Thirty Eight Minutes (104)

[Falcon Horus]

An excellent point has been made... I rest my case.

Green for Xaeden.

[heweaver]

OK I recently re-watched the episode, and I wonder why Dr Beckett's suggestion of walking thru the event horizon and just materializing in the city when the wormhole shuts off...and McKay says it won't if all matter doesn't make it thru...

So on more than one episode of SG1, one in particular I think I saw that same day coincidentally, where a Jafaa's weapon staff didn't make it all the way thru, and all that happened was the end of it was cut off...

So do the Pegasus gates work differently in that regard? (I don't know if that type of situation came up again in Atlantis at all or not)...

But then also, an early episode of Universe where they are needing a few more seconds, Eli stuck his arm in to keep the wormhole open...

Or maybe the difference between all those situations is that in SG1 and Universe, the 38 minute mark isn't what shuts off the gate, it was normal deactivation (and on Universe, still not 38 minutes and doing that to keep the gate open only delayed the jump to FTL, but it worked since 38 minutes had not yet elapsed.)

I dunno those are just some thoughts I had that made me get on here and post about it. What are your thoughts?

[Xaeden]

Pegasus gates do not work differently in that respect, but there may be some contradictions in early Sg-1 episodes as it doesn't seem that the writers decided that Stargates transmit matter "in discrete units" until later on. The only definitive contradiction that I am aware of is in season 1's "Torment of Tantalus." In that episode, Earnest was transmitted to Heliopolis even though his support line was cut off.

Per "38 minutes," when the Stargate shut off before the Jaffa's entire staff weapon made it into the event horizon in "Point of View," that individual Jaffa should have "ceased to exist" because the Stargate should not have transmitted "the matter stream until the demolecularisation is complete." The writers may not have envisioned that was what happened when they wrote the scene, but we weren't shown what happened to the Jaffa one way or another so there's no contradiction there.

38 minutes is when a Stargate will shut off on its own, even if it has all the energy it needs to maintain a connection. A tremendously excessive amount of energy being funneled into the gate will keep the wormhole active beyond the 38 minute limit, and a wormhole will shut down at any point before 38 minutes if power to the gate is cut completely. The latter is likely what happened to the gate in "Point of View." The base suffered damage during the attack, and Carter using O'Neill's transformer to dial the 8th chevron may have done some damage of its own to the electrical system. The episode didn't pause to explain this to the audience, but it did show us a rather large spark come out of a junction box in the gate room. If you have the ability to watch the episode again, skip to the point when the wormhole is activated. Right after that the camera cuts to two Jaffa. As they're running up the ramp, we see sparks fly up behind the second one. The camera then cuts back to a wide shot of the gate room, showing more Jaffa running toward the gate/gate room and we briefly see the last few floating sparks die out and briefly hear an electrical frizzy noise.

Gateworld doesn't have a screen capture of the moment when the sparks first appear in its image gallery, but it does have one of the lingering sparks dying out around the junction boxes directly behind the staff cannon (see below).


Stargates will also deactivate on their own long before the 38 minute mark if nothing enters the event horizon a certain amount of time after the wormhole is initiated or after the last object passes through. I would imagine this is likely a energy saving protocol controlled by the DHD and the SGC replicates this by manually cutting power to the Stargate. In any case, the amount of time is not clearly defined and varies from episode to episode as the production has its own reasons for when it wants to cut the wormhole off, such as limitations on its visual effects budget, pacing, and whether or not the plot calls for someone or something to have time to follow the last team member through the gate.

A quick and easy way to keep the gate from shutting off early has always been to stick something partially into the event horizon, like a hand. As long as the gate's power flow isn't interrupted, this will keep the wormhole active up to a full 38 minutes. In Eli's situation, the Destiny won't jump to FTL while there is an active wormhole connection, so by putting his hand in the event horizon he was preventing the outgoing gate from shutting down early and buying Scott and Greer an extra 38 minutes minus the amount of time the gate had already been open.

Radio transmissions are another method for keeping the gate open and would explain a number of instances where the gate shuts down almost immediately after the last member of a team exits a gate. For example, Sg-3 used a radio signal to hold the gate open for Sg-1 in "Lost City, Part 1" (Season 7, Episode 22):

REYNOLDS: Send a constant radio signal, we have to keep that door open. (Thru radio) SG1 we have incoming.

I'm sure there are plenty of times this was forgotten. Eli being told to stick his hand in the gate through an active radio signal is either one of them or, because of how dire the situation was, Rush was being extra cautious (a radio signal could cut out on its own; Eli's hand is going to stay there as long as he doesn't panic, has a medical episode, or get attacked).

The Destiny will also drop out of FTL if someone dials in, but someone can only dial in while the ship is in FTL by using a 9th chevron address because that is like a code that can find a gate anywhere in the universe, while a 7th chevron address is based on a fixed area of space and because the Ancients didn't want local dial in attempts to disrupt FTL travel. That was why the Destiny ended up being hit by radiation from the pulsars in the season 1 finale. When the Lucian Alliance dialed in, "the Destiny had to drop out of FTL to make the connection" and just happened to be in range of a dangerous binary pulsar at that exact moment.

Btw: I responded to some of the same questions on page 27 of this thread, which have some information that I didn't repeat in my reply to you, so you may want to give those a look.

[Falcon Horus]

Erm guys... in this episode the jumper got stuck because the pods didn't retract properly so when McKay says "square peg, round hole" he meant to say that the foreward momentum of the jumper was interrupted therefore halting it's dematerialization.

There was nothing to materialize on the other end of the gate cause the whole object had not yet entered into the buffer so at the cut-off point, the forward section would have been lost in the wormhole - like Teal'c once got lost - while the aft section would have been exposed to space, killing the entire team there.

Notwithstanding that the matterstream acts like a computer and remembers what object goes through otherwise we'd have seen many a scrambled item or person exit on the other side.

If you get in walking, you walk back out with more or less all your molecules intact on the other end in the same configuration as you walked in. Same for the jumper.