Prawn technology

[Srelex]

Here I'll be attempting an analysis of the technology displayed by the Prawns in District 9.

Antigravity: They were able to keep a mothership about a kilometer or so in width hovering for over two decades, with no sign of power loss. Further evidence of gravity manipulation is demonstrated towards the end, but without any indication of how this goes about, all we can gather from this is that they have very reliable power sources.

Nanotechnology: I believe this is how the 'fluid' was described. It appears to be capable of restructuring a human being right down to the cellular level, which makes you wonder what other applications they have for this. It was also used as a power source, apparently, with a cylinder of the stuff being able to power a ship. Given the energy requirements for antigravity, this points to more evidence of highly effecient Prawn power. I'm not sure how nanotechnology can be used as a power source--does anyone have any idea?

Weapons: Prawn weapons vary from shotgun-like weapons capable of overturning vehicles and throwing men back, and demolishing simple walls. As they do not appear to cause immediate external harm to the target, one can presume that it is either a compressed air weapon--something that judging by the appearance of the heated barrel seems unlikely--or uses gravity technology. I'm not sure if they used these weapons to smash their way into MNU. They also use taser like weapons that cause a man to explode, and appear to be related to electricity judging by the sparks that travel along it--does anyone know what sort charge would cause an organic being to explode, if this is possible?

Furthermore, they also appear to use grenade launchers of some kind capable of causing an explosion comparable to, I think, a light artillery round. They also appear to have energy weapons that also likewise cause bodies to explode--these may be another example of taser weaponry, but I think they appeared to project what looked like electrical bolts. Body armor appeared to offer no protection. They also used minaturized missiles that didn't seem to be much more powerful than simple RPGs.

Armor: Prawn protection does not seem impressive at fist glance--the mech was downed by small arms fire, and their shuttle was taken down with a single SAM. Nevertheless, the mech also demonstrated the curious ability to focus incoming bullets into a single space and then return them to the firer, using, I presume, some sort of magnetic technology. Wikus did not seem to make use of this, indicating his inexperiance with the suit. I guess there is no reason why the mech cannot deploy this on the move, so against a force that uses kinetic weapons it could be most useful indeed, although it is unclear whether munitions coming from the back would be affected. I'd say its armor is comparable to that of a Humvee, or a lightly armored combat vehicle, but anyone with greater expertise can correct me here.

FTL: I think it was mentioned in supplementary materials that the Prawns originate from another galaxy. Whether this is down to terminology confusion is uncertain, but let's go with it anyway. Christopher mentions that he'd be back in three years, if we assume that he was going there and back it would take 1.5 years for the ship to travel, using Andromeda as a benchmark, 2.56 ± 0.08 Mly. Of course, this relies on a lot of assumptions, but nevertheless, it does indicate very potent FTL for the prawns.

In short, the Prawns possess quite remarkable power sources, versatile nanotechnology, weapons very effective against lightly armored infantry, and, although admittedly this is based on a lot of assumptions, quite eyebrow-raising FTL. Does anyone have any comments, or anything to contribute, or is willing to highlight any mistakes I've made?

[sirocco]

Was it an exploration ship or a war ship ?

We've seen a lot of weapons but nothing really looked like actual everyday technology. As a war ship that could be somewhat understandable if you consider the majority of prawns as simple-minded cannon fodder at the service of a superior kind of prawn (like it was hinted at the beginning of the movie). But on the other hand there was no external weapon on the mothership.

[Srelex]

Was it an exploration ship or a war ship ?

We've seen a lot of weapons but nothing really looked like actual everyday technology. As a war ship that could be somewhat understandable if you consider the majority of prawns as simple-minded cannon fodder at the service of a superior kind of prawn (like it was hinted at the beginning of the movie). But on the other hand there was no external weapon on the mothership.

The purpose of the ship wasn't hinted at, I would guess it to be some sort of freighter, owing to the squalid conditions inside.

[Zixinus]

It was also used as a power source, apparently, with a cylinder of the stuff being able to power a ship.

The fluff I read says that it had nothing to do with actually powering the ship.

It was a backup emergency thing that changes a prawn's status from barely-thinking drone to intelligent supervisor or something. I guess it is needed to understand and operate the prawn control unit. That also explains Wikus later on.

rawn weapons vary from shotgun-like weapons capable of overturning vehicles and throwing men bac

Erm, shotgun-like? You refer to wide dispersal or the lack of penetration in favour of transmitting kinetic energy?

