History Headscratchers / SteinsGate

** My guess was simply to avoid copyright issues. SERN is an obvious allusion to the real life CERN, whose name (and products, like the LHC) would be copyrighted. However, while the LHC device itself is probably copyrighted by CERN, the science behind it and the words composing its name (large hadron collider) are not - they are physics concepts and thus in the public domain.

** Because it can. Same reason that Dr. Pepper is Dr. People, and the IBM5100 is the IBN5100

** It arrived too late in the Beta timeline to alter it into the Alpha line. In order from Okabe to jump from Beta to Alpha, the future needed to change from WW3 into the SERN dystopia. Even if SERN recorded the 2025 message at that point, it wouldn't stop Dr. Nakabachi from defecting to Russia with the time-travel thesis and instigating the time travel arms race. Without a monopoly on time travel, SERN can't create the dystopia of the Beta line. At most, they were just another participant in the arms race in the Alpha line.
*** This troper actually assume Suzuha sent that as a normal message. She knew about it after all and told Okabe to leave his phone behind. She simply sent him a video file while he was running around saving Kirisu. On retrospect if definitely could have been a D-Mail (wait would a D-Email be veen able to sent a file that big. Well it's a future D-Mail so probably) but it being a normal message was what I immediately assumed for some reason.
*** This troper remembers that Steins Gate's Future Okabe's time-travel tech is far superior the one used by Alpha Timeline's Okabe and SERN. Alpha's timeline Time Machine could only go backwards in time, Beta Timeline machine could move freely through time. Thus, Beta and Steins Gate Okabe could be able to send D-Mails as big as they wish.

** It works like this: Okabe initially sets events in motion by seeing Kurisu's body and sending a D-Mail that she was killed, which jumps him into the Beta world line. After he manages to return to the Alpha world line, he can't directly save Kurisu because it would create a paradox. If he never saw Kurisu's body, he would never shift to the Beta world line and therefore never obtain the motivation he needed to save Kurisu in the first place. After future Okabe sends the D-mail, he most likely shifts to the Steins Gate world line's future.

*** It's quite possible that the record of the D-Mail itself is the only thing anchoring it into history, considering it comes from another worldline. Requires some assumptions about the system of time travel, but it'd explain how deleting something in all likelihood already read would erase it's undue effect on the timeline.
It is implied that although the D-mail is in SERN's server, it is the Rounders' intel itself (That Okabe knows SERN's secrets, their completion of the Time Leap Machine, and their decision to go public with it) that triggers the raid that ultimately lands SERN the Akihabara time machine.

While the use of D-mails is able to push away the date and the circumstances by which SERN receives the Akihabara Time Leap Machine, so long as Okabe is in the ALPHA world line SERN will always have a dystopic rule over the distant future, and Mayuri will always die in the very near future regardless of the cause due to convergence.

On 08/17/2010 in the DP 0.523307 timeline, Okarin and Daru use the IBN 5100 to delete SERN's present (not past) Echelon data of the first D-Mail, severing the reason for SERN to investigate them. Furthermore, at this point, Moeka is not interested in finding the IBN 5100 due to the D-Mail from FB's phone and is therefore uninterested in Okarin. Since Okarin will never complete the Time Leap Machine, and SERN no longer has any record of there being any time machine anomalies from them in the Echelon, SERN will never acquire the Time Leap Machine and the Major Divergence Point event is averted. Had they not deleted the Echelon data that day, what's still important about this date 08/17/2010 in the DP 0.523307 timeline is that even though there is no Rounders raid in the immediate future, Mayuri was still scheduled to die in the ALPHA world line on that day, which is why it was Okabe's deadline.

However, because the SERN dystopic future is averted, Okabe returns to the BETA worldline where he is no longer under the threat of Mayushi dying due to convergence, and where instead of a SERN dystopian future lies a WWIII future. In this Beta timeline, the first D-mail was recorded in the SERN Echelon database, Kurisu is stabbed in the radio tower, Moeka receives a D-mail cancelling her search of the IBN 5100, Okabe finds the IBN 5100 at the Shrine, using the IBN 5100 Daru and Okarin delete the data of the first D-mail, Okarin gets rid of the Phone Microwave D-Mail machine and IBN 5100, and finally gets a call from a BETA timeline future Suzuha asking him to save the BETA timeline Kurisu.
* That's not really how the Beta worldline works. In the Beta worldline, no D-Mails are ever received or recorded by anyone. The only one sent in the continuity of the beta line flips causality to the alpha line.
Finally the STEINS;GATE timeline required Kurisu to only appear to be stabbed in order to preserve the events that lead up to the ALPHA timeline, to avoid a time paradox.

* A very minor headscratcher: Daru didn't win a ticket to the concert, and the characters lampshaded that by saying he should've won. Does that mean the tickets were rigged?