Retrospective Stargate SG-1/Atlantis/Universe Question

[Lonestar]

Although, uh...

I suppose despite McKay's claim, it's probably mostly Asgard tech. The Asgard almost certainly gifted some sort of fab unit to the Tauri, and in the season finale of SG-1 they gifted them another. One or two fab units would explain the slow production of ships, and the inability of the Pegasus Asgard to build intergalactic hyperdrives while the Tauri can(they lack the tooling).

EDIT: Sorry, continuing train of thought


From a story telling standpoint, it would have been great to explicitly state there was a Fab unit somewhere under Area 51 that was churning out Asgard beam weapons and engines and spare parts, then when the Wraith destroyed the place it would have set the Tauri back. 4th Rate groups like the Lucian Alliance would have been much more of a threat then in SGU. Doesn't matter how great the weapons are if there are only 5 hulls that need to cover 2 galaxies, while they are sitting on the old Go'auld Industrial base.

[Borgholio]

I'm still aghast at the lack of air defense available over Area 51. You'd think there would be enough SAMs at least to shoot down one stinking dart...

[Elheru Aran]

For some reason Gateworld's Omnipedia thing isn't working for me, and my google-fu is inconclusive on the answer, so here's a random question:

Does Teal'c ever receive any military rank in the SGC, or any sort of command authority?

One source I found indicated he's something along the lines of a Master Sergeant, but others basically said "we don't know"...

Not quite on topic, but hey, since we're talking about the thing and all.

[Borgholio]

Does Teal'c ever receive any military rank in the SGC, or any sort of command authority?

Officially, no...but he is paid and he does appear have a great deal of command authority, second only to Hammond, O'neill, and Carter in the grand scheme of things.

[Elheru Aran]

"Does appear to have" isn't quite the same thing as being commissioned or whatever, though. In military terms, if Hammond or O'Neill supported a call by T and it went bad, they'd look a *lot* worse than if he was an actual subordinate officer/noncom rather than a civilian, even one employed by the DoD. If he's technically outside of the command hierarchy of SGC, then why does he have authority to issue commands?

Are there any similar situations IRL outside of Secretary of Defense/POTUS type ranking civilians?

[Borgholio]

If he's technically outside of the command hierarchy of SGC, then why does he have authority to issue commands?

The whole situation is a bit...odd. An alien, formerly working for the enemy, now trusted to be in the middle of the most sensitive military installation on Earth.

[StarSword]

Does Teal'c ever receive any military rank in the SGC, or any sort of command authority?

Officially, no...but he is paid and he does appear have a great deal of command authority, second only to Hammond, O'neill, and Carter in the grand scheme of things.

According to Stargatewiki they gave him an honorary rank of technical sergeant, but I think that's based on a line in "Point of No Return" where Sam apparently gave Tanner Teal'c's rank off-screen (and she was lying through her teeth in the rest of the conversation).

Maybe his authority is more a case of, people respect him and trust that he generally knows what he's doing. Or maybe it's a result of the SG-1 team's position in the chain of command.

[Forgothrax]

It may very well be that the SGC has an alliance with the Jaffa that equates certain Jaffa ranks with human ones, like NATO and its ranks.

[Elheru Aran]

It may very well be that the SGC has an alliance with the Jaffa that equates certain Jaffa ranks with human ones, like NATO and its ranks.

That doesn't happen until later on in the series, though. It's clear that Teal'c is treated like an officer or high-level noncom pretty much after at least partway through Season 1.

The only thing that can be said for sure, I suppose, is that there was clearly some informal understanding about where he stood with the SGC and they never saw fit to elaborate it on-screen other than Carter's throwaway line about "technical sergeant".

Given Teal'c's experience and position, among the Jaffa he would have been equivalent to a general, but you never see him countermanding Hammond or O'Neill, or giving orders to either one of them. He does lead people on occasion and while it cannot be canon, it can be assumed that within SGC he has the respect afforded a senior noncom or an experienced junior officer such as Lieutenant or Captain.

He's in kind of a screwed up position anyway, as is SGC, given that he's basically a foreign (alien) defectee that SGC can't really admit exists until the Stargate project becomes public knowledge... IRL he'd have been kept in protective custody and employed as a 'consultant' to SGC for the duration, I think. Certainly not allowed to run about the base and go on missions with SG1!

[Lonestar]

I'm still aghast at the lack of air defense available over Area 51. You'd think there would be enough SAMs at least to shoot down one stinking dart...

