Time Lords vs. Xeelee

[Batman]

the doctor would be low on the timelord side they built it why would the daleks build prison ships. the doctor built the moment a bigger demat gun. would the Xeelee be able to enter the votex.

Okay, this is a bit too coherent for JasonB so I guess it's somebody else with an equally inexistent grasp of the english language.
And who said the Daleks built the prison ship? They built the tug that dragged the prison ship the Time Lords built into the void. I.e., the actual Void Ship.

[Batman]

Also, unless the Christmas Specials (or NuWho in general) aren't part of the canon, in 'The End of Time' they managed to park Gallifrey practically on top of Earth (an Earth that seemed to be missing its moon in a lot of the external shots, though that may have been a scaling issue, Valen knows Earth wouldn't have looked that big when looking out a window a hundred thousand miles above it).

[mr friendly guy]

One of the DW sourcebooks mentioned that engagements between the TL and the Daleks took place in the Great Void, so it seems they did have the technology. I would suspect that it wasn't widespread though.

[NecronLord]

Gallifrey can certainly be moved, sort of. During The War in Heaven (happened in the novels, a war against The Enemy, which sort of ended up not happening but it did ... damn, it was a confusing mess) the Time Lords made perfect copies of Gallifrey and placed them in different parts of SpaceTime. Each Gallifrey was under the commend of someone different so that the Enemy had multiple different tactics being used against them at the same time (they placed one Gallifrey under the commend of The Master).
Also, if the location of one Gallifrey was found (and possibly destroyed) then they had more Gallifreys to go or could replace it again using the original technique.

This was the same storyline where they broke into Rassilon's original workshop to unleash forbidden technology ('The Slaughterhouse'), developed WarTARDIS', and started grabbing technology and weapons from Gallifrey's own future in a bid to win.

And they were still losing.

But the whole thing got changed a lot since, originally, the first casualty of the War In Heaven was the Doctor himself. But then the current Doctor changed events by detonating his TARDIS above Gallifrey (which blew it completely up but he did it to make sure a Universe shattering war never happened) and he absorbed the zip file version of the Matrix into his head. Or something.

While I'm quite willing to mention the bits of the Second War in Heaven, it eventually didn't happen at all, thanks to Lawrence Miles going utterly off his rocker and Ancestor Cell unhappening the whole thing. So it's hardly plot-relevant.

I do wonder if the Enemy were ever thought through or if they were always just some arty concept.

Of course, Gallifrey is moved in The End of Time too.

[mr friendly guy]

Allegedly Lawrence Miles had some idea of who the Enemy was. The clues were a) they are humanoid b) they used Earth sometime as a base c) utterly imicable to Time Lords (ie their culture is very different).

Daleks were dismissed as they aren't humanoid. Humans were dismissed by fans as being too obvious, although I would really like that. Future humans with Time travel tech take on the Time Lords in the past. Of course BBC came up with the retarded idea of the Ancestor Cell which just fucks over concepts of abiogenesis (on Earth) and evolution more times than Creationists screw over scientific fact.

[Ahriman238]

What I don't understand was this quote:
"This is only the furthest edge of the Time War. But at its heart millions die every second. Lost in bloodlust and insanity. With Time itself resurrecting them to find new ways of dying. Over and over again."

From End of Time part 2. So, apparently, millions died every second, but were continually resurrected to keep fighting/dying? Anyone have any ideas on what this quote may mean?

IIRC, there are supposed to be two kinds of Time War. Type 1, we'll call it a Temporal Cold War because pissing on Enterprise never gets old, involves limited intervention: sending agents back in time to make changes favorable to you, while other agents protect your own timeline from enemy manipulation. In Type 2, you say "what the hell?" and throw open the floodgates of the Time Vortex, directly manipulating the elemental force of time as a weapon. Time freezes, reverses itself or is vastly accelerated as you see fit, you enemies die of old age in an eyeblink or stand perfectly still while the universe moves around them, whole star systems are erased from history and time is generally twisted into a pretzel or (dare I say it?) a "big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...stuff."

Though I can't remember my source which is... annoying.

However, type 2 and even type 1 should be fairly desperate measures on their part. The Time Lords are very committed to what they call "the Web of Time," the orderly flow of casuality where action A leads directly to consequence B. They invest much time and resources, and consider it their great cultural mission, to maintain the Web. They are highly committed to the idea that there is a single "correct" timeline which Must Be Preserved.

Maybe that's the only way a society of time-travelers could exist.

In any case, they've shown they can change over from carefully preserving the timeline to fucking with it, but it had better be damn important. Or part of the machinations of Gallifrey's ridiculously corrupt high political echelons, but those should obviously be an exception not reflecting the intentions of the Time Lords at large.

[Parallax]

My understanding is that The Enemy ended up being a future version of Faction Paradox.

