The Federation vs The Empire

[Executor]

Ahhh, a classic of geeky versus threads. The United Federation of Planets vs The Galactic Empire. I believe no further introduction is needed.

So, it is two years after the Battle of Yavin, a wormhole has been discovered on the outer edges of the Star Wars galaxy. Testing this wormhole, the Emperor first sends a small frigate through the portal, alone. It emerges near Deep Space 9, in the Milky Way galaxy. A series of disagreements between the captain of the frigate and Commander Sisko of DS9 result in the frigate promising to bring a battlegroup through the wormhole to attack the Federation. The frigate returns and relays news of the new people to conquer to the Emperor. Palpatine decides that the second galaxy will be crushed and makes preparations to send a large force through to invade the Federation.

So, who wins? In my opinion: The Empire by an overwhelming margin. Let us say that the Empire sends a fleet of one hundred Star Destroyers. This is a middling force by the standards of the Empire, it doesn't even exceed the total mass of one Super Star Destroyer. The Federation, in one of those "WTF" moments the writers often put in, includes little things like fighters and runabouts in their total ship counts. Each Star Destroyer carries *Wookieepedia check* 72 fighters. Thus 7200 fighters. By Federation reckoning, the small fleet would number 7300 ships. That's the largest space force ever seen in the history of the Federation, and yet a fraction of 1% of the Imperial Navy. When you consider that each Star Destroyer can carry weapons superior to America's entire nuclear arsenal (All American nukes = 20.5 gigatons, Star Destroyer turbolaser = 200 gigatons), you realize the Federation simply has a snowball's chance in hell.

So, who would actually think the Federation could win in the face of overwhelming size, speed, firepower and industrial strength?

[Nerd-o-rama]

Okay, now you're just trying to make people angry. There's already a whole website for this one question. One with laughable math, but still good points. My point is, this was done to death ten years ago.

[SurlySeraph]

Gahh! The mother and source of all versus threads is manifest on the boards! Run before it takes over your mind and all your spare time!

[Executor]

Check the signature under this post. Don't you know the cycle of Versus-dom? It's simple

Star Wars vs Star Trek is posted ... People debate it to death ... People leave it as old and overdone ... People start posting other versus matches ... People debate them to death ... Eventually, SW vs ST is fresh and new once again and is debated once more

Rinse and repeat ad infinitum

[Ominous]

My personal rule requires me to post the link to the youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNxhrPaaCA4

[Sleet]

"Lord Vader! The unidentified spacecraft is hailing us, sending us messages of peace in all known languages."

"How quaint. Open fire."

[Dervag]

Check the signature under this post. Don't you know the cycle of Versus-dom? It's simple

Star Wars vs Star Trek is posted ... People debate it to death ... People leave it as old and overdone ... People start posting other versus matches ... People debate them to death ... Eventually, SW vs ST is fresh and new once again and is debated once more

Rinse and repeat ad infinitumBecause everybody knows it's going to happen, maybe it won't happen?

Yeah. And maybe the next generation of weapon will be so terrible that people will be unwilling to use it and thus stop fighting wars.


"Lord Vader! The unidentified spacecraft is hailing us, sending us messages of peace in all known languages."

"How quaint. Open fire."Eh, even Vader would probably stop to talk at least once, if only to issue a surrender demand.

[EntilZha]

Ahhh, a classic of geeky versus threads. The United Federation of Planets vs The Galactic Empire. I believe no further introduction is needed.

So, it is two years after the Battle of Yavin, a wormhole has been discovered on the outer edges of the Star Wars galaxy. Testing this wormhole, the Emperor first sends a small frigate through the portal, alone. It emerges near Deep Space 9, in the Milky Way galaxy. A series of disagreements between the captain of the frigate and Commander Sisko of DS9 result in the frigate promising to bring a battlegroup through the wormhole to attack the Federation. The frigate returns and relays news of the new people to conquer to the Emperor. Palpatine decides that the second galaxy will be crushed and makes preparations to send a large force through to invade the Federation.

So, who wins? In my opinion: The Empire by an overwhelming margin. Let us say that the Empire sends a fleet of one hundred Star Destroyers. This is a middling force by the standards of the Empire, it doesn't even exceed the total mass of one Super Star Destroyer. The Federation, in one of those "WTF" moments the writers often put in, includes little things like fighters and runabouts in their total ship counts. Each Star Destroyer carries *Wookieepedia check* 72 fighters. Thus 7200 fighters. By Federation reckoning, the small fleet would number 7300 ships. That's the largest space force ever seen in the history of the Federation, and yet a fraction of 1% of the Imperial Navy. When you consider that each Star Destroyer can carry weapons superior to America's entire nuclear arsenal (All American nukes = 20.5 gigatons, Star Destroyer turbolaser = 200 gigatons), you realize the Federation simply has a snowball's chance in hell.

So, who would actually think the Federation could win in the face of overwhelming size, speed, firepower and industrial strength?

The Federation wins by default if they can collapse the wormhole with a bilitrium/trilithium/protomatter explosive before the threatened battlegroup can arrive.

Of course, if the wormhole in question is natural and not artificial like the Bajoran wormhole, its endpoints are going to shift. When the Imperial force attempts to go through it, they could likely end up in another part of the Galaxy, or Universe, or a completely different universe--they might emerge near the rim of the Galaxy near a benighted planet called Z'Ha'Dum (dun dun DUN!!) and be set upon and sliced up by Shadow Battle Crabs.

:biggrin:

[Dervag]

OK, so the Federation can win if it manages to close the wormhole preemptively, or if it ends up wandering away by luck so that the Empire can't find them?

I'll buy that.

[Blue Paladin]

...two years after the Battle of Yavin...Palpatine send[s] a large force through to invade the Federation.OMG This explains so much. I always wondered how the Empire could fail to stop The Star Wars Holiday Special. Obviously they were busy with the Feds!


So, who wins? In my opinion: The Empire by an overwhelming margin. Let us say that the Empire sends a fleet of one hundred Star Destroyers. This is a middling force by the standards of the Empire, it doesn't even exceed the total mass of one Super Star Destroyer.A fleet of nothing but Star Destroyers is ridiculous. They'd die within a few days from lack of food and water. Fleets need support.

You want a fleet (probably a battle fleet): 8 heavy attack lines, 12 attack lines, 4 skirmish lines, 8 recon/support lines. Let's go nuts and say all of the attack lines are Imperial-class Star Destroyers; more than enough. So in addition to 12 ISDs, there are (maximum) 160 heavy attack ships, 80 skirmisher ships, and 160 assorted ships for recon/support/troop transport. Of the 72 TIEs per SD, the first 48 are combat type; the latter 24 are "merely" heavy bombers and scouts.

Anyway, that's a total of 864 TIEs + 12 SDs + 160 hvy + 80 skirm + 160 asst = 1276 ships (by Feddie reckoning). Still larger than anything seen by the Federation, and there's nothing that says the Emperor won't send two battle fleets. Or maybe three.

Four fleets is pushing it; that's more than half a sector group. It's only two years after Yavin; you can bet the Emperor is not going to risk losing a sector to the Rebels after that embarassment.


When you consider that each Star Destroyer can carry weapons superior to America's entire nuclear arsenal (All American nukes = 20.5 gigatons, Star Destroyer turbolaser = 200 gigatons)These numbers are pure fantasy. You know how they came up with these, right? Way back in the day, the first few rounds of the Trek/Wars, they used the "minimum" firepower required to vaporize that famous asteroid in Empire Strikes Back. They waved their hands and calculated the size of the asteroid, waved their hands more and calculated the energy required to vaporize the asteroid (not break it apart, because there was no debris left), pointed at their physics degree hanging on the wall and said "this number". Trek supporters called BS, aka O RLY? Wars supporters replied YA RLY. Several years later, "this number" showed up in an official SW book, at which point all the Wars supporters said "See? Toldja so!"


So, who would actually think the Federation could win in the face of overwhelming size, speed, firepower and industrial strength?I will.

Based entirely on the fact that the first Death Star (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_star) had 7,293 TIE fighters, 10,000 of those YA RLY turbolaser batteries, plus 2,600 ion cannons (and at least 768 tractor beam projectors); it was destroyed by a "fleet" of 30 snubfighters. The Rebel force had a 10% survival rate (Luke, Wedge, unnamed Y-Wing); the Imps had .000848% survival rate (Vader; 1 out of 1,179,293 listed Death Star crew). Those kind of numbers go beyond mistake, beyond blunder, past ridiculous and ludicrous, and far into plaid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceballs).

I'm not even a Trekkie(? Trekker? Whatever.), but even though the Federation has a long history of stupidity, the Empire has a long history of stupidity and incompetence. I'm not betting the Federation will win; I'm betting the Empire will lose.

[sikyon]

Based on what I've seen in the movies, and igorning EU crap I honestly don't think that star wars has a technological edge over the federation. Occam's razor for the most part, it's more plausible that the Empire has decent armor and decent weapons rather than rediculously powerful armor and rediculously powerful weapons. I also argue that star wars is too inconsistent to do any sort of analysis on. The extremes of power presented vary too much.



My personal, honest opinion is that Star Trek has the better tech, but Empire has a rediculous advantage in terms of numbers, which lets them win.

[GoC]

Impossible to determine.
Startrek's dues ex machina is insane. but as ramming appears to be the most damaging weapon to a starship I'd say starwars wins by ramming an executer into the other ships.
In terms of actual tech the federation is far more advanced. The problem is their vulnerability to ramming. Without that the fed wins easily.

[kentma57]

One word Transpoter...

"Sir we have a problem...
What?
Our power core is gone...
What!"

[Theodoriph]

This particular scenario is resolved fairly easily.

The federation close the wormhole via explosive devices, thus satisfying their pacific nature and preventing the war.


Regardless, the Federation would win fairly easily. Faster sub-light. Similar superliminal speeds (trans-warp). Superior weapons ranges. Working cloaking devices. Genius engineers who can magically fix any problem in the bottom half of any given hour and awesome leadership that doesn't get its asses kicked by puny rebels. Oh yes...and time travel.

[factotum]

Funny how that never worked for them in 7 seasons of Deep Space Nine, then, isn't it?

[Theodoriph]

They didn't want to close the wormhole in DS9. Some sorta religious thing with it being the temple of the Bajoran gods :smallwink: Not to mention the other innumerable benefits. No...closing it was not an option. It was considered at a certain point, though I cannot remember when. They did stop other people from trying to close it though.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

The Empire wins because of 2 factors: mobility and resources. Their ships travel much faster over long distances. (Obi-wan in a couple days travels a length of the galaxy comparable to a 7 year voyage by Voyager) Meanwhile, the Empire has ships 4x the largest ship in the Federation and spans a galaxy, not part of a quadrant. Without using magic technology, the Federation has no chance. If you allow Picard science-cheese, though, the Federation will win simply because they always do. I hate that.

edit:This is exactly the sort of mission that Thrawn would be sent on. Far away from politics where good leadership is key and it might provide some clues into the dark ones(Vong). Picard and his pseudo-science lose. No question.

[WalkingTarget]

Funny how that never worked for them in 7 seasons of Deep Space Nine, then, isn't it?

Ha! Right, but they did set up a large field of self-replicating, cloaked mines in front of it for a while.

[SITB]

Man, I read it as The Foundation vs The Empire, what a letdown.

I believe the Empire would walk over The Federation.


Becasue.

[Seraph]

Federation fleet resources are limited only by manpower. Replicators give them an effectively infinite industrial capacity. Therefore, if the Federation stopped being stupid long enough to staff ships with programmed holographic crews instead of spending time training meat crewers, they would be able to swarm the empire with little effort.

chew on that for a bit, mmkay?

[Dhavaer]

The Death Star comes through the wormhole and explodes Bajor. Rinse and repeat.

[sikyon]

Impossible to determine.
Startrek's dues ex machina is insane. but as ramming appears to be the most damaging weapon to a starship I'd say starwars wins by ramming an executer into the other ships.
In terms of actual tech the federation is far more advanced. The problem is their vulnerability to ramming. Without that the fed wins easily.

Actually, what I inference was that ramming is so effective because if you ram someone and you both have shields, the shields cancel each other out (or something like that). Therefore ramming just goes right through shields, into the much, much weaker hulls of star trek starships. Also, at maneuvering speeds Star Wars ships don't seem very fast or agile at all.


The Death Star comes through the wormhole and explodes Bajor. Rinse and repeat.

If Star Trek wanted to be extremly mean, they could pull out stuff like genesis device or kill you with a bioweapon or something from light years away carried on a radiation stream (Don't ask, I didn't really understand what the weapon was. It was the weapon that was banned and captain picard was looking for before he got caught and kept yelling there were 4 lights). Or they pull out the probe that was used to blow up stars. A single very smart dude managed to build one, a few meters long, with a warp drive, that would destabilize a star in moments and cause it to explode. That's somewhat more powerful than a planet crushing laser.

[factotum]

Federation fleet resources are limited only by manpower. Replicators give them an effectively infinite industrial capacity.

Absolute cobblers. We don't even have to go in to all the in-depth arguments of why replicators can't be magic "produce stuff from thin air machines", because we have a canonical example: the whole of Voyager! Use of the replicators was severely restricted once they realised how long it was going to take them to get home, and the only possible reason for that would be that the replicators have some sort of finite fuel source that would get used up if they kept getting food that way. Therefore replicators are NOT "infinite industrial capacity", no matter how much you would like to believe they are.

Mind you, we DO have a good example of the Empire's industrial capacity--the second Death Star. They managed to get all the materials required to build a battle station 160km across into the Endor system in a matter of a few months, and no matter how you slice it, that is a COLOSSAL amount of material.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Actually, the DS2 took at least a couple of years.


If Star Trek wanted to be extremly mean, they could pull out stuff like genesis device or kill you with a bioweapon or something from light years away carried on a radiation stream (Don't ask, I didn't really understand what the weapon was. It was the weapon that was banned and captain picard was looking for before he got caught and kept yelling there were 4 lights). Or they pull out the probe that was used to blow up stars. A single very smart dude managed to build one, a few meters long, with a warp drive, that would destabilize a star in moments and cause it to explode. That's somewhat more powerful than a planet crushing laser.

Star Wars had that too, but the guy who used it was a total Mary Sue, so it doesn't count.

[Blue Paladin]

The Empire wins because of 2 factors: mobility and resources. Their ships travel much faster over long distances. (Obi-wan in a couple days travels a length of the galaxy comparable to a 7 year voyage by Voyager)Rebuttal 1: SW ships only travel faster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspace_%28science_fiction%29) because of:

There are established safe hyperspace routes that were scouted out by an unknown species 25,000 years prior to the events in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). These routes made interstellar trade and eventually the establishment of the Republic possible. New routes are almost never scouted out, mostly due to the fact that the end coordinates might place the traveling ship inside some star or planet.Without those hyperspace routes, Imperials are stuck at sub-light speeds.

The time period for this confrontation is also specifically stated to be 2 ABY. Thrawn and his crazy "microjump" ideas are nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, the Empire ... spans a galaxy, not part of a quadrant. Without using magic technology, the Federation has no chance. Yes, and it spends a ridiculous amount of time, effort and resources to build the Fleet, let alone special (potentially bankrupting) projects like a Super Star Destroyer or Death Star. The Federation replicates parts essentially for free. They have available an army of re-purposed holographic lifeforms (ex-EMH mk.I). Dots... connecting...

also: "Magic technology"? What do you think Star Wars has?

edit: factotum replied while I was writing this. Replicators convert energy to mass. Simple as that. As long as you have the energy (which Voyager was specifically trying to conserve in all three seasons it ever came up), you have the matter.

[Dervag]

A fleet of nothing but Star Destroyers is ridiculous. They'd die within a few days from lack of food and water. Fleets need support.Do star destroyers rely on a steady supply of consumables, or do they recycle said consumables?

It's entirely possible to design warships for independent cruises of weeks or months (nuclear submarines). Of course, space is an immensely inhospitable environment, but assuming moderately futuristic life support I can't tell a priori whether or not star destroyers (or Trek Galaxy class ships, or anything else) would need supply ships in order to survive for more than a few days. US Navy warships may not be the right example to work from.


These numbers are pure fantasy. You know how they came up with these, right? Way back in the day, the first few rounds of the Trek/Wars, they used the "minimum" firepower required to vaporize that famous asteroid in Empire Strikes Back. They waved their hands and calculated the size of the asteroid, waved their hands more and calculated the energy required to vaporize the asteroid (not break it apart, because there was no debris left), pointed at their physics degree hanging on the wall and said "this number". Trek supporters called BS...OK, so where, specifically, are the flaws in the argument?


Based entirely on the fact that the first Death Star (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_star) had 7,293 TIE fighters, 10,000 of those YA RLY turbolaser batteries, plus 2,600 ion cannons (and at least 768 tractor beam projectors); it was destroyed by a "fleet" of 30 snubfighters. The Rebel force had a 10% survival rate (Luke, Wedge, unnamed Y-Wing); the Imps had .000848% survival rate (Vader; 1 out of 1,179,293 listed Death Star crew).On the other hand, the Rebels knew exactly how to one-shot the Death Star by exploiting a very specific fault in its design that they only knew about because they had complete blueprints for the entire thing. If they hadn't known to use that very improbable attack plan, which they never would have thought of if they didn't have the plans, they'd have been totally screwed. At best they would have inflicted some superficial damage before their fighters and base were completely destroyed.


I'm not even a Trekkie(? Trekker? Whatever.), but even though the Federation has a long history of stupidity, the Empire has a long history of stupidity and incompetence. I'm not betting the Federation will win; I'm betting the Empire will lose.Well, the Empire did manage to beat up a lot of planets. Otherwise, they'd never have been able to control their territory during the period before the Death Star was built.

The Empire may well be their own worst enemy here, but I think the raw disparity in numbers and strategic mobility will tell even if we assume roughly equal levels of weapons and defensive technology.

Strategic mobility is important. Every Star Wars movie has examples of ships travelling from one planet to another planet in a different part of the galaxy in a matter of hours, days, or weeks (at most). In Star Trek, ships take decades to traverse large parts of the galaxy (unless we dismiss all of Voyager).

This indicates that Star Wars ships can fly very fast from one place to another, which will make it very difficult for Star Trek ships to catch their fleets. If a Star Wars ship is getting hammered by Federation ships, it can retreat into hyperspace much faster than the Fed ships can pursue, even at their best warp speed. Star Wars ships will be able to jump from planet to planet, evading strong points and concentrating against weakness. Even if their individual ships were vastly weaker than Star Trek ships (which, given their size and even the most conservative estimates of their firepower, I find hard to believe), they could still win based on that advantage of mobility combined with the fact that they have something like a thousand times more planets to draw resources from.


Based on what I've seen in the movies, and igorning EU crap I honestly don't thi1nk that star wars has a technological edge over the federation. Occam's razor for the most part, it's more plausible that the Empire has decent armor and decent weapons rather than rediculously powerful armor and rediculously powerful weapons.Occam's razor favors the simplest explanation that fits the data, not just the simplest explanation. Does it fit the data to assume that Star Wars weapons and shields are less powerful than the ones used in Star Trek? Do Star Wars weapons have a harder time dealing with a known target (like a cubic meter of rock) than Star Trek weapons? Do Star Wars shields go down when bombarded by a known amount of energy faster than Star Trek shields do?

If so, then Occam's razor would indeed indicate that Star Wars tech is weaker, because this is a simpler way to explain the observed data than to do all kinds of tap dancing about "oh, well Star Wars ships use variable power shots so the fact that they have so much trouble blowing up a rock doesn't really mean that they can't fire beams a thousand times more powerful in an emergency." Tap dancing would be stupid in this case.

On the other hand, if the same kinds of observations indicate that Star Wars weapons are more effective against known targets than Star Trek weapons, or other such things, then the "reasonable" thing to assume using Occam's razor would be that Star Wars tech is the more powerful.

So, what observations can we use to figure this out?


I also argue that star wars is too inconsistent to do any sort of analysis on. The extremes of power presented vary too much.Trek isn't very consistent, either. In the original series we had Kirk flying to the galactic core and back in a matter of a few days or weeks. In Voyager, we had Janeway needing seventy years to get back home- and if Kirk could fly from near Earth to the galactic core in weeks, Janeway should have been able to get home in a few months, in which case Voyager would have lasted no more than one season, tops.


One word Transpoter...

"Sir we have a problem...
What?
Our power core is gone...
What!"Transporters can't get through shields, remember? And say what you will about Star Wars ships, we know that they have shields (well, except for TIE fighters).


This particular scenario is resolved fairly easily.

The federation close the wormhole via explosive devices, thus satisfying their pacific nature and preventing the war.That's a very likely thing to have happen; I can certainly believe it.


Regardless, the Federation would win fairly easily. Faster sub-light. Similar superliminal speeds (trans-warp).... Working cloaking devices.Do they have enough trans-warp ships to make a decisive difference?

The Federation has lots of clever one-off technologies that it encountered once, and then did not see fit to equip all their ships with. In the event of a shooting war, it would take considerable time and effort to refit their existing fleets with the special weapons they'd need, like cloaking devices. Most of their ships don't have cloaking devices, after all. In fact, almost all their ships don't have cloaking devices. Except maybe one, depending on when the Empire arrives.

Also, the bucketheads appear to at least know about cloaking devices, even if they don't get used very often. So they might not be caught as totally by surprise when attacked by cloaked enemies as you might think.


Superior weapons ranges.Don't we often see their space battles with warships firing at targets that are close enough to be visible on screen? If you can see two objects in space at the same time, and they're both less than a mile long (as Star Trek ships are), then they can't be that far apart, can they?


Oh yes...and time travel.So why don't they use time travel to solve all their problems, or at least more of them? If they could use time travel to nullify an enemy so easily, wouldn't they be doing so all the time (so to speak)?


Federation fleet resources are limited only by manpower. Replicators give them an effectively infinite industrial capacity.They still have to have raw materials to put in their replicators (like the replicator paste that they use to make food). And we've never seen them replicate things as big as starship components. Sure, they can replicate a steak dinner, an object that weighs a few pounds and is about a foot across. That doesn't automatically mean they can replicate the saucer of a GCS, an object that weighs thousands of tons and is hundreds of feet across. In fact, the fact that they have shipyards and do build ships in them (which they totally do) suggests that either they can't replicate warships, or can't do so quickly and cheaply enough to make it a competitor against conventional building techniques.


Therefore, if the Federation stopped being stupid long enough to staff ships with programmed holographic crews instead of spending time training meat crewers, they would be able to swarm the empire with little effort.

chew on that for a bit, mmkay?OK. So your argument is that the Federation can use replicators and AI ('holographic' crews being basically a form of AI) in order to build a giant fleet of robotic warships very fast. Fast enough to make a decisive difference in a single campaign.

Why didn't they do that against the Dominion? I don't know about you, but if I were a crewman in the Federation fleets that got chewed up so badly in the Dominion Wars, I'd be really mad if I found out that the Federation had been sitting on a technology that allowed it to spam thousands of robot battleships in a matter of days or weeks. I'd be all like "Why didn't they have a hundred robo-Galaxy ships guarding the Bajoran wormhole, instead of the one space station?"


If Star Trek wanted to be extremly mean, they could pull out stuff like genesis device or kill you with a bioweapon or something from light years away carried on a radiation stream (Don't ask, I didn't really understand what the weapon was. It was the weapon that was banned and captain picard was looking for before he got caught and kept yelling there were 4 lights).Wasn't the Genesis device destroyed?


A single very smart dude managed to build one, a few meters long, with a warp drive, that would destabilize a star in moments and cause it to explode. That's somewhat more powerful than a planet crushing laser.Sounds like the shots fired from the Galaxy Gun (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Galaxy_Gun), or url=http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sun_Crusher]Sun Crusher[/url]. Nasty stuff.

Because the two sides are on opposite ends of a [i]very long wormhole, the Federation has to get those star-blowing-up projectiles through the wormhole. Which requires them to secure control of their own end of the wormhole and enough of a beachhead on the Imperial side to locate and launch the projectiles against the Empire's primary star systems.

Oh, and they're going to need a lot of them to take out the Empire. I can see it being possible, but it's not a trivial challenge for them to do it, unless they're so powerful that they don't need to do it.

[Seraph]

They still have to have raw materials to put in their replicators (like the replicator paste that they use to make food). And we've never seen them replicate things as big as starship components. Sure, they can replicate a steak dinner, an object that weighs a few pounds and is about a foot across. That doesn't automatically mean they can replicate the saucer of a GCS, an object that weighs thousands of tons and is hundreds of feet across. In fact, the fact that they have shipyards and do build ships in them (which they totally do) suggests that either they can't replicate warships, or can't do so quickly and cheaply enough to make it a competitor against conventional building techniques.

Raw materials, you say? that's what dead planets are for. Replicators already turn one kind of matter into an entirely different kind, I expect that replicator paste is just premade to make the process easier. as for shipyards, what makes you think they don't replicate small components en masse and assemble them at the shipyard? when you have a post-scarcity utopia full of people who have nothing to do but sit around and get bored of decadence, doing things the hard way is a nice method of keeping people from going crazy of boredom.



OK. So your argument is that the Federation can use replicators and AI ('holographic' crews being basically a form of AI) in order to build a giant fleet of robotic warships very fast. Fast enough to make a decisive difference in a single campaign.

yep.



Why didn't they do that against the Dominion? I don't know about you, but if I were a crewman in the Federation fleets that got chewed up so badly in the Dominion Wars, I'd be really mad if I found out that the Federation had been sitting on a technology that allowed it to spam thousands of robot battleships in a matter of days or weeks. I'd be all like "Why didn't they have a hundred robo-Galaxy ships guarding the Bajoran wormhole, instead of the one space station?"

because fiction characters are stupid. however, since these kinds of discussions ALWAYS involve ascribing competence to people far in excess of what they've been shown displaying in the source material, this shouldn't be a kind of limiting factor.

[kentma57]

Transporters can't get through shields, remember? And say what you will about Star Wars ships, we know that they have shields (well, except for TIE fighters).

That is arguable the shields in star-trek were designed with transporters in mind, there is no reason my star-wars shields would block a transported beam...

ps: if some one can disprove this I am happy to be out geeked...

[EntilZha]

In Star Wars there are two kinds of shields: Particle shields, which protect against projectile weapons and ray shields, which protect against energy weapons. Whether a Star Trek transporter could function through Star Wars ray shielding depends on how low an energy state they're designed to stop. It's conceivable, though speculative, to think that Imperial ship designers might not have taken a relatively low power energy discharge (like a transporter beam) into consideration when designing them.

[Blue Paladin]

Aha. I do have to retract my statement about ISDs. In Vision of the Future, a strike force of 3 Star Destroyers is under cloak and cut off from the rest of the world for several weeks. So they can definitely last at least that long without support ships.

Wookiepedia lists ISDs as having Consumables: 6 years. I can't begin to fathom storing enough materiel for 6 years, but whatever. The reason I find this number suspect anyway is because of the Executor-class ship. It's 10 times larger than the ISD, which means it should have 1000 times the storage space (square-cube law). Yet despite having a crew a little bit less than 10 times that of the ISD, it is also listed as having Consumables: 6 years. Relatively fewer crew members plus relatively much more storage space equals same Consumables? Makes me think that they made up yet another number, just to have something there...

(In an unrelated bit of inanity, guess how many TIEs the Executor is packing! Darth Vader's personal ship, the flagship of the Empire, has 144 TIEs! That's right! Two times as much as the standard ISD! Two!)


OK, so where, specifically, are the flaws in the argument [about turbolaser power levels]?Failing to realize that the special effects team for ESB had no interest in showing an asteroid "break apart", probably because that would be more work. It's easier to just have the asteroid there, show the explosion, and take the asteroid out of subsequent frames.

The entire calculation is based on the assumption that the asteroid is completely "vaporized" (sublimated to gas/plasma). And that assumption is based on wishful thinking that the entire asteroid disappears, as opposed to, say, being shot apart into very little pieces (which requires orders of magnitude less power). The calculations, if you accept all the assumptions, are fine; but they hinge entirely on that first assumption, which is hardly an open-and-shut case.

Here's something to consider. ISDs are shown in ship-to-ship combat with the Rebel fleet over Endor. They shoot each other, they blow up. It's fair to conclude their offensive abilities are on par with one another, would you agree? So capital ships are able to shrug off multiple hits of YA RLY turbolasers. That's some powerful defense, if you believe the hype of how powerful those turbolasers are.

In Empire Strikes Back, an ISD is taken out in one hit by an errant asteroid (#3 here (http://www.i-mockery.com/minimocks/empirestrikesback/)). Now not only does this lead me to point out how incompetent Imperial gunners are to let an asteroid that big through their field of fire, but it leads me to seriously question just how strong the defense really is on a capital ship. I also point out that the Millennium Falcon, nowhere near a cap ship class, has taken hits and not been instantly vaporized. Similarly, multiple snubfighters don't get vaporized (they are blown apart) in the Battle of Endor.

Maybe if instead of scaling my estimate of defense up, it might make more sense to scale the offense down?


On the other hand, the Rebels knew exactly how to one-shot the Death Star by exploiting a very specific fault in its design that they only knew about because they had complete blueprints for the entire thing.You're missing my point. The Rebels have 30, count them, 30 fighters. I have 2000+. 7000 if you believe Wookiepedia (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Star_I). If you are any kind of non-traitorous, at-least-one-percent-competent commander, you do not lose a battle with that kind of superiority. Those Rebels don't even get a shot at the weak spot.


This indicates that Star Wars ships can fly very fast from one place to another, which will make it very difficult for Star Trek ships to catch their fleets.I believe I wrote this in another reply, but it bears repeating. Star Wars ships follow hyperspace routes that have been established for 25,000 years. They are now in a new universe, and flying blind. They don't get to use their superior (max) speed, for fear of smashing into a planet/star/black hole/spatial anomaly (you know those are freakin' everywhere in Trek).


Even if their individual ships were vastly weaker than Star Trek ships (which, given their size and even the most conservative estimates of their firepower, I find hard to believe), they could still win based on that advantage of mobility combined with the fact that they have something like a thousand times more planets to draw resources from.I, for one, believe the Star Wars ships to be much more powerful than Star Trek ones. As for the resources, the problem lies in the fact that Star Wars is the aggressor; this is Star Trek's home field.

Here's how I picture this fight: Imperial fleets arrive and decimate DS9; the Alpha Quadrant's best weapons can't dent anything with SW-shields. However, there are survivors (there are always survivors). During the battle, some Starfleet smart-aleck notices the TIE fighters have no shielding. Beaming the TIE pilots into the brig, they beam the pilotless ship into a cargo bay, and warp back to a safe haven. Without any star maps, the Imperials can't pursue. They release hundreds of probe droids to map the immediate area.

As the Imperials are spreading out through the system, Starfleet now has laser tech from the captured fighters. Replicating a couple hundred or thousand, they head out with their new weapons and take out some of the smaller Imperial ships' shields (I'd personally go for a TIE Interceptor). Since Starfleet defense hasn't been improved at all, it's still one-hit one-kill, but all that matters is taking down the shields on any one Imperial ship. Once the ship's shields are down, transport them away (with an "expert" transporter chief, this can be done from the safety of warp). Now Starfleet has upgraded shield tech too.

At this point, it continues to be a brutal slugfest, with Starfleet paying hideous amounts of lives and materiel to capture ever-better ships and shields and turbolaser tech to achieve offensive & defensive parity. But once that point is reached (or even gets to the point of "close enough"), the Imperials are beaten. Even if Palpatine were willing to throw good fleets after bad, it would weaken his position at home, and stir more Rebellion in his galaxy.

(If it were allowed, I'd hand over YA RLY weapons to the Klingons, and let them destroy the Imperials with impunity from cloak. Imperial officers highly placed enough to know about cloaking shields cry at how unfair this universe is, that allows single-blind cloaking technology. But this is supposed to be Federation only, not allies too.)

It's a tremendous cost in Federation casualties, losing more than one world for sure, and invoking multiple speeches about "the price of victory" and "who's the real loser here?" but they win in the end.

The opposite is true if Federation intrudes on Imperial space. They never get a chance to steal tech and implement it (they'd have a chance to get YA RLY tech if they had cloaks in the first place... stupid Treaty of Algeron). As soon as Starfleet appears in the Imperial Galaxy, they're vaped. Thankfully (or regrettably), the Empire never gets to steal Fed tech, because it's destroyed so thoroughly.


That is arguable the shields in star-trek were designed with transporters in mind, there is no reason my star-wars shields would block a transported beam...This is exactly another O RLY/YA RLY point of contention that was in the original TrekWars debate. No good conclusion was ever reached :smalltongue:

[EntilZha]

Aha. I do have to retract my statement about ISDs. In Vision of the Future, a strike force of 3 Star Destroyers is under cloak and cut off from the rest of the world for several weeks. So they can definitely last at least that long without support ships.

more responses to be found in an edit later

It seems to me a Star Destroyer could endure for a few years without support ships. Even if the Feds did manage to collapse the wormhole, as I and others supposed they might do, they'd still have to contend with several very large, heavily armed warships that could go on fighting for quite a long time if the Imperials played their cards right.

[TheThan]

Now lets assume for the sake of argument that the technology for both the empire and federation are about equal.

The federation has a few advantages:

1. Sensor systems/early warning systems.

Because they focus on building exploration ships and the like, they have developed much more sophisticated sensor arrays than the empire (from orbit the Enterprise D can detect the faintest sign of life on a planet). This gives them an advantage in being able to detect incoming ships and prepare for attacks. Basically they can see further and more accurately than the empire can. But they are still vulnerable to being blinded.

2. agility

Federation ships tend to have significantly more agility than the larger bulkier Imperial ships. Their capitol ships would be able to easily out maneuver and out flank the larger Imperial ships.

3. allies

The Federation has allies that grant them far more combat power than they would have alone. Take for instance just the Klingon Empire. Being a warrior culture, the klingons represent elite troops (as opposed to the red shirt mooks of the federation). They also have the use of cloaking devices, which give them the ability to hit and run without being detected. Plus they could easily combine their fleets with the federation’s giving them much needed punch.

4. Home Turf advantage

The federation lives and breathes in the Alpha quadrant. If this fight were to take place in it (as the OP suggests) then they have the advantage of knowing where to hid their fleets, what planets are significant to the war effort etc. The empire would have this same advantage if the federation invaded the empire (unlikely at best).

5. transporters

The transporter allows federation personnel to move from ship to ship or from ship to ground very quickly and easily. This means they can land troops without having to risk landing craft getting destroyed or setting up a beachhead for their landing craft. However the standard transporter can’t seem to transport more than 8 or so people at once. Also they can potentially do out of the box attacks like beaming a bomb onto a bridge (done in voyager), or beaming away essential parts of the enemy ship (like mentioned above), but this assumes the transporter can breach the enemy’s shields, which isn’t usually the case.

Now lets look at the empire’s advantage

1. size

The empire can field ships of enormous size. Take a look at the Scimitar from the latest star trek film. It’s roughly the size and possess roughly the same amount of combat power as a single ISD. The Enterprise E with two Romulan war birds supporting it couldn’t even scratch the paint. It took a ram order (see some posts above) to significantly damage the thing (IIRC, the enterprise exhausted its supply of quantum torpedoes on it). That was a single ship. Now imagine a fleet of hundreds of ships like this.

2. numbers

Sort of a spin off of number one, the empire has a huge number of troops available, meaning that it has the resources to easily conquer and occupy a planet. An ISD carries 9700 troops, plus all the hardware they need to occupy a planet. Not to mention all the ships needed to land all that hardware and troops. With so many troops at their disposal the empire can afford a battle of attrition. The Federation cannot.

3. Fire Power

War ships in the star war universe carry a huge amount of firepower. Its unlikely the smaller ships of the federation would be able to absorb all the shots an imperial capitol ship could dish out. The enterprise seems to only have two primary phaser banks, one dorsal and one ventral mounted (more if you split the ship in two). These can split fire and sustain a prolonged burst. But a single ISD can fire all 60 of its turbolasers at once (and in different directions). Star destroyers also have Ion cannons, which can disable a ship’s systems, ISDs have 60 of these. Plus there are auxiliary craft such as fighters and bombers. Tie bombers are designed to attack capitol ships, so it stands to reason that a flight of bombers can do significant damage to a federation ship. Even if turbolasers and phasers are equal in power, the empire still outguns them.

4. Armor
The defensive capabilities of the empires’ ships are quite heavy. Remember these are war ships that are designed to sit there and take punishment. Its unlikely a single federation capitol ship can penetrate the shields (once again look at the Scimitar), of a big imperial war ship (smaller ones would be more vulnerable, obviously). It would take a few more ships to take one down, and even then they are likely to suffer causalities. Remember the Scimitar disabled two of the three ships it was fighting, and it was probably pulling its punches in that regard (as in not destroying them outright once they were out of the fight), what’shisface wanted to capture Picard for a blood transfusion, not just kill him.


Now lets look at tactics.

The Empire wants to draw the Federation out into the open and fight them in a big fleet engagement. That way they can use their superior numbers and their larger, more powerful ships to their best advantage and crush ‘em. If the Federation falls for it (the klingons would, you know warrior pride and all that), then they’re done for.
However if they manage to draw the empire into a running war, then the empire slowly looses, due to maintenance shortfalls, hit and fade tactics (being employed by the more knowledgeable star fleet). That’s the exact tactic the rebellion used. They couldn’t confront the empire’s war machine directly (suicide) so they attacked it indirectly by cutting off their supply lines and hitting poorly defended outposts and ships (not to mention they stole a lot of the goods the empire transported). For a long time it was a thorn in the Empire’s side, until the loss at Endor, which changed everything.

The empire could also pull off a “planet hopping” campaign, much like the pacific campaign in WWII, the empire would attack and capture strategically important planets as they work their way inwards to earth (the home of the federation). The empire should have sufficient forces to control these planets (particularly if they get reinforced via the wormhole) and protect them from attacks. The problem is that the Empire needs detailed maps of the area in order to even consider using this tactic, which they initially don’t have.



Wow I just about exhausted my thoughts on this, if anyone can come up with more tactics for the federation, that would work great.

[Eita]

Federation fleet resources are limited only by manpower. Replicators give them an effectively infinite industrial capacity. Therefore, if the Federation stopped being stupid long enough to staff ships with programmed holographic crews instead of spending time training meat crewers, they would be able to swarm the empire with little effort.

chew on that for a bit, mmkay?

Wrong. Replicators need Replicator mass, IE: crap.

[Seraph]

Wrong. Replicators need Replicator mass, IE: crap.

I already said that mass is no object. there are more than enough dead planets around that can be used for replicator fuel; you're just grasping at straws.

[Eita]

And so are you. The Replicator mass needs to be organic in nature. Therefore, dead planets are no-go. And before you say anything, harvesting random animals/plants is both out of the way for ships needing to go to war and somewhat counter to Federation ideology.

Dammit. Forgot that you had programmed holograms.

Still though, energy constraints and the Mad Scientist Effect.

[GoC]

One word Transpoter...

"Sir we have a problem...
What?
Our power core is gone...
What!"

You know I never thought of that...
Transporters are an instant win. They can instantly destroy, disable or capture any ship and if they can borrow some of those long range transporters they could start their own invasion.
The empire unfortunately doesn't have transporters...

Note: I've never figured out why the fed never used an auto-targeting version of that transporter gun, the one in DS9 that teleported speeding bullets right in front of unsuspecting victims through many walls? That pretty much exterminates any boarding party, renders soldier irrelevant and if you manage to smuggle one of those on board a spaceship...
Modern guns can fire over 20 bullets per second, I'm sure the fed can do better.


Actually, what I inference was that ramming is so effective because if you ram someone and you both have shields, the shields cancel each other out (or something like that). Therefore ramming just goes right through shields, into the much, much weaker hulls of star trek starships. Also, at maneuvering speeds Star Wars ships don't seem very fast or agile at all.
Compare the Star Wars fighters to the completely static battles of the federation (disregarding the picard maneuver for now).

factotum: Someone once produced written proof that you could use transporters and replicators to replicate anything. There was a link somewhere on these boards...

Also: Emergency middle programs mark II=you just destroyed the Star Trek universe! They can now grow at an exponential rate as they let holograms build starships, more holograms and collect fuel. Strong AI wrecks any sci-fi universe. I've no idea what the writers were thinking when they included it.

Dervag: They have very different types of shields. The Star Trek ones are designed to counteract transporter technology and even then they can be bypassed (the Enterprise D could bypass the shields of some of the less advanced races IIRC). Star Wars has no such transporter technology and wouldn't have worked up a counter.

btw: Does anyone know what industrial replicators do? They work making advanced metals and stuff right?

Blue Paladin: I <3 your posts!:smallcool:
Looks like the fed isn't the only one vulnerable to ramming. This is what happens when the fans know more physics than the writers.

btw: Judging by fluff phasers>lasers. One hits with a beam of light or plasma, the other tears atoms apart... Then there's those gravitic weapons ST has.

SW has only a couple of different types of weapons/shields/starships/misc tech. The fed has one for each episode ever produced. Did you know that cononicly they have the technology to build thousands of permanently cloaked, transwarp capable, planet destroying ships in the space of a few months?
Stupid writers and their plotholes.

[Talkkno]

Dervag: They have very different types of shields. The Star Trek ones are designed to counteract transporter technology and even then they can be bypassed (the Enterprise D could bypass the shields of some of the less advanced races IIRC). Star Wars has no such transporter technology and wouldn't have worked up a counter.

.

We see some funky rocks could interefre with transporters and it requires very decent scanning for transport and Imperial warships carry sensor jammers as a matter of course. And even weak magnetic fields (as seen on the prison asteroid in ST6) can easily prevent transportation.

[Seraph]

We see some funky rocks could interefre with transporters and it requires very decent scanning for transport and Imperial warships carry sensor jammers as a matter of course. And even weak magnetic fields (as seen on the prison asteroid in ST6) can easily prevent transportation.I don't see where you get the idea that the magnetic shield was weak. I mean, transporters can go through the magnetic field of a planet.

[EntilZha]

I don't see where you get the idea that the magnetic shield was weak. I mean, transporters can go through the magnetic field of a planet.

The thing is, the magnetic field of the Earth measures only 0.5 gauss, and it's probably a safe bet that most similar planets will have a similar value. Magnetic shields used to defeat transporter beams probably measure at least several hundred thousand gauss (a crane mounted electromagnet, by way of comparison, rates 10,000 gauss).

Transporter systems have to be regularly de-gaussed to prevent magnetic intereference.

[Executor]

Ahh, you're all forgetting the Federation's one key weakness: Pacifism. They are achingly, amazingly, atrociously pacifistic and diplomatic. Collateral damage effects them far more than it does the Empire. All the Empire has to do is capture and board some Federation ship or station, entirely possible, given the fact that their wormhole spits them out near DS9. After they've got the station under control, go through the Federation's charts and star maps to get the coordinates for some moderate planet, a modest colony of one or two billion people. Pop in with a couple Star Destroyers and Base Delta Zero (read: Reduce to molten slag) the whole planet. That's a canon capability of the Imperial Star Destroyers, one or two can BDZ a planet. Once the news hits the Federation media, their government will be in deep **** with the people. All the Empire then has to do is threaten to continue slagging planets until their demands are met. The Federation government will appease faster than Neville Chamberlain.

[Seraph]

Pop in with a couple Star Destroyers and Base Delta Zero (read: Reduce to molten slag)

god dammit, no. this is not what BDZ has EVER meant in any canon source.

http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWbd0.html

[Nerd-o-rama]

The Federation government will surrender faster than a French army.
This the Napoleonic French, Franco-Prussian War French, or World War I French?

Sorry, I make fun of the French too but if you're trying to seriously argue, don't showcase the fact that you don't know military history.

And when was the last time the Federation surrendered in the face of overwhelming threat? Against mad scientists who can obliterate star systems? How about the Borg, who can wipe out the habitable parts of a planet almost as fast as the Empire? The Dominion? No. The Federation doesn't surrender. It sends in the Enterprise.

Executor, I believe the Empire would come out on top too, barring a miracle, just due to superior firepower (even disregarding stardestroyer.net, the Empire's a lot better armed). But your actual arguments just aren't terribly convincing.

[Executor]

Sorry, i'm Canadian, we like to poke fun at the French sometimes. Not as much as our Southern cousins, but we have our fun. In any case, I'd be referring to WWII French. Not the freedom fighters, they kicked ass, the actual army itself which didn't do much. There, I changed it to a Chamberlain reference, is that better?

Seraph: ST vs SW.com is just a Star Trek version of stardestroyer.net, and just as biased. If you want the canon, the true depiction of what Base Delta Zero is, check Wookieepedia (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Base_Delta_Zero). That's canon, that's the hard and fast truth. And that truth is that the Empire possesses the overwhelming firepower neccesary to reduce the entire crust of a planet to molten glass. Or, in the case of the unfortunate top soil, atoms.

Nerd-o-rama: That is what the Federation has done in the past. However, in the past the Enterprise wasn't entirely outclassed in superluminal speed, armour protection and raw firepower.

