Stargate Universe/Headscratchers

As usual, new entries at the bottom, please.

The very premise of the show is that Destiny was launched a bit less than a million years ago, but is primitive by Ancient standards (Rush says that it predates ATA gene technology, and it lacks Puddle Jumpers). In 'Rising', Atlantis is said to have left Earth 'several million years ago'. Destiny should be far, far newer and more advanced than Atlantis.
- They did have all those years to upgrade Atlantis, but chalk it up to Continuity Drift. Someone forgot about the caption.
- It could also be that Rush was simply wrong. Most people would be pretty bad at determining if something is hundreds of thousands of years old rather than millions - and Rush is the sort who would make a conservative estimate instead of admitting he isn't sure.
- Joe Mallozzi has said that "Dr. Rush may have misspoke" in regards to how old the Destiny is.
OK, so the crew of the Destiny brought along with them a case of Ancient Communication stones that work perfectly, onto an Ancient ship that is heavily damaged. Why exactly has no one thought of swapping the mind of one of the more useless civilians they brought along with that of Dr McKay or Colonel Carter? These two are not only the biggest experts on Ancient technology on Earth but are also two of the most resourceful. If anyone could get that ship working on junk it would be these two.
- Their solution wouldn't be that much different than what Rush devised (there's only so many ways to clean air with limited supplies). It would also depend on where they are and what they're doing.
  - It's not so much a case of expertise that they need, it's supplies. True, they have more than a few underqualified people on board, but Rush certainly knows his way around Ancient tech. Enough to make recalling the Hammond from active duty just to get hold of Sam, or messing with the current issues with Atlantis just to get hold of Rodney, largely pointless.
  - More expertise never hurts. Just think of the psych evaluations or medical assistance. Sure, they can't send supplies, but an experienced M.D. surely could do more than TJ, the nurse. Even more importantly: Rush may be the top expert on Ancient tech, but his goals are ambiguous and depending solely on him is A Bad Thing. If Young has half a brain, his first priority should be to get more experts on his side to break Rush's knowledge monopoly. He's trying to do that with Eli, who has been on the team for two weeks. Go figure.
  - Incidentally, in "Divided" they grabbed a doctor from Earth when they needed to do some surgery.
  - We're missing an important part here: Would you be willing to let someone else run around in your body for months or years so you can play on an Ancient ship (or vice versa, go home)? Before you answer, note that if your body (which you are not in control of) dies, you mind dies too. The military might be willing to do that, but they're the ones who are least necessary to switch--their guns are still needed, but any grunt can do that job fine.
    - To her credit, Wray is willing to do just that. However, it clearly puts a massive emotional and psychological strain (even outside of the limitations of her host body) on her and her partner as well as the visiting person.
    - Um, actually, as "Incursion", pts 1 & 2 have shown; while any grunt can pick up a weapon; not just any grunt can actually handle defending an unknown ship against unknown enemies. If SG-1 and the first Atlantis recon team got on Destiny, the Lucian Alliance would have been used to mop floors.
      - The above point is TV Tropes Made of Win Archive. As O'Neill says, "I'm not there. But..I'm wondering if I should be." If O'Neill was on the Destiny instead of Young, the Lucian Alliance wouldn't have made it through the gate, Rush and Camille would've fallen in line, and the ship would've been back at Earth by lunchtime.
    - Well, be fair. He would've needed Carter there for that last point.
    - To be even more fair, those "grunts" are Airmen. Grunts are something different.
- Keep in mind, Universe was intended to have a decidedly different tone than SG-1 or Atlantis, to the point where it almost helps to consider them not sharing the same continuity. Sure, SG-1 Carter would have had control of the ship by the end of the first episode, but Universe Carter wouldn't have accomplished much more than Rush did.
The communication stones, lets be honest, destroy the very concept of this show. It was marketed as a crew completely cut off from civilization in a hostile part of space. Instead some bright scriptwriter decided that instead of this, they would give them the ability to communicate with anyone, absolutely anywhere! Am I the only one that see's this as a ridiculous idea? this basically puts SGU in a situation where first season Stargate Atlantis had more communication problems than they do, despite the fact Atlantis is newer, closer and was in far better condition.
- Doesn't change the fact that they're stuck out there, just not as lonely.
- Being able to talk to Earth does absolutely nothing to change their situation, other than if they all die horribly, someone at least knows it happened. They're still in a derelict ship, with no way home, to be crewed by a group that's maybe 1/4 military, 1/4 scientist, and half unlucky civilians. So no, it does not "destroy the very concept of this show." Also, it would have been a Wall Banger for someone not to have remembered the stones, considering their abilities are known, and extremely useful for an expedition that's going to places quite literally unknown.
  - Given the fact the stones were used for gratuitous 90210esque scenes in "Earth", with such stunning and compelling drama as the senator's daughter realising she's shallow and her boyfriend is cheating on her, all of which transpires in a bar... it might well be worth saying that while the Ancient communication devices aren't inherently destructive to the shows concept, the way they're being used is severely undermining and cheapening the show. This troper finds it hard to not look at their use and have it scream LAAAAAAZY - because thus far, it seems to have been used solely for the purposes of exposition on characters and now, more of the IOA's idiot plans.
  - They have at least two stones. Possibly more. Assuming that the SGC can muster six experts on Ancient language and tech (not a huge assumption, even excluding Jackson, Carter, McKay and Zelenka), give each of the six experts one eight-hour shift on Destiny each day and they've have TWO experts working 24/7. No matter how smart Rush is supposed to be, he can't match that. Meanwhile, the Destiny folk who've been mindswapped back to the SGC get crash courses in emergency medicine, reading Ancient, or whatever else they might find useful. No, the SGC can't provide Destiny with more equipment, but Mission Control couldn't provide Apollo 13 with more gear either--but they sure as heck worked their asses off to help them. They didn't waste invaluable resources and time with lengthy goodbyes from the crew to their families.
    - The comparison to Mission Control is an excellent one.
  - The device fits five stones at a time and they presumably carry that many, but body-swapping also can't last forever. As for the experts, Rush is an expert in the language and tech, but he can only do so much with what he has. The only benefit to having others work on the problem is fresh perspectives, and this is somewhat mitigated by tying up Earth's finest minds on one task when there's other work to be done. The Apollo 13 thing doesn't work as a comparison. They knew the ship better than the crew. No one knows the ship better than Rush at the moment, and sending other experts means they'll have to get up to speed (it seems they'll actually do so in a later episode with a guest star, but there's not too many details on that). Finally, to the crash courses thing, given how they're going from one problem to the next, there's really not enough time for people to be taking such courses.
    - The show makes a big deal about the lack of skilled professionals like doctors and psychiatrists, why can't they use the stones to get a physician on board?
      - Because, as seen in the latest episode, using these stones on a daily basis is starting to have side effects. It's just a little memory bleed-over now. What happens when it degenerates into psychosis?
      - These side-effects only popped up in ep. 9 (i.e. the writers finally realized that stone overuse destroys the story). Before that, they used the stones without even a trace of concern. They allowed Eli and Chloe to spend the night in a club - pretty much anything is more important than that, so there's really no justification for not bringing useful people to the Destiny. It's simply a Plot Hole.
        Note that, in this instance, they really had brought supposedly more useful people in their place and barred them from returning. What else could they do?
    - As for letting Eli and Chloe go clubbing, it's pretty clear by this point that members of the 'expedition', for lack of a better word, are allowed to take purely personal time on their trips (note the Chinese IOA member's latest trip home).
    - I don't really get why everyone hates the stones. It's a nice variation on the whole isolation theme. Expert's minds are transported every time they are needed. Also, who is to say that McCay and Carter aren't looking in the vast repositories of ancient knowledge they have of both the ancients and asgard to figure out how Destiny works?
- I'm still irked by the idea that these stones allow for realtime communication across literally billions of lightyears. Um, signal scatter anyone? At those distances even one degree off isn't even reaching the same galaxy!
  - Clearly they built wizards into their devices.
  - Yes, because the ancients have never built any other tech which is capable of instantly transfering stuff over several galaxies. Most notably, they didn't invent this technology billions of years before the stones were even developed and did not have time to improve on it. Sarcasm aside, the stones could contain a miniature wormhole. It would take far less power than a stargate, because there is no need for the puddle, since no matter is being transported.
- The ISSUE with the communication stones is about atmosphere. Voyager, fucking VOYAGER managed to go five season before they got real time communication with Earth. Not to mention that thus far, the Ancient communication devices have just provided padding and thinly veiled exposition. OH! LOOK! Young has issues with his wife! The ability to communicate with Earth INSTANTLY kills the isolation. They even get to EXPERIENCE Earth with these devices! It allows the struggle for survival to go into - oh, look! The slutty senator's daughter has to tell her mother daddy died... RATHER than actually developing characters or forwarding plot.
  - Yeah, cuz the plot hasn't moved at all from the first episode! Nobody's showing any signs of development either! All because of those damn stones! It's not like a character's relationships and backstory actually matter, so let's forgo an established piece of technology that makes perfect sense to bring along given the setting so that the "atmosphere" can feel more like Voyager!
    
    Yeah, sure. And once again, a character is called "slutty" when she slept with one guy. Cut down the hate a little, take a chill pill, then get back to us when you stop foaming at the mouth, okay?
    
    The ability to communicate with Earthy doesn't "INSTANTLY kill the isolation". They're still isolated with no way home. They still need to figure out how to survive. They still don't even know if they'll survive, and they know there's no help coming from Earth. The stones are an established, used item in the universe already, and as mentioned before, if they hadn't been brought, then that would be a Wall Banger because why the hell wouldn't you bring an extremely reliable and compact communication system if you're going to parts that are literally and completely unknown?
    
