Headscratchers / Stargate SG 1 Technology

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How gate travel works, how technology works, why a technology problem wasn't solved a certain way, etc. If you feel there are more examples that were not ported over or think any of these examples were sent here in error, feel free to do move them.

Stargate Questions

Questions concerning how the Stargates, DHDs, Dialing Computers, Irises, etc. work.

Indentical Stargate glyphs

• If the Stargate glyphs are based on Earth constellations (except for the point of origin), why are they identical on all Stargates throughout the galaxy? And for that matter, if the dialing mechanics explained by Daniel Jackson in Stargate are supposed to be true, how do constellation-based coordinates allow dialing a completely different galaxy with only one extra chevron?
  • Actually, the one extra Chevron can be explained, as Carter said "It's some kind of new distance vector". Basically "Ok, we start here, point of origin, now aim the wormhole at the spot in the middle of co-ordinates dictated by the other six chevrons, now fire the wormhole, but skip the first gate that you come to, and/or go an extra hundred light years"
  • Just to be pedantic, 100 light-years would not be nearly long enough to get to another galaxy. IIRC, the Milky Way itself is about 100,000 light-years in diameter, and the next-nearest Galaxy - Andromeda - is something like two-and-a-half million light-years away.
  • Because the Ancients used Earth as the center-point for the gate network. The extra chevron is the equivalent to an area code.
  • But even that doesn't make sense, because modern constellations look nothing like they did when the Stargate network was supposedly built.
  • Remember how the original TV series pilot retconned the movie. Abydos was the closest system to Earth, and other systems couldn't be reached because the stars had moved enough that the Stargate coordinates no longer worked. Only when they learned to compensate for this drift could they get to other systems. In other words, the "constellations change" thing was taken into account from the very start.
  • Still, this doesn't answer the question of why the constellation symbols physically carved on the gates match the way these constellations appear now, not the way they looked millions of years ago.
  • Maybe it's not carved on the gates. Maybe it's nanotech that changes shape when correlative updates are done. That would also explain why the Point Of Origin on the gate was the original one when they used a different gate (but not why the old earth symbol changed to the at in the first place. head meet wall)
  • In the original movie, the symbols were different on different planets. Of course, one doesn't have to think about the geometry very long before realizing that the whole "six points give three connecting lines that intersect at the destination" system really doesn't make sense. Change just one point (I think we've seen addresses that were only one symbol apart), and suddenly you have two intersecting lines and another that touches neither. I prefer to think that the addresses are actually XYZ coordinates with three two-digit base-38 numbers, which makes much more sense.
  • But the Ancients use Base-8 math. Why would they use a coordinate system in base-38? (I know you said it was fanon and I should take it as such but I couldn't resist.)
  • The base-8 math may have been for O'Neill's benefit because he was trying to contact the 4-fingers Asgard. The clocks on SG:Universe and the displays on Atlantis use a base-10 system.
  • For what it's worth, there are symbols that aren't on every gate. This may mean that the glyph used to represent a gate address component is a localization.
  • In Stargate, the Earth and Abydos Stargates had different symbols. However, Stargate SG-1 retconned away this aspect, making symbols on all Milky Way Stargates identical except for the point of origin, which is unique for every Stargate. But then, the movie placed Abydos "at the other side of the known universe"...
  • Since the Stargates are spread all over the galaxy and beyond, "at the other side of the known universe"), would the marking constellations look different from each different point?
  • A little clarification: "at the other side of the known universe" is a phrase from the movie, referring to Abydos, which is wrong in the series, where Abydos is one of the closest planets to Earth having a Stargate, and is within the Milky Way galaxy. Apart from it, Stargates are present in Pegasus, Ida (the Asgard home galaxy), probably in the Ori galaxy (how would the Priors travel otherwise?), and whatever galaxy Stargate Universe takes place in. But the Ancients had limited time to plant Stargates throughout galaxies, and with the limitations of the address system they could have linked 38 galaxies, at most.
  • It's confirmed that there are Stargates in the Ori galaxy the instant someone from the Ori galaxy gets to our galaxy via a Stargate...
  • The "one chevron" difference makes sense if you remember that the intersection point could vary because it might not be between the two stars that are points. Bear with me a second. If you imagine a space, say the room you're in right now. Use 4 symbols to establish a point on the wall to your right. Now put a 5th symbol in the "bottom left back" corner of the room. Now assuming the Stargate use some kind of "tolerance" to snap to a destination gate and two gates close together. You could place that 6th point anywhere in room to get a very precise intersection.
  • More importantly, perhaps, how do you use 6 constellations to establish a point in space when constellations are groups of stars that only appear to be close to each other when viewed from Earth?
  • I think this is being overthought. Not taking into account all the retcon of how the gate symbols (and the gates themselves) worked, lets look at it from the pure semantics of the symbols. If we assume that the gates are using the 6 points in space as a baseline for a possible destination, then why assume those points in space need to be so specific. It is not so much looking for the specific points in space as it is a general representation of the area. An address (as described in the movie and elaborated on with some retcon in the series) not specific points in space. Adding the 7th (and eventually 8th and 9th) symbol gives an effect of origin, and distance (or some such). It is all very imprecise when you analyze it, but that could be a little Fridge Brilliance if you think in terms of how this tech could have been designed. I would assume a tech this elaborate with this simple of an interface was designed expressly to be used by people that were not as advanced as the Ancients that created it. Like giving a "my first space travel" device to a toddler. Yes, in that analogy, we [humanity] are the toddler. So it more than likely uses some massively advanced AI in the design so that it works even when in theory it shouldn't.
  • And let's face it, the movie was never meant to be anything more (aside from potentially a couple more movies) and when you make a series that is lasting 10 seasons (plus two spin-offs) there is going to need to be some serious retcon to keep things somewhat cohesive. They did the same thing with Star Trek over the years and now there is a much more cohesive overall universe that does not quite resemble what it was in the beginning.
  • I still like my hypothesis that I typed up somewhere else that, instead of the simple to explain but impractical "6 points to form 3 lines of position to get a fix in space plus a point of origin" system, that it's actually the identity, azimuth and elevation from two pulsars plus the point of origin as a procedural glyph. The point of origin symbol is unique on each gate to indicate what planet you're on. To dial a distant galaxy, you add an 8th symbol just before the point of origin as a sort of area code, as if to say this point between these two pulsars in this other galaxy. The Milky way system uses constellations as seen from Earth as letters in an alphanumeric alphabet because Earth is really important to the Ancients' history, but they don't mean the actual constellations themselves. Other galaxies use local constellations so that no two addresses can be alike.

Stargate Mechanics: Kill And Replace?

• Does a Stargate really transport you (as the same person), or does it kill you and build a replacement elsewhere? The whole "matter to energy and back to matter" conversion is one of the reasons Star Trek transporters are so controversial with their treatment of personal identity, yet this issue seems to be completely unaddressed in Stargate fandom.
  • It transports the person through Hyperspace to the other gate — transport isn't instantaneous: it takes a couple fractions of a seconds to send the matter to another Stargate in the same galaxy.
  • That sort of misses the point. The question I'm asking is, when you step through a Stargate, undergo "molecular deconstruction" and then get reassembled at the other side, is that person on the other side still you, or just a copy of you, while you are irrevocably gone?
  • That is an interesting question, but perhaps we should go into on the Destructive Teleportation page?
  • In the movie and early episodes of SG-1, people were half-frozen and slingshotted out of the Stargate. This implies transportation. I'm not sure, but early on they might have even mentioned sensations during the transport.
  • IIRC, the story had no transporter feature - the gates created a stable wormhole that you just walked through. Later on, however, they decided to make it into some kind of teleporter system.
  • The whole "Stargate is a kind of transporter" thing has some other problems. We've been told that wormholes (not specifically Stargates) are one-way for matter, but bidirectional for energy. But if a Stargate works, as it is implied, by converting matter into energy, transmitting it, then reconstructing it on the other end, the reasons for it only going one way break down. We can of course, come up with other reasons for this (That it's a property of the gate mechanism, not the wormhole, or that the "bandwidth" is asymmetric: if there's not enough bandwidth for a radio signal, you get some static. With matter, you arrive without your kidneys) but they don't jive with the on-screen explanations.
  • The bandwidth issue would actually explain it. Comparatively small upload is enough for anything we'd treat as energy. The amount of energy in a physical object is humongous compared to this, so the wormhole can't send such a huge amount the other way.
  • From what I gather the Stargate disassembles you and sends you through the wormhole atom by atom. You are reassemble with everything in the same position, with no possibility of duplication. The Soul/Death issue is avoided.
  • Perhaps it's just a safety precaution hardwired into the gate network. It's known there are dozens of safety precautions the gate system has - it being a plot point at one time that the Earth's custom built interface ignores quite a few of them, including not making a wormhole which goes through a star. It makes sense that after a single nasty incident, the Ancients would quickly just make it impossible at all times to have matter travel in both directions.
  • In one episode Teal'c gets "trapped in the buffer" of a Stargate, so presumably there is transference rather than copying, otherwise they'd just have downloaded a copy and erased the original.
  • It would be impossible to create a wormhole to transport a person in one piece (more energy then there is in the entire universe). A Stargate creates a very small, stable wormhole (a feat in and of itself) and then the gate identifies the position of every particle in your body, breaks it down, transports it through the wormhole and then reconstructs the person on the other side, including the masses momentum. Electromagnetic radiation is immune to the one way restriction, most likely because the gates can only handle deconstruction/construction in one direction but electromagnetic radiation is already subatomic particles.
  • Lets say the gate acts differently on fermions and bosons (look these up on wikipedia if you don't know what they are, I think this is the distinction the first poster was trying to find when saying "matter" and "energy", which wouldn't strictly be correct). Since photons and (conjecturally) gravitons are bosons, they are transmitted back through the gate (as seen in the episode with the black hole). People are made of electrons and nucleons, which are fermions, and it is established that these only go one way. Whether Cooper pairs of electrons can travel backwards through the gate, and what the effect of supersymmetry are left as exercises for the reader.
  • Side note: this is a central issue in the 2006 film [[The Prestige]].
  • Wait, aren't we forgetting that gate travel is extradimentional? They mention several times in the show that when you travel through the wormhole, that for those few moments, you're going through another dimension (I'm guessing something akin to Hyperspace from Star Wars). So I see it not so much as "break you down, chuck your atoms through, piece them back together" as "pull you into another dimension, zoom you to your destination by virtue of space-time bendiness in said dimension, stick you back into your regular dimension upon arrival".
  • When you are transported through the Stargate, the event horizon of the wormhole on one side allows the gate to disassemble you, whereupon you are essentially converted to energy that travels through subspace to the other gate, where the buffer stores the energy that you are made of and reassembles you on the other side of the gate's event horizon. Your consciousness is hence transferred through subspace. You are in fact traveling from 1 gate to another, however you are just disassembled in the process. It isn't a copy of your mental state but the actual energy your consciousness is composed of. The reason why the buffer in the gates is necessary is so your entire being - so to speak - can be collected and that energy is converted back to matter. This is how the gate is shown to be working in SG-1 (I haven't watched Atlantis or Universe so I can't speak for those series).
  • I was under a completely different assumption based on the movie and the way they showed it. It looked to me like it is pure travel. No transfer of matter into energy (or some more science-y techno-babble). When the team walks through the gate, they just step on through and it makes that bloopy watery sound as they disappear. Daniel is the last to walk through and he "tests the waters" so to speak, sticking his hand in and then putting his face in the thing. It looked to me that what was happening at that point was a warping of his body as it is "stretched" through the space/time/dimensional space that connects the two gates. And on the other side, he seems to stumble out, fall down, and be completely disoriented. Something I imagine being stretched across the galaxy (or universe if you deny the retcon from the series) would do to you.
  • I got the further impression that at a certain point the gate itself would forcibly pull you through if you put too much of your mass into the entrance, but that is pure conjecture on my part.
  • The references to "molecular deconstruction" are just because it sounds cool. It doesn't really make sense, even for a matter-energy conversion transporter, which the Stargate technically isn't.
  • The disassembly/transport/reassembly approach does not necessarily avoid the issues of death and personal identity invoked by Star Trek — type teleporters. Yes, you could argue that the "same" particles/energy/whatever that you were originally composed of is making the trip, and that thus your identity is preserved. But is this really significant? Would it actually make any difference to your identity if, while the gate was re-assembling you, some atoms that weren't part of your original self found their way into your structure? You'd have no way of knowing the difference, as long as they were the same kind of atoms, and fitted into your body in the same way. Imagine it as a thought experiment — suppose someone just took you apart into a pile of atoms, doesn't matter how, and then somehow put those atoms back together again using a very accurate instructions manual. Would you still be "you" after this re-assembly? Now suppose that instead of reassembling those same atoms into your original self, they used a new pile of atoms that still had all the exact elements and isotopes needed in the same proportions, but that never formed a part of your body before. They assemble these new atoms into a new "you" using the same "instruction manual." Would you still be yourself after this? Does it make sense for the answer to be "yes" in the first case, but "no" in the second? After all, how would you, or anyone, know the difference? It's not like your original atoms have your name on them somewhere — a carbon atom is a carbon atom. Assuming all the "new" atoms were of the right type, and put together the right way, would the new "you" be effectively different from the old? So, the answer must either be "yes, you're the same person" in both cases, or "no, you are not the same person" in both cases. Either the Stargate has the same problems as the Star Trek teleporter, or neither has an issue.