[Seraph]

Sorry, i'm Canadian, we like to poke fun at the French sometimes. Not as much as our Southern cousins, but we have our fun. In any case, I'd be referring to WWII French. Not the freedom fighters, they kicked ass, the actual army itself which didn't do much. There, I changed it to a Chamberlain reference, is that better?

Seraph: ST vs SW.com is just a Star Trek version of stardestroyer.net, and just as biased. If you want the canon, the true depiction of what Base Delta Zero is, check Wookieepedia (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Base_Delta_Zero). That's canon, that's the hard and fast truth. And that truth is that the Empire possesses the overwhelming firepower neccesary to reduce the entire crust of a planet to molten glass. Or, in the case of the unfortunate top soil, atoms.

Nerd-o-rama: That is what the Federation has done in the past. However, in the past the Enterprise wasn't entirely outclassed in superluminal speed, armour protection and raw firepower.



The source I showed you was full of solid, canon quotes. you are fighting back with a Wiki. don't you feel ashamed of yourself? I mean, the place is run by power-optimizers and for all I know you went int and edited that in yourself.

[Executor]

I'm sure everyone agrees with me that sites run by a fanboy with the express purpose of making their side look victorious are far more biased than any dedicated wiki. Besides, said Wiki provides canon sources which clearly reference a BDZ as referring to the total destruction of a planet's crust. We all agree that stardestroyer.net is biased towards Star Wars, ST v SW.com is just as biased towards Star Trek. That fellow, whoever runs that site, clearly has no understanding of Star Wars scaling. See, this is the thing I can never understand about Trekkies. When push comes to shove, the unavoidable fact is that Trekkies hate Roddenberry's carefully estimated figures for his galaxy, and they chafe at the restrictions imposed on the world Gene Roddenberry created. Where Roddenberry envisioned a growing Federation of a few dozen planets which eventually grew to more than a hundred, delirious Trek fanatics imagine thousands of worlds, ready for war. Where Roddenberry thought of small fleets of intrepid explorers, fanatics imagine monstrous battle fleets of thousands or even tens of thousands of nigh-invincible warships. Where Roddenberry thought a continous energy beam of scientifically plausible strength, Trekkies imagine ferocious streams of pure energy which rip through ships with rapier accuracy. Conversely, Trekkies chafe at the vast scope of Star Wars, which they simply refuse to accept no matter what George Lucas envisioned. When George Lucas envisioned a galactic empire whose industrial strength was so vast that it could casually construct artificial moons, Trekkies imagine a small organization in one corner of its galaxy which is hard-pressed to make a single Executor-class vessel (even though DS2 is millions of times larger). George Lucas envisioned an ancient galactic civilization whose mastery of nature was so complete that they don't explore their galaxy any more; they commute. But Trekkie fanatics see a primitive and backward society whose technology is marginally ahead of 20th century Earth. I don't know why they can't accept Lucas' vision of his own universe, and why they must rewrite Roddenberry's universe to be stronger than it is. In any case, i've gotten off-topic.

[Seraph]

I'm sure everyone agrees with me that sites run by a fanboy with the express purpose of making their side look victorious are far more biased than any dedicated wiki. Besides, said Wiki provides canon sources which clearly reference a BDZ as referring to the total destruction of a planet's crust.

no it does not. whatever whining you may have about STvsSW.net, the fact remains that Wookiepedia's "canon sources" consist of a name and a number, not even a page number, whereas STvsSW gives direct quotes. in a conflict of canon, the one actually backing itself up always wins - and Wookiepedia's got nothin'.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Nerd-o-rama: That is what the Federation has done in the past. However, in the past the Enterprise wasn't entirely outclassed in superluminal speed, armour protection and raw firepower.
Uh, I'm no Trekkie, but...Borg cubes?

[Executor]

Knights of the Old Republic shows an ancient Base Delta Zero-esque operation. Several Sith ships (each about 600m long) reduce the entire urbanized planet of Taris to ashes. If those ancient, inferior designs can carry out a BDZ, which DOES destroy the entire planet's crust mind you, then modern mile-long Star Destroyers can do the same. Carth made it clear "No building over two stories tall left standing" And we're talking about a planet in which the entire surface is one big city, like Coruscant. The Essential Chronology and both of the Incredible Cross-Section books also reference a BDZ as a planet-slagging operation. The canon evidence speaks for itself.

[Seraph]

Knights of the Old Republic shows an ancient Base Delta Zero-esque operation. Several Sith ships (each about 600m long) reduce the entire urbanized planet of Taris to ashes. If those ancient, inferior designs can carry out a BDZ, which DOES destroy the entire planet's crust mind you, then modern mile-long Star Destroyers can do the same. Carth made it clear "No building over two stories tall left standing" And we're talking about a planet in which the entire surface is one big city, like Coruscant. The Essential Chronology and both of the Incredible Cross-Section books also reference a BDZ as a planet-slagging operation. The canon evidence speaks for itself.

oh, for ****'s sake. they outright say that people survived on taris in the undercity. you are WRONG, BDZ does not mean what you want it to mean, no single piece of canon supports you, and no amount of denial will make reality change itself around.

[nothingclever]

I think the Federation should win simply because they should be able to call their bazillion alliance members to help them since they are basically just as much a part of the federation as the humans, they just weren't forced to share one banner like the Empire does to the people it conquers.

[Talkkno]

I think the Federation should win simply because they should be able to call their bazillion alliance members to help them since they are basically just as much a part of the federation as the humans, they just weren't forced to share one banner like the Empire does to the people it conquers.

150 planets vs a minimum of over 1 million systems, hmm...

[factotum]

edit: factotum replied while I was writing this. Replicators convert energy to mass. Simple as that. As long as you have the energy (which Voyager was specifically trying to conserve in all three seasons it ever came up), you have the matter.

I love the way you say "simple as that". Several flaws in your argument:

a) You would require a colossal amount of energy to produce even a small amount of matter. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you could extract every single erg of energy from the sunlight falling across the entire surface of the Earth. That's a lot of energy, and we'll ignore the fact you'd destroy the planet if you did this, because it would rapidly cool to fatally cold levels. Anyway, even with all that energy at your disposal, it would take about 3 seconds to produce one tonne of material. Sounds a lot, but how are you going to get anything like that level of energy?

b) If Star Trek has the ability to convert matter into energy and vice versa, why do they use anti-matter in their warp cores? Just converting normal matter directly into energy would produce the same amount of power without requiring all that finicky containment, which, considering the number of times Federation ships seem to suffer warp core breaches, would only be a good thing!

c) Linked to the above point...if matter/antimatter reaction IS the most powerful source of energy generation Star Trek has, it takes us back to our original problem; namely, you'd have to annihilate 1kg of matter and antimatter to produce enough energy to create 1kg of matter. Therefore the ship has to carry around lots and lots of fuel just to run its replicators...

Fact is, replicators MUST use some sort of "feed stock" which it can convert into the foodstuffs people eat and the materials used for repairs. In addition, replicators are clearly not capable of converting one form of matter into another, because why would Voyager end up with shortages of particular materials if that was the case? Replicators are not magic technology and do not give the Federation the win in this, sorry.

[Ubiq]

Without those hyperspace routes, Imperials are stuck at sub-light speeds.


The Millenium Falcon's hyperdrive is inactive during The Empire Strikes Back, but they are still capable of making an interstellar journey in a relatively short time. Ergo, Star Wars vessels, even outdated hunks of junks like the Falcon have another method of moving faster than light. The EU would rationalize this by saying that they have a backup, but the dialogue seems pretty clear that the Falcon doesn't have the ability to enter hyperspace.

Even then, probe droids can easily map out new routes, which are largely a creation of the EU (if I recall correctly, as an explanation for the ridiculous Unknown Regions concept that should have died a horrible death after the map of the entire galaxy and its subsidiary that appeared in Attack of the Clones) and don't have any supporting basis in the films themselves.


You know I never thought of that...
Transporters are an instant win. They can instantly destroy, disable or capture any ship and if they can borrow some of those long range transporters they could start their own invasion.


Transporters are very vulnerable to blocking because of various metals (among them, neutronium, which plenty of sources say is used in the construction of Star Destroyer hulls), energy fields, and God only knows what all else.

Somebody suggested beaming out the power core; good luck with that seeing as how a ISD reactor is easily as large as some Federation ships.


They have very different types of shields. The Star Trek ones are designed to counteract transporter technology and even then they can be bypassed (the Enterprise D could bypass the shields of some of the less advanced races IIRC). Star Wars has no such transporter technology and wouldn't have worked up a counter.

Considering the sheer variety of things that block transporter technology, I don't see any reason for them to create something that does specifically that.

Even if it did work, the Empire would eventually figure out something was up and would just start blowing up Federation ships before they got anywhere near transporter range.

[Dervag]

oh, for ****'s sake. they outright say that people survived on taris in the undercity. you are WRONG, BDZ does not mean what you want it to mean, no single piece of canon supports you, and no amount of denial will make reality change itself around.On the other hand, they also outright say that all the gigantic, kilometer-high skyscrapers got blasted to pieces. The fact that people survived in underground warrens doesn't mean that it didn't take one hell of a bombardment to do the job.

Imagine a planet covered with cities like Manhattan. If you wanted to wreck all the skyscrapers, you'd have to drop a lot of nukes. If you didn't have weapons roughly as powerful as a nuke you wouldn't even be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time. And the Sith "bomb" Taris fast enough that most of the damage is done in a matter of hours or days. That's the equivalent of saturation nuclear bombardment, such that the only survivors are a few people living in the foundations of the giant skyscrapers and in the tunnels underneath the ground. And even they are mostly killed; it's only a handful who survive.

So cool your jets.


Seraph: ST vs SW.com is just a Star Trek version of stardestroyer.net, and just as biased. If you want the canon, the true depiction of what Base Delta Zero is, check Wookieepedia (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Base_Delta_Zero). That's canon, that's the hard and fast truth. And that truth is that the Empire possesses the overwhelming firepower neccesary to reduce the entire crust of a planet to molten glass. Or, in the case of the unfortunate top soil, atoms. In the novels that mention Base Delta Zero, it was once stated that it would be cheaper to find a new planet and terraform it to the specifications of a BDZ'ed planet than to rebuild civilization on the BDZ'ed planet. This suggests a well and truly scorched Earth; when something's been blown up to the point where it's cheaper to build a new one it's pretty well wrecked.


I don't see where you get the idea that the magnetic shield was weak. I mean, transporters can go through the magnetic field of a planet.The magnetic field isn't lethal, and unless I'm mistaken, guys wearing metal objects can walk around in it without having them ripped away. That puts an upper bound on the field strength. Planetary fields are, as others have pointed out, actually quite weak (most of the planet is nonmagnetic; only a tiny fraction of it is generating that field).


You know I never thought of that...
Transporters are an instant win. They can instantly destroy, disable or capture any ship and if they can borrow some of those long range transporters they could start their own invasion.
The empire unfortunately doesn't have transporters...Except that they can't penetrate shields, and can't be used effectively against a ship that is jamming sensors enough to make it hard to be sure where the stuff you're beaming into the enemy ship will arrive.

Federation troops will be in deep trouble in a firefight with stormtroopers; stormtroopers are pretty good at boarding actions (see the beginning of a New Hope). So they'd have to rely on their ship's ability to beam individual enemies into space and stuff like that- which requires very fine transporter control that cannot be achieved through ECM or shields.


Note: I've never figured out why the fed never used an auto-targeting version of that transporter gun, the one in DS9 that teleported speeding bullets right in front of unsuspecting victims through many walls?Possibly because they can't build a teleporter capable of teleporting more than one bullet per few seconds? Rate of fire is not a common requirement of Starfleet transporter design.


Dervag: They have very different types of shields. The Star Trek ones are designed to counteract transporter technology and even then they can be bypassed (the Enterprise D could bypass the shields of some of the less advanced races IIRC). Star Wars has no such transporter technology and wouldn't have worked up a counter.Yeah, but if their shields are stiff enough and advanced enough (i.e. at least as strong as Trek shields), there's a good chance they'll be able to block transporters even without knowing about them. Remember all the stuff that blocks transporters by blind chance.

Star Wars shields aren't less advanced than Trek shields, or at least there doesn't seem much reason to assume that they are. If they work on the same basic principles as Trek shields, they must be an equally advanced or more advanced application of those principles.


btw: Judging by fluff phasers>lasers. One hits with a beam of light or plasma, the other tears atoms apart... Then there's those gravitic weapons ST has.Depends on the size of the phaser. Obviously, a hand phaser is not as powerful as an ISD's turbolasers. For that matter, when we compare the hand phaser to Han Solo's blaster, we notice that Han Solo's blaster can blow big holes in things like metal that phasers merely scorch, and that it seems to have comparable effect on rock. Of course, it can't vanish a human body into thin air, but it can assuredly kill him, which is probably good enough.


SW has only a couple of different types of weapons/shields/starships/misc tech. The fed has one for each episode ever produced. Did you know that cononicly they have the technology to build thousands of permanently cloaked, transwarp capable, planet destroying ships in the space of a few months?The fact that they haven't done so indicates that there's something preventing them from doing it. For example, much of that super-duper tech was discovered in the form of one-off prototypes. And, again, they may lack the capability to replicate something as large as prefab starship components. It's not hard to explain why the Federation is limited to the capabilities we've seen them use.


I already said that mass is no object. there are more than enough dead planets around that can be used for replicator fuel; you're just grasping at straws.You still have to mine the dead planets, though. Remember, to replicate a piece of steel you need iron; if you didn't, ships would be able to replicate food from hydrogen instead of needing replicator paste, and would never lack for any rare elements or materials like dilithium crystals.

So even if replicators can replicate starships (which we haven't ever seen them do, and have seen the Federation do things that would make no sense if they could do that), the replicator can completely eliminate all the stages of construction involving smelting the ore into metal, shaping the metal, and so on. But it can't eliminate the step of mining the raw materials to make the ship out of. In which case making thousands of starships will require you to mine millions of tons of iron ore and such, and many tons of ores that are both rare and valuable- rare enough that you can't simply handwave your way past the need.


That is arguable the shields in star-trek were designed with transporters in mind, there is no reason my star-wars shields would block a transported beam...

ps: if some one can disprove this I am happy to be out geeked...Were Star Trek shields designed explicitly to block transporters?

Remember, lots of things disrupt the functioning of transporters or jam sensors well enough to make accurate transporter use impossible. We've seen many episodes of Star Trek series where transporters could not be used due to ambient magnetic fields, natural mineral formations, ultra-dense metal bulkheads, et cetera.

So it's not at all hard to imagine that a nigh-impermeable energy field sturdy enough to withstand point blank nuclear strikes, as Trek and Star Wars shields are, would simply make it impossible to use a transporter regardless of whether or not the shield was specifically intended to disrupt teleportation.


Wookiepedia lists ISDs as having Consumables: 6 years. I can't begin to fathom storing enough materiel for 6 years, but whatever. The reason I find this number suspect anyway is because of the Executor-class ship. It's 10 times larger than the ISD, which means it should have 1000 times the storage space (square-cube law). Yet despite having a crew a little bit less than 10 times that of the ISD, it is also listed as having Consumables: 6 years. Relatively fewer crew members plus relatively much more storage space equals same Consumables? Makes me think that they made up yet another number, just to have something there...Well, Star Wars is by no means unique in the sin of making up numbers like that. Every science fiction setting that lasts long enough to grow a tech manual will end up doing this. Star Trek does it too.

However, there's a natural explanation- the Star Destroyer is recycling consumables. Water is the main thing that needs to be recycled, and it's trivially easy to do so. Basically you need to hook up a distillation unit to the ship's plumbing system. And try not to think about where your drinking water's been.

Assuming highly efficient recycling of the ship's water supply (it need not be perfect; there's room for millions of gallons of water storage on an ISD if they decide they need it), then you provide dried rations or a much more complicated system for recycling... organic waste and converting it into something edible.

Now, is there room aboard for six years of canned dessicated food? We can actually get a guess at this based on how much space it would take to stock enough MREs (modern American military rations) for the crew of an ISD for six years. MREs aren't dried, so they take up more space, but it would give us a helpful order of magnitude estimate.


(In an unrelated bit of inanity, guess how many TIEs the Executor is packing! Darth Vader's personal ship, the flagship of the Empire, has 144 TIEs! That's right! Two times as much as the standard ISD! Two!)Well, the point of having a TIE wing on a star destroyer is mostly power projection- the TIEs can fly away from the ship and attack targets without forcing the SD to chase after them. If 72 TIEs is normally enough for this purpose on a ship suitable for independent command (such as an SD), then there's no compelling reason to provide several times more fighters for a ship designed to serve as the flagship of a fleet. Sure, the Executor has way more space, but that space can surely be used efficiently for bigger guns, thicker armor, stronger shields, or storage for things like ground combat equipment (AT-ATs and such). Adding more TIEs would allow it to do the duty of a squadron or task force of SDs in the 'spacecraft carrier' role, but is there really a need for that? If you need 500 TIE fighters to control the system, you probably need more than one capital ship to control it too, be that capital ship ever so powerful.


Failing to realize that the special effects team for ESB had no interest in showing an asteroid "break apart", probably because that would be more work. It's easier to just have the asteroid there, show the explosion, and take the asteroid out of subsequent frames.OK, but if we reason from "the special effects team cheated," then we end up having to examine everything in terms of "the writers needed it to be that way" or "that's just special effects."

Do phasers vaporize people? There are compelling reasons of physics to assume they couldn't; vaporizing people would cause steam explosions and stuff and scatter gore all over the place. So, like the disintegration of the asteroid in Episode V, we have to assume that that's just the special effects team showing off.

Or we can ask if the power of many Star Trek superweapons was exaggerated by the writers to make the stories involving them more compelling. Or.. well, there's really no limit.

The problem is that if we want to make an argument centering on measurable numbers and provable arguments (this phaser cannon has power X, this turbolaser has power Y), we have to take the stuff we see on screen at face value except where it contradicts itself. Otherwise, everything degenerates into bickering about how much the special effects designers exaggerated what was really going on.


The entire calculation is based on the assumption that the asteroid is completely "vaporized" (sublimated to gas/plasma). And that assumption is based on wishful thinking that the entire asteroid disappears, as opposed to, say, being shot apart into very little pieces (which requires orders of magnitude less power).How many orders of magnitude? How much less power would it take to reduce the asteroid to gravel?

Because we can reasonably argue that that is the more appropriate, conservative estimate for the firepower of an ISD's main battery guns. Fine. I'm cool with that. Although since it's a canonical fact that ISDs are effective planetary bombardment weapons, we should probably consider that too.


Here's something to consider. ISDs are shown in ship-to-ship combat with the Rebel fleet over Endor. They shoot each other, they blow up. It's fair to conclude their offensive abilities are on par with one another, would you agree? So capital ships are able to shrug off multiple hits of YA RLY turbolasers. That's some powerful defense, if you believe the hype of how powerful those turbolasers are.If it can be proven that they really are that powerful against an unshielded target such as a rock, then it isn't hype.

By the same argument, any material capable of resisting a hand phaser must be quite sturdy, because hand phasers are quite capable of vanishing a human being with nary a trace. Of course, they barely make a dent in metal, and indeed often damage metal less than a slugthrower or Star Wars blaster that is far less effective against flesh; hand phasers are extremely antipersonnel weapons. But the point remains valid. If a weapon is demonstrated to be exceedingly powerful by its effect on targets of known toughness, then it isn't hype to apply the results of the demonstration.


In Empire Strikes Back, an ISD is taken out in one hit by an errant asteroid (#3 here (http://www.i-mockery.com/minimocks/empirestrikesback/)).Was that the first asteroid hit? We see the ship get hit with an asteroid and get wrecked, but the ships were in that asteroid field for a long time. I mean, we also see asteroids hitting the SDs without destroying them.


Now not only does this lead me to point out how incompetent Imperial gunners are to let an asteroid that big through their field of fire,Marginally less incompetent than the gunners on board the USS Defiant were to repeatedly miss the USS Lakota, a target much larger than that rock and moving at about the same relative speeds. Which is certainly quite incompetent, in both cases.


but it leads me to seriously question just how strong the defense really is on a capital ship. I also point out that the Millennium Falcon, nowhere near a cap ship class, has taken hits and not been instantly vaporized. Similarly, multiple snubfighters don't get vaporized (they are blown apart) in the Battle of Endor.All the targets in question are shielded before they get blasted, so all this tells us is that the shields on the Falcon are capable of withstanding at least a few shots from an SD (however powerful they are), and that a starfighter's shield is not. It may well be that the fighter's shield absorbs the brunt of the SD's attack, and that the fighter is instead destroyed by a feedback reaction in the shield generator- we know that Star Wars ships can get shaken or rattled by hits that do not penetrate their shielding. Maybe a big enough hit causes the shield generator to blow up, much as a Star Trek ship is usually destroyed by the explosion of its own warp core rather than by actual enemy fire.


Maybe if instead of scaling my estimate of defense up, it might make more sense to scale the offense down?I see the logic. If you can give me some calculations based on your estimate of the defense strength (your own version of the stuff on stardestroyer.net), I'll be happy to believe it if I think your arguments are reasonable.


You're missing my point. The Rebels have 30, count them, 30 fighters. I have 2000+. 7000 if you believe Wookiepedia (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Star_I). If you are any kind of non-traitorous, at-least-one-percent-competent commander, you do not lose a battle with that kind of superiority. Those Rebels don't even get a shot at the weak spot.What the rebels did was something very weird and would have been totally ineffective if they hadn't known exactly where to plant that torpedo. They charged in as fast as they could with their shields raised to maximum power in front. Now, if you're the commander of the Death Star and you don't expect a proton torpedo up your exhaust port (which you wouldn't), you'd think "Wow. That was... interesting." Because those fighters don't pack enough fire power to do more than harass or annoy your ship. Their torpedoes and guns wouldn't stand a chance of hurting the Death Star by firing on its surface. Capital ships could do that kind of damage, but capital ships could never have gotten that close.

So it would come as no surprise that you might react much as a tank commander attacked by infantry with only small arms would react- by using a level of force that appears sufficient, but not necessarily all the available force. A tank commander attacked with small arms would be entirely reasonable to return fire with only his coaxial machine gun, rather than using main cannon rounds or calling for air support or any of the other options at his disposal.

So the commander, thinking "There are 30 fighters buzzing around my hull, but they can't do enough damage to be a real problem," scrambles a few fighter wings to cope, and moves on. Remember, he's about to fire the war-winning shot in like ten minutes. He's concentrating, and that stupid suicide run by a handful of snubfighters isn't going to break his concentration.

So far, this isn't unreasonable. And, in fact, if the rebels hadn't known about that exhaust port or hadn't had a Force-sensitive pilot handy, it would have been more than enough. The TIEs managed to destroy almost all the Rebel fighters, and would surely have finished off the last of them in a few more minutes. If the Rebels had been forced to resort to pecking away at the surface of the Death Star with turbolasers and torpedoes, they'd all have been killed without doing significant damage.

Then, of course, some unnervingly clever junior assistant tactical officer taps you on the shoulder and says "Sir, I've analysed their attack pattern, and there is a danger." But by that point you're five minutes from victory and it's too late to change your mind anyway... boom. For that matter, the fact that the Imperial officer had to analyze the rebel attack pattern to notice the danger indicates that the Imperials themselves didn't realize that the exhaust port was a vulnerability. Probably because the fact that one two-meter funnel was designed without torpedo baffles is such a small detail that it would totally escape the notice of the officer commanding a hundred-kilometer mauler of a warship.

So I would argue that Tarkin did not react incompetently. He underreacted, but that could only be known in hindsight, given our knowledge of just how vulnerable the Death Star was to Luke Skywalker's torpedoes if he could get into position to fire them.


I believe I wrote this in another reply, but it bears repeating. Star Wars ships follow hyperspace routes that have been established for 25,000 years. They are now in a new universe, and flying blind. They don't get to use their superior (max) speed, for fear of smashing into a planet/star/black hole/spatial anomaly (you know those are freakin' everywhere in Trek).Your reply ninjaed mine.

This is a very important point and one that stardestroyer.net totally overlooks. Star Wars ships would have to do a lot of survey work in order to navigate safely in the Milky Way. So for a while, the best that the Empire could do would be to seize the Milky Way end of the wormhole, and the surrounding star system, and fortify it. They could almost certainly fortify it far beyond the power of any Star Trek nation to recapture, but could not expand from this base for quite some time, depending on how much work they wanted to put into it.

A few years later, the Rebels blow up the DS2 with Palpatine aboard, and the Imperial Expeditionary Force in the Milky Way gets stranded with nothing better to do than to keep surveying in hopes of conquering the Milky Way. They probably won't succeed without reinforcements, so they end up getting coopted into the existing power structures- some of them defect to the Federation, some of them get assimilated by the Borg, and so on.

At least, that's how I see it happening.


Here's how I picture this fight: Imperial fleets arrive and decimate DS9; the Alpha Quadrant's best weapons can't dent anything with SW-shields. However, there are survivors (there are always survivors). During the battle, some Starfleet smart-aleck notices the TIE fighters have no shielding. Beaming the TIE pilots into the brig, they beam the pilotless ship into a cargo bay, and warp back to a safe haven. Without any star maps, the Imperials can't pursue. They release hundreds of probe droids to map the immediate area.Have the Trekkers got sufficient beaming precision to do that? I don't say they don't, but can you provide examples? I'm honestly curious.


As the Imperials are spreading out through the system, Starfleet now has laser tech from the captured fighters. Replicating a couple hundred or thousand, they head out with their new weapons and take out some of the smaller Imperial ships' shields (I'd personally go for a TIE Interceptor).Has Starfleet demonstrated the ability to replicate objects the size of capital ship beam weapons? And will they be able to reverse-engineer the guns on a TIE fighter that quickly? I mean, if the weapons are so much more powerful than theirs they're probably based on technology significantly beyond Starfleet's. Starfleet scientists might well lack the physics to understand or the reactors to power such weapons.

By analogy, imagine that a WWI navy captured a modern destroyer and attempted to duplicate the Phalanx antimissile/AA mounts on it. They couldn't. They wouldn't understand any of the electronics; they wouldn't even have the knowledge of physics to describe the electronics.


(If it were allowed, I'd hand over YA RLY weapons to the Klingons, and let them destroy the Imperials with impunity from cloak. Imperial officers highly placed enough to know about cloaking shields cry at how unfair this universe is, that allows single-blind cloaking technology. But this is supposed to be Federation only, not allies too.)Err, single-blind? I'm confused.


The opposite is true if Federation intrudes on Imperial space. They never get a chance to steal tech and implement it (they'd have a chance to get YA RLY tech if they had cloaks in the first place... stupid Treaty of Algeron). As soon as Starfleet appears in the Imperial Galaxy, they're vaped. Thankfully (or regrettably), the Empire never gets to steal Fed tech, because it's destroyed so thoroughly.Eh, once the Imperials realize just how fragile Trek ships are, they might just detach a few TIEs or other light warships to disable one and board it with stormtroopers just in case. Y'know, capture some prisoners, figure out where these amusingly primitive spacefarers are coming from, that sort of thing.

[Rockphed]

c) Linked to the above point...if matter/antimatter reaction IS the most powerful source of energy generation Star Trek has, it takes us back to our original problem; namely, you'd have to annihilate 1kg of matter and antimatter to produce enough energy to create 1kg of matter. Therefore the ship has to carry around lots and lots of fuel just to run its replicators...

Unless my knowledge of stuff is totally messed up, wouldn't you have twice the amount of energy required to produce 1KG of matter? After all, both the matter and anti matter are eliminated.:smalleek:

Either way, producing food out of energy generally does not work. It is better to just transmute matter you have into food. Oddly, one of the most effective ways to do that is just to make food normally.

And thank you Executor for that nice scaling. It is easy to forget that the federation is supposed to be small and growing, while the Empire has been around for tens of thousands of years(Humans are thought to have developed in the last 10,000 years, no?)

[EntilZha]

150 planets vs a minimum of over 1 million systems, hmm...

Actually, according to the book "Star Trek: Star Charts" by Geoffrey Mandel, there are 183 member worlds and 7,128 affiliated worlds (colonies, planets with star bases, and so on).

The actual dialogue from "First Contact" regarding this:

LILY: How many planets are in this Federation?
PICARD: Over 150.

Some have used this to say there are only 150 planets controlled by the Federation, conveniently overlooking the first part of that line. Besides, the idea that in an area 8,000 light years across the Federation controls only 150 planets is ridiculous.

[factotum]

Unless my knowledge of stuff is totally messed up, wouldn't you have twice the amount of energy required to produce 1KG of matter? After all, both the matter and anti matter are eliminated.:smalleek:


That's why I said "1kg of matter and anti-matter"--I meant that much in total, not 1kg of each. Sorry if it wasn't very clear.

[nothingclever]

I'm no expert on either side factually but I would still say the hand phaser is stronger than the blaster even if the comparison doesn't really matter.

I don't remember phasers having any problems with rocks except when people hid behind them. I don't know if a phaser should theoretically be able to vaporize an entire rock but I think part of the reason they weren't used that way is because shoot outs in Star Trek would be pretty dumb if you just blew up whatever people used for cover since you might as well have every fight take place in an empty room. Another reason is that phasers are set to stun by default and the only time they are ever set to kill is when someone gives an order so if they are aiming to stun people there's no way they can blow up rocks on the same setting.

Also power wise phasers have been shown to be extremely strong when used in emergency situations such as one point where Riker or Chakotay or whoever is in a dream and he just says if there's no way out of this reality I'll just kill myself and blow up this whole room by setting my phaser to level 10 (or whatever the exact level was, I may be wrong).

Plus hand held phasers have been used to hold up portals and cut through thick metal security doors with focus fire or again higher levels.

[Talkkno]

Stuff...

Cite your sources, from the AOTC:ICS, we know if we derive the esimate that a heavy blaster rifle can blast a meter i think in permacrete, and assuming that is a cross between concerate and steel, that would be about 8 times the force of a modern day concussion grenade .

[sikyon]

Cite your sources, from the AOTC:ICS, we know if we derive the esimate that a heavy blaster rifle can blast a meter i think in permacrete, and assuming that is a cross between concerate and steel, that would be about 8 times the force of a modern day concussion grenade .

Isn't ICS ridiculously overpowered?

Anyhow, in star trek original series we see the ridiculously photon grenade. It's basically a mortar, but it has the destructive power somewhere around a modern day fuel-air bomb (most powerful non-nuclear weapon). It's ridiculously powerful for its size.


Anyhow, I suggest that Star Wars is too inconsistent in terms of what it presents to extrapolate its power... if you take the weakest example and the strongest example there is a ridiculous difference in power. For example, in one scene a blaster shot does ridiculously low damage to Leia's arm and in another scene it blows apart rocks...

I hate comparing Star Wars.

[Talkkno]

Anyhow, I suggest that Star Wars is too inconsistent in terms of what it presents to extrapolate its power... if you take the weakest example and the strongest example there is a ridiculous difference in power. For example, in one scene a blaster shot does ridiculously low damage to Leia's arm and in another scene it blows apart rocks...

I hate comparing Star Wars.

....Leia is a force sensitive, we see Jedi take hits that would destroy shielded armored battle droids into smithereens coming out only slightly injured. So its not out of comparison, even though Leia was not yet trained, the force enabled her to survive a blast from a less powerful carbine only slightly injured.

[sikyon]

....Leia is a force sensitive, we see Jedi take hits that would destroy shielded armored battle droids into smithereens coming out only slightly injured. So its not out of comparison, even though Leia was not yet trained, the force enabled her to survive a blast from a less powerful carbine only slightly injured.

Blah Blah Force Force *cough magic cough*. I don't remember seeing young force sensitives surviving blaster shots. In fact, in the movies, I don't remember seeing Jedi ever surviving blaster shots.

[GoC]

Uh, I'm no Trekkie, but...Borg cubes?
Very nasty. They have a ninja field in effect. One ship can kill them but 100 will be slaughtered. And as the empire has thousands of ships...


Considering the sheer variety of things that block transporter technology, I don't see any reason for them to create something that does specifically that.
Could you give some examples?


Possibly because they can't build a teleporter capable of teleporting more than one bullet per few seconds? Rate of fire is not a common requirement of Starfleet transporter design.
They've often teleported two entire ship crews to eachothers ships. Even one bullet per second would be better than those little phasers... Especialy as they can put numerous small teleporters to act in sequence (the one is DS9 could be held in one hand).


If they work on the same basic principles as Trek shields,
Do you have any evidence they are even remotely similar? Even their graphics are different!


Federation troops will be in deep trouble in a firefight with stormtroopers; stormtroopers are pretty good at boarding actions (see the beginning of a New Hope).
Their markmenship more then makes up for it though. Kirk could walk through an army of them without any risk at all with his inch thick character shield.


Have the Trekkers got sufficient beaming precision to do that? I don't say they don't, but can you provide examples? I'm honestly curious.
They've done it multiple times. They can even choose to beam small objects on a person into another area.


The fact that they haven't done so indicates that there's something preventing them from doing it.
Yep, writer fiat.
And don't we just love one-off prototypes (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoPlansNoPrototypeNoBackup)?:smallwink:
Even if each cost a fortune they're so effective it would be more than worth it. Especialy as things get much cheaper when mass produced.

[Rutee]

Could you give some examples?
Watch an episode. Seriously. *Something* will always prevent Kirk from leaving without uncloaking the macguffin of the episode. About 30% of the time, it'll be diplomatic. The rest, will be technical.

[EvilElitest]

Damn Darvag, that post is like one of my monstrosities. Wow
from
EE

[sikyon]

Watch an episode. Seriously. *Something* will always prevent Kirk from leaving without uncloaking the macguffin of the episode. About 30% of the time, it'll be diplomatic. The rest, will be technical.

If by diplomatic, you mean seducing the evil overlord's much ignored female other.

[Rutee]

If by diplomatic, you mean seducing the evil overlord's much ignored female other.

Yes. Yes I did. I'm reminded of Weapons of the Gods.

"So.. they were in bed because they were negotiating a peace treaty.. and they were naked to prove they were unarmed?"

[Ubiq]

Isn't ICS ridiculously overpowered?


People like to say that, but don't seem to complain about the fact that those calculations are largely derived from other sources that say that an ISD's reactor is like a small star, that a single ISD can melt the surface of a planet by itself, and so on. It's all well and good to say such things apparently unless they're quantified and then it's too high.



For example, in one scene a blaster shot does ridiculously low damage to Leia's arm and in another scene it blows apart rocks...


Because it's obvious that a civilization that's been using blasters for thousands of years couldn't possibly come up with such a notion as power settings. Despite the fact that power settings are mentioned in the Han Solo trilogy among other sources.

Just because they don't spell things out in the films like they do in Star Trek doesn't mean that they don't have such things. We don't hear anybody discussing setting their blasters to an automatic or semi-automatic setting, but we clearly see Clonetroopers use the same type of gun to fire at both rates.

[factotum]

Anyhow, I suggest that Star Wars is too inconsistent in terms of what it presents to extrapolate its power... if you take the weakest example and the strongest example there is a ridiculous difference in power.

You can say exactly the same about Star Trek. Just take the simple example of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. We see at least two occasions during that film where phasers strike an unshielded ship, yet the damage done each time is wildly different; when the Reliant exchanges fire with the Enterprise in an early scene the phasers from both sides barely seem to penetrate the ship's hulls, whereas a single touch of a phaser from the Enterprise to one of the Reliant's warp nacelles causes the thing to go off like a Roman candle. OK, one could assume that warp nacelles are unusually sensitive, but one wonders in that case why they aren't always targeted in any ship-to-ship battle!

[Talkkno]

Enough said, they can't for a crap shoot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRm0RfUGkS4

[Deadmeat.GW]

People like to say that, but don't seem to complain about the fact that those calculations are largely derived from other sources that say that an ISD's reactor is like a small star, that a single ISD can melt the surface of a planet by itself, and so on. It's all well and good to say such things apparently unless they're quantified and then it's too high.



Because it's obvious that a civilization that's been using blasters for thousands of years couldn't possibly come up with such a notion as power settings. Despite the fact that power settings are mentioned in the Han Solo trilogy among other sources.

Just because they don't spell things out in the films like they do in Star Trek doesn't mean that they don't have such things. We don't hear anybody discussing setting their blasters to an automatic or semi-automatic setting, but we clearly see Clonetroopers use the same type of gun to fire at both rates.

The only probblem I have with the Starwars stuff is when a salvo from a vehicle has widely diverging effects.
Attack on Hoth is a prime example.
A single burst of fire goes from destroying a defensive emplacement to making small puffs of steam on ice to killing a rebel without leaving more then a scorch mark on him...

That is where Star Wars falls down on.

Also the fact that people are talking about troop transports with 200+ gigaton weapons, the transports in question having the same weapons as the small transport ships like the Millenium Falcon, and then from there going to quadrupling the damage output of the smaller SD's and more for the bigger stuff...
Assuming that asteroids are always made of the most solid and difficult to damage stuff and then claiming they were vaporized despite the film showing that this is not the case.
Star Wars stuff is way more powerful then the ST stuff and this is from simple quoted numbers in ST so there is no need to start with multiplying the damage output by a factor of several thousands when ST biggest stuff was doing less then a couple of hundred megaton damage throughout most of the series.
And looking at the Star Wars stuff several hundred megaton is not beyond the broadside weaponry the average SD has.
Of course from several hundred megaton jumping straight to close to a thousand Gigaton is a tad bit of a difference.

[GoC]

Watch an episode. Seriously. *Something* will always prevent Kirk from leaving without uncloaking the macguffin of the episode. About 30% of the time, it'll be diplomatic. The rest, will be technical.

Well I can think of three reasons:
1. No Plans No Backup.
2. Upsets the balance of power (really lame reason)
3. Unstable (needless to say none of the rocks-to-replicators starfleet engineers try to correct the problem).
4. Would cause chaos due to the changes in society.
5. No explanation given.

I'm sure if their existance was threatened they'd ignore a few of these reasons (or at least section 31 would).

[Hasivel]

Enough said, they can't for a crap shoot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRm0RfUGkS4That's. . . pitiful. Really. That shows just how good their aim really is if you pay any attention to it.

Just look at it, it draws on every season of Trek so you've got many hundreds of episodes and battles to pull from, and yet he can only splice together 2 minutes of video from them all of misses, and even then it's padded out with many explosions and non-misses? That's really amazing. The accuracy of Trek Ships must be the stuff of legends for that to happen.

Not to mention how many of those shots appear to be aimed at things offscreen, at least one of them shows fire being exchanged between ships beyond visual range.

Really though, this thread does need some better guidelines for how the war is fought and such. Is Wars allowed to cherrypick the best spots from all it's EU and ignore all EU weakpoints? Is Trek allowed to do the same and thus draw on all it's weapons of the week and time travel and such (Every main captain on any show has used time travel, it's surely a canon ability.)

[GoC]

Just look at it, it draws on every season of Trek so you've got many hundreds of episodes and battles to pull from, and yet he can only splice together 2 minutes of video from them all of misses, and even then it's padded out with many explosions and non-misses? That's really amazing. The accuracy of Trek Ships must be the stuff of legends for that to happen.

They practically never miss. I think the only ship that ever dodged shots was the defiant and in that case it's character shield was nearly impenetrable.

EDIT: The Defiant has very poor aim because it's weapons are slow and always aim forward.

[Hasivel]

They practically never miss. I think the only ship that ever dodged shots was the defiant and in that case it's character shield was nearly impenetrable.
Yes, hence my surprise that this was being taken as proof that they "Can't for crap shoot."

Even more amusing, I just realized there's almost no Federation ships in that clip. There's a handful of shots by the Defiant, one in Kirk's day that missed because the ship went to warp before impact, one shot that's from beyond visual range, and a couple of massed battles where it's not clear if the Federation ships are missing or not as they're firing at things offscreen. Even picking every miss from several series you can't find much Federation missing.

[Renegade Paladin]

<Original Post>
This isn't even an issue. The only reason it comes up so much is because Trek and Wars are the two most popular sci-fi franchises. However, they're not even in the same league; the Galactic Empire is so much more powerful than the Federation that the latter can't even begin to pose a threat to the former.

However, since it's going to be argued anyway:
These numbers are pure fantasy. You know how they came up with these, right? Way back in the day, the first few rounds of the Trek/Wars, they used the "minimum" firepower required to vaporize that famous asteroid in Empire Strikes Back. They waved their hands and calculated the size of the asteroid, waved their hands more and calculated the energy required to vaporize the asteroid (not break it apart, because there was no debris left), pointed at their physics degree hanging on the wall and said "this number". Trek supporters called BS, aka O RLY? Wars supporters replied YA RLY. Several years later, "this number" showed up in an official SW book, at which point all the Wars supporters said "See? Toldja so!"
Show that the calculations are erroneous. Saying it's so does not constitute an argument.


Based entirely on the fact that the first Death Star (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_star) had 7,293 TIE fighters, 10,000 of those YA RLY turbolaser batteries, plus 2,600 ion cannons (and at least 768 tractor beam projectors); it was destroyed by a "fleet" of 30 snubfighters. The Rebel force had a 10% survival rate (Luke, Wedge, unnamed Y-Wing); the Imps had .000848% survival rate (Vader; 1 out of 1,179,293 listed Death Star crew). Those kind of numbers go beyond mistake, beyond blunder, past ridiculous and ludicrous, and far into plaid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceballs).
Based entirely on the fact that you're citing Wikipedia, I'm going to say that this is going to be interesting, since you evidently can't even be bothered to use a reliable source. Regardless, the survival rate of the attacking Rebel fighters is immaterial; the Death Star was destroyed through the exploitation of a very specific design flaw that the Federation doesn't have access to and wouldn't be able to take advantage of if it did. However, since the Death Stars are not involved in this scenario, it doesn't matter what their strengths and weaknesses are; what matters are the Star Destroyers.

I'm not even a Trekkie(? Trekker? Whatever.), but even though the Federation has a long history of stupidity, the Empire has a long history of stupidity and incompetence. I'm not betting the Federation will win; I'm betting the Empire will lose.
Not through any Federation action apart from preemptively closing the wormhole. Starfleet is completely incapable of harming a Star Wars warship.
Based on what I've seen in the movies, and igorning EU crap I honestly don't think that star wars has a technological edge over the federation. Occam's razor for the most part, it's more plausible that the Empire has decent armor and decent weapons rather than rediculously powerful armor and rediculously powerful weapons. I also argue that star wars is too inconsistent to do any sort of analysis on. The extremes of power presented vary too much.

My personal, honest opinion is that Star Trek has the better tech, but Empire has a rediculous advantage in terms of numbers, which lets them win.
You don't get to "igore" the EU; unfortunately it's canon material. Regardless, the movies themselves show firepower far superior to anything the Federation can field.
One word Transpoter...

"Sir we have a problem...
What?
Our power core is gone...
What!"
Explain to me how the transporters will work through Imperial shielding and armor when they have trouble with simple dirt and rocks.
This particular scenario is resolved fairly easily.

The federation close the wormhole via explosive devices, thus satisfying their pacific nature and preventing the war.
That's fair enough.

Regardless, the Federation would win fairly easily. Faster sub-light. Similar superliminal speeds (trans-warp). Superior weapons ranges. Working cloaking devices. Genius engineers who can magically fix any problem in the bottom half of any given hour and awesome leadership that doesn't get its asses kicked by puny rebels. Oh yes...and time travel.
However, this is not. I don't know of any evidence either way regarding sublight propulsion (if you have some I'd love to see it). The superluminal propulsion of the Federation is laughably inferior; this was the whole premise of Voyager. (And the Federation doesn't have transwarp.) If Trek weapons ranges are so superior, why do they have battles with opposing ships within a stone's throw of each other as a matter of course? The cloaking devices won't matter if they don't allow effective harm to be done to the enemy, and again, apart from the Defiant the Federation has no cloaking devices. Trek may have brilliant engineers, but that's because they need them to survive; the Empire doesn't have problems with their entertainment devices trying to take over their ships every other week. :smalltongue: Palpatine isn't personally overseeing the invasion of the Federation, so his grand schemes with the end goal of converting Luke Skywalker at the expense of his navy won't be a factor. And time travel is cheating. :smallwink:
Federation fleet resources are limited only by manpower. Replicators give them an effectively infinite industrial capacity. Therefore, if the Federation stopped being stupid long enough to staff ships with programmed holographic crews instead of spending time training meat crewers, they would be able to swarm the empire with little effort.

chew on that for a bit, mmkay?
Replicators don't make something out of nothing; they still need raw materials. Besides, if they could do that they would have done so in any of the many wars they've been involved in.
Rebuttal 1: SW ships only travel faster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspace_%28science_fiction%29) because of:
There are established safe hyperspace routes that were scouted out by an unknown species 25,000 years prior to the events in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). These routes made interstellar trade and eventually the establishment of the Republic possible. New routes are almost never scouted out, mostly due to the fact that the end coordinates might place the traveling ship inside some star or planet.
Without those hyperspace routes, Imperials are stuck at sub-light speeds.
True. So they simply scout more hyperspace routes. It's time-consuming, but it can be done, and fairly simply. Even jumping out to the extreme range of the sensors, stopping, scanning the path ahead, jumping again, and so forth will get them where they're going faster than warp drive.

