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The function of an Iconian Gateway
rweninger
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
I have a little problem with the concept of those gateways.
In general they are a great idea and I love the iconians. Though in Lore there are about 7000 Gateways in Milkyway and Andromeda. Thats OK, however, how are they used?
In the Series we see, that 1 Gateway leads to multiple destination and they are roamed through. In STO we see fixed point-to-point portals.
So are they dialed up? Is it possible to change their destination with a Dial-up Device? How does this work? Is there something in lore? I think it is tactally quite no tgood if 7000 Portals roam different destinations. And it is quite not very well worked out that some portals need an other portal as exit point and some portals need an other portal.
What do you think?
Stargate had a similar issue. In S01E02 it was possible to get home through an incoming wormhole. That error never appeared then again.
In general they are a great idea and I love the iconians. Though in Lore there are about 7000 Gateways in Milkyway and Andromeda. Thats OK, however, how are they used?
In the Series we see, that 1 Gateway leads to multiple destination and they are roamed through. In STO we see fixed point-to-point portals.
So are they dialed up? Is it possible to change their destination with a Dial-up Device? How does this work? Is there something in lore? I think it is tactally quite no tgood if 7000 Portals roam different destinations. And it is quite not very well worked out that some portals need an other portal as exit point and some portals need an other portal.
What do you think?
Stargate had a similar issue. In S01E02 it was possible to get home through an incoming wormhole. That error never appeared then again.
Post edited by rweninger on
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If this issue is addressed in the future, I hope Cryptic will do it in a similar logical way.
in sto canon though mostly its connected from one portal to the next with a massive control node in subspace, however once or twice there was the iconian portal seen used outside the portals themselves on qo'nos on when the first team arrives from new romulus.
so i suspect all you need is a set of coordinates? but that doesnt explain the multitude of other locations that also pop up within the network of destinations.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
I know this topic is useless for the game itself, it always bothered me.
And actually we see no Space Gateway in game that was not connected to an other Gateway. I simply miss the logic and the technical deep dive in the lore.
Then compute the failure rate after... what? A MILLION years of disrepair? Why are these gates still even there? They'd all have been taken out before humanity began its journey on 2 legs.
Be it planetary shift, gravitational pull from anomalous asteroids/etc, earth quakes, planetary failures, global shifts/catastrophies, etc... None of them would still be functional. Look at the new Romulus gate - in such a poor state of disrepair that not one, but two different civilizations nearly destroyed the same planet to try and get it running.
The problem is plot armor. They wanted to write the biggest, meanest, most awesomest bad guy ever... So now what?
It's a problem a number of sci-fi shows run into -- they wanted to make the bad guy insurmoutnably bad, but then didn't have a logical reason for X or for Y, so they just started making stuff up that didn't make sense. Oh, then they had written themselves into a corner, plot-wise, and didn't know how to make the good guys come out on top. Now for MORE plot armor!
That's the current state of the Iconians in this game: 100% plot armor.
In one of the episodes, I think it was Sphere of Influence, there's a Ferasan NPC who explains that you don't actually need another gateway on the destination end (at least not to get there, getting back may become quite difficult). Which is also true as in that episode you more or less get stuck in that strange facility once you enter the gateway on New Romulus.
So yes, I would think that all you need is a set of coordinates. One problem is that we indeed do not have control over the destination/coordinates.
The reason there sometimes seems to be a link between two gateways may simply be because you need to have a way to get back.
The malfunctioning of the New Romulus gate was sabotage. If you read the different consoles in the strange facility in that episode, you'll see that brain scans were made of Researcher Adranna. So the Iconians or one of their servitor races were closely monitoring the whole event.
There's also some text explaining that if this gateway were to be activated, there would be a 70% casualty rate on New Romulus. IIRC. That indicates that the Iconians or one of their servitor races were expecting and possibly deliberately working towards failure of the gateway.
Who say's that there's no maintenance? We know the Iconians are keeping account of the gateways from Sphere of Influence, so who's to say that every now and then over the millennia, they haven't sent maintenance teams to upkeep the gates when no-one is looking?
Besides, alien tech is Alien (something Star Trek as a whole has almost always done extremely poorly), it could have a self repair system of nanites (or pixies) that are powered by... Air molecules (or pixie dust), or any number of other explanations.
