Why use ships when you have the stargates? 

Ships are for places without gates. Gates are inherently limited. Unless you are the Iconians. Their gates open to anywhere.

Stellaris actually has one of the best representations of the evolution of this technology. We start with the hyperspace network (Clasic FTL). Them we move on to the Hyper relays (Highway in space) Then we go to point to point teleportations with the Gateways and Quantum Catapults. (The big Stargates in space) Then we do to the jump drives. (BSG style teleportation.) And none of them really become obsolete as we grow as a Galactic Empire.

in episode Midway, on Stargate Atlantis, McKay mentioned that, dialing stargate between galaxy requires tons of energy (ZPM, blackhole, etc.). ships take much longer between galaxy, but is much more fuel efficient.

The show presented multiple reasons. It's a choke point, the size of the gate limits how much can be transported at a time, the gate can be blocked by another on the same planet, you can't access a gate if it's busy, not all useful destinations have a gate, the number of advanced systems designed to target/use stargates, the overly exciting malfunctions/alternate uses (lousy time travel), and gates can be buried or removed to indefinitely disconnect planets from the network.

Before I even watched the video I had two thoughts, which were brought up anyway. 1. Stargates/Supergates will always be limited in size as determined by the other gates in the network. 2. Despite they're being thousands of Stargates in the Milky Way galaxy alone... there's ONLY thousands of them so you're still very, very limited on where you can actually go.

SG-1 themselves got screwed so many times because the Stargate was blocked or inaccessible and they had no way back to Earth. Being unable to access space, even if you can travel to thousands of different planets, is a HUGE handicap. And that's assuming the interstellar gate network is already built, which as you pointed out, the Ancients used ships to build.

Ultimately It's about redundancy. And the fact that if you don't have bigger guns than everyone else. Than everyone else will want a piece of you. Glances at the absolute juggurnauth that is the Imperium of Man from 40k and that they are on the brink of collapse because of their technological stagnation left them unable to deal with literally everyone else wanting a piece of them.

Yeah, the logistics of the gates in Stargate leave a lot to be desired, especially since if you were constantly using them, then any dial up needs would fail if the other side is in use and there isn't a coordinator.

One reason is shown in the show. Using a Wormhole any astral phenomenon, such as black holes or solar flares, can throw off how the gate operates. Where as with traditional FTL travel IF there is somthing like that then one can simply plot a different course to avoid said obsticles.

In the SG shows themselves they show several times how limiting stargate travel can be, they are a convenience and very useful, but when someone has an iris or shield then you got to show up in person. You covered a lot of examples that the show also used and all are good points. Besides ships are just cool.

when it comes to things like the stargate you also have to include the fact that the stargate network in the Milky Way was limited to 1 stargate for over 30,000 stars, this is a limit due to the ring only having 39 constellations and only used 6 per address. To put it in other words the Stargate can take you to the other side of the galaxy but it can't take you to Alpha Centauri.

You can lock a gate, but if you want to protect your planet from ships you need ships of your own.

I always thought it was funny that Anubis was the only Goa'uld to ever protect his gates. Force fields for one pass codes for another. Would have made for more interesting stories if the other Goa'uld were clever like that.

SGA showed the gate builders used both, the gates for rapid people / small urgent ( expensive / luxury ) cargo. ships for bulk cargo, troops etc.

Why dont we all ride the bus. airplane or the train? Because the reach is limited and they only drop off at so many locations. You can get to a planet but you are not going to gate to the other side of the planet. Or hold defensive space around the planet with just a gate.

A stargate can move people and small cargo. The spacecraft can move shear volume of cargo, people, and military equipment.

Or, eventually, both. Damn SGU being cancelled on such a massive cliffhanger!

