So a frequent thread is how would the United Federation of Planets (Star Trek) do against the Galactic Empire (Star Wars). With people looking at things like the size of ships or number of worlds.
The thing is, for various reasons including the limits of TV budgets and ST's greater focus on exploration and science, I contend the ST universe is far more advanced than just about any major faction in pop culture.
Simply put, the Federation can convert matter into energy, and do that because it's faster than boiling water for tea. They disassemble their molecular structure and reassemble it somewhere else because it's faster than taking a shuttle. They can travel through time. On screen they have literally laughed at ships that have mear lasers and nukes. Hand phasers can disintegrate boulders. There's a line in TNG about how a phaser at max power, wide angle will destroy a whole building. In DS9 about 20 Romulan and Cardasian ships reduce a planet's surface to molten sludge. They play at a level so much higher than the Galactic Empire it's not even funny.
And that's without going into the rabbits the various Federation crews pull of their hats every week.
Meanwhile, other the invention of Death Star and Starkiller Base I don't really see much progress in the SW universe' technology. And we have books, comics, video games going back 10,000 years or more.
The only advantage I see the GE has something like 2 million worlds spanning an entire galaxy while the UFP had hundreds. So it might win by horde tactics, but in anything short of a surprise attack by their entire fleet I see victory for the UFP.
If we had to rank them I would go something like:
Spacefaring Factions of Pop Culture
Real World-ish Tech (fusion power, sublight travel) - 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Expanse, Earthforce in Babylon 5 (since they got FTL from the Centauri)
Space Opera Tech (FTL, shields, energy weapons, artificial gravity) - Star Wars, Andromeda, Original Battlestar Galactica, most comic book space travelers, the Imperium of Man, Tau, Humans in Dune, the Foundation Trilogy
Advanced Space Opera (teleportation, create/destroy matter, time travel) - Star Trek (most factions), Necrons, Eldar, Dark Age of Technology Man
'Sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic' - Time Lords, Borg, Cyberman, Daleks
Not quite god but close - Q Continuum
Notes: Reboot BSG would be halfway between Real-ish and Space Opera, they had gravity but not shields or energy weapons, they didn't seem worth their own tier.
Eldar would be on the low end of Advanced, Necrons on the high end.
And that's how they lose. They don't pick a fight. Ever. They're dead against it. Send in a couple of Star Destroyers, find out where Earth is, then bring up the rest of the fleet, through Hyperspace, and bombard the planet. The Federation will naturally withdraw their forces in a vain attempt to protect Earth. Galactic Empire then strikes the other major worlds - because they've got vastly superior numbers.
Galactic Empire travels via Hyperspace, which is shown to be much faster than Warp Speeds.
The Federation is, barring the six crews we've followed, utterly incompetent. How many ships are lost because 'well, they found a big poisonous flower, so beamed it up to the ship and then everyone gave it a lick in turn' type stupidity?
The Federation is not a military. They make scant use of fighter or bombers. Their capital ships are pretty dinky compared to those favoured by the Galactic Federation. Send in a couple of wave of TIE Bombers, evasive flight pattern, bomb the poop out of The Bridge. Remove that command structure.
They may laugh at laser weapons (focussed light) - but the Galactic Empire uses weapons based on ionised gas. And the ships laughed at for using laser weapons are tiny. The sheer, relentless firepower of a Star Destroyer is ridiculous.
The Galactic Empire is fond of boarding actions. They don't want to merely defeat you, they want to capture you. With their technology base, it's only a matter of time until they've reversed engineered the allegedly superior phaser, and then the Federation is done - because the Galactic Empire can churn that stuff out at a ridiculous rate of knots.
The Galactic Empire is also more than just it's Navy. It has a standing army. A standing army of millions. The Federation simply isn't equipped to fight a Ground War. And to be honest, it's only Plot Armour that stopped them getting humped in such by The Dominion - a foe that literally grows soldiers custom designed for the task.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and finally?
Give the Galactic Empire a bloodynose, and it comes at you harder.
Give the Federation a bloodynose, and they'll want to talk peace.
Sadly, a pacifist regime will always lose out to one geared around war.
I mean sure the Star Wars universe generally lives and dies by the power of it's Mary Sue characters doing impossible nonsense to destroy the latest super weapon of the year, but definitely at least as a matter of rough comparison the Star Wars universe is way more advanced in technology than the Star Trek universe. The only real difference there is that Star Trek plays with hard science ideas in a soft science setting, while Star Wars basically absconds the science of science fiction entirely. Of course the Star Wars universe also basically runs on space magic so...
All that said, the plot always wins indeed. Granted this is probably one of the most tried and thoroughly beaten crossover ideas in Fan Fiction The premise itself is a cliche XD
Sadly, a pacifist regime will always lose out to one geared around war.