    In other words, quit bitching about a character you feel didn't sleep with the right guy, face up to the fact it isn't Voyager, and think about what makes sense in the 'verse of the show.
  - Also, you may be meaning "the senator's slutty daughter". As far as we know, the senator was not a slut.
- How can something introduced right at the beginning of the show be destroying the concept of it? On the contrary, the communication stones are part of the concept of the show. They are opening up all kinds of interesting plot developments, for example fostering the feud between Young and Telford. If there was no communication with Earth, it would just be a clone of Star Trek Voyager. This Troper applauds them for doing something a bit different with the 'stranded' concept.
- "Earth" just plain has a distinct, cheap Deus Ex Machina feel to it.
- Could someone clear up a practical issue with these communication stones? We, the viewer, are seeing the actor who has swapped bodies rather than the actor they have swapped with. This is obviously to give the main characters screen time. What bugs me however is that does the character in question also see themselves as themselves, or do they see themselves as someone else? for example if a female swapped with a male would she have to go to the toilet with a (to her) invisible appendage? would a short man swapping with a tall man constantly be hitting their heads on door frames that look like they can fit through but actually can't? basically - if you still visually interpret your new body as your old body then surely there are hundreds of practical and downright impossible situations you could find yourself in.
  - People who swap see themselves and others who have swapped as the host body, not themselves. Chloe looks in a mirror at one point to see a different face staring back, and there's a camera in the stone room so people get a chance to see their host's face upon switching. It also seems to have some way to make sure people end up in a gender-matching host, the Daniel/Vala switch notwithstanding.
- In Justice, it would have made perfect sense to use someone from earth as the prosecutor - someone who doesn't have a personal agenda and doesn't have to live with Young for years to come after things get nasty in the courtroom. Which is pretty much what happens.
- Perhaps. Or everyone argued that they(the people on board) should be the ones to decide, since they are the ones that have to live with the decision. Besides, there would be major conflict about whether to have a court martial or a regular court.
Am I the only one bugged that Eli was able to solve, in his spare time, a puzzle that had stumped the highly qualified Dr. Rush (presumably with the help of McKay, Carter, and the dozens of other scientists in the Stargate program), and yet can't even hold a job at a fast food restaurant? I'm sorry, anyone who is that much of a genius would be able to easily hold down some kind of tech job with minimal effort. Especially considering his mom seems to be having health problems. The only way it makes sense is if he is extraordinarily lazy and selfish.
- Maybe he's just not suited to the fast food industry, or poor people skills. As for the problem itself, it being complicated math as opposed to more technical expertise, maybe he's just got a knack for it.
- Maybe he just wasn't interested in any old tech job and with his ill mother, his options for say... going to Silicon Valley or working at Boeing Aerospace may have been limited. Just because you're intelligent with certain things doesn't mean you love doing anything that's smart. Plus, technical fields generally require a lot of work, certifications, and what not if you want to even get entry level positions. As for the math, it does make sense - what people might normally be averse too may turn into something enjoyable if they have more tangible benefits out of it or find it enjoyable. One protein folding project gives scores to people based on how well they can identify and/or fold proteins. As well even outside of video games, look at the amount of devotion and attention Star Trek and Star Wars has generated - people have written entire technical manuals for ships that don't exist and may have only appeared a single time in the movies. As well, within the context of an MMO, it was probably the work of a lot of people that helped solve the puzzle - Eli have simply been the one to put it all together.
  - One must also note several bits of information. He's mentioned as dropping out of MIT, presumbly when his mother became ill. His mother also mentions during his phone call home to explain his absense that "...this is what you've always wanted to do." Entering MIT with aspirations of work in astrophysics or what not would hardly mean someone would want to end up doing say... managing a computer network. And as mentioned, with his mother ill, he may have been guilt tripping himself into not getting a job because he wants to spend more time with his mother.
  - Also in the matter of Eli solving a puzzle in his spare time, while Rush couldn't solve it after two years, first of all, he didn't just do it in his spare time, he claims to have spent quite a lot of time indeed working in it. Secondly, Rush has shown that he can very easily get locked into a decision. Eli was basically a new set of eyes, offering a fresh perspective. After all, Eli was the one who suggested the ninth chevron was a code, not a point of origin. Almost anyone who regularly worked at the S.G.C probably would have taken longer to think of that, since they're so used to the last chevron being the point of origin.
  - Eli's probably smarter than Rush in terms of sheer brainpower. He's what they call "gifted".
- Just for the record, it was shown on screen that he had an interview for a job, likely a relatively good one, that he canceled because it "wasn't in his skill set". He probably could get a job, but refused to.
- This troper assumed that Carter or McKay or even Zelenka could probably have solved the puzzle had they looked at it. In the grand scheme of 'Oh fuck more things trying to kill us' that is the Stargate Verse, figuring out how to dial the 9th Chevron is not a high priority.
  - Also, most of Eli's 'brilliant deduction', Math aside, was 'Hey what if we use Earth instead of this planet as the Point of Origin', which honestly, should be a pretty obvious solution.
    - How is that obvious? It contradicts the very basics of gate dialing. Eli's deduction is something only someone totally unfamiliar with the program would draw. Anyone else would have the procedure so drilled into them that the notion would be absurd.
    - The using Earth as point of origin was the solution to a secondary problem that came up just seconds before that. Eli's solution was regarding the power usage associated with using the ninth chevron.
- A lot of computer science research problems look a lot like puzzles.
- Yep, McKay has never needed any help solving problems; there's no one else in the universe that knows math better than he does. Keeping it in the family doesn't count, I guess. "McKayand Mrs. Miller" and "Miller's Crossing"
At the end of "Air (Part 3)", what happened to the two scientists who walked through the gate? They just go through, and we never talk about them again. We're never given any reason why they can't just dial back to the desert planet, or to the Destiny. They walk through, another guy is shot before he can. And that's it. Also, how did that dust devil lead the soldier to water? What was that? Why was it helping him? How did it know where the water is?
- The solider and the scientist (to be specific) went through first. The third guy earned himself a bullet in the shoulder for nearly screwing over the other four people on the planet by taking their only dialing remote. That's why those two can't dial back. They have no remote to do it with and Destiny gates don't come with DH Ds. Also Eli tries to contact them repeatedly to no avail. They went through and vanished, so they got left when the Destiny decided to move on. As for the magic tornado, it absorbs moisture, so logic would suggest it can find it wherever it may be. Then it just decided to pity Scott and made water/dragged some up from underground so he could drink it.
  - Note too that Rush had pointed out that a few hours would have not been enough time to establish habitility and, though he didn't say, there -must- have been a reason that the Destiny locked out those other addresses. If Rush and company had let the three go to another planet, not only would they have screwed the four people on the planet but also everyone on the ship as it would mean wasting precious time for the Destiny crew to call in for a progress report.
- And it's mentioned that the Destiny itself has locked out the other gate codes; they -wanted- to try it but they couldn't bypass Destiny's locks and that's not considering the time limit.
- Judging by "Aftermath", at least one reason why Destiny might lock a gate is because the gate is buried or otherwise non-functional. Meaning that trying to gate through would be the same as gating into an iris. Splat.
  - A buried gate is not the same as an iris. A buried gate just won't connect at all. An iris-type barrier would need an impossible number of factors to occur by random chance.
    - A buried Milky Way or (possibly) Atlantis gate won't connect at all. These are specifically stated to be older gates, with no DHD, so who's to say what kind of unsafe things they'll allow? The iris itself specifically shows that a gate can connect with something blocking the portal, so obviously the 'no connection to buried gates' thing is a safety feature, not an inherent part of the connection process.
    - The Iris was specifically designed by the Tauri to prevent matter from coming through the gate while still allowing a connection. Place the iris 1 micrometer towards the gate and it's effectively blocked and "buried." 1 micrometer further away from the gate and the iris itself is disintegrated when the wormhole opens. No buried gates is a part of the connection process, for the simple fact that no connection will ever go through if the gate is buried.
  - Well, regardless, gates that can't be dialed can't be dialed for good reasons other than "Destiny doesn't want to".
At the end of "Air (Part 3)", what was that small ship that broke off from the Destiny? At first I thought it was the shuttle containing Senator Armstrong, but in the next episode, the characters discuss what to do with the senator's body, implying that shuttle is still attached.
- It was an alien ship. It doesn't match the Destiny's design and it was latched on to the hull itself, not a docking bay of any kind. What aliens, however, remains to be seen. That's part of the mystery.
  - We know what it is NOW.
Is there a reason why "Air" needed three parts? The status quo at the end of part two wasn't so different from the status quo at the end of part three, aside from the air supply issue. The business on the planet seemed like its own self-contained plot deserving of its own episode title, doesn't it?
- You said it right there, "aside from the air supply issue." The first two episodes (well, three, really, since the first two-hour long episode counts as two) dealt with their air problems, the next two (which were originally one episode called Fire before being divided into Darkness and Light) deal with energy problems, the following one (Water) will presumably deal with water problems...they're following a pretty consistent pattern here. Probably the only reason they expanded Fire into Darkness and Light rather than Fire (Part 1) and Fire (Part 2) is that they could come up with two suitable contrasting words that described each half; since no similar split worked for the first set of episodes, they just went with the (Part 3) suffix.
  - Production-wise, "Fire" became two episodes because it was twenty minutes over standard running time, so they broke it up and padded it with whatever wasn't in it the first time.
I'm surprised no one has brought this up yet, but... since WHEN do stargates have a failsafe to keep them from closing on someone partway in? Decapitated System Lords want to know!
- That guy wasn't a System Lord. Aspiring one, maybe. Anyway, it's brought up several times that the gate will not close if something is passing through the event horizon (radio signals, matter). With any normal gate, this failsafe remains intact. Earth's gate is not powered by a DHD. It worked because they just killed the power and the gate shut down.
  - I distinctly recall the SG-1 episode Shades of Grey when O'Neill has located the rogue agents and tells them the only way they can get out of their situation is to head through the gate to earth. He says he'll be holding it open so they won't go anywhere else. We next see him in the gate room, sticking one arm in the event horizon. As long as you don't exceed the thirty eight minute window, you're fine.
- It wasn't a failsafe in the gates, it was a failsafe in the ship's computer. The ship was set to close the gate and enter FTL when the timer ran out, but it detected incoming matter through the wormhole and waited.
If the ship is powered by suns (as Rush so interestingly put it), I can only assume they mean hydrogen or helium fusion. If that's the case, why the hell didn't they just pick it up from the FRIGGIN GAS GIANT they used to brake with, thereby saving unnecessary horror, power, and wear on the ship?
- Maybe because the suns have ongoing fusion while the gas giants isn't? The ship isn't doing the fusion, it's just skimming energy off the sun.
  - In other words: Solar Power!
  - This troper presumed it was picking up fuel from the gas giants and using the star for ignition or sommat.
  - Helium-3. This isotope of helium is far more usable as fusion fuel than hydrogen, and stars contain quite a lot. Gas giants on the other hand don't.
    - Uhm, no, the easiest fusion reaction to get going is deuterium + tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen
      - Easiest, yes. Best? Hardly. Helium-3 produces a lot of power with very little radiation. Kind of a good thing. Trick is merely getting it started, but once you do...
- Gas giant have a lot more than hydrogen in them, there's methane, ammonia, all kinds of hydrocarbons and other contaminants. Suns are mostly hydrogen and helium, with a little bit of other elements, and so presumably it's much easier to purify out whatever the ship needs.
- Yes getting fusion to happen is harder then simply keeping it going.
- Why does Destiny wait until it's on the last ounce of power before recharging? Why not drop out of FTL a few weeks earlier and do it then, so that it's not necessary to shut off all the systems. As an added bonus, it could then decelerate using its own engines, rather than go through the apparently traumatic process of aerobraking (all that turbulence shows that it's not immune to the effects). That way, our heroes wouldn't be left holding the Idiot Ball, as they were when they assumed that after a million years, Destiny had miscalculated and accidentally plunged itself into the sun.
  - While Rush says the military turning on smaller consoles and the like didn't make a difference, it's likely that things like turning on the Stargate and them simply arriving (necessitating both life support and shields to keep some of the air in turning on) did drain the Destiny's batteries. If they hadn't shown up, it's likely the ship would've had plenty of juice left to just make the course correction, but as it was it had to change its plans somewhat.
- Since when was fusion power enough to power shields, FTL etc.? Naquida and ZPMs are pretty much mandatory for either of those by SG-1 canon.
  - To power the shields and everything else on the ship/base from a power source that can fit inside a suitcase? yes, thats true. Perhaps the Destiny has power plants specifically dedicated to shield generation and drives in addition to separate plants for different systems.
- Actually, nothing in the show states that the ship runs off of fusion power. It is quite possible that the purpose of the Destiny's trip into the star was to collect energy directly from the star (rather than fusion fuel), which could then be stored in Ancient Magical Capacitors (TM). Depending on how effective the capacitors are, it could be better than picking up anti-matter - the energy in a capacitor is stored in the electric field, and the field's mass comes only from the energy, so all of the "mass energy" is available for work.
  - The ship is shown explictly sucking up stellar matter in "Earth", so something about the fusion process is how the Destiny gets its own reactors going. As for the question of how the Destiny functions on such a power source, maybe its shields and FTL are super-efficient in that regard. It was built to last, after all, so it wouldn't do for its primary systems to be energy hogs. Also, as a note to the complete power failure, "Earth" also shows that normally the Destiny recharges much earlier, enough to keep the lights going at least, and doesn't have to pull an aero-braking maneuver to hit the star. Rush wasn't completely overreacting the first time. It must have lost a lot more power than it was supposed to and had to stop the crazy people from trying to kill themselves by shutting everything off.
  - Maybe fusing the stellar matter is used as back-up power? So, solar energy is stored in ancient magic power thingie (maybe a precursor to the ZPM?) and whenever that runs out, it uses fusion to keep up life-support and heat shielding.
20-year-old Master Sergeant Ronald Greer--wait a minute, 20-year-old? Uh, Master Sergeant is a rank that requires at least 16 years of prior service. Did Greer join the Marines when he was 4?
- Maybe SG service counts per month instead of year. Fighting aliens has to have its payoffs, after all.
- Field promotions perhaps and other distinctions. Not all promotions necessarily have to be mundane career work.
- Greer is a Marine, apparently attached to SGC. That means it's impossible for him to reach the rank of Master Sergeant at the age of 20. As the above poster noted, it takes at least 16 years to get the rank. Field promotions and "distinctions" will not reduce that required time in service to 2 years. It's a clear case of Did Not Do the Research and will therefore be added to the main page. I assume that the military adviser for the show (if there is one) was ignored due to the fact that "Master Sergeant" sounds cool.
- Don't forget that this is the Stargate franchise we're talking about. Even if Greer was technically born 20 years ago, there is so much Applied Phlebotinum lying around that he could easily acquire 16 years of military experience. Time dilation fields, advanced computer simulations that compress a milennia's worth of experience into a day (like what Telford claimed to have gone through in "Resurgence"), Mental Time Travel, and so on. Couple that with some act of extreme heroism that we haven't heard about yet, something that was made possible by Greer's "16 equivalent years of military experience", and you probably have enough weight to convince whoever's in charge of handing out ranks that Greer has some merit. Of course, reconciling the notion that he has wisdom beyond his years with the temper he shows in the first few episodes might be a problem, but if O'Neill could survive holding the entire library of the Ancients' knowledge in his head twice without losing his attitude, then Greer should be just fine.
  - A few episodes of SG1 actually played around with that idea, such as that memory device that was used on Mitchell. Maybe they finally got around to implementing it.
  - It might help to explain how someone with such obvious mental instabilities wasn't kicked out of the SGC long ago. Maybe whatever Applied Phlebotinum gained him an extra 16 years military experience also weakened his mental state which, coupled with his years of childhood abuse, sent him into a downward spiral. The military can't discharge him or move him to another assignment because of the top-secret nature of his work so they're doing their best to rehabilitate him.
The fact that they have people openly religious in a show that got started on the idea that gods are evil aliens just playing at the role and they can't even lampshade it?
- When did SG-1 prove that all religions were wrong again? Oh, right, they didn't. The idea was never that "all gods are evil aliens." It was that aliens were impersonating/inspiring the ancient gods, and the series as a whole conspicuously avoided making any such judgments toward the Muslim/Jewish/Christian god, except for once having a Goa'uld who was playing Satan.
  - It's not that every one in the know should be an atheist now. But they should question their faith is all I'm saying. You can't honestly expect someone to learn about the Goa'uld and not say "gee a lot of stuff my god did sounds like their m.o. maybe he isn't real."
  - Maybe if they're still worshiping the Greek or Egyptian gods you'd have a point, but Teal'c directly states that no Goa'uld would have done what the Christian God did, and I don't seem to recall there being any Hindu or other still-practiced polytheistic religions with Goa'uld representation; they were mostly relegated to ancient religions that are no longer in wide practice. Hell, the writers probably went out of their way not to use those gods so they wouldn't have people sending in letters about the portrayal of gods still being worshiped.
    
    Plus, people question their faith all the time as it is without having to have heard that the ancient gods were really evil aliens. Hell, you could argue that the fact that Earth is still around after fighting technologically and numerically superior enemies for better than a decade means there's some higher power watching over us (though if you want to get technical, it's the writers).
    - Actually they did have at least one. Amaterasu, chief deity of the Shinto pantheon through whom the Japanese Imperial Family used to claim descent (the current status is... ambiguous). Also one of the Goa'uld who showed up to the negotiations to get Earth covered under the Protected Planets Treaty. Showed up a few more times afterwards as well.
    - I take it you missed season 9 and 10 of SG-1? The Ori were fundamentalist Christians in disguise.
  - No, I saw them. Difference is the Ori never claimed to be the God. They totally and openly acknowledged that they were ascended beings, even if they were asking to be worshiped as gods.
    - People do worship ancient religions, just not in the numbers of other religions. Also old testament god goes big time Goa'uld. Besides any post Goa'uld occupation of Earth religion would be suspect. I just want some one to bring that up. Rush is a big enough jerk to call them morons and not have us think it a writer soapbox. It would at least balance Lt. Scott hallucinating Jesus over the thing they needed to save themselves like they were saved by God.
  - Granted, Old Testament God was a lot more wrathful, but He was still basically in the Jews' corner. Can you see a Goa'uld freeing people from slavery, for example?
  - It was from the Pharaoh who is viewed as the son of Ra, so it would have just been freeing them from a rival system lord to be his own. God doesn't have to have been a Goa'uld at any rate, the viking gods weren't but still aliens.
  - It's not just the Goa'uld pretending to be gods that's the problem, though. If the characters just believed in a vague 'higher power' it would be one thing, but we're getting Christianity/Catholicism specifically. The mere existence of life (usually human life at that) on other planets raises all kinds of problems:
    
    1. Do the people on other planets need to be saved by Jesus, like everyone on Earth? If so, why did God stick Jesus on Earth, a planet that didn't even have Stargate access at the time. Every human who ever lived outside Earth is burning in Hell.
    
    If not, why did God hate Earth humans so much? Either way, it ends up being really unfair for someone.
    
    A supposedly deeply religious Catholic would have to confront this. Either by adjusting the doctrine to fit the situation (by limiting the scope of the religion to Earth humans as opposed to the whole universe) or by becoming the most frantic missionary ever, since there's planet after planet of people out there who will be tortured for all eternity without even the opportunity to convert.
    
    2. What about the non-human aliens? Are the Asgard going to Hell for not believing in Jesus? What about the Ancients? What does Ascension mean for the concepts of Heaven and Hell? Is Ascension Heaven? If so, why did Daniel (and pretty much everyone else who's done it) require assistance to do it? If Heaven and Ascension are the same thing, why can't people who've died normally "descend" the way Daniel Jackson did, and why aren't they ever mentioned as being Ascended? If they aren't the same, is Ascending just a separate unrelated state? Can people escape going to Hell by Ascending? Wouldn't aiming for Ascension be more practical than aiming to go to Heaven, since Ascension is known to work if you can find the means? Would attempts to ascend during life be defying God's Will? And so on...
    
    I could keep going, but I think I've made my point. There should be zillions of problems for a Catholic character whose beliefs are deeper than "there was this Jesus guy who was kind of cool". I'm not saying Catholicism couldn't survive a situation like this; I do like it when current-day/near-future shows address how religions would react and adapt themselves to aliens/superpowers/whatever. But in this case, the religious authorities don't even know this stuff exists, let alone that they have to adapt. What does Lt. Catholic Guy think about the fact that his priest, ALL the priests, and even the Pope don't even know about life on other planets, let alone the Ancients who have Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence? Wouldn't it, I don't know, make him doubt what their ability to give advice about these things? Why did we get a mundane drunken-priest issue instead of this more relevant issue?
    
    But the fact is, Lt. Catholic Guy doesn't seem like he's thought about any of this, let alone changed his behavior or mindset because of it. Until we hear about how he got banished to the Earth-personal-only Icarus because he kept trying to tell people on other planets about Jesus, or how he's radically readjusted his beliefs in light of the new info (in which case, the traditional stuff makes no sense), I'm just not buying it. (And no, a vision of Sand-Jesus on another planet doesn't count. He could have been a random military dude in a desert on Earth somewhere and it wouldn't have looked any different.)
  - For quite a few of those points, you could simply change "alien/non-human alien" for "person of another religion." As a Christian, the question becomes, "Do Hindus all go to hell if they're not saved by Jesus? If so, why did God just put Jesus in Israel?" My point is, those are the same questions that people on this earth already ask, even without the idea that there's other, intelligent life out there. Also, never underestimate the human ability to believe fervently in something even though intellectually they know otherwise; I believe it's called Cognitive Dissonance, but I'd have to look it up.
    
    And for the record, the Vatican actually does have an opinion on aliens. As I understand it, the idea of there being life on other planets is fine and dandy, because they're God's creatures too.
- Also, for the record, the official Catholic view on "Does everyone who isn't a christian go to hell?" is "We wouldn't put it past God to save whoever He wants saved."
- They don't have to take the show in a vein of disproving religion or just making every one in the Stargate program atheist. But no one has ever been openly religious in a Stargate show before that wasn't worshiping an alien in disguise. I just feel that by having characters be openly religious and not address that it's hard to hold to your faith when your prophet could have been an alien evil or not is just wrong.
  
  When they first run into Oma in SG-1 Daniel points out that it seems like it could be the basis for Buddhism on Earth. So how hard is it to make the leap that Jesus was an Ancient who descended and taught people to be good because you have to be to ascend, and he wasn't in the cave three days after his death because he ascended again.
  
  It really comes down to the point that religion should be a story element instead of just a character trait. Just being a trait makes it seem like they had a show no one wanted to make so they just decided to toss a Stargate into the mix and we'll watch it because we've been here for fifteen seasons of gate already.
  - It is pretty well established that the Icarus project was Lt. Scott's first assignment in the Stargate program. And while he has probably read a lot of SG team reports, reading about something and experiencing it first hand are two completely different things. So the most most logical explanation would be that he hasn't had enough time or been through enough encounters with aliens masquerading as gods to cause him to seriously question his faith on that basis... yet.
- Short response to all of the above: they have more immediate concerns.
  - Hasn't stopped us from getting a seemingly random love triangle.
- Maybe he did consider it. Maybe he looked at everything, all the evidence of Ascension presented, and decided, "Well, I believe that Jesus wasn't an Ancient. I believe that Jesus was the Son of God, and he was resurrected from the dead." And maybe he did it years ago when he joined the Stargate Program.
  
  Unless someone comes to him with evidence, or a theory, or something that Jesus was an Ascended Ancient, there's really no pressing reason for him to be mulling over things right now. I'm a Christian (Lutheran, for the record), and while in the past I've thought about my faith and whether I believe it's the Truth, I don't do it terribly often unless someone else asks me about it.
  
  And I imagine, to some, it's probably something of a taboo subject in universe as well, for similar reasons to why the show never directly addressed it, to avoid pissing off devout Christians by trying to tell them their God is really a space alien. There's always been a certain...not hypocrisy, but self-centeredness of the SGC, along the lines of, "Your gods are fake, and you should do things our way, but we're not going to change what we do," and religion is probably under that header as well.
  
  And how does religion being a character trait and not a story element make it seem like "a show no one wanted to make so they just decided to toss a Stargate into the mix"? The characters' religions haven't been the focus before, why do they need to be now? That last point isn't making any sense to me.
  - The point is that no one before now has ever been open about being a part of any faith. Now it is a part of some characters, and in a show that was started by putting Earth at war with aliens posing as gods it just doesn't seem right to ignore the questions that could make someone ask themselves. By not having them question their faith on camera, it seems like Brad Wright was trying to pitch this show and MGM didn't want to bother with a Battlestar Galactica/Star Trek Voyager hybrid until Brad said "Oh it's also a Stargate spin off."
  - I am not understanding that logic at all. Seriously, I'm trying to think about it, but that doesn't make any lick of sense to me. The individual characters' faiths have never been an issue before (And yes, Col. Mitchell was open about being a Christian, or at least that his family was). So now that we have a character who is openly Catholic, because he's not contemplating his own navel and mulling about whether God was a space alien when A. he's had several years to come to terms with this since joining/hearing about the SGC, and B. he has much, much, much more pressing concerns right now, that means that it is somehow a Dolled-Up Installment?
    
