Colonel/General O'Neill would likely be a much more experienced fighter what with the Cold War getting likely very hot over the discoveries on the Moon. This could easily give him a totally different more no nonsense persona and the happy go lucky Jack of the Stargate timeline would have far more difficulty coming about.
He
already fought in the Cold War. He was black ops, that was what he
did with his time.
Honestly, if the Cold War got hot he'd actually be
more laid back - at least the fighting and operations he did would feel less bordering-on-evil-hopefully-the-people-giving-orders-know-what-they're-doing. Remember, the man responded to someone pointing out that
Teal'c, as First Prime of Apophis had been ordered to do damned distasteful things... by pointing out that at the behest of the United States government,
he had done just as bad, or bad enough that there's no point comparing.
Jack is special forces. They are almost never no-nonsense - their nonsense is without compare. They get the job done, but they are goofing off and arguing with each other the whole time. If you can't keep your sense of humour, there's no way you'll last - that's Jack.
Jack is
not happy-go-lucky. He knows exactly how black the world can get.
He just doesn't care.
Personally I found that to be THE BEST part of Stargate. The whole evolution of humanity from bit players barely holding on against a opponent beyond us but at the same time learning at an extreme rate. Stargate to me showcased the whole military mindset of our species and our adaptability. I think my very favorite scene in all of Stargate was when we fired a missile at a Gou'ald through the gate and blew him up satisfyingly. Us using the technology we have to kill the baddies in a plausible fashion.
Agreed. I loved that scene as well.
Series should have ended at the Battle of Antarctica as that really showed what we had become from the start of the show.
Gyaaaah, you kidding? That was the last part I saw (I couldn't afford the other DVDs...), and frankly, it was the worst. That didn't show what
we had become. That showed 'oh fuck, we don't actually have any possible way for our heroes to win this with grit, determination, and cleverness, let's give them some godlike technology out of nowhere!'
It was a hamfisted plot development that seems to shift a major shift in the show from 'Humanity, Fuck Yeah' to 'Ancients, Fuck Yeah'.
F-302s versus Gliders? Awesome. Prometheus tangling with the fleet? Awesome. Squid-missiles out of nowhere sweeping away the entire enemy fleet and rendering all humanity's efforts pointless? ... Uh, what?
That's my problem with the 'total bottom of the barrel' start. It relies on plot mechanics, insane coincidence, and stockpiles of retardedly overpowered ubertech to keep the protagonists alive. Not initially, but Stargate ran on long enough that by Season 7, they had to reach straight into the toilet to figure out how anyone would survive anything big.
And it creates an inherent plot where the sole objective - when you strip away the fanciness - is
level-grinding. You can skip three quarters of the episodes of Stargate if you want to. While they're well-made and entertaining, they yield no result on the plot, they hold no impact on characterization, and they're basically the equivalent of a Warcraft guild diving into a dungeon for the adventure of the week while looking for the phat lootz that will get them to be awesome, someday.
Just start them of at least moderate awesome (or at least, with the tools to get that way) and focus on plot, character... something other than
another planet-of-the-week plotline.
Ummm...No. In like ten years with little to moderate help from the Asgard we went from our current level of technology to space travel within Stargate canon. Think it's pretty likely if the materials and learning elements we need are at the moon in this proposed timeline by the time 30 years would have passed in addition to the threat that other Moon tech will likely make the Russians we'll be heavily advanced in space travel and tech methods of the Moon Kingdom. How else do you explain the Stargate source material and our rapid technological development? Obviously the Asgard and Tok'ra helped out a bit but Prometheus was largely our own reverse engineering of Goau'ld tech why should the Moon technology which according to the proposed timeline is a School not have even better instructional materials in building of spacecraft. Due to that again I say this is broken.
Hey, I agree. Space travel.
But 'space travel' does not equal '32 000 times the speed of light galactic empires'. Even if Earth colonized the entire Solar System, and fully equalled the Moon Kingdom in every respect... we'd
still be smaller than the goa'uld - the smallest System Lord would have more territory and armaments than Earth. We'd have an industrial advantage, so long-term Earth would overwhelm... but long-term is
very long-term, the goa'uld have been building their shit for around 30 000 years, even if they don't build fast they've got plenty of stockpiles. This is completely discounting the Replicators, Ori, etc.
