13 KiB
[FF] Parody of Stargate SG-1: Snippets
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Author: u/eaglejarl *
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11361802/10/What-if-SG-1-weren-t-stupid
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Score: 19
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Created: 2015-07-22T20:09:46
Post:
Comments:
u/JackStargazer [+6] Primordial Apologist (31 minutes later)
I've got another one for you: infinite free spacelift capacity.
They have two gates, the Antarctic Gate and the Egypt Gate.
Put one gate in the SGC, carry the other gate into orbit.
Send satellites through the SGC gate to the Alpha site. Plug in the DHD to the gate in orbit, making it the primary gate. Send the Satellites through the gate directly into orbit.
Create modular space-station components which just barely fit through the gate. Send those up too.
Get some power and construction stuff going in orbit. Create orbital ore-processing yards and factories for use in creation of more orbital infrastructure. Haul in some asteroids with stolen or home brewed ships depending on location in the timeline.
Put a naquadah refinery up there after the delivery of the ManThereIsALotOfPhlebotinumHere rock.
Oh, also, go public with the Stargate at some point here, so you can actually put the whole output of an industrialized world of 7 billion people behind, y'know, preventing the extermination of all life on Earth, rather than trying to make due with what can be fit into the black budget of the US Air Force.
Spacegate can also be used as a security precaution. If you think baddies are going to dial in, plug in the DHD and let them suck vaccuum.
u/iemfi [+3] (2 hours later)
What's the point? The useful spaceships all seem to be able to get into orbit for free. So why not just build them on Earth? I guess the rare ores in asteroids could be a reason but perhaps the raw material mining wasn't the bottle neck in ship production.
u/JackStargazer [+2] Primordial Apologist (5 hours later)
Even if you assume the delta v is negligible, it is still just plain easier to do large scale engineering in zero-g. There must be significant power, machine, and labour costs to move around heavy chassis or armor components in gravity, and that would be significantly reduced in space.
Also there is, well, more space. You don't need to worry about buying more land to upgrade your throughput, just build another spacedock. Get as much infrastructure in space as possible and you can keep transport costs down as well - though that is also effectively eliminated once Asgard Beaming is standard on ships.
This is really for the early game, before you have enough ships to have effectively infinite spacelift capacity. If you've only got 1 interstellar ship, and half of its time is spent saving SG-1 from the Goa'uld of the Week, you need some other way to do general background construction.
There's also the fact that although we don't see the power ever run down except in plot important moments, there is at least some kind of cost to keeping a starship up. Even if we assume it runs on completely free power, people aren't considering that eternal mother of war- logisitics.
Salaries, maintenance, repairing bullet holes, bullets, nukes, fuel for anything that needs fuel, refitting with ever-new technological upgrades, and opportunity cost all apply to using a ship instead of a Stargate for placing satellites.
And of course, the more you put in orbit, the more jobs and economic growth in orbit, the more businesses want in on that. You can start constructing O'Neill Cylinders (no relation) at L1-5, get a moonbase going, do large scale asteroid mining, etc.
u/iemfi [+3] (5 hours later)
But all that infrastructure and logistics in a vacuum! You need to build a massive structure in space with gate sized pieces, hardly a simple undertaking. Moving around heavy stuff on Earth is a problem we have solved pretty well. Doing the same in space we would have to start from scratch. If there isn't a good reason to do it I think building a ship on Earth would be much cheaper. Also it'll use up a lot of stargate time, time which you could spend establishing bases elsewhere.
I guess it would be convenient for lifting satellites, but why do you need so many satellites in the first place? And all the cool stuff to build in space seems like it would take a much lower priority than building ships or building bases on other worlds. The practical reasons for colonizing the solar system sort of disappear when you have an entire galaxy of habitable planets at your disposal.
u/JackStargazer [+1] Primordial Apologist (5 hours later)
Actually, with an instantaneous method of personal travel, but a method of starship travel that is much slower, you are much better off heavily developing a few systems then massively spreading to only the planets of many systems, especially if you have an enemy with an overwhelmingly superior Space Navy than you - a single Starship can reduce a dozen of your colonies before you could have the chance to even respond to the destruction of the first.
Literally the primary mission of the Stargate program is "Acquire technology and resources necessary to protect Earth from alien attack." Yes, having backup sites and offworld bases helps, but those are military or resource gathering outposts, not colonies.
And speed-of-light or superliminal-communication limits mean that data cannot be passed freely from one planet to another either, which means you are again better off keeping as much industry as possible in one system.
Hell, this is exactly what most of the Go'auld did wrong. They have thousands of agrarian and primitive worlds, and few if any major technological or resource bases - to the point that Sokar had almost complete domination over all of the others combined through the use of a single highly-industrialized world.