[ThomasP]

Considering all the crazy-ass crap the Time Lords could do, they'd probably just go back to five minutes after the Big Bang and shoot the Xeelee then. End of problem, since AFAIK the Xeelee couldn't time travel anywhere near that far back to stop them. When the humans were cleaning them out of the Milky Way, they only ever went something like a few years, maybe centuries at the outside, in either direction- again, AFAIK and IIRC.

Several of the stories and novels make it explicit that the Xeelee were effectively born with the Big Bang, existing as far back as the primordial quark-gluon plasma and strongly implying that they were responsible for cosmic inflation through technological means. They exist in their current form as a combination of three different states of matter, dating back to those early epochs.

The range of the anti-Xeelee's "sugar lumps" (the devices sent back in time through closed time-like curves and used to bootstrap their civilization) was never outright stated, unfortunately. What kind of capability they could field in the eras before baryonic matter formed is anybody's guess.

Possibly relevant to tactical capabilities: while Exultant stated the Xeelee did use FTL jumps to send useful information into the past, the humans were capable of at least putting up a fight with the same methods. When the humans deployed a "gravastar shield" to throw a wrench into causality and block FTL fore-knowledge, they were able to pierce Xeelee defenses that had held off the entire species for a good 10,000 years. This is the best indication that the Xeelee could at least be spoofed by tactical applications of "causal shielding".

Or it may be that they got briefly tired of the humans and ceded the battle, given they came back some 300,000 years later and sealed every star in the galaxy in a Dyson shell.

[mr friendly guy]

My understanding is that The Enemy ended up being a future version of Faction Paradox.

That in a way makes sense given the clues. However it would suck soooo bad because its Miles wanking on his creation.

[hongi]

'Realistically', would they come into conflict in the first place as opposed to a live/let live mentality?

[Ahriman238]

'Realistically', would they come into conflict in the first place as opposed to a live/let live mentality?

Sure, that's the easy part. Remember the Time Lords are all about preserving causality. The Xeelee send themselves tactical information from the future all the time, even if it is a sort of closed time-loop. They wouldn't exist, except they esxisted to send back a party to create themselves.

So the Time Lords issue grand proclamations and send a single envoy in a TARDIS with a cease-and-desist order. The Xeelee promptly laugh in his face, they're engaged in a desperate war for the survival of the entire universe, they're not going to pander to another race's sensibilities. So the TL decide to force the issue, which will also create a great distraction from their own political corruption at home.

Alternatively, the Time Lords could simply decide that the existence of the Xeelee is a temporal aberration that needs to be fixed.

[NecronLord]

'Realistically', would they come into conflict in the first place as opposed to a live/let live mentality?

Sure, that's the easy part. Remember the Time Lords are all about preserving causality. The Xeelee send themselves tactical information from the future all the time, even if it is a sort of closed time-loop. They wouldn't exist, except they esxisted to send back a party to create themselves.

So the Time Lords issue grand proclamations and send a single envoy in a TARDIS with a cease-and-desist order. The Xeelee promptly laugh in his face, they're engaged in a desperate war for the survival of the entire universe, they're not going to pander to another race's sensibilities. So the TL decide to force the issue, which will also create a great distraction from their own political corruption at home.

Alternatively, the Time Lords could simply decide that the existence of the Xeelee is a temporal aberration that needs to be fixed.

Closed timelike curves are permitted in the laws of time. The Time Lords do it themselves, from time to time. It's when you go about trying to change history or create paradox that they care.

[andrewgpaul]

Several of the stories and novels make it explicit that the Xeelee were effectively born with the Big Bang, existing as far back as the primordial quark-gluon plasma and strongly implying that they were responsible for cosmic inflation through technological means. They exist in their current form as a combination of three different states of matter, dating back to those early epochs.

The range of the anti-Xeelee's "sugar lumps" (the devices sent back in time through closed time-like curves and used to bootstrap their civilization) was never outright stated, unfortunately. What kind of capability they could field in the eras before baryonic matter formed is anybody's guess.

Possibly relevant to tactical capabilities: while Exultant stated the Xeelee did use FTL jumps to send useful information into the past, the humans were capable of at least putting up a fight with the same methods. When the humans deployed a "gravastar shield" to throw a wrench into causality and block FTL fore-knowledge, they were able to pierce Xeelee defenses that had held off the entire species for a good 10,000 years. This is the best indication that the Xeelee could at least be spoofed by tactical applications of "causal shielding".

Or it may be that they got briefly tired of the humans and ceded the battle, given they came back some 300,000 years later and sealed every star in the galaxy in a Dyson shell.

There were several civilisations which rose and fell before the Xeelee evolved. They were still in existence within a fraction of a second of the Big Bang, IIRC. this timeline suggests that it took 200,000,000 years or so for them to encounter the Photino Birds, and the sugar cubes only began influencing their own development at this point.

[avatarxprime]

The Birds were also able to fling about galaxies as weapons. The Time Lords hold no such numerical superiority and have not displayed that kind of brute power as far as I know. Even the Last Great Time War is described simply as eliminating planets and species in seconds. If we take that at the extreme of obliterating star systems at a go with their weapons, that sill doesn't equal fragging an entire galaxy.