You don't create a gate network of so many gates unless you had need for them. You could only have built such at thing if there was constant traffic to and from all of those gates on a very regular basis.
Couple that with the clear evidence that no life has been around any of the iconian "stations" or ruins or ancient artifacts, that there is no nanite presence, there are no signs of cleaning, maintenance, or the like.
It's 100% clear the gates were abandoned.
Except that as per Sphere of Influence, it's spelt out that the Iconians are keeping track of every gateway. Yes, a lot are inactive or broken, but the majority aren't. They all however (All that we see anyway) have current intelligence of the planet attached. It may have been mothballed for eons, but that's all.
Mothballed = not currently functional.
What you mention is just part of the plot armor that shows all these gates just magically "work" for no reason at all. See Reyan's comments.
It does not mean abandoned either. Or at least not permanently. If I file something away, that doesn't mean its abandoned - It means its been filed away.
And yes, it is plot armour. The same plot armour that exists for everything in the shows. It works or fails as the plot requires. That does not mean however that there cannot be a reason made up for WHY the armour works or fails.
Warning: This is just my own, personal take, not some official Cryptic doctrine.
The Iconians were known for just appearing out of thin air. So we know that no exit gateway is necessary.
However, to piggy back off the above, perhaps each Iconian Gateway has a limited range in which you can teleport without an end gate. But each gateway can also connect directly to another gateway no matter the distance. This would explain why the Klingon team could go from New Romulus to Qo'noS without an exit gateway, but we needed an exit to get to the Delta Quadrant.
However, one could also argue that the space gates led to each other simply for convenience of return. One thing that I don't think was ever covered was how the Iconians get back. They appear out of thin air. . . then they walk home?*
Also, the Iconians have only been gone a couple hundred thousand years, not a million. And the universe is a big place. The gateways we've come across so far have all been hidden in some way. There could have been plenty that have been destroyed over the years.
And "Mothballing" is specifically putting something away in good condition so that it can be pulled out and used again with ease. That doesn't mean it's broken or inoperable.
*And in an OOC manner, this is why there was gate-to-gate transfer to the Dyson Sphere, we needed a way to get you back to the other quadrants. . .
If the Iconians were conquerers, then it'd stand to reason they wouldn't need a way back. They had Stargate-sized gateways to get personnel into position, then they had Supergate-sized gateways to get ships and fleets in. Worst comes to worst, they have to travel back home at warp but not until after they took over. Or they could build a gate to help facilitate the back-and-forth to and from that planet/system.
I'd say they could justify the use and non-use of gates quite a few different ways.
Can, not does. Which is why as I keep mentioning Sphere of Influence. From that mission, 880 gates (according to the wiki) are broken or inoperative, a further 5,967 are listed as inactive, leaving 408 (out of a total of 7,255) which are presumably in use (or at least fully hooked up and ready to use).
The problem here is that the Iconian gateway found in the Gamma Quadrant was showing exit locations such as Starfleet Headquarters and Paris on Earth. So the gateways in the series had tremendous range on them even without an exit gateway structure. STO itself has shown that the Iconians don't need a physical gateway structure to enter and exit to and from a location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlZzP61VDZY
Commanding Officer: Captain Pyotr Ramonovich Amosov
Dedication Plaque: "Nil Intentatum Reliquit"
The Iconians probably know their own tech better. They may be able to set up a 'return' portal from a remote point or link one gateway to another to step through multiple gateways while apparently from the passenger perspective, only stepping from one gateway to another.
Or they left the door open on Q'onos for their little presentation.
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My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
Another thing to consider is that if you have only one gate then you can only go to one place at a time. It's practical for a single installation, but not practical for an Empire.
My character Tsin'xing
So while an intact gateway may be able to open portals just about anywhere, we may not have figured out how to do that yet. The Iconians, obviously, know how to, which you see in instances where they do stuff like kidnapping Taris or you. Right now all we've managed to piece together from this alien tech is how to open large portals to other gates.
It's also possible that opening the gates without a gate on the other end is rather power intensive, and it's difficult for us to recharge the old machinery.
