As for when this will all be put together and finished, as I’ve said before it’ll be done when it’s done–I have learned not to make completion predictions because (a) I suck at them and (b) this isn’t my full-time job (or even my only hobby)… life has a way of messing with timelines, so the best I can say right now is that one of my resolutions for 2010 is to finish this project before 2011!

Unfortunately, the number of “layers” required for each scene forced me to limit the resolution to 480p for this project–it would have taken six times as long to render these effects in high definition. So I’m afraid DVD-level sharpness is about the best this will get.

Let me just say – WOW! This really is fantastic work! I am really impressed with your efforts and your interpretation of Trek’s
‘The Doomsday Machine’.

I’ve been a graphic designer for 18 years. This
is great work. You should be proud.

I hope when you complete this project that maybe just maybe you will release it in HD ( i know … not going to happen) but if you do, I would love to view this on my 1080p HDTV.

I look forward to viewing it in its completed form.

Warm Regards,
DREW

Scott Gammans :

the fact it’s made of neutronium means it’s probably the mass of a small star to begin with!

Murray Leinster’s THE WAILING ASTEROID describes an interstellar war lasting millennia. One of the weapons in the story is an FTL super mass shot through an enemy’s solar system to rip its star to pieces.

The beserker’s “total conversion drive” could mean anything, so a graviton-based propulsion system is certainly within the realm of possibility. In fact, it might not even need a gravity field to suck in space debris–the fact it’s made of neutronium means it’s probably the mass of a small star to begin with!

As for the diminishing power of the attacks, the berserker had just destroyed a solar system. Maybe it needed recharging, or…

I hadn’t meant to make a debate about whether or not the berserker had FTL drive in a previous thread, but the following demands that I introduce a few concepts.

Jack McDevitt’s “Academy” novels posit a stardrive known as the Hazeltine engine. The small starships in the series must cruise for a few hours on their sublight engines while the Hazeltines charge. When ready, the Hazeltines push the ship into hyperspace. In the novel CHINDI the pilot explains to one of her passengers that it is perfectly safe to spacewalk on the hull while in the misty, gray void of hyperspace, but that falling off would have certain consequences for the ship when returning to normal space. The loss of mass from the closed system would turn into added momentum in real space.

This expose is used later in the novel when one of the Terran explorers is trapped on board the massive, automated Chindi ship as it accelerates onto its appointment with another star. The Hazeltine pilot cannot match the Chindi acceleration with her space normal engines, but figures she can plot its next destination and meet it there. She jumps to the next star, but the Chindi never arrives. After some trial and error, the pilot realizes the Chindi does not have hyperspace engines. How can she save her missing passenger before his life support gives out?

She eventually plans a multi-ship rescue with other Academy ships. The first stage involves one ship latching onto a small asteroid like a space tug and hauling it off into hyperspace. The rock is jettisoned and the ship drops back to normal space at a speed matching the Chindi, thanks to the mass left in hyperspace. Other Academy ships in series bring the rescuer back down to space normal speeds they can handle.

The technology in STAR TREK is never explained in the series, but some of the spin-off novels take a stab at it. One novel likened warp engines to the Hazeltines. Although instead of spending any time in hyperspace, the ship instantly jumps from one location to another. Long hyperspace jumps are dangerous because one might lose one’s bearings on exit and become lost. So starflight is a tedious series of small jumps with long navigational calculations in between. What makes the starships, like the Enterprise, so special is the revolutionary Daystrom computers that can recalibrate for a next jump almost instantaneously. Thus, what appears to be continuous velocity in normal space is really an ultra-rapid series of small jumps. If we assume an Einsteinian Relativity, then there is an obvious gap in the Federation speed gradient between impulse engines and warp engines.

Suppose, like the Chindi, the doomsday machine (which I’ve been calling “berserker” after Saberhagen’s stories) has a continuous speed gradient all the way up to lightspeed and beyond. How is that possible? (In the Academy novel the Chindi is sub-light, but let’s assume the berserker is not, based on the timing of the attacks on systems L370 and L374.)

I suppose it’s complete heresy to question Einstein, especially since I am nothing more than an armchair fan of physics with no degrees in advanced mathematics. Still, some physicists do question Einstein, as well as the Big Bang, quantum mechanics and so on. I’m not a fruitcake; I understand that these theories may be right in some ways and not in others. With that in mind, the late Tom Van Flandern published a layman’s book in the early ’90s titled DARK MATTER, MISSING PLANETS AND NEW COMETS to explain his Meta Model, derived from LeSage’s corpuscular gravity. The link below is an introduction to Flandern’s work, and the rest of the site is food for thought:

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/PhysicsHasItsPrinciples.asp

Some of the relevant parts of the Meta Model include:

* The speed of light is not a universal limit and there is evidence to this fact. (Flandern likens the Light Carrying Medium, or LCM, to air molecules. Thus any body using this medium cannot accelerate beyond its wave speed the way a prop-driven plane cannot exceed the speed of sound. As for the LCM you’re probably thinking Michelson and Morley. Most physics books do not cover all of those early 20th century “ether” experiments.)

* The Meta Model includes another medium, a sea of “gravitons” made up of particles that are estimated to move at tens of thousands of times the speed of light. Learn how to harness them and even warp drive will seem slow.

Spock said the berserker had a “total conversion drive,” which could mean anything. Did he mean total conversion of matter to energy, a la e=mc^2 ? The Enterprise has anti-matter engines, and it doesn’t get any more efficient than that. So how is the berserker different? Suppose the “conversion” was LCM type matter (planet rubble) into graviton-like speed. The berserker would then have FTL drive with a continuous gradient from space normal all the way up, while the Enterprise might have a “gap” in its speed spectrum. Thus, the Enterprise might be able to evade the berserker even with impulse-only (using the asteroid field to give it cover) because it is low enough in mass to make hard turns, while the berserker would rumble on past with a screeching of tires, as it were. Sulu the bull fighter. (Remember the berserker’s neutronium hull, which would give it tremendous mass. It might even have a gravity field strong enough to collect space debris.)

Assuming the berserker has a graviton drive, as described, what would Federation warp drive look like to its attack computer? Perhaps warp drive would look like enemy ships blinking in and out of existence, or perhaps the berserker was up against an entire fleet of ships with cloaking devices?

Thus, the power of the attacks might vary if the berserker thought it was dealing with a huge fleet of ships, when in fact there was only one-and-a-half.