Not really. Destiny comes out of FTL, and there are... 3, 4 gates in range? When we dial from earth, the whole GALAXY is in range. Doesnt seem like the seeder ship actually goes to too many planets.
Seeder Ship: What's the Point?
- Thread starter Checkmate
- Start date
Not really. Destiny comes out of FTL, and there are... 3, 4 gates in range? When we dial from earth, the whole GALAXY is in range. Doesnt seem like the seeder ship actually goes to too many planets.
Keep in mind that the 12 hour window thing isn't the intended 'full' operation of the ship - with the master code that the Ancients would use to unlock the vessel, they could take it wherever they wanted, and stay there as long as they liked. Our crew are basically experiencing the ship on autopilot.
We don't know much at all about how the voyage has progressed thus far - Destiny could have been stationary for a thousand years at some point. Your point only stands if destiny has been in continuous flight for the entire time since it left Earth - we have evidence from Air that at least someone has been on the ship before our team, and odds are the Ancients used it when they were still around and corporeal.
We already have a Stargate on Earth that is millions of years old and yet works perfectly, in fact indistinguishably from a 'new' one. We've also had a puddle jumper that was a) abandoned for god knows how long in a forest and then b) buried in a desert since ancient Egyptians were walking around... work perfectly. We're dealing with a species that built their shit to last, that much has always been obvious.
Checkmate
Commodore
So now you're saying the Destiny has traveled to at least three or four galaxies since the series began? And every time it stops it's in a new galaxy? Because that's all I've gathered from what you just said.
Going by what's been shown on screen and, more importantly, what's been said aloud while on screen, the Ancients abandoned the Destiny project for whatever reason. Rush said as much in the pilot. There's been no actual evidence whatsoever that anyone's ever been on the ship aside from exterior damage (which doesn't exactly require a crew) and a shuttle that left the ship early on (with no indication that anyone was on it at all).cultcross said:
And it flying on autopilot proves the point all the more. The ship's been flying at that speed and taking those relatively short breaks for its entire journey. And hell, even if it did stop for a thousand year break, it still would have caught up to the seeder ship after a million years. It boggles me how people can't seem to grasp that amount of time. The seeder ships would have to be traveling tens if not hundreds of times faster than the Destinty in order to mine, build, survey, and seed all those stargates in order to have stayed ahead of it for that ridiculous amount of time.
Even if you assume it's only going twice as fast, which is a far more reasonable value, that's nowhere near fast enough for the crazy zig-zag pattern the seeder ships have to fly. Remember, they're not only seeding the planets that come up on the Destiny; it has to survey every single planet in order to tell if its worth seeding. And there's far more planets that aren't than are. So for every planet we see with a stargate, dozens upon dozens of other planets had to have been visited.
Well, it's either that, or the old stargates don't have the range of the newer ones.
We've seen the Destiny's cycle over, what, a month? Can you really generalize the procedure for a million-year mission out of six weeks? Maybe the Destiny takes relatively frequent, longer breaks after it catches up to the Seeder Ships, for maintenance, or power conservation or just for the hell of it, and we were just lucky enough to land on it during an active phase, and not a sit-around-waiting-for-something-to-check-out phase.
It's really basic programming that the Destiny will never overshoot the seeder ships, because that would make it useless (that, and the seeder ships are responsible for giving it the information needed to decide on its course). So it's entirely possible it lets them get a head start from time to time so they can do their jobs.
Checkmate
Commodore
Yes, the Destiny could take longer breaks when it catches up.
The point is, it shouldn't need to because the seeder ships serve no useful purpose.
The Destiny was already designed to be fully automated for excessively long periods of time. There's no reason for it to have to sit and wait once it catches up because it should be doing the seeder ship's duty, too.
The seeder ships provide absolutely no useful function, and especially not for a race as intelligent as the Ancients. The only thing the seeder ships are are liabilities. If they go off-course, get destroyed, get lost, get swallowed up by a wormhole, or whatever else... bam, the Destiny is out there all alone with no way to fulfill its mission. If the same thing happens to the Destiny, bam, the seeder ships have no purpose either because they're so damn far away from anything to send their data to.
And worse, if the seeder ships were damaged/lost/destroyed, the Destiny would be taking those apparent thousand year breaks for absolutely no reason.
There's absolutely nothing to be gained by having seeder ships on this type of a mission. The sole reason is an out for lazy writing when they get tired of writing stories about the Destiny.
The point is, it shouldn't need to because the seeder ships serve no useful purpose.
The Destiny was already designed to be fully automated for excessively long periods of time. There's no reason for it to have to sit and wait once it catches up because it should be doing the seeder ship's duty, too.
The seeder ships provide absolutely no useful function, and especially not for a race as intelligent as the Ancients. The only thing the seeder ships are are liabilities. If they go off-course, get destroyed, get lost, get swallowed up by a wormhole, or whatever else... bam, the Destiny is out there all alone with no way to fulfill its mission. If the same thing happens to the Destiny, bam, the seeder ships have no purpose either because they're so damn far away from anything to send their data to.
And worse, if the seeder ships were damaged/lost/destroyed, the Destiny would be taking those apparent thousand year breaks for absolutely no reason.
There's absolutely nothing to be gained by having seeder ships on this type of a mission. The sole reason is an out for lazy writing when they get tired of writing stories about the Destiny.
...right up until the point they evolve into mechano insects and start eating whole planets.
Well, there is precedent for the Ancients fooling around with such tech!
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense for seeder ships to be self-replicating. That would exponentially decrease the time required to seed a galaxy, and exponentially increase the number of galaxies that could be simultaneously seeded.
Aside from allowing the manned ship to cover many times as much ground without a corresponding increase in travel time. They could have teams investigating several planets concurrently via stargate, rather than one at a time, in series, by flying directly to the planets.
I still don't see the problem, Destiny was supposed to be a manned followup to the seeder ships unmanned mission to put gates on planets. Seeder ships pick up prelim info, beam it back to the Destiny, the Ancients would board her and decide what planets to go explore or settle or do whatever Ancients do once they seed planets with gates.
Checkmate's argument hinges on the notion that the seeder ships can't do everything they need to do and still practically stay ahead of Destiny. Their job just takes longer.
There are plenty of ways around this, but it is a fair observation and it would be nice if the show commented on it at some point.
No, but along a galactic line, perhaps in a curve around the central denseness, the seeder ships may have left a series of gates. The seeders dont necessarily have to have visited or cataloged EVERY planet. Perhaps the Altairans would have used the gates in place to add more. They obviously were able to seed 2 galaxies that we know of with a massive gate network.
Was there ever a point in the various Stargate series where the Ancient tech wasn't completely absurd? I mean, this is the show that gave us ascension as a "scientific" concept.
Checkmate
Commodore
Earth is on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, yet it's in range of every other gate in the galaxy, so I really don't see the difference there.
And I didn't mean to imply that the seeder ships had to visit every planet in the galaxy. It's just that for every one viable planet they found, there had to be tens or hundreds of nonviable ones. Like the ones discovered in the system where the Destiny did her first refuel.