The only reason you would not build FTL ships is that you can't like in the Expanse. The whole purpose of the protomolecule is to go to other systems and build the ring so it's within reach within their lifetime. Otherwise, you build FTL ships to get to the locations lacking a gate or to ensure you have a big stick to secure strategic locations locked down by the enemy. For example, the Iconians from Star Trek built ships for they were once an empire that relied on travel through their gates only and got wallop due to depending on said gates only and returned with a massive fleet to a devastating effect against the UFP, Klingons, Romulans, and Dominion. When you have both, you can make everyone pay for daring to look at you wrong.

How about the fact you can only wind up at one place on a planet generally speaking? You can literally use the jump drives of the starships to get to the other side of the Earth from Abados faster than you could go to Stargate Command from the Abados Stargate, leave the Cheyenne Mountain military base, get to a landing field, get on a supersonic transport or even a 302 and fly the other side of the planet.

Love the FTL music playing while discussing FTL/instantaneous space travel

Basically, enemy ships need blowing up. And you need ftl to build brand new stargates on new planets without taking millenia. Lastly, you need an alternative in case of a black hole gate or anubis stunt again.

Logistics is an easy answer. I've worked in Management most of my adult life and any time someone tries to just use one source for something they inevitably have issues. Usually the first problem is a disruption of your single source and your business grinding to a hault until it is fixed. The second problem that comes up is limitations of that single source. If you're a small business you can get by for awhile getting all of your supplies from the local Walmart but eventually Wally doesn't cut it and you need more/better stuff.

David Weber's 'Dahak' series, the precursor empire had FTL, then developed an interstellar matter transporter network. It worked pretty well for a few centuries, but then the precursors developed the ultimate bio-weapon and it got lose. The weapon had a variable incubation time, transmitted easily, and was 100% fatal, by the time they precursors realized what was happening, it was too late, and the only systems that survived were ones that turned off the transporter network before anyone infected tried to flee there.

I personally love when -any- work of speculative fiction, whether fantasy, sci-fi, or otherwise. Love that you're doing SG1! Truly a formative part of developing my writing style for sci-fi.

In a book called "Endeavour" by Ralph Kern, The human race develops devices called 'Von Neumann Gate Ships", Automated gate construction ships that fly at close to the speed of light to distant destinations and construct that fiction worlds version of a 'Stargate". Once the gate has been constructed, the ship then gathers material and resources and creates 3 or more copies of itself, they then fly off further into space and repeat the process ad infinitum untill all of space is connected, this would take years to construct but in someways, its similar to the way the Alterans in Stargates Universe creatyed there networks. (TRUST ME, READ AND/OR GET THE AUDIOBOOK Of THIS AUTORS AMAZING WORK)

I like the twists that Star Trek and the Sojourn do on this, where the iconian gateways in Trek and the Drift Gates in the Sojourn are the ftl drives and can propel a ship one way to a target but would need a gate constructed on the other side in order to make the return journey so they send a construction fleet to the new system to build a return gate

In stargate universe they had touched on seed ships, which were automated ships that made gates and dropped them off in new worlds. That’s also another method to explore as an empire would not need to commit time and people to a ship exploring and could just show up once the ground work was done. Then return back home quickly if it’s inhospitable.

Logistically, Stargates fill the role of an expediter - a relatively expensive service best used for small volume time sensitive shipments. The vans large enough to carry 1-3 pallets. Spaceships are the semi trucks, railroads, and ocean freighters. The farther you're going, the more sense it makes to have a bigger one. Remember when the DOS'd the Earth Stargate because they couldn't dial out fast enough? good times. But not for them.

Another potential answer to why ship not puddle, is the Ancient-Wraith war. Whilst never explicitly stated, when the Ancients started over in Pegasus they built/expanded an extensive gate network, they appeared to use this gate network extensively with puddle jumpers and their large ships were never as numerous, seems they forgot why they need a large navy.

Dont forget, Ships like a BC304 are also mobile bases. They have research labs, infirmarys, crew quarters, small ship bays, mess halls and so much more making them quite useful to send to a planet as a qucik temporay base.

