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It has been well established in the Stargate universe that anything entering the gate will exit on the other side with the same velocity (speed and direction) as it entered.

In the opening scene of Stargate Universe, as the various people are evacuating from Icarus Base to Destiny, they come flying through like they've been launched from a catapult. Yet even if they were running as fast as they could into the source gate, they should not have come flying out the other side.

Is there any explanation for why they came shooting and tumbling out of the gate on the Destiny, or was this most likely just a case of the director wanting to make it look all "dramatic"?

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    They probably wanted the dramatic effect and a cheap explanation for why they didn't contact anyone on the other side (or leave a message) before the gate shut down?
    – Mario
    May 12, 2014 at 7:02
  • Might be the core of the planet going critical, which channels more energy to the capacitors, and as they increase their charge, the speed of the travelers increase until Telford comes in literally flying. So the increasing energy of the gate is translated in increased kinetic energy of the passengers.
    – Einer
    May 12, 2014 at 7:19
  • You could also say that because the Destiny gate is old, less sophisticated, and very distant, its harder to keep the wormhole stable, so the velocity is not properly kept. Maybe all the gates are doing this, but on a much smaller scale.
    – akaltar
    Jul 25, 2015 at 23:16

3 Answers 3

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It was almost certainly down to the fact that there was an explosion as they left the platform, injecting additional energy into the outgoing wormhole.

We see a very similar situation in SG1 : "Solitudes" when an explosion in the vicinity of the gate on P4A-771 resulted in the SG1 team being ejected from the Earth gate(s) at high speed. In that instance T'ealc and Daniel came "flying out" at a similar velocity to that seen in SGU

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    I was going to mention "Solitudes." It also happens in both the first film, Stargate, and the pilot, "Children of the Gods." In those incidents, the SG members also suffered uncomfortably freezing temperatures. This has been retconned as resulting from a problem with the correlative update, if I recall correctly. May 12, 2014 at 10:13
  • Heh, I was expecting this to mainly be a director looking for cheap drama, and not to have an actual in-universe explanation. It's cool that there is one!
    – eidylon
    May 12, 2014 at 17:42
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    SGU was anything but cheap drama, eidylon. In fact I'd say it was the best Stargate series they made and one of my all time favorite newer SF series... sadly canceled before it's time. May 13, 2014 at 3:14
  • I don't know... I mean, it had some interesting points, and the Destiny was a cool ship, but most of the overarching plot lines and sort of "feel" of SGU felt to me very much like the SG writers were trying to capture the feel and success of RDM's Battlestar. Even down to the annoying mad scientist doctor character with Rush being ridiculously close to just a direct port of Baltar.
    – eidylon
    Jul 18, 2014 at 16:24
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I always thought that it was the unstable connection between Icarus and the destiny gates, if you look closely, you can see that the event horizon is almost flickering, this happens before solitudes when the connection is unstable and Jackson and teal'c literally exited the wormhole from the top and going at high speeds. That was due to energy being transferred into the gate by weapons fire. In this instance it could simply be the long distance between the gates itself that caused the instability if the wormhole But who knows?

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This also seemed to happen in the movie. I think it is because of both reasons: Distance and stability of the wormhole

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