Not all the federation are softies, Section 31 for example are happy to get their hands dirty to get the job done.
I think the Galactic Empire has a weakness in that so much power is vested in the person of the Emperor, if he is killed the whole thing falls apart as we saw in the old films.
However, the ability of the Galactic Empire to use clones and droids as weapons of war could swing things in their favour.
The Federation doesn't really seem to leverage their superior technology properly for fighting a war.
Did Dakka go through a waybackwhen wormhole to 15 years ago?
Sorry, this was discussed all over the place in the early days of the internet and I never saw any compelling evidence that everything in Star Trek wasn't just weaker, slower and more fragile than anything comparable in Star Wars.
Too lazy to dredge up too many old links but the 'cliffnotes' from the main page of SD.net was a good place to start and is still online:
And you best agree with their totalitarian mono culture or they'll send Sir Patrick to bellow ethics at you whilst pointing a bright white deathstar at you
Frazzled wrote: Federation has the great Trump card, they can fight at or above the speed of light, and can track enemt vessels doing the same.
Plus they have cloak technology, just don't use it by treaty.
Those aren't even their trump cards. Those are like a pair of eights. The Empire might not have those abilities, but they can expect them and create strategies to adapt.
The real trump cards that the Empire won't see coming are
1. the Federation's inclusivity, as in the Federation includes members like Kevin Uxbridge, Guinan, young Q, Charlie X types and so on. Try Base Delta Zeroing the wrong world and suddenly your fleet makes the Husnock look lively.
2. The proliferation of time travel. Not only can the current federation use time travel to save their bacon, but they have more proactive counterparts in the 29th and 31st centuries who are capable of causing some serious, if incompetent, damage. And that's to say nothing of beings with a vested interest in the Federation like the Aegis or (again) the Q, who have access to multiple timelines and billions of years worth of tricks and gadgets. Death Star getting you down? Here's a dozen V'Gers from parallel universes to brighten your day. And that's the opening salvo.
The Federation is fairly weak by itself even in just the Star Trek universe, but it has been made explicitly clear that there are greater forces watching over it to ensure it's success.
Well the Fed is weak against more evolved races. Against those of equal or near equal level they are very tough.
Remember the Fed had advanced sufficient ly that it developed Shields and weaponry such that a mid-level ship could destroy multiple cubes with one or two shots (series end of Voyager).
If voyoger can take out a cube with a shot, what can it do to a Star Destroyer?
There are so many plot and science holes in both universes that either would instantly implode the second you tried to compare them realistically.
For instance, with Start Trek and the concept of transporters, basically anything that isnt actively shielded could be instantly obliterated at will if they so chose (oh look your shields are down, I can beam your crew off the ship and into space, or just say screw it and molecularly disassemble the ship and the crew and just not rematerialize it all in the blink of an eye) and yet...they never do that. Transporters by themselves basically break most of Star Trek when looked at critically
Hyperspace isn't something the Federation would be able to fight in, plus it's massively faster than warp travel (an almost insurmountable advantage in space warfare). The only real advantage there is that Hyperspace lanes are charted and randomly hyperspacing off is generally a really bad idea so the Federation once it figured out how to find the lanes could probably track movement through them.
There's also the industrial advantage. The Galactic Empire was an entire galaxy of industrial power, while the Federation is a relatively tiny slip of its own galaxy.
Agree with Vaktathi about Transporters. Scotty is the only man to ever beat Kobyashi Maru without cheating and he did it by transporting photon torpedoes onto the enemy ships... which apparently no one thought of until he came along but still.
That said shields are on everything in Star Wars so not sure how much of an advantage that would be worth.
Agree with Vaktathi about Transporters. Scotty is the only man to ever beat Kobyashi Maru without cheating and he did it by transporting photon torpedoes onto the enemy ships... which apparently no one thought of until he came along but still.
Technically, it was cheating, because Scotty himself knew that the trick he used only works in a computer simulation and could not work in real life.
He knew this because he was the one who proved that a few years earlier, essentially as a backyard science experiment in his teens.
Anyway, I prefer not to choose sides in debates like this, as they rarely end well. Often, too many arbitrary rules get thrown around to disallow certain things, without applying such rules equally.
Technically, it was cheating, because Scotty himself knew that the trick he used only works in a computer simulation and could not work in real life.
That just means the test is flawed
Anyway, I prefer not to choose sides in debates like this, as they rarely end well. Often, too many arbitrary rules get thrown around to disallow certain things, without applying such rules equally.
As has been said, this has been discussed to death.
But for the fun of it, here's my take. The Empire, by a lot. And for one simple reason - strategic mobility combined with being immune to counterattack.