    Where does one affect the other? How is there any connection at all? I really, really don't understand WTF you're trying to say here.
  - I'd just like to posit this: Is Ascension any less magical than "son of God"? It's explicitly stated as a "higher plane of being", all that stuff. It's quite possible that some people view it as an acceptable point of convergence for religion/mysticism and science, and keep their faith in the teachings of their religion while not being disillusioned by the seeming truth. After all, if Jesus was an Ancient, and his teachings were meant to bring us closer to Ascension, why would anybody but the really hardcore bible-thumping extremists think that's bad? Ascension is definitely not a bad way to spend eternity, it seems, and it's possible that Ascension lines up pretty well with peoples' previous notions of the afterlife anyway.
    
    At the end of the day, it turns out religion might have been closer to the truth than science would have people believe (or at least, that's what religious people might think). This might actually be pretty gratifying, as opposed to theologically traumatic. Plus, it kind of vindicates modern mainstream religions in a way; Older religions, such as those imitated by the Goa'uld and the Asgard have been shown to be nothing more than aliens in spaceships using technology. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc., might be the hand of the Ancients at work, beings of light from on high coming down to show us the path to salvation. Before the events of Season 5, members of the Stargate Program MIGHT have been disillusioned, terrified that Jesus and God were actually just some kind of self-righteous and flawed Alien at best, and downright evil Goa'uld at worst. Nowadays, though...
    - For obvious reasons, they've always left open the possibility that Christianity (and by extension, Judaism and Islam) are genuine religions, with no significant alien influences. The only mention of any Abrahamic religion, apart from characters practicing it, was the SG-1 episode "Demons", where the Goa'uld Sokar was posing as Satan. While it's often unclear whether the Goa'uld and Asgard inspired Earth gods or simply adopted their identities, here it's easy to conclude that Sokar did not directly inspire the Christian Satan.
      
      In fact, God's behavior in the Bible doesn't fit the Ancients either - their policy of noninterference would surely prohibit things like destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, or making a 100-year-old woman fertile. In the end, the Stargate Verse makes no real statement on the Bible (or Koran), apart from taking the literal interpretation of Genesis and bombing it from orbit.
Did anyone notice that Destiny picked up a 'The' in Episode 5? It wasn't "The Serenity," that crew actually corrected folks for getting the name wrong. So why did "Destiny" suddenly get to be "The Destiny?"
- It's not "The Destiny" it's "the 'Destiny'", as in "the" and then ship name. Sort of like saying "the Enterprise" or "the Odyssey"; it's not part of the name, just how it's referred to.
- Serenity was just Serenity because the crew thought of her as a person, not as a ship. It's pretty standard to refer to ships and other named vehicles as "the ________".
  - Probably also a matter of ease of grammer. They may feel that some phrases just sound better when used with 'the Destiny' and others with just 'Destiny'.
Just what the hell is TJ supposed to be? She is an Air Force Lieutenant. But she can't be a medic, because she's an officer (medics are enlisted). She's not a doctor though, because she's said she's only a medic. If she wanted to become a doctor, she could have done so with the Air Force from day 1 if she was smart enough to get into a civilian medical school on a scholarship, she'd be training on earth, probably never even heard of the Stargate, and she'd end as a Doctor, and as at least ranked Captain by the time she finished.
- It's possible to come into the military as, essentially, a civilian consultant that amounts to officer rank or at least something like an attache.
- It's also possible that TJ is a nurse. Training and knowledge in various medical aspects but not enough education to be a doctor, nor would she be enlisted and considered a medic. The real question then would be: Is she academy-bred, or ROTC?
- Being an Air Force nurse is the same for the purposes of her becoming an officer to being a Doctor, and all nurses are commissioned officers as well, and are generally the same ranks as Doctors. Medics are trained (as far as I know) from day 1, and stay medics the entire time. You don't transfer from the officer corp to become a medic. I can only guess that in joining the SGC, she was trained as a medic.
  - Or it could be the other way around - she was a medic before joining the SGC, where she underwent officer training.
A Stargate can connect to any other gate in its galaxy, so why is Destiny only in range of four (or one) at a time? The Stargate network of the entire galaxy should be available. For that matter, why is the 12 hour limit so important, if Destiny drops out of FTL whenever its gate is dialed?
- The Destiny won't drop out of FTL if someone is dialing the gate normally. The special nine-symbol address probably told it to explicitly stop and accept the traveler. Under ordinary circumstances, being in FTL would prevent any dialing whatsoever, as the system requires it to be stationary to lock on. Once it jumps, they're never getting back. The range thing is a bit confusing, but I always took it to be the planets Destiny decided worked for what needed to be done. It just doesn't load the rest.
- Alternatively, its not clear if Destiny is in a particular galaxy right now, and the number of stars between galaxies is comparatively slim. Which raises the possibility that Destiny really is only within range of a very small number of worlds suitable for the Ancients when they still planned on using it. This doesn't answer the question of the countdown clock, especially if Destiny "is" in a galaxy because the seed ship could be anywhere in its galaxy and still catch up to the seed ship when it finished seeding that galaxy. That, or Destiny simply hates everyone aboard, an explanation I'm prone to liking.
  - Unless Destiny has travelled a galaxy's distance since the premiere, the planet from "Air," for example, should still be in range. It defeats the drama of the countdown, since if someone was on a relatively habitable planet and about to get stranded, they could toss a few weeks' worth of supplies through the gate and dial back next time they're out of FTL. Given the Destiny's slow speed (a few billion light years in a million years is slower than even regular hyperdrive), it doesn't make sense.
    - Destiny doesn't seem to be orbiting any planetary body half the time. Maybe the gate can only lock on locally within a certain range. Sure, they can bounce from planet to planet in the network, but Destiny's gate will only work within a specific range, so once it hits FTL there'd be no way to get back. To continue the ever-popular phone analogy, one can think of Destiny, locally, as something that never has the same number, relatively speaking. Each time it moves, the address changes. Since no on-site DHDs exist to calculate the new address, only the remote dialers can. Those probably aren't networked through subspace, so as soon as Destiny hits FTL, the remote is useless.
      - Nope, we now know that it's possible to follow Destiny by gate-hopping, as long as the ship remains within the same galaxy.
- It probably develops something like this: Seeder ships are sent out with a single gate design (same as Destiny) to ensure compatibility - while all gates seem to be compatible, there's no need to complicate the issue and the Ancients would be rational to think that once they get those seed gates set up, they could simply re-built and update the gates as needed. And at a certain point, the seed ships (and Destiny) would be far enough away that continually updating their gate designs would be more trouble than its worth. The seeder ships drop/built gates however these are not active beyond a local range (no way to coordinate uh... coordinates) until the Destiny shows up and updates the gates addresses based on a map of it's own travels (You are now here relative to my starting point; here is your address) at which point it's theoretically linked into the rest of the network. Destiny itself, being a moving target, was probably never intended to be something to continually gate -from- and so may have not been built with the need to gate more than a short distance. Once you can gate to it and then access a local gate, you could then gate back to wherever you need to be or have someone access that local gate (via communications stones for instance). As the Destiny project was never completed by the Ancients, well...
- According to this article, the Destiny's Stargate is not only the oldest Stargate encountered by the SGC, but also has a limited range because of that. To quote: "It has a limited range, a far more limited range than the Milky Way or Pegasus Galaxy stargates. For example, if the Destiny is travelling through a galaxy it can't go anywhere in that galaxy, it can only go within a limited range, that's why they put it on a ship..."
  - Arrgh! Why is it an old stargate if Destiny is only a million years old? The Milky Way gates are over 3 million years old! This Just Bugs Me.
    - - Shocking perhaps, but consider: Rush is just wrong or speaking figuratively to indicate "really old." Plus how do we know that the Milky Way Gates in generla weren't simply replaced? The Beta Gate was the only one that could be somewhat reliably dated (though even then you can get around it) to pre-Atlantis departure.
    - Continuity Drift. Whenever they say one, think four or five. Your brain will thank you.
- Another possibility lies in a few episodes of SG-1. In the Pilot, "The Torment of Tantalus", and "2001" that without a dialing program capable of compensating for stellar drift, you can only dial relatively close planets (such as Abydos in the movie and the pilot). DH Ds due this automatically ("Avenger 2.0") and keep the whole network in sync, while the SGC has to do so manually. With the Destiny constantly moving, it would likely have to re-calculate gate positions fairly often, which takes time. So until the crew can access the main systems and force the Destiny to stop and update its dialing program, they only have the nearest planets available. Combine that with the Seeder ship likely only planting a few dozen gates in each galaxy before moving on, and the Destiny possibly being in the void in between galaxy's (or on the edge of one), and, well....its miraculous that the ship was able to dial that many planets to begin with, much less ones with what they needed.
  That actually makes more sense too. None of the gates have been shown with DHDs so it may simply be a matter of being unable to compensate as much as the newer gates for drift and other factors; the Destiny may be collecting data and updating gates but ultimately, perhaps, the Ancients were going to gate to the gates and install DHDs after exploring with Kino for anything worthwhile. No good stuff, let the gate fall out of the system. Destiny can dial these gates only because it already knows where they are relative to itself.
  
  Well, they've now explained and shown that the seeder ships make cheapie knockoff stargates with a very limited range; they clearly knew that extremely long range gates were possible, that was how the Ancients planned to get Destiny her crew, but it didn't make (economical?) sense to build the high end models deployed around the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies. Furthermore, thanks to the limited range, it appears that these short-range models just ping every stargate in range, so they don't need the big directory and update froo froo that the galaxy-spanning gates have.
  
  The newer model of gates probably didn't exist when they sent it out. Something along the lines of "we're sure to solve this issue eventually, but for now let's get the ship out there." They could always upgrade the gates later.
  Perhaps the reason the gates are still the same is a lack of naquadah, which is needed to channel the power for long-distance wormholes. If the ancients ever started colonizing another galaxy, they could use the naquadah gates from home, and build another one there to dial back.
In Water, they say they don't know why the creatures attacked Gorman. A couple people posit that it might have been self defense, but they won't know anything about what happens until he comes to. Didn't anyone see all the spent shell casings near him? Or check his gun? Not that it would've told them everything, but it woulda been nice if someone mentioned it.
They mention that Gormon might have provoked them, which carries the implication that they did find the casings and put two and two together. They just didn't state it outright.
That's my point. They say "He might have provoked them," and "We don't know what happened." You'd expect at least a mention of "We found shell casings, he was shooting at them!" or something.
Mallozzi's blog does make mention that they're more for the "show, not tell" method. This is one of those cases where they just let the implication ride, rather than explaining it.

For all they know, the alien attacked Gorman without provocation and he fired in self-defence.
Yet it didn't attack either Scott or T.J., so it's logical to assume he fired first.

That certainly supports the idea that Gorman attacked first, but maybe the bugs had been observing up to now and were only now starting their attack. Or maybe he did some innocent action that the aliens interpreted as threatening. It's fair enough to consider the possibility that he provoked them but, well, they do consider that, they just can't rule out all the other options on such limited information.
In Earth, why do they permit Eli and Chloe to go out and abuse the bodies they are inhabiting willy-nilly? Wouldn't the Air Force have guards chaperoning them everywhere, to make sure they don't do completely irresponsible stuff, like getting drunk as -surprise- Chloe did? Also, it's probably a bad idea to let Eli drive a car if the connection might be disrupted at any moment, resulting in a highly disoriented person being placed behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.
Telford switched back mid-coitus with Young's ex-wife and this you consider irresponsible use? A little drinking is fairly tame by comparison. In any case, anyone on either end of the stone resolved to loan their bodies to the other side, so as long as they don't do anything too outrageous, it's probably ok. They do mention a set of rules, so obviously the guideline permits for getting drunk to some extent and casual sex.
Also, unless I'm mistaken, they didn't know the connection might be disrupted until after the car driving thing. Presumably, they're only going to break the connection on schedule when everyone's at the base.
They didn't have any sort of schedule for popping back and forth. The first time it was a "glitch" that "wouldn't happen again". The third time Eli says "That's it! Switching back and forth without warning is completely {Switches back} unacceptable!"

I may be overthinking this, but, when they use the stones, wouldn't they get a crash course on "Know your new body"? Suppose one of the soldiers is severely allergic to something - like strawberries - and then the Destiny person comes on, takes control of the body and just as easy goes on a romantic dinner and eats strawberries... Now that would stink.
They presumably have volunteers with no immediate medical concerns, and when they do they inform them of any problems before they happen.
How the hell can three puny Ha'tak ships bring the Hammond, with all it's Asgard upgrades into trouble? What the hell?. The Daedalus-class ships were possibly the most powerful ships in the entire Stargate Verse, even surpassing the Ori Cruisers. And yet, they get into trouble with freaking Ha'taks. Look, I don't care about the whole "Yeah, their technology evolved too" excuse. There's no way they could have become that powerful in 2 years or whatever. The difference between a Ha'tak vessel and a Daedalus-class ship post Asgard upgrade is simply too big.
Why not? The humans evolved in that short of time.
While it's hard to deny that humans did a pretty passable job of reverse engineering alien tech, most - if not all - the good stuff was out and out handed to humanity by the Asgard. Although quite how the US military were able to draw up the plans for not ONE model of space faring ship but THREE...

The three cruisers jumped in and starting firing without a word. Maybe they got a lucky hit in and nailed the beam cannons before shields could be raised. Without those, Earth ships have rather sub-par offense, and defense would be whittled down eventually.

The pilot took place a week after the end of Stargate Atlantis, at which point ALL of Earth's ships were, for various reasons (mainly being almost destroyed) unavailable for the defense of Earth, and the Hammond wasn't even finished construction (hence being unavailable in preventing the end of all life on Earth). So its more than likely the ship was quickly pressed into service just so they can look after bases like Icarus, and is nowhere near battle-ready.
But still, remember: at the end of SG-1 season 7, Anubis attacks Earth; before doing an all-out attack he decides to see how Earth will react, and sends in two Ha'taks. The comment they make to the president is (slightly paraphrased): "If that's all they're gonna throw at us, the Prometheus can give them a run for their money." The Prometheus, mind you, an earlier generation ship, without any of the upgrades the other ships got in the meantime. The Hammond, even though half-way completed, should be more than capable to hold its own against three Ha'taks; it would have made more sense if rather than just three ships it had been a small flotilla that attacked the planet.

The US Government has a history of majorly overestimating the effectiveness of their own weapons against the Goa'uld. Recall when Apophis first tried to invade with a couple motherships, and that one Air Force officer was so convinced that the two missiles they sent up were going to wipe out the ships. Or how Kinsey kept going on about how "They'll be sorry they challenged the United States of America!" Just because an adviser said that Prometheus was going to be able to take on two Ha'taks doesn't mean it actually could.

Actually: the railguns used on earth ships should have been able to dish out considerable damage to the Hatak vessels. Why? Because basic physics, thats why. The bullet does not get blocked by the shield via magic. It requires power and every power-system can be overtaxed. Hammer the vessels long enough and the shields must fail, and then you have free reign to turn the hull into swiss cheese. It is totally understandable that the railguns performed subpar when used against hive ships - just look at the size of these things - the hives simply had the "bulk" needed to take the fire, ask for more and facerape you. But Hataks didn't. The hammond would most likely have won the battle, even without Asgard beams. Case in point: In all my sins remembered, we see a flock of 302's railgun their way through the shield of an Asuran Aurora Class, then slam it with missiles. Do not joke about high velocity slugs coming for you. (yes btw thats how ancient drones work: crash into things fast and repeatedly. like a better railgun, with bullets that turn around for another run.)

I went back and checked (transcript here, the line is about one-third down the page). First, it wasn't two Ha'taks but three; second, the line was said by a random adviser, but corroborated by General Hammond, who has proven not to be the kind of person to underestimate his enemies.

Perhaps there were originally more Ha'taks, and the Hammond destroyed several before they finally disabled her primary weapons.

Maybe something was wrong with the Hammond's primary weapons (ie Asgard beams) at the time - some engineering fault, or one of the techs accidentally spilled coffee into a capacitor or something. As the Hammond - or any Daedalus-class battleship - can take on a few Ha'taks with just its secondary weapons (ie railguns and missiles), they figured that it was OK to put the Hammond on shuttle duty to Icarus, a base they aren't expecting to be attacked anyway.

So the Hammond was sent out unfinished because the rest of the fleet was in even worse shape from battle damage? Sounds a lot like the Hammond is yet another example of somebody caught in the wrong place at the wrong time; she was spaceworthy but not really combat ready.
One of the basic ideas of this show - that the folks who ended up on the Destiny are a crew of misfits who really don't belong there, is really hard to buy. Sure, maybe they wouldn't be the best of the best, but it's been established that to even get into the Stargate program you have to be really really damn good (and... uh... pass a psych profile).
Just being good doesn't mean they're qualified for what's happening now. They have what seems to amount to about five decent scientists in a crew of 80, and they're working with unfamiliar Ancient tech without the proper equipment.
True, but so far the way they're being portrayed these folks wouldn't have been qualified for anything related to the Stargate program. Ever. I'm not saying that they should be the perfect crew for this expedition, but so far they seem to be entirely too incompetent and screwed up. Again, the psych profiles? I can believe that one or two people might slip through, but all of these people have serious big time massive issues. These are just volunteer grunts, they're hand picked for this program because they're so damn good.

