Stargate Problem

[Xon]

I don't know where you get that idea from.

From the TV series itself. In the episode "48 hours" Teal'c is spat out well 48 hours after the input stream is disconnected and something like 1/10 to 1/3 of the energy has been magically radiated away. They use a modded DHD to power the gate enough to reintegrated him without an active wormhole.

It's stated early on in the series, and many times afterwards, that the iris works by preventing matter from 're-integrating' after exiting the event horizon.

The irs bounces the outgoing matter stream back into the wormhole where it magically goes away, apparently before it becomes a solid object.

This suggests to me that it blocks the process that imposes the pattern on the incoming stream, but there's no way to stop the particle stream itself from exiting the wormhole.

Except the episode 48 hours shows you can. The entire point is Teal'c didn't get reintegrated but left in the pending buffer when the stargate disconnected! It's explicitly mentioned as part of the initialization routine to flush the buffer before a connection which was why they suspended travel.

If the Stargates were capable of making matter out of nothing ('energy...'), they'd be capable of trivially cloning people and mass-manufacturing any item. There's no indication that the ancients did this or that anyone since has tried to use the technology that way.

The stargates have an amazing amount of failsafes, and it was only in the very latter seasons when we really got to explore how those failsafes worked or failled. Untill the episode 8x18 Threads, there was no proof that a Staragte could support multipule outgoing connections. But Baal with some DHD hacking managed to make a Stargate dial every other stargate in the milkway. And the entire point was it replicated the Dakara genesis wave effect across every planet with a stargate.

And the only real example of Ancient manufacturing tech we have seen is a, is a mind-to-machine interface which virtually constructed a device from molecules before materializing it into real matter. ie how Merlin & Daniel constructed the Sangraal (the quest 10x11).

[Starglider]

Ok, conceeded. I must've forgotten some details from the show, because yes it does sound like energy -> matter conversion. Still I really don't think the supergate control computers would try and scale up objects, as it would be instant death for any living creature and any complex technological artifact would be rendered nonfunctional.

[doom3607]

Yeah, that would be a little ridiculous. Now I wonder why, if the Ancients had a field capable of matter-energy conversion like the Stargate 'event horizon' (the glowy water, not the wormhole behind it), they didn't try to weaponize that. I mean, a total conversion beam could probably one-shot a Hive. Hmm... Stargate weapon... Well, at least it probably wouldn't be as bad as the planet-eating wormhole weapon.

[Xon]

Ok, conceeded. I must've forgotten some details from the show, because yes it does sound like energy -> matter conversion.

Stargate does cover over 17 seasons of stuff, and a lot looks contrictory. But the amount of computer control over the really wacky stuff unfortunate forces the conclusion that a lot of it will have arbitrary limits because a wizard programmer did it. Then throw in that Stargate really does have different laws of physics when you start going beyond energies reachable by RL earth and exotic conditions, and actually figuring out if you are looking at real physics limitations or a hardcoded limit in the computer control system which has been in used for over +10 million years unchallanged is effectively imposible.

Still I really don't think the supergate control computers would try and scale up objects, as it would be instant death for any living creature and any complex technological artifact would be rendered nonfunctional.

We already know how the Stargate behaves when a smaller gate connects to a larger one, it just passes stuff through 'as-is'. A descended Ascended Ancient who followed Carter home built a one shot gate for ~$50k from online stores(on Carter's credit card) and cost Carter her toaster and microwave(the expense form for that would have been hilarious!). It connected fine to a normal stargate despite being only a few feet wide, and only staying 'on' for about 10-15 seconds.

Yeah, that would be a little ridiculous. Now I wonder why, if the Ancients had a field capable of matter-energy conversion like the Stargate 'event horizon' (the glowy water, not the wormhole behind it), they didn't try to weaponize that. I mean, a total conversion beam could probably one-shot a Hive. Hmm... Stargate weapon... Well, at least it probably wouldn't be as bad as the planet-eating wormhole weapon.