Or the "rail guns" that are installed on Atlantis and off site locations.

Honestly, I think some larger(like Alkesh-sized) staff weapons in a pom-pom configuration with modern fire control would be better for higher altitude targets.

[Lonestar]

It's too bad that all the sets have been sold off, the whole wikileaks and Snowden thing is practically *screaming* for SG1 Movie with the program being revealed publically.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Supposedly the SG-1 movie was going to have Disclosure (finally). But with both it and the SGA movie tanked...yeah...

[Borgholio]

As I recall there were two SG-1 movies...and I don't recall an SGA movie...

[Lonestar]

There wasn't.

Anyway,

The quasi-canon Atlantis Books seem to imply that if you aren't explicitly uniformed personnel you're a contractor, at least that's the case for McKay and Ronan Dex. For some reason I find the idea of McKay working for Booz-Allen-Hamilton and Dex for Triple Canopy funny.

[Skywalker_T-65]

This

And this are what I was talking about. Don't remember exactly where I read that the SG-1 movie would have disclosure. Need to track that down again.

EDIT: In retrospect, I should have linked those to begin with and put 'new SG-1 movie'. My bad.

[Elheru Aran]

To return to the original question of power.

Watched 'Exodus' this morning, the one where they blow up a star and get booted over to the Asgard galaxy. Carter has a line that goes something like, "The explosion must have altered the subspace window" yada yada.

So, hypothesis: The Asgard are capable of fast travel between galaxies because they have a better understanding of subspace physics (ignoring how ridiculous the term sounds). It's not just a matter of the power in their ships, which is a given, but they are also able to... I don't know, configure their ships' aerodynamics or whatever, in order to move through hyperspace at ludicrous speed. They have not shared this technology with Earth thus far, so while Earth can pull up the power to some degree with naquadah reactors and ZPM's, they are still limited in the speed they can go due to not having as strong a understanding of the... subspace physics.

Of course, the Exodus incident could simply be an one-off freak accident of fictional physics, because when supernovas happen the universe divides by zero or something, but I am inclined to think it's not just a matter of how much power you're putting into your ships. If that was the case the Goa'uld could just build bigger and stronger ships to zoom all over the place and start being a serious threat to the Asgard, provided they can build power plants at that level, which I'm not sure about.

Make sense? I know this doesn't necessarily answer the 'dialing other galaxies' power issue, but it works for the ships, at least for me...

[Elheru Aran]

Another quick question while I'm thinking of it.

By midway through season 5 the SGC has had ample opportunity to gather multiple examples of alien weaponry and technology-- Goa'uld staff weapons, zats, even a staff cannon.

Yet for all this the only alien technology they're shown actually adapting to their own use is naquadah reactors. They don't seem to have tried to adapt, say, zats into the form of a standard Earth hand-gun even though they encountered a Goa'uld modification to Earth weapons (the stun bullets used by the spec-ops folks being trained by Apophis). Imagine the utility that a staff-weapon would have adapted for, oh, under-barrel packing on a M4.

So, is it pretty much a case of "we don't understand this crap" or is it writing laziness? Because I have no doubt that the SGC could figure out how to make A go from B in order to make the thing shoot. There have got to be scientists in a lab (or multiple labs) taking apart staff-weapons and zats to figure them out... but we never see anything that really results from this, do we?

Bear in mind that I'm only just now re-watching SG-1 over; I last saw Season 9 when it first came out and I haven't watched it since then...

[Eternal_Freedom]

I think it's not a case of writing laziness as much as in-universe semi-complacency. They've shown on multiple occasions that a P90/MP5/M9/M16/whatever are very effective at fighting Jaffa, Wraith and so on. Why bother copying the enemies guns when, as O'Neill explained once, are weapons of terror not weapons of war. And then no doubt someone got to thinking "what would be the point of building a human-gun-styled staff weapon? It's inaccurate, it's noisy, it's more powerful than necessary, you can't put a silencer on it, it's probably impossible to reload in the field (what with having a liquid naquada fuel cell). Why go to all the trouble of overcoming all those things when bullets and grenades work jut as well?

Yes, the zats and wraith stunners can incapacitate, fine, we see SG teams and Atlantis personnel using them as sidearms all the time. Again, what they have works more than enough. Also, I suspect that there is a security question. Tooling up armaments factories to build these M-Zats is going to be expensive, complex and someone will notice. Building them in secret at Area 51 is possilbe, but again, why go to the bother when they clearly have plenty of spares?

