OMNI SCI FI VERSUS: All those ships on the size chart get into a fight! Who wins? [Archive]

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-04, 07:02 PM

So I was thinking... what if all of the ships on this:

http://dirkloechel.deviantart.com/art/Size-Comparison-Science-Fiction-Spaceships-398790051

Get into a fight? I mean, each of the ships in that specific image get into a fight?

Let's set the scenario.

At each one of the ship's points of origin, the government or intelligence associated with each ship is told something along the lines of, by some deity sort of super-reality warper, "These vessels of yours will be taken and will be placed in an unfamiliar star system with many unfamiliar vessels that use unfamiliar technologies. Many will be hostile. Many will shoot first. If you manage to win the ensuing confrontation, you will have access to untold wealth and riches and technologies, both from the now-open controllable dimensional portals to their galaxies or their versions of your galaxy, and the novel sciences and ideas from the hulks of their ships. Many technologies will be compatible with your own. Many will not be. Any so-called 'trump cards' of yours, like literal permanent invulnerability or time travel or utterly perfect stealth or irresistible mind control, will be minimized to nigh invulnerability and temporal distortions and almost perfect stealth and almost irresistible mind control. Strategic faster than light and jumping will be limited though if you have a form of tactical FTL, it is enabled. Tactical FTL might not be as useful as you think; it will cause a reverse echo to enable targeting from slower ships. Communication will be an issue if you try to be peaceful. Science and understanding what other ships are doing and why will be difficult as well. They may come from places where the physical laws themselves are different, but everyone's capabilities will mostly work as they expect them to. It is possible that ships from different versions of your own timeline will be taken -forward or backward- and you will not know this until you find yourself near them. Be prepared to cooperate or compete with other timelines of yourself as you see fit. If this set of ships of yours is unarmed or peaceful, be prepared to try to run, hide, sell yourself well, scuttle your vessels, or bribe or abandon ship as you see fit. It is possible you may see familiar foes or friends as well, which might not behave or look as you expect. If you can communicate and recognize those similar to you, consider truces of convenience. Outfit and crew your vessels well. Have a plan for dealing with the unexpected and the blatantly impossible. Represent your universe well."

And this godlike entity basically keeps its word.

In the outskirts of a solar system with a wide variety of planets and asteroid belts and planets and such, including things like a garden world, all of these ships are placed, at the height of their readiness and preparation, in well-separated parts of the solar system. They are mostly placed outside the weapons range of all the other ships, and 'at rest' but with chances to accelerate and obtain combat readiness. It is not possible to tell ranges of weapons by how far ships are to one another because everyone is equidistant (space is big!). Related universes and polities and timelines and such are grouped roughly close to one another.

So... how does this go? Who ends up winning, who ends up losing? Who is a wild card? Who goes in guns blazing, who tries to hold back or hide or do something clever? Who tries to communicate, and who do they manage to team up with?

...And does anyone want to write little mini fiction snippets, ideally in the 'voice' or style of the fiction universe in question, of how they think this would go?

jseah

2015-09-04, 08:55 PM

One ship means nothing in the grander scheme of things. Here's how I interpreted the scenario:

Everyone goes to such and such a system.

Whoever is the final victor (what's the criteria?) thus controls the system

Said system will have toggles to control gates to other universes like the ones from which the ships were taken

Aka, this system will become the mother of all junction systems

Further assumptions I am making:

Leaving the system is impossible, FTL or otherwise; let's say this system exists in a bubble universe that is only a few LY across

Tactical FTL causes local time travel (as per the Minkowsky diagram) which means other ships will see you at your final destination before you leave (to be precise, they see you arrive at your destination at a number of seconds before you left equal to the distance you travelled in light seconds)
-> How you prevent multiple jumps and closed time loops is something that needs to be addressed

So you probably want to adjust something in your scenario to account for these?

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-04, 09:25 PM

What are some plausible tweaks to take care of this? I don't know some good rules...

Final Victor... I guess it would be 'total domination of the star system'. Whether it is through political alliance, military prowess, causing the unconditional surrender of others, being the last one alive, whatever.

LokeyITP

2015-09-04, 11:00 PM

Remove anything Dr Who?

I think the thread will implode once the Trek vs Wars threads meet the various 4k vs threads :)

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-04, 11:18 PM

Remove anything Dr Who?

I think the thread will implode once the Trek vs Wars threads meet the various 4k vs threads :)

And it will be glorious!

The Glyphstone

2015-09-05, 02:11 AM

Using the original scenario, I vote for the Jet Ganymedian Trawler from Cowboy Bebop. At 142 meters, it appears to be the smallest thing on the chart that is not from a AAA sci-fi franchise like Star Trek or Dr. Who. It can therefore go unnnoticed and hide in a corner of the starsystem while raging fanboy flamewars annihilate all the other combatants.

Kitten Champion

2015-09-05, 02:27 AM

I'm just wondering what the Arcadia's going to do with the rest of its morning. Sift through the wreckage of all the other ships for valuables I suppose.

McNum

2015-09-05, 02:53 AM

I see Dr. Eggman is in the fight. I'm gonna cheer for him, just because win or lose, following the Egg Carrier as a viewpoint ship is going to be hilarious. Plus he has the good sense to flee or if that's not possible, grovel to whoever is stronger than him. I mean, he may plot betrayal, but still. Eggman will not be the first to be eliminated due to his ability to be a sneaky intelligent coward.

As for the overall winner, well, all the big ships will attract attention really, really fast, so I'm thinking we need to find the smallest ship with the biggest punch.

So, I'll put 20 Zorkmids on the Heart of Gold from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I mean, sure, it coming out victorious is highly, highly improbable. Good thing it has an Infinite Improbability Drive, then.

Seppl

2015-09-05, 04:54 AM

So many ships...

Some factions have a whole fleet as there are so many different ships: The Empire from Star Wars, The Imperium from Warhammer, the Federation from Star Wars, the Confederation from Wing Commander and some more. Also, many vessels from EVE. Would they be allies? I am not familiar enough with the EVE universe to answer that.

Of those with a whole fleet, the Empire, the Imperium and EVE (if allied) seem to have the biggest concentration of heavy hitters. Even if the rest of all the ships were to ally against one of these factions, every single one of their capital ships could take on 90% of the ships on the chart without any effort. (I am not familiar enough with EVE to make any well-founded statements about their capabilities. I am just guessing based on size) It could come down to a competition of whose capital ships survives a fight against the others'. The winner will then take it all.

Or not. Among the smaller ships there are some that have quite ridiculous capabilities. One that I saw was the Lexx. That thing has Death Star levels of firepower. If for example a Star Destroyer were to win the battle of the capital ships, the Lexx could take it down with one shot. And it would then perish against all the other survivors who gang up against the Lexx, because the Lexx is only armed with its slow firing planet buster and is not equipped for ship to ship combat. I'm sure there must be more one hit wonders in the chart that I have overlooked or do not know enough about. For example some of the TOS era ships from the Star Trek universe, when god-like aliens showed up every second week.

What about alternative win conditions? A diplomatic victory? I do not really see that happening. There are so many diverse factions, I cannot see a grand alliance happening, not on the timescale that this conflict will take place on. The size of the solar system is nothing to most of the ships on the chart. Whoever wins will be able to do so quickly. There are also quite a few factions that are unlikely to ever make any alliance or even contact. For example the Imperium from Warhammer will not compromise, the only way to not fight them is to be human and to submit to worshiping the God Emperor.

In the end, I would expect some wild card to take the victory. The big factions will duke it out among each other, one will triumph with one (possibly damaged) capital ship remaining. Then some small ship with ridiculous firepower or some super-tech and a clever commander (i.e. not the Lexx) will take it down.

There are some factions that one can be sure cannot win: Those factions have just "normal" spaceships with the usual sci-fi genre conventions, no special technology, no notable abilities among their crew, and a technology level were nuclear weapons are still considered reasonably powerful. These include (but may not be limited to as I am not familiar with all the settings and may just have overlooked some of the smaller factions): Battlestar Galactica, X-Universe, Starcraft, Mass Effect (non-Reapers), Wing Commander, Starship Troopers and Homeworld. The Dune universe also counts as they have only non-military vessels from the first books; if they had a few no-ships full of super-conditioned super-humans they would be a good candidate for winning the scenario.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-05, 05:02 AM

So, I'll put 20 Zorkmids on the Heart of Gold from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I mean, sure, it coming out victorious is highly, highly improbable. Good thing it has an Infinite Improbability Drive, then.

This is actually a very solid argument. The Heart of Gold will likely win the mass combat, but what sort of collateral damage and/or side effects will result?

GloatingSwine

2015-09-05, 05:15 AM

As that image stands, contains Time Lord and time war era Dalek vessels, full weaponised time travel basically makes everyone else irrelevant.

Barring those, if it's based only on the ships there then probably the Ori mothership. I don't think anyone else is packing enough heat to see it off.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 08:09 AM

>Wing Commander

Wing Commander is packing a planet buster there, and there's a ship that is essentially immune to damage from repeated attacks from high yield antimatter shaped charges.

So there's that.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-05, 08:17 AM

True, but there are also Systems Commonwealth ships there, and they can manufacture and deploy nova bombs, so just blowing up one planet isn't necassarily all that. (If this was a full verse vs. verse the Systems Commonwealth would have a high chance of taking the prize due to their strategic mobility and industrial base spanning three galaxies, but their individual ships aren't that high end.)

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 08:24 AM

So who is the first to threaten to destabilize the star? Who actually goes for that first? Who tries to stop them?

GolemsVoice

2015-09-05, 08:32 AM

Given what I remember about the Heart of Gold, isn't the question rather: how unlikely is it that the HoG will win?

Kitten Champion

2015-09-05, 08:48 AM

Bulldog Psion

2015-09-05, 09:03 AM

Well, I'll just toss out that I expect WH40K ships to be the most useless of the bunch. After all, their space warfare is based on Napoleonic-era fleet tactics, just like the designers thought it would be cool to make the main battle tanks look like idiotic World War I designs. They will, in short, lose in a humiliating fashion because they deserve no better. :smallwink:

A bunch of bilious bubonic blistering blue barnacles, as Captain Haddock would say. :smallbiggrin:

GloatingSwine

2015-09-05, 10:20 AM

I think Captain Harlock can destroy the Universe.

I mean, he didn't, but I'm pretty sure he can.

Not just with the Arcadia alone though, the whole "rewrite the universe" thing was based on using a weapon system that took years to place and prepare. The (movie) Arcadia is pretty tough but can't easily be quantified.

(Also depends on what version of Arcadia it is, because Harlock isn't a consistent single canon, it's various different ones).

Well, I'll just toss out that I expect WH40K ships to be the most useless of the bunch. After all, their space warfare is based on Napoleonic-era fleet tactics, just like the designers thought it would be cool to make the main battle tanks look like idiotic World War I designs. They will, in short, lose in a humiliating fashion because they deserve no better.

They'll be in good company with the Honorverse ships then, who also use age of sail fleet tactics because of the design of their drive system offering absolute protection from above and below but leaving the sides open. (Though the 40k ships have a hell of a lot more grunt in their weapons than the 200-500 MT warheads of Honorverse missiles, the Honorverse ships are mostly a threat due to extreme range and volume of fire (battles might involve exchanges of hundreds of thousands of missiles on the basis that most will be intercepted, but based on "ships in this picture" there aren't enough HV ships to make up that kind of serious volume firepower).

Kitten Champion

2015-09-05, 10:47 AM

Not just with the Arcadia alone though, the whole "rewrite the universe" thing was based on using a weapon system that took years to place and prepare.

No one said there would be a time limit.

You build and set up the universe-ending bombs then threaten the Beyonder with it to take his power.

The (movie) Arcadia is pretty tough but can't easily be quantified.

(Also depends on what version of Arcadia it is, because Harlock isn't a consistent single canon, it's various different ones).

Yes, it's the Superman of spaceships.

Aotrs Commander

2015-09-05, 11:05 AM

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 12:59 PM

GloatingSwine

2015-09-05, 02:06 PM

Specifically, probably not.

There's too many, for a start.

Most of the larger Star Wars and 40k ships can wreck your whole continent's day.

The larger weapons on Honorverse ships can do it as well.

Maybe the higher tech Stargate ships (Wraith, Ori, Asgard) but their weapons tend more towards exotic principles than brute force (cf. the Asgard's go away beam).

The Yamato's wave motion gun cannon and did destroy a floating landmass the size of Australia.

The Super Exelion* outsources most of its firepower to its buster machines but can probably do it as well (the sort of things it is designed to deal with can shoot through the moon and still blow up an enemy fleet on the other side)

The Daleks can, so can the Time Lords, but they're more likely to just make your planet never have existed.

The Vorlon Planet Killer is, well, aptly named, but most B5 weapons are nothing like its power.

* Super Exelion is a good one to bet on in a battle royale if it has its complement of buster machines.

Seppl

2015-09-05, 02:24 PM

So can we catalog which ships in the image specifically have 'weapons which will through sheer amount of power alone, rather than any weird destabilizing of active tectonics or something, at the least, glass a large continent in one shot'? Like, who -- I mean which ship -- has that scale on up weaponry in that image?
Just glassing a continent is pretty tame looking at the chart. Let's say "obliterate" a continent to keep it short. Some that I have found:
The Doomsday machine from Star Trek (planet killer)
Lexx from Lexx (planet killer)
The Behemoth from Wing Commander (planet killer. Missed it when writing my previous post)
Probably the Ori Mothership from Stargate. Other ships from the SG-Universe are able to glass a planet in short time. Ori Motherships eat those ships for breakfast.
Vorlon planet killer from Babylon 5 (exactly what it says on the tin)
Probably the Eclipse class Star Destroyer from Star Wars (at least take out a continent). But I really do not want to read up on yet another superweapon from the EU. It hurts my brain.
The larger vessels from Warhammer may not be able to destroy a continent in one shot. But a mountain range. With a rather quick rate of fire.

I also found the Krenim Temporal Incursion Ship from Star Trek on the chart. Speaking of "I win"-buttons this is one of the more ridiculous ones.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 02:31 PM

How would I phrase adjustments to the rules to tone down the Dalek and that Star Trek's I Win buttons?

The Glyphstone

2015-09-05, 02:32 PM

None of the Honorverse ships depicted there are from the late-war era (except one carrier-class ship), which was the age of the gigantic missile spam; the ships on-chart will be firing salvos of a hundred or so missiles as openers, and relying on their energy weapon broadsides. If the Honorverse gets a dog in this fight, it'll be from their range rather than their missile spam; it's a universe that remembers how big space is, so 'knife range' energy-weapon duels take place in the 500,000 to one million kilometer range. On the other hand, they are bound by their own laws of physics and drive systems to obey Newtonian movement, which makes them hilariously clumsy to maneuver compared to almost everything else on the chart, so bringing those huge broadsides to bear won't be easy.

How would I phrase adjustments to the rules to tone down the Dalek and that Star Trek's I Win buttons?

Easy - the Sufficiently Godlike Beings who set up the contest don't want anyone to 'cheat'. You win or lose based on the quality of your ship construction - its armor, weapons, drives, etc.. Leaving the battlefield in any fashion, including temporally or shifting into another dimension, is a forfeit.\

I also noticed the 'other timeline versions of yourselves' clause in the OP, which makes stuff interesting as well. If that is taken literally and this is meant to be a true free-for-all, even the various ships from a single canon (ST/SW/HV/HW/etc.) are every-man-for-themselves.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-05, 02:38 PM

I also found the Krenim Temporal Incursion Ship from Star Trek on the chart. Speaking of "I win"-buttons this is one of the more ridiculous ones.

On the other hand anything it erases comes back when it gets blown up, and it's not invincible, driving Voyager into it sorted it out and there are some things on that chart that wouldn't even notice the collision.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 02:43 PM

Well, for the purposes of this, the Empire -in all it's versions- is a single group. Same for things like the Federation. So if the disparate versions could cooperate, they could win jointly. But that is a big If for some of these...

HandofShadows

2015-09-05, 02:52 PM

Wish Dahak was on the chart. Course you would need a couple more pages for it if you wanted it to scale with everything else. :smallbiggrin:

Seppl

2015-09-05, 02:53 PM

How would I phrase adjustments to the rules to tone down the Dalek and that Star Trek's I Win buttons?
Though call. There is no sliding scale to tone it down, you cannot just erase half a person from time. If you just forbid time manipulation it would be the same as not inviting them at all. It is their defining trait that they win through temporal shenanigans.

You could say that nobody can travel further back in time than the start of the battle. That would allow them to use time travel on a tactical scale instead of just wiping out the opposition before they existed. Actually sounds quite interesting.

The Krenim timeship is probably already dealt with through the clause that perfect invulnerability is not perfect. Therefore it "only" has a slow firing weapon that can wipe anything from existence in one shot. Still a strong contender but not as stupidly overpowered as it would be at full power. Also makes for an interesting battle because of the constant rewriting of history whenever it erases something from time.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-05, 03:12 PM

The Krenim timeship is probably already dealt with through the clause that perfect invulnerability is not perfect. Therefore it "only" has a slow firing weapon that can wipe anything from existence in one shot. Still a strong contender but not as stupidly overpowered as it would be at full power. Also makes for an interesting battle because of the constant rewriting of history whenever it erases something from time.

Bear in mind that the Daleks and Time Lords also both have access to weapons which do that. (De-Mat guns, temporal cannons, etc.) as well as ones which freeze the target in time so it can't do anything ever.

It's probably better to just say no temporal weapons.

Which does somewhat nerf the Daleks and Time Lords, but a Dalek command saucer is still a planet buster in its own right and Time Lord weaponry still includes weapons that turn a planet into a black hole.

On purely conventional grunt alone I think I'd have to give this to Gunbuster though. In a strategic setting they're hampered by their lack of FTL, but tactically, well, let's just point out that every single one of the 1220 RX-7 Machine Weapons that the Super Exelion carries is packing a reactor equivalent to that of a Star Destroyer, and weapons to use that power output.

Gunbuster is ludicrously high end, possibly Culture level.

(Though that does ignore the Forerunner keyship, because we don't know what it can actually do, but the Forerunners were also near Culture level, if far stupider, so probably a lot).

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 03:45 PM

Wish Dahak was on the chart. Course you would need a couple more pages for it if you wanted it to scale with everything else. :smallbiggrin:

That's because the guy only does ships in a certain scale. There's a reason the Death Star is not on this. He has a FAQ on there, go read it...

Killer Angel

2015-09-05, 04:08 PM

GloatingSwine

2015-09-05, 04:33 PM

Well, as long as they're trying to capture it intact and it's as fast as they are, anyway.

Eldan

2015-09-05, 04:36 PM

The Heart of Gold may not win, but I'm not sure it can lose, either. Just kick the drive to maximum. Unless anyone has a bistromatic, everything goes to... some place weird.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-05, 04:45 PM

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 04:56 PM

So does anyone wanna start writing this up as a fanfic? Changing styles/tone to fit the swapping of the protagonists, of course?

I think that'd be completely hilarious, if someone could pull it off...

Also

If the Honorverse gets a dog in this fight, it'll be from their range rather than their missile spam

Oh, I think they have a dog in this fight. Considering that many of these ships fight in under a kilometer range, and they can beam spam in a useful way at a million km's...

The question is -- who do they notice is really bad at range thing, who do they start targeting, who do they try to ally with, and why?

McNum

2015-09-05, 05:12 PM

Bear in mind that the Infinite Improbability Drive isn't supposed to affect anything outside of itself, not even the rest of the Heart of Gold, and activating it without the probability shields active is as likely as not to be fatal to the ship and all aboard.
It's totally a last resort tactic, yes. I could only see them do it if they had no other option, like say, a thousand hostile ships surrounding them, some of which are several miles long. Playing the random odds is the smart move here.

A fanfic of what happens to everyone else at that moment would be amusing, though. "Lord Vader, you are turning into a penguin. Cease that immediately!"

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 05:20 PM

McNum

2015-09-05, 05:42 PM

So which ships would have to be completely annihilated to not cause, uh, awkward questions to be asked? Other than the Spaceballs ship being present where there are serious Star Wars ships. ;) ;)

Pity, cause it's one of the fastest ships, strategically, on the field...

Any others along those lines?
The NSEA Protector of Galaxy Quest is there. So is the USS Enterprise. Clearly, they need to meet up.

The Daleks in the Command Saucer might also want to have words with the Independence Day City Destroyer, marking the first giant ship kill. One does not imitate the Daleks and get away with it.

We also need to find the hammiest characters to send the Mass Effect Reapers at, I see some Futurama ships there, so that's an option. I'd pay to have Sovereign try his speech at Zapp Brannigan at least.

Team Star Fox is also on scene, so we have to find out who spams the most lasers and have Fox barrel roll everything back to sender once. Because that just needs to happen.

And finally, there's two of Dr. Eggman there. So he'll have someone intelligent to talk to as they compliment eachother's mustaches and plans to get that hedgehog together. They're the comedy relief, but I wouldn't sleep on them, Eggman can be scarily clever at times, and he has cracked a planet with his ship once, so he has more firepower than you'd think. The Empire might have wanted to have words if Eggman brought in his Death Egg, but it's not on the chart, so he didn't.

Eldan

2015-09-05, 05:47 PM

I'd pay to have Sovereign try his speech at Zapp Brannigan at least.

Brannigan would do what he does every time Earth is attacked. Talk big, get defeated and immediately roll over on his back.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-05, 05:50 PM

It's totally a last resort tactic, yes. I could only see them do it if they had no other option, like say, a thousand hostile ships surrounding them, some of which are several miles long. Playing the random odds is the smart move here.

I think more reasonably all the unarmed ships (and the ones that aren't spaceships like the various FFXII airships) just get counted as spectators.

McNum

2015-09-05, 06:07 PM

Brannigan would do what he does every time Earth is attacked. Talk big, get defeated and immediately roll over on his back.
Exactly! I want to see if he can utterly frustrate a Reaper by simply not having a clue and yet having an ego bigger than it.

I think more reasonably all the unarmed ships (and the ones that aren't spaceships like the various FFXII airships) just get counted as spectators.
Hm, the Ragnarok from FFVIII might do some damage, actually... It's Space-Worthy, and fully prepared to fight means it has the best crew it can have... So who's getting boarded by the main cast of Final Fantasy VIII? Because THAT would be a whole lot of trouble for most ships. Wait... We have another instant win candidate there. If the Ragnarok has the FF8 party, then it has Selphie. And Selphie can win this fight in one move: "The End (https://youtu.be/Ye1SnniOTtw)". Battle's over, everyone goes home.

There should probably be a rule about crew and named characters, although full fighting strength means full fighting strength, I suppose.

Seppl

2015-09-05, 06:30 PM

There should probably be a rule about crew and named characters, although full fighting strength means full fighting strength, I suppose.

