change it'. As multiple genders are foreign to them, Sontarans are known to confuse the human male and female sexes; Strax routinely addresses young women as "Boy" and vice versa, and claims not to have known that River Song was a woman. In "The Sontaran Stratagem", the Sontarans are seen to create human clones by growing them in tubs of green fluid. Enemy of the Bane confirms that Sontarans are cloned in the same way. In a human clone, the umbilical corresponds to the probic vent on the back of a Sontaran's neck, suggesting that the vent is not unlike the human navel, albeit clearly more complex. Technology The Tenth Sontaran Battle Fleet in the new series consists of a Command Ship and a number of capsules that can be moved into position when Battle Status is enjoined. Sontaran ships are impervious to nuclear missiles, however in War of the Sontarans they are vulnerable to both ramming by another Sontaran ship and also to explosions of barrels of gunpowder. In both the classic and new series, Sontarans are depicted using spherical or semi-spherical single-occupant spacecraft known as capsules. Each capsule is small enough to avoid detection by radar and is piloted by an individual Sontaran. The Sontaran Stratagem also saw the introduction of a large mothership from which the small Sontaran capsules could be seen to originate. The Doctor notes that the one ship by itself is enough to completely wipe out Earth. The Sontarans have a variety of weapons. Their distinctive weapon is a small rod with two handles and a plunger at one end, giving it a syringe style. This is so it can be held and fired using three fingers. This weapon fires a disabling beam that can temporarily render a person useless and emits an energy pulse that can repair systems like the teleport, and has appeared in every Sontaran story except The Sontaran Experiment. When first used by Commander Linx in The Time Warrior, it shows the ability to fire a beam which can disarm by knocking the weapon out of the wielder's hand, hypnotise, as well as cutting through wood, disabling limbs and killing. In The Sontaran Experiment, Field Major Styre instead used a small red laser pistol which only killed (although it did not kill the Doctor, because of a small metal plate the Doctor had been keeping in his inside pocket). The