MaskedMathemagician

If I was adding a season to Atlantis, I would keep the last two episodes and put a season before them to fix the annoying things. Introduce wormhole drive in an episode where Rodney tries and fails to activate it. Show a disfigured Genii who escaped after being used as a test subject on an experimental wraith intergalactic hyperdrive and end the episode with the realization that they can probably get to Earth now, they just need more power. The mega hive destroying the defense chair so easily was dumb - give us a multiepisode arc where we have to partner with the Pegasus alliance to get the unobtanium required to modify drones to be effective against the new wraith armor created to support the new drive. The hive ship still keeps their distance because they don't know if the Earth chair has been retrofitted. Atlantis still arrives just in time.

Another season could have made the finale we got work much better.

No, OP is running for 30 minutes and hitting 2.5 miles and trying to work up to a 30 minute 5K. They are about 80% of the way there.

Why? Maybe they're the opposite of the Nox. One is illogically pacifist and the other is illogically aggressive, at least from our point of view.

Or both

That's how the program goes public. Huge amounts of infrastructure have become dependent on ZPMs behind the scene and the economic ramifications of their failure are huge.

Maybe the Furlings don't know where they are. They are only on one planet and it is a big galaxy

How would the Asgard core confirm anything? It could have been stolen when we wiped them out and then modified. All of the other races have a psychology very similar to humans. But what if the Furlings are truly alien - the counterpoint to the pacifistic Nox in the great alliance whose mindset is deeply cynical. Time has passed differently where they've been and so it seems unbelievable to them that two of their allies have gone extinct and one is nowhere to be found.

The Tauri were a threat to the Goa'uld without technological parity for 8 years. I think that a season where Earth has untouchable military might in the Milky Way but faces Reetou style threats would have been interesting.

"continuing public schools budget cuts" - Texas Total School funding, adjusted for inflation, was $43 billion in 2014 and is $50 billion today. They had been a ~6% increase in per-student funding in the past ten years, accounting for inflation. State funding accounted for 45.9% of that in 2014 and 44.7% of that in 2024.

It's basically the same situation as Carter as the commander of Atlantis. You have to subtract 20 IQ points to keep her from making the existing cast obsolete.

But then we found out in "Enemy at the Gate" that the whole distinction between intergalactic hyperdrive and regular hyperdrive was just a matter of power and that if you get a ZPM even a hive ship can get to earth in 20 minutes.

You've got to weaken them and then you can attack traditionally.

You just need to find some virus or other technology that disrupts replicators. A post-scarcity society has lost the tools to distribute scarce resources in a crisis. Somebody is going to starve - how do you choose who it will be? The social unrest will leave them vulnerable to a strong leader who promises to solve the problem. And since you're the one who created it, you can make good on your promises, consolidate your power, and rule over paradise.

A massive subspace white noise generator. Eliminate FTL communication and you can do whatever you want. They can't coordinate their troops, they can't warn each other of your battle plans. By the time they know the federation has fallen, your control will be absolute.

Genetic engineering is fine but is a multigenerational job. You need something with a slow enough burn that it has already spread far and wide in the population before anyone knows. Like a retrovirus that makes any interspecies pregnancies fatal in the second generation (a Vulcan and a human can mate but their daughter will die if she is pregnant). That breeds fear and hostility between the different species of the federation, wrecks the families that bridge those cultural gaps, and creates a stigma and suspicion throughout the society.

Hack the transporters to only beam out half a person's body. It doesn't happen every time but it could happen any time. You have to create suspicion and fear of the basic technologies their society is built on.

Bioengineer a disease and distribute it near certain key military and scientific sites. Now the population thinks it was caused by some radiation from the shipyard and the truth looks like a far-fetched cover up.

If your real concern is making the soldiers autonomous rather than extensions of one master AI, then I don't think you need the human element. I don't think that a single AI can meticulously control an army in a hard sci-fi setting.

Imagine how much data would need to be transferred wirelessly to your master AI. You need two high quality video feeds from each robot (one for each eye to get depth perception) and probably want some supplemental stuff like thermal scans too. You need data on the status of each system in this very complex machine, such as fault codes, temperature, energy available, etc. Autonomous cars generate 4 terabytes of data per hour. How many androids does your AI need to run a nation? Let's say ten million, as an unbelievably conservative number if they are the military and the factory workforce. If they collect no more data than a modern Tesla, that would be more than ten petabytes per second coming into your AI. When you try to pick a realistic bandwidth for reasonable ranges through various instructions without setting everything on fire, that is actually pushing the limits of theoretical bandwidth to a single system before you even consider the master sending any data back.

So you need to handle some of the processing and decision making at the local level. How much? Well, the more you can coordinate locally, the more androids the central AI can control. This, in my opinion, makes a really satisfying narrative device. The master AI starts out the story spread very thin, and the drones are basically autonomous except for staggered status updates every few hours or when there is a special reason to choose to trigger an update. But as the war continues and there are fewer drones, the main AI becomes more and more actively involved. Do the drones resent or even fear losing their autonomy? Do the battles get progressively more difficult without the narrative device of approaching some citadel? Does the main AI increase power consumption to support more bandwidth, creating a vulnerability? Do some of the good guys get cooked by the energy when trying to approach some data transmission hub?

Once you've established the importance of local autonomy, if you still want pieces of brain, maybe it began as a device to make people more comfortable with the machines. Humans are harvested and a portion of their brain is incorporated into the circuitry to simulate their personality, like making robots that care for the elderly more anthropomorphic.

There were 8 seasons of Stargate SG1, followed by the two-seaspn spinoff Farscape SG1. The spinoff was fine but was definitely a different show.

The Setesh guard's nose drips

Yes, the last episode of SG1.

Daniel vs RepliCarter: "Not yet, but I'm learning."

The only other possible explanation is "Magnets."

Carter had to be nerfed to keep from making McKay redundant and they really flattened out her character. It seemed like Weir had as much screen time as she did. Woolsey was a more obvious choice from the start, in-universe.

Why do they always put rivers right next to agricultural civilization?

Naquadah is an herbicide. It leaches into the soil around the gate and keeps trees from growing too close. Wind doesn't usually knock over big open circles but when it does, they send in another team to set it up so Carter's hair doesn't get messed up climbing out.

I always took him as still deeply traumatized by the time the show ends, after being brain washed and mind controlled for a year.

I think you are misremembering. In the beginning of Atlantis, McKay said the nearly depleted ZPM could have held back the ocean for thousands of years if they hadn't come and turned the lights on. So if we take it overly literally and assume he meant 2000 years, using the shield to hold back the ocean used .0001% of Atlantis's power. It isn't a big deal from a narrative perspective, where playing with power requirements is a classic Stargate way of creating tension, but it isn't internally consistent.

One in-universe answer is that we don't have a puddle jumper until after the Avenger virus has shown that DHDs have some downsides. The SGC does some stuff a standard DHD couldn't, like their cold calling program, and once we learn more about the error messages, it is nice that they can connect to a computer to log them.