I think it's more fun with full crews in full protagonist mode. Luckily the Tardis is nowhere to be found:smallbiggrin:

The Glyphstone

2015-09-05, 06:43 PM

I think it's more fun with full crews in full protagonist mode. Luckily the Tardis is nowhere to be found:smallbiggrin:

That's in the Faq also. The TARDIS is simultaneously both too small and too large to fit on the chart.:smallcool:

GloatingSwine

2015-09-05, 07:14 PM

Hm, the Ragnarok from FFVIII might do some damage, actually... It's Space-Worthy, and fully prepared to fight means it has the best crew it can have... So who's getting boarded by the main cast of Final Fantasy VIII? Because THAT would be a whole lot of trouble for most ships. Wait... We have another instant win candidate there. If the Ragnarok has the FF8 party, then it has Selphie. And Selphie can win this fight in one move: "The End (https://youtu.be/Ye1SnniOTtw)". Battle's over, everyone goes home.

There should probably be a rule about crew and named characters, although full fighting strength means full fighting strength, I suppose.

The Ragnarok's not on there, too small. Only the FFXII ships. Which are airships and not spaceworthy.

(Also, The End doesn't always end all battles, you have to use it on Ultimecia something like four times, even when you're at her technically "final" form.)

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 07:23 PM

Okay I would guess that airships, if they can be made space worthy, are... Or they are not present.

McNum

2015-09-05, 09:10 PM

The Ragnarok's not on there, too small. Only the FFXII ships. Which are airships and not spaceworthy.

(Also, The End doesn't always end all battles, you have to use it on Ultimecia something like four times, even when you're at her technically "final" form.)
It's there. Between the Ragnarok and Leviathan class Titans from EVE to the right of the other Final Fantasy ships. 108 meters.

I kind of want to sic them on the Goa'Uld. Seems like the right weight class of enemy to unleash a Final Fantasy party on. Although I would give them fair odds for capturing on of the big Star Wars things, if they can land there. Final Fantasy parties vs. Stormtroopers is not fair at all...

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 09:14 PM

I kinda wanna see final fantasy party versus named, heroic, protagonist type Astartes...

GreatWyrmGold

2015-09-05, 09:25 PM

Size is not, directly, power. However, it tells us two important things:

1. The scale of combat the ship was intended for. Weapons intended for use in a universe where a typical warship is the size of a mid-sized asteroid will be much more powerful than ones where they're on space-shuttle or fighter-jet scales—and their armor/shields/etc will be prepared to take the kinetic/thermal/etc energies such weapons dish out! The largest ships on the chart could probably annihilate the smaller ships with their point-defense guns.
2. Big ships, especially the truly massive ships, are usually associated with works that play hard and loose with the laws of physics which so tether more realistic spacecraft, alien species capable of doing so with the force of their sufficiently advanced technology, or both. This comes part and parcel in either case with abilities that more directly relate to combat.

The ships which really stand out in size (not counting a few civilian ships, which would naturally be dead meat) include:

1. Star Wars's Star Dreadnoughts and Super Star Destroyers
2. WH40k's Imperial flagships and Tau battlespheres
3. Halo's Forerunners Keyship
4. Mass Effect's Crucible
5. Starcraft's Zerg Leviathans
6. EVE Online's Titans
7. Babylon 5's Vorlon Planet Killers
8. Stargate Atlantis's Wraith Hives
9. Independence Day's spaceships
10. Robotech's Mothership
11. Farscape's Peacekeeper Command and Scarran Dreadnought
12. Lexx's...Lexx

That should narrow thing down a little, but not as much as I'd hoped, and too many I've only learned about today...so I'll just post this list of GWG's Top Picks.

Douglas

2015-09-05, 10:13 PM

On the other hand anything it erases comes back when it gets blown up
According to the article I read on it, that happened because it actually erased itself, not because it blew up.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-05, 10:49 PM

Unregistered

2015-09-06, 01:55 AM

As a Wing Commander fan I feel the need to inform you that some of his figures on the WC ships are wrong. Especially the Kilrathi Hvar'kann dreadnought is not 6705 meters long but 22,000 m.

But of course, size does not matter.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-06, 08:06 AM

There's a BIG discussion about the size of that ship on wcnews... after a lot of analysis of the image and the scale and other similar, known things, and in going into the game engine and such, they determined that there was a unit conversion error in that number.

Mato

2015-09-06, 09:52 AM

I think the thread will implode once the Trek vs Wars threads meet the various 4k vs threads :)I doubt it.

AS the OP said,

Any so-called 'trump cards' of yours, like literal permanent invulnerability or time travel or utterly perfect stealth or irresistible mind control, will be minimized to nigh invulnerability and temporal distortions and almost perfect stealth and almost irresistible mind control.ST's trump card is an hourly solution to impossible problems. Those solutions are typically banned by your average debater because it's like arguing against a Batman fan if Batman could lose any fight. But in this case, they are not.

How would I phrase adjustments to the rules to tone down the Dalek and that Star Trek's I Win buttons?Oh wait, they are. :smallwink:

How things typically go is the good guys team up, evil looks for a way to crush it's enemies so an alliance would never work so that strikes out armies like the Empire or the Dominion. The time traveling Delaks are a problem, but more than one captain of the Federation is willing to break the temporal directive so basically a Federation built Warhammer alliance starship running on a TARDIS-like engine fires a a couple dozen mass relayed Lexx beams and no more Delaks.

The good guys split the good per their agreements and Shepard begins dating B4.

Eldan

2015-09-06, 10:07 AM

Broken Crown

2015-09-06, 06:03 PM

Also... I've seen a LOT of arguments on this. What actually IS the range of these Star Wars ships?

Like, watching things like The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels... ship gun range is terrible. Even in big ship fleet to fleet engagements... The movies? Terrible. And don't some of the video games have the same terrible engagement envelope too, like the X-Wing games that seem to mostly have the right scale? But we see quoted ranges in some of the EU stuff as really super high. And these are EU ships, mostly... so...?

Uh, in the video games, including the EU video games, do ships actually have decent gun range?

In a visual medium, like movies, TV, and video games, they keep the ranges small so the viewer can see what's going on. In real-life early 20th Century naval battles, the target would frequently only be visible as a tiny smudge of smoke on the horizon, or even over the horizon, completely out of sight. However, that doesn't look good on screen, so the directors make everything happen at point-blank range.

Books don't have this problem, which is why you tend to get much longer engagement ranges in novels than on screen (e.g. Star Wars EU, Honor Harrington, etc.). It's annoying for vs. debates when a series isn't self-consistent: Which numbers do you use?

The only mention of a maximum range in the Star Wars movies is when the Millennium Falcon is chasing a TIE fighter in the Alderaan system; Han says it's out of range when it's well under a kilometer away. However, the Falcon's weapons appear to be aimed manually, whereas fighters have some kind of targeting system, so that doesn't tell us much about the franchise in general. We only see short-range battles, but that doesn't tell us whether longer ranges are possible.

Also, aren't the biggest guns present, as far as 'traditional boom' rather than 'weird reality warping' or 'LOL Time wankery', on the Super Exelion? How big is the boom on the Space Battleship Yamato?

I don't know if there are official figures for the Super Exelion, but according to the "Gunbuster" bonus material, the Sizzler units (which are 100 m tall) have a power output of 10^26 Watts (about a quarter of the power of the Sun). The fully armed and operational Gunbuster demonstrates the ability to destroy hundreds of multi-kilometer aliens with one shot. In the final battle in Episode 6, we see a number of planets being obliterated, apparently as collateral damage. So the firepower of that franchise is fairly over-the-top.

IIRC, in an early episode, the Wave Motion Gun on the Space Battleship Yamato is used to blow up a continent-sized planetoid, so that's a contender for "ridiculous amounts of firepower," too.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-06, 06:18 PM

GloatingSwine

2015-09-06, 07:03 PM

What are the ranges in the video games like? That might be what we want to use; lots of these ships come from video games. So those Star Trek, 'you captain a ship!' games, that would be the ranges for those, the Star Wars games where you use a fighter to fight, at least the simulationy-ones, you'd use the range for those, things like that.

Video games are even worse for deciding what the ranges and scales of things are, because they're designed for game balance or usability not to simulate. (eg. Starcraft, everything in the game is a different scale).

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-06, 07:09 PM

Starcraft is not a simulationy video game.

I'm thinking more like..

X-Wing or Star Trek: Bridge Commander.

TeChameleon

2015-09-06, 09:47 PM

Bleh. Weapons ranges aren't even internally consistent within episodes of the same show, a lot of the time. Take Star Trek: TOS, for example. I'm reasonably certain that the Enterprise fired on human-sized targets at ground level from orbit (if they were at the upper end of a low-Earth orbit, they'd be about 2,000 km out) with pinpoint precision, and yet ship-to-ship battles were usually fought on a scale where they'd be less than a kilometer apart.

Anyhow, my take on the real monkeywrenches in the mix (based solely on series I'm familiar with- I can't speak to V, or X3, or Gunbuster, Babylon 5, or even Mass Effect, really :smallconfused:)

The Heart of Gold, of course, is the ultimate wildcard. If they just put up the bridge probability shields and let the improbability run rampant otherwise, things would get seriously, seriously weird, and there's really no way to tell what the outcome would be (aside from the fact that it would probably be amusing, at least for those not directly experiencing it).

Almost all Star Trek ships are ludicrously fast and maneuverable for their size; I'm guessing because the various series didn't have dedicated fighters, per se, capital ship combat ended up being designed to look like WWII dogfights, rather than having the capital ships replicating naval combat while smaller fighter ships did the whole dogfight thing. Also, transporters could make a merry hash of just about any enemy ship that didn't have proper shielding (or had their shielding knocked out).

The Borg are kind of a special sub-category for Trek, what with the whole assimilation thing- if they got ahold of the right ships at the start of the battle, it'd be pretty much game over for just about everyone else. Plus they've got their patented No Sell shields, as well.

Star Wars ships, as dedicated warships for the most part, tend to be big, bad mothers. Massive firepower and heavy armour, along with the sheer size of them, means that they're hard to put down, and the fact that some of them would have Force-sensitives in various capacities could potentially be hard to deal with.

40k- all questions of weaponry and firepower aside, psykers and the Warp would seriously mess with a lot of the other series' ships. That and, well, they do tend to have pretty respectable firepower.

The various super-robot series (Gundam, Robotech/Macross, Transformers, etc.) would be a bit of a weird one, too, since a lot of them have fighter-sized... 'ships'... that have firepower that verges on major capital ship territory. Special mention goes to the Macross-class capital ships like the SDF-1, since most universes don't have a tactical doctrine for your ship being punched to death by a kilometre-tall robot.

The Honorverse ships would probably claim a startling number of victims with their impeller wedges during the first few minutes of the fight, since most of the other 'verses wouldn't exactly expect to slap into a borderline-blackhole above/below the Honorverse ships while they were doing their cinematic flyover.

The Zerg and the Protoss could potentially punch a fair ways out of their weight class by simple virtue of their respective schticks- assimilation (can you imagine a Zerg-ified Lexx? Eesh) and POWER... OVERWHELMING!! (aka psionics). Although part of me would love to shove them into a Tyrannid and an Eldar, respectively, to see if they'd mutually annihilate or just merge or what... :smalltongue:

The Daleks probably have some of the heaviest firepower of anything on the chart, even discounting their timey-wimey shenanigans, and some impressive shielding as well.

And one final weird wildcard- the Soyokaze, courtesy of the insane, borderline reality-warping luck of a certain Justy Ueki Tylor.

Kitten Champion

2015-09-06, 10:10 PM

As a wildcard, there's also the Elle Ciel - or Elsior - which houses Milfeulle Sakuraba, with potent and quite literal luck powers herself. The ship also comes with its own Wave Motion Gun which destroyed a moon of Death Star proportions, and serves as a carrier for 6 smaller advanced fighters that individually are more powerful than most of the ships on that chart.

Seppl

2015-09-06, 10:34 PM

The Borg are kind of a special sub-category for Trek, what with the whole assimilation thing- if they got ahold of the right ships at the start of the battle, it'd be pretty much game over for just about everyone else. Plus they've got their patented No Sell shields, as well.Speaking of assimilation: Does the Egg Fleet have Metal Sonic on board? I am imagining a result similar to the Dr. Eggman vs. Dr. Wiley Death Battle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qitt0AsCSYQ).

Rogar Demonblud

2015-09-07, 01:45 AM

And one final weird wildcard- the Soyokaze, courtesy of the insane, borderline reality-warping luck of a certain Justy Ueki Tylor.

Which feels kind of weird, since the ship is named 'Gentle Breeze' and yet it could be one of the most devastating.

Broken Crown

2015-09-07, 04:11 AM

And one final weird wildcard- the Soyokaze, courtesy of the insane, borderline reality-warping luck of a certain Justy Ueki Tylor.

Of course, Captain Tylor's immediate response to being placed in this scenario would be to surrender....

jseah

2015-09-07, 07:08 AM

Suggestion for handling Tactical FTL:

1. If your FTL takes you to another dimension (henceforth referred to generically as Hyperspace), your hyperspace is not the same as other people's hyperspace and you cannot see or interact with them unless you can somehow use their technology.
1a. The various hyperspaces are not connected, the only way to go between one hyperspace to the next is by dropping out of it into the real and jumping back into the other hyperspace
1b. This means you cannot shoot into other people's hyperspace even if you can shoot out of yours into the real (unless you have both your and their technology, and both tech bases allow shooting from hyperspace to real and vice versa, and have applied it to the specific weapon you want to use)

2. For FTL that takes an orthogonal dimension that is not an alternate plane of reality (Alpha Band from honorverse is alternate plane, so is the Warp from 40k; Culture hyperspace is an orthogonal dimension) have been nerfed. The FTL works on the same principles and to the same performance but you remain fully in the real.
2a. This is explained by "reality" being stretched across all orthogonal dimensions so everything is of infinite size along the orthogonal dimension (or said dimension is rolled up really really tiny, which is the same thing) and so interacts fully across orthogonal dimensions

3. For FTL that uses realspace (and those that don't). This is a bubble dimension of only a few LY across, and the physics model here is Newtonian, not Einsteinian. There is no relativistic length contraction, time dilation and any of those shenanigans. Light has a fixed speed (of the familiar 300 kkm/s) but its not a special speed limit. The preferred reference frame is at rest relative to the local star at the time when the match begins (the location of the local star may undergo sudden violent changes but that doesn't affect the reference frame).
3a. Drive and weapon specs are corrected to maintain the same momentum/energy of their shot. This means that weapons that were high-relativistic but sublight might suddenly become FTL. Then again, FTL can now also be achieved simply by pushing hard enough by standard reaction (or reactionless) thrusters. Certain reaction thruster types might find their exhaust velocity suddenly becoming FTL, once again this isn't a problem either.
3b. Realspace FTL is still an advantage though since you get there faster than the light (or gravity wave) from you does. Light or gravimetric sensors are suitably lagged due to signal propagation time, but FTL sensors abound here anyway.

HandofShadows

2015-09-07, 09:16 AM

Of course, Captain Tylor's immediate response to being placed in this scenario would be to surrender....

And then somehow he STILL manages to win. :smallamused:

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-07, 11:23 AM

Seppl

2015-09-07, 12:26 PM

I would say that Kerrigan would immediately snarl at the others to "Stay out of my way!" and then go and try to get the genetic codes of the Lexx and those Starship Trooper bugs... any other major organic ships or entities of note in the area that she would want the codes to? Or to make into Zerg?
She will at least try any non-humans, even though most of them are just rubber-head aliens. The Vorlons would be very interesting, although the attempt to assimilate them is most probably doomed to fail. Some other interesting species to assimilate:
Borg: Turn assimilation up to eleven! Cyber-Zerg!
Eldar: If assimilating Protoss gives you the perfect hybrid what about Eldar?
Orks: Kerrigan might even skip the Orks because they look like stupid space apes. But if the Swarm gets hold of their "it works if enough people believe it does"-power, it would be really scary.
Goa'uld: Instantly get all of their technology because of genetic memory. Would be more interesting if the Goa'uld were a bigger contender in this battle.
Alien: Zergling 2.0
A Founder: Shapeshifting Zerg!

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-16, 11:30 PM

Another thing. The ships are spread out, generally out of weapon ranges of each other, from all but the longest range super-weapons which are capable of firing from one end of the outer limits of a star system to the other.

Wow. What I really, really want to see happen, is someone with encyclopedic knowledge of all of these shows and a good amount of writing skill and the understanding of 'taking reasonable versions of the numbers' and 'going with versions that make the story interesting' and with 'a good understanding of each setting's style and 'a good sense of humor.' I mean, I can try, but I'm not good at it...

EDIT:

Okay... I can preeetttyyy comfortably say that the Daleks would probably win this one. They just have two much going for them. Now... that said, how can we make this more interesting? What about some little snippets of fiction or point of view? I have a few ideas of some interesting scenes... now, I am really really not good at writing, but I gotta get this on paper... All I have is a bunch of ideas for scenes. Could anyone help contribute with the scenes? How would things go? Would love to hear your contributions!

Here's the narrative setup:

Two stars are the only stars visible, orbiting around a single point: a Yellow Dwarf and a Blue Dwarf. Orbiting them are many planets, each with many moons. The Habitable Zone of the two stars is positively full of planets, each with moons, all with huge varieties of atmospheres, teeming with life and biomass. There are several asteroid belts, several varieties of gas giants, several rock debris fields that seem to be denser than an asteroid belt should be, comets, ice planets, lava planets, an iron planet, even a planet that seems to be entirely made out of diamond. This is obviously a constructed pocket universe, built for variety. Simultaneously, at parts separated by vast distances, ships appear.

Their experience is much the same: they are at the height of their readiness, and then the world turns black for a moment, and then, light; they are in this space. Whatever trick they may have used to try and sneak other capital-scale ships did not work. For those with only lightspeed sensors, they see only the stellar objects.

All of them, however, hear the same thing. On thousands of communications devices, and filtering into the minds of psychics and psionics and psykers and wyrds and mystics and sorcerers of all sorts, is a single, screaming message:

"WE ARE THE DALEKS. WE CARE NOT WHO YOU ARE. YOU WILL ALL BE EXTERMINATED! EXTERMINATED! EXTERMINATED!!"

Reaction to this, of course, is mixed.

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<40k scene. If you know anything about 40k lore, that Gloriana is NOT supposed to be there. My idea here is to have a bit of a 'cheat'; as the Imperium is incapable of getting a Gloriana-class up to spec, the only derelict one the Imperium actually has will be arbitrarily made whole ("The systems are all online! The battle damage is gone!"). This would be the Red Tear of the Blood Angels. This also sets up the characters interestingly, which would be focused primarily on the Blood Angels and their successor chapters. Alas, Astartes aren't really all that interesting personality-wise, but Mephiston might be a bit more interesting with the psychic battles with the other heavyweights in the battle of thoughts that will inevitably take place.>

---------------

<Star Trek scene. The Enterprise NX, Enterprise, A, B, C, D, E, and F are all present. And Voyager. I would say that the Federation manages to get it's time-displaced forces to have a chain of command quite well. It's also a good place to have Vulcans do blatant exposition. I'd have Voyager be placed very late in the era, 2410, with Rear Admiral Tuvok taking overall command of the Federation and United Earth and Vulcan Confederation craft. There'd be some interesting banter with Kirk talking to Older Kirk and Picard talking to Older Picard. It's a good place for them to realize that they are copies, because none of the forward-time individuals show the events related to this taking place in their histories, but they see earlier captains. This is also the first group that tries to start transmitting universal translator technology and start a bit of a propaganda campaign (ie, by transmitting images and video and warnings about their dangerous enemies, in the hopes of causing allies of convenience against them). Probably, more of the older ships will be seen Warping around, saving ships that are about to be destroyed and depositing them on remote parts of the planets, to save lives, because that is what they do.>

<Point of View: Star Wars. Admiral Thrawn's perspective, where he immediately starts inferring things based on broadcasts, the shapes of their ships, their order of battle, and what physical laws they are operating under -- some of which his intelligence team don't immediately see, and yes he is sometimes wrong but the guesses are good, he has an actual talent at this. His intelligence team does include Force users, and he has to try and keep some of the hot-headed commanders from his own universe, which are in different timelines, in command, and he manages to barely keep command via charisma and bluff, and get a handle on some of the more shoot first elements from his universe, and some of the omnicidal groups -- which often are 'big ships with small fighters' too, often pirate based, which end up trying to steal things from these obvious big fish>

----------

<Point of view. Borg. They are rapidly identifying targets to assimilate, as high priority. They give their message, and start doing quite well against some small players.>

--------------

<Point of view. Daleks. They immediately take offense to the saucer ships on the field and blow the hell out of them. "NO ONE SHALL MOCK THE DALEK! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!" They immediately dust the Independence Day City Destroyer, after tanking a direct hit from the main weapon. The V Mothership tries to flee, and fails. The Prawns mothership shoots at them, but is outmatched. Others start taking them seriously; a few groups try to get planet-destroyers aimed at them, which CAN usefully damage the Dalek ships, if they can get a shot off; they don't manage to, but some fools at some point does give out that they have a weapon that can shoot the range of the solar system, which causes a LOT of unwanted attention...>

---------------

<Point of view: Sonic the Hedgehog. This is Doctor Robotnik... meeting another version of Doctor Eggman, who get along swimmingly, and gripe about that damn blue hedgehog, and compliment each other's mustaches and sense of style, and trade stories about how they never liked the nickname Eggman, and the other one actually liked it, because some friends from college gave it to him before he had them ruthlessly roboticized. They are aware that they are probably outmatched by some on the field, but know that their fleet should not be underestimated

-------------

<Point of view. Mass Effect. Shepard in the SR-2 has had his AI immediately interpret the Federation language upgrade, and starts, with his allies, transmitting about the strengths and weaknesses of the Reapers, with a desperate search for others with dramatically different technology base than them, which the Reapers might be weak against [perhaps bigger focus on Directed Energy Weapons]. One of the 'carriers with swarms of fighters' groups comes. Perhaps an EVE faction? Maybe Freespace or Wing Commander? Maybe X3?