How do you figure that all of them were hand-picked for the expedition? In Earth, it was pointed out that most of the people on the ship were NOT supposed to be there. It seems that of the people on board Destiny only three or four were likely to be included in the actual expedition. And while Rush seems to be one of them, it's iffy that he would have been taken after all.
I didn't mean to imply they were handpicked for this mission, but everything we've seen in the past implies that anyone who gets into the Stargate program period is selected because of excellence.

Despite Telford's objections, the implication is that Rush always had a spot. Whether he would have on a return trip is what Telford was aiming at. I don't see how these people wouldn't have passed psych profiles. Greer, at his worst, might not have made it, but his anger issues, for the most part, seem subdued unless he's significantly provoked (as the conversation with Young in "Light" implies, Telford had it coming for whatever reason). Scott's fairly straight-laced as far as military personnel go. TJ was having an affair with Young, yeah, but that probably never got out. The water-theft guy is probably just having a hard time dealing with the isolation. Under normal circumstances he'd pass. Beyond those examples, I don't see any horribly outrageous personality flaws that would preclude service on what is implied to be a backwater posting (why else send Wray there?).

Point taken, but other than Rush, you have only mentioned military personnel. While i have no problem saying that the military personnel were probably wanted on the expedition (with the exception of maybe Greer), or at the very least they were capable of taking nearly any mission through any gate, military personnel constitute at most 20 of the 60+ people on Destiny as a whole. There are only, really, 3 or 4 non-military personnel that we can point out and say "you could have deserved to be here regardless of the screw-up." That leaves, at minimum, 35 people (going with a baseline of 60, but i believe it's a total of 80 on Destiny) who aren't supposed to be there (including the IOA representative, the math geek, and the Senator's daughter). The majority of the scientists on the Destiny were likely drawn up as the people who were to solve the 9th Cheveron problem (or to explore how the planet Icarus works), with no real intention of having any of them accompany the expedition through the gate if everything went "as planned." And i believe that's the biggest reason why the misfit crew bit works. More than 60% of the group on the Destiny right now (all of which civilians/scientists) have no real business there, and really don't have a whole lot to do or help assist with.
What you say about the civilians makes sense, although I still think even those would have to be pretty special people to be working for the Stargate program. It's not even like this was just some random outpost, this was a very special base being used to figure out the 9th Chevron, which is kind of a big deal.

I agree. But keep in mind the activities and specialties necessary for activating the 9th Chevron are not necessarily the same as the activities and specialities needed for an expedition through the gate to wherever the 9th Chevron went. There may have been some overlap, but primarily, the people at the specific base are likely not the first or even second choice for the mission. And i highly doubt that there was no one on Icarus who was there primarily as a geologist (or a similar speciality) to figure out how Icarus worked, and see if it could be implemented on another planet.

There's also the base personnel, who just keep Icarus Base operational - technicians and janitors.
It'd be funny if while the medical department got hammered, the Icarus janitorial staff are all alive and in good health.

True to an extent. TJ is 'only' a medic while Beckmen and his staff (well, the one guy shown to be helping him out) were the cooking staff at Icarus.

I think they might actually have intended to drag Eli along. There wouldn't be reason to bring him otherwise. If his solution was the only thing they wanted from him, just using it would be enough. Clearly he had proven himself a valued asset that might come in handy later. Other than that, your figure sounds pretty good, but you have to remember the setting. You had what amounts to the kitchen staff, civilians on a political visit, and regular military personnel. The whole idea at the time was to make a show of it for their benefactor. All the competent people were out, so to speak.

As an analogy, take the various space programs in the real world. You have people that develop and work on all the 'stuff' required to fly to the moon, but the people that actually fly to the moon are different people. Just because the guy who helped build the rocket knows all about the rocket is very smart and qualified to be a rocket scientist doesn't mean he's qualified to handle the various problems and activities required for actual space flight, EVAs, and what have you. Or likewise, just because someone is an employee of a car company doesn't mean they're also qualfied to be high speed stunt drivers. In context of the show, qualified doesn't mean they're not very good at what they do, rather, it means they're not the sort who were trained to handle the problems of space travel, exploration, and what not.
Is anyone else starting to find it a bit trying that pretty much everyone except Eli and the senator's daughter have been to the Avery Brook's Shouting Sisko school of acting? Obviously, a misfit crew on a broken ship, with limited supplies and no immediate prospect of getting home is going to put people on edge but must this result in ACTING = SHOUTING with such regularity? Although, watching Rush chew his way through the set is sometimes rather amusing.
What? Most of the character interactions have been pretty subdued, except for a few points where Dr. Rush gets exasperated with one or more others and when Col. Telford is around being a Jerkass.

Take, for example, Light. For a large group of people to see only a few of them be lucky enough to have a chance of survival (the shuttle lottery) and be as calm as they did doesn't fit the claim at all. The only person to get worked up over it had already been shown to be a loose cannon. In fact, the reactions were down right subdued. Overall, I would expect there to be more shouting in a situation like the one the characters are stuck in. I'd certainly lose my cool regularly in that setting.
There really are only three possible reactions to the scenario posed in Light. Either A) Accept that you're probably going to die, but could get lucky; B) Freak out, claim the whole thing is crap, and try to storm the way to salvation; or C) Suicide. I think that the fact that most everyone reacted in the A category probably says more about the SG and IOA psych evaluations of off-world personnel than anything.
Or D) Trust that the big ancient spaceship knows what it's doing and didn't just happen to aim itself directly at a star through fluke misfortune. Seems like only Dr. Rush might have been taking that option.
Funny how nobody else thought of that, at the time. The odds are pretty slim that Destiny would accidentally end up pointed straight towards a star by something that could have been predicted. Especially when you take into account that the ship has been taking care of itself pretty well (considering) for the past 'some' million years. Compared to the odds of surviving on a completely unknown planet, let alone ever being rescued. This Troper would have taken himself out of the lottery, too!
"Life" got me thinking. Sergeant Spencer (the bald crazy guy), seemed to be taking prescription drugs at the beginning of the episode. Honestly, I'm really only annoyed that it took me this long (9 episodes) to realize that such a thing might be a problem for those on the Destiny.
He was doing that in "Light", too. I've tried to catch a glimpse of the label, but to no avail. I'd have to venture a guess that they're "anti-[something]" pills. His increasingly foul temper would suggest the pills just aren't doing their job.
Well his temper could be a result of him being pissy about it not a result of the pills or his condition per say. Given his actions and words ("I don't have a year."), it's likely that whatever he has is some sort of physical and not mental problem that would, ordinary, be easily controlled and not interfere with military needs. Mental and he'd have been declared mentally unfit for duty. Regardless, given his response to the situation, he's probably going to continue his physical and mental deterioration. Alternatively, he's taking some sort of illegal drug that he's been hiding or has some condition he's been hiding (Young didn't seem to be aware of why he was lashing out despite, presumably, knowing something significant like someone who needed medication).
It wasn't "I don't have", it was "I can't wait", or the crew would have reacted differently.

Young wouldn't necessarily know about it if they were obtained legally. Medical records in the military are more or less confidential until something serious shows up. Especially in mental issues. If it's something that can be treated through medication, it's more likely it was treated with pills. And unless they were seeking some sort of special treatment, the patient wouldn't be likely to tell his superiors. Likewise, the doctor who prescribed his medication would not be obligated to tell his the patient's superiors about the situation until they got stranded on Destiny, as there wouldn't be a risk until that point. I can't recall if the doctor died on board or before they left Icarus. Either way, it's not far fetched Young wouldn't know about the situation at all.

I was tad more concerned with the fact that he only had one pill left as of the beginning of "Life" and likely none by the end of it. So I think they weren't doing such a good job because he was rationing them in an effort to make them last as long as possible. Not exactly going to find refills anytime soon.
Ax Crazy, coming right up.

If you don't know where the Gate will lead you and when (if ever) you'll come back, why take people who rely on prescription drugs? It just screams bad idea!
It screams bad idea! a tad less than staying on a planet that's going to explode...

That's irrelevant. Look, everyone at Icarus Base is there for the express purpose of going on an expedition to wherever the nine-chevron address goes, right? It's just like when the Atlantis expedition left; you have no idea where you're going and when (if ever) you're coming back. You're leaving with whatever you can carry and that's it. No pharmacies out there in the great unknown, right?
No. That is six ways wrong. As mentioned earlier, Icarus base was designed for the express purpose of figuring out how to dial the 9th Chevron, and find out where it goes. THEN there would be an expedition. The reason why the Atlantis expedition was self contained was that all the records that were obtained about it was that it was a self-contained base in which there were ZPMs on location, and one could dial there and back at any time. People had ideas as to the purpose of the 9th Chevron, but no one knew exactly where it went, or what was available on the other side. The pilot (Air part 1/2) made that explicit. A MALP would go through, info would be collected, then after everything was analyzed, a specialized team might go through to check the other side. Then more trips as the case may be. Icarus going explody made the whole deal moot, and everyone on the base had to be evacuated. So what they had when the left Icarus was we could be going to Earth, but we're going to this new place because this is the only chance we have and Rush wants it. If you don't want to come along, that's all fine and dandy, but anyone who stays dies. Take what you can carry.
Exactly. The people on Destin are mostly technicians and support staff, with a few surplus scientists. They aren't the kind of people you send on SG missions, but they're probably like the kind of people working at the SGC.
Ok. They're billions of light years from Earth. They're travelling faster than light. And still they use those mind stone things to send their consciousness back to Earth, instantaneously, for some good old fashioned Star Trek body swapping. Come on!
Was there a particular Bugs Me in that? The stones are just good like that.

I think what he's trying to say is They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot.
Col. Young just bugs me. Sure, its a crew of misfits isolated in space. Rush and Eli can be justified because they are geniuses, Chloe's there because of politics, even the behavior of the other civilians can be explained because they just signed up for lab work. But not the military, and especially not Young. Let's see: he's the commander of a Top Secret outpost of humanity in space, on a unique planet hosting a critical research project. You'd expect a career officer with top-notch skill and dedication, best of class, excellent leadership. So far, this is at best an Informed Ability. He's grumpy, doesn't lead very well (go on an mission on an ice planet, together with your best pilot? You're a Colonel, you should know about delegation by now), doesn't keep an eye on Rush and, most importantly, he totally fails at communication with his superiors. He uses the stones when he feels like it (we see Telford waiting all the time), shouldn't a daily status report be the first thing you establish? He disregards orders (!!!), argues and bickers instead of giving proper status reports, constantly fights with Telford (even hits him in the face). And let's not even get started on the situation with his wife...
Rush calls him out on this in Justice and mentions something about Young stepping down from SG command because he (Young) couldn't make the tough decisions. Icarus might have been Young's last chance at staying in the program and being essentially head of security for what would have been a mildly important but low risk project. Or something to that effect; at any rate, an assignment where he -wouldn't- have to make the kinds of choices he's so bad at or that demands the sort of leadership he's so bad at. As with everyone else on the ship, he's not necessarily qualified for what he's doing.
Young was stepping down because he was trying to fix things with his wife, not because of any problem with his career. Jack even mentions that Young was his first choice. Rush still seemed to have a point, though. Young hasn't seemed willing to take risks where it might be logical to do so, and does where it's a bit illogical. Pays off so far, but I think it will start to come back on him now that Rush is (temporarily) out of the picture.

Being the first choice doesn't mean anything - being the first choice to go to the insane asylum just means you're more crazy than the other game. Jack may have been doing and saying what he felt he needed to say to make sure bad stuff doesn't get worse - saying what Young needed to hear. As smarmy as Jack is, I don't think he'd straight up tell the leader of a lost expedition where tensions and relations are thin and vulnerable to break at any sign, "Yeah, I only gave you the job to save your butt and don't really think you can do more important jobs. I trust you'll rely your basic training but really, I'm not confident in your ability so I'll just give authority to people I think I can handle it."

In this case, being the first choice would mean that Jack felt him qualified enough to lead a team into the unknown potentially never to return. Unless he was outright lying just to get Young to feel better about himself, which isn't likely since Young turned the job down and would thus know his status, then he really did feel Young was capable of doing the job even if Young himself did not.

This troper started off agreeing with the all the above-mentioned gripes about Young. But, it's clear that when he puts his mind to it, Young can Colonel Badass with the best of them. I think his problem is that he's distracted; if he wasn't married, I don't see him dropping the ball as often as he does.
Valid observation. Look at the S2 premiere. He keeps his cool up until the point where he learns TJ's been shot.
The Bugs in 'Time'. I know they're just there to be scary monsters but as animals they make little sense. As a large swarm that eats meat it would make more sense for them to attack a person more then one at a time, they would get more food with less effort then one creature burrowing through a chest and then leaving the dead body to waste.
We don't know that they eat meat. They may just be territorial. A meat-eating creature probably wouldn't be so quick to ditch its meal, after all.

Bear in mind, they also were attacking a group. Attacking en mass would be more effective one on one but it'd be less effective because it would allow the rest of the group to escape (or hurt them). Downing one and then moving on to attack still active opponents is a good thing at times especially if they can come back and move/eat the food later. Predators and bugs may be animals but they're not stupid or mindless.
The plot of "Time" isn't resolved in the episode, it's resolved in a Kino webisode. This bugs me. A person should be able to watch the episodes in order on DVD and not shout "Hey! What happened?" And don't the powers that be know that only some of their viewers would know about the webisodes, and they would be very annoyed that there was no "Part Two" to explain the plot resolution?
Without the webisode, they ~~expect~~ hope that the viewer will be able to put two and two together to realize what happens next, or what did happen at any rate. It doesn't take the webisode to figure out that by sending back the Kino, Scott fixed things, or maybe it took two or three loops. In any case, SGU isn't the first to end on a "it will get fixed" note with no actual followup. I'm sure SG1 has done it a few times.

I would hope that the people who put together the DVD of the first season would have the webisodes in there. And since most of the Kino webisodes are supplemental to specific epidsodes, I would like to think that they'll have some sort of option for that (to see the supplemental Kino webisodes after each episode on the DVD). Besides, the DVD won't be released for a while anyway.

Yeah, like it couldn't be guessed what happened. Or rather, like it wasn't obvious that they weren't going to show the resolution. Curse the writers for assuming viewers aren't morons!
Something bugs me about this show's very existence: SG-1 was canceled because advertisers like to target young men and the fan base was all women. So in advancing the saga, do they create a more action-oriented show? Nope, they make a soap opera in space. Hardly any action at all, just 20-somethings acting like angsty teenagers complaining about "Oh, this guy's sleeping with this girl who likes this guy but he's married to blah blah blah" for an hour. Hell, even in the episode where they were in a forest with giant bug monsters, we got more scenes of them sitting around discussing the bug monsters and their personal lives rather than them shooting some freaking bug monsters. How is this show not directly targeted at bored housewives?
SGA was the action show you refer to, then they got tired of that. Then came this.
And according to the ratings it's worked out pretty well for them.
For a very short time, and then they went straight in the toilet.

Okay, I take issue with this. I loved SG-1, and while I don't like Universe very much, I'd probably like it a lot less if they did more shooting and less talking. And I'm male. So firstly, way to stereotype your own gender, there. "Durr, guys like shootin' stuff, not this boring talking and relationship junk!" Yeah, maybe you do, but so? Maybe this isn't the show for you! Go watch something else, and stop telling everyone else what they should and shouldn't like based on their gender. And secondly, if you make a show that women like, uh, isn't that a pretty awesome demographic to advertise to as well? So maybe they wanted men as their demographic at first, so what? I bet any executive would kill to have a show that appeals to a lot of women. (SG-1 lasted how many seasons? And it was getting more action oriented towards the time at which it got cancelled!) Are you just complaining that the show is targeted at icky girls who have cooties, and not at Real Men (tm) such as, uh, yourself? Complaining About Shows You Don't Like much?
For a crew stuck for weeks/months away from the niceties of home and with only the supplies they carried with them, the male cast who don't already have beards sure do look a little too clean shaven. I mean, Scott always looks like he's just shaved with a brand new razor not more than an hours ago! In Real Life men grow beards. Sometimes, overnight even.
They have knives. Not the best way, but it can work. It's also not that hard to believe that razors were included in the expedition supplies, either. Not shaving razors, specifically, but certainly razor blades like in a box cutter or something. On the extreme end, maybe the rooms have super-tech razors. The Ancients aren't likely to evolved past facial hair, after all.

Maybe a few people grabbed toiletries, including some electric razors.
Confirmed. Young has an electric razor, so they must have brought a supply with them, or they're all sharing that one.
We've by now established that the Destiny is moving slower then a standard vessel would in hyperspace (thats a gou'old hatak) with the upgrades to the Daedalus class vessels, they can make the trip from earth to Pegasus in 4 days. Even if it takes a few months to a year or two to get there, they definitely could cover the distance in a reasonable time frame, drop off a team of skilled experts to deal with the Destiny, and taking the civies back. Its not a perfect solution, but its one that they could do right now, and would definitely be better then them all just telling those stuck on destiny 'tough luck'.
The standard Daedalus class intergalactic speed is 18 days for every three million light-years. That's about 16 and a half years per billion, and since Destiny is several billion out (minimum 3, max 9), it's going to take at least half half a century for any ship other than the Odyssey to get there. Daedalus class ships are not built for those kinds of journeys. Using the ZPM-powered Odyssey, it's four days for the three million light-years. That's a bit more than 3 and a half years per billion, so at least a decade. Assuming the power even lasts that long. Plus the crew would age along the way. Even so, to do this would be to abandon one of Earth's precious few ships, one of which is even more precious than the rest, to a mission that, at least, would take them several decades to complete. No one in the SGC or anywhere else in the government would approve this. As far as they're concerned, Destiny is going to be finding its own way home. The only ship capable of making the journey in a reasonable time frame is Atlantis, the hyperdrive of which could cover the minimum distance in about 41 days. That is of course assuming the power doesn't fail on the way.

