Posleen in the Stargateverse

[Zor]

Here, the Posleen Conquest Fleet that attacked earth From the Legacy of the Aldenata series is relocated via Q to the Stargate Verse circa ten minutes after the end of Evolution and are pointed at a Goa'uld Mining World which has a stargate and Cartouche of Gate Adresses.

What happens?

Zor

[Stargate Nerd]

What are the capabilities of the Posleen in terms of weapons etc. ?

[Gerald Tarrant]

It's a ground-war centric series, there is some info about Space ships, but the bulk of the info is about the ground action. Unfortunately there's not a lot of technical info other than names of weapon systems, for analysis purposes they might as well be ray-guns.

The first thing about the Posleen is that they're for the most part Morons, the ratio is something like 100 morons to one "God-King"-leader-thingie. The Morons are conditioned to follow the orders of their God. So they have some severe command issues, once a God-King dies the morons (in Posleen speak "normals") become undirected and sort of berserker (I wasn't really sure if this is a psychic thing, or just the psychological trauma of seeing their leader die.) That said the God King's usually come equipped with very good kit, they're often mounted on a floating tank packed to the gills with sensors, "plasma" weapons, rail cannon and the like. In the book the Posleen could achieve a near 100% kill rate against anything powered, guided or transmitting within their line of site.

On to the Posleen normals. Their equipment depended on how rich their god was, a poor god-king could only hook his crew up with shotguns; pretty much equivalent to human shotguns, except possibly for bore size. Better equipped god-kings would use railguns, 1mm or 3mm (kind of a useless measure without knowing the speed, but in the book I thought they could easily hole a Bradley) plasma cannons (in the book they could usually 1-hit kill an Abrams) and Hyper Velocity Missiles (which could I believe kill any human vehicle excepting possibly SheVa's). Normals, while idiotic, had excellent reactions, eyesight, and aim, and a decently equipped God-King would usually have several HVM's and plasma cannons mixed into a force of mostly rail-guns.

The most important thing about Posleen is their numbers, they're hermaphrodites, breed like rabbits, can eat anything, and mature quickly (I thought it was something like 2 years). Replacement of their equipment doesn't seem to be an issue as they have access to some type of nano-tech factories which build common equipment (and possibly their ships, although that's not mentioned).

I had to look this up, but the invasion fleet was five waves each of around 240 Million Posleen, all of them combatants. Each wave also consisted of 50 -70 "battle globes" groups of 500-600 warships capable of landing and reaching orbit under their own power.

I have no idea how their ships will stack up against Gou'uld ships, but their upper limit for survivability is something like 10 kilotons. I don't know the power output of the ships, if you're interested the first novel is available for free on Baen's free library I'm sure someone could do a technical analysis if they so desired. Link It's under Ringo, and A Hymn Before Battle.

Onto the OP. Personally I think the Posleen would run rampant if they got access to the gate network, there aren't really any ground forces with the numbers or equipment to stop them. Most major powers would have to bury or shut down their gates, or risk losing their planets. In space I have no idea how things would stack up.

[Mr Bean]

What are the capabilities of the Posleen in terms of weapons etc. ?

The Posleen are center like Reptiles, Picture Four Raptor like legs, a big mouth of teeth and a tail plus two primate like arms.

The Posleen travel between worlds engaging in giant D20 shaped ships, each facing mounting different weapons from anti-ship kinetic weapons to repeating plasma cannons and more.


On the ground the Posleen are divided into groups, God-King's at the top(Who are mounted on flying saucer shaped craft which mount sensors capable of detecting electronics(Like an electronic scope) at over 200 meter even if it can't tell exactly where. The saucers also mount heavy plasma, rail gun or repeating kinetic rocket launcher. God King's can think, reason and have semi-genetic memories, they are "born" knowing how to do everything from repairing weapons to flying their own spaceships.

However they are as a rule, either suicidally brave and somewhat stupid to full on thinking military commanders on the Chinese model.

Below the God-Kings are "Posleen Superior" they nearly always carry weapons such as 3mm Rail-guns(Described as being able to kill an Abrams from the front) or a Kinetic Kill Rocket Launcher(Goes right through the Abrams front to back) They fill the role of NCO's in Posleen ranks, they are for the most part stupid, on par with very smart chimps. They can not communicate.

