The Stargate's Eighth Chevron

[thekillman]

which makes me believe the gate system was never meant to be so extensive. i think that the Destiny uses a wholy different system, using coordinates

[Quadhelix]

which makes me believe the gate system was never meant to be so extensive. i think that the Destiny uses a wholy different system, using coordinates

That raises the question of how old the 'Gate-Network and the Destiny are, relative to one another; more to the point, it raises the question of why Stargates have exactly nine chevrons, no more yet no less.

First, we have the still-unanswered question of the ninth chevron's purpose. Yes, we know that it can be used to reach the Destiny, but not much more than that. An analogy would be someone hearing spoilers about Stargate Atlantis without having seen "The Fifth Race": this person would know that the eighth chevron could be used to reach Atlantis, but would have no idea about its true function of generalized intergalactic travel.

In any case, let us assume that the eighth chevron works the way you say it does. Depending on the function of the ninth chevron, this means that Ancients never expected the 'Gate network to extend either beyond the Local Group (if the ninth chevron is tied directly to the Destiny) or to fill the Local Supercluster (if the ninth chevron is a generalized "group/cluster code").

However, if the ninth chevron is tied directly to the Destiny, then the Ancients would have know with certainty that the Stargate network would expand beyond the Local Group. This is a contradiction. Therefore, either (a) each eight-chevron address designates a region somewhere on the scale of a galaxy (maybe a bit smaller) or (b) the ninth chevron is not tied directly to the Destiny.

Of course, there is also the possibility that the ninth chevron isn't tied to the Destiny, but is rather a generalized "group/cluster" code. However, that raises the question of "why nine?" Why not eight or ten? It also raises the question of how "the crew" in Universe uses the ninth chevron to 'Gate to the Destiny, which by now should be well outside the range of even the ninth chevron if it works this way.

[thekillman]

which is why the destiny has a new gate: i speculate it has been made to work in a new way, to create a new, better gate network. much vaster, much better. either it creates unique "Glyphs" for each galaxy, or it simply uses coordinates.


we do know the glyph system uses base eight math, i dont know if that helps (Fifth Race)

[Quadhelix]

which is why the destiny has a new gate: i speculate it has been made to work in a new way, to create a new, better gate network. much vaster, much better. either it creates unique "Glyphs" for each galaxy, or it simply uses coordinates.

I'm not entirely sure how this addresses my point. After all, if the ninth chevron ties to the Destiny, then that means that the Ancients new with certainty that the Stargate network would expand beyond the Local Group. It doesn't matter how the Destiny's Stargate makes a connection, only how Stargates in the Milky Way do so.

After all, if the Ancients knew that there would be Stargates well beyond the Local Group, they would want to be able to access those Stargates. The Destiny is not the best method, as it is an exploration vessel, not a passenger ship: its function is to explore new networks, not to ferry people about existing networks. This leads to our first conclusion:

A. If the eighth chevron functions as a "galaxy code," we can rule out the ninth chevron being a direct connection to the Destiny.


Thus, the alternative is that the ninth chevron is some sort of "galaxy/cluster code," much like the eighth is, as you say, a "galaxy code." This, however, raises problems of its own. First, one has to wonder why the Ancients chose exactly nine chevrons, not eight or ten; this is not an insurmountable problem, however. A worse problem is that there is reason to believe that the Destiny is now well outside the Local Supercluster. This is a severe problem because the eighth and ninth chevrons working together as "galaxy codes" can be used to reach only about a thousand galaxies; the Local Supercluster contains on the order of 10,000-100,000 galaxies. This, however, means that the ninth chevron cannot be used to reach the Destiny. This leads to our second conclusion:

B. If the eighth chevron functions as a "galaxy code," the ninth chevron must be linked to the Destiny.


However, if the eighth chevron serves as a "galaxy code," then A and B are clearly in contradiction. The only way for to resolve this is to conclude that the eighth chevron does not work as a "galaxy code."

[thekillman]

or maybe the 9th is an unique sequence which isnt so much of an adress but more of a macro

[Spimman]

or maybe the 9th is an unique sequence which isnt so much of an adress but more of a macro

I never thought of that, interesting. Could be true if it hits the Destiny no matter where it is.

