Yeah, I had forgotten whether it was three or four weeks for the Daedalus to make the trip. Man, imagine being stuck on that thing for SOOOOOOO long.

Hmmm. Well when they go on away missions (or whatever they call them, blah, I'm still rather new to SG fandom and it's all headspinny) they can radio in to Atlantis through the gate, so since they said radio I assumed they meant radio.

The thing about all those different types of waves that you link to is that we don't have evidence that any of them get through the stargate. The only ones we have evidence for don't go through the gate. Maybe what I really don't understand is how anything without mass gets through the Stargate, because it's pretty clear from what they said on the show that the Stargate breaks down and stores matter. And waves aren't matter, so I don't get it. Perhaps there's some rule that the gate only transmits matter AND electromagnetic waves in the 300 MHz to 3 GHz range.

As to the stunners, I'd been previously operating on the assumption that they were some kind of plasma, which fits with the appearance and purpose of the weapon and also easily allows it to go through the gate. Plus, it just sounds cool.

Okay... my biggest thing I guess is that I've personally seen no evidence that energy *doesn't* pass through the gate. I have never seen any instance of that through all of SGA and the small chunk of SG-1 that I've seen. Matter is transmitted through the gate *as energy*. The stargate breaks down and stores matter *as energy*. There is no mass between the wormholes; everything's dematerialized into energy. Therefore plain energy would be transmitted, and I've seen it transmitted as Wraith dart beams, Wraith stunner beams, as an Ancient weapon overloading a gate remotely.

The gate itself is how the discrete packet thing works. It could very well just dump matter out piecemeal, feet, arms, head, but it's programmed to make sure the energy packet it has = one whole object, so it always deposits whole objects at the other end of the gate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_%28device%29#Matter_transmission

Hmm, see I was looking at that article as well and getting completely different things. I haven't seen the episode with the weapon overloading the gate remotely (is that the Dakara superweapon? I was looking for more information on that but was having trouble finding what I wanted, I think you just said it though) so that was what I really needed to hear though.

I guess, and it was this post of yours that made me get it, everything that goes through the gates is being converted into electromagnetic waves and sent across the aether. Which means radio waves would be no big deal because, hey, saves the trouble of the conversion process.

So, yes, thank you for continuing to come back and explain, because now it is not confusing me so much.

And E=mc². ^^; Whether or not it has mass doesn't, uh, matter. Whether or not it can be converted into energy and then back again into matter does. But if it's already energy, the gate doesn't have to do anything. It'll just transmit it. Does that make sense?

Yes, now it makes sense. They need to explain this on the show. In great detail. Of course, they're probably not expecting people to get nitpicky about the 'gate travel details when we go all handwavey over the retrovirus, but whatever.