If I remember the series time line, the Goa'uld basically achieved dominance in the Milky Way after the Ancients were weakened by a plague and left for the Pegasus galaxy, The Asguard withdrew to focus more on their genetic degradation problem, The Nox are the Nox and the Furlings barely seem to exist. If anything the Goa'uld seemed to have lucked into their global position than anything.
The goa'uld "lucked" into it in that the Ancients were no longer around/active. But they fought a war with the Asgard while unable to actually reach the Ida galaxy in any kind of useful time period;
and they didn't lose. They fought that war because the Asgard got pissed at them for going on a genocidal war of conquest across the entire Milky Way galaxy.
Their tech base when they started that war was, quite literally, stone age. Ra and his generation are, literally,
one generation removed from the goa'uld first taking Unas as hosts.
And you also have to remember their ability to take hosts. A goa'uld jumps into your head? Every thought you have ever had is now part of that goa'uld genetic memory. They know your language, they know how you think, they know every skill you knew. And then they can jump into another host and do the same thing again, and again, and again.
Think about what that means in relation to, say, real life Earth. A Goa'uld shows up and takes a random person as host. They instantly have everything they need to pass for a native. It can go to a university and make its way through people with Doctorates in any, or every, field you care to name. And they can combine all that knowledge.
The goa'uld conquered, and they the goa'uld leadership took steps to ensure their continued dominance and reduce the competition. EVERYTHING shown in the show, that the SGC was exposed to? That was the goa'uld basically at peace.
The goa'uld's primary focus was their internal succession dispute to decide Ra's replacement, and that was a fight conducted under the rules of Goa'uld vs. Goa'uld conflict.
The Blood Angels don't get that consideration. They are a threat to the goa'uld as a whole and would be treated as such.
Yes but your typical Goa'uld is self-serving Starscream only out for their own advancement. They are absolutely lousy soldiers who few physical advantages, greater strength and durability, are outshined by Space Marines. In comparison the Jaffa are at least reasonably loyal and are willing to die in droves for their respective gods.
Except, again, you aren't seeing the "typical" goa'uld when you watch the show. You are seeing the handful that survived the games of goa'uld politics.
You are also overlooking what the Queens are capable of. The Kull Warriors? That is what happens when a goa'uld queen decides to create an army. The Queen can pick and choose what memories to pass along, and can shape the personalities of their offspring to their own desires; see the Tok'ra as another such example.
The mass produced and fielded goa'uld wouldn't be like the leadership caste. They would be the synthesized combat ability of the thousands of worlds that the goa'uld have destroyed over their millennia of conquest. Every single one of them fanatically loyal to the goa'uld cause. Every single one of them with the skill set and life experience to hold any rank from private to supreme commander of a star spanning military. Every single one of them a maser of not just every form of combat but of politics, of science, of intrigue.
And every single 40k individual taken, living or dead so long as their head/body is substantially intact, is another potential host. More, they are sources able to teach the goa'uld how the 40k forces think, act, operate, and their capabilities.
Every Goa'uld does certainly posses the genetic memory of the Queen that birthed it but that doesn't necessarily translate into mastery of that field. Indeed the implication is most Goa'uld tech is cheap, Chinese knockoffs of Ancient and other races technology they stole. The Sarcophagus being a prime example where the Goa'ulds can only make copies with far more limited ability than the Ancient healing device it's based off of.
And Ancient tech blows
anything that 40k has shown short of the extreme high end of Necron tech out of the water. It's a tech base that was trans galactic for, literally,
millions of years. Being the "cheap Chinese knockoff" of Ancient tech is not an insult.
Honestly it's unclear how much the average Goa'uld understand their technology and how much is simple rot learning via the aforementioned genetic memory. The fact it was SG-1's experience with time travel which Ba'al had to rely on to build his time machine in Continuum despite centuries more time, more familiarity with the technology in question and and over all greater tech base than late 90's Earth suggests they likely don't understand their technology nearly as well as they think they do.
