Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete)


I prefer linking it on Fanfiction dot net since Archive of Our Own doesn't really play well with random browsing in my experience. To even consider reading anything on there you need to be a member. To become a member you need to be invited. Which could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few eternities. I'm still waiting for an invite after submitting a request for one a few years ago.
 
Leet-Tech™ Wormhole Units©​ are far safer in my opinion. They simply make two points in space directly adjacent, so nothing needs to be quantized and reconsistuted, you just walk through. Admittedly the intense gamma irradiation is a minor issue if you're not a demon, but there are ways around that part :) And as he explained when they managed to fix the original one, with that tech even if it fails mid-use, you merely get ejected from whichever side has more mass on it, or randomly if you are exactly balanced. Which in practice probably couldn't happen to anyone other than Jackson or O'Neill :)
 
I'm so glad this isn't falling into the trap of the so-called 'read and react' story. And I use the term story loosely in this case. The standard 'read and react' "story" is nothing less then blatant plagiarism pretending to be a piece of original work where the so-called author copies word for word the entire text of a published novel (or in rare cases someone else's fanfiction) while having whoever is 'reading' the story make shocked/angry comments on occasion. I am pleased to see the Ship of Fools cast reading/viewing the books/comics/tv series off screen and making plans based on that foreknowledge. Thus the actual story isn't 100% 'reading' the original work of fiction and having the cast react to what is being read.
 
I prefer linking it on Fanfiction dot net since Archive of Our Own doesn't really play well with random browsing in my experience. To even consider reading anything on there you need to be a member. To become a member you need to be invited. Which could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few eternities. I'm still waiting for an invite after submitting a request for one a few years ago.

Interesting, as I've found I can read things on AO3 with no obvious problems, but I'm using a desktop Linux, not a iOS or Android smart phone, as many seem to default to, these days...


This would really explain a lot, wouldn't it?

Maybe the Ancients had been around long enough that their software systems included self-checking???
 
Last edited:

The other point of a train is you can build it over several days and take it apart over several days with the important time being the transfer in the gate. You can move a few thousand troops on a single train with the right types of cars and loading time or a few hundred colonists traveling in comfort on train cars they can live out of as the colony is built.

When using trains cargo containers are good when you need to have the product in a semi protected shell due to not having structures to store things in as you can throw up a metal building in a day that can house many containers worth of materials with limited access in/out. You can also ship entire 18 wheeler trailers when you want to transport a distance from the rails but both cargo containers and trailers reduce the total capacity you get with box cars and ore hauler cars.

Another important product to ship by rail is cement powder as sand, gravel and water can be found/produced locally for concrete works. The first few trains you would want to bring in the ingredients needed but that would get cut down once you source them locally.

The other good news is most of the big mining equipment can be broken down small enough to fit onto rail cars but would require welding some parts back together on the other side like off road dump truck dump beds.
 
Yeah, but wouldn't you even try it? I mean, they salvaged a ton of crap for Area 51. You would think snagging a control device for your magical portal network would be a top priority, and one of the things you try is plugging it into your own gate to see if it works.

Please remember that while DHDs are fairly fail-safe, they also have the Ancient's typical security, ie: none. Because of that Earth's unique (crappy) dialing system is one of the most secure systems in the galaxy. :rolleyes: God help them.
 
The Ancients had absolutely no concept of occupational health and safety, they were really, really good about designing their tech to last forever, be functionally indestructible and easy to use, but they never even considered the possible dangers of misusing their technology. Worse, while Ancient tech works perfectly safely and reliably 99.9% of the time, that last 0.1% is likely to be world-endingly catastrophic and have absolutely no inbuilt failsafe or countermeasure in place. While it rarely goes wrong, when Ancient tech does go wrong, it goes wrong hard.

The Ancients in Stargate are basically an entire culture of this:


They are the perfect 'Neglectful Precursor' archetype; utterly brilliant, ridiculously powerful and hilariously naively ignorant about the consequences of their actions.


And yeah, Daniel isn't a pacifist, he just genuinely believes that violence is a last resort, which means that you're supposed to try other things first and only resort to violence if genuinely necessary. Jack O'Neill on the other hand tends to lean more towards feeling that violence is also something to resort to when it is convenient, or spooky. In hindsight, he might be right about the spooky.

Please remember that while DHDs are fairly fail-safe, they also have the Ancient's typical security, ie: none. Because of that Earth's unique (crappy) dialing system is one of the most secure systems in the galaxy. :rolleyes: God help them.