Below these "superior's" are Posleen normals, They are as smart as a smart horse or a dump chimp. They are for the most part moron's but fearless for the most part. Normals carry everything from the heavy weapons to lighter 1mm Railgun launchers(Will still kill a Bradley) and Shotguns.

All Posleen carry molecular tipped Boma blades which slice through armor plate like a Machetee through drywall.

Posleen fight by first assaulting a world, stripping it of all orbital defenses, then kinetically bombarding all planetary defensive guns. Once all opposition has been spotted they will land their ships at random but near some population center and go to loot and plunder.


Posleen are immune to all know bio and chemical weapons and they are death on planes since the sensors on the ships and tenair engage any thing that crests the horizon, guided missiles are engaged by every craft that can see them, ballastic weapons are not.

One huge Posleen advantage is numbers, in the Posleenverse they land around five hundred million Posleen per wave and every one of them is a fighting Posleen.

[NecronLord]

So... They slaughter everything in their path until they run into Asgard or Replicators (either flavour) then?

[Xon]

What are the capabilities of the Posleen in terms of weapons etc. ?

Multi-kiloton contact warhead wax any single ship of the Posleen, but the Posleen have a lot of shipts.

[Xon]

So... They slaughter everything in their path until they run into Asgard or Replicators (either flavour) then?

Anything with shields which can absorb radiant EM and shoot from orbit could kill them given enough time. The Posleen haev some profoundly wierd blind spots, and are strategically more inept than the various higher tech races in Stargate.

They would still cut a bloody path across the galaxy if they manage to use a Stargate, otherwise it is posible for no-one to notice them running around till they notice other worlds falling.

[Slacker]

The Jaffa are almost more strategically inclined then them. At least the Jaffa can defend choke points by something other than a pile of corpses.

Not saying much, though, I grant you.

[Stargate Nerd]

Shotguns, Rail guns and Plasma rifles? I can't think of any ground force in Stargate that could keep up with that.

[Gerald Tarrant]

Shotguns, Rail guns and Plasma rifles? I can't think of any ground force in Stargate that could keep up with that.

The Posleen do have quite a few drawbacks:

• 1. They're fragmented
  a. This means there will be no unified command, although occasionally large clans cooperate.
  b. They don't fight each other until there all non-Posleen forces have been eaten.
  2. They're centaurs, meaning they face the same mobility issues that horses have.
  a. in the Posleen-verse this was what let humans survive, Posleen cannot climb mountains, and they need decent terrain.
  b. Posleen have a terrible time taking prepared positions; despite their huge disadvantages, strong defenses let humans inflict 100-1 casualties on the Posties.
  3. The Supply situation, the Posties are obligate carnivores, normally they solve this by killing and eating their enemy. But to eat they need to take and hold an area.
  4. Related to 3. When all the food in an area is eaten, they turn on themselves.
  5. Related to 3 and 4. They don't stop breeding. Malthus anyone?

I don't know enough about how intelligent the ground forces of the Star Gate verse behave, or whether or not they can capitalize on the Posleen's weakness.

[DrStrangelove]

The posleen are nearly unstoppable on the ground in SG verse due to numbers, but are easily stoppable in space due to slow FTL and poor durability. the physical size of stargates will limit their numbers for future attacks through them and allow them to be mopped up easily through orbital bombardment.

[Covenant]

I don't recall offhand, but I do know that nuclear missiles were used quite a bit by the USAF's Stargate division early on against those big Goa'uld motherships, and they found out pretty fast that it was utterly pointless. Which is why for the first, like, third of the series they were looking for weapons that could piece shields and to get shields of their own. In fact, nukes that had even been enhanced with the naquada stuff that made them into massive superbombs (which we've seen demonstrated from time to time, occasionally as anti-planet weapons, so we've seen their power verified) failed to penetrate their shields.

And there's also some bad news for their capital ships. From the episode "There but for the grace of God" we get a firepower calc from Carter, who is a reliable witness overall. She's describing the effects of a Ha'tak bombardment of Earth. We don't know which weapon they're using in specific--this could be a big volley of their main guns or something that they call one single blast, they have very little experience with the Goa'uld to make that assessment--but it's pretty obvious that the Posleen aren't going to be doing anything of merit in space against this.

