Description:
Description:
A squat, powerfully built species of warriors with three to five fingers and dumpy, potato-shaped heads who were devoted to perpetual war. The Sontarans came from a high surface gravity planet where they weighed several tonnes and fed off pure energy. When deprived of this energy a Sontaran's body would deflate like a balloon.
The Sontarans were also vulnerable to coronic acid, and had a weak spot at the back of the neck called the probic vent. A direct hit to this spot would be enough to kill a Sontaran, but had the advantage that it forced them to face their enemies. Sontarans replicated by cloning and were able to multiply at a rate of a million every four minutes.
These vast numbers were vital to the Sontarans in their endless war with the Rutans. This war had been going on for millenia and shaped Sontaran policy. At the Sontaran military academy hatchings of a million cadets per muster parade were clad in space armour and armed with a variety of weapons including pistols, rifles, grenades and energy wands capable of hypnotising an opponent.
Battle fleets of cloaked spherical ships flying in arrow formation would carry armies of hundreds of millions into battle against the Rutans as the front line was pushed back and forth throughout the galaxy. Far from being unimaginative generals, the Sontaran Grand Strategic Council used a wide variety of tactics and technology to aid the war effort, including robots and time transference via matter transmitters.
Tactics included small-scale operations by specialist units, including military intelligence assessments that involved experiments on Humans, a sneak attack on Gallifrey under cover of a Vardan invasion and the kidnapping of a Timelord. The latter two examples indicate that the Sontarans intended to improve their time-travel technology, no doubt in order to win the war against the Rutans.
Led by rabidly xenophobic individuals with traditions of honour and duelling, these special mission squads proved to be dangerous opponents. When a Sontaran became stranded in Medieval England it was quite prepared to give local warlords advanced weaponary in order to enlist their help, regardless of the implications to the timeline.
The Sontaran military hiearchy included ranks such as Group Marshall, Marshall, Fleet Commander, Commander, Field Major and Major, and military organisations such as the G3 Military Assesment Survey, Special Space Service, and the 9th Sontaran Battlegroup. These methodical warriors did nothing without a military reason and brought death and terror wherever their war against the Rutans took them.
Appearances:
The Time Warrior
The Sontaran Experiment
The Invasion of Time
The Two Doctors