...did I miss something? Did they find out where the ship is? Because as far as I knew, the ship was flying off in some random direction, and they have no idea where it is in relation to Earth. Even if they took Earth's fastest ship, loaded it with geniuses to make it even faster, and set out at maximum speed... where would they go?

Destiny has a map of where it is. In an earlier episode it showed its path starting at Earth and going to its current location.

I don't really think the Destiny's FTL drive is slower than hyperspace. They are moving between galaxies like they're hopping on stones in a pond.
If the game was designed by people who didn't know the solution to the puzzle, how does it recognize the solution to the puzzle?
It seems Eli was the only player who even recognized that it was a puzzle- that alone is a red flag which would catch the SGC's attention. Without knowing exactly what the problem was or how Eli solved it, it's hard to say exactly what information was being exchanged, but any attempts at a solution can be transmitted to Rush, who seemed to know a possible answer when he saw it.

It's possible the puzzle didn't recognize the solution. Remember what happens when Eli solves it? Nothing. The game doesn't even acknowledge it. It's more likely that the game was designed with the same elements as the Icarus problem, and people were monitoring whoever was on that 'quest' at the time and seeing what they did about it; if anyone came up with something workable, they'd go check them out.
That sounds plausible.

The game doesn't necessarily need to know how to get the answer for it to recognize the answer. To put it in the simplest terms, it's like that puzzle where you have to move water between three tubes, getting each tube to a specific water level. Knights of the Old Republic has one such puzzle. In this case, the game doesn't really need to know how the puzzle is solved, only the conditions necessary for it to be considered solved. For the show example, the game puzzle doesn't know what the equation is to get the result. What it does know, however, is that the correct equation will produce a specific output, and the game is programmed to recognize that. Eli notes that the firing sequence did lock, so the game knew he did it right.

The above comment is correct. NP-complete problems, for example -- we have no way of generally solving them quickly, but we definitely can test quickly whether a candidate solution is valid.
How do they have so much stuff on the Destiny? They only had a few minutes to grab what they needed before evacuating the base. How well-stocked could the Destiny be after traveling through space without passengers for so long? It's like Gilligan's Island!
Most of the stuff they have is expedition supplies. As was made clear in the pilot, they basically grabbed anything in the room not nailed down and started running. There were 80 people to grab stuff and a room full of supplies. Not to mention 6 minutes to do that in.
Like an entire couch? I mean, where did Young pull that couch from that he is sewing his socks on? They have Hammerspace on the Destiny? Don't tell me the Ancients had a bad taste in furniture. This troper wonders if some idiot spent what could have been the last 6 minutes of his (or her, knowing the women in this show) life hauling a couch into a stargate during the pilot.
Someone who really wanted to have a nice place to sit. /sarcasm They didn't bring the couch. Destiny had couches in the bigger rooms, obviously. A race of technologically advanced humans can't have somewhere to sit?

What kind of leather would it be made of? So I doubt the Ancients decided to butcher an Ancient cow to make an Ancient leather couch, and an apalling one on top of that? It looks quite worn, but I doubt it would have survived for a million years. Even in a closed off enviroment like the Destiny.
We have no idea what kind of materials they used. What we do know is they built Destiny and intended it to last a really really long time. Therefore, they'd make the equipment out of stuff that lasts. All we know is, apparently, the Ancients liked a nice soft place to put their asses once in a while, just like everyone else does.
You'd be surprised how long things will last in a completely sterile environment that, more than likely, was also a vacuum for most of its journey.

Joseph Mallozzi's blog has stated that the "leather" couches were on the ship when they got there, and are made of a high tech material that looks a bit like leather, but will last a very long time.
Yeah but none of this addresses where they're getting all their clothing from. Both Rush and Chloe had theirs taken by aliens, and yet, an episode later they've got normal clothes again. How, exacty, did they got those back? And if you're going to say 'well, they have extras', then why are they always in the same outfit. Besides if clothes were so easily replaced, why is Young fixing his socks?

Rush went out in military fatigues. His clothes were on the ship. Chloe is just a plot hole.

Also, remember they have a really big ship, parts of which are in ruins. They have probably been salvaging areas that are beyond recovery for supplies. And on planet stops, they could be collecting more than just food, water, etc but also things like wood and such. Doesn't entirely explain Young's kinda fancy wooden desk...
Or their lamps. But one imagines it's just a matter of them opening new areas of the ship (which they show every so often) as they make it safe. Supplies probably come from there and they re-purpose rooms. Their 'bar' just showed up after the montage showing Brody and his still but they never explicitly said "Okay, we found a empty room that doesn't do anything. Make a bar!" or even where Brody got the stuff to make a still.
The lamps are from Destiny, some of which were in the rooms when they found them. Same goes for the desk. The Ancients did intend to live there, so basic amenities are to be expected. Brody's still is obviously a bunch of repurposed scrap metal.

Worth remembering, when the Atlantis Expedition arrived, most of the furniture (including couches) were waiting for them.
Why would you send X number of seeder ships out to drop stargates off and not bother to include frigging DHDs? They'll obviously deposit more stargates than Destiny can ever visit, even if there's only the one seeder ship - given that the seeder was launched first and is entirely automated, so what's the point? For that matter, why didn't the Ancients board destiny? Even with their horrible track record of follow-through, such a monumental undertaking can't have just been forgotten.
The whole Ascension thing kinda ruined their plans, that and they were in a war with the Wraith for quite a while. Or, as in much of their undertakings, they simply decided it wasn't worth the trouble and abandoned it. As to the matter of DHD placement, the gates were intended to be used by Destiny alone. There's no need for DHDs because it's not a network like the Milky Way and Pegasus.

Since we've seen the gates link up with each other and not just with Destiny, we can assume that it is a network. However, I think the lack of DHDs is likely because DHDs weren't invented until after the Destiny was sent off. Or maybe the Ancients didn't want just anyone using the gate system until they had a chance to explore the galaxy themselves and determine that there weren't any bad guys out there. After all, by this point they had already been screwed over by the Ori.

I just assumed that DHDs were superfluous because they didn't actually have a real network. With the limited range you don't need a large address book, much less worry about updating it. And your explorers all have remotes, right? So why waste the resources on a DHD?

On the other hand, dumb 21st century humans were able to reprogram the gates to act like links in a chain (the Milky Way / Pegasus Gate Bridge) after only a few years of research. The Ancients couldn't figure out how to connect all the gates together without each of them having a DHD?
They wouldn't need to.
Young's bargain with the wannabe-'colonists' in "Faith" can be boiled down to "if the military members of the 'colony' agree to return to Destiny, we'll give the remaining 'colonists' this shuttle"... except that just moments before he explained to the 'colonists' that the shuttle was damaged and would never again be able to leave the planet; apart from arguments about 'duty' or trying to guilt-trip the soldiers into returning to Destiny, he had zero bargaining power - and he had just told them that.
You missed part of it. The entire thing went, "If the military comes back, you get this shuttle. If they don't, I come back with a entire team and have you brought home at gunpoint." He had more than enough time for a couple trips back and forth in the one shuttle.
Okay, I watched the episode at past midnight so I'll concede the point; nonetheless, Young is still in a much, much weaker position than the 'colonists': Young has a time-limit before he and any reinforcements have to leave the planet - all the 'colonists' have to do is conceal themselves and wait it out - they've been on planet for roughly a month, they should know a few holes to hide in, even with the sensors on the second shuttle.
One would expect that both the second shuttle and Destiny could track the first, not to mention it's damaged and probably not up to outpacing the first. Also, some of the military were coming back, so Young could just leave them behind to stand guard while he went back for reinforcements, if he even needed them.

I'm not saying the 'loyalists' couldn't have rounded up all the 'rebels' and dragged them back to Destiny, I'm just saying the latter could have made things a lot more difficult for the former than they did.

Naturally, but what would be the point other than to be spiteful?
Not to mention one of the unstated goals of the trip was to mend fences between both civilian and military. A month is a long time to hold a grudge when there's not much to grudge over. Notice too that during the decision, the military personal almost immediately join Young barring the few who wanted to stay - perhaps meant to be an indicator that they were willing to give up their chance at... something to help the others.

Also, while the shuttle was damaged, it still would have proven useful to the colonists-- it can't leave the planet, sure, but even if it could it can't go all that far (no FTL and no other planets close by). Young pointed out that it would have been able to make hops around the planet, though, which would have been helpful for gathering supplies and such.
Also, it is a solid shelter with internal heating, weaponry to defend against any roaming giant wildlife, shields to protect against hailstorms and is generally a boon to surviving the unexpected.
In the episode "Human," why didn't they just stuff something into the stargate to prevent the FTL jump?
The crew of the ship would have had to do it from their side since Scott and the others couldn't reach the gate. That means even if they did get out of the ruins, they wouldn't be able to go through the gate because it would be an incoming wormhole.

Assuming the did it from the right side, a wormhole will only stay open for 38 minutes. It would have taken days to dig Scott and co out. As soon as the wormhole timed out, Destiny would jump.
When they first came to Destiny, where did all that excess kinetic energy come from? They exited the stargate like they'd been shot out of a cannon. If that excess energy came from the unstable core of the doomed Icarus planet, then Rush saved the lives of everyone on that ship. If he had dialed Earth instead, as he was ordered to do, how much faster would they have exited a the stargate given that the wormhole would have only had top stretch about twenty light-years instead of billions? They would have exited at, what, a considerable fraction of the speed of light? And, let's not forget the in-universe rules of the stargate wormholes. Dump enough energy into them, and you can keep them open for as long as you like. Dump too much energy into them and you can blow up both gates! Hey, Rush saved Earth too! Ingrates, all of them! Rush is a hero!
As explained in "Red Sky", the rough ride is caused when a Stargate cannot form an exact lock with another. Because Destiny is always moving, the wormhole can't completely compensate, hence the part where they're tossed like ragdolls.
To the second one, baloney. Connections have been made to moving vessels plenty of times with no ill effect. To the first, it was a function of the enormous distance and fluctuating and extremely high power levels involved. Going to a close-by planet would have needed much less energy. And it would have been stupid to go to Earth- especially when there were at least a couple dozen off world sites to go to instead. The only reason he dialed the Destiny address was because he was afraid he wouldn't get another chance.
Connections have never been made to an in-flight spaceship. They've made connections to ships orbiting a planet (or a star), but never one actively travelling through space. That would throw off the calculations. Same as travelling through a planet's star did.

Well, don't forget that, at least for the first time through, they were all taking running starts to go into it. Doesn't explain why the Lucian's came flying out, though. ... or why they felt it necessary to take a running start.

A running start is better if you intend to face resistance and want to find cover quickly. They were flying out for the same reason the Destiny crew did, imperfect connection.
The whole plan designed by the Lucian Alliance to seize Destiny just bugs the hell out of me because I just can't work out what they stand to gain from this. Firstly we're not talking about an Aurora class starship here - we're talking about probably the oldest craft in the universe. It predates drone weapons, Aurora level shields, ATA Gene locking, advanced Hyperdrive technology... I would argue that except for the Destiny's AI, an advanced Ha'tak mothership (like the one Anubis used) is superior in every way. Secondly this ship is falling to pieces and could die at any moment in the void between galaxies - fine if you could actually control the ship, which you can't, meaning that you couldn't even attempt to fly the thing back to the Milky Way. You can't even use the Stargate to transport any stolen tech back home because it just hasn't got the range. As far as I can see the Lucian Alliance are basically commiting suicide in a foolhardy attempt to steal antiquated technology.
Destiny may be 'antiquated technology' but it has an alternative method of FTL which can travel between galaxies, so far only the Asguard have been shown to be able to do this. Also, we have nothing to compare it's weapons or shields to, it's shields and it's main guns are pretty effective from what we've seen! It surpasses most of the demonstrated technology level in the milky way despite it's age and state of repair (excluding Earth, which has 'modern' Ancient + Asguard tech to work with). You can't really compare it to Anubis' advanced Hatak, as that was built with access to much newer Ancient technology.
I would argue that Destiny's weapons are actually pretty unimpressive. The Blue aliens were stated by Rush to be nowhere near as powerful as the Ancients (from what we've seen, they don't surpass the Asgard either) and most of Drones don't even have shields - it's their numbers not their technology that makes them a threat. Realistically, Destiny's point defence weapon systems are probably no more powerful than that of a Wraith Hive ship. I also wouldn't agree it surpasses Milky Way technology as the Lucian Alliance Ha'Tak's were capable of causing considerable damage to the Hammond; a product of Tau'ri, Ancient, Asgard and Goa'uld engineering. But like you say, without a common frame of reference it's a very hard problem to gauge.

Or they just want to get out of the reach of the Tau'ri. They can't win in the Milky Way. They know it. But out here, they have a shot. They also probably believe the myth that the ninth chevron, or rather Destiny, is a key to ultimate power or whatever.
The Alliance are thugs though; they're a like the Space Mob. They're not seriously threatened by the Tau'ri or the Free Jaffa because the galaxy is huge, and they can operate on countless planets.
Didn't stop SG-1 from tearing apart their kassa operations. The galaxy is huge. Inhabited worlds formerly under Goa'uld control (prime targets) are not. They'd have to abandon their source of income.
Why are the Lucian Alliance using guns? Wouldn't they have zats and staff weapons?
No. This is internally consistent to a point. They have used low-tech firearms in conjunction with Goa'uld weapons, and the thing about Tau'ri weapons is that they've been proven to be damn effective in warfare.
Exactly why didn't Young vent the atmosphere from the gateroom the minute he saw Lucian Alliance forces coming through? Even if he did it in case they brought Rush along, he would still have plenty of time to go in, revive Rush and disarm the Alliance personnel once they'd all been incapacitated by lack of oxygen. Better yet, since he knew no one was off the ship and therefore the only ones who could come through the gate were Lucian Alliance people, why didn't he vent the atmosphere before the gate even activated?
He didn't vent the atmosphere because Telford came through, and as he saw it there was no real harm in giving them a chance to surrender. He couldn't have known they'd be so prepared. Venting it just enough to incapacitate them leaves the risk of at least one managing to get a shot off. Venting it before they even arrived would have possibly killed some SGC personnel had they secured the gate before the Lucian Alliance left.
As for not venting as soon as they came through: that's pure idiocy. No harm in giving them a chance to surrender, huh? How about they might have brought over a naquadria-enhanced bomb to use as a bargaining chip ("open the door or the ship gets blown to smithereens")? For that matter, they should have thought about them bringing over some way of opening the doors after all the intel Telford fed them, be it a device like the one they used or even a bomb to blast through. As for the second one, they have the communication stones exactly for that reason. All they needed to do was tell O'Neill "Hey, we've vented the atmosphere from the gateroom, just in case, so tell us if anyone from SGC is coming through so we can repressurize before you get here." I was really hoping there would be an explaination for the episode's events aside from "Young grabbed the Idiot Ball really hard".
I'm pretty sure the show told us/implied that the reason he didn't is because he thought Rush was inside Telford's body. When we know they got swapped back once Rush in Telford came through the gate. That then begs the question why the frick didn't Rush tell Young straight away that he was back in his normal body? I also wonder why he didn't just drop down the air to barely survivable levels just in case.

The Lucian Alliance wouldn't go to all the effort to invade Destiny just to blow it up. Young would have called that bluff. Otherwise, Young's actions are partially a result of him wanting to keep Rush/Telford alive and probably a lack of control over the life support systems. It may just be an on/off sort of thing.
Sure, their objective is to take control of Destiny. But we (and the people at SGC) know perfectly well that they're the kind of people who are willing to go "If we can't get the ship, no one will" on the protagonists. Also, if the reason is Young wanting to avoid killing Telford, remember that lack of oxygen isn't immediately fatal; between someone losing counciousness and death there's a window of a couple minutes, plenty of time to repressurize, rush in, revive who needs reviving, and disarm the rest. Young should know this, he employed the very same method to snap Telford out of his brainwashing.
I can't recall an episode where the Alliance was actively spiteful like that. They're criminals, sure, but they're not stupid. With no way back, they aren't going to blow themselves up on the spot. As for lack of oxygen not being immediately fatal, that is true, but not everyone can hold their breath for the same amount of time. Telford could very well die before the others finally went out, and the first revival was at least partially luck.
While the Lucian Alliance isn't actively spiteful, and they tend keep their word, failure in the Lucian Alliance tends to equal death. Someone specifically tasked with taking the Destiny for the Alliance (in this case, Kiva), would likely not survive long after word got out that it was a failure. This only assumes that Kiva is really a commander in the Alliance, and not a Second. I do think, though, that a decision of "No one will have the ship if we can't" would only be made by SG personnel. The Alliance wants the ship for a reason, and they're not going to jeopardize it. SGC doesn't want the Alliance to have the ship, period.

Keep in mind the woman in charge was telling the first batch who went thorugh the gate to radio back once they knew it was safe, which Young probably assumed they would do. Therefore, if he killed the first group before they had a chance to radio back, the rest wouldn't go through the gate and they would just try the same method again another day, when the Destiny crew wouldn't see it coming. Basically, my guess is that Young wanted to hit them all at once.

