To be frank, from an in-universe perspective they had to work with what they got. - The gate room used to be a nuclear silo built inside a mountain of solid rock. Not exactly easy to dig through. - They were initially fully unaware of the dangers of the galaxy until the mission to Abydos (the movie), so defensive planning was an afterthought. - The Iris shield gave SGC a massive cheat code for preventing any attacks through the gate (except the few times when it didnt), in fact, the Goa'uld even gave up coming in with force at some point and switched to subertfuge and infilitration instead. (The Iris is its own can of worms) - For the longest time, Senator Kinsey was in charge of budgeting the SGC, even though he wasnt initially fully aware of its extent, and the man was a notoirous bean counter and all an all a bureaucratic asshole (not to mention his massive ego and ambitions). Id bet my ass that after the first attack by those shapeshifting aliens, Gen.Hammond immediatly requested extra budget to improve SGCs defenses and was slammed down by Kinsey who probably didnt even read the report. - All the issue above gave the staff a very strong "if it aint broke, dont fix it" mentality. I mean, this doesnt change the fact that the entire gate room was badly designed, but it does put things into perspective. ^^

People say it's a stupid room, but these days, it is what I consider 'realistic expectations' if government were left in management of such a device.

This episode could be titled "But wait, there's more!"

In my SGC role play game we immediately set to redesign the situation. Using lots of tech the SGC had gained at this point. We took a spare gate control device off of a barren world. Got rid of all the computers replaced them with a bunker with "arrow slits" Multiple auto weapons on turrets. Walls had pull out cover plates. A hammer of Thor with a separation chamber for captured goauld. Several other stuff was done too.

The best design would be a triangular room, with the gate sitting at the narrow tip. Any enemy that piles out will have no place to go and be exposed to fire from the broad base of the triangle. Set up bunkers and fixed MG positions, and site the control room a level above, so they can still observe the gate, but so that they are not in a straight line and can avoid taking arrows in the arm. Have staggered fire positions and overlapping kill zones, and two barrier doors for access. If it all goes south, seal the doors and make it so you can fill the room with something nasty as a last ditch effort.

As a navy man; I would expect you to have a solid understanding of Air Force incompetence. I certainly do as an army Man.

That Rocket launcher is worse than you might imagine. Wormholes in this franchise are one way so if an enemy is coming though the gate then you can't shoot back at the people on the other side.

I’m sure with a bigger budget the show could’ve had a better looking room, having the control room and the stargate on the same set was probably meant to save precious bucks.

Its the chair force, they need a direct path to their ergonomic chairs and merry-go-rounds after a "tough" mission. Navy strong baby!

I always thought that the biggest hand-wave in the series was the iris. Just looking at it, you can tell that there is no way that it could fit within the gate with all the gate mechanics. And USAF techs were able to fit it in there without breaking anything? And they did this in just a day or two?

I was 10 when I first found this show in 2005, and even kid me thought it was weird they didn't even put a machine gun nest or 4 in the walls facing the gate. All the guards are just standing in the open like morons most of the time.

the stargate was a gift, free for any foe to take as log as they didn't try to get there via the gate itself (with military force at least) the only most-worst defended place/item I have seen in media was maybe the "one ring" which was basically trolling it's way trough the generations as it waited on a respawn timer, spreading chaos and envy wherever it was.

Like Rhodey said in Iron Man 2, 'It's the kill box, this where you go to die" This is something that has always bugged me in Stargate but it is also a common occurrence in many other franchises, their really vital top-secret installations have terrible defenses. But as bad as the SGC is, the place where the Russians keep their Stargate is absurd, I will give them points for the location in the middle of Siberia but the Facility itself is just a giant factory with a few airtight doors and their only defense is nerve gas. It is actually a running theme in stargate that Russians are stupid which is a real shame because I would have loved to see properly coordinated missions with the Russians. I would have also loved to see an armoured column being deployed through the stargate, it would have been awesome to see all their new tech applied to ground vehicles. Imagine a BMPT Terminator with twin staff weapons blazing away with twin repeater staff weapons or an M2 Abram armed with a heavy plasma cannon, actual the Terminator would be perfect for fighting the Jaffa because it's armoured like a tank which would give protection against staff weapons and its twin 30 mm autocannons firing 600 rpm would shred entire companies of Jaffa replicators. 😅

In addition to all the excellent points you brought up I always thought that the gate room should've been more accessible to vehicles, there were so many episodes where it's just a walking tour and it sure would be nice to have a truck or ATVs , hell you could squeeze a Bradley through the gate.