------------------

<Point of view. Gunbuster. Super Exelion. Tone is hardcore military sci fi, focus on the science, but with mucho, mucho power. It starts cleaning house against, oh, say, the Borg. Maybe Reapers. Big Obvious threats that they would use excessive force on. But they are probably weak to mental command.>

------------------

<Point of view. Mindspace. There's mental and psychic battles taking place on subjective space between a LOT of mind/magical power groups. I don't know who those should be, but this is where things should get really weird and mind powers don't quite synch up with one another exactly well...>

------------------

<Point of view. New Battlestar Galactica. The new, smart Cylons start hacking EVERYTHING in their close range that has terrible information security -- which is a LOT of things, because they know they are very weak -- and they should probably get something truly bizarre hacked, but don't really know what to do with it.. >

-----------------

<Point of View. Some cheeky, charismatic, snarky, well known hero in their ship, which is completely outmatched and they know it. They see Some Gundam or some other giant humanoid robot fly up to a battleship of some sort and punch through it with a rocket punch. The guy goes, "I have got to get me one of those!" in true hollywood fashion.>

----------------

<Point of View. StarCraft. Kerrigan is at the head of the Swarm. She has a quick conversation with Jim Raynor. Something along the lines of, "Jim, love. I am in this to win, to save our universe. Don't make me fight you... and keep your men out of my way!" And she immediately goes to assimilate bioships. She manages to actually save the starship troopers bugs from their local enemies through some sort of tactical genius, but it's only to ruthlessly assimilate them into the Zerg. Then she goes after Lexx... but she spares the mismatched crew of Lexx. She tactically outmanuevers the Crysis Ceph Mothership in a brutal battle, and assimilates it. She starts going after Moya, and John Chrighton tries to talk her down. Maybe he manages to with some sort of weird heroic charisma thing, that'd be awesome to see. She DOES end up going after Goaul'd, which hugely increases her power -- but only in ways that can be immediately used, ie, by psychic zerg and herself directly, by leveraging the physics knowledge with her psychic powers, because she doesn't have the capacity to immediately infest them in a useful way, quickly, or to make zerg that can make use of their technology...>

-----------------

<Point of view: One of the Final Fantasy groups. This is an endgame Final Fantasy team, with all the drama appropriate to such. They end up fighting someone appropriate. I don't know, maybe Stargate baddies? They are great individual badasses with epic attacks, and this should seem like a final fantasy game.>

-----------------

<Point of view: Daleks. They notice that Time Lords are on the scene... and then realize that they aren't actually Time Lords. They are Gallifryean, before they were time lords, in a tactically inflexible ship, which they promptly annihilate, and start going to town on their local enemies>

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<Point of view: 40k. But not the main Imperial Navy and Astartes ships, which are engaged with Rak'Gol, Ork, Chaos, and Eldar Corsairs. Instead, we are looking at the secondary factions: The Mechanicum, who are attracted to whatever group of humans they see which builds humanoid giant robots (probably battletech or macross or, hilariously, maybe Doctor Eggman? And inevitable hilarious misunderstandings happen). Also, the Mechanicum is SCREAMING at the Astartes to not annihilate any unknown human-only ships, because any one of those ships could be STC, or some alternate universe's equivalent of the STC, and they must have all aspects of Human technology! Also, a funny scene where the Mechanicum actually RECOGNIZES the Event Horizon -- it's the first ship that traveled in the Warp... with insuficcient mass to do it safely, and before Gellar Fields were invented. Maybe it's right before their historic voyage, and there can be an interesting back and forth. "You mean our FTL drive... goes down in your history... as opening a portal to Hell?" Also, other 40k sub-factions of note: the Star Galleon? Is from a Rogue Trader of Rogue Traders. Take one of the famous internet ones that hilarious stories are written about, like this: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/14169390/ or one of those epic internet stories. The shennanigans and the double and triple-crossing and the tales of debauchery and ornatedance (ornate ordinance) should know no limits!>

-----------------

<Point of view: Eldar, 40k. Uthwe has exactly two ships on the field... and a large number of seers, and eldar on psychic paths that have not been trod for thousands of years. They are hidden, desperately trying to find a situation where the Daleks don't sweep the field. They find a few possible keys: A few individuals with unfathomable luck, their souls shining brightly, like Captain Tylor and John-117... and there are a FEW ships with some temporal capabilities. The Protoss Mothership. The Krenim Temporal Weapon Ship (on loan to Starfleet...). A few others like that which might be useful. Some of the planet-busters, which would have to shoot at the Daleks simultaneously. And the Super Exelion, which is probably the highest end 'traditional blow stuff up' ship on the field, discounting the odd superweapon and star destabilizer. They realize that they aren't all dead because the Daleks want to kill things up close, because of their Hate, which is the only emotion they have.>

-----------------

<Point of view: Someone with a star destabilizing weapon. Someone sees destruction they are not ready for, panics, fires some sort of stellar torpedo or something, and has it and the torpedo incinerated by one of the bumbling fools or lucky characters. Ooorr where something highly improbably happens....>

-----------------

<Point of view: Heart of Gold, Hitchiker's Guide. Because they've activated the infinite improbability drive at this point, because they really don't want to die. They've taken this long to rig up the drive to affect probabilities outside the ship and cause weirdness to happen in a radius around the ship, which will be teleporting basically randomly around the battlefield, doing weird things to probability and causing bizzare things to happen from now on. With sometimes cuts to what they see immediately outside of their shielding from now on.>

--------------------

<Scene: Super dense asteroid field. A WHOLE LOT of unarmed ships are in here, mostly hiding, squabbling over hiding places, trying to not draw attention to themselves. Play this bit for comedy. "This is my asteroid!" "No, this is MY asteroid!" sorts of shenanigans>

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<Scene. Honorverse. While there are some ships that definitely they don't beat, they definitely outrange quite a few things on this list, many of which are hostile. Some fancy moves with Impeller Wedges are used, and death by a thousand cuts laser spam after they shoot all their missiles -- these ships are before the missile spam timeline.>

-------------------

<The sorta-deity, Walker of Sigma 957, babylon 5, tries to do some deity thing to the Daleks... who promptly scream at it and stop it with technology, of all things, disrupting it's ability to function in this timeline. It should still be, you know, really powerful, but as one of the 'very unknown' gods on the field, it should get pretty high priority.>

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<A nova cannon from 40k obliterates the borg cube. Or a shot from Lexx. One of the big ones. Cause the borg ARE going to get stomped -- it's just a matter of who.>

-------------------

<Replicators start, uh, Replicating in the sidelines, trying to get their numbers up.

-----------------

<Xenogear's Durandal, with Kos-mos, is supposedly powerful. It does something powerful with that. I don't know anything about this.>

-----------------

<Star Trek's Voth City Ship is beaming smaller ships inside to try and take them apart for study. It beams up the WRONG ship, probably one of those with super powerful humanoid individuals that actually start punching things to death or doing something completely outside the context of what Voth think should be possible.>

---------------------

<One of the EVE factions is shooting the heck up the Keyship. The EVE faction is modelled on how EVE players actually behave and talk smack to one another and so forth. Do some comic relief here. They're less powerful than the Keyship, but more tactically versatile, and are taking heavy losses, but are disabling and doing effective battlefield control on it.>

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Marlowe

2015-09-17, 12:56 AM

http://i.imgur.com/mxgNN7s.png
http://i.imgur.com/ehxrCS2.png

Broken Crown

2015-09-17, 11:15 AM

<Point of view. Gunbuster. Super Exelion. Tone is hardcore military sci fi, focus on the science, but with mucho, mucho power. It starts cleaning house against, oh, say, the Borg. Maybe Reapers. Big Obvious threats that they would use excessive force on. But they are probably weak to mental command.>

"Remember, Takaya: Gunbuster is invincible because it's powered by Hard Work and Guts!"

"Pull yourself together, Onee-sama! We're doing this for Coach!

Weak to mental command? I don't think so.

Actually, this raises a question: Exelion is in the picture, but Gunbuster doesn't seem to be. However, Gunbuster is normally carried on board Exelion. Is Gunbuster in this battle, or not?

The Glyphstone

2015-09-17, 12:06 PM

That's actually a good point. A lot of the ships here are carriers, or have some other form of parasite craft deployed from/with them. But they're technically not on the chart, so....?

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-17, 01:19 PM

I'd say carriers and motherships have their full complement, maybe with some tweaks for versatility made by their militaries to try to prepare for anything.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-17, 02:19 PM

"Remember, Takaya: Gunbuster is invincible because it's powered by Hard Work and Guts!"

"Pull yourself together, Onee-sama! We're doing this for Coach!

Weak to mental command? I don't think so.

Actually, this raises a question: Exelion is in the picture, but Gunbuster doesn't seem to be. However, Gunbuster is normally carried on board Exelion. Is Gunbuster in this battle, or not?

It's actually the Super Exelion on the chart, which was the redesigned version that supported the Eltreum escorting Buster Machine 3. (Buster Machine 3 is a doomsday weapon which created a supermassive black hole that consumed 4/5ths of the Milky Way. That was considered acceptable losses to stop the Space Monsters)

So actually they probably have Sizzler units on board (the Mass Production Gunbusters).

In the final battle of the series the Earth fleet was fighting multiple waves of billions of space monsters and holding them off (Space Monsters are sufficiently durable that when one showed up on Titan in Diebuster the attack that actually killed it sliced the moon in half, it was firing its main weapon at targets on the other side of Titan by pointing down and shooting straight through it.)

Even if Gunbuster itself isn't actually there, there's more than enough firepower to deal with basically everything in the ship itself and its Sizzler units, probably all at once.

(Also, the Exelion itself can overload its singularity core and generate a black hole that sucks in everything in a 40AU diameter, which was how the first space monster fleet was stopped)

Just as a quick example of the firepower on offer here:

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y143/Uberbucket/vlcsnap-2015-09-17-20h43m38s587_zpseoomtwfo.png

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y143/Uberbucket/vlcsnap-2015-09-17-20h44m18s092_zpscyfhe7rb.png

That's not even Gunbuster doing that, it's not even combined at the time, that's the fleet of Super Exelions and Sizzlers.

Those space monster ships? Their fleets come in billions. repeatedly.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-17, 04:02 PM

So yes, they have the most traditional dakka. But they aren't stupid. The tech, including quirky tech, in the other ships is still probably something they want. Also because the other technology available might give them ways to defeat their enemies without so much collateral damage. Also as soon as they show they have the most traditional big boom, they immediately make themselves a target for all the psionic and magic users and such. They might hold back, quite a bit...

GloatingSwine

2015-09-17, 04:46 PM

Well the Earth Empire in Gunbuster is predominantly focused on self defence (because space monsters keep trying to exterminate them), so they probably won't be shooting first.

But if they're threatened they will absolutely go all the way. (All the way in this case means "gigantic laser beams that arc through multiple light seconds and destroy anything in their path")

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-17, 06:50 PM

Well... But how are they on innocent bystanders that are useful? And CAN anyone other than like three ships really threaten them??

Marlowe

2015-09-17, 08:17 PM

40k- all questions of weaponry and firepower aside, psykers and the Warp would seriously mess with a lot of the other series' ships. That and, well, they do tend to have pretty respectable firepower..

These things aren't significant factors even in GWs own space-combat games.

"The warp" takes the form of minor upgrades to Chaos ships that are generally overpriced what they do, and Psykers aren't even a feature.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-17, 08:41 PM

Let's say that one of the better psykers in the Imperium, Mephiston, is on the bridge of the Red Tear. And what's one of the current better Sorcerer's for Chaos? Ahriman? What's the best currently living sorcerer that is probably 2nd to him that works with Chaos Undivided, some named character or other? Let's also put some of Uthwe's best farseers, seer councils, and a large amount of highly psychic eldar walking exotic psychic paths that they have not walked in millennia on the two craftworld ships. And let's put some very powerful Weirdboyz on those Ork ships, to boot. Surely that must do SOMETHING?

The Glyphstone

2015-09-17, 09:07 PM

Very likely not - 40K psychic abilities have a strongly exponential dropoff of range vs. power; the strongest, or at least most combat-effective stuff, needs the psyker to basically be looking at his target. At starship scale, you've got at best some divination abilities to forsee the near future, or morale-boosting auras to keep the crew motivated. Also, you're deviating tremendously from the original point of the thread (your thread, to boot) where it was just the various ships going into a FFA against each other, not a gigantic Every Universe At Once Versus with all these extra addons and named characters coincidentally being onboard.

Marlowe

2015-09-17, 10:00 PM

http://i.imgur.com/rJGqEpO.png
http://i.imgur.com/eKMjJ94.png
http://i.imgur.com/QkjSjDn.png

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-17, 10:55 PM

Point made.

Consider the psychic tangent to be scrubbed -- or minimized. There are SOME psychics, but they aren't the 'best' psychics, or most of them will be limited in range, or some of their longer range stuff will be interacting with other psychics, or trying some psychically-veiled boarding action to get in range of some mind control, maybe? So 'having powerful psychic' is a useful toolkit, especially with short range future-sight, but it isn't, again, a full win. It needs to be intelligently leveraged.

For example -- how would Kerrigan go about asserting dominance over some of the biotech around, and putting together her own fiefdom in the inevitable psychic mindscape-kerfluffle?

Also, I'd like to see a solid 'battle of the space combat sims'. See how Wing Commander goes up against Freespace goes up against X3 goes up against EVE... with a few interesting matchups. I'd like to see Maraak Steele in a Tie Advanced go up against a young Christopher Blair in a Confederation Wraith...

As an example of what named characters or ships might be present, let me go with Star Trek, as an example:

Intrepid-Class: Voyager, under Rear Admiral Tuvok, from 2410
Odyssey-Class: Enterprise-F, under Captain Va'Kel Shon, from 2410
Sovereign-Class: Enterprise E, under Captain Picard, from 2385
Galaxy-Class: Enterprise D, under Captain Picard, from 2371
Ambassador-Class: Enterprise C, under Captain Garret, from 2343
Excelsior-Class: Enterprise B, under Captain Johnson, from 2328
Constitution-Class Refit: Enterprise A, under Admiral Kirk, from 2286
Constitution-Class: Enterprise, under Captain Kirk, from 2270
NX-Class: Enterprise, under Captain Archer, from 2161

Make sense?

Broken Crown

2015-09-18, 12:15 AM

It's actually the Super Exelion on the chart, which was the redesigned version that supported the Eltreum escorting Buster Machine 3.

The chart certainly claims it's a Super Exelion, but the Super Exelion-class only appeared in the final episode, which was in black and white, whereas the ship on the chart clearly has Exelion's blue-with-red-stripes colour scheme. It looks to me very much as though the creator of the chart took a screen cap of Exelion, copied it onto the chart, and labelled it as a Super Exelion for some reason.

(Of course, because episode 6 was in black and white, we don't know what the actual colour scheme of a Super-Exelion is, and the ships are otherwise virtually identical, visually. It's a bit of a nitpick anyway, since AFAIK, there aren't many official figures for either ship, other than what can be deduced from watching the series, so it's all pretty speculative, either way.)

TeChameleon

2015-09-18, 04:38 AM

Oop... kinda suspect I accidentally started the psionics tangent. Apologies.

(although, if a thread of said tangent is continuing, it would be rather amusing to see what Kerrigan made of Unimatrix Zero...)

Having given it a bit of thought, I don't have much else to add, except that the Star Trek ships have one other major advantage I forgot about- Federation sensor suites appear to be borderline magical in a lot of cases, with utterly absurd detection abilities (not sure if their range is anything special).

If a fully-functional Federation starship were to fall into the hands of one of the more ruthless or creative commanders, that detection ability combined with their transporters could completely wreck a lot of the competition (although the Daleks do still have them massively outclassed).

Hmm... as a continuation on the Trekverse line of thought, who would the Borg have to assimilate (that they'd be likely to be able to assimilate) to stay in the game?

Jothki

2015-09-18, 05:11 AM

Be sure to take into account universes that are capable of teleporting missiles directly into enemy ships and universes that have no defense whatsoever against an enemy teleporting missiles directly into their ships.

It's probably fair to allow any kind of energy shield to block forms of teleportation that are blocked by shields in their own universe. Shield strength matters as well, if a ship has enough power to teleport through lighter shields, you'll need to guess at how strong alternate universe shields need to be to provide the necessary resistance.

If a ship is just a giant hunk of metal, I'd give it no teleportation resistance whatsoever. Their only defense is being large enough that internal explosions will be mostly harmless and hoping that enemies have no idea where to aim to hit actually important things.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-18, 06:07 AM

(Of course, because episode 6 was in black and white, we don't know what the actual colour scheme of a Super-Exelion is, and the ships are otherwise virtually identical, visually. It's a bit of a nitpick anyway, since AFAIK, there aren't many official figures for either ship, other than what can be deduced from watching the series, so it's all pretty speculative, either way.)

There are the Gunbuster Science episodes that were included on the OVA though, which do give dimensions for a lot of the ships.

As for the Super Exelion, it's definitely a darker colour than the Eltreum (which is slightly off white), so it's not unreasonable to say they're still the blue and red. (They're the same shape externally as the original Exelion)

Since the original Exelion was still powered by a degeneracy generator (That's what allowed it to generate a black hole which consumed the space monster fleet in ep.5) it is still likely to be ludicrously powerful by the standards of basically any of the other ships.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-18, 08:37 AM

The sensor question brought up an interesting aside.

Who has the best sensors?

Also, who has the most realistic sensors? And by realistic, I mean, 'limited to lightspeed, but otherwise pretty much made of magic, able to go far and above beyond most of the other ships' sensors.'

Because a LOT of these ships have absolutely pitiful sensors, compared to realism, which causes the truism, 'There ain't no stealth in space!"

Whose sensors actually follow this, and are therefore better than the sensing and information processing capabilities of, say, mid 1970's united states?

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions.php#id--There_Ain%27t_No_Stealth_In_Space

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--There_Ain%27t_No_Stealth_In_Space

Rakaydos

2015-09-18, 02:38 PM

Honorverse plays up Stealth Systems whenever someone is trying to hide- and above Cerberous, even the engine flare of a reaction thruster burn is consided something easilly detectable if tactics hadnt made it irrelevant. Their own drive system is a large gravitic (and visual) anomaly larger than several of these universes weapon ranges.

Their gravity detectors are calibrated for other impeller ships, but knowing this going in they'll be keeping an eagle eye on their "million km radar range" on their less capable traditional sensors And if anyone uses a gravity based superweapon they'll know.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-18, 02:48 PM

Though said 'stealth systems' are elaborated on a bit in later books, and there isn't really anything complex or magical about them either - a combination of sensor-absorbing/muffling hull material, ECM, and a system where waste heat (the big thing that you need to hide if you want space stealth in any fashion) is simply vented away from known enemy sensors, reducing detection range. A revolutionary secret technology in the later books involves a super-complicated system of panels on a ship's exterior hull that perfectly maps emissions from the other side of the hull, effectively turning the entire ship 'invisible' or at least completely transparent, and even they have to worry about enemy sensors detecting waste heat if they can't find a vector that lets them dump it in a safe direction.

So their sensors are correspondingly 'realistic', which makes them pretty pitiful compared to stuff like ST magic sensor scans.

Overall, it seems like as usual, the less a setting is beholden to the laws of physics the better off they are in this sort of mass melee. The planet-boiling Wave Motion Guns of the crazier Super Spaceship anime series look to be major threats, followed by the Daleks who apparently carry planetbusters as standard armament as well.

Chen

2015-09-18, 02:49 PM

Star Trek sensors are the super magic kind of sensors with absolutely ridiculous range on them. Some notes from Memory Alpha mention being able to fully scan a 10 light-year radius in 24 hours.

Douglas

2015-09-18, 03:32 PM

Star Trek sensors are the super magic kind of sensors with absolutely ridiculous range on them. Some notes from Memory Alpha mention being able to fully scan a 10 light-year radius in 24 hours.
Star Trek as a whole is a giant showcase of scifi writers having no sense of scale.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-18, 07:44 PM

Star Trek sensors are also kinda terrible because visual cloaking devices function against them...

The Glyphstone

2015-09-18, 08:05 PM

Star Trek cloaking devices are also magic, though - they block any visual (or apparently anything else) sensors from detecting them, but can see out through the cloak just fine.

Douglas

2015-09-18, 09:18 PM

Star Trek cloaking devices are also magic, though - they block any visual (or apparently anything else) sensors from detecting them, but can see out through the cloak just fine.
See, but not shoot. Solely because, as far as I know, shooting from cloak would be too powerful. Don't know if they ever gave an in-universe explanation for that detail.

Kitten Champion

2015-09-18, 09:37 PM

See, but not shoot. Solely because, as far as I know, shooting from cloak would be too powerful. Don't know if they ever gave an in-universe explanation for that detail.

Some can. the Scimitar from Nemesis, and The Undiscovered Country had a Bird of Prey which could fire while cloaked.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-18, 10:00 PM

See, but not shoot. Solely because, as far as I know, shooting from cloak would be too powerful. Don't know if they ever gave an in-universe explanation for that detail.

It was a power issue - they couldnt' generate enough energy to simultaneously power the weapons and the cloak/shields. Later iterations of the technology overcame that limitation in prototype designs.

Aotrs Commander

2015-09-19, 05:38 AM

Also, the other thing is, you can't cloak your weapons fire ANYWAY.

So shoot often enough, and eventually someone will figure out your attack pattern (if you're flying around a lot) or your position/course (if you you can't fly around enough). And then you'd better hope you've got enough power for your shields as well, otherwise it's going to hurt.

(The Galactic Empire did actually try experimenting with a blind targeting system predictor (so they could fight while cloaked), but it didn't work. Admittedly, they were trying it on fighters, though, which made the job harder. Even if it had, though... It wouldn't have helped because, at the end of the day, it's a STAR DESTROYER. It can't dodge, so all you have to do is follow the turbolaser bolts back to their source. Heck, the rebels found the damn cloaked ships by running into them on at least two occasions...!)

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-19, 08:03 AM

I just figured something of vital importance that we must discuss! What fourth wall breaking shenanigans and asides will the Spaceballs crew get up to?

Rakaydos

2015-09-19, 08:10 AM

I just figured something of vital importance that we must discuss! What fourth wall breaking shenanigans and asides will the Spaceballs crew get up to?
We must steal the improbability drive!

endoperez

2015-09-19, 08:55 AM

We must steal the improbability drive!

Even better - the whole fight was CAUSED by them trying to steal the improbability drive! They got their hands on a multi-dimensional radio, and decided to spoof a message that'd make anyone with a working impropability drive to use it to actually get to them, so they could steal it! Unfortunately...

Mato

2015-09-20, 03:54 PM

Star Trek sensors are also kinda terrible because visual cloaking devices function against them...According to La Forge, the cloaked Scimitar emits no tachyons and left no residual anti-protons so I don't think you really understand what they scan for.

Also, the other thing is, you can't cloak your weapons fire ANYWAY.The Federation could teleport it's bombs thereby skipping that.

And the idea of all ships hold still in Star Trek comes from the low budget TV shows unable to film what they wanted to depict. It's always been said in the books, and even displayed in the more recent films, that the ships are constantly moving and even adjusting their angle and shield arrangements for maximum combat efficiency.

I'd also pay to watch a series where the crew from Spaceballs is trust into this.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-20, 05:09 PM

The Federation could teleport it's bombs thereby skipping that.

If they can, why don't they?

There's never been a single instance of transporters used in space combat like that, not in sixty years of Star Trek.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-20, 05:20 PM

If they can, why don't they?

There's never been a single instance of transporters used in space combat like that, not in sixty years of Star Trek.

Probably because it's also a ST staple that shields block transporters (except when Plot says otherwise), so you'd have to drain the shields with conventional weapons before doing any transporter bomb shenanigans (at which point you might as well just finish them off with said conventional weapons anyways).

Whether other universes's shield tech is cross-compatible with Trek shields in that regard has caused endless debate already, let alone the ones who use armor instead of shields.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-20, 08:08 PM

I'd say most shields that are said to block some sort of teleportation block most forms of teleportation, and a few weird armor types would block teleportation too...

Also, I assumed most Spaceballs 4th wall breaking stuff would be comments about the scenario, riffs on the other ships, in-jokes, talks about lawsuits and lawyers, puns, sexual innuendo, stuff like that...

Anyone have any good jokes on what they would actually do or say?

Mato

2015-09-20, 10:34 PM

If they can, why don't they?

There's never been a single instance of transporters used in space combat like that, not in sixty years of Star Trek.