In Stargate, we either see the longest lasting fuckups of the Ancients or prototypes which never got off the ground in Atlantis. There is a very big gap between those two, plenty of opportunity for galaxy changing screw ups.

[Metahive]

Yeah, that would be a little ridiculous. Now I wonder why, if the Ancients had a field capable of matter-energy conversion like the Stargate 'event horizon' (the glowy water, not the wormhole behind it), they didn't try to weaponize that. I mean, a total conversion beam could probably one-shot a Hive. Hmm... Stargate weapon... Well, at least it probably wouldn't be as bad as the planet-eating wormhole weapon.

As seen in The Siege Part One the Ancients actually had beam weaponry at hand capable of one-shotting hiveships. Said weaponry also didn't require ZPMs to work so it's puzzling why those weren't more widespread. Drones just don't look to be as efficient a weapon in comparison.

[doom3607]

Yeah, but since when do the Ancients go for 'efficiency'? I mean, why build manned starships at all when you have Stargates and automated means to spread them?

[Simon_Jester]

Backup to reach places taken off the network by accident or sabotage, desire to move bulky items, desire to have an effective military that can contest space above a planet, personal entertainment for people who enjoy space flight... there are a lot of reasons, I think.

[doom3607]

Ok, but a flying city? And all their stuff was a lot bigger and flashier than it needed to be. They could probably have cut the size of the Aurora-class down by at least 50% by taking out all mthose useless hallways.

[CaptJodan]

If the Stargates were capable of making matter out of nothing ('energy...'), they'd be capable of trivially cloning people and mass-manufacturing any item. There's no indication that the ancients did this or that anyone since has tried to use the technology that way.

The stargates have an amazing amount of failsafes, and it was only in the very latter seasons when we really got to explore how those failsafes worked or failled. Untill the episode 8x18 Threads, there was no proof that a Staragte could support multipule outgoing connections. But Baal with some DHD hacking managed to make a Stargate dial every other stargate in the milkway. And the entire point was it replicated the Dakara genesis wave effect across every planet with a stargate.

Huh. Never put that together myself. Could this have been how Baal cloned himself? Dialed multiple stargates in his own domain and stepped through, thus creating the indistinguishable copies of himself that we see later? We never did get an explanation as to how he did clone himself, but we do know he was the expert in the multi-dialing technique.

[doom3607]

Considering he was actually kinda clever for a Goa'uld I think if he could have done that he'd have just had a Ha'tak broken up into parts small enough to fit through a gate and then had its crew carry it through. Boom, instant mother of all space navies!

[Simon_Jester]

Considering he was actually kinda clever for a Goa'uld I think if he could have done that he'd have just had a Ha'tak broken up into parts small enough to fit through a gate and then had its crew carry it through. Boom, instant mother of all space navies!

This is nowhere near as good a plan as it sounds for the first three seconds. I see some very, very obvious problems with that.

1) Energy budget:
Ha'taks are fucking heavy. Making copies of a man-sized organic lifeform may be a lot cheaper than making copies of giant pyramid-based space battleships.

2) Component size:
Ha'taks are not only fucking heavy, they are fucking huge. The size of skyscrapers, giant naval vessels, or small hills. No, wait, they're bigger than those things.

Real-life objects anywhere near that size have pieces that are, themselves, fucking huge. Like the main structural girders of a warship or skyscraper. These objects are probably too big to cram through a stargate, since those things are not fucking huge. If you try to take something like that apart into gate-sized chunks and reassemble it on the other end, you probably can, but that is a LOT of bolts and weld points and crap.

From an engineering standpoint, the resulting ship will probably have many of the same problems you'd get with, say, a normal-sized house made entirely out of Legos.* The individual pieces are small and numerous, and there are many failure points where the join between one part and the next can fail under the heavy loads being applied to the structure. Put your furniture in the wrong place in the upstairs bedroom, and it's all too likely to crash right through the floor of your Lego house.