Yes. I assume that instruction to radio back was disregarded by Kiva herself (since we never actually hear or see a radio call) after she found out the planet was going to explode. With a Tau'ri vessel in orbit, the only other 'way' out was the Stargate. Doing so meant if there was no problem on the other side, she could proceed, and if there was one, she'd die (but she'd die on the planet anyway, since she wasn't going to run). And "death is preferable to capture" is a trait of most Lucian Alliance personnel. Also, Young had no problem with wiping out the first group. He actually intended to. He didn't because they brought Telford/Rush with them.
A minor detail, but it still bugs me: Chloe and Eli shouldn't have any trouble breating in the derelict part of the ship. True, the life support is off there, but it was on until they came aboard, so the air down there is fine, and no one has been down there yet. While it's true that there's no new air going in, they have hundreds of meters of corridors all to themselves. That's a lot of breathing room, no pun intended, and they've been there for what, six hours, tops. It should be a lot longer before they have trouble breathing.
This is true. They actually said it during the episode. But how long have they been in that section of the ship? We also don't know how many corridors are actually available. Plus, every door seems to be closed, regardless of the next section's condition. Which would mean the air available to the two is coming only from where they've been and where they are. This would affect the air supply available. Depending on how long it takes for them to traverse the different areas, they could use up an awful lot. Especially since Eli is carrying Chloe around. And it's not like they want to open every door in a section of the ship Eli knows has decompressed areas.
Another issue with the communication stones, specifically in regard to "Subversion": when people swap bodies, do their accents remain in their original bodies? This is implied, as no one saw any issue with a Scot impersonating an American, and Rush didn't bother trying to imitate Telford's accent. But if it's a transfer of consciousness, how would that even work? Accents are learned, not physically innate. This can be handwaved, sure, but not justified as far as I can see.
According to Joe's blog the accents are kept in the original body, so a switched person sounds like their host through and through. Doesn't make much sense, of course, but there it is.

It really depends on how the communication stones work on a basic level- if your mind overrides the mind native to the body you're occupying, then your accent should come with you, as would any tics you have, and the way in which you use your body. Since we aren't seeing people who use the stones constantly bumping into things, tripping, and basically "awkward like a teenager" we can probably assume that the communication stones overlay your conciousness over-top of the body you're inhabiting, so when you want to walk across the room, the body walks across the room without you getting all tangled in your own legs because you're four inches taller than you used to be, and speech would function the same way- you decide what you're going to say, the body says it
Case in point: Back in season 1 when Col. Young was still recovering from his broken leg and he and Telford were swapping bodies back and forth, Telford kept walking on Young's busted leg and Young had to leave a note telling him to use a crutch. Clearly the stones only create a limited connection between the host body and the consciousness transferred into it, otherwise Telford would have felt the pain of walking on Young's broken leg immediately.

Telford did feel it, he was just too much of a dick to heed it. He insisted on giving orders as long as he was there.

Incursion: What the hell was going on in this episode? Firstly, how did the Lucian Alliance get access to Tauri weapons. Secondly, how did Carter lose two 302 pilots when she has beaming technology and said fighers were clear of the shielded areas. This is to say nothing of how stupid Young's stratagy was.
The black market is great for getting illegal arms for random goods. The Lucian Alliance undoubtedly has access to an ungodly amount of gold. Easy trade. Carter lost two F-302 fighters as a command decision. They couldn't make it back to the ship and it does take time to lock on and beam out people. She had to run.
Trade with who? Tau'ri are the only ones running around with that type of weapon in the Milky Way. As far as the F302's go, it does take time to establish a transporter lock, but as we've seen from the ten billion times everyone else has been rescued, the time is negligible.
The lock time was the excuse given on Joe's blog, and it has been an issue before (Prometheus blowing up). As for how they got the guns, I meant the black market on Earth. If they can land a cloaked cargo ship, or even an Al'kesh, they could get the location of an arms dealer, buy a bunch of weapons, then be set.

It should also be said that the Lucian Alliance did successfully attack a SG outpost (the one Telford knew about and didn't say anything). For all we know, they could have received a good majority of the Tau'ri weapons they are using from that.
Oh, right. I'd forgotten about that. Does make sense.

For the purposes of a criminal organization, captured Staff Weapons would be problematic. Zat guns would be more useful, but still suffer from the problem of being more for show than actual combat, leaving the Alliance with what they can manufacture themselves. It's likely that instead of going through the R&D from scratch, they backwards-engineered captured Tau'ri weapons and modified captured goa'uld factories to produce them.

Or they could be firearms from another world in the Milky Way with 20th century technology - maybe Langara (Jonas Quinn's homeworld). It would be easy for the LA to show up and start making deals with the local arms manufacturers.

She lost the 302s so that O'neil point about the concept of "acceptable loses" to Young later in the episode would have more weight, showing that yes, the SGC does expect it's commanders to make hard decisions like that and that in situations like the one shown, it is the right move.

Back in SG-1's "Ex Dues Machina", Baal managed to roll his way onto Earth and hide in plain sight. Free Jaffa chasing after him landed directly on the office building where he had established himself. The SGC didn't become aware of any of this until the two parties started killing one another. In "Bounty", Lucian-employed bounty hunters landed on Earth and made attempts on SG-1 without getting blown up on the spot. Perhaps they just landed and bought up a bunch of weapons?

Whose bright idea was it to name the project after the legend of Icarus? I mean, we are talking about the same Icarus, right? The boy who refused to listen to his father's warnings, flew too close to the sun, and fell to his doom? Was Stargate Command perhaps...unfamiliar with the specifics of that particular legend?
Perhaps Rush came up with the name as a subtle Take That towards the Air Force.

The Novelisation of "Air" suggests that it was some pencil-pusher at the Pentagon who is probably going to be chewed out by O'Neill for jinxing the expedition.

In "Intervention," how did they go from "The hydroponics lab is safe because it's buried deep within the ship" to "anyone not standing inside the hydroponics lab will die"? Is the hydroponics really that much better shielded than the surrounding hallways? I mean, really, if the hydroponics lab is protected by the rest of the ship's hull, wouldn't the Lucian Alliance be just as safe huddling outside the door as Rush and co. would be inside?
The hydroponics lab is safer than the halls outside because it is a tiny, sealed room deep inside the ship. The corridors nearby, no matter how close, are still more exposed than the lab itself is. The halls would flood with radiation, but the tiny room would be sealed off.

Well, if this was said to the LA, obviously Rush is exaggerating to help his bluff. And, even if he really had to do it, by the time anyone got to hydroponics, well... they'd probably have fried anyway. More than likely, it wasn't that it was truly and perfectly safe, but protected enough that they could survive long enough to ensure everyone else was dead.
Which is exactly what Rush said in the episode.

Why the ridiculous "million year old" timeline? This has always bugged me about this show. I can deal with Atlantis lasting 10,000+ years w/o regular maintenance...but Destiny lasting a MILLION years? The Ancients were that advanced a million years ago and they lost to the Wraith? Considered the could make machines that work relatively well after a million years? Their civilization wouldn't have collapsed and been rebuilt dozens (if not hundreds) of times in that span of time? They'd speak the language? (Try understanding people from just one hundred years ago on Earth.) Not sure why the producers thought of the million year-old timeline, but it makes an already implausible show even less plausible.
Who's to say there wasn't regular maintenance? And how often is "regular?" The Destiny does seem to dock with the Seed ships from time to time, some form of maintenance could be done at that time. We saw Rush break the ship off early, so we don't know. Regardless the Stargates themselves work without maintenance (that we have seen) after millions of years, and the ancients built these ships to last (not to mention they do have this thing about planning things out).
Ok...then why not show that? Given that a million years ago (or actually longer,since R&D and testing would have to take place) the Ancients had technology that surpasses human technology of today,it still doesn't explain why they lost to the Wraith and why they were killed by a virus. And where's the proof (outside of Destiny) that the Stargates are millions of years old? Since most of the planets that have Stargates would now be lifeless (or would not have intelligent life) if they were that old, why aren't more of them buried either by sand or vegetative matter...or whatever?
The proof comes from an early episode of SG-1, where the Antarctic gate is said to be on the order of 50 million years old.

That just doesn't make sense to me. Why put a gate here 50 million years ago? No human life then, and the weather patterns were much more different than they are now.
There were Ancients living there back then.
That's kind of ridiculous. So the Ancients were here just after the dinosaurs, huh? I didn't know Stargate was a religious program.
How much of the show have you actually watched? This would make sense to you if you understood the timeline and universe.

Watched every episode of the original two series and some of the new shows. That really doesn't change the illogical premise of the millions of years passing between when the Stargates were designed and built, when Destiny was launched and the current time period portrayed on the show. Given that the Tau'ri of the programs have developed intergalactic space travel (w/ massive amounts of assistance, of course) in less than 8 years, millions of years of the Ancients being alive ending w/ the levels of technology shown on the show is incongruous. The Tollan, which were stated to be descendants of humans transported from Earth, had levels of technology that rivaled the Ancients and would have had to develop it in less time than the writers are granting the Ancients. It just might have been more believable (as much as a TV show can be believable) if the writers had chosen much more realistic time spans.
The Tollan got stomped by Anubis using Ancient tech. They were powerful, but not anywhere near the Ancients. The Ancients had to start from scratch, and a certain degree of stagnation would have set in after a while. Everyone else has been reverse-engineering their tech.

Arguably the Tollan's downfall was more due to their own ineptitude and overconfidence. They hadn't been in a real war for years, maybe even generations. They were so blindly assured of their own technological superiority that one mothership from Chlorel's fleet almost took down their entire planetary defense grid in five seconds. That said, I agree that Tollan technology was still quite inferior to Ancient technology. Tollan tech was very slick-looking, but really, how much super-advanced stuff did we really see from them? There's the Tollan FTL communication device, the Tollan ion cannon, the thing that magically disables weapons, that doo-hickey that lets them walk through walls, and...that's about it. Five pieces of super-advanced tech, but other than that their society appears to be nothing more than a very slightly more advanced version of late-20th/early-21st century Earth. Hardly a "rival" to the Ancients.

And let's not forget that the Tollan absolutely sucked at space travel. Earth after the end of SGA was, all in all, much more advanced than them.

As the seed ships prove, the Ancients basically just threw Stargates on every planet that might, possibly, in theory have something useful for them. They could have left the Antarctic gate untouched for 49 million years for all we know.

Eli's laptop must have a huge hard drive, if it can keep massive raw video from the kino, as well as a huge library of the edited kino footage. I guess the Ancients used a really good codec.
Eli might empty the raws periodically, or keep only the most recent raws on his hard drive (say, the past two or three days) while keeping the rest stored in Destiny's computers.

Eli explicitly states that he keeps just the last day or so worth of kino recordings for editing purposes.

Matthew Scott has repeatedly put himself and others in danger by not thinking before he does something... going off half cocked when Chloe is in danger and really is more of a danger to himself and others... so why is he the guy the writers keep shilling the Creator's Pet for and say is the best guy on the ship to help run the military? Isn't it deeply obvious by now that the only sane and rational guy is GREER? Greer is the only person who actually acts like a military trained soldier on board. He is professional, he does things by waying the options, and always does things sensibly. He's like the Blackadder to Young and Scott's Melchett and Darling, total incompetent leaders. Why doesn't anyone question this?!
It's hard to question it when the Creator's Pet of the show is widely considered to be Chloe. Anything stupid action anyone makes with regards to her can't be put on said person, but on the idea that the writers are shilling Chloe...

Greer is angry and violent. Justifiably angry and violent, but that's still not the kind of person the civilians want in charge. Again, remember that most of this is from the civilian point of view: They think Scott should take command because he's nice to them and tries to accomodate their needs, despite the fact that he's shown that he probably couldn't handle that kind of pressure.

Ok, honestly? No one's complained about this? "Hello, we have an idea of getting you idiots back home." "Really? Oooh, tell us please!" "Alright, it involves opening a wormhole inside a sun . . ."
Did no one else out there find that the writers failed at keeping their own laws of physics striaght highly annoying? If someone out there can justify the wormhole-in-a-sun plan and explain how it doen't contradict the sun flares + wormholes = timetravel/bad things, please, put it here.
Um, it didn't work. There's no evidence that the time travel issue wouldn't have happened if it had worked. Arguments were made against the action during the episode, but more on the basis of "If we do this, and mess up, we could all go explody" because that's a more important issue than 80 people going to the past/future on earth. I mean, really, how is the possibility of time travel by using the gate during said instance worse than being blown up by attempting to dial Earth?

Spoilers for the upcoming episode "Twin Destinies" appears to address this.

It isn't the sun that is the problem, but the solar flares ( I have no clue if that makes any scientific sense in the real world). Solar flares emanate outwards. So, inside a sun is the safest place to open a wormhole (WARNING: THIS IS ONLY IN REGARDS TO TIME TRAVEL, PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FLY INSIDE THE SUN TO OPEN A WORMHOLE)

Yup, latest episode totally addressed your complaint. Next?
I'm not the OP, but no it didn't. It didn't say anything about fixing the problem... It side-stepped it by sending Telford back to earth, then the instability hit(which was likely caused by Rush)... Wait. The JBM is that the issue wasn't addressed. Yes, the someone pointed out the problem of time-travel by dialing inside a star in the latest episode...
Yes it did, the OP was bugged by the fact that they writers forgot that opening a wormhole inside a star creates time travel problems... well, they didn't, it causes time travel problems ^[1] . Next?

Solar flares making time travel is a random occurance. It might not even happen. It was no doubt passed off as an acceptable risk.

Okay, so if the purpose of the Ninth Chevron is to dial Destiny... Why does every gate have one? If you need an entire planet made out of Naquadria to dial it, why have EVERY stargate equipped with a ninth chevron? The 8th one makes sense. You just need a small doodad made from scrap and a staff weapon's power cell to dial that. Presumably the ancients had plenty of power sources (not even limited to a ZPM) to dial those. On top of that, why does the 9th chevron require an algorythm to dial? Why build a ninth chevron in EVERY gate, but not put the required software for it in the DHD?
They did it for the same reason they had an 8th chevron on every gate, but leaving the required software to dial that in every DHD. So that any gate could potentially dial the ship (just like any gate can potentially dial another galaxy). For all we know, the Ancients did have a piece of equipment (like a ZPM for the 8th chevron), that would provide the power to a stargate and allow the 9th Chevron to be dialed.

The algorithm is made by SG personnel. We have yet to see anyone attempt to dial the 9th Chevron with a DHD. Every gate that's attempted it thus far has done computerized dialing. And since SGC needed an algorithm to dial Atlantis, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me...
SGC didn't need an algorythm to dial Atlantis. They needed the gate address (actually they needed 1 symbol, they were assuming it was a 7 symbol adress till "Rising" where Daniel saw they adress they had was just incomplete). The question of why they needed an algorithm to dial the ninth chevron while a DHD could not do the job is never answered. That raises a new question: Where DID they get the address for Destiny?

^[2]The question hasn't been answered because it hasn't been necessary to ask it yet. No one has attempted to dial nine symbols on a DHD, so there is no evidence that it could not do the job as you suggest. They got the address from an Atlantis database. They said that in the pilot.
The one Eli solved in the pilot that got him hired for the SGC/Icarus. If they had the address, why did they need that? Why couldn't they just punch the address on the DHD of the gate of the Icarus planet ?
That algorithm was not for dialing the address itself, but for calculating the exact power needed and how to regulate it for a successful connection, WITHOUT blowing up the planet. Unfortunately the Lucian Alliance added a little surprise orbital bombardment variable into the equation, and we all know how that turned out.

We don't know the purpose of the ninth chevron is to dial Destiny. We know that of all the possible nine chevron combinations, the one we know dials Destiny's gate. For all we know there are other nine chevron addresses that work or given the fact that every single gate has nine chevrons perhaps each gate has it's own individual nine chevron address that works irregardless of physical location

What do you mean why does every stargate have a 9th chevron? Every stargate has far more than 9 chevrons, have you seen a dial home device? There's tons of them, since there are many stargates in each system, requiring a large variety of addresses.
You're confusing chevrons with stellar coordinates. The chevrons aren't the digits in a gate address, but rather the slots that can hold a digit. Each gate is shown to have nine chevrons, but usually only locks in seven of them.

The answer is simple: the ninth chevron wasn't build specifically with Destiny in mind, but to allow for dialing individual stargates. That is, rather than dialing a location (which can be messed up if a ship with a stargate onboard is orbiting a planet with a stargate) you dial a specific gate no matter where it is or its proximity to another stargate. The Ancients probably had other ships with stargates onboard, but instead of flying to an inhabited planet and dialing from there they wanted to dial in no matter where the ship was. Think how useful a shipboard stargate would be in a war if you could resupply a ship in deep space rather than at a planet. Or use it like the Asuran gate weapon; it doesn't matter if the target planet's stargate is active or not—in fact with a ninth chevron gate it doesn't even need to be on the gate network! Imagine the shock of using one of those against an enemy in an area that isn't supposed to have a gate address. It's an incredible force multiplier if all you need is an FTL ship big enough to carry a stargate and suddenly that ship can function as an aircraft carrier or missile cruiser the size of the biggest military base. And the power requirements are probably not normally that much of a concern if the ship you're dialing is in the same galaxy as you. It's just that Destiny was so far away that they needed the special planet to reach it.

So, in Alliances, we have Wray and Greer trapped inside Homeworld Command after some Lucian Alliance terrorist crash-landed, taking down a chunk of the building. Then, they are the only ones that can defuse the bomb. Why didn't someone beam them out, and beam a bomb disposal unit in? Honestly, the fact that they keep "forgetting" that the Tau'ri are now the most advanced race in the galaxy (except for perhaps the Nox, and the Furlings if they're still around) is what takes the cake at just bugging me.
The only Asgard beaming technology SGC controls are currently in their ships. We have no idea where those ships are. If none are in orbit of Earth, then there isn't a way for them to do what you suggest.
At least one of those ships is guarding Earth. Especially since they're expecting a Lucian Alliance attack.

