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After watching the first season of the new Doctor Who show I was thinking that the Daleks and the Mechanoids have a remarkably similar origin and life mission. Except that the Mechanoids only want to kill humanoids and the Daleks want to kill anything not Dalek. And then I was looking at the Doctor Who website for the original series and I found an episode in the first season that was actually called "The Mechanoids."

I hope that Kevin doesn't get into trouble with the BBC now. I just wanted to know if anybody else noticed it as well.

As long as Palladium has had The Mechanoids, I would think that there is no problem at all. The Mechanoids, as they are, have nothing really in common with the Daleks other than some generic stuff.

Lets compare...

Daleks want to kill anything that isn't them.
Mechanoids want to kill anything that even remotely resembles what they used to be.

Daleks were (and perhaps still are) easily stopped by stairs (I only know of one Dalek that wasn't stopped by stairs).
Mechanoids don't have that trouble (Thinmen and Runts), and they won't mind just leveling building said stairs are in.

Daleks can be outrun most of the time, by someone on foot...
Mechanoids can't be outrun on foot unless someone happens to be really, really fast.

Dalek rely on mass numbers of a Daleks when invading.
Mechaoids use one heck of a lot more, include combined arms tactics, air support, and they tend to 'have fun' with planetary populations before the tear the planet apart for resources, but can simply blast a planet surface to bits from orbit if they had to.

Daleks have lots of ships.
Mechanoids have lots and lots of big ships not to mention really big ships the size of planetoids.

Daleks go yelling "Exterminate! EXTERMINATE!!!!" and zap stuff at closer ranges from what I have seen.
Mechanoids can go for silent kills, or just blast stuff from thousands of feet away or more, or just drop/launch ordnance on the target and blast the area in general.

Last but not least, neither side has tried to sue the other into a smoking crater over this stuff in the last few decades (at least not that I know of), so there must not be anything legally conflicting between the two IPs.

I think Palladium is pretty much safe. The only reference to Mechanoids in Doctor Who is in the very first season of the b&w television show. They do not really resemble PB Mechanoids and their origin is completely different. They are a race of machines to outlived their creators and were essentially building machines. When encountering anything other than themselves they capture the creature keep it fed give it a place to sleep. Not a dangerous situation but a boring one.

Originally they were created to capitalize on the Daleks popularity but were never as popular. Though who knows they may make a reappearance in the new series.

Here is a link to a series of clips from the very first series. You will need Realplayer to make it work: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/ ... irst.shtml

Here is a link from Wikipedia listing all the Doctor Who robots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doctor_Who_robots

Besides, A mechanoid can telekinetically tip a Dalek over...
"Practical Jokes the Omniverse's Greatest Villians Play on Each Other."

You must not have seen the new series. All of the Daleks have the ability to fly. They have an anti-gravity system. Technically, they were always able to do that it's just that the BBC never had the budget to make that effect practical until the late 1980's.

I saw one part of an episode where there was this guy who had a "museum", and one thing he had was a Dalek that somehow became active again, and that was supposed to be the "last" of the Daleks, and it could do things the Doctor apparently didn't know about. I remember two people running up stairs, a gal mentioning that the Doctor said the Daleks couldn't get up stairs... and their surprise when it strated hovering up the stairs.

But since they gave the impression it was the "last" Dalek, and that I got the impression that it was was unique, I figured it was just a one of a kind Dalek since it went boom in the end.

I saw one thing about Daleks flying through space, but never thought anything about it at the time. (empty space and planets with gravity/atmospheres are two different things... I figured they they just "hot drop" to the planet and get picked up by the ships when they secure the ground...)

I guess I was wrong.

There was a Dalek which flew in "Revelation of the Daleks" (McCoy era) as well. Chased the Doctor up a flight of stairs and very nearly got him.

Ultimate irony was until that point it was assumed Daleks could not fly. Only toward the end of the original series did you see a Dalek fly. My favorite was when a Dalek was chasing 4th doctor(Tom Baker) he climbs up a shaft looks down and goes "If you are supposed to be the superior race in the universe why don't you come after me". For the longest time there was a running joke how do you escape from a Dalek? Fnd a set of stairs. Thank god the lastest series actually shows them flying.

