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In the movie and in the early episodes of Stargate SG-1, whenever a team travelled from Earth to their destination they always arrived 'cold'. This is especially noticeable in the movie.

In the later series, however, this no longer happens. Was a reason for this change ever stated in the show? What happened to the 'freezing' side effect of gate travel?

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My guess is that it was an effect of a minor incompatibility between the dialing computer and the gate (maybe a lack of sufficient power, or perhaps a missing command). Once they figured out the problem the freezing effect probably went away. – Xantec Jan 16 at 15:03
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Wikipedia says " This is possibly explained by the 'freezing effect' also witnessed – heat energy is converted to kinetic energy, both cooling the object and increasing its velocity. These effects were countered during an upgrade of Stargate Command's dialing computer.". But this is completely unsourced, so likely is an attempted explanation by someone writing the Wikipedia article instead of canon info. – DVK Jan 16 at 15:05
There is also the possibility that the writers just forgot. They aren't perfect. – Garan Jan 16 at 15:34
@DVK: I have no sources, but I'm fairly sure that it was actually tackled in the show. I'm not sure whether they explicitly spelled out that it was related to energy misconversion, but it's a safe bet given that the primary sign of "oh no our gate isn't working quite right" always seems to be flinging things out of the other end. – Phoshi Jan 16 at 18:53
It was probably a make-up decision. "Ok, guys, for every episode we're going to spray you and your costumes with frost. Hmm, that's a lot of frost and we're on a tight budget. Never mind. Let's skip it and hope no one notices." – BBlake Jan 17 at 14:08

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up vote 10 down vote accepted

I think this was addressed in the show's pilot Children of the Gods. On Abydos, they find a bunch of new gate addresses. Carter comments:

Now with this map as a base, that should be easy. All we have to do is correct for Doppler shift. Then I should be able to arrive at a computer model that will predict the adjustments necessary to get the Gate working again.

I'll have to rewatch some early episodes to confirm that in the 3rd, 4th, etc episodes that there is no frost on them when they exit the gate, but I think this may have been the data they needed to fix the frosting problem.

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As of that episode, Carter's correction was because Daniel couldn't get any of those addresses to work from Abydos. Abydos and Earth were sufficiently close to their original coordinates that gate travel with the original coordinates was possible through them, but with other worlds it was not. However, the correlative update introduced later in the series should have negated this reasoning from Abydos, which still had a DHD... Unless Ra had disabled the correlative update from that DHD, to keep it "off the grid", and his source of humans a secret. Which I don't think was ever stated... – Izkata Jan 16 at 23:51

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