The transporter can also serve a tactical purpose, such as beaming a photon grenade or photon torpedo to detonate at remote locations (TNG: "Legacy", VOY: "Dark Frontier"), or to outright destroy objects (TNG: "Captain's Holiday"). The TOS episode "A Taste of Armageddon" mentions Vendikar materializing fusion bombs over targets of enemy planet Eminiar VII in the course of theoretical computer warfare.
...
Various episodes of Deep Space Nine ("DS9") and Voyager ("VOY") have introduced two anti-transporter devices: transport inhibitors and transporter scramblers. Inhibitors prevent a transporter beam from "locking on" to whatever the device is attached. Scramblers distort the pattern that is in transit, literally scrambling the atoms upon rematerialization, resulting in the destruction of inanimate objects and killing living beings by rematerializing them as masses of random tissue; this was gruesomely demonstrated in the DS9 episode "The Darkness and the Light".
...
Transporter operations can also be curtailed when either the point of origin and/or the intended target site is moving at warp velocities. In the TNG episode, "The Schizoid Man", a "long-range" or "near-warp" transport was required as a transporter beam cannot penetrate a warp field. (In the 2009 Star Trek film Kirk and Scotty beam aboard while the Enterprise is traveling at warp, however, the movie takes place in an alternate continuity, thus not affecting the Prime Continuity used in all previous media and the Star Trek Online computer game.) To deposit an away team on the planet Gravesworld while at the same time responding to a distress signal, the Enterprise would only drop out of warp drive just long enough to energize the transporter beam. Geordi La Forge personally performed the delicate operation, which involved compensating for the ship's relativistic motion. After materializing, Deanna Troi commented that for a moment she thought she was trapped in a nearby wall, to which Worf replied, "For a moment, you were." In later stories ("The Emissary" and "The Best of Both Worlds"), it was confirmed that the transporter would work at warp only if the sending and receiving sites were moving at equal velocities.
...
While several characters have asserted that transporters cannot transport through a ship's shields or planetary defense shields, there are instances of this "rule" being broken through a technobabble solution (TNG: "The Wounded", DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations") or disregarded by the show's writers (Voyager: "Caretaker").You know, I wish people would ask simple questions instead of assuming grossly incorrect opinions and then posting them in a disparaging manner.

Marlowe

2015-09-20, 11:04 PM

You know, I wish people would ask simple questions instead of assuming grossly incorrect opinions and then posting them in a disparaging manner.

But then the internet would have FACTS on it! That would be terrible!

GloatingSwine

2015-09-21, 01:46 AM

Probably because it's also a ST staple that shields block transporters (except when Plot says otherwise), so you'd have to drain the shields with conventional weapons before doing any transporter bomb shenanigans (at which point you might as well just finish them off with said conventional weapons anyways).

Whether other universes's shield tech is cross-compatible with Trek shields in that regard has caused endless debate already, let alone the ones who use armor instead of shields.

You'd think that, but actually you don't even need to beam through an enemy's shields to make effective use of transporters in battle, you could be using them to drop mines into an enemy's path, or into contact with his shields to maximise their effectiveness, which would allow you to construct a more efficient device than a photon torpedo because you wouldn't need fiddly things like warp sustainers and could have a bigger warhead and still maximise its effectiveness (and prevent the enemy avoiding it because you drop it too close in his path to manoeuvre around).

But they don't. Ever.

(NB, Mato: All the instances cited on Wikipedia that you quoted are instances of ground combat receiving tactical support from transporters, not ship to ship combat. Facts, y'know?)

Aotrs Commander

2015-09-21, 06:10 AM

You'd think that, but actually you don't even need to beam through an enemy's shields to make effective use of transporters in battle, you could be using them to drop mines into an enemy's path, or into contact with his shields to maximise their effectiveness, which would allow you to construct a more efficient device than a photon torpedo because you wouldn't need fiddly things like warp sustainers and could have a bigger warhead and still maximise its effectiveness (and prevent the enemy avoiding it because you drop it too close in his path to manoeuvre around).

But they don't. Ever.

(NB, Mato: All the instances cited on Wikipedia that you quoted are instances of ground combat receiving tactical support from transporters, not ship to ship combat. Facts, y'know?)

The single largest problem with that is how LONG is takes to transport anything. Seconds, which is FOREVER in combat. (A quick check on the length of the effect is something like a total of 4-6 seconds. That's AGES.) Plenty of time to dodge, because you'll see it coming. (Yeah, unless you're in an ISD or something.) And they have trouble often enough (not all the time, but when they sometimes remember - like everything else about Star Trek they are very consistent) beaming onto moving targets that it's probably not that easy to even get it close in practise.

(As a general rule, as well, mines don't work in space. (Despite some popular sci-fi believing otherwise.) As space is so bloody BIG, the chances of you actually running into anything accidently are infintesimal. You'd need billions to mine a planet, for example, and DDS9 just about got away with it since they were mining a very small, not much bigger than starship, area. SW mines aren't even explosive, they just shoot at you!)

Chen

2015-09-21, 07:20 AM

The shield thing for transporters works both ways as far as I can tell. Which means you'd need to drop YOUR shields to transport stuff too. That's probably not a great idea in combat. That said with computers as advanced as theirs you'd think you'd be able to drop the shields for a fraction of a second at just the right time to avoid that problem too. That said the tactic would immediately become commonplace with the other side scanning for that momentary shield drop and then in that instant beaming stuff onto the enemy ship too. In the end I guess it might not be worth using as a weapon.

Mato

2015-09-21, 10:42 AM

(NB, Mato: All the instances cited on Wikipedia that you quoted are instances of ground combat receiving tactical support from transporters, not ship to ship combat. Facts, y'know?)

The Borg vessel closes on Voyager but it is neither a cube nor a sphere; instead, it is a probe. The two ships exchange fire. Aboard the probe, there are explosions as the deflector shields are disabled. The Collective instructs that they be regenerated and the weapons re-modulated when, suddenly, a Starfleet photon torpedo is transported into the vessel. A drone moves to disable it but as the drone is about to begin dismantling the torpedo it detonates, destroying the probe and all drones aboard. What's this about facts?

And did we really have to do this twice?

LokeyITP

2015-09-21, 11:33 AM

It's the internet you'll have to do it 50 times. Despite things like Scotty's Kobayashi Maru win (no one's seen Wrath of Khan). Of course this is Star Trek...their torpedoes would be close to a million times more effective without bothering with the explosive at all (millions of megaton vs tens they use occasionally--they use a random number + isoton most of the time).

HandofShadows

2015-09-21, 12:57 PM

Despite things like Scotty's Kobayashi Maru win (no one's seen Wrath of Khan).

Well those that have seen WoK know it was Kirk (by cheating) who beat the Kobayashi Maru scenario, not Scotty. :smallwink:

LokeyITP

2015-09-21, 02:06 PM

Bah, it was probably the next gen episode he was in then (some victory of his using transporter as a weapon that was used as a KM test later).

Like mentioned above, there's very little transporter as a weap in ST because most enemies have them too, and they'd make battle a farce: beam off important part of opponents offense and you win :)

Granted ST just isn't a contender, it's too rules based (even when they're nonsense by real world science) against lots of opponents that don't have to deal with such.

Rakaydos

2015-09-21, 05:00 PM

How many verses in this conflict have effective (not easilly dodged) weapon ranges over a million KM?

Gnoman

2015-09-21, 06:12 PM

You'd think that, but actually you don't even need to beam through an enemy's shields to make effective use of transporters in battle, you could be using them to drop mines into an enemy's path, or into contact with his shields to maximise their effectiveness, which would allow you to construct a more efficient device than a photon torpedo because you wouldn't need fiddly things like warp sustainers and could have a bigger warhead and still maximise its effectiveness (and prevent the enemy avoiding it because you drop it too close in his path to manoeuvre around).

But they don't. Ever.

It's a standard tactic in the Star Fleet Battles tabletop wargame, primarily used to destroy missile salvos, fighter squadrons, or reveal cloaked ships.

How many verses in this conflict have effective (not easilly dodged) weapon ranges over a million KM?

The Honorverse does for certain - for them 1,000,000 km is the extreme limit of energy weapons against unshielded targets (Honorverse shields provide a significant visual and sensor distortion that makes it very difficult to see where a ship actually is, so this is as much a limitation on energy range as raw power is) while even "primitive" single-drive missiles have an effective range of several times energy range.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-21, 06:18 PM

The various Mega/Super X anime franchises seem to have ranges variably measured in light-seconds and AU's.

Also, someone is rapidly going to point out that range is worthless without the ability to inflict damage, and {Faction Z}'s armor/shields allow them to tank anything else while they close to killing distance.

Aotrs Commander

2015-09-21, 06:31 PM

Or simple use of tactical FTL to close the distance if it's too great to get within desired weapons range. Heck, high enough sublight cruiser speeds could very quickly eliminate modest ranges.

TeChameleon

2015-09-21, 08:45 PM

So... is there anyone running around that could give the Daleks serious competition out of the picks we've got? I'm pretty sure they outgun Star Trek & Star Wars by something like an order of magnitude, and the 'verses like Mass Effect and Robotech/Macross by... eesh. It wouldn't be pretty, at the very least.

Plus they have their own grab-bag of weird tricks (any psionic attacks attempted on them would probably result in the telepath's head exploding, for example).

Mato

2015-09-22, 11:24 AM

How many verses in this conflict have effective (not easilly dodged) weapon ranges over a million KM?A class 6 photon torpedo has the range of eight million kilometers. It's 2371 era technology, Voyager's launch.

The technical manuals indirectly explain why the range is to short. In 2215 the first experimental proton torpedo was made and it trapped the explosion in a shield so the antimatter had more time to mix (TNG's manual), so it was limited to how long the internal batteries could last. By 2268 they reached the theoretical maximum limit of 25 isotons (DS9's manual). In 2271 the process changed, the shield would be used to drive the material together, compressing it.

At a signal from the onboard detonation circuitry, the fields collapse and drive the materials together, resulting in the characteristic release of energy. While the maximum payload of antimatter in a standard photon torpedo is only about 1.5 kilograms, the released energy per unit time is actually greater than that calculated for a Galaxy class antimatter pod rupture.
Antimatter pods house have an internal storage of 100m3 and liquid antideuterium has a density of 162.4 kg/m3, the potential is 697,670.4mt putting pre-TNG technology in the seven hundred gigaton range, but it's about as accurate as SW's prequel book is imo.

Almost one hundred years later on 2364 the Enterprise used in TNG is launched. It uses an unknown model of proton torpedoes, they have a 300,000km range and sixteen variable explosion levels (TNG TV). In 2365 they were upgraded to "Pho-torp Mark IV" which increased explosive potential by +11% (DS9 TV). Voyager launched in 2371 with Type 6's, which had up to a 200 isoton yield and a range of eight million kilometers (Voy TV). Since their maximum setting violated strategic arms limitation treaties (Voy manual), you can figure anything near 200 isotons is a type of WMD and Voyager also confirms a model types known as Type 10 and Mark XXV (Voy TV).

But we have no true scale of isoton to joule, just fan and antifan estimations (I personally favor the self-destruction figures). Writers were commonly hired and fired on a whim, and Star Trek is a logic/reality breaking show that uses science mumbo jumbo to excuse things. Like a quantum torpedo was created just to ignore spacial storage limitations on warheads, the experimental versions used a 21 isoton explosion to start a cascade that rips a hole in space, mumble mumble zero-point energy 57 isotons! :smallsigh:

Gnoman

2015-09-22, 12:06 PM

A class 6 photon torpedo has the range of eight million kilometers. It's 2371 era technology, Voyager's launch.

The technical manuals indirectly explain why the range is to short. In 2215 the first experimental proton torpedo was made and it trapped the explosion in a shield so the antimatter had more time to mix (TNG's manual), so it was limited to how long the internal batteries could last. By 2268 they reached the theoretical maximum limit of 25 isotons (DS9's manual). In 2271 the process changed, the shield would be used to drive the material together, compressing it.

Antimatter pods house have an internal storage of 100m3 and liquid antideuterium has a density of 162.4 kg/m3, the potential is 697,670.4mt.

Almost one hundred years later on 2364 the Enterprise used in TNG is launched. It uses an unknown model of proton torpedoes, they have a 300,000km range and sixteen variable explosion levels (TNG TV). In 2365 they were upgraded to "Pho-torp Mark IV" which increased explosive potential by +11% (DS9 TV). Voyager launched in 2371 with Type 6's, which had up to a 200 isoton yield and a range of eight million kilometers (Voy TV). Since their maximum setting violated strategic arms limitation treaties (Voy manual), you can figure anything near 200 isotons is a type of WMD and Voyager also confirms a model types known as Type 10 and Mark XXV (Voy TV).

But we have no scale of isoton to joule. Writers were commonly hired and fired on a whim, and Star Trek is a logic/reality breaking show that uses science mumbo jumbo to excuse things. Like a quantum torpedo was created just to ignore spacial storage limitations on warheads, the experimental versions used a 21 isoton explosion to start a cascade that rips a hole in space, mumble mumble zero-point energy 57 isotons! :smallsigh:

1.5kg of antimatter will produce an energy release in the 50-60 megaton range if every single particle interacts with normal matter, which is why the TNG-era torpedo warheads are made up of lots and lots of little packets mixed with packets of normal matter - when the internal energy barriers collapse, everything touches and you get near-total conversion. This is far greater than the explosion of an antimatter pod because nearly none of the antimatter in the pod will come into contact with matter and explode, because only a thin surface layer will touch, and most of the antimatter will be vented into space. Thus we can fix a photon torpedo yield at 55 megatons in the TNG era, 60.5 in the DS9 Era, and (extrapolating from the DS9 improvment, since Voyager started babbling about yields in the absolutely meaningless isoton (literally, isoton means "like a ton", so a 200 isoton yield would mean "200 ton") scale) 71.5 megatons in the Voyager era (which is actually a very high yield given on-screen evidence - we see photons detonating in atmosphere in at least one episode producing none of the effects even a 1 kiloton explosion would generate). This is in the same power range as high-end nuclear warheads (although much, much more compact - Tsar Bomba (designed for 100 megatons and detonated at 50) was eight meters long and three in diameter compared to the ~2 meter length of the photon torpedoes seen in Star Trek II and VI) if we assume that the energy is released in an identical manner. A potent heavy weapon, but not anything close to the planet-cracking yield you're suggesting.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-22, 01:59 PM

Also, despite the vaunted 8 million km range, the question was whether weapons could effectively hit and not be dodged.

Photon Torpedoes can and do miss at basically point blank range (see: Klingon assault on DS9, torpedoes go everywhere and more miss than strike a warbird).

Mato

2015-09-22, 02:03 PM

For referenceLook, you understand how an engine works right? You light a puddle of gasoline it goes whoomf and it's on fire, it's pretty cool. But if you put it in an enclosed cylinder, it goes boom and explodes. And it gets even cooler than that. If you take the same amount of fuel and same container, but then squeeze it down to half the size you get an even bigger explosion! And if you take blow air into the container before sealing it and compressing it, you even an even bigger explosion!!! Science, it "magically" makes bigger booms.

You also have a ton of fallacies on your end. Like the previously offered explaining brings up an unaccounted for stored electromagnetic energies that power the separately handled compression, that you still ignore. But the 1.5kg warhead that canonically hits the perfect ratio is another massive fallacy of falsified comparison. Canonically vastly superior types are used and in plain text, it's like saying the M134 Minigun is only as effective as the sixteen century Arquebus because they are both guns.

Your position of ignorance is astounding, but even more to it. These are the stated configurations and outcomes of a fictional weapon in fictional media using fictional science. This entire thread could not exist it you did not accept things like hyperspace, psionics, or a 200+ periodic table exists. If you cannot accept their version of science and wish to argue it's wrong. I really think you should be posting your complaints in a thread titled "fiction is a lie", arguing that we should never believe someone's fictional writings based on our real world theories and proofs over there instead of hanging out in here.

Photon Torpedoes can and do miss at basically point blank range (see: Klingon assault on DS9, torpedoes go everywhere and more miss than strike a warbird).Klingons use disruptions I believe, direct energy beams figred out of a gun. The fired weapon has no on-board navigation capability and is limited to the cannoneer's aim.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-22, 02:09 PM

But the 1.5kg warhead that canonically hits the perfect ratio is another massive fallacy of falsified comparison. Canonically vastly superior types are used and in plain text, it's like saying the M134 Minigun is only as effective as the sixteen century Arquebus because they are both guns.

You can't even demonstrate a photon torpedo reaching the 64Mt yield, let alone anything "vastly superior".

Every single instance of them actually being used in Star Trek canon they're massively weaker. Hell in TFF a photon torpedo is barely more powerful than a modern hand grenade, Kirk and co survive a detonation mere metres away!

Klingons use disruptions I believe, direct energy beams figred out of a gun. The fired weapon has no on-board navigation capability and is limited to the cannoneer's aim.

As you might have been able to infer from my post, if you actually read it, I was talking about DS9's own torpedo launchers missing the Klingons. Which they do. A lot.

Mato

2015-09-22, 02:28 PM

You can't even demonstrate a photon torpedo reaching the 64Mt yield, let alone anything "vastly superior".

Matter from the primary deuterium tankage and the total supply of antimatter from the storage pods on Deck42 are expelled simultaneously, producing an energy release on the order of 10^15 megajoules, roughly equivalent to 1,000 photon torpedoes.That's actually my favorite entry since in the entire whole of star trek it's the only time a joules to torpedo equivalent is ever made. I don't know which type or class of photon torpedo it's talking about, but I know 10^12mj is equivalent to 239 megatons.

Every single instance of them actually being used in Star Trek canon they're massively weaker. Hell in TFF a photon torpedo is barely more powerful than a modern hand grenade, Kirk and co survive a detonation mere metres away!
A 25 isoton photon torpedo explosion could destroy an entire city within seconds. (VOY: "Living Witness")
A 54 isoton yield gravimetric charge could blow up a small planet. (VOY: "The Omega Directive")
A 90 isoton bomb of enriched ultritium had the explosion radius of 800 kilometers. Such a bomb was used to blow up a ketracel-white facility in Cardassian space in 2374. (DS9: "A Time to Stand")
"City" is also ambiguous, like if you dropped a 1mt bomb on Santan Island the residents in Brooklyn wouldn't even call the police. If you dropped a 64.4mt bomb on New York the fireball would only be 1.58 miles wide but at least the air blast would cover the Bronx. For a 497 mile explosion through, you'd need around ten gigatons according to nukemap classic. So yeah, I'm really really really sure the 200 isoton warheads are over 64.4mt.

And this is also the third time you've done this gloatingswine. I cannot express are unfathomably old this is.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-22, 02:39 PM

Now demonstrate it happening on screen in actual Star Trek canon. Go on. Find one single instance of a photon torpedo in actual Star Trek being anywhere slightly near that powerful.

(PS: That Ketracel White facility in A Time To Stand? Not destroyed by anything as powerful as you're claiming, it's on an asteroid at best a couple km across, and that would only take a few megatons to do what canonically happens to it).

Actual onscreen evidence is wholly contradictory to what you claim.

Gnoman

2015-09-22, 03:15 PM

Look, you understand how an engine works right? You light a puddle of gasoline it goes whoomf and it's on fire, it's pretty cool. But if you put it in an enclosed cylinder, it goes boom and explodes. And it gets even cooler than that. If you take the same amount of fuel and same container, but then squeeze it down to half the size you get an even bigger explosion! And if you take blow air into the container before sealing it and compressing it, you even an even bigger explosion!!! Science, it "magically" makes bigger booms.

This pretty much proves you don't know how antimatter works. It is scientifically impossible to get more energy out of it than you get by plugging the mass of the antimatter+the normal matter it is reacting to into E=mc2. If you do that with the stated 1.5kg of antimatter, you get 64.442 megatons of TNT. My previous post was heavily rounded, so the yield estimate was lower. The TNG manual explicitly states that the warhead of a Galaxy-class ship's photon torpedos is more powerful than earlier models because it divides the warhead into little packets of antimatter mixed with little packets of matter to make sure more of the antimatter reacts, while the older ones that just had a chunk of antimatter held in a containment field wasted much of it. As a fuel pod does not have such compartments, only that portion of the antimatter that directly touches the edge of the pod in a containment failure would annihilate, which would release enough energy to rupture it and vent the remainder into space.

EDIT: Also, it is physically impossible to generate a fireball or shockwave in vacuum via a nuclear explosive, thus trying to use nuclear weapon resources to determine the yield equivalent of a fireball in space (WHATEVER the measurements you use) is essentially, to borrow a phrase "arguing that a minigun is the same as an arquebus because they're both guns."

Mato

2015-09-22, 04:00 PM

It is scientifically impossible to get more energy out of it than you get by plugging the mass of the antimatter+the normal matter it is reacting to into E=mc2.
Like the previously offered explaining brings up an unaccounted for stored electromagnetic energies that power the separately handled compression, that you still ignore.For a third time as well. You continue to miss the point, the antimatter is not the only source of potential energy. My point on the engines just covered the battery pack for the shield array adds to the potential, just like a missile flying through space also has momentum energy to consider.

Like they also have sustainer warp engines.

1.516 kilocochranes: Under the conditions where a warp field of 1.516 kilocochranes achieves warp factor 9, approximately 3 exajoules are required to create the field, and only 1.2 exajoules to maintain it. (Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, page 55)I'm not saying I've seen one fired at warp 9, but the battery pack for the wrap drive potentially stores four times more energy than your claim the entire torpedo has.

And all this stored energy vanishes, apparently destroyed as I guess you think energy can be, because it's only supposed to detonate with 64.4mt according to you. Maybe the writers did make up a bunch of things as their right to do, but if you're going to try calculating something using real world numbers for sport, at least try to encompass the entire thing instead of leaving out several contributing factors.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-22, 04:45 PM

Like they also have sustainer warp engines.
I'm not saying I've seen one fired at warp 9, but the battery pack for the wrap drive potentially stores four times more energy than your claim the entire torpedo has

The very next line after your quote is:

1.65 kilocochranes: When the development of the Galaxy-class began, 1.65 kilocochranes was the sustainable field output level that was to be exceeded by the warp core of the the starship. (Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, page 1)

So what you've actually done is claimed that each and every photon torpedo is within a couple of percent of the entire output of the warp core of a Galaxy Class starship.

Or, just maybe the volume enclosed by the warp field is relevant to the amount of power required to generate and sustain it and you're just completely wrong. Which would be consistent with, as also demonstrated on the very page you linked, shuttles requiring vastly lower warp engine outputs (measured in millicochranes) to achieve warp.

Gnoman

2015-09-22, 04:51 PM

And all this stored energy vanishes, apparently destroyed as I guess you think energy can be, because it's only supposed to detonate with 64.4mt according to you. Maybe the writers did make up a bunch of things as their right to do, but if you're going to try calculating something using real world numbers for sport, at least try to encompass the entire thing instead of leaving out several contributing factors.

That energy would already have been used to power the warp field, assuming that it's even there in the first place - Memory Alpha (which also explicitly states that the warhead yield is 64 megatons) suggests that most of the energy needed is generated by the photon torpedo tube, with the torpedo itself having a very small onboard power source. As the field only needs to be sustained for a very brief period (and also given that a photon torpedo cannot break the light barrier unless fired at warp), the energy needed is going to be much lower and mostly expended by the time of impact.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-22, 06:06 PM

Mato

2015-09-22, 07:35 PM

I'm not saying I've seen one fired at warp 9, but the battery pack for the wrap drive potentially stores four times more energy than your claim the entire torpedo has.