3) Some assembly required.
Someone's gotta put all those little Ha'tak parts together. This is going to be a lot of work, much like trying to assemble a normal-sized house out of Lego bricks would be a lot of work.* If people fuck up even a small fraction of the work, the whole thing may collapse like a house of cards the first time you fire up the engines and/or someone takes a shot at it. Not good.

In all probability, you will want to gather up all your zillions of little Ha'tak parts and ship them to a small number of assembly facilities, where highly skilled Lego specialists assembly workers can put them together into working Ha'taks.

But if you're already committed to doing that, why not just build normal factories to build normal Ha'taks in?
__________

*This has been done. It was a lot of work and probably more trouble than it was worth for any purpose other than "art for art's sake."

[Xon]

Huh. Never put that together myself. Could this have been how Baal cloned himself? Dialed multiple stargates in his own domain and stepped through, thus creating the indistinguishable copies of himself that we see later? We never did get an explanation as to how he did clone himself, but we do know he was the expert in the multi-dialing technique.

Well it does neatly explain how he cloned both the host and the Goa'uld symbiote itself so well that he had dozens of identical clones all of the same apparent age. The SGC didn't even realise they where dealing with a horde of Ba'al clones till they captured several at once. From vague memory, most clones in Stargate-verse have genetic markers leftover from the accelerated group phase and initial cloning.

Atomic level duplication just ignores all the issues with biological cloning quite nicely.

[doom3607]

Huh. Well, it does do that. And fine, so he can't clone Ha'taks. How about his entire army of Jaffa, and him along with them? He ever gets even a slight foothold on any planet with an iris, he floods it with billions of Jaffa. And as for feeding them, Earth could produce enough food after its conquest.

[Simon_Jester]

Again, the big problem is that while gate-copying one man a few dozen times doesn't mean being able to gate-copy armies to turn out billions of the guys. Also, a Goa'uld would rightly worry about their ability to control such a large force- my impression of the way their society operates is that they're simply not set up for one being to exercise command and control over so many.

[Themightytom]

Again, the big problem is that while gate-copying one man a few dozen times doesn't mean being able to gate-copy armies to turn out billions of the guys. Also, a Goa'uld would rightly worry about their ability to control such a large force- my impression of the way their society operates is that they're simply not set up for one being to exercise command and control over so many.

yeah, and... you'd want to do that ONCE with someone you trust, because if word ever got out that was possible, that would become a shit show of epic proportions. Can you imagine a clone army of Nerus es? How do you FEED them all

[doom3607]

Eh, the total output of Earth should be about enough.

And I doubt Ba'al really trusted his own clones.

[Batman]

Creating 1 measly billion humanoids of 70kg apiece out of energy (which seems to be what the Stargates do in such cases) represents some 6.3E27J. IIRC NecronLord calced ZPMs at roughly 9MT/s, meaning that to do this, you need a ZPM (a power source considerably superior to those the Goa'uld have typically available) to supply that power for five thousand years. Just as with the cloned Ha'taks, something tells me it's far easier to simply recruit your armies the old-fashioned way.
EDITed because I originally used the german billion, which is 1E12, not 1E9. Still, not exactly instantaneous cloned army.

[doom3607]

Yeah, but they never said just how much power Stargates have, except for the fact that, when overloaded, they can destroy planets. This is internal power only, mind you. And each one, from the looks of it, only has to make a few thousand troops, or one Ha'tak. How much power would that take?

[Batman]

Stargates are made of Naquada, which doesn't take well to being overloaded. That doesn't say beans about their power output when operating as intended, especially as intragalactic wormholes can quite apparently be established with modern day (more or less) power generation methods. And while it has been established that receiving Stargates can draw power from incoming wormholes, I don't think it has ever been stated that the power available is some side effect of the wormhole itself, as opposed to something the Gate dialing out does have to provide, what with all the problems of establishing long range wormholes on a limited power budget. At best, you have Gates drawing power from the wormhole itself once the wormhole has been established. Which means the Gate dialing out still has to provide enough power to establish all those wormholes, and maintain them (Gates can apparently draw power from incoming wormholes, NOT outgoing ones as evidenced by outgoing wormholes being limited in duration by locally available power,see SGA).