I'd say its armor is comparable to that of a Humvee, or a lightly armored combat vehicle, but anyone with greater expertise can correct me here.

It could be possible that the thing was a re-purposed engineering suit. The fact that it has this gravity/magnetic well ability may indicate that it was a one-man armour suit.

[Srelex]

The fluff I read says that it had nothing to do with actually powering the ship.

It was a backup emergency thing that changes a prawn's status from barely-thinking drone to intelligent supervisor or something. I guess it is needed to understand and operate the prawn control unit. That also explains Wikus later on.

Aha.

Erm, shotgun-like? You refer to wide dispersal or the lack of penetration in favour of transmitting kinetic energy?

Both.

It could be possible that the thing was a re-purposed engineering suit. The fact that it has this gravity/magnetic well ability may indicate that it was a one-man armour suit.

Possibly, although given its rather wide array of weapons it'd have to have been repurposed prior to the trip.

[gizmojumpjet]

It could be possible that the thing was a re-purposed engineering suit. The fact that it has this gravity/magnetic well ability may indicate that it was a one-man armour suit.

In the DVD commentary, the director says something along the lines that the exo-suits as he calls them were both for exploring the surfaces of planets and asteroids in search of resources as well as fighting whoever gets in the way of the prawns' efforts to extract those resources. He also says there are ~200,000 exosuits aboard the Mothership.

I actually have the disc at home from Netflix right now if exact quotes would be useful, but I'm not sure how much weight is normally afforded to comments such as those.

[Anguirus]

The fluff I read says that it had nothing to do with actually powering the ship.

It was a backup emergency thing that changes a prawn's status from barely-thinking drone to intelligent supervisor or something. I guess it is needed to understand and operate the prawn control unit. That also explains Wikus later on.

Where from? I haven't finished combing through the DVD special features yet, but this doesn't make any sense. Christopher Johnson was already plenty smart, as was his son, and they clearly use the "stuff" as fuel. They have to plug it into the command module to get it to fly, and CJ says that he will have to "use up all of it" to fly back to his planet, instead of using any to activate the medical machines that will cure Wikus.

[CBG]

We have a huge ship, with a lot of cannnon fodder, no ship class weapons (at least none seen), but a lot of infantry weapons on board. The re-purposed mining equipment theory tries to explain the weapons on a supposed mining ship. But on the other hand, who would do the re-purposing, and why? The lower caste prawns show no ability to do such things. After the higher caste died, making the situation critical, there would be no one capable of doing it, except for one Christopher, who got into the command module and flew off.
Another question is, why would a such advanced civilisation need so much simple minded laborers for this kind of undertaking? Didn't they hear about automatisation?
Few another, less techology related questions are:
Why did the command module detach? How did it get into the district 9 without anyone noticing?
Why didn't any of the smarter prawns try to represent the lower caste before humans and explain their rather problematic behaviour, and give suggestions about what to do about it? While the leaders might be dead and a tech like Christophr might not be able to control them, he could make things easier for both sides by explaining to humans the nature of lower caste prawns, and maybye suggest some methods of making them more controllable, or at least less dangerous?

[Srelex]

We have a huge ship, with a lot of cannnon fodder, no ship class weapons (at least none seen), but a lot of infantry weapons on board. The re-purposed mining equipment theory tries to explain the weapons on a supposed mining ship. But on the other hand, who would do the re-purposing, and why? The lower caste prawns show no ability to do such things. After the higher caste died, making the situation critical, there would be no one capable of doing it, except for one Christopher, who got into the command module and flew off.

Perhaps it was done prior?

Another question is, why would a such advanced civilisation need so much simple minded laborers for this kind of undertaking? Didn't they hear about automatisation?

Someone has to monitor the automation. Or perhaps it's a cultural thing. Who knows?

Why did the command module detach? How did it get into the district 9 without anyone noticing?

It's speculated on in the film.

Why didn't any of the smarter prawns try to represent the lower caste before humans and explain their rather problematic behaviour, and give suggestions about what to do about it? While the leaders might be dead and a tech like Christophr might not be able to control them, he could make things easier for both sides by explaining to humans the nature of lower caste prawns, and maybye suggest some methods of making them more controllable, or at least less dangerous?

That may be how the humans understood what they were doing. Besides, there not be a way to make them 'more controllable' that they have available.

[sirocco]

Another thing :
at the beginning of the movie we have 3 smart prawns (Christopher, his son and their friend killed by MNU)... 3 smart people among millions of other prawns! something's wrong here.

