Weaker than human fleet?[]
While weaker than the ancients, the wraith hives tend to give the Dedalus a run for its money. The Dedalus does manage to take out several ships, but it does so via tactical advantages. In The Seige, it uses beaming technology to send nuclear weapons directly onto the target ship, after discovering all conventional tactics are useless and the wraith vessels are quickly depleting their shields. This flaw in their defenses is compensated for within seconds of a hive seeing the tactic (possibly just fine tuning, if the cruisers that escaped the destruction of the first wave reported back and started developing the countermeasures at that time). At the start of season 3, the Dedalus manages to handle another hive in a one-on-one battle (after the Orion destroys the other and is promptly destroyed), partly because of a mass-launch of all of its nucelar weapons upon exiting hyperspace - of all those missiles, only one penetrates their defensive screen. The hive thus starts the battle damaged (with further assistance from Sheperd's earlier attack that disabled the hyperdrive (funny that it was later working just fine...). After that, massed fire into the fighter bay as Darts are being launched succeeds in causing enough cumulative damage to disable the ship's weapons. I see no indication of the Dedalus being a superior vesse - its Caldwell's tactical brilliance and his crew's capacity to adopt these new tactics (and some help from the Atlantis stars from time to time) that let it occasionally find an opportunity to eliminate a Wraith hive. Rashkavar (talk) (Contribs) 12:54, September 7, 2014 (UTC)