[Quadhelix]

or maybe the 9th is an unique sequence which isnt so much of an adress but more of a macro

A Macro that does what?

After all, if the ninth chevron is designed to connect to the Destiny, then that immediately shatters your argument about the Ancients not expecting their 'Gate network to expand the Local Group, since the Ancients would have known ahead of time that it would.

On the other hand, if the ninth chevron isn't specifically designed to connect to the Destiny, then why would the the Ancient's have even included a "macro chevron"? Furthermore, would all 'Gates have been upgraded with the Macro necessary to dial the Destiny, or is Icarus base just lucky in that regard?

[thekillman]

they made one with nine chevrons, and i think first 7 were to dial galactically, but when the need arose, they made the eight. and then the ninth. nine were chosen because they probably knew they needed some expansion and nine were just a wild guess. its like adding two extra USB ports to your computer, just in case.

[Aer'ki]

Ok, I'm going to throw this out, despite my hate for SGU, as a way for the 9th chevron thing to make a little sense.

7 chevrons for in galaxy dial.

8 for galaxy to galaxy trip. The seven say where in the galaxy, 8th is the area code for which galaxy to look in.

9th is for a network jump, and comes AFTER the point of origin. This leaves a 9th chevron BEFORE the point of origin without a use. The Ancients added this purpose after the fact and now the 9th chevron has two functions: the original network jump and the connect to Destiny idea put on as a 'patch' into the gate function.

Yes, I know you hate the multi-gate network theory, but I thought I'd just throw out the possibility for more criticism.

[Quadhelix]

they made one with nine chevrons, and i think first 7 were to dial galactically, but when the need arose, they made the eight. and then the ninth.

So they just added two random chevrons?

I suppose I could accept that, except it still raises uncomfortable questions. Why two and not three or zero? Do the eighth and ninth chevron work the same on all 'Gates, or are there some that never got the update? If the Ancients realized that their Stargate Network was going to expand beyond the Local Group (due to the launch of the Destiny), would they have changed the functioning of the eighth chevron so that they could use it to access these new networks?

nine were chosen because they probably knew they needed some expansion and nine were just a wild guess. its like adding two extra USB ports to your computer, just in case.

Except that USB ports have an intended function: connecting to USB-compatible devices. A better analogy would be adding a gear-shift to a car...without adding the extra gears..

8 for galaxy to galaxy trip. The seven say where in the galaxy, 8th is the area code for which galaxy to look in.

Ihave several problems with the idea of the eighth chevron as a "galaxy code," not the least of which being the question of how one would dial a 'Gate that is in intergalactic space.

9th is for a network jump, and comes AFTER the point of origin.

Two things:

A. What is a "network jump"?

B. If the ninth chevron is supposed to be engaged after the point of origin, wouldn't the 'Gate already be active when you tried to engage the ninth chevron?

This leaves a 9th chevron BEFORE the point of origin without a use. The Ancients added this purpose after the fact and now the 9th chevron has two functions: the original network jump and the connect to Destiny idea put on as a 'patch' into the gate function.

Except we don't know for certain that the purpose of the ninth chevron is tied to the Destiny. Let me give an example:

Imagine that it is early-mid 2004. You are a new fan to the Stargate franchise, and have not seen many of the episodes. You notice, however, that while the Stargate has nine chevrons, they use only eight. This confuses you, and you wonder what the extra two chevrons are for. Then, you here about the upcoming series Stargate Atlantis. You can't find much, but you read that the team uses the eighth chevron to get to the lost city of Atlantis. "Ahah," you think to yourself, "the purpose of the eighth chevron is to dial Atlantis!"

I have a feeling that we might be in a similar situation with Stargate Universe.

[thekillman]

ok i had a revolutionary moment last night. erase all you know of the stargate.


1: it is said that each gate has its own unique POO. but there are 39 symbols. this means that there are unique symbols in the galaxy. many thousands of them. but if each gate has its own POO, then why not dial that POO as opposed to dialling a long 6chevron sequence.