SGC no DHD

• If the slowness of manual dial is a pressing issue, why didn't the SGC integrate the DHD from the Antarctic Stargate (recovered in "Touchstone") into its own dialing mechanism (by, say, concealing it and making a remotely controlled manipulator to press the buttons)? Even if a DHD can only be used with its own Stargate, they could simply replace the Giza Stargate with the Antarctic Stargate when they had both in possession, and just dial it with the DHD.
  • They spent an awful lot of time MacGyvering that system together and they're probably loath to get rid of it.
  • And Walter has lots of fun Engaging Chevrons.
  • You can't use a DHD to get to Atlantis.
  • For the rare cases when eight-chevron addresses must be used, the DHD can be temporarily disconnected.
  • That always bugged me. Couldn't they allow eight-chevron addresses by hitting the big red button first, to tell the DHD "I'm doing a long-distance dial," then the eight glyphs, then the big red button again?
  • It was demonstrated in one episode (when they used it for a Tok'ra funeral ceremony) that pushing the big red button before pushing any other buttons just activates the wormhole without a destination, causing an unstable vortex and then immediately shutting down again. Also, pretty sure it was mentioned that a regular DHD doesn't have enough power to connect to another galaxy on its own.
  • In any case, the Antarctic DHD, being one of the oldest in the network, ran out of power sometime after it was found. Why no one's tried to recharge it is a different mystery altogether. There's also a security issue- anyone trying to escape the SGC can slap buttons on a DHD, but you'd need at least a password and familiarity with the system to use the dialing computer (though most villains don't seem to have a problem in that regard).
  • The people who hijacked the Antarctic Stargate in "Touchstone" repaired the DHD. And I'm not proposing to allow someone to press it directly; it could be concealed and controlled via the dialling computer.
  • The Antarctic Stargate's DHD was said to have run out of power after that. It was obviously an attempt by the writers to cover what would otherwise be a plot hole, but it does explain the problem away. Of course now that Earth has spaceships there's no reason we can't pick up a spare one from another planet.
  • Yes there is: It would leave that planet without a DHD. This is just one tropers opinion, but the Ancients probably designed each DHD to only work with a specific Stargate to prevent this from happening. Of course, Stargates can be manually dialed with the help of the circus strongman or friendly neighbourhood Jaffa, so...
  • The SGC probably prefers the control that their setup offers in comparison to the DHD.
  • That's a good point. Anyone and his mother can activate a Stargate that's connected to a DHD so long as they know at least one valid address. But with the SGC's computerized system the Stargate can only be activated from one place: the gate control room. With this setup the SGC has much greater control over how, when, and why the Stargate can be activated and who can do so. They can install any number of security measures, such as identity scanners or password programs, making it next to impossible for anyone to activate the gate without official permission (or at least not without someone finding out about it). And when you have dudes like the Reetou and the Stragoth running around, preventing unauthorized gate activations is a top priority.
  • Another advantage: efficiency. The MacGyver'ed DHD may dial slower than a regular DHD but it also does it automatically, meaning you can just log into the computer, select "dial Abydos", and let it run. You don't have to worry about "wrong numbers" (so to speak) like you would if you had to use a DHD to dial the gate up by hand (and considering how much it costs just to turn the gate on, the SGC would definitely want to make sure the address is dialled right the first time). Also, exploring the galaxy via Stargate means keeping a database of every single world you've ever visited or plan to visit. No one human has the mental capacity to memorize each and every one of those addresses, so having a digital database of every single gate address to select from every time you dial up the gate would be invaluable.
  • No one, except Rodney McKay!
  • We see in late season 8 that the Alpha Site gate has both a DHD and a Dialing Computer, and the address in dialed through the computer.
  • Didn't they blow a DHD getting Teal'c out of the Gate's cache?
  • No That was Russia's DHD, which originally went with the Giza Gate. The Russians found it somewhere somehow but didn't get a gate until they ninja-d the one that SG-1 crashed, so it was just the pretty magic button machine.
  • Dialling computers can also input all 39 glyphs and have macros set-up for internal gate operations, while any individual DHD only has 38 glyphs (including point of origin glyph) and must be manually taken apart to override most automatic gate features.
  • This has always bugged me - if your DHD has 37 glyphs plus one point of origin glyph, but addresses can have any combination of six out of 38 glyphs, how do you dial a planet that uses the one missing glyph?
  • You don't, simple as that. Probably for good reason, like going through a sun or something. Probably have to bounce through a midpoint.

Opaque Event Horizon

• Why can't Stargates be seen through? Light is a kind of electromagnetic radiation, which can pass through a Stargate in both directions.
  • Maybe they are. The event horizon of the Gate behaves like a moving fluid, so light striking it would be refracted and reflected in an effectively random pattern. It's not transparent for the same reason that snow is white and not clear.
  • For that matter, the event horizon looks a bit on the blue side. Blue light scatters more through media like air and water.
  • Also, the event horizon has some sort of surface tension-like property (I believe we are told this outright), which is probably a design feature to allow things like space gates to work safely. Non-coherent light may just bounce off the surface.
  • Yes, in "Watergate" it is outright stated that surface tension prevents things that aren't trying to get through the gate from getting through. Thus, dialing out from a Stargate submerged in water doesn't flood the other end.

Stargate Portal Shenanigans

• What would happen if you establish a wormhole between two Stargates, then stick one gate halfway into the other?
  • Since the "wormholes" are more like dematerialization fields generated by the gates, presumably the gate which is stuck in would cease to function once part of its circuitry crossed the event horizon, collapsing the field, ending the connection, and amputating whatever part of the gate the event horizon covered.
  • Assuming you could establish such a connection. It's been established that when Stargate dials its own address, it gets a busy signal- you can't dial your own planet.
  • Yes. It isn't possible to connect two Stargates that are located anywhere near each other. By extension, this also avoids the "infinite fall scenario" that is possible in Portal.
  • However, with Stargate Universe revealing that the ninth chevron is used to lock a gate address to a specific gate rather than it's location, it's possible that they might explore this scenario in the upcoming series.