The time period for this confrontation is also specifically stated to be 2 ABY. Thrawn and his crazy "microjump" ideas are nowhere to be found.
Actually, Thrawn and "his" microjump ideas are to be found in the Unknown Regions; he could easily be recalled and sent on this mission. Besides, microjumping was not invented by Thrawn and is not unique to him.

Yes, and it spends a ridiculous amount of time, effort and resources to build the Fleet, let alone special (potentially bankrupting) projects like a Super Star Destroyer or Death Star. The Federation replicates parts essentially for free. They have available an army of re-purposed holographic lifeforms (ex-EMH mk.I). Dots... connecting...
Oh please. The second Death Star was completed with such a small portion of the Empire's budget that it was able to be funded through black ops budgeting with no one asking any questions; it could not have simultaneously bankrupted the Empire and been secret. And no, the Federation does not replicate parts for free; replicators need materials to replicate stuff from.

edit: factotum replied while I was writing this. Replicators convert energy to mass. Simple as that. As long as you have the energy (which Voyager was specifically trying to conserve in all three seasons it ever came up), you have the matter.
No, they convert mass to other forms of mass, and since Voyager had supply problems we can presume that it's not just any mass. Besides, energy doesn't just magically appear out of nowhere. Energy = mass * the speed of light squared, that is, energy is directly dependent upon mass and the two can be converted into each other. Even if energy will work, they don't get a free pass just because it's energy.
Aha. I do have to retract my statement about ISDs. In Vision of the Future, a strike force of 3 Star Destroyers is under cloak and cut off from the rest of the world for several weeks. So they can definitely last at least that long without support ships.
Indeed.

Wookiepedia lists ISDs as having Consumables: 6 years. I can't begin to fathom storing enough materiel for 6 years, but whatever. The reason I find this number suspect anyway is because of the Executor-class ship. It's 10 times larger than the ISD, which means it should have 1000 times the storage space (square-cube law). Yet despite having a crew a little bit less than 10 times that of the ISD, it is also listed as having Consumables: 6 years. Relatively fewer crew members plus relatively much more storage space equals same Consumables? Makes me think that they made up yet another number, just to have something there...

(In an unrelated bit of inanity, guess how many TIEs the Executor is packing! Darth Vader's personal ship, the flagship of the Empire, has 144 TIEs! That's right! Two times as much as the standard ISD! Two!)
Welcome to the wonderful world of West End Games pulling numbers out of their behind for the Star Wars RPG.

Failing to realize that the special effects team for ESB had no interest in showing an asteroid "break apart", probably because that would be more work. It's easier to just have the asteroid there, show the explosion, and take the asteroid out of subsequent frames.

The entire calculation is based on the assumption that the asteroid is completely "vaporized" (sublimated to gas/plasma). And that assumption is based on wishful thinking that the entire asteroid disappears, as opposed to, say, being shot apart into very little pieces (which requires orders of magnitude less power). The calculations, if you accept all the assumptions, are fine; but they hinge entirely on that first assumption, which is hardly an open-and-shut case.
Three words: Suspension of disbelief. It's not a failure to realize; this stems from the fact that if we start considering the special effects studio's intent/budget/laziness/whatever instead of what we actually see on the screen, then we've removed the whole framework of the debate. It's like staying in-character in a game of D&D; the in-universe material is what we have to work with.

Here's something to consider. ISDs are shown in ship-to-ship combat with the Rebel fleet over Endor. They shoot each other, they blow up. It's fair to conclude their offensive abilities are on par with one another, would you agree? So capital ships are able to shrug off multiple hits of YA RLY turbolasers. That's some powerful defense, if you believe the hype of how powerful those turbolasers are.
Yeah, it is.

In Empire Strikes Back, an ISD is taken out in one hit by an errant asteroid (#3 here (http://www.i-mockery.com/minimocks/empirestrikesback/)). Now not only does this lead me to point out how incompetent Imperial gunners are to let an asteroid that big through their field of fire, but it leads me to seriously question just how strong the defense really is on a capital ship. I also point out that the Millennium Falcon, nowhere near a cap ship class, has taken hits and not been instantly vaporized. Similarly, multiple snubfighters don't get vaporized (they are blown apart) in the Battle of Endor.
The Star Destroyer was not destroyed. If you actually look at the final frames of that scene, you can see the outline of the bridge tower, still intact, through the clearing dust of the destroyed asteroid. I have screenshots if you'd like to see them. The Imperials were explicitly attempting to capture the Falcon intact; woe betide the captain and gunnery crew of the ship that destroyed it. And for the final point, point defense weapons and heavy turbolasers are not the same thing.


You're missing my point. The Rebels have 30, count them, 30 fighters. I have 2000+. 7000 if you believe Wookiepedia (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Star_I). If you are any kind of non-traitorous, at-least-one-percent-competent commander, you do not lose a battle with that kind of superiority. Those Rebels don't even get a shot at the weak spot.
The Imperials weren't aware that there was any danger; why deploy all of those TIE fighters against a force that (they think) cannot damage the station anyway? That many would simply get in each other's way trying to come to bear on thirty targets, and they would quickly be destroyed by the rapidly expanding debris field that they were about to convert Yavin IV into, which would just be a waste.

I believe I wrote this in another reply, but it bears repeating. Star Wars ships follow hyperspace routes that have been established for 25,000 years. They are now in a new universe, and flying blind. They don't get to use their superior (max) speed, for fear of smashing into a planet/star/black hole/spatial anomaly (you know those are freakin' everywhere in Trek).
True, but they don't have to in order to beat warp drive.

This [transporters vs. Imperial shielding] is exactly another O RLY/YA RLY point of contention that was in the original TrekWars debate. No good conclusion was ever reached :smalltongue:
How's this for a good conclusion: Transporters have been shown to be stopped by proximity to a planet's magnetic north pole, and Star Wars warships are known to have magnetic fields. Transporters lose. :smalltongue:

Pop in with a couple Star Destroyers and Base Delta Zero (read: Reduce to molten slag) the whole planet.

god dammit, no. this is not what BDZ has EVER meant in any canon source.

http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWbd0.html
Actually, yeah it is. Disregarding for a moment the fact that Robert Scott Anderson has no idea what he's babbling about, destroying "all natural resources," as his own cite for the BDZ order states, involves destroying the planetary crust, because natural resources includes metals, oil, coal, and other things deep under the ground.
<Stuff about transporters and the interference thereof.>
As I stated earlier in this post, mundane electromagnetic fields can interfere with transporters. Here, have a look through the canon database's entries on the subject. (http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Database/Query-ST.php?Series=&Category=Transporters&EpName=&Keywords=magnetic&Quotes=&Analysis=&Submit=Submit) Those search results are the result of searching the "Transporters" category for the word "magnetic." Search the Transporters category for other things and you'll probably find more instances of their disruption by a variety of fairly common phenomena.
Enough said, they can't for a crap shoot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRm0RfUGkS4
Here, the 2007 edition has a much clearer picture. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBDbVPimLB0

And while we're at it, Trekkies may want to consider carefully before they rag on stormtroopers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu45GcHZHAU :smallamused:
That's. . . pitiful. Really. That shows just how good their aim really is if you pay any attention to it.

Just look at it, it draws on every season of Trek so you've got many hundreds of episodes and battles to pull from, and yet he can only splice together 2 minutes of video from them all of misses, and even then it's padded out with many explosions and non-misses? That's really amazing. The accuracy of Trek Ships must be the stuff of legends for that to happen.
It is. In fact, it's the stuff of so many legends that many Trekkies in the history of the versus debates have, in point of fact, claimed that Star Trek ships never, ever miss. Hence, the existence of that video.

[Hasivel]

You don't get to "igore" the EU; unfortunately it's canon material. Regardless, the movies themselves show firepower far superior to anything the Federation can field.

Oh please. The second Death Star was completed with such a small portion of the Empire's budget that it was able to be funded through black ops budgeting with no one asking any questions;

See, here's why debating SW is so aggravating at times, many of SW's more rabid fans demand full use of the EU for it's power ups but totally ignore anywhere something in the EU would be a penalty. Case in point, the EU specifically mentions (In Darksaber) that the Executor, not the Death Star, nearly bankrupted the Empire in it's construction. So as you just said, you don't get to Ignore the EU, it's canon material. You're stuck with an Empire that can barely afford to build a single Super Star Destroyer. Presumably the Death Stars were funded by going horribly into debt.

[Renegade Paladin]

See, here's why debating SW is so aggravating at times, many of SW's more rabid fans demand full use of the EU for it's power ups but totally ignore anywhere something in the EU would be a penalty. Case in point, the EU specifically mentions (In Darksaber) that the Executor, not the Death Star, nearly bankrupted the Empire in it's construction. So as you just said, you don't get to Ignore the EU, it's canon material. You're stuck with an Empire that can barely afford to build a single Super Star Destroyer. Presumably the Death Stars were funded by going horribly into debt.
Kevin J. Anderson is a hack. However, we don't even have to resort to that, since fortunately the statement that the Executor nearly bankrupted the Empire comes from a direct statement by Admiral Daala, and we can safely presume that she doesn't know what she's talking about, since 1.) she was out of contact in the Maw Installation during the whole Galactic Civil War, since before the construction of the Executor, 2.) the statement cannot be correct because the Empire built many Executor class dreadnoughts, and 3.) all the information we have about Daala says that she's mind-bogglingly ignorant of how the Empire actually worked. She was (supposedly) a good tactician, but she was shut away in the Maw with absolute power over the installation for most of her adult life; this made her a megalomaniac and completely skewed her worldview.

[sikyon]

See, here's why debating SW is so aggravating at times, many of SW's more rabid fans demand full use of the EU for it's power ups but totally ignore anywhere something in the EU would be a penalty. Case in point, the EU specifically mentions (In Darksaber) that the Executor, not the Death Star, nearly bankrupted the Empire in it's construction. So as you just said, you don't get to Ignore the EU, it's canon material. You're stuck with an Empire that can barely afford to build a single Super Star Destroyer. Presumably the Death Stars were funded by going horribly into debt.

I concur totally with the premise that Star Wars universe is so inconsistent it's ridiculous. There's no point trying to extrapolate anything from Star Wars - people take the extremes, and there's no comparison. I've given up on Star Wars continuity, in fact, and I suggest that others do the same. Decent storytelling for the most part, but terrible continuity.

[Wyvern_55]

Alright first off, the empire rests in the hands of a single person, a person who is foolish enough not to put a grating over a vent that has proven in the past to lead to a 'blow up super-weapon" button. This is a large weakness, which the federation is famous for finding a clever way of exploiting.

even so, despite the Federation's MASSIVE technological advantage (save for faster than light travel) sheer numbers will give the empire an advantage. However this is an unfair comparison.

You have pitted a galaxy against the Federation. let's pit both Galaxies against the other. Realistically placing two Borg upon the Death Star will lead to victory 99% of the time. one takes a hit, the other is now immune to all blaster shots. they assimilate and take over, the only real threat is Vader and Palpatine. and that's just ONE of the species in the galaxy, in a knock 'em down drag it out fight the Star Wars Galaxy can not take the Star Trek Galaxy.

[Deadmeat.GW]

Of course it could be very simple for this...

Admiral Daala actually refered to the series of Executor ships, silly phrasing but it makes a lot more sense.

How many were there of the SSD's, half a dozen in total?
Including the uber one?

As for the cost for the deathstar, it is refered to in the EU also as being exceedingly expensive as in that it was worth the whole value of the Imperial fleet.
And that was refering to the first one.
The second one being seriously bigger would have cost a lot more.

As for the hack...so if the writers come up with absolutely ridiculous statements (still a good read but not anywhere near what the previous books, films and so on for canon info) as long as they are possibly interpretable as backing the uber numbers given they are not hacks?

If it is detrimental it is a hack and should be ignored?
If it is in favour it should be counted no matter that it contra-dicts previous material and this including the films?

As for erroneous calculations, have you checked their calcs on destroying the asteroids?

If you assume they are vaporized...wait a SEC, the asteroids were not vaporized, there were still fragments around.

Let me see, so if you have a BLATANT mistake like that you are telling me they are correct?
They work out the data as if it destroyed the toughest asteroid type we know off completely.
And conveniently miss that there are fragments left over...

Also, they assumed a solid asteroid with no faults whatsoever.

This same type asteroid then hit the bridge on a SD and knocked it out, using EU it was actually even destroyed...
Yet to make the calculations work they come up with the notion of a Super hull armour, if the asteroid which according to their numbers had a specific energy potential can crush through it at very slow relative speeds does crash through this and the turbo lasers don't smash through quite as easily then the numbers don't make much sense.

Another reason the numbers are suspect is that the energy produced by SW ships to do Light speed travel following our current day science is also the basis for the potential output of the reactors which then get linked to the output of the guns.

Except as an example in the Honorverse the energy required to jump to ftl is substantial but...most of this is actually to make the transfer, after which the actual way that the ftl travel works provides you with the power you need to move.
And in no cases is this power output for transforming the Warshawski sails for ftl used also for powering the energy weapons.
It cycles up on a seperate system...

Hum, does this sound familiar?

A seperate system?
Like a Hyperdrive Generator and Power Generator for Starwars ships?

Yet for some reason despite all the evidence that these two systems are not directly linked in the films, the EU and so-on for the purpose of these calculations they are the same system...

[Hasivel]

Kevin J. Anderson is a hack. However, we don't even have to resort to that, since fortunately the statement that the Executor nearly bankrupted the Empire comes from a direct statement by Admiral Daala, and we can safely presume that she doesn't know what she's talking about, since 1.) she was out of contact in the Maw Installation during the whole Galactic Civil War, since before the construction of the Executor, 2.) the statement cannot be correct because the Empire built many Executor class dreadnoughts, and 3.) all the information we have about Daala says that she's mind-bogglingly ignorant of how the Empire actually worked. She was (supposedly) a good tactician, but she was shut away in the Maw with absolute power over the installation for most of her adult life; this made her a megalomaniac and completely skewed her worldview.No, Kevin J. Anderson is a writer of the EU that you've been demanding is accepted as canon. Calling him names is simply a use of the Ad Hominem fallacy. (although I actually agree, the man's a terrible writer.) Calling the writer a hack doesn't mean you get to pick and choose what canon is, the EU is an all or nothing deal.

Daala is repeatedly put forward as one of the most brilliant minds the Empire ever had in it's ranks, second only to Thrawn. The only thing holding her back was that, for the sake of plot, the empire Spontaneously developed a mysognynistic streak that never existed anywhere else and held her down for being a woman. She's also put forward as one of the most levelheaded and least egotistical of all Imperials, the only one who gave up most of her personal power simply because she felt it would advance the cause of the Empire at her own expense.
The notion that Daala, an Admiral who was in charge of the Empire's most important R&D operation, couldn't possibly know how the Empire works is unfathomable to me. As is the notion that she doesn't know how much the Executor cost because she was in the Maw conducting research for a decade or two. Are you presuming she can't possibly have read the expense reports at some later date after leaving, or that the Executor project couldn't have been started before she entered the Maw?
Calling her names is simply another ad hominem attack. Presumably, an excuse to cherry-pick the "good parts" of the EU and leave out the bad ones.

[Talkkno]

You have pitted a galaxy against the Federation. let's pit both Galaxies against the other. Realistically placing two Borg upon the Death Star will lead to victory 99% of the time. one takes a hit, the other is now immune to all blaster shots. they assimilate and take over, the only real threat is Vader and Palpatine. and that's just ONE of the species in the galaxy, in a knock 'em down drag it out fight the Star Wars Galaxy can not take the Star Trek Galaxy.

No limits fallacy, if the Borg was so powerful, why could not they assimilate Data? Or take our species 8472 by themselves, they couldn't adapt to their weaponary, what makes you think they could adapt to the much more powerful weaponary of the Empire.

[Executor]

Alright first off, the empire rests in the hands of a single person, a person who is foolish enough not to put a grating over a vent that has proven in the past to lead to a 'blow up super-weapon" button. This is a large weakness, which the federation is famous for finding a clever way of exploiting.

even so, despite the Federation's MASSIVE technological advantage (save for faster than light travel) sheer numbers will give the empire an advantage. However this is an unfair comparison.

You have pitted a galaxy against the Federation. let's pit both Galaxies against the other. Realistically placing two Borg upon the Death Star will lead to victory 99% of the time. one takes a hit, the other is now immune to all blaster shots. they assimilate and take over, the only real threat is Vader and Palpatine. and that's just ONE of the species in the galaxy, in a knock 'em down drag it out fight the Star Wars Galaxy can not take the Star Trek Galaxy.

Federation technological advantage: Not really, the standard turbolaser (as typified by the Venator's main battery), according the ICS, has a maximum range of 10 light-minutes (180 million kilometers, to be exact), and can rotate 180 degrees in 3 seconds in its quick tracking mode. I pulled these figures directly from the canon ICS books. Not only that, but an ISD has a reactor core that produces a small star's worth of power and of course, there's always the Death Star, that ultimate expression of technological power and industrial capacity. The only area where the Federation is more advanced is the totally militarily superflous area of recreation, like Holodecks. And with all the times holodecks go hay-wire, they can't be all they're cracked up to be. There is replicators, but I think we've conclusively proved in this thread that they aren't some magical "Make anything from nothing" device.

Borg Adaptation: Okay, that's a gross overstatement. How, exactly, will they 'adapt' to an energy beam that blows up planets in five seconds. Really, how do you adapt to something like that? The Borg can't adapt to being knifed or shot with a Tommy Gun, how do they adapt to a planet-destroying superlaser? I'd really like to know.

[Hasivel]

No limits fallacy, if the Borg was so powerful, why could not they assimilate Data? Or take our species 8472 by themselves, they couldn't adapt to their weaponary, what makes you think they could adapt to the much more powerful weaponary of the Empire.
I'm going to disagree with the assessment that the Empire's weaponry is "Much more powerful." 8472 death-starred a planet using what, nine ships? Each smaller than Voyager?
The rest I heartily agree with.

Of course if you're calling in the entire ST galaxy they get Q so the Borg are small potatoes, comparatively.

[Talkkno]

I'm going to disagree with the assessment that the Empire's weaponry is "Much more powerful." 8472 death-starred a planet using what, nine ships? Each smaller than Voyager?
.

But we didn't see what exactly happened to the planet, we know the Death Star threw 1 million times the required energy to destroy planet, seeing how fragments were moving at a fraction of c.

[Renegade Paladin]

Alright first off, the empire rests in the hands of a single person, a person who is foolish enough not to put a grating over a vent that has proven in the past to lead to a 'blow up super-weapon" button. This is a large weakness, which the federation is famous for finding a clever way of exploiting.

even so, despite the Federation's MASSIVE technological advantage (save for faster than light travel) sheer numbers will give the empire an advantage. However this is an unfair comparison.

You have pitted a galaxy against the Federation. let's pit both Galaxies against the other. Realistically placing two Borg upon the Death Star will lead to victory 99% of the time. one takes a hit, the other is now immune to all blaster shots. they assimilate and take over, the only real threat is Vader and Palpatine. and that's just ONE of the species in the galaxy, in a knock 'em down drag it out fight the Star Wars Galaxy can not take the Star Trek Galaxy.
"Massive technological advantage?" :smallamused: I don't know what movies you were watching, but it can't be the Star Trek I've been a fan of since childhood. (Yeah, you read that right. I actually like Trek better than Star Wars, but that doesn't change the sheer fact that Trek loses hard in a war against the Empire.) Federation equipment routinely breaks down, fails to function, threatens to kill the crew, or is simply inadequate to tasks that Imperial weaponry and technology can routinely deal with.
Of course it could be very simple for this...

Admiral Daala actually refered to the series of Executor ships, silly phrasing but it makes a lot more sense.

How many were there of the SSD's, half a dozen in total?
Including the uber one?
At one point I'd gone through the novels and compiled a list of the named SSDs; there were considerably more than half a dozen. (We can also extrapolate many more from that, since there were no less than three in Black Sword Command, and that was just one sector fleet.) Unfortunately, those notes have since been lost and I no longer have most of my Star Wars novels, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to have done so; it shouldn't be hard to find a listing.

As for the cost for the deathstar, it is refered to in the EU also as being exceedingly expensive as in that it was worth the whole value of the Imperial fleet.
And that was refering to the first one.
The second one being seriously bigger would have cost a lot more.
It had enough firepower to defeat the whole Imperial fleet; that doesn't mean it necessarily cost a lot more than every single ship. Regardless, worth more than the fleet does not mean that it must have bankrupted the Empire; as depicted the Empire is never fully militarized. Surely there were many things in the budget apart from the Imperial Starfleet.

As for the hack...so if the writers come up with absolutely ridiculous statements (still a good read but not anywhere near what the previous books, films and so on for canon info) as long as they are possibly interpretable as backing the uber numbers given they are not hacks?

If it is detrimental it is a hack and should be ignored?
If it is in favour it should be counted no matter that it contra-dicts previous material and this including the films?
That's not the standard at all; I call Kevin Anderson a hack because he is a horrible writer, paid to churn out novels to sell rather than to produce anything of literary value. He pays little to no attention to preexisting material or even consistency with his own work.

As for erroneous calculations, have you checked their calcs on destroying the asteroids?
Thoroughly.

If you assume they are vaporized...wait a SEC, the asteroids were not vaporized, there were still fragments around.
No there weren't.

Let me see, so if you have a BLATANT mistake like that you are telling me they are correct?
They work out the data as if it destroyed the toughest asteroid type we know off completely.
And conveniently miss that there are fragments left over...
Where are these phantom fragments?

Also, they assumed a solid asteroid with no faults whatsoever.
Asteroids as we know them are generally solid; hollow asteroids to my knowledge only occur in fiction. Earth's asteroid belt has several different types of asteroids; the ones composing the Hoth asteroid field look exactly like nickel-iron asteroids as we know them, so that is the type that they are presumed to be. This assumption is eminently reasonable given the data at hand.

This same type asteroid then hit the bridge on a SD and knocked it out, using EU it was actually even destroyed...
Yet to make the calculations work they come up with the notion of a Super hull armour, if the asteroid which according to their numbers had a specific energy potential can crush through it at very slow relative speeds does crash through this and the turbo lasers don't smash through quite as easily then the numbers don't make much sense.
First, that asteroid was very, very large; almost as big as half the bridge tower. Second, I'm not sure the Star Destroyer was destroyed; the bridge tower appears to still be there in the visuals.

Another reason the numbers are suspect is that the energy produced by SW ships to do Light speed travel following our current day science is also the basis for the potential output of the reactors which then get linked to the output of the guns.
We've been over this before in other threads; the amount of energy required is enormous.

Except as an example in the Honorverse the energy required to jump to ftl is substantial but...most of this is actually to make the transfer, after which the actual way that the ftl travel works provides you with the power you need to move.
And in no cases is this power output for transforming the Warshawski sails for ftl used also for powering the energy weapons.
It cycles up on a seperate system...
Well that's their problem.

Hum, does this sound familiar?

A seperate system?
Like a Hyperdrive Generator and Power Generator for Starwars ships?
"Hyperdrive generator?" You made that up; C-3P0 refers to a hyperdrive motivator at one point, which one would presume to mean the engine, but nothing says that it has to have its own separate power source that cannot be used for anything else.

Yet for some reason despite all the evidence that these two systems are not directly linked in the films, the EU and so-on for the purpose of these calculations they are the same system...
What evidence that the systems are not linked? You cited Honor Harrington as your evidence, which has absolutely nothing to do with Star Wars.
No, Kevin J. Anderson is a writer of the EU that you've been demanding is accepted as canon. Calling him names is simply a use of the Ad Hominem fallacy. (although I actually agree, the man's a terrible writer.) Calling the writer a hack doesn't mean you get to pick and choose what canon is, the EU is an all or nothing deal.
No, it is not an ad hominem. It would be so if I'd said "he's a hack, and therefore..." However, I did not say that; I simply called him a hack, which is not an argument and therefore cannot be fallacious. :smalltongue:

Daala is repeatedly put forward as one of the most brilliant minds the Empire ever had in it's ranks, second only to Thrawn. The only thing holding her back was that, for the sake of plot, the empire Spontaneously developed a mysognynistic streak that never existed anywhere else and held her down for being a woman. She's also put forward as one of the most levelheaded and least egotistical of all Imperials, the only one who gave up most of her personal power simply because she felt it would advance the cause of the Empire at her own expense.
None of that makes her an economist.

The notion that Daala, an Admiral who was in charge of the Empire's most important R&D operation, couldn't possibly know how the Empire works is unfathomable to me. As is the notion that she doesn't know how much the Executor cost because she was in the Maw conducting research for a decade or two. Are you presuming she can't possibly have read the expense reports at some later date after leaving, or that the Executor project couldn't have been started before she entered the Maw?
She could have read the expense reports, but we know for a fact that the Executor project was not started for some years after she entered the Maw. And even reading the expense reports wouldn't tell her whether or not it was bankrupting the Empire; she'd need the economic data for the whole galaxy to know that. And I assure you, the resources of a galaxy would find the construction of a 17 kilometer ship trivial.

Calling her names is simply another ad hominem attack. Presumably, an excuse to cherry-pick the "good parts" of the EU and leave out the bad ones.
No, I'm calling into question her direct knowledge of the situation. What we have is the word of one character against everything else we know about the situation. Which is more likely to be correct?

This isn't about trying to call Daala names; in fact I was careful to avoid doing so. (Ignorant isn't an insult as such; it simply means she didn't know about it.) This is about attempting to rationalize an inconsistency in the canon, one that only exists because Kevin J. Anderson is a hack. :smalltongue:
I'm going to disagree with the assessment that the Empire's weaponry is "Much more powerful." 8472 death-starred a planet using what, nine ships? Each smaller than Voyager?
The rest I heartily agree with.
I've never dealt with 8472, so I'll have to go look into that, but keep in mind that the nature of Alderaan's destruction necessitates that many times more power than was necessary for the planet's destruction went into it.

Of course if you're calling in the entire ST galaxy they get Q so the Borg are small potatoes, comparatively.
They get Q, but Q's prior behavior suggests that he would just make popcorn and watch the show rather than actually get involved, even if he was dragged into the scenario.

[Seraph]

First, that asteroid was very, very large; almost as big as half the bridge tower. Second, I'm not sure the Star Destroyer was destroyed; the bridge tower appears to still be there in the visuals.

It does not at all apprear to still be there. Quite The Opposite, in fact: (http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWbta.html)


First Frame
http://www.st-v-sw.net/images/Wars/Episodes/TESB/HDC5-bta01sm.jpg

last Frame
http://www.st-v-sw.net/images/Wars/Episodes/TESB/HDC5-bta05sm.jpg

[Renegade Paladin]

The debris from the asteroid is still obscuring the scene in the last frame. There's the shadow of a solid line barely visible that seems to correspond to the back of the bridge tower's neck, limned against the glow from the Executor's engines; apart from that you really can't tell.

And yes, I know of Darkstar's inane attempt to say that the starboard portion of the bridge tower should be visible, but that simply isn't so. The angle we viewed the bridge at was not as large as he says it is, and it would have gotten smaller since the Star Destroyer was moving forward relative to the Executor throughout the scene. As for his cute little animated transposition at the bottom of the page, you may note that he magnified the bridge tower in the overlay to produce his desired effect.

[Seraph]

The debris from the asteroid is still obscuring the scene in the last frame. There's the shadow of a solid line barely visible that seems to correspond to the back of the bridge tower's neck, limned against the glow from the Executor's engines; apart from that you really can't tell.

Yes you can; I only posted two images, the website has a superimposing gif that pretty clearly shows that the entire tower is gone.

[Renegade Paladin]

Yes you can; I only posted two images, the website has a superimposing gif that pretty clearly shows that the entire tower is gone.
I don't trust Robert Scott Anderson, because he has in the past shown himself to be a rabid liar; in fact he has in the past accused me, along with everyone else who posts on the SD.net board, of being unhinged to the point of being capable of murder. However, even if the bridge tower was gone it doesn't mean a whole lot; an asteroid of that size striking at the relative speeds we're talking about would transfer an enormous amount of energy to any object it struck; since the impact was hard enough to totally destroy the asteroid, it transferred almost it's total kinetic energy. Since this is far more energy than any Star Trek weapons system is capable of producing, it's not of much relevance to the versus debate.

[Ubiq]

Attack on Hoth is a prime example.
A single burst of fire goes from destroying a defensive emplacement to making small puffs of steam on ice to killing a rebel without leaving more then a scorch mark on him...


People like to bring that up for some reason, but they always omit the fact that the Rebels were being killed by near-misses rather than direct hits, which suggests that the blasts are incredibly powerful.


Also the fact that people are talking about troop transports with 200+ gigaton weapons, the transports in question having the same weapons as the small transport ships like the Millenium Falcon, and then from there going to quadrupling the damage output of the smaller SD's and more for the bigger stuff...

I don't get why people cannot understand the simple concept of energy weapons which is: the bigger the reactor, the more powerful the weaponry. The fact that the Millenium Falcon has the same quad-lasers that larger ships use for point defense (it doesn't have medium turbolasers like an Acclamator; I don't know where you got that notion) doesn't mean that those quad-lasers generate as much firepower as the same quad-laser would if it were hooked up to a more powerful reactor.

The bigger the ship, the larger the volume. The larger the volume, the more massive the reactor that powers. Bigger ships have more powerful guns even if the exact same armament is used on a smaller ship.



And looking at the Star Wars stuff several hundred megaton is not beyond the broadside weaponry the average SD has.
Of course from several hundred megaton jumping straight to close to a thousand Gigaton is a tad bit of a difference.

Not at all; the total broadside for an Acclamator's 12 medium turbolasers is 2.4 gigatons. The total broadside for the more massive Venator (which, unlike the Acclamator, isn't primarily a transport and is intended to fight against other capital ships) with its heavy turbolasers is 80 gigatons, though it could easily be ten times that if all energy were devoted to the weapon systems.


You're stuck with an Empire that can barely afford to build a single Super Star Destroyer. Presumably the Death Stars were funded by going horribly into debt.

Statements in the EU that blatantly contradict the films should always be discarded. An Executor is about one hundred times as large as an ISD while the first Death Star (let alone the vastly larger DSII) has well over a million times as much volume.

An organization that would have trouble building something the size of the Executor couldn't possibly build something as massive as the Death Star, let alone secretly. Since we know that they did both, the notion that the Executor "nearly bankrupted the Empire" must be discarded and the person making that statement considered an idiot who doesn't know what they're talking about.

[Mando Knight]

An organization that would have trouble building something the size of the Executor couldn't possibly build something as massive as the Death Star, let alone secretly. Since we know that they did both, the notion that the Executor "nearly bankrupted the Empire" must be discarded and the person making that statement considered an idiot who doesn't know what they're talking about.

And, after all, the Empire made two Executor-class Star Destroyers, not just one. The other was the Lusankya, started and finished at the same time as the Executor. And the Eclipse was being constructed at the same time as the DS II..

[Hasivel]

Asteroids as we know them are generally solid; hollow asteroids to my knowledge only occur in fiction. Earth's asteroid belt has several different types of asteroids; the ones composing the Hoth asteroid field look exactly like nickel-iron asteroids as we know them, so that is the type that they are presumed to be. This assumption is eminently reasonable given the data at hand.Yeah, it's not like Han Solo pretty much assumed that there would be caves and hollows he could hide in on the Asteroids, or that he found one in about thirty seconds of searching. Oh wait . . .


No, it is not an ad hominem. It would be so if I'd said "he's a hack, and therefore..." However, I did not say that; I simply called him a hack, which is not an argument and therefore cannot be fallacious. :smalltongue:Then why do you keep repeating it, if it's not serving as an excuse to ignore his writing?


She could have read the expense reports, but we know for a fact that the Executor project was not started for some years after she entered the Maw. And even reading the expense reports wouldn't tell her whether or not it was bankrupting the Empire; she'd need the economic data for the whole galaxy to know that. And I assure you, the resources of a galaxy would find the construction of a 17 kilometer ship trivial.See, here's the thing. You're assuring me that the resources of the Galaxy can afford it, although we really don't know what those resources are. But you're a person posting on Giant in the Playground, and Daala is a person who actually lives in that universe, was a major component of the machine that built the ships, successfully ran the Empire's remnants for years, and generally is the person on the spot. I find her conclusions far less suspect than yours.


No, I'm calling into question her direct knowledge of the situation. What we have is the word of one character against everything else we know about the situation. Which is more likely to be correct?See, you're saying "Everything else we know about the situation." But how it reads is "everything SD.net stands for."
The fact is the Empire having trouble affording the Executor doesn't fly in the face of the films at all, just the worst conclusions of the EU. The Empire needed decades to build the first Death Star (and quite possibly the second, it may well have been underway many years before the first was finished). It could only spare 11 ships to protect the Emperor Himself at Endor. Unless your goal is to bring in other EU stuff, it fits quite nicely. The Emperor needed decades to build his Death Stars, the second being started shortly after the first. Han Solo's comment on "A thousand ships" suggests that the fleet is remarkably tiny, it's not surprising that an Empire that can't afford a full thousand vessels and takes decades of work to build a very large space station was nearly bankrupted trying to build a few large ships in a hurry that they couldn't afford.

No, she fits the movies. What doesn't fit are the million starship fleets and absurdly huge firepower of other EU sources.


This isn't about trying to call Daala names; in fact I was careful to avoid doing so. (Ignorant isn't an insult as such; it simply means she didn't know about it.) This is about attempting to rationalize an inconsistency in the canon, one that only exists because Kevin J. Anderson is a hack.Riiiiiiight. Calling somebody mind-bogglingly ignorant about the military they command isn't an insult. It's quite common for reporters to go up to modern-day admirals and inform the Admiral that he's mind-bogglingly ignorant about how the United States functions. The Admiral always just smiles and nods because he knows he hasn't really been insulted.


Statements in the EU that blatantly contradict the films should always be discarded. An Executor is about one hundred times as large as an ISD while the first Death Star (let alone the vastly larger DSII) has well over a million times as much volume.So if I show how the ICS is blatantly contradicted by films you'll immediately vote it to be tossed out?

[Dervag]

I don't remember phasers having any problems with rocks except when people hid behind them. I don't know if a phaser should theoretically be able to vaporize an entire rock but I think part of the reason they weren't used that way is because shoot outs in Star Trek would be pretty dumb if you just blew up whatever people used for cover since you might as well have every fight take place in an empty room.Any argument that beings with "Star Trek would be pretty dumb if that were true" has a slight loophole in it. The Star Trek writers aren't very smart about some things. Science and the practical aspects of firefights among them.

The catch is that phasers don't do much more to rocks than large hand blasters do, even on the "kill" setting. You could destroy a rock with a phaser, but could also do so with a large hand blaster. And the hand blaster is better designed as a weapon- more suitable for use as a gun by being easier to aim and such. Given the designs of most of the phasers we see on Star Trek, they'd be nigh-impossible to aim at long range.


Also power wise phasers have been shown to be extremely strong when used in emergency situations such as one point where Riker or Chakotay or whoever is in a dream and he just says if there's no way out of this reality I'll just kill myself and blow up this whole room by setting my phaser to level 10 (or whatever the exact level was, I may be wrong).On the other hand, we've also seen phasers overload and explode with no more power than that found in, say, a stick of dynamite. Which is by no means more than the power a blaster would have to store.

I can't say how much power a blaster would have if it exploded because blasters don't do that very often in the movies. However, they definitely have enough power to fire repeated shots that destroy large masses of metal or stone, and therefore would have to store quite a lot of energy.


Anyhow, I suggest that Star Wars is too inconsistent in terms of what it presents to extrapolate its power... if you take the weakest example and the strongest example there is a ridiculous difference in power. For example, in one scene a blaster shot does ridiculously low damage to Leia's arm and in another scene it blows apart rocks...

I hate comparing Star Wars.Star Trek has equally serious inconsistency problems. If we can invoke low power settings to explain why phasers blast holes in steel in some cases but do not instantly kill people hit by them in others, we can do the same for blasters. Especially if it occured in a situation where it would make sense for stormtroopers to be trying to capture rather than kill instantly, as when a small group of enemy commandoes are surrounded and cut off while trying to break into a vital installation.


Blah Blah Force Force *cough magic cough*. I don't remember seeing young force sensitives surviving blaster shots. In fact, in the movies, I don't remember seeing Jedi ever surviving blaster shots.In which case blasters are powerful enough to reliably kill human targets instantly all the time, except that one instance, no?

So do we base our entire evaluation on the one instance when a blaster failed to maim or kill a human target, or on the numerous instances where it blasted fist-sized holes in metal or rock and killed human targets instantly?


Could you give some examples?The magnetic field in the prison asteroid of ST6 would be a prime one; it would not at all be hard to rig one's ship to generate magnetic fields in spaces that you wnat to block boarders from.


They've often teleported two entire ship crews to eachothers ships. Even one bullet per second would be better than those little phasers... Especialy as they can put numerous small teleporters to act in sequence (the one is DS9 could be held in one hand).OK, you're right. My theory is that the teleport rifle was a specialized assassination weapon, one that was never mass produced and not suitable for mass production. Or one that was designed by a specific person who managed something the Federation hasn't figured out how to duplicate, and that the Federation's Weapons Development Board is too stupid to realize the need for. If they knew they needed better infantry weapons they'd have improved the ergonomics of phasers a lot faster.


Do you have any evidence they are even remotely similar? Even their graphics are different!Yes, but it seems more likely to me that what we're seeing are two essentially similar applications of the same principle, with one being more advanced than the other or being a more specialized application. Since we don't have much explicit evidence that they do work on totally different principles, that's good enough for me. I am open to persuasion to the contrary.


Their markmenship more then makes up for it though. Kirk could walk through an army of them without any risk at all with his inch thick character shield.The only time I remember them being comically bad shots was when the enemy was supposed to get away, in the Death Star escape. Granted, with a character shield you can kill many of them with near-impunity, but that relies on individual characters rather than the strengths of the settings.


They've done it multiple times. They can even choose to beam small objects on a person into another area.OK, then they do.


Yep, writer fiat.
And don't we just love one-off prototypes (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoPlansNoPrototypeNoBackup)?:smallwink:
Even if each cost a fortune they're so effective it would be more than worth it. Especialy as things get much cheaper when mass produced.I distrust writer fiat as the only reason for something not happening. After all, the writers are presumed to be on strike in a Vs. setting, right? In that case, we have to ask "why hasn't the Federation built dozens of Weapon X?" or "why don't Star Wars normal soldiers use things like shotguns against Jedi instead of standard blasters?" And there has to be some reason.


The only probblem I have with the Starwars stuff is when a salvo from a vehicle has widely diverging effects.
Attack on Hoth is a prime example.
A single burst of fire goes from destroying a defensive emplacement to making small puffs of steam on ice to killing a rebel without leaving more then a scorch mark on him...I don't think the kill on a rebel was a direct hit, in which case the cause of death was concussion or shrapnel- effects entirely consistent with a very powerful beam or chunk of material hitting nearby.


That is where Star Wars falls down on.Yes, but so do lots of other settings.


Assuming that asteroids are always made of the most solid and difficult to damage stuff and then claiming they were vaporized despite the film showing that this is not the case.OK. Assume they were made out of some reasonable material (i.e. not a fragile hydrogen balloon asteroid, which would be bizarre, but simply an asteroid of less vulnerable stone). Assue that the asteroid was not vaporized, but was merely blown into pieces too small to be easily seen. How much energy would that take? I understand why you question the number, and I find your argument fairly compelling, but could you please give me another number to put in its place?


Alright first off, the empire rests in the hands of a single person, a person who is foolish enough not to put a grating over a vent that has proven in the past to lead to a 'blow up super-weapon" button. This is a large weakness, which the federation is famous for finding a clever way of exploiting.On the other hand, the Empire's capital ships do not appear to have such obvious flaws. Indeed, the 'obvious' flaw in the Death Star 1 was one that only someone who examined the blueprints would have been able to find. And only the Rebels would have even known how the Death Star was destroyed. Any witnesses aboard the DS were killed, remember? Since the Rebels would probably not have made their tactics a matter of public knowledge, it should come as no surprise that the Empire didn't realize the problem.


even so, despite the Federation's MASSIVE technological advantage (save for faster than light travel) sheer numbers will give the empire an advantage. However this is an unfair comparison.How does the Federation have a MASSIVE technological advantage? I am curious.


You have pitted a galaxy against the Federation. let's pit both Galaxies against the other. Realistically placing two Borg upon the Death Star will lead to victory 99% of the time. one takes a hit, the other is now immune to all blaster shots.If the Borg were that adaptable, then they'd have destroyed the Federation long ago. For example, Picard killed several Borg drones with a "holographic" Thompson submachine gun. By your logic, he should only have been able to kill one. For that matter, many Borg have been killed in close combat by Worf and others using sharp bits of metal. Presumably, the Borg have encountered knives, swords, and the like before. If the Borg ability to "adapt" were as godlike as you imply, then they'd already be immune to those, right? The Borg can definitely "adapt" to specific technologies. But it seems far more likely to me that this is merely a clever form of modifying their existing technology, much as Starfleet engineers do with regard to various threats ("I've remodulated the plasma phase inversion tubes to counter the effects of the veriton particles!") than a supernatural ability to pull "invulnerable to X" out of a hat and apply it to all their drones.


Yes you can; I only posted two images, the website has a superimposing gif that pretty clearly shows that the entire tower is gone.I'd have to agree. Although it is not clear to me that this star destroyer had its shields up (shields were also shown withstanding asteroid impacts in the same movie). Or, if its shields were down, how much battering it had taken to collapse them.

Would a Star Trek ship have survived this asteroid impact? With or without its shields up? I'm curious; what evidence do we have one way or the other?


I don't get why people cannot understand the simple concept of energy weapons which is: the bigger the reactor, the more powerful the weaponry. The fact that the Millenium Falcon has the same quad-lasers that larger ships use for point defense (it doesn't have medium turbolasers like an Acclamator; I don't know where you got that notion) doesn't mean that those quad-lasers generate as much firepower as the same quad-laser would if it were hooked up to a more powerful reactor.

The bigger the ship, the larger the volume. The larger the volume, the more massive the reactor that powers. Bigger ships have more powerful guns even if the exact same armament is used on a smaller ship.It isn't that simple. To use a real-life example, building a more powerful laser is not the same as pumping more power into an existing one. You have to build a more powerful cooling system, use bigger components that conduct more electricity, and so on.

So it is entirely reasonable for the same ship to have low-power point defense weapons and high-power main battery weapons, without the PD weapons being any more powerful than the same weapon design when used as the "main battery" of a smaller ship. If I wanted to quadruple the power of one of the Millenium Falcon's quad guns, I couldn't just run more power to the guns. I'd have to physically redesign every part of them that uses energy.


Yeah, it's not like Han Solo pretty much assumed that there would be caves and hollows he could hide in on the Asteroids, or that he found one in about thirty seconds of searching. Oh wait . . .But the asteroid was definitely not completely hollow. There was a hole in it, but it wasn't hollow. It was mostly rock by volume.


But you're a person posting on Giant in the Playground, and Daala is a person who actually lives in that universe, was a major component of the machine that built the ships, successfully ran the Empire's remnants for years, and generally is the person on the spot. I find her conclusions far less suspect than yours.But the things she says totally contradict what other people say, and the simple fact that the Empire has built things much bigger than the thing she said bankrupted the economy. It's far more likely that she was exaggerating or mistaken than that all those other Executor-class ships and the Death Stars didn't actually exist after all or were somehow built by an economy that could barely afford to build one Executor.


Han Solo's comment on "A thousand ships" suggests that the fleet is remarkably tiny, it's not surprising that an Empire that can't afford a full thousand vessels and takes decades of work to build a very large space station was nearly bankrupted trying to build a few large ships in a hurry that they couldn't afford.And yet, the Death Star is said to have "firepower greater than half the star fleet." Which suggests it has less firepower than all the star fleet, or the briefing wouldn't have said "half." In which case the Empire would have to have enough ships that their combined firepower is somewhere around that of the Death Star. Which would imply, say, "a thousand ships."

[Talkkno]

Keep in mind, the Rebels threw a couple hundred of X wings and two trade federation battle ships at the incompleted DS1 and they got pretty much ran over before the battle of Yavin in the new Death Star novel.

[Renegade Paladin]

Yeah, it's not like Han Solo pretty much assumed that there would be caves and hollows he could hide in on the Asteroids, or that he found one in about thirty seconds of searching. Oh wait . . .
Having caves and being completely hollow are not the same thing.

Then why do you keep repeating it, if it's not serving as an excuse to ignore his writing?
Because it's the truth. You even said as much. As for "keep repeating," I've made the statement exactly twice, and the second was for comedic effect.

See, here's the thing. You're assuring me that the resources of the Galaxy can afford it, although we really don't know what those resources are. But you're a person posting on Giant in the Playground, and Daala is a person who actually lives in that universe, was a major component of the machine that built the ships, successfully ran the Empire's remnants for years, and generally is the person on the spot. I find her conclusions far less suspect than yours.
No, that's not the thing. This is: An empire of hundreds of thousands of inhabited worlds at the bare minimum must, by necessity, control enough labor and materials to create a ship the size of the Executor given that it is physically possible to do so. Since it clearly is (they did, after all, do it), then what economic principle could cause the creation of such a small vessel in comparison to the vastness of the entire galaxy to bankrupt said galaxy?

