But In A Good Way
Bear with me, I'm making this up as I go along, even more so than usual. Okay, a video on Youtube caught my eye because of it's title: "Forbidden Planet; The Building Of The Great Krell Machine", which then proceeded to use clips from "Things To Come" as a stand-in, which is kind of cheating in an ingenious way. Art!
You know Conrad; any excuse to get a FP matte on display
Here an aside. Yes, already! TTC is an interesting look at how the Thirties thought the future would be, and is incredibly dated, especially the aircraft. The film was made before jet engines were a thing, so they're not to blame too much. Art!
Where were we? O yes. Conrad did a bit of Googling and came across a web forum not previously encountered, 'ALL SCI FI", which had a fantastically detailed set of expositions and schematics and diagrams about Professor Morbius' house, and how it linked up with the Krell passage to the laboratory. They really put a lot of thought into it, which is simultaneously impressive and sad. Allow me to pinch one of their schematics. Art!
The grey portion of this diagram is the entrance to the Krell laboratory. The house - it's never made clear who constructed it nor when it was built - must have been constructed on the site of a Krell structure external and linked to the tunnel, which had long since eroded and disintegrated away. There is an even more elaborate architectural plan showing the outlay of the house and how it abuts into the rock face. Art!
That kind of sets the scene.
So, Conrad conjectured, how did the Krell create their Great Machine? We can successfully discount any notion of them doing it themselves, because of their physiology. Art!
CAUTION! Do not cuddle
Perhaps a model would make the point better. Art!
No arms. Presumably they can balance on one foot and use the other as a substitute hand, or else how did they develop a civilisation without the ability to create and use tools? But miners they are not.
Now, let us jump tracks and abruptly switch to Morbius. Recall, if you will, that he had his intellect permanently boosted by a factor of three, yet he was still classed as a moron by comparison to the Krell. Still, he managed to 'tinker together' an artefact that leaves the crew of the C-57D with their jaws on the floors. I refer, of course - obviously! - to Robbie. Art!
Imagine the kind of robot that the far more intelligent Krell could create. They could put an enormous amount of time and effort into building it, because all they then need to do is instruct it to construct a duplicate of itself. These two would then build two more, either working together to halve construction time or solo. These four would then build another four, and so on. Say it takes 3 months to build the first Robby, and it takes him another three months to create a duplicate. After nine months you have four Robby's and at year's end you have eight. By the end of the second year of Robby production you have 128. By the end of year three you have 2,048 Robbys. Year four brings you 32,768. Year five ends with 524,288, and you stop at the end of year six because, with 8,388,608 Robbys, you're going to run out of room for them. Art!
Conrad suspects that construction of the fusion reactor complex will have been done entirely by Robbys, because it's so dangerous and risky for squishy life-forms to be in close attendance to. Meanwhile the other seven million robots will be carrying out all the excavation and construction work in the eight thousand cubic miles of the Great Machine. This work will be supervised and guided by the Krell in person, working on a shift basis to allow them to eat, rest and sleep (being flesh-and-blood we will consider these a given), whilst the super-Robbys carry on working 24/7/12, only needing occasional pauses for maintenance and charging.
You might well wonder where 4 billion tons of excavated rock would go; we can assume that some of it will be vapourised and extracted from the rockface, whilst other spoil would be heaped up outside the surface site. Over the span of 200,000 years these will erode away into unimpressive hills and peaks. Art!
Of course, I could be over-thinking this ...
Feeling Flat?
One very interesting item I came across whilst looking for interesting facts about "Tora! Tora! Tora!" was the use of background props to simulate full-sized aircraft. Art!
This is a 'flat', used in the background to fool the audience into thinking that it's a real, three-dimensional B-17 bomber. If it were parked up in the middle distance you'd never know the difference. Er - this may mean I need to go back and see if I can spot them. Sorry about that. Art!
I'll let you know.
"The Sea Of Sand"
We're going to jump narratives here, from the Libyan desert to Wasteworld, so hand on to your hat.
‘Abandon the
depot?’ said Dominione, not entirely in agreement once he understood what the
other officer wanted.
‘We barely
held off that last attack. The bio-vores
know where we are, now, and how many of us there are. We have only seven people, three of whom are
civlians unfamiliar with firearms. The
A13 can’t be moved around.’
Sarah caught
Albert looking sideways at Roger. The young
graduate seemed about to speak, then changed his mind.
Albert had
intended to point out that the defenders still had the giant-flamethrower, and
over a hundred Amaretto spirit bombs, and – most tellingly – an aircraft.
Twenty Six: Pushed Over the Edge
From his viewpoint, his hands strung together behind
the pillar by cuttingly thin strands of glass wire, the Doctor saw an enormous
metal oval appear at the edge of the execution basin, moving jerkily. In fact he was the only witness, since the
audience of bio-vores were clustered along the lower tiers of the amphitheatre,
all intently looking at him.
‘Oh,
get on with it, you pompous windbag!’ he shouted at Url, who ignored the
interruption and carried on with the sentence.
Fascinated, the Doctor recognised the metal oval as an Element Sieve, big as a house, being pushed over the rim of the artificial basin. The bio-vores who would normally be towing it were now pushing it. And it would come racing down right at him.
O dearie me, things not looking good for our favourite Time Lord!
The Haul
I trotted into Lesser Sodom yesteryon, as the market was on, and I got a big punnet of golden cherry tomatoes for Wonder Wifey, since those slackers at Morrisons didn't have any. I also got uncooked beetroot for my Borscht recipe, and - tah dah! - a long turnip, which is used as a substitute for daikon in the Kim Chee I brewed up yesteryon. And these - Art!
Yes, five packets of sugar-free sweets <cackles and twirls moustache ends>.
Hmmmm Interesting
Your Humble Scribe is about halfway through "A Very Stable Genius", which is about the Trump administration's first two and half years in power. Art!
The overall impression of how the Trump administration functioned can be summed up in a single word: chaotically. It's also a fascinating insight into how the White House works; did you know that an incoming administration has to fill 4,000 positions? That takes a lot of work. The outgoing Obama administration offered to help show the Trumpers the routine and the ropes. Their response? (bearing in mind they had exactly 0% experience!) "Nah, we're good."
There was something on the BBC News website about Citizen Trump, can't think what it could possibly be ...
Finally -
A very wet day today, full of that fine drizzle that depresses the world. Thankfully our daily constitutional occurred when it had slackened off.
ANYWAY time to descend to the kitchen and get a shot of that Kim Chee happily fermenting in the cupboard, and then lunch.
Pip pip!
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