SAM
If they fire on us, chances are we wont
even feel it! Blast on the East coast
were the equivalent of a two hundred
ton nuclear war head.

Basically, it boils down to how well they learn how to use the Gates. Unless they're clever enough to borrow Goa'uld technology to improve their vessels they'll be entirely useless against anything build for Stargate space warfare, and they can't gate onto Earth due to the iris. The SGC is also willing to use the gate as a weapons delivery system and to develop biological weapons capable of massive genocidal depopulations, so if they come up with some kind of viral weapon (which they're often intersted in researching, having used them against replicators, priors and jaffa) capable of killing off the Posleen then you're pretty sure it'll get deployed.

Really, it'll be pretty pathetic, except when they're lucky enough to achieve a landing. I'm not sure if or if not any of their weapons will penetrate a personal shield like the Goa'uld leader sorts wear. Since you're dropping them in right after Evolutions that also means they're going to be fighting a bunch of Kull Warriors as well, the Anubis Supersoldiers who have been seen shrugging off hits from small arms up through missiles. How well they do against railguns is a matter of debate, as anti-armor munitions didn't seem to phase them at all, but that a relatively small projectile made of unbotanium ultrastrong materials (trinium, in the show) could get through. I suppose it depends what the railgun slug is made out of. Do we know anything about the railguns at all, like the amount of kick they cause and the relative size of the projectile? Would be useful.

In any case, I seriously doubt they'd do well. Their ships are tissue paper compared to the most average Stargate Powers, and their numbers won't mean much if none of them can land. As you can simply block, bury, or move a gate to render it useless for invasion, it really doesn't matter if the Posleen manage to capture a portion of the gate network using the gates. They can spread out all they want, they can't control space, and so they'll just got bombarded from space. The SGC has deployed pretty horrifying weapons in the past--such as one "designed solely for the purpose of vaporizing Stargates and anything else within a 100 mile/160 kilometer radius" as it was said, which is a pretty astounding yield from a warhead. Six of these are contained within the "Horizon" MIRV weapon, and we've already seen it used once in a first-strike ground bombardment capacity. Using it against the Posleen would be overkill, but it gives you some idea of the disparity between Posleenverse and the Stargate series in terms of "high ground" potency.

Posleen soldiers with shotguns won't even be able to outshoot Jaffa (assuming the Jaffa use their helmets) since you need AP rounds to get through their armor, but the railguns would do just fine. In any case, after the first few embarassing losses to them, they'd just get treated like a disease and wiped out from space.

[Mr Bean]

One strong advantage against that is the Posleen's anti-missile ability. They are murder on missiles. If you launch a ICBM at them be prepared to lose it if it's under power at all. They managed to tag several hundred human nukes out of the sky in a brief window(Less than five minutes) before the missiles went ballistic and the automated systems lost them.

This was ground systems firing as well, firing any kind of missile at them is a recipe to lose them.

This also applies to space based missiles, Firing space nukes at them is worthless, even if it's got a two terataon warhead if they kill the missile it won't mean squat, your need ray based weapons or alot of missiles to take them down in space.

As for Kull, a HVM can hull a Abrams and keep on going, have we ever seen them shoot at a Krull with something the size of a 122m gun? The magic dart that kills the Kull in Death Knell had much less force than what an Posleen rocket can put out. It might not be made of magic material but it sure as hell can go right through a Abrams, out the back and through a concrete wall and still have energy left over.

[Xon]

One strong advantage against that is the Posleen's anti-missile ability. They are murder on missiles. If you launch a ICBM at them be prepared to lose it if it's under power at all. They managed to tag several hundred human nukes out of the sky in a brief window(Less than five minutes) before the missiles went ballistic and the automated systems lost them.

The F-302 carries an active radar scattering system, they actually strapped the device to an ICBM to use it to EMP a city once as in the radar couldn't see the ICBM on it's ballistic path.

[Covenant]

This also applies to space based missiles, Firing space nukes at them is worthless, even if it's got a two terataon warhead if they kill the missile it won't mean squat, your need ray based weapons or alot of missiles to take them down in space.