Yeah, there a lot of issues with the gate room and the SGC. One idea I heard was to drop the gate into a deep slot that just fits the gate. Anything that gets through walks/slams into a solid wall buried even further underground. But I'd still fill the darn room with auto turrets.

1) The wormhole does not _always_ take a full butt-ton of energy. The show gets cagey about never supplying any hard numbers but we see it take as little as one lightning bolt or a few Deuce and half 6 wheelers charge a gate up for shorter trips. 2) The plate glass in the control room is like the bullet resistant glass in a bank, that arrow is just supposed to superexreagreat... And presumably shot out of a Roman torsion catapult or something. 3) Yeah. There's 99 obvious attack strategies and countermeasures nobody who's been using these gates for 20,000 years has ever thought of. It's unfortunate the basic premise requires us to ignore this to have a show... 4) Yup. That base should make Groom Lake look as secure as Disneyland. Considering the body snatching nature of the Goa'uld nobody going through the gate should know anything about anything regarding the facility controlling it and access to it, right up to being blindfolded and taken from what amounts to a cell-block they're kept in while on base to the gate and back. The location of that base being a closer guarded secret than where Dick Chenny hides the orphans he's going to eat. 5) SGU isn't unwatchable it just jerks the audience too far too fast from the previous entries style, tone and cast. Half the weekly speaking roles in SGA were characters introduced up to years previously in SG1 and the pilot for SGA alone had more cameos from SG1 characters than both seasons of SGU. If we'd seen a lot of the rank and file from SGU introduced as background characters in the other series, maybe seeing part of the backstory fleshed out in SGU then there would've been a hell of a lot of less hate from fans imo.

it could be worse, it could be the atlantis gate-room that one had a flight deck and the gate in the middle of the main command room (or near enough)

I mean, in all fairness to the SGC, when the whole thing was set up it was just a classified research project that nobody had been able to get to work for 60+ years. So when they moved it to Cheyenne Mountain they just stuck it in the bottom of an old missile silo. By the time anyone figured out how to make it work (well, more than once, anyway) they had already installed the major power systems and massive computers deep in the mountain. Moving the gate itself wasn't a huge deal (they did it more than once during the series) but moving all the support equipment would have been a massive undertaking. So it was basically a dead-end science project that suddenly and unexpectedly became incredibly important, and the design of the room reflects that. The missiles really were incredibly stupid, though. Especially since gate travel is one-way, from the dialing gate to the receiving gate, so firing them through the gate would have been entirely useless.

Any SG SG1 bad guy: “It’s over SGC! I have the high ground.” SGC: “You underestimate my shortsightedness.”

I can think of two additional security measures that they could have added relatively easily. One a mobile ramp, either one that lowers down to the ground or one that slides to the side. That would cause unauthorized personal coming through not expecting it the gate to take a 3ft or more fall and face plant into the ground. That's going to daze the attackers and the even as they start to recover the others behind them will fall on top of them. Oh and while it would suck for people coming back through in an emergency it could also be considered a bit of extra safety since they to will drop upon exiting, which they would be expecting and can prepare for, they would fall out of the way of any shots that were fired at them when they were extracting from their location. Second thing would be using explosive bolts for the rig holding up the stargate and have it set up so when they go off the stargate drops and falls over. Now which way you would design it to fall is really debatable, though I'd argue face up. I figure that way anything thrown, walks, or drives through would just would start coming out only to immediately fall back in and be destroyed, as opposed to face down which would have a little bit of space which something could be dropped or left, plus if the gate was immediately dialed again wormhole formation would dig out the spot underneath which then allows for bigger things to be dropped or come through. if you want the best of both set it up so after the stargate falls back face up a large concrete block fall over it to really prevent any thing from coming through.

They should not even send their teams directly to planets and back at all. There are uninhabited planets with stargates. They even build bases on those planets. The Earth stargate should only connect to these bases and then the teams should be send out from there. Whatever bad can come back through the gate will only come back to those bases and not Earth.

I think the primary 3 issues are the secrecy, the billions spent on research and technology prior to activation and the fact that there was no expectation of it actually working in the way it did even if it could be proven to have worked previously. They can't ask for more funding without disclosing their ultra top secret project. They built the entire complex and the associated security measures decades before it became active. They were examining an alien relic thousands of years old which shouldn't possibly still be functional. At this point, I don't think they can make any serious changes to the layout until they're willing to disclose their current situation to the broader US government. And given the nature of their work it might be decades before a suitable administration can receive that information without starting a full blown global panic.