Then I guess the new defense is stairs with to low of a ceiling for Daleks to fly up...
then they will have to learn to fly at an angle...

Then we can skip over to special doorways that are just simply not wide enough or high enough for a Dalek to fit through in the first place, with three sets of them that are offset so there is no clear line of sight from one side to the other... and made of tough stuff so the Dalek can't easily blast its way through.
Or fences/barricades over a doorway that a person can crawl through but a Dalek can't...
Or electrified wire packing enough juice to flash cook an elephant... just make sure someone turns off the juice before you go to crawl through...

I have thought about their new shields stoping assault rifle rounds...
I wonder how well the Daleks could handle a bigger, badder gun, like a naval CIWS style vulcan, preferably 20mm with tungsten core rounds. Stoping a dozen or so 4-5 gram rounds per second from different directions is one thing, but how about 133 separate 80-120 gram rounds per second in a small focused area? See what the threshold of those new shields are... and if much bigger, heavier (and hopefully higher melting point tungsten) will have a better chance of getting through...

If all else fails, get an old fashioned stone thrower (the ballista looking type) and chuck a several dozen pound chunk of rock or metal at them... see what that does.

I also wonder how a Dalek could handle a trap involving a snare and a trebuchet... can they fly well if they are sent tumbling through the air head over heel? Yeah, I can see a Dalek angrily screaming "EX-TERM-IN-ATE!" as they tumble through the air overhead before slamming into the side of a building... or a stone wall, or some other big and really hard object...

On a side note...
can they go very fast when "on" the ground?
It seems that anyone with a good set of legs (or a vehicle) could easily outrun them.
Can they move/fly faster than someone taking a brisk walk?

The new Cylons have this going for them as well.

He won't get in trouble. The BBC Mechanoids and his own are two entirely different things. The only common point they have is their name.

Would be great in a universe with both species and the resulting carnage.

Humans in the middle defeating them both?

Well yeah, the Mechanoids are for all intents and purposes identical to Daleks. After all, they're both formerly organic life forms who've now become an almost unstoppable interstellar empire of genocidal cyborgs intent on conquering the universe and eradicating inferior life (even if they do have slightly different standards about what counts as "inferior").

But this doesn't mean the Mechanoids from Palladium's games are a ripoff of the Daleks from the Doctor Who universe. Because what we're forgetting here (and what we forget when we accuse stuff of being a Star Wars ripoff, or a Terminator or Predator or Alien or RoboCop ripoff) is that SCI-FI IN TV AND ON FILM HAS NO ORIGINAL CONTENT AND NEVER HAS. None of the concepts in Doctor Who (or any other classic sci-fi shows and movies that we all know and love) was remotely original, and accusations of ripping ideas from Doctor Who are completely ludicrous, since the only original thing Doctor Who had was its own distinct visual style for some of the characters and monsters.

Interesting side note:
Mechanoids in Dr Who— The Chase.

Large, spherical robots originally created to serve humans. Mechanoids which had been sent to prepare the planet Mechanus for human colonization kept the astronaut Steven Taylor prisoner, since he did not have the Mechanoids' control codes. Daleks, following the TARDIS crew, engaged the Mechanoids in battle.
The Mechanoids also appear in the Big Finish audio drama The Juggernauts. In this story, Davros adds human nervous tissue to robotic Mechanoid shells to create the Juggernauts of the play's title.


See a full write up on the episode here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_%28Doctor_Who%29

They aren't the same thing. To say his mechanoids are Daleks renamed would be to say the Coalition is the Star Wars Empire renamed. Their are similarities but they aren't the same thing at all.