2: what if the 39 symbols arent just random symbols that together form a location, but rather the galaxy is designated 39 positions. this might sound strange, but if you dont need an intersect but only the middle point to dial a gate, the gate network can intrapolate the location of the stargate. now the whole constellation thing is just rubbish and unnessecary. unless the constellations have a "Chevron" at their centre.

3: the chevrons are not needed to form a wormhole. i always found it strange how, using some symbols, you could accurately dial a stargate. i found the answer. stargates communicate much more that you would think. not just correlative updates and such. the chevrons say where the stargate is, and a message is sent. the POO tells the location of the sending gate. so the recieving gate gets the message, activates itself together with the sending gate, forming a wormhole.

the eight, ofcourse has no use when it comes to deducting the location of a gate. after all, the chevrons say where the gate is. the eight is not so much of a normal symbol but also a macro, that says that the gate is in the MW and that one has to be dialled.

the ninth chevron would theoretically say the galactic cluster. meaning we can use 39 clusters, each cluster having 39 galaxies, each galaxy having 39 chevron points to deduct 60 billion places with.

39x39x60 billion is a lot, 9.126x20^13 to be precise. a billion is 10^9th. so my figure would be 91 trillion stargate locations. which to me seems more than enough.

why 9 chevrons were chosen. well, see it like this. they were in a galaxy. amelius' method would need 7 to dial galactically. assuming their empire would expand, they needed an eight. and not to get themselves in a corner, they added a ninth for safety.

now we know there are 8 chevron gates out there, so obviously the ancients once got fed up with the 9th chevron.

my previous enlightenments also explain why the destiny gate is different, most likely all other universe gates are different. these gates are compatible with the massive amount of gates seeded. meaning they could have eleven symbols. but i was thinking. why make chevrons? what if the destiny gate does not have carved-in symbols, but rather uses a new set of symbols per galaxy.



so galaxy 1 has, say, 41 symbols. so the destiny gate switches to these symbols, and their DHD too. now i was thinking, perhaps this time there is logic, and the symbol system goes via some algorithm. or all gates use the same symbols.

annother thing i was thinking is, if the 9th chevron is a new area code, we can never ever possibly dial the destiny as we do not know where it is. so there are 2 possibilities:


1: the ninth chevron activates a macro that works like the gate bridge, forwarding the gate to the next galactic cluster they are in. seeing as all gates are in contact per galaxy, the destiny would automatically notice if the forwarding has reached its galaxy.

problem: power. you'd easily drain a ZPM. cause you follow the trail of the destiny. then again, the premise said it entered a region of space where the gates were seeded thousands of years ago, so its a few thousand years of gate seeding closer.


2: a direct connection. again, you can never know where the destiny is. but remeber the ancient comm terminals. they work across galaxies, and way further. what if the gate that has the 9th chevron dialled sends out a burst through subspace, one that only the destiny can recieve, and that makes the destiny gate activate and allows a connection. then why an adress? the adress activates that call macro, the adress acts like a key. the key to infinite treasure.

[Aer'ki]

So they just added two random chevrons?

I suppose I could accept that, except it still raises uncomfortable questions. Why two and not three or zero? Do the eighth and ninth chevron work the same on all 'Gates, or are there some that never got the update? If the Ancients realized that their Stargate Network was going to expand beyond the Local Group (due to the launch of the Destiny), would they have changed the functioning of the eighth chevron so that they could use it to access these new networks?



Except that USB ports have an intended function: connecting to USB-compatible devices. A better analogy would be adding a gear-shift to a car...without adding the extra gears..



Ihave several problems with the idea of the eighth chevron as a "galaxy code," not the least of which being the question of how one would dial a 'Gate that is in intergalactic space.



Two things:

A. What is a "network jump"?

B. If the ninth chevron is supposed to be engaged after the point of origin, wouldn't the 'Gate already be active when you tried to engage the ninth chevron?



Except we don't know for certain that the purpose of the ninth chevron is tied to the Destiny. Let me give an example:

Imagine that it is early-mid 2004. You are a new fan to the Stargate franchise, and have not seen many of the episodes. You notice, however, that while the Stargate has nine chevrons, they use only eight. This confuses you, and you wonder what the extra two chevrons are for. Then, you here about the upcoming series Stargate Atlantis. You can't find much, but you read that the team uses the eighth chevron to get to the lost city of Atlantis. "Ahah," you think to yourself, "the purpose of the eighth chevron is to dial Atlantis!"