They expect a Lucian Alliance attack. They don't know where the attack will take place. Perhaps the ships are called away from Earth for the purpose of defending a "more likely" target.

Nah, they were expecting an attack on Earth, it's stated all over the past two seasons. Also, they would never leave Earth undefended and send all their ships to, say, the Alpha Site. Even considering that that is a rather boneheaded thing to do, there's always the possibility that they were fed misinformation, as a ruse to leave Earth unprotected. No, the beaming technology was "forgotten" for the same reason transporters broke down so often in Star Trek: it's a plot-killer.
"Never" is not a word one wants to use. There are only four 304s in existence at the moment (assuming the Sun Tzu was destroyed by the ZPM Hive ship.). In the fight against the ZPM Hive ship, two of those 304s were crippled. The Hammond is functional, and the Deadalus is/was on a Secret Mission (what the mission is, and whether it ended is unknown). Depending on whether the Apollo and Odyssey are repaired, this matters... If the Lucian Alliance launches an attack on the Tokra, or Jaffa Free Nation, SGC would be obligated to send a 304 (or multiple, if they are available) to help defend. There are many different reasons why there would be no 304 in orbit of Earth. But just because none are, does not mean Earth is defenseless. Just that they have no vessel with the Asgard beaming technology.

Sun Tzu wasn't destroyed. It was disabled. It's crew had to evacuate to Apollo because they were loosing atmosphere. Presumably it may be repaired. Odyssey was the one on a secret mission (Caldwell and the Daedalus were in Pegasus, they presumably returned to earth via FTL, which would have taken three weeks. With Atlantis on earth. there's no reason for them to go back to Pegasus). Still, it's been in story over a year since enemies at the gate, so I doubt Odyssey is still gone, and Earth has no obligation to send all it's ship to defend the Jaffas or Tok'ras (not like THEY ever sent a Mothership to defend earth). SGC would no doubt send SG teams and supplies, but there's nothing forcing them to remove their last ship, knowing an attack on them is imminent. Considering that the whole plot being Simeon killing Ginn revolved around the fact that they knew an attack on earth was coming, I doubt they would ever leave earth without a cruiser, no matter how many Jaffa bases were attacked..

"I doubt they would ever leave earth without a cruiser" They already have left earth without a cruiser for defense. Multiple times. Thinking that they would do so again is not an insane thought. The reason why can be a problem, but there are satisfactory explanations for why such an event could occur in the present and/or future.

I think it safe to assume that all strategic locations on Earth are protected from beaming with most reliable system ever. Because noone wants to secret documents and high-ranked officer to be beamed by some moron who got his hands on beaming technology. Because all morons this days has beaming technology.

Why would their site be protected from their own beaming technology? While certain areas have stuff preventing sensor locks (The gate room in the SGC has that) why would you make a scrambler your own ships can't go through if it's an emergency?

Because they are. Carter specifically mentioned it in a pilot. And how exactly can you make counter-beaming discriminate?

That was something I wondered about too. Now, if they do have 'transport scramblers, that would make sense...but why not turn them off? Of course, it's entirely possible they had all the ships called off on duty elsewhere - perhaps a diversionary attack? - but regardless of the reason, it's sloppy scriptwriting. They could have explained things/lampshaded it entirely with one line of dialogue by Telford. "All our ships are away" / "We can't turn the transport blockers off". But nooooooooo...

A question, is the SGC gate still earth's primary Stargate? Atlantis' final, Enemy at the Gate shows that a Pegasus gate always overrides a Milky way gate. Since Atlantis returned to earth, it's gate would have become the primary gate of earth. This is supported by the Atlantis team escaping the ZPM powered Hive to the alpha site, only to end up later in Atlantis' infirmary, without Ronon or Teyla having seen San Francisco bay (which they would have if they had returned from the Alpha site to the SGC to be flown into Atlantis). SGU Twin Destinies clearly shows the SGC gate being the primary gate, and in Atlantis, Rodney did mention that while working on Midway they had found a way to prevent a Pegasus gate from overriding a Milky Way gate. So has this actually been done, or is it just the SGU writers forgetting what they wrote? Also, why do the change? The Atlantis gate actually has a DHD, which makes it more reliable than the SGC gates, which bypasses several security protocols. On top of that, the Atlantis gate is a more modern model that dials faster than the SGC's.
We have no idea where Atlantis is. It has been over a year since Atlantis landed on Earth. It could have left Earth and went back to the Pegasus galaxy, or any number of options. That that the SGC is the primary gate in SGU, it says that something does happen and Atlantis leaves Earth.
Atlantis can't have left, it didn't have enough power to even get back into orbit, let alone long range hyperspace/wormhole drive travel. Besides, Word of God has said that a return of Atlantis to Pegasus would be reserved for an Atlantis film. (Who are now on hiatus thanks to SGU's failure at getting viewers).

This premise assumes that Atlantis leaving Earth and Atlantis returning to the Pegasus galaxy are not mutually exclusive... One claims they don't have enough power to return to orbit. As though there is no way that could change over the course of a year.

You're assuming that any film about Atlantis would take place the year the film came out. That's unlikely. It would be more likely take place within a year of Atlantis landing on Earth (because otherwise, why wouldn't everyone be reassigned?). Which is prior to SGU coming out...
All of SG-1, Atlantis, SG-1's 2 movies, even the original film, takes place during the same year as it's release (Not counting time travel stuff). SGU's the only one so far with a fuzzy timeline (though "Alliance" mentions the Destiny crew has been stranded for a year, which puts it somewhere in 2010/ early 2011, so it might also follow the present). So it's not a big leap to assume future movies would follow the same pattern the entire verse has kept through.

The Atlantis gate has the unique ability to prevent any stargate other than one from Earth from dialing in. If they switched that feature on then any incoming wormholes would presumably be redirected to the SGC. As for why not change to the Atlantis gate and use a DHD, it's already been shown that while the SGC's system bypasses safety protocols it also enables them to do things a gate linked to a DHD can't. Their system is more secure (handprint authorization), can autodial and there are very few situations where it's necessary to dial out quickly.
No it didn't. The Atlantis Stargate didn't have the ability to prevent incoming wormholes, that's why it had a forcefield to replace the Iris on the earth gate. What it did have was an extra crystal, missing from all other Pegasus gates that allow it to dial out to Earth. (Or just to dial 8 cheveron addresses? I'm not sure about this bit.)
Yes, it did. In the episode "Before I Sleep" Janus tells Weir, "I've blocked all addresses to the gate, except Earth." He did that so no one from Pegasus (specifically the Wraith) could access Atlantis and to ensure no one could harm Weir while she was in stasis. That feature was either automatically deactivated when the Atlantis Expedition arrived or they deactivated it themselves so their SG teams could dial back home.

The Ancients know how to work the Stargate system... For all we know there could have been a self-deleting "virus" in the Pegasus system, in which no connection to Atlantis could be made until Atlantis dialed said gate first... The fact that everyone(hello, Genii) has been able to dial the Atlantis gate since the Tau'ri arrival, even when the Tau'ri would definitely not want such a thing to happen(like: "The Replicators are going to attack the station, and one may want to evacuate to, oh, anywhere"), says that such a "feature" is so advanced, or so subtle, that the Tau'ri are incapable of making use of it... That or the Tau'ri are much more stupid than they are made out to be...
Right. The Ancients could probably block individual gates from dialing Atlantis but Janus decided to block ALL of them except Earth (presumably not just the Pegasus ones). The Tau'ri don't yet have the skill to really edit Ancient programs so it was really an all-or-nothing proposition with that blocking command.

How does the Lucian Alliance manage to have plants in Homeworld Command and other Taur'i installations? Doesn't anyone question the airman that gets hired despite having no papers? What happened to background checks? Heck, you'd think someone who is not from earth would be easily noticed.
Well, it is implied he was a pilot who tried to leave building, but was trapped. (I actually think he was suicide bomber but didn't know that)

Most of the plants are Tauri who were captured and brainwashed into being Lucian Alliance agents. The airman in Alliances is likely the pilot of the Lucian Alliance ship, rather than a plant. If he was a plant, then where is the pilot of the ship?

He's stated to have been the pilot, he had intended to land, arm the bomb and walk out. Most security measures don't care about people leaving, only about people entering. After all, if someone is leaving, they've obviously managed to legitimately access the facility, so why should security care about them?

The original Icarus planet was destroyed because of an orbital bombardment. If the planet was so unstable that a few minutes of energy weapon hits could destroy it, the planet would have been destroyed years ago by the sun it was orbiting- which would 'bombard' the planet with several magnitudes more energy/particles than the Lucian Alliance could have possibly shot at the planet.
The sun isn't shooting weaponized, concentrated bolts of energy. It's radiating at the planet, yes, but it's the sudden shock and influx of energy that did it. It's like saying, "If his body was so weak that a few ounces of metal from a gun killed him, he would have been dead years ago from all that time he spent working on cars."
Scale! The Icarus planet is reasonably Earth-like, which allows us to use known figures to calculate a few things. Every second the Earth absorbs ~1.74×10^17 J from the sun. For comparison, the "little boy" nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima released ~6.3×10^13 J. It would take 1000 bombs to even equate to a single second of output that is absorbed by the planet. We have seen on-screen that blasts from Ha'tak ships are sub-nuclear, and create reasonable small explosions. Anything the Lucian Alliance would have been capable of throwing at the planet would be a rounding error.
Context! As was pointed out earlier, the energy being emitted by the nearby star is constant and consistent background radiation that is in no small part absorbed by the atmosphere, not the planet itself. The Lucian Alliance weapons go straight through the atmosphere and hit the very unstable naquadria that the entire planet is filled with, thus "BOOM!" happens.

You do realize that the planet didn't explode because the Lucian Alliance bombarded the planet, but because the Lucian Alliance bombarded the planet at the same time that the Stargate was active (specifically, dialed into Destiny). The Stargate being powered by the (more or less) "unique" geothermal properties of the planet. The planet itself only started to become unstable once the gate was active, and even then, took ~10 minutes to explode... Methinks that the math in Eli's algorithm wasn't completely accurate...
Uh, no. Watch that episode again. One, the core was going unstable before they even dialed. Riley says so. Dialing only made the problem worse. Two, the power was not geothermal, it was naquadria, a highly unstable substance which does have a habit of exploding at the slightest provocation.

Moreover, don't get ENERGY confused with POWER. Power is an amount of energy per unit time, and is what you actually consider when talking about the amount of work or force being done on/by a system. A small amount of energy delivered over a very small amount of time to a small amount of area is a huge amount of power experienced by that area; it's how we can deliver the equivalent power of A STAR using femtosecond lasers to create small scale fusion (and other sweet physics experiments). What does all this mean? We know the Ha'tak's weapons can output around 30 megatons, and this is a highly concentrated, highly short duration blast, piercing into a planet full of extremely unstable material that can, once ignited, chain react like a runaway nuclear reaction. On top of this, the material is being directly activated and catalyzed for power at the moment, making it especially unstable. I think the logical results are well depicted in the episode.

Those Ha'tak must output waaaaaaaaay more than the default 30 megaton, coz they could take on the Hammond's Asgard shields.

How DOES Icarus have a core of naquadriah? Naquadriah (and we are repeatedly told this on SG-1) is not naturally occuring, unlike naquadah. Now, the logical explanation would be that the same System lord from Jonas' homeworld also experimented there, and that his research caused the Naquadah to turn into Naquadriah (as it happened on Jonas' planet twice - when said system lord blew himself up, and when they fired a naquadriah bomb). The question then is how did Icarus survive? The process of converting a mere vein of naquadah into naquadriah threatened to blow Jonas' planet up - without the involvement of a stargate's 9th chevron or planetary bombardment from Goa'uld motherships. And THAT planet didn't even have an entire CORE made out of naquadah/naquadriah.
Well if Jonas' homeworld didn't have a naquadah/naquadriah core but had a vain of it running all the way into the core then when the naquadah at the core became naquadriah BOOM! However if the core of the Icurus base was made entirely of naquadah and was then turned to naquadriah wouldn't that be what kept it from going boom? The fact that there was nothing it it's core to react with naquadriah making it explode?
There'd still be immeasurable pressure. And in "Fallout" it's specifically mentioned that these pressures are what would cause detonation. And those were pressures in the mantle: Far from those of a planet's core.

I was under the impression that the pressure was only a problem during the change from Naquadah to Naquadriah. If it got past that point, there wouldn't be a problem. Because Naquadriah, while unstable, doesn't go boom unless something happens to it. The problem that everyone had in "Fallout," was that no one believed that it would be ok during the change.

Because the Goa'uld weren't the first ones to create Naquadria. It's mentioned in SGU and SG-1 that the ancients experimented with it too.

So one of the biggest problems with trying to dial Destiny has been the fact that the process used to do so tends to be on the... unstable side, right? So in order to make the process safer, Homeworld Command brings in Dr. McKay. The guy who blew up five-sixths of a solar system with his power supply studies, then risked collapsing an entire universe when he continued those same studies again. Discuss.
Third time's a charm?

They continued to use Carter after she blew up a Sun....
Which was done on purpose, as part of an operation to wipe out a Goa'uld fleet. Clearly carter is a terrible person for doing what she was ordered!

The two power generation studies worked on very different principles from one another as well as Icarus. One involved predicting that which cannot be predicted and the other involves things on the scale of an entire universe. A planet full of naquadriah is relatively easier to grasp than the others. Plus, you'll note how late McKay was brought in on the project, maybe they figured they'd ask other experts before going to him.

In "Alliances" the Lucian Alliance attacks Washington DC with a cloaked ship carrying a 70 megaton naquadriah bomb. Cloaking technology has always been a tricky proposition and I'll give the writers credit for not side-stepping its implications, but this tactic seems like a Game Breaker. The Goa'uld had the resources and know-how to build a weapon that is invisible and can be placed anywhere, what stopped them from fielding fleets of them and nuking each other with impunity? There's no defense against it (unless the pilot is Lucian Alliance and not a fanatical Jaffa willing to die for the cause) so unless there was some treaty the Goa'uld had (and you know how good they were at keeping their word) why didn't they wipe themselves out years ago?
The Goa'uld do have treaties and such; there's a couple episodes that deal with a summit among the System Lords, and their treaty with the Asgard about what planets are protected comes up in a few episodes. Sure, they subvert the spirit of those treaties and agreements whenever they think they can get away with it, but they're probably a little more likely to abide by a treaty if breaking it meant wiping themselves out.

Also, it would be out of character for the Goa'uld. Sure, they're conniving and have no morals, but they do want resources and people to worship them. Nuking an planet would prevent such things from happening (especially when everyone else decides to do it to you). The reason why it's never done to the Tauri is because, first, the Asguard were protecting the planet due to the treaty. And second, because the Tauri were annoyances with only a small segment knowing of the Stargate. It wouldn't be "cost-effective" to do such an attack and alert the 6 billion people on Earth to your existence if you don't yet have a true means of controlling all of them (only two Goa'uld ever did, and both still got screwed).
I thought the Goa'uld figured out that the Asgard were gone and therefore the treaty was null and void. Not to mention that the whole strategy to the Goa'uld's control over worlds boils down to, "Do as we say or we'll vaporize you and there's nothing you can do to stop us." Using cloaked nukes or a fleet of warships doesn't matter. Sure, it's not as theatrical as raining firebolts from the sky, but erasing cities from the map in the blink of an eye is still pretty god-like. And the only reason Anubis failed was because he attacked with Hataks when the Ancient Outpost was operational, using cloaked cargo ships with nukes bypasses that defense entirely.

Cloaked cargo ships with nukes is not theatrical. How does one know they did it? Fire raining from the sky is what makes people believe. That's the Goa'uld MO. It has to be showy and obvious. Plus, it's a waste of ships to go for suicide nukes every time.
The problem with the it's not theatrical enough theory is that Ra was perfectly willing to use a Naquadah enhanced nuke to destroy the Earth; even though he knew full well that only O'Neill's team were the only ones who had any knowledge of the Goa'uld. He put the destruction of the Earth over his ego - there's no reason other System Lords (especially Baal) couldn't have done the same.
The others could have. But using Ra as an example of such an action isn't the best thing to do, as the SG series' had basically established that Ra was the most powerful system lord, and basically the ruler of them all, as well as the Goa'uld primarily responsible for Earth(since the planet was his before the Goa'uld-Asguard treaty). And since the planet rebelled against him and not any of the other system lords, it's probably more likely that Ra did not put the destruction of Earth over his ego, but rather his ego called for the destruction of Earth...

"Seizure". OK, I can see somebody coming up with a plan to bodysnatch the Langarans and commandeer their 'Gate. And it might even get kicked up the chain of command for consideration. But...O'Neill approving it? This is exactly the kind of thing the NID used to do all the time, for cryin' out loud! There's no way in Sokar's realm that the old O'Neill would ever agree to the execution of such a plan. Bad, bad character derailment for O'Neill here. (Also, not even a single mention of Jonas? Shame, shame.)
Yeah, because the fact that the Alliance, who had just recently come within a hair of nuking DC, may have allied with the Langarans was in no way a factor. This is not the first or last time O'Neill has made a morally questionable decision because the alternative could have been far worse. Just look at Fifth.

