On the Stargate TV series, how do radio transmissions through the Stargates differ from physical transport? I’m watching an Ep. now where an SG team is trapped on a distant planet; they can’t dial home, but they CAN talk via some sort of A/V broadcast with SGC. How does this work? Is there a different “broadcast” vs. “travel” dialing scheme?
Also–what’s the deal with the Iris? How does it work? It doesn’t look thick enough to stop a determined incoming traveler/missile/etc. Is it just the sheer fact that anything coming through the wormholes will technically be traveling faster than the speed of light and will, if it encounters even a thin sheet of metal at the far end, be totally splattered?
And while we’re at it, why do so many episodes hinge on the “something’s wrong with the stargate, we can’t get back to Earth and some natural disaster is sneaking up on us!” Seems to me that among the various habitable (but uninhabited) planets they discover, they could easily dump emergency tents and enough supplies to last six months, and then get each SG team member to memorize the seven-character key to that planet. Thus, if something bad happens and it’s impossible or unsafe to return directly to Earth, go to the safe planet, make camp, and get further instructions.
The Stargate was built with a one way passage for matter and a 2 way passage for long wave energy. Therefore you can commincate from either side across and active Stargate but you can only send things through from one side.
The thinking behind it likely was that if you’re sending things through both sides of the gate they will likely collide in the wormhole, and who knows what happens. Energy transmissions don’t seem to have that problem so there was no reason to build the gates with a safeguard against it.
The Iris is just a metal plate built just infront of the event horizon of the Stargate. It was originally made from titanium, destroyed and then rebuilt out of titanium and tritanium (strong metal from another planet) alloy. It works by not allowing the Stargate to turn the incoming matter back into normal matter. Basically cutting the wire before an electrical current can pass through. The signal just hits the iris, not the matter. So while a huge amount of energy is still hitting the iris (hence the thump) its has no mass and therefore doesn’t turn the iris into scrap.
However if you send through enough energy the iris can be melted by it, as Anubis tried in one episode.
They have what they call the Alpha Site. Basically a safe planet to send everything they can over to if Earth for whatever reason is doomed. More recently this has become the home to the rebel Jaffa liberated by the SGC. In some cases teams have gone to the Alpha site waiting for whatever problem Earth is having to clear up. But in most cases (unless under attack) it makes just as much sense to keep dialing home from the gate you’re at. Plus this keeps the address to the Alpha site safe, because you don’t want the enemy to know the location of your last resort escape planet. I can give you more backup if you want, a few episodes have dealt with it.
were the Ancients human? The Asgard seem to talk about them as separate from humans, but I thought the Ancients were also the Atlanteans … who seem pretty human.
They must be similiar to humans, since the Ancients/Atlanteans (same thing) bred some some humans back in the day. Granted, I once saw a video of a human ‘breeding’ with all sorts of stuff, so that might not be it, but according to the show, x percent of the Earth humans (Tau’ree, or something like that; The Gao’uld differentiate between humans and Earth humans) carry trace amounts of Ancient genes.
In other news, shouldn’t Stargate Alliance (the video game) be coming out soon? I thought it was Q1 2005, but I don’t keep up on game release like I used to…
Just out of curiosity, was this established before or after that episode when O’Neill and Carter were stuck on the frozen planet
that turned out to be Earth; through a second stargate built in the Antarctic. The couldn’t dial Earth without getting a “busy signal” and it struck me as odd that it didn’t occur to Carter that almost any planet would be preferable to freezing to death.
They didn’t come up with the ‘busy signal’ theory until the end, and that was the team at SGC, not Carter and O’Neil, that came up with it. Those two just thought something was loopy with the gate.
In that episode. Carter expresses frustration that the icy stargate won’t work at getting them back to Earth:
CARTER: I have been working on the control panel for the last twelve hours, it just, I don’t know why it won’t work, it should work! I… I’m missing something.
It never occurs to her, apparantly, to pick a third location where she can continue to work on the problem and she and O’Neill won’t freeze to death. Frankly, I’d have expected the SG teams to carry little notebooks of symbols giving them lists of safe havens of uninhabited but comfortable planets where emergency supplies and medical gear had been stashed, in case the Earth gate has to go into iris lockdown at some point.
Oh, well… the Star Trek guys never think strategically, either.
To pick at nits, she expresses frustration that the icy stargate won’t work, period. She has no reason (at the time) to presume that dialing Earth is the problem.
After twelve hours of repeatedly dialling Earth, it never occurs to her to try dilaing somewhere else, just as a test? Perhaps one of the necessary chevrons for Earth on this gate is damaged, and a logical workaround would be to dial a code to a safe planet without that chevron, and use that planet’s gate to get to Earth. At the very least, picking a planet that’s a little warmer would be a better choice than sitting there like a doof for twelve hours.
As with many shows with a sci-fi or magical premise, useful applications of something discovered in a previous episode are elusive.
IF the ancients designed the Stargate for matter one way only, to avoid collisions between travellers mid worm hole… what kind of safe guards are there for people who walk backwards into a gate that was not opened on their end?
Would they die? Would the Stargate shut off?
It took hours to find the DHD, dig it out of the ice partly, and dial Earth once.
Dialing the planet you are on apparently causes the gate to get stuck somehow. Perhaps the ice, cold, and the much greater age of this gate had some effect, as well.
Carter then begins the laborious task of digging out the DHD enough to get to a side panel where she hopes to find (presumably) a big, fat, red RESET button.
In this she fails. I can’t tell you why. This is where my memory fails me.
One thing that bugs me a bit about the gate is how Jack is always walking up to it and sticking his arm into it and pulling it back out. Or, occasionally they’ll be wrestling a bad guy, half the bad guy gets through the gate and they yank him back out. How’s that work? Isn’t it one-way for matter? How does the gate know when all of you is through the gate, so it can de-molecularize you and transmit you as energy/information?
Let’s say you tied a rope around a bunch of people’s waists, and had them walk through one at a time. How far can you walk into that thing and still yank everyone back, violating this one-way rule?
Nope. Well at least not now. You see energy =/= mass. I can’t knock on someone’s door with my headlights. Technically no thump should be heard and in later seasons you’ll notice it doesn’t happen any more.