why did the Doctor assume something was wrong because the engines weren running?
It’s a spaceship. Unless it was changing direction or slowing down, its engines wouldn’t need to be running (see Space Friction). I would assume life support etc. but as the absence of vibration is caused by the star whale, presumably it’s only the ship’s thrust that the Doctor was concerned with. • Could be that you’re trying to apply more real world physics here than the show honestly cared about. Very rarely do you get a science fiction show which displays the environment and physics of space entirely accurately. Shouldn’t there at least have been engines for steering? • It might also be standard practice to keep engines running in case some space debris big enough to overcome any shielding is spotted as on a collision course with the ship. Or simply because the engines normally used take a long time to power up – without power, your ship can’t do anything except keep in the same direction at the same speed. • Because in a ship that size, I refuse to believe they wouldn’t at least h