Building the Dialing Computer

• Why did it take the SGC "fifteen years and three supercomputers" to MacGyver the dialing system? Isn't it as simple as connecting the Stargate to an energy source, rotating the ring and locking chevrons? And for that matter, how did they determine the chevron order if they never successfully dialed it prior to the movie (the unregistered incidents in "The Torment of Tantalus" and "1969" notwithstanding)?
  • It's getting the chevrons to actually lock in the first place that was the problem. They had the first six chevrons already via the discovery of the gate.
  • They had the order of the glyphs, but how did they deduce that chevrons on the Stargate itself were ordered 7-1-2-3-9-8-4-5-6? And for that matter, how did they determine which chevron was the top one if it (retroactively) looks the same as the other eight?
  • Um...what? Seriously, I have no idea what you're talking about.
  • The question more or less boils down to "How did they know which end of the thing was "up"?" A gate's got nine or ten (can't recall which, but it's more than they use) chevrons, and you dial an address by lining symbol 1 up with chevron 1, and so forth. But there's not really a particular order to those chevrons. On a combination lock, you've got one mark at the top of the dial that means "Line the number you want up with this," but a Stargate's got ten of those instead of just one. But I think this goes back to the "How do you actually signal that you want the position the wheel is in now to count?" question: whenever you do the thing that means "I've got the wheel where I want it" (probably reversing direction), the "next" chevron lights up, which means you've only got to try dialing it once to deduce the location of the first six chevrons (It's only the seventh chevron that fails to lock if an address is invalid). And then three more tries to find which chevron is seventh.
  • Yes, I was wondering exactly that. (There are nine chevrons, by the way.) And in the series, the top chevron is easily determined because it's the only one that locks, others just light up. However, here's another question: how did they determine which side of the Stargate was the front if it looks symmetrical?
  • Uh, it isn't symmetrical that way: the back doesn't have the ring or the chevrons, it's just flat with some engraving on it. You just don't see it that often, is all.
  • And in the original movie, it was even easier to orient the Stargate: most chevrons have a \|_|/ shape, while the top one appears to have more of a \\|-|// shape. This is seen when Daniel identifies the seventh symbol in the address.
  • They spent 15 years, obviously, answering the "How do you actually signal that you want the position the wheel is in now to count?" question.
  • A possible explanation for how they discovered the order is that when the SG-1 dialed the Stargate in 1969, there was a security camera watching. They would have seen the chevrons lighting up (And the order in which they did so), but the video quality might have been low enough that they couldn't make out details (Like which symbols were dialed).
  • The dialing computer doesn't just manually dial the gate. It's tied into the gate and sends and retrieves information from it. That's how they get gate diagnostics. There are a number of episodes that show this but you just need to watch red sky or 48 hours to get the idea.
  • RED SKY: SAM: (Somberly) No. Sir, we bypassed some of the normal dialing protocols. The fact is, this planet is dying, and it's probably because of us.
  • 48 HOURS: MCKAY:The Gate wasn't meant to be used without a dialing device. Your computer system ignores 220 of the 400 feedback signals the Gate can emit during any given dialing sequence. It is a fluke that you picked up the buffer warning, for that matter, I'm surprised that you even bothered to abort the dialing sequence despite the error.
  • Also, "connecting the Stargate to an energy source" isn't the most trivial thing in the world. The thing is made out Unobtanium and its control systems are crystals. Working out a way to deliver power to it was no small task, and once that was done, there was still the matter of working out voltages and amperages, and phases and frequencies and all that. With their resources, getting "enough" power wouldn't be a problem, but getting the right power would be rather tricky given that the physical properties and the principles of design were largely unknown. Ever tried to find a compatible DC adapter for some random electronic gizmo? And those at least are made from earth materials and some of the parts are almost certainly labeled. It's probably comparable to the scene in Back To The Future III where Doc and Marty try to come up with a replacement fuel source for the car — except that blowing out the fuel injector during trial-and-error was not an option. The times we've seen them put a gate on external power in the show, it's generally been with a Naquadah generator (or quantum mechanical alchemy), and in those cases, they had the benefit of already knowing how to do it.
  • Actually, not always. In "The Torment of Tantalus", they power the Stargate from lightning. (A very BTTFish solution...)
  • And from car engines in 1969!
  • It's been established that the Stargate's Unobtainium acts as a sort of capacitor for all sorts of energy. Basically they just had to throw any form of energy at it and wait until fully charged. Of course, as they didn't know that at first and as they surely didn't want to fry the supposedly delicate alien tech, they might have been wary to attempt a direct linkup to the nearest nuclear reactor...
  • It will absorb any form of energy, but it might not be absorbed efficiently. In 'Heroes', Carter claims that the gate consumes 25% more energy in the SGC than with a DHD.
  • It's also not all that safe to just plug the gate into any old power source. In a flashback from 'The Torment of Tantalus' Ernest tells Catherine that one of the generators exploded while they were trying to power up the gate back in the 1950s.
  • Having done a bit of research (watching and looking at pictures on the interwebs) I looked at the gate and had a Fridge Brilliance moment regarding the gates and their theoretical limitations on combinations (and why it took them 15 years to figure it out). Look at this render of a Stargate◊ (it is nearly identical to the gate on the show). It looks to me like there is no one way up. Now if we do some extrapolation on things that have never been confirmed or denied on the show, what if EACH of the 9 chevrons CAN be a locking mechanism for a symbol. Now combine that with the potential of them also being able to be locked in any order... you have potentially millions or billions of possible codes that a gate could dial! Not just 38 galaxies, based on the 38 symbols, but taking those symbols and locking them in different places and in different orders and combined with the 9 potential symbols to lock in... the possibilities become insane for how many ways a gate could be dialed. In fact, if it were a possibility, then it is probably more of a miracle that they figured it out in ONLY 15 years.
  • If we were to assume the number of chevrons locked for an appropriate address were between 1 and 9, that would be 79,460,340,751,779 possible permutations of glyphs without repeats and and 214,221,212,768,199 permutations of glyphs with repeats. That's a lot of choices. ^note This is based on adding the number of permutations possible for choices between 1 and 9 out of 39 different symbols. Look here for some details.
• You're wondering why it took so long? Imagine trying to code something for Windows on a Linux machine without any reference manual or platform-independent coding language. Now imagine a Windows Machine FROM SPACE!.
• There's also the matter of accidentally blowing the Stargate up were you to feed it too much or the wrong type of energy, sure in a life or death situation they might in a pinch, hook it up to a lightning conductor and hope for the best, but for day-to-day use by the military they might not want to risk destroying the planet. The DHD, regulates the power-flow to the gate, presumably when the military built their computer they had to build this bit too

Mechanics of Manual Dialing

• On the subject of manual dialing: you can input power from any source and turn the ring by hand? OK fine, but once you've lined the symbol you want up with the right chevron, how do you tell the gate "Next symbol lined up, input this". It's not as if it has an 'enter' key, or any built-in controls at all actually.
  • Maybe combination-lock style? Reverse direction once the glyph is lined up? (I think that's how it looked, anyway.)
  • I think there is a signal, perhaps something that can easily be simulated directly from the "manual power source" provided the user is familiar enough with the tech (and honestly, why would you be rigging up power sources to something you didn't know how to use?)

How, exactly, does the McKay-Carter space bridge work?

• Do you just dial the midway station and the intermediate gates all link up? Is there an episode that explained this more thoroughly?
  • It's implied early on that matter is transferred from one gate to the next, in turn, so you are stored-and-forwarded some 18 or so times until you hit Midway. However, they very quickly use the gate-bridge for live radio transmissions, so that explanation doesn't work anymore.
  • You don't dial the Midway Station, you dial the first Milky Way gate. Sam and Rodney hardwired the intermediate gates to automatically dial the next one in line (there was a graphic and everything!). Similarly the macro entered at the Midway Station dials the first gate on the way to Pegasus, and the hardwired gates go all the way to the first gate outside Pegasus. At this point the macro dials Atlantis.
  • Also, McKay mentioned that they had altered the programming of the Stargates used to build the bridge to suit their purposes, as well as preventing any other Stargate outside of Atlantis and the SGC from being able to access them.
  • Which is perfectly safe as long as the enemy doesn't remember that they live in a Hollywood Math universe where all encryption can be broken by any moderately smart person in the universe inside of eight hours, or two seconds before the deadline, whichever comes first. Oh, wait....
  • This always bugged me. How could it possibly work? They'd need Stargates that can work in space. Fine for the Pegasus side of the bridge, but the Milky Way doesn't have space gates.
  • The Milky Way gates work fine in space. Remember when Carter blew up a sun? They're just not usually kept in space, probably because there's only about one Puddle Jumper in the entire Milky Way. Or... two, depending on how you count it when it went back in time. And then didn't. I don't know. Moebius just bugs me.
  • Any Stargate can be a space gate. Remember when they attached an external power supply to the gate, dialed it, and chucked it out the cargo bay into the black hole? We already know that Naquadah is practically indestructible, why wouldn't it work in space?
  • The gate bridge cannot possibly work, the problem with dialing Earth from Atlantis was not having enough power for a long distance connection, but even if the travel is split over a whole bunch of gates, you still need the same total amount of power? Where do the forwarding gates get it from? is there a Naquadah generator strapped to each one? And clearly radio communication would be impossible.
  • Who says every intermediate Gate is just floating in space with a couple Naquadah power packs on it? Furthermore, why leave behind the DHD when you steal the Gate for this bridge? And DH Ds have the power source for the standard Stargate. Take the DHD apart to hardwire the power supply and dialing computer to the appropriate Gate, then place it in the right spot.
  • It seems to me that, 1.) information is transferred much faster than matter, and 2.) gate power requirements are logarithmic or exponential. Sending a gate twice as far might take four times as much power.
  • I'd regard the bridge as using the equivalent logic as a game of golf. One person is generally not able to hit the ball all the way to the green. Instead you hit the ball part the way and then from there you hit it again. The ability to hit a ball X meters 10 times is completely different from the ability to hit it 10*X meters in one go. In this case it'd be like the difference between having one golfer standing at the tee and trying to reach the green and having a whole bunch of golfers each hitting the ball to the next until it eventually gets there.
  • Which episode(s) had them use live radio transmission through the gate bridge? I don't remember it off the top of my head. Transmitting a radio signal through the gate bridge makes as much sense as transmitting a person and would work the same way. Normally, radio signals can pass both ways through an open gate but since the matter is being stored (and the next gate doesn't actually open) the radio signal would be stored in the buffer too. Since multiple people can walk into a gate in order and then come out in order, the buffer must be cleared in some sort of order. So a radio signal could also be sent in advance of a person's arrival (to allow them time to open the iris) without violating any rules. However, if there's live back and forth communication that definitely doesn't make sense.
    • There is at least one episode where Daniel and others are in trouble on the station and he tells Teal'c to come through the gate as they're fighting someone.