As for ship mounted weapons, well, Prometheus clearly had some kind of energy weapon when it shot down the fleeing Al'kesh in season 8 (Endgame I think it was), so it's there, but they may have decided for various reasons that railguns and missiles were more effective. Or, more likely, some teams had just worked out the kinks, felt very proud, and then the Asgard hand us plasma-beam weapons which are waaaay better.

That reminds me, we do see them attempting to build energy-based small arms, in the X-699, but it's big, needs a micro naquada generator to fire, and it took them right up until the end of season 10 to get it working reliably.

[StarSword]

Goa'uld tech tends to be awesome but impractical. The only advantage a staff weapon has over a firearm loaded with armor-piercing rounds is ammunition capacity. Other than that, firearms are longer-ranged, more accurate, and more compact and less unwieldy. They also do adapt other alien tech. The F-302 uses a lot of technology derived from reverse-engineered death gliders (inertia reduction being the big one), but fuses them with the trappings of a late-model jet fighter (e.g. ejector seat, fire-and-forget missiles).

[Batman]

Not unless by 'firearm' you mean '40mm grenade launcher'. Staff weapons are noticeably more powerful than modern day smallarms and rifles-in a completely useless way in a hopelessly unwieldy package. They create small explosions where a bullet (AP, JHP or otherwise) would either drill a hole in the ground or ricochet off something sufficiently resilient in the way. The problem is outside the immediate hit area all they do is bowl people over when a 40 mm grenade would have a reasonable chance of causing damage via fragments (and I think there's room for quite a lot of those in a staff weapon sized launcher).
I'd say that from s3 or so on they had captured Zats coming out of their ears (you have to remember that even compared to just the US military, the SGC is a tiny organization) and the same is true for the Atlantis crew and Wraith stunners. Atlantis is of course off the hook because even if they had the need, for a lot of the series they didn't have the means to produce, and the SGC had spoils of war aplenty.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Hell, another reason to prefer the grenade launcher over a staff weapon? By late series 7 they produced armour vests that van withstand a direct hit tot he chest at close range with minimal effect to the wearer. Siler took a hit at only a few feet and he was standing up and shaking it off in under fifteen seconds. Granted it's not perfect as Dr. Frasier showed, but it's impressive.

Compare that to a grenade hitting you in the chest? Armour won't be much use there.

[PREDATOR490]

If you want to get into the technology bullshit - The Krull Armor suits should have become standard equipment for SGC personnel or at least the under garment thingy which prevent zats from being effective.
Not to mention those armor suits also came with wrist mounted spray and pray energy weapons.

That said, the lack of reverse engineering the Zat is inexcusable. The weapon is highly effective even after you go with the shitty retcon of the 3 shots vaporize.
The series more than jumped the shark with the jump to the Prometheus which was made out of Goa'uld shit so its a bit silly for spaceships to be easier to design than personal weapons.
Not counting when the Asgard donate their core...

SGC can produce Plasma Beam Weapons and X304s but the only actual energy weapon shown to be designed by the SGC was a bulky brick.
Result: Within 10 years of the show
The SGC could build this: X304
But could only build this: X-699

You can also make a case for Ronin's gun being a joke not to reverse engineer when they make such a big case for it being super awesome and everyone wanting one.

[StarSword]

If you want to get into the technology bullshit - The Krull Armor suits should have become standard equipment for SGC personnel or at least the under garment thingy which prevent zats from being effective.
Not to mention those armor suits also came with wrist mounted spray and pray energy weapons.

They only ever acquired maybe a dozen suits tops, and that's assuming the SGC retrieved the suits from the Kull they killed in "Death Knell" and "Lost City". I wouldn't be surprised if Area 51 is busy reverse-engineering the things. Also we don't know what effects the anti-Kull gun has on the suit. Finally, the Kull armor is Goa'uld tech fused with Ancient tech, presenting a whole host of other issues.

You can also make a case for Ronin's gun being a joke not to reverse engineer when they make such a big case for it being super awesome and everyone wanting one.

Assumes Ronon would let them touch his stuff.

[Borgholio]

Assumes Ronon would let them touch his stuff.

Teal'c got his hands on it and used it when Ronin was grappling with a Wraith. Even Teal'c was impressed.

Teal'c: I would very much like to have a weapon such as this.
Ronon: Yeah? Get in line.

[Eternal_Freedom]

On the topic of questions about SG-1, I'm curious how they managed to explain the loss of USS Nimitiz and her entire battle group in Lost City. Kinda hard to keep that a secret.