Reveal the truth about Artoo's secret Skaro connection, and prove that you own the owner's manual for the droid, by getting the T-shirt today only. [TeeFury]

Dr.Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators


You may have read about Dr.Grordbort's amazing artillery here before, or perhaps you even had the pleasure of seeing them at Comic-Con. These ray-guns are the careful craftsmanship of WETA designer Greg Broadmore, who has created an entire world for his work to reside in, publishing Dr. Grordborts Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory. Broadmore is also responsible for all of the cool alien contraband tech in District 9. Take a gander at this WETA Informercial for his Infallible Aether Oscillators:

Steampunk TARDIS Console

Livejournal user Douglas442 is working on a project we wish we'd thought of first; a Steampunk TARDIS console. We assume he's building it using a only a sonic screwdriver. Douglas has posted a 3D rendering of the eventual finished project, pictured here. Wouldn't Matt Smith look dandy in his bow tie and tweed at this gleaming console? Assuming, of course, that his Doctor is a bit more competent at flying through time and space than some of his predecessors....

Steampunk Dalek
Because we can't get really mention the Doctor without making some mention of the deadly dustbins, here is an amazing little project from Who fan Alex Holden, the base of which is apparently a Dalek Bubble Bath bottle. (And yes, Cyberman Bubble Bath is also available.)

Chronotheric Fluxing Capacitron

It's what makes time travel possible. The inventor (the elusive Absinthetic) explains his revolutionary time-traveling device:

I set forth in a series of experiments, attempting to capture that energy and use it towards my research on creating tears in the fabric of time. Though I cannot divulge the exact method, I will grant you the final product: lightning in a bottle! With this incredible success, after much trial and error of course (and three dead cats), I had the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to power the Chronotheric Fluxing Capacitron and send myself back (and forward!) through the time-aether. A rotating "time dial" allows me to set the exact date and time I wish to arrive in (to the nearest hour)

A photo gallery of the CFC can be found here. His Wonderland Expedition Kit is also well worth a look, and was a runner-up for this list.

The Electriclerk
Bringing the dystopian deskware of Brazil to life, our next entry is the incredible Electriclerk . According to the Make: blog, The ElectriClerk is a functional 1988 MacSE with a 1923 Underwood typewriter base, which craftsman and creator Andrew Leman says was "built for a game of Cthulhu Lives! that has yet to be played." Leman is a multi-talent prop maker and designer, and we shudder to think what awesomeness could ensue if he and WETA's Broadmore ever collaborated.


Steampunk Telectroscope
Based on the infamous Victorian hoax, the Telectroscope is ostensibly a transatlantic tunnel, allowing viewers in London to peer through a giant 'telescope' and see viewers in New York, and vice versa. The web-cam installation appeared in both cities last year courtesy of artist Paul St. George and the Artichoke Trust, whose mechanical innovations and gigantic inventions are the next two entries on our list.


The Sultan's Elephant
The brainchild of the Artichoke Trust and theater company Royal de Luxe,The Sultan's Elephant is both dazzling performance art and a masterpiece of steampunk conceptual design. The first performance took place in Nantes, France for the Jules Verne Centennial, and involved a massive mechanical elephant, a time-traveling little girl and her rocketship. The show was performed in London in 2006 to much fanfare. If you haven't already seen it, check out this video of the Elephant in London:

Machines of the Isle of Nantes
Artichoke and Royal de Luxe set up shop in a vast shipyard and warehouse in Verne's hometown of Nantes to construct the Sultan's Elephant and other fantastical mechanical contraptions for our enjoyment. Along the way the Machines de l'île factory became a tourist attraction in itself, and in 2007 became a permanent exhibit hall and museum for the Royal de Luxe crew. The museum is home to, among other oddities, a full-scale replica of the Sultan's Elephant and a replica of the giant mechanical spider known as La Princesse. The crew is currently working on a giant merry-go-round of undersea creatures (including a giant squid!) which will debut in Spring 2010 - book tickets now!