As for Kull, a HVM can hull a Abrams and keep on going, have we ever seen them shoot at a Krull with something the size of a 122m gun? The magic dart that kills the Kull in Death Knell had much less force than what an Posleen rocket can put out. It might not be made of magic material but it sure as hell can go right through a Abrams, out the back and through a concrete wall and still have energy left over.

Missiles or not, the railguns, beams and capital staff blasts used by the spacefaring nations of stargate are still more than capable of delivering the kind of lethality you need. Plus, what I was really saying is that they possess high-powered warheads. The most common application of their warhead technology is not via a missile afterall, they usually just shove it through the stargate. When they eradicated the Abydos civilization they did it by just rolling a big enhanced nuke through the gate. If the Posleen don't use the Stargates then they'll be trapped due to their incredibly inferior space capabilities. If they do use them, they'll need to develop iris technology very fast or else they're open to gate-launched warhead attacks.

The same applies even if they don't build within 100 or so miles of the gate, and leave all that room as buffer area (which is a strategic danger in itself), since the gatebuster munitions are designed to bust the gate anyway, thus leaving them without means of escape.

You can also beam a gate up, or smash the DHD. It wouldn't take more than a minor bit of even mundane bombardment from space to break the DHD to the point that you're utterly incapable of dialing out of it, and since the Posleen can't stand up in space combat, that's basically the end of it right there. Can't escape, can't fight back, you lose. This is really a very bad matchup because of the Posleen's suprisingly bad spaceforce and Stargate Universe's often underestimated space force firepower levels and speed.

Prometheus has been around for about a year by this time, and unless the Posleen muss with the timetable soon the Humans will have partial access to the Antartica base's space defense platform and access to the Atlantis base. Assuming that the Posleen are dangerous enough to warrant not permanently colonizing Atlantis at the moment we can assume the extra guns, equipment, and manpower sent there to fight the Wraith will remain on Earth to fight their new enemies. Once the Daedelus comes online you've got an even more impressive weapon platform to work with. Prometheus is not even that bad of a ship in it's first generation, it's capable of full atmospheric air combat and takeoff-and-landing operations on the ground. I don't think there's much hope for the Posleen, even if the SGC never use another missile ever again.

And against the Goa'uld, Asgard, Ori, Asurans and so forth, they're similarly just fucked due to even worse combat capabilities. A Goa'uld Ha'tak-type ship may not have the best defenses known to man but it's offensive capabilities are fairly impressive, and it took is a ground takeoff-and-landing capable vessel, and it's use in ground bombardment is well documented. This isn't namby pamby Star Trek afterall, they're happy to dust off and clear you from orbit.

[Beowulf]

What are the capabilities of the Posleen in terms of weapons etc. ?

Multi-kiloton contact warhead wax any single ship of the Posleen, but the Posleen have a lot of shipts.

Upper bound of what's necessary to wax a C-Dec is about a 10 MT warhead (stated .25 kg of AM). Realistic upper bound is about 1 MT. However, even that level of firepower will not actually destroy pulverize a C-Dec, though it will rip it in half. Admittedly, this was an external application of a nuclear level weapon. The "normal" method of dealing with the ships is to toss a 10kT nuclear weapon at the lander at 10km/s.

On the other hand, a .50BMG round can destroy a tenar (not a tank, for one, the posleen ride on top, not inside).

As for the posleen weapons: The HVMs fire slugs of dense metal at about .3c. The largest difference between the HVMs and the 1 and 3mm railguns is the size of the round, not the velocity. They aren't like earth missiles.

Radar stealthing is essentially useless since Posleen don't use radar (see F-22 Raptors get nearly instantenously vaporized on overflight of a Posleen force).

Chemical/biowarfare is known to be useless against Posleen (the Galactics weren't complete idiots).

It's unknown how well the Posleen can assimilate new technology. They aren't great innovators at advancing their own technology, and the tech level of their opposition remained relatively stagnant throughout the war.

It's been noted that quantity has a quality all its own. Stargate is a decidedly minimalist universe. We rarely see more than a handful of ships. I believe the greatest number was about 30. The Posleen start with between 25000 and 42000 ships.