Yes, the Gate Room should be an effective killbox. But right in front of the Gate should be a huge tunnel, with numerous blast doors, capable of shoving a continuous 38 minutes worth of men and vehicles through the Gate. An MAU should be able to roll through the thing quickly. Colonists. Trains. Thousands of tons of capital goods.

It's even worse than that. If the Goa'uld dial in and start coming through the gate, that missile, the grenades, and the bullets are just gonna get pulverized when they hit the event horizon of that wormhole. Those things are one way at a time where it comes to matter. Apparently though, comms still work, so O'Neill and Teal'c could still keep up on thier Netflix from the other end of the galaxy... Not D+ though; it wasn't in the budget.

>Did they mean for Stargate Command to be THAT easily compromised? I think they meant to use only one level of the mountain base since that's all the US government allowed them to use. Such a shame that the US government never truly appreciated it's most advanced exploration program. It should come as no surprise though, considering they spent less on the Prometheus than they did on the space shuttle program. Politicians really hated the Stargate program.

There's something appropriate about making the fellow responsible for the safety and security of the powder magazine live and work on top of it.

Water. You want General Hammond to have a button he can press that just fills the entire gateroom with water; disorienting and drowning all assaulting enemy infantry. And if you really wanted to violate the Geneva convention have aforementioned water also electrified.

A Stargate is only one-way (for matter) at any given time. If enemies have dialed in, any rockets fired into it on the receiving side would just be disintegrated. That rocket launcher literally can only be used on enemies that have already come through -- just a couple dozen yards in front of the launcher.

Sounds like you just proved the movie Independence Day (see alien holding cell), the video game Half Life (see anomalousml materials test chamber... among others), and Star gate all exist in the same universe... They all have the same facilities design contractor.

Seeing some of the other comments...a lot of people's suggested alternatives are taking it too far. The big issue is they're trying to defend against the unknown. If the enemy does that 'turn the gate into the bomb' trick all those miles of corridor you set up have now become a liability. Also, the silo is what the silo is. Even if you have the budget, there's only so much you can build while under a mountain. To put it bluntly I'd just move the machine guns to where the control room and briefing room are, and move those two rooms somewhere else if technically possible. If the enemy is serious and gets past the iris, anything in the first room is dead. Because of one-way travel there's nothing the defender can do to stop the attacker from putting an artillery piece right up to the gate and annihilating the first room with the scifi equivalent of a 155mm round. The real defense of the SGC was the self-destruct button. Basically they told the defenders that if there's a serious attack, they're fighting a suicide mission, and they were defending Earth by burying the stargate under a mountain. It's worth noting the standard practice in the rest of the galaxy is to not try to defend the stargate at all. More often than not on alien planets it was in a remote field in the middle of nowhere. This actually would make sense if you're not as overwhelmed as the humans were. The defender could let the attackers bottleneck their way through the gate, and then attack and cut down a fraction of them. See William Wallace at the Battle of Stirling Bridge.

i loves the earlier series when they were trying to at least be a little sneaky but with extended serialisation comes excessive plot-armour afforded to the main cast and SG1 never fully benefited from having enough budget and redshirts to show how lucky they truly were sometimes. i swear, given a quarry, some fireworks/smoke-bombs/flares and a load of airsoft enthusiasts they could have done a LOT of good work in selling some of the skirmishes simply by zooming out a bit more. Screw the samey terrain, a bit of good old fashioned imagination and cheap-extras can work miracles even without much CGI (thunderbirds, star wars ep4 corridor defence, Quo Vadis and lest I forget the hot shots boat scene). I particularly appreciated that every death glider or mounted weapon that attacked fleeing troops would pointedly refuse to fire a salvo or 50 through the gate on the off-chance they would hit something amusing (like the base commander standing on the other side of the gate). I'd have hollowed out that entire section and modelled it after the Naarden star fort (moats included0 just for the fun of the thing, only bristling with every modern anti-material and defensive structure designed. plus some trap-doors into napalm pits, a few ankle/neck/belly high monofilament wires that whip around and a good old fashioned abrams tank turret or 3 for good measure. then use that as much on offence as for defence.

Let's not forget 2 things the show was made in Canada (the same people who brought bicycles to Normandy) and Hollywierds idea of having a military advisor is shooting in the same state that happens to have a veteran living in it.

I learned early in D&D not to cast 'fireball' in an enclosed space.