So what you've actually done is claimed that each and every photon torpedo is within a couple of percent of the entire output of the warp core of a Galaxy Class starship.:smallsigh:
No, not at all. But thanks for listening to me.

Oh, and the Galaxy-class ships can enter warp 9 which consumes three exajoules on top of running full systems such as shields, scanners, halodecks, replicators, and general crew activity for three years. I'm not sure why you think maintaining an exajoule's worth of output for a second or two is even close to that, but I think I never will.

Memory Alpha (which also explicitly states that the warhead yield is 64 megatons) Let's check that.

The second type warhead was loaded with a maximum yield of only 1.5 kilograms of antideuterium. Due to the premixed reactants, the released energy per unit time is greater than in a rupture of a storage pod containing 100 cubic meters of antideuterium. The torpedo had a dry mass of 247.5 kilograms. (pg. 129, 68 referenced) By using standard physics calculations, a payload of 1.5 kilograms equals to about 64.4 megatons. The second type, at maximum yield, generates the destructive effects greater than in an antimatter pod rupture. Antimatter is stored as liquid or slush on starships. (pg. 69) Density of mere liquid antideuterium is around 160 kilograms per cubic meter. According to this comparison the high annihilation rate energy release would be comparable to the effects in a 690 gigaton explosion. For the sake of plausibility the affected blast area at these intensities might be extremely small. Visual effects on-screen would seem to confirm this. Antimatter calculator: http://edwardmuller.com/calculator.htmMemory Alpha says the torpedo explodes with around 690 gigatons and the visual effects on the show confirm it, so thanks.

And the torpedo in question is the same one I mentioned before, it was put into operation in 2271, three years after the theoretical 25 isoton figure was reached and around one hundred years before TNG took place. I kind of already mentioned that too...

Guys, guys! Let's stop the yield of star trek discussion because it doesn't really help with the premise in any way.I'm fine with moving on.

Broken Crown

2015-09-22, 08:50 PM

At some point, there needs to be a battle between the Arcadia and the Enterprise-D, so as to pit two self-inconsistent universes against each other.

It would also play on two sharply contrasting visions of the future of humanity:

Captain Picard: "Humanity is the ideal to which all sapient beings should aspire!"

Captain Harlock: "Humanity is beneath contempt. Why do I even bother protecting these people?"

Gnoman

2015-09-22, 09:00 PM

Guys, guys! Let's stop the yield of star trek discussion because it doesn't really help with the premise in any way. This sort of thing can simply be solved by 'the capabilities of the ships are neither the highest nor the lowest shown by contradicting sources, with most ships' capabilities being somewhere in the middle, with baseline energy weapons being fairly similar across universes, albeit at different efficiencies or utility or range or explosion size or similar, unless all sources agree that a ship is seriously more powerful than everything else. Like for the Super Excelion, which can clean house as it has the most dakka.'

It absolutely is relevant - the lower estimate (that is consistent with all on-screen evidence) puts the Federation at a fairly low level. The ludicrous high-end claim puts the Federation at "Can destroy planets with very little effort - ~700 gigatons is "creates nuclear winter all by itself" range, and the Enterprise-D can fire ~16 in a single salvo, for a yield 0f 11,200 gigatons, or 11.2 teratons. Ten such salvos would surpass the meteor that ended the age of the dinosaurs, and a single such salvo detonating in near proximity to the planet would produce enough radiation to sterilize any planet.

Memory Alpha says the torpedo explodes with around 690 gigatons and the visual effects on the show confirm it, so thanks.

You read that wrong. On screen visual effects appear to confirm the extremely small radius that must be assumed for the sake of plausibility. Nothing on screen confirms (or even supports) the ludicrous explosive yield, and there's a great deal to dispute it.

1. Balance of Terror (TOS) - A Romulan Bird Of Prey-class starship tosses a leftover nuclear warhead out of a hatch to serve as a mine. Spock describes this as a "small, metal-cased object". While there is no maximum yield of a nuclear device, the fact that the device was small enough to be partially concealed by debris means that it wasn't too large, probably no bigger than Tsar Bomba - we'll go ahead and triple the yield of Tsar Bomba to make the point. In fact, for the sake of argument, I'll multiply it by ten to get 1 gigaton. This warhead was detonated at range and still did damage to the Enterprise. A direct hit on the shields would probably have collapsed them, else Kirk would not have tried to avoid it or spent phaser energy shooting at it. If TNG-era photon torpedoes were really ~700 times this already inflated-beyond-all-reason blast, this would mean that a single torpedo would destroy entire fleets of older-style ships.

2. Star Trek III - A Klingon Bird Of Prey fires a photon torpedo into an unshielded Federation ship, destroying it. This destruction was entirely accidental, and resulted in the Klingon gunner being summarily executed for incompetence. If the photon torpedo was even half (to represent earlier technology) of the ~750 gigaton figure, this would make no sense - half of the 64 megaton figure is barely plausible if you account for advanced materials.

3. Star Trek Generations - Enterprise-D was struck by photon torpedo fire from an old but updated Klingon Bird Of Prey. This weapon does not destroy the ship outright even coupled with disruptor fire, but merely causes the ship's safety systems to fail, leading to a warp core breach. A ~700 gigaton blast would have simply vaporized an object of 1701-D's size, leaving no survivors. The unshielded Bird Of Prey was destroyed by a single torpedo, but not vaporized - most of the ship itself is visibly intact. Also, none of these explosions had any adverse effects on the planet they were orbiting.

Of course, the Technical Manual conflicts with on screen evidence in other ways - dialogue in TNG establishes torpedo range to be a mere 400,000km.

Rakaydos

2015-09-22, 10:47 PM

I seem to recall Honorverse Dreadnauts are individually on the lower end of planetbuster scales- there's an offhand comment in prose about "enough power to shatter a moon" in Short Victorius War that is apparently backed up by comparing energy outputs of the class's weapons with the binding energy of a planet. And Honorverse Superdreadnauts are even more powerful... and designed to SURVIVE that kind of firepower.

With lightspeed energy ranges against even shielded targets of more than most the competition, an early honorverse Superdreadnaut (before they reduce energy armamanet for moar manticore missile massacre) might be able to get some early hits in on the Daleks?

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-22, 10:48 PM

Gnoman

2015-09-23, 12:09 AM

Sigh. Trek yields and capabilities:

I would say keep the yields mostly on-screen, but perhaps the higher end of what is shown on screen, maybe with a few nods to things off-screen, with the implication that the various polities have treaties against WMD's, and most of the weapons being more 'clean, exotic shaped charges that are designed to destroy what they hit and only what they hit, but do so very reliably', maybe with some of the abilities as shown in TOS that aren't common in TNG (like attacking at warp, shields working at warp, ships weapons actually having reasonable range...). You know. Keep it INTERESTING but not crazy.

Rakaydos: You are one of the few that places Honorverse highly in this fight. Personally, I think they are seriously underestimated, because someone actually listed a particular amount of megatons for one of their weapons at some point (and the amount was low), and that often causes them to be considered a minor player...

Late model Mark 16 destroyer grade missiles carried a 40 megaton warhead, which was explicitly stated to be slighty larger than that carried by solarian league capital-ship class missiles. A pre-pod superdreadnought would have a forty tube broadside, and most of the ships in this chart would have a rather difficult time shooting them down due to sheer speed, as even single-drive missiles come in at half lightspeed. These were considered skirmishing weapons, with the real punch being their massive energy weapons (lasers and gamma-frequency lasers called graders) which were far more destructive.

With that kind of long range punch, and total invulnerabilty above and below, the Honorverse is a serious contender that mostly loses to the space fantasy factions.

Rakaydos

2015-09-23, 12:55 AM

With that kind of long range punch, and total invulnerabilty above and below, the Honorverse is a serious contender that mostly loses to the space fantasy factions.

And given that most space fantasy fleets fight 2 dimentionally anyway, the honorverse ability to "roll ship" and be invincible to one fleet while engaging a second one lets them pick battles even against faster and pore powerful foes.

And in the honorverse technical manual who's name I'm forgetting ATM, "lasers" are actually Xray Lasers, not visible beam- the distinction between "Lasers" and Gamma ray "Grasers" come from the different penetration qualities of the wavelengths. Apparently Xrays are partially refracted and absorbed by honorverse armor, whereas a graser of the same energy doesnt care what your superscience armor is made out of :p

Gnoman

2015-09-23, 02:07 AM

And in the honorverse technical manual who's name I'm forgetting ATM, "lasers" are actually Xray Lasers, not visible beam- the distinction between "Lasers" and Gamma ray "Grasers" come from the different penetration qualities of the wavelengths. Apparently Xrays are partially refracted and absorbed by honorverse armor, whereas a graser of the same energy doesnt care what your superscience armor is made out of :p

You may be mixing up the bomb-pumped lasers used as missile warheads (limited in the early era, ubiquitous later on) with the shipboard weapon. The former are X-ray lasers, while I don't recall the latter being so.

Rakaydos

2015-09-23, 10:38 AM

You may be mixing up the bomb-pumped lasers used as missile warheads (limited in the early era, ubiquitous later on) with the shipboard weapon. The former are X-ray lasers, while I don't recall the latter being so.

Actually, I'm referring to the "story" http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/An_Introduction_to_Modern_Starship_Armor_Design from the book In Fire Forged.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-23, 02:05 PM

Personally, I think Honorverse is a definite contender in the range and firepower departments barring the obvious outliers like the Daleks or Super Exelion Gunbuster Extreme, but it's decidedly vulnerable in the maneuvering department. Compared to pretty much every other ship on here, Honorverse capital ships move like pigs in molasses since they are bound by Newtonian physics to some degree. Most of their weaponry is in their broadside armament, since these are early-generation capital ships without the later tech developments that permitted off-bore targeting, which is also where their shields are located (plus their tops/bottoms). Anyone operating on an inertia-less drive system or possessing tactical FTL that's not blocked by the presence of a gravity well would be able to easily keep 'ahead' of an Honorverse capital ship, where their defenses are weakest (armor only, no shields) and their weapons are weakest (only a handful of chaser guns).

Rakaydos

2015-09-23, 02:14 PM

That still requires both a verse with magic tech AND reasonable tactical skill, especially if the smaller honorverse ships screen the larger ones like honor's little puddlejumper did to stop the stealth torpedo attacking Manticore 1.

TeChameleon

2015-09-23, 04:02 PM

And here we run into the difficulty that good tactics do not necessarily make for good and/or affordable visuals. So the canonical, shown-on-screen tactics and abilities will often be... well, to be entirely blunt, stupid. Usually painfully so.

At which point the debate will often boil down to 'which ships have better space magic?', which isn't necessarily all that productive a topic of discussion- see the multi-page argument over Star Trek torpedo yields :smallconfused:

... although I do find it amusing that the Daleks, of all things, are considered to be such a massively high-end outlier, given that they originate on a show that pretty much defined 'low budget' in its early days.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-23, 04:31 PM

Personally, I think Honorverse is a definite contender in the range and firepower departments barring the obvious outliers like the Daleks or Super Exelion Gunbuster Extreme, but it's decidedly vulnerable in the maneuvering department.

Honorverse big ships will be within an order of magnitude or so of Star Wars and 40k with their main energy weapons. Missiles* reach the 100-200 megaton range, a Heavy Cruiser's chasers are "dozens" of times more powerful, implying low single digit gigatons, and dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts are probably a few times that (Superdreadnought lasers are explicitly three times as powerful as an ordinary Dreadnought's, so there's probably a similar gap between Dreadnought and Cruiser). Missiles, even laserheads, probably won't be too worrying to serious energy shields, but main broadside batteries in enough volume would be.

But yes, mobility for them is distinctly constrained, 600g acceleration is mentioned for impeller drives, which is pretty slow compared to eg. the acceleration demonstrated by the fleets at Endor. It would be quite possible for a faster fleet to use the shadow of the impeller wedges against the Honorverse ships, forcing engagements only on their own terms.

... although I do find it amusing that the Daleks, of all things, are considered to be such a massively high-end outlier, given that they originate on a show that pretty much defined 'low budget' in its early days.

This scenario limits them somewhat (their usual method of attack would be "raze your planet before you evolved out of the mud"), but even without major strategic time travel they can simply stop enemies in time, erase things from ever having existed, timeshift their own vessels to avoid weapons fire, blow up planets largely at will, and generate temporal paradoxes.

The Last Great Time War almost destroyed the concept of spacetime itself, they were fighting with weapons that threatened the existence of literally everything that is, was, and could ever be. That's why the whole Time War had to be edited out of the timeline of the rest of spacetime, because if the things that happened and arose in it got loose then everything was broken forever and always had been broken.

Deep future Whoverse Earth is pretty meaty as well, they also blew up a galaxy to get rid of a particularly tricky problem (the Cybermen), but had the luxury of doing it to a different galaxy than the one they were living in at the time.

* David Weber does not understand the Kzinti lesson. The kinetic energy of a Type 24 missile at terminal velocity is roughly one thousand billion times the explosive power of its warhead. But then, when your series is about recreating age of sail battles iiiin spaaaace with a horrible mary sue version of Hornblower, you probably don't sweat the actual details no matter how many technical words you pretend to include.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-23, 04:55 PM

* David Weber does not understand the Kzinti lesson. The kinetic energy of a Type 24 missile at terminal velocity is roughly one thousand billion times the explosive power of its warhead.

Considering his missiles aren't impact weapons, the kinetic energy means absolutely zilch. Honorverse navigational particle screens shrug off kinetic impacts from debris at .8C, in-universe weapons that need hull contact to inflict damage- and anything with a reaction drive in general - are considered uselessly obsolete even in the first book. The only thing KEWs are used for is planetary bombardment, and even then under very limited circumstances to adhere to the galactic treaty of 'we can all easily sterilize each other's planets with kinetic warheads, so let's not okay'. You may not like his primary protagonist (to put it mildly), but Weber puts far more work into his technical details and technical consistency than [A large but non-specific percentage, because 75% of statistics are made up] of sci-fi writers out there, and he also has an informal 'support staff' of friends who do technical fact-checking for him. Aside from a few admitted goofs like the gravity lance and the Great Resizing, it's safe to assume any deviations from strict hard science are done deliberately to support the aesthetics and themes of his universe (the lack of true AI, for instance).

In these particular circumstances, though, all that is an undoubted weakness. Being a good writer doesn't help you when the other universes don't find themselves remotely constrained to anything approaching physics to begin with. Even Star Trek will run rings around Honorverse vessels, and ST can't even get its dialogue, visual effects, and technical documentation to agree on anything.

LokeyITP

2015-09-23, 05:00 PM

Like I said last page, Star Trek has the same problem. Maybe 100k times more or billions if you have to deal with the majority of on screen as a max (Star Fleet doesn't shoot to kill usually--a compact car moving at 0.95c is ~10^20J which would probably glass a decent sized US state and blow down trees a few thousand miles away). Granted Daleks and probably others would just laugh at that too, though it'd be neat to know their secret of destroying continents without igniting the atmosphere lol.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-23, 05:12 PM

Considering his missiles aren't impact weapons, the kinetic energy means absolutely zilch. Honorverse particle screens shrug off kinetic impacts from debris at .8C,

Here's the thing though, you can't just make the kinetic energy go away. No, not even by "redirecting" it, becuase you couldn't redirect it without applying a force to it equal to at least a vector of its velocity (and if it's coming straight at you that's going to be an incredibly large amount).

And you can't apply that force without, yes, an equal and opposite reaction.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-23, 05:34 PM

Here's the thing though, you can't just make the kinetic energy go away. No, not even by "redirecting" it, becuase you couldn't redirect it without applying a force to it equal to at least a vector of its velocity (and if it's coming straight at you that's going to be an incredibly large amount).

And you can't apply that force without, yes, an equal and opposite reaction.

The magical inertial compensators that permit 600+ G's of acceleration without turning the crew members into greasy stains on the bulkheads work by somehow 'dumping' the physical inertia into the impeller wedge. It's easy enough for me to assume, though it is never explicitly stated, that particle screens do something similar; they have to do something with that energy, like you said, but you can still shoot lasers through them and inflict significant damage.

Ultimately, I don't pretend to understand the exact physics, but I do know that you can buy (on the civilian market) transparent aluminum (ALNO) armor plates that will deflect .50 armor piercing rounds, but you can still shine a flashlight through (or more relevantly, beam X-rays through). So I can accept a science fiction scaling-up of this concept - that kinetic energy and electromagnetic energy are sufficiently different as to need different defenses, and being able to stop one does not inherently guarantee being able to stop the other - while retaining my suspension of disbelief with a healthy margin of error.

Gnoman

2015-09-23, 06:20 PM

Here's the thing though, you can't just make the kinetic energy go away. No, not even by "redirecting" it, becuase you couldn't redirect it without applying a force to it equal to at least a vector of its velocity (and if it's coming straight at you that's going to be an incredibly large amount).

And you can't apply that force without, yes, an equal and opposite reaction.

Missiles that are shot down are either blown to bits thousands of kilometers away (and there is a massive difference between "solid slug flying at your ship at .5c" and "debris field moving at .5c, some tiny fraction of which will cross the path of where your ship (which has navigation shields that can easily deflect micrometeorites travelling at .8c before combat defenses come into play), or else annihilated by the impeller wedge of a counter-missile, which is little different from flying it into a black hole. It's even stated in at least one book that the warhead on a "contact" nuke is there in case the missile doesn't generate a direct hit.

Weber quite clearly understands the principle of kinetic energy - Honor's home continent was devastated by a debris strike, there's several occasions where people on every side can't shoot at something with missiles because even one accidentally striking the nearby planet would be a disaster (and result in 2000 Solarian superdreadnoughts showing up and glassing their home planet under the Eridani edict), and many personal weapons rely on it for much of their destructive power

Douglas

2015-09-23, 06:22 PM

Here's the thing though, you can't just make the kinetic energy go away. No, not even by "redirecting" it, becuase you couldn't redirect it without applying a force to it equal to at least a vector of its velocity (and if it's coming straight at you that's going to be an incredibly large amount).

And you can't apply that force without, yes, an equal and opposite reaction.
I believe the real problem with trying to use long range capital ship missiles as kinetic energy weapons in Honorverse is getting them to actually hit. In order to deliver damage from kinetic energy, you need to physically impact your target - and it's really hard to steer to follow a dodging target when you're moving at .7c. Honorverse missiles are able to reliably maneuver only to within a few tens of thousands of kilometers of a target that has a mere 600g or so acceleration. To deliver a kinetic impact they'd need to reduce that margin by 5 orders of magnitude.

Weber does use kinetic impact based missile weapons in Honorverse, but only at short range or against immobile targets. At short range, the difficulties Special Relativity dictates for course corrections at high speed don't apply, and most targets don't have time to even try to dodge anyway. Against immobile targets, every competent navy officer in the galaxy knows that c-fractional missile strikes from extreme range are the ultimate trump card, defeating all known defenses (other than dodging). Nominally stationary forts universally have (relatively weak) drives for the sole and express purpose of allowing them to dodge c-fractional missile strikes.

Also, some of the more recent books introduced kinetic energy weapons used for orbit-to-surface bombardment. These weapons were never seen before in the series because no one's been stupid or determined enough to refuse to surrender on a planet surface after losing the space battle before.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-23, 06:34 PM

Ultimately, I don't pretend to understand the exact physics, but I do know that you can buy (on the civilian market) transparent aluminum (ALNO) armor plates that will deflect .50 armor piercing rounds,

You can, but if you strapped one to your chest and got shot by a fifty cal it would still break your ribs, because the kinetic energy doesn't go away.

So on impact with a missile, the impeller nodes suddenly find themselves having to absorb something of the order of six zettajoules of energy (enough to halt the kinetic energy of the impactor and then redirect it elsewhere).

And even if they were 99.9999999999 percent efficient in doing that they would still generate enough waste heat to reach a temperature ten thousand times that of the core of the sun.

Let alone what one of those missiles would do to a planet. Every single one is an extinction event in its own right.

Douglas

2015-09-23, 06:44 PM

Let alone what one of those missiles would do to a planet. Every single one is an extinction event in its own right.
Which is why hitting a planet with one is officially considered using a Weapon of Mass Destruction. It is one of the very few things that absolutely everyone believes would get the largest navy around (that of the Solarian League), which is normally paralyzed by politics and bureaucracy, to act quickly and decisively, in whatever level of force is required to punish the offender.

Planets are pretty much the only relevant thing in-universe that anyone could reliably get such a missile into actual physical contact with, though. Everything else is small and mobile enough to dodge. Laser warheads are such a critical technology throughout the series because they allow a (physical, kinetic) miss by 20000 kilometers to still count as a (damage-dealing) hit.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-23, 06:45 PM

You can, but if you strapped one to your chest and got shot by a fifty cal it would still break your ribs, because the kinetic energy doesn't go away.

So on impact with a missile, the impeller nodes suddenly find themselves having to absorb something of the order of six zettajoules of energy (enough to halt the kinetic energy of the impactor and then redirect it elsewhere).

And even if they were 99.9999999999 percent efficient in doing that they would still generate enough waste heat to reach a temperature ten thousand times that of the core of the sun.

Let alone what one of those missiles would do to a planet. Every single one is an extinction event in its own right.

Not the nodes, the wedge - you know, the physics-breaking horizontal planes of absurdly concentrated gravitic force above and below the ship, that are effectively tame and oddly shaped black holes? That's where the inertia (which is sort of kinetic energy?) magically gets rerouted to, and I'm pretty sure a black hole can absorb any kinetic impact in the universe.

And as people have noted above, it's a blatantly well-known and accepted fact of existence that kinetic projectiles are planet-killers, and effectively unblockable/unstoppable ones at that. So it's hardly ignored or not understood.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-23, 07:15 PM

Not the nodes, the wedge - you know, the physics-breaking horizontal planes of absurdly concentrated gravitic force above and below the ship, that are effectively tame and oddly shaped black holes? That's where the inertia (which is sort of kinetic energy?) magically gets rerouted to, and I'm pretty sure a black hole can absorb any kinetic impact in the universe.

Which is generated by the impeller nodes. Any changes or impacts onto it would have to be handled by those nodes because the energy doesn't go away.

And that also assumes that the missiles impact the impeller wedge not the sidewall (which will be facing the enemy or the ship can't shoot back), and sidewall impacts from missiles are a thing. Something has to absorb that energy and redirect it. Something in the ship (that's why sidewalls can be overwhelmed and fail). Because energy does not go away, it hits the sidewall and then the simple laws of newtonian motion decree that whatever generates the force required to stop it encounters an equal and opposite reaction.

The trouble is that the principle that does it is a nuclear explosion or nuke powered laser, which is much much less powerful than just stuffing the same missile with dead mass (eg. 1kg uranium buckshot and a scattering charge to make a monstrous beehive round) and impacting would be.