The Posleen would almost certainly remain a pest in the Galaxy,

[Covenant]

I won't dispute that they come with an awful lot of ships and men, but the 'quantity has a quality' aspect has very little merit when we consider the nature of this debate. If it was merely throwing them at Earth then yes, there might be an issue. The issue being that the Prometheus may eventually run out of ammo. But if you read Zor's setting post, the Posleen force is simply thrown into the mix by pointing them at a Joe Average mining world with a Stargate. They're not going to be fighting the SGC or Earth's limited resources, which are probably still sufficent to cause a great deal of harm. They're going to be fighting the Goa'uld, and probably Anubis' force itself:



This is more than a handful of vessels, more than 30 or so right here, and this is one fleet of one force of the Goa'uld. So while there is indeed a great degree of minimalism, there's no doubt that a System Lord is capable of throwing a serious amount of hardware at a problem. There's a big difference between when they send one or two ships to go investigate a problem and when they mobilize for war against a specific target, as we've seen a lot. One of the big concerns is that a rival would exploit the gap in your defenses and attack you while you're off conquering Bumfuck, so it's rare that we see them devote a significant amount of their Ha'taks to any one task. But when they do, it's obvious that even one system lord is capable of pulling a goodly fleet together:



These images don't even include the variety of sub-capital vessels and flagships used--except the top one, which does indeed feature a flagship. The most notable exception to the list of ships seen are the many Al'kesh vessels that do a variety of fairly substantial fighting as heavy bomber craft. They carry a mix of munitions, some pretty small and some pretty decent at cutting through ships, but the forgotton element is that they can cloak. Optical cloaking bomber transports are a huge advantage when you're dealing with the primitive kinds of ships the Posleen seem to. How slow are the Posleen ships in realspace, and what is the nature of their FTL? Would they be able to avoid simply being rounded up and slaughtered, despite what numerical advantage they have?

While I'd say their wanky ground forces (a man packed weapon firing something at .3c? ) are probably superior to anything we've seen, and theoretically superior to a great deal of ground forces from many sci-fi settings, their spaceships are just too damn pathetic to do anything and they're going to primarily be facing a race of beings whose modus operandi is taking over leadership as God-Kings of their own people, and failing that, complete eradication from orbit.

At the very best the Posleen can hope to live out their lives as feral tribes, landlocked on planets but otherwise free to exist on their own. At the worst, we find out that a Zat works just fine on them and a few of the God-Kings of the Posleen end up as hosts for Goa'uld, giving the snakeheads like Anubis access to all the Posleen knowledge that the host had, as well as command of all his wanky ground forces.

[Connor MacLeod]

As I recall in "Hymn before Battle" its mentioned that Posleen warships do mount some fairly heavy weaponry even if their smaller component ships are fairly crappy in terms of durability (in a relative sense. I shoudl admit that the methods in which they are destroyed tend to be a bit ah, multi-aspect. Like the hypervelocity SHeVa rounds.)

They mention, for example that the ship mounts plasma cannons that could "slag mountains", which suggests farily substantial anti-ship firepower (high Megaton or low gigaton) I expect HVMs could be similar. In "Gust Front" there was some anti ship/anti lander weapon mounted in those incomplete bases that hurled 2 meter long depleted uranium rods at .3c, which is worth a couple hundred megatons itself...

The "C-dec taken out by an antimatter bomb".. bearing in mind its an atmospheric detonation, it was a point-blank detonation (right up against the skin of the ship) and ships are hardly the most inert objects possible. You could fudge that a little (I think you almost have to) but the Posleen ships are still going to be "eggshells with hammers" to borrow/paraphrase another baen writer.

of course, as I recall, their landers/other ships alos function as a sortt of ablative armor. When they form the massive globes-o-doom to travel to and invade a planet, they expect some losses.

And HVMs? I'm generally leery of alot of how they're portrayed in the "man portable" sense. Ringo tends to abuse terminology with his weapons, and makes some ouright errors (he referred to the "teardrops" the grav guns fire as massing two ounces, or having the equivalent of 200-400 lbs of TNT in them.) THey're powerful, yes, ,but I doubt that they routinely hurl (in essence) small nuclear warheads or meteor impacts with each man portable missile. As I recall, ,they tend to use the HVMs to take out tanks and other armored vehicles, ,and the destruction isnt nearly THAT devastating.