Iris Alternatives

• It rather bugs me that it seems even the Ancients couldn't come up with a friendlier way of preventing incoming travelers than a barrier over the event horizon that would smash unwanted guests into atoms (Excluding disabling the gate altogether by sticking something big in the middle or pulling the plug). I can maybe get behind humans not being able to do better (though I've got some clever ideas involving placing two gates face-to-face), but with the thing having a pattern buffer, you'd think the folks who built the darned thing could come up with a Sufficiently Advanced Decontamination Chamber.
  • Good point - Anubis was able to build himself that 'send you somewhere else' device for the planet with his personal genetics lab, so why not the people he stole his tech from?
  • For the most part the Ancients didn't go to war much—they were wiped out by a plague, with the exception of the Lanteans who didn't seem to be as smart as the MW-based Ancients.
  • Anubis's "call forwarding" device probably was Ancient in origin, given that all of his other above-Goa'uld-norm technology came from his knowledge of the Ancients. Most likely it's something they invented after abandoning Atlantis, though. And given that when they were living in Atlantis, any unauthorized use of the Stargate would surely have been by the Wraith, having the uninvited guests splatter against the shield would've been considered a nice bonus, not a shortcoming.
  • Is that canonically the only way to prevent it? It seems inconceivable that they wouldn't have designed some way to screen unwanted calls. On the other hand, AFAIK the gate system hasn't undergone maintenance recently; the Goa'uld (or the Wraith, or some other bad guy) may have discovered an unpatched exploit in the system which lets them bypass the filters on any gate.
  • There is a way to "screen unwanted calls". When the Ancients left Atlantis in "Before I Sleep", they locked its Stargate so that it could be only accessed from Earth. It just isn't used widely because it's inconvenient, and the Tau'ri probably lack the knowledge to reprogram this defense system. Also, it's possible that this is limited to Pegasus, since its gate system looks more secure overall (for example, only the Atlantis gate can dial other galaxies).
  • On the subject of dialing other galaxies, that's not a quirk of the Pegasus gate network, but rather one of Atlantis's control system. The dialer in Atlantis has a control crystal that allows input of an eighth chevron, which run-of-the-mill DHDs lack. Install that crystal in any given DHD and the gate it's attached to can dial other galaxies. The same applies to the Milky Way gate system. The SGC can dial out because it's using its own custom dialing computer rather than a normal DHD.
  • What about a big room with metal walls, and you open the door when you're okay with the visitors? That always seemed like a quick fix to me.
  • There are already Sufficiently Advanced Decon Chambers that act as big rooms with metal walls — the Asgardian Thor's Hammer and Human Gate Room, for example. The problem is that we're talking a setting where people routinely make planet-busting bombs, and the gate itself is a very, very big bomb ready to go off if anything too big goes boom near it. You can block all incoming calls completely, or limit it to a very small number of gates, but if you're letting anything unknown through in the first place there's too much opportunity for damage. The Tau'ri don't set it to always-off mode because the gate system is also their only (in earlier seasons) or primary method of communication and travel; there's no telling when a Stargate team might need to dial in after gating or being moved to a different planet than they were assigned to, and the only way to check whether an incoming call is good or bad is to turn off call-blocking.
• Who says the Ancient's didn't have a better way? In canon there's a lot of the Stargate system humans don't understand (hence the episode where ignoring a warning led to disaster). Just because the Pegasus gate has an Iris doesn't mean that's the only way the Ancients knew of to prevent unwanted dialing. Seems to me that keeping out unwanted dialings and stopping enemy soldiers from attacking you are two different things, the fact that the ancients used an iris to perform the second doesn't preclude them from having something to do the first. To use an internet analogy compare blocking ports (iris) to firewalling (allow certain things through and not others). Both have their uses, neither negates the other.

Where does the iris go?

• How exactly is the iris built into the Stargate? It seems to fold straight out of the Stargate itself, but wouldn't that interfere with the operation of the Stargate?
• Into the Stargate?
  • It's about three micrometers in front of the event horizon.
  • This is not what I asked. Where does it fold into?
  • Hammerspace!
  • Probably somewhere behind the gate. Unless the gate just has unused space inside the ring that the SGC decided to make use of.
  • The took off the gate's faceplate added the machinery, then modified the faceplate to fit the machinery. Just like changing the faceplate on your computer so it can hold another cd tray except instead of replacing with a new plate they modified the old one.
  • Speaking of the iris, with the way it folds around itself at the center of the gate, there must be a hole between the plates. I didn't hear any references to them using a metal that could be made as strong as a solid block of steel yet as thin as to make the hole in the center small enough not to let a high-pressure jet of gate-traveler puree through.
  • The original iris was made of Titanium (outright said so in "Children of the Gods) which would suit this purpose just fine as it is stronger than steel at half the weight. The second iris (installed after the original was destroyed when they dialed into a black hole) was made of Trinium which is hundreds of times stronger than even that. Although there wouldn't be any traveler puree as the iris prevents any matter sent through the Stargate from reintegrating at all.
  • This. They stated that the iris was close enough to the event horizon that matter did not even reintegrate. It didn't matter how much mass the bad guys threw through the gate. Matter doesn't even reintegrate, so what ends up hitting the iris is a subatomic particle stream. It creates heat and a burst of radiation (you often see teams analyzing the radiation, and from that they can determine what kind of matter they tried to send through). So the iris doesn't necessarily have to be "strong", it just has to be heat and radiation resistant.

Forgotten Superweapon, Part I

• For that matter, what happened to Sokar's iris-melting weapon? Even if Apophis didn't use it because he was bound by the Protected Planets Treaty at that time, why didn't Anubis use it right after his plan to devastate Earth by blowing up its Stargate failed?
  • Did they ever say that Sokar's weapon was something the Goa'uld could build? It might also have been a one of a kind Ancient device; alternatively, Anubis might not have thought of it. He pursued his goals, but was more fond of brute force than anything else. He tried to destroy the SGC from remote once, when it failed he probably gave up on the easy incrementally more powerful attacks one after the other motif and decided that next time he'd just bring a fleet of motherships and conquer the whole planet. You have to admit the whole "you beat my 10th most powerful weapon, so I will send my 9th most powerful weapon against you" thing is a bit stupid.
  • They did manage to duplicate the effects of Sokar's weapon on Earth when O'Neill was trapped on an alien planet when the local Stargate was buried after an explosion (which made him believe it was destroyed). It took them several months, and it doesn't specify whether alien technology was used, but if the people at SGC can accomplish that, you'd think that it wouldn't be difficult for Goa'uld to do the same.
  • I assumed it was Sokar's tech. The system lords don't generally share technology with each other. Unless anther system lord found the weapon no one else would have it.
  • Which means that when Apophis took over Sokar's forces, he inherited the weapon. But when Apophis's forces were wiped out, the technology was probably lost.

Earth's Correct Point-Of-Origin

• If the SGC's Stargate was brought to Earth by Ra, why does it have Earth's point-of-origin symbol on it? Shouldn't it have a completely different one?
  • There is no "Earth point of origin" per se. Points of origin are unique to Stargates, not planets — for example, the Antarctic Stargate, Earth's original one, has a different symbol. Sun-over-Pyramid just came to be associated with Earth in Goa'uld-associated cultures because nobody knew about the other Stargate.
  • Hmmm. It seems like an awful big coincidence that the symbol which is only coincidentally associated with Earth is also the first letter of "Atlantis" in Ancientese.
  • Maybe Ra took that Stargate from a planet that was once more closely associated with Atlantis than Earth.
  • Doesn't O'Neill identify the lost city as "Terra Atlantis"? Supposing that Atlantis was at some point more closely associated with some other planet, and, by coincidence, Ra raided that planet for a spare Stargate.
  • Now that I think of it, a simpler answer might be what we actually see: the At symbol is still on the gate even during the seasons where they were using the Antarctica gate. Maybe that symbol does mean "Earth", and whatever gate you plug in to Earth's position in the network will "grow" an At symbol in that position.
  • This was probably just a production error — they didn't bother to modify the main prop. And I only remember two episodes in which it was seen: "Window of Opportunity" and "Watergate". The DHD in "Solitudes" shows a different symbol. Since it was Earth's original Stargate, it's logical to assume that the symbol is Earth's original POO.
  • That still doesn't explain why Ancient databases like Merlin's phase-shifting device and the Atlantis hologram room show Milky Way addresses ending with the sun-over-pyramid symbol rather then the circle-and-line symbol.
  • Perhaps 'At' is just the standard Point of Origin symbol, and only planets that were of particular importance to the Ancients had specific ones. Maybe that's the real reason that the vast majority of the other Stargates have the 'At' symbol on them - it's not that the prop department only had two mock-up gates (one of which was permanently on-set), it's that this just happens to be the placeholder symbol until the Ancients wanted to give it a planet-specific one.
  • My concern with the whole point-of-origin thing was SGU. They had to use Earth's point of origin to dial Destiny no matter what planet they were on (Eli stated it was more of a code than an address). The problem: the original Ancient gate that would've been on Earth when Destiny was sent out was the Antarctic one, that had the point of origin from Solitudes. But they used the point of origin from the gate Ra brought to earth to dial Destiny. We know the system is intelligent in some way (perhaps Ra recoded the system to make that the new default Earth gate), and it knew to use the "current" Earth point of origin rather than the original. But it's still weird, knowing what we know from Solitudes. Other times when they are using the Antarctic gate and you see the Ra gate point of origin is just due to stock footage, I give them a pass on that.
  • Solitudes established that the Antarctic gate point of origin was Earth's original point of origin. That was the original gate put there by the Ancients, and it would've been the point of origin for that gate that would've been part of the code to dial Destiny. All Ancient writings referring to Earth should've showed the Antarctic gate point of origin for Earth. Scenes from the season where they have that gate in the SGC, but showing the Ra gate point of origin can be excused - it's because they're using stock footage for the gate dialing (it was a very expensive effect to create). Ancient writings showing the Ra gate point of origin, and having to use that point of origin to dial Destiny are production errors. Most likely, the team writing the later season episodes simply forgot about Solitudes - it was a season 1 episode after all.

