Gates and Power

[Control_Chair]

All plausible I suppose. Though not very satisfying. Ignore everything I was saying about shields and this and that. The argument has been (by those that take this point of view) that Destiny is more or less unreachable. That even the ancients couldn't get there because its farther out than even they had anticipated, let alone the Asgard or their knowledge, and nothing short of a ridiculous number of ZPMs or Iccrus planet can do it. And yet in this episode a million+? year old space ship can do it. And the ship doesn't do it with a magic power generating device, but your average sun + good power storage.

I think the writers have some work to do.

Not all of the energy from an Iccarus type planet or outputted by a star goes into dialing the 9 chevron address to Destiny.

I apologise I am about to get a bit technical

The gravitational binding Energy of the Earth is about 2.24×10^32J, then the TOTAL amount of energy supplied by the Naquahdriah core had to be greater than this amount to destroy the planet (assuming Iccarus base planet was of a similar size to the Earth because of similar levels of gravity). This figure is roughly equal to how much energy the sun puts out in one week.

Now multiple dialing of the nine chevron address where planed by both Iccarus base and the Lucian Alliance so only a fraction of this power was being tapped each time. Also in Earth only a fraction of the Energy output of the star was being harnessed to dial back to Earth.

Conclusions:-
Dialing the ninth chevron address requires significantly less power than planet busting levels that can be supplied by ZPM’s, so theoretically a fully charged ZPM should be capable of dialing Destiny multiple times before it is depleted, however the few ZPM’s in Earths possession are almost depleted so why waste what little power is available to dial Destiny when other sources like Iccarus planets are available.

[geddarkstorm]

I think you are misinterpreting my post. I'm saying there have been several discussion threads about whether or not its possible to reach Destiny. You can search for them and read for yourself. I think you will absolutely find forum users making the argument that its difficult to the point of almost impossible to reach destiny. Nothing short of dozens to hundreds of ZPM will do it. Asgard couldn't have helped, and neither can their core. Juiced up ships can't, and at this point even the ancients probably couldn't etc. etc... I'm sure you'll find all those kind of arguments in those threads.

I think this episode is kind of a game changer in discussions like that since it was a million+- year old ship and a short range gate that seems to be able to do it. At least the science geeks on the show seemed to accept that there is no reason it shouldn't work.

So, either a Destiny class ship (wicked old tech) can store the power of dozen's to 100's of ZPMs (something that seemingly is almost impossible to do in present time) and would seem quite ridiculous, or perhaps powering up the gate to dial back and forth just isn't that hard.

Again, Destiny isn't doing it with some magic power generating device, or rare mineral. Its all about the storage. Earth can't build subspace in a bottle, but how about destiny style capacitors?

Actually, you totally misunderstood my post . When I said "no one" I was talking about the only "ones" that matter, the ones on the show. I couldn't give less for what people have speculated in other threads if it isn't based on hard information and logic from the show's universe.

Again, NOTHING in Universe that I've seen so far says a ZPM couldn't dial Destiny. I would bet you a ZPM, a single ZPM, could do it just fine without trouble. You know, overloading one of those things will blow up a planet after all. They have at least the power of an Icarus like planet then. It's just that, well, NO ONE HAS ZPMs anymore in the SG universe. There's a total of two known, both in continuous use and cannot be spared. This whole "100's of ZPMs" thing is based on absolutely nothing that I can find, unless there's some hidden snip of in show dialogue I missed.

There in, this episode has not changed the game what so ever, except told us that Destiny can scrounge enough power to dial back to Earth when leeching from a seeder ship and combining its own reserves. We know it can also likely (though not completely sure) dial Earth safely by itself while recharging in a star. But thanks to Rush...

[Kaiphantom]

Yeah, I agree, we should really drop the line about "needing 100's of ZPMs to connect to Destiny." The truth is, we don't know how many it would take. It's unclear exactly how many ZPM's Earth has now, and how much energy they have left (or whether Earth would even want to risk draining them to establish a wormhole to Destiny, or take them from whatever else they are needed for). All we know is that the Ancients could manufacture ZPM's, so obviously connecting to Destiny wouldn't have been an issue.

Could have easily just taken a dozen ZPMs. I'd guess more than one, though, heh. Jack's makeshift device from a staff weapon could dial another galaxy, and a single ZPM can dial another galaxy fairly easily. If we assume Destiny is 40+ galaxies away, and each ZPM can dial another galaxy 5 times (very low estimate), then they'd only need 8 ZPM's.

[Abiron]

Those are special circumstances. Midway used a special macro that overrode basic gate operating procedure. The Ori Supergate was built in orbit of a planet, so it's still technically planetary targeting.

The macro was only used to store the incoming travellers in the buffer and dial the next address. And the supergate consumed its planet to create the black hole that powered it. If McKay had also needed to find a way to target a gate in space instead of on a planet, I'm sure he would have been very excited to expound upon that as well.

I'm sorry, but I cannot think of any evidence in the franchise where a planet is required for the target gate. The addresses are coordinates, and I believe that any gate within the targeted 3-dimensional volume, planet or no, is a valid reciever. At most, we've seen that a gravity well is usually present, but not always a planet.