See, you're saying "Everything else we know about the situation." But how it reads is "everything SD.net stands for."
Now who's using the ad hominem circumstantial? I post on SD.net, therefore what I say cannot be trusted; that's textbook, that is.

In any case, "Everything else we know about the situation" does not mean "everything SD.net stands for;" it means that we know that the Empire built two Death Stars, probably dozens more Executor class dreadnoughts (including at least one concurrently and in secret; the bare minimum total for the number of Executor class ships is, going by the individual ships I can think of off the top of my head, eight), a Starfleet of many thousands of warships, the Eclipse, the Sovereign, the Galaxy Gun, Sun Crusher, funded a sizable enough army to keep an entire galaxy under its boot, the list goes on and on and on. Positing that the Executor by itself nearly bankrupted an empire that could do all that as well is ludicrous on its face.

The fact is the Empire having trouble affording the Executor doesn't fly in the face of the films at all, just the worst conclusions of the EU. The Empire needed decades to build the first Death Star (and quite possibly the second, it may well have been underway many years before the first was finished). It could only spare 11 ships to protect the Emperor Himself at Endor. Unless your goal is to bring in other EU stuff, it fits quite nicely. The Emperor needed decades to build his Death Stars, the second being started shortly after the first. Han Solo's comment on "A thousand ships" suggests that the fleet is remarkably tiny, it's not surprising that an Empire that can't afford a full thousand vessels and takes decades of work to build a very large space station was nearly bankrupted trying to build a few large ships in a hurry that they couldn't afford.
Not this again. First, the most glaring error in this paragraph: Watch the Battle of Endor, (http://youtube.com/watch?v=TGMvadAFqLQ) and pay attention. There are far more than 11 Imperial warships at Endor in the movie; pause the video at 2:08 when the Rebels are first turning to face the Imperial fleet and count.

Han Solo was panicking when he made the thousand ships statement. We know, for canon fact, that the Imperial Starfleet was far larger than that; he just picked a round number while frantically searching for an explanation. To discard everything else because of one statement made under pressure without great need for accuracy is ludicrous. For starters, just a few hours before over Tatooine, he hadn't thought that the presence of at least three Star Destroyers was anything unusual; if there were really less than a thousand ships in the Starfleet then he'd probably have thought it unusual for such a sizable percentage of the Empire's combat force to be at a backwater Rim world. At Endor, the Rebels could not possibly have thought that the entire Imperial fleet was scattered throughout the galaxy if there were so few ships in total; I count upwards of 30 just in one frame as I type this. Over three percent of the total fleet unaccounted for and the Rebellion didn't think that they might be at Endor? No.

Construction did not start on the second Death Star until at least after the first's destruction; that gives a timeframe of three years at the maximum. Six months is more likely given the events in Shadows of the Empire, but even with that it's still an impressive feat of industry.

No, she fits the movies. What doesn't fit are the million starship fleets and absurdly huge firepower of other EU sources.
You keep saying it's absurd, but you never do anything to actually show it.

Riiiiiiight. Calling somebody mind-bogglingly ignorant about the military they command isn't an insult. It's quite common for reporters to go up to modern-day admirals and inform the Admiral that he's mind-bogglingly ignorant about how the United States functions. The Admiral always just smiles and nods because he knows he hasn't really been insulted.
Modern-day admirals don't talk about how building an aircraft carrier will bankrupt the United States, now do they? Because it doesn't and they know it. If one did say that, he'd be laughed right out of the Pentagon.

[Ubiq]

See, here's the thing. You're assuring me that the resources of the Galaxy can afford it, although we really don't know what those resources are. But you're a person posting on Giant in the Playground, and Daala is a person who actually lives in that universe, was a major component of the machine that built the ships, successfully ran the Empire's remnants for years, and generally is the person on the spot. I find her conclusions far less suspect than yours.


Again, her statement, taken at face value, means that the Empire could not have constructed the Death Star under any circumstances. Since they did, she's obviously an idiot.

Hey, want another example of why she's an idiot?

The Empire constructed at least 25,000 ISDs between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Since this is a span of only about twenty years, that means, at minimum, they had to construct at least 1,250 ISDs per year to meet a number that has been stated in numerous sources. That's equivalent to ten Executor-class vessels per year. Those didn't bankrupt the Empire either.

I repeat: an organization that can't afford to build a vessel a mere hundred times the size of a normal Star Destroyer couldn't possibly build something that has 35 million times as much volume as that single "bankrupt the economy" ship and certainly not in a matter of months. Since they clearly do that in Return of the Jedi, again, the conclusion can only be that she's an idiot.



(and quite possibly the second, it may well have been underway many years before the first was finished).

Little does Luke know that the
Galactic Empire has secretly
begun construction on a new
armored space station even
more powerful than the first
dreaded Death Star.

I don't see any implication in that the DSII began construction prior to A New Hope. If anything, "has secretly begun" means that it was recently started.

Even then, let's say that we throw out the opening crawl and all of the secondary sources and go with the idea that the construction of the DSII was spread evenly out over two decades. That still requires the ability to construct one million Executors worth of the DSII's structure every year.

Under no circumstances does the "bankrupt the Empire" quote make any sense.


It could only spare 11 ships to protect the Emperor Himself at Endor.

What? There are far more than just eleven Imperial ships at Endor. Most counts put it at thirty to forty vessels, which is the local Sector Fleet's ISD allotment as well as one unknown SSD that falls between an ISD and a ESD in size.

Even then, that doesn't mean much as the Emperor is on the Death Star itself, which is worth far more ships than both sides at Endor combined. The fleet isn't even there to fight, but to box the Rebels in so the Death Star can pick them off with its superlaser.


The Emperor needed decades to build his Death Stars, the second being started shortly after the first.

The latter supposition is flatly contradicted by the opening crawl as well as events in Shadow of the Empire. Beyond that, we see plenty of statements that the second Death Star was designed to omit the fatal exhaust port as a direct result of the Battle of Yavin.



Han Solo's comment on "A thousand ships" suggests that the fleet is remarkably tiny, it's not surprising that an Empire that can't afford a full thousand vessels and takes decades of work to build a very large space station was nearly bankrupted trying to build a few large ships in a hurry that they couldn't afford.


Han Solo's full quote was "A thousand ships with more firepower than I've ever seen". The Empire is a militaristic society; so unless you're arguing that they had far less ships than either the Republic or CIS, then they had to have had more than a thousand ships.

Moreover, they didn't even use their full resources to build that very large space station; it was a secret project constructed by the population of a single prison planet.



So if I show how the ICS is blatantly contradicted by films you'll immediately vote it to be tossed out?

Considering that you're arguing that the same organization could have trouble building an ESD while still being able to build a Death Star, I'll have to decline such an offer. Besides, all Dr. Saxton did was to attach numbers sufficiently high enough to achieve feats commonly cited throughout the EU.

[factotum]

Han Solo's full quote was "A thousand ships with more firepower than I've ever seen". The Empire is a militaristic society; so unless you're arguing that they had far less ships than either the Republic or CIS, then they had to have had more than a thousand ships.


Perhaps also to the point, Han Solo was a smuggler operating on the Outer Rim territories. Chances are he'd never been into the Deep Core and seen whatever fleets were guarding Coruscant and other vital Imperial worlds, so his assessments of the Imperial Starfleet's strength are suspect in any case.

[Dervag]

Perhaps also to the point, Han Solo was a smuggler operating on the Outer Rim territories. Chances are he'd never been into the Deep Core and seen whatever fleets were guarding Coruscant and other vital Imperial worlds, so his assessments of the Imperial Starfleet's strength are suspect in any case.Well, according to his 'expanded' background, he's from Corellia, a fairly urbanized planet in the Core Worlds, has at least visited Coruscant, and was a cadet in the Imperial Navy.

On the other hand, given the sheer size of the galaxy, he might never have seen a thousand ships concentrated, and it might be virtually inconceivable that the Empire could concentrate such a large fleet without leaving vital strategic targets uncovered.

[GoC]

If Trek weapons ranges are so superior, why do they have battles with opposing ships within a stone's throw of each other as a matter of course?
I've noticed this...
Captain Picard says that the enemy ships are 500km off the enterprise's starboard bow. The camera then goes to outside the ships and it looks more like 500 meters. I don't think we can base anything off the ST visuals...


The cloaking devices won't matter if they don't allow effective harm to be done to the enemy, and again, apart from the Defiant the Federation has no cloaking devices.
I'd say sneak attacks are pretty devastating...
That reminds me, did the OP specify a time period?
The fed could have transwarp or not even have transporters depending on when the battle takes place.

Have we specified what amount of macguffins are allowed?
Has anyone ever noticed that writers don't realise that things (weight, cost, firepower, ect.) increase proportional to the cube of the length of the ship?
I remember seeing on a wiki that some ship over 2km in length only weighed 40,000tons! What on earth was it made of? It would float in earths atmosphere!:smalltongue:

btw: That asteroid certainly doesn't look like it's traveling at relatevistic speeds...


The Star Trek writers aren't very smart about some things. Science and the practical aspects of firefights among them.
So are most sci-fi writers... Including the Star Wars ones.:smallbiggrin:

In fact I'd recommend we stop trying to use consistancy and logic in this debate as the writers clearly used niether. Let's just have fun and crack a few jokes, kay?

Just because it's fun though...
Do you mean the prison asteroid Bashir, Garak, Martok and Warf were kept on? I seem to remember they teleported out to escape...


And there has to be some reason.
You said it:

that the Federation's Weapons Development Board is too stupid to realize the need for. If they knew they needed better infantry weapons they'd have improved the ergonomics of phasers a lot faster.
So, so true!
The leaders of the federation must be total morons. I think even a few modern day tanks with guided missiles would be a big help in their ground battles.

Apparently the borg can't adapt to stop projectile weapons, only energy weapons. Yes it makes no sense but hey, few things in ST/SW do!

[Hasivel]

Again, her statement, taken at face value, means that the Empire could not have constructed the Death Star under any circumstances. Since they did, she's obviously an idiot.

Hey, want another example of why she's an idiot?

The Empire constructed at least 25,000 ISDs between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Since this is a span of only about twenty years, that means, at minimum, they had to construct at least 1,250 ISDs per year to meet a number that has been stated in numerous sources. That's equivalent to ten Executor-class vessels per year. Those didn't bankrupt the Empire either.Constructed 25,000 ISDs according to the EU. You can't use the EU to prove or disprove itself.


I repeat: an organization that can't afford to build a vessel a mere hundred times the size of a normal Star Destroyer couldn't possibly build something that has 35 million times as much volume as that single "bankrupt the economy" ship and certainly not in a matter of months. Since they clearly do that in Return of the Jedi, again, the conclusion can only be that she's an idiot.That depends on the timeframe. It also depends on how the economies of scale operate, how much corruption and inefficiency intruded to alter prices at any given moment, and whether or not "Volume" is a reasonable way to judge price. Hint: Volume isn't, it's abundantly clear that the DS2, at least, had massive hollow areas inside large enough for ships to have dogfights in, and since we have no knowledge of what the parts really cost, you're just making up "facts" to support your position based entirely on random judgments of size.


Little does Luke know that the
Galactic Empire has secretly
begun construction on a new
armored space station even
more powerful than the first
dreaded Death Star.

I don't see any implication in that the DSII began construction prior to A New Hope. If anything, "has secretly begun" means that it was recently started.Actually "has secretly begun" means that they started sometime in the past, in secret. "has recently begun" would prove the point you're trying to make. There's no implication that they began construction at any time except "before." Further we see a nearly-complete deathstar, not one where it they have just begun construction, and between the beginning of the movie and the end there's no sign of apparent progress from the appearance of the Death Star 2, indicating that progress must be extraordinarily slow.


Even then, let's say that we throw out the opening crawl and all of the secondary sources and go with the idea that the construction of the DSII was spread evenly out over two decades. That still requires the ability to construct one million Executors worth of the DSII's structure every year.I see no need to throw out the opening crawl since it's fairly ambiguous. However secondary sources are merely secondary, just like Daala's comment. There's no compelling reason to take one over the other.


Under no circumstances does the "bankrupt the Empire" quote make any sense.Unless you leave out the most inflated parts of the EU.


The latter supposition is flatly contradicted by the opening crawl as well as events in Shadow of the Empire. Beyond that, we see plenty of statements that the second Death Star was designed to omit the fatal exhaust port as a direct result of the Battle of Yavin.EU. Where it contradicts itself, you keep trying to cherrypick the best parts, which is my entire beef with your line of reasoning.


Han Solo's full quote was "A thousand ships with more firepower than I've ever seen". The Empire is a militaristic society; so unless you're arguing that they had far less ships than either the Republic or CIS, then they had to have had more than a thousand ships.Actually you're adding the "Seen" onto that sentence. We really don't know what the ships would need more firepower than because the TIE fighter cut him off.

Further you're, again, drawing on the EU and calling it canon to contradict other EU in your claims of Republic military size. In fact, the movies say the entire clone army consisted of 1.2 million "Units." And in the novelization, Mace Windu both comments on the inhumanity of calling each soldier a unit, and expresses awe that an army of 1.2 million warriors could even exist. In the same vein, we know the Gungans have a "Grand Army" and EU material says the Gungans are a strongly martial race with a tradition of military power. What do they actually bring to the field? A couple of hundred foot soldiers, two or three catapults, and a dozen or so infantry mounted on giant chickens. In the Star Wars universe, this is a Grand Army.

So no, the movies clearly point to a military much, much smaller than you're trying to twist out of the EU. Over and over.


Moreover, they didn't even use their full resources to build that very large space station; it was a secret project constructed by the population of a single prison planet.Let me guess, EU material you're using to prove itself once more?


Considering that you're arguing that the same organization could have trouble building an ESD while still being able to build a Death Star, I'll have to decline such an offer. Besides, all Dr. Saxton did was to attach numbers sufficiently high enough to achieve feats commonly cited throughout the EU.Ah, so what you're really saying is, you want to cherrypick. When it comes to the weaker parts of the EU, it's "contradicting the movies." When the points are strong, the movies are full of morons.


Perhaps also to the point, Han Solo was a smuggler operating on the Outer Rim territories. Chances are he'd never been into the Deep Core and seen whatever fleets were guarding Coruscant and other vital Imperial worlds, so his assessments of the Imperial Starfleet's strength are suspect in any case.Actually the EU also says Han Solo was one of the Empire's most impressive and decorated commanders before his DD over Chewbacca. Even the novelization says he is a former officer and still wears at least one medal. Really this is just getting crazy, first Daala doesn't know what she's talking about, now Han doesn't know what he's talking about. And I suspect shortly the pro-wars folks will be claiming that Mace Windu doesn't know anything about military sizes, and Jar Jar doesn't realize anything about his own people (much less all the politicians and Jedi who agreed with him.)
Does any character in SW know what they're saying? Why are the movies so peppered with morons who have no idea what they speak of? Oh yeah, because the EU contradicts the movies so much but Cherrypickers want to keep that and throw out the movies when it will give them an advantage.

[Executor]

The leaders of the federation must be total morons. I think even a few modern day tanks with guided missiles would be a big help in their ground battles.


I tell you what they SHOULD do, they should make body armour or shields out of whatever material shipping crates are made of, because those seem to be totally impervious to phasers :smallwink:

[factotum]

Hint: Volume isn't, it's abundantly clear that the DS2, at least, had massive hollow areas inside large enough for ships to have dogfights in, and since we have no knowledge of what the parts really cost, you're just making up "facts" to support your position based entirely on random judgments of size.


When there is such a vast difference in volume then yes, it DOES become a halfway reasonable way to judge things. Unless the DS2 was nothing more than a hollow balloon--which it clearly isn't, because you can see parts of the internal structure due to its unfinished state--it MUST require many, many times more materials to construct than an Imperial Star Destroyer. Or are you saying that a supertanker must cost less to construct than a fishing trawler because the supertanker has large empty spaces inside while the trawler doesn't?

As for Star Trek combat taking place at such absurdly close ranges, it never used to be the case...watch any episode of the Original Series where there is a space battle and you never see both participants onscreen at once. You can blame Nicholas Meyer for the way modern Trek battles pan out, because he had that whole battle at the end of "The Wrath of Khan" where the Enterprise and the Reliant were essentially dogfighting with each other (some of the DVD commentaries talk about how people really didn't like that, but because the battle worked so well in the end they let it ride). That encouraged later Trek films and series to follow the same trend, because the Rule of Cool overrides any attempt to be scientifically plausible (in both Trek AND Star Wars).

Anyway, there is one indisputable fact which is utterly canonical and owes nothing to the Extended Universe: the Empire has shown the capability to build a vessel capable of utterly destroying a planet, whereas the Federation has not. The closest they came was the Genesis Device, which just remodelled the surface of a planet.

[pendell]

Ya see, I think a big mistake's being made in trying to compare the Empire to the Federation, since they're from two entirely different universes, at least one of which (SW) was written more with an eye for 'what looks cool' and 'what tells the story' vs. what is actually scientifically plausible.

So I propose we compare them on silly grounds instead.

1) Costumes. The Empire gets stormtrooper armor and rugged ships. The Feds look like they should be flight stewards or something, and their ship looks more like a luxury hotel than a warship. Advantage: Empire.

2) Embarrassing loss. An 'entire legion' of the Empire's 'best troops' got beat by three-foot-tall furballs with stone spears. Try as I might, I can't think of anything equally awful for ST. Even the time the ST Enterprise was taken over by children, they had psionic powers to offset that problem .Advantage: Star Trek.

3) Psionic abilities. Sticking strictly to the canon films, SW has Luke, Palpatine, Vader, and Leia. At their best, they can just about lift an X-wing.

By contrast, the ST universe is awash with entities of mind-croggling psionic power such that they can do instant matter teleportation, 'alter time', or whatever. Q is only the most egregious example. You've also got Charlie, whoever the silver-eyed guy in TOS episodes were, and a host more. Even normal humans evidently develop these powers and subsequently go mad with power. Any one of them could step on Palpatine with a cockroach, and handwave the DS as if it never existed. Advantage: ST

4) Accuracy. Storm Troopers can't shoot. Neither can red shirts. A ground combat would bore everyone to tears, as no one would hit anything until it was resolved by beating each other to death with sticks. Which is probably the REAL reason the Ewoks won. In a battle between two forces who can't shoot straight over a distance of five meters, any real battles must be decided between people with stone spears, and the Ewoks were simply better at that. The Empire has access to Ewoks, the Federation doesn't. Unless they use the Guardian of Forever to bring the Spartans forward in time, in which case the Spartans conquer both universes and rule unchallenged. Advantage: Empire.

5) Handwaving. The Federation does a better job of handwaving pure scientific balderdash into something halfway believable. The Empire has the planet-destroying superlaser. The Feds have replicators , holographic crew (What's up with that, anyway?) . It's clear ST writers can bury SW writers under a mountain of BS with shovels to spare. Advantage: ST.

6) Diversity sweepstakes. The Fed seems to primarily consist of humans, humans with strange foreheads, and blue humans. By contrast, The empire has sentient Calamari, whatever-that-thing Greedo was, the Hutts, Dexter, fifty bazillion kinds of sentient droids, and wookies. The Empire has a lot more different kinds of beings than the Speciesist federation. Advantage: Empire.

7) Fashion sense. The Empire evidently thinks that Leia's cinnamon buns are something a human being should be seen in. Advantage: Federation. Offsetting the Empire's advantage in costumes.

8) Universe coolness: The Federation is a world where money is obsolete. By contrast, the Empire has slave-trading, unbridled capitalism, the Trade Federation, bounty hunters like Boba Fett, and smugglers like Han and Lando. Which is the more *interesting* universe? Advantage: Empire.


Bottom line: It's pretty clear the Klingons could wipe the floor with both these pretenders and the Zerg rule all.

Tongue-in-cheek,

Brian P.

[Ker]

the Zerg rule all.

I disagree. The Protoss are obviously superior.

[sikyon]

4) Accuracy. Storm Troopers can't shoot. Neither can red shirts. A ground combat would bore everyone to tears, as no one would hit anything until it was resolved by beating each other to death with sticks. Which is probably the REAL reason the Ewoks won. In a battle between two forces who can't shoot straight over a distance of five meters, any real battles must be decided between people with stone spears, and the Ewoks were simply better at that. The Empire has access to Ewoks, the Federation doesn't. Unless they use the Guardian of Forever to bring the Spartans forward in time, in which case the Spartans conquer both universes and rule unchallenged. Advantage: Empire.

Actually Feds go pretty nitty-gritty in DS9 ground combat.

Anyhow, to respond to RP's statements about Star Trek inconsistencies on Phasers, the difference between a blaster barley wounding someone and a phaser being able to blow apart rock but only stun on a "stun" setting is consistency. Not scientific consistency, but in-universe consistency. Phasers act consistently in their properties, but blasters do not. Star Wars Power Levels rocket around alot in the movies alone, and in EU it goes nuts. And then people try to rationalize it. And then whenever a debate comes up, people start quoting low end and high end figures. With Star Wars, these figures are so distant from each other that it makes discussion pointless.

[GoC]

Anyway, there is one indisputable fact which is utterly canonical and owes nothing to the Extended Universe: the Empire has shown the capability to build a vessel capable of utterly destroying a planet, whereas the Federation has not. The closest they came was the Genesis Device, which just remodelled the surface of a planet.
No. It remodeled THE ENTIRE PLANET! Destroying anything that was there before. It even created an entirely new planet. I bet the emperor couldn't create a new one could he?:smallwink:
And they managed to mount this planet destroying weapon on a single small missile compared to the 100-500mile diameter deathstar. They decided never to use it because it was too powerful!

Anyway, number of planets destroyed: Fed-1 (and one created),SW-1 (and one asteroid)

[Deadmeat.GW]

Again, her statement, taken at face value, means that the Empire could not have constructed the Death Star under any circumstances. Since they did, she's obviously an idiot.

Hey, want another example of why she's an idiot?

The Empire constructed at least 25,000 ISDs between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Since this is a span of only about twenty years, that means, at minimum, they had to construct at least 1,250 ISDs per year to meet a number that has been stated in numerous sources. That's equivalent to ten Executor-class vessels per year. Those didn't bankrupt the Empire either.

I repeat: an organization that can't afford to build a vessel a mere hundred times the size of a normal Star Destroyer couldn't possibly build something that has 35 million times as much volume as that single "bankrupt the economy" ship and certainly not in a matter of months. Since they clearly do that in Return of the Jedi, again, the conclusion can only be that she's an idiot.



Little does Luke know that the
Galactic Empire has secretly
begun construction on a new
armored space station even
more powerful than the first
dreaded Death Star.

I don't see any implication in that the DSII began construction prior to A New Hope. If anything, "has secretly begun" means that it was recently started.

Even then, let's say that we throw out the opening crawl and all of the secondary sources and go with the idea that the construction of the DSII was spread evenly out over two decades. That still requires the ability to construct one million Executors worth of the DSII's structure every year.

Under no circumstances does the "bankrupt the Empire" quote make any sense.



What? There are far more than just eleven Imperial ships at Endor. Most counts put it at thirty to forty vessels, which is the local Sector Fleet's ISD allotment as well as one unknown SSD that falls between an ISD and a ESD in size.

Even then, that doesn't mean much as the Emperor is on the Death Star itself, which is worth far more ships than both sides at Endor combined. The fleet isn't even there to fight, but to box the Rebels in so the Death Star can pick them off with its superlaser.



The latter supposition is flatly contradicted by the opening crawl as well as events in Shadow of the Empire. Beyond that, we see plenty of statements that the second Death Star was designed to omit the fatal exhaust port as a direct result of the Battle of Yavin.



Han Solo's full quote was "A thousand ships with more firepower than I've ever seen". The Empire is a militaristic society; so unless you're arguing that they had far less ships than either the Republic or CIS, then they had to have had more than a thousand ships.

Moreover, they didn't even use their full resources to build that very large space station; it was a secret project constructed by the population of a single prison planet.



Considering that you're arguing that the same organization could have trouble building an ESD while still being able to build a Death Star, I'll have to decline such an offer. Besides, all Dr. Saxton did was to attach numbers sufficiently high enough to achieve feats commonly cited throughout the EU.

Of course there is the slight detail that the SSD's were being built in secret mostly.
Several of them were being built at the same time.

I would not put it beyond the Emperor to tell his commanders that that 'one' SSD costs x-billion creds.
And at the same time funneling off funds for the other SSD's and the second Deathstar.

Would you tell anyone who does not absolutely has to know what you have in your black book projects?

Now given there are about half a dozen SSD's who pop up about simultaneously I can see 'one' SSD cause enormous issues for the Imperial economy given the huge distractions and issues with the rebellion, keep in mind that the EU refers to a lot of the more prosperous planets throwing in with the rebels (and therefore losing revenue to the Imperials) or becoming in all but name independent kingdoms (which kept claiming they had far less revenue then they actually did, remember that pitch black SSD one of the warlords built and where people could not figure out why he only was able to built such a small fleet in his turf...except he had a fully functional SSD hiding out on his turf where nobody was aware of).

The issue is that you cannot throw out the 'bad' things or the obvious discrepancies by handwaving and claiming super armour exists.

There was super armour, it was on ONE ship and one ship only.
The Suncrusher.

Secondly, why do people think that a bigger reactor can increase the power output of a gun by a thousandfold without increasing the size, components or other material characteristics of said gun?
If we built a laser with a 5joule power output adding a system that gives it 5000 joules power and firing it is not likely to result in good things for the laser.
No engineer is going to built a weapon with a 900% redundancy and 900% spare energy handling capacity, making it that powerful potential and installing it on something that does not use that potential is a waste of time and materials.
If this would have been the case for SW SD's would not have Heavy Turbolasers, just Turbolasers since according to that theory just throwing a bigger reactor behind it would increase the power output anyway.
Heck, given that a laser cannon can increase according to this theory its damage output by 900% you would likely have just a metric ton more lasers to cover all angles more efficiently.

Thirdly, if asteroids have caves big enough to house a spaceslug, said spaceslug is the size of a blocaderunner, you cannot then claim that these asteroids are solid.


Edit:

P.s. look again...


Quote:
And looking at the Star Wars stuff several hundred megaton is not beyond the broadside weaponry the average SD has.
Of course from several hundred megaton jumping straight to close to a thousand Gigaton is a tad bit of a difference.

Not at all; the total broadside for an Acclamator's 12 medium turbolasers is 2.4 gigatons. The total broadside for the more massive Venator (which, unlike the Acclamator, isn't primarily a transport and is intended to fight against other capital ships) with its heavy turbolasers is 80 gigatons, though it could easily be ten times that if all energy were devoted to the weapon systems.

People have been claiming 200 gigatons for SD's in several of the discussions...
Not 2.4 gigatons, a tad bit more and then gone on to making a straightline increase for size for the SSD's...
Saying it would be about 4 times as powerful or more...
1000 gigatons, not 2.4 gigatons...

Tiny little difference there...

[Dervag]

I've noticed this...
Captain Picard says that the enemy ships are 500km off the enterprise's starboard bow. The camera then goes to outside the ships and it looks more like 500 meters. I don't think we can base anything off the ST visuals...OK, so if the visuals contradict what the cast says, which do we believe?


I'd say sneak attacks are pretty devastating...Yeah, but the Defiant isn't a very effective platform for delivering them. Moreover, Star Wars ships seem to keep their shields up as a routine precaution (I could be wrong here), which greatly limits the effectiveness of a surprise attack because the first enemy salvo isn't likely to destroy a powerful ship with no warning.


So are most sci-fi writers... Including the Star Wars ones.:smallbiggrin:Absolutely. However, blasters at least seem to have marginally more internally consistent effects than phasers. Blasters do pretty much the same things all the time, with the notable exception of the blaster shot that didn't kill Leia. And even that is reasonable if you assume that the stormtroopers in question were using blasters made to have the impact of a modern bullet, rather than, say, a hand grenade. Which is quite reasonable when you think about it- security troops often use lower-powered weapons than the guns you might find on the front lines.

Phasers have a dramatically inconsistent effect, disintegrating people while barely damaging metal. This can only be explained in terms of some sort of effect that doesn't do the same things to all types of matter. Which is OK, but it makes it a lot harder to come up with consistent estimates of how effective a phaser is.


In fact I'd recommend we stop trying to use consistancy and logic in this debate as the writers clearly used niether. Let's just have fun and crack a few jokes, kay?I truly wish my brain worked that way.


Just because it's fun though...
Do you mean the prison asteroid Bashir, Garak, Martok and Warf were kept on? I seem to remember they teleported out to escape...Did they do it without using any gimmicks?


Apparently the borg can't adapt to stop projectile weapons, only energy weapons. Yes it makes no sense but hey, few things in ST/SW do!What I'm getting at is that... ah, forget it. You've as much as said you're not trying to do this by logic. I shouldn't let myself get baited.


Constructed 25,000 ISDs according to the EU. You can't use the EU to prove or disprove itself.Can I use a dozen statements in the EU to disprove one statement in the EU? Can I use massively important plot-determining facts in the movies (such as the existence of a Death Star) to disprove one statement in the EU?


That depends on the timeframe. It also depends on how the economies of scale operate, how much corruption and inefficiency intruded to alter prices at any given moment, and whether or not "Volume" is a reasonable way to judge price. Hint: Volume isn't, it's abundantly clear that the DS2, at least, had massive hollow areas inside large enough for ships to have dogfights in, and since we have no knowledge of what the parts really cost, you're just making up "facts" to support your position based entirely on random judgments of size.So your argument is that the Death Star is so cheap and easy to build that it is in fact less expensive than a single super star destroyer? If so, why didn't they just build a Death Star instead?


Actually "has secretly begun" means that they started sometime in the past, in secret. "has recently begun" would prove the point you're trying to make. There's no implication that they began construction at any time except "before." Further we see a nearly-complete deathstar, not one where it they have just begun construction, and between the beginning of the movie and the end there's no sign of apparent progress from the appearance of the Death Star 2, indicating that progress must be extraordinarily slow.All the events of the movie could reasonably take place within a couple of months. During that period of time, there's no reason to expect much more visible construction of the superstructure. A lot of the work of construction on any large project occurs in the interior.


I see no need to throw out the opening crawl since it's fairly ambiguous. However secondary sources are merely secondary, just like Daala's comment. There's no compelling reason to take one over the other.

Unless you leave out the most inflated parts of the EU.OK, screw the EU. Ignore it entirely. Assume it never existed, and use only evidence from the movies for this argument about industrial capacity.

Here is my argument, and I'd like to hear where you disagree.

Assume that the Death Star 2 was roughly as expensive to build as the Death Star 1. Not more expensive, despite the fact that it appears to have been something of a rush job and that it was supposed to be even bigger and tougher than the first one. As expensive. Is that unreasonable?

Assuming that, we need to estimate the cost of the first Death Star.

Now, let us assume that when Han Solo was freaking out after the destruction of Alderaan, he was nonetheless a very accurate and unbiased observer, who was in no way inclined to overestimate how big the Death Star would have to be.

He said "it would take a thousand ships, with more firepower than I've ever [seen] [to destroy Alderaan completely]."

Some time later, the Rebel fighter pilots were briefed on the Death Star, and it was said to have "firepower greater than half the star fleet."

So, we have established that the Death Star can do the work of a thousand ships, each with more power than Han Solo had ever seen. We know Han Solo has seen Imperial star destroyers. Let's assume that star destroyers are in fact the most powerful ships he's ever seen- he's never seen a super star destroyer or any other kind of specialized 'flagship' with that kind of power.

Therefore, the Death Star must be at least as powerful as a thousand star destroyers. In fact, it is probably more powerful, as powerful as a thousand ships that are individually much stronger than a star destroyer. At a conservative estimate, say that the Death Star is as powerful as 1200 star destroyers, or 1000 ships each strong enough to overpower a single star destroyer.

In that case, such a fleet has the firepower to destroy Alderaan.

Now, during the briefing we learn that the Death Star has "firepower greater than half the star fleet." However, the general did not say that the Death Star has firepower "greater than the entire star fleet." If it did have that much power, you can bet he would have said so, rather than pointlessly underestimating the threat. And he'd seen the Death Star's blueprints, so he knew exactly how powerful it was.

So we have a Death Star that is at least as powerful as 1000 star destroyers. In fact, it must be as powerful as 1000 ships that is each stronger than a star destroyer, although we don't know how much stronger because we don't know what the most powerful ship Han has ever seen is.

This one weapon, with the power of 1000 capital ships, has firepower "greater than half the star fleet," but pretty clearly not greater than the whole star fleet. Let's assume that the general was understating the problem significantly, and that the Death Star in fact has power equal to 95% of the star fleet.

Which suggests that the Empire has a starfleet with a combined power of about 1050 of these ships that are each significantly more powerful than anything Han Solo has ever seen. In order to have that, they must have at least 1100 star destroyers, probably more. We don't know how much more, but even using the most conservative estimate they need at least a thousand ships.

Now, we have established that the Death Star has the firepower of "a thousand ships" more powerful than those Han Solo is familiar with. So it must have as much punch as a thousand star destroyers, at least. In which case it is hard to believe it could cost much less than a thousand times as much as one star destroyer. Even allowing for all possible advantages, I have a hard time seeing how it could cost less than, say, a hundred times as much as a star destroyer.

It is a fact that constructing the Death Star did not bankrupt the Empire, because they were able to build a second one and to continue military operations even after it was destroyed. Among other things, they built the Executor after the Death Star was built.

Now, unless one maintains that the Executor, a ship so much smaller than the Death Star that it staggers the mind, was more expensive than the Death Star, we must conclude that the Executor was not expensive enough to bankrupt the Empire, and that this person in the Expanded Universe was misinformed (say, by their lack of knowledge about the Imperial economy and their extreme isolation from that economy during the period when the Executor was built).


EU. Where it contradicts itself, you keep trying to cherrypick the best parts, which is my entire beef with your line of reasoning.My line of reasoning never uses the EU. How is it?


Actually you're adding the "Seen" onto that sentence. We really don't know what the ships would need more firepower than because the TIE fighter cut him off.Yeah, but you can bet it was something like "seen" or "imagined" or something. It sure wasn't going to be something like "more firepower than I've ever looked at and said whoa, that's a WEAK ship!" That would be bizarre, very bizarre.


Further you're, again, drawing on the EU and calling it canon to contradict other EU in your claims of Republic military size. In fact, the movies say the entire clone army consisted of 1.2 million "Units." And in the novelization, Mace Windu both comments on the inhumanity of calling each soldier a unit, and expresses awe that an army of 1.2 million warriors could even exist.Frankly, I'm not sure I'd call Mace Windu an experienced military strategist at this point. He grew up in an age of relative peace. The Jedi are used to planetary conflicts, like the events of Episode I. So a man like Mace Windu may grossly underestimate the number of soldiers it would take to play a decisive role in a galaxy-spanning war. On a planetary scale, 1.2 million troops drawn from the best genetic stock and trained ruthlessly for war are a big army.

Think of it as Mace Windu's paradigm shifting without a clutch, to wax Dogbertian.

Or, if that's too hard for you to believe, he may have been thinking "Whoa. 1.2 million Jango Fetts. That's a lot of really tough guys." I mean, one Jango Fett could probably have killed a 'merely average' Jedi knight, or at least been a serious threat. A million of them would undoubtedly represent more fighting power than the entire Jedi Order. Which would definitely impress Mace Windu.


In the same vein, we know the Gungans have a "Grand Army" and EU material says the Gungans are a strongly martial race with a tradition of military power. What do they actually bring to the field? A couple of hundred foot soldiers, two or three catapults, and a dozen or so infantry mounted on giant chickens. In the Star Wars universe, this is a Grand Army.First of all, you're ignoring most of that army- just look at the zoomed-out scenes where their troops are deploying and count. They have at least a few thousand soldiers on screen. Second, and more importantly, it's entirely possible that the Gungans are fooling themselves. They obviously have no spacecraft or effective anti-air weapons except for their big theater-defense shields (the ones on the dinosaur-like beasts). They may think they are great warriors, and even be very warlike people with many martial virtues, and yet be so outclassed by a professional modern military that they're as outclassed as the Scotch highlanders were at Culloden. The highlanders were certainly brave, and could definitely say they were a "fighting people." But at Culloden, the Scots painted themselves blue and charged into battle with their heavy swords; the British mowed them down with muskets and skewered them with coordinated bayonet tactics.

In fact, if you look at what actually happened in that battle, the Gungans were totally defeated. The paramilitary detachment sent to occupy this peaceful planet by a private corporation, albeit a large one, utterly routed their "grand army." Had it not been for the action of a small unit of fighter pilots who had the right kind of weapons to confront the droid army, the Gungans would have been wiped out at this point.

Now, the Trade Federation has only a tiny fraction of the worlds to draw on that the Empire does, and its army was constructed with regard to profit margin- the Trade Federation could not afford to engage in deficit spending to build up its armed forces. And yet it utterly routed all the defenses of Naboo, including the 'warlike' Gungans.


Actually the EU also says Han Solo was one of the Empire's most impressive and decorated commanders before his DD over Chewbacca. Even the novelization says he is a former officer and still wears at least one medal. Really this is just getting crazy, first Daala doesn't know what she's talking about, now Han doesn't know what he's talking about. And I suspect shortly the pro-wars folks will be claiming that Mace Windu doesn't know anything about military sizes, and Jar Jar doesn't realize anything about his own people (much less all the politicians and Jedi who agreed with him.)
Does any character in SW know what they're saying? Why are the movies so peppered with morons who have no idea what they speak of? Oh yeah, because the EU contradicts the movies so much but Cherrypickers want to keep that and throw out the movies when it will give them an advantage.In my argument, I assume that Han Solo knew exactly what he was saying. And I assume, God help me, that Jar Jar Binks knew what he was saying. I assume Mace Windu did not, but I think I am not off base in doing so- the last interstellar war large enough for a million soldiers to be a drop in the bucket was a long time ago.

[Seraph]

Would a Star Trek ship have survived this asteroid impact? With or without its shields up? I'm curious; what evidence do we have one way or the other?


I don't think it's ever happened. ST ships are, on average, so ridiculously more maneuverable than anything bigger than the Falcon in SW that they dont ever seem to get hit by anything big enough to cause serious damage. not that it matters anway; a scene in one voyager episode shows a single photon torpedo more or less shattering an Asteroid several times larger than the Voyager itself, so even if they couldn't dodge they have high-speed firepower capable of taking anything down to manageable size.




Apparently the borg can't adapt to stop projectile weapons, only energy weapons. Yes it makes no sense but hey, few things in ST/SW do!

Unlikely. they do, after all, have to interact with their environment, so their shields likely have a KE threshold above which it would activate - sort of like personal shields in Dune, which stop bullets cold but can be breached by knives. no proof, but it makes sense, and the people arguing for SW do not want character stupidity and incompitence broguht up. Ewoks, anyone?

[Renegade Paladin]

Actually, let's bring up the Ewoks. More specifically, let's bring up how they were routing until Chewbacca hijacked a scout walker.

The Ewoks were by no means defeating the stormtroopers. They gained initial tactical surprise, set off a couple of booby traps, and then began to get massacred. You may note that they were starting to run away until Chewbacca began to take out the Imperial armor and mow down stormtroopers with his captured AT-ST.

In the meantime, let's examine Star Trek ground combat. In the Siege of AR-558, Jem'Hadar troops manage to overrun a prepared Federation position at a narrow, rocky chokepoint. Modern-day troops could have easily stopped such a foolhardy assault with a squad automatic weapon or two; stormtroopers could do the same with an E-Web heavy repeating blaster such as the one they were preparing to attack the Falcon with on Hoth before it successfully lifted off. The Federation ground forces, however, have no means of stopping the attack despite the fact that the narrowness of the pass allows only one or two Jem'Hadar to pass through abreast.

The Federation has no armored vehicles whatsoever; their idea of a military vehicle is apparently an open dune buggy with a phaser cannon in the back with a field of fire encompassing only the rear arc. Walkers may be a silly design (much better to have treads, as they can't be tripped, but that's why mecha are a stupid idea in general), but they're a whole lot better than nothing at all.

Speaking of tripping, the Federation appears to have no air superiority assets at all. Close air support would have been invaluable at AR-558, yet none was in evidence.

[nothingclever]

I think I noticed a few people saying phasers are very random and inconsistent. Maybe they are but it should be known all phasers have power levels. It's common Star Trek knowledge that could explain these "inconsistencies." "Set phasers to stun" and "set phasers to kill" are phrases you hear in many many episodes. They also have several episodes where they mention multiple levels not just 2 but I'm not going to find you guys a detailed list or make one because that's a little too much effort for me.

[Seraph]

Actually, let's bring up the Ewoks. More specifically, let's bring up how they were routing until Chewbacca hijacked a scout walker.

The Ewoks were by no means defeating the stormtroopers. They gained initial tactical surprise, set off a couple of booby traps, and then began to get massacred. You may note that they were starting to run away until Chewbacca began to take out the Imperial armor and mow down stormtroopers with his captured AT-ST.

Oh, that's utter bull**** and you know it damn well. they were crushing walker after walker with goddamned logs and beating the **** out of the Empires "Best Legion" at close range, with sticks. they weren't being routed in the slightest, stormtroopers are just ****ing incompetent.


As for ground combat, consider that the Federation has hand-held weaponry with a blast effect comparable to a small fuel-air bomb. Furthermore, ground combat is useless when you have ships in orbit capable of using a wide-angle blast to kill/stun massive swaths of soldiers instantly.

[Renegade Paladin]

Oh, that's utter bull**** and you know it damn well. they were crushing walker after walker with goddamned logs and beating the **** out of the Empires "Best Legion" at close range, with sticks. they weren't being routed in the slightest, stormtroopers are just ****ing incompetent.
My my, getting a little testy there, aren't we? :smalltongue: As it stands, no, it isn't. They crushed one walker with logs and tripped another with some more logs, and were running away from the remainder. The stormtroopers were massively outnumbered (seriously, look at that clearing and see how many there actually are; it's not much), so it's no surprise that they would get initially overrun by the Ewoks, who were pouring out of the woods faster than the stormtroopers could shoot them, and it still wasn't mattering up until the walker hijacking.

As for ground combat, consider that the Federation has hand-held weaponry with a blast effect comparable to a small fuel-air bomb. Furthermore, ground combat is useless when you have ships in orbit capable of using a wide-angle blast to kill/stun massive swaths of soldiers instantly.
If they can do that, why don't they? Even so, ground combat is far from useless even if they have this capability. Urban fighting comes immediately to mind; unless the Federation wants to apply wide-angle capital ship phasers to the population of a city, they'd have to go down there and fight if it came up.

[Executor]

You know, given the fact that cargo crates seem to be totally impervious to phase fire, i'm guessing the yield on a phaser beam is just a tad bit less than that of a fuel-air bomb and that Redshirts won't be doing much to Stormtroopers. In fact, given the stormtrooper's experience with the more powerful blasters and their own, admittably illogically coloured combat armour, I can forsee a ground engagement going something like this:

Redshirt: Set phasers to kill, open fire!
Stormtrooper #1: Hey, did anyone else feel that slight breeze?
Stormtrooper #2: Nevermind that, check out those idiots in the red leotards!

On the topic of Ewoks: Indeed, they were being routed after the first few minutes. They were like the Vietcong, you see, they achieved a surprise attack, set off a few booby traps, and proceeded to be destroyed by the American/Imperial forces. The only difference is that the Vietcong didn't have a seven foot tall Wookiee hijacking armoured vehicles for them.

[Dervag]

I don't think it's ever happened. ST ships are, on average, so ridiculously more maneuverable than anything bigger than the Falcon in SW that they dont ever seem to get hit by anything big enough to cause serious damage. not that it matters anway; a scene in one voyager episode shows a single photon torpedo more or less shattering an Asteroid several times larger than the Voyager itself, so even if they couldn't dodge they have high-speed firepower capable of taking anything down to manageable size.In the Episode 'Genesis', the Enterprise fires three torpedoes with enhanced warheads into an asteroid field for testing. One misfires, and Picard orders it destroyed. However, it has already proceeded out of phaser range, and Data says:

"That would be inadvisable, sir. The asteroid field is unusually dense -- the Enterprise is too large to navigate through it safely."

You can find the script of the episode here (http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/nextgeneration/season7/tng-719.txt).

This suggests that the Enterprise cannot simply charge into an asteroid field evading or disintegrating any rocks in its path in the way that Darth Vader orders his fleet to do in the Empire Strikes Back. Of course, it may simply be that Data is more cautious than Darth Vader, and thus reluctant to risk damage to the ship that it could sustain while moving through the asteroid field. But the point remains that unless Data was totally off base and Picard was a fool to believe him (which seems absurd) Star Trek ships are clearly in at least some danger of being struck by asteroids when they enter dense concentrations of space debris.


