Talk:Hot Zone (Stargate Atlantis)

Retorical question removed
"why would a similarly advanced technology not likewise be immune? " This sounds like a personal opinion and i will try to edit it.Ex Pluribus Unum 16:33, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

EM technology
Ok, in "Childhood's End", the EM field of M7G-677 was able to down Ancient, Wraith AND Human technology, yet in this episode, Ancient systems are immune to EM. Is it a difference between a pulse and a constant EM field or an oversight on the writers' part?

--Faris b 00:36, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I can't quite recall the scientific explanation from Childhood's End, but are you sure it was actually an EM field? Maybe it was some other high-tech thingy. JBK405 02:38, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm 99% sure it was called an EM field/shield depending on the speaker, it was even called so in the season 2 episode "Critical Mass" when Dr. Zelenka was going off world to that planet.

--Faris b 02:57, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

If it was an EM thingy, that just adds more problems to this, since that field knocked out the human radios in addition to the Jumper. Why would that EM field effect the radios and not this one? JBK405 04:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Good question, this episode has major scientific flaws in it, also everything I read indicates that EM pulses permanently knock out technology, why does their stuff work when the field is off?

Faris b 06:35, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

EM Shielded radios
While it's well within the capability of human technology to shield equipment from EMP's (Such shielding exists in present day reality), why would the radios be shielded but not the laptops? Logic would suggest doing the opposite, shielding the laptops and not the radios, since information can be irretrievably lost if a laptop is damaged. Of course, why wouldn't the air force shield both, considering the importance of the Atlantis mission. JBK405 02:38, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

"Shielding" a device by turning it off
While I am hardly an expert in EMP, I have always understood that one of the features of it was that a device did not have to be ON for it to be damaged. Is that not true? If so, then the episode has more significant technical problems than whether the radios were EMP hardened or not. --chrisweuve 08:25, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

McKay's theories?
What's up with McKay's theories that he mumbles out when he thinks he's going to die?

Now I wasn't a fan of Atlantis back when this ep first aired so I didn't pay much attention to the dialogue but when it aired in syndication recently I paid closer attention.

Something about looping the power on the Gate to charge a dummy ZPM.

Now is this about building up a charge to dial Earth or just using the gate to store power and send it to somewhere else like powering the shield or something? I never got that.

And...

If they were there for more than a year, I've left some notes on how to roll blackouts to effectively maintain your power requirements

What does that mean? That the Naqahdah generators only have enough power to power Atlantis for 2 years without shutting them down every now and then to save power or what? I assumed that they lasted indefinately like certain nuclear reactors that power but I guess when powering something the size of Atlantis it taxes it quite a bit.

Does anyone understand or have an idea about what he meant by that stuff?

Faris b 08:59, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Charging a ZPM could be used for anything. Dialing Earth, powering the shields, powering the chair, etc. Most technology on Atlantis is designed to be powered by ZPM's, and many of its resources don't work when hooked up to a normal Naqahdah generator (Hence why they needed the Mk II to power the chair in The Siege).

Regarding the blackouts...I dunno. I was always under the impression that (As you said) they lasted for quite a while, but maybe it really is just to much of a drain powering the whole city 9Or even just sections of it). JBK405 20:33, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Fast ship?
Somebody questioned the fact that being the Puddle Jumper an interstellar ship, it should be able to get away from the release point fast enough to be in a safe place at the time of the detonation. However, there is something that was not factored in: the atmosphere. The release was about 20 miles above Atlatis, so we can imagine that is still within the atmosphere. The Jumper would have to vacate the atmosphere first in order to accelerate to its interstellar speeds. The presence of the atmosphere prevents the ship from reaching such velocities and the acceleration needed to accomplish that.

Two small corrections: It's an interplanetary ship, not interstellar (mentioned within the article), and even if it's not at its full speed, it should be able to accelerate to several thousand miles per hour in a bare few seconds, our own airplanes can accomplish this without inertial dampers (To protect the inhabitants from the effects of acceleration) or sufficiently durable hull (To protect it against friction from the atmosphere). Like the article says, clearing the blast range would never have been a problem. JBK405 01:34, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

The problem is not the acceleration per se, but the resistance of the air. The faster an aircraft goes, the more resistance it will meet from the air in front of it: Aerodynamics 101. I do not recall hearing that the Puddle Jumpers have shields, so unless they have, air resistance would be a great deal. OVERMIND 21:12, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, jumpers DO have shields, but the only way to get them is to modify the energy spectrum of the cloaking field but it uses way too much power to be efficiently used so no, the shields would not have been active, the shields were used twice, in "The Defiant One", the Wraith activated them to prevent Sheppard from escaping in the jumper and in "Grace Under Pressure" in order to save McKay from the back of the sinking jumper.