(The problem is that Weber has thought out just enough aspects of the universe to make his Hornblower in space, and not more. See also: why they use Grasers. Sure, grasers will go through a lot of armour unimpeded, but they'll also have bugger all effect on anything behind the armour because the reason they go through is that gamma rays aren't easily absorbed and so will go through most of what's behind the armour without doing anything, whereas masers would be strongly absorbed and, whilst they would have to burn through armour would do a far better job of actually affecting the target because less of the energy of the beam would pass harmlessly through)

Mato

2015-09-23, 07:18 PM

You can, but if you strapped one to your chest and got shot by a fifty cal it would still break your ribs, because the kinetic energy doesn't go away.I'm glad you took something positive away from our little discussion. :smallsmile:

Gnoman

2015-09-23, 07:23 PM

Which is generated by the impeller nodes. Any changes or impacts onto it would have to be handled by those nodes because the energy doesn't go away.

And that also assumes that the missiles impact the impeller wedge not the sidewall (which will be facing the enemy or the ship can't shoot back), and sidewall impacts from missiles are a thing. Something has to absorb that energy and redirect it. Something in the ship (that's why sidewalls can be overwhelmed and fail). Because energy does not go away, it hits the sidewall and then the simple laws of newtonian motion decree that whatever generates the force required to stop it encounters an equal and opposite reaction.

There's no logical reason why all that energy would go into the nodes, not when the impeller wedge already and explicitly dumps waste energy into hyperspace (it's how the inertial compensator works, and why Mesan spider drive ships are confined to a much lower accel. The energy from a kinetic impact on the wedge gets dumped into hyperspace.

The sidewalls? Contact nukes are only still used as "sidewall busters: because they're very effective at taking down a sidewall. No contradiction there.

The trouble is that YOU don't know how Honorverse tech is explicitly stated to work.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-23, 07:31 PM

There's no logical reason why all that energy would go into the nodes, not when the impeller wedge already and explicitly dumps waste energy into hyperspace (it's how the inertial compensator works, and why Mesan spider drive ships are confined to a much lower accel. The energy from a kinetic impact on the wedge gets dumped into hyperspace.

Ah, so it's space fantasy as well then ;)

The sidewalls? Contact nukes are only still used as "sidewall busters: because they're very effective at taking down a sidewall. No contradiction there.

Right, but they do so with a nuclear explosion not the thousands of times more powerful impact.

Remember that this whole tangent started because I accused Weber of not learning the Kzinti lesson, and it turns out he really hasn't. Massively greater energies got ignored in favour of much smaller ones because Weber forgot what the difference would be or didn't work it out, just like the Kzin thought human ships were "unarmed" because they discounted what the propulsion system of any seriously fast ship would do.

Douglas

2015-09-23, 07:46 PM

Ah, so it's space fantasy as well then ;)
Eh, I'm not sure the "One Big Lie" type really qualifies for that label. Hyperspace and the drive systems are the only clear departure from hard scifi, and even they have clear and consistent rules they follow.

Right, but they do so with a nuclear explosion not the thousands of times more powerful impact.

Remember that this whole tangent started because I accused Weber of not learning the Kzinti lesson, and it turns out he really hasn't. Massively greater energies got ignored in favour of much smaller ones because Weber forgot what the difference would be or didn't work it out, just like the Kzin thought human ships were "unarmed" because they discounted what the propulsion system of any seriously fast ship would do.
You still haven't addressed my point of needing to actually physically hit, at least not that I've noticed.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-23, 08:15 PM

Right, but they do so with a nuclear explosion not the thousands of times more powerful impact.

Remember that this whole tangent started because I accused Weber of not learning the Kzinti lesson, and it turns out he really hasn't. Massively greater energies got ignored in favour of much smaller ones because Weber forgot what the difference would be or didn't work it out, just like the Kzin thought human ships were "unarmed" because they discounted what the propulsion system of any seriously fast ship would do.

No, because aside from this one aspect you are fixated on, every other aspect of his universe shows it is evident he does understand said lesson and incorporates it very strongly into the setting. So rather than assume all those other bits of evidence are somehow a gigantic string of random flukes or accidents, it's more logical to assume Weber is aware of the 'Kzinti lesson', but his specific Big Lie (effectively total control/manipulation of gravitic forces) and the technology derived from it entirely negates any consequences of said lesson.

Regardless, we should probably let this drop, because it is exactly as derailing of a tangent to the actual point of the thread as the utterly pointless Star Trek canon-conflict digression from last page was.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-23, 09:35 PM

Can someone here help me actually write this? As a fiction? Or actually write it with my help? Please? The thread has been most active here.

Also, is there a place on Reddit where sci-fi vs. threads are allowed? If so, where? Or some other place where I can get help writing and/or inspire people to take this up?

Rakaydos

2015-09-23, 10:21 PM

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-23, 10:26 PM

Not suuuuure. I'd kinda like more suggestions for what I asked for with the spaceballs bit...

"What fourth wall breaking shenanigans and asides will the Spaceballs crew get up to?"

"Also, I assumed most Spaceballs 4th wall breaking stuff would be comments about the scenario, riffs on the other ships, in-jokes, talks about lawsuits and lawyers, puns, sexual innuendo, stuff like that...

Anyone have any good jokes on what they would actually do or say?"

And that second quote got buried under the star trek tangent. :(

Mato

2015-09-23, 10:45 PM

I seen them all, even said I'd like a film of it. But I can't write (good) jokes.

Like did you hear about the space restaurant?
The food was great but it has no atmosphere.

And I didn't even write that one.

Broken Crown

2015-09-23, 11:02 PM

Can someone here help me actually write this? As a fiction? Or actually write it with my help? Please? The thread has been most active here.

That would be a gigantic undertaking, if only because of the size of the project. Also, the writer would ideally need to have a good knowledge, not just of the technical capabilities of the ships (to get "realistic" outcomes), but of the style of the different franchises involved, to get the tone of the story right. It's a daunting prospect.

That said, it could be fun to work on a small part of it.

Kitten Champion

2015-09-23, 11:45 PM

Yeah...

1. Star Wars
2. Star Trek
3. Star Blazers
4. Independence Day
5. EVE
6. Halo
7. Mobile Suit Gundam
8. Doctor Who
9. Macross/Robotech
10. Warhammer 40K
11. Free Space
12. Final Fantasy IV
13. Final Fantasy VIII
14. Final Fantasy XII
15. Sol Bianca
16. Gunbuster
17. Lexx
18. Titan A.E.
19. Galaxy Quest
20. Thunder Cats
21. Wall-E
22. Star Fox
23. Toho Kaiju Movies
24. Star Citizen
25. Andromeda
26. Event Horizon
27. Martian Successor Nadesico
28. V
29. Dead Space
30. X³
31. Dune
32. Xenosaga
33. Irresponsible Captain Taylor
34. Starship Troopers
35. Sonic the Hedgehog
36. The Fifth Element
37. Stargate
38. Battlestar Galactica (2003 and 1978)
39. Hyperdrive
40. Red Dwarf
41. Futurama
42. Galaxy Angel
43. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
44. Avatar
45. Defying Gravity
46. Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs
47. 2001: A Space Odyssey
48. The Black Hole
49. StarCraft
50. District 9
51. Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
52. Mass Effect
53. Wing Commander
54. Farscape
55. Babylon 5
56. Freelancer
57. Honorverse
58. Battletech
59. Legend of Galactic Heroes
60. Cowboy Bebop
61. Monsters Vs. Aliens
62. Space: Above and Beyond
63. Space Pirate: Captain Harlock
64. Homeworld
65. Ulysses 31
66. Transformers
67. Firefly
68. Quark
69. Independence War (I-War)
70. Silent Running,
71. Space Balls
72. Captain Future

... and I might have missed some. That's.. a lot, particularly for any kind of coherent narrative. I didn't even know what at least 15 of those are at all without Google's aid, and my knowledge of about half of those is "they exists". It might be for the best to start by trimming down the participants to more manageable levels as has been suggested but never really specified.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-24, 04:55 AM

I can't see this working out as any sort of coherent fan fiction, sadly - rather, I'd expect the results to be a sci-fi battle version of that Ultimate Toonspiracy of Doom or whatever that was called.

Kitten Champion

2015-09-24, 06:08 AM

I have a proposal to simplify things, well, try to at any rate.

There's a bit in Ernest Cline's Ready Player One which I think could be adapted into something like what the OP wants. The novel is set in and around a virtual reality that's replaced the internet and, well, it's not terribly important to get into specifics, but around the climax the protagonists end up in a multi-versal mecha battle with one another with Evangelion, Ultraman, Mechagodzilla, Gundam, and Voltron - some characters picked their mount strategically while others just embraced their fandom. The effect is something like what this thread is going for but without the convolution necessary to encompass the various details that an actual cross-over between these universes would require -- writing the fictional characters in their own voice, for instance, or trying to establish a tone which isn't all over the place.

So, my idea is to do something similar but with these star ships. More or less the characters that appear are just people with real-world knowledge of these franchises as fictional worlds such as you or I rather than writing it in the voice of a Thrawn or whatever, I suppose something similar to the plot of Galaxy Quest in the whole fictional technology becomes reality through cosmic coincidence meta-sense. These people get chosen by the Beyonder-equivalent to fight in this battle royale for its amusement, and can pick one fictional vessel to enter this tiny artificial universe. The scope of the battle would be dependent more on creator interest than the deviantart size comparison chart, and the more super-duper aspect of the technology could be nullified by the fact that the characters involved are only given a certain degree of familiarity with the vessel they choose.

I suppose if you want to get around the issue of manpower, you could take the Dragon's Dogma route - basically the craft would be granted in-universe explained NPCs who have no particular will of their own but will mindlessly follow orders in the background, Pawns to their king.

HungLo

2015-09-24, 07:32 AM

I think Star Trek may not have the biggest guns, but they probably have by far the biggest brains.

A Federation fleet (say, under Captain Picard) has galactic-class scientists like Spock and Data, top operations officers like Sulu and Ryker, and experience in diplomacy.

If Captain Picard appears in hostile space surrounded by unknown vessels, he has the experts to rapidly create a diplomatic and tactical picture... who can be befriended or avoided? Can we find technobabble that counters everyone else's superweapons?

Compare to Star Wars, where the Empire has purely military vessels and no interest or talent in science or diplomacy (except Thrawn or the Emperor). The Empire would blindly flail around shooting at anyone in sight until they win or die.

Star Trek's purpose - to seek out new life - makes them experts in analyzing situations and finding a rational course of action, plus as the "we try to be nice to everyone people" they aren't hamstrung by any ideology that immediately puts them in conflict with others (like 40K people, say).

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-24, 07:59 AM

Well I was kinda hoping for a 'several folk contribute multi-author thing', with everyone who REALLY knows their favorite universe, uh, rping it, I guess. In one of those paragraph style forum story freeform persona rp's, I suppose. I dunno. Its vague.

Aotrs Commander

2015-09-24, 11:49 AM

I think Star Trek may not have the biggest guns, but they probably have by far the biggest brains.

Not with the Daleks in play, no.

(Definitely not if the TARDIS is in play.)

Their ability to (as SFDebris outs it) "tech-tech" a solution to a problem probably puts them very high in that regard, granted, but the Daleks are much more advanced and sort of do that too. (And that is the Doctor's raison d'etre.)

Broken Crown

2015-09-24, 11:52 AM

Star Trek's purpose - to seek out new life - makes them experts in analyzing situations and finding a rational course of action, plus as the "we try to be nice to everyone people" they aren't hamstrung by any ideology that immediately puts them in conflict with others (like 40K people, say).

I am now wondering how long Captain Picard would be able to get along with the Imperium of Man. They'd like his "Humanity is the Greatest!" attitude, and skillful diplomacy would let him hide the more "heretical" aspects of the Federation, but it would only be a matter of time before Picard got self-righteous enough to start criticizing the Imperium. And then he would die.

Or maybe not – given the quality of Federation sensors and engineers, the Star Fleet crews could probably quickly understand most Imperium tech much better than the Imperial forces do, and pull off some shenanigans. It would be one of the few match-ups where that sort of thing would actually be plausible.

Well I was kinda hoping for a 'several folk contribute multi-author thing', with everyone who REALLY knows their favorite universe, uh, rping it, I guess. In one of those paragraph style forum story freeform persona rp's, I suppose. I dunno. Its vague.

That could be doable, if enough people decide to get involved. I'm tempted, but I wouldn't be able to contribute more than a small amount, partly due to time, and partly due to realizing that there are actually very few of these settings that I know well enough to feel confident writing in them.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-24, 02:13 PM

GloatingSwine

2015-09-24, 04:25 PM

I am now wondering how long Captain Picard would be able to get along with the Imperium of Man. They'd like his "Humanity is the Greatest!" attitude, and skillful diplomacy would let him hide the more "heretical" aspects of the Federation, but it would only be a matter of time before Picard got self-righteous enough to start criticizing the Imperium. And then he would die.

Or maybe not – given the quality of Federation sensors and engineers, the Star Fleet crews could probably quickly understand most Imperium tech much better than the Imperial forces do, and pull off some shenanigans. It would be one of the few match-ups where that sort of thing would actually be plausible.

The fact that they're rolling around with nonstandard tech probably guarantees their execution for heresy before they reach the o in "hello".

(More entertaining: Season 1 Picard vs Captain Tylor, who can surrender fastest?)

Rakaydos

2015-09-24, 04:45 PM

If we do actually do a big rp... What setting would each person take?

Dibs on Wing Commander.

...if I'm not GMing. I might be GMing. Would this be one of those things where it would be okay to both GM and play, or would that remain taboo?

Are we counting People's Republic of Haven as a separate faction from Manticore, or arethey presumed to have a truce for the duration of the episode, on the theory that whatever the reward is, it'll at least be in the same universe as their spies and R&D people?

TeChameleon

2015-09-24, 06:20 PM

Blargh... the forum RP sounds like fun, but I don't know if I can commit to something like that right now :smallfrown:

Hmm... some questions that might be worth answering would be "Are the Borg terrifying and actually competent, like they're supposed to be, or are they the Voyager-Borg that mostly exist to job to Janeway and co.?", "Whose assimilation techniques would be likely to work on whom?" (or conversely, "Who is likely to be immune to the various types of assimilation running around?", whichever is easier), "What effects are the various forms of blatant space magic stuff going to have on the scenario?"

... actually, that last one might be a good one to give a quick explanation... thinking stuff like Minovsky particles, the 'Quantonium' from Monsters vs. Aliens, Melange/Spice from Dune, Protoculture from Robotech, even the Goa'uld Sarcophagi. Well, that and the Heart of Gold's Infinite Improbability Drive, of course :smalltongue:

Most of the stuff like that is held by characters/ships that aren't likely to be major players in the fight, but if a major player got ahold of it, it could seriously change the balance of power.

HungLo

2015-09-24, 07:48 PM

The Federation is the only power to come close to neutralizing Borg technology - every other race or empire the Borg ever encountered were assimilated, right?

So if any faction could eventually start unlocking Time Lord or Dalek tech...

The Federation is at the beginning of understanding of temporal science. Spock plotted time jumps in the fairly primitive Enterprise, and Data and Geordi have quite a bit of experience with timey-wimey stuff. (was it late in Voyager where the future Federation had mastered time travel?)

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-24, 08:28 PM

The Borg go down HARD. Even the competent Borg. Almost any planet-buster shoots them from across the solar system, they go down, especially if they are being overwhelmed by a huge quantity of ships with a very wide variety of energy and physical weapons being shot at them... Hell, they go down hard to competent boarding, especially with non energy weapons and a focus on being badass, low-tech melee. Like a LOT of settings are capable of doing.

Mato

2015-09-24, 11:44 PM

The Federation is the only power to come close to neutralizing Borg technology - every other race or empire the Borg ever encountered were assimilated, right?The Federation is the first enemy in Alpha Quadrant the Borg has failed to assimilate.

It only takes a single cube to be a huge threat to the Federation, as seen from the 40-on-one fight in Best of Both Worlds or a single cube almost winning in Generations. In the seven year run of TNG the Borg only appeared in a total of six episodes because even the writers said they were too strong. That all changed in Voyager's run. Borg became overused, flawed, weak, and then there was the whole Queen deal.

It's pretty hard to figure out just how strong they are through. I suppose it comes back to how strong you think the Federation is, so to some people they might be weaker than a caveman with a dull rock. :smallwink:

The Glyphstone

2015-09-24, 11:46 PM

Yeah...assimilation is scary, but it's also kind of slow and needs direct, individual physical contact from another Drone AFAIK - I've never seen the Borg, even Competent Borg, demonstrate the power to assimilate at range. They're powerful in their own context, but this sort of mass brawl takes away basically all of their advantages and highlights their weaknesses.

TeChameleon

2015-09-24, 11:53 PM

So... why would the Borg be more of a target than any of the other grandiose-statement-making-we-broadcast-our-superiourity-to-everyone-we-see-whether-we-understand-the-situation-or-not races that are running around in this huge melee? I mean, yeah, they've got at least one big ship, and they announce their intent to 'assimilate' everyone at every opportunity, but they're a long way from being the biggest thing out there, and they're hardly the only ones that run around making all kinds of noise about everyone else getting EXTERMINATE-ed, or joining the swarm, or HERESY! or what have you.

So I'm not really seeing why the Borg would just get swarmed and obliterated, or planet-killered from a bajillion miles away, at least not anymore than any of the other ships in this.

And I agree that the Borg would probably go down hard to any kind of competent boarding action, but it's tough to say how you'd be getting on board in the first place- it's open to question whether or not the Borg ships even have exterior access hatches or not, they're certainly never shown as far as I know. And most of the other 'verses, even the ones that are incredibly badass and overly-fond of bladed weaponry, won't know that one scratch from a Drone is potentially enough to do you in.

*shrug*

I doubt that the Borg are all that likely to be the eventual victors, unless they get really lucky with who they assimilate in the early stages, but I don't think they'll be quite the non-event that some seem to be saying.

Speaking of assimilation, I wonder if there are enough of the races that do that to create a sort of macro-scale grey-goo scenario? If the Borg, Zerg, Replicators, Cybermen, Daleks, Flood, Tyrannids (are there any 'Nid ships on the chart? I don't recall seeing any...), etc. all managed to assimilate one another in a way that left them functioning with all the strengths of their component races, would that be enough to overwhelm the other races running around?

Mato

2015-09-25, 12:43 AM

So I'm not really seeing why the Borg would just get swarmed and obliterated, or planet-killered from a bajillion miles away, at least not anymore than any of the other ships in this.Oh I doubt they would win too. Transphasic torpedoes are not future technology, the Enterprise E in 2380 carried them.

But I think they would be pretty competent in boarding. Star Trek never really depicted anything close to "action", the actors just were incapable of that. So you get scene of bad actors dog piling to rip out critical components and it works. Look at in universe through, for what they meant to do instead of how the series portrays mastery of the martial arts at a below-I-once-watched-a-movie levels. Data can take them unarmed, but he can exert at least 40,000psi which is a little cheap. I mean look at Worf. His battle prowess was constantly and consistently noted (or even challenged and proved) throughout the series, same with Klingons throughout the franchise. While the numbers very, your typical Klingon clocks in around twice the strength of a normal human (Vulcans btw are x3). And Worf needs a bladed weapon in order to defeat a drone.

And once they assimilate an actor capable of doing a cartwheel, they gain that too.

Douglas

2015-09-25, 01:00 AM

As I recall, the Borg didn't start broadcasting their classic "you are doomed, we will assimilate you" message on first sight. What they did first was transport a drone on board to access computer records to find out what kind of tech their target had. Then, after that mission was complete, they opened their initial hail with "we have analyzed your defenses and determined you are not capable of withstanding us".

So, I'd expect the Borg to be somewhat cautious and pick their targets with care.

I'd be considerably more scared of the Replicators, though. Their sheer speed of reproduction replication even from a single seed Replicator is far more scary than Borg assimilation in the short term, and they're pretty good at co-opting their victims' tech too.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-25, 01:05 AM

And Worf needs a bladed weapon in order to defeat a drone.

And once they assimilate an actor capable of doing a cartwheel, they gain that too.

Worf was semi-routinely defeated by inanimate objects. I'm not sure he is a fair baseline to judge the threat level of a drone.

Broken Crown

2015-09-25, 02:14 AM

But I think they would be pretty competent in boarding. Star Trek never really depicted anything close to "action", the actors just were incapable of that. So you get scene of bad actors dog piling to rip out critical components and it works. Look at in universe through, for what they meant to do instead of how the series portrays mastery of the martial arts at a below-I-once-watched-a-movie levels.

Unfortunately, how the series portrays them is the official basis for what they can do. Just as with any fiction, we can't say, "Real Borg drones would be more competent than that," because there are no real Borg drones. What you see is what you get.

If you can't judge the abilities of a fictional entity by using the fiction in which it appears, you can't judge them at all.

(Besides, we have a counterexample in the TNG episode "Descent," in which Lore was leading a bunch of free-willed Borg drones. Those drones were much faster and more agile than the regular variety, a fact which was remarked on by the Enterprise crew. Canonically, Borg drones are simply very slow and rather ineffective in combat.)

GloatingSwine

2015-09-25, 03:25 AM

(Besides, we have a counterexample in the TNG episode "Descent," in which Lore was leading a bunch of free-willed Borg drones. Those drones were much faster and more agile than the regular variety, a fact which was remarked on by the Enterprise crew. Canonically, Borg drones are simply very slow and rather ineffective in combat.)

From the perspective of the Collective, an individual drone is of no more consequence than an individual skin cell is to you. Borg drones display nothing resembling tactics because their losses are irrelevant.

Broken Crown

2015-09-25, 03:31 AM

From the perspective of the Collective, an individual drone is of no more consequence than an individual skin cell is to you. Borg drones display nothing resembling tactics because their losses are irrelevant.

Precisely.

TeChameleon

2015-09-25, 03:39 AM

Worf was semi-routinely defeated by inanimate objects. I'm not sure he is a fair baseline to judge the threat level of a drone.

*chuckle*

Look up 'Hal Jordan head injury' sometime if you want to be amused by one of the most powerful superheroes on offer being taken out by falling branches, frisbees, errant remote-control planes, slipping on wet tile floors, running headfirst into walls, and, on a surprising number of occasions, his own green energy constructs connecting with his skull.

Does that mean that Green Lantern can be casually taken out by a shot to the noggin? Probably not, if we're being totally honest (although taking one to the brainpan seems to be a bigger weakness for Hal Jordan than yellow, if that trend is any indication... it's a wonder he can still work his ring, with the number of times he has to have been concussed).

In other words, 'getting Worfed' is an artifact of multiple (occasionally rather mediocre) writers more than anything in-universe; basically, when a show is as internally-inconsistent as Star Trek, you kinda have to take a median baseline, rather than just 'going with what's shown', since 'what's shown' can contradict itself wildly, occasionally within the space of a single episode -_-;

And Drones don't need to be terribly fast, as a general rule- all they really need to do is scratch someone, and their target is down and kinda hosed, since they'll be a Drone themselves by the time they get back up. Unless they're a protagonist, of course :smallyuk:

Speaking of which, how would we implement 'protagonist/primary antagonist power' in this battle? Because if it's Original Series James T. Kirk in charge of the Enterprise-no-letter, he's got luck to rival Captain Tylor's, and if the opponent is female (especially if they're green :smalltongue:), then they'll probably end up sleeping with him before all is said and done. If it's some random no-name Federation Captain, then things will play out rather differently...

