Yet Another Doomsday Machine Thread

So the mighty Doomsday Machine came here and got a case of Montezuma's revenge?

 

More that it would be very low on power after the inter-galactic journey. First refuel, then go back to normal. Possibly Kirk's tactic wouldn't have worked once it was up to full power.

 

I suspect that in the era of TOS there are words for volumes of space within the glaxy of various sizes. Words like "galactic volume" shortened to "galvol", or "Galactic region" shortened to "galreg", etc. And when TOS characters use such words they are mistranslated to 20th century English as 'galaxy".

I also suspect that in the era of TOS there are things like "grand sectors", "sectors", and "small sectors", and "grand quadrants", "quadrants", and "small quadrants". But when translating them into 20th century English the various sizes are given as plain "sectors" or "quadrants", confusing the audience about the relative sizes of sectors and quadrants.

 

IIRC, in the novel Vendetta Picard postulates...accurately, as it turns out...that the DDM was built outside the galaxy, but not far outside the galaxy, and certainly not in another galaxy. More just outside the galactic barrier.

 

This one?

 

In Star Trek and more Lost in Space the writers seemed to be confused by the terms galaxy, solar system and quadrants!
Although in Trek I think the emphasis was on the fact that the galaxy was virtually explored outside of some areas or the like. But with the Doomsday Machine I believe they are actually meaning that the thing came from outside the limits of the galaxy rather than just beyond their dominion of it!
JB

 

That is likely the case.
Galaxies were called “island universes”
The Milky Way was called the universe.

Star systems are often called galaxies.
Here Trek got it right, I think, although something from another universe would be interesting. ID4 aliens would be a big enough threat.

Trek also shows Andromeda in deep black, though there are a few extra-galactic stars in real life.

If two star systems orbited one black hole, that might be an example of the smallest galaxy.

 

If the Doomsday Machine came from the Andromeda galaxy then it would have been mighty hungry by the time it reached here!!! Even with the Kelvan adaptation of the Enterprise's engines that reduced the travel between galaxies to three hundred years, that is still a heck of a long time! Plus it seemed to be homing in on other planetary systems during the episode so it must have been able to conserve it's energy derived from eating the matter of the crushed planets!
JB

 

Maybe the DDM can suck up thin, interstellar dust like an enormous bussard collector to fuel itself between galaxies plus travel in low energy mode.

 

Or then it doesn't really get any sort of nourishment out of the stuff it "eats", that is, chews. Spock speaks of an "apparent function", but appearances generally deceive, and as far as the audience can tell, this is once again Spock speaking out of his ass, without a shred of evidence.

Very little gathering of evidence is evident at any point during the episode. The heroes don't measure the power levels of the entity, analyze its movement patterns, or study the debris of the planets to see what may have been digested. They perform a coarse course analysis and deduce the presence of "neutronium hull" and "some sort of a total conversion drive" from sensor data, but that's pretty much it.

What may have justified Spock's speculation is an unseen analysis of the star systems the heroes traveled through in their search for the culprit, though. Perhaps missing radioactives are Spock's cue there? OTOH, if the beast truly has a total conversion drive, fissionables don't convince me as a potential fuel...

Timo Saloniemi

 

I guess I have a higher opinion about Spock's deductive and analytical abilities. My first assumption is that Spock is usually correct.

 

You can bet your pointed ears on that!
JB

 

It should be worth noting that Spock's analysis is base in part on what info the Constellation had gathered in its travels leading up its encounter with the DDM:

KIRK: What about the Constellation's tapes?
SPOCK: She was attacked by what appears to be essentially a robot, an automated weapon of immense size and power. Its apparent function is to smash planets to rubble and then digest the debris for fuel. It is, therefore, self-sustaining as long as there are planetary bodies for it to feed on.
KIRK: A robot weapon that purposely destroys entire solar systems. Why?
SPOCK: Unknown, Captain. However, Mister Sulu has computed the path of the machine, using the destroyed solar systems as a base course. Projecting back on our star charts, we find that it came from outside, from another galaxy.
KIRK: What is the projected course of this thing?
SPOCK: If it follows its present path, it will go through the most densely populated section of our galaxy. ​

As for crossing the galactic void, there are always stellar streams...

 

Oh, that and him speaking out of his ass are in no way mutually exclusive. He's just damned lucky with his guesses.

It's true that the path of destruction was apparently charted by both starships, and Sulu would have access to both datasets. But those should be identical datasets in the end, if the path is unambiguous enough to lead Kirk to the DDM. If the machine gobbled up a veritable cloud of star systems rather than a single path, Kirk would still be looking as of "Unification III"...

The path would necessarily be a polygonal chain rather than a beeline: otherwise, it wouldn't go through star systems. Sulu could work out a trend from that, and perhaps also estimate the speed of the DDM. But the chain, rather than the trendline, would need to have a vertex right next to the Galactic Barrier at a plausible endpoint, that is, starting point. And preferably not do that at any other point, so Sulu could treat the one proximal point as a starting point with at least some confidence. For this to be true, the heroes, too, would have needed to scrape the Barrier, preferably at their first encounter with an eaten system already, or else they would have been traveling the chain in two directions which is again undesirable.

Lots of border conditions there. The adventure could meet those - it's just that they will then establish the adventure as taking place at the border, quite literally. Are the densely inhabited parts of the galaxy really proximal to its border with intergalactic space?

Timo Saloniemi

 

And a few extra-galactic stars are not enough to make space look any brighter than pitch black. Have you ever looked through a telescope at night in a region without light pollution lighting up the sky? The sky looks very black, despite Earth's night atmosphere having a faint glow. It would look even blacker when seen from the vacuum of outer space.

Two star systems and a black hole are not enough to make a galaxy, They would merely be a triple star system where one of the stars has become a black hole.

There is a certain minimum mass required to be a galaxy.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy#Formation

So galaxies formed early in the history of the universe from vast regions which were more dense with matter, both baryonic matter and dark matter, and which had vast total masses.

Star systems like the triple one you mention form within galaxies. The first ones formed soon after galaxies formed and are over ten or eleven billion years old, while some are still forming at the present.

There is a big difference between coming from outside the galaxy and coming from the Andromeda Galaxy.

The Andromeda Galaxy is not, repreat NOT, the closest galaxy to our Milky War Galaxy. There are billions and trillions of galaxies farther away than the Andomeda Galaxy, so it is very close compared to the vast majority of galaxies, but it is definately not the closest galaxy to the Milky Way Galaxy.

My answer to: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/39879/what-is-the-closest-galaxy/39933#39933 points out that the Andromeda Galaxy is actually the 86th closest galaxy in one list of the nearest galaxies.

Also see my post number 206 on page 11 of this thread:

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/yet-another-doomsday-machine-thread.306036/page-11:

 

Nope. The Enterprise was responding to the Constellation's disaster beacon and came straight to the sector at the end of the path of destruction.

 

In some people's world, everyone on TOS is either a liar, an idiot, or both.

 

AFAIK, stellar streams orbit their galaxy, consequently they are confined to the immediate galactic neighborhood of their galaxy, and there is no known stellar stream connecting two galaxies.

 

From the supplied link (emphasis added):
"A stellar stream is an association of stars orbiting a galaxy that was once a globular cluster or dwarf galaxy that has now been torn apart and stretched out along its orbit by tidal forces." The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy is still undergoing this process so dwarf galaxy to MW...

 

Spock didn't say it come from one of the Milky Way's satellites, he said it came from another unqualified (i.e. non-dwarf) galaxy.