Those guns in Stargate were called a zat'nik'tel or Zat gun as O'Neill used to call them.
No, not those guns. The stun weapons that looked like Earth guns, introduced in that episode where they found a Goa'uld training planet mimicking an Earth installation. SG-1 adopted the intars and started using them in their own training.
https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Intar
They actually fired red bolts, not blue. But the point is, since they already looked like Earth weapons, it would've been possible to reverse-engineer them and mass-produce them as a non-lethal armament on Earth even without going public about the Stargate program.
I prefer the timeframe of Sam's original leap to be in 1995. The series was supposed to be set in an alternate 1990s where computer technology and fashion took weird visual turns for a few years and a show actually set in 1989 might be forced to explain why nobody in the project dressed like they were from the late '80s.
That's overthinking it. The show was supposed to be set six years in the future, as simple as that. It didn't become "alternate" until reality caught up with it. The makers just went a bit overboard with the "this is the future" trappings, because 1980s SFTV was prone to garishness and unsubtlety, and some of that lingered in QL even though it was smarter than the norm.
It's sort of how T2 was forced to be set in 1995 since the original Terminator film takes place firmly in 1984 and John Connor is shown as being 10 years old in the Los Angeles Police Department database. Doesn't matter if everything else in the movie's "current day" setting is straight out of 1991.
Not so much "was forced" as "chose." Nothing in fiction "forces" the creators to do anything, because it's all imaginary and can be altered at will. Look at the series I just finished reviewing on my Patreon,
Starman. The
original movie came out in 1984 and depicted its title alien being inspired to visit Earth by his people's ship intercepting the
Voyager 2 space probe launched in 1977. The 1986 TV series was set 14 years later, with Starman coming back to find the 13-year-old son he'd conceived with a human woman in the movie, yet it was set in the present day of 1986, pushing the events of the movie back to 1972, before
Voyager 2 was even launched. (The timing could just barely work if you substituted
Pioneer 10, the first space probe to have a message for aliens aboard, but only if the aliens intercepted it mere days after launch instead of years.)
It's what needed to happen to make things line up and having Sam make his first leap from 1995 makes the clothing and technology line up better.
You're getting it backward. They didn't set it in the future to match the clothing. They chose the clothing to match the intended future setting. Obviously the script is written before the costumes are designed.
Though it's round it brings to mind the one used by Thames.