Unlikely. they do, after all, have to interact with their environment, so their shields likely have a KE threshold above which it would activate - sort of like personal shields in Dune, which stop bullets cold but can be breached by knives. no proof, but it makes sense, and the people arguing for SW do not want character stupidity and incompitence broguht up. Ewoks, anyone?I'm not trying to use stupidity as evidence for or against anything here. I may comment on it, but only as an aside in either universe (example: why didn't anybody ever think to shoot actual physical buckshot at Jedi knights?).

The problem with that is that if the Borg cannot rework their personal shields to stop physical bullets or blades, there may well be other things they can't stop. We've seen plenty of things kill more than one Borg drone, which proves that the Borg have limits to their ability to adapt. There may be conditions that a Borg could never adapt and overcome, such as being stabbed in the chest or being dropped into a star. So you can't use the 'unlimited' Borg ability to adapt to assume that they can in fact make their personal shields immune to blasters.

Phasers seem to be heavily dependent on some sort of exotic physical effect we do not now know of, because they don't behave like any physical weapon we can imagine. Perhaps they harness subspace phenomena. Thus, it is more plausible that there is some way to screen them out completely than that the same could be achieved for things like fast-moving solid bodies or jets of plasma.


I think I noticed a few people saying phasers are very random and inconsistent. Maybe they are but it should be known all phasers have power levels. It's common Star Trek knowledge that could explain these "inconsistencies." "Set phasers to stun" and "set phasers to kill" are phrases you hear in many many episodes. They also have several episodes where they mention multiple levels not just 2 but I'm not going to find you guys a detailed list or make one because that's a little too much effort for me.Fine. But if phasers have variable power settings, why can't blasters? We know that at least one kind of blaster used by stormtroopers has a "stun setting," we see it in A New Hope. Although the stunner seems to be a totally different effect from the standard blaster, so it may just be attached to the blaster much as a grenade launcher might be attached to a modern rifle.

So we can easily explain the fact that Leia was merely injured by one blaster while other blasters blew big divots in stone walls and killed armored soldiers by hitting near them by using the exact same "multiple power settings" explanation that does so much to make sense phaser behavior.

In this case, both settings have weapons of choice that have been observed at a variety of different power levels and with a variety of different effects, and the obvious explanation is that both settings use variable-intensity or variable-effect weapons.


Oh, that's utter bull**** and you know it damn well. they were crushing walker after walker with goddamned logs and beating the **** out of the Empires "Best Legion" at close range, with sticks. they weren't being routed in the slightest, stormtroopers are just ****ing incompetent.I saw the movie a few months ago. I remember quite clearly. The Ewoks were running for their lives and getting shot left and right before Chewie saved their butts by stealing a chicken walker.

They nailed two walkers with logs. Walkers who came down prepared lanes of approach. And they weren't killing any more of them. They had managed to kill a number of stormtroopers with heavy stones and such, but they definitely were getting chewed up by blaster rifles once the stormtroopers reacted and brought their weapons into action.

Moreover, if you look at the specs given in the tech manuals and such, the AT-ST is definitely not intended as a heavily armored vehicle. It's armored against hand blasters, sure, but it isn't a tank. It's a scout transport, more like a US military Humvee than a tank or APC. So the fact that it can be taken out by, say, getting nutcrackered between a pair of 50-foot logs shouldn't be a surprise. An impact like that could kill a lot of terrestrial light armored vehicles too.

The stormtroopers walked into those traps for the same reason Western soldiers so often walked into ambushes set by native rebels- they underestimated the enemy and relied on firepower without paying close enough attention to their surroundings. That was the same kind of mistake Custer made at Little Bighorn, but the stormtroopers were still winning once they bashed their way through the inital ambush. The fact that they lost any men and vehicles at all suggests a serious screwup, but by no means worse than the kind that professional real-world militaries have made by being overconfident and underestimating the intelligence of a primitive enemy.


As for ground combat, consider that the Federation has hand-held weaponry with a blast effect comparable to a small fuel-air bomb.So how come they never used it after that one episode in TOS? Or, for that matter, used mortars of any kind at all, ever? Even in situations where it would have been extremely useful? Does it not seem more likely that the weapon was discontinued sometime after TOS than that they've been sitting on it all this time?


Furthermore, ground combat is useless when you have ships in orbit capable of using a wide-angle blast to kill/stun massive swaths of soldiers instantly.So why didn't they use such weapons at AR-588?


If they can do that, why don't they? Even so, ground combat is far from useless even if they have this capability. Urban fighting comes immediately to mind; unless the Federation wants to apply wide-angle capital ship phasers to the population of a city, they'd have to go down there and fight if it came up.With 'stun' settings, that would at least be viable, assuming capital ship phasers can be set to stun. I don't know if they can. But you could apply stunners to an urban population. They'd be really angry at you, and you'd probably miss any enemies who were disguised as civilians when you knocked them unconscious, but you'd be able to spin it well enough in your Federation-controlled media that it wouldn't create mass outrage.

[North]

Yeah the Federations "ground" forces are laughable at best.

[Dervag]

Yeah the Federations "ground" forces are laughable at best.There are historical precedents, actually.

The key thing to remember is that the Federation military-industrial complex is dominated by Starfleet. Starfleet plays a very important role in Federation politics, and it appears to have long since absorbed any other armed forces the Federation might have.

The basic unit of Starfleet is the individual ship, as in many Age of Sail navies. Each ship is an independent command. Ships may be combined into fleets under the command of flag officers, but the norm seems to be independent command (we've seen situations where even key planets like Earth have only one ship orbiting them), and not coordinated fleets that practice tactics extensively.

Now, an individual Starfleet ship, even a large one, simply cannot carry large ground combat formations. Therefore, the Starfleet focus on independent ship commands means that there will be hardly any permanent ground combat units larger than, say, a company or battalion of infantry. I am going to call the Starfleet personnel dedicated to ground combat 'marines.' In practice, they are typically identified by their bright red uniform tunics, but not all red shirts are 'marines.' Some of them do things like work transporter beams.

There's a good reason for this. No ship captain wants hundreds of large hairy men on board ship who aren't fully trained crew members. Thus, there is strong pressure by ship captains to have any 'marine' detachments aboard their ships fully trained as starship crew, even at the expense of ground combat training (which is hard to do aboard a starship anyway). So any marine detachment will tend to get assigned junior crew duties (like working the transporter or providing manpower to fill out exploratory away teams). Over time, the difference between a 'marine' and a 'sailor' will disappear, especially in a fleet that is not first and foremost a fighting navy. Starfleet has experienced long periods of peacetime for this to happen.

The practical upshot of all this is that after a century or so of evolution within Starfleet, it should come as no surprise that the soldiers Starfleet sends into ground combat are basically just sailors who were handed weapons. This practice was common in Age of Sail navies, which bear some other important organizational similarities to Starfleet. Among those similarities are the focus on the extreme power and responsibility of the individual ship commander, and the fact that most warships have to be designed to carry out a wide variety of different missions.

That worked in the Age of Sail because the duties of a crewman could be learned under pressure in a matter of months. It might take years to reach full proficiency, but there was no barrier to a given sailor acquiring both full proficiency with weapons and full proficiency as a ship's crewman.

In Starfleet, this appears not to be the case. Starfleet is a very technical armed service, and its use of unreliable technology means that virtually all Starfleet personnel have to be intimately familiar with the way Starfleet technology works. They may have to drop everything and crawl through the Jeffries tubes to fix something important at any time. Starfleet can't afford a lot of people for whom their technology is just a black box.

Therefore, there is little time to cross-train sailors as infantrymen. The need for constant drills so that Starfleet crews will know what to do in the event of a (likely) emergency and the need to keep retraining Starfleet personnel on new, exotic, or prototype technology prohibits taking out time for boot camp.

Thus, most Starfleet ground combat detachments will take the form of poorly trained naval infantry. Those kinds of people will often make 'rookie mistakes' simply because they never went through the kind of boot camp that ruthlessly pounds those mistakes out of you. There are many real life examples of this happening.

That explains why Starfleet ground soldiers tend to do things like bunch up, stand in the open and fire from the hip. Nobody ever really taught them not to, because there is no branch of Starfleet academy dedicated to providing a real infantry 'boot camp' for their marine detachments. In fact, this has been going on for so long that there probably aren't any experienced combat veterans who could write a proper manual of infantry tactics and organize a boot camp. It may be that the kind of infantry tactics we take for granted are in fact a 'lost secret' in Star Trek because the human race's military has gone through a long period in which those tactics were neither taught nor seen as very important.

This is not unreasonable, nor is it fair to say that Starfleet was 'stupid' for letting this happen. They've gone through an era of centuries of low-intensity conflicts and of high-intensity conflict that was almost entirely naval. Is it any wonder their ground tactics atrophied in that kind of situation?


Now, we have to ask why Starfleet ground troops seem to lack integral heavy weapons, with a few rare exceptions- most of them in the original series, many decades before the 'current' generation of Star Trek found in TNG, DS9, and Voyager.

Each Starfleet capital ship represents a fairly large concentration of firepower. It is armed with both formidable beam weapons and megaton-range 'nuclear' weapons (its torpedoes). The arrival of a Starfleet capital ship in orbit over your planet is a big deal, and unless you've got very strong space defenses of your own you may well have to do what it says just because it can nuke you from orbit, in which case it doesn't even have to bother sending ground troops down.

Since most permanent ground combat units are attached to starships, it's a good general rule that if there are ever a lot of Federation soldiers on your planet, it's because there's a Federation starship in orbit to back them up. You will hardly ever see a Federation ground force operating in isolation for space support.

Now, even given that this is true, it's a little surprising that Federation troops are short on heavy weapons. Heavy weapons are useful in situations where it would be foolish or pointless to try to support the ground troops with phasers from orbit.

However, most heavy weapons require extensive special training. You can't just read a "Mortars for Dummies" book and be able to use a mortar. It takes extensive practice to become familiar with the weapon. The same factors that make it hard for soldiers to train in large-scale combat exercises aboard a starship make it hard for them to train with heavy weapons (just try coordinating a company-scale field exercise where the company assaults a defended position using combined arms fire from hand weapons, machine guns, and mortars in the holodeck!).

To make matters worse for the Federation grunts, Starfleet senior officers are almost exclusively former ship captains who advanced to ship and fleet command by tracks other than ground combat. The average Federation admiral probably has very little direct experience of how hard it can be for ground troops to perform their mission without heavy weapons. Even the Starfleet captains most experienced in ground combat during the age when there were still some heavy weapons in the Starfleet ground arsenal (Captain Kirk, for instance) only used heavy weapons on a few specific occasions.

So who in Starfleet sticks up for the ground troops? Except for a few very unlucky captains who get dropped in the soup a lot (Kirk, Picard, Sisko), most Starfleet captains hardly ever need heavy weapons for ground combat because they don't have to detach ground troops into battle very often. The admirals won't, either.

And so it comes as no surprise that the Federation heavy weapon arsenal was gradually defunded. No new R&D went into developing new heavy weapons for infantry. Existing heavy weapons would have been decommissioned when their service life expired, and not replaced because there was no use for the expensive boondoggles aboard a starship. Again, this isn't something one can fairly call 'stupid.' It's the natural product of an organization that has spent hundreds of years dealing with the same basic kind of threat that doesn't require them to develop advanced infantry weapons or tactics relative to the quality of technology used in their starships.

[Innis Cabal]

one thing going against Stat Fleet is the Prime directive. It may not seem like much...but it would be a nail in their coffin from the get go. The Empire is not so peace loving

[factotum]

not that it matters anway; a scene in one voyager episode shows a single photon torpedo more or less shattering an Asteroid several times larger than the Voyager itself, so even if they couldn't dodge they have high-speed firepower capable of taking anything down to manageable size.


This brings us back to the inconsistency of Trek, because there was at least one episode where Riker states it would take the Enterprise-D's entire complement of photon torpedoes to destroy a large asteroid.


one thing going against Stat Fleet is the Prime directive. It may not seem like much...but it would be a nail in their coffin from the get go. The Empire is not so peace loving

The Prime Directive prevents the Federation from interfering with civilisations that have not achieved warp flight. OK, the Empire doesn't use warp drive, but they nonetheless have FTL travel, so the Prime Directive is irrelevant in this case.

[pendell]

In the meantime, let's examine Star Trek ground combat. In the Siege of AR-558, Jem'Hadar troops manage to overrun a prepared Federation position at a narrow, rocky chokepoint. Modern-day troops could have easily stopped such a foolhardy assault with a squad automatic weapon or two; stormtroopers could do the same with an E-Web heavy repeating blaster such as the one they were preparing to attack the Falcon with on Hoth before it successfully lifted off. The Federation ground forces, however, have no means of stopping the attack despite the fact that the narrowness of the pass allows only one or two Jem'Hadar to pass through abreast.

The Federation has no armored vehicles whatsoever; their idea of a military vehicle is apparently an open dune buggy with a phaser cannon in the back with a field of fire encompassing only the rear arc. Walkers may be a silly design (much better to have treads, as they can't be tripped, but that's why mecha are a stupid idea in general), but they're a whole lot better than nothing at all.

Speaking of tripping, the Federation appears to have no air superiority assets at all. Close air support would have been invaluable at AR-558, yet none was in evidence.


This brings up a point ... it seems as if there really isn't any ground combat in the ST universe.

The standard pattern seems to be a duel in space between vessels armed with nuclear weapons. Once the defenders are eliminated and the orbital defenses are down, the invaders don't bother landing on the planet.

Why should they? Consider how many troops it would take to conventionally conquer a single world, given the tech shown on Star Trek. They would have to build an army of millions for even one planet. And in an interstellar campaign, you have to conquer *many* planets.

So they don't bother. Instead, it seems as if they simply issue a 'surrender or be utterly annihilated' directive. If they can't trust the other side to surrender, they just annihilate the planet anyway.

In such an environment, the major use for ground troops would be security duty at installations or spaceports, and special ops raids to do the usual thing like hostage rescue, raid, sabotage, etc. So you'd have a very small force of elite commandos whose job is to do such things, supplemented by poorly armed redshirts whose job is to stand watch and provide basic security. Why do you need more?

This might also explain the pacifist bent of the Federation in ST. When "Space War" -- even a winning space war -- means you have to train up starship captains and crews who are ready and willing to consign entire planets full of sapients to nuclear fire -- it makes sense that you would try to avoid those conflicts if possible.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Renegade Paladin]

I doubt the Federation would nuke planets into submission, because they really don't have to. If it comes down to it, they can destroy the planet's orbital facilities, including orbiting ships, shipyards, and space stations, and then go on their merry way. The world is unconquered, but unable to pose a threat, and that's all the Federation cares about.

[factotum]

The world is unconquered, but unable to pose a threat, and that's all the Federation cares about.

Some starships have been seen as capable of landing on a planetary surface (Voyager, the Klingon BOP from Star Trek III), so just taking out the orbiting stuff does NOT mean the threat of the planet is completely removed. In addition, how long would it take the planet to rebuild the space infrastructure? If they were a big enough threat to be targeted in the first place, leaving them be once you've removed their stations is not likely to be a good idea.

[GoC]

OK, so if the visuals contradict what the cast says, which do we believe?
Neither. Just stop debating. It won't get anywhere.


Yeah, but the Defiant isn't a very effective platform for delivering them. Moreover, Star Wars ships seem to keep their shields up as a routine precaution (I could be wrong here), which greatly limits the effectiveness of a surprise attack because the first enemy salvo isn't likely to destroy a powerful ship with no warning.
*adds this to his database*


I truly wish my brain worked that way.
Not sure what you mean there.


Did they do it without using any gimmicks?
They didn't mention any and they had no engineers...


What I'm getting at is that... ah, forget it. You've as much as said you're not trying to do this by logic. I shouldn't let myself get baited.
That was... unnecessary.


Which would definitely impress Mace Windu.
I must respectfuly disagree here. Badass Mace Windu would wipe out any army of redshirts!:smallbiggrin:


The Prime Directive prevents the Federation from interfering with civilisations that have not achieved warp flight. OK, the Empire doesn't use warp drive, but they nonetheless have FTL travel, so the Prime Directive is irrelevant in this case.
It also says no WMDs.

[Seraph]

It also says no WMDs.


What? no, seroiusly, what? It says no such thing. all the prime Directive says is that a federation ship may not interfere with a pre-FTL culture, unless said culture fits the definition of an Arrested Culture. the Federation may very well have laws against WMDs, but none have been observed, and such a law is cast into doubt by the existence of general Order 24, which mandates the destruction of all life on a planet.

really, I think you're just doing an Ass-pull now.

[GoC]

What? no, seroiusly, what? It says no such thing. all the prime Directive says is that a federation ship may not interfere with a pre-FTL culture, unless said culture fits the definition of an Arrested Culture. the Federation may very well have laws against WMDs, but none have been observed, and such a law is cast into doubt by the existence of general Order 24, which mandates the destruction of all life on a planet.

really, I think you're just doing an Ass-pull now.

Huh?
I'm almost certain that biological weapons (the only type of WMD in StarTrek) were banned...
Damn. You're right. It was stated in that agreement based on the geneva convention not the prime directive (the one the klingons temporarily pulled out of in DS9). My point still stands though.

EDIT: Just remembered. They were pronounced The Kitimur Accords (no idea on spelling).

[Seraph]

Huh?
I'm almost certain that biological weapons (the only type of WMD in StarTrek) were banned...
Damn. You're right. It was stated in that agreement based on the geneva convention not the prime directive (the one the klingons temporarily pulled out of in DS9). My point still stands though.

EDIT: Just remembered. They were pronounced The Kitimur Accords (no idea on spelling).


The Khitomer accords do ban biological and subspace weapons, but Bioweapons are probably banned because of excess cruelty and Subspace weapons are banned specifically because they're too unpredictable to be safely deployed. As I said before, though, General Order 24 shows that Starfleet is willing and capable of glassing a planet, if not through WMDs then through sheer firepower.

[Dervag]

Some starships have been seen as capable of landing on a planetary surface (Voyager, the Klingon BOP from Star Trek III), so just taking out the orbiting stuff does NOT mean the threat of the planet is completely removed. In addition, how long would it take the planet to rebuild the space infrastructure? If they were a big enough threat to be targeted in the first place, leaving them be once you've removed their stations is not likely to be a good idea.Well, you can always bomb any ships on the ground from orbit. Or any industrial facilities capable of making such ships.


I must respectfuly disagree here. Badass Mace Windu would wipe out any army of redshirts!:smallbiggrin:Sure. I'll grant that Mace Windu could certainly kill scores, or even hundreds, of clone troopers. Unfortunately, there's over a million of them. If nothing else, his arms would get tired.

Besides, these clones are at least supposed to be identical copies of one of the greatest non-Jedi warriors the galaxy has ever known. That doesn't make them individually a match for a Jedi master, but it makes them a credible threat, even to masters. Look at how hard Obi-Wan had to fight against Jango Fett on Kamino. Now imagine an entire army of guys like that, and you see why a Jedi master might get a little nervous.


The Khitomer accords do ban biological and subspace weapons, but Bioweapons are probably banned because of excess cruelty and Subspace weapons are banned specifically because they're too unpredictable to be safely deployed. As I said before, though, General Order 24 shows that Starfleet is willing and capable of glassing a planet, if not through WMDs then through sheer firepower.Is General Order 24 still part of Starfleet's standing orders? A lot of other things have changed since the era of Captain Kirk, and the Federation is considerably more pacifist than it was then. Are there any references to it in any of the newer series?

Moreover, according to Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Starfleet_regulations), GO-24 has never actually been carried out, but was instead used as a massive bluff by the only sane commander ever to order it (Kirk).

[Seraph]

Is General Order 24 still part of Starfleet's standing orders? A lot of other things have changed since the era of Captain Kirk, and the Federation is considerably more pacifist than it was then. Are there any references to it in any of the newer series?

Moreover, according to Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Starfleet_regulations), GO-24 has never actually been carried out, but was instead used as a massive bluff by the only sane commander ever to order it (Kirk).

I don't see why not. Starfleet has had a recent upswing in Armed Conflicts, and the need may always come up. And while GO-24 was only used bluffingly by kirk, the fact that another captain, sane or otherwise, seriously planned to enact it, shows that a TOS-era ship was capable of devastating a planetary biosphere. 24th century ships have significantly greater firepower, showing it to be possible.

edit: missed the last part of the first paragraph. no, GO24 is never directly referenced, but in one episode of DS9 Sisko is perfectly willing to wipe out all life on a maquis world with an augmented Quantum Torpedo, with the justification of Hostility, which meets to known definition of GO24 (Authorization to kill all life on a planet if inhabitants of said planet are engeged in hostilities against the Federation)

[factotum]

24th century ships have significantly greater firepower, showing it to be possible.


Ah, but we have the example from Deep Space 9 where the Cardassians and Romulans got together and sent an enormous fleet through the wormhole in order to wipe out the Founders once and for all. Of course, it turned out to be a Founder ploy to gather those fleets in one place so they could be destroyed, but nonetheless, it took the entire firepower of two major civilisations to wipe out a fraction of a planet's biosphere. That doesn't necessarily mean that a single ship couldn't do the same job, but it would take a heck of a long time!

[Joran]

Ah, but we have the example from Deep Space 9 where the Cardassians and Romulans got together and sent an enormous fleet through the wormhole in order to wipe out the Founders once and for all.

Technically, these were the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order, the intelligence arms of those respective civilizations, neither of which are supposed to have ships. They only sent 20, which is half of the number of ships lost at Wolf 359. Those 20 ships had enough firepower to destroy the planet's crust in 1 hour and planet's mantle in 5 hours.


GO24 is never directly referenced, but in one episode of DS9 Sisko is perfectly willing to wipe out all life on a maquis world with an augmented Quantum Torpedo

Sisko, I don't believe, was trying to kill everyone on that planet. Instead, he forced a quick evacuation of the planet and he threatened to do it to every other Maquis planet. The ploy was to get Michael Eddington to stop poisoning Cardassian worlds in the same manner. Nobody died as far as I could tell, but entire planets were made uninhabitable in this manner.

[Theodoriph]

The Defiant can cut a planet in half with its phasers as per Heart of a Warrior.

[LordVader]

I really wish Star Wars had consistently established their weapons' powers. Turbolasers according to various technical things should be able to rip planets apart, but they then fail to harm an unshielded SD.

I've gotta throw my weight behind the Empire here for 2 reasons.
1) The Empire is bigger, they have vastly superior FTL and in general a HUGE amount of resources to draw on.

2) The Empire has dedicated ground combat forces, enabling them to easily wrestle control of WORLDS, and not the space around them, away from the Federation. The Federation's only answer to this is to glass their own planets----> no go.

Star Wars planets also seem to have far superior defense systems to Star Trek ones, the main thing here being the Planetary Shield, which is commonplace and extremely effective provided it can be raised for the attack.

[Executor]

The Defiant can cut a planet in half with its phasers as per Heart of a Warrior.

Is that an episode? Book? Comic? What? Again we come to this 'cut planet in half' thing, where does that come from? Who states it? Is it ever demonstrated? Until we receive some canon evidence of this capability, the Empire has superior firepower due to their canonized ability to slag planets at will.

[Seraph]

2) The Empire has dedicated ground combat forces, enabling them to easily wrestle control of WORLDS, and not the space around them, away from the Federation. The Federation's only answer to this is to glass their own planets----> no go.

who says they need to glass planets? ST ships are canonically able to wide-angle stun entire armies from orbit. all the positive effects of glassing without having to destroy your own resources.

[Executor]

If the Federation can do that from orbit, why don't they? I have never heard of a single incident of that happening. In AR-558, why didn't the starships support those poor, poor Redshirts? I'm also fairly sure that starship phasers undergo something called "Exponential loss of power per unit of area" which is why they always fire in narrow beams and never sweep enemy fleets with wide angle fire.

[LordVader]

who says they need to glass planets? ST ships are canonically able to wide-angle stun entire armies from orbit. all the positive effects of glassing without having to destroy your own resources.

The Empire has ground-based shield generators.

So no-go on the stunning, especially when Imperial capital ships are far more powerful and numerous than that pathetic heap of junk you call a navy. :smallbiggrin:

It's a bit difficult to wide-angle stun an army from orbit if all you have in orbit is wrecked hulks venting air.

[Seraph]

The Empire has ground-based shield generators.

Not particularly useful when you're on the march and unable to set one up. or, you know, you get hit the moment your troop transports touch down.




So no-go on the stunning, especially when Imperial capital ships are far more powerful and numerous than that pathetic heap of junk you call a navy. :smallbiggrin:

It's a bit difficult to wide-angle stun an army from orbit if all you have in orbit is wrecked hulks venting air.

you have to hit them first. And let's be honest, here, Imperial marksmanship has difficulty hitting a capital ship that's just sitting in space, what makes you think they'll be able to hit something with the maneuverability of a fighter and a few thousand times greater the firepower?

[LordVader]

Considering that the Imperials can put up, oh, I don't know, one thousand capital-class ships for one Federation ship, they shouldn't have too much trouble putting enough firepower into space to hit the Federation ship.

And they don't have to kill it to drive it out of orbit. If you're forced to flee orbit to stay alive, you're still not killing troops on the ground.

Or, failing that, they can send droids down to set up shield generators first.

[Theodoriph]

Is that an episode? Book? Comic? What? Again we come to this 'cut planet in half' thing, where does that come from? Who states it? Is it ever demonstrated? Until we receive some canon evidence of this capability, the Empire has superior firepower due to their canonized ability to slag planets at will.

It's from a book, a description of the Defiant's capabilities. Consider it as being on the EU canon level.





LUCAS: I don't read that stuff. I haven't read any of the novels. I don't know anything about that world. That's a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions.





As for the wide-beam phaser stun from orbit you were asking about, I checked Wiki and that happened in the episode A piece of the Action in TOS.

[Ker]

It's from a book, a description of the Defiant's capabilities. Consider it as being on the EU canon level.

Paramount's canon policy is that only the movies and TV shows are canon, no books. Lucasarts allows books to be canon. The canon policy of the company that has ownership of the universe is used in debates. Therefore ST books are discounted.

[Theodoriph]

Paramount's canon policy is that only the movies and TV shows are canon, no books. Lucasarts allows books to be canon. The canon policy of the company that has ownership of the universe is used in debates. Therefore ST books are discounted.


STARLOG:

The Star Wars Universe is so large and diverse. Do you ever find yourself confused by the subsidiary material that's in the novels, comics, and other offshoots?

LUCAS:

I don't read that stuff. I haven't read any of the novels. I don't know anything about that world. That's a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions.


STARLOG:

'Yet novelists have written "Star Wars" sequels using the same characters and extending their stories.'

LUCAS:

"Oh, sure. They're done outside of my little universe. ”Star Wars” has had a lot of different lives that have been worked on by a lot of other people. It works without me."


...which are the exact same thoughts as Gene Roddenberry with respect to the books etc.


So I'll discount SW books. According to the Man, they're not part of his universe. It's an alternate universe, like the ST books.

So...films and episodes it is :smallsmile:

[LordVader]

We're talking about Film Empire anyways, so it's good.

However, let's get it firmly established that Imperial personnel are in fact, crack shots. As they should be. :smallwink:

[Theodoriph]

We're talking about Film Empire anyways, so it's good.

However, let's get it firmly established that Imperial personnel are in fact, crack shots. As they should be. :smallwink:


Ah and here I thought I previously saw references to Thrawn, weapon power levels and Star Destroyers slagging planets and such :smalltongue:

[LordVader]

Even if we assume SDs are at movie power levels, they're still perfectly capable of slagging planets, provided you have a decent amount and some time.

They can't destroy the planet, but they can wipe out all of the population centers and utterly raze all of the infrastructure.

[Seraph]

They can't destroy the planet, but they can wipe out all of the population centers and utterly raze all of the infrastructure.


by the time they get close to doing this, however, Starfleet will show up and start dropping teratons worth of photon torpedo volleys on the Imperial fleet.

[LordVader]

Heh. Right.

All 500 ships of them. Indeed. *snickers* :smallamused:

The Empire simply has too many ships for the Federation to deal with. They don't need to worry about losses, they can just spray fire into an area and rely on it to hit.

I'm also curious as to how slow-as-molasses Star Trek (in relation to ZOMG FAST SW) FTL will enable the cavalry to charge to the rescue of this planet when it'll take a few weeks in transit to get there! :smallbiggrin:

[Seraph]

Heh. Right.

All 500 ships of them. Indeed. *snickers* :smallamused:

The Empire simply has too many ships for the Federation to deal with. They don't need to worry about losses, they can just spray fire into an area and rely on it to hit.

I'm also curious as to how slow-as-molasses Star Trek (in relation to ZOMG FAST SW) FTL will enable the cavalry to charge to the rescue of this planet when it'll take a few weeks in transit to get there! :smallbiggrin:

your assumption of SW speed depends on the SW galaxy being the same or comparable size to the milky way. this comes into doubt when you remember that the Millenium Falcon managed to get from Hoth/Deep Space to Bespin in a short time, without any kind of time dilation or decades passing by. So, No, I don't think hyperdrive is as fast as you think, its just that things are a lot closer together.


As for "Spray fire into an area", that has trouble working in space. It's a good bit bigger than you think, and ST ships are canonically able to hit people from 300,000 kilometers range.

[Joran]

So why don't they use time travel to solve all their problems, or at least more of them? If they could use time travel to nullify an enemy so easily, wouldn't they be doing so all the time (so to speak)?

Temporal Investigations doesn't like that; the Federation has a Temporal Prime Directive. Now, if the Federation government was in shambles, I don't think they would mind if a rogue starship traveled back in time to save the Federation by closing the wormhole. Time travel really is cheating in this one.

On that note, does the Krenim temporal weapon ship (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Krenim_temporal_weapon_ship) beat out the assorted Imperial superweapons for most overpowered superweapon? It not only destroys planets but removes them from the timestream so entire civilizations never existed.

[Executor]

Wookieepedia give The Star Wars Galaxy a size of 120,000 light years across, counting nothing for depth or circumference. Our own Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. So, no, that argument doesn't fly. Hyperdrive is vastly faster than Warp Drive.

[Seraph]

Wookieepedia give The Star Wars Galaxy a size of 120,000 light years across, counting nothing for depth or circumference. Our own Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. So, no, that argument doesn't fly. Hyperdrive is vastly faster than Warp Drive.

you want that argument to work? source it with a quote, best served from a movie.

[LordVader]

As for "Spray fire into an area", that has trouble working in space. It's a good bit bigger than you think, and ST ships are canonically able to hit people from 300,000 kilometers range.

300,000 kilometers?

Do a minijump. Once you pop out of hyper right on top of the Star Trek vessels, proceed to tractor beam them and pound them into oblivion. Done.

Failing that, simply laugh off the pathetic attempts of the puny Star Trek vessels to knock down your capital ship's shields. :smallcool:

Seraph, there is no quote in the movie regarding the size of the SW galaxy. So we have to go to EU on this one.

Also, Seraph: Do they ever state "Engaging the enemy at 300,000 klicks" in a Star Trek episode? Because the visuals on-screen are obviously not that far, in fact they look to be a few kilometres apart at once. If Star Wars is bound to movie appearances, Star Trek is bound to TV show appearances.

[Seraph]

300,000 kilometers?

Do a minijump. Once you pop out of hyper right on top of the Star Trek vessels, proceed to tractor beam them and pound them into oblivion. Done.

minijumps don't work that way. Canon shows that hyperdrive takes time to calculate, and warp can activate faster. Also, ST ships can attack targets while at warp, whereas SW vessels have the issue of being in another dimension at the time.

Also, however powerful you think SW shields are, they aren't going to just shrug off ST attacks. A Photon torpedo packs at least 75 megatons in each hit, more likely 100 at a bare minimum. a single torpedo launcher can fire four torpedoes in under a second, and most ships have about 5. that's, what, 1500 megatons every salvo, from an average ship? This isn't counting Quantums, which are just ridiculous cheese, or Akira class missileboats, which have a visually confirmed minimum of 14 torpedo launchers. Plus phasers, Plus vastly superior maneuverability.

EDIT: got some SI prefixes mixed up, my bad.

[Tyrant]

Those 20 ships had enough firepower to destroy the planet's crust in 1 hour and planet's mantle in 5 hours.

It's been a while since I saw the episode, but I was pretty sure that they only exposed the mantle, not destroyed it. Also, unless I am misremembering (possible, I admit) those ships were shown to be completely stationary the entire time and only focusing on whichever bit of the planet was directly in front of them spreading damage at the rate of planetary rotation. And I am quite sure they were running low on weapons at the end of that 5 hours.

Their tactics were awful. It took them all that time to even consider that it was a trap. They slag a reasonable portion of the planet's surface and the lifesigns never significantly decreased (because it was a trap and they were being faked by apparently impervious devices) and it took 5 hours for them to even consider this might be a set up. This was the intelligence branches of two seperate powers who routinely give the Federation problems. I believe this speaks quite poorly of the capabilities (military and intelligence) of the Star Trek powers.


who says they need to glass planets? ST ships are canonically able to wide-angle stun entire armies from orbit. all the positive effects of glassing without having to destroy your own resources.

They also canonically don't have the common sense/will to use the majority of super tactics at their disposal.


As for "Spray fire into an area", that has trouble working in space. It's a good bit bigger than you think, and ST ships are canonically able to hit people from 300,000 kilometers range.

They also, canonically, choose to engage at far closer distances in roughly 95% of all space combat situations.


Also, however powerful you think SW shields are, they aren't going to just shrug off ST attacks. A Photon torpedo packs at least 75 megatons in each hit, more likely 100 at a bare minimum.

Source? Sounds an awful lot like something that isn't crystal clear as you seem to demand everything from SW to be. I need episode number and time stamp where this is clearly spelled out, not merely implied. Not to mention, since you disallow any source citing power levels of SW, you have no clue how strong their shields are. One could quite easily argue they could shrug off anything from Star Trek as we apparently have no hard data. Of course you could reverse engineer a calculation based on the Superlaser and the comment of the Death Star having greater firepower than half the star fleet. Of course we have no idea how many ships the Empire has despite it being fairly consistant in the EU. The EU is canon, get over it.

[GoC]

Sure. I'll grant that Mace Windu could certainly kill scores, or even hundreds, of clone troopers. Unfortunately, there's over a million of them. If nothing else, his arms would get tired.

I'm talking about CN Mace Windu. He doesn't get tired.:smallwink:

[Ker]

STARLOG:

The Star Wars Universe is so large and diverse. Do you ever find yourself confused by the subsidiary material that's in the novels, comics, and other offshoots?

LUCAS:

I don't read that stuff. I haven't read any of the novels. I don't know anything about that world. That's a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions.


STARLOG:

'Yet novelists have written "Star Wars" sequels using the same characters and extending their stories.'

LUCAS:

"Oh, sure. They're done outside of my little universe. ”Star Wars” has had a lot of different lives that have been worked on by a lot of other people. It works without me."


...which are the exact same thoughts as Gene Roddenberry with respect to the books etc.


So I'll discount SW books. According to the Man, they're not part of his universe. It's an alternate universe, like the ST books.

So...films and episodes it is :smallsmile:

But Lucas has approved the books, comics, (unfortunately the ewok adventures) and games as Star Wars canon.



Also, however powerful you think SW shields are, they aren't going to just shrug off ST attacks. A Photon torpedo packs at least 75 megatons in each hit, more likely 100 at a bare minimum.

Current calcs put photons at 64 megatons and quantums at 128. And SW shields are designed to resist minutes of heavy fire from 200 gigaton weapons batteries. I think they could shrug off ST torps.

(On a side note, Firefox's dictionary doesn't recognize gigaton.)

[Seraph]

Source? Sounds an awful lot like something that isn't crystal clear as you seem to demand everything from SW to be. I need episode number and time stamp where this is clearly spelled out, not merely implied. Not to mention, since you disallow any source citing power levels of SW, you have no clue how strong their shields are. One could quite easily argue they could shrug off anything from Star Trek as we apparently have no hard data. Of course you could reverse engineer a calculation based on the Superlaser and the comment of the Death Star having greater firepower than half the star fleet. Of course we have no idea how many ships the Empire has despite it being fairly consistant in the EU. The EU is canon, get over it.

Simple matter of scaling.

1) Voyager episode, a single torpedo is fired at an asteroid.

2)Said asteroid is named as being made of real-world materials.

3)Comparison of the torpedo next to the Voyager's hull, then compared to the asteroid in the frame before impact. from this, you can compare the size of the asteroid to the size of the voyager. Voyager's dimensions are well-established, and so from that the size of the asteroid can be established.

3)By extrapolating the size of the asteroid, and guessing the structure of the asteroid to be similar to those in real life, it's a simple issue of math to figure out just how much power is needed for the desired effect. to achieve the Desired effect, and absolute minimum of 75 megatons would be necessary.

I find the ICS to be bull**** because the ICS is bull****. It has all the in-universe support of a child's crayon drawing, and was written by a long-time pro-SW debater with nothing but Concept art and a grudge.



If you want to talk tactics, by the way, then the concept of massed, wall-of-turbolaser-fire firing clearly can't be effective, seeing as it's never used in the movies.

[Ker]

I find the ICS to be bull**** because the ICS is bull****. It has all the in-universe support of a child's crayon drawing, and was written by a long-time pro-SW debater with nothing but Concept art and a grudge.


However, it's still canon.

[Seraph]

However, it's still canon.


yet contradicted by the movies.

[Joran]

Do they ever state "Engaging the enemy at 300,000 klicks" in a Star Trek episode? Because the visuals on-screen are obviously not that far, in fact they look to be a few kilometres apart at once. If Star Wars is bound to movie appearances, Star Trek is bound to TV show appearances.

Oy. Are we going to get into discussions about how X-Wings can "bank" in space with no air? Fictional depictions of space battles almost always get them wrong, especially for dramatic effect and limitations in technology.

The Battle of Wolf 359 (from DS9) is a very static looking affair since the fight was done with models. Later on, in First Contact, ships are moving around , explosions are bigger, simply because of CG and a larger budget.

Also, the writers often time have issues with three-dimensional thinking (like Khan). Too many times have I seen Star Trek officers order a ship to block another ship... Can't you just go around them? Also, ships are always in visual range of each other, because dog fights are more visually dramatic.

[Seraph]

300,000 kilometer range was shown in an episode of TNG, when a rogue Starfleet ship one-shotted a Cardassian ship at that range.

[Tyrant]

Simple matter of scaling.

1) Voyager episode, a single torpedo is fired at an asteroid.

2)Said asteroid is named as being made of real-world materials.

3)Comparison of the torpedo next to the Voyager's hull, then compared to the asteroid in the frame before impact. from this, you can compare the size of the asteroid to the size of the voyager. Voyager's dimensions are well-established, and so from that the size of the asteroid can be established.

3)By extrapolating the size of the asteroid, and guessing the structure of the asteroid to be similar to those in real life, it's a simple issue of math to figure out just how much power is needed for the desired effect. to achieve the Desired effect, and absolute minimum of 75 megatons would be necessary.

This sounds quite similar to the method used to figure the point guns hitting power using ESB with the only real difference being that Trek specifically named the material whereas Wars assumes that it is what it appears to be. You know, kind of like how you are assuming that asteroid in Voyager is like one in real life as well. Is this the pot or the kettle we are calling black?


I find the ICS to be bull**** because the ICS is bull****. It has all the in-universe support of a child's crayon drawing, and was written by a long-time pro-SW debater with nothing but Concept art and a grudge.
Sounds like a personal problem to me.



If you want to talk tactics, by the way, then the concept of massed, wall-of-turbolaser-fire firing clearly can't be effective, seeing as it's never used in the movies.

I seem to recall the Death Star firing lots of turbolasers when the Rebels attacked along with Star Destroyers chasing the Falcon in ESB. Not a wall of lasers in the second case as they were trying to not destroy them. They did employ a wall of laser firing fighters in RotJ to keep the Rebel ships at bay while it was very specifically noted the Star Destroyers weren't attacking at all.

Also, I noticed you completely dodged the canon fact that Starfleet is apparently run by incompotent morons who forget technology and tatics a minute after their wonder engineers devise them. Or the fact that despite massive potential range they choose in virtually every conflict to engage at point blank range.

[Dervag]

I don't see why not. Starfleet has had a recent upswing in Armed Conflicts, and the need may always come up. And while GO-24 was only used bluffingly by kirk, the fact that another captain, sane or otherwise, seriously planned to enact it, shows that a TOS-era ship was capable of devastating a planetary biosphere. 24th century ships have significantly greater firepower, showing it to be possible.Oh, I never doubted that a Federation ship could do that. They do carry dozens upon dozens of multimegaton-range 'nuclear' weapons, after all.

Whether their torpedo payload is up to the task of reducing a planetary surface to glass or to a crater field... I doubt it. That would take a lot of weapons with the approximate yield of a photon torpedo. But they could easily induce a nuclear winter, wreck all a planet's major urban centers, and otherwise cause the downfall of a planetary civilization.


edit: missed the last part of the first paragraph. no, GO24 is never directly referenced, but in one episode of DS9 Sisko is perfectly willing to wipe out all life on a maquis world with an augmented Quantum Torpedo, with the justification of Hostility, which meets to known definition of GO24 (Authorization to kill all life on a planet if inhabitants of said planet are engeged in hostilities against the Federation)OK. Fair enough. Whether or not the code name "GO24" was retained, the idea that the Federation reserves the right to commit genocide against the population of a hostile planet remains.

Note that this is by no means a unique criticism applied only to the Federation; the Galactic Empire with its "Base Delta Zero" command reserves a very similar right.


Technically, these were the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order, the intelligence arms of those respective civilizations, neither of which are supposed to have ships. They only sent 20, which is half of the number of ships lost at Wolf 359. Those 20 ships had enough firepower to destroy the planet's crust in 1 hour and planet's mantle in 5 hours.What were they planning to do it with?


The Defiant can cut a planet in half with its phasers as per Heart of a Warrior.When I did a google search for that, I got hits referring to a romance novel, not a Star Trek episode. Could you provide me with a link?

Also, we've seen a lot of cases where a capital ship phaser flatly did not do enough damage to an unshielded target to cut a planet in half. Based on the principle that many pieces of evidence outweigh one contradictory piece, I would say that a Star Trek capital ship is no more capable of cutting a planet in half than an Imperial Star Destroyer is*.

*i.e. not.


who says they need to glass planets? ST ships are canonically able to wide-angle stun entire armies from orbit. all the positive effects of glassing without having to destroy your own resources.What blocks a 'stun' phaser setting? Shields? The Imperials may not be able to set up shields on the fly, but if they can establish space superiority even for a short while, their stormtroopers will be able to sieze a foothold on the planet and set up shields and surface-to-orbit defenses like the ones the Rebel base on Hoth had.

Such defensive shields are proven immune to capital ship bombardment, so I suspect that wide-angle stunners fired from orbit would be useless against them. Meanwhile, the Imperials would be free to shoot back at the starship firing the stun beam using heavy ground-based weapons (like the ion cannon from The Empire Strikes Back).

To win in that situation, the Federation would have two choices. They could choose to launch a ground assault by physically marching troops through the shield a la Hoth. But that isn't a good situation for them, because the Federation has little experience in large-scale ground battles and very few heavy weapons. Their troops would have to get to very close range for their hand phasers to be effective, and they'd be under fire from walkers and heavy weapons all the way. It would be very hard for Federation ground troops to win an offensive like the battle of Hoth, especially if the Imperials have more heavy weapons than the Rebels did at Hoth.

Or the Feds could employ enough firepower from orbit to collapse the shield (requiring at the least a massive salvo of photon torpedoes or very prolonged bursts of phaser fire). That amount of firepower would probably ruin a planetary ecosystem, triggering nuclear winter and other environmental disasters. Again, not good, and not the kind of thing the Federation likes to do.


you have to hit them first. And let's be honest, here, Imperial marksmanship has difficulty hitting a capital ship that's just sitting in space, what makes you think they'll be able to hit something with the maneuverability of a fighter and a few thousand times greater the firepower?Imperial gunnery in capital ship duels has about the same track record as Federation gunnery in capital ship duels. When firing at long visual ranges against targets with sizes of a hundred meters or more, they have some misses, but a very large fraction of shots fired will hit their targets. If the Federation can hit the star destroyers, the Imperials can hit the Galaxy-classes.


Considering that the Imperials can put up, oh, I don't know, one thousand capital-class ships for one Federation ship, they shouldn't have too much trouble putting enough firepower into space to hit the Federation ship.You're overstating your case here. While the Imperials can theoretically send a fleet that outnumbers the Federation navy, they can't send one that outnumbers that fleet by a large margin unless they either draw a lot of ships away from their home galaxy (which they won't do two years after Yavin, when this takes place), or unless they radically step up their shipbuilding programs.


So I'll discount SW books. According to the Man, they're not part of his universe. It's an alternate universe, like the ST books.

So...films and episodes it is :smallsmile:I, for one, can live without them.


by the time they get close to doing this, however, Starfleet will show up and start dropping teratons worth of photon torpedo volleys on the Imperial fleet.Well, assuming they have days or weeks to answer the call, yes. Which they might not. And if the Imperial ships feel outgunned, they can always flee into hyperspace faster than Trek ships can pursue. As for the firepower, you're exaggerating a little.

