looking back to look forward

Hung out with a bunch of high school friends (hiya, guys!) and some friends-of-friends for a friend's birthday. The restaurant was prohibitively-expensive, but the company was more than worth it. Yes, it's sometimes uncomfortable being the college dropout in such an otherwise successful crowd, but getting to see everyone again was a reminder of better times (and how high school can be better than something, I'll never know), and that was worth the occasional discomfort.

I'm so proud of all of you and I love you all very much. I really do hope we'll be able to keep in touch.

And this is why I should always remember to ask my father...

Feel free to ignore the previous tl;dr post about SGC organization unless it amuses you. I think I've solved my problem by coming at it from a different angle:

Assume that only trusted individuals would be taken through the 'gate come escape time (I suspect that Jack's Leave No Man Behind could be trumped by Protect the Ones You Take). Assume that trusted individuals include Gate Teams (hazing of new members could include testing them out to make sure they're on the level, especially after Makepeace) and civilian scientific consultants.

Assume that, to save money, the civilian scientific consultants are a mix of permanent employees (ex. Daniel Jackson, Bill Lee) and contractors; there is plenty of precedent for the US government and military hiring civilian contractors on a temporary basis to complete certain tasks (ex. librarians at the medical library at Walter Reed, Blackwater, what-have-you) that would take only a certain amount of time to complete. So, the SGC has a few permanent employees in each of the necessary scientific fields (anthropology, archeology, linguistics, physics, astrophysics, botany, zoology, engineering, tell me if you think I'm missing things) and then they hire contractors if they need to, say, translate a tablet from Finnish to English, and snag someone military if they need them to do it while under fire.

So, this cuts the number of people the need to potentially take with them from hundreds (possibly thousands, if there's as much military on the base as Dad thinks) to the eight 'gate teams that don't get deployed, 2-3 dozen civilian scientists, and a handful of trusted medical folks. Perfectly sensible, and it means I don't have to do nearly as much character juggling as I'd been dreading.

Now, to actually get some writing done. :P I wrote about 100 words of porn on the train yesterday, so I have to type that up, and then I need to get cracking on the last half-dozen scenes in Act I and working out the actual plot for Act II. *sigh* My work is never done.