Stargate: Made Of Explodium

• According to the earlier episodes, Naquadah is extremely volatile. Why, oh WHY would the Ancients build Stargates out of it? Or the Gou'ald for that matter...
  • Naquadah is able to interact with neutrinos (subatomic particles emitted from nuclear events which pass through normal matter as though it's not there), this is what provides most of the energy to make the wormhole.
  • Naquadah is stable — it's naquadria, its unstable variation, which is problematic.
  • Some Naquadah is stable. There is also weapons-grade Naquadah (Naquadria is unique to Jonas Quinn's world) which you can make bombs out of, and you can also make something like a nuclear reactor from the stuff. That said, it's not extremely volatile. They used it, I assume, for the same reason you can make stuff very strong by adding a bit of depleted uranium. It's a ridiculously heavy superconductive element with some unstable isotopes.
  • Naquadah is stated to be a super-heavy element. It's located in a still hypothetical in the real world island of stability that's speculated to exist in atomic numbers higher than known elements in the periodic table. If such a thing exists in reality, it is *probably* radioactive, but in the way that bismuth is. Bismuth-209 was long thought to be stable, but presumed to be radioactive on theoretical grounds. It was finally proven mathematically to be radioactive, but its half life is 10 billion times the age of the universe. Naquadah is most likely the same - technically radioactive, but decays so slowly that it's safe to deal with as if it were stable. *Naquadria* on the other hand, is a highly unstable radioactive isotope of Naquadah (probably with an extra neutron or two).
  • Naqadah magnifies conventional and nuclear explosions. As for the Stargates, that's a bit that was grandfathered over from the Emmerich movie.
  • Didn't the nine-chevron planets have Naquadria cores?
  • Maybe Naquadah is like nitroglycerin. It's naturally unstable, more effective when properly mixed, but can also be mixed to form stable compounds such as dynamite. And like nitroglycerin, it's safe to have in your body in small quantities (Carter and O'Neill have Naquadah in their blood because of the symbiotes).
  • Because the very properties that make Naquadah so devastatingly explosive when triggered are also the properties that make a Stargate possible. Stargates function because they're made of Naquadah; no other material would work.
  • Ruled out by Orlin's 'toaster' Stargate in Ascension. The Universe Stargates also appear to have a much more machine-like structure, and are very easily damaged.
  • IIRC the toaster gate was specifically mentioned to only work the one time before burning out.

Why even HAVE a Point of Origin?

• If you have to dial it every time, why doesn't it just automatically send it? I mean, we don't have to dial our own phone number every time we call for pizza. And what's it used for? There's no "Caller ID"
  • One theory is that the Point of Origin serves as a sort of "Enter" key for a given Stargate, signaling the gate that you're done dialing.
  • Except that the DHD already has an "Enter" key- that button in the middle. Probably a function to protect the unintelligent.
  • AFAIK, that 'button in the middle' on a DHD is the Point of Origin key. I'll have to pay attention the next time I see Daniel dial on a DHD, but I'm pretty sure of this theory ...
  • People are seen dialing six and seven symbols throughout the years. but i think the previous poster is right and any time they dial seven its a production error (like the chevrons lit up one by one on incoming wormholes. Although I have a theory on that ill put forth in the relevant section) But you can set a gate to only accept addresses from certain gates if you are smart enough so the idea of adding call id to the system is probably the reason points of origin exist. The Ancients were just showing uncharacteristic foresight :P
  • I think it is a backup for manual dialing to let the gate know that you have entered the complete address (like the "call" button on a mobile phone)
  • If the "constellations" are indeed some kind of co-ordinate system (problematic, but not impossible) then a Point of Origin is actually needed to chart a wormhole's course, and determine that nothing untoward will happen (for instance, the wormhole travelling through a star, which a properly-functioning 'Gate should prevent.) I also believe that this is why the Giza DHD exploded when they used it to rescue Teal'c. If the Giza 'Gate and DHD were indeed brought to Earth by Ra, then the 'Gate/DHD thought it was on another planet. When it tried to connect to a new Stargate, it would send it's POO information, saying "this is where I am." The receiving 'Gate would say "No, you're not, you're here." Subtle lag every dialing, because the Giza 'Gate always defaulted to whatever planet it was originally on, before being corrected and told it was on Earth. Finally, it was hooked up to the Stargate to reintegrate Teal'c (something neither the 'Gate nor DHD was ever intended to do) and the whole thing just shorted out, all because the Great System Lord Ra was too lazy to update his drivers.

Going Through the Stargate Backwards, Part I

• What the hell happens when something goes through the other side of a Stargate. think about it. we only ever see things going through one side of the Stargate. i'm guessing that something that gets shoved through doesn't just go to the other side of the receiving Stargate, since the iris of the earth gate only covers one side (when the iris is closed and the gate active, you can see the shimmer pattern projected onto the wall behind the gate.) but that still leaves a question. does it just pass through unhindered? (could have some really freaky effects if something is going in the correct side.) does it get vaporized, what?!
  • More importantly, what happens if you step into an incoming wormhole? you don;t go through, but what happens?
  • The RPG says that any objects entering a Stargate in the "wrong" direction (such as from the exit, or from the back) are destroyed.
  • What happens to matter that is caught in the horizontal flush effect, beyond just being destroyed? Conservation of mass and energy applies.
  • Well, a couple times the remains are seen smoking afterward, so maybe they're flash fried so hot they just evaporate.
  • Why doesn't the iris get destroyed by the horizontal flush?
  • Its very close proximity to the event horizon prevents the flush from occurring in the first place.
  • Also, they usually close the Iris after the incoming wormhole is established. That said, we have seen 'Gates open without a kawoosh, usually as a result of sufficiently advanced alternate dialing technologies, so it's possible that they eventually figured out the Iris would prevent the kawoosh.
  • The matter is probably reduced to elementary particles, permanently, or (less likely) converted to energy, which is then absorbed by the gate.
  • That would be a massive amount of energy, 100lbs of person, rock, whatever, equals 45,359.237 grams of matter converted to energy. For comparison the bomb dropped on Hiroshima converted about 3 grams of matter to energy. The phrase Earth-Shattering Kaboom ceases to be meaningful. How much ice did the kawoosh in Continuum shave off of the hull breach in the Achille's? 400, 500lbs? Safe to say the gate would have plenty of power. To wit, the Mark IX bomb is said to be multi-gigaton. Okay, a gigaton is 4.184×10^18 joules of energy. Let's say it's a 5 gigaton blast(209,200,000,000 joules). Matter releases 9×10^16 J/kg of energy. If we assume the gate vaporized an even 400lbs (181.436948 kilograms) the gate would of had to absorb 16,329,325,300,000,000,000 joules. Now I'm no expert, but uh, one of those numbers is waaay bigger than the other. The Stargate would of had to absorb orders of magnitude more energy than their "Gatebuster" bomb put out. Think of the two schmucks who vaporized themselves when SG-1 was trapped in that prison cave. Bet they had a combined weight over 400lbs.
  • Maybe all that energy gets pushed off into subspace.
  • The "kawoosh" is referred to as an "unstable vortex" in the series. Its appearance suggests strong turbulence similar to high-pressure CO2 being released underwater, and it is "made" of the same "material" as the event-horizon. If we think of the unstable vortex as being a short-lived region of turbulent space-time that forms before the full connection is established, then there is ample justification for speculating that any matter caught in the vortex is violently de-materialized (like a regular gate traveler) but in a totally incoherent way. Further, because the wormhole connection was never fully established, the energy is dissipated into subspace, like opening a gate to everywhere.
  • "Destroyed" is just the term they're using; nothing is actually getting destroyed in the scientific sense. I think that the kawoosh (yes, that is the canon name) is waste energy from the gate, and it vaporizes anything in its path. Some things could probably survive it, but not much.

Abydos POO

• This is more a problem with the movie than SG-1, but why is the seventh symbol of the Abydos gate made into such a big deal? Daniel gets all worked up about it being worn off the cartouche, but you'd think all they'd have to do is dial the gate repeatedly, trying a new seventh symbol every time. At most it would take thirty three times (assuming the point of origin can't be the same as another symbol in the address).
  • Similarly, just how did Daniel figure out the seventh symbol by looking at a picture drawn by Skaara? There was absolutely nothing to link it to the Stargate, he just draws a few lines on it and claims that it's the point of origin.
  • The "just try all the 7th symbols" method could have been done in the movie instead of needing Daniel to explain to them which to try. They have done the brute-forcing on Atlantis on Universe so they didn't stay dumb here. :)
  • Pattern recognition: The Earth symbol was a pyramid with one circle (the single sun) above it. It makes sense that its symbol would be similar to the Earth one, but distinct, so when Skaara draws the symbol, it makes Daniel realize what it is.
  • There's also the fact that, while it is only obliquely stated, Daniel recorded all the symbols on the Abydos gate in his notebook. He recognized Skaara's drawing as matching one of the symbols he'd seen. As to why they didn't try multiple Po O. How much power did they bring with them? How many tries would they get at dialing.
  • The gates have been in use for centuries, so there presumably 'would' be enough power to dial a few dozen times.
  • When they find the first six symbols O'neil orders them to return to the gate. They probably were just going to randomly try over and over until they got it, but when they got back there Ra had landed his ship and they didn't have a chance. They got the seventh symbol before they defeated Ra and didn't have to random dial.

