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On Earth, there are two separate gates we know of:

  • The 'Original' Gate of SG Command (Later recovered by Russia)
  • The 'Antarctic Gate', which becomes the SG Command's gate.

We've seen Stargates survive a ton of different disasters and weird phenomena:

  • Alien Ship burning up on reentry
  • Direct Meteorite Hits
  • A black hole
  • The surface of a sun (whilst connected to said black hole)

as well as pressure of being underwater, extreme heat/cold & other wild weather effects.

Indeed, the answer to the question: Why didn't they just blow up the Stargate?, lists a bunch of notable stats about a Stargate's durability.

So I don't buy that the explosion of a ship could destroy a gate, hence the question: what happened to the gate on Apophis' ship after the ship exploded? (I am referring to one of the two ships in the assault against Earth, Season 1-2)

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    Drifting through space? No doubt to cover up loose ends it drifted into a star. Unless of course they hit Apophis' with a gate buster or his ship contained a sizeable amount of naquadah.
    – CandiedMango
    Jun 16, 2014 at 9:38
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    Probably someone took an old first-generation stargate, did a little paint job to make it look like a 2nd gen, and charged Apophis the full price. He first noticed it, after his ship was destroyed and he was like "Hey dude, where is my star gate?!" 1st gen star gates are so fragile...
    – Einer
    Jun 16, 2014 at 10:31
  • @Simon - even if it did contain a sizable amount of naquadah, it still wouldn't be nearly enough to reach the energy levels of a sun going supernova, or the stress it would be under from being in a black hole. I'm just wondering if it were addressed in any way, like "um, hey guys, there's a Stargate floating in orbit around Saturn", or whether it became a part of Mackay/Carter's Stargate Bridge
    – Robotnik
    Jun 16, 2014 at 10:45
  • In the linked Question: However, a later attempt (in the episode "The Shroud") successfully destroyed an active Stargate in the Pegasus Galaxy (which is connected to the Ori Supergate) by placing a Mark IX warhead behind the gate, thus preventing the energy from being absorbed by the open wormhole.
    – CandiedMango
    Jun 16, 2014 at 10:48
  • @Simon - and the same trick failed when the energy was absorbed earlier - in either case they were both directed bombs, a starship with a couple of grenades and some C4 causing debris and secondary explosions is not nearly as directed
    – Robotnik
    Jun 16, 2014 at 10:52

2 Answers 2

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In cannon, unknown. Yes they are durable, but not indestructible and the Why didn't they just blow up the Stargate? does overstate it a little. There are a few possibilities:

  1. It was destroyed with the ship. The gate was close enough to the reactors that when they went critical they had a force equivalent to that of a gatebuster and successfully damaged it beyond usability.
  2. Not destroyed with the ship but sent into a unpredictable vector with the ship debris. In this case it would drift on that vector in perpetuity unless captured by the gravitational field of a planet or the sun. There it would crash land and anywhere but the sun would probably survive. Then whenever another gate dials the Tauri system as long as it is within the orbit of I believe Saturn it will react. However, since it is not the nearest to a DHD or has access to an external power source greater than the other gates in the system it would never capture the inbound wormhole. And since it is not in a place where we could detect the telltale vibrations of a gate that is being dialed but does not have precedence (how they discovered the Antarctic Gate) it would be a very small needle in an exceedingly large haystack. The only way to find it would be to disable/remove all gates from the Tauri system, dial it and send a beacon signal through strong enough to be triangulated throughout the solar system. By the time that becomes feasible there are much easier ways to get a gate.
  3. Not destroyed on the ship but crashed on Earth. Left a crater, but none was mentioned so if this happened it would have landed in water. It would have caused telltale vibrations like the antarctic gate did when a inbound wormhole targeted the system but it didn't have precedence. However to be detected it would need to be in a medium that would transmit those vibrations, and unless encased in a solid enough material those vibrations would be virtually undetectable if it did anything other than embed itself in solid stone.

In all of these scenarios the likelihood of finding it intact and operable are slim. And by the time the resources to complete such an operation were available there are far easier ways of getting another Stargate.

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  • "It would have caused telltale vibrations like the antarctic gate did when a inbound wormhole targeted the system but it didn't have precedence." Really? IIRC, the Antarctic gate only vibrated during the failed dial-out-to-self attempt, and during the initial dial-in (caused by gate-jumping wormhole). Mind you, we're led to believe that all gates vibrate a lot during normal activity (e.g. the SGC's before its dampeners are installed). It's weird that we never see any evidence of this off-world. Heh, maybe the SGC vibrations were due to the double-gating all along!
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    May 7, 2016 at 19:04
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    In Watergate (s4e7) they were able to use seismic activity to discover the location of the Alpha gate in Russia. As well as use local vibrations of the Beta gate in the SGC to detect use of the Alpha gate by the Russians and earlier in Touchstone (s2e14) to detect Mayborne's rogue useage. Between those and Solitudes (s1e17) it is fairly established that both gates wiggle when being in the same dialed zone.
    – Tyson of the Northwest
    May 24, 2016 at 20:56
  • Canon* please, especially on this site
    – GordonBennett
    Feb 21, 2019 at 7:56
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My suggestions:

  1. It did land on Earth without being destroyed completely (i.e. It doesn't require the force of a gatebuster focused nuke) but it was damaged enough that it didn't work without repair. It remained on the ocean floor forgotten about and non-functional so they couldn't use the 'dial your own number' vibrations to find it.
  2. As above but they DID find it off-screen and use the parts to upgrade the SGC's DHD and/or reverse engineer some superconductor power systems for the F302s and F303s.
  3. Apophis' ship has a failsafe that destroys and-or ruins a Stargate if the ship explodes, similar to a crippled cold war submarine being rigged to blow the reactor and destroy the onboard computer used to decode encrypted messages (I assume that was standard procedure in the 70s but it's just a guess)
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