I have to root for SG1, they're my home town sci fi team! Fun fact, there's actually a room in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex marked SGC. It's deep, I don't recall how deep, but deep. It's a broom closet.

Sticking your commanding general on top of the bomb he is responsible for keeping safe has a certain logic to it.

Room size was set set designers allocated space and budget. You have to admit the Air Force would have excavated a bigger room to some direction whether you think they would have initially had defences or a 30 man theater and entertainment center.

A massive drop down electrified barb wire net would have been a better protection. Round it up with some high performance flame throwers. The cutting edge of an electrifying BBQ before you run out of air

In Jack’s defense…That arrow was made of trinium. The window is actually bulletproof….And it has blast shutters, Which once the technology became available were constructed of trinium. The design of the gate room is a relic of the fact that it was a missile silo prior to the project taking it over for testing purposes. The reason the TV show continues to use the same facility, is also a relic of the movie and production budgets. I think there might be some inter-service rivalry bleeding through here because your last statement on what the defensive scheme should be….ya, The Navy fails that as well. Look at it like this. It’s an all or nothing armor scheme. The SGC is parked on top of a nuclear SELF-DESTRUCT, if the shit hits the fan there’s no amount of armor that the SGC can use that will defend this mountain against enemy naquadria bombs….and any attempt to do so will only get in the way of the self destruct destroying the gate and ending the threat.

Apparently the Air Force and Stargate Command doesn’t believe in Material Condition Zebra. 😁

To be fair, if a Jaffa in a needle threading death glider came in and wrecked the gate room with a naquada explosion that'd pretty much bury the gate and prevent any further invasion force from using the gate.

I would have put the gate over a lava pit with an iris for the floor. Also could mount the iris on a rotatable armature so you can point it up when enemies are coming. Incoming travellers would pop out the gate and immediately fall back into the event horizon which would vaporize them. That happened to at least one malp with a gate that was knocked on its back.

The Embarkation room is a refitted missile silo. The glass is supposed to be bullet proof. That is what made the arrow so surprising is the fact that it went through the glass. As for the rooms lay out... Yeah... It was pretty poorly designed.

You overlook the fact that wormholes are unidirectional (one way) so if an enemy dialed in, you couldn’t use the missile launcher to fire missiles through the gate, so they must have planned to have the missiles explode inside the gate room.

I'd kinda like to see a contest to redesign the gate room, with RTS gamers as the contestants.

The Reason for the room being built like that is that it is an old ICBM Silo. Those were apparently just built like that, and the SGC repurposed it.

Awesome video and channel. Your logo is ingenious, by the way. I love the anchor/hoof/c-o-w centerpiece. Brilliantly designed. 💯👌

It’s the chair force, what did you expect?

You have to remember that this is a Psy-op! It's *supposed* to make the SGC look incompetent and easy to take over and their agents like bumbling fools that solve problems with nothing but dumb luck and charisma!

As to the defense, I agree. Filling the room with troops never made much sense. Was flashy. Even when the show was made, we had the tech for remote operated gun turrets and cameras. Could mount say 4, 50 cals with armor piercing rounds on turret mounts on the ceiling, ready to mow down any army coming through the gate. And if there have to have a rocket launcher, again I'd go with ceiling mount, possibly on a hydraulic piston so its exact elevation in relation to the gate can be adjusted for shooting into the gate. Also, with the 50 cals mounted on the ceiling pointing downward, they would have a field of fire to shoot through the gate down on any one coming through on the other side instead of into the air.

On the defense of the arrow, it was a special arrow with what amounted to the greatest armor piercing head ever made. On the other hand, by the time any one realized there was a threat that might warrant dropping the blast doors to protect the briefing and control rooms, Oniell already had an arrow through his arm. Which demonstrates that a surprise strike could get lucky and blow up the entire command and control center before any one has time to react.

There's actually another flaw with Stargate Command. Stargates only permit travel in one direction. That means that if the Jaffa dial to Earth and fire through the gate, We can't fire back.

Too be fair they were working with what they had at the start, an old missile silo, which does not explain why they did not move the gate to a new purpose built facility by the second season. The blast doors covering the control and briefing rooms are two parts and come in from the sides (you can see the line down the middle that divides the doors) and is that really a rocket launcher? It's not there all the time and the image looked more like a twin 20mm cannon to me. The two fifty cal guns would have been better mounted as remote units high on the walls or not there at all.

Look, at least they have a control room, rather than a DHD just sitting there a 10 meters away from the gate.

