1) If the symbols were JUST symbols, they wouldn't need to be changed to allow for stellar drift, since the planet would be the same.
Right. But I can't remember in which episode it was said that the glyphs had to be changed.
I may have to change a bit my pov and then say that a glyph has a bit of connection with the coordinates.
2) Sam would not be able to re-calculate the co-ordinates that she has done for stellar drift, since there would be no reference point for the original "co-ordinates" (ignoring point 2).
Well, then I have to update the idea.
May be a name could indeed be also updated.
But I'll have to look out for the episode(s) where Sam or someone else need to re-localise a gate.
I'll have to see where these people were when they had to recompose the right sequence...
Hey ! Well, in fact, maybe a glyph sequence is not attributed to a door but to a zone of the network.
The nuance is quite important, since a gate simply ADOPTS the name of its actual access zone (the contact point into the network if you want).
And it still sticks and explain the necessity of a moving gate, for eg one aboard a space ship, to get INSIDE a particular access zone of the network.
Just imagine plugs.
A gate in a ship needs to be near enough of a plug to connect to the network. There would be plug zones.
Yep, plug zone, I love that term ! :blush:
3) The "approximate constellation drawing" is a simple, single symbol, a universal language, won't change TOO much over years, and means something very specific, doesn't rely on a number system or alphabet, or a means of otherwise locating points in space.
It's still quite vague. A constellation is pretty big in regards of what is needed to point out a precise local point of the size of a planet and its orbit. It's so vague that I can't imagine it being used by such an advanced race as the Ancients. For me, there's more than meet the eye.
4) The Earth's gate IS dialable with the symbols appearing on the other gates. There don't seem to be many in use which aren't on the Earth's gate.
Well, this isn't a problem. We just have to say that there can be more than one name per plug zone.
5) There is no reference in the show [that I have seen] to the use of beacons for identifying the constellations from any specific stargate. I would have thought that any system capable of creating articial wormholes would be able to use radio telescopy (from within the gate), or perhaps a trans-dimensional equivalent, to "see" where it is in relation to the constellations.
Well, someone on this forum - not me - introduced this possible system. To me it's irrevelant, as I explained why before.
7) If it takes huge amounts of energy for the gate to create them, which we know, how can they just survive without the gates, which is what you suggest.
Well, first, the people tend to think that the gates produce the wormhole.
There are theories dwelving about the possible existence of an infinity of wormholes all over the universe.
And well... why not ?
Btw, I tend to think that a gate needs its energy more to communicate and create the event horizon (which corresponds to the open state of a gate).
8) Also, why would there be a 38 minutes limit, since you are saying they are actually there the whole time, without external energy sources.
The 38 minutes limit may be a attribut of the gate itself, not the network.
For an analogy, in Babylon 5, the what-it's-called-which-is-some-sort-of-parallel-dimension is always active. It's in fact another universe itself.
9) Finally, it has been stated in the show that the wormholes are charged matter streams, that is, one-way. So, you would either need two wormholes between each pair of gates, or the gate system is limiting (to uni-directional) the underlying physics which actually is bi-directional. This IS a possibility - since we know the ring transports work in both directions at once.
... I don't know if this is supposed to point out a problem with what I'm saying.
The differences between the rings and the gate is that the gate send the beam through a wormhole, and that when the rings are two ways, the gate is only one way.
Now, when they say that a wormhole in only one way, this is THEIR interpretation of what happens when they use a gate.
The fact is that they probably don't have a clue about how the wormholes work and what they're made of. They only know how to use the technology.
For eg, I know how to use Photoshop pretty well, but don't ask me how it works. I may have theories and minor knowledge, but that's all, and I pretty believe that that's the same for the stargates, except that it happens at a larger scale and it is much more important, as the stargates weren't made by people who, first, couldn't communicate with us now, and next, who would be much more intelligent.
Another example. A person would have crafted a stick and given it to a monkey. The animal would know what to do with it (merely not a lot of things because, after all, it's only a stick), but the person would lose its time trying to explain to the monkey how he made the stick and what it is made of. Same here. We're the monkeys.
I tend to believe that this is more a safety mesure of the gate, since unlike the rings where you have to stand within them and activate them, you can always touch the even horizon.
This is a simple safety function to avoid hazardous blending accident when someone is half gone when another person has half arrived.
10) What creates the wormholes? Is it the first dialling, or are they there in nature, which would limit where they could go to and from.
This is not a problem if the wormholes are every where. The ancients would have simply given particular names, thus coordinates, where there was a need for.
11) I think I have covered this somewhere else, but: the currently "accepted" theories have it that the constellations DO define an intersection of 3D space, of a certain radius, as you "Note:". Within that radius, any gate which travels there can be used. Given how many possible combination of symbols there are (we have estimated this in another thread) it is EXTREMELY unlikely that all combinations already have a gate there. Perhaps less than 1%. So, most combinations are vacant most of the time. However, that still will only cover a fixed percentage of space - say 50%. Even with the radius of each co-ordinate point, see below, there will still be large chunks of space which can't be described accurately enough as an intersection of say 40 constellations. Example: take a soccer pitch (topical!); mark (at random?) 40 seats in the stands. How many positions on the pitch can be accurately (to the centimetre?) specified as the intersection of lines from any four of the chosen "seats", and more importantly, how many can't?
... where's the problem ?
If there's an infinity of wormholes, it's like having an infinity of locations in space.
The Ancients may have took assurance that there always be a dedicated plug zone.
Btw, what is important to notice, is that by the time the Ancients were still there, they probably had the task to manage, maintain and organize the network. Not the wormholes netwrok, but the gate network, periodically cheking it up.
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I skip point 12 as I agree with it.
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13) What would be the point of having a network of stargates, and not being able to dial them all? It would be like distributing telephones on Earth without the number "7". I have made this very point in some other threads. This means that the number of symbols in the SG-1 universe stargate systems which are not on the Earth gate must be quite small to avoid this problem. We can probably ignore the gate on Abydos in the movie, since there are other major differences there anyway.
You're right, and this remark goes with one of your previous ones.
There may be in fact different names assigned per plug zone. All these names, based on the APPRXIMATIVE crossings of the constellations, would anyway converge to the same coordinates.
14) How would your system cope when starting up the system? Each time you added a new gate, you would have to re-program each of the other gates. When the Tollan added Tollana, they would have to do the entire rest of the network?
Probably yes.
