X-303/304 landing ability in Stargate

[Cecelia5578]

So, in both SG-1 and Atlantis, the X-303/304's are able to land planetside. Does this make any sense from either a real world or in universe perspective?

Off the top of my head I can only remember this happening twice-When Vala stole the Prometheus back in Season 8, and in later SG-1 ep where the Daedalus takes SG-1 to Atlantis for their little black hole experiment. Oh, and in The Siege part 3, I think?

I can sorta see it making sense in universe, the Tauri simply don't have any orbital shipbuilding/maintenance facilities, so it makes sense that they'd be able to land their ships for overhaul and repair work.

[NecronLord]

All Stargate ships can at least hover in low atmosphere. Even destiny must be able to fly in a planetary atmosphere, given that she does so regularly to passing stars and aerobrakes through gas giants. Anubis' Citadel Ship could hover around ground level. Hive ships, in all their eleven click glory, can land. Ori warships are assembled on the ground and asgard ships are assembled in atmosphere.

Prometheus also lands in an earlier episode, Memento. The Earth ships are built underground, so of course they can make it into orbit.

[PREDATOR490]

Prometheus also lands in an earlier episode, Memento. The Earth ships are built underground, so of course they can make it into orbit.

I know the Promie was assembled underground but are the X304s ?

Would seem rather retarded to waste the effort developing underground facilities which need to be covered up vs. build them somehere else so some Mulder wannabe dosent take pictures of launches.

[spaceviking]

Well at the scale of these things is anything sensible other than building them in orbit?

[Batman]

And how, prey tell, would you get all those things you need to build them into orbit? Remember that to the very end of the series, the Stargate program is secret, and that most of Earth's industry is Earth's industry as we know it. What's easier to keep under wraps? A remote construction site in a desert somewhere nobody cares about...or 19 million rocket launches to establish and support an orbital shipyard?
Not to mention that things in orbit are easily visible to anybody with a telescope (or for something the size of a capital shipyard in LEO, anybody with reasonably good eyesight).

[Serafina]

Well at the scale of these things is anything sensible other than building them in orbit?

Well, it makes sense.
Those spaceships represent the only serious lift capability they have. To assemble them in orbit, they would have to move all that stuff up there with much smaller craft, possibly even chemical rockets. Much easier to built it on the ground, because the thing can lift of easily once it's finished.

This is usually not the case with other civilizations, because they progress gradually. Even then, building in orbit is not necessarily easier depending on how their technology can handle construction in zero-g. While doing so is generally advantageous, if you lack the proper techniques to do so, it might not be worth it. After all, most sci-fi ships can lift off the ground very easily - building them there might just be more comfortable.

[NecronLord]

No one in setting builds ships in orbit, not the Asurans, not the Asgard, not the Goa'uld and not the Wraith. Clearly it's something no-one bothers with.

[Ahriman238]

Prometheus also lands in an earlier episode, Memento. The Earth ships are built underground, so of course they can make it into orbit.

Also in 'Unnatrual Selection.'

Given that the SGC mines the bulk of the materials used to build the ships offworld, it always struck me as kind of odd that they didn't establish a secret shipyard on some galactic backwater, or even one of the alpha/beta/gamma/delta sites. It makes about as much sense as sending a thousand tons of naquadah through the gate and trucking it from Colorado to the middle of the Nevada desert.
Clearly they had at least some stage of F-302 production occuring at the Alpha Site in season eight. Even if they were just sending components through the gate and assembling them on the other side.

[Sea Skimmer]

Building ships in space gains you the advantage of minimal gravity making moving large parts easier, at the cost of everyone doing the work needing to be in a space suit, or else construction a pressurized space hanger before hand. Space suits suck for getting anything done; and if you pressurize the construction hanger you’d always have a huge safety risk of it being depressurized and killing the work force. This is very very bad if you expect the shipyard might come under sudden attack. So assuming the spaceships can simply fly into orbit, working on the surface would be a lot better.