I have a feeling that we might be in a similar situation with Stargate Universe.

Ok, think of it this way. You have a map, a sphere, in which a galaxy is located. Any stargate within that region is assigned an ID number, six digits long. It doesn't matter where it is, it still carries that number. As the stars gradually drift apart, the small calculations as to their relative locations are handled by the correlative update in the DHD. If not, the gates would eventually drift out of their target zone.

The target zone is the approximate place in the region where that ID tagged gate is supposed to be. An outgoing connection searches that area for a gate. If one is in position it makes a connection. If one isn't in that small region, no connection can be made.

For example: if NEW YORK CITY had a gate that was stolen, and you placed CHICAGO's gate in new york, then you could still dial into the chicago gate in new york by using the new york address. You could not dial out until you altered the POO to match the new location.

So a gate doesn't look for an ID tag when making a connection, it looks for a gate in a specific area. Those areas were originally laid out in conjunction with the star constellations as seen from earth, but that was just for asthetic affects and not actual function. (Daniel Jackson was wrong and right at the same time)

If you want to connect to a gate outside of the spherical region, you have to dial the 8th(7th actually) chevron to tell it to look in another area code(galaxy zone). These zones may meet up in intergalactic space so no areas are dead zones, or not.

Reprogramming a gate to look at a specific region automatically isn't hard, and was accomplished with the gate bridge. Its not in a galaxy, its just been programmed to connect to one gate and one gate only. (or two, for going both ways)

9th chevron(my theory) is for gate network jump, and is dialed after the POO, but before the activation bubble is hit on the DHD that actually triggers the connection. Network jump is based on the theory that wormholes have different frequencies and only a gate based on a certain frequency can connect to a similar gate. Gate frequencies are determined by the color of crystals on the gates. MW gates are red, Pegasus gates are blue. This is why they can't dial each other. They operate on different frequencies and are effectively not in existance as far as each network is concerned.

Atlantis's control crystal adjusts the frequency of the gate it is plugged into so a connection between earth and Pegasus can be made. This way the Wraith can't get out and originally the plague couldn't get in.

Now, why haven't we seen any shipyards, zpm factories, drone factories, etc? I think that's because such sensitive facilities were built on another gate network (green crystals) only 9th chevron gate jump would allow you to access that network and therefore keep it secure. An access code would be required upon dialing of the address before a connection could be made...access code would be delivered using the symbols on the DHD much like Adria did when she was searching for addresses and the symbols lit up randomly.

Also, a planet can have multiple gates, so long as they're different colors. You input the planet's address, POO, then the network symbol to say which network you want to jump to, access code, then hit the connection bubble. You walk through into a chamber in the center of the earth from a green gate rather than through a red gate on the planet's surface(a random example).

Perfectly secure, especially since no one really has a clue the other networks exist. For Alterran use only, which is why the Nox and Asgard had normal red gates.

[Quadhelix]

1: it is said that each gate has its own unique POO. but there are 39 symbols. this means that there are unique symbols in the galaxy. many thousands of them. but if each gate has its own POO, then why not dial that POO as opposed to dialling a long 6chevron sequence.

Because a 6-chevron sequence on a 'Gate with 38 non-PoO glyphs can yield about two billion addresses. I would like to see you design a DHD with two-billion glyphs on it.

3: the chevrons are not needed to form a wormhole. i always found it strange how, using some symbols, you could accurately dial a stargate. i found the answer. stargates communicate much more that you would think. not just correlative updates and such. the chevrons say where the stargate is, and a message is sent. the POO tells the location of the sending gate. so the recieving gate gets the message, activates itself together with the sending gate, forming a wormhole.