Actually, in 'The Etra Prime Incident' (AKA The Apocalypse Element) an audio-play cited by RTD as one of the first engagements of the Time War, the Time Lords accellerate time over an entire galaxy, to stop a dalek weapon from spreading across the entire universe and wiping everything out. This is peacetime, it's a fair bet that more-militant Time Lords can do worse.

In an Eigth Doctor novel, Time Lord war weapons are described in one future war as:

‘It’s an insult,’ Homunculette babbled. ‘The weapons of the High Council are legendary. We’ve made defensive arrays the size of star systems, we’ve taken apart whole galaxies...’

They can certainly operate on that kind of scale, when they want to.

So the radio dramas, books and other stuff count as canon too? I've been operating under the assumption that if it's not on the television it doesn't count. That expands the list of feats by the Time Lords quite a bit then, and the "taken apart whole galaxies" would seem to indicate brute force and not "timey whimey" manipulation so that covers just about everything I could put up to give the Xeelee an advantage in real space.

Oh, and as to the Xeelee bootstrapping themselves against the Time Lords, won't that only be allowed if the Time Lords themselves decide to allow it? Without Time Lord intervention any kind of paradox generating time travel results in the Reapers coming out and "sterilizing the wound." That would certainly not be a pleasant experience for the Xeelee.

One generally assumes that both parties' stuff works as normal. However, I don't think even a Closed Timelike Curve will help the Xeelee if they're just going to get blasted with the Final Sanction from some hidden fortress.

I know, but don't we also assume that dangers inherent to something in one universe then persist? It's not like in SW vs WH40K we say that a SW ship going through the Warp is immune to any of the bad stuff that tends to happen in there. I was doing something similar with the Reapers, which are supposed to be a natural consequence of messing with the timeline that were kept in check by the Time Lords. If the Xeelee don't get that Time Lord beneficence and have to run time travel as it normally functions in Who-verse then they can easily run afoul of Reapers, at least I think this is the way it would work.

[NecronLord]

So the radio dramas, books and other stuff count as canon too? I've been operating under the assumption that if it's not on the television it doesn't count. That expands the list of feats by the Time Lords quite a bit then, and the "taken apart whole galaxies" would seem to indicate brute force and not "timey whimey" manipulation so that covers just about everything I could put up to give the Xeelee an advantage in real space.

Doctor Who has no official canon policy (when asked about it, one BBC official back in the day said it was 'whatever you want it to include') though there are occasional references to the expanded universe in the TV series (for instance in The Pandorica Opens, some aliens from the books are mentioned as in the fleet over Stonehenge) on rare occasions. Personally I consider the more reliable sources to be those broadcast by the BBC (TV show>Radio 7 broadcasts) followed by everything else.

I know, but don't we also assume that dangers inherent to something in one universe then persist? It's not like in SW vs WH40K we say that a SW ship going through the Warp is immune to any of the bad stuff that tends to happen in there. I was doing something similar with the Reapers, which are supposed to be a natural consequence of messing with the timeline that were kept in check by the Time Lords. If the Xeelee don't get that Time Lord beneficence and have to run time travel as it normally functions in Who-verse then they can easily run afoul of Reapers, at least I think this is the way it would work.

I would imagine the Xeelee setting handles paradoxes differently.

[Parallax]

For Doctor Who canon, I follow more or less the same idea as Star Wars canon;

Everything in books/games/comics/audios/whatever counts until it is contradicted by the TV series.

[mr friendly guy]

I generally go with the order of canon from highest to lowest

1. the show (duh) - ie classic and NuWho, Torchwood, Sarah Jane adventures etc.

2. Sourcebooks on the show - eg Doctor Who : Aliens and Enemies, Doctor Who : Creatures and Demons, Doctor Who : Monsters and villains, Doctor Who : Starships and spacestations plus the annuals.

3. Other audio, novels, comics referenced by the show or the sourcebooks. For example the apocalypse element is referenced in one of the annuals (not by name, but its pretty obvious its refering to the events in that audio).

4. Other audios, novels, comics etc not referenced by the show or sourcebooks - ie most of them especially the companion spin offs.

5. Faction Paradox stuff which diverges from the time line in the novels - which I consider a separate continuity. In fact lets just confine where they diverge into apocrypha.

6. Blatant apocrypha - ie Dimensions in Time, Death comes to time (snigger snigger). Of course I consider it apocrypha if its blatantly contradicts or hard to reconcile into continuity using a reasonable mindset (ie we don't automatically assume they must fit in continuity and have convulated explanations / act like an apologist for why it is).

[ChosenOne54]

Are the DW novels any good? Just a general question.

[Parallax]

Are the DW novels any good? Just a general question.

They vary right across the spectrum from unbelievably-mind-meltingly-stupid (The Ancestor Cell) to hey-that-was-really-kind-of-cool (The Gallifrey Chronicles).