One thing you missed about the SG-1 lore is that if someone is coming through the gate, you can’t send *anything* but a radio signal the other direction. For whatever reason, a dialed gate is one-way (from the dialing end to the dialed end) for anything except radio.

To be honest, if I was designing a room, I would leave it about the same size and I wouldn’t bother with any auto Tourette’s. But the spot where the control room is and the conference room and the side walls on both those floors wouldn’t be plate glass or solid concrete. They’d be rows of those arrow slits that you see on the sides of all castles. The spot with the control room would probably have flamethrower in placements in the spot with the conference room would probably have the 250 caliber and placements. Also, those gun galleries would not be accessible from the Corredor’s directly outside the control room.

The stargates have a matter-energy converter in them, one side converts matter to energy and the other back to matter again. This is why the iris works. The iris doesn't allow matter to reintegrate, this is explained in the show. Sokar once managed to make a hologram by utilizing the decay of subatomic particles.

If you think sg universe was unwatchable, I raise you sg infinity

Besides the sensible defensive measures, what was needed was *a nice long tunnel* leading to it (with multiple blast doors, autoguns, cannons aimed down the tunnel, a *dropping block* to crush everything ect, _before_ you get to the loading docks), so you could drive a M1 Abrams Tank through the Stargate - *it will fit.* The Templin Institute did the maths _(they overlaid a to scale drawing of a Abrams over the Stargate iris and went "oh $hit")_ and it even had room to spare! That means that _a lot_ of US military equipment could fit through, if it can be carried in a C-17 transport plane it should fit through the Stargate, and the length is not even a issue anymore, only the height and width [could a ballistic missile?] A lot of US military logistics is already built around those dimensions, the stuff is sitting in warehouses waiting to be used. It would not cost a lot as it's off the shelf, unlike a lot of the SGC's equipment. No mysterious budget items needed to hide the development of specialised Area 51 tech, just requisition regular inventory for a "training exercise" or its falsely listed as still in storage. That way the SGC can build a real presence on the other side, they could look through a marine expeditionary equipment catalogue and go shopping … _"Why not a fast attack vehicle, the APC may be a bit much"._ "The APC does come with AA guns and stingers". _"Good point - Hey, this Helo could fit through with its rotors folded!" [holds up picture of Cobra attack helicopter]._ And if they get the naquadah refit working on a Abrams, no fuel range supply issues …? But really just the logistics and transport vehicles would be incredibly useful in exploring a planet, set up a FOB near the Gate and then have utility helicopters scout around. As for the SGC, one other modification, have the Stargate mounted on a gymbal arm, so it can have it's position changed. Alien invasion - drop it face down so they are firing into the Earth (or face up if they are firing a doomsday beam weapon). And here's the nasty part, can a ballistic missile fit? Well mount the Gate above it facing down, so the missile goes through the Gate (at a slight angle so it will be banking up skywards as it exits) and then it continues on the other side to hit it's final target, either designated locally or with some careful preprogramming that took the Wormhole into account (if say… using a nuke on a grounded mothership). And if that's too complicated, keep the Gate fixed and just work out some way to hide using a bunch of cruise missiles, from accounting.

Had a good chuckle listening to this one. Yeah the gate-room was a complete mess of design. In the original movie you could forgive it since it was just supposed to be a re-purposed room in the highest security place that was available. They really had only the vaguest idea of what the gate was, and had no idea if there were hostiles on the other side. And in that case, the plan was to nuke the other side, so defending the room was not an issue. In the series however, they really should have built a new transit room with MUCH better security and fail-safes. There is no consideration of biologic contamination, heavy armored troops, or the hostiles pulling an earther "just send a nuke through". It was mentioned several times that it would take a large nuke to actually hurt the gate. There was also one episode where they have to quickly remove the gate and the suddenly show that there is a huge shaft that goes directly to the surface above the gate. (The room was supposedly a missile test silo, even though "The Mountain" has never actually had a silo, and that would completely defeat the purpose of putting your hardened base 300+ feet underground.) I think most of this was because of budget limitations, space for sets, making it easier to film, and maintaining tension and pace. If you Have the gate-room at the end of a 500 meter tunnel with at least three 1-meter thick blast doors that take 5 minutes to open or close, it would seriously affect the show. I personally have a bigger problem with the idea that our heroes go thruogh this gate, and are suppose to explore on foot. I would think that as soon as you have some idea of the terrain, you would call for appropriate transport, ie. motorcycles, dune-buggies, horses, helicopters, etc. Being on foo with those ridiculous MALPs, and occasional cargo carriers is a joke. Just how far can you walk out and back with all of your supplies on your back? At best maybe 50 miles over easy terrain, in most cases less than 20.