To quote Memory Alpha's entry on photon torpedoes:
"The second type, which were first seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, had the reactants mixed together to increase the surface area between the deuterium and antideuterium, and driving up the rate of annihilation. This type had an effective tactical range of 3.5 million km. (pg. 128)
The warhead was loaded with 1.5 kg of antideuterium, and the torpedo had a dry mass of 247.5 kg. The torpedo was not capable of attaining Warp speeds if launched at sublight. It's warhead was rated at 25 isotons. (pg. 129)"

1.5 kg of antimatter gives a theoretical maximum explosive yield of 2.7*10^17 J, or about 65 megatons. In practice, there are reasons of theory you can't engineer around why the yield will be less than the theoretical maximum, but let's go with 50 megatons and assume the Federation has really good weapons designers.

That means it would take at least 20,000 photon torpedoes to add up to one teraton of explosive yield. While a large Star Trek fleet might plausibly carry this many torpedoes, I know of no precedent for any Star Trek fleet firing this many torpedoes in a coordinated salvo or in a rapid launch. Unless I'm underestimating events in one of the big fleet battles of the Dominion Wars, which I guess I might be.


your assumption of SW speed depends on the SW galaxy being the same or comparable size to the milky way. this comes into doubt when you remember that the Millenium Falcon managed to get from Hoth/Deep Space to Bespin in a short time, without any kind of time dilation or decades passing by. So, No, I don't think hyperdrive is as fast as you think, its just that things are a lot closer together.We know the Star Wars galaxy is a spiral galaxy, because we've seen it from outside in The Empire Strikes Back. There are very compelling reasons of astrophysics why the idea of a spiral galaxy that is as small as you suggest can't exist and won't be stable.

Moreover, we have the evidence of the Galactic Senate in the prequel trilogy movies. Which indicates that there are at least several thousand senators. Senator represent a single planet such as Naboo, or an intersystem polity such as the Trade Federation. Therefore, we can safely say that there are at least several thousand inhabited systems within the Republic. Since there are also plenty of systems that have uninhabited or uninhabitable planets (Yavin, Dagobah, Hoth), it seems unlikely that the Star Wars galaxy is some sort of freakish anomaly that magically retains a spiral shape despite being so small that such a shape should collapse in short order.


minijumps don't work that way. Canon shows that hyperdrive takes time to calculate, and warp can activate faster. Also, ST ships can attack targets while at warp, whereas SW vessels have the issue of being in another dimension at the time.Which means they can't shoot but can't be shot at, either.

Personally, I have grave questions about the effectiveness of Star Trek ships firing from FTL against STL targets. We have few, if any, cases of this happening during the actual TV shows. If it were as effective a tactic as many imply, you'd see it more often on the shows. Moreover, if Star Trek ships had good enough fire control and targeting to be effective shots while moving at FTL speeds relative to the target, their gunnery would be so good that they would never miss when they were moving at the low relative speeds we see in the TV visuals.

To recycle an analogy, a modern AA gun can track aircraft moving faster than sound and hit them from ranges measured in kilometers. For such a weapon to miss a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon larger than that aircraft, moving at a few kilometers an hour, at a range of, say, 10 meters would be unthinkable. But the difference between the supersonic jet and the Macy's day balloon as targets pales compared to the difference between a target moving FTL relative to the shooter (as would, say, DS9 relative to a warp strafing Klingon warbird) and a target moving at a few kilometers per second relative to the target (as would, say, DS9 relative to the same warbird moving at the speeds we see on screen).


Also, however powerful you think SW shields are, they aren't going to just shrug off ST attacks. A Photon torpedo packs at least 75 megatons in each hit, more likely 100 at a bare minimum.I assume the warheads have gotten bigger since the time my Memory Alpha quote refers to?

Even so, we face the practical problem of using theoretical yield (which may indeed be around 100 megatons) to calculate actual yield. If nothing else, photon torpedoes detonate in a spherical blast like any other explosive, rather than producing a single lethal jet of energy like a shaped charge. Therefore, much of the energy they produce is simply radiated into space rather than being smacked into the enemy's hull.


a single torpedo launcher can fire four torpedoes in under a second, and most ships have about 5. that's, what, 1500 megatons every salvo, from an average ship?On what basis do you say that Star Wars shielding can't shrug off that kind of strike? I'm not saying they can, but I feel compelled to ask the question.


Simple matter of scaling.

1) Voyager episode, a single torpedo is fired at an asteroid.

2)Said asteroid is named as being made of real-world materials.

3)Comparison of the torpedo next to the Voyager's hull, then compared to the asteroid in the frame before impact. from this, you can compare the size of the asteroid to the size of the voyager. Voyager's dimensions are well-established, and so from that the size of the asteroid can be established.

3)By extrapolating the size of the asteroid, and guessing the structure of the asteroid to be similar to those in real life, it's a simple issue of math to figure out just how much power is needed for the desired effect. to achieve the Desired effect, and absolute minimum of 75 megatons would be necessary.OK, sounds like good reasoning. Would you mind giving me a few more numbers (like the diameter of the asteroid)? In theory I should be able to do the calculation from here, but you appear to have already done it yourself and it's much easier to check someone else's math than to reconstruct it.

Question: On the other hand, in the episode "Pegasus" of TNG, Riker says that it would take the Enterprise's entire complement of photon torpedoes (which as I recall is several hundred) to destroy a particular asteroid. How does this square with the case where Voyager one-shotted an asteroid?


300,000 kilometer range was shown in an episode of TNG, when a rogue Starfleet ship one-shotted a Cardassian ship at that range.Was the Cardassian ship moving?

[Theodoriph]

But Lucas has approved the books, comics, (unfortunately the ewok adventures) and games as Star Wars canon.

No he hasn't.

He's approved them in the same way Paramount has approved Star Trek books. That is, give me money and I'll let you write it.

That being said, Lucas still views his movies as one universe and everything else as another universe, exactly like the Roddenberry view.





Even so, we face the practical problem of using theoretical yield (which may indeed be around 100 megatons) to calculate actual yield. If nothing else, photon torpedoes detonate in a spherical blast like any other explosive, rather than producing a single lethal jet of energy like a shaped charge. Therefore, much of the energy they produce is simply radiated into space rather than being smacked into the enemy's hull.

Actually, they usually detonate completely into whatever they're striking. Rarely ever do they detonate in a spherical blast. They're quite efficient that way :P It's one of the anomalies in the show...much like phasers being far more powerful than their power output.


Imperial gunnery in capital ship duels has about the same track record as Federation gunnery in capital ship duels. When firing at long visual ranges against targets with sizes of a hundred meters or more, they have some misses, but a very large fraction of shots fired will hit their targets. If the Federation can hit the star destroyers, the Imperials can hit the Galaxy-classes.

Imperial gunners can deliver broadsides, and only from a few hundred metres (if that) as per the movies. Trek ships have a range of 300, 000 km as per the shows. Imperial gunners wouldn't even be able to see the Trek ship, while the computer on the trek ship can easily nail the Imperial one, especially given Imperial ships lack of maneuverability. (That scene is ESB where the captain says evasive maneuvers and the ship keeps going straight is pure win!)


Personally, I have grave questions about the effectiveness of Star Trek ships firing from FTL against STL targets. We have few, if any, cases of this happening during the actual TV shows. If it were as effective a tactic as many imply, you'd see it more often on the shows. Moreover, if Star Trek ships had good enough fire control and targeting to be effective shots while moving at FTL speeds relative to the target, their gunnery would be so good that they would never miss when they were moving at the low relative speeds we see in the TV visuals.

They rarely miss. Taken as a whole, ST ships have deadly accuracy. If you factor out DS9, even more so. DS9 tried to make combat more exciting though and made it more like snubfighters as opposed to capital ships...though I must admit...having the Defiant be just as agile as an X-Wing was fun to watch =D


When I did a google search for that, I got hits referring to a romance novel, not a Star Trek episode. Could you provide me with a link?

Also, we've seen a lot of cases where a capital ship phaser flatly did not do enough damage to an unshielded target to cut a planet in half. Based on the principle that many pieces of evidence outweigh one contradictory piece, I would say that a Star Trek capital ship is no more capable of cutting a planet in half than an Imperial Star Destroyer is*.

A link to a book? If you come to my basement, I'll let you read it.:smallbiggrin: The Defiant does have more powerful phasers than in TOS, TNG or Voyager. Starfleet didn't upgrade weapons until the middle of the Dominion War, so I'm not really sure how many contradictory pieces of evidence there are =P It is a book though. As long as SW fanboys are happy to stick to the movies (preferably 4,5 and 6 since those are directly applicable), then I'm happy to stick to episodes =D

If we want to get into EU and books, then we can get into the Borg's willingness to make allianced with members of their galaxy...and well, since the Borg have no restrictions against using time travel as a weapon...and since they have millions of ships and exist in other dimensions (i.e. 5-dimensional space) where they can't be attacked by the Empire...that would pretty much seal the deal. Alas poor Empire, I knew him well. The Borg could really kill almost anyone from any series.

It's a silly argument really. Even if the Empire wins...the Borg would destroy them. Granted since we're getting away from stupid writing...even if the Feds win, the Borg would destroy them...the Borg are just made of win once you get to scenarios designed by intelligent people and not ST writers. =D

[factotum]

A link to a book? If you come to my basement, I'll let you read it.:smallbiggrin: The Defiant does have more powerful phasers than in TOS, TNG or Voyager.

I thought the main thing that made the Defiant's phasers more powerful was that they worked better against shields than a normal phaser--something to do with the greatest shield damage being done in the first hit of a phaser blast, so the Defiant fires lots and lots of tiny phaser pulses rather than a single continuous beam like other Federation ships.

Anyway, as for your argument that Star Trek ships have "deadly accuracy", how do you explain the numerous occasions where they actually MISS even at a distance of a few kilometres? If they're accurate enough to hit a moving ship that's 300,000km away then they ought to be able to surgically remove the captain's pancreas from a range of 3km, but there's nothing to indicate they can be so precise.

[Theodoriph]

I thought the main thing that made the Defiant's phasers more powerful was that they worked better against shields than a normal phaser--something to do with the greatest shield damage being done in the first hit of a phaser blast, so the Defiant fires lots and lots of tiny phaser pulses rather than a single continuous beam like other Federation ships.

Anyway, as for your argument that Star Trek ships have "deadly accuracy", how do you explain the numerous occasions where they actually MISS even at a distance of a few kilometres? If they're accurate enough to hit a moving ship that's 300,000km away then they ought to be able to surgically remove the captain's pancreas from a range of 3km, but there's nothing to indicate they can be so precise.

Nope, it's more than that. The Defiant's phasers were more powerful as well.

Err yes...there are things to indicate they can be so precise...namely the fact that they hit the majority of time, whereas from the Star Wars movies, the Empire misses a vast majority of the time.

Someone crunched the numbers and concluded that the only ship with a less than 85% accuracy rate was the Defiant. Granted, I'm not sure how spot on he was, and I'm not going to bother watching all the episodes of every series and counting =D Accuracy did suffer a hit with the introduction of space combat as a primary aspect of the show though. It would have been boring if everyone almost always hit in a combat focused show. That's why the Defiant was perfect for the role. Strong weapons...but due to fixed axis weaponry, it was easier to miss and the ship had to be piloted so it was aiming at its target. (Granted...it was designed to take out Borg Cubes...which are fairly immobile and harder to miss)

There's a reason snub fighters are not a viable option in Star Trek, but are in Star Wars...namely weapon accuracy. In Star Trek, snub fighters get picked apart (I don't remember if this was a book or episode though), whereas in Star Wars, due to inaccurate human gunners, they have a chance. Hell in SW books, capital ships are often reduced to simply trying to create a wall of fire to discourage snubs.

[Dervag]

Actually, they usually detonate completely into whatever they're striking. Rarely ever do they detonate in a spherical blast. They're quite efficient that way :P It's one of the anomalies in the show...much like phasers being far more powerful than their power output.How could a photon torpedo do this against a shielded warship? I can understand the idea of a torpedo penetrating an unshielded object before detonation, much as armor-piercing shells do. But if a photon torpedo can pierce a shield and release its energy inside that shield, then shields are useless against it, which is definitely not Star Trek canon.

So when hitting a shielded target such as a Federation warship or an Imperial warship, the photon torpedo must detonate outside the shield, in which case at least half its energy will be radiated harmlessly into space.


Imperial gunners can deliver broadsides, and only from a few hundred metres (if that) as per the movies.The biggest space battle fought in the original trilogy, and the only fleet battle we've seen where either party was in a position to choose an engagement range rather than having it forced on them by circumstances, was the battle of Endor.

At Endor, the Rebel fleet explictly decided to "move as close as you can, and engage those star destroyers at point blank range!" Thus, the reason why the Imperials were delivering broadsides at ranges of a few hundred meters- their enemies deliberately charged right up to them in an attempt to limit their engagement arcs and to make it impossible for the Death Star to pick off their ships with its massive superlaser.

Moreover, when we see this "point blank" fleet battle from the perspective of the Emperor's command bridge aboard the Death Star, it is clear that the ships are still fighting at ranges of more than a few hundred meters.

The only other fleet battle in the movies is the battle over Coruscant, which was a special circumstance because the two fleets were both forced to fight at short range by their own missions. The CIS fleet was explicitly trying to cover a commando raid aimed at capturing Chancellor Palpatine, so they had to keep their ships in close orbit over the planet. Likewise, the Republic fleet couldn't afford to stand off and pounded the CIS from above, because their stray shots would have hit the surface of Coruscant, killing millions of people. Thus, the Republic ships had to close with the CIS ships and "engage... at point blank range," regardless of what their maximum range nominally was.

There are no other major fleet battles in the Star Wars movies. The only other engagements we see involve:
-fighters attacking capital ships (attack on the first and second Death Stars, or the attack of Naboo starfighters on the droid control ship in The Phantom Menace). In this case the fighters have every reason to get as close as they possibly can to the capital ship's own hull, because they want to prevent any detached enemy units from firing on them and to exploit any gaps or spaces in the enemy's close-in point defense.

-capital ships attacking individual small craft with the goal of overtaking them and tractoring them in (Imperial star destroyer chasing Leia's ship in A New Hope, Imperial star destroyer chasing the Millenium Falcon in The Empire Strikes Back). In this case, engagement range is not decided by the range at which the capital ship's guns are most effective, because the goal is not to destroy the enemy ship. The goal is to overhaul the enemy ship, damage it with precision strikes to its engines, and pull it on board. Thus, the individual small ship will flee as fast as it possibly can, and the capital ship will chase as fast as it possibly can, with engagement range being determined purely by the ability of the two ships to open or close the range.

-dogfights, such as Slave I's pursuit of Obi-Wan's fighter over Geonosis, or the Millenium Falcon's battle with TIE fighters in A New Hope. In a dogfight, many of the ships have forward-firing weapons and so are not free to choose their engagement range because they have to be barreling towards the target in order to hit it at all. Moreover, firing angles will often be more important than engagement range in a battle between small craft.

So the movies don't really provide us with any good information on engagement ranges, because there are literally no battles in the Star Wars movie continuity where either side is in a position to engage the enemy for a sustained period at long range. One side or the other is always trying to close to extremely close range and destroy or overhaul their targets, for some reason other than the limits of their effective gun range.

In this case, we can use the novelizations of the movies, or we can use some other EU work, or we can use nothing. Just about the only case I can think of is the one where the Rebel ion cannon on Hoth crippled an Imperial star destroyer with its first salvo, firing from the surface at a target that was definitely in planetary orbit, a rather high one as I recall.


Trek ships have a range of 300, 000 km as per the shows.Do they routinely fight moving targets at this range, or was the incident where a Trek ship fought at this range a special case of some kind?


Imperial gunners wouldn't even be able to see the Trek ship,Do Imperial gunners rely on the Mark One Eyeball for targeting?


while the computer on the trek ship can easily nail the Imperial one, especially given Imperial ships lack of maneuverability.It may or may not make a difference; Star Trek ships have a proven track record of missing targets that are barely moving relative to themselves. There are presumably good reasons such as sensor jamming or decoys for this, but the fact remains that even if a Trek ship has the advantage of a slow-moving target, it isn't guaranteed to score a hit, especially at ranges longer than 'visual'.


They rarely miss. Taken as a whole, ST ships have deadly accuracy. If you factor out DS9, even more so. DS9 tried to make combat more exciting though and made it more like snubfighters as opposed to capital ships...though I must admit...having the Defiant be just as agile as an X-Wing was fun to watch =DWait.

Why do we factor out the inaccuracy of the Defiant? For that matter, why do we factor out the inaccuracy of DS9's own guns against attacking warships? Even when enemy warbirds bored straight in against DS9, DS9 did not always hit them; as I recall, on one occasion they were rammed by a crippled enemy ship. This is every bit as bad as the worst cases of Star Wars gunnery, and there's no obvious reason why DS9 (not Defiant, but the actual space station Deep Space Nine) should be such a terrible shot.


A link to a book? If you come to my basement, I'll let you read it.:smallbiggrin:Can you link me to a reference to the book, so that I can be looking for a plot synopsis of the actual book, and not to a synopsis of that stupid romance novel? That's what I was looking for.


The Defiant does have more powerful phasers than in TOS, TNG or Voyager. Starfleet didn't upgrade weapons until the middle of the Dominion War, so I'm not really sure how many contradictory pieces of evidence there are =P It is a book though. As long as SW fanboys are happy to stick to the movies (preferably 4,5 and 6 since those are directly applicable), then I'm happy to stick to episodes =DI deny fanboydom. I'm just trying to come up with a consistent basis for debate. However, I would point out that if there is one point in the 'Expanded Star Trek Universe' where an author claims that a phaser can slice a planet in half, and many other points in the 'Expanded Star Trek Universe' where a phaser cannot slice a planet in half, where it fails to do so, or where it is unable to do something a planet-slicer could do, then the one[i] claim loses out to the many.


If we want to get into EU and books, then we can get into the Borg's willingness to make allianced with members of their galaxy...and well, since the Borg have no restrictions against using time travel as a weapon...and since they have millions of ships and exist in other dimensions (i.e. 5-dimensional space) where they can't be attacked by the Empire...that would pretty much seal the deal. Alas poor Empire, I knew him well. The Borg could really kill almost anyone from any series.Except Species 8472, for some reason. And a whole bunch of other species in the Delta Quadrant, some of which have quite small technological and industrial bases to work from. And I'm still trying to figure out why the Borg didn't use time travel to eliminate all those threats.


It's a silly argument really. Even if the Empire wins...the Borg would destroy them. Granted since we're getting away from stupid writing...even if the Feds win, the Borg would destroy them...the Borg are just made of win once you get to scenarios designed by intelligent people and not ST writers. =DWhen one is an intelligent person looking at the Borg, one is struck by certain obvious facts. For one, their ability to adapt and overcome technological threats has to have limits or it becomes nonsensical. For another, they seem [i]persistently unable to adapt to certain particular threats, for reasons that are not obvious a priori. For yet another, there are all sorts of intelligent species that appear to coexist peacefully with the Borg in the Delta Quadrant, which suggests that the Borg might not be interested in waging a costly war with the Empire.

And the war likely would be costly; the Empire is, like the Borg, a very large galaxy-spanning power that build mile-long capital ships and can travel from one sector of its galaxy to the next very quickly.


Nope, it's more than that. The Defiant's phasers were more powerful as well.No surprise; they're a spinal mount. Thus, it would be possible to design a ship like Defiant around its phasers, much as the A-10 'Warthog' is designed around its heavy autocannon. Whereas even a larger capital ship like the Enterprise has its energy weapons mounted in an internal space that is limited by the constraints imposed by other ship systems.


Err yes...there are things to indicate they can be so precise...namely the fact that they hit the majority of time, whereas from the Star Wars movies, the Empire misses a vast majority of the time.The Empire misses a vast majority of the time only against small and evasive targets. Against targets that are the approximate size of a capital ship, they hit quite frequently. Moreover, most of those Star Trek hits are scored at the same kinds of visual combat ranges that Star Wars ships are fighting at.


Accuracy did suffer a hit with the introduction of space combat as a primary aspect of the show though. It would have been boring if everyone almost always hit in a combat focused show.And yet the same argument applies to Star Wars, and you use inaccuracy in Star Wars as evidence that the Empire can't shoot rather than as evidence that George Lucas thought good marksmanship was boring. In Star Wars, space combat was always a primary aspect of the show (or movie), and thus the same external, fourth-wall breaking factor you describe affecting Star Trek would have affected Star Wars from the very beginning, regardless of what the accuracy of Imperial weapons should be.

And it's rather unfair to compare Imperial gunners whose accuracy has been deliberately reduced to increases suspense against Star Trek gunners who haven't, especially when Star Trek gunners did eventually suffer exactly such an accuracy loss.


That's why the Defiant was perfect for the role. Strong weapons...but due to fixed axis weaponry, it was easier to miss and the ship had to be piloted so it was aiming at its target. (Granted...it was designed to take out Borg Cubes...which are fairly immobile and harder to miss)Ironically, fixed-axis weapons were originally installed on fighter aircraft because they were easier to aim than flexible-mount machine guns.


There's a reason snub fighters are not a viable option in Star Trek, but are in Star Wars...namely weapon accuracy. In Star Trek, snub fighters get picked apart (I don't remember if this was a book or episode though), whereas in Star Wars, due to inaccurate human gunners, they have a chance. Hell in SW books, capital ships are often reduced to simply trying to create a wall of fire to discourage snubs.In SW books, the reason isn't because gunners can't shoot, it's because of pathologically strong jammers. It's so hard to localize a target the size of a snubfighter for fire control that the things are damn near impossible to hit even with computer fire control.

After all, we know Star Wars has capable computers, because they can build sentient robots easily enough for them to be a major factor in most Star Wars societies. So it's nonsensical to assume that they are unable or unwilling to build fire control computers. If they're having trouble hitting targets, it's not going to be because their computers are terrible, unless you assume a total logical disconnect between gunnery computers and the computers that go into designing robots.

[pendell]

Not particularly useful when you're on the march and unable to set one up. or, you know, you get hit the moment your troop transports touch down.



Who says they can't? Remember the shield generators the Gungans took into
battle in Episode 1, which made the Trade Federation artillery useless? Are you saying that the Gungans are technologically superior to the Galactic Empire?

It makes perfect sense to mount those kind of massive generators on something like a specialized AT-AT chassis, preventing air superiority action and forcing a direct fire ground engagement.

Actually, there's another point to consider. Suppose the Empire goes to war with anyone. What's to stop the Imperials from turning the droid foundries back on that were shut down at the end of the clone wars and cranking out legion after legion of droid cannon fodder, starfighters, etc.?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Tyrant]

Actually, there's another point to consider. Suppose the Empire goes to war with anyone. What's to stop the Imperials from turning the droid foundries back on that were shut down at the end of the clone wars and cranking out legion after legion of droid cannon fodder, starfighters, etc.?
Respectfully,
Brian P.

Or crank up the cloning facilities for that matter. If it were still around there is always the Starforge.

[Seraph]

How could a photon torpedo do this against a shielded warship? I can understand the idea of a torpedo penetrating an unshielded object before detonation, much as armor-piercing shells do. But if a photon torpedo can pierce a shield and release its energy inside that shield, then shields are useless against it, which is definitely not Star Trek canon.

So when hitting a shielded target such as a Federation warship or an Imperial warship, the photon torpedo must detonate outside the shield, in which case at least half its energy will be radiated harmlessly into space.

Torpedoes do have shielding, so perhaps it's a quirk like shaped charges, where the Torpedo's own shield lasts just long enough to direct the energy against the opponent's shield.



Do they routinely fight moving targets at this range, or was the incident where a Trek ship fought at this range a special case of some kind?

See, that's the thing. in TOS, ships are clearly engaging eachother at massive range, where magnification is needed just to see the enemy at all. when Wrath of Khan came out, everyone utterly fell in love with the battle at the end, where the Nebula's massive interference meant that the Enterprise and the Reliant had to more or less dogfight just to have a shot at scoring a hit at all. Hence, once the Inmates started running the Asylum, every space battle was that way. however, as we've noted before, Picard has been heard ordering ranges that simply don't match up with the visuals, so it seems that the things you see in space may not be as accurate as they seem.

[captain_decadence]

Because the Empire hates droids. It's been well establishedin the Expanded Universe. They much prefer using human armies, probably because the emporer could help them with the force and he can't really do that with droids. Even after Darth offs the Emp, the residual hate on droids remains.

They also really don't like clones that much. They use them sometimes, but it's always with a feeling of "well, this is creepy and I'd rather not do it"

[Tyrant]

Because the Empire hates droids. It's been well establishedin the Expanded Universe. They much prefer using human armies, probably because the emporer could help them with the force and he can't really do that with droids. Even after Darth offs the Emp, the residual hate on droids remains.

They also really don't like clones that much. They use them sometimes, but it's always with a feeling of "well, this is creepy and I'd rather not do it"

The Empire is also anti alien. Yet one (Thrawn) holds the highest military position short of Vader because he is excellent at what he does. The Empire seems willing to use the tools at hand even if they officially don't like them. Also, I have always understood the no more clones thing to be so no one else could raise a clone army and destabalize the Empire.

[factotum]

There is another important factor concerning the relative accuracy of the Empire versus the Federation...plot shielding. The Empire are the bad guys in Star Wars, so their aim is going to be absolutely terrible when shooting at the good guys. The only time we see them aim well is when they're shooting at non-plot-critical targets--for instance, the two Rebel capital ships which the DS2 took out at the end of ROTJ. I think that particular instance is significant, because the Imperials were using a weapon designed to shoot PLANETS to do that, and planets tend to be rather large and prone to not dodging out of the way!

The Federation, of course, are the good guys in their series, so naturally they have much better aim. Technologically they seem to be on about the same level as most other species in the Star Trek universe (Borg etc. excepted), and it's interesting how poorly those other species do when shooting at Federation targets...

[Ker]

There are five types of canon:



G-canon is "George Lucas" canon; the six Episodes and anything directly provided to Lucas Licensing by Lucas (including unpublished production notes from him or his production department that are never seen by the public). Elements originating with Lucas in the movie novelizations, reference books, and other sources are also G-canon, though anything created by the authors of those sources is C-canon. When the matter of changes between movie versions arises, the most recently released editions are deemed superior to older ones, as they correct mistakes, improve consistency between the two trilogies, and express Lucas's current vision of the Star Wars universe most closely.

C-canon is "continuity" canon, consisting of all recent works (and many older works) released under the name of Star Wars: books, comics, games, cartoons, non-theatrical films, and more. Games are a special case, as generally only the stories are C-canon, while things like stats and gameplay may not be; they also offer non-canonical options to the player, such as choosing female gender for a canonically male character. C-canon elements have been known to appear in the movies, thus making them G-canon; examples include the name "Coruscant," swoop bikes, Quinlan Vos, Aayla Secura, YT-2400 freighters and Action VI transports.

S-canon is "secondary" canon; the materials are available to be used or ignored as needed by current authors. This includes mostly older works, such as much of the Marvel Star Wars comics, that predate a consistent effort to maintain continuity; it also contains certain elements of a few otherwise N-canon stories, and other things that "may not fit just right." Many formerly S-canon elements have been elevated to C-canon through their inclusion in more recent works by continuity-minded authors, while many other older works (such as The Han Solo Adventures) were accounted for in continuity from the start despite their age, and thus were always C-canon.

N-canon is "non-canon." What-if stories (such as stories published under the Infinities label) and anything else directly and irreconcilably contradicted by higher canon ends up here. N-canon is the only level that is not considered canon by Lucasfilm.

T-canon refers to the canon level comprising only the two television shows: Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the Star Wars live-action TV series. Its level in canon is currently unknown.

Most books are C-canon



On August 4, 2004, when asked if the G and C-levels formed separate and independent canon, Leland Chee responded by stating that both were part of a single canon:

"There is one overall continuity."


Therefore, Star Wars books are canon, and can be used in debates.



In 2000, Lucas Licensing appointed Leland Chee to create a continuity-tracking database referred to as the Holocron continuity database. The Holocron follows the canon policy that has been in effect for years, but the capabilities of database software allow for each element of a story, rather than the stories themselves, to be classified on their own merits.

Leeland Chee is an acceptable source on Star Wars canon policy.

[Renegade Paladin]

Technically, these were the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order, the intelligence arms of those respective civilizations, neither of which are supposed to have ships. They only sent 20, which is half of the number of ships lost at Wolf 359. Those 20 ships had enough firepower to destroy the planet's crust in 1 hour and planet's mantle in 5 hours.
Except they didn't, because their sensor readings were being spoofed by the Founder spy aboard. While they claim sensors indicate the destruction of 30% of the planet's surface, the visuals clearly show no such thing when the camera cuts to an external view.

So I'll discount SW books. According to the Man, they're not part of his universe. It's an alternate universe, like the ST books.

So...films and episodes it is :smallsmile:
The Expanded Universe is canon. Star Trek novels are not. These are the policies of Lucasfilm and Paramount, respectively. Those are the terms of the debate; I recommend dealing with it. Even so, the Empire can win on the strength of the movie evidence alone; the EU is just icing on the cake.
your assumption of SW speed depends on the SW galaxy being the same or comparable size to the milky way. this comes into doubt when you remember that the Millenium Falcon managed to get from Hoth/Deep Space to Bespin in a short time, without any kind of time dilation or decades passing by. So, No, I don't think hyperdrive is as fast as you think, its just that things are a lot closer together.
The Galaxy Far, Far Away is canonically 120,000 light years in diameter.

In any case, if star systems were as close together as you suppose, then space would appear quite different; the starfield would be dense and incredibly bright, and it's unlikely that many worlds would be inhabitable since there are so many stars exerting powerful gravity fields in proximity to one another; planetary orbits could not remain stable.
I find the ICS to be bull**** because the ICS is bull****. It has all the in-universe support of a child's crayon drawing, and was written by a long-time pro-SW debater with nothing but Concept art and a grudge.
Say what? :smallconfused: To my knowledge, Dr. Saxton has never been involved in the versus debate; he merely analyzes Star Wars as a hobby, and then got paid to write a technical book due to his work.
yet contradicted by the movies.
How so?
Alas poor Empire, I knew him well. The Borg could really kill almost anyone from any series.

It's a silly argument really. Even if the Empire wins...the Borg would destroy them. Granted since we're getting away from stupid writing...even if the Feds win, the Borg would destroy them...the Borg are just made of win once you get to scenarios designed by intelligent people and not ST writers. =D
Incorrect. The mechanical space zombies would simply die in droves. They're a major threat to the Federation because they have a large technological edge over the Federation; not so the Empire, where the situation is utterly reversed.

[ashmanonar]

Actually, let's bring up the Ewoks. More specifically, let's bring up how they were routing until Chewbacca hijacked a scout walker.

The Ewoks were by no means defeating the stormtroopers. They gained initial tactical surprise, set off a couple of booby traps, and then began to get massacred. You may note that they were starting to run away until Chewbacca began to take out the Imperial armor and mow down stormtroopers with his captured AT-ST.

In the meantime, let's examine Star Trek ground combat. In the Siege of AR-558, Jem'Hadar troops manage to overrun a prepared Federation position at a narrow, rocky chokepoint. Modern-day troops could have easily stopped such a foolhardy assault with a squad automatic weapon or two; stormtroopers could do the same with an E-Web heavy repeating blaster such as the one they were preparing to attack the Falcon with on Hoth before it successfully lifted off. The Federation ground forces, however, have no means of stopping the attack despite the fact that the narrowness of the pass allows only one or two Jem'Hadar to pass through abreast.

The Federation has no armored vehicles whatsoever; their idea of a military vehicle is apparently an open dune buggy with a phaser cannon in the back with a field of fire encompassing only the rear arc. Walkers may be a silly design (much better to have treads, as they can't be tripped, but that's why mecha are a stupid idea in general), but they're a whole lot better than nothing at all.

Speaking of tripping, the Federation appears to have no air superiority assets at all. Close air support would have been invaluable at AR-558, yet none was in evidence.

The involvement of Jem'Hadar makes the calculation on this one sorta squicky. The Wikis and other sources of information about Jem'Hadar make them out to be super-soldiers; they're extremely hard to kill and not susceptible to pain. It makes sense that the Federation is having trouble stopping a force of super-soldiers that are armed with more powerful weapons and superior tactics.

I'd say that most of this is correct about the quality of Starfleet ground force; they're really not that good. I'd much rather send Klingons or Borg against Stormtroopers, because they'd actually be effective.

[Renegade Paladin]

The involvement of Jem'Hadar makes the calculation on this one sorta squicky. The Wikis and other sources of information about Jem'Hadar make them out to be super-soldiers; they're extremely hard to kill and not susceptible to pain. It makes sense that the Federation is having trouble stopping a force of super-soldiers that are armed with more powerful weapons and superior tactics.
Yes, the Jem'Hadar are hardier than the average human, but they can still be killed. The problem at AR-558 was that the Federation had no rapid-fire weapons to train on the gap. And it's not hard to have superior ground tactics than Starfleet security officers; however, if the Jem'Hadar actually have such tactics, they were not using them, but rather opting to heedlessly charge through the gap. Even with the Federation's ineptitude at holding the gap, enough Jem'Hadar died storming it to allow a Federation victory in the fighting at the outpost itself.
I'd say that most of this is correct about the quality of Starfleet ground force; they're really not that good. I'd much rather send Klingons or Borg against Stormtroopers, because they'd actually be effective.
Oh, please. The Klingons would charge forward with their poorly designed swords (seriously, the human, or Klingon, arm has longer reach than a bat'leth) and get massacred. This is not a feat to boast of; a medieval European army could beat Klingons. As for Borg, well, they'll shuffle forward like zombies and fire no weapons whatsoever. This makes them extremely ineffective ground combatants; presuming for a moment that they can adapt to blaster fire (this is by no means a certainty; they can adapt to phasers, but phasers use an exotic chain reaction instead of transferring energy directly to the target, and the adaptation likely works by stopping that reaction), they still won't do much serious harm to the stormtroopers, who, at the very worst, can simply stay away from them.

[kamikasei]

Except they didn't, because their sensor readings were being spoofed by the Founder spy aboard. While they claim sensors indicate the destruction of 30% of the planet's surface, the visuals clearly show no such thing when the camera cuts to an external view.

That's a strange argument.

They bombard the planet and the sensor guy reports that they've basically melted a good percentage of the crust. They don't seem to think this is an unrealistic outcome. He then sees that the lifeform readings haven't changed, and everyone is amazed, and realizes that the lifeform readings are false data and the planet is empty.

If the destruction is not precisely what they expected to achieve, you would expect their incredulity to set in at that point. If the Dominion was faking that info, then for some reason they decided to lure the fleet in with false lifeform readings, feed them false data about the effects of their weapons, but for some reason not bother to update the false lifeform readings to match. Isn't this rather a bizarre hypothesis? Doesn't it make more sense to say that the fleet achieved exactly the devastation they report, but on an empty world, and the visual effects just didn't reflect this very well, as is extremely common in Trek?

And (a separate, weaker point to the above) as I recall, the bombardment is shown as sending actual shockwaves through the crust of the planet, visible from orbit...

[Renegade Paladin]

That's a strange argument.

They bombard the planet and the sensor guy reports that they've basically melted a good percentage of the crust. They don't seem to think this is an unrealistic outcome. He then sees that the lifeform readings haven't changed, and everyone is amazed, and realizes that the lifeform readings are false data and the planet is empty.

If the destruction is not precisely what they expected to achieve, you would expect their incredulity to set in at that point. If the Dominion was faking that info, then for some reason they decided to lure the fleet in with false lifeform readings, feed them false data about the effects of their weapons, but for some reason not bother to update the false lifeform readings to match. Isn't this rather a bizarre hypothesis? Doesn't it make more sense to say that the fleet achieved exactly the devastation they report, but on an empty world, and the visual effects just didn't reflect this very well, as is extremely common in Trek?

And (a separate, weaker point to the above) as I recall, the bombardment is shown as sending actual shockwaves through the crust of the planet, visible from orbit...
Unfortunately, the planetary bombardment is at the very end of this ten minute clip. (http://youtube.com/watch?v=VgyF9u18nA8)

However, I just watched it (and enjoyed it very much; it's been a long time since I've gotten to see Deep Space 9), and the visuals show damage visible from orbit, but it is nowhere near the claimed 30% destruction of the crust. Besides, the destruction of so much of the planetary surface in a matter of seconds (the 30% figure was reported as a result of the opening volley) would result in much more violent reactions than what we see; blasting so much of the planet's surface away in so short a span of time should at least result in visible ejecta reaching through the atmosphere, and we see no such thing.

[kamikasei]

However, I just watched it (and enjoyed it very much; it's been a long time since I've gotten to see Deep Space 9), and the visuals show damage visible from orbit, but it is nowhere near the claimed 30% destruction of the crust. Besides, the destruction of so much of the planetary surface in a matter of seconds (the 30% figure was reported as a result of the opening volley) would result in much more violent reactions than what we see; blasting so much of the planet's surface away in so short a span of time should at least result in visible ejecta reaching through the atmosphere, and we see no such thing.

Okay; so the visuals don't match the dialogue. I am inclined to give precedence to the dialogue, since the idea that the sensor readings were kinda-sorta-half-faked just doesn't make sense, and the idea that the effects guys screwed up does. Also, though it's been a while since I last saw the episode and haven't checked the clip yet, I thought the claim was that the crust had been liquefied, not actually blasted clear off the planet.

Thanks for the link though.

[Seraph]

Therefore, Star Wars books are canon, and can be used in debates.

you just contradicted yourself. Lucas Himself said that the books are not in the same universe, and that trumps anything anyone else says on the subject due to the Canon's intrinsic structure.


And As I've said before, the Visuals and the Dialogue don't always match up (500 Km vs. 500 M, for instance). It always is a better choice to follow dialogue, especially if said dialogue gives hard numbers. if they said that 30% of the crust was destroyed, then 30% of the crust was destroyed; it's the VD's ****up if they didn't give the proper effects, the dialogs still remain.

[Renegade Paladin]

you just contradicted yourself. Lucas Himself said that the books are not in the same universe, and that trumps anything anyone else says on the subject due to the Canon's intrinsic structure.


And As I've said before, the Visuals and the Dialogue don't always match up (500 Km vs. 500 M, for instance). It always is a better choice to follow dialogue, especially if said dialogue gives hard numbers. if they said that 30% of the crust was destroyed, then 30% of the crust was destroyed; it's the VD's ****up if they didn't give the proper effects, the dialogs still remain.
Suspension of disbelief does not work that way. Besides, following Trek dialog creates it's own problems. For instance, what the hell is an isoton? :smalltongue:

[kamikasei]

Suspension of disbelief does not work that way. Besides, following Trek dialog creates it's own problems. For instance, what the hell is an isoton? :smalltongue:

A ton, as defined by the Interstellar Standards Organization.

[Renegade Paladin]

A ton, as defined by the Interstellar Standards Organization.
Yes, I'm well aware that it actually means "equal to a ton," which is why I find it's constant use as though it were impressive hilarious. :smallamused:

[kamikasei]

Yes, I'm well aware that it actually means "equal to a ton," which is why I find it's constant use as though it were impressive hilarious. :smallamused:

You realize I was joking?

As used on the show it's clearly meant to be an arbitrarily large magnitude prefix. If you parse it like "isobar" or similar "iso-" terms, it would mean something more like "a line connecting points of the same tonnage", which is totally meaningless. It doesn't mean "equal to a ton" unless you're taking a perversely precise etymological approach.

[Seraph]

iso- is just a fictional SI prefix that ST writers toss around when they don't want to use hard numbers when they logically would have to be used.

[LordVader]

I'd actually argue that the Empire has very little need to leave ships in the Empire for self-defense.

#1. Star Trek warp is far too slow, and will not have the speed to mount a "blitzkrieg" offensive into the Empire while maintaining enough ships to defend the Alpha Quadrant.

#2. Any world of any importance at all (ones the Empire cares about) will have a planetary shield. More important worlds will have planetary defense systems. And I daresay a planetary shield could hold out for a goodly amount of time against a Star Trek ship's assualt.

[Renegade Paladin]

You realize I was joking?
Yes, I did kind of grasp that. :smalltongue:

As used on the show it's clearly meant to be an arbitrarily large magnitude prefix. If you parse it like "isobar" or similar "iso-" terms, it would mean something more like "a line connecting points of the same tonnage", which is totally meaningless. It doesn't mean "equal to a ton" unless you're taking a perversely precise etymological approach.
There's nothing perverse about a precise approach. And I wasn't seriously suggesting that Trek weapons are equal to only a few tons; what I'm getting at is that even if you don't recognize that visuals trump dialog (they do), the line of thinking that leads one to conclude that the effects guys screwed up should instead be leading to the conclusion that the dialog is hopeless as a reference point because the writers are clearly incompetent to accurately describe what effects they want to convey.

[Seraph]

Yes, I did kind of grasp that. :smalltongue:

There's nothing perverse about a precise approach. And I wasn't seriously suggesting that Trek weapons are equal to only a few tons; what I'm getting at is that even if you don't recognize that visuals trump dialog (they do), the line of thinking that leads one to conclude that the effects guys screwed up should instead be leading to the conclusion that the dialog is hopeless as a reference point because the writers are clearly incompetent to accurately describe what effects they want to convey.

That's utterly ridiculous and contrived.

[kamikasei]

And I wasn't seriously suggesting that Trek weapons are equal to only a few tons; what I'm getting at is that even if you don't recognize that visuals trump dialog (they do), the line of thinking that leads one to conclude that the effects guys screwed up should instead be leading to the conclusion that the dialog is hopeless as a reference point because the writers are clearly incompetent to accurately describe what effects they want to convey.

I can't accept that. The logical endpoint of that is to say that, well, they say they're flying around in a starship being shot at, in their "dialogue", but you can clearly see that they're actually sitting on a sound stage lurching in sync and periodically looking at a small model on strings. The visuals can't trump the dialogue because the dialogue is what's supposed to be conveying exposition while the visuals are just meant to approximate kinda maybe sorta what we would see if they had the time and budget to make it look better.

[Tyrant]

you just contradicted yourself. Lucas Himself said that the books are not in the same universe, and that trumps anything anyone else says on the subject due to the Canon's intrinsic structure.

I think if you keep saying that at least one other person might start to believe it. In the meantime, the statement from Lucasarts (little company, I'm sure you've heard of it and their involvement in that quaint little film called Star Wars) seems to satisfy everyone else.

You also seem to have no real response to any of my comments. Specifically teh fact that the Federation, as per canon, is run by people who can't fight their way out of a paper bag and are quite lacking in strategic thinking. Or the fact that they seem to forget wonder technology ten minutes after using it. Star Wars is at least somewhat consistant on that front. The Death Star was used in 2 movies, a prototype exists at the Maw, a Hutt built one, and the Eclipse has a small scale version mounted onto it. Can we say the same for trilithium weapons, for instance?

[Renegade Paladin]

That's utterly ridiculous and contrived.
No, it isn't. They clearly don't know what they want, or they'd use actual units to describe it instead of making up nonsense words.
I can't accept that. The logical endpoint of that is to say that, well, they say they're flying around in a starship being shot at, in their "dialogue", but you can clearly see that they're actually sitting on a sound stage lurching in sync and periodically looking at a small model on strings. The visuals can't trump the dialogue because the dialogue is what's supposed to be conveying exposition while the visuals are just meant to approximate kinda maybe sorta what we would see if they had the time and budget to make it look better.
Which goes back to why suspension of disbelief is necessary for this debate. If you can't do it, this isn't going to get anywhere.

[kamikasei]

Which goes back to why suspension of disbelief is necessary for this debate. If you can't do it, this isn't going to get anywhere.

...Yes. You need to suspend your disbelief when you're watching SF. So when someone on screen says they've just devastated the surface of a planet but the effects department doesn't accurately represent how that would look, I suspend my disbelief and go with what they've said, rather than assuming they're deluded, deceived or stupid.

I don't see what kind of point you're trying to make with that statement.

[Dervag]

Or crank up the cloning facilities for that matter. If it were still around there is always the Starforge.The Star Forge is very much expanded universe, though. Also, since the light side ending of KOTOR is the canonical one, it isn't. But whoever else responded to this is right; the Empire hates (or at least despises) droids. Moreover, their own population has bitter memories of the Clone Wars and their battledroid armies.

The expanded universe includes some roles where the Empire uses heavy battledroids for ground combat platforms, or droid-controlled fighters, but that would explain very well why the movie Empire doesn't use combat droids except for things like automatic gun turrets (like we see in A New Hope in the detention block)


Torpedoes do have shielding, so perhaps it's a quirk like shaped charges, where the Torpedo's own shield lasts just long enough to direct the energy against the opponent's shield.The problem is that photon torpedoes have a minimum range and ships can be damaged by firing their own torpedoes at extremely close range. This indicates a substantial backblast.

Moreover, a shaped blast is not likely to be as effective at smashing asteroids, because shaped blasts drill holes in things rather than trying to shatter them by brute force. It would make sense for the Federation to try to design a torpedo with a shaped blast effect, but I don't think they've done it.