Every goa'uld is able to go from sticks and stones to Ha'Taks. They know every step of that process.
As for the time travel example, I never said that the goa'uld understood the Stargates. Or a lot of other Ancient tech. Fully, at least. The time travel was the result of a freak accident. You had to manually dial a gate (no DHD connected, the safety protocols prevent it) and time that dialing to an appropriate solar flare. That's a rare combination of factors.
Further it is unlikely in the extreme that the bottleneck to starship production is going to be brainpower. As you mention most Goa'uld tech seems to be fabricated via nano machines or other assemblers so you don't even need skilled labor to slap their stuff together. Rather the limiting factors will be raw materials and assemblers to turn that raw material into a useable end product. Of which one Goa'uld and a bunch of slaves can likely do it swifter and more efficiently than a thousand ego maniancs who all think they should be in charge. It would be like putting a team of Alphas from Brave New World on a project.
Not really. The goa'uld have slaves mining raw materials because it amuses them to do so. Not because they lack the ability to automate resource extraction or strip mine worlds. And goa'uld build times are
fast. As in under a year to build a Ha'Tak from scratch fast.
Again, basically everything you see of the goa'uld on the show is their form of RTS game and a thing of entertainment. Anubis tossed an asteroid with shit tons of Naq into the Sol system basically just because, and because he wanted to see a pretty super nova when the SGC tried to stop it.
I would have to disagree. We've seen the Goa'uld go to war numerous times during the course of the series all long after Ra and any rule of war he might have enforced was long dead. But against Rival System Lords, rogue Goa'ulds with equal power to their combined might or even extragalactic foes like the Asguard or Replicators there's not sign of a superior industry.
The Goa'uld never want to war with the Asgard on screen, and the Replicators defeated them in - literally - a matter of a week or two.
Goa'uld vs. Goa'uld (even rogue goa'uld) conflict is still governed by the rules that they collectively established. They were, after all, fighting over who got to be in charge of the goa'uld and so none of them had any interest in wrecking things or fundamentally changing the game.
And bear in mind the Goa'uld view the Asguard as a real threat to their power. So much so the Asguard have been able to bluff them despite their fleet being occupied fighting the Replicators so the Systems Lords have every incentive to build as massive a fleet as they can to protect their holdings and secure their dominance in the MW. Yet they rely on slaves to dig out by hand everything.
The goa'uld had already secured the Milky Way galaxy. It was the
Asgard who found the previous open war with the goa'uld unwinnable at anything like an acceptable cost. They would have won but in doing so lost the entire Milky Way as the goa'uld turned it into a wasteland. The goa'uld couldn't win the war any time soon thanks to the Asgard having an extra galactic industrial base, but they also weren't
losing it.
The Goa'uld appear to be a very planet reliant species. Especially for things like starship construction where we repeatedly see the Goa'uld style is to build dirt side. Or resource collection which again always seems to take place in atmosphere in a reasonably earth-like planet. Every System Lord we've gotten a confirmation about has a "Throneworld" which seems to be their primary abode.
The only Goa'uld throneworld shown on screen was Sokar's. Chulak, for example, was just one of Apophis's Jaffa worlds - not his throne world. Saqqara had that honor. Then you have Soma-Kesh, which had mobile orbital shipyards.
Except RepliCarter didn't end them. What broke the Goa'uld empire was their Jaffa rebellion. If anything RepliCarter strengthened the System Lords since it was driving Jaffa back into their ranks prompting the attack on Dakara to shatter forever the illusion the Goa'ulds were gods.
The Replicators destroyed the near entirety of the Ha'Tak's in the galaxy in a matter of a week or so. And killed the vast majority of active goa'uld at the same time.
The Jaffa Rebellion never actually threatened the goa'uld as a whole or their primary power base. It threatened an army whose only purpose was as slave masters, priests, and as disposable pawns in the ritualized entertainment/conflict that the System Lords indulged in to amuse themselves.