Pointing out the flaw with the Stargates and natural disasters. In SG Atlantis (Sorry don't remember which episode), the main team gated onto a planet just as the area with the gate flooded. This forces the team to wait on top of the gate whilst waiting the 30+ minutes for the gate to naturally disengage before they could dial back and return through a "one-way" only wormhole.

Another thing that a lot of people don't think about with these arguments is that there's one very specific area where gates excel over starships: Data transmission, either via courier or direct data transfer between already known points. Where they'd really excel role wise, is as the relatively small, diplomatic or otherwise official channel of a mail service.

Also, ships are useful for mass data transport. Just like trucks and planes are used to transport hard drives (or heck, even tape drives) filled to the brim with data that needs to go from one place to another. It's. Just. Faster.

I think “The Human Reach” book series handles this topic well with portal “Keyhole” gates that act as bottlenecks in terms of how you can traverse them and how many can be in one system. Wormholes can let a setting have FTL while still allowing for the harder element of Sci-Fi to shine

In stargate one of the reasons is POWER. Even going to places in the galaxy costs power, It was mentioned several times by Gen.Hammond. It costs billions to just keep the lights on and that is just to move in the same galaxy. To go from one galaxy to a nearby galaxy you need an extra power source And the longer that stargate is open to another galaxy the more power is used. This was mentioned on the first episode of SG:Atlantis. They could not just keep the gate active for 20minutes as they slowly moved things in, they got a connection and they went for it quickly.

Mccaffrey's Tower and the Hive series had an interesting take, FT&T were an independent private company that avoided government control because while being the most efficient way to transport anything weren't the only way.

The same reason why in morrowind I would use a silt strider to get to one location, immediately cast divine intervention, and follow it up with an almsivi intervention. It gets me where I want to go, faster than any of those methods individually because there is a place I haven't established a warp to.

Edit: can’t help but feel like I should add “how gate when no ship?” 😂 At least there can be a possible lore reason for why the gates are typically in such undenied positions, mainly being that the Gould have been drinking their own look aid for so long that they completely believe that they are untouchable. Short of act ice combat between various lords, they probably didn’t feel that the resources needed to fortify a gate was worth it. Once earth started to explore and being such a pain in the butt to the Gould, they should have considered fortifying things more, but that didn’t happen due to the kool aid as well. And why bother over defending a gate when you still have to defend against ships that would have a much wider area that they could attack from. Another choke point issue that was in the show but not directly addressed was the fact that if you didn’t have an iris/shield or bury a gate an enemy could keep dialing in to prevent you from dialing out to escape or block them from dialing in.

So... 1. Depending on the gate tech in question, you might have to have a gate at both ends. Ships can be used to seed gates (see: Destiny from Stargate: Universe) 2. Gates limit the size of what you can send through them. This limit could be anywhere from "large enough that it doesn't matter" to "barely big enough for land vehicles". Ships have no such limits. 3. Ships help keep enemy ships away.

Yup, exactly this - you need something to go and build the gate in the first place. There is a very good story by Peter Watts (who wrote Blindsight) called the Freeze Frame Revolution which is centred on this issue, and the fact the crew spend eons in suspended animation travelling between systems around the galaxy building them.

The Stargate was hacked, dossed, and brute force opened a number of times. The gate one time was dialed to a world that had gotten close to a black hole. Neat EP, Casaba-Howitzer. The gate was like the Holodeck of TNG, always trying to kill the gang as they explored the mysteries of the unknown.

Add in the fact with Gates we risk a small team then jump in a ship with thousands and years to build plus limited ships as well as more of a resistance or ships for massive freighters like the Arouras I suspect were

Imagine your entire galactic trade network competing for the use of a single door.

Love your content , even if its a series im unfamiliar with, its still great.

Because redundancy is essential

THANK YOU for pointing out the chicken-egg-thing.