GloatingSwine

2015-09-25, 04:02 AM

Speaking of which, how would we implement 'protagonist/primary antagonist power' in this battle? Because if it's Original Series James T. Kirk in charge of the Enterprise-no-letter, he's got luck to rival Captain Tylor's, and if the opponent is female (especially if they're green :smalltongue:), then they'll probably end up sleeping with him before all is said and done. If it's some random no-name Federation Captain, then things will play out rather differently...

Depends if anyone can defeat him before his shirt gets ripped.

That's when his real powers are unleashed.

(If this decided by characters, then Honor's amazing mary sue powers means she wins. Captain Tylor would have a chance if there were no Daleks, but "we surrender" translates into Dalek as "please exterminate us at your earliest convenience". His other primary capability, confusing and annoying people until they get a headache and go away, won't work either. If a Dalek becomes confused and/or annoyed it retreats into its comfort zone, which is exterminating.)

Chen

2015-09-25, 07:13 AM

I'd be considerably more scared of the Replicators, though. Their sheer speed of reproduction replication even from a single seed Replicator is far more scary than Borg assimilation in the short term, and they're pretty good at co-opting their victims' tech too.

Problem with replicators is getting them on board an enemy ship. Any of the strong ships will have shields to block the initial replicators from getting on board. Anything without good shields though could be in for some trouble. Particularly if their energy based personal weapons are not exceptionally strong.

HungLo

2015-09-25, 07:16 AM

The Borg or the Cybermen could get off to a great start if they can grab a ship with a large crew - say, a Super Star Destroyer with apparently 280,000 crew according to wiki.

Assuming that Executor comes with Darth Vader, even the Big D may not be able to stop a Cyberman/Borg conversion party all by himself (assuming regular stormtroopers are ineffective against a basic Cyberman).

Vader is great at personal combat but he doesn't seem especially clever at anything else. So he might survive while his whole ship is turned all around him.

Even the Emperor - what could he do against a massive boarding party? He's great at manipulating other beings, so he might be able to think of a way to divert the invaders to some other purpose, maybe.

Heh, then the Empire might need The Doctor to save their necks. :)

Chen

2015-09-25, 09:15 AM

I don't know about the Cybermen, but Vader and the Emperor would mow through any Borg that go on board. Even just telekinesis via the force would probably be sufficient for slow moving drones. Vader probably wouldn't even be instantly assimilated if he tried using his lightsaber first (assuming it failed to penetrate a Borg shield once they had adapted) due to his armor. After which points its just throwing one Borg into another until they're done with them.

Also one big thing against the Borg would actually be the Federation. Not in direct combat but more in them telling the others "uh don't let that crazy giant cube of a ship get near you and if they do board use non-energy weapons to kill them". Same would go for the Replicators and the other Stargate ships, especially the Asgard ones. The Asgard ship would almost certainly immediately attack the replicator ship the moment it detected them. They know they are an utmost threat, compared to the rest who MAY be able to be negotiated with. The Federation might do something similar to the Borg, especially if Picard is at the helm of the Enterprise. I'd imagine a lot of the groups out there would immediately attack if they had similar blood enemies out there.

Mato

2015-09-25, 01:17 PM

What you see is what you get.Not quite, there are novels and comics to consider.

And the new prequals are showing the Federation crew members are adequately able when they claim they had had some kind of combat training. Finally matching spoken context with displayed ability. You have every single reason to believe it's the show's poor acting and cheap budget.

In other words, 'getting Worfed' is an artifact of multiple (occasionally rather mediocre) writers more than anything in-universe; basically, when a show is as internally-inconsistent as Star Trek, you kinda have to take a median baseline, rather than just 'going with what's shown', since 'what's shown' can contradict itself wildly, occasionally within the space of a single episode -_-;Actually The Worf Effect (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWorfEffect) is all about showing how dangerous a new character is by having him beat up someone who is supposed to be powerful. It has nothing to do with implying Worf is weak.

In this case and trope namer, kicking Worf's face in is the fastest way to claim this episodes villain is a serious threat because the writers were too lazy to come up with any other way even with a run time of 40+ minutes per episode.

I don't know about the Cybermen, but Vader and the Emperor would mow through any Borg that go on board. Even just telekinesis via the force would probably be sufficient for slow moving drones.Maybe, but in Star Wars it appears that shields can dampen TK effectiveness. While size and range have been taken to astronomical levels in the EU, crossing shield barriers is practically none existent and sensory abilities are limited. And in Star Trek shields are also able to block TK unless the TK is powerful enough to overload it.

So there is plenty of context to suggest the Borg could adapt to Vader's force powers and block them, assuming they work at all since no one outside of SW's universe has midiclorians. So Vader would have to lure them where he has plenty of material to throw at them, like a ship bay or something. All the while the rest of Vader's crew and technology is assimilated.

If all Vader had was his long distance TIE fighter, who would he turn to and attempt to extort?

Douglas

2015-09-25, 01:29 PM

Problem with replicators is getting them on board an enemy ship. Any of the strong ships will have shields to block the initial replicators from getting on board. Anything without good shields though could be in for some trouble. Particularly if their energy based personal weapons are not exceptionally strong.
Replicators are practically immune to energy weapons, you want kinetic impact weapons for personal scale combat against them. How lucky for Stargate's protagonists that their version of Earth hasn't advanced beyond solid projectile firearms yet:smallwink:. Hmm, what if the Replicators take out something from Mass Effect first? Putting kinetic barriers on Replicators would significantly increase their individual threat factor.

Stargateverse has shield technology on practically every spaceship except the early human ones. The Replicators consistently manage to board anyway, they're only ever stopped by plot device weapons. Even the Asgard, whose shields are the strongest in the series short of the Ori (who never faced Replicators so we don't know how they'd match up), can't reliably keep Replicators off their ships.

Speaking of the Ori, is there an Ori warship on that chart anywhere?

GloatingSwine

2015-09-25, 02:07 PM

Speaking of the Ori, is there an Ori warship on that chart anywhere?

Yes, just below the Guild Heighliner.

Ori are definitely one of the high tier powers.

Replicators are practically immune to energy weapons, you want kinetic impact weapons for personal scale combat against them. How lucky for Stargate's protagonists that their version of Earth hasn't advanced beyond solid projectile firearms yet. Hmm, what if the Replicators take out something from Mass Effect first? Putting kinetic barriers on Replicators would significantly increase their individual threat factor.

On the other hand, Mass Effect is probably the single best placed 'verse on the chart to stop the Replicators cold, because their weapons are purely kinetic and they have a sufficiently basic approach to fighting. (Maybe not O'Neill basic, but pretty basic)

Mato

2015-09-25, 02:21 PM

Speaking of the Ori, is there an Ori warship on that chart anywhere?
Yes, I missed that before.

Since everyone else is getting named characters that died before the series was over (vader) that means an ascended Adria is the ship's captain.

Douglas

2015-09-25, 02:21 PM

On the other hand, Mass Effect is probably the single best placed 'verse on the chart to stop the Replicators cold, because their weapons are purely kinetic and they have a sufficiently basic approach to fighting. (Maybe not O'Neill basic, but pretty basic)
Oh, any Replicator someone from Mass Effect gets in their sights will definitely get blasted apart, but that doesn't mean much to a Replicator that's hiding in the ducts, replicating by eating the ship out from around them. I'd expect a Replicators vs Mass Effect fight to end up very similar to how SG-1 vs Replicators always does, except without a plot device weapon instant-killing the entire swarm at the last second.

Since everyone else is getting named characters that died before the series was over (vader) that means an ascended Adria is the ship's captain.
:smallamused: That's a bit unfair, I'd say. Without the rest of the Ancients here to counter her, she's essentially a god and would win by snapping her fingers unless there's another god-level being in play.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-25, 03:09 PM

To someone 'playing' Star Wars... Would you WANT Vader at the helm of Executor circa right before it was destroyed? What other ships of that class were made? Or would you prefer another one of those ships, hopefully helmed by someone a bit more sane?

Also there are several gods on the field. Some from Babylon 5, some from Stargate. Also, canonically, Daleks fight reality warping gods and win, regularly.

Rakaydos

2015-09-25, 06:57 PM

To someone 'playing' Star Wars... Would you WANT Vader at the helm of Executor circa right before it was destroyed? What other ships of that class were made? Or would you prefer another one of those ships, hopefully helmed by someone a bit more sane?
Would you prefer Isard with Lusankia or Zinj with Iron Fist?

Both of them seem to feel skittish when it comes to protecting their SSD, as a symbol of their power. Vader and the Executor would be able to actually USE the power better.

And if you can believe Captian Pelleon, Executor had the cream of the Empire's officer corps, too.

Olinser

2015-09-25, 10:21 PM

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-25, 10:41 PM

If one of them is on the chart then any Earth ship from the Ender's Game universe auto wins because the Little Doctor destroys anything it hits in a single shot.

Anything else it really boils down to how well you interpret various shields/armor holding up against cross universe weapon systems.

On the whole, the ship with the most effective offensive weapons wins. In which case probably the Eclipse with the superlaser, simply because it can dust any other ship on the list with a single shot. The only other ship even worth mentioning is the Replicators from Stargate simply by virtue of them potentially being able to hijack the Eclipse.

Heh. Hehehehe. Heeeeehhhh. Oh wow. You are coming a bit late to this discussion. That ship is actually on the low end of superweapons shown; there are a LOT of other continent busters, planet busters, starbusters/solar system busters, and maybe a few interstellar-cloud busters. Also, a few gods are present. And the MD Device requires, uh, contact. It's a missile, right? A missile that can be shot down, and can be defeated by exploding on an energy shield that is not actually made of matter...

Would you prefer Isard with Lusankia or Zinj with Iron Fist?

Both of them seem to feel skittish when it comes to protecting their SSD, as a symbol of their power. Vader and the Executor would be able to actually USE the power better.

And if you can believe Captian Pelleon, Executor had the cream of the Empire's officer corps, too.

Hrmmm. *looks at the wiki* Maybe the Lusankya right before the battle of Thyferra? Much of the point is -- assume that it is optimal for Thrawn to take full command of all Imperial forces in the area, AND hold them back from immediately engaging Rebels or New Republic, because he's just way more competent than others. Who could he manage to get to follow his orders?

Rakaydos

2015-09-25, 11:05 PM

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-25, 11:16 PM

So... basically. The ships would fairly immediately descend into bickering and cliques? With POSSIBLY the Reborn Emperor holding the group together (if he would actually be present... if not him, who would be on the Eclipse?) Especially since Thrawn would probably be at the head of a NORMAL Star Destroyer?

Essentially, what would have to happen for the Empire to do well in general? Given this probable problem in command and tactics...

Olinser

2015-09-25, 11:38 PM

Heh. Hehehehe. Heeeeehhhh. Oh wow. You are coming a bit late to this discussion. That ship is actually on the low end of superweapons shown; there are a LOT of other continent busters, planet busters, starbusters/solar system busters, and maybe a few interstellar-cloud busters. Also, a few gods are present. And the MD Device requires, uh, contact. It's a missile, right? A missile that can be shot down, and can be defeated by exploding on an energy shield that is not actually made of matter...

Hrmmm. *looks at the wiki* Maybe the Lusankya right before the battle of Thyferra? Much of the point is -- assume that it is optimal for Thrawn to take full command of all Imperial forces in the area, AND hold them back from immediately engaging Rebels or New Republic, because he's just way more competent than others. Who could he manage to get to follow his orders?

No. The Little Doctor was a beam weapon. It was MOUNTED on a missile intended to destroy a planet so the firing ship wasn't at risk of dusting itself. Given that shields don't exist in-universe it is arguable to extrapolate, but given the weapon's description of breaking things down at the molecular level heavily implies that the weapon would just consume the shields and destroy a ship anyway.

And while yes there are a number of large scale destruction weapons, very few of them can actually be fired multiple times in any respectable amount of time. Per the OP we're talking ship to ship combat here, not interstellar/interplanetary war.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-26, 02:21 AM

No. The Little Doctor was a beam weapon. It was MOUNTED on a missile intended to destroy a planet so the firing ship wasn't at risk of dusting itself. Given that shields don't exist in-universe it is arguable to extrapolate, but given the weapon's description of breaking things down at the molecular level heavily implies that the weapon would just consume the shields and destroy a ship anyway.

The Molecular Disruption Device interferes with atomic bonding. Any defence system based on electromagnetic or gravitational force fields has a high chance of stopping it outright (no atomic bonds to disrupt, specifically intended to protect from incoming energy beams).

And while yes there are a number of large scale destruction weapons, very few of them can actually be fired multiple times in any respectable amount of time. Per the OP we're talking ship to ship combat here, not interstellar/interplanetary war.

Quite a lot of the ships on the list have weapons of mass destruction as their primary batteries. Sometimes secondaries as well.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-26, 09:16 AM

Also -- point to me on the chart where Enders Game ships are, hmmm?

Rakaydos

2015-09-26, 09:48 AM

Also -- point to me on the chart where Enders Game ships are, hmmm?

Indeed- if we want to talk ships that ARNT on the chart, Megaria the Alpha Synth from Path of the Fury (david weber) shoots black hole-propelled missiles and uses her own black hole drive to defend at extreme ranges. Or a Culture ROU. Or the Lying Bastard and Longshot II from Ringworld.

HungLo

2015-09-26, 09:53 AM

I actually like writing little mashups - you can probably tell my main fanboy interests. Hope you enjoy it! :smallsmile:

The bridge lights dimmed, and the ship shook hard.

Kirk gripped the arms of the center seat and gritted his teeth. “One more time, old girl,” he thought to himself. “You can take it.”

The lights resumed and the Enterprise settled.

“Report!” Kirk barked.

“Sir!” Sulu stated. “Unknown vessel, very close. On screen now!”

The viewscreen showed a blurred view of strange, angular vessel. A cloud of tiny specks was emerging from a central bay.

“Sulu, magnify and enhance. Spock?”

“Scanning, Captain,” Spock said, bending to his instruments. “The unknown vessel has launched a large number of fighter spacecraft on attack trajectories.” The viewscreen refocused on tiny space fighters with wings like curved knives, driving at full power toward Enterprise.

“Sulu, shields. Arm phasers and photon torpedoes,” Kirk said calmly. “Uhura, hailing freq-“

Uhura interrupted. “Captain! We are receiving a scanning probe, attempting hostile entry into our main computer!”

Spock bent to work, snapping buttons with serene confidence. “Ensign, your assistance, please.”

“Aye, sir!” said Chekhov, rising from the navigation station and rushing to the hooded viewer.

Sulu called out, “Phasers standing by. Fighters entering firing range in ten seconds. Nine…”

From over Kirk’s shoulder, Spock stated. “Captain, I believe we have neutralized the scanning probe.”

“Good work, Spock, Chekhov. Uhura, get me a hail.”

“Aye, sir. They are answering.”

Kirk took a breath. “This is Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise, of the Federation of Planets. We are peaceful explorers. We mean you no harm. Call off your fighters, or we will be forced to defend ourselves. Please respond.”

“Sir, fighters are retreating, forming protective patrols around their main vessel,” said Sulu a moment later. The viewscreen showed dozens of fighters, like angry wasps circling a hive.

“Incoming communication, Captain,” Uhura said. The viewscreen shifted, now showing a humanoid woman sitting alone in a darkened chamber. Long streams of lights, apparently flows of data, tumbled like water down panels all around her.

Kirk blinked. The unknown spokeswoman would be a stunner in any galaxy – tall and slim with long platinum blonde hair and cheekbones that could cut through dura-alloy plating. She wore a long red sleeveless evening gown that showed every curve of her apparently human body.

She looked deeply straight in Kirk’s eyes, her own eyes huge and dark. Finally, she spoke.

“Are you… human?” she asked.

“Yes, I am,” Kirk said. “From Earth.”

Her eyes widened. “Earth, you say?”

“Yes, Earth is the home planet of the human species,” Kirk replied. “Our home. But the United Federation of Planets represents many planets and species, of which we are a part. And you are…?”

She paused. “Some of us would very much like to speak with you. May we visit your vessel?”

“Yes, we would be happy to meet with you. But you didn’t say who you are—“

“We will see you shortly, Captain James T. Kirk,” the spokeswoman said. And the screen went back to normal space, showing the unknown vessel and its swarms of fighters.

HungLo

2015-09-26, 09:56 AM

And a little stinger that just popped into my head..

Lt. Hikaru Sulu stood at the edge of the diplomatic party, who arrived aboard Enterprise in their shuttle minutes ago. Sulu didn’t have any role to play, but the captain let the junior officer observe to expand his diplomatic experience.

Kirk and the tall blonde spokeswoman were beginning their conversation – the woman leaning very close to him, nearly towering over Kirk in high heels.

“I hope the captain knows what he’s doing, she’s a man-eater,” Sulu said to himself. “But he always does.”

Sulu gravitated to a visitor standing by herself, looking a little shy apart from the gathering. He couldn’t help gawking at her – she seemed Earth-Asian, short, with dark glossy hair and exquisite features. She turned and looked at the helmsman – she seemed almost like any girl he’d see on the street in San Francisco, except he'd hardly ever seen anyone so cute.

“Hi, I’m Lieutentant Sulu,” he said, beaming. “Call me Hikaru.”

“Hikaru,” she said, returning his smile. “You can call me… umm, Sharon.”

“Pleased to meet you, Sharon,” said Sulu. “We are very eager to learn more about your people and to become friends.”

“Friends,” said Sharon wistfully. Two other visitors came over to join their conversation. Sulu was stunned. The two other gorgeous women were just like Sharon in every detail, dressed differently but otherwise exactly the same. Triplets? Clones?

The two women each took Sulu’s arm. One of them breathed in his ear, “We couldn’t help overhearing…. we would very much like to be friends.”

Unseen by the Enterprise officers, the three women began edging the young helmsmen out into the corridor.

Sulu grinned.

“Oh, my.” :smallbiggrin:

Eldan

2015-09-26, 09:58 AM

Hm. Ships not on the chart... personally, I'd just like to see what happens if Nostalgia for Infinity and the Melding Plague get their hand on some of the mechanical races.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-26, 10:46 AM

I'm not sure you could really judge, because it's hard to know exactly what the Melding Plague is or does when nobody in the setting knows for sure except that it causes any nanotech to go haywire and try and merge with organic substrates (because the effects of it destroyed most of the things that could tell them).

TeChameleon

2015-09-26, 05:44 PM

*grin*

If we're talking about ships we'd like to see added... and we've already tossed in the Culture... how about the other 800 lb. gorilla of sci fi, the Lensmen? The Directrix and a detachment of Maulers could make life rather interesting for just about anyone on the chart, including the Daleks, especially if they had Lens-bearers in the command roles.

Granted, once we start including groups like that, you're likely to be minus one star system fairly promptly.

On a somewhat more limited scale, how about some of the ships from Schlock Mercenary? With weaponized gravity, a rather wide variety of weapon-flavours to choose from, standard-issue strong AI, and a unique form of teleportation that doesn't seem to be impeded by shields (along with the cheerful willingness to use it in unpleasantly creative ways on their opponents), they'd be strong contenders. And the defense systems they use against their own form of teleportation would probably block transporters, at the very least.

... fair warning: if you decide to go for an archive trawl on Schlock Mercenary, make sure you budget some time. It's been running since June of 2000, and the closest it's ever come to missing a daily update was when the host servers exploded (quite literally, by the way- apparently the detonation took out at least one wall), and the author apologized for that update being late >.O

Oh, and the early art is... well, awful is probably being charitable. But the writing starts off pretty good, and only gets stronger, and the art does improve rather markedly. Good read all around, anyhow, and the ships being involved would be rather fun, especially if we got the Fleetmind involved :smallbiggrin:

Kitten Champion

2015-09-26, 06:51 PM

Essentially, what would have to happen for the Empire to do well in general? Given this probable problem in command and tactics...

Avoid the Arcadia? Not that it's likely.

Also -- point to me on the chart where Enders Game ships are, hmmm?

Obviously this thread needs more SF universes, having 70+ clearly isn't enough.

Personally I'd like to add Marvel and DC cosmic-level heroes, because why not?

Marlowe

2015-09-26, 07:21 PM

Is it worthwhile asking again if MAYBE it might be more productive to sort what we have into pools/weight classes/approximately even match-ups? That's me asking. Not Haman. Haman just doesn't want to die, become a Newtype ghost, and turn into a Dues ex Machina.

Broken Crown

2015-09-26, 08:21 PM

Marlowe

2015-09-26, 09:05 PM

First off; as Katyusha suggested; which of us knows what about what? There are whole franchises here I've never heard of except as fleeting references on the internet.

I've been doing some Gundam homework lately, because I need to know it for my comic thing, but I still haven't seen half of the Gundamverse ships on that page in action.

I know about Star Wars and Star Trek of course, but I'm not going to get into any arguments about their respective technobabble.

I was a very successful Chaos admiral in Battlefleet Gothic; so I feel reasonably competent to discuss 40K-style space combat. :smalleek: Incidentally, 40K is frelled in this company.

And that brings up a point that's been thrown around already: many of these franchises have multiple vectors that contradict each other.

There's a minor example in the way the Gundam ships have lengths quoted from a third-party source that don't match the dimensions shown in the show (the show itself is reasonably consistent. It appears that Sunrise knows what it's doing but doesn't necessarily share its notes with third-parties).

Trek and Wars have huge disconnects between what we're told things can do and what we actually see them do; and 40K fluff is often at variance with BFG, the actual 40K space-combat game. Just an obvious example, did you know Space Marine ships are pretty bad at space combat? Well, they are. They're not designed for ship-to-ship combat at all. Won't see that in the fluff much though.

So; do we go with what we're told? Or what we're shown?

GloatingSwine

2015-09-27, 01:39 AM

So; do we go with what we're told? Or what we're shown?

You always have to take what you're shown over what you're told if the two contradict. What you're shown is what happened, unless you have a specific reason why it didn't (ie. it's fictional or staged within the universe itself).

Also, game mechanics are almost never usable because they're altered for balance. (40k tabletop mechanics are explicitly not the "real" capabilities of anything at all, if they were a single tactical squad would be an entire 1500 point army).

In the case of 40k you tend to use books first, then rulebook fluff, and only use the most basic rules concepts like "Gun X is bigger than gun Y" but not try to actually determine how much.

TeChameleon

2015-09-27, 02:11 AM

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-27, 02:30 AM

I'm working on a set of RP writeups for this.

And the point of it is, it has to be one of those agreement-based roleplays -- with the whole point that both parties have to agree what would happen.

Mostly, it's faaiiirly obvious when some setting is by far and away wayyyy more powerful than another at something, or how a particular matchup would go:

-The Empire of Man is great against any group that is weak to massed amount of traditional ordinance (say, the Borg, whose defenses is mostly against exotic energy weapons... Also, the Borg is weak against people who are competent at melee.)

-Battlestar Galactica Reboot Cylons are strong against United Federation of Planets, who seriously only have like ONE computer on the ship, with pitiful information security

-Honorverse ships are strong against anyone who doesn't have tactical FTL, whose ships are generally short ranged (like some of the video game ships, perhaps? maybe X3?)

