So. I never watched the show in order until recently. Im on the late season 2 episode with the wormhole and I think I was scratching my head before with some other episodes as I thought it was two way. That episode finally made it clear it was one way. Also will add a mildly infuriating but do a community search for stargate does not bring up this community.
And fluids, like water and air(?), don’t come through by themselves, if the gate is inside a large body of that fluid. If it’s a stream of grain or soup, it does go through though. Oh, and gravity can come through.
It makes a lot more sense when you learn that the rippling puddle effect isn’t actually the wormhole itself. The wormhole is microscopic, the Stargate is more like a transporter pad that breaks you down and squirts you through it to reassemble on the other side. So there’s actually an Ancient computer doing all the work, and it can “decide” how some of those rules work in an arbitrary manner.
Which does make me wonder why the heck the Ancients designed the Stargate to disassemble stuff that enters the puddle in a situation where it’s got nowhere to send it. I guess that was all long before OSHA.
What situation are you thinking of? The gate can’t open at all if the exit can’t open. If it can open, there’s the big swoosh that blows several meters ahead and disintegrates anything in the way. If you mean the iris, it’s set something like a few microns ahead of the surface, so atoms can pass, they just get smashed on the iris. It’s not like the gate is going to constantly measure the size of shit that goes through and visually check if someone didn’t just put up a wall in front. Also, the Ancients themselves did use shield technology that exact same way, see the Atlantis version, so it is all on purpose.
Which suggests that when the Goa’uld attempted to attack the Earth and were smashing Jaffas against the iris (as O’Neill said: “like bugs on a windshield”), someone had to clean up all the Jaffa goo on the gate room for afterwards.
I mean that if you enter a Stargate that’s going the “wrong way”, as in it’s an incoming wormhole rather than an outgoing one, it just disintegrates you and sends you nowhere.
For example, in the SG-1 episode “A Hundred Days,” a Stargate is lying flat. A MALP probe emerges from it and immediately falls back into the receiving gate, destroying it.
Ah, right. The puddle is there and nothing’s stopping you from touching it, I guess. But you can’t tell if it’s an entrance or exit at a glance, I suppose they could have put some color or whatever that can be powered by the wormhole to tell the difference (unless you’re colorblind).
If I were Amelius designing these things I’d just make it impossible to enter the wrong way. Put up a force field, perhaps add a safety buffer that stores stuff that went in the wrong way so it can be spit back out again.