Faris b 22:17, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

the jumper may not hav been going full speed as it needed to drop off the generater as it travelled so it is concievable that shepard slowed down in order to do this accurately.supposing he came to a standstill to drop it off and as a puddle jumpers rate of acceleration would be about 200G (judging from shepards comment that their organs would be crushed in suspision then according to the equation of motion S=UT+1/2AT^2 he would be a couple of hundred kilometers away which may be within shockwave range of a naquadah generator but far enought to be in no real danger —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.39.30.173 (talk) 21:19, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Killing the Wraith
"**All of the scientists studying the virus seem to make the unjustified assumption that it was designed to kill humans - it never seems to occur to any of them that the virus could have been designed to kill the Wraith."

It never occurs to them because there's nothing in the episode to point out that it could have been designed to kill Wraith. At this point the humans didn't know just how close to humanity the Wraith were, they had no reason to suspect that the nanites could be an effective weapon. JBK405 18:09, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Atlantis transport system teleports an infected man - Oversight?
The alleged scientific oversight of the Atlantean transport of an infected man is in fact not an oversight. The following comments were made and should be removed from this wiki entry as they are unfounded:

"The Atlantis transport system teleports an infected man, despite sensors in place designed to detect such infection. The city not detecting the virus when it first appeared is explained by damage sustained during the Storm, but the teleportation system itself seems to be in perfect working order and should have detected the nanites when the system was used. Since the city had preprogrammed actions designed to minimize infection and damage, the teleporters should logically not help spread the disease."

The conclusion that the teleporters should logically not help spread the disease rests on the assumtion that


 * The teleportation system has the capability to detect the nanites.

In order for the teleportation system to detect the nanites, it would require a database of known dangers. Then before or during transport the molecular structure of the item in transport would be compared against this database to detect any present dangers. However, it has not been suggested in any of the Stargate Atlantis episodes that the Atlantis transport system has this capability. Rather, it is suggested in the Hot Zone episode that the teleportation, or as it is called in the show the transport, system and the detection systems are two separate systems that operate in parallel as suggested by the following conversation:

Controller: "Atlantis must be designed to respond to outbreaks automatically. The city initiated a lockdown when Peterson transported out of the east side"

Weir: "Why now? Not when Johnson and Wagner became infected"

Controller: "The city's detection systems might have been affected from flooding in those areas. Once Peterson entered the mess hall the pathogen was almost instantly detected by the automated systems and the city protected itself."

Thus, Atlantis's transport systems are operational until shutdown manually or by the detection systems. To build this detection system into the transport systems would be a redundant system that is not needed. If the detection systems were operational, the infected man would have been detected long before he could enter and use the transport system.

It has never been suggested in any of the episodes in Stargate Atlantis that the transport system does in fact have this redundancy.

Also, this detection system does not have to be a part of the transport system. Conceivably, at a basic level the transport system functions by deconstructing matter, sending that matter to another area, then reconstructing it to exactly its previous molecular structure. A detection system does not have to be a part of this process in order for it to function.

I used a truck as a previous analogy but perhaps downloading of a file would be a more appropriate analogy. If you view the item to be transported as a file that could contain a computer virus, it is also similarly deconstructed and sent in packets to a destination where the file is subsequently reconstructed in its proper order. Parity checks are done on the packets to ensure the integrity of the data sent but not on whether it contains a virus. This scan can be initiated when the download is complete.

The transport system does not have to contain its own redundant virus scanner nor does it need one to function. Thus, it is not logical that the transport system would operate in a way that would help to stop the spread of the disease and this trivia entry should be removed.

Relationship to Asurans
After viewing the episode "Progeny" and seeing various commentaries by the producers, I notice that the article is wrong when it states that the "Hot Zone" nanites are the precursors to the Asurans, and that the Ancients created them. Both the episode and the producers say that the Asurans themeselves are teh creators of the nanite virus, not part of it at all. The virus was created by them to kill the humans on Pegasus for the sake of eliminating the Wraith's food source, and it is presumabely this disagreement (if not others) which made teh Ancients realize the Asurans weren't the harmful experiment they used to be. --Sauron18 19:32, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Fixed it anywyas.--Sauron18 19:45, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

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BetacommandBot (talk) 06:31, 26 February 2008 (UTC)