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Old July 12 2010, 03:01 PM   #13
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Location: Virginia, USA
Re: The Doctor Who Schematics Thread

Psion wrote: View Post

Oh, I understand your rationalizations for the size, but I'm rather stunned by something this big. Sure, the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, but this thing dwarfs the moons of Mars. If this landed in Washington, DC, it's shadow would extend past Boston. That's really ... big.

What do Timelords do with all that space?
With a ship as large as the tardis, there were 305 of them in use.. think of the massive amounts of data that the Timelords would need to seems like the Doctor knows every history and every alien language, this is due to the research done by previous time lords with their Tardis. the Ship's massive size allows them to retain knowledge and specimens, or technology gathered from countless worlds throughout the cosmos. But I do think I was premature in my initial scale.. I have since re-sized the images..when I first did it, I was using metres, when I switched to kilometres, I should have removed those extra zeros.. yeah no, the tardis is massive, and probably a bit larger then the 1st death star, but no more then 124 miles in diameter, I can't see it needing to be larger then that.

Our moon which measures 3,476 km way larger then the size of a Tardis.. I would think that a Tardis is the equivalent of a Deathstar from Star more then that though..sorry I should have double checked my work before I uploaded it..200 km is still a massive ship..the explosion and burning up of the Tardis engines would be so massive because of the massive amount of energy being exerted..

The Time Lords would need a massive ship like that to map and log in the galaxy, which then ends up being dumped into the matrix, on Gallifrey.

Psion wrote: View Post
How many typically staff such a vehicle?
I would say a crew of a Tardis Typically housed about 2,000 Time Lords.. most were technicians, scientists, historians, and probably a few senators, or council assistants who oversaw the operations for the high council back on Gallifrey. 6 members were the operators who piloted the ship..with probably about 24 in reserve who could take over in shifts in other console rooms in other areas of the Tardis..with such a massive ship, it would be necessary for the ship to be modular to allow corridors, and rooms to shuffle to specific locations in the ship to assist those researchers who were working on projects. The Tardis would probably travel to a solar system, and spend time chronicling the history to present of the planets, moons, and anomalies in that system.

A tardis would take specimens, examine, and study a planet, and then move on through time to the present day of Gallifrey (they were forbidden to go into their own future), and map, chronicle, record, study, analyze, and then leave those worlds, for other systems.. think of the 5 year mission of star trek but on a massive information gathering mission that spanned hundreds of years.. this explains a great deal as to why a time lord has the regeneration ability they do, and why the Tardis interior can shift and change.. once completed, the Time Lords would return to Gallifrey and deposit their gained knowledge into the most powerful computer in the universe, the Gallifrey matrix.

I think that once a Time lord has been linked to a Tardis, his mind has a sort of access to this data in the Tardis Memory banks, which explains how they can recognize a species and specific dates and activities that occur..and recognize differences in the original time line..this would also explain how the languages are automatically translated, cause a Tardis houses a massive repository of the Matrix data regarding alien races.. sort of a portable space almanac..

Psion wrote: View Post
I have to admit that I'm not familiar with this holodeck function you mention. Certainly, I don't recall the Doctor ever exploring anything in safety and comfort.
the Doctor does so in the comics and was mentioned quite a bit in the novels..., and it is never shown in the show, but, it does make sense that to preserve the first law of time, most time lords would never leave their ships while chronicling the life of a particular race, planet, or cosmic event..In the comic, it was Frobisher and Peri who got lost in the Tardis, and the 6th doctor has to find them before an invader to the tardis kills them. As the Doctor travels with Frobisher ( a shape shifter stuck in a peguin mode..) he shows Frobisher the computer data memory section, which houses multiple countless rooms which house holodeck versions of every various world the tardis has visited. which makes sense, when you think about what the Time Lords represent.. control and watchers of natural events of time..they wanted to know everything that happened in their universe from past to present and chronicle all of that to know everything about anything in the universe..the holodeck memory banks allowed the Time Lords to follow the first law of time, and never interfere with other races..the doctor doesn't use those memory banks, cause he gets involved, which makes sense that we wouldn't see those rooms in the tv series, unless a story were developed around that.

Psion wrote: View Post
Although, the TARDIS did tow Earth across the cosmos once. That's not exactly the job of something tiny ...
this is true, however, the fact that the Tardis houses an artificial Black hole core at it's center cloister room makes it's own gravitational field which is powerful enough to hold objects and tow objects, even a rocket ship from another black hole.. but you are correct, the Tardis would have it's own gravitational force, in addition to the core.. I would presume a Tardis of the older classes like the Type 40 to the Type 80 were massive.. from 80 onward, they dropped off in size, cause by then, most time lords were not traversing the universe and gathering knowledge...

they ended up not even leaving Gallifrey until the time war, at that time the Ships ended up way smaller, probably about 20 Kilometres in Diameter, instead of 2,000. Though that is still a large size, it does fit the narrative that the Tardis could map its exterior onto the interior design and impose its size on a dalek ship during the time war and those ships were about the size of huge asteroids,or a crater on our moon..

Last edited by starsuperion; July 12 2010 at 05:59 PM.
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