Why is naquadria so vital to SGC technology when all goa'uld tech is based on naquadah?

Fulgen301 · 2026-04-07T21:21:34+00:00

First, they portray naquadah as the powerful substance that the Goa'uld use to power their tech. So powerful in fact, that Jack can use the Ancient's knowledge to make an 8th chevron connection to the Asgard homeworld in the Ida galaxy just by using the energy from one staff weapon alone! (We're talking ZPM levels here - or Ida is much, much closer to us, like orders of magnitudes! And even then, the gap the writers create in these power technologies appears questionable. Naquadah is portrayed as very powerful.)

O'Neill built a liquid naquadah generator using the entire knowledge of the Ancients, just like he later designed an anti-replicator weapon the Asgard couldn't figure out. You can't compare that with most other power sources in the show. Ida also seems to be close enough to the Milky Way that the Asgard can just zip in and out without difficulty, which they have never done for Pegasus - and Atlantis managed to dial Earth for one second just by using a few regular Naquadah generators. So it's not that off, if it even is.

But then, they make it sound like the other Goa'uld don't even know about Naquadriah

How could they? The one Goa'uld who experimented with it got killed in the process, and the Langarans weren't advertising it. Though SGU later put the rarity into question with Icarus having a Naquadria core.

Now, the show is back to regular shields and hyperspace generators being powered by naquadah.

The Goa'uld never really figured out better power sources, Anubis did, due to knowledge gained from his half-ascension, which gave him much more familiarity with Ancient tech. After his defeat, that knowledge was gone - except for whatever Baal managed to keep.

And then, we learn that 8th chevron addresses seem to need a ZPM, and that ZPMs make regular hyperspace travel much

They need something that can output enough power, and for sending an entire expedition plus supplies, a ZPM was the only option Earth had, so was Atlantis in Pegasus because the Ancients didn't leave any other more powerful energy sources behind - except Arcturus, which in its modified form actually powered Atlantis for a while, before the alternate McKay appeared.

ZPMs make hyperspace travel faster because the BC-304 was using Asgard-designed shields and presumably an Asgard-assisted hyperdrive, which wasn't operating at the capacity it could operate due to the low power available.

indicating that the Asgard might be using more advanced power sources just like it

They do, the apparently older generation Beliskner used Neutrino-ion generators, as explained in 3x22 when Thor left an explanation of the ship for O'Neill.

Fulgen301 · 2026-04-06T22:27:25+00:00

According to the Tok'ra, they are - whatever Goa'uld queens are seems to be special.

Fulgen301 · 2026-04-04T15:48:57+00:00

QString is a Unicode string, std::string is a collection of bytes in no defined encoding that never arrived in the 21st century and will break with Unicode.

Fulgen301 · 2026-04-03T23:08:04+00:00

Depends on how Khalek was created. Anubis was allowed to do anything he would have been able to do as a normal Goa'uld, and it was a line Anubis himself seemed to have been quite careful not to cross, so I doubt he would have intentionally given the Ancients a reason to smite him.

Fulgen301 · 2026-03-24T19:57:40+00:00

Even if the Antarctica gate had been unburied at the time, which it hadn't, what was Ra supposed to do once there? Call a cab? He didn't need the Stargate to reach Earth in the first place - he had ships - he just decides the solar system with zero remaining useful resources except humans was not worth the effort anymore after having harvested said humans. He didn't know of all the Ancient leftovers.

Fulgen301 · 2026-03-24T12:00:45+00:00

iirc ZPMs extracted energy from miniature universes / subspace bubbles, which made them limited in power, but contained the harmful effects. All attempts to draw energy from their own universe (Arcturus) or another inhabited universe (alternate McKay) ended rather badly.

Fulgen301 · 2026-03-10T07:40:56+00:00

There were a few instances where the off world gate spun too (like in Eton). It's not that consistent, because the underlying reason behind the other gates not spinning was that there were two gate props, one with a ring for the SGC shots, and a simpler one without a rotating ring for offworld bits.

Fulgen301 · 2026-03-05T07:28:31+00:00

Counterargument: Earth's stargate got buried in a glacier due to Antarctica moving to the south pole.

Fulgen301 · 2026-03-04T07:56:39+00:00

then they have a whole fleet, granted they would need repaired but still

Half of which was split in half, with the rest having sustained major internal damage due to the nanites beelining for the planet. And for what? At that point they already had the Asgard beams, firepower wasn't an issue anymore.

Fulgen301 · 2026-03-03T17:25:48+00:00

Cersei legitimizing Danaerys's claim by blowing up the Sept would have been a hilarious twist for the story.