The long and short of it is, The Empire has ships that can go intergalactic, and the Federation does not. Even assuming the Feds can track Imperial ships in hyperspace (which cannot be proven one way or another), big deal! The Empire can begin a truly massive strike at a world, and when Fed assembles and sends their whole fleet in the Imperials hop over to a target on the far side of the Federation and demolish it. Sure, the Feds can chase, but when it takes the Imperials a matter of days to cross the entire galaxy and it takes the Federation weeks to months just to cross their own space...
The Empire has most of the resources of a galaxy to utilize... and not only does the Federation fall short of those resources, it can't even get to that galaxy to play commerce raider, much less a serious attack on Kuat, or Coruscant, or any other important world of the Empire. The Empire has THOUSANDS of ISDs. Possibly tens of thousands. They have more ships than the entire alpha quadrant has photon torpedoes at any point and time.
We see one shot from an ISD's heavy turbolaser vaporize a good sized asteroid in ESB. It takes the Enterprise two photon torpedoes to do the same. So the weapons are at least comparable, which means to withstand them the shields are comparable. Certainly nothing mobile that Star Fleet can manage will be able to break a planetary shield, if a SSD and a dozen or so ISDs couldn't break the one on Hoth.
There are a few wild cards, of course. Technobabble science. Transporters may well work through Imperial shields. The Force. Does the Empire have either Death Star, or the Sovereign or Eclipse class star destroyers in operation? Who knows.
But since the Empire could afford to scout hundreds of star systems in their own galaxy with probe droids while hunting for rebels.... how much scouting do you think the Empire would do when planning to conquer a whole new galaxy?
Of course, while scouting the Federation galaxy they'd also discover the various other factions, the Q, the Borg, etc. etc. etc. and decide it's just not worth the hassle. I don't think the Emperor's ego could survive an encounter with any Q-type being. Or, they might play "England conquering Ireland", by assisting various factions against each other and eventually weakening everyone to the point where the Empire can just waltz in and take over.
As has been mentioned it ultimately comes down to who has the best plot armor. But even given the Federation's superior technology - which, given the Empire's scouting and recon advantage, they may not even have if the Empire plays it smart - the raw numbers comes down to the Fed losing... badly.
Once Grand Admiral Thrawn captures a holodeck to study Federation cultures they are truly doomed. Also numbers and speed combined are a fairly insurmountable advantage for the Empire.
So looking at some maths, and numbers that other people provided through maths... an ISD-2 would need about 60 direct hits from all 60 of it's Turbolasers to take down the shields of a galaxy class.
I haven't found good numbers for how well the ISD would stand up to the return fire, but something the ISD has that the Galaxy doesn't, is a wing of Tie Fighters, who are assisting with degrading the shields.
The Empire has numbers, no question about it. The Federation struggled to scrape together a few thousand ships during the Dominion War (most not to the punching weight of a Galaxy class), and that was on a full war footing. The Empire had tens of thousands of star destroyers alone, let alone ships of other classes.
I think the big issue would come down to... travel. If the Empire had the capability to map out hyperspace lanes, no question, they'd smash the Federation, in a heart beat. It's a Russian v Germany equation. Quantity over quality.
We've seen what just a few Ion Bombs/Torpedoes can do to a Star Destroyer. And those were launched by Y-Wings. I think. Oh no, I'll have to watch Rogue One again to make sure.
That's going to be a headache for The Federation. Ship ain't worth diddly if your opponent can just switch it off...and if your ship is switched off, so are your shields. Nighty night!
If voyoger can take out a cube with a shot, what can it do to a Star Destroyer?
Probably not much as a Star Destroyer is a premier heavily-armoured fighting starship of an overtly-militaristic regime and a cube is a flying jumble of pipes.
The Federation has a few hundred warships tops, dependent on which canon you go by. I will take it as a given that they are individually superior to Imperial warships of similar size. We don't know that but lets assume it anyway.
Weapons vs defences cant be measured, we can only guess by what they do. However both factions are capable of large scale destruction and precision strikes.
However we do know the Galactic Empire is far faster, and their ships are considerably larger. We can assume that being on the offensive, say through a dimensional portal or two, the Galactic Empire can only send a small fraction of their Star Destroyer fleet, perhaps no more than one or two command vessels and cannot spare a Death Star. Even so the Galxctic Empire will be able to match numbers with the Federation with much larger and faster ships.
Both factions appear to have near identical communications technology.
Assuming that direct combat could be advantageous to either faction the Galactic Empire could rely instead on launching ground assaults on planets that the Federation cannot defend. Stormtroopers are an effective army, they only auto-miss when shooting at heroes.