My take on the Dyson Spheres is that they're partly as a secured staging ground and partly as a mobile war fortress and factory. Dyson Spheres are mindboggling tough, and likely indestructible even by 25th Century weaponry (hence why we don't just blow them up: we don't know how). Remember, they're somehow resilient enough not to tear themselves apart from gravitational forces despite having a mass several hundred orders of magnitude greater than the entire solar system compressed into a shell with a 1 AU radius. The feats of engineering involved are insane, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's shifting part of it's mass into another dimension or something.
And the bloody things can move, albeit with immense energy cost requiring some of the most energetic and dangerously unstable particles in existence.
So yeah, we're dealing with tech we don't quite fully understand. Fortunately, Iconians built to last.
It's possible there are other settings for the gates we haven't figured out that'd be more practical for an imperial scale, just it's not worth the risk or we don't have the energy for that. Or just the gates we're going through are dialed in to each other, or that the big fleet gates need a second gate, hence the use of the spheres.
Then again, the galaxy is also enormous with somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars, and the Federation, despite being probably one of the largest territorial powers in the known galaxy, is quite small in comparison with maybe a little under 200 member species and another 1000-1500 colonies and planets claimed, plus protectorates, allies and affiliated non-member worlds and allied minor empires. I figure the Iconian empire looked more like an archipelago on the map rather than a big blob of claimed systems.
Sela said something along the lines that the Iconians biggest weakness is their underestimating just how many people and how BIG the galaxy is, which lends some weight that the Iconians tended to skip around to garden spots.
The Gates the Alliance are using seem to be locked on each other. We hope, but clearly the Alliance isn't trying to change the settings too much to risk losing access to the Spheres (which are also ridiculously advanced scientific marvels)
The 'Iconian worm' is an interesting thing to bring up at this point - Iconian systems may work together to keep themselves self-sustaining, and verify against each other that they are operating in normal parameters and what those parameters are.
Also, functional gateways have been found on planets that were explicitly bombarded into being uninhabitable. The Iconians really built to last.
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My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
so 6.4k gates are working as intended after the subspace iconian gateway system was reset and the gateways got the signal to reactivate and reset to original factory settings. of course that is what the iconians wanted in the first place.
as usual starkos keeps going on about directing a gateway to a ship bridge and dropping a bomb off. but that entirely depends if the iconians know what a bomb is and how to construct one and if the iconian gateways can be directed in such a way. none of which has enough proof to determine. for the iconian portal device on iconia before the facility was leveled, there could of been circumstances that made it possible for the ent-d and the romulan ship to exist in the numerous locations chosen by the portal, no idea.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
While gateways are the ultimate in military technology, it doesn't mean the Iconians were a militaristic society. I personally agree with Picard that the other races bombarded Iconia out of fear and greed while STO went with them being militaristic.
As far as Iconians knowing what a bomb is and how to construct them is not the issue. They are a highly advanced race so if they want to create weapons like bombs, then it would be easy. The issue is if they would create bombs to attack their enemies. Iconians could have been a highly advanced race of peaceful explorers that were destroyed by war-like races to gain the gateway technology for themselves.
Nah, the Iconians have tech that can open a gateway that is currently closed, much like how the Borg can open transwarp conduits that are currently closed. Presumably they can also order the gate to become permeable or not, so they can hit a button and 'vanish' as an otherwise invisible gate moves over them.
If they didn't know how to build bombs, there's always there 'portal in, vaporize everyone, portal out' trick. Death on a location is clearly something the Iconians are functionally capable of.
I do wish they were better about leaving their non-military archives around, though. It's possible most of that data was evacuated while the gateways encountered were unable to be.
Member Access Denied Armada!
My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
And that assumes the Iconians of today we're running into are the same guys who got bombarded into rubble back in the day. My personal pet theory is that since a lot of those gates open in the Andromeda Galaxy, what we're really facing here is Kelvans, or that the Kelvans are somehow connected to this. Maybe the Iconian refugees gated to Andromeda and got themselves taken over or replaced, or the Kelvans are pretending to be Iconians, or something else is going on.
I did notice that the wildlife on New Romulus, or Dewa, has the same physical arrangement of eyes as the Iconian we see.
I would fathom a bit of protomatter and trilithium would do the trick. While the shell itself might survive, most of the survace (and near-surface) facilities would be easily destroyed.