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, but I am generally of the belief that addresses define regions, not positions (although I'm not sure how well that fits into the whole "stellar drift" thing). When you enter an address, you are not dialing a position, but a region, and will thus connect to any Stargate in that region. Perhaps the purpose of the correlative updates is to let the Stargate know just where in a given region the Stargates actually are: i.e., if you move a Stargate from one planet to another planet with the same address without then initiating an update, the Stargate will not be able to connect. The reason that the SGC is able to make its own correctional computations is that the Stargate already "knows" where most of these other 'Gates are, but that information is 5-10 thousand years out of date.

the ninth chevron would theoretically say the galactic cluster. meaning we can use 39 clusters, each cluster having 39 galaxies, each galaxy having 39 chevron points to deduct 60 billion places with.

Problem: galaxy cluster generally have at least 50 galaxies, and can have as many as a thousand.

39x39x60 billion is a lot, 9.126x20^13 to be precise. a billion is 10^9th. so my figure would be 91 trillion stargate locations. which to me seems more than enough.

"More than enough"? Try "hardly any": under your method, the combination of the eighth and ninth chevrons would allow access to only about a thousand galaxies. The Local Supercluster alone has 10-100 times that.

now we know there are 8 chevron gates out there, so obviously the ancients once got fed up with the 9th chevron.

Those are CGI errors.

my previous enlightenments also explain why the destiny gate is different, most likely all other universe gates are different. these gates are compatible with the massive amount of gates seeded. meaning they could have eleven symbols. but i was thinking. why make chevrons? what if the destiny gate does not have carved-in symbols, but rather uses a new set of symbols per galaxy.

We can see quite clearly that the Destiny 'Gate has nine chevrons. As for using a new set of symbols for each galaxy, I see that as a very real possibility.

Ok, think of it this way. You have a map, a sphere, in which a galaxy is located. Any stargate within that region is assigned an ID number, six digits long. It doesn't matter where it is, it still carries that number. As the stars gradually drift apart, the small calculations as to their relative locations are handled by the correlative update in the DHD. If not, the gates would eventually drift out of their target zone.

The target zone is the approximate place in the region where that ID tagged gate is supposed to be. An outgoing connection searches that area for a gate. If one is in position it makes a connection. If one isn't in that small region, no connection can be made.

For example: if NEW YORK CITY had a gate that was stolen, and you placed CHICAGO's gate in new york, then you could still dial into the chicago gate in new york by using the new york address. You could not dial out until you altered the POO to match the new location.

So a gate doesn't look for an ID tag when making a connection, it looks for a gate in a specific area.

Yeah, that's been fairly well established by the show itself.

9th chevron(my theory) is for gate network jump, and is dialed after the POO, but before the activation bubble is hit on the DHD that actually triggers the connection. Network jump is based on the theory that wormholes have different frequencies and only a gate based on a certain frequency can connect to a similar gate. Gate frequencies are determined by the color of crystals on the gates. MW gates are red, Pegasus gates are blue. This is why they can't dial each other. They operate on different frequencies and are effectively not in existance as far as each network is concerned.

Okay, except that there is absolutely zero evidence of this in the show. Also, no matter how much you dislike it, "Enemy at the Gate" is still canon, which directly contradicts you're "network" idea.

Atlantis's control crystal adjusts the frequency of the gate it is plugged into so a connection between earth and Pegasus can be made. This way the Wraith can't get out and originally the plague couldn't get in.

Again, zero evidence.

Now, why haven't we seen any shipyards, zpm factories, drone factories, etc? I think that's because such sensitive facilities were built on another gate network (green crystals) only 9th chevron gate jump would allow you to access that network and therefore keep it secure.

Well, we can be fairly sure that the ones in Pegasus were destroyed/scuttled during the war with the Wraith. Also note that the Wraith have ships, meaning that the can still go wherever they want, no matter how secure the 'Gate is.

As for the Milky Way, it is several thousand times the size of Pegasus, so finding a small handful of Ancient facilities would be extremely difficult.

[thekillman]

and that assuming the ancients didnt destroy their stuff so no baddy could use it for wrong things

[Aer'ki]

and that assuming the ancients didnt destroy their stuff so no baddy could use it for wrong things

You mean like the gate destroyer that Anubis found? Oh well, they just missed that one, even though it's the size of a couple football fields.