User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20170121220436/@comment-28349479-20170123160208

Amorkuz wrote: If TARDISes are used exclusively by Time Lords (which is not strictly speaking true: I've seen Veraxils using a TARDIS; it would be better to say that TARDISes are built exclusively by Time Lords), it does not imply that Time Lords exclusively use TARDISes. I freely admit to my mistake there; it wasn't my intention to say anything otherwise. There are plenty of instances in Faction Paradox where a character or group of characters steals a timeship built by the Great Houses; in fact, every instance in Faction Paradox where someone uses a craft called a timeship, they're either a member of the Great Houses themselves, or they stole/borrowed it from one!

The appeal to Time Lord as containing complete information about all timeships used by Time Lords is completely unfounded. It is very dangerous to conclude that something does not exist just because it has not yet been added to this Wiki. In this particular case, I can actually point out a whole lot of transportation devices used by Time Lords but not present in that 2-paragraph section. Fair enough. However, I don't believe that any of these ever hit the ubiquitousness of TARDISes. The Book of the War defines the Faction Paradox series' use of the word "timeship" very specifically as the Great Houses' traveling device that I described above (bigger on the inside; alive; multiple generations, of which 102 is Compassion and 103 is humanoid, while older generations are known to travel as, eg, a blue police box). The whole discussion about "non-Great-Houses" timeships in the Faction Paradox series is wholly hypothetical; within the FP books and audios, at least, "timeship" is always synonymous with "TARDIS", and when other races use what we would call "timeships", they're either named differently (eg the Osirians' "barges") or stolen/borrowed from the Great Houses (eg Justine McManus' use of Thoth's timeship).

To address why I exclude Alien Bodies from my "definition of FP", it simply isn't part of Faction Paradox (series). It's marketed and branded solely as a BBC Eighth Doctor Adventure; I exclude it for the same reason School Reunion (TV story) isn't part of a the Sarah Jane Adventures.

When we switch from timeships used by the race of Time Lords to timeships used by specific Time Lord renegades, such as the Master, the situation becomes even murkier. ... Thus, the line of reasoning that a Time Lord traveling in a timeship must necessarily be travelling in a TARDIS is again a logical fallacy, even if we know who this Time Lord is and that he/she had a TARDIS at some point. To clarify, the specific things I'm referring to are situations where Alien Bodies says, "Lord Ruthventracolixabaxil died in his TARDIS", and The Book of the War says, "Lord Ruthventracolixabaxil died in his timeship." When Thoth uses an Osirian barge, it isn't called his "timeship"; it stays a barge, to differentiate it from the Great Houses' TARDISes.

In effect, what we will be doing in the near future, I expect, is establishing this very baseline. And, being an admin on the other end, you will probably be the expert responsible for this baseline. Unfortunately, this process is likely to take time as more and more editors will be faced with FP-type material and will search guidance as to the established baseline and these editors need to trust you and to respect your authority on the matter. ... To trust your expertise, personally I would need to know just two things: that you know the FP part of DWU and the policies of this Wiki, but also, very importantly, that you do not withdraw information about FP to make the transition smoother. I've read all the policies of this wiki before, and I'm now reading them again (in light of my misinterpretation of the word "policy" in T:BOUND). I fully intend to never remove or withdraw any FP information from this wiki (excepting errors of absence, where I'm just not around to see the discussion, eg the last thread). I recognize what you're saying about baselines, and I fully respect it. I look forward to helping establish a manageable baseline with all of you.