[geddarkstorm]

Actually, a ZPM is way more powerful than that. Remember when Atlantis had just one, they dialed Earth up -routinely-. Way more than five times, by probably an order of magnitude or so, and that dialing never drained the thing. Overloading a ZPM will blow up a planet and anything immediately near it, so it's said in Atlantis. We've also had ZPMs power huge time dilation fields for over ten thousand years without difficulty. I believe a single ZPM would get to Destiny without much trouble. It's just, well, were are you going to find a spare ZPM now?

[pipi]

The main point of my original post was to address the 'power' problem and people's perceptions of it.

If you look at some of the old threads, you'll find people calculating that it takes dozen to 100's of ZPM, and other seemingly ridiculous amounts of energy to connect with Destiny and back again. This episode suggests one of 2 things.

Either a Destiny class ship stores the power of dozens to hundreds of ZPM's which seems ridiculous because its million year old tech, or the power requirements to make the connection just isn't that big a deal (relative to what we've seen in the franchise).

As other has stated, it's anyone's guess how many ZPMs it takes to dial the 9 Cheveron. It could be 1 (fully charged), it could be 10 or more. Earth did not have any fully charged ones to experiment with.

Regardless, it seems a Destiny class can hold the power of several ZPMs? Thats more than an Arura Class ship runs on by factor of 2 or 3 seemingly, and even more than Atlantis itself. That seems odd.

Besides from not quantifying the number of ZPMs needed to dial the gate from above, the two classes of ships are different indesign. Destiny could be constructed as an 80% battery for all we know and lacks shield amour and other things like fighter launch bay etc. that a battle class Aurora ship would require. Since the Aurora ship seems to only need 1 ZPM to be fully functional, it can make more efficient use of its internal space like storing other smaller ships and living quaters and also keeping a reserve of ZPMs and other stuff, like maybe a fleet of puddle jumpers. We don't even know if the two ships are of the same size. Destiny definitely dwarfs the seeder ship that's for sure. Maybe most of that space are allocated for capacitors. I believe Destiny's remaining functional battery capacity was not sufficient to dial the gate home, that's why they need to link the seeder ship's batteries too at the same time. And it was doubtful how long they could maintain the wormhole, so it could just be for a few seconds then poof.

Neither is a war zone, neither is under the ocean. But in theory, a sun would be a constant power source and place that the wraith couldn't follow. So, imagine Atlantis equip itself with the solar collectors and power storage and could juice its shields to the tune of a dozen ZPMs, not just 3. Flies into the sun, recharges, flies out basically indestructible, offs a half dozen hives, flies back to the outer surface of the sun. rinse, repeat

You seem to think the city of Atlantis was a warship. Well it's not. It was a city for people to live in. It just happen to have a shield capable of defending off the Wraith without the need to fly anywhere near a star. The Ancients were spread out across the galaxy living happily but were chased out by the Wraith. Only the city of Atlantis was safe. A one of a kind super city. The city was above water taking in refugees, they only sunk it to pretend to be destroyed, and then left the galaxy anyway since who would want to spend the rest of their lives underwater. Your facts are mixed up.

Unlikely. The wraith had 60 hives or so? Compare that to the number of stars one could flee to to recharge.

You're basing your figures on post war hive numbers. How many million years has past since then. And why would any ship want to incurr this inconvenience? Who cares about going green. Just pull out a spare ZPM from the store room. A ship seems to function fine with 1 ZPM, so a room full of these would last any mission until they can dock back with the city to resupply. We don't know how easy it is to create a ZPM. They could be manufactured like AA batteries for anyone guess. So easy.

[erotavlas]

I don't get it, in all this time why haven't they learned to build their own ZPMs. I mean they have the entire collected knowledge of the Asgard and access to Atlantis etc. Surely the knowledge must be there somewhere.

[morbosfist]

I don't get it, in all this time why haven't they learned to build their own ZPMs. I mean they have the entire collected knowledge of the Asgard and access to Atlantis etc. Surely the knowledge must be there somewhere.

Knowing how and being able to do it are two very different things. They likely don't know how to do it, anyway, since much of Atlantis' database is still encrypted.

[Kaiphantom]

I don't get it, in all this time why haven't they learned to build their own ZPMs. I mean they have the entire collected knowledge of the Asgard and access to Atlantis etc. Surely the knowledge must be there somewhere.

Some things are more complex, or more difficult to figure out. Just because you know something is possible, doesn't mean you can duplicate it. Getting yourself out a straight jacket is possible, but how long will it take you to figure out on your own? ZPM's require our own understanding of science to grow, and that could take years. Realistically, TPTB won't have us building ZPM's for story reasons, but they are story reasons that make sense.

[tomstone]

Just wanted to say something about ZPM's. If we take ZPM as our equivalent to a battery, and the Ancients used it as such, they probably had a way to generate power on a permanent level. I know it wasn't mentioned, but using batteries to work all their tech would be pretty inefficent. I know a ZPM can power our Cities for years, though ancient tech will need a lot more. Atlantis itself at use of the Ancients, couldn't have taken more then some months to deplete 1 ZPM. So what would be more efficient? A battery you have to change every x months or something durable?