I'm envisioning a series of S-turn corridors, heavily reinforced, with blast doors before each 90° turn. At the end of each long hallway are as many Phalanx CIWS as you can fit, alongside other weapons systems like the aforementioned gas and smoke dispensers, so that when the enemy breaches the blast doors they're met with a high-speed wall of lead. Oh, and there are multiple Phalanxes pointing at the Gate aperture, too. And there's no way to rotate the Phalanxes to shoot each other or down the wrong hallway.

SG1, despite how much we loved it, drove my old Navy vet buddy nuts. "You put the gate to a zillions worlds in the middle of the CONUS? You put it out at Pearl, and give the long-duration ships to the Navy!"

Ya, I as retired Air Force I can tell you that SGC really screwed up on how we actually do Security

After my service time in the army, sg1 never felt the same again.

To be fair to the blast doors covering the windows for the Control and Briefing rooms, it's actually one big door that slides down to cover both, hence how both can be covered with seemingly no real space to two doors.

There was a novel version of stargate that went down a different road... they wound up taking a very serious stance on gate defense, with guns that would pump lots of metal at high speed through things coming out the gate - and if to be believed, back up the wormhole to make things fun even for the guys on the way - if memory serves, they did that after an honor guard expecting to meet dignitaries at the gate instead met alien invaders... the invaders were ready for a fight. The honor guard was ready to definitely not shoot dignitaries. Will say, claymores might not be a bad idea - simple , cheap, effective against anything with unarmored bits. Doors that can be trivially dropped but not so easily lifted would also be good. Doors that lock are nice, but doors that are not easily budged even when unlocked? Much more secure - as picking or cutting out the lock doesn't get you anywhere.

All it takes to clear the gate room is one off those roll on the floor like bowling ball stun grenades coming through the stargate.

I'd like to see some 18" naval cannons in the room pointed into the gate. The shock wave alone would paste anything in the room.

Others have mentioned it but the Iris really was a cheat code. Anything going though the gate would encounter the iris while it was materializing. So it prevented anything from existing at all as it came through. People, bullets, cars, space ships, even energy blasts. Nothing could form coming through so for all intent and purpose the iris was a 100% effective defense and everything else was a stop gap while teams came back though, their defense only had to hold back what the away teams brought back with them, not against active assault. In such events that the Iris was by passed no mundane defense would have worked anyway!

I agree. Although from an in universe perspective they didn't have allot to work with. They were stuck in a missile silo that doesn't leave a lot for modification(even though there are no missile silos in norad). And they had there own people like Sen. Kinsey trying to shiv them in the back. Although I would be very curious to see what you come up with if you decided to design your own Gateroom.

SGC wasn't concerned about 40mm launchers throwing shrapnel around in the gate room because the gate room is too small for a 40m round to arm.

I always thought they should just have a couple of Phalanx gun turrets installed inside the room + 5-inch naval turret for flavor

Could we get an overview of the box-304? That ship is so freaking awesome :D

Heya. You probably wont get this, but if you do, hope you're doing well. I just have one point to make. And its probably the only thing that can excuse the "problems" you've pointed out. That being the fact that Cheyenne Mt was not build for the Stargate or the SGC. It was repurposed for it. In fact when we first see the Stargate, its in a storage room in the Mountain. They were lucky the room was large enough to take the cone blast when Apophis first appears. The entire first 3 seasons are the SGC playing catch up. The Control room was so large because its computers had to do what the clavis does in opening the gate, but as Carter points out, they bypass hundreds of safeguards when ever they use their setup to open the gate. You're basically looking at 'Gud enuff fer Guvment werk" at its finest. We are lucky they didnt level Cheyenne Mt the first time we dialed it up. Btw, this is all based on the show not the movie. The movie's control room was a bit more impressive because of a better budget.

I think the biggest problem is that they put the SGC in the middle of Colorado instead of somewhere near the Groom Lake Facility in Area 51. They even use Area 51 in the show to reverse engineer the tech they brought back. You mean to tell me that there is not a suitable location in the entirety of the Nevada Test Range they could not have built a facility for the SGC and not have anyone really question it because Area 51?

