Nothing About the Stargate Is Intelligent
Don't get me wrong, I love all three Stargate shows, and I regard them as some of the best science fiction on television.
But the Stargate itself is a mass of technobabble whose operation is not just ridiculous, but impossible. And I don't mean technically, I mean logistically.
A standard Milky Way Stargate has 39 glyphs. Each glyph represents a constellation. A standard Stargate address involves seven of these glyphs-- six of them identify the location in three dimensional space, and the seventh is the point of origin.
This is several entirely distinct flavors of stupid.
Constellations are not points. One of the stars in Orion's belt, for example, is more than a thousand light years from either of the others.
Even if this weren't the case, the Stargates are millions of years old. Stellar drift has changed the constellations in the ~10,000 years that mankind has been aware of them.
You only need three points to identify a location in three dimensional space. Requiring a second position for each axis does nothing except for drastically limit the locations that can be addressed.
If every address requires the same seventh symbol at a given gate, there's no reason not to make the gate automatically supply it.
If you can identify the point of origin with a single glyph, why can't you identify the destination with one? (There is actually a bit in the original movie where Daniel tells the natives, "we're from here" and shows the symbol that corresponds to earth and they get it.)
Also, if the point of origin is one symbol.... there can be a maximum of 39 total gates. There is no such limit in the shows.
Of course, there is also the magic eight-symbol address that somehow, despite being made up of coordinates in the milky way galaxy, points to the Pegasus Galaxy. Or the nine-symbol address that can only be dialed from one gate (that apparently isn't even in the right place, affecting its ability to dial), which points to Destiny, which doesn't even have a fixed location.
And while we're on the subject of Destiny, how does THAT gate work? If the glyphs on a gate are constellations, how does that work on a ship that moves between galaxies?
How does dialing even work? The whole spinny thing is just our gate, because we don't have a DHD, but, like... why does spinning it even work? And how is it that, by the end of the show, we've developed the technology to build our own gates, but we're still dialing the main gate with the equivalent of a hotwire?
That's not even getting into the physics of the "wormhole" itself, or, rather, the lack thereof.
An incoming wormhole spits out a vortex that, in a violation of all known laws of physics, completely destroys everything it comes into contact with.
Unless it's the iris, which is just really close to the event horizon.
Or you just bury it, but that seems to have only worked the once.
The iris that we built, because the ancients who created them didn't seem to think anyone would need to be able to lock the goddamn door (until they got to the Pegasus Galaxy).
The iris that nonetheless seems to be completely integrated into the gate so seamlessly that you can't see the mechanism or where the parts go when not in use.
Wormhole travel is one-way. Except, of course, for radio waves.
It is an explicit plot point in several episodes that an object passing through a stargate is de-materialized as it passes through the event horizon, and is not re-materialized until (and unless) the entire object passes through.
Which begs the question-- how can you step through? Once your front foot is through the horizon, it can't bear weight. How is your back foot lifted up?