[morbosfist]

Just wanted to say something about ZPM's. If we take ZPM as our equivalent to a battery, and the Ancients used it as such, they probably had a way to generate power on a permanent level. I know it wasn't mentioned, but using batteries to work all their tech would be pretty inefficent. I know a ZPM can power our Cities for years, though ancient tech will need a lot more. Atlantis itself at use of the Ancients, couldn't have taken more then some months to deplete 1 ZPM. So what would be more efficient? A battery you have to change every x months or something durable?

A ZPM may be a battery, but it's a battery that lasts for an ungodly amount of time. Three ZPMs can power the shield for 10,000 years while holding back the pressure of ~6000 feet of water. That's a lot of energy being expended. Normal operations don't even need the shield to be active. Atlantis under Ancient control could probably last centuries, at least, on the power of a single set of ZPMs, probably longer.

[Trinary]

This discussion is going nowhere. Being able to dial Earth using combine destiny and seeder ship power is remain a theory. Each time someone dial to destiny, the whole planet will exploded. It may resulting the same consequences when destiny trying to dial home. With bunch of stargates made of Naquadriah on the seeder ship, the explosion from power capacitors may ignite a planetary size explosions and destroy both ships.

Probably, that is the motive of the brown alien disengage the power routing to the destiny's stargate. Perhaps, the brown alien is seeder ship keeper droids created by the Ancient. They constantly in hibernation when the ship not at work.

Logically, it's a waste of energy and dangerous to connect via stargate to Earth.

[The_Asgard_live]

Conclusions:-
Dialing the ninth chevron address requires significantly less power than planet busting levels that can be supplied by ZPM’s, so theoretically a fully charged ZPM should be capable of dialing Destiny multiple times before it is depleted, however the few ZPM’s in Earths possession are almost depleted so why waste what little power is available to dial Destiny when other sources like Iccarus planets are available.

Again, NOTHING in Universe that I've seen so far says a ZPM couldn't dial Destiny. I would bet you a ZPM, a single ZPM, could do it just fine without trouble. You know, overloading one of those things will blow up a planet after all. They have at least the power of an Icarus like planet then. It's just that, well, NO ONE HAS ZPMs anymore in the SG universe. There's a total of two known, both in continuous use and cannot be spared. This whole "100's of ZPMs" thing is based on absolutely nothing that I can find, unless there's some hidden snip of in show dialogue I missed.

There in, this episode has not changed the game what so ever, except told us that Destiny can scrounge enough power to dial back to Earth when leeching from a seeder ship and combining its own reserves. We know it can also likely (though not completely sure) dial Earth safely by itself while recharging in a star. But thanks to Rush...

Yeah, I agree, we should really drop the line about "needing 100's of ZPMs to connect to Destiny." The truth is, we don't know how many it would take. It's unclear exactly how many ZPM's Earth has now, and how much energy they have left (or whether Earth would even want to risk draining them to establish a wormhole to Destiny, or take them from whatever else they are needed for). All we know is that the Ancients could manufacture ZPM's, so obviously connecting to Destiny wouldn't have been an issue.

Could have easily just taken a dozen ZPMs. I'd guess more than one, though, heh. Jack's makeshift device from a staff weapon could dial another galaxy, and a single ZPM can dial another galaxy fairly easily. If we assume Destiny is 40+ galaxies away, and each ZPM can dial another galaxy 5 times (very low estimate), then they'd only need 8 ZPM's.

For the record, I never believed it took hundreds of ZPMs. Fully believed the Ancients would have been able to dial it, and the Asgard as well for that matter.

For those who did in the previous threads I was trying to point out the following based on what I think we can safely conclude or imply from this episode. We know for a fact, Atlantis, a city ship is powered by 3 ZPM, so either:

1. A Destiny class (seeder) ship stores more power than is required to power all of Atlantis 3 ZPMs or more. Which seems very odd, given in the franchise even 1 ZPM is such a big deal. Not to mention Destiny's power is based on million+- year old tech

or

2. Some people estimates have been way off (from those threads) and the power requirements are probably 3 or less ZPMs.

I also wanted to note that from this episode we learned that a short range gate seems to be just like any other gate. It will go where you want it to if you put enough power into it.

I think my reasoning is solid, don't mind being corrected.

Also as Control_Chair points out for the rest of us who were sloppy in articulating it, dialing Destiny does not deplete an Icurus Planet, probably not even close. Just like dialing Atlantis wouldn't deplete a ZPM.

[morbosfist]

Power requirements are one thing. Power output is another. ZPMs have a long shelf life but there's a limit to how much power they can safely output at once. Icarus can output a lot more power because it's essentially one giant reactor. The same may hold true for the seeder.

[RobertF]

Also we don't know how far the Destiny and seeder ships have flown from the Milky Way during the past million years. The ships may not be on a continuous outbound flight vector, but instead on a more circuitous route or a steadily widening spiral.

Based on the map presented in the first episodes it does seem to be more of a straight line than a spiral.

Or actually somewhat of a random walk:

http://www.gateworld.net/gallery/alb...i_season1/101-