I think the in-universe reason why the CO's office was so close was the first CO(Of the series not counting the movie) was Hammond wanted to be close so if shit went wrong he could give orders quicker, similar to star trek's ready room. Plus Hammond was the type to be on the frontline anyway, I mean he helped Teal'c fly a damn glider in the season 2 finale

You can't dial a stargate that is being used at the moment, right? Simple defensive solution: Once you know some "safe" empty worlds already, just keep dialing them all the time, so you almost always have an active connection, disabling any inbound dialing, except for times you yourself want to go somewhere else.

Remember, the gate was only one way. Those rockets were only usable for strikes through an outgoing wormhole and were used accordingly.

Not gona lie when watching stargate I was amusing myself by inventing ways to violently murder anything that comes out of the stargate. Seriously this is the most perfect chokepoint in the universe and they did this. Also they should just ask germans for all that leftover cyclon-b and mustard gass from last 2 world wars, and send it to more annoing goa'uld plnets. And there are so many amazing ways to weaponise the gates, mount one in front of your starship and another in front of biggest laser battery ever created, powered by whole God damn USA power grid, and here it is, cheap and afordable death star without this whole spaceball part that has tendency to explode in most inconvinient moments.

This has got to be my favorite episode of yours. Stargate SG-1 is one of those shows that's really dumb, but I love it anyway. I guess it's a symptom of the movie being one of my all-time favorite sci-fi films. To be totally fair though, the studio for this series probably couldn't afford better and just worked with what they had.

Afaik wormholes are one way, so if someone is attacking you through it you cant attack anyone on the other side, only those attackers that are already on this side of the gate.

Idea for a future episode: Long before SeaQuest DSV there was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the Seaview. And the Flying Sub, but we'll leave Cousteau's diving saucer with SR71 chines and a new grill for this model year for later. A few tidbits for you to gnaw on: At one point in the movie they were under the polar ice cap when the ice started breaking up and FALLING ON THE SUB. This threatened to push them below their crush depth. Can't be all that deep given how much they were panicking as close as they were to the surface... There were crash doors to protect the front of the control room - but - they were in back of the guy who steers the boat and all of the equipment needed to do same! And within the hull, where were these ginormous steel doors kept? And that's long before Chief Sharkey has to short the reactor to the hull with a wrench to get rid of the giant octopus before it eats them. (Can't be mating. Galen wasn't onboard at the time, and the network censors would /never/ allow that!) Its an oldy but a goodie with lots of stuff to riff on.

One of the biggest things that are a disadvantage for defending is that the wormhole is one-way travel. Radiation such as radio waves and high gravitational influences are capable of bi-directional transmission, but physical matter is only able to move in one direction, from dialing gate to destination gate. Which means that all of those defenses and rockets setup in the gate room would do all of diddly-squat if fired INTO an incoming wormhole, while allowing anyone on the other side the ability to fire indiscriminately into the Gate Room from the other side. A few of those Jaffa flash-bang grenades that overwhelm the nervous system and you would be able to moonwalk down the ramp, as the majority of the base's available defenders would be drooling messes on the floor in front of you, giving you a solid foothold on Earth.

Also the rocket launcher makes even less sense than you think when you remember that you can't send matter through an incoming wormhole, only outgoing.

I think in one episode they discussed a secondary control room farther up in the complex in case the lower area was compromised. I think it came up in the black hole episode, or one of the invasion episodes.

Tbf for like half the og series stargate command was like in constant beurocratical war to justify its existance and budget. And even after solving the budget part it still had to resolve using what it could get.

They had a shield within the event horizon to prevent reanimation of matter ... That's their defense ... Not the rest the rest is to cover SG teams retreating

Technically you can't shoot through an incoming wormhole to the other side because the wormhole is ONE WAY. So those guns and the rockets would just explode in the ROOM.

most of the other comments already pointed everything out so i'll throw my rag out. it was a missile silo rocket test room. it was already heavily fortified and when they first got it down they didn't exactly have defenses in mind. but when the time came for defenses to be a worry, the amount of money and time it would take to change the room entirely combined with how it was originally laid out and the tons of money already being put in and considering how heavily classified the program is, it would be a miracle to get that extra funding.

I love hearing your take on the stupid things us squishies seem to do. thanks and keep it up.

As former Air Force, this room is an embarrassment. My understanding is the gate is one way from the side it was opened from. So you go through one way. Close the gate, then open a new one to get home. You could not just jump back through. This means the rocket launcher was a god awful weapon if it was remote fired. Look at the clip. They have a guy get behind that thing like he is manning a navy twin mount in WW2. NO! I don't recall arrow through the glass. So my forgiveness that it was at least bullet resistant glass went out the window. I liked this show. There were scenes that brought a tear to my eye. (General Hammond preparing a rescue mission and saying he won't order men out. So volunteers take a step. And he didn't get to finish the word forward before ALL his troops took that step is one.) But I can't argue with a single point here. Okay except the Air Force is this sloppy. . .

