What if Stargate Command buried the gate?(RAR)

[FaxModem1]

So, between Stargate and Children of the Gods, the Stargate program was shut down and just left there, sitting at the lowest level of NORAD, wherein Apophis and his Jaffa came there and abducted an Airman. What if instead, the gate was moved to Area 51 and sealed, in the same way that burying the gate does on other worlds, so that wormholes cannot be established. What happens to the galaxy at large? Would the Goa'uld even come to Earth, or would it still be forgotten about, as it had been for thousands of years?

[Eternal_Freedom]

It would be forgotten about, right up until Apophis and co attack Abydos, find the leftover weapons from the film, torture prisoners and/or Daniel to find out where they came from, try dialling the address to find it doesn't work and decide to go there and check it out in a ship.

At which point, Earth is kinda fucked.

[Borgholio]

Would they really go to Earth? I mean it was left alone for thousands of years already. If they tried dialing the gate, found it was still buried, wouldn't it be assumed that the intruders came from somewhere else? We know there are plenty of other advanced civilizations besides Earth.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I think they would. Apophis was at this time busy cementing himself as top Goa'uld after Ra's untimely nuclear demise. The possibility of a new, advanced world that no other Goa'uld knows of, and is not protected by the Asgard, is too good a possibility to pass up. At the very least it's worth a visit by an Al'kesh to have a look. And when that reports back just how well-populated Earth is, Apophis will come.

[Crazedwraith]

If nothing else, they are all eventually eaten by replicators in the long term.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Hmm that too. Without O'Neill and Carter there to help Thor the Asgard will be dead by mid season 4 equivalent.

[FaxModem1]

Apophis will also have to deal with Sokar as an emerging competitor for System Lord. How powerful was Apophis during the early seasons of SG1?

[Lord MJ]

Was talked up as one of the top lords, but was extremely weakened by the loss of just two Hatak over Earth.

[NecronLord]

The thing about losing to the earthlings may have been primarily loss of face rather than loss of materiel. That's how I always imagined it.

[Zixinus]

I think it has more to do with the potential threat that this is probably the first time in a long while when regular humans killed a Goa'uld. That alone would require retaliation.

[Elheru Aran]

Yeah, the killing of Ra was something of a Big Deal as it decapitated the hierarchy of the System Lords. It took things a while to shake down, but without Ra's existence to prolong the status quo, that's why we had the constant stream of System Lords trying to be the top dog (Apophis, Heru-ur, Sokar, Anubis, and so forth).

There are two possible paths: either someone decides to investigate Abydos, finds Daniel Jackson and the Abydonians, manages to get the Gate address to Earth out of Jackson and when they find out they can't gate there, they send a few ships and it's game over for Earth. Or, the Goa'uld eat each other up in internecine warfare for the next few years before the Replicators show up and eat everybody. Again, game over for Earth, especially without any alien-derived high tech. Really the best thing Stargate Command ever did was start the SG program...

[NecronLord]

Presumably Apophis was searching for a host for his wife by geographic locality, and would have dialed Abydos next even if he didn't get a hit from Earth, then he'd have got Shau'ri and Amaunet would have known about the Tau'ri killing Ra anyway...

[Imperial Overlord]

The System Lords don't seem to have giant fleets. When the number of Hataks a strong system lord might possess is in the low double digits, losing two of them is serious loss.

[Simon_Jester]

Speculatively (haven't watched much Stargate), but if those two Ha'taks were seriously intended to invade Earth, they may also have been loaded heavily with Apophis's best ground troops, the loss of which would further inconvenience him. On the other hand, Ha'taks aren't that big, so while they might well be able to transport tens of thousands of soldiers... if losing a few tens of thousands of men is a serious setback for Apophis, then Apophis's doesn't have an army as big as you'd expect for an interstellar overlord.

Even, granted, an interstellar overlord who doesn't great numbers of subjects on any single planet, because the Gou'ald seem not to encourage their minions to use mechanized agriculture or build densely populated cities.

There might be other evidence contradicting my theory too (say, weak security aboard the Ha'taks, which seems unlikely if there were many thousands of Jaffa aboard).

[Batman]

Security on Ha'taks is essentially inexistent and the average Ja'fa has worse aim than an OT stormtrooper.

[Lord Revan]

Security on Ha'taks is essentially inexistent and the average Jaffa has worse aim than an OT stormtrooper.

Starting with the fact that Stormtrooper aim is nowhere as bad as people assume it is, the stormtrooper weapons are build like normal weapons (they even have a stock though it's not seen in the unfolded position normally), where as Ja'fa weapons are literally staves with a gun strapped to them so you really can't expect more then 50 meters effective range at most for anyone but your absolute best and most cases probably closer to 10 meters.

The staff weapons seem to be build to seem magical to the human slaves and jaffa of the System Lords not to be really that practical weapons. In fact one of the main weaknesses of the System Lords was that were buying into their own lies about being gods and because of it were extremly arrogant so the piss poor security might be side effect of that after all why would you need security patrols when you're a "god".

[Simon_Jester]

The question is, is security lousy because the Jaffa are lousy fighters, or is security lousy because there are pathetically few Jaffa on each ship?

If the Jaffa are crappy fighters, but there are fifty thousand of them on the ship, you might expect to see some evidence of that from the point of view of the boarding party. They might not have trouble dealing with any individual group of Jaffa guards, but as soon as the alarm sounds they should be up to their asses in hordes of such guards even if individually they are weak.

[Eternal_Freedom]

The staffs being made to look scary was explained by O'Neill in a season 5 episode: "This is a weapon of terror, it is meant to intimidate people" compared to a P90: "this is a weapon of war, it is made to kill people."

