Yet Another Doomsday Machine Thread

[CorporalCaptain]

I find it hard to believe that after thousands of years and possibly thousands of systems, none of its previous victim races didn't think to ram big nuclear tipped missiles down its throat.

This was but one machine that drifted into the Milky Way from outside the galaxy, a relic of an ancient war. Perhaps the war for which the machine was created saw fleets of the things attacking in formation and supporting each other so that no such attack from the other side could succeed. Presumably the machine we saw is one of the survivors of that war from the side that "won," i.e. that outlasted the other side, perhaps the only surviving combatant; it finished off the systems in its galaxy and then exited to eventually coast into ours.

 

[Henoch]

This was but one machine that drifted into the Milky Way from outside the galaxy, a relic of an ancient war. Perhaps the war for which the machine was created saw fleets of the things attacking in formation and supporting each other so that no such attack from the other side could succeed. Presumably the machine we saw is one of the survivors of that war from the side that "won," i.e. that outlasted the other side, perhaps the only surviving combatant; it finished off the systems in its galaxy and then exited to eventually coast into ours.

Excellent point. Kirk does compare the DDM to "Something like the old H-Bomb". One H-Bomb does not have the destructive power to make it a true Doomsday Machine, rather thousands of them on both sides of a war was what made it a Doomsday technology.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I find it hard to believe that after thousands of years and possibly thousands of systems, none of its previous victim races didn't think to ram big nuclear tipped missiles down its throat.

This machine came from outside the galaxy, meaning untold hundreds of years at warp speed. Maybe when it got to Kirk, it was no longer in full working order. Some of its defensive systems and sensors were shot, for the simple reason that electronic hardware gets old and starts to fail over time.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

This machine came from outside the galaxy, meaning untold hundreds of years at warp speed. Maybe when it got to Kirk, it was no longer in full working order. Some of its defensive systems and sensors were shot, for the simple reason that electronic hardware gets old and starts to fail over time.

We don't know that it traveled at FTL speed in intergalactic space. For all we know, it drifted at high sublight speed in a low power mode.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

We don't know that it traveled at FTL speed in intergalactic space. For all we know, it drifted at high sublight speed in a low power mode.

In that case it took millions of years to get into our galaxy. That just makes my point even stronger.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Well, yes, we don't know that the DDM is operating the way it was out of the box. Plus, it quite likely did see battle, and it looks dented.... So, yeah, it's probably damaged internally, too.

 

[Noname Given]

I find it hard to believe that after thousands of years and possibly thousands of systems, none of its previous victim races didn't think to ram big nuclear tipped missiles down its throat.

Well remember the doomsday machine looked very mangled. It probably had a lot more defensive armament that it lost during various engagements. It was probably a lot more powerful before it reached our galaxy.

 

[Timo]

The other possibility here is that the DDM was never intended to cope with any sort of opposition. It might not be a weapon at all, and might not comprehend malice or threat, but would have learned some rudimentary ways of coping with stupid people who interrupt its important work.

Why does Spock think it came from outside the galaxy? No "course analysis" could ever achieve that: the course from my desk to the fridge can be backtracked to outside the Milky Way, too, and would be equally baseless. But perhaps there's a telltale type of dust you pick up when traveling between galaxies. Or the Galactic Barrier leaves a smear when you get in through it.

Kirk's speculation about the DDM being a doomsday machine is even less reasonable. Those are intended for use against specific enemies, the ones one wants to deter from attacking. This might be a berserker instead, a machine that preemptively sterilizes the universe so that its masters can reign supreme. But it's not doing a good job at that, wasting its time with planets that supposedly would never grow into threats, and then ignoring those who actually show signs of resisting.

What we see is far more compatible with a harmless terraformer that has simply grown a bit senile and is trying to swat the kids off what it perceives to be its lawn while doing what it perceives to be tilling the soil.

Not that this should affect our heroes' actions much, of course. But it does away with all the story problems, of how nobody tried tricks on the DDM before (it wasn't evil before), of how the DDM is stupid in combat (it's not geared for combat and might not even realize it is in combat), of how the thing can travel between galaxies if its MO is to stop and eat at every star system (it might not be from another galaxy, or it might not be eating at all and is independent of food sources but digests the soil for gardening purposes nevertheless).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[mike hill]

Was it really THAT "intelligent"? Spock reasoned it was "essentially a robot" and implied its attack protocols were rather basic.

Fair cop Guv'nor!

Then again, maybe an interesting RPG or fanfic concept could be that it is not designed to be autonomous at all. Maybe it operates under basic programing, with a sentient crew in suspended animation, which are only awakened for emergencies or when something interesting crops up. Just that this particular one's crew died and so it is stuck with it's programing only?
What if a slew of them were sent to our galaxy, of which this one is just a scout? Maybet the main force is just coming over the horizion? Some still suspended animation crewed but any not?

 

[MAGolding]

A neutron star would very quickly “wear” a planet it got near, perhaps explaining the craggy exterior.