Stargate Speed-Dial

• It's established as rock-solid theory that gate travel is "six points in space" plus "a unique identifier given to each gated planet". Here's a novel idea, Mister Ancient Inventor: Give each gate a lookup table of planet co-ordinates, then make the DHD only have to dial THE UNIQUE IDENTIFIER GLYPH!! Seriously, the gate is said to have onboard computers, so why couldn't they make a three chevron gate (one for the unique glyph, one for other galaxies, one for whatever special weirdness they might need)?
  • The Point of Origin is specific to the gate not the planet. SGC's original gate (with the pyramid and sun) wasn't Earth's original gate; it was brought to Earth by Ra. The original gate is the one in Antarctica and has a different POO (a horizontal line with a large dot over it). If you just wanted to dial the gate, you'd need a DHD with thousands of symbols on it and that's just for the Milky Way gates. And you'd have the problem that you wouldn't be able to predict where you actually would end up. If you dialed the pyramid and sun symbol before Ra moved the gate, you'd end up on the original planet. If you dialed it after it moved, you'd end up on Earth. What you want to be able to do is say "connect to the gate at this location" otherwise it's pretty useless for travel.
  • Because each point of origin symbol is unique to that specific Stargate. You couldn't say, dial Earth from Abydos using only Earth's unique symbol because that symbol doesn't appear on the Abydos gate or DHD. The theory was a little unstable in earlier seasons (such as Daniel claiming he dialed Earth's unique symbol as the point of origin on a different gate in season two), but I think this is meant to be the official rule.
  • He says he used Earth as a point of origin, not that he used the symbol. He used that gate's unique symbol as the POO key, and the gate interpreted that as "Here," or as Earth, and it worked.
  • Tho we know from the movie one thing, and they kind of continue to use that as their reference for things in future episodes of series and spin-offs, we also know retcon happens, and the show was not afraid to forget "facts already in evidence" when it suited them. Try not to think of it as a "simple point in space" and more that those 6 symbols are a unique address related to the approximate location of a gate. With this knowledge it makes more sense that they have all those symbols since it allows gate travel between thousands (millions?) of potential gates.
  • I know that someone might say something about it being an address to a specific gate, but I don't think it works that way. The AI involved in the tech of the gates has some kind of spacial map inside it (extrapolation based on shown evidence) and can pinpoint a gate by an approximate location in space. This is also why the gates can't seem to open when dialing the same address in a nearby area (such as the two gates on earth). Just a theory.

Ring Transporter Insecurity

• Why is it that no one has ever figured out how to make their ring transporters secure? Letting people ring in and out willy-nilly has been an Achilles' Heel for both the heroes and the villains on several occasions.
  • For that matter, there's something even easier than an iris: burying a gate. Depending on just how much matter you need interfering in the event horizon to stop a lock, they might be able to secure their gate with a couple of Kryptonite-brand bike-locks.
  • Rings ... what about the gates? Nine out of ten Goa'uld just left their planet's Stargate sit somewhere unguarded. Which seemed stupid for reasons of both security and accessibility.
  • First, Goa'uld seem possessed by an innate desire for power, but (with a few exceptions) they're not generally all that militaristic; if they've got a bunch of people thinking they're god and all the immediate pleasures they could want, they're as happy as a snake in the sun. Which is, in fact, what they are. Militarizing requires a military-industrial complex, and that requires people to operate it. Since their only choices are other Goa'uld (who would eventually try to kill them because they're innately self-serving) or Jaffa who they're trying to appear magical to, they pretty much have to do everything themselves or risk getting bumped off.
  • Second, most Goa'uld control more than one planet. Ever played Civilization? At the beginning of the game you've got a couple little villages that you can control instantly and micromanage to your heart's content, but by the time you reach the modern era you have tens if not hundreds of cities and armies moving around; at a certain point it becomes too tedious to give everything new orders every turn so you either hit "automate" or just let them sit doing nothing until you need them. And this is in a video game where you're omnipresent and your commands are obeyed instantly; it's not much of a stretch to imagine any one person who was in control of a couple dozen planets would say "ah screw it, it's good enough" when faced with the prospect of micromanaging each one individually.
  • Similarly, and even more appropriate perhaps, try playing Spore during the space stage and take over the entire galaxy. Now imagine your one ship is your command ship and in order to do anything significant in your empire, YOU and you alone must go take care of it, because otherwise the people on the planet will not think of you as their god protector and fear you and your weapons of destruction.
  • Another way to think about it is this... who goes to those planets? The system lord or maybe a lesser underling and... the SG-1 team. Every planet they went to was surprised to see someone other than the Gou'ald and usually going through the gate grabbed the attention of the local system lord and they would be in the system in a few short hours or days (in galactic terms that is really short travel time). And if you think about what might happen if you left some group of "soldiers" (even "loyal" Jaffa in small numbers) behind, they would probably get bored or just start rethinking the whole idea of being subservient and lead a rebellion on the planet they were supposed to be protecting.

Stargate: No OSHA Compliance

• Why don't the Stargates have any warning as to where the kawoosh will go to (such as the STAY CLEAR banner on earths gate.) These things are dangerous and you're not bothering to tell people how far away they should be to avoid it? shame on you, Ancients, shame on you.
  • The Ancients chose which planets to build gates on, so I imagine they probably informed any settlers of the dangers first. But as the Ancients ascended and the Goa'uld, Wraith and Ori took over, I bet many worlds lost that information over the centuries.
  • The majority of gates we see are ones that have been in use for thousands of years, with the steps and DHD intact, meaning that the locals know exactly which direction it comes from and about how far it shoots out, and thus don't need warning signs; you don't have to put, "Don't stand in the middle of the road" signs on modern roads for the same reason, people already know it. The others started the same way, even if they were buried and dug back up in the meantime.

Stargate Two-Way Travel, Part I

• In the first episode ("Children of the Gods") we see Apophis & a Jaffa step through the Stargate to Earth, capture a female airman, then step back through the still open Stargate. Later in the series it's mentioned several times that matter can only travel one way through a wormhole. Explain.
  • I rewatched the ORIGINAL version of the episode (not the final cut remake). After the Jaffa and Aphophis come through the gate and shoot the soldiers, you HEAR the gate shut down (and the "water reflection" on the walls disappears). You don't SEE them redial the gate, but it is operating again when Hammond and company come in and see them departing. But it is very clear that they had to redial the gate because you hear it shut down.
  • The most popular theory is that the didn't go backwards, they redialed the gate. It's not a continuous shot and the Goa'uld are known to have Stargate powering devices and the knowledge/capability to manually dial, so it's not impossible to imagine that they simple stepped through, went off to grab the person, shut the gate off, dialed back, then went back through.
  • Children of the Gods: The Final Cut addresses this... somewhat. Apophis orders his Jaffa to redial the gate (although it's not shown how they did that), and when Hammond and the other staff are rushing towards the gate room, the dialing sounds are heard in the background.
  • How they were able to dial the gate with neither DHD nor access to the dialing computer is a fair question in and of itself.
  • Cassandra did it with a device on her hand at the end of the episode 1969, so it is technically possible.
  • Teal'c himself also did this in the final confrontation in Continuum with his electronic device, both powering-up an unpowered Stargate and dialing out to a gate address without a DHD. So it is entirely possible... but some on-screen confirmation would have been nice at least.

Incoming Wormhole Inconsistency

• Is it just me, or are there TWO alternate ways an incoming wormhole can announce itself: (barring aliens who click their fingers and just make it turn on instantly... what the hell is up with that?)
  • 1) Identical to the dialing out: the circular part spins, and the chevrons lock like normal. Loads of time to close the iris.
  • 2) The chevrons engage and light up one by one with no spinning. All they get is 'clonk-clonk-clonk' and then it's on!
  • What's the difference between these two?
  • I think they eventually settled on the second one being the way for an incoming wormhole to activate. Perhaps Sam upgraded some firmware in the gate which (inadvertently) caused the dial-in time to speed up? Or perhaps it's indicative of the method of dialing on the other end? Spinning means the dialing was "manual" (ie, not using an ancient dialing device) while simply clicking in is done by using a DHD?
  • In at least one episode, the "chevrons lighting up" method is shown to have occurred on a planet that was dialed to from Earth, which we all know uses the "manual" method, so it's probably just an inconsistency.
  • There's actually another way that's only shown in one or two instances: all 7 chevrons light up simultaneously, followed by the ka-whoosh a few seconds later. Some have claimed that this is the correct way and that all of the others were production errors, since the destination gate technically isn't going to know it's being dialed until the source gate has received the final symbol (or at least until it's got the 6th symbol). In "Solitudes", when Sam tries dialing Earth's address, the SGC gate is shown with all 7 chevrons glowing simultaneously, and Daniel later describes it as being just like an incoming wormhole.
  • Treating the Stargate as a public utility, one would want safety. The kawoosh takes out anything and everything, thus you would want the receiving gate to make as much noise as possible to alert people "get out of the way, incoming wormhole!" The real reason is dramatic license, of course. One idea: the Stargate has some form of sensor related to nearby activity - if little to no activity, no need to warn anyone and instant on; the more people around, make more noise and buffer incoming travelers to provide a delay for arrival.

Time Travel, 1969

• "1969." After arriving in the past the Gate exists just long enough to spit them out, then vanishes. First of all, why does the ramp remain if the Stargate hasn't been installed yet? Second, how did this time-traveling wormhole create a virtual Stargate? Shouldn't the wormhole just go to wherever the Gate is at this point in history, which is (I think) a storage facility in Washington D.C. (and inside a crate, by the way).
  • When a wormhole jumps in time, it always goes to wherever the gate is located in that time. In 1969, the gate was packed in a crate, the event horizon blocked so a wormhole couldn't form. This is probably why they ended up in a "virtual" gate. Because the actual gate was inaccessible, so the wormhole looped back on itself and put them in both timeframes at once until it closed.
  • In Continuum, gate-time-travel works exactly the way you describe. I guess they changed their minds, plus they needed a way for them to get arrested by Young Hammond.
  • Wasn't the gate room the floor of a missile silo in '69?
  • The "virtual gate" in "1969" wasn't ever used that way again. Although in Stargate Universe they finally explain why sometimes the solar-flare-intersected-wormhole takes you to your destination, and other times back to your point of origin.

Tunnel Of Screaming Light

• What exactly is that animation they use when someone steps through the gate? The thing that looks like you're flying down a tunnel through space, I mean. Is that what you actually see when you're traveling through a wormhole? If so, how can you see if your body's been completely dematerialized?
  • I think that's just artistic license for the viewer's benefit (which would explain why the Milky Way gate wormholes changed from "tunnel through space" to "blue version of Atlantis wormhole"). Look at the original movie or The Ark of Truth. Both times when Daniel passes through the gate, we see him being dematerialized, then he goes through the wormhole and then the camera follows. So we're seeing things from the camera's point of view, not the traveler.

