Random SGU Techgeekery
Dec. 19th, 2009 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Okay, I've mentioned before how I wondered why the Stargates in SGU, specifically on the Destiny, don't seem to be able to reach every gate in the whole Galaxy, but instead only "close" gates.
Watching a rerun of SG1 ("2001"), I stumbled upon and interesting possibility.
Okay, in 2001, Sam is explaining how she's trying to extrapolate the homeworld of the Aschen. The Aschen have a Stargate, but haven't been able to use it because they don't have a DHD, and without one of those, they haven't been able to compensate for stellar drift like Earth had to in order to gate anywhere but Abydos. She also mentioned that she theorized that without any DHDs compensating for Stellar Drift, the largest distance any two gates could connect to each other is about 300 light years.
That makes sense. The Ancients launched the Destiny at an earlier level of technology than most of the things we've seen. It was before Atlantis, for example. So, it's quite possible that the Stargates themselves are slightly more primitive, in that they lack the automatic correction mechanism (or they have them on the planet based, but the Destiny, being a mobile gate can't auto-correct, or maybe they work well for a few million years but it's been too long). All the Pegasus/Milky Way gates are newer, or at least had been updated in the time since installation.
So it's possible just due to stellar drift, the Stargates in the Destiny's galaxy, instead of being a tight network where you can go point to point, is a loose network where you can still go anywhere in the galaxy, but you have to do it in short hops, a few hundred light years at a time. Getting abandoned is dangerous because it means in order to get back to the Destiny, you'd often have to figure out a SERIES of jumps to different gates to get you back in their range. It does make for some potentially interesting storytelling developments for any stargaring empires in the area (gates becoming increasingly STRATEGIC, because controlling certain gates means you control gate traffic between two different points in the galaxy... you can't just bypass it... in the Milky Way, gates are only strategic if they happen to be on a particularly interesting planet, or can be used as a launching bay, because if you an enemy controls a certain gate, you just don't go to that world).
This makes sense to me and makes perfect sense with established SG continuity. I hope this is the reasoning they are using, because it gives me a happy when shows like SG uses their science consistency instead of just making things up as they want to (coughDOCTORWHOcoughcough).
Watching a rerun of SG1 ("2001"), I stumbled upon and interesting possibility.
Okay, in 2001, Sam is explaining how she's trying to extrapolate the homeworld of the Aschen. The Aschen have a Stargate, but haven't been able to use it because they don't have a DHD, and without one of those, they haven't been able to compensate for stellar drift like Earth had to in order to gate anywhere but Abydos. She also mentioned that she theorized that without any DHDs compensating for Stellar Drift, the largest distance any two gates could connect to each other is about 300 light years.
That makes sense. The Ancients launched the Destiny at an earlier level of technology than most of the things we've seen. It was before Atlantis, for example. So, it's quite possible that the Stargates themselves are slightly more primitive, in that they lack the automatic correction mechanism (or they have them on the planet based, but the Destiny, being a mobile gate can't auto-correct, or maybe they work well for a few million years but it's been too long). All the Pegasus/Milky Way gates are newer, or at least had been updated in the time since installation.
So it's possible just due to stellar drift, the Stargates in the Destiny's galaxy, instead of being a tight network where you can go point to point, is a loose network where you can still go anywhere in the galaxy, but you have to do it in short hops, a few hundred light years at a time. Getting abandoned is dangerous because it means in order to get back to the Destiny, you'd often have to figure out a SERIES of jumps to different gates to get you back in their range. It does make for some potentially interesting storytelling developments for any stargaring empires in the area (gates becoming increasingly STRATEGIC, because controlling certain gates means you control gate traffic between two different points in the galaxy... you can't just bypass it... in the Milky Way, gates are only strategic if they happen to be on a particularly interesting planet, or can be used as a launching bay, because if you an enemy controls a certain gate, you just don't go to that world).
This makes sense to me and makes perfect sense with established SG continuity. I hope this is the reasoning they are using, because it gives me a happy when shows like SG uses their science consistency instead of just making things up as they want to (coughDOCTORWHOcoughcough).