[Covenant]

That firepower level is still too low. In The Serpent's Lair two special "Goa'uld Buster" munitions were deployed to take out a Ha'tak, each of them rated at 1,000 megatons, and failed. Even if you assume the weapons did not successfully deploy, a Ha'tak has shields capable of withstanding it's own weaponry, putting their shielding capabilities high enough to withstand at least a short amount of sustained 200 megaton blasts.

Do we ever see the Posleen deploy any of these weapon systems? They can be written as being able to slag a mountain, but unless they did, doesn't that just fall to Author's Intent instead of any kind of verifiable fact? This isn't even bringing the Asgard into play, who have a vested interest in preserving Earth, or any of the ancient technology such as drones and stealthed attack ships.

I also find their weapon systems somewhat suspect overall, considering the fact that these ships didn't just obliterate the idiotic fatass Bolo tanks that the Nazis used against them, and that overall the science in Posleenverse seems to be tenuous at best. Even if we're extremely generous, their ships are still pathetically weak and lucky if they can mount the same kind of destructive firepower as comes standard on any ol' Ha'tak out there.

Regardless, unless the Posleen force can continually stay on the move, devouring as they go, they'll quickly starve, turn on each other, and cease to be a problem. They seem to lack any sort of understanding, or a willingness to exploit, farming and herding practices. I assume that the God-Kings understand how to cultivate crops to feed to livestock to eat, but their raging carnivorous idiocy makes them a shamefully easy-to-defeat foe if they cannot maintain space superiority, and we really need some evidence they're even capable of taking down a single Ha'tak, let alone fleets of them deployed by System Lords defending their territory.

[Xon]

The Posleen doesn't use thier spaceships as support weapon systems except to engage other spaceships before landing. They entire race and even tactical doctrine has been designed to have stupid massive gaps in it that most space-based powers could wax them with ease.

Upper bound of what's necessary to wax a C-Dec is about a 10 MT warhead (stated .25 kg of AM).

Do you have an exact quote on how much anti-matter it was and its context?

Ringo has utterly butched some technical terms before, and I can't remember the exacts beyond there was a lot of actual sheilding to prevent the anti-matter cooking off at once using strong permement magnetic fields.

[Stargate Nerd]

That firepower level is still too low. In The Serpent's Lair two special "Goa'uld Buster" munitions were deployed to take out a Ha'tak, each of them rated at 1,000 megatons, and failed. Even if you assume the weapons did not successfully deploy, a Ha'tak has shields capable of withstanding it's own weaponry, putting their shielding capabilities high enough to withstand at least a short amount of sustained 200 megaton blasts.

I think it's generally agreed upon that the modified ICBMs did not detonate their load but merely impacted against the shield and were destroyed.

Also many people dismiss the 200 megaton blasts as alternate reality figure.

[Covenant]

I think it's generally agreed upon that the modified ICBMs did not detonate their load but merely impacted against the shield and were destroyed.

Also many people dismiss the 200 megaton blasts as alternate reality figure.

While I think the wording of your reply is fairly cowardly, I did a quick search of the forum and it seems like there's a painfully large amount of discussion on just that matter. I was about to call you full of shit, but ah well. In the future, a link to the previous debate or something would be nice, since you're presenting it without any degree of substantiation.

Still though, even if the Goa'uld weapons are at the low end of the capability that even the detractors in that arguement do agree on, we're looking at weapons that should be able to achieve kiloton-level effects per hit, and fire quite quickly. I see no reason to doubt that even a minimalist's Ha'tak would be more than a match for the Posleen offensively, and that the demonstrated defensive capabilities of a Ha'tak shield (sitting in a blue sun's corona, etc) mean that unless the Pos'leen weapons achieve penetration, they're going to need a demonstrated extremely high-level power to do anything.

It's just important to look at the numbers presented first. If we take the "slag mountains" at face value, despite the series' poor command of science, then we're failing the bullshit test of fancy writing. In the Alternate Universe at least we see Goa'uld vessels able to obliterate a huge amount of major cities from orbit enmasse in a matter of half a week, which suggests moderate capability weapons. These same Alternate Universe weapons can penetrate the NORAD mountain defenses, so there's your 'mountain slagging' weapon right there.

