But it does make some sense, If you could reverse engineer a stargate it could be used in such fashion.

Dieing while trying is alot nobler then dieing without trying everything.

Pattrick

I think Washuu and Skuld are the only ones who could "reverse engineer" and artifact like that.... maybe...

>Dieing while trying is alot nobler then dieing without trying
>everything.

But you're still just as dead...

-Z

Rabid Crack Turtle 3.14159
---
Welcome to Hell. Here's your accordion.

But you might have accomplished something before you died. That still counts as something (for a given value of something).

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Jeffrey McIntyre
"You're a louse, Roger Smith."
"I usually get that from human women, Dorothy."

Something vaguely similar to the "carry a stargate" idea posited at the beginning of this thread is shown in Stargate SG-1, most notably (to my recollection) in the 1st season finale. However, rather than a portable stargate that could be erected to ship size, flown through, and then self-destruct, what happened instead was that the Goa'uld ship had a standard-issue, regular-size stargate on the ship. I don't recall offhand if the planet the ship was orbiting when SG-1 gated into it had its own stargate, but the ship had been the default-receipt for that location (you can have multiple stargates on a planet, and can dial out from any of them, but only one at a time is the primary stargate that can accept travelers), so either it was the only gate there or the ship-gate had become the primary gate, either automatically or through some manual setting. And it only worked while the ship was in orbit; once it shot off into whatever FTL they have (I forget what they call it, but I think it might be hyperspace), on its way to Earth, it stopped working, 'cause it no longer had a fixed point of origin.

Given the size of the room the gate was in in that episode, and what was there (crates of weapons... this was SG-1's first exposure to and opportunity to acquire the smaller Goa'uld gun-like weapons which Jack nicknames "zat guns"), I imagine that the idea was that it was at least sometimes a cargo hold, and that a stargate on a ship is for transporting stuff that's too large for the transport rings -- which I don't think are ever shown larger than maybe a half-dozen people standing close together -- from a remote location onto a ship.

But yeah, you're not going to fit anything larger than a "death glider" through a Stargate, and even that's a very near thing (doing it is known as "threading the needle"). And even if you could do what Fanatic suggests, it'd be messy to try doing things that way, 'cause a B5/UF jump/metagate is probably still close enough to the planet that only one stargate in that region could receive travelers, who could be coming in either from standard rooms-size gates or from these hypothetical mega-sized stargates in space. The former would be trouble if the default gate was the metagate (disregarding whether things would get sucked through the gate, there'd still be the no-fun of someone walking through and arriving in the vacuum of space, unprotected), and the latter wouldn't work very well if the default gate was on the ground (it'd be too small, plus arrival would lead to not so much a landing as an outright crash).

Besides, if you could make metagate-sized jumpgates, then metaspace scarcely seems necessary except as a backup, since stargates combine the "no special engine needed" of metagates and the "near-instantaneous travel" of fold drive. Well, okay, and possibly the "exceedingly large power requirements" of fold drive, too, but probably not on quite so massive a scale.

So, no, I don't think the "portable emergency ship-size build-n-go stargate" idea is particularly feasible or otherwise desireable.

Slarti
Eagerly awaiting the SG-1 2nd season DVD box set...

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Except that, since you can't take the stargate WITH you; either you end up with the enemy having an insta-portal to wherever you abandoned the ship TO, or you have a destroyed stargate (and I wonder how many years it takes to find one of THOSE.)

The Beautiful Voice Admin
-Lady Kozue's Media Archive
-The Beautiful Voice

This assumes that you're abandoning ship because you've been boarded. I've also noticed, however, that if you put a 'door' in front of it, you can't get through the gate. Hey, anyone know what happens to someone if you run into something solid before you clear the event horizon??

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Ouch?

<Shrugs>

According to SG-1, you go splat in a very fatal (but non-messy) way. That's why they have the iris up, whenever they're not using the gate. Whether it works that way in UF? that's certainly not my call ;)

well according to the show, when entering the stargate, an object is broken down to it's component particles tossed to the recieving Gate (quantum tunnelling maybe?) and reassembled. The iris is (I think) a millimeter (roughly .04 inches) from the event horizon, resulting in no room for the object to reassemble.

well the goa'uld COULD, in their piramid like ships (which shows
that they have no brains when it comes to starship building)

As for the enemy having an insta-portal to wherever you abondoned
the ship, the receiving end would be heavily guarded no?

-WF-
Rabid Crack Weasel #15

Or you could use the iris from the SG-1 series.

"Close the iris!" *scrape* *THUNK* *THUNK-THUNK*