I think that :

1 either all the other prawns are under the effect of catfood while those 3 guys eat something else

2 or you need some special feature for a regular prawn to get smarter

3 or else there are other smart prawns who didn't like Christopher's idea of leaving their fellow people behind and keep hiding as mindless prawns

4 the ship was really a mining ship and the regular prawn were some kind of third-rate citizens with low education while the smarter one were rather engineers or at least managers. They probably were slaughtered when their ship was lost and the few that survived just lay low, very low.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Another thing :
at the beginning of the movie we have 3 smart prawns (Christopher, his son and their friend killed by MNU)... 3 smart people among millions of other prawns! something's wrong here.

I think that :

1 either all the other prawns are under the effect of catfood while those 3 guys eat something else

I didn't listen to the directors comment track or watch the documentaries (it was a traditional rental and I didn't have the time), so I don't know if there is a confirmation for the caste theory there. If there isn't, my theory would be as follows:

The majority of the prawns are stupid because of some disease or mulfunction of their nanotechnology. Perhaps the latter is a more probable explanation, since the earth-born Prawn were stupid as well. They may have inherited the faulty nanotech or mutated genome from their parent. With advanced nanotech it is not inconceivable, since we are not talking about a naturally occurring disease. The ship came to Earth to look for help or resources to fight the "disease", but as they arrived nearly all Prawns were already affected. CJ escaped (possibly with his friend) in the command module and buried it, but did not want to reveal himself to humans for fairly obvious reasons. Once the humans cut the ship open the disease had already run its course and become inert, or perhaps CJ was naturally immune but did not realize it until later.

CJ then decided that the humans were too irrational to be reasoned with and started to collect the strange stuff from leftover prawn-tech. Why he had to do that I don't know; perhaps they were nearly out of it at the time for reasons which might have something to do with the disease. The stuff may not actually power their ships, but perhaps it is needed to control their power sources, but can not be manufactured in the ship and is slowly consumed in the process. It's not a waterproof explanation, but it's consistent with what was actually seen in the movie and the deleted scenes (which I did watch).

[CBG]

Perhaps it was done prior?

Why would it be done? Makeshift modification of mining equipment into weapons doesn't seem like something ordinary.

Someone has to monitor the automation. Or perhaps it's a cultural thing. Who knows?

Of course it would need monitoring and maintenance, but that would suggest more techs.

My first impression about the prawn ship was:
It is a prison ship/prisoner transport, on which the prisoners overpowered the crew and guards (explains weapons, lack of leadership, prison-like conditions on board and their less than pleasant attitude). Christopher and other smart ones are the few survivors from the crew who somehow avoided the slaughter (explains the command module detaching), and it is understandable that they want to keep a low profile, if not for humans, then just to not get killed by the rest.

[Tasoth]

I don't think Christopher's friend was a "Thinker" caste, since he kept grabbing the wrong things while Christopher's child snatched things up. Prawns were shown to be capable of some form of independent thought, they just weren't that clever (the butchering of the one by the gangsters, the weapon test victims, etc.)

As for why so much physical labor, it might be a form of control. Get a huge volume of individuals who just mill about with no work and they'll get destructive as boredom increases. If they lack the imagination to work on theoretical concepts, like philosophy or science, or for use in art, they'll need something simple and physical to be kept busy. Shit, they may just have a limited attention span.

[Zor]

As for why so much physical labor, it might be a form of control. Get a huge volume of individuals who just mill about with no work and they'll get destructive as boredom increases. If they lack the imagination to work on theoretical concepts, like philosophy or science, or for use in art, they'll need something simple and physical to be kept busy. Shit, they may just have a limited attention span.

That seems like a type of behavior that could be very problematic. Imagine what would happen if a factory was shut down because of some major mechanical malfuction.

Zor

[Marcus Aurelius]

My first impression about the prawn ship was:
It is a prison ship/prisoner transport, on which the prisoners overpowered the crew and guards (explains weapons, lack of leadership, prison-like conditions on board and their less than pleasant attitude). Christopher and other smart ones are the few survivors from the crew who somehow avoided the slaughter (explains the command module detaching), and it is understandable that they want to keep a low profile, if not for humans, then just to not get killed by the rest.

