posted
I remember reading in the Star Trek Chronology that the Doomsday Machine was created by a civilization at war with another civilization in some faraway galaxy. The DM ended up destroying both civilizations and then proceeded to take a trip to the Milky Way Galaxy. But of course this is all stuff pulled out of the Okudas' collective arse.
Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
Actually, it's stuff pulled from Spock and Kirk's respective arses. From the flimsiest evidence, Spock draws the conclusion that
quote:"Projecting back on our star charts, we find that it came from outside, from another galaxy."
Which is profoundly silly, because he can't tell how far back he should backtrack. If you extrapolate the route I took to work this morning back far enough, I came from outside the galaxy, too...
Kirk then goes on with
quote:"It's a weapon built primarily as a bluff. It's never meant to be used. So strong, it could destroy both sides in a war. Something like the old H-Bomb was supposed to be. That's what I think this is -- a doomsday machine that somebody used in a war uncounted years ago. They don't exist anymore, but the machine is still destroying."
We never learn why Kirk would jump to this conclusion. He has no evidence that the weapon would be destructive enough to hurt the alien combatants he postulates. He has no evidence that the intended mission of the device would be over, rather than ongoing according to plan. And he has no evidence that the original builders aren't still receiving daily updates and steepling their tentacles and going "Exxxxellent!".
Of course, Kirk's conclusions don't actually hurt anyone. He still has to stop the machine, and he wouldn't do it any other way even if he knew this was the desperate anti-Borg measure of a peaceful race of sapient bunny rabbits.
posted
Well, Peter David's novel "Vendetta" (about the only one of his books that I liked) posited that the PK was the prototype for an anti-Borg weapon - and that it was on a beeline through the Federation and right into the Delta quadrant. Basically, some ancient civilization blah blah blah built the PK outside of the galaxy and far away from Borg space. The idea was that the PK would track and consume the lifeless or assimilated worlds the Borg left in their wake, all the way back to the heart of Borg space. For some reason, the makers of the weapon had to turn it loose early, and we know the rest.
The makers also made the production version of the PK, which was hella bigger, spikey, and possesed by their souls. It eventually found a pilot in the form of Guinan's soul sister (really) who was on a quest to find a weapon to revenge herself upon those who whacked her home planet. She starts blowing up cubes, the starships Enterprise, Repulse and Chekkov get involved, and everyone just has a grand ole' time.
Mark
PS - Timo, if you extract your course from work and take into account the curvature of the Earth, you actually just came from work! Unless of course you don't treat the Earth as a perfect spheroid, at which point you WOULD have taken a complex spiral course from outside the galaxy to arrive at work on time.
posted
I would love to see what that DM would look like! That Vendetta novel sounds really interesting; might get it some day.
Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
The Vendetta nocel is worth picking up for the sublime way it treats the Borg- there's a fantastic chapter wherein the Borg assimilate an entire world- going so far as to chop up the planet for raw materials to make additional cubes. In true (pre-First Contact) borglike fashion, nothing is wasted- even the planet's corpses are used as drones or recycled...the depition of their "unimind" is very good as well.
As is their new "voice of the Collective"- a assimilated Ferengi Daimon.
Sadly, the characterizations suck no end of ass and David does his usual "over the top introduced character" in Captain Corsmo- someone so fueled by petty envy of Picard (his old academy rival or some nonsense) that he endangers his ship and the Enterprise, then actually fires on the Enterprise when Riker refuses his order to atack the Planetkiller wit Picard aboard it! That shit might work in the comics he writes, but it's pretty tough to stomach in Trek-.
Starts out great, ends in suck-city.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
[Spoilers for Vendetta, in case anyone cares]
To be fair, Korsmo DID tell his tactical officer to attenuate the Chekkov's phasers to they'd just "shake them up a bit". Mind you, he gets keestered by his own hubris not five pages later. On the flip side, everyone who survived gets transferred to the Excalibur, and the rest is sappy "New Frontier" history...
posted
Another example of the "unfit for ANY command" character tat Peter David sticks into all his novels. But I'll refrain from the garbage that is New Frontier.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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