The Swimming Cities
The Swimming Cities are something out of Terry Gilliam's daydreams, part Mad Max fantasy and partWaterworld reality. The first iteration, Swimming Cities of The Switchback Sea, is a collaborative project by notable artists and eccentrics such as Swoon, Chicken John, and Kinetic Steam Works crew. A flotilla of seven sister raft-cities, hand-crafted and cobbled together with everything including the kitchen sink, they voyaged down the Hudson River river last year and put on various multi-media performances from there decks. This year, the gang reunited and built three vessels christened The Swimming Cities of Serenissima, and sailed the rafts across the Adriatic sea to crash the Venice Biennale. We eagerly await the next installation by these merry mischief makers.



We couldn't complete this list without mentioning the Treehouse, could we? Brought to you by the fine purveyors of steam-powered wonder, Kinetic Steam Works, the Treehouse emerged as a installation for Burning Man 2007 and has since become something of a Steampunk celebrity. The 30' tall Treehouse has been traveling, and most recently showed up at Coachella. Members of KSW are currently in Nevada, assembling the Raygun Gothic Rocket in Black Rock City.

Now, we know that this list is going to upset more than a few of you (Especially if you disliked the three Star Wars prequels), but we're not ranking these killer robots in order of awesome - Because then you would have seen IG-88 and KARR, amongst others - nor even in order of evil, but literally in terms of estimated kill-rate. Which robot has killed the most living things? That's all we're interested in.

So, get started with the countdown, and feel free to dispute our choices in the comments. Just don't send a robot after us, to change our minds.

Who else have we missed? Tell all here.

Next: See who didn't make the list.

Next: Science Fiction's Most Killhappy Robots!

Next: Planet-Eating Robots!

Next: Genocidal Robots With A Plan!

Next: Ineffectual-But-Deadly Droids!

Next: Time-Traveling Murder Machines!

Next: Eco-Friendly Killbots!

Next: Mutant-Hunting Robots!

Next: The Self-repairing Murderbot!

Next: Robot Warriors!

((Pictures removed. Sorry!))

Okay... not quite Dalek material, I guess. But I could see people dressing up as Tritovore for Halloween, partly because they're just Dharma Initiative members with fly heads. And with any luck, we'll be seeing all-Tritovore dance squads soon. We can hope!

In "Planet Of The Dead," the Doctor and a charming thief named Christina get on a London bus, which gets whisked off to an alien world, where presumably mayhem ensues.

[Doctor Who on LJ and DWDaily_Ru and Who Daily]

They are disgusting and will last long in the memory... Everyone remembers the Daleks and the Cyberman, but not a lot else if they're honest. The Tritovore will change that. Scriptwriters are confident they'll make a huge impact.

And the Tritovore may come back in future episodes as well. I have to say, if you want to create a menace we'll be naming for years to come, including the word "Trite" in their name probably isn't the best move. [Digital Spy]

In 1962, the head of BBC serial dramas requested a study on whether "SF" could be adapted for television. The answer? Not really. "People aren't all that mad about SF," the first report observes, "but it is compulsive." And most SF was American, leaving the BBC with only the "modest writer" Arthur C. Clarke and the "clumsy and old-fashioned" C.S. Lewis to adapt. (in another jab at C.S. Lewis, he is labeled "boring and platitudinous" – perhaps they're lucky he passed away the day before "An Unearthly Child" aired, and couldn't complain that the TARDIS stole his "bigger on the inside" shtick).

Television SF, they conclude, "must not be written by SF writers." Most SF of the day consisted of "the imaginative short story with philosophic overtones" – fine on paper, but no good for television. One wonders if they'd ever heard of a little thing from across the pond called The Twilight Zone.

But the Beeb prevailed! And a follow-up memo concluded three basic rules for a proper SF serial, which boil down to:

1. No Bug-Eyed Monsters
2. No Tin Robots
3. No elaborate SF settings (ie, the interior of a spaceship or the surface of a planet)

The Daleks, the Cybermen, the TARDIS console, and several Welsh quarries all hang their heads in shame.