Trucking materials around the US in secret is easy, when is the last anyone here saw a nuclear weapons convoy or a stealth materials convoy? That kind stuff all moves in unmarked trucks with no escort or a covert escort in civilian vehicles and no one's the wiser unless they look very closely. But the advantage with moving naquadah ect... is even if someone did notice the transportation secuitry they'd logically assume it was somthing like nuclear warheads.

[Shroom Man 777]

And their 'verse is already chock full of hokey stealth devices. Maybe the next time Mulder goes to photograph Area 51, he'll be surprised to see that it's disappeared entirely.

[Simon_Jester]

Given that the SGC mines the bulk of the materials used to build the ships offworld, it always struck me as kind of odd that they didn't establish a secret shipyard on some galactic backwater, or even one of the alpha/beta/gamma/delta sites. It makes about as much sense as sending a thousand tons of naquadah through the gate and trucking it from Colorado to the middle of the Nevada desert.
Clearly they had at least some stage of F-302 production occuring at the Alpha Site in season eight. Even if they were just sending components through the gate and assembling them on the other side.

The ships may have had components too big to send through a stargate. If at some point during the construction you need to build steel frameworks twenty feet across, and you can't safely cut them up and put them back together during assembly, you're going to need to do assembly on your end of the gate.

Judging by the scale and published length statistics on the wiki, I wouldn't be at all surprised if even the relatively early and small Prometheus tipped the scales at fifty thousand tons or more. I'd therefore be surprised if they didn't have such bulky components.

This came up during an earlier discussion of modular ship designs, actually in more than one in different settings, recently.

[Xon]

Given that the SGC mines the bulk of the materials used to build the ships offworld, it always struck me as kind of odd that they didn't establish a secret shipyard on some galactic backwater, or even one of the alpha/beta/gamma/delta sites.

Like say SG-Earth?

[Ahriman238]

Ahriman238 wrote:
Given that the SGC mines the bulk of the materials used to build the ships offworld, it always struck me as kind of odd that they didn't establish a secret shipyard on some galactic backwater, or even one of the alpha/beta/gamma/delta sites.

Like say SG-Earth?

Exactly! Except, with a few billion less people they need to hide the materials and construction from.

[Themightytom]

I think it has been firmly established via anecdotal evidence that the population of SG earth is absolutely inattentive.

[Batman]

Which is why no inquisitive reporter ever tried to wrangle information about the Stargate program out of O'Neill, nevermind knowing they destroyed two alien starships close to earth because the official explanation was completely incompatible with the visuals, no deranged billionaire ever tried to get ahold of a goa'uld symbiont to cure his incurable disease, no other deranged billionaire ever abducted Rodney and his sister to find a cure for his daughter, and that third deranged billionaire totally didn't try to expose the Stargate program to the point of showing a fake Asgard in the hopes of forcing the program out into the open.

[NecronLord]

Which is why no inquisitive reporter ever tried to wrangle information about the Stargate program out of O'Neill, nevermind knowing they destroyed two alien starships close to earth because the official explanation was completely incompatible with the visuals, no deranged billionaire ever tried to get ahold of a goa'uld symbiont to cure his incurable disease, no other deranged billionaire ever abducted Rodney and his sister to find a cure for his daughter, and that third deranged billionaire totally didn't try to expose the Stargate program to the point of showing a fake Asgard in the hopes of forcing the program out into the open.

In reality, you couldn't hide the ships. People would see them. The ISS is amongst the brightest stars in the sky, never mind that.

[Themightytom]

Which is why no inquisitive reporter ever tried to wrangle information about the Stargate program out of O'Neill, nevermind knowing they destroyed two alien starships close to earth because the official explanation was completely incompatible with the visuals, no deranged billionaire ever tried to get ahold of a goa'uld symbiont to cure his incurable disease, no other deranged billionaire ever abducted Rodney and his sister to find a cure for his daughter, and that third deranged billionaire totally didn't try to expose the Stargate program to the point of showing a fake Asgard in the hopes of forcing the program out into the open.