This is why ships like TARDISes are the end point of space travel; even taking out the time travel aspect, it's a vehicle that can cross the _entire universe_ in (at most) a matter of minutes, and has all the benefits of both types of interstellar travel and very few of the drawbacks of either.

You've forgotten the most important reason why ship when puddle.... the rule of cool. Starships are cool and thus we must have them.

The Ori build huge gates, but still have ships, because someone could mess up your gate. Just like the Anceints had a city size ship, but also had ships that fit in the stargates. We have trains, but we still use cars. Even starfleet still has land based "rovers" and shuttles even though they have transporters. Voyager has 3 transporter rooms that go as far as 24,854.84 miles.

That's like asking, why make rifles and tanks when you have nukes?

Note that Atlantis showed it was actually possible (and given certain tech progression, beneficial) to actually bootstrap your FTL capacity by instead sending Stargates to where you need to go and then gating in. The replicator satellite was able to be assembled and launched to Atlantis without ship building capability (as it had been all nuked) but gave significant power projection capability. So it could make sense for someone with poor FTL technology (or perhaps lacks other technology to enable it like inertial dampeners) that somehow had access to a bunch of Stargates to instead do it that way. It seems no one has progressed in that way, however, which suggests that making a Stargate is much higher up on the tech tree typically. (it's not THAT far up the tech tree, however, the Tollans did it)

I think another considerations against Stargates - is that there is pretty much 1 exit per solar system. What if there are multiple habitable worlds in one place? (excluding the episodes where the gate locked to another active gate) A starship will let you deal with the other planets. You can also stop in all those places between planets (like they had to do to link up with Pegasus galaxy). Even outside the videos mention of still needing to be able to get to where you want a gate setup. Stagates are good once you establish 'where' you want your terminus to be - but I think ships will still be required - even if you can develop the gates to function like telephones with the 7 symbols being like country codes. . .

Thank you! The easiest way to propagate the gates are to launch them manually. Obviously non-manned, so survivability wouldn't be an issue. Their speed could be ramped until approach, and self assemble or be cushioned by the impact

Stopping at just the 1.30 mark, my thoughts on it, just from the top of my head: 1) The Stargate network only connects certain planets. It does not connect all (we've seen a few races from outside the gate-network) and every celestial object on a system (every other planet, moon, asteroid). Therefor, if you want to mine those objects, you need space-ships. And if you are one of those (un)lucky aces not in the gate-network, you need ships anyway, otherwise you are done-for. 2) The Stargate, being (usually) a one of a kind connection, is a massive chokepoint for any invasion. Especially if that entrance point can be blocked (the Irises) or the gate buried (which means that erupting ka-woosh clears out a very small cavern before the gate which will be quickly filled and become a deadend). 3) The opposite direction is also possible. If you are the one leaving and find your gate malfunctioning, blocked, damaged, or otherwise inoperable, you are stranded on your singular planet with no means of going to other planets without a spaceship. 4) Fighting a war and losing is bad, but when you are losing and can safely and securely evacuate people off-world, that is highly beneficial - heck, make that generally any disaster that could befall a planet. Nuclear winter, asteroid strike, solar flare, severe tectonic disruptions, whatever.

If you want to include some of the cooler scifi concepts. Von Neumann probes could be launched at sublight speeds to land on planets, build a stargate and other probes, and launch those to the next worlds. It takes more time but you effectively end up with an automated construction system that spreads your gate network across the galaxy.

I gotta admit the idea of the Stargate is a good one, so long as you can create a stable wormhole. However, they state several times that the gates hold an enormous amount of energy, if they were destroyed the blast would destroy everything within a hundred miles.

It made the most sense when the gates were all uniformly small and only suitable for transporting people and things not much larger than a pickup truck. That's great for personal transport and limited trade but eventually you're going to want to move more serious tonnage, never mind going places outside the gate network.