10,000 troops (requiring 100,000 gates for a measly billion), 6.3E22J per gate, with no indication that the gate is that powerful to begin with (they manage to run the SGC gate off the US power grid without anybody noticing and intragalactic wormholes can be powered by lightning). 19 and change days of ZPM operation. Per Gate.

A Ha'tak-assuming a ludicrously low mass of 1 million tons, 9E25J-in roughly 19 billion pieces you can't put together without ferrying another billion tons of materiel to establish the shipyard that can reassemble them.
75 years per Ha'Tak for the pieces alone. Per gate.

[doom3607]

*winces* Ok, I surrender. No army of gate-clones. Not that it would really help the Goa'uld anyway, the incompetent losers...

[Metahive]

I wouldn't call the Goa'uld incompetent seeing as to how they were mostly defeated by both ludicrous Dei Ex Machinae and ridiculous plot contrivances. How else could have Earth pulled a victory against a major, galaxy-spanning power otherwise?

[doom3607]

Umm, maybe by the fact that they beat the Goa'uld in every single infantry enagagement even though they were massively outnumbered due to the Jaffa failing to apply even basic tactics, let alone advanced concepts such as 'aiming' and 'use of cover'? They were only galaxy-spanning because everyone else was either dark-ages tech or didn't care enough to get rid of them. And after the idiocy at the end of season one shields were retconned so nukes worked, so we could kill their ships.

[Metahive]

Every single infantery engagement? As far as I remember if it came to violent clashes with Ja'far ground troops the Ta'uri most of the time had to retreat or wait for the inevitable cavalry/deus ex machina to come and rescue them. Ja'far do use cover and effective small arms tactics, they're rather unlike Jem'hadar or Borg drones in this regard. Their weapons may not be the handiest or most practical (except for the Zats) but one single hit is usually enough to incapacitate any character including the main cast and they hit often enough so that almost every single SG1 member had to be revived or recuperate from it at one point of the series.
You're seriously selling them short, dude.

And after the idiocy at the end of season one shields were retconned so nukes worked, so we could kill their ships.

I don't recall a single instance of Ta'uri nuclear missiles working against a fully operational Ha'tak. The only enemies that are occasionally affected by these are Wraith ships which lack shields but most often just shoot the missiles down before impact. Until Earth gains advanced Asgard arms technology at the very end of the main series, their ship-to-ship weapons are comically ineffective in any serious combat.

[NecronLord]

Umm, maybe by the fact that they beat the Goa'uld in every single infantry enagagement even though they were massively outnumbered due to the Jaffa failing to apply even basic tactics, let alone advanced concepts such as 'aiming' and 'use of cover'? They were only galaxy-spanning because everyone else was either dark-ages tech or didn't care enough to get rid of them. And after the idiocy at the end of season one shields were retconned so nukes worked, so we could kill their ships.

Let's take a plot contrivance away here.

Imagine Lost City, but with no Ancient outpost on Earth. The Tau'ri don't just happen to be sitting on the most powerful weapon in the galaxy.

What happens?

[NecronLord]

Every single infantery engagement? As far as I remember if it came to violent clashes with Ja'far ground troops the Ta'uri most of the time had to retreat or wait for the inevitable cavalry/deus ex machina to come and rescue them. Ja'far do use cover and effective small arms tactics, they're rather unlike Jem'hadar or Borg drones in this regard. Their weapons may not be the handiest or most practical (except for the Zats) but one single hit is usually enough to incapacitate any character including the main cast and they hit often enough so that almost every single SG1 member had to be revived or recuperate from it at one point of the series.
You're seriously selling them short, dude.

There are various occasions when their ground forces do suck enormously, and the humans quite often beat them. But this is toned down in later seasons, at least against Anubis' forces, who're made of sterner stuff than those they mow down, it seems.

And of course, infantry engagements include kull warriors, who required a ludicrous plot contrivance to beat.