Truly though the idea of an unstobable horde of a force that comes out of no where and can't be reasoned with and destroys all in it's wake is as old as the Mongols. It's a staple of sci-fi and fatasy settings. Similar creatures include:

Tyranids and Necrons (Warhammer 40k)
Yuuzhan Vong (Star Wars EU)
Aliens (Aliens)
Forces of the Wyrm (Werewolf: The Apocalypse)
Zerg (Starcraft)
Replicators (Stargate SG-1)
Everything (HP Lovecraft literature)


I'm sure if you read more literature than I do, you can find parallel antagonists from many more sources. The Daleks and the Mechanoids do have a bit more in common with eachother than the other one's I've mentioned, but all are fundamentally the same thing: a plot device used to show what people can do in a near hopeless situation.

This being brought into mention, what if the people of the Mechanoids Universe displayed "disfunctional" mechanoids for "historical" purposes only to have them go active. Wouldn't that be an adventure.

About the only thing they'd leave site of the Mechanoids would be either mockups of the Mechanoids or hollow shells, same for the robots. They wouldn't leave a live Mechanoid, sleeping or no in a body. It's just too dangerous.

As for the whole thing. Really the idea of a species that is super intellegent, physiclly weak and has a mechanical/technological shell to make up for it isn't really a unique thing.

I'll admitt there are a good number of parallels, but really the Daleks are really lame. Wheeling around screaming "Exterminate!" isn't the signs of a super intellegent species. It's really more like an Uber evil villan. You know the kind that goes "Kill, Crush, Destroy!"

How about switch it around to "Crush, Kill and Destroy!"
Then it reminds me of a '"pre-apocolypse" killer robot from the PC game KKND, which sometimes says something like that when ordered to attack.

DALEKS are MECHANOIDS posers!

Someone trying to up their post count?

I think the Daleks fixed their lack of flight power when a local radio station dropped them out of a helicopter on Thanksgiving day...

"As God as my witness...I thought Daleks could fly..."

I like the new Daleks from last three Doctor Who series but they are still posers like the CYBERMEN are STAR TREK BORG posers even if they (the CYBERMEN) were out before TREK had the BORG.

Daleks and Mechanoids have some cosmetic similarities (Cybernetic bodies, frankenstein type origin, etc), and I can't see how the former would not one of the inspirations for the latter. However, the Mechanoids have differences in their emotional passion and all the psionic stuff they're into. Also in who they're supposed to be up against, aka, normal humans with guns. "We will destroy humanity", not an uncommon sentiment for a bad-guy race, and the details (Telekinetic cities, psychotic obsession) bring out the differences.

The Daleks are designed around being time-travelling hyper-tech bad-guys who are all powerful against anything less than members of millenia old time-travelling races. Daleks are partially defined by the hero needed against them. A Dalek's stats would read something like

'IQ 45, with all the foresight and perception that entails' with skills like Temporal Mechanics, Technological Dimensional Rift manipulation, Bio-engineering 98%...... Native language, 30%....I never understood how if Daleks were supposed to be so smart, why was their vocabulary so bad? Why did they primarily use one-syllable words, knowing one one two-syllable word (Doctor) and one four-syllable one?

Daleks were one of the first, and most interesting of the trans-time-space-scourges simply due to the measures needed if you wanted to stop them (all you needed was a Time Lord on your side to tell you what to do, anything less, and you're exterminated in one of those strange blasts that makes the entire TV screen turn white).

Luckily, Doctor Who has an IQ of 50, so he can outwit them and is the only one who knows where to find force fields strong enough to repel them and to give people the 'shoot at it's eye command' that seems so very common sense but just doesn't seem to help all that much. And even with The Doctor's help, they can still kill off a companion or two.

DamonS
IIRC, any sort of conversion of other people's IP's is a big no-no.
I think you're treading on very thin ice with your last post.

As for the Dalek's way of speaking, so what?
They are alien cyborgs hell bent on killing 'inferior lifeforms' IIRC, it's not like they need a Masters Degree in English Language to do that.

They probably perfect their speaking capabilities just enough so they can go around yelling "Ex-term-in-ate!" with feeling, and so they can at least communicate with others (maybe either to interrogate or intimitate or even just to talk as I think has happened before). Otherwise, they probably aren't much up for talking.

But then again all TIME LORDS or CIA agents tend to be high IQ (the CIA is not the spy agency I want to see if anyone knows the WHOVERSE?).

