GStone wrote:Mr. Oragahn wrote:That was Stargate's own First Contact Borg shots, only multiplied by a hundred ships or so.
It's just... really that inconsistent. That firepower alone wouldn't be enough to do what ships did in the very close alternate reality in season 1, nor would be able to destroy a planet a piece like said in one episode, nor could they turn the entire surface of a world into a polluted place.
You also have plenty of evidence that points to the obvious megaton range shots, but it's never involving a direct fireball in an atmosphere, or the vapourization of an asteroid.
Continuum's yields have been "explained" with much pain, but it's hard to imagine Ha'taks firing peawee when SG-1 could field gigaton warheads just by adding raw naqahdah to their nuclear devices in the middle '90s.
Oh, I got it! I know how we can consistently explain the inconcsistencies.
It's a 2 part process. First, the goa'uld are scavengers, not inventors. They can have their people build stuff, but it isn't always up to the same level as other things. Sometimes, they are stuck with substandard equipment and resources because of the feudal system and constant infighting.
The second is that humans only have so much infrastructure to study, reverse engineer and make the ultra tech they've been given over the years. From zats to intergalactic hyperdrives. They aren't equiped to mass produce such things. So, sometimes, they opt for different levels of capabilities to at least have 'something' out there, as they build up their infrastructure and eventually bring everything else up to spec.
This makes a lot more sense than anything else. It'd also be a bit more believable for why the Ori have such few ships. Their battle plan was to concentrate their ship building capabilities into a few things, since the priors would only have limited abilities to make things and the regular people wouldn't have the proper infrastructure to mass produce ships and weapons.
I'm not really getting the gist of your explanations here, but I know that, anyway, explanations have been formulated, largely at SBC following Continuum (there's been a thread in the tech forum, and a thread in the versus board ending shortly thereafter.
The problem is that these explanations are not dumb or unlikely. It's just that such and so many explanations are needed.
It really makes the show feel terribly weaker than it already is.
The Ori weapon are purely in universe centric shield piercing guns. They clearly don't show an universal ability that would allow anyone to say they'd be just as effective against other types of shields.
Ori ships also had a good number of pulse guns in Camelot, wasting Ha'taks rather quickly, but these cannons were never seen later, so obviously TPTB just dismissed them.
They preferred the slow ass buuuooooeeeaaaammmmzzzz.
In one of the DVD specials, or maybe it was one of the explanation eps on scifi (I think it might have been the science of stargate), they mentioned that they did this one shot because they thought it looked good and some people said it wouldn't be possible when they saw it, but someone figured out how it could work and they were happy about that. I think after they learned that, they figured the fans would be able to reconcile anything, regardless of how out there it is.
And look what I did. I reconciled their inconsistencies.
There are times it just doesn't work, and it's a sad excuse for the writers to be lazy asses. I don't want some crap such as "fans will bridge all of our turd."
Besides, the case of an Ori ship firing at a village is just a pathetic moment of embarrassing pseudo-science and fan pandering, with just burning the topsoil over a small radius, barely extending beyond that ten houses random medieval village-kit.
Those weapons were dialed down, maaaaan. j/k
The Prior spitting at the planet would have caused more damage.
The most interesting debate I had about the Ori, in a versus thread, was at Gateworld in a thread opposing a Prior to a Technomage from Babylon 5. Things would obviously become complicated when books from B5 were brought, when the wank was unleashed, and when I had to argue against such wank by pointing out material from the aborted show, which argued for a more moderate appreciation of a TM's abilities.
Besides, I realized at SBC that many people, even Fivers, don't exactly know nor understand what the books' quotes say (cf the destruction of Zahadum and the description of Galen's powers).
I never read the B5 books. They wank the shit out of technomages?
Quite yes, but the wank is largely amplified by the Fivers, who can't really defend their claims up to the extent they inflate them once you really dig deep into the quotes.
