Meanwhile astronauts using Windows:

Where I live it’s the same, the machine does all the work. But there’s always one or two dudes that walk ahead of the truck and make sure it’s all positioned and spaced correctly. Especially in the city where streets can be narrow and there isn’t enough room, they end up just wheeling the bins into the machine a couple at a time.

Tell me Legolas, what do your elven eyes see?

Fucking pixels Aragorn, it makes me want to puke. And what the fuck is up with these compression artifacts? What tier of Netflix do you have?

Sorry Legolas, could we just enjoy the movie?

Maybe if the dwarf stops stinking up the place. And don’t think I didn’t see him take that last chicken wing, fucking dwarves.

Sure you can physically move the gate. The intergalactic gate bridge proves that in spades. But there’s more to it than just the gate. It’s also all the supporting hardware. Without a DHD you need so much hardware to make it work. Then there’s all the security issues. Being inside a mountain is a huge plus when it comes to safety. Not just from a foothold situation, but also when being connected to a black hole for example. And having a failsafe device is also something easier done inside a mountain. You can destroy the entire base without basically setting off a nuke without warning in the mainland US. Possibly even destroy the base without anybody on the outside knowing about it, or with the option to say it’s an accidental collapse. Then there’s moving all the personnel, who are all stationed at that base. With other programs like NORAD being stationed there, it’s easy to hide what you are doing. This is much harder on other sites, especially to cover up the huge energy hookup needed to establish the wormhole before it can draw power from the other side.

Bottom line it would cost probably a billion dollars or even more. That’s if a good enough site already exists, otherwise it would cost way more. And in the end be worse off in every possible way. Yeah no, you are right, that sounds exactly like a Trump move.

Yeah, it would be a pretty big task to move the Stargate and the entire Stargate project to another state. It makes zero sense to have Space Command be that far away from our primary access to space.

Talk about a low bar

Well yes and no. It’s a giant piece of silicon, but it’s also exposed to high energy rays all the time. Panels can suffer from water ingress and then crack when it freezes. They are exposed to all sorts of animals, both big and small that can cause damage. Have their top surfaces get more opaque due to normal erosion. Experience huge swings in temperature every day. Those things can either outright break the panel, or slowly make it less efficient. UV rays alone cause a degradation of around 1% every year. However modern more efficient compact panels suffer more from this than the older kind. So old panels might still be going strong, but give a modern panel the same amount of ageing and it might do a lot worse.