Stargate: Vacuum Cleaner

• If matter can only travel in one direction through a Stargate, opening one — anywhere at all — should suck air out. Having randomly traveling air molecules just "vanish" when flying in one direction would have the same effect as a Stargate-sized hole connecting the room to vacuum.
  • The Stargates seem to detect the ambient pressure of the atmosphere around it and only allow matter exerting a greater pressure to pass through the event horizon. This is why a if a Stargate underwater dials out it doesn't pour out at the dialed planet. It might be that the Stargate only performs this pressure check once, hence why if one falls into lava or a star the 'gate still allows all that matter to come through. That might mean that if the wind was blowing or there was a sudden pressure change while it was active then air might go through.
  • Also, in regard to the star incident specifically, in that case the gate was connected to a black hole. So the star matter was being pulled through by the force of gravity. So it would seem the gate does do some sort of "check". It takes a force greater than the pressure detected when the wormhole opens to initiate travel through the gate.

Glyphs As Syllables

• Just rewatched the series, and I'm a little confused in regards to the whole "Stargate glyphs work like syllables" thing from season 7's Lost City, particularly the "Proclarush Taonas" bit. According to them, PT translates to "lost in fire", and the planet's gate address is pronounced "Pro-cla-rush Ta-o-nas." That's great, but I'm assuming that the phonetic sounds were assigned BEFORE the planet was covered in lava and such, so how (outside of time travel) can it be that the planet's gate address just happened to spell out "lost in fire" in Ancient? And even if they were assigned after the planet was abandoned, why would they apply a cipher language to just one planet that was of practically no interest anymore?
  • They may simply have put a secret base there, with the idea that the lava planet would help hide it. Lost in fire is also an appropriate description of the secret hidden base too.

Going Through the Stargate Backwards, Part II

• What happens if someone tries going through the back end of a Stargate?
  • I don't think it was every officially explained, but it's assumed that anything that goes in the back end of a Stargate gets destroyed.
  • The RPG makes it explicit: anything that goes through the wrong side of a gate, or the wrong way through an open connection, is disintegrated. Which raises questions about where the released energy goes (and it would be a very violent explosion), but eh...
  • Which opens up a world of easily-solved-problems where dangerous items the SGC had to sort out and deal with could have simply been tossed through the back of a gate. This presents such a problem for the writers that it isn't until Season NINE that anyone thinks to use the "Kawoosh" for disposal - despite knowing at least two groups they have seen using this for a method of burial (The Tokra and the prison planet in season 2)
  • The Fandemonium novel "Stargate SG-1: Survival of the Fittest" includes a reference to this issue; when circumstances lead to Jack wondering what would happen if they tried going through the 'back' of the gate, Bra'tac comments that he knew someone who tried that once and "his death was most unpleasant".

Russian And Antarctic DHD

• Just re-watched "48 Hours", where Teal'c is trapped inside the memory of the Stargate due to a crashed al'kesh flattening the originating DHD. Daniel and Maj. Davis spend half the episode playing politics with the Russians to get their DHD. A bit of Fridge Logic occurred to me. Namely, why did nobody even mention the fact that Area 51 still had the DHD found with the Beta Gate in Antarctica? Why couldn't they just fly that one over?
  • Because it ran out of power in the very episode they found it, and they can't repair an Ancient device.
  • Okay, I hadn't seen "Frozen" yet. I get the impression Carter's line about the Beta DHD being depleted was written to patch that plot hole.
  • Then how were the rogue NID agents able to dial out during "Touchstone" if the DHD's power was depleted?
  • I think the guy who responded to my previous query had his timing a little off. The DHD probably ran out of power after they got it back from the NID.

Stargate Two-Way Travel, Part II

• So matter can only move one-way through a stable wormhole but energy can move both ways right? That's how they are able to use their radios to communicate with whoever is on the other side. The SGC was able to send an EMP through the gate in "Redemption" and we know gravity can as well thanks to the black hole incident. Then there are the Asgard holograms. So what else can travel both ways through an open wormhole? Lasers? The energy blasts from a staff weapon? Could plain old sunlight go either way through the wormhole?
  • It's probably an issue of bandwidth. So, high-energy stuff is out. Maybe you could use a laser pointer, but the event horizon scatters any light that shines through.
  • We know staff weapon blasts can go through: Jacob takes a stray shot to the knee after exiting the gate in "Allegiance".
  • No. That staff blast came through the gate travelling from dialing gate to receiving gate like regular matter does. We're talking about stuff that can go the other way.
  • My bad. In that case I'm guessing staff blasts can only go one-way. When their mechanism is described at all, it's as a plasma weapon, and plasma is matter.

Script Reading Stargate

• How does a Stargate know how long it has to remain open? It always seems to remain open for just the right amount of time, but there doesn't seem to be a timer or anything on DHDs.
  • There may be a motion sensor or something built into the gate so it can "see" people who are milling about in front of the event horizon waiting for their turn to go through.
  • Alternatively, the Stargate can Break the Fourth Wall and read the script. :P
  • At the very least, we can probably assume that the gate will wait until something has gone through before shutting down, at least up until the 38 minute deadline is reached.

Easy 'Gate Burying

• Is it me, or is there a very simple defense mechanism missing from earth's Stargate? We know that gates won't dial when sufficiently obstructed (hence, the usefulness of burying a Stargate), so why is there no mechanism to do so? A simple extensible platform behind the Stargate would have been enough, and it would prevent earth from being locked off by continuous redialing.
  • At the very least, it should have been the obvious solution for preventing the bomb from being triggered in "Critical Mass"
  • I recall a line in a mid-series episode saying the SGC modified the iris to be able to angle inward and obstruct the gate (I think it was in "48 Hours" when Teal'c was trapped in the gate buffer). However it seems to have later become Forgotten Phlebotinum.
  • I think they had to weld the iris into a specific position to bury the gate that time, and then they moved it back when the crisis was over. As for why they never pursued a way to bury the gate at the push of a button, I think there are only out-of-universe reasons to explain it: the writers never thought of it, they didn't want to change the look of the set, etc.
  • Besides, we've seen time and again that the gate can function if the obstruction is where the ground would normally be. There are lots of gates that just have their bottom part buried instead of having stairs. The SGC would have to implement something more complete than a simple extending platform.
  • This is just a straight-up "the writers forgot" thing (they admitted it during the commentary for one of the episodes, I think Sokar's assault). It would have been trivial to add a Stargate-sized plug that just extends from behind blocking it completely to simulate a buried gate.
  • Earth also has any number of off-world allies who may need to dial in at a moment's notice, to say nothing of off-world SG teams, so "burying" the 'Gate when it's not in use would not be a practical solution to most problems.

Sam's Basic Troubleshooting Fail

• In "Solitudes", why didn't Sam try dialing a planet with a more hospitable climate after dialing Earth failed? Just because you can't connect to one gate doesn't mean you can't connect to them all. They would've been much better off if they'd simply dialed a hospitable world where they could get some kind of help, or at the very least somewhere warmer.
  • Solitudes was a Season 1 episode, and at that time they hadn't yet nailed down a lot of their later Gate travel protocols. They didn't have the Alpha Site yet and Sam probably hadn't memorized any Gate addresses other than Earth. Also, she didn't realize why the Gate wouldn't connect. She thought it was a malfunction which is why she tried to take the DHD apart. So even if she knew any other Gate addresses off the top of her head, she would assume they would have the same problem.
  • They do learn from this, in a later episode where the gate system goes down O'Neill mentions that they tried multiple addresses in an attempt to get a lock.
  • Carter also would have been flung out of the wormhole like O'Neill, Jackson, and Teal'c. She probably was concussed and suffering from hypothermia herself, just not in as rough shape as Jack.

Dial All The 'Gates!

• How can Ba'al connect one Stargate to every other gate in "Reckoning"? We see the effect of the Dakara superweapon go through each gate. If Carter for example were step through the stargate during this time, would there be a Carter in every single planet in the galaxy?
  • Given that the Ancients once did the same thing in order to seed the Milky Way with life according to their own design, the Stargates were presumably designed to be capable of that. And most likely any physical object that's sent through a Stargate configured in that manner would be stripped down to its component atoms and scattered across the galaxy. That would be why it's a very long, complicated process to reconfigure a Stargate to connect simultaneously to multiple other Stargates: so that it would be impossible for anybody to do it by accident.

Stargate Two-Way Travel, Part III

• Did they ever show or say what happens if you try to go through the receiving end of an active Stargate? Do you just fall out the other side? Do you just disintegrate, like the kawoosh?
  • You're disintegrated by the matter stream going the other way smashing into you at a gajillion times the speed of light.

OSHA Compliant Stargates

• So how is it that everywhere you go, the Stargate is at exactly the right height to walk through? Not once does the team suddenly drop half a foot, or smack their shins against a rock that's sitting too close.
  • Because they were put in place by people who planned to walk through it. They're not just arbitrarily placed natural phenomena, and the show makes it really, really obvious that an intelligent race of beings with working legs put them where they are. Even if something had fallen in front of the gate, the effect of it opening vaporizes anything that's in front of it.

Non-Stargate Questions

Intar Ultimate Weapon

• This show seems to seriously underestimate the value of Intar technology. They seem to be a near-perfect weapon. Non-lethal, no apparent long-term effects aside from slight soreness, and can take the form of any weapon (ergo, no special training needed). So why doesn't the SGC equip all off-world teams with Intars? It would make things a lot easier since, as O'Neill himself pointed out, it would allow SG teams to "shoot first and ask questions later" with no consequences. No more Mexican Standoff scenarios. No more hesitation to fire on primitive peoples who don't know any better. They can shoot, shoot, shoot, and sort things out later. (And don't say they don't have enough Intars to go around. If they can spend Intar rounds on cadet training simulations they clearly have the ability to produce new intars.) On a related note, why don't the Goa'uld use intars when they harvest hosts?
  • Goa'uld take Large Ham to a remarkable level, especially since they don't need many hosts. "Accidentally" killing a few dozen potential hosts is a feature, not a bug; they want as many of the survivors scared shitless as possible. As to the use of Intars by SG-1, they probably don't want to establish a "shoot first, ask questions later" mindset. There's too much risk of it encouraging native populations to try and kill you. It's also not clear how effective Intars are on armored opponents, meaning that carrying Intars would require a doubled weapons load-out. The x-699 suggests that the Tau'ri were working on more effective energy weapons, but it's not clear if such were successfully demonstrated.