IIRC the DHD for the Alpha Gate ended up in Russian hands when they took it from Nazi Germany, who took it from Egypt. I remember that being a plot point, because the Russians were able to use the DHD to 'override' one of the stargates and allow them to clandestinely send and retrieve teams without anyone knowing. The DHD for the Beta Gate (the one in Antarctica) ran out of power shortly after the gate was found, as that gate was actually the oldest (clocking in at just over 50 million years) and possibly one of if not the first gates built in the Milky Way. Ra brought the Alpha Gate from some less important planet, so it was much younger.

Edit: The Ancients were scientific geniuses every single one of them, but complete and total morons in every other field. The term 'Idiot Savant' comes to mind as a fitting description. Give them a toaster, two tin cans, a roll of duct tape and half a dozen paper clips and they'll use it to build an antigravity device that provides perfectly toasted bread on demand, but point out that if misused the device can easily be turned into a planet-cracking black hole bomb and they'll just look at you funny and go "Well sure, but why would anyone do that? You'd have to be stupid to do that, don't worry so much. Now if I can just find a few bits of copper wire and some aluminum foil then I'll be able to finish that perpetual motion machine to power the mood lighting in my bedroom." They are the kind of people who build a toy for children that, when left unattended for too long, may inadvertently run the risk of conquering the galaxy. (The toy, not the children; that's Saiyans.)
 
Last edited:
IIRC the DHD for the Alpha Gate ended up in Russian hands when they took it from Nazi Germany, who took it from Egypt. I remember that being a plot point, because the Russians were able to use the DHD to 'override' one of the stargates and allow them to clandestinely send and retrieve teams without anyone knowing.
Actually, it was the Alpha Gate they were using it on; they'd recovered it from Thor's crashed vessel after SG-1's introduction to the Replicators. And they didn't 'override' the SGC gate so much as keep their gate and DHD powered down when they knew SGC was using theirs (thank you, Maybourne).

What I want to know is, since obviously the Antarctica DHD worked (since the NID teams used the Antarctica DHD and gate to do their larceny runs) why they didn't hook it up when they installed the Antarctica gate after the Replicators mission.
 
I prefer linking it on Fanfiction dot net since Archive of Our Own doesn't really play well with random browsing in my experience. To even consider reading anything on there you need to be a member. To become a member you need to be invited. Which could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few eternities. I'm still waiting for an invite after submitting a request for one a few years ago.
I'm sorry for your difficulty. When available though I would say the AO3 version of a fic is better since you can load the entire fic at once instead of having multiple tabs.
 
I prefer linking it on Fanfiction dot net since Archive of Our Own doesn't really play well with random browsing in my experience. To even consider reading anything on there you need to be a member. To become a member you need to be invited. Which could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few eternities. I'm still waiting for an invite after submitting a request for one a few years ago.

You do? I've literally never had trouble reading anything on AO3 despite only being aware of it's having a log in in the vaguest sense, and not even knowing it was invite only.
 
Actually, it was the Alpha Gate they were using it on; they'd recovered it from Thor's crashed vessel after SG-1's introduction to the Replicators. And they didn't 'override' the SGC gate so much as keep their gate and DHD powered down when they knew SGC was using theirs (thank you, Maybourne).

What I want to know is, since obviously the Antarctica DHD worked (since the NID teams used the Antarctica DHD and gate to do their larceny runs) why they didn't hook it up when they installed the Antarctica gate after the Replicators mission.

By that point they'd gotten used to doing it manually and didn't want to change things, probably. Hooking up the DHD would require them to completely redesign their systems, including important things like the Iris. Easier, safer and cheaper to just continue the status quo.
 
Edit: They should have come up with some shorthand for worlds besides P#X-### blah blah blah. Instead, I'm stuck thinking of them as rapey-Mongol world or zappy-crystal world.
One of the dropped plot elements was the revelation that the Gate symbols were also vocal sound. So you have 6 syllable words/phrases that exactly encode the addresses.
Pro-cla-roosh Te-o-nas ...... and the Earth's "pyramid with single moon" having "at?" as a sound.
36 phonemes isn't a bad set.
 
Last edited:
One of the dropped plot elements was the revelation that the Gate symbols were also vocal sound. So you have 6 syllable words that exactly encode the addresses.
Pro-cla-rush Te-o-nas ...... and the Earth's "pyramid with single moon" having "at?" as a sound.
36 phonemes isn't a bad set.
Sounds like something the Ancients would do; clever and efficient and entirely useless to anyone who isn't an Ancient and knows what they know.

They're like an entire culture of children who are also scientific and technological geniuses, and rather than grow up they decided to just NOPE out of reality entirely.
 
Last edited:
You do? I've literally never had trouble reading anything on AO3 despite only being aware of it's having a log in in the vaguest sense, and not even knowing it was invite only.

