Dawn Part 2

[thepope]

wineblood said:

It makes sense that most parts are ancient, they built the stargates. I pretty sure the cloak is nox though, sounds like their area of expertise.

Yeah the ship is mostly Ancient in design, not sure if this has already bin posted or not but the Ark is a re-fitted Ancient warship. You'll find out more about the cloak in an upcomin episode called "Mirage".

[immhotep]

Yes yourll also find out about the history of the ark, to some degree in the torch. The ship is as pope has said basicly a alteran craft that has been basily gutted, revamped, reformed, most things you can do to it has been done. the only orgional feature is the engines, shields and the drone chair duo. All the other weapons, and power sources and the arm and the transporters, the computer systems, the actual corridoors were modiefied, the living spaces are kept origional but they are spacious rather than in large quantity due to the ark being manned by a reletively small crew compared to the size (origional crew was about 400/500, but all really highly trained and specialised) and the ship could potentally hold about 2/3000 people. We are quite spaced out because the exploration expedition and security escourt detail are only half the orgional crew(roughly)...So when we say 'daniels quarters' think two or three rooms in size, thats actually standard for alot of them, i dont think anyone has shariing a room, or will do for a while.

[NoDot]

Forgive me, but one thing keeps bugging me about this: now that they have a ZPM, why don't they just return to their own time?

[immhotep]

The time device has a safety feature in-built, that you cant go too far through time, there are two modes of time travel short jump an long jump, now the can do short jumps, which are anything between 200 years and 50000 years, and their are the long jumps which are millions of years.
Now when we jump back in Dawn 2 its part of a program built in to the ark, that has a marker put in, Earth and the time when dakara exists is a standard point in the computer, so when elliot asks 'why is the black hole there' the ark travels to that default point. It is a long jump however its a by pass of the rule because it was a command that was linked to reactivating the ship after it went to investigate ( it - the time device's computer system - is autoprogramed to follow the first command relating to the time drive, which was elliots and led them to the default point)
After this first command the rule is not applicable and so the OS of the ark return to normal mode where we can only make short jumps. So simply we cant get home because we dont have the permissions required, however we can get there because there were protcol put in place for a situation like this that allowed thos security measured to be by-passed.

[NoDot]

OK, that helps, but can they just override the protocall to jump back to our time? Surely they could work on hacking the computers and overriding the long-jump protocall!

[immhotep]

Ah no because the Alterans have passcodes, alteran passcodes are like hyperpasscodes they are uncrackable, they are not even in a language we understand probley contain things we could fathom and are basicly built right in to the Time OS (we cant hack the ark, we can try ), basicly so we dont go back and stop the allience being creating or some other major major major event like the stargate being create, so we dont erase that scale event from history, we can affect recent history but becauae the allience is soo old to affect anything on a grand cosmic scale we would need to go back very far. to prevent this they limited our access to time in a way, if we have to go back that far they will give us a crystel that has 1 time zone and 1 adress and an unlock code type thing, and that is the only place we can go to, its like a train ticket, 1 2way, 1 trip, and it burns out and to go back we have to ask them again.