It would take a LOT longer to build up a whole functioning colony on another planet then it would to figure out how to build space stations (they figured out interstellar starships in under 7 years) in the same system. And if Stargate time is as important as you suggest, then using it to send an outrageous amount of materials to dozens of different colonies (Earth-Gate being a heavy bottleneck in that plan) is even worse then occasionally using it for spacelift.
u/iemfi [+1] (5 hours later)
I would think that spreading out and controlling many stargates would be better than controlling only a few stargates and losing a large base if the go'auld find the base and blow it up from orbit. But either way you still need stargate time to heavily develop a system. The gate is super useful, even if building ships in space was slightly easier there are probably better things you could be using the gate for.
They figured out interstellar starships in 7 years, if they took a couple years to figure out space docks that's a couple years spent not figuring out starships. Then you still need to build the space stations.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (40 minutes later)
Good ones.
Also, turns out that naquadah IS scarce. They had an episode in season 7 about prospecting for it and it turned out that the mine was in the sacred ground of a too-many-to-shoot group of Unas. They were all on about "ooh, this mine site is 10 ppm naquadah!" and I'm sitting here going: "don't you have this giant solid naquadah asteroid just a few fractions of an AU away from Earth?"
EDIT: oh, just realized -- the DHD got blown up when they borrowed it from the Russians.
u/JackStargazer [+3] Primordial Apologist (55 minutes later)
oh, just realized -- the DHD got blown up when they borrowed it from the Russians.
Details. Prometheus is a season 7 episode, so they should have a homegrown interstellar warship at this point, go steal a DHD from an abandoned world near Earth. Grab some extra Stargates while you're at it - you never know when you'll need an extra one or two.
Hell, do like the Go'auld did in Season 1, and keep one on your ship to override the one in-system if needed for quick transport or resupply. That was actually a clever trick.
u/Gurkenglas [+1] (2 hours later)
You could also use the homegrown interstellar warship for infinite spacelift capacity.
u/JackStargazer [+2] Primordial Apologist (5 hours later)
Technically not infinite, it burns at least some fuel/energy. Plus it's a lot less subtle, and even with incredibly efficient drives, it ha less storage space than 'A whole bunch of other planets' when you can just shove things through the gate.
Plus it makes you use your interstellar warship for hauling duty.
u/None [+4] (7 hours later)
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u/eaglejarl [+6] (7 hours later)
Yeah, I did always wonder about that -- how does the team know when it's safe to go? Presumably SGC broadcast a signal back saying "okay, iris is open", but that's never actually mentioned.
u/clawclawbite [+3] (6 minutes later)
Once you have Replicators running around, you should also move your heavily armed gate room with remote cameras to inside a salt mine. You can't build much if all you have is NaCl.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+1] Mouse Army (20 hours later)
Well Reps start with consuming the base. And since you still want copper for electric fixtures and steel (iron+tons of different heavy metals) you are pretty much out of luck.
u/clawclawbite [+1] (20 hours later)
That is why you don't put most of that in the giant room carved from solid salt.
Put a big bank of batteries or such in. Run fiber optic cables.
It is a pain to limit operations, but it could be done.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+1] Mouse Army (21 hours later)
I think its very not-feasable.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (3 days later)
I've seen worse design requirements, though I'm unsure how we will flip the gate with hydraulic pistons made of salt. Usually this is where you say: "Okay so what you really want is . . . basis behind Gross Concept Error Design requirement."
/u/clawclaw bite wants a gate room that replicators could not effectively use for resources. So we make a sacrifical ant-replicator gate step in the back to off-site chain, lets say we put the stargate in a chamber made of something useless, but airtight, in orbit, and we put transport rings to the next gate, in another chamber in orbit, and then we put a bomb on ring transporter. Just to be sure lets put this in orbit of a black hole, at least before the replicators eat the asgard, and stage emplacements to de-orbit the chambers if the replicators get through.
Asumming it's airtight I guess we could make the chambers out of salt too.
u/None [+3] (11 hours later)
Removing the screen in the gate room is a good idea, but solely relying on cameras is not so good - electronics suck and can always fail or be made to fail. How about some kind of optical system with mirrors?
u/jgf1123 [+2] (2 hours later)
re: the last one, disposing of nuclear waste
The Time Monks in Night Watch by Terry Pratchett used time-travel to dispose of human waste in a volcano some billion years ago rather than pay Harry King to carry it away in a bucket.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (38 seconds later)
Brain was locking up writing the "Three Lies" story, so I took ten minutes to scribble this down. May you all enjoy.
u/None [+1] (22 hours later)
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u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
I was pretty sure they said pounds in that episode, but maybe not. Have you seen it recently?
u/None [+1] (a day later)
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u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
The wiki states that it was pounds. (Search for "64,000".)
Also, why are kilograms any more sensible than pounds?
u/None [+1] (a day later)
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u/eaglejarl [+2] (a day later)
Sam was probably rounding off. It's doubtful that it's literally that precise.
That said, a kilogram isn't really that universal; it's defined based on a particular physical object. It was originally 1000 cubic cm of water "at the temperature of melting ice", later defined as 4C, but even then a meter (and by extension a centimeter) was originally defined based on the circumference of the earth. 1000 is only an interesting number if you use base 10, which we only use as an artifact of having ten digits. Arguably, 12 or 16 are better (more useful), as they have more factors.