SciFi Bullshit: Stargate Addresses

Hi. I just wanted to leave that here. I need it from time to time, when someone wants to reminisce and talks about Stargeate. In case you watched Stargate back then, you might remember that scene where Daniel explains addresses.

“To find a destination within any three-dimensional space, you need six points.”

No. Sorry. You don’t. You need minimum 1 point, if it’s the one you want already. Otherwise things get complicated. So Daniel draws three straight lines, each of which is defined by two of those six points. Of course, you can draw a line through any two points. The problem is that arbitrary lines in space do not intersect at all. While in a plane two lines are either parallels or intersect, in 3D they can also be skewed. Just pick up two pencils and imagine them being infinite straight lines. You can hold them touching one another making an intersect, you can hold them exactly parallel, or you can hold them any other way passing by one another. That’s skew. And adding a third line doesn’t make it better. In fact you might now get two intersections or even a triangle. It’s a wondrous thing that the air force officers in the scene do not figure that out.

Furthermore, the 7th symbol as point of origin is idiotic. If the gate didn’t know where it currently is, how does it work in the first place?

So let’s think again. We have some dials that fit constellations. First we need to figure out what that means. A constellation is not a point but an extended area in the night sky, creating an infinte 3D slice out into space. We could say that we are talking about the brightest star in the depicted constellation as seen from earth. That means every Stargate needs custom labels for the planet where it’s located, referring to the sky there. At its latest that becomes problematic, when they start driving around gates via starships in the series, but for the movie at least it’s workable. Let’s stick to the movie.

So we have 38 symbols referring to stars from which we choose up to 8 (a stargate has 9 chevrons, it’s just that two are are not usually visible because of the runway). How could we make a somewhat sensible addressing system? So first of all, we might mean one of our 38 star systems itself, call it A. What would be sensible address for A itself? A+ENTER. Dial that very symbol, then “origin” to end your sequence. So we would want sequences ranging in length from 1 to 8 signs. The ORIGIN terminates the sequence, but is otherwise meaningless.

How do longer sequences work? We want the point that has the shortest total distance to all the symbols we reference; the “center” of our chosen reference points. Using this approach there is no reason to prohibit repitition of symbols. We could do A+A+B+ORIGIN, demarcating the point that is on the line from A to B, but twice as close to A as it is to B.

We could even allow up to 9 target glyphs. Since ORIGIN is just an ENTER, the sequence must stop when all 9 places are used up. The reason they have to dial ORIGIN in the movie is that they have only a 6 symbol address.

Finally, we could make a difference between A+B+ENTER and B+A+ENTER, by giving the first point a little more weight, making its pull on the “center point” a little bit stronger. How many addresses does that give us? We have 38 addresses with a single glyph, 38 squared for two glyphs and so on up to the power of 9. But we must substract the options that all places are the same each time. A+A+…+A+ENTER ist just A+Enter.

38 + 38^2-38 + 38^3-38 +...+ 38^9-38 
= 38 + 38^2 + 38^3 +...+ 38^9 - 38*8
= 169,681,401,296,978 - 304 
= 169,681,401,296,674

Note the number for Daniel’s method is smaller than you might expect, even if it worked. Since it uses three pairs to define three straight lines, certain addresses are eqivalent like

(A,B) + (C,D) + (E,F)
= (B,A) + (D,C) + (F,E) || switching the fix points within pairs
= (E,F) + (A,B) + (C,D) || moving pairs around
= ... || any combination thereof

Rebellion: Alien procreation

Tags

Rebellion, Worldbuilding

A typical question is: How to make alien aliens? That is, how to make them more alien than giving them rubber foreheads. My suggestion is: Start with procreation. Just a few changes can lead to major deviations from human culture. Some things about us:

• We have males and females, mostly. We do not regularly produce hermaphrodites, switch our sex, or do other things real animals do.
• Sex is determined by chromosomes, not by environmental conditions like in crocodiles.
• We have little differences between sexes. We do not regularly produce infertile individuals.
• We can do it all year round, no mating seasons.
• We can do it before we’re fully grown (that’s rare).
• We bare life young. So we usually know who the biological mother is, less so with the father.
• Our kids are helpless for a long time. Mother and father often cooperate in child rearing.

If you want some more ideas, Crash Course had an episode recently.

So let’s put some aliens into Rebellion.

The dense forests of the south-eastern peninsula are beset by “spider monsters”. It unknown which god made them, but until shortly before the Rebellion no humans ever lived there. The spider are actually no such things. They have an internal sceleton, active lungs and only four legs. They are hairy, venomous and grow to size of a lion.

Their life cycle is rather different from humans. They spend most of their life “male” and become “female” only later in their life span. They grow bigger and less agile, when they transition to female state. Bearing children ultimately kills the mother, who bury out of her abdomen. The children are then usually adopted by other females, who nuture and train them. Ultimately most females let themselves be impregnated by their adoptees / students / husbands. (Those categories are pretty much the same for them.)

The spiders initially didnt’t have much culture as we understand it. They have no hands and are thus no tool users. But when Mistress Weavers’s divine domain within the Empire collapsed, some of her followers fled down the coast. They finally in the spider djungle. It turned out their divine connection considered those creatures “weaver enough” and provided them with a telepathic connection. When more refugees fled south during the rebellion, the spider talkers took them in. They have since formed a hybrid culture known as the Spider Tribes; spider talking appears to be meta-genetically rather dominant. They have developed a script both species can write and a drum language that is of great use in the dense forests.

The neighboring Realm of the Royal Couple has so far been incapable of pacifying the tribes and has resigned themselved to secure the frontier with a line of fortresses.