You comment does not seem to be referring to any earlier comments. So what exactly does it mean?

This machine came from outside the galaxy, meaning untold hundreds of years at warp speed. Maybe when it got to Kirk, it was no longer in full working order. Some of its defensive systems and sensors were shot, for the simple reason that electronic hardware gets old and starts to fail over time.

Your untold hundreds of years at warp speed seems a bit vague considering the details about intergalactic travel mentioned in the early scenes of "By Any Other Name"..

It is also illogical to waste time travelling to a galaxy which is much more distant than the nearest galaxy to the one you start from. Thus the Planet Killer probably came from a galaxy much closer than the Andromeda Galaxy. It probably destroyed all planets within a small satellite galaxy of our Milky Way Galaxy and then headed to the Mility Way. There are over 50 known small satellite galaxies of the milky Way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies

The other possibility here is that the DDM was never intended to cope with any sort of opposition. It might not be a weapon at all, and might not comprehend malice or threat, but would have learned some rudimentary ways of coping with stupid people who interrupt its important work.

Why does Spock think it came from outside the galaxy? No "course analysis" could ever achieve that: the course from my desk to the fridge can be backtracked to outside the Milky Way, too, and would be equally baseless. But perhaps there's a telltale type of dust you pick up when traveling between galaxies. Or the Galactic Barrier leaves a smear when you get in through it.

Kirk's speculation about the DDM being a doomsday machine is even less reasonable. Those are intended for use against specific enemies, the ones one wants to deter from attacking. This might be a berserker instead, a machine that preemptively sterilizes the universe so that its masters can reign supreme. But it's not doing a good job at that, wasting its time with planets that supposedly would never grow into threats, and then ignoring those who actually show signs of resisting.

What we see is far more compatible with a harmless terraformer that has simply grown a bit senile and is trying to swat the kids off what it perceives to be its lawn while doing what it perceives to be tilling the soil.

Not that this should affect our heroes' actions much, of course. But it does away with all the story problems, of how nobody tried tricks on the DDM before (it wasn't evil before), of how the DDM is stupid in combat (it's not geared for combat and might not even realize it is in combat), of how the thing can travel between galaxies if its MO is to stop and eat at every star system (it might not be from another galaxy, or it might not be eating at all and is independent of food sources but digests the soil for gardening purposes nevertheless).

Timo Saloniemi

The galactic disc of our Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter. The thickness of the galactic disc is a small fraction of that. Many sources state that near the Sun the thickness of the galactic disc is only about 1,000 light years.

In order to make the voyages of the Enterprise to the galactic barrier in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "By Any Other Name" as short as possible, it is usual to imagine that the galactic barrier and the edge of the galaxy as defined by it covers the galactic disc only. Thus a voyage of no more than 500 light years from Earth would be the minimum necessary to reach the "upper" or "lower" 'edge" of the Galactic disc from Earth. If the galactic barrier covers the halo region of our galaxy The minimum distance of the galactic barrier from Earth would be on the rough order of about 75,000 light years.

Suppose that they were able to date the relative order of the destruction of the various solar systems by various scientific scans of the rubble. In that case Spock would be able to project the course of the Planet Killer Backwards. And if they were near the edge of the galactic disc there might be only a relatively small distance from the earliest destroyed star system and the galactic barrier. And if the course of the Planet Killer came from the direction to a globular star cluster or a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, it would be quite logical for Spock to deduce that the Planet Killer came from outside our galaxy.

As for the purpose of the Planet Killer perhaps it eats fo fuel only a tiny fraction of the mass of the planets it destroys, and leaves the rest as rubble. By breaking up planets into tiny asteroids, the planet killer brings the valuable minerals that were deep within those former planets close to the surfaces of the new asteroids, and thus makes them much easier to mine.

So perhaps the planet killer is a mining robot programmed to break up panets where the resources are buried too deep to reach, turning them into swarms of asteriods which are easy to mine with the technology of its society. Perhaps its builders programmed it to not disrupt habitable planets but its programming became corrupted. Perhaps their definition of habitable planets only includes rare types of planets not found in the destroyed solar systems nor habitable for humans. Perhaps they didn't bother to program it to avoid destroying habitable planets.

 

[johnnybear]

We only have Kirk's theory that it was a relic of a long ago conflict. Spock had identified it's course as coming from outside of our galaxy, whether that meant from a race living in space stations beyond the rim or another galaxy itself is never explained and if the DDM travelled here from another galaxy then without super-light speed it would have taken a thousand years or more and would it have had a stockpile of energy to make it here? Seeing the weapon hitting the energy barrier would have been awesome and I wonder if anyone has ever done a video of it and put it on YT?
I thought Andromeda was our closest galactic neighbour? A satellite of the Milky Way seems a bit off to me as the home to the Planet Killer, I'd be surmising a large spiral cluster with many hundreds of planets...
JB

 

[StarCruiser]

Andromeda is the closet full "galaxy" but, there are a number of smaller clusters like the Greater and Less Magellanic Clouds (along with a bunch of others) that are much closer.