Every time I tried in the past without having a link directly to a specific story I could view the top page. But if I tried going any deeper, it insisted I was trying to access a Members Only section, and thus needed to log in. Which was impossible since you needed an invite to become a member, and I wasn't getting one. I eventually gave up. Tried 3 or 4 times to submit a request for an invitation. Nothing came of it. So I stopped bothering with AO3.
 
Every time I tried in the past without having a link directly to a specific story I could view the top page. But if I tried going any deeper, it insisted I was trying to access a Members Only section, and thus needed to log in. Which was impossible since you needed an invite to become a member, and I wasn't getting one. I eventually gave up. Tried 3 or 4 times to submit a request for an invitation. Nothing came of it. So I stopped bothering with AO3.

I found that direct links work, yes, and also putting an author name in the search box, as various authors have said "I use the same name on AO3". You could try other things in the search box...

The reason I went to AO3 was some of my Fenspace stories ('Dr Scure' and 'Arthur' ones, in Season 0) were uploaded there, by someone else, in a partial form...

Fenspace would be an interesting place for SoF to visit... Looks like Earth Alph, but, then handwavium turned up...
 
Last edited:
Security. having a working dhd hooked to a gate anyone that knows a planet and can access it can punch in and leave. By having it controlled by a computer they control the security so you have to be able to bypass it before you can dial out.

Can you secure the DHD sure but until you know everything it can do are you sure you fully secured it?
 
Put the DHD in a secure location. Like, not directly in front of the gate.
And if the DHD happens to be a receiver for a remote dialing device? I'm not sure if we ever see the puddle jumper that was in the Milky Way dialing the SGC gate, but it can "remote dial" others. What if it does that through the DHD instead of direct to the gate? Then the DHD being in a "secure location" doesn't matter, if it can dial the gate then anyone with a remote dialer can do the same.
 
And if the DHD happens to be a receiver for a remote dialing device? I'm not sure if we ever see the puddle jumper that was in the Milky Way dialing the SGC gate, but it can "remote dial" others. What if it does that through the DHD instead of direct to the gate? Then the DHD being in a "secure location" doesn't matter, if it can dial the gate then anyone with a remote dialer can do the same.
First you need a remote dialer on earth.
 
A railway car can hold about 100 tons. In 38 minutes, you could pretty easily send several dozen full-sized freight trains worth of cargo through, assuming they were up to speed prior to the gate opening.

Or, you could do it like the Aschen, who simply turned the gate on its side in order to dump bulk grain through, presumably to fall into a waiting hopper on the other side. The advantage there is that gravity does all of the work as a motive force for the cargo. That only works for some types of cargo, of course, but is wonderful for bulk items.

The problem would come though, that a train needs to be connected together for efficiency in acceleration and braking.
But it's shown in Atlantis that an entire vehicle needs to enter the wormhole before it will be transmitted (that episode where they first encounter the wraith's ancestor bug, and the puddle jumper gets stuck partway into the gate).
So all your train carriages would need to be decoupled before reaching the wormhole, and that's also assuming that the gate can actually handle something _longer_ than a standard size puddle jumper...
 
The DHD does need to be connected to or near the gate in at least some fashion, as its primary purpose is actually to serve as the gate's power source and to provide hardware to run the STARGATE.EXE software that accounts for stellar drift and whatnot. In typical Ancient fashion, they carefully made sure that the nigh-indestructible Stargates were in fact fully functional all on their own as a failsafe to account for the DHD's being somewhat less indestructible. Thus, if anyone ever got accidentally stranded on a world with a DHD wrecked beyond repair, it's fine, they can easily get back home by grabbing one of the half-dozen ZPM's in their back pocket universe and taping it to the side of the gate, then manually spin the wheel to dial. And if for some inexplicable reason they don't have a spare ZPM available (as if that would ever happen) then its still fine because the entire gate is superconducting, so in the absolute worst-case scenario you can just scrounge up the appropriate bits of metal, sticks and fruit to cobble together a simple one-shot cold fusion core that'll get you at least a minute or two of usable wormhole time before its thematic matrix destabilizes enough to violently implode the local star system.

I mean, yeah you'll have to do the stellar drift calculations manually, but that's just math, that's easy.
 
Last edited:
Pretty sure a collaboration between Linda and Taylor could make DHD which goes in your back pocket... If Kevin got involved they might be able to make it a general-purpose portal-device remote power-source and control - so it'll work on just about any remote-controllable portal/gate/wormhole set-up they might run into...

Could be tricky, but they might even make one that can recharge from both industry-standard micro-USB or Apple phone chargers, using the same socket! :)
 
Last edited:
Back
Top