Knowing the Stargate universe as I do, there are some planets where gates either have been buried or they don’t exist so the only way to get to them is by a ship that’s the symptoms explanation and don’t even think about traveling from one galaxy to another without some sort of long-term FDL traveleventually they did make a bridge to the Pegasus galaxy, but my point is that’s a long inexpensive and power consuming project when you can just take faster than like ship to the next galaxy

Decent summery, I just wish more people knew that Robert Heinlein's "Tunnel in the Sky" explained all of this 50 years ago.

The one thing from Trek that makes Stargates' gates look limited, were the Iconian Gateways. Point to point inter-dimensional gates, but while a choke point issue did exist, it was rendered null, as they could open a "gate" anywhere with no need for a pre-existing structure on the target world. So the choke could appear anywhere on the targeted world, so a choke that could not be exploited by the defenders.

The thing is that you need the ships to put the Stargates on planets or in orbit to begin with. Plus, what happens when there's something that locks up the system. It's kind of like the in-world reason that Federation star ships still carry shuttles when they have transporters.

Comment for the algorithm.. I’m a new sub thanks for the battletech vids

The Akon empire in the Perry Rhodan universe was very old and had stopped expanding. They had transmitters which are in function, if not technology, similar to star gates (instant transport form one transmitter to another). But there was no limit on how many transmitters you can have on a planet and very little limit on size. They were used for transport and travel on planet and between planets and solar systems. The Akon empire only maintained a small fleet. The fleet was much larger in the past when they were building their empire and bringing transmitters to all their worlds. Their planets were protected by energy shields. They even had a shield around their whole home solar system. That worked well for them for millennia until Perry Rhodan came and found a way through their shield. Then their small fleet became a disadvantage.

Read Neal Asher’s polity book series. Humanity relied mainly on industrial sized teleporters and nearly got overwhelmed when they ran into aliens with huge fleets of heavily armoured ships

The Honorverse addresses the importance of jump gates as strategic nexus and potential choke points.

3:57 Amphibious Assault ships and Amphibious helicopter docks are especially good at this job. They carry the basic equipment necessary to rapidly construct buildings as barracks for troops and clear obstacles. They have landing pads or full flight decks and we'll decks for boats allowing rapid deployment of this equipment and troops. And as a troop ship expected to deploy front line troops, these ships have some of the better hospitals for treating trauma victims. Finally, they stock excess food for initial troop deployments, and have powerful water purifiers. All those tools are useful for war, yes, but they serve incredibly well as disaster relief. It's easy to repurpose all these tools to clear out rubble after a natural disaster, set up emergency shelter, and begin treating the injured.

What's a much more interesting question is why the Goa'uld didn't use ships to the extent they were in the early 2000s. This is one of the more interesting and subtle lore bits in the series. Until the late 1990s, Goa'uld hyperdrives were relatively slow, taking weeks or months to cross interstellar distances. In a galaxy filled with stargates, this greatly reduces the offensive usefulness of a spaceships. Say you want to invade a nearby rival's from space, you'd load thousands of warriors onto a mothership and send it on a multiweek journey to assault it. However, because stargates are instantaneous, your rival is guaranteed to hear about your assault long before it is due to arrive and has plenty of time to move defenses into place. Or, knowing that significant resources are tied up, far from your worlds, they could launch an attack through the stargate. So it makes sense why most system lords only had one or two motherships. Everyone had their little kingdoms, effectively isolated from each other. But all this changed around the turn of the millennium when significantly faster hyperdrives were introduced. Overnight, warships could cross between worlds in hours or days. These faster ships completely changed the Goa'uld power dynamic. For the first time in history, it was possible for one Goa'uld to launch a military campaign against the galaxy as a whole. This fundamental change did more to destabilize the Goa'uld empire than anything Earth or its allies ever did.

THANK YOU! Holy crap, finally someone said it. The Egg came first dangit!