At one point we do get told about but not specifically shown using a Ha'tak to blast open parts of a geologically unstable planetoid down to the mantle, and use occasional bombardment to keep the moon's surface hot. That's the Sokar episode with that hellhole prison world. There's a lot of debate about that, but we have more evidence of Goa'uld weapon power from those events than anything we've seen posted about the Pos'leen weaponry.

Would it be agreed that we can put a lower limit on Goa'uld, Human and Asgard weapons that is still dangerously close to a Posleen ship's maximum damage threshold? That seems reasonable.

While it seems like the Goa'uld are suffering from a lack of hard numbers on their output, we've seen their weapons capable of damaging each-other and of taking down Earth vessels with comperable shields as well. These shields don't always successfully stop all targets, allowing for penetration kills, but when they do stop an entire effect they've been demonstrated to be able to achieve high-levels of power. I still say the Posleen are just too weak, but if people are able to provide evidence that they would be able to team up like Glass Cannons to achieve space superiority, then they might be able to survive.

So what we really need is evidence of a concerted Posleen warship attack on a quantifiable target so that we can compare that to shield strength to determine if their weapons are ever capable of making a kill, and what numerical advantage is required to achieve it.

[Gerald Tarrant]

Upper bound of what's necessary to wax a C-Dec is about a 10 MT warhead (stated .25 kg of AM).

Do you have an exact quote on how much anti-matter it was and its context?

from a "Hymn Before Battle", the cobbled together limpet mine:

Mike ignored the weapons and headed for the drive section. Lifting a deck plate he keyed in a code on an inconspicuous pad. A drawer opened with a susurrant whoosh and Mike lifted out the heavy canister within. He put it in the French backpack and started adding grenades from his suit, its cavernous ammunition storage disgorged two hundred and eighty-five. To this he added all of his magazines and all the ammo on the shuttle that was handy. He carefully duct taped his last grenade to the outside. In the end he had one hundred kilos total weight, at least .005 percent of which was pure antimatter.

...

"I love you, hon," he said and let go of the clamp; the grenade pin went with him. As he swung out and down he manually overrode the suit systems and set the suit to maximum inertial protection. It was a long shot but what the hell

...

The grenade initially caused massive failures on the part of the grav-gun ammunition and the suit grenades. The rifle ammunition used a dollop of antimatter as its propellant charge. Under normal use a small energy field, similar in design to the personal protection field, would reach out and shatter the miniature stabilization field that prevented the antimatter from contacting regular matter. Another field held the antimatter away from the breech of the weapon so that it only contacted the depleted uranium teardrop. When the antimatter touched the uranium, the two types of matter were instantly converted into a massive outpouring of energy.

This energy was captured in a very efficient manner and used to accelerate the uranium round down the barrel of the grav-gun.

When the conventional French grenade went off, it shattered a large number of the antimatter stabilization fields immediately around it. Each of these fields contained an antimatter charge equivalent to two hundred pounds of TNT. There were several hundred in the backpack.

The rupturing of the rifle ammunition in turn smashed the antimatter grenades. The grenades actually held a smaller charge than the rifle rounds, but the casing provided much more in the way of shrapnel and that proved providential.

The canister from the shuttle also contained antimatter. Quite a bit of it.

The ubiquitous substance was the primary energy source for all high-energy systems in the Galactic Federation. In the case of the combat shuttles it was the source of choice because of its high mass-to-energy ratio. The shuttles not only had to have an energy source that could carry them for short interplanetary hops, but also one that could fuel their terawatt lasers.

The canister, however, unlike the grenades and ammunition, was heavily shielded against damage. The possibility of penetrating damage that reached the bottle was anticipated by the designers. The bottle was not only made of a heavy plasteel similar to the armored combat suits, but also had a heavy-duty energy shield around it.

When the first ammunition detonated, the rapid explosions, effectively one expanding nuclear fireball, were shrugged off. Likewise the initial explosions of the grenades; the explosive force simply was too weak to destroy the integrity of the well-designed antimatter containment system.

However, the grenades were detonating practically in contact with the bottle, and their iridium casings were accelerating at nearly half the speed of light.