Ok look YOUR population is letting you pretend they don't know you're Bruce Wayne, why can't the SG's Joe The plumber be aware that something is going on but unwilling to connect the dots

[Simon_Jester]

I think what matters here is that hiding a construction site on the ground is easier than hiding one in orbit, because the launches of material into orbit are at risk of attracting attention, far more so than truck convoys- they're also expensive. Even if Stargate Earthlings are ludicrously unperceptive and in-denial about the existence of alien lifeforms and spaceships and shit, you don't want that unperceptiveness to be the only line of defense.

And, again, launching the shit into orbit is expensive.

"Orbital construction is cheaper" is a stock argument in SF. But realistically, it only applies in light of certain conditions:

-The ship can't feasibly hold itself together under terrestrial gravity, even with a scaffold holding it up, or the ship can't feasibly take off under terrestrial gravity. Big flimsy cargo haulers or really really large ships might fall under the first category. Ion drive and Orion drive interplanetary spacecraft fall under the second- the former because they lack the thrust to take off, the latter because of safety concerns.

-There is no need to ship bulk cargo up a steep gravity well to assemble the ship, or spacelift is ridiculously cheap. If the materials start out in space, you have a good argument for assembling the ship there even if it's difficult and expensive to work up there, because of the cost of bringing the materials into and back out of the gravity well. If the materials start on the ground, though, you're going to be hard pressed to justify not doing the assembly on the ground, assuming the ship can take off under its own power. If spacelift is so cheap that the cost of moving materials into and out of the gravity well is irrelevant, then the decision will be based entirely on issues (1) and (3).

-Space technology is so advanced that working in space is not drastically more costly than working on the ground. Space suits must be extremely comfortable and practical to work in, the worker housing must be easy and cheap to pressurize, and so on.

[Serafina]

There are two good reasons to build in space:
-the craft can not be built on the ground and then lift off.
-the material is minded from asteroids and transporting stuff into orbit is not dirt-cheap.

The former has already been covered by Simon. The latter should be quite obvious:
Transporting the material from the asteroid to the surface of a planet, assembling it and then lifting it out of the gravity well all over again will cost a lot. Constructing it in space will save you to the cost of lifting the mass of the ship out of the gravity well - and that can be very substantial if your technology doesn't make that process very cheap.

Of course, if the materials are already on the planet, then you won't save any money by assembling them in space.

The main hurdle of building in space is obviously the need for spacesuits, unless you build in a spacedock. This is (more or less) a one-time investment and likely miniscule compared to the cost of lifting the ships mass out of a gravity well.

[Simon_Jester]

There are two good reasons to build in space:
-the craft can not be built on the ground and then lift off.
-the material is minded from asteroids and transporting stuff into orbit is not dirt-cheap.

The former has already been covered by Simon...

-There is no need to ship bulk cargo up a steep gravity well to assemble the ship, or spacelift is ridiculously cheap. If the materials start out in space, you have a good argument for assembling the ship there even if it's difficult and expensive to work up there, because of the cost of bringing the materials into and back out of the gravity well...

The latter has also already been covered by Simon.

[Sarevok]

There MIGHT be one advantage to building in space in the SG universe.

In naval ship building large ships in real world required moving around some very huge pieces. The turrets on the Yamato battleship weighed over 2000 tons, more than a destroyer class ship. The "medium sized" aircraft carrier India is presently building is composed hundreds of modules each massing several hundred tons. A Nimitz type carrier uses even more enormous prefabricated sections.

Now consider some of the large spacecraft seen in SG like BC-304s or Hataks. They probably mass hundreds of thousands or even millions of tons. Despite the difficulty of working in spacesuits the ease of moving around such huge pieces just might be worth the hassle.

In case of the Goul'd there is another advantage to this. If an uprising were to occur amongst a planets population the surface based industrial sites would be overrun. And the former human subjects would gain access to advanced System Lord technology. An orbital shipyard would be relatively safer from falling into the wrong hands. The technology of the "gods" would remain in the heavens so to speak.

