[chuckadams]

> I found the book's use of modeling how to pilot an alien starship to be a little misleading, because a starship is a highly engineered product that functions in large part as a control mechanism for software. It comes with a clean design model already available for you to discover and copy.

Doctor Who fans will note that TARDIS craft seem to follow a different design: they regularly reconfigure themselves to fit their pilot, don't have controls laid out in any sensible fashion, and there's at least one reference to how they're "grown, not built". Then again they were also meant to be piloted by a crew and are most likely sentient, so it's also possible that due to the adaptations, the Doctor's TARDIS is just as eccentric as he is.

It's not like Doctor Who is "hard" sci-fi tho, it's basically Peter Pan in Space.