Starfleet Jedi

I'd like to point out that the Pegasus Replicators were introduced by the Ancients to even the field against a foe who had greater numbers, who could build their ships out of energy, as seen in The Seed and Enemy at the Gate. In Be All My Sins Remeber'd, power is rerouted to hull regeneration (which depending if they're doing on pure energy or at least using some stock matter, could imply, on the high end, some immense levels of power production), and we had something similar in The Queen, and with clear evidence that hiveships can reconfigure their interiors in Infection.

It's also heavily implied that they could clone drones in some similar fashion - using ZPMs to clone people, considering the power outputs of those devices, obviously goes in that direction.

They could also hack an alien starship (a Tau'ri 304), as seen in Intruder: a Wraith viral AI takes control of the Daedalus after having remained semi-dormant and understanding its systems, and almost bested humans at the killing game, with a clear plan to kill the crew by exposing them to a star until they're all cooked alive and the ship ripe for looting, and makes copies of itself even in the hard drives of the 302s, and proves just as capable to pilot such a fighter.

Smart combat capable AIs + growing ships out of energy would explain why the Lanteans were outnumbered and why even a Dakara device would have been of limited use against a foe who can remain in hyperspace and rebuild its colonies from scratch with the raw energy lying around.

Interesting thing, the whole of SGU's second season was about the crew of Destiny dealing with remnants of automatized hunting space ships and drones.

The Lanteans didn't use fighters, just two or three types of large warships. The Wraith would have little interest in wasting fleshy drones piloting Darts at the time of the war when they could obviously build AI driven ships. It would totally fit with the nature of the Wraith cruisers and hiveships, the later being battleships mixed super carriers, against the Lantean ships strictly being battleships with big cannons and smart missiles. Wraith hiveships wouldn't make much sense by throwing drones upon drones against Lantean battleships that couldn't be threatened by the puny firepower of the Darts, unless said darts could be sacrificed. Yet queens and lieutnants would rather have the drones to feed upon than send them in outer space to get munched by the cannons of warships too big to take on.

One thing Wraith darts could do perfectly would be to transport countless bombs and reintegrate them against the Lantean ships : they can technically carry several dozen tonnes of matter each.

Now if this is supposed to represent a decent summary of the Lanteans incompetence against the Wraith...

Hotpoint wrote: The issue with Ancient competence is that they didn't do things that we do know they could do. For example they could have beaten the Wraith by simply moving Atlantis, using it as a mobile base and using their battleships massive speed advantage over the opposition to make hit-and-run attacks on the Hives.

Only if the hives' locations were known, only if the hives could easily be mauled back then as they're by the time of SGA, and only if the Wraith cannot simply clone troops and produce ships. Surely, cloning would be slower and/or in smaller quantities without access to ZPMs (Wraith power tech would most likely require plants of humongous size to match the output of a ZPM).
Fact is, we never saw the industry behind the Wraith "navy". All we got were glimpses.
My first post in this thread summarizes some of them.
Who has the advantage? The people who have to build ships elsewhere and then send them on their own into a galaxy, or those who actually build their ships inside the galaxy already?

Besides, one can speculate about what would happen if the Wraith were to use their pathogen on Lanteans.

We have evidence that the Wraith could, at least, tap into some kind of telepathic network working over huge distances. This allowed Michael and re-wraithed Wraiths, to summon a hiveship light years away. Aside from their known FTL communications abilities, this is certainly another great advantage in forwarding information with little resources (and therefore bringing little attention, greater for scout squads).

Or they could have waited until the Wraith fleet was bombarding Atlantis, evacuate via stargate and detonate one of the ZPM's to take them all out at once.

Someone hasn't been watching the show. There wasn't "the Wraith fleet" at Lantea. There was a fleet, with scores of those 1 to 11 km long ships that kept coming. The entire planet was blockaded by dozens of the heaviest ships.
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displa ... play_media
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displa ... play_media
Ships which, if we go with the schematic view by some unknown lantean, were defined by a shape at odds with what we were used to see from your usual hiveships and cruisers.
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displa ... play_media
http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displa ... play_media
Hiveships and cruisers never had a piece of dorsal superstructure so massive that it would literally double the ship's height.

Or they could have used cloaked Puddle Jumpers to sneak up on Wraith ships and nuke them.

Assuming they could reach those hiveships or sneak anything. Hiveships kept moving, they weren't easy targets. Not only that, but back then, that is, 10,000 years ago, they were in the middle of a total war. How many times one thinks the cloaked jumper trick would have worked? How many times against the Wraith lead by commanders having a much more vivid experience of the battlefield than the guys we see in SGA who, for most of them, don't even know how to repair or even change their ships?
Above all, we saw that Wraith tech is flexible. So much that the mere addition of a ZPM and a few tweeks allowed them to build a 11 km behemoth which had the capacity to spot cloaked jumpers.
So, OK, they needed a ZPM for that.
Then, again, why hiveships have those huge caves barely filled with a couple darts these days? As form serves function, wouldn't you think that those caves, back then, were used for something else? Something much more useful than storing crafts requiring like a fraction of the size of those huuuuge caves? Like, say, big reactors for a change (which would have been ditched for all sorts of reasons afterwards)?

Or they could have built a Dakara Superweapon and target individual systems where the Wraith were concentrated.

Needs a stargate. Wraith can afford sending a mere squadron of Darts through a stargate for culling.
That technique would never manage to do more than denting the overall naval capacity of the Wraith.

When you think about the tactical and strategic advantages offered by the technology we know they have, and know they used, then they really shouldn't have lost the war. If we extrapolate to things that logically they could do, even if we didn't see it done, then it should have been a curbstomp.

And if we extrapolate what the Wraith were seen to do, what they would have been at the height of the war cannot ever be given justice with what we saw in SGA.

Let's remember some devices and technologies left around the galaxy that I haven't mentionned before in this thread.

- Typical science fiction shields, acting as containment fields as well (one was used to hold a captured Asuran).
- Force fields that become solid and serve as screens on Darts, or which can do the same and perfectly mimic the aspect of rock walls while allowing through people with Wraith DNA.
- Stun weapons such as rods which can stun what looks like several decks of a ship, and a spherical device capable of stunning all personnel in the SGC while detonated from some of the lowest levels (wikia).
- The nightmare machine messing with people's minds and literally having them see their fears come true (wikia).
- The small drones. We saw two types, first in Childhood's End, the other in Sateda. Similar to the flying droid seen escorting Tatooine stormtroopers in the newer editions of ANH. Good for hunting and scouting. One of those devices could send a signal to a distant hiveship, so it either dialed a stargate or literally had a FTL radio.
- The crashed Dart from episode Vegas used to send a signal to Pegasus galaxy by using a powerline from the electric grid. As the ship was destroyed, the signal actually got sent into several alt-dimensions.

Thinking of it, if I were to channel the spirit of Saxton by looking at the schematic view of the siege of Lantea in the same way he looks at the orbiting Death Star over Endor, I'd have to conclude that the Wraith ships surrounding Lantea were several hundreds of kilometers long. :D