Enmity with an Object: Rohan at one point explicitly compares plans to destroy the resident Microbot Swarm to Xerxes whipping the ocean.On human side, this is very much averted as a survivor of the experience must be taught even the most basic things from scratch with the implication he'll never be the same person again and possibly never entirely come back to his mental faculties. The microbots use their electromagnetic fields as a defense against anything with a central nervous system by completely blanking its memory. Desolation Shot: The Condor, once it's found, looks like "it's been attacked by a horde of mad monkeys", with tools, book and personal belongings laying all over the ship and surrounding area.and don't shield from electromagnetic radiation. A plot-important flaw is that they cannot be shaped arbitrarily. Come in all sizes: from kilometer-wide starship shield, to man-portable variants. Deflector Shields: Of disintegrator variety, employed by both humans and "the clouds", for various purposes and to various degrees of success.The fact that equally powerful Condor had met its end on Regis III is not lost to the crew. Cool Starship: The Invincible is capable of interstellar travel, generating protective forcefields able to withstand a close nuclear detonation, and can return it in kind.The opening scene, pretty much the Establishing Shot, speaks of "southern quadrant of the constellation". Artistic License – Space: Turns out even Stanisław Lem is not immune to the constellation-as-location issue.When the captain points that out, it's explained that the methane here has different chemical bond energy, making it much less reactive. Artistic License – Chemistry: The atmosphere of Regis III contains significant quantities of oxygen and methane, which normally would make it an immense bomb just waiting to go off.However, protagonists speculate that living machines of Regis III might have descended from some kind of autonomous robots crewing a crashed Lyran colony ship. Absent Aliens: Justified: the only other known alien civilization - the Lyrans - have been destroyed millenia ago when their home star went supernova.Which leads to one last solitary venture into the desert. Nothing but make sure every man - alive or dead - is accounted for. As attempts to learn more about the phenomenon or destroy it cause increasing damage and loss of life, the protagonists have to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing really left for them to do on Regis III. During exploration, they also stumble upon the the Condor's unsettling remains and eventually learn its sad fate, losing several of their own crewmembers in the process. The Invincible's crew discovers strange metallic ruins on the surface of the planet, which don't look like anything in particular either machines or buildings. The Condor vanished after landing on the desert planet of Regis III, sending a single distress signal mere hours after arrival. The Invincible continued to move at close to the speed of light: inert, mute, and seemingly deserted."The Invincible" (Niezwyciężony) is a novel by Stanisław Lem describing the mission by the eponymous spaceship to find out what happened to its sister vessel, the Condor. There was no longer the faint vibration accompanying the shaft of light that had previously been streaming from the stern and, like a sword of infinite length thrust into the darkness, had been propelling the ship forward. The air conditioning and digital instruments went on functioning without a sound. For some time, throughout the ship there was a dead silence. When it filled half the width of the screen the annihilation reactor was turned off. In the crosshairs of their field of vision was the disk of a sun that was not much hotter than a regular red dwarf. Only automatons were working on the bridge. Since the journey was relatively short, rather than full hibernation they had been put into a deepened sleep in which body temperature did not drop below fifty degrees. The eighty-three men of the crew were sleeping in the tunnel-shaped hibernation chamber on the main deck. The Invincible, a class II cruiser, the largest vessel of the fleet stationed at the base in the Lyra constellation, was moving in photon sequence across a quadrant on the very edge of that cluster of stars.
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