So, all criminals in the Prawn society are idiots? And their offspring as well? There was a lot of aggressive behavior among the Prawn, but that could be explained simply by that controlling aggression was difficult for them for some other reason. Perhaps they all had extremely serious cases of ADHD in addition of being stupid? In any case, unless the lack of intelligence was somehow genetically determined, I don't see how all the Prawns beside CJ and his son were more or less stupid.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I offer the following hypothesis; the prawn ship was a hibernation transport. See how this set of ideas hangs together.

Prawn FTL has some genuinely severe, or logistically problematical, or alien health and safety alarm-raising, effects, and either those effects or the hibernation method used to avoid them reduce the average Prawn to a low- grade moron by any standard, including their own.

The goo isn't a literal fuel, it's primarily medical, reversing the damage- or possibly the brain- deadening effects of the hibernation drugs. (How you inherit a drug effect, on the other hand- unless it has a similar effect on the growing foetus?)

It must be a very sophisticated concoction, repairing damage as well as reactivating the brain's higher functions, at least it was in the dosage Wikus got exposed to- a massive overdose by normal standards. 'Power' wouldn't be energy content, but think of power as authority, ability to exercise command and control- that fits.

If it's an organic chemistry based neural net on the ship- well they need to repair it and restore it's higher functions also.

Simple minded cannon fodder with that much firepower- how smart would you have to be to make full and effective use of one of the exosuits, and on a lesser level be trustworthy with some of the exotic weaponry they possess? Rather more so than most of the Prawn drones, I submit.

Even if it was a mining ship, mining has always been a dangerous and difficult job; it may not be the most intellectually demanding task in the universe, but common sense definitely helps when it comes to doing a good job and not dying. The Prawns were marginal even for that.

If they were artificially stupid by their own standards, that explains a lot of the mismatch between ship and technology, and the apparent users; CJ probably wasn't some lone intelligent survivor of the actual crew, he was the only one of many who was lucky enough to be accidentally exposed to enough goo to recover some brain function and start working on solutions to the problem.

[Zixinus]

The problem with the "fluid is for keeping the brain in top condition" theory is that the thing is not injected anywhere into CJ or his son: its put into the ship.

I think people are a bit hasty about declaring the Prawn stupid: it could that their intelligence is just normal (if slightly uneducated) with just a bad mental state, leaderless and in an alien environment. We take the judgement of some of the interviews at face value.

They may be bad at business because they come from a society where an individual does not need to bargain. I also thinks that it is strange to assume to think that all the prawns know English or even want to learn any human language. They could not really start a society of their own because they do not have the resources to do so: they can't do shit with human technology and there is probably little on the ship they can do anything with.

Think about it. The ship is hovering in the air, ok. However, when the humans opened up the place, they found that most of the people on-board were starving or malnourished. Where are the computers, where are the books, where are the tools these people keep with themselves? MNU is shown to only take weapons, not other devices. They only have weapons, probably scavenged from the armoury for whatever reason.

The film uses the prawns to symbolise the plight of refugees in a foreign country. Why shouldn't the prawns be different? After all, then they could have landed on a planet that has both a familiar biosphere and does not have sentients that the prawn would have to compete with. However, in the trailer, the interviewee tells that they had no choice: indicating that either the ship's supplies are low (and also putting another stake into the "hibernation" theory) or the ship's capacity is limited.

Of course, CJ is still able to fire up the ship. However, he did not give any reassurance that the ship can be kept working. Again, either he stopped over Earth because they either ran out supplies for the people on-board or the ship is only partially functional.

[sirocco]

Also about the general stupidity of the prawns, I remember that in third world countries some hygiene related disease can ultimately attack brain's cells and well damage your natural intelligence. Maybe Christopher just got lucky or was naturally immune to whatever happened on that ship.

Back to the technology question, Zixinus pointed out that there were no books or common tools to be seen when they entered the ship. Why so ? Are they stored in some unexplored area of the ship or just don't exist ?

[Ryan Thunder]

Back to the technology question, Zixinus pointed out that there were no books or common tools to be seen when they entered the ship. Why so ? Are they stored in some unexplored area of the ship or just don't exist ?

Perhaps they were somehow edible?

[Zixinus]

Another question that should be asked regarding the prawns is: would humans in similar circumstance do better?

We don't know why the prawns left their homeworld or why they arrived to Earth, except that they see it that they had no choice. They supposedly come from another galaxy. I would say that with FTL capacities like that they either could have chosen another habitable world where they would not have to deal with competition.

And when they arrive on Earth, the prawns also act chaotically and erratically. The ship just hovered over JoBurg for three months until humans looked in. Did none of the prawns think of opening up to the outside? When they got lose, they could not integrate into human society.

