Arcturus, or even deploy a couple of Goa'uld busters or Mark IXs.
Their communications don't suffer because of shields, their hyperdrives bypass shields, and their hyperdrives don't care much about gravitational masses until you get close to black holes. They don't require much of a region to be premapped either, aside from knowing the coordinates. Their sensors have long light year ranges.
Considering their course of action in SGA, they'll be bold enough to demonstrate that they can hit the Empire hard if they want to, and no Death Star will help.
Sure, they won't be able to defeat the Empire on their own, but the damage they can deal to a single planet without displacing an entire battle station, and that with Star Wars having no way to stop them, will simply keep everybody quiet.
Hell, with late SG, piss the Tau'ri off and they could unleash a new plague of Replicators onto an entire galaxy. It would take one code to stop the Replicators.
For the Goa'uld, it's trickier. They have not shown to possess the tech for super genocide on a system scale, although they have access to naqahdah in spades (so gigaton bombs is easy to obtain for them), and they also have all advantages about shields and hyperdrives, safe that their FTLs are slower (below several dozens thousand of c).
But they're the Goa'uld: they're much nastier and wouldn't hesitate to nuke a place like Coruscant if required. Since they wouldn't hesitate to kill millions to get to the point in the MW galaxy, the trillions of Coruscant is just a question of zeroes.
Add the fact that they're not from Star Wars and may have no signature in the Force, the symbiotes may even be hard to spot for Sidious, Vader, Inquisitors, Hands, Prophets and other random Dark Jedi. Aside from Force sensitive people, the symbiotes will have virtually free reign within enemy societies.
The ability to plant a symbiote into anyone, and hopin' from body to body, is rather terrifying. The only problem is to kill the previous host, but this shouldn't be too hard. Doing so, the symbiote acquires all memories and knowledge.
Add the fact that Goa'uld could still put some personal shields and cloaking tech on Ashraks would allow them to organize effective spying and assassinations.
That, and the Goa'uld's small crafts (Al'keshes and Tel'tacs) can cloak and achieve hyperspeeds similar to their larger counterparts'.