Couldn't they at least offset the control room window a few feet in either direction? So that it isn't s STRAIGHT shot into the control room

10:51 and alot of sharp right angles and also some like collapsible tunnel sections and mabey a room sized vat of hydrofluoric acid and maybe a massive gamma ray source that can quickly be unshielded to just irradiate a corridor that has to be passed thru with gigagrays of gamma gradation and then like after that just a giant warehouse sized room with a single light in the center shining down on a 2 foot tall clown doll ..... and frankly if that donest make them stop and think then frankly nothing will

Yeah know one really stupid thing that was brought up was how the wormholes work. According to the show the portals are one way, so no shooting at invading troops. Which means that rocket launchers only purpose is to explode in the embarkation room. Man it would suck to have ears, when that thing fires and explodes. Anyways the thing is that even though they are one way, radio waves, through the power of space magic, can work both ways. Thus allowing communications via radio. There’s lots of other science problems but damnit it’s my favorite Sci-Fi show of all time.

The rocket launcher mentioned at 7:25 would be useless against an enemy force attacking the SGC as I believe the wormholes were one way only. If the Jaffa attacked and sent a force INTO the SGC the SGC could not use the Jaffa's wormhole to attack back, they would have to wait for the wormhole to close then dial out themselves...at least that is how I remember it.

Minor correction about your complaint about the rockets... you made it sound like enemies might come through the gate so we'd shoot back with the rockets to blast their ranks trying to come through the gate. The problem with that is that the stargate is not bi-directional... matter can only go one way through it, from the dialing gate to the receiving gate. The only things that can go through both directions are electromagnetic energy, such as radio waves and video transmissions.

Don't forget the Gate Room is at the bottom of a missile silo and can be accessed from the silo hatch cover a good distance above.

The Stargate is one-way btw - If an enemy is coming through then you're not going to be able to fire through the gate at them...You've got to wait till they're in the room! - I would say that you should give Stargate: Universe another chance - It's a slow starter but it was getting better and better before it was cancelled way too early. Just imagine if SG:U had been given the leeway that ST:D has been given!

I always did think that the gate was way to fucking close to the control room, I know that there’s at least 4 reinforced steel doors between the gate room and the control center, that’s not the problem, the problem is how physically close it is to the gate. I know technologically there are limitations but If I could have my way I’d have the gate at the end of a 100 meter room with several automated turrets of various large calibers pointed at the gate, several different cameras recording the gate from infrared to ultraviolet, the control center would be as deep as you could get, buried under the complex with an airlock style security door with both doors being a foot thick slab of steel and concrete ventilation to the control center would go straight up to the surface with several microbial air filtration systems to ensure nothing gets in or out.

This honestly feels moreso like a lack of budget aforded to the SGC than anything else, and possibly being limited to a small part of the cheyane mountain complex because of it. They could, at least. Have not had windows looking into the gate room, and instead just have thick concrete walls and cameras to do the same job. That, seems possible assuming a similar budget allowance to the SGC, and assuming they could not expand the area they were allotted in any way. Plus moving the 50 cals further back, alll the way back to give them the most distance. And add some freaking sandbags or concrete barricades near the back wall for dudes to hide behind! Bare minimum protections, would at least improve the defensive capabilities. If space was able to be allotted to the SGC? Turn the existing control room and conference room into concrete bunkers, stick even more 50 cals in em. Have no dudes in the gate room itself, and have all troops equipped with NBC gear in the new bunkers. Cue chemical warfare, which would be sure to make whoever is on the other side think twice about keeping their gate open as literally tonnes of mustard gas, agent orange, or any other nasty stuff we can think up just pours out their end. Make Venus look positively habitable by comparison. Also ideally have at least a 90 degree turn from the gate before you can hit any of the defences, even if the gate itself is only slightly off of the main death corridor. So even if you were shooting everything you had through the gate, you would likely only collapse the concrete in on your approach. Cue continued chemical warfare despite you not being able to press forwards from rubble.

the other problem with the gate room, they didn't think to make the room or the doors big enough to bring vehicles like cars and apcs through (tanks might be a bit too wide) drive an APC through the gate, and most enemy jaffa will be woefully insufficiently armed to do much damage