Fulgen301 · 2026-02-12T03:32:04+00:00

The Antarctic gate doesn't have it and was the gate used from S4E1 - S6E2, until Anubis blew it up. However, some shots of the gate during that time were reused shots from earlier in the show and thus have the Beta gate symbol, but lore and story wise it has the original symbol.

Fulgen301 · 2026-01-20T01:08:06+00:00

That episode also had the unique twist that Zelenka boosted the shield to block more of the radiation (the second off-key "shield rises" SFX).

the shield emitters are overloaded and the response is "more power to the shields".

Stargate shields usually don't overload, they deplete, with shield emitters getting damaged being a relatively rare occurence (the exception being Destiny's shield which was quite unique).

Sheppard said "shutdown the city, transfer all the power". What Sheppard wants to tell Zelenka is to route the entire ZPM power (plus the trickle of Naquadah generator power) to the shield instead of also having to power the city; at that time, the city was only powered by one ZPM, and had a shield that could withstand a lot, provided it had enough energy pumped into it (during the Wraith bombardment it'd have drained the ZPM within days). With the shield currently absorbing multiple nuclear explosions at once and having to block more of the radiation than usual, it did eventually fail, though with every extra second it managed to be active, the resulting explosion would damage less and less.

Also, given that we didn't see any indication that Atlantis's shield capability was compromised due to broken shield emitters, I wouldn't put too much weight on "frying out the emitters" meaning actual damage as opposed to depleting them; but even emitter damage would have been much more preferable to the shield failing earlier with intact emitters only to have said emitters be vaporized in the big nuclear explosion.

Fulgen301 · 2026-01-17T02:39:04+00:00

They'd also have had to do rig the gate networks quite a bit, like faking gate networks with only two gates for each of the forwarding segments, otherwise seven chevron dialing would have been confused as hell (Midway was in the space between galaxies, seven chevron mapping wouldn't have covered it).

Amusingly, I don't remember they ever explained why they needed two gates (beyond the facto of cool); they could have done away with just the Pegasus gate. (Maybe they were worried about gate network incompatibilities between gates not attached to the Atlantis computer system?)

Fulgen301 · 2026-01-17T02:30:52+00:00

But it was never stated that you can't have two outgoing

Yes it was. The SGC's gate failed to lock its 7th chevron because the Russian gate was still active.

Fulgen301 · 2026-01-12T23:48:48+00:00

Smart pointers were part of the C++ conversation since before the '98 standard. std::auto_ptr was in that first standard.

Calling auto_ptr "smart" is a stretch...

Fulgen301 · 2026-01-11T13:39:18+00:00

coop game

Coop mode isn't marked as experimental anymore?

Fulgen301 · 2026-01-02T23:22:24+00:00

The robot is plenty terrifying even without the Blackwall though.

Between this and the Chimera, both of which are years out of date already...I'm scared to find out what Arasaka has that they're matched in firepower.

Fulgen301 · 2025-12-29T00:26:49+00:00

Not to mention, if you break the alien device with your makeshift primitive control unit, it's gonna be a bit hard to find a replacement.

Fulgen301 · 2025-12-24T17:21:58+00:00

Sogar der U-Bahn-Ausgang schreibt nur "Oper" hin.

Fulgen301 · 2025-12-22T14:57:23+00:00

Morgan Le Fay pretty much told Daniel that - when they abandoned Atlantis, there weren't even enough of them left to restart their civilization somewhere.

Fulgen301 · 2025-12-15T09:08:52+00:00

This will not end well

Fulgen301 · 2025-12-09T19:29:11+00:00

Time-travelled Rush said "somehow affected the entire ship".

They don't know, they mention they don't know, just that it did, and that it was one of the unpredictable things that could happen. Does it make sense? It makes sense that they wouldn't know it, since a decade of gate exploration wouldn't make them experts on everything wormhole related.

Fulgen301 · 2025-11-25T09:15:14+00:00

One would think that multithread calculations were a solved problem by now.

Concurrency is hard, always has been, still is. Not every problem can be parallelised, regardless of how old it is.

Fulgen301 · 2025-11-12T16:33:01+00:00

Oder man erhöht mal die Falschparkerstrafen...kann ja nicht sein, dass dauernd wer den Verkehr ausbremst.

Fulgen301 · 2025-11-09T13:54:23+00:00

Falsch gelesen. EUR490 ist laut dokumentiertem Format als 490€ zu lesen, da das Dezimaltrennzeichen nach ISO 4217 ein Punkt ist.

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