-The Empire (as in, Star Wars) WOULD be quite powerful, because they are quite versatile, except for the fact that their setup of ships means a huuuge amount of infighting amongst egotistical admirals from different time frames at the helm of super star destroyers, which would ruin their tactical cohesion.

-Kerrigan would probably do REALLY well at gaining biotech very rapidly, very few groups that have a lot of biotech Kerrigan would want to steal, can handle the sheer variety of pressure that she can bring to the table

-It's easy to tell when someone is very definitely FAR above other settings -- which happens with some of the gods, and the Super Exelion -- so give them reasons to not want to destroy absolutely everything... And settings that are NOT obviously far above one another, have them be roughly equivalent with one another, albeit with a different way of doing things and each with their own specific strengths and weaknesses; mostly, keep things roughly within one magnitude of one another, yaknow?

-When two characters with a LOT of plot armor go up against one another, just make it interesting. Remember, everyone is fighting to make sure nothing horrible dominates their universe, so even people who might not want to fight might end up against each other... and surrender IS viable. If one setting manages to kill all the omnicidal entities and force a surrender from everyone else, then they flat out win without having to kill everyone's favorite heroes. Question is... who could manage it?

Mostly, this would be very fast and loose with the power levels, and more be based off of 'interesting interactions'. And there's plenty of groups that everyone would want destroyed or conquered before they would start bickering with one another (Borg, Cybermen, Bugs, Replicants, the Daleks, who will be a huge problem for EVERYONE)...

Also remember, this RP isn't to figure out who would win in an all out brawl. We already KNOW that. It'd be the Daleks. What this is to figure out is -- can things happen in such a way that the Daleks don't win, and if they don't, who might upset things and end up lucky enough to manage? Can, say, Craftworld Uthwe, with THREE ships, manage to manipulate, sayyyy, the Protoss, the Confederacy, uh, Earth Space Forces, and the United Federation of Planets (they have a Krenim Temporal Weapon Ship on loan, don't ya know), to attack the Daleks in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time, to win? In such a way that DOESN'T make the Daleks decide to stop their rampage of other random groups at close range, and promptly make the star go nova?

...Cause the Daleks hate everyone else so much, they are going and killing everyone that upsets them, personally. at close range. Since they (rightly) don't feel threatened at all by anything on the field, not even the gods that are present. And also, how does the groups with future sight prevent Earth Space Forces from panicking and glassing half the solar system?

Also, the ships we know bugger-all about are the first ones that fall to the Daleks, of course! Especially that Independence War ship.

"NO ONE MOCKS THE DALEKS! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"

Douglas

2015-09-27, 02:33 AM

Since Interdictor Cruisers from Star Wars cut off access to hyperspace, does that mean that all the Honorverse ships would rip themselves apart or turn their crew to jam when they entered an Interdiction field, since all their inertial dampers would simultaneously fail..?
No, they'd only be unable to enter or exit FTL. Honorverse gravitic drives and inertial compensators are separate technologies from their hyper generators, and only the hyper generators are disabled by gravity wells.

GloatingSwine

2015-09-27, 02:33 AM

For that matter, what about the ships about which we know basically bugger-all, even if we're intimately familiar with the source material? I mean, you could watch Independence Day as often as you like, and still have no idea what the mothership can do in space combat

You could reasonably conclude "not a lot" though, given their Big Gun is a few megatons at best and isn't used from anything other than point blank range. (and there was no reason for them not to use it at longer range if it could be, as they were here for extermination not conquest).

and I'm not sure if Dune even mentions whether or not that huge Heighliner Jumpship is armed.

I'm pretty sure it's not. The Spacer Guild uses the leverage their monopoly on space navigation gives them to make the houses work for them instead of having to get their own hands dirty.

And that's not really getting into exactly how we'd factor in things like the Force- would Battle Meditation help in any way in this? Are Jedi pilots' reflexes/precognition sufficiently superhuman to tip the balance in a combat where they're outmatched?

Those are the kind of things that are only going to be effective when the technology gap is sufficiently close (and are probably best discounted, it's probably better to consider the ships as crewed by NPCs who are competent enough to use them at the best of their combat ability.

or Minovsky Particles- would the laws of physics suddenly go sideways if you got too close to a Gundam ship?

Minovsky particles scatter EM radiation including visible light by a perceptible degree. You'd allow them their normal effect of passive sensor scrambling and ECM/ECCM jamming (but UC Gundam is low enough power that it won't help).

Since Interdictor Cruisers from Star Wars cut off access to hyperspace, does that mean that all the Honorverse ships would rip themselves apart or turn their crew to jam when they entered an Interdiction field, since all their inertial dampers would simultaneously fail..?

Interdictors project a gravity well, so it would probably do exactly the same as it does to Star Wars vessels, prevent them from entering FTL because they are suddenly under the hyper limit even if they are technically in open space.

And I don't think we can just say that everybody is just stuck with their own tech, since in at least some of these universes, there are ships running around which have eating everyone and everything and using the bits they like is their entire raison d'etre, and saying that they can't do that would pretty much neuter them.

Yeah, but they have to have a reasonable way to get other people's tech. The Borg, for instance, aren't going to be assimilating any of the major powers any time soon because they'll get too horribly stomped on if they try. Likewise the Zerg are probably out of luck getting hold of anybody's unique biological capabilities because their space combat power is anaemic to nonexistent.

Douglas

2015-09-27, 02:44 AM

Likewise the Zerg are probably out of luck getting hold of anybody's unique biological capabilities because their space combat power is anaemic to nonexistent.
The Zerg are all about sheer incredible ridiculous QUANTITY. If they're only getting one each of a few select things, they'll be really weak. It's possible they might grow to become a threat if everyone overlooks them and leaves them alone to multiply for a while, but otherwise they're screwed.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-27, 03:05 AM

Marlowe

2015-09-27, 03:05 AM

You always have to take what you're shown over what you're told if the two contradict. What you're shown is what happened, unless you have a specific reason why it didn't (ie. it's fictional or staged within the universe itself).

Also, game mechanics are almost never usable because they're altered for balance. (40k tabletop mechanics are explicitly not the "real" capabilities of anything at all, if they were a single tactical squad would be an entire 1500 point army).

In the case of 40k you tend to use books first, then rulebook fluff, and only use the most basic rules concepts like "Gun X is bigger than gun Y" but not try to actually determine how much.

40K tabletop mechanics and conventions are completely irrelevant here. Books on space combat in the 40K universe are massively inconsistent. And there is no "Gun X is bigger than Gun Y" in BFG.

It's remarkable that you're so prepared to throw out the PRIMARY source for a franchise apparently completely unseen.

Misery Esquire

2015-09-27, 07:01 PM

The Zerg aren't that bad. And Kerrigan is very tenacious. She will probably immediately let others know that her ship isn't as evil as it looks, and then immediately 'handle' her equivalents: Starship Troopers bugs, and then the Crysis Ceph Mothership, maybe some Collectors.. and then maybe go for the Goaul'd genetic technology thing (that was Goaul'd, right?), and mostly just be on 'cleanup' against some of the low powers with biotech or psychic powers, as a way to quickly increase her power level. And the Zerg do have a fairly wide variety of space units:
Scourges, Devourers, Mutalisks, Guardians, Brood Lords, the old versions of Queens, Vipers, Flying Locusts, Corruptors... that's a lot of tactical versatility. I'd say with the wider variety of units she has, she is one of the better 'carrier/fighter' based groups, because of the sheer amount of versatility and battlefield control / suppression that she can bring on board. And that's before she gets some of the exotic plasma capabilities of the Bugs or whatever it is that Cephs do, not to mention Collectors or Goaul'd!

YES, she starts low power, low range, but she fights like a cornered rat, and has a clear path to go 'up', you know?

The problem being is (and this is a rather simple example compared to some of the more exotic and powerful members of the fight) ;

What does she do when the Imperium of Man refuses to even consider talking to her and provides nearly a million tons of metal as their personal envoy? At a range beyond anything her fleet can consider, and even if she does close somehow, it only brings more firepower to bear, even including if they break onto the ship where the guardsmen realise they've got discount Tyranids to fight.

Hell, apparently some older Imperial ships have more terrifying squiddy things living in their water filtration system than a mob of zerglings.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-27, 07:19 PM

Simple. She doesn't go NEAR the Imperium of Man until she is dramatically powered up by eating a lot of bioships and getting a lot of biotech. What would she have to gain by getting in a scuffle with them? And remember, as both are mid range powers with ambiguous range, we are setting their range as 'roughly similar to one another'. After all, the Imperium of Man is one of the settings that plausibly has low range in this fight, seeing as how they do end up in knife range slugfests all the time.

Marlowe

2015-09-27, 08:51 PM

In fact, the vast majority of Imperial ship guns have a maximum range of 30,000 kilometers. Which is knife-fighting range compared to many things here. Hell, it's knife-fighting range even in Battlefleet Gothic, and the short ranges are a reason for the focus on broadside fighting in the first place. It's not smart to place all your guns on the prow if you're going to get one volley off and then wind up with the enemy behind you by your own ship's momentum.

Chaos ship tend to have longer ranged guns, up to 45,000/60,000K. And the Nova Cannon mounted as a spinal on a few Imperial ships has a max range of 150,000K and a minimum range of 30,000. But forget any idea of 40K ships being long-ranged in this company.

EDIT: Checked. There's only two Imperial ships on that chart I know have a gun capable of shooting beyond 30K Kilometers. That's the Retribution battleship and the Mars battlecruiser. The Mars has a Nova cannon.

I'm not familiar with the Conquest, Ambition, or Chalice-class. Ambition and Chalice look like more of the same standard stuff, and the Conquest doesn't have the look of a warship to me.

The Gloriana-class chapter flagship I'm unsure of, but if she's just a big Battlebarge then she's a lot less powerful than her size suggests.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-27, 09:13 PM

Ehhh... the Gloriana was a Primarch Flagship. So there's that.

And also. The range of the big capital ship killing zerg in space is NOT actually specified anywhere.. You don't actually KNOW how far a Corruptor or Mutalisk or Brood Lord or Guardian can shoot, usefully, in vacuum against large starship scale targets or large fortresses... and a Scourge is basically a guided missile anyway...

And there's also the fact that a large number of her star force would be mostly treated as bombers, which means you'd have to shoot them down with the point defense guns and fighters, which fits as she is one of the Carrier type forces!

Marlowe

2015-09-27, 09:22 PM

Ehhh... the Gloriana was a Primarch Flagship. So there's that.
Which means it's more a warhammer 30K ship, that it's likely to have much better weapons than the other Imperial vessels, but which also begs the question of whether it would want to have anything to do with them. Lovely.

And there's also the fact that a large number of her star force would be mostly treated as bombers, which means you'd have to shoot them down with the point defense guns and fighters, which fits as she is one of the Carrier type forces! Not good for the Imperium then, given they only have two carriers present.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-27, 09:46 PM

Lots of those ships probably have at least some fighters, many of the battleships hold fighters too. Also, that rogue trader ship? The Conquest Star Galleon? Makes an absolutely superlative carrier, when outfitted right. And I'm sure there's a spaceborn variant of a Stormraven for fighter duty as well for the Astartes.

Marlowe

2015-09-28, 02:09 AM

Make that three carriers then, along with the Dictator and the Mars. I doubt it's a patch on an Emperor-class, which is what that set really needs.

As for the rest? Retribution? Pure gunship. No launch bays. No fighters. Avenger? Same deal. And so on, and so on. It's no use saying "This ship probably can to X" if you're going to completely ignore the published and official stats on what it actually is and what it does.

Also, that Conquest is definitely outfitted as a gunship, not as a carrier. I know what Imperial launch bays look like.

Kitten Champion

2015-09-28, 02:17 AM

I know what Imperial launch bays look like.

Let me guess, poorly lit and pointlessly ornate?

Marlowe

2015-09-28, 02:37 AM

http://i.imgur.com/0zLnzem.png

These ships come as standardised hulls and different weapons sections that you glue to the sides to make different classes. This means it's very easy to tell what most of them can do just by looking at them, even if you haven't seen the precise class before. Building your ships in a non-standard way to add personality is a common game.

Our Imperial player had a Dictator with the launch bays and gun batteries attached the wrong way around. We decided it came from the somewhat-Australian forgeworld of Foster's Laager, was named the Nulles Anxietas, and was captained by a captain "Mad" Max.

My third Devastation had its lance turrets attached straight onto the base hull, foregoing the usual deck section, to give it a more wasp-waisted appearance. I had High Elf bits left over from an old kitbash attached to their bridges as a faction insignia. These bits in question showed a hand grapsing a crescent moon and throwing the horns with fore-finger and fingers, prompting spectators at our games to ask why the Imperial navy was under attack from the Chaos fleet of Sailor Moon.

We had fun. The major reason the campaign died is that we could not figure out how the Orks could win at all.

Chen

2015-09-28, 07:27 AM

If Kerrigan is with them, the best chance the Zerg have is actually ditching the big ship of theirs and finding some way to get Kerrigan alone on board some of the lower tech ships so she can start multiplying the swarm. She'd be small enough that just finding her would be difficult for those without magic sensors. Without Kerrigan they pretty much have zero chance though.

Broken Crown

2015-09-28, 11:09 AM

Let me guess, poorly lit and pointlessly ornate?

In the Grim Darkness of the 41st Millennium, there are only dubious design decisions.

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-28, 01:29 PM

note on the images. The images don't have to be exactly how the ship is outfitted or equipped. For example, for 40k, it could be a different Gloriana. And the ships might have slightly different equipment than shown, provided doing so is within the capacity of the polity to do, and fits their doctrine and political will.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-28, 03:00 PM

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-28, 03:14 PM

You just keep wanting to make this even more complicated than it already is, don't you?:smallsmile:

Yes. The idea though, that if you are going to be roleplaying this, you are supposed to show restraint and focus more on minor tweaks than huge excessive overhauls. And I haven't changed this from the start; it has always included the words 'outfit' or 'equip' in reference to what the ships are carrying, with the idea that there might be some minor changes to improve versatility.

Marlowe

2015-09-28, 06:14 PM

Yes. The idea though, that if you are going to be roleplaying this, you are supposed to show restraint and focus more on minor tweaks than huge excessive overhauls. And I haven't changed this from the start; it has always included the words 'outfit' or 'equip' in reference to what the ships are carrying, with the idea that there might be some minor changes to improve versatility.

Changing kilometers-long sections of equipment to turn the ships into examples of completely different classes are not "Minor tweaks". Are we using the ships in the picture or aren't we?:smallconfused:

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-28, 06:30 PM

We are using the class of ships shown in the example? The images are just examples of the class of ships.

Marlowe

2015-09-28, 06:56 PM

We are using the class of ships shown in the example? The images are just examples of the class of ships.

The example ships are the basis of the exercise. We don't get to rebuild them, or replace them with other ships from the same franchise, just because we've since discovered they're not the ships that we might ideally want.

In 40K terms specifically, it's nonsense to talk of changing weapons loadout and calling it the same class. A Lunar with lance decks replaced with launch bays stops being a Lunar and becomes a Dictator. An Avenger with Launch Bays isn't an Avenger any more. It's an Exorcist. And a Retribution with launch bays is something that doesn't exist.

Are we using the ships in the image or are we just making stuff up?

Gavinfoxx

2015-09-28, 07:15 PM

In 40k, the Navy usually doesn't call ships from the same basic hull but different outfitting the same class. But NOT all groups actually do it like that -- for example, Rogue Traders and other, non Navy groups do put other odd things on the ships, and customize them to one extent or another. There's also things like getting forbidden atomics on the ships, or getting an occasional odd, nonstandard torpedo shell or macrocannon shells or nova cannon shells or something, provided the standard launcher can still launch it. For example, Mechanicum ships in an Explorator fleet will tend to have more hopped up sensors than a Navy ship. And there's also the fact that each individual ship of a given class will be unique, and may have unique sets or capabilities of armaments in general, especially as they are repaired and refit with whatever happens to be on hand. Especially if you consider the details in the excellent Rogue Trader game as an example of what is possible when powerful, wealthy people get their way. So SOME level of customization is possible. For example, someone put together all the rules of the 1.0 versions of the RPG to show what items or customization is possible with that specific system:
https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/101426-warhammer-40krp-armory/
and http://www.mediafire.com/folder/i3akv9qx9q05z

And that doesn't even show all the useful canonical components (such as fleet defense turrets), nor most of the canonical ships.

And remember the initial bit:
"Outfit and crew your vessels well." And I never intended for a ship to be any particular example of a <something> class, unless the ship is entirely unique! The idea was always, 'the group or polity prepares as best as it is capable, given the constraints of the setting, for the scenario'!

And there's also the fact that the artist used whatever example images he could find of a typical member of the class. You'll notice that the Gloriana? It's the Iron Blood. Flagship of the Perturabo. Primarch of the Iron Warriors... a traitor legion. But it's placed with the rest of the Loyalist forces in the image. That's why I always thought that the details of the particulars of the ships -- including where they are in time, or if there is some weirdness going on -- would be decided by whichever fan wants to do the RP.

After all, we've already answered the 'who would win in a fight' question! Now it's just to make a most interesting RP...

Rakaydos

2015-09-28, 11:15 PM

Honorverse wedge ram vs Dalek shields! Who wins!?

Douglas

2015-09-28, 11:17 PM

Honorverse wedge ram vs Dalek shields! Who wins!?
Considering that the Doctor's Tardis was able to say "gravity schmavity" to a black hole and Dalek tech is on par with the Time Lords, I think the Daleks win that one.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-29, 03:18 AM

Yup. I'm probably the best person to be 'championing' the Honorverse here, and they're going to get roflstomped by the Daleks just like everyone else. Impeller wedges aren't literally black holes - no event horizon, for instance, just incredibly concentrated gravity bands that might as well be black holes as far as energy or matter intersecting them is concerned. Shields that can shrug off actual black holes are going to be just fine.

Gurston

2015-09-29, 06:53 AM

Which other ships on the list would survive an Impeller wedge ram?

Gnoman

2015-09-29, 07:42 AM

Which other ships on the list would survive an Impeller wedge ram?

Nothing without energy shields for certain - which would make Honorverse countermissiles an unstoppable superweapon within their 1 million km range.

As for those verses with energy shields, the only one that I know for certain can't withstand the wedge is Star Wars, as their shields were extremely vulnerable to YV gravity manipulation in the NJO series.

The Glyphstone

2015-09-29, 02:37 PM

Mato

2015-09-29, 04:11 PM

Considering that the Doctor's Tardis was able to say "gravity schmavity" to a black hole and Dalek tech is on par with the Time Lords, I think the Daleks win that one.Daleks are canonically murdered by machine gun fire and even the Doctor had to cycle through another life after a botched surgery for a gun shot wound. In all actuality, Dr Who's world is very, very, low power and even suffers from low tech. Even the almighty temporal cannons carried by Dalaks are barely comparable to Star Trek's hand-held phaser tech.

Also don't make the assumption that "gravity schmavity" somehow implies the TARDIS is immune to weapons. The interior exists in an alternate dimension and the exterior teleports through spade and time is the real reason gravity isn't a big deal. The TARDIS has no real form of shielding and has been blasted apart, or even leaked radiation through it killing another one of the Doctor's lives.

Fascinating series, but not a high roller.

Gnoman

2015-09-29, 04:29 PM

Countermissiles have a powered range of one to four million KM - offensive capital ship missiles of the generation on the chart can range out to six million KM. But in fairness, using counter-missiles against actual enemy warships is not likely to be something that would occur to them using the Generic Competent Commander rule I tend to adopt; a Named Hero(ine) like Honor Harrington or Thomas Theisman might, but even they wouldn't resort to it until their main missile magazines ran dry simply from the shorter range. And while early-war ships didn't have a lot of launchers, they had plenty of magazine space. Though since the capital ship missiles themselves also use wedges, a skilled tactical officer might reprogram them for direct impact if the enemy shields were proving resistant to X-ray laser heads.

Though I think that if a wedge does make it to physical contact with an enemy hull, 'unstoppable superweapon' is probably honestly accurate. Book 6 has the wedge of a pinnace (air-to-ground shuttle, about the size of a modern jumbo jet) switch on inside a .75km, 900Kton battlecruiser's hangar - the entire battlecruiser is instantly reduced to finely shredded debris. Physical matter does not react well to a wedge.

The exact passage:

The small craft of all impeller-drive navies have at least one thing in common. They may be larger or smaller, armed or unarmed, fast or slow, but every single one of them is fitted with safety features to prevent it from bringing up its drive when any solid object large enough to endanger it—or to be endangered by it—lies within the perimeter of its impeller wedge. And above all, it is impossible to accidentally activate an impeller wedge while still within a boat bay.
But those safeguards, while as near to infallible as they can be made, are designed to prevent accidents, and what happened in PNS Tepes' Boat Bay Four was no accident. The only vessel left in it was the pinnace upon which Scotty Tremaine had labored, and now Horace Harkness' last program brought its systems on-line. But Scotty had made one small alteration: he had physically cut the links between the pinnace's sensors and its autopilot. The flight computers could no longer "see" the boat bay about them. As far as they could tell, they could have been in deepest, darkest interstellar space, and so they felt no concern at all when they were commanded to bring the pinnace's wedge up while it still lay in its docking buffers.

"My God."
Shannon Foraker's hushed whisper seemed to echo and re-echo across Count Tilly's flag deck as PNS Tepes blew apart.
No, Lester Tourville thought shakenly. No, she didn't blow apart; she simply came apart. She . . . disintegrated.
And that, he realized, was precisely the right word. The battlecruiser's fusion plants blew as their mag bottles failed, spewing white-hot fury amid the wreckage, but it didn't really matter. Nothing could have survived that dreadful, wrenching blow from inside her hull. All the fusion plants did was vaporize a few score tons of wreckage and silhouette the rest of it against a star-bright fury, like snowflakes in a ground car's headlights.

The reason for this is the size of a pinnace's wedge. From Ashes of Victory:

A pinnace has a far weaker wedge than any regular warship or merchantman. It's enormously smaller, for one thing, not more than a kilometer in width, and less powerful. The little hip-pocket fusion plants we put into small craft couldn't even begin to power an all-up wedge for a ship the size of a LAC. Which is just as well, because they use old-fashioned mag bottle technology and laser-fired fusing that's not a lot more advanced than they were using back on Old Earth Ante Diaspora. We've made a hell of a lot of advances since then, of course, in order to shoehorn the plants down to fit into pinnaces, but the way they're built puts a low absolute ceiling on their output.

In other words, Tepes disintegrated because two sections of her hull were suddenly gone the width of the ship and probably the length as well. Even a shipkiller's wedge won't be that big, and would have no chance of biting that deep. It would still be unbelievably powerful if it contacted, but it would me more "chopping the ship with a knife" than it would be "putting the ship in a blender. Of course, given that Honorverse ships in one-on-one fights tend to spend a lot of time spinning on their long axis to maximise their invulnerability, they could just wipe ships out of existence, but I doubt that any normal captain would think to move to the suicidally-close hundred thousand kilometers that you'd need to use the wedge offensively, at least not easily.