Forgotten Not-So-Super Weapon

• Whatever happened to Felger's plasma cannon? One would logically assume that work on it would continue considering that it was intended to be a replacement for the Prometheus' missile armament, but we never hear of it ever again. It's like the SGC abandoned the idea of having a viable energy weapon just because it failed its first test.
  • That's assuming it only failed the first test. Felger had a bad habit of overestimating his work. It's probable that he never perfected the cannon. And even if he did, maybe the power requirements were simply too great for the Prometheus to make good use of it.
  • The SGC does have a working, human-built energy weapon. Carter uses one in the episode with the bounty hunters tracking SG-1. Vala also tries to bring one to Ba'al's extraction ceremony in Continuum. Thing is, it's bulky, awkward, underpowered as far as we know (it certainly can't pack the punch of an anti-fighter gun), and for now only available in handheld form. Plus the spiffy Asgard weapons have rendered it obsolete for capital ships.

Zat Gun Stun

• Can I just ask, why do the Zat guns knock the bad guys out cold for minutes, and yet when shot by a Zat, the members of SG-1 only have seconds of painful, but conscious incapacitation to endure?
  • It's said in the show itself: people repeatedly knocked out by zats eventually develop resistance to them. SG-1 get more resilient the more often they are shot.
  • The bad guys most usually being Jaffa, the above is justified because Jaffa are usually shooting at each other with staff weapons, not zats.
  • Plus it's been shown that metal conducts a zat fire and when you consider that Jaffa tend to wear entire suits made of metal, it's possible that the energy is intensified.

Forgotten Needle Threader

• In the episode into the fire we're introduced to the Goa'uld equivalent of the Puddle Jumper - called a Needle Threader. What the hell happened to it after this episode? this was Season 3, long before Earth had something as basic as the F-302 - yet despite the fact it would of been useful in a good hundred episodes after this we never see this fully functioning craft ever again. Even if they didn't want to keep this at SG Command for whatever reason they could have, at the very least, sent it to Atlantis as a back up for their very finite supply of Jumpers.
  • Yeah, because the Needle Threader is so much easier to replace. The reason they don't use it is because it lacked any sort of autopilot to get it through the gate, which made it dangerous as hell to actually fly through a gate. It's also far weaker than a Jumper, presumably slower, technologically inferior... need I go on? It was an odd-shaped death glider, nothing more.

Asgard Cloning

• Once upon a time, the Asgard were humanoid aliens who reproduced sexually. Nowadays they are incapable of old-fashioned conception and reproduce exclusively through cloning, each generation of clone being more degraded than the one before it. How exactly does a problem like this originate? Why do the cloning thing in the first place?
  • They also move their minds into the new body every time they clone themselves. As such, it may be that a body will reject the mind unless they are an almost-perfect match, just like organs are rejected unless there is a sufficient match. Since mutations tend to build up slowly, the difference between every clone is less than between any blood connection. Therefore cloning would be necessary to make them live forever. Assuming the Asgard lived in prosperity for a very long time, it was unnecessary for them to grow in population, so the entire population survived solely by cloning. (This doesn't explain why they didn't just store the genetic code of the original individual, and just replicated their genome without any genetic flaws in the same way they replicate replicators, and then insert it into a denuclearized stem cell (everything except making the genome is already possible using currently existing human technology)). Alternately, with a lot more Hand Wave-ing, Asgard don't have cells like humans do, but are rather extremely complex single-celled organisms (I'm not sure if this is physically possible), which have only one genetic code in their entire body. As a mind inhabits an Asgard body, it adapts to the genetic code of the body so closely that it can only be placed on a perfect genetic match. Clones would then have to be made with the exact genetic content at the time of death, and as such the mutations built up over the course of a lifetime can't be corrected. Since this would make them more liable to detrimental mutations even when reproducing sexually, their genome would require a lot of redundancy, and as such they would stay healthy for a long time of cloning, and then suddenly feel the detrimental effects after an (arbitrary, that is, randomly determinable) number of generations, explaining why they were careless enough to ignore the effects until it was too late. If it were determined that a technology would allow you to live for approximately 60 million years, would you really care about the end of your life? About what would happen if everyone were to do it, and nobody of your trillions-counting civilization would bother to have sex? No, they would prepare for it no more than we prepare for when the sun goes nova, or when it becomes so hot the earth's seas start to evaporate off into space, or when a meteor hits the earth. And when any of those things happen, and it's too late to save everyone, we will ask ourselves why our ancestors didn't do anything to prevent this. But it's our nature, and quite possibly theirs too, to think "Eh, I'll get to it later". So now you know: don't procrastinate.
  • In one of the episodes (the one with Loki, I think ^Warning  I just got back from an Asgard episode marathon so it's all a bit blurred and there's a niggling feeling in my head that's not the one.) it was mentioned that they'd mentally evolved since the time of their first cloning and in another one (the one with Alec Colson) where they mentioned that clones were now created to grow to maturity in three months and retain a blank enough mind to download an Asgard consciousness, implying they'd mucked around with their genetic code and even if they did have the original DNA, they probably wouldn't be able to use the clones. Not to mention that episode where they did find the body of one of the original Asgard in stasis.

Sha're's Hammer Time

• In "Secrets", why don't Daniel and Teal'c just take Sha're to Cimmeria?
  • This one's been bothering be. It's clearly stated in both Thor's Hammer and Thor's Chariot that that world would be good for removing Sha're's Goa'uld. Even if it doesn't work in all cases, occasionally killing the host, the one test case, the shaman women, had the exact same set of circumstances as Sha're. They even had a chance to get to the Stargate while the parasite was dormant. The only explanations are: (a) lazy writing, or (b) Daniel wasn't thinking clearly.
  • My understanding was that Thor's Hammer wasn't rebuild after SG-1 destroyed it. Since the Goa'uld were already deathly afraid of the planet and the one time Heru'ur doubted the planet was still protected his invasion force was wiped out. The Asgard felt there was no need to rebuild the device having discouraged the System Lords yet again.
  • Um, not true. At the end of "Thor's Chariot", Gerwyn specifically mentions that the Asgard are going to build a new Hammer that will ignore Teal'c.
  • Maybe they were worried about the effect the Hammer might have on a pregnant woman (e.g. miscarriage or worse). Still, some mention of it would've been nice.
  • They couldn't. Daniel and Teal'c tried taking Sha're through the Stargate, but Heru'ur's arrival ruined that plan.

Use The Keyboard

• In “Arthur’s Mantle”, and out-of-phase Carter and Mitchell can only use “yes” and “no” to communicate with Daniel - but it's an ancient keyboard! Why don’t they just press the keys that correspond with the letter?
  • Because they don't know what any of the keys do. The last thing they needed was to randomly mash buttons hoping they'd fix things when doing so could have easily made things worse.

MALP Transmissions

• This is a science thing but it definitely qualifies as a headscratcher to me. Okay, you've got a device that can create a wormhole from point A to point B. I can accept that. You send a probe through. I can accept that. You close the wormhole behind the probe. The probe is now thousands of light-years away from the SGC, with no shortcut home. So how does the data get back in real-time? If the data is going the long way, which at this point is the only way (with the Stargate closed), it shouldn't get here for thousands of years. Yet somehow, the data shows up instantly, even with the gate closed. If they can transfer that much information across that much space instantly, why the heck are they only using it for a probe? There's so much more that they could do with something like that.
  • You're misunderstanding what's happening; the MALP is transmitting info back through the Stargate, at no point do they keep getting info from the probes after the gate has closed down.

Mimic Devices

• In ''Smoke and Mirrors" the episode where Kinsey is "assassinated" Carter uses a mimic device to impersonate an NID agent. I thought the devices could only be used to mimic people those aliens impersonated. How could Carter use the alien device to impersonate someone who wasn't involved in the alien foothold incident?
  • It's stated in that same episode that through research, they were successful in getting the device to mimic other people, but only for short periods of time.
  • Carter even states that her disguise set a new record for how long the image lasts.

All The Nukes!

• So, starting in the movie, and going all the way through SG-1 and Atlantis, the SGC and the capital ships have at least dozens, probably hundreds, of nukes at their disposal. Where do they come from? In real life, nuclear weapons manufacture and storage is extremely tightly controlled by the IAEA and the UN. If they were taken from existing US stockpiles, standard inspections of those stockpiles would've either shown that 1) they're "missing" (hidden in a secret facility or on our spaceships), or 2) they've would seen the Naquadah-enhanced warheads designed to be moved by remote control on wheels. I think the UN would have disapproved of that. And it's known that the DOD was incredibly stringent regarding security, so they waited seven or eight years (movie in 1995/96, "Disclosure" in 2003) to tell the other permanent members of the Security Council. How did they get away with it?
  • Given the fact that they could conceal multiple aircraft-carrier-level projects to build each of the ships, tossing a few nukes on the assembly line is pretty much chump change at that point.
  • In the first season, the budget of the SGC was $7+ billion. That's over 2% of the entire military budget of that year. And that was before they started all the R&D programs, reverse engineering, the Atlantis expedition, and building massive spaceships. I don't really think building nukes would even raise an eyebrow at that point.
  • The IAEA monitors civilian nuclear facilities to make sure nuclear material is accounted for and not diverted to secret nuclear programs; it has nothing to do with acknowledged existing military weapons production by the 5 declared nuclear powers (US, Russia, China, UK, and France). Any monitoring of weapons that goes in is due to voluntary agreement between those countries to keep the others informed (and really only includes the US and Russia). It would be trivial to arrange for some nukes to be allocated to the Stargate program without widespread knowledge of the fact.

Where's The Bridge?

• Where exactly on the Prometheus and Daedalus class ships are the bridges located? I'm assuming the bridge is on the "tower" part on the Prometheus much like a Star Destroyer, but I have no idea where the Daedalus's bridge is.
  • Prometheus◊ & Daedalus◊ schematics.
  • Which is the same problem Star Trek has: the bridge is exposed and a perfect target. Granted, that's still true of most naval ships today, but you'd think the USAF would realize the problem.

Armor Really Is Useless

• At the end of Continuum, Mitchell and a ship-mate ambush the time-travelling Jaffa and Ba'al as they step out of the Stargate. How can bullets from small automatic rifles from 1939 pierce Jaffa armor?
  • If I remember correctly, those were Thompson sub-machine guns. Thompsons fired .45 caliber rounds, which are by no means small.