See, that's the thing. in TOS, ships are clearly engaging eachother at massive range, where magnification is needed just to see the enemy at all. when Wrath of Khan came out, everyone utterly fell in love with the battle at the end, where the Nebula's massive interference meant that the Enterprise and the Reliant had to more or less dogfight just to have a shot at scoring a hit at all. Hence, once the Inmates started running the Asylum, every space battle was that way. however, as we've noted before, Picard has been heard ordering ranges that simply don't match up with the visuals, so it seems that the things you see in space may not be as accurate as they seem.The problem is that we've also heard Picard and his crew say all sorts of things that are physically impossible. To pick an obvious example, they have measured energy releases in units of power, which is like saying that New York City is 100 miles per hour away.

This kind of thing happens on a fairly regular basis. So we know that sometimes, when they're talking about science or precise measurements, Federation personnel are simply wrong. They make mistakes, either because they speak carelessly or for some other reason. They make confident pronouncements about the size of something they're measuring that aren't even in the correct units.

I don't mind that. I don't say they're stupid for doing that, because I know very smart people who slip like that once in a while, especially under stress. But given that they do slip like that, we can't assume that their statements about combat ranges and such are reliable, especially when they directly contradict what we are seeing.

It's all very well to blame close-quarters combat in Star Trek on the writers, but within the Star Trek universe there are no writers. There has to be an in-universe reason for all the close combat we're seeing.


The involvement of Jem'Hadar makes the calculation on this one sorta squicky. The Wikis and other sources of information about Jem'Hadar make them out to be super-soldiers; they're extremely hard to kill and not susceptible to pain. It makes sense that the Federation is having trouble stopping a force of super-soldiers that are armed with more powerful weapons and superior tactics.

I'd say that most of this is correct about the quality of Starfleet ground force; they're really not that good. I'd much rather send Klingons or Borg against Stormtroopers, because they'd actually be effective.I'm actually not sure.

The Borg have persistently failed to hold their own against Federation troops in ground combat. The Klingons are good melee warriors, but that does not make them a match for soldiers who maintain formation discipline and have automatic weapons (as stormtroopers do).

As for the bit about the Jem'Hadar, what bothers me is that if the Feds had possessed some effective heavy weapons, equivalent to the squad automatic weapons and heavy machine guns of real-world armies, it wouldn't have mattered how tough Jem'Hadar soldiers were. Unless they were actually immune to phasers, they'd have been slaughtered in short order during that mass charge at the climax. A modern ground force with the same weapons it would have, fighting that exact same Dominion force with its phasers, would have slaughtered the Dominion troops.


Okay; so the visuals don't match the dialogue. I am inclined to give precedence to the dialogue, since the idea that the sensor readings were kinda-sorta-half-faked just doesn't make sense, and the idea that the effects guys screwed up does. Also, though it's been a while since I last saw the episode and haven't checked the clip yet, I thought the claim was that the crust had been liquefied, not actually blasted clear off the planet.

Thanks for the link though.Star Trek dialogue has contained a lot of things that can only be called bloopers when it comes to making accurate measurements and using the correct units to measure a distance or energy release. That's why I'm more inclined to trust the visuals than the dialogue.


Yes, I'm well aware that it actually means "equal to a ton," which is why I find it's constant use as though it were impressive hilarious. :smallamused:I don't have a problem with the idea of a unit like "isoton." Remember, our existing measurement scheme for nuclear weapons isn't any better. It's based on the number of tons of TNT it would take to yield an equivalent amount of energy. Maybe "isoton" means "equivalent to one ton of something much more powerful than TNT."

Of course, I do dislike the fact that the isoton is deliberately ambiguous, and therefore totally useless for calculating the actual yields of isoton-range weapons in terms I can work with, but it's not much worse than things would be if there were no units at all (as is often the case in Star Wars)


I'd actually argue that the Empire has very little need to leave ships in the Empire for self-defense.

#1. Star Trek warp is far too slow, and will not have the speed to mount a "blitzkrieg" offensive into the Empire while maintaining enough ships to defend the Alpha Quadrant.

#2. Any world of any importance at all (ones the Empire cares about) will have a planetary shield. More important worlds will have planetary defense systems. And I daresay a planetary shield could hold out for a goodly amount of time against a Star Trek ship's assualt.They're not defending themselves against the Trekkers. They're defending themselves against all the other powers in the Star Wars galaxy. Remember, most of their navy is on some station, not just sitting in a port waiting for a mission. If they pull ships off those stations to launch an overwhelming assault against a distant enemy, their own enemies will exploit that by rebelling against their rule or trying to pick off border systems.


That's utterly ridiculous and contrived.So is insisting that someone who measures an energy release in watts is a reliable commentator on distances and measurements.


...Yes. You need to suspend your disbelief when you're watching SF. So when someone on screen says they've just devastated the surface of a planet but the effects department doesn't accurately represent how that would look, I suspend my disbelief and go with what they've said, rather than assuming they're deluded, deceived or stupid.

I don't see what kind of point you're trying to make with that statement.Let me give a related example.

Imagine that Captain Picard says "I am eleven feet tall."

You can look at him, and he is clearly not eleven feet tall. Coincidentally, he is the same height as Patrick Stewart, but that is irrelevant. The point remains that if Captain Picard were in fact eleven feet tall, all sorts of things would be different. His crew would get neckaches trying to look him in the eye. He would bump his head on doorways a lot. No sane person would want to engage him in melee combat. And so on.

Clearly, Captain Picard is not eleven feet tall, no matter what he says. And so we need to think of reasons why Picard might be lying (for instance, if he is trying to fool an enemy who does not know his real height). Or reasons why Picard might be mistaken (for instance, if he is under the influence of a hostile telepath or a hallucinogenic drug). But what we should not do is assume that Picard is actually eleven feet tall and that the only reason he appears to be about six feet tall is that they couldn't find any eleven-foot men and had to hire Patrick Stewart to play him. It would be absurd to assume such a thing.

From my perspective, exactly the same reasoning applies to the visuals in space combat. If Picard claims that his ship is firing on the enemy from a range of 500 kilometers, and I look at the screen an it appears to be a range of 20 kilometers, I am going to assume he is mistaken or lying, just as I would if he claimed to be eleven feet tall.

[Swordguy]

From my perspective, exactly the same reasoning applies to the visuals in space combat. If Picard claims that his ship is firing on the enemy from a range of 500 kilometers, and I look at the screen an it appears to be a range of 20 kilometers, I am going to assume he is mistaken or lying, just as I would if he claimed to be eleven feet tall.

While I agree with what you're saying, what about intentional suspension of disbelief because both ships need to be shown on the TV screen - a completely exterior concern? We see it in tabletop games all the time - a 1" hex is equal to 30 meters, and this machinegun has a range of 3 hexes (90m). A 90m range for a machinegun is ludicrous. However, the ranges are specifically stated to be artificially compressed so people can actually play on the tabletop and not on a football field. I look at ranges in TV shows the same way; nobody wants to see the quarter-inch long blip that the OPFOR ship would realistically be at a sane distance. Therefore, the ships are shown to be closer than they should be for the sake of the show, not the underlying universe.

[kamikasei]

I don't have a problem with the idea of a unit like "isoton." Remember, our existing measurement scheme for nuclear weapons isn't any better. It's based on the number of tons of TNT it would take to yield an equivalent amount of energy. Maybe "isoton" means "equivalent to one ton of something much more powerful than TNT."

Worse: remember that they seem to use it as a unit of simple mass, too. Weapon yields aside, I recall Voyager often mentioning having an isoton of this-or-that.


Star Trek dialogue has contained a lot of things that can only be called bloopers when it comes to making accurate measurements and using the correct units to measure a distance or energy release. That's why I'm more inclined to trust the visuals than the dialogue.
...
From my perspective, exactly the same reasoning applies to the visuals in space combat. If Picard claims that his ship is firing on the enemy from a range of 500 kilometers, and I look at the screen an it appears to be a range of 20 kilometers, I am going to assume he is mistaken or lying, just as I would if he claimed to be eleven feet tall.

I don't think you can make a hard rule about when to trust visuals and when dialogue, given that both contain bloopers and inconsistencies at different times. To me, though, it seems clear that the constraints on a special effects team representing a space battle are greater than those on a casting crew trying to get an actor within a normal human height range. I am more inclined to trust dialogue describing an event over the visuals that showed it if the visuals have obvious reasons for not being accurate - which is almost always the case in space battles.

I don't aim to be dogmatic about this. If the battle in Sacrifice of Angels, for example, had included dialogue claiming that the ships involved were hundreds of kilometers apart, I would give the visuals credence over that because the whole scene is clearly arranged according to the visuals. If two ships are reported as a thousand kilometers apart but when we see a brief external shot they're both visible and large enough to be seen, I give the reported distance greater credence. If they cast the world's tallest man as an alien and say he's eleven feet tall, I'll accept that he's eleven feet tall even though I know he's not and they haven't gone out of their way to force perspective. Do you see where I'm coming from?

In reference to the actual scene in question from The Die is Cast, the statement that they have destroyed 30% of the crust is taken in stride as though it were exactly what was expected. It does not make sense for this to be false data as then you would have an enemy carefully updating some sensor readings to react to the bombardment and leaving others as-is (and you would still have to explain why the 30% figure did not seem surprising!). That the visuals of the bombardment don't quite match up is not very good support for the false-data argument. Such visuals fail to match up all the time. Hell, it's supposed to be a Class-M world but for some reason it looks more like a gas giant from orbit! Weird how that happens, isn't it?

[Dervag]

I don't think you can make a hard rule about when to trust visuals and when dialogue, given that both contain bloopers and inconsistencies at different times. To me, though, it seems clear that the constraints on a special effects team representing a space battle are greater than those on a casting crew trying to get an actor within a normal human height range.What do you mean? I'm not sure I follow. After all, if I want an eleven-foot Picard I'm out of luck; there are no eleven-foot men. That's a much more serious constraint than the ones imposed on visual effects crews. If anything, realistic visuals would be easier because you'd never shoot more than one ship at once except for exceptional cases. That's probably part of why the original series used more realistic visuals (at least in terms of range).

But when the visuals persistently fail to match the dialogue- Picard persistently claims to be eleven feet tall when it is clear that he is not based on the visual evidence- I'm going to believe the visuals. I know Picard has been known to lie or to be deluded. I have no compelling in-story reason to assume that the visuals have been systematically distorted to make everything look bigger and closer than it really is by a factor of hundreds or thousands.

Out of story, I can see exactly why that happens. But if they didn't want me to believe the combat took place at short range, they shouldn't have shown me so much combat at short range. You'll never catch me denying that Star Wars combat takes place at short range in the movies, for precisely that reason.

The only difference is that in Star Wars you never see ship captains claim to be fighting at long range and then immediately cut to a picture of them fighting at extremely close range. To me, believing the dialogue in a case like that would be a dangerous approach. I mean, think of all the times in fiction where a character says "the enemy couldn't possibly be sneaking up on us!" and you cut to a picture of the enemy sneaking up on them. It's so common it's a cliche.

And yet if we make a general policy of believing the dialogue when it contradicts the visuals, we're going to get blindsided by things like that. I know you're not being dogmatic about it. You wouldn't say "Well, obviously they must not be being ambushed because this character said they weren't." But for me, it's a slippery slope.


If they cast the world's tallest man as an alien and say he's eleven feet tall, I'll accept that he's eleven feet tall even though I know he's not and they haven't gone out of their way to force perspective. Do you see where I'm coming from?Sort of. But I'm not talking about a case where they cast the world's tallest man. I'm thinking of a case where there is no attempt to cast the world's tallest man, or to otherwise create the image of an eleven-foot man. Instead, there is only the claim by Picard that he is eleven feet tall (or fighting a battle from a range of ten thousand kilometers), accompanied by visual footage of something completely different happening (Picard being six feet tall, or the battle being fought at a range of ten kilometers).

So given a choice between believing Picard and my lying eyes, I'm going to have to believe my eyes. Especially since the visual people for Star Trek didn't have to choose short-range combat. They had a choice. They could quite easily have chosen to make sure their visuals roughly reflected the engagement ranges in the dialogue. But instead they set up a conflict between what the characters say and what the viewers see. I know where my preference lies in that kind of conflict.


In reference to the actual scene in question from The Die is Cast, the statement that they have destroyed 30% of the crust is taken in stride as though it were exactly what was expected. It does not make sense for this to be false data as then you would have an enemy carefully updating some sensor readings to react to the bombardment and leaving others as-is (and you would still have to explain why the 30% figure did not seem surprising!). That the visuals of the bombardment don't quite match up is not very good support for the false-data argument. Such visuals fail to match up all the time. Hell, it's supposed to be a Class-M world but for some reason it looks more like a gas giant from orbit! Weird how that happens, isn't it?I was thinking more in terms of the ship battles than that specific case.

[Tyrant]

The Star Forge is very much expanded universe, though. Also, since the light side ending of KOTOR is the canonical one, it isn't. But whoever else responded to this is right; the Empire hates (or at least despises) droids. Moreover, their own population has bitter memories of the Clone Wars and their battledroid armies.

The expanded universe includes some roles where the Empire uses heavy battledroids for ground combat platforms, or droid-controlled fighters, but that would explain very well why the movie Empire doesn't use combat droids except for things like automatic gun turrets (like we see in A New Hope in the detention block)


I'm aware the Starforge is EU. Just as I am aware EU is canon. My point was that if it were still around it would be useful for this situation. I assume it was destroyed in the light side ending. I played dark side.

As for droids, I understand why some people would hate them. I also know Palpatine is willing to use the right tool for the job. Again, Thrawn is a Grand Admiral despite alien hate. It's not like they would be using the droids in their own galaxy. They would fire up the factories and start sending them through the wormhole. It is very unlikey the majority of Imperials on the other side have any real first hand memories of battle droids destroying their worlds. Some officers might be old enough but the front line soldiers won't be. Once a foothold has been established and worlds that are suitable are found, more factories can be built on the other side of the wormhole to further fuel the droid army. This allows for minimal Imperial presence which solves the problem of diverting resources. If the war were to last long enough, they could build ship yards to build more Star Destroyers and cloning facilities to pump out more troops on the other side of the wormhole.

[pendell]

Once a foothold has been established and worlds that are suitable are found, more factories can be built on the other side of the wormhole to further fuel the droid army.


I agree that Palpatine could do this if he believed it necessary. So he and most of the SW galaxy don't like battle droids. The Empire is not a democracy. They could "seed" a droid factory/ship (which they could build, if they don't already have them) through the wormhole with these instructions:

1) Find an uninhabited star system with mineral resources
2) Produce droid army in infinite quanitites.
3) Conquer planetary systems.
4) Establish new factories, and factory ships.
5) Repeat from step 2 until receive "stop" order.

====
I don't see any actual need to conquer a *world* as such to achieve this. An asteroid belt might be better, as it has all the mineral resources and doesn't require us to boost out of the planet's gravity well.

The danger, of course, is if the robots stop responding to the 'stop' order. Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers, anyone?

================
Some other points:

1) When they first contact each other, the Empire and the Federation have very different technologies, with very different mechanisms and ways of fighting. The Feds have transporters, which give a whole host of tactical options. The Empire has 'hyperdrive' and small craft.

However, these differences will only be important in the first engagements; both sides are going to make strenuous efforts to develop tactics against the other side, and to steal/acquire the other side's technology. Within 3 to 5 years it's likely both sides will be using similar technology and tactics.

2) When that happens, the Empire will win a head-to-head confrontation. Although the EU throws into question whether the 'Galactic Empire' is truly 'Galactic', it has enormous resources at it's disposal the Feds don't have.

So how can the Federation fight such an enemy? Three ways I can think of:

1) Destroy / block the wormhole. If the Empire can't enter Fed space, the Empire poses no threat.

2) Throw a mad dog into the Empire's backyard. The Empire has a number of enemies in it's own universe, of which the Rebel Alliance is only the most prominent. There are no doubt a number of backwater 'hot spots' that could be made into a full-fledged rebellion given an infusion of resources and training. Deliberately foment insurgencies such that the Empire is so busy fighting fires in their backyard they have no time for extra-galactic conquest.

3) God mode. Bring in Q. Q or beings like them are simply off the scale vis-a-vis anything in either universe. Mere material superiority on the part of the Empire has no meaning.

And there is one final option:

4) "Assimilation". Relying heavily on the EU here, specifically, the Han Solo novels and the TIE Fighter video game. The Fed asks to join the Empire as an autonomous entity a la the Trade Federation, the Techno Union, or the Corporate Sector Authority. The Empire sends out a governor. With luck and effort and a bit of skillful lobbying, it is possible the Fed can get a Moff sent to them who's a fop and a fool, as opposed to a Tarkin.

Soon enough, the Moff arrives with his fleet. The Moff is given a palatial estate and is kept so happy with food, prostitutes, and his private pleasure planet (Wrigley's Pleasure Planet, perhaps), he is only seen on formal state occasions once a year, and even then when he's not falling down drunk. His navy (such as is sent, which shouldn't be much if the Feds are peaceable) can be sent off to "hold the line" against the Cardassians or the Borg or someone like.

A couple years pass. The Battle of Endor happens. The Republic is restored, the Fed gets senators in the Galactic Senate, and suddenly the Feds are the most powerful force in the Milky Way Galaxy, since they are now part of a galaxy-spanning -- now extra-galactic -- republic.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Dervag]

While I agree with what you're saying, what about intentional suspension of disbelief because both ships need to be shown on the TV screen - a completely exterior concern? We see it in tabletop games all the time - a 1" hex is equal to 30 meters, and this machinegun has a range of 3 hexes (90m). A 90m range for a machinegun is ludicrous. However, the ranges are specifically stated to be artificially compressed so people can actually play on the tabletop and not on a football field. I look at ranges in TV shows the same way; nobody wants to see the quarter-inch long blip that the OPFOR ship would realistically be at a sane distance. Therefore, the ships are shown to be closer than they should be for the sake of the show, not the underlying universe.I understand the argument, but I question the claim that both ships do need to be shown on screen at the same time. It may be mildly more thrilling to do things that way, but it isn't obviously better.

Imagine a space battle where the visuals cut back and forth between external views of 'our' ship, external views of the OPFOR ship, and views of one ship's "tactical board" in CIC where both ships are visible as enlarged images or icons. The external views are used to establish a sense of (extremely large) scale and of what's happening to the ships, while the CIC view is used to give a sense of what the ships are doing relative to each other.

I, for one, would love that. And it wouldn't force me to choose between believing crewmen known to make bloopers of measurement and believing my own eyes, either.


1) When they first contact each other, the Empire and the Federation have very different technologies, with very different mechanisms and ways of fighting. The Feds have transporters, which give a whole host of tactical options. The Empire has 'hyperdrive' and small craft.

However, these differences will only be important in the first engagements; both sides are going to make strenuous efforts to develop tactics against the other side, and to steal/acquire the other side's technology. Within 3 to 5 years it's likely both sides will be using similar technology and tactics.Assuming the war isn't over by that point, you're probably right. However, the Federation isn't very large by Imperial standards. If they can win at all, they probably won't win by a defensive war of attrition, but instead by being so much more powerful that they rapidly destroy any Imperial fleet, no matter how large, that comes through the wormhole.

The wormhole is the only bottleneck that can stop the Federation from being completely overrun with hyperspace-capable Imperial warships (not just star destroyers, but gunboats and FTL-capable fighters). And once the Federation has to deal with all those little Imperial raiding craft zipping around, they're screwed. Their subspace communication relays get shot to pieces; no planet is secure unless it has Federation ships orbiting it, and the Federation won't have enough ships to secure everything and defend itself against its local enemies at the same time.

Conversely, if the Empire is strong enough to win (i.e. its tech is within shouting distance of Federation tech), it will probably win quickly once it gets a fleet through the wormhole. If the Feds can't stop the Imperials at the wormhole they won't be able to stop them anywhere else; the situation is much worse than the one that they faced with the Gamma Quadrant wormhole in DS9.


1) Destroy / block the wormhole. If the Empire can't enter Fed space, the Empire poses no threat.Their best plan. However, they'll probably have to destroy the wormhole outright, because the Federation can't win a battle of attrition at the mouth of the wormhole. Unless their ships are so strong that they can keep killing star destroyers all day one by one and never get tired (so to speak), the Empire can overpower any defense the Feds can put in the immediate vicinity of the wormhole entrance.


2) Throw a mad dog into the Empire's backyard. The Empire has a number of enemies in it's own universe, of which the Rebel Alliance is only the most prominent. There are no doubt a number of backwater 'hot spots' that could be made into a full-fledged rebellion given an infusion of resources and training. Deliberately foment insurgencies such that the Empire is so busy fighting fires in their backyard they have no time for extra-galactic conquest. A good idea. There are two catches. One is that the Federation will have some problems doing this. They don't have ships capable of flying at immense speeds across the Star Wars galaxy, so their spies can't use Federation ships to travel around in Imperial space. Imperial security would make that hard, anyway. So the Federation spies will have to fly aboard Imperial ships, and you can bet the Imperials will maintain tight security at both ends of the wormhole.

To make matters worse, many of the groups that might rebel against the Empire are nonhuman. The Federation can deal with nonhumans quite well, much better than the Empire, but they won't have any negotiators familiar with the language and culture of the nonhuman species in the Star Wars galaxy. Thus, they will face many of the same first contact problems that made the experiences of Picard and Kirk so interesting, combined with the fact that they can't rely on their own ships to back them up and that Imperial authorities will be gunning for them.

The second problem is that the Empire can do this to the Feds almost as easily as the other way around. Many of the spacefaring powers around the Federation space would be quite happy to go back to war with the Federation if they thought they could win. If the Empire has any weapons tech significantly better than the equivalent in Federation space, they might very well be able to use it to bribe the Klingons or Cardassians (to name two) to jump the Federation from behind. Which would hurt the Feds much more than a local uprising would hurt the Imperials.


3) God mode. Bring in Q. Q or beings like them are simply off the scale vis-a-vis anything in either universe. Mere material superiority on the part of the Empire has no meaning.The problem is that Q isn't very likely to wipe out the Imperial Navy just as a personal favor. After all, this is a purely intra-human conflict.

And if Q isn't likely to do it, then you can bet none of the other Qs will.


4) "Assimilation". Relying heavily on the EU here, specifically, the Han Solo novels and the TIE Fighter video game. The Fed asks to join the Empire as an autonomous entity a la the Trade Federation, the Techno Union, or the Corporate Sector Authority. The Empire sends out a governor. With luck and effort and a bit of skillful lobbying, it is possible the Fed can get a Moff sent to them who's a fop and a fool, as opposed to a Tarkin.

Soon enough, the Moff arrives with his fleet. The Moff is given a palatial estate and is kept so happy with food, prostitutes, and his private pleasure planet (Wrigley's Pleasure Planet, perhaps), he is only seen on formal state occasions once a year, and even then when he's not falling down drunk. His navy (such as is sent, which shouldn't be much if the Feds are peaceable) can be sent off to "hold the line" against the Cardassians or the Borg or someone like.

A couple years pass. The Battle of Endor happens. The Republic is restored, the Fed gets senators in the Galactic Senate, and suddenly the Feds are the most powerful force in the Milky Way Galaxy, since they are now part of a galaxy-spanning -- now extra-galactic -- republic.

Respectfully,

Brian P.Now that I can see. I like it.

[Renegade Paladin]

...Yes. You need to suspend your disbelief when you're watching SF. So when someone on screen says they've just devastated the surface of a planet but the effects department doesn't accurately represent how that would look, I suspend my disbelief and go with what they've said, rather than assuming they're deluded, deceived or stupid.

I don't see what kind of point you're trying to make with that statement.
The point is that if you're rationalizing something as "the effects guys screwed up," then you're not suspending disbelief.
While I agree with what you're saying, what about intentional suspension of disbelief because both ships need to be shown on the TV screen - a completely exterior concern? We see it in tabletop games all the time - a 1" hex is equal to 30 meters, and this machinegun has a range of 3 hexes (90m). A 90m range for a machinegun is ludicrous. However, the ranges are specifically stated to be artificially compressed so people can actually play on the tabletop and not on a football field. I look at ranges in TV shows the same way; nobody wants to see the quarter-inch long blip that the OPFOR ship would realistically be at a sane distance. Therefore, the ships are shown to be closer than they should be for the sake of the show, not the underlying universe.
There is absolutely no out of universe reason, technical or otherwise, why battles can't be shown beyond visual range; Babylon 5 did it, and did so at the same time that later Star Trek series were running. If they wanted to show that, they'd have shown it.

[kamikasei]

The point is that if you're rationalizing something as "the effects guys screwed up," then you're not suspending disbelief.

I'm recognizing that they're attempting to depict a world being devastated and not getting hung up on whether the visuals are quite right. Is that not suspension of disbelief? Disregarding the fact that effects are involved at all and deciding that the armada must have been incapable of doing the very job it was designed for and claimed to be accomplishing because the footage doesn't quite look right seems to be a step or two beyond willing suspension of disbelief.

[GoC]

Also, I noticed you completely dodged the canon fact that Starfleet is apparently run by incompotent morons who forget technology and tatics a minute after their wonder engineers devise them. Or the fact that despite massive potential range they choose in virtually every conflict to engage at point blank range.
I love the rants on these boards! :smallcool:


After all, we know Star Wars has capable computers, because they can build sentient robots easily enough for them to be a major factor in most Star Wars societies.
No. Just no.
Strong AI doesn't exist in StarWars or any other coherent sci-fi universe. We'll have to imagine the C3PO and co. have an organic brain or something otherwise SW falls to pieces.

Renegade Paladin: The dialog may be bad but the visuals are a thousand times worse. The standard in TNS and TOS (DS9 is a bit inconsistant) is range measured in km, lightminutes, klicks, lightseconds. I don't recall meters though and I haven't seen many episodes of voyager.

Maybe we should use TOS startrek and watch them slaughter the empire with their amazing range advantage?:smalltongue:

[Renegade Paladin]

No. Just no.
Strong AI doesn't exist in StarWars or any other coherent sci-fi universe. We'll have to imagine the C3PO and co. have an organic brain or something otherwise SW falls to pieces.
:smallconfused:

Renegade Paladin: The dialog may be bad but the visuals are a thousand times worse. The standard in TNS and TOS (DS9 is a bit inconsistant) is range measured in km, lightminutes, klicks, lightseconds. I don't recall meters though and I haven't seen many episodes of voyager.

Maybe we should use TOS startrek and watch them slaughter the empire with their amazing range advantage?:smalltongue:
No version of Trek has an amazing range advantage, not even TOS.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

No. Just no.
Strong AI doesn't exist in StarWars or any other coherent sci-fi universe. We'll have to imagine the C3PO and co. have an organic brain or something otherwise SW falls to pieces.No it doesn't. Why do you say that? :smallconfused:

[Tyrant]

I love the rants on these boards! :smallcool:
Even if that somehow qualifies as a rant (don't see how, but whatever), watch any 10 episodes of Star Trek and tell me how I am mistaken. They will come across 10 different problems that all have 10 wonder solutions, none of which we ever see again. If we do, it will only be before or after numerous similar situations have popped up where it would also be a good idea to use them but they don't. As far as the range, any ship battle after Star Trek II agrees with my assesment.

Maybe we should use TOS startrek and watch them slaughter the empire with their amazing range advantage?:smalltongue:

This would be the same TOS that had the Enterprise trying to outrun a nuclear warhead the Romulans dumped into space at them? Kiloton or megaton makes no difference. The Imperial weapons are substantially stronger than that and they can keep firing.

[kamikasei]

This would be the same TOS that had the Enterprise trying to outrun a nuclear warhead the Romulans dumped into space at them? Kiloton or megaton makes no difference. The Imperial weapons are substantially stronger than that and they can keep firing.

Not a nuke but an ill-defined plasma blast thingy. Which had proven capable of one-shotting Federation listening posts (again, how tough the posts were is not very clear, but I think it's implied the Roms were actually destroying the asteroids on which the posts were built).

[Tyrant]

Not a nuke but an ill-defined plasma blast thingy. Which had proven capable of one-shotting Federation listening posts (again, how tough the posts were is not very clear, but I think it's implied the Roms were actually destroying the asteroids on which the posts were built).

No, they dumped a nuclear warhead out in an attempt to hit the Enterprise. I am well aware of their plasma sphere weapon. Somewhere between shots they dumped the nuke along with trash (and possibly dead crew members) to help conceal it amongst the other metallic objects.

[factotum]

Even if that somehow qualifies as a rant (don't see how, but whatever), watch any 10 episodes of Star Trek and tell me how I am mistaken. They will come across 10 different problems that all have 10 wonder solutions, none of which we ever see again.

Oh, I always hated that. There was an Original Series episode where they picked up an alien probe (the probe was called NOMAD, I think--forget the name of the episode). They took the probe down to Engineering and it immediately said something like "Your matter/antimatter reaction is really inefficient, let me fix that." Suddenly the ship is accelerating from Warp 1 and it hits something like Warp 11 before Kirk says, "Stop that! The ship can't take it!" and forces the probe to reverse its changes.

At that point I think, "The probe is just making the engines more efficient. Turn the ruddy things off and figure out how to control them at their current efficiency level, then get to the nearest Starfleet outpost and get the techies to strip that darned engine for every secret it's got! Don't just reverse the changes!"

[Dervag]

I'm recognizing that they're attempting to depict a world being devastated and not getting hung up on whether the visuals are quite right. Is that not suspension of disbelief? Disregarding the fact that effects are involved at all and deciding that the armada must have been incapable of doing the very job it was designed for and claimed to be accomplishing because the footage doesn't quite look right seems to be a step or two beyond willing suspension of disbelief.OK. Let's ask a few questions and use a few known facts.

The bombardment fleet would have been composed of warships armed with phasers and photon torpedoes.

Photon torpedoes are multimegaton-range antimatter weapons, with a theoretical maximum yied of 50-75 megatons. In space, much of this energy is wasted in a spherical detonation. However, in atmosphere, much of the 'wasted' high-energy particles and gamma rays produced by an antimatter detonation will be absorbed by the target planet's atmosphere, making its effective yield closer to theoretical limits. In addition, unreacted antimatter (such as will almost inevitably be left over after detonation in space) will tend to react with the planetary atmosphere, further increasing the amount of energy delivered to the target. So the torpedoes would indeed come fairly close to their theoretical maximum yield.

Now I'm going to take advantage of one of the few setting-neutral features of stardestroyer.net: their "Nuclear Weapons Effect Calculator, " here (http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Science/Nuke.html). If you want to use your own or do the math yourself, feel free.

Based on this, I get a figure for the radius in which thermal radiation (direct blast of light and heat from the explosion) of 58 kilometers. Assuming the torpedoes are detonated at the optimum height to spread this effect (i.e. the point of blast must be visible from the surface for 58 kilometers), that's going to produce circles roughly 100 kilometers in diameter in which all exposed animal life suffers severe, crippling burns and in which vegetation is likely to be set on fire. However, this tactic requires a high altitude detonation that will cause little physical damage to the surface except on a superficial level.

Photon torpedoes are devastating planetary bombardment weapons. Against a populated planet, each torpedo could destroy a major metropolitan area, starting enormous numbers of fires and causing millions of casualties.

A saturation pattern of blasts like this would cause a mass extinction event on the planet's surface, at least as bad as the one that afflicted the Earth at the end of the Permian, and likely far worse. Only the hardiest and most primitive life could possibly survive. Of course, the bombardment fleet would have to carpet entire continents with hundred-kilometer circles, which would take thousands of torpedoes to carpet the entire planet.

The Romulans or Cardassians might very well have deemed an area of the planetary surface "destroyed" when they had burned it by starting fires and killing most of the animals in the area using a high-altitude blast in the planet's stratosphere. In that case, it is entirely reasonable that they could have bombarded the planet and "destroyed" 30% of the surface, although this would have taken them at least a few hundred torpedo launches to achieve (they're covering an area of millions of square kilometers with circular zones of destruction roughly ten thousand kilometers across).

However, even a saturation pattern of torpedoes used in this way could not literally destroy a planetary crust. To do that would require many, many more torpedoes, fired to detonate at or near ground level (to create bomb craters) instead of in the planet's stratosphere. Unless the joint bombardment fleet is much larger than I thought, I doubt that they even carry enough torpedoes to physically pulverize every piece of the planetary surface.

But don't count out the Trek fleet yet. We haven't covered phasers.

Normally, we'd count phasers out because they appear to pack less punch than photon torpedoes. They don't do as much damage to capital ships, and if they were normal direct energy weapons like lasers or particle beams, that would be decisive. Such weapons would be considerably less effective for planetary bombardment than photon torpedoes or even conventional nuclear bombs. While the command "fire phasers from orbit" might be an excellent way to take out a specific installation with precision strikes, it would be a bad choice for causing widespread devastation on a planetary surface. Phasers carry orders of magnitude less energy than torpedoes.

But remember, phasers are pretty clearly not conventional beam weapons. Unlike Star Wars blasters and turbolasers, which we can plausibly identify as plasma weapons of some kind, phasers appear to employ totally unknown technology. This is illustrated by the fact that they can disintegrate a human body without causing the contents of that body to explode all over the surrounding area as one would expect from a large mass of flesh vaporized by a beam of heat or high-energy particles.

In this particular case, I think stardestroyer.net's speculation that phasers use some kind of exotic 'chain reaction' to destroy matter is a good explanation. Regardless of any opinions the website may hold about phaser power, it does explain some important facts:
-Phaser shots do not obey conservation of momentum; Captain Kirk can fire a phaser bolt one-handed that throws a Klingon warrior several feet. Any physical projectile, including one made of plasma or high-energy particles, powerful enough to throw a man several feet would be powerful enough to break Kirk's wrist with its recoil. Whereas if the phaser induces a chain reaction in the atoms of the Klingon warrior's body, he may be thrown by the thrust created disintegration of those atoms, rather than by the impact of the phaser bolt itself.
-Phaser shots do not exhibit consistent properties against different forms of matter. A phaser bolt that disintegrates a man may only scorch a metal bulkhead. A plasma bolt, laser, or physical bullet carrying enough energy to volatilize the human body would do great damage to a metal wall, blasting a big hole in it and filling the air with a huge cloud of metal vapor and toxic metal oxide smoke.
-Phasers appear to be more effective against Star Trek shields than most other types of energy are, joule for joule and watt for watt. This suggests that whatever exotic technique is used to generate the phaser bolt has an effect on shields in addition to the simple disruption caused by dumping energy onto the shield.

Now, if phasers create a chain reaction in matter rather than being a simple direct energy release, the effect of a phaser may scale nonlinearly with the amount of energy used. It may be that increasing the energy release only slightly causes a catastrophically greater effect on the target, if the increased energy yield is enough to reach a 'critical power'. This would be comparable to the 'critical mass' of fissile material required to set off a nuclear explosion.

So a phaser that can be used as a heat lamp or stunner (perhaps in the same way that high-energy microwave beams are being considered as non-lethal weapons on Earth) on a low power setting may act as a cutting beam or a disintegrator on a high power setting, which would be totally inexplicable using any technology known or envisioned on Earth today.

Phasers are relatively ineffective against metal compared to stone or organic matter, as demonstrated by the performance characteristics of hand phasers. Since naval phasers are normally used as antishipping weapons against metallic warships, this weakness may lead us to underestimate their normal effective power.

Consider the episode A Matter of Time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Matter_of_Time_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)) (TNG-109). In this episode, the Enterprise attempts to use its phasers on wide-angle beam settings in order to burn up dust in the upper atmosphere of the planet Penthara IV and prevent it from entering an ice age after it was struck by an asteroid. However, the plan has a major drawback- if the Enterprise applies even slightly too much power to the beam*, Penthara IV's atmosphere would get blasted into space.

This suggests that the amount of power required to destroy the atmospheric dust was perilously close to the 'critical power' or 'critical intensity' required to trigger a chain reaction in the planetary atmosphere.

*the quoted figure was 60 gigawatts. This is a very large amount of power by the standards of normal contemporary power generation, but apparently small impressive by the standards of Star Trek beam weapons.

If such a critical threshhold exists, then the Romulans and Cardassians might well have been able to cause far more damage to the target planet than the power of their weapons suggests, if they could crank those weapons high enough to exceed the critical power threshholds in planetary atmosphere and bedrock. In that case, phasers might cause mass destruction on a scale I cannot estimate. Since Trek ships can fire phasers on a more or less continuous beam, this would allow them to cause enormous damage to the planetary surface very quickly.


No. Just no.
Strong AI doesn't exist in StarWars or any other coherent sci-fi universe. We'll have to imagine the C3PO and co. have an organic brain or something otherwise SW falls to pieces.I question your assertion.

[Seraph]

That's all well and Good, dervag, but answer me this. you're the head of a Visual effects team working on a deadline of about a week. the script just came down and describes a planet's crust being destroyed. you have to devote all your time to doing the effects, and as this is before Wikipedia, you don't have the time to look up precisely what the effects would look like. therefore, as a layman with minimal understanding of physics and no experience with how multi-megaton explosives would look like from orbit, what do you do?


This is why dialog is trusted more than visuals.

[Emperor Tippy]

No. Just no.
Strong AI doesn't exist in StarWars or any other coherent sci-fi universe. We'll have to imagine the C3PO and co. have an organic brain or something otherwise SW falls to pieces.
Whether or not strong AI exists in Star Wars is a matter of debate but whether or not it exists in other coherent universe isn't.

Cortana is certainly strong AI and Halo is one of the more coherent sci-fi universes. The Andromeda Ascendant is strong AI and that show has a ton of strong AI yet (at least for the first 2 seasons) it was one of the most coherent Sci-Fi universe around.

[Tyrant]

That's all well and Good, dervag, but answer me this. you're the head of a Visual effects team working on a deadline of about a week. the script just came down and describes a planet's crust being destroyed. you have to devote all your time to doing the effects, and as this is before Wikipedia, you don't have the time to look up precisely what the effects would look like. therefore, as a layman with minimal understanding of physics and no experience with how multi-megaton explosives would look like from orbit, what do you do?


This is why dialog is trusted more than visuals.

Why is a layman with minimal understanding of physics (not that planetary destruction or what the script says is really that hard to grasp) the head of the effects team on a show steeped in technobabble that at least tries to be something approaching plausable sometimes? I really don't buy, "the effects guy isn't a physicist" argument. While I doubt the effects guy is a physicist, he is an effects guy. If I go to him and say make some penguins for a show and through some freak chain of events he has never heard of them he will find out what they are and what they should do, not just make it up. Get real.

[turkishproverb]

Whether or not strong AI exists in Star Wars is a matter of debate but whether or not it exists in other coherent universe isn't.

Cortana is certainly strong AI and Halo is one of the more coherent sci-fi universes. The Andromeda Ascendant is strong AI and that show has a ton of strong AI yet (at least for the first 2 seasons) it was one of the most coherent Sci-Fi universe around.

I know, From what I can tell, his arguments seem almost like a spiritual objection, a guy yelling "Oh, it can't be a computer program and so close to human. IT CAN"T!! DON"T MAKE ME HIT YOU!!" :smallyuk:

[Seraph]

Why is a layman with minimal understanding of physics (not that planetary destruction or what the script says is really that hard to grasp) the head of the effects team on a show steeped in technobabble that at least tries to be something approaching plausable sometimes? I really don't buy, "the effects guy isn't a physicist" argument. While I doubt the effects guy is a physicist, he is an effects guy. If I go to him and say make some penguins for a show and through some freak chain of events he has never heard of them he will find out what they are and what they should do, not just make it up. Get real.

my point was that the effects guys were portraying surface destruction to the best of their knowledge. they hardly had time to be off researching if there would be planetary ejecta or anything of the sort.

[Tyrant]

my point was that the effects guys were portraying surface destruction to the best of their knowledge. they hardly had time to be off researching if there would be planetary ejecta or anything of the sort.

I still fail to see how that would take more than a day tops. They are working on a scifi show that presumably has at least some scientific consultants. If not, there is always the local university or library. People were able to research things just fine before the internet. If they can't go in person for whatever lame reason is conceaved, there are always assistants or the telephone.

[Talkkno]

That's all well and Good, dervag, but answer me this. you're the head of a Visual effects team working on a deadline of about a week. the script just came down and describes a planet's crust being destroyed. you have to devote all your time to doing the effects, and as this is before Wikipedia, you don't have the time to look up precisely what the effects would look like. therefore, as a layman with minimal understanding of physics and no experience with how multi-megaton explosives would look like from orbit, what do you do?


This is why dialog is trusted more than visuals.

"A lot of people argue over whether one should place more emphasis on dialogue or visuals. However, this argument is really just a roundabout way of approaching the argument over literary vs suspension of disbelief. Remember that the "suspension of disbelief" method requires that we treat dialogue and visuals the same way we would in real life, and in real life, we don't take verbal communication at face value. After all, real people are much more careless when speaking than writing. Moreover, they are prone to leaving out crucial details (for example, there are a wealth of unspoken technical caveats hidden in a stereo amplifier rating of "200 watts per channel"). They are prone to outright errors (for example, a lot of people mix up "gigabytes" and "megabytes" while describing computer hardware, and others might not even bother correcting them because they know what the person meant to say). They may even describe things in a manner which they know to be technically false (for example, even highly qualified physicists will often describe lightning bolts coming down from the sky, even though it is fairly common knowledge that the incandescent bolt actually moves upward, from the ground to the clouds). And of course, real people are not infallible, which is why the "appeal to authority" is a fallacy.

The opposing argument comes from the literary analysis camp, and holds that dialogue is a better indicator of the author's intentions than visuals. This argument is flawed on many levels. First and foremost, if it is being used to justify technical arguments (hint: any argument which involves characteristics of technology or scientific units such as "joules", "watts", or "megatons" is a technical argument), then the use of literal methods forces the inherently self-contradictory exercise of trying to magically divine meaningful scientific intentions on the part of a scientifically ignorant author (note: very few sci-fi authors actually have a science or engineering background). Moreover, it is generally predicated upon the argument that dialogue is more consistent than visuals, which is simply untrue in this case. For every mistake you can find in special effects (eg- bad compositing that puts element A in front of element B when it should be behind, or inconsistent scaling), you can find ten horrible mistakes in dialogue (eg- sonic weapons in space, 4.3 kJ shields on a space station, power measured in watts per second, warp core output measured in teradynes, machines to alter the laws of probability, similar numbers being given for yield on both starship weapons and hand weapons, etc). It's not at all unreasonable to say that more attention is paid to visual consistency than dialogue consistency in TV shows and movies.

There is another facet to the "dialogue vs visuals" debate, and that is the fact that people tend to think visually when they write screenplays (which are full of very specific instructions for the appearance of scenes, the layout of events, etc). As a result, they usually plot out events in shows so that, if you were to greatly modify the visuals, they would no longer make any sense."

[kamikasei]

In this particular case, I think stardestroyer.net's speculation that phasers use some kind of exotic 'chain reaction' to destroy matter is a good explanation.

This is pretty much what the ST Tech Manuals say, describing phasers as using the "Rapid Nadion Effect" (no, nadions are not mentioned anywhere in canon, nor is a slow nadion described).

As to the blast and yield calculations: meh. Power levels of weapons in Trek vary so widely on the whims of the writers I have no interest in defending their capabilities. My argument here has been specifically in response to Renegade Paladin that a) it makes no sense for the Dominion to have fed false data to the fleet describing the destruction of the surface yet not update the life-form readings to match, b) it makes even less sense for them to try to fool the fleet into thinking their weapons are orders of magnitude more effective than they should be, which since he's contesting the evidence the scene provides for their destructive power is presumably the point, c) no one on the warbird's bridge seems at all surprised to see their weapons laying waste to the very structure of a planet, and d) the fact that the effects team didn't do a great job is a flimsy basis on which to reject the rest of the scene.

I was also under the impression that the fleet was carrying "planet buster" torps, but that may derive from speculation elsewhere as to just how they did so much damage. It is at least plausible that an armada specifically assembled to attack one planet with no static defences could carry extra-high-yield torpedoes at the expense of shielding and maneuvrability, though.

[Dervag]

That's all well and Good, dervag, but answer me this. you're the head of a Visual effects team working on a deadline of about a week. the script just came down and describes a planet's crust being destroyed. you have to devote all your time to doing the effects, and as this is before Wikipedia, you don't have the time to look up precisely what the effects would look like. therefore, as a layman with minimal understanding of physics and no experience with how multi-megaton explosives would look like from orbit, what do you do?

This is why dialog is trusted more than visuals.Well, I'm an apprentice physicist, so I am the wrong person to ask.

Frankly, if I were the guy in charge of visuals for Star Trek, I like to think I'd keep a couple of experts on call for just such an emergency. So I'd phone Dr. Smith over at UCLA an say "Hey, we've got a Romulan fleet that's supposed to wreck the crust of a planet in next week's episode; what should it look like after the dust clears?"

Dr. Smith thinks about it for a few minutes and calls back with "craters full of lava" or something. And so I go and special-effect craters full of lava or whatever. Problem solved.

My objection is that while I know the visuals are designed by people who don't always know how the visuals are supposed to look, it is equally true that the scripts are written by people who don't always know what's physically possible or plausible. By people who don't know that energy isn't measured in watts. Or that you can't just invent elements with new names and randomly chosen numbers tacked on the end and give them arbitrary properties, because all the elements that could have that number are already known.