Once they'd established the ground rules, the BBC's best and brightest were still stuck on a premise – and their solution sounds suspiciously similar to Torchwood. "Partners in a firm of scientific consultants!" announces the new series' concept notes, hoping that bold-face type will make a consulting firm sound exciting. Cecil Webber, writing the pitch, wanted our heroes to be called "The Troubleshooters." A young man, a young woman, a child, and "a maturer man with a character twist" (Ian, Barbara, Susan, and the Doctor?) would solve off-beat scientific mysteries, with some freelance adventuring on the side. So, basically, Torchwood. Except the same document also states that "SF is deliberately unsexual." Torchwood, minus the sex. Sounds awesome.

The next document, "Background Notes for Dr. Who," brings us a little closer to the show we know, as the "maturer man with a twist" becomes "a frail old man lost in time and space." This draft intended the mystery of Dr. Who (it's really hard to type "Dr. Who" and not "the Doctor," by the way!) to get re-set with each story, remaining inscrutable to the other characters. Dr. Who is a bit of a luddite, who hates scientific progress. He wants to find "an ideal past," and then "destroy or nullify the future." Head of Drama Sydney Newman penciled in a rejection of this idea – not because it sucks, but because he didn't want Dr. Who to be a reactionary.

Webber finishes up the document by offering several theories about Dr. Who's true identity:

"Was it by means of Dr. Who's machine that Aladin's palace sailed through the air? Was Merlin Dr. Who? Was Cinderella's Godmother Dr. Who's wife chasing him through time? Jacob Marley was Dr. Who slightly tipsy, but what other tricks did he get up to that Yuletide?"

Well, he was proven right on the Merlin count, but I'm not so sure about the rest…

[BBC]

As part of a retrospective look at the creation of BSG's Cylons, original designer Andrew Probert revealed the hidden Dalek-eque origin that we were all spared:

Originally the Galactica motion picture (for overseas distribution) was filmed with dialog explaining that the Cylons were creatures. They were blind and created helmet scanners to see. That explains the helmets... The living Cylons were changed to robots for the TV series because of an hourly body-count limitation for prime-time television. There was, however, no limit to how many robots could be ‘killed’ per hour so they became robots and dialog was revised to explain it all.

It's not often you'll hear us saying this, but thank the Gods for network TV standards and practices. It's not that we're against the idea of Daleks with legs per se, but if the Cylons had been armor-wearing aliens in the original show, it's unlikely that we would've gotten the various twists, turns and headfraks provided by the sleeper agents in Ron Moore's reinvention of the show.

the true history of the cylons [Darth Mojo]

Digital Spy's Ben Rawson-Jones feels that we've not only seen too much of the Daleks, but we've also see them completely destroyed too many times:

Rose Tyler's absorption of the Tardis vortex allowed her to disintegrate every Dalek in existence (apparently), which was a sudden plot twist that tied in with the ongoing 'Bad Wolf' story arc. Fast forward a year later and the Daleks are out in force and dominating the Earth's skies. Rose Tyler pulls a lever and suddenly all the Daleks (except the Cult of Skaro) fly into the Void and out of reality. Job done.

Most recently in 'Journey's End', Donna Noble has to flick a few switches in the Crucible and, shock horror, the Daleks go doolally and blow up. All of them. In seconds. Again.

Just as importantly, he argues, even when the Daleks aren't being genocidally defeated, they still seem ineffectual:

[T]here's a danger of returning to the days when Daleks would scream "exterminate" several times until their intended victim was able to escape. This happened to both Wilf and Sarah Jane in the latest season finale, although one trigger-happy Dalek at least managed to strike The Doctor with a glancing shot. Still, even that didn't do much damage. Are they starting to fire blanks?

While the Daleks were never able to kill off any series regulars, he's kind of got a point; when was the last time that they managed to exterminate anyone of any real importance to a storyline? Maybe one of the first things Steven Moffat should do when he takes over is to create a couple of redshirts to create some sense of pathos when the evil pepperpots inevitably return. He could even call one Scott Hall.

Cult Spy: The Impotence of the Daleks [Digital Spy]