(no subject)
Sep. 28th, 2010 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brushwolfAnother dumb bit of geek thinking; the old Trek episode The Doomsday Machine which I find really memorable for whatever reason.
Okay, so they have this ancient, alien ship driven by a really primitive AI, with an engine which converts nearly anything it eats into propulsion but which can be overloaded through too much matter. I have to wonder if the Federation ever bothered sending people to research the hulk after it burned out. Even if that's not some advanced engine it's still alien enough to be crucial from a xenoarchaeological perspective. But I don't think in canon there was ever any follow up.
Maybe this is one of the best case examples of old-skool Trek being basically pulp sci-fi. If it were a game, a group of PCs around for the events of the episode would probably need to be forcibly convinced not to loiter around the thing trying to rebuild it enough to tow to dry dock, or comb over it themselves looking for plot points to connect up to stuff from other Trek episodes. It seems pretty believable that Starfleet personnel would be ordered away from the thing until a committed science team could be sent to investigate it, but even then I can easily imagine an Enterprise bridge crew player group looking for doomsday-machine-culture evidence in the next supercomputer-run Amazon culture they ran into, and repeatedly trying to contact Starfleet's committed researchers to find out what if anything they'd found.
Okay, so they have this ancient, alien ship driven by a really primitive AI, with an engine which converts nearly anything it eats into propulsion but which can be overloaded through too much matter. I have to wonder if the Federation ever bothered sending people to research the hulk after it burned out. Even if that's not some advanced engine it's still alien enough to be crucial from a xenoarchaeological perspective. But I don't think in canon there was ever any follow up.
Maybe this is one of the best case examples of old-skool Trek being basically pulp sci-fi. If it were a game, a group of PCs around for the events of the episode would probably need to be forcibly convinced not to loiter around the thing trying to rebuild it enough to tow to dry dock, or comb over it themselves looking for plot points to connect up to stuff from other Trek episodes. It seems pretty believable that Starfleet personnel would be ordered away from the thing until a committed science team could be sent to investigate it, but even then I can easily imagine an Enterprise bridge crew player group looking for doomsday-machine-culture evidence in the next supercomputer-run Amazon culture they ran into, and repeatedly trying to contact Starfleet's committed researchers to find out what if anything they'd found.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-29 02:07 am (UTC)Someone goes through a unofficial third party book of old monsters from 1E. I think I even saw the book on a shelf once long ago. It's nuts!