posted
Right. Which was pretty much my point. Yes, they're user friendly, but you pretty much have to have the whole system figured out before you can use the system reliably.
posted
Hmm. Perhaps the gates are designed not to allow primitives to travel throughout the galaxy, but to remove the brightest and most curious members of a society, thereby keeping the rest in their place. And if they manage to work around that, the Ancients can activate their Halo and kill everything in the galaxy.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
The thing from the movie that for some reason irked me the most is how Daniel described Earth's point-of-origin symbol... as a pyramid with the sun above it, with two 'funny-looking' kneeling guys 'praying'.... obviously, meant to mean "Ra's Planet." .. sun god, pyramid, etc. However, the ANCIENTS built the Gate system...why would they praise the Goa'uld on their stuff??
Also, it always seemed kinda stupid to me to have to describe your destination with 6 poitns but your point of origin with just one. In fact, why need a point of origin at all? If the symbol means "here", why can't the Gate just go "Oh duh, from here to there"?? If it has some kind of coordinate associated with it, still, just 'hard-code' it into the Gate's software. The only thing that really makes sense is taht it's sort of a null-marker saying "That's the end of the address, Gate" since you can make longer ones...but then they should call it that.
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Was that acctually part of the story at the time?
Registered: Mar 2004
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Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
No, but I saw the movie way after getting hooked on SG-1 there should be some central canonical statement or something...
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
I didn't like the film when it came out in 1994 it was lacking and ended weirdly.
Post season 3 SG1 - I borrowed out the movie again... FANTASTIC - watched it Twice in one night... I was watching it with a sort of 'ok if the series backstory existed when they made this move'
And it makes the movie much more watchable.
BUT Having said that - there are always those people who like 'The original movie' better than any TV series - even when the series far surpasses the movie, Like Buffy. "Blah blah blah Kristy Swanson was so much better" - well where were these people when those movies came out the first time to make them box-office sensations??
-------------------- "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica." - Jim Halpert. (The Office)
posted
"The thing from the movie that for some reason irked me the most is how Daniel described Earth's point-of-origin symbol... as a pyramid with the sun above it, with two 'funny-looking' kneeling guys 'praying'..."
...Although this is not what the symbol looks like on the Gates. There it is simply a lambda with a circle on top ( "Sounds Swedish" ). What Daniel was describing was the cartouche reproduction of the symbol, and THAT would be Goa'uld heritage, not original Ancient making.
"Also, it always seemed kinda stupid to me to have to describe your destination with 6 points but your point of origin with just one. In fact, why need a point of origin at all?"
Remember that Gates can be moved from place to place, and multiple Gates can be operated from the same coordinates. Both practices would benefit from a special disambiguating key. The Gates in the network no doubt communicate with each other before opening the traversible wormhole, and one could plausibly e.g. have dialed open the Beta Gate by pressing the appropriate seventh symbol from the Alpha Gate DVD... (Edit: no doubt this would work, too, but what I meant to say was "press the symbol on the Alpha Gate DHD".)
Agreed, though, that the names given by SGC to the various features of the Gate system may be misleading, and contrary to their newest knowledge of their function.
And I admit you have to know a trick or two to use the Gate network, but it is still built to be extremely rugged, fault-tolerant and user-friendly. An educated Ancient (or Nox, or Furling, or whatever) wouldn't really need that much pampering, so it's possible one design criterium was indeed the ability to serve primitive societies in distant future, beyond the mortal lifetime of the Ancient culture...
posted
How about this: Consider what the Asgard did for the inhabitants of Sumeria. They set up all these cool gadgets on their planet and made it so, they couldn't hurt themselves with them, but also couldn't do anything with them until they understood them. Maybe the Gate system served double duty... it served as a means of travel for the Ancients and their buddies, but was also there as a marker of the development of a society. If they could figure out how to use the Gate network, they would be worthy of being contacted, which eventually they would be when they ran into the Ancients on some other planet. Of course, the Ancients didn't know that they would be wiped out by a plague at the time... (I think... I'm not really trhat far in the series yet).
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
there should be some central canonical statement or something...
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