It's not just the Technomages, it's the Shadows and Vorlons as well, being given clearly better stuff which they supposedly don't use. Like, you know, they were pulling punches, nevermind both Shadows and especially the Vorlons fell back onto the use of devastating planet killers. One could argue that the SPK was only used for instilling fear, but the Vorlon's precious PK was defended by the same bog standard Vorlon armada.
It's also JMS sort of starting to give bigger balls to his universe.
For one, they say an old Battlecrab sat in that giant cave where the Shadow city of Zahadum was located, which got destroyed by the Whitestar slamming through the giant glass roof and activating several multi hundred megaton nukes all at once, making a total yield of a couple of low gigatons.
They say the Battlecrab easily survived that explosion, but when I asked for the quotes, the story was totally different. It actually really reads as Galen came out of a long tunnel (after meeting that Lorien guy deeper in the crust, below the city). So Galen, after logically going back up, exits a tunnel, and the book says "surface". What it describes doesn't correspond to the flattened urban scape as an aftermath of that cataclysmic detonation, the cleansed floor of the giant cavern. What we can read is much more a description of the planet's surface. And there, somewhere, lies the Battlecrab, with other ships.
There's also the claim that Galen could cast Shadow skin that protected him from the explosion. This has always been very vague to me, since I never read the books either.
What was clarified is that Galen cast a skin around him and another person. And more skins, on and on and on, until they were a cocoon more than anything else.
Also, the Fivers never say that Galen was clearly weakened by the effort, and the other person suffered grave damage. Light poured through the skin as the nukes detonated.
But I wanted to know how close to the explosion Galen and the other person were.
I learned that he was actually flying down along the wall of that giant abyssal pit in the center of the city, the one which Sheridan jumped into. Galen cast a sort of platform, and they were moving downards as fast as possible.
And that was at a time, iirc, after Galen had sort of been able to take control of the Eye, some Shadow super beacon that can observe a large fraction of the galaxy and provides other abilities I think. So it's hard to pretend it's vanilla Galen here. Nevertheless, some Fivers leaped to claiming this exception would now define a standard.
In this post, I list all sorts of references about the power of naqahdah.
The complete thread:
The Gua'Uld System Lords in Babylon 5.
Then the shorter thread where I ask for the quotes:
B5 + nuBSG Vs Cylons then Minbari.
You have Zohak doing his Zohak, that is, dropping barely edited entire quotations of some sources, but not engaging a debate, so few give a crap about what he says.
The Ori had no reason to be watered down. They had no reason to be Goa'uld 2.0, since the Ori did control the Priors and the Priors would control the soldiers, who then could be given proper gear and combat crafts instead of that uninspired crap.
I think they might have been going with a Dune-like feel. High tech mixed with low tech and throw in some crap along with it. Giant sand slugs?
They had the Goa'uld. The Goa'uld reigned because they maintained a paranoid control over their tech. The Ori didn't need that, they literally were using magic.
What we should have had was the Imperium of Man with a Stargate spin on it, not pseudo boring one sided and poorly thought enemies erased in the most cheap and insulting way. Globally Ark of Truth was at the image of the last two seasons of SG-1: too fucking much.
Of course, that and the realities of a TV show which has been supported by the US army, any criticism is a fucking total niet.
So although I have no hope for SGU, at least the lack of the army may allow the writers to pretend writing more mature and thought stuff.
I thought it was the air force.
Mmm... right, the Air Force, indeed. Same guys at the top anyway, the cool US president with super nice generals and so on.
Original SG-1 was much more interesting, darker in the sense of dilemmas, not emogoth darker as in SGA, and the whole underdog situation made things believable... that's before RDA got bored with the seriousness of the show he funded past the first season.
It's literally baffling how writers could not have the intelligence to understand that their shabby writing was destroying that very fragile balance that made the show credible enough so disbelief could indeed be suspended. Profit and a bunch of uninspired yes-men kills genuine artistry.
That's nearly what happened with nBSG's third season, until Moore reclaimed control of his show and ended the thing how it should end.