Study tactics to win a battle, study logistics to win wars. I don't know where I heard the quote I paraphrased, but it has been proven multiple times. Anyway, even the Ancients needed ships to get where they build the gates. The Destiny is an extreme example, but it does show that the Ancients needed to build their roads first. I also want to point out that the Asgard are also a gate building empire, but their ships are more useful to them. Actually all members of the Great Races except the Tau'ri are gate builders. The last point I want to make is the number of Stargates is slowly decreasing. Between being buried, destroyed, and moved, the network is getting smaller.

Someone: If puddle why ship? John Shepherd: why not both

As much as I love SG1 and SGA , I really wish there was some scifi where there are stargate like devices, and FTL is just impossible

Another thing to consider. The ammount of energy u need. In stargate ships can just travel bewtween galaxies freely. Gates can go as well but they need an ludicrously large amount of energy. Multiple times the Pegasus Galaxy sgc barely has enough power to hold the gates open for any reasonable amount of time.

"How do you think they got it here in the first place?" Jack O'Neil More truth in those words than you realize!!! If memory serves right that quote came from S1E1 of the series. What???

All good points, and your right about the standard gate clear intended use. But you forgot about how the gate network would key for galactic or Intergalactic government and political systems.

it's exactly like asking why cars when we got trains

This was already answered on stargate. The best scenario is, having stargates on ships.

Military anyways needs ships for combat in local space. Also you need ships to go after the enemy in case they have the tech to disable gates. There is an episode in Atlantis where ancients disable the wraith's ftl tech. However civilian ships is not likely to be wide spread. Most people would travel through the gates and so only things too big to transport, to do intersteller mining or to establish a gate in the first place.

I always imagined that the ancients were missing a trick by not using their advanced tech to make super gates. They built ZPMs in such huge numbers even during a war they had three to spare for their city they didn't even bother to take with them(and it's shown one was able to hold back the ocean). Hyperspace is not that fast compared to supergate travel, they could have spread supergates across the galaxy and used them as a quick travel hub/spoke system to make large scale transport faster(rather than spending 20 minutes in hyperspace flying across the galaxy you spend 2 minutes flying to the nearest supergate, travel to closest supergate to your destination, then fly 2 minutes on the other side making the trip in a quarter of the time). The ancients could have even used the supergate unstable vortex as a weapon, the size of the vortex scaled linearly with the Stargate and could destroy anything, that would be very easy to destroy almost anything that's not well shielded.

you only really need to get it vaguely to the location, an FTL canon/catapult, could seed locations with stargates, then a small non FTL capable craft, jumps through the gate and finish the setup, diel home to do it again, or if ftl wasn't invented just send a ghost ship with a stargate to the location and jump people in when it gets there

Well. I would imagine that regardless of how cool the gate travel is, the gate sure needs to end up somewhere useful somehow. Unless you wait for some one to develop it on the other side from sticks and stones.

Thank You! Finally someone else says it.

My favorite "Class" is the BBSSFN series of Classes.

I'm working on a non-FTL 'verse with slowboats towing wormholes. The empire basically collapses into warring successor states after relativistic space travel is developed.

The thing about the stargates that got me was that we never saw one of the more advanced or industrialized worlds run a train through the portal. A special-built train to fit the gate and a transfer station with a rail-line running right to the portal - to an identical line on the other side - would allow for immense logistical transport through the 'gate. It stays open for up to 38 minutes. That would let a very long train transit the gate, especially if it were to build up any significant speed first. I understand why Earth did not do this, as the Stargate was a point of alien invasion, but several times they encountered industrial-era+ worlds with active gates, but they did not use them in this fashion. The sole sort-of-exception is the (now probably extinct) Ashen, who would tilt the gate sideways and dump harvests of grain through it.

If someone wants to explore stories build around this trope, i highly recommend "the commonwealth saga" from Peter F. Hamilton. In it a human interstellar civilization is traveling via wormholes and not space ships. They encounter a hostile species wich utilizes spaceships as a method of transportation. A war breaks out, the hostile species (who have stolen human wormhole tech at this point) uses wormholes and spaceships in tandem and pushes humanity tonits limits really fast. Good books with good stories. Probably one of the best written hostile alien species in fiction.