As for security on the Ha'taks being absurd, yeah it is, but consider that as far as Apophis and Klorel were concerned they were going to put down an uppity world with a small population, so blowing up some stuff from orbit and deploying a limited number of Jaffa would have been enough (this is exactly what they do in "The Sentinel." They're used to fighting primitives that have no idea about spaceships or gate travel,so the idea of enemies sneaking aboard their ship is what TVTropes would call an "outside context problem."

No-one in the Goa'uld understood just how many humans there were, or how advanced they were. The loss of those two ships may not have been a serious loss in material terms (though it may well have taken out a large portion of Apophis's best (read: most loyal) Jaffa) but it was losing two Ha'tak, with all hands while Apophis runs away to a primitive world that took no casualties in return? Well that neatly proves the Goa'uld are not invincible.

[Lord Revan]

Also I suspect that there's minor goa'uld who would relish to the chance to boost their standing by taking out a system lord that was seen as weak (either to take that system lord's place or to gain prestige among the system lord's enemies) so actual loses that Apophis suffered there might a lot more then just 2 Ha'taks and their crews but he might also lost several important vasals/allies and their fleets so that the losses in the end were much worse,thus weakening Apophis' position within the System Lords.

[Imperial Overlord]

Apophis carrying a Stargate on one the ships. His ability to pour in occupation troops is limited by the number of troops in his empire, not by how many a Hatak can carry.

[Simon_Jester]

The staffs being made to look scary was explained by O'Neill in a season 5 episode: "This is a weapon of terror, it is meant to intimidate people" compared to a P90: "this is a weapon of war, it is made to kill people."

As for security on the Ha'taks being absurd, yeah it is, but consider that as far as Apophis and Klorel were concerned they were going to put down an uppity world with a small population, so blowing up some stuff from orbit and deploying a limited number of Jaffa would have been enough (this is exactly what they do in "The Sentinel." They're used to fighting primitives that have no idea about spaceships or gate travel,so the idea of enemies sneaking aboard their ship is what TVTropes would call an "outside context problem."

Thing is, at a bare minimum they know that Earth is the Tau'ri homeworld. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that the Tau'ri have spread all across this world's surface. That's an issue even if their settlements were individually small and primitive (Stone Age or Iron Age villages with a handful of large cities, much as in the days before the Tau'ri buried the gate).

Therefore, they would reasonably need a large number of soldiers just to physically plunk down garrisons in major cultural and political centers. Even supposing their technological edge is, say, significantly more decisive than that of Cortez over the Aztecs... Cortez needed on the order of a thousand soldiers to subdue a nation of on the order of ten million. Even with ray guns it would have been hard for Cortez to do this with only a hundred soldiers, and impossible to do it with ten. Even with orbital bombardment... ten men can be physically overwhelmed and ambushed.

So Apophis might not foresee any great difficulty in subduing the 'primitive' Tau'ri, but he'd still have reason to bring a lot of soldiers with him, not just a handful.

Again, the only reason I'm making this point is that if he lost a lot of his best troops over Earth along with the two Ha'taks, it would help explain the damage to his position. In the kind of skirmishing warfare that seems to take place among the System Lords, losing Jaffa makes you more vulnerable to having your own possessions raided, and far less able to launch raids of your own to retaliate, so you will be methodically humiliated by your enemies in short order.

Apophis carrying a Stargate on one the ships. His ability to pour in occupation troops is limited by the number of troops in his empire, not by how many a Hatak can carry.

This is true and might explain him bringing very few soldiers... although he'd still want a substantial force of Jaffa to secure a respectable area on the ground before he began firing up the Stargate. If nothing else, he knows by this point that the Tau'ri have long range rifles (because he's been shot at personally with them during his clashes with SG-1), and it would be... unpleasant to try and get his troops out through a Stargate unless all enemies have been driven back out of rifle range of the gate.

[Eternal_Freedom]

He can keep the gate on his ship, either in orbit (where we know it works) or after the Ha'tak lands, so the "secure a beachhead" option has become easier.

As for your comments on Goa'uld expectations of Earth's population, those are good points, but as was shown repeatedly Goa'uld are not the most sensible or reasonable of beings, so what might make sense to us may not make sense or even occur to them.

Besides, we saw what Apophis' plan would have been...and it was effective. Season 1's "There but for the Grace of God." Earth is getting it's ass kicked, with an estimated 1.5 billion casualties so far and the SGC about to be overrun. The only reason thsi didn't happen to our Earth is Daniel brought back the warning letting SG1 sneak aboard the Ha'tak (something that, as I said, clearly never occurred to the Goa'uld was a possibility).

[Elheru Aran]

SG1 didn't "sneak aboard" the Ha'tak. It was pure accident that they landed there-- they were gating to Apophis' world and intercepted the gate in orbit.

The way I see it, the Goa'uld never *needed* large fleets. If they encountered a problem one System Lord couldn't handle, they would use their network of alliances to call in some favors, but this was rare because they stayed out of the advanced races' territory and their subjects were mostly not advanced enough to give them any trouble.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Granted they didn't intentionally sneak aboard the ship, but the warning did allow them to act before the attack began, making all the difference.

[Elheru Aran]

Granted they didn't intentionally sneak aboard the ship, but the warning did allow them to act before the attack began, making all the difference.

Quite, but the point is it was a complete accident, a lucky turn of fate. Had they wound up on Chulak instead, odds are they would've either had to commit to a prolonged, likely fruitless guerrilla campaign, or been rooted out and killed quickly once Apophis destroyed Earth.

It's possible that the Jaffa could've been massacred by the ground forces on Earth-- they never did have any good showings against the SGC from what I recall, alternate universes aside-- so Apophis might have had to summon reinforcements via the gate. But with the Ha'tak he would have had orbital supremacy and been able to bombard most of the world with ease. Either way, Earth would have lost. There's not much way around that.