Who builds and maintains Goa'uld technology?

[scvn2812 504]

At the beginning of the series, a big deal is made of how ignorant Jaffa are of how Goa'uld technology works. So, as I'm sure it has everyone, this leads to the question: if there are only a handful of Goa'uld per System Lord empire, who builds the technology? We haven't directly seem any evidence of matter conversion technology like that the Asgard use to instantaneously create small items and presumably enables to them to produce the components for starships and then assemble them using a mixture of teleportation and tractor beam technology. On the other hand, a black box with a hole labeled "insert naquada" and a hole on the other end where starship parts are extruded with a "go" button on it is about the feasible set up I can think of that involves slave labor.

 

I have also speculated on the existence of a sub-cult of Jaffa who are "blessed" with more intimate knowledge of how Goa'uld technology works, technomancers if you will, who function as the engineers to support the common foot soldiers who can push buttons and make the guns go boom and maybe even swap some crystals around in a pinch but otherwise have at best a renaissance level education.

Edited February 24, 2013 by scvn2812

[Khas 12,158]

So, a Jaffa version of the Adeptus Mechanicus from Warhammer 40K?

[scvn2812 504]

In broad strokes that would be a fair comparison to make.

[Vince 520]

Thats actually a good comparison, because without this technocult, the abscission is left with absolutely NO knowledge on how anything works. But they might be left with some of the infrastructure to continue reproducing the technology at a lesser efficiency.

[scvn2812 504]

Presumably in either case, detailed if exceptionally protected, instructions exist for assembling the parts extruded from any matter converters the Goa'uld possess (an application of ring technology in the same way that the Asgard use their teleportion technology to produce machined objects and Star Trek's replicators?) but the theory that would be required to do anything more than inserting module A into slot B and hit the On button would be almost utterly absent among the Jaffa. The Jaffa nation, in the absence of an engineering caste, will likely need several generations before they have a large enough academic base to compete with Earth and other Milky Way nations in actually refining and improving what they have. Meanwhile as Earth sifts through all the assorted goodies they've looted from the Goa'uld, Asgard and Ancients they will likely lap the Jaffa before they put together a Jaffa DARPA. The good news is that since Goa'uld tech seems to be about as simple to maintain as swapping out modular components, you only need a fraction of the engineers of any merit designing and testing new hardware since matter conversion technology would allow any prototypes to be rapidly constructed and tested. Although building something of any decent quality requires more skills than just inserting module A into slot B, new designs would require new skill sets for Jaffa assembly crews to have a decent failure rate. A good analogy would be building iPhones. Workers who only know their part of the assembly process can still make mistakes as they move from working on one model to a newer model.

[Brian Young 11,994]

We wee Hatak motherships being built in "Orpheus." I don't recall how many Goa'uld were present, but they definitely used Jaffa slave labor. This was a punishment for prisoners of war, IIRC. Anyway, that is a good episode to take a look at, to hopefully answer some of your questions.

Also note the trees. Fan consensus is that these ships are about 700 meters across. That appears vastly in error here, and I plan a commentary on that in the near future.

[scvn2812 504]

I am familiar with that episode, my preference is to assume that the Jaffa in question are doing the dirty work of mining and basically just shoveling raw materials into the Goa'uld equivalent of an Asgard matter converter which extrudes modular components while loyalists do the work of assembling the ship according to a sort of Idiots Guide to Mothership construction which basically reads like "insert crystal A into slot B of hyperspace window generator X."

 

Otherwise it seems at best unwise, at worst suicidal to build a starship using slave labor when if one of any random billion or so things happens to go wrong you (or Yu) could be incinerated by a sudden burst of radiation, have your atoms sprayed across the universe by poorly coordinated inertial dampener, lose pressure in your bedroom...

 

I look forward to your look at Ha'tak scaling. I suspect that it might suffer from Bird of Prey syndrome...