[Ahriman238]

Alas, the we've only seen two Goa'uld ships in construction. One (Upgrades) was to be Apophis' new one-of-akind supership and was built atop a mountain protected by a one-off shield tech.

The other, more standard Ha'tak (Orpheus) was built in atmosphere, suspeded a few miles above the ground by an anti-grav scaffold. That seems to combine the difficulty of transporting materials with a lot of the difficulties in assembling them. Then again, it was a ship being built at a prison planet, there's a lot of motive to make it inaccessible to the inmates.

[Skgoa]

"Orbital construction is cheaper" is a stock argument in SF. But realistically, it only applies in light of certain conditions:

-The ship can't feasibly hold itself together under terrestrial gravity, even with a scaffold holding it up, or the ship can't feasibly take off under terrestrial gravity. Big flimsy cargo haulers or really really large ships might fall under the first category.

If we want to look at the question from a realistic POV for a second, this is actually an excellent reason to construct anything in microgravity that is not meant to leave that environment. Engineers will always try very hard to get their crafts as light as possible... and structural mass that isn't neccessary in microgravity is an easy thing to reduce.

[Simon_Jester]

"Orbital construction is cheaper" is a stock argument in SF. But realistically, it only applies in light of certain conditions:

-The ship can't feasibly hold itself together under terrestrial gravity, even with a scaffold holding it up, or the ship can't feasibly take off under terrestrial gravity. Big flimsy cargo haulers or really really large ships might fall under the first category.

If we want to look at the question from a realistic POV for a second, this is actually an excellent reason to construct anything in microgravity that is not meant to leave that environment. Engineers will always try very hard to get their crafts as light as possible... and structural mass that isn't neccessary in microgravity is an easy thing to reduce.

True, but this reasoning may not apply to warships, which will typically be built more heavily so they're not ridiculously easy to kill. Also to withstand relatively high accelerations, for much the same reason- you may find yourself needing to get well out of the way of an incoming ballistic projectile in a hurry.

[Sea Skimmer]

Alas, the we've only seen two Goa'uld ships in construction. One (Upgrades) was to be Apophis' new one-of-akind supership and was built atop a mountain protected by a one-off shield tech.

The other, more standard Ha'tak (Orpheus) was built in atmosphere, suspeded a few miles above the ground by an anti-grav scaffold. That seems to combine the difficulty of transporting materials with a lot of the difficulties in assembling them. Then again, it was a ship being built at a prison planet, there's a lot of motive to make it inaccessible to the inmates.

It’s also possible that the ground in the desired construction area was simply too soft to support the weight of the ship without a very heavily engineered foundation which would cost the same as the floating anti grav platform. Its one of those things we just don’t have enough hard information to draw any true conclusions on. All the more so since anyone using slaves to build major warships clearly has a pretty idiotic economy going on!

There MIGHT be one advantage to building in space in the SG universe.

In naval ship building large ships in real world required moving around some very huge pieces. The turrets on the Yamato battleship weighed over 2000 tons, more than a destroyer class ship. The "medium sized" aircraft carrier India is presently building is composed hundreds of modules each massing several hundred tons. A Nimitz type carrier uses even more enormous prefabricated sections.

Keep in mind that the turrets on battleships are placed on the ship with no armor or guns installed, greatly reducing the weight involved in any one lift. I dunno how much a Yamato turret weighed broken down like that, but US 16in turrets on the Iowa class are around 460 tons. The largest single piece ever installed on a warship is the block for the Nimitz class bridge tower which is around 1,000 tons. But given someone willing to pay for a bigger crane, certainly nothing specific would now stop much larger blocks.

Now consider some of the large spacecraft seen in SG like BC-304s or Hataks. They probably mass hundreds of thousands or even millions of tons. Despite the difficulty of working in spacesuits the ease of moving around such huge pieces just might be worth the hassle.

it might well be, and certainly no reason exists why anybody should use only one means of shipyard construction. Modern large shipbuilding isn’t all the same either. We've got as I count it four major methods just to get the ship in the water.