 

[MAGolding]

We only have Kirk's theory that it was a relic of a long ago conflict. Spock had identified it's course as coming from outside of our galaxy, whether that meant from a race living in space stations beyond the rim or another galaxy itself is never explained and if the DDM travelled here from another galaxy then without super-light speed it would have taken a thousand years or more and would it have had a stockpile of energy to make it here? Seeing the weapon hitting the energy barrier would have been awesome and I wonder if anyone has ever done a video of it and put it on YT?
I thought Andromeda was our closest galactic neighbour? A satellite of the Milky Way seems a bit off to me as the home to the Planet Killer, I'd be surmising a large spiral cluster with many hundreds of planets...
JB

Your comment is awakening my inner Spock.

No, Andromeda is not the nearest galaxy to our mIlky Way Galaxy. In fact there are dozens of small galaxies much closer to our gaalxy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group

Your term "spiral cluster" is inaccurate. There is no astronomical term "spiral cluster"..

In astronomy, star clusters, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies are three separate things.

Star clusters are clusters of stars. The two main types are galactic or open clusters, and globular clusters. Open clusters are smaller and contain only hundreds or thousands of stars. Globular clusters are larger and densely packed, containing tens of thousands of stars.

The three main forms of galaxies are irregular, elliptical, and spiral. IIrregular and spiral galaxies contain open star clusters. All three types of galaxies usually have globular clusters, tens, hundreds, or thousands of them.

The smallest sized dwarf galaxies might have only about a million stars each, which is still somewhat larger than the largest globular star clusters. Galaxies vary greatly in size, with the largests ones having trillions of stars.

Glaxies are usually grouped into clusters of galaxies, and many clusters of galaxies are grouped into superclusters of galaxies.

So there is no such thing as a "spiral cluster" A large spiral galaxy would have hundreds of billions of planets, not a few hundred planets. Even the tiniest spiral galaxies would have millions of planets.

Andromeda is the closet full "galaxy" but, there are a number of smaller clusters like the Greater and Less Magellanic Clouds (along with a bunch of others) that are much closer.

LIke Johnnybear, you are arousing my inner Spock by confusing star clusters with galaxies.

Astronomers never refer to other galaxies as clusters. The Greater and Lesser Mgellanic Clouds are defined by astronomers as galaxies, not cluseters. Irregular galaxies to be precise.

 

[Maurice]

Look... Google!

 

[Timo]

The course analysis crumbles even if for some reason the L-whatever systems offer Spock a veritable beeline that bumps against the Galactic Barrier. After all, the only logical assumption in that case would be that that DDM took a sharp turn at that very point, arriving from within in a similar beeline (which Spock naturally has no awareness of, as his ship only ever visited the L-systems and explicitly had no means of observing destruction in any systems she did not visit) because that's what it does by default, and only altering course when it absolutely had to.

To presume a breaching of the barrier would involve presuming the DDM suddenly radically changed its flight mode, from intergalactic gliding to intragalactic eating of planets in a beeline. Such a presumption appears baseless when the bouncing-from-a-wall model allows one to avoid presumptions on this altogether.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Redfern]

I love the texture of the thing. No one who does CGI models of it ever tries to mimic that and the odd colors along the creases in the surface texture.

That's a tough nut to crack, at least with my meager skills and limited tools, but I gave it a shot.

The "planet Killer" mesh and textures are by Marc Bell; the "broken" planet is by ZateticPetra and the environment sphere by Cybertenko. Basically, I played with material settings in Poser and then "post-worked" the render in PaintShop Pro.

 

[publiusr]

Good work.

What I meant by wearing debris from its victims is this...maybe there is a pristine cone at the center, and debris from the rubble was compressed also into neutronium, just more roughly...like a sea floor smoker

 

[publiusr]

I thought this was funny
http://www.starshipmodeler.com/contest/dio_01.htm

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

And if the course of the Planet Killer came from the direction to a globular star cluster or a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way,

if the DDM travelled here from another galaxy then without super-light speed it would have taken a thousand years or more and would it have had a stockpile of energy to make it here?

Astronomers never refer to other galaxies as clusters.

In some thread from the last year or so, it was discussed that sometimes when characters say "across the Galaxy," "the other side of the Galaxy," etc, it does not make sense with distances as they should be in the show. In fact, at the time time, I and others brought up the use of the word "galaxy" in "Super Mario Galaxy" and "Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy," as somehow using the word "galaxy" seemingly to refer to something smaller than a galaxy, a word that either does not exist in English or that usage has changed in the universe of the story.

While "Super Mario Cluster" does not sound like something that would sell well, it seems to describe common level designs in terms of there being a small collection of spacial bodies to traverse. Could one of the types of "cluster," subbed in for "galaxy" explain the distance issues in more Star Trek episodes?

 

[diankra]

If it did come from another galaxy, possibly its behaviour would have changed once it refuelled by 'eating' the first few solar systems it encountered.