In canon, Earth got lucky - they were small enough to pretty much ignore while they built up, tough and resourceful enough to take down the small forces put out to crush them, and they then found Ancient Lolubertech basically the minute someone actually took them seriously.
That dies the second we start the commercialization of space in reality with the mining of Asteroids and other celestial bodies. It'd die quite quickly here.
Yeah, whether it's
followed is another matter. And long-term, it's likely unsustainable, and sooner or later someone's gonna give the one year requisite notice and withdraw from it. I was just pointing out what they technically made a binding promise to do - the probability of it being done being quite low.
We'd probably break up the Moon like we did in real world Antarctica into various different research facilities for both the Soviets and NATO nations more then likely.
That's another possible outcome, yeah. I was gonna mention it but sort of got into the WW3 concern.
I never thought the nations getting together behind the SGC or having complete joint development and research in Stargate canon was particularly realistic as I'm pretty sure a lot would be withheld.
It was. It was very realistic, but also very dickish - the US promised Russia full technology sharing, in exchange for Russia shutting down their gate program.
29 episodes later, over a year, the Russians still haven't got anything. They allow the Americans to use their gate to withdraw personnel from offworld while the US gate is offline, purely out of common decency. They then give the US their DHD, in exchange for a
new deal - 'give us that tech you promised in the first place'.
They got naquadah reactors. Another nine episodes later, Chekov storms into Hammond's office, rather reasonably pissed off that the US was developing
a space interceptor while completely cutting the Russians out of it (again).
Again that would be very interesting to read but I'm not seeing how Stargate fits in here other then entirely peripherally. A pure SM fic with this kind of back-story leads to a very different world for the girls growing up and I think would be quite good it's just I'm not seeing how Stargate adds anything here other then character fodder.
A fair point - honestly, the SM side of this is much more interesting due to that.
Over finding artifacts of unknown value on the Moon you think that leads directly to World War 3? I think tensions would mount but I think you're slightly overestimating the doom and gloom here.
It's highly possible. Not in general terms, but 1969 is very nearly the absolute hottest part of the Cold War. Brezhnev is not the coolest-headed guy the Soviets ever put up as leader, and neither is Nixon (frankly, the only ones
worse than these two are Reagan and Andropov in the 80s). At this
exact moment, the Vietnam War is still under way. The United States is
in the process of dropping more bombs over Cambodia than were ever dropped during World War II. The Cuban Missile Crisis was barely a few years ago.
If the United States and Russia actually start shooting at each other, the whole thing could go off like a powder keg at this stage of the Cold War.
Remember, the exact value of these artifacts is unknown, but it's known to be extremely high - these are the remains of a
spacefaring society. Which means these people had economical spacelift, life support, apparently holograms or illusions or something crazy just going by the fact that the university appeared in front of their faces... the potential applications of simply the technologies you can assume to exist with a basic guess are absolutely staggering. Nobody
wants the Cold War to heat up over this, but if someone's stupid enough to push it, it will.
I mostly had to spend so much text on it since it's a big topic. Practically speaking, I'd imagine anyone put in charge of a spacecraft would be smart enough to see the writing on the wall and
not push it.
Militarization of space yes, but I think a more peaceful but not joint exploration would be the result.
Ideally. But sane people have difficulty comprehending the Cold War.
And honestly if the Soviets had invaded Europe England nukes them anyway regardless of what we do...
Yup. NATO launches first nuclear strike, because frankly there is just no way they're beating the Soviets conventionally (the British and German armed forces, the biggest guns among the Western European forces, put together, equal about a third of the modern-day Russian military - as in, the much-diminished-from-heights-of-Soviet-power military). The US has more forces, but they have to actually get them there, and that's very difficult .