In canonical Dr. Who lore; only other Dalek weapons can hurt a Dalek, or some of the toys of Galefrae (the Time-Lords).
HOWEVER... certain LARGE scale weapons will hurt Dalek armour & shields. The above mentioned 16inch naval cannon, nukes, and VERY large rocks will incapacitate and / or destroy a Dalek physicaly. The Tom Baker Dr. Who managed to kill one by causing it to have a stroke, after enraging it to the point of madness.
Oh...and there is mention in the novels of Daleks having 'walkers' when needed.. 4- 6 legged platforms they slot into. None, of course, have ever been shown.

True on the weapons!

This discussion about Mechanoids/Daleks semblances make me remember certain Dr. Who double episode Army of Ghost/Doomsday where the Cybermen (one of the Dr.' s usual nemesis) meet the histerical homicides from the planet Skaro.
I think a encounter between Daleks and Mechanoids will be similar to that meeting:
-"Beware, Daleks, you' re declaring war upon the Mechanoids!".
-"This is not war, this is pest control!".
-"We are five million mechanoids, how many are you?".
-"Four".
-"You are going to fight the Mechanoids with four Daleks?".
-"No, we can annihilate Mechanoids with one Dalek!. Cut the communications barrier!".

Yes.
That was a great show of the Cybermen vs Daleks .

That's putting it mildly, what with the way Cybermen have been trying to assimilate everyone ever since 1966, the year that Star Trek itself started

True .

Hmm...Mechanoids Homeworld has a race called Cybormen. Of course, the map of Gideon has Lucas Bay and Spielberg Mountains on the map so the early works of Kevin certainly have a firm stamp of the media that inspired him.

There is no doubt there is a strong relation between the Daleks and the Mechanoids, but you have to understand that ALL artistic expression is inspired by what excited the authors. Take a look at old Flash Gordon and the Lensmen novels and go see the original Star Wars for some comparisons...then listen to Holst's The Planets.

There's nothing new under the sun. Creativity is how your reinterpret your inspirations and make them into something fresh.

don't insult the Daleks

if you attenuated the strnghth of them a million times and then cast away there power to warp space and time perhaps

I be rollin'...
They be hatin'...
I know in my heart I be EX-TER-MIN-ATE!

Cool

My take:

Are the Mechanoids(r) really Daleks renamed? Yeah, pretty much.
Is this a bad thing? Not in the least.

They both push the "Oh crap! An implacable cybernetic foe impervious to conventional weaponry runrunrun!" button.

To bad someone has not written up the Whoverse yet .

Besides, the Dr. Who Mechonoids are named differently than the Palladium Mechanoids. No infringement.

Good point.
I am sur in some netbook the Time Lords and the rest of the Whoverse are written up .

Uhm... what? I suppose I should clarify that I'm speaking thematically.

Impervious to conventional weaponry? Check.
Deformed mass of tissue piloting/wearing/living in a well-armed cyber body? Check.
Reputation as a scourge across galaxies? Check.
Kill everyone who isn't them? Not quite. Daleks kill everyone who isn't a Dalek. Mechanoids(r) kill everyone who's humanoid.

I'm sure there are many, many differences that people will (and already have) pointed out, but IMO, it's a thematic thing. And I reiterate: It ain't a bad thing.

I've seen them! I know they exist out there!

Yep .
Rifts Torchwood ?

Their equal over on Doctor Who would be either the Daleks or the Cybermen. Both are a mix of machines and what is left of their once humanoid people.

Cybermen I would go with .

The Celestial Intervention Agency is a group of renegade time-lords dedicated to intervening when they deem necessary. In Genesis of the Daleks, they give the Doctor a Time-Ring and orders to stop the birth of the Daleks. After he fails, most of them are arrested and imprisoned (Shada?) by the Council of Gallifrey.

Yep. They can be a real pain sometimes. The CIA that is. Talking about the Tinme traveling ones.

You say that as if the Daleks were an original concept in the first place

It's pretty clear that the Mechanoids were inspired by the Daleks.

They don't necessarily infringe, but you can't deny the similarity.

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