The script writers are no less ignorant than the visuals designers, and so the script isn't a better guide to what's really happening than the visuals are if we resolve the debate by breaching the fourth wall this way. So I pretend that I'm seeing a documentary- the script is a transcript of what the characters say, and the visuals are footage of what happened. If they contradict each other, I go with whichever seems more plausible and against whichever seems more likely to be wrong.


my point was that the effects guys were portraying surface destruction to the best of their knowledge. they hardly had time to be off researching if there would be planetary ejecta or anything of the sort.I don't expect planetary ejecta.

I expect that if somebody says "We've destroyed 30% of the planet's crust" that when I look at the planet 30% of the crust will look sort of, well, destroyed. It doesn't take any scientific education beyond the high school level to know that a planet is pretty much a big ball of lava with a crust of rock. Most people in developed nations already know that if you dig deep enough you hit lava.

Now, if the crust has been destroyed, you'd expect big craters full of lava, stuff like that. If I see big craters full of lava, I'm happy. I don't demand detailed perfect simulations. But I do want to see at least a rough correlation between what I'm seeind and what I'm hearing. If I don't get that correlation, then I must assume that what I'm hearing is wrong- that the characters are mistaken (their sensors are being spoofed). Or that something got mixed up in translation from Romulan (maybe they mean 'sterilized' and not 'destroyed').

But if I'm going to make arguments about Star Trek, and not about Paramount Studios, I have to assume that the stuff portrayed as happening in the Star Trek universe really is happening. That it isn't just a fake image of what's "really happening" produced by people who are too ignorant to know how it should look. Otherwise, I might as well assume that the crew of the Enterprise never really left Earth and that the whole thing is a mass hallucination and that the show is really about the delusional inhabitants of a mental institution.


I was also under the impression that the fleet was carrying "planet buster" torps, but that may derive from speculation elsewhere as to just how they did so much damage. It is at least plausible that an armada specifically assembled to attack one planet with no static defences could carry extra-high-yield torpedoes at the expense of shielding and maneuvrability, though.That's actually quite likely. I hadn't thought of that. And it would make a big difference.

[Renegade Paladin]

I feel it should be pointed out that Romulans and Cardassians use disruptors as their shipboard weapons rather than phasers. What sort of technical difference that makes with regards to planetary bombardment I have no idea, but it's there.

[Mando Knight]

Sheer-numbers-wise, I'd say that the Empire would win. Setting the phaser and size-equivalent turbolaser powers as equal, as well as the shield power per square meter, (highly unlikely, though I'm not the one to debate the exact weapon and shield powers with), the Enterprise-D could easily go toe-to-toe with a Vindicator-class heavy cruiser... by no means the largest of the Imperial starships.

The Federation has to make due with star battleships <700 meters long versus the 1.6 km Star Destroyers. This gets even uglier with the inclusion of the Executor, which was finished by the time given in the OP. The Executor is about 19 km long, whereas the Enterprise-D is only about 641 meters long. Assuming similar weapon densities (not likely, as the Executor is a battleship first and foremost, whereas the Enterprise D is an exploration ship), the Executor is worth about 30 of the buggers. I'm not sure, (as the exact numbers aren't available to me), but I don't think that the Federation has more than a handful of Galaxy-class ships or its more-battle-oriented siblings, the Sovereign-class. The Empire officially had over 25 thousand Imperial Star Destroyers, again each about 2.5 times the size of the Enterprise. Larger ships often get to place more power behind the turbolasers... so an ISD, having more powerful turbolasers than the Vindicator class, would likely have more power than the Enterprise-D per weapon...

Furthermore, the Empire has far more resources to expend to the fleet. Granted that the Borg, Q continuum, the Rebel Alliance, etc. are not entered into this equation, the Empire (~1.4 million planets) invading the much smaller Federation (~1-2 thousand planets) would be able to unleash a massive war of attrition. There have been victories in real life with odds of 3:1, but not 1000:1.

Also, I don't think that a Picard v. Thrawn battle would end in the Federation's favor if Thrawn got to see any Federation artwork before hand... the Grand Admiral did lay waste to the New Republic single-handedly with a small fleet of only a few Star Destroyers... (of course, Thrawn is a cross between Sherlock Holmes, General Lee, and Alexander the Great...)

[factotum]

I feel it should be pointed out that Romulans and Cardassians use disruptors as their shipboard weapons rather than phasers. What sort of technical difference that makes with regards to planetary bombardment I have no idea, but it's there.

I'm pretty sure they didn't use any photon torpedoes during that planetary bombardment either, but that just means they're using less powerful weapons...there wouldn't be a need for photon torpedoes if the normal phasers or whatever could do as much damage!

[GoC]

No it doesn't. Why do you say that? :smallconfused:
Umm...
Because strong AI is REALLY REALLY powerful?
Strong AI with access to a large database such as the internet or those libraries can become an expert on every single topic in a matter of seconds. With faster "thinking speed" it can analyze a tactical situation and in milliseconds come up with the best battleplan you ever saw then run a few simulations to iron out the bugs. Obviously C3PO never did this and in fact seemed to have trouble walking upright! He was worse at understanding human behavior than a normal psyciatrist despite it being his primary function! Even if his cpu had the same proccessing power as the human brain his ability to "concentrate" it into a single line of thought makes it so much more powerful than a human brain it's not even funny.
For example a household computer has far less power than a human brain but can calculate 3^100 in a few milliseconds due to it's ability to focus that power.


Even if that somehow qualifies as a rant (don't see how, but whatever), watch any 10 episodes of Star Trek and tell me how I am mistaken. They will come across 10 different problems that all have 10 wonder solutions, none of which we ever see again. If we do, it will only be before or after numerous similar situations have popped up where it would also be a good idea to use them but they don't. As far as the range, any ship battle after Star Trek II agrees with my assesment.
Sorry. I put rants in the same category as vs. threads; fun and interesting.
And no, you're very correct, I agree with you.:smallcool:

Emperor Tippy: Then pray tell why all the humans in every field weren't replaced with AI? They're faster, just as good at creative thinking (hence the "strong" part), can be copied millions of times easily, learn MUCH faster and can constantly develope new subsystems (thought processes) for every need!
And why wasn't there a cortana in every ship to give advice? Or a few in data storage in case one broke? It's because she had a biological part isn't it? So my point still stands.


I know, From what I can tell, his arguments seem almost like a spiritual objection, a guy yelling "Oh, it can't be a computer program and so close to human. IT CAN"T!! DON"T MAKE ME HIT YOU!!"
I have no such spiritual objections. I'm quite happy with sentient/strong AI and it could by definition perfectly emulate human quirks, emotion, ect.
What I was saying is that C3PO is more limited than a Strong Ai. In fact almost every robot in SW hasn't done anything that indicates more than weak AI.

Strong AI might use human traits because it helps it attain it's primary goal. Humans on the other hand have no choice.

Strong AI isn't even humans on steroids. It's Silver Age Superman with Squirrel Girl's plot armor!

[kamikasei]

Because strong AI is REALLY REALLY powerful?
...
Strong AI isn't even humans on steroids. It's Silver Age Superman with Squirrel Girl's plot armor!

This is an abuse of the term "strong AI". "Strong" isn't superhuman, it's "this AI is actually a self-aware entity" as opposed to the "eh, it can fake it, who cares" of "weak AI".

It may be quite natural to assume that by the time you can build a true AI you've got a sufficiently technological and networked society, and a thorough enough understanding of the mechanisms of both evolved and constructed intelligence, that all the lines will blur and any AI is likely to be scalable up to superhuman levels, rather than having a class of human-level intelligences bound up in droid bodies that are, for most purposes, just people with metal skin. But that's an argument about the lack of verisimilitude in a setting with isolated technologies absent the framework to produce them, not about strong AI per se.

[Tyrant]

Sorry. I put rants in the same category as vs. threads; fun and interesting. And no, you're very correct, I agree with you.:smallcool:

Sorry, I misunderstood. To clarify what I said, I don't doubt that some of those things are reused. If I really thought about it I could probably come up with something. The shield modifications to allow them to pass into a star's carona comes to mind (and if they didn't reuse that, then the writers truly are stupid). It's just that for every 1 that is reused there are dozen's never seen again. Whereas with Star Wars, the super cheese super weapon (Death Star) is reused in at least 1 other "super canon level" location (RotJ) and at least 3 I can think of in the EU. Clearly the ability to destroy a planet, though nothing next to the power of the force, is something to be proud of when one constructs a technological terror in Star Wars.

[Mando Knight]

He was worse at understanding human behavior than a normal psyciatrist despite it being his primary function!

Where do you get that? 3PO carried in his mind over 6 billion forms of communication, and was capable of deciphering the Ewok language with only a few examples by referencing it to his database...

R2-D2 has as much personality as almost any organic character in Star Wars and can plot navigational data between several star systems, including one that he'd never been to before.

And then there was IG-88, who managed to develop an intricate plan to destroy the Empire and build up his own mechanical monarchy. He nearly succeeded, but his plan was ruined when Wedge Antilles and Lando Calrissian blew him up in the Battle of Endor... he had downloaded his consciousness into the DS II mainframe.

Many of the droids in Star Wars were designed around the fact that if they were too smart, they could take over the galaxy, like IG-88 almost did. It's not that the tech for strong AI doesn't exist in the GFFA, it's just that they don't want to use it because the organic beings want to remain in control.

And what about the Borg? If Star Trek AI are so powerful, then why isn't the Borg in control of the Federation by the end of the 4th season of TNG?

[Emperor Tippy]

Emperor Tippy: Then pray tell why all the humans in every field weren't replaced with AI? They're faster, just as good at creative thinking (hence the "strong" part), can be copied millions of times easily, learn MUCH faster and can constantly develope new subsystems (thought processes) for every need!
And why wasn't there a cortana in every ship to give advice? Or a few in data storage in case one broke? It's because she had a biological part isn't it? So my point still stands.

Because in the Haloverse you can't copy a smart AI (self aware ones) and they are very hard to create. And there was a smart AI on almost every UNSC ship. As for them not replacing humans, they did do a lot of replacing.

And in Andromeda it was that way. The reason copying didn't happen was because the computer network needed to contain an AI was so advanced. It took up a large part of a kilometer long starship.

Strong AI can work quite well and coherent Sci-Fi can have them. The culture novels are another example.


Strong AI isn't even humans on steroids. It's Silver Age Superman with Squirrel Girl's plot armor!
And what do you think Cortonta or Andromeda were? Cortona managed to take over entire covenant ships in a few minutes and then in under a week improve their tech by well over a hundred percent.

[Dervag]

I'm pretty sure they didn't use any photon torpedoes during that planetary bombardment either, but that just means they're using less powerful weapons...there wouldn't be a need for photon torpedoes if the normal phasers or whatever could do as much damage!I'm not sure what you mean by "using less powerful weapons" in this context.

Whatever weapon they would have used to bombard that planet would probably be whatever weapon in the Romulan and Cardassian arsenals is most effective at planetary bombardment. Photon torpedoes, which basically duplicate the effects of very large nuclear bombs without so much of the radioactive fallout, are quite effective. Phasers would not be effective unless they could somehow trigger chain reactions that did more damage than the phaser's raw energy statistics would indicate. Disruptors, which appear to be more standard direct-energy weapons, likewise.

I know nothing of other weapons.


Umm...
Because strong AI is REALLY REALLY powerful?
Strong AI with access to a large database such as the internet or those libraries can become an expert on every single topic in a matter of seconds. With faster "thinking speed" it can analyze a tactical situation and in milliseconds come up with the best battleplan you ever saw then run a few simulations to iron out the bugs.Don't be too sure.

The problem is that you're wedded to the notion that a strong AI will automatically think much faster than a human being. This need not be true. It can calculate much faster than a human being, but it could well take a truly enormous amount of calculation for a computer to emulate the complexity of human thought.

A strong AI (in the standard definition of "smart enough to emulate human thought") might very well be able to do math much faster than me without being able to outwit me in a game of riddles or predict my reaction to events or anything like that.


Obviously C3PO never did this and in fact seemed to have trouble walking upright! He was worse at understanding human behavior than a normal psyciatrist despite it being his primary function! Even if his cpu had the same proccessing power as the human brain his ability to "concentrate" it into a single line of thought makes it so much more powerful than a human brain it's not even funny.The obvious rejoinder is that, according to the prequel trilogy, C3PO was designed by a small child. Said child, despite considerable native talent, may not have been competent to assemble a sentient robot from scratch.

More to the point, C3PO was not designed to be graceful, or to "understand human behavior." C3PO was designed to be a translator and a database of regional customs, with legs so it could go where you needed it without having to carry it and with a personality so that you could interact with it.


For example a household computer has far less power than a human brain but can calculate 3^100 in a few milliseconds due to it's ability to focus that power.There are a lot of people who can calculate faster than me without being better than me at everything. Calculating 3^100 is an example of a task that a computer is ideally suited for (because it is a number), and that human beings are most poorly suited for (because we didn't evolve to do high-order exponentials in our heads).

A computer can only perform a task if that task can be reduced to numbers. The more numbers it takes to describe a task, the harder the computer will find it.


Emperor Tippy: Then pray tell why all the humans in every field weren't replaced with AI? They're faster, just as good at creative thinking (hence the "strong" part), can be copied millions of times easily, learn MUCH faster and can constantly develope new subsystems (thought processes) for every need!Says who?

A "strong" AI need not be as good all-around as a human being. It needs to be able to roughly approximate the core functions of human intelligence, but that task might well approach the very limits of its processing power. Moreover, it need not be able to pick up new abilities instantly the way you suggest.

Now, a really strong AI might have those capabilities, but "strong" AI equal to that of, say, R2D2 need not.


What I was saying is that C3PO is more limited than a Strong Ai. In fact almost every robot in SW hasn't done anything that indicates more than weak AI.They can pass a Turing test. They possess most of the characteristic traits of human intelligence, although in some cases the intelligence in question is that of a fool or an idiot savant (as with C3PO). As far as I'm concerned that is "strong."


Strong AI isn't even humans on steroids. It's Silver Age Superman with Squirrel Girl's plot armor!That's because your idea of what constitutes a "strong" AI is much stronger than everybody else's is here.

But I don't really care about how strong AI has to be to be "strong." All I'm saying is that Star Wars droid technology proves that they pretty much have to have a mastery of computer technology that at least matches that of the Federation.


Where do you get that? 3PO carried in his mind over 6 billion forms of communication, and was capable of deciphering the Ewok language with only a few examples by referencing it to his database...Million. M for Mother Million.

[nothingclever]

This argument should just die. Star Trek vs a universe X zillion times it size where it's creator apparently lets any any books be canon clearly isn't fair.

Empire wins because it is bigger and can have anything, not because it is necessarily better as a whole in terms of enjoyment or realism.

[Renegade Paladin]

This argument should just die. Star Trek vs a universe X zillion times it size where it's creator apparently lets any any books be canon clearly isn't fair.

Empire wins because it is bigger and can have anything, not because it is necessarily better as a whole in terms of enjoyment or realism.
Yeah, pretty much.

[Dervag]

This argument should just die. Star Trek vs a universe X zillion times it size where it's creator apparently lets any any books be canon clearly isn't fair.

Empire wins because it is bigger and can have anything, not because it is necessarily better as a whole in terms of enjoyment or realism.Well, it does serve as an interesting launching point for stuff like "how nasty would Star Trek weapons be for planetary bombardment, and why?" Maybe I'm the only one interested in that.

If you are bored by it, I can't blame you, but no one forces you to pay any attention to me or any other people who aren't bored by it.

[Ubiq]

The Empire officially had over 25 thousand Imperial Star Destroyers, again each about 2.5 times the size of the Enterprise.


2.5 times the length you mean. Star Destroyers are much, more larger than just 2.5 times the size of a Galaxy-class starship, which are tall and long, but not very thick compared to their other dimensions. Volume-wise, an ISD is somewhere between ten and twenty times as large as the Enterprise-D while an Executor is between one and thousand times as large as a Galaxy-class.

[factotum]

Where do you get that? 3PO carried in his mind over 6 billion forms of communication, and was capable of deciphering the Ewok language with only a few examples by referencing it to his database...


C3PO actually says himself that he doesn't understand humans--I forget exactly where he says it, but he definitely does! In the first film he also said that his primary function was "human-cyborg relations", which implies he wasn't just a walking translator.

[GoC]

Don't be too sure.

The problem is that you're wedded to the notion that a strong AI will automatically think much faster than a human being. This need not be true. It can calculate much faster than a human being, but it could well take a truly enormous amount of calculation for a computer to emulate the complexity of human thought.
...
Wow. I'd never realised I'd been assuming it could emulate human thought at the same speed as a human...
Most of my points now collapse like a house of cards.:smallfrown:


A strong AI (in the standard definition of "smart enough to emulate human thought") might very well be able to do math much faster than me without being able to outwit me in a game of riddles or predict my reaction to events or anything like that.
Well if it's Strong AI that complies with my assumption above then as riddles mostly relly on associating different bits of popular culture and plays on words it could solve them far faqster than a human. It's true that it may not be able to predict your reactions any better than an expert psycoanylist with some time on his hands but that's still pretty good.


The obvious rejoinder is that, according to the prequel trilogy, C3PO was designed by a small child. Said child, despite considerable native talent, may not have been competent to assemble a sentient robot from scratch.

More to the point, C3PO was not designed to be graceful, or to "understand human behavior." C3PO was designed to be a translator and a database of regional customs, with legs so it could go where you needed it without having to carry it and with a personality so that you could interact with it.
See?
Nothing that indicates Strong AI!:smallbiggrin:


There are a lot of people who can calculate faster than me without being better than me at everything. Calculating 3^100 is an example of a task that a computer is ideally suited for (because it is a number), and that human beings are most poorly suited for (because we didn't evolve to do high-order exponentials in our heads).
Actualy it's suited to it because:
A. That calculation is mostly linear (a lot of battleplans also have linear components)
B. Instead of only being able to devote a small part of it's computing power it can give 100%.


A computer can only perform a task if that task can be reduced to numbers. The more numbers it takes to describe a task, the harder the computer will find it.
Any task can be reduced to numbers.


Says who?

A "strong" AI need not be as good all-around as a human being. It needs to be able to roughly approximate the core functions of human intelligence, but that task might well approach the very limits of its processing power. Moreover, it need not be able to pick up new abilities instantly the way you suggest.
Why wouldn't it?
The reason humans learn slowly is that they have to slowly coax their neurons into remembering things or into a configuration required to solve a problem.
An AI on the other hand can just say "I learn this". It simply breaks down the words of the university course into their logical components and assembles this into a program. That'll take what? A few billion cycles?


They can pass a Turing test. They possess most of the characteristic traits of human intelligence, although in some cases the intelligence in question is that of a fool or an idiot savant (as with C3PO). As far as I'm concerned that is "strong."
"Strong" means they have the ability to learn. Idiot Savants generaly just record information instead of learning it.

That's because your idea of what constitutes a "strong" AI is much stronger than everybody else's is here.[/quote]
I'm just requiring a few things:
A. Strong AI can learn things at least as well as a human.
B. Strong AI will use electronics or some other system that allows most of the advantages mentioned below. This seems likely.


But I don't really care about how strong AI has to be to be "strong." All I'm saying is that Star Wars droid technology proves that they pretty much have to have a mastery of computer technology that at least matches that of the Federation.
Except for their holographic doctors who can adjust to a different role.


This is an abuse of the term "strong AI". "Strong" isn't superhuman, it's "this AI is actually a self-aware entity" as opposed to the "eh, it can fake it, who cares" of "weak AI".
Srong AI has a few very important advantages:
A. Perfect memory. It can memorize things most humans can't.
B. Instantaneous memorizing.
C. Larger memory
D. Can devote processing power to a single task.
E. Far far faster linear thinking speed.
F. Able to create subroutines. This is it's most important and powerful advantage over humans. Once it's solved a type of problem from then on it can solve it a million times faster than a human. If it discovers a similar problem it can modify the subroutine to work with the whole range or combine some of it's other subroutines to allow it to instantly solve problems involving several disciplines.
G. A subset of F. It can assemble a thought process from a piece of text/speech. It hears how to analyze a human and assembles a subroutine from the text to do just that from now on.
H. Able to copy itself given enough space and processing power.


rather than having a class of human-level intelligences bound up in droid bodies that are, for most purposes, just people with metal skin.
I've never understood why they have to be like this. Surely it's better to have an AI controlling several robots via remote control?
This allows you to make the brain bigger, you can worry less about it's durability and as humans generaly spend most of the day with large parts of their brain on idle it allows you to use up that huge amount of wasted proccessing power!

Mando Knight: Startrek AI is about as good as modern AI with the exception of the holographic doctors.


Because in the Haloverse you can't copy a smart AI (self aware ones) and they are very hard to create.
Why not?:smallconfused:
Surely it's just copying every byte to somewhere else?


And in Andromeda it was that way. The reason copying didn't happen was because the computer network needed to contain an AI was so advanced. It took up a large part of a kilometer long starship.
It still has most of the powerful advantages of strong AI. These are enough that it should be better than a human at anything it puts it's "mind" to.

[Dervag]

C3PO actually says himself that he doesn't understand humans--I forget exactly where he says it, but he definitely does!He doesn't understand why humans do things, sure. Then again, there are plenty of humans who have trouble understanding why humans do things.

I, for one, could definitely imagine a real person with C3PO's personality and those of his limitations that are not imposed on him by the fact that he's made out of metal (poorly). To my way of thinking, that makes him strong AI- he can emulate a person well enough that I can imagine a person who would behave almost exactly like him.


In the first film he also said that his primary function was "human-cyborg relations", which implies he wasn't just a walking translator.Yes. He's also a protocol database and semicompetent servant.


Well if it's Strong AI that complies with my assumption above then as riddles mostly relly on associating different bits of popular culture and plays on words it could solve them far faqster than a human. It's true that it may not be able to predict your reactions any better than an expert psycoanylist with some time on his hands but that's still pretty good.The problem is that good riddles involve one or more layers of metaphor. Humans are good at thinking in layers of metaphor, because it lends itself to the kind of gestalts that our brain produces naturally. Computers might not be so good at it, because it's not just a matter of cross-indexing entries in a card catalog.


See?
Nothing that indicates Strong AI!:smallbiggrin:His personality emulation is too good (as in, he acts too much like a being with a personality) to qualify as a mere 'expert system' or other form of weak AI.


Actualy it's suited to it because:
A. That calculation is mostly linear (a lot of battleplans also have linear components)
B. Instead of only being able to devote a small part of it's computing power it can give 100%.I find it hard to believe you can construct an algorithm that will simplify battle tactics to something like 3^100.

Sure, you could construct such an algorithm. But it's not going to be simple. It's going to require the computer to keep track of lots of numbers all at once, interacting in complicated ways.

That's why arithmetic is so easy for computers. Operations like addition and multiplication require very few operations per stored digit of data, so the computer can do them very fast. Since human beings don't have 'software' for calculations, we have to use our adaptable computing power to perform those operations one by one, slowly.

Think about how long it takes you to catch a ball, compared to how long it would take you to solve the equations required to locate and catch it using pen and paper. No human being could consciously solve the equations in the time it takes them to catch a ball. That's because our brains have a "ball-catching" utility, but the actual equation-solving process is not conscious, just as you don't see what's going on inside a calculator when you punch the buttons.

Arithmetic is a very poor test of the relative abilities of computers and humans, because it plays to a human's weakness (our brains aren't hardwired to do the task with massively parallel computing, our strength), and a computer's strengths (any arithmetic operation can be reduced to a relatively small group of numbers and a simple group of operations.

Chess is a somewhat better test, and you'll notice it takes considerably more effort to build a chess computer that can beat a human at chess than to build an arithmetic computer that can beat a human at arithmetic.

And most of the real-world activities humans perform are more complex from a mathematical modeling standpoint than chess, not less. It would be harder to create a computer that could outperform a human at them.

Indeed, for some human activities such as understanding human reactions, it may well be that the number of calculations required to perform the task with a digital computer is so big that we need too much computing power to do it in a human timeframe, given the theoretical physical limits on human ability.


Any task can be reduced to numbers.Presumably, but it may require a LOT of numbers to describe a complicated task. If, for example, the only way a computer can predict my reaction to an event is by running a "SimBrain" program, it will need many times more computing power than my brain to simulate all the events in my brain accurately. And a brain has quite a lot of computing power, even if it's totally unsuited for performing the sort of calculation a digital computer can do quickly like "3^100=?".


An AI on the other hand can just say "I learn this". It simply breaks down the words of the university course into their logical components and assembles this into a program. That'll take what? A few billion cycles?Don't bet on it being that easy. Words are a human form of thinking; each word evokes gestalt images (imagining "apple" when you hear "apple"). That helps us organize our thoughts because we generate gestalts quickly.

For a computer it's worse than useless, because computers do not generate gestalts quickly. You have to break down each gestalt into a component set of Turing machine operations before the computer can even begin to tackle it. The list of Turing machine operations may be very long. Which means the computer will have to work through a maddeningly large number of calculations to understand each sentence, because they don't think the way we do.

It's not clear that you can "just break down" words into "logical components" quickly the way you describe. Words are high-order abstractions of very complicated datasets that have lots of cross-indexing.


I'm just requiring a few things:
A. Strong AI can learn things at least as well as a human.
B. Strong AI will use electronics or some other system that allows most of the advantages mentioned below. This seems likely.Electronics don't necessarily allow a computer to do human thoughts so much faster than a human does, for the reasons I list above.


Except for their holographic doctors who can adjust to a different role.And which are produced by capital ship computers, which are too big to fit in the body of an autonomous droid. If they didn't need a massive computer to run the Doctor, they would just build a Data-like construct.

Frankly, I think the computer technology is more or less a tie between Federation and Empire. The Feds have technology such that something like Data is imaginable, although only possible as a kind of one-off prototype. The Empire has billions or trillions of droids, but by and large those droids are less flexible than Data. The Federation might well be able to duplicate Star Wars droids, but the Empire could probably duplicate Data too.


Srong AI has a few very important advantages:
A. Perfect memory. It can memorize things most humans can't.
B. Instantaneous memorizing.
C. Larger memoryBut can it memorize meanings? Again, humans can memorize high-order abstractions that it would take a computer a lot of bits and flops to represent, because the computer can't do high-order abstractions as easily as a human.

To give a limited analogy, AIs will tend to think in machine language while humans think in, say, C++. Obviously, anything you can do in C++ you can do in machine language, but it will take a lot more typing to write a program in machine language. C++ allows the programmer to abstract out the details of how his machine works.

So it comes down to a question of how much processing power and processor time it takes for an advanced computer to cope with abstractions, and we have no idea what the answer to that question is. The fact that we haven't already done it suggests you need a lot of power and time, more than we can get using our computers today.


D. Can devote processing power to a single task.
E. Far far faster linear thinking speed.Which doesn't mean it can perform a task with large numbers of separate factors interacting in complex ways faster than the massively parallel computation style of the human brain.


F. Able to create subroutines. This is it's most important and powerful advantage over humans. Once it's solved a type of problem from then on it can solve it a million times faster than a human. If it discovers a similar problem it can modify the subroutine to work with the whole range or combine some of it's other subroutines to allow it to instantly solve problems involving several disciplines.Subroutines don't allow an AI to do computation 'free of charge'.

For human programmers subroutines are helpful because they allow us to abstract up to another level. It reduces the number of things we have to keep track of, and because of the gestalt-based way our brains work we can't keep track of many things at once. So abstracting out the individual lines of code into subroutines helps us understand what the computer is doing.

But an AI is the computer. It still has to physically perform every operation in the subroutine, just as if there were no subroutine. The subroutine is nothing more than a convenient label for a collection of operations to the AI. It can't just think "I want to perform subroutine X" and get the result of X for free without expending clock cycles on it.


G. A subset of F. It can assemble a thought process from a piece of text/speech. It hears how to analyze a human and assembles a subroutine from the text to do just that from now on.Once again, subroutines don't come free of charge. And it's by no means apparent that there are simple instructions on "how to analyze a human."


H. Able to copy itself given enough space and processing power.How big a computer does it need? Remember, there are theoretical lower limits on how small a computer of a given power can be given the laws of physics. We don't know the answer to the question "how big?" yet.


I've never understood why they have to be like this. Surely it's better to have an AI controlling several robots via remote control?If all the robots are expected to operate in synchrony, as in a factory or a robot-controlled warship, then the answer is "yes." If the robots are expected to be capable of operating independently without suffering from transmission lags, no.

For example, C3PO works even if you're stranded on the Planet of the Teddy Bears, a thousand miles from your spaceship. If C3PO were a remote-controlled teleoperation platform, the transmission lag would vastly decrease the efficiency of his brain. And the problem would get worse as you got farther from his base unit.

Likewise, you can stuff C3PO in an escape capsule and eject him from an exploding starship and he still works. If his base unit were aboard the starship, he'd be a gold-plated doorstop.


This allows you to make the brain bigger, you can worry less about it's durability and as humans generaly spend most of the day with large parts of their brain on idle it allows you to use up that huge amount of wasted proccessing power!Yes. So centralized AI is vastly more efficient if you're planning to keep all the remote controlled units in close proximity to the central computer and if you don't care about their ability to operate independently of that computer.


Why not?:smallconfused:
Surely it's just copying every byte to somewhere else?Maybe it's too big, and you can't readily construct a computer large enough to carry it. Maybe it used some kind of complicated distributed computing network or massively parallel computing network, so that no one node can store all the information you're trying to copy.

[GoC]

The problem is that good riddles involve one or more layers of metaphor. Humans are good at thinking in layers of metaphor, because it lends itself to the kind of gestalts that our brain produces naturally. Computers might not be so good at it, because it's not just a matter of cross-indexing entries in a card catalog.
Really?
Got some examples of riddles?


His personality emulation is too good (as in, he acts too much like a being with a personality) to qualify as a mere 'expert system' or other form of weak AI.
It's a pretty basic personality.


I find it hard to believe you can construct an algorithm that will simplify battle tactics to something like 3^100.
That's because I'm not the superhuman programmer required to build Strong AI. And most general's tactics involves taking things other people have invented and adapting them to the situation at hand. That's hardly something a Strong AI couldn't do.


Sure, you could construct such an algorithm. But it's not going to be simple. It's going to require the computer to keep track of lots of numbers all at once, interacting in complicated ways.
This is more a question of mathematics than programming. I bet there's a simple and efficient algorithm for determining troop placement. Or it could just do the human thing and compare the situation to the millions of historical and fictional battles in it's memory.


Think about how long it takes you to catch a ball, compared to how long it would take you to solve the equations required to locate and catch it using pen and paper. No human being could consciously solve the equations in the time it takes them to catch a ball. That's because our brains have a "ball-catching" utility, but the actual equation-solving process is not conscious, just as you don't see what's going on inside a calculator when you punch the buttons.
What a human goes by is experience. He's essentialy got a table of values telling him that if the ball is coming at this angle and that speed it's going to pass through this space. A computer could also generate such a table and often do for things like trig and exponential functions.


Chess is a somewhat better test, and you'll notice it takes considerably more effort to build a chess computer that can beat a human at chess than to build an arithmetic computer that can beat a human at arithmetic.
Of course but you're missing out an important fact: the algorithm used was very inefficient. If the computer scientists had used a better method they could have won much more easily.


And most of the real-world activities humans perform are more complex from a mathematical modeling standpoint than chess, not less. It would be harder to create a computer that could outperform a human at them.
Give some examples and I bet you I can counter them.


Indeed, for some human activities such as understanding human reactions, it may well be that the number of calculations required to perform the task with a digital computer is so big that we need too much computing power to do it in a human timeframe, given the theoretical physical limits on human ability.
You're thinking the wrong way here. All the Strong AI needs to do is take a uni course in psycology and turn that into a program. Now the number of calculations is rather small.


If, for example, the only way a computer can predict my reaction to an event is by running a "SimBrain" program,
It wouldn't. There are many many shortcuts. Just ask any psychoanalyst.


Words are a human form of thinking; each word evokes gestalt images (imagining "apple" when you hear "apple").
It's not gestalt. The apple is an apple. It's then asigned properties such as roundness, redness, taste and so on.


For a computer it's worse than useless, because computers do not generate gestalts quickly. You have to break down each gestalt into a component set of Turing machine operations before the computer can even begin to tackle it. The list of Turing machine operations may be very long. Which means the computer will have to work through a maddeningly large number of calculations to understand each sentence, because they don't think the way we do.
Pretty much all of what we say can be re-written in logical form. The expressions such as "a colorful person" originate from things like colorful also meaning "complex or non-unifrom".
Strong AI could also just use all the times the word has been used as a baseline just like humans do.


It's not clear that you can "just break down" words into "logical components" quickly the way you describe. Words are high-order abstractions of very complicated datasets that have lots of cross-indexing.
You mean how a "word" can actualy be a set of words or even a whole sentence? Presumably Strong AI would have an internal dictionary (explaining words in terms of logical structures) wouldn't it? Of course compiling such a dictionary is currently very difficult (if not impossible) but Strong AI would necessarily have one.


Electronics don't necessarily allow a computer to do human thoughts so much faster than a human does, for the reasons I list above.
It doesn't need to for the reasons I listed in the previous post. It is likely that it would be considerably faster though.


But can it memorize meanings? Again, humans can memorize high-order abstractions that it would take a computer a lot of bits and flops to represent, because the computer can't do high-order abstractions as easily as a human.
Strong AI can however.


To give a limited analogy, AIs will tend to think in machine language while humans think in, say, C++. Obviously, anything you can do in C++ you can do in machine language, but it will take a lot more typing to write a program in machine language. C++ allows the programmer to abstract out the details of how his machine works.
Seeing as you know so much about computing you'll also know that it only takes another one million bytes (more likely far less)? And that that amount won't go any higher no matter how large the program is going to be? Also Strong AI could easily have a compiler/abstracter among it's subroutines? He could even have multiple abstracters! One for words->logical components, one for logical components->C++ and one for C++->machine code. Of course it probably wouldn't need to given it's ability to keep track of many more tiny functions than a human could.

Programming in mahchine code makes programs much faster and far more efficient in terms of memory use. A few years ago some guys once build a fps that was comparable to others of the time yet was only 96KB in size compared to the hundreds of MBs of the comercial ones it was compared to?


So it comes down to a question of how much processing power and processor time it takes for an advanced computer to cope with abstractions, and we have no idea what the answer to that question is. The fact that we haven't already done it suggests you need a lot of power and time, more than we can get using our computers today.
No, we have the speed required. What we lack is a mathematicion/computer scientist capable of creating such a complicated thing as Strong AI.


For human programmers subroutines are helpful because they allow us to abstract up to another level. It reduces the number of things we have to keep track of, and because of the gestalt-based way our brains work we can't keep track of many things at once. So abstracting out the individual lines of code into subroutines helps us understand what the computer is doing.

But an AI is the computer. It still has to physically perform every operation in the subroutine, just as if there were no subroutine. The subroutine is nothing more than a convenient label for a collection of operations to the AI. It can't just think "I want to perform subroutine X" and get the result of X for free without expending clock cycles on it.
The thing is that running those subroutines is so so so soooooooo much faster then putting it's "problem solver" to work on it. Your typical exam question in SAT chemistry for instance could be solved in less than a thousand cycles. A pittance in computer terms.


Once again, subroutines don't come free of charge. And it's by no means apparent that there are simple instructions on "how to analyze a human."
A university course. Sounds pretty simple to me.


How big a computer does it need? Remember, there are theoretical lower limits on how small a computer of a given power can be given the laws of physics. We don't know the answer to the question "how big?" yet.
We know the maximum minimum (an oxymoron!:smallbiggrin: ) would be the amount required to emulate the human brain. However we're assuming a futeristic computer is linear when it doesn't have to be. It could be parralell in much the same manner as a human brain and it would be indesputably better than a human brain because it'd have all the advantages I mentioned (especialy speed) and neatly bypasses any of your objections.
I'd also like to add another advantage to that list: Lack of emotions.


If all the robots are expected to operate in synchrony, as in a factory or a robot-controlled warship, then the answer is "yes." If the robots are expected to be capable of operating independently without suffering from transmission lags, no.
In many universes FLT transmission is a given. And I'd like to know why you have so many unneeded human crewmembers/factory workers/beurocracy workers/shopkeepers/firemen/researchers(except the rare few inspired geniuses)/policemen/soldiers/doctors/dentists/computer programmers that could easily be replaced by a few AIs. In fact there are very few things intodays society that Strong AI couldn't indisputably do better. Only geniuses with their unique thought structure couldn't be replaced.


Likewise, you can stuff C3PO in an escape capsule and eject him from an exploding starship and he still works. If his base unit were aboard the starship, he'd be a gold-plated doorstop.
But I'd personaly rather have 1000 hyper-efficient workers who are confined to the ship than to have 1000 idiots.


Yes. So centralized AI is vastly more efficient if you're planning to keep all the remote controlled units in close proximity to the central computer and if you don't care about their ability to operate independently of that computer.
Glad we agree then.:smallsmile:


Maybe it's too big, and you can't readily construct a computer large enough to carry it. Maybe it used some kind of complicated distributed computing network or massively parallel computing network, so that no one node can store all the information you're trying to copy.
Cortana's computer is apparently palm sized and she resides only in there.
Even if she was massively parallel you could simply build another network, freeze the original and transfer everything into the new network.

This is a very interesting debate. Keep it up!:smallsmile:

[Talkkno]

We know the maximum minimum (an oxymoron!:smallbiggrin: ) would be the amount required to emulate the human brain. However we're assuming a futeristic computer is linear when it doesn't have to be. It could be parralell in much the same manner as a human brain and it would be indesputably better than a human brain because it'd have all the advantages I mentioned (especialy speed) and neatly bypasses any of your objections.
I'd also like to add another advantage to that list: Lack of emotions.


Cortana's computer is apparently palm sized and she resides only in there.
Even if she was massively parallel you could simply build another network, freeze the original and transfer everything into the new network.

This is a very interesting debate. Keep it up!:smallsmile:
Eh, But in Halo:First Strike, Cortana considered turning off her emotion part of herw hen she was coordinating a hijacked Covenent Flagship against 3 crusiers for increased processing power as she was already burdened with all the Data she absorbed from the Halo's. But she considered it too valuable in battle for the "inution" in battle to turn it off. So using a lack of emotion as a advantedge when using Cortana as a example is a little of a oxymoron with what i have provided here, my 2 cents.

[GoC]

The ST dialog is remarkably consistant when it comes to distance. It's almost always measured in km or thousands of km.
I can understand picard being mistaken but find it unlikely he'd be wrong more than 50% of the time by such a wide margin.

Talkkno: The emotions shouldn't affect her actions though. They should be used to simulate emotional responses and she should then base her actions off that instead of giving direct control.

[Dervag]

The ST dialog is remarkably consistant when it comes to distance. It's almost always measured in km or thousands of km.
I can understand picard being mistaken but find it unlikely he'd be wrong more than 50% of the time by such a wide margin.Given the sizes of the ships, I can certainly believe most battles shown in the modern visuals are fought at kilometer ranges.

Again, the problem here is that I have to choose between believing visuals that are very consistent about having battles fought at kilometer ranges, or believing dialogue that is not consistent about ranges and which is wildly inconsistent or flatly impossible on the subject of other issues.


Talkkno: The emotions shouldn't affect her actions though. They should be used to simulate emotional responses and she should then base her actions off that instead of giving direct control.Perhaps emotional states are useful because they can provide systematic alterations to one's pattern of thought more readily than can any specific external stimulus of variable?

Humans think in gestalts, big holistic pictures that incorporate a vast amount of data in a single high-level abstraction. To tweak one's perception of a gestalt, emotions actually make sense. For instance, your gestalt picture of a cat contains many elements, including traits like "fuzzy" and "remember to feed him."

But what if you are being attacked by an angry tomcat? Under those conditions, it would be totally inappropriate to remember to feed the cat while thinking about the cat. The emotions of anger and the fight-or-flight response can suppress those aspects of the gestalt in favor of others like "has claws" and "is very agile."

Now, a computer may not think in gestalts, in which case they wouldn't need general-purpose 'states' like happiness and anger to reshape those gestalts to fit a new situation. But I can certainly see why they would benefit from such a thing if they did think in gestalts (say, by being massively parallel computers).

[factotum]

Of course but you're missing out an important fact: the algorithm used was very inefficient. If the computer scientists had used a better method they could have won much more easily.


Erm...we're talking computer scientists here. People whose JOB is to find the most efficient possible algorithm for doing whatever it is they're doing. If they used an inefficient algorithm it's because there wasn't a better one available, which supports Dervag's point--namely, that you can't assume that real world situations are as computationally simple as you seem to believe. If they were, we'd already have workable AI in the real world, and we don't, last time I checked!

[Renegade Paladin]

Okay, let me make the Halo AI thing simple. Cortana works the way she does because she's actually imprinted from a human. That's how the UNSC creates smart AI.

[Dervag]

Erm...we're talking computer scientists here. People whose JOB is to find the most efficient possible algorithm for doing whatever it is they're doing. If they used an inefficient algorithm it's because there wasn't a better one available, which supports Dervag's point--namely, that you can't assume that real world situations are as computationally simple as you seem to believe. If they were, we'd already have workable AI in the real world, and we don't, last time I checked!Right, more or less.

We can't afford to assume exponential improvement in algorithm technology when we don't know how to make a better algorithm. This isn't an engineering problem. This is a 'computer science theory' problem.

It's like assuming that sooner or later we must end up inventing FTL travel. There's no evidence that it's even possible, so basing an argument along the lines of "well, it must be something we'll be able to do" doesn't fly.


Okay, let me make the Halo AI thing simple. Cortana works the way she does because she's actually imprinted from a human. That's how the UNSC creates smart AI.All right. I didn't know that, because I only played just barely enough Halo multiplayer for the beginner's luck to wear off and none of the single player.

In that case, the UNSC appears to not know how to program an AI. It can copy a human mind into a machine, but not necessarily construct the algorithms to make one that is fully stable.

This may be because they don't understand how consciousness as we imagine it emerges. So they can construct the hardware they need, but it doesn't "wake up" and start learning and adapting the way a strong AI should.

It's quite possible that such a problem will arise for AI programmers at some point. We don't actually know how to make a system as adaptable as strong AI should be. The hope of AI programmers is that the problem can be solved by throwing more computing capability and better algorithms at it, but nobody really knows if that will work.

[Talkkno]

In that case, the UNSC appears to not know how to program an AI. It can copy a human mind into a machine, but not necessarily construct the algorithms to make one that is fully stable.



Are you referring how AIs have to be shut down after 7 years or so because they think themselves to death?

[Renegade Paladin]

Are you referring how AIs have to be shut down after 7 years or so because they think themselves to death?
I don't think so, because he said that he didn't know about how they work, but while we're on the subject, it's true. Smart AIs in the Haloverse go what they call "rampant" after less than a decade because their systems expand so much that the human mind that forms their base can't keep track of it all; they go absolutely crazy.

[GoC]

Erm...we're talking computer scientists here. People whose JOB is to find the most efficient possible algorithm for doing whatever it is they're doing. If they used an inefficient algorithm it's because there wasn't a better one available, which supports Dervag's point--namely, that you can't assume that real world situations are as computationally simple as you seem to believe.

Well I strangely doubt they found one even near the most efficient. And remember that computer scientists aren't perfect. Otherwise our AI would be quite a bit better.


Okay, let me make the Halo AI thing simple. Cortana works the way she does because she's actually imprinted from a human. That's how the UNSC creates smart AI.
Then why can't she be copied?


We can't afford to assume exponential improvement in algorithm technology when we don't know how to make a better algorithm. This isn't an engineering problem. This is a 'computer science theory' problem.
Very true!:smallcool:


It's like assuming that sooner or later we must end up inventing FTL travel. There's no evidence that it's even possible, so basing an argument along the lines of "well, it must be something we'll be able to do" doesn't fly.
Well we've assumed both FTL and Strong AI...


To tweak one's perception of a gestalt, emotions actually make sense.
I thought emotions were simply a remnant of the primitive R-Cortex?
Strong AI also has the unique capability to think both with and without gestalts right?

btw: I see my post was a bit too long... I still proud of it though!:smallbiggrin:

[Rutee]

Well we've assumed both FTL and Strong AI...
WEll.. Star Wars and the Federation DO have FTL. We're not assuming it there.

[Talkkno]

Then why can't she be copied?




Actually, that is addressed in the same book, copying just makes accelerates the fragmentation process.

[factotum]

Well I strangely doubt they found one even near the most efficient. And remember that computer scientists aren't perfect. Otherwise our AI would be quite a bit better.


So what you're basically saying is that AI is a lot easier than everyone thinks, and all the experts working on it are basically idiots? Yeah, that one'll fly...

[Rutee]

So what you're basically saying is that AI is a lot easier than everyone thinks, and all the experts working on it are basically idiots? Yeah, that one'll fly...

No, that wasn't what he said. He was referring to the fact that he doubts all the fictional characters working on it truly found the best solution.