Feels Like the discussion of a Elevator vs staircase Or... Buss vs car One is a Infrastruktur and the other works without the structure

The Hyperion novels and Polity have a simple answer for it. Simply put, to get to portal somewhere you have to install your portal somewhere. So you have to get your portal there first. Hyperion didn't have real FTL so they did it via robot slow mover ships that folded out into space gates when they got to their destinations. From there they warped in smaller ships and eventually installed the planet side ones. And their portals are literally windows with no lag. Polity portals are more like stargates. They had FTL ships, but since Skydon Warp portals were so much faster and comfortable for smaller transports and people than ships they preferred installing them on any planet they wanted to colonise. Since their portals needed a super advanced AI to calculate the ever changing variables they also used that AI to govern much of the colony and it's defence grid at the same time. Because that AI was one of the best protected and OP processor on the planet anyway.

I mean, something like the Stargate... The Lanteans were already well established as an intergalactic race before they even built the stargates. They still made them, because it's a super convenient way to get around between important planets really quickly. But yeah, asking why we need ships when we have stargates is like asking why the US Navy needs ships when we have sidewalks.

Please do more Stargate lore

To be fair their are a few times the gould did fortify a gate location. They just go to sgc levels of fortification

Babylon 5 featured an the appearance of an Exploration ship who's whole point of existence was to travel to uncharted space, chart said space and build new Jump Gates.

EvE Online has a well thought-out and fairly robust space logistics system: immense gates service each system, but ships can FTL themselves around local planets/points of interest, but space is just _so vast_ that complex inter-system logistics are far better off with jump-gates installed at hubs. Other reasons include taxation, sovereignty, policing, and military concerns Also, certain capital vessels can create jump-bridges themselves (both purely for the ship in question and for an entire fleet), but such systems require specialized technology, training, hull space, energy, and consumable resources to operate. Space truck go brrr.

Very much a case of people not fully thinking out their questions right here, and yes people seem to forget that Spaceships are very useful for many things beyond 'get from point A to point B'. And the idea of making enough gates to go to all the places...ha...hahahahahaha, that's funny.

I always thought that myself in regards to a Artificial Portal Network. If it exists across the Galaxy, a Shipborn form of FTL HAS to exist to allow it to come into being. Babylon 5 does it well. Jump Drives are massive, so it limits the size of FTL Ships to a certain large size. But you also have Jump Gates which allow Ships without Jump Drives to go FTL and leave FTL as well.

The show itself gave an answer at the end of S1, when Apophis came with 2 ships to destroy Earth. SG1 only one through pure luck at every stage.

Hay, have you done any vids on Command and Conquer, and are you going to do any vids on it.

Yeah their is quite a list of reasons. 1. Military. Having no ships makes it hard to defend your planets from orbital bombardment. just Iris up that ring. Power projection 2. Natural disasters We have seen at least twice in stargate that the gate got taken out by one. an asteroid and a supervulcano. 3.Risk in using it for stuff like logistics. see reason 1. outside of the risk the gates will most likely be used as hub points after which ship take the rest of the journey. 4. they are not every where.

It's like someone asking why plane when car?

Like anything, its logistics and resources. You still need a ship to put a gate on the planet. You still need a ship to move freight that's too big to push through a gate. The gate's are good enough to move people and resources you can cart through or design a vehicle that can move through it simply (like puddle jumpers) however when it comes down to it. A gate can easily be locked down and neutralized. Its quite hard to neutralize a fleet of ships orbiting over a planet unless...you have a fleet of ships yourself.

One idea I had in the past is you could combine train tracks with star gates star gates tread like train tunnels. good example is from Tom's the train engine where their island and outside world is connected by portal if I remember right.