So total nuclear war and mostly everyone is dead. And the West's nukes at the time were far superior to the Soviets while there would be a lot more damage over a wider area the Soviets would likely have their entire infrastructure successfully destroyed in a nuclear war at the time and more then likely NATO would come out the 'winner' as much as there would have been one with this scenario.
Honestly? Depending on the timeframe of the war, shooting at the infrastructure may be utterly and completely pointless. It's generally assumed to be so, and given how rapidly the Soviets would be advancing (bear in mind, when they were at the top of their form in WWII, they conquered an area equating to roughly the size of Western Europe within a week and a half - Manchuria), the early phases of the war would be over within, like, months.
Industry doesn't factor in to that. Nuking the infrastructure, cities, etcetera... that's not a strategic move, that's pure, out-and-out bitchery. Assuming they target competently, infrastructure strikes will only be at the very end. Nuclear first strikes will be on command keystones and military concentrations.
This is still, again, assuming NATO's nukes actually launch in significant numbers. Preventing that is precisely what Spetsnaz exists for, and they are
very good. Even assuming they fire, while NATO's nukes may have the edge (I wouldn't say 'far superiour', if I'd say superiour at all - MIRVs don't exist yet, or at least won't in significant numbers, and both sides have ICBMs, Russia actually developed them first though they have less), the Soviet Union has a
major edge in anti-ballistic-missile systems - they put out the A-35 six years before the US got their Spartans rolled out. The ABM treaty hasn't come into place to reduce the amount of this hardware, which means this edge remains the same.
It will be
very difficult to nuke the Soviet Union.
And then they get to shoot back. Again, unless they're spectacularly stupid, infrastructure strikes won't be on the menu unless they feel like tossing them at the US, whose ABM coverage is much lesser. We'll be seeing small-scale, tactical usage - blow away defensive strongpoints and make their way through.
End result, nukes cancel out nukes, and Soviet wins conventional within months. If the US launches, we'll see some damage to Soviet infrastructure, which they will promptly replace with the Western European - because the timeframe of the war is simply too short for the infrastructure damage to actually come into play - and at
least equal damage to the US infrastructure. NATO has more to toss, but the Soviet Union has some monstrously effective defences.
I find it difficult to imagine the US could be barricaded from launching spacecraft or that the Soviets could successfully launch enough craft to militarily be effective with 1960's/70's hardware. It's still hard to fight in space NOW with our current level of technology and there would be little if any preparation for anything resembling a blockade. Perhaps they would destroy our launch facilities but then we'd destroy theres and...no one wins and nothing happens.
Yup. No one wins. Bear in mind that it's hard to fight in space for both sides. Launching attacks or major combat operations in space? Not happening.
But all you have to do to prevent a ship from making it to the Moon is intercept it anywhere along the three-day trip. There are a limited amount of orbitals that take you to the desired location at any given time, and all you really need to do to scrub a mission entirely is force them to maneuver to evade... thereby using up the fuel and positioning they required to get there and back - if they're
lucky, they can still scrub the mission and get home.
Blockading space in general? Ridiculous. But with our current technology, there are sharp limits on the paths we can take, and we have to launch from specific sites and there's only one particular site we
want to get to.
Change around a couple events in history and have the Soviets be the ones to first land on the Moon due to American setbacks or simple lack of funding or drive from someone like Kennedy. Thus the Soviets begin their research and we begin ours and with the advances the Cold War continues with the rapidly gaining technology and interest from BOTH sides...That would be a neat backdrop and I could see SG-1 coming into existence there.
Hm, I like this idea too, except
gah, the level-grinding...
The problem then is fitting SM believably into that militaristic and tense a overtone as that story would seem a bit lighter...Japan being a NATO nation though and with the Senshi coming into existence and possibly changing the balance the Soviets have there since they are the direct descendants...That would be interesting.
Heh. SM wouldn't necessarily be lighter. To be sure, if you did anything with the setting at all, the tone certainly wouldn't match that of Sailor Moon, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a valid tone to work with.
Again not saying you would be wrong in reality but in Stargate canon humanity learns and advances IMMENSELY faster then that.
Sure, mine was a realism assessment, not a 'plot demands!' assessment.
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