Time Lord - Technology

Technology

The greatest example of Time Lord technology is the Eye of Harmony, a repurposed black hole singularity contained within the instrumentality below the Panopticon. This is the source of their power and the anchor of the Web of Time itself, created by Rassilon and the co-founders of Time Lord society in the distant past.

Paradoxically, although the Time Lords are a scientifically and technologically advanced race, the civilisation is so old that key pieces of their technology have become shrouded in legend and myth. In the spin-off fiction, an edict and general aversion against exploring Gallifrey's past also contributes to this. Accordingly, until the Master rediscovers it, the Time Lords forgot that the location of the Eye of Harmony is beneath their capital. They also treated such ceremonial symbols as the Key and Sash of Rassilon as mere historical curiosities, being unaware of their true function.

The great defence system of Gallifrey is a quantum forcefield known as the Transduction Barrier, a perfect defence shield preventing all matter and energy, even TARDISes, from passing through without authorisation. The Time Lords are further protected by phasing the entire region around Gallifrey into a temporal domain known as Inner Time, effectively separating the homeworld from interaction with the rest of the Universe.

TARDISes are characterised not just by their ability to travel in time, but also their dimensionally transcendent nature. A TARDIS's interior spaces exist in a different dimension from its exterior, allowing it to appear to be bigger on the inside. The Doctor states that transdimensional engineering was a key Time Lord discovery in "The Robots of Death". In the revived series, the TARDIS has an organic look, and the Doctor states in "The Impossible Planet" that TARDISes are grown, not made.

Fitting their generally defensive nature, Time Lord weapons technology is rarely seen, other than the staser hand weapons used by the Guard within the Capitol. Stasers (possibly a portmanteau of stunner and laser, as they are used to stun targets) can be lethal energy weapons, specifically designed to prevent the unwanted regeneration of rogue Time Lords; staser beams also shatter the crystalline structure of non-organic targets.

Standard TARDISes do not generally seem to use any on-board weaponry, although War or Battle TARDISes (armed with "time torpedoes" that freeze their target in time) have appeared in the spin-off media. In the novels, the Eighth Doctor's companion Compassion, a living TARDIS, has enough firepower to annihilate other TARDISes. In the serial "Castrovalva" the Master's TARDIS is equipped with an energy field that he uses to temporarily disable or stun several human security guards outside the vessel, although it is unclear whether this is an original feature of the craft or a custom feature fitted by the renegade Time Lord.

One exception to the Time Lords' defensive weaponry is the de-mat gun (or dematerialisation gun). The de-mat gun is a weapon of mass destruction that removes its target from space-time altogether, as seen in "The Invasion of Time". The de-mat gun was created in Rassilon's time and is a closely guarded secret; the knowledge to create one is kept in the Matrix and is available only to the President. To make sure this knowledge is not abused, the only way to arm a de-mat gun is by means of the Great Key of Rassilon, whose location is only known to the Chancellor. As a means of extreme sanction, the Time Lords have also been known to place whole planets into time-loops, isolating them from the universe in one repeating moment of time as well as hurling planets from one galaxy to another using a weapon referred only as a magnetron in the episodes "Trial of a Time Lord" and "Journey's End".

In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel "The Ancestor Cell" by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole, the Time Lords are shown to house other weapons of mass destruction in a stable time eddy known as the Slaughterhouse. In the Doctor Who Annual 2006, a section by Russell T Davies says that during the Time War, the Time Lords used Bowships (used against the Great Vampires in an ancient war), Black Hole Carriers and N-Forms (war machines first mentioned in the Virgin New Adventures novel "Damaged Goods", written by Davies).

In "The End of Time", the Lord President is shown wearing a gauntlet with several powers, primarily the ability to disintegrate a target and the ability to reverse/revert changes made to the human race by the Master. Physically this resembles the Resurrection Gauntlet from Torchwood and Davros' gauntlet from the Series 4 finale, but this may be coincidental.