The first few bits of molten forged iridium shrapnel plastered themselves to the outside and sublimated under the expanding fireball. But by a few microseconds after the explosion of the conventional grenade thousands of forged particles were bombarding the outside of the canister. Under the assault, first the outer shielding, then the plasteel armor, and finally the inner shielding failed.

At which point nearly a quarter kilogram of antimatter detonated, with an explosion to rival the Big Bang.

Link This is a link to the Baen free library, which contains the entire first and second books.

The Posleen doesn't use thier spaceships as support weapon systems except to engage other spaceships before landing. They entire race and even tactical doctrine has been designed to have stupid massive gaps in it that most space-based powers could wax them with ease.

Incorrect. In "Watch on the Rhine" (not as good as any of Ringo's stuff) The Posleen landers engage and destroy planetary defense centers, which is where the statements about slagging mountains come from. One case has a base buried in the Pyrenees firing on Posleen landers, and the book refers to the mountain being smashed, I'll look for the quote.

Also in "Watch on the Rhine" several Posleen began learning proper use of massed landers in a support role, or in a hunter killer role. (Personally I'd just like to ignore the canonicity of the non-Ringo novels, as it introduces what looks like some contradictions.) But in any case, in "When the Devil Dances" and "Hell's Faire" (Books 3 and 4 of the main sequence) Tulo'stenalar has learned to start using landers en mass. Even before then, humans had noticed that the occasional Posleen would use landers in air-mobile and support roles, which was why the Americans needed to develop SheVa's for anti-lander work.

[Covenant]

At which point nearly a quarter kilogram of antimatter detonated, with an explosion to rival the Big Bang.

Clearly a creationist writer here to know so little of the Big Bang. A quarter kilo of antimatter reacting with 100 percent efficency to another quarter kilo of normal matter is going to create the same amount of energy as a 10 megaton bomb, which is pretty pathetic in Space War terms, and that doesn't mean you get a 10 megaton nuke out of a quarter kilo of antimatter anyway.

It's quite possible that in a reaction such as this (which appears to be out in space, yes?) the second that the container was breached it caused an explosion that tore the ship apart and left the majority of the antimatter unreacted, as is often the problem with space-based antimatter weapon systems. Even if this was in an atmosphere where the antimatter couldn't avoid reacting in entirity, it may not have gone up all at once, and a slow explosion is quite different than a fast one.

And furthermore, we do know that antimatter sends off at least a quarter to a third of it's total energy as harmless particles that do nothing whatsoever. While this isn't to say that a quarter kilo of antimatter isn't an awful thing to do to someone, it does cast some immense doubt on the consistancy of their science. In space, a 10 megaton blast would not rival the big bang. It'd hardly rival the Fourth of July. A little flash and nothing else, and that's at best. On the ground it's about 2/3rds of the size of a Bikini Atoll test, far less than the biggest Soviet nuke ever tested, so this is pretty much some extreme hyperbole on their part. It makes it hard for me to swallow the accuracy of the other systems mentioned when nearly all of the weapons we've seen talked about are either powered by magic pixie dust, like the manpacked railguns, or creating effects that are at odds with as simple a fact as their maximum potential energy.

[Covenant]

Lack of edit button makes me add another line here: My post is to say that it is becoming clear that while the Stargateverse suffers from occasional wide variations in potency and ship capability, we do see a ballpark of figures that can let us make general assumptions about their capabilities. However, we can't see anything in these books without taking the writing as evidence, and the writing is either unhelpful or wrong as many times as it is useful.

This is partially to fault the writers on relying on "smashing a mountain" and "to rival the big bang" as descriptive terms for their weapons, since it makes it hard to justify taking one hyperbole as representative and the other merely as artistic, and to cast the Posleenverse into the same dubious catagory as Starcraft in terms of canonicity and capability being such a grab-bag of different interpertations.

Watch on the Rhine, with it's tanks massing in the thousands of tons, introduces the series to some undeniably bad science and the descriptions we have of things often makes no sense. From the simple idiocy of hobnails in boots to the stupendous question of why don't the new tanks don't simply sink into the dirt like the Maus and Ratt and other superheavy tanks have always done, it just isn't easy to make calculations when we can't verify what we're being told. It would be like trying to verify Star Trek based only on what the characters say, rather than what we see.