"The Hunt". Let's leave the godawful "tracking through the forest" be. Varro's entire team of redshirts, who he's presumably gotten to known due to their shared past in the Lucian Alliance, gets killed off by a random predator. These are guys he's worked with for years. He's probably gotten to know their names, their families, etc. He doesn't even blink. What's up with that?
The Lucian Alliance sounds like a God-forsaken place, so he might be used to all the death.

More importantly, this isn't a change for Stargate. All three series try as hard as possible to kill off every extra they can.

As well, consider the sort of environment that's been established for the LA. Dannic and Kira and their superiors killed people who failed them, forcefully constripped people, and overall treated their people as expendable resources. In that sort of place, it's possible that Varro and the other survivors simply became desensitived to each other and avoided any sort of connection beyond a working one. Also, at least while they were still in danger, it's a bad idea to get emotional as you want to focus on survival and such rather than debilitated by emotion.

In "Common Descent" a stargate gets a sizable chunk taken off by the evil aliens. Hasn't it been established prior to that that stargates are pretty much undestroyable artifacts ?
These are early model stargates--they don't even have nearly the range the one on Earth does, for instance. It's probable that these aren't quite as hardy either.
But it still takes a crapload of power to subvert the laws of physics, and the medium for that power is the gate itself--even if it could be damaged there would also be a large energy release. A nuclear weapon sized energy release.

Naquadria absorbs energy. That blast may have been good enough to blow a hole in the gate through sheer force, but the excess would be safely contained in the naquadria. It takes a lot to make it explode.

How did 85 or so people manage to have enough genetic diversity to allow a globe-spanning civilization in 2000 years without them all being horribly inbred? If the next generation completely abandoned single pair mating and just swapped mating partners every time, they might last longer than a "traditional" society but I'm pretty sure they don't have a viable population size no matter how they do it.
There's enough of them to manage. None of them are related, so there's diversity right there. So long as the kids don't marry each other, in two or three generations there'd be enough drift for it to work out ok. So long as they're at least a cousin or two removed, the risk of dominant negative mutation is minimal.
Though they'd have been a lot safer/better off if they'd considered less monogomous relationships and asked the homosexuals to contribute as well.

And considering that they seemed to do a decent job of retaining knowledge, they might have been able to build the tech base genetic manipulation and analysis before any issues became crippling.
Which brings to question how they weren't able to devise some FTL technology, after having a long hard 18 month look at the tech - and 2000 years to ponder over it.

They don't know how Destiny FTL functions, the only hyperdrive expert didn't come with them, and they were a little busy just trying to set up infrastructure.

Why would you possibly need FTL technology when you're the only species in your sector of the Galaxy and you've already got Stargates on all the human inhabitable worlds in the vicinity?
Why did Sir Edmund Hillary climb Mount Everest? Because it was there. Not to mention they had no way of knowing they were the only species...

And should have suspected they weren't the only species, Drones and small brown aliens anyone?

This bothered me too -- why didn't the people of Novus re-invent the hyperdrive? They advanced far beyond present-day Earth technology and science in so many ways. They didn't have experts for lots of scientific fields with them -- even when it comes to medicine, they didn't have an "expert" in the full sense of the word, and yet they found cures for diseases that no-one on present-day Earth could cure. Hyperdrive technology was already thoroughly studied by the time SG:U started. Even if there was no dedicated expert in the tech with the Novus settlers, it seems counter-intuitive that their only option would have been slower-than-light ships.

Question: Given that we've seen Destiny charge off of odd stars before, why not, after killing a command ship, RECHARGE AT THE STAR IN THE SYSTEM?
It's explained in "Blockade" that Destiny can only recharge off of red dwarf stars, because they are the only stars that are safe enough to fly through without getting the entire crew roasted. Flying through any star hotter than that puts the crew and the ship at serious risk.

That and they weren't in dire need of power. The long stretch to the next galaxy was a strain on power because of the distance and damage to the ship. A refuel, at best, would have put a few extra hours on the clock.

In Gauntlet Rush tells Eli that he's come a long way from the slacker he met a year ago. I thought one Stargate season was the equivalent of a year of real time, so shouldn't the length of time between Air Part 1 and Gauntlet be two years?
No, they've been pretty clear only one year has passed. All the breaks and the more serialized nature of the show prevent them from making such large timeline gaps.

Another couple "Gauntlet" questions: How were the drones able to find the Gates across the galaxy if they hadn't been activated before? Did they comb the galaxy to find the Gates, or did they detect the Novan SG teams as they scouted for colonies? And once they found the Gates, why didn't they destroy them? We already know they had the capacity from "Common Descent".
The gates do send out signals to coordinate with each other. The drones could have tracked them through that. They don't destroy the gates because they're trying to destroy Destiny. They are capable of basic reasoning. Destroying the gates would keep Destiny from using them, thereby betraying its presence.

That doesn't explain why they didn't destroy them before Destiny turned up. After all, the seed ship was undiscovered until the Ramming episode and there doesn't "have" to be a follow up ship in any case. Why would a destroy all technology focused drone, leave really advance technology where anyone could find it (the gates) just on the off chance it might help them find someone who they don't even know is coming.

They didn't treat the gates as advanced technology before Destiny started using them. With no energy signature being given off, the drones would never recognize it as such. The connection signal is weak enough that they don't detect it normally, so they could only have recently discovered it.

Where did Koz go? He was one of the few remaining LA survivors on the ship, appearing in several episodes, and wasn't with the hunting party that wiped out all of the others, yet it's stated that Varro is the last of the boarding party. This is rather bothersome when the writing seemed to make a conscious effort to give him a bit more development than the standard Lucian Redshirt.

Gauntlet: Why add the double cliffhanger to the final episode when the show's been cancelled? I get that there's a whole late notice thing, but seriously was there no way to pad 5 mins into the last episode and remove the whole the last pod is broken "cliffhanger"? Wasn't the whole could be 3 years, could be 1000, could fail and the Drones still get us enough for a last episode ever situation?
By the time they had found out the news, the episodes had already been produced and were waiting for airing. Presumably, Syfy has a thing against editing episodes of cancelled shows once they're done.

Gauntlet: Why can't two people go into one pod? They're definately big enough. It's a two line question and answer to say the pods can't work with two in, but it looks like idiocy the way they ignore it.
According to interviews with the writers, they were leaving that very solution open as a possibility to have Eli survive the trip. But since a third season didn't happen, we never saw this. (And it was one of several ideas they'd come up with.)

So what was it that finally killed this show and presumably also dragged down the SG-1 and Atlantis film's? Because Universe both in my own opinion and that of most forum's I've been on seem to have a general consensus of it being a pretty well liked show. Were the Nielson's actually that bad or was it the Fan Dumb that centred around the whole it's too dark, it's not SG-1 crowd? the first example is fair enough, many far better shows have been cancelled before their time due to low ratings but if it was just some really vocal crying from the fans that shelved it, then that is a very cruel shame.
A bit of both. Ratings definately were a problem caused partly by the Fan Dumb, but also partly self inflicted. If you're going to change the style of a franchise that's been running for 13 years who do you think is going to watch it? People who don't like SG-1 and Atlantis are unlikely to tune in to start with because it's "just another Stargate" and out of those that do like Stargate you're obviously going to get some They Changed It, Now It Sucks. Stick that alongside a long running, strong focus Myth Arc and 3-4 month long breaks every 10 episodes, to the point where people are unsure if it's still season 1 or not, and you have to wonder what they were thinking.

Here's my problem with the revelation TJ was going to contract Lou Gehrig's disease; it's frequently stated that there is no known cure. Not there is no cure on board Destiny but that there is no cure period. Huh? 1) No one even suggests that, instead of using the hilariously old Destiny database, they instead use the stones to research the Atlantis or Asgard database's that have several thousand years more medical data within. If the people of Novus have developed a cure, the modern Ancients or Asgard sure as hell have. 2) Let's count just how many things the SGC have acquired/know of that could potentially heal this condition. Sarcophagus; capable of healing just about everything up to and including death, Goa'uld healing device; powerful enough to initially cure the Ori plague (before it adapted), Tretonin; capable of bestowing the immune system and long life of a Goa'uld and of which Tau'ri have ample supply thanks to their alliance with the Free Jaffa, Tokra Symbiote; basically the same thing as Tretonin, Nanomachines; Atlantis can produce these at will, are incredibly powerful and Mc Kay eventually learnt how to disconnect them from the Pegasus Replicator network. Now admittedly each of these options come with risks such as addiction or loss of identity, but to say there is no possible way to cure it is ridiculous. Basically this plot would have made for a great Season 2 SG-1 storyline, but in an era where the Tau'ri are one of the most powerful races who ever lived? No dice.
Treating disease is not some linear continuum, whereby if you can cure Y, then you can cure A through X. The Ancients don't necessarily have a cure for Lou Gehrig's disease, because we don't know that they ever encountered or experienced it. Especially the Asgard, who are physiologically very different from humans--you expect them to have had the same diseases?
As for the other stuff, the SGC doesn't have access to Sarcophagi and have more or less sworn off using them (a bit of Honor Before Reason, admittedly). As for the rest of it, yeah, there's probably ways around it, but sadly none of it can get to Destiny to help TJ.

There are the Stasis pods though. This bothered me even before Eli's idea of using them came up. They know there "is" a cure for Lou Gehrig's because the Novans have it. So TJ can afford to wait. Of course there are issues with who would be the medic on Destiny, but there are years to solve that before TJ needs to go into Stasis.

In the episode Common Descent we are introduced to a purple fruit that, like most food the Destiny crew find, tastes disgusting. However Camille and Chloe claim they have discovered some special properties that they absolutely refuse to reveal to Eli... is that some kind of sexual reference I'm simply not understanding or are there really some advanced medicinal properties to this fruit? if so, not only is it unlikely that these two non-scientist non-medical women could have discovered these features over TJ or any of the science team but it's also being pretty damn selfish that they don't feel the need to share this use to the rest of the crew.
I watched it again, the way they were talking about it seemed quite 'flirty', and Chloe obviously didn't want to tell Eli which means it's likely something sexual like an aphrodisiac or even as a 'tool', due to his crush on her Chloe wouldn't be comfortable telling Eli that it makes the sex with the Scott even better for example.

Where was Jonas Quinn during the episode Seizure? if anyone was going to convince the Langaran Council to let the Destiny try their plan it would surely be him. The only reason I can think of is that he died during the Ori invasion, but you would think that the death of a former SG-1 team member would have warranted a throwaway line somewhere down the line.

In the first season episode "Faith", they drop a mess of people off on what will be called "Eden". Despite having a shuttle craft and the ability to choose to land anywhere on the planet, they picked a TEMPERATE ZONE to start their colony in? Come on, a sub-tropical area would make a ton more sense (equatorial would be too hot), what with more reasonable temperature swings. Come on, in every colony ever started on earth in a temperate area the first winter was always a killer. They could easily have seen when the planet will be experiencing what seasons where by its axial tilt.
And how many climatologists, meteorologists, and ecologists did they have with them again that might have noticed this? I'm guessing somewhere on the order of "none."
Basic general science knowledge - it doesn't require a degree to know where the equator is and where the poles are.

They chose that spot to begin with because of the Obelisk they found, as evident by the fact that they made the initial camp in order to study the Obelisk while Destiny made its maneuver. The fact that the people who wanted to stay believed that the planet was made for them should explain why they probably didn't move from that location after the Destiny left...

Is it just me or is Kiva's invasion strategy incredibly stupid? She kills the only person who could reliably give her any information on the science behind the destiny (or recognize a bluff from the scientist she captured), she doesn't have any probes prepared to check out the destiny, she didn't plan to bring any supplies in the first wave (even after it became obvious she had been discovered and it would be the only wave), her invasion plan can only work if there are no defenses within the gate room itself, col. Young is not willing to vent the atmosphere (despite showing an earlier willingness to kill both people that he would sacrifice this way), the defending troops are only one door away, rather than a far more logical two doors(which would have given reaction time) and doesn't bring any personel with medical expertise. Not to mention the fact that her second-in-command was absolutely nuts.
She was rushed for time. She expected to have multiple waves, and a lot more people and supplies. The first wave was just supposed to get a foothold. Instead it became her entire invasion force.

So, if Chloe and Scott have sex, how do they prevent her getting pregnant? I very much doubt any condoms or contraceptives were on stand-by in the gate room.

So, early in season 1, there is a coup because the civilians think the military is taking too much control. In late season 1, and in season 2, Young starts to act like an actual military dictator. He refuses to listen to orders from the US government and does not bother to consult with the IOA official on any subject. The most annoying to me was when he killed Telford (for a bit) before resurrecting him and then said he didn't have to explain why he killed a defenseless prisoner to anyone. Though his actions do make some sense, what makes me scratch my head is that no one really seems to question his control anymore.

Did the Novus!Crew take the stones with them? Would the stones have contacted the ancients if they used them (we are talking 2000 years in the past).
Considering the Ancients left 10,000 years in the past, no.

But there were still some around during the time of the Romans.
Was this in an Expanded Universe novel or video game? because I honestly can't recall a single mention of surviving Ancients around 0 BC... in fact seeing as the Romans existed alongside the Ancient Egyptians that would put them during or just after Ra's conquest of Earth. I would think that the surviving Ancients would be more concerned with fending off the legions of Jaffa than communicating with some obscure colony of people claiming to be from the future.

Nope, it was in the main series. Ianus(the inventor of the time machine), is actually the roman god of gates, doors and time. They also interbred with humans, which explains why some humans have the ancient activation gene. They apparently just ignored the goa'uld on earth, like the asgard presumably did as well.
You're actually mistaken... The Ancients were all ascended(or dead) many years prior to the Goa'uld arriving. The Ancients from Earth died of a disease(or ascended). The Ancients fleeing from Atlantis arrived on Earth at around 10k BC, they intermingled with humans to give the activation gene, yes. But they were all dead by the time the Goa'uld arrived on Earth. The only Ancients who were on Earth following the Goa'uld invasion, had descended from their energy form and died as "normal" people(because they were going to "meddle"). Like Merlin and Morgana. Just because Ianus used his machine to visit doesn't mean that any Ancients were actually alive during the time of the Goa'uld.^[3]

They arrived 10k years(8k BC) ago, but were apparently around for a significant amount of time afterwards, though it is a bit unclear for how long exactly (in fact, the only way for the timeline of the alliance of the four great races to make sense is if it formed after the ancients came back). Way back in the second season (episode: the fifth race), Dr. Jackson identified them as the roman gods, which implies they would have still been around during at least part of the roman empire.
You're mistaken again... The four races are the Furlings, Nox, Asgard, and Ancients. The alliance between them could have been as far back as ~50 Million years ago(When the Ancients arrived in the Milky Way Galaxy)... The only knowledge we really have of the alliance itself is that it ended when the last of the Ancients died out/ascended(which was ~10k years ago). The Ancients who arrived on Earth after fleeing the Pegasus Galaxy intermingled with the humans on Earth, but for the kept a low profile because the Goa'uld were in charge of Earth until Ra's eviction 5k years later. Their status as being considered Gods does not mean that they existed for all that time. Especially considering that some, like Merlin, are known to have descended to carry out last wishes on Earth.

The asgard hadn't developed hyperdrive until 30000 years before the series takes place, which puts a big limit on that timeframe, since the ancients were in the pegasus galaxy at that time. Concidering the asgard are not mentioned as ever having helped fighting the wraith, it would definately imply the alliance wasn't until after the remaining ancients came back.

Its always been an issue where the Asgard, Nox and Furlings were during the Wraith wars and the Milky Way plague. This brings me back to one of my Stargate SG-1 Headscratchers about just how useless they actually were compared to the Ancients if the latter could already build Destiny level ships millions of years beforehand - the most likely idea that has arisen from the discussion is that the Asgard were actually at a Tau'ri level of development during that time with the Nox remaining neutral due to being pacifists (who the hell knows with the elusive Furlings.) My point is, just because we don't hear of them during this period doesn't necessarily mean the Alliance didn't exist yet. It also has to be said that IF the unlikely chance of Roman Ancients was true, they couldn't have had much technology left considering that there were two SG teams comprised of identical people running around with Time Jumpers and stealing ZPM's right underneath their noses.

What bugs me is this: Why end the entire franchise with SGU's failure instead of just ending SGU?

↑ I'm not talking about Alliances, btw, which is the latest episode right now, but of episode number 12, whose title I do not know. Also, the instability was not caused by Rush, unless you'd expect him to lie to himself. Well, actually, I would expect just that, but he seemed sincere.
↑ The algorithm I am speaking of is the program the SG personnel enter into the dialing computers to activate and dial out at the SGC(which they used to dial Atlantis), Icarus, and any other base that they remove the DHD from the stargate... what algorithm are you talking about?
↑ Not unless you're also saying that because O'Niell and Co ejected Ra from Earth, that the SG teams have been in existence for 2k years...

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[1] I'm not talking about Alliances, btw, which is the latest episode right now, but of episode number 12, whose title I do not know. Also, the instability was not caused by Rush, unless you'd expect him to lie to himself. Well, actually, I would expect just that, but he seemed sincere.

[2] The algorithm I am speaking of is the program the SG personnel enter into the dialing computers to activate and dial out at the SGC(which they used to dial Atlantis), Icarus, and any other base that they remove the DHD from the stargate... what algorithm are you talking about?

[3] Not unless you're also saying that because O'Niell and Co ejected Ra from Earth, that the SG teams have been in existence for 2k years...