All of these conclude that the prawns were leaderless.

However, CJ is still willing to return to their homeworld for help. Ergo, he is not at odds with the government (or lack of thereof) there or is willing to risk their ire to help his people. He was particularly disgusted by the medical experiments.

That's another thing, that might also put a hole in the "prisoner transport" theory. If that were the case, CJ wouldn't care about his people.

Which leads us to our next conclusion: the ship was somehow damaged.

It doesn't look like it on the surface and CJ believes the ship operational enough to go back to his home planet that is somewhere in Andromeda.

So what else does that leave us? What could have been damaged? Life support obviously.
It can't be something like navigation, because the ship was able to land on Earth, on JoBurg (a heavily populated area probably looked attractive) as opposed to some random spot somewhere.

Which leads me to this question?

What happened under those three months while the ship just hovered there?

1. Land on Earth, near a populated area. Ergo, they know there is civilization and deliberately go to the most large and most convenient city they can. The ship is damaged and they need help.
2. Command module detaches.
3. ???
4. Rest of the leadership caste is gone or died. Possible rioting or uprising against the bad leaders? If the species is truly caste-based by biology (which would explain why they still bother with such labor at all) that seems unlikely. Disease? Possible, I recall a poster about prawns being possible carriers for something but I find that a bit far-fetched in the view of the fact that the ship has medical machines that can reverse a human transformation. Curing a disease next to that should be trivial.

I think that with that, we can put in another assumption, in view of these analysis:

Whatever damaged or malfunctioned the ship, also killed off most of the tech and leadership caste crew.

And where would most of such be? Command module. Where the "fuel" was needed.

This explains much: the command module is damaged and the ship has reduced functionality. The crew in it and a deal of technical crew is dead.

What is left are lower techs and leaders that were not near the module when disaster struck. Panicked and on a ship with reduced functionality and what they only partially understand, with a giant population of drones. Drones that would probably need the functions that are disabled or damaged on the ship, such as food reproduction/cultivation.

Here we get a possible explanation:

So, under such circumstance, what do these techs do? They fly to the nearest habitable planet so the drones would not be on their backs. Drones that these lower techs are not trained to deal with in such large numbers and drones that are hungry. In the ensuring chaos, it is possible that more of the techs would die.

Anyway, they are able to find such a planet and land near civilization, where the techs would hope they could find tools and resources to repair the command module.

That's why the command module gone down right after the mother ship landed: they had to be repaired first. CJ was probably on that, along with some other techs. They had to distance themselves from the drones they probably could not control, so they landed the thing and hid it, so they can work on it in peace.

And as time progressed, any leftover of the thinking caste got wiped out except CJ. They were few and they only focus on getting the module restarted or repaired. They quickly discover that there is nothing on the planet that they can immedeatly use to help them: nanotechnology, which is what the fluid probably is, is not available. Despite landing near civilization, they do not have access to the technology required to repair their ship.
As they just barely arrived, they do not have the means to request it or bargain to gain access.

Then the whole human contact thing and the unleashing of the drones. Either the remaining techs were not on the module (which would explain why did it drop, but not why it remained intact and hidden) or they hid themselves well in that 3 months.

The techs see that the humans are not necessarily intent on helping their kin and that they react badly to the drones. It's easy to see why they would be afraid of humans: for one thing, they are just barely learning their language, they are armed and they appear to be fascinated by the technology.

So what happens under the 25-30 years? One or two of the surviving techs come forward and tries to learn the language. Humans complete this process with the drones.

But some of the techs get killed or go into hiding. According to the marketing, there was a prawn worker at MNU, writing a blog about how horrible it was to work for MNU (MNUspreadslies). Meaning that the prawns eventually learn human technology and use it to tell other humans that MNU is abusing the prawns.
MNU kills them because they don't want the pressure, they don't want the trouble of these people talking. This also explains any possible techs that were not on the module when it landed.

As for the module-team, they got shot off one by one for various transgressions. Probably involving stealing computers that they used to change the fluid.

See, that's what the fuel was all about: the fluid was nanotechnology that the techs had to reprogram so it would do something with the command module that would make it operational again.

The fluid itself was obviously used in other stuff. For God's sake, CJ and co were searching for it in the dumps, looking for any scrap that fallen off the ship.
The reason they couldn't just use it right away was because they needed so many other components that took 20 years to get, as well as to learn how to reprogram it.