Efficient way to transport a Stargate [closed]

Question

In the future Earth, scientists have successfully created Stargate.

And because of the greedy nature of human being, they wish to colonize as many planets as possible!

And they sure can NOT wait till the Warp Drive is invented!

So transporting Stargate to another planet become a huge problem!

Especially those planets of another star system!

So how could my scientific think tanks overcome this problem!?

Additional Information:

1. There is NO magic or superpower.
2. Based on as many scientific facts, realistic or fictional, as possible. But only technologies considered "lower" than the Stargate may be used. Of course this is all subjective, such as one could never know which of Stargete or Warp Drive is more advanced. But please do as best as you could to fit the criteria.
3. The scientists are controlled by greedy, and ignorant, governors, therefore simple answer such as "Our current technology is simply impossible to accomplish such a thing!" is ABSOLUTELY unacceptable!

Update:

Seems like a lot of comrades here have this question, so I decide to add it to the list.

4. Any objects moving in and out of the Stargate won't affect the gate itself at all! The device is simply open a connection between 2 different places. Not much unlike the regular door in your room.

Answer 1

Rockets

Rockets are the fastest means of acceleration we have but it's just not efficient but for a stargate, this isn't a problem as you can open the gate to refuel.

You effectively build the stargate into a ship and use the gate to refuel and resupply. Crew can come and go as wanted.

As tech improves, you bring it through the gate and upgrade the ship on the way.

With current tech, we're looking at around 100 years but with a gate, we don't need to carry supplies so the weight is less which means we can go much faster.

Answer 2

It seems your only option is to utilise slower-than-light travel to get your Stargate to the each world you wish to connect to. Once it's there you can dial it up and use the wormhole to start sending through people and supplies to establish a colony. Once that's established you can start using that as a jumping-off point for the next Stargate seeding mission.

Notes:
Depending on if the Stargates have a minimum connection distance like the did in the show, it may be possible to use them to drastically boost the efficiency of your space program. Simply have one in orbit around Earth and push the ships through from the ground level. Bam! No need to waste all that fuel escaping Earth's gravity.

Similarly having one on the Moon, or at the edge of the Solar system allows you to shortcut the more expensive parts of space travel.

You may also be able to use the Stargate as a thruster depending on the exact physics. Have the engines on Earth where they can be easily refuelled and repaired, and direct their thrust through the wormhole here -

• If matter travelling through the gate exerts an equal and opposite force on it, you can put the 'gate at the rear of the ship and direct the thrust away to push yourself forward.
• If there is no corresponding force on the exiting 'stargate, you'll have to direct the thrust at the ship itself, and use an armoured catching plate or sail to absorb the force and push the ship forward - as well as the Stargate, as there is no force acting on it. Basically laser propulsion.

IIRC correctly on the original show it was possible to connect to a ship in space as long as its position was calibrated correctly. In the show I don't think the Stargate thruster idea was ever attempted.

Answer 3

You said that when an object passes through a pair of stargates, then its velocity will also be transferred. So with some applied orbital dynamics and multiple pairs of stargates which you send through each other, you might be able to reach some really impressive speeds.

1. Create a pair of large stargates (1A and 1B).
2. Place 1A on a very large orbit around the Sun (somewhere in the Kuiper belt).
3. Accelerate 1B on a retrograde orbit around the sun which is slightly smaller than that of Earth. (a retrograde orbit is an orbit going the opposite direction of Earth)
4. Build a slightly smaller pair of stargate (2A and 2B) which fit through the stargate pair 1A and 1B.
5. Launch 2A from Earth in a prograde orbit which intersects that of 1B stargate. It will meet the larger stargate with approximately twice the orbital velocity of Earth, approximately 200,000 km/h.
6. When 2A enters 1B with 200,000 km/h, it will exit the outer stargate 1A at the same speed of 200,000 km/h. You saved most of the energy it takes to leave the Sun's gravity well.

With that speed it will arrive at Alpha Centauri in about 1000 years. That's still far too slow to meet our shareholder's expectations. But wait, the nice thing about this setup is that we can chain it!

We still got gate 2B back on Earth. If we put this one on a retrograde orbit too and send a 3rd, even smaller, stargate 3A through it, it will get launched out of 2A with another 200,000 km/h. You can chain more and more subsequently smaller gates that way. Each one gets you an additional 200,000 km/h. If you chain 10 stargate pairs like that, you get down to 100 years. If you chain 100 stargate pairs, you get down to 10 years (at that point you will experience diminishing returns due to relativistic effects. No matter how the physics behind your stargates work, this trick won't allow you to accelerate objects beyond the speed of light).

Just don't forget that you still need to decelerate when you reach the destination. But you can do that the same way if you rotate one of the gates in transit by 180°.

And if you can somehow disassemble the stargates before you fit them through and then assemble them after arrival, then you might even use stargates which are all the same size.

Answer 4

And because of the greedy nature of human being, they wish to colonize as many planets as possible!

So we're trying to min/max time, so the rate limiting step is the speed of light and the vast distances between planets.

Any objects moving in and out of the Stargate won't affect the gate itself at all! The device is simply open a connection between 2 different places. Not much unlike the regular door in your room.

Accelerate a star gate to near light speed by using light sails, rockets, or whatever. This is expensive resource wise but it only needs to happen once per "exploration" gate because we're never going to decelerate.

When the gate gets close to a system, do NOT decelerate but just drop another gate and exploration ship out of the first one. This assumes gates are either not round or of differing sizes but presumably you can build the things so can influence that.

The 2nd gate and colonization force appear at their own velocity not connected to the 1st gate, they go down to the planet and explore it (hopefully colonize it) while the 1st gate continues on to another planet.

If the planet is unworkable then the colonization force returns home through the 2nd gate (this doesn't prevent using the 2nd gate as a jump off point). If it is workable they stay.

Answer 5

If we're talking about the initial endeavor to get a single "nearby" planet colonized and set up with a stargate, then I agree with other answers. If you rule out any tech as or more advanced than the stargate and warp drives, you are probably going to have to do it the old fashioned way with slower-than-light travel.

Regarding how to settle as many worlds as quickly as possible, you might consider adding some naturally occurring wormholes. Many works of science fiction rely on "wormholes" as shortcuts to other areas of the universe (sure, it stretches science a bit, but it's a well accepted sci fi trope). If you are lucky enough to have one or more stable wormholes in your neighborhood, you could use these naturally occurring "stargates" to get your ships and stargates to other parts of the universe, and then head for any planets close (galactically speaking) to the wormholes using traditional slower-than-light travel. This would give you access to more worlds faster and allow you to begin creating expanding hubs of colonized worlds with stargates more quickly than you otherwise might.

For instance, in David Weber's Honorverse books, the Star Kingdom of Manticore happened to be located at a terminus of multiple wormholes. This allowed them fast travel to several other areas of space, and made a tiny single star-system kingdom super rich as a result, because they became a hub of trade. In your case, the stargates would render the wormholes obsolete eventually, but the wormholes could still be used to get them places while you're getting your stargate system set up.