I do think that the Galactic Empire will have an easier job stealing and retrofitting Federation technology than the other way around. They might aquire much through trade prior to invasion anyway, but even if we assume they are not smart enough to try this, or the Federation are smart enough to baulk them the advantage is clearly on their side.
The Federation has very few advantages. They have more hero units, but they are individually weaker.
Their major advantage will be the Federations black ops teams. The Federation enjoys its space hippy hegemony with four main advantages, first its reputation and second the fact that its contact/trade fleet doubles up as fairly competent warriors. However these are minor considerations.
The Federations main two strengths are that, three they have a very strong economic model, broadly comperable to the Culture though less advanced. It is said that Federation economic policy is the actual cassus belli of most of their wars. While "friendly" the Federation is economically hegemonic to the extent that other factions attack them.
Fourth the Federation has a very nasty black ops section which appears infrequently. They act only when they need to but when they do the gloves come right off. These teams also have access to temporal weaponry,, and reading between the lines they are working hard in the background.
All in all the Galactic Empire would be better off performing aggressive raids against the Federation, stealing technologies and retreating and returning once those necessary are installed in the Imperial Fleet. In that time we must assume that Federation heroes if nobody else has gleaned something of their foe, but the Federation will be a long way coming to building Federation tech star destroyers that the Galactic Empire will. The second invasion would be decisive, unless it is timewarred away, which could happen.
Frankly the only major faction in the ST universe that would scare the Galactic Empire would be the Borg, assuming god-tier factions like the Q sit it out.
Again. We are closing over the fact Federation ships move and fight at speed where SW weapons literally can't hit them. It is the ultimate stealth tech.
But neither can the Federation enter hyperspace. At all. And if they chose to enter Warp? Well.....why? What good would it do them?
The Empire doesn't use Warp Engines. So all you'd be doing is legging it away from them PDQ.
Pretty sure The Empire wouldn't be too worried about The Borg. Just hunt down Uni-Matrix zero and zap it with a Deathstar. Goodbye, Queenie, goodbye cohesive, efficient enemy. Hello panicked and terrified ants.
Frazzled wrote: Again. We are closing over the fact Federation ships move and fight at speed where SW weapons literally can't hit them. It is the ultimate stealth tech.
Ok, so the Federation ship enters warp, and the Empire ship doesn't. In the blink of an eye, the Federation ship is out of weapons range. They gained absolutely nothing.
Frazzled wrote: Again. We are closing over the fact Federation ships move and fight at speed where SW weapons literally can't hit them. It is the ultimate stealth tech.
Ok, so the Federation ship enters warp, and the Empire ship doesn't. In the blink of an eye, the Federation ship is out of weapons range. They gained absolutely nothing.
The point Fraz is making is that ST ships can also attack while at warp speeds.
Generally, Star Trek is full of tricks, where Star Wars is full of brute force. Which one wins in the end? I don't know, other than the fans usually lose because tempers flare, and things go downhill quickly.
Frazzled wrote: Again. We are closing over the fact Federation ships move and fight at speed where SW weapons literally can't hit them. It is the ultimate stealth tech.
This is not technically true. The warp fields move that fast, but they are permeable to various natural phenomena and can be affected by gravitational fields and the like. If the Empire is willing to saturate local space with mines or even TIE fighters, they could largely mitigate the advantage. Plus, warp strafing does not allow a federation ship to bring all of its weapons to bear.
And before anyone asks, while FTL ramming has been considered in ST (BOBW part 2), the mechanics of warp travel reduce the actual attack into a Picard-Maneuver style surprise STL ramming attack preceded by not inconsiderable, yet not overwhelming warp field interaction effects. In other words, nope to the Snope on the Holdo Maneuver.
Frazzled wrote: Well the Fed is weak against more evolved races. Against those of equal or near equal level they are very tough.
Remember the Fed had advanced sufficient ly that it developed Shields and weaponry such that a mid-level ship could destroy multiple cubes with one or two shots (series end of Voyager).
If voyoger can take out a cube with a shot, what can it do to a Star Destroyer?
That Voyager tech was the result of Admiral Janeway violating the Temporal Prime Directive and bringing in weapons from a timeline that will never exist. And that was just over losing Seven. Imagine what Janeway, now an admiral, would do if the Empire killed her whole crew.
The Federation has a lot more advanced technology than many others, yes, but as YE showed, they would lose a prolonged war with the Klingons. The Dominion is very much like the Federation without it's morals, and we saw how that translated into a vast empire with a crazy industrial base. The Federation's main weakness is their morality based restraint. However, it is also one of their greatest assets, as that is no doubt why all the godlike beings seem to keep them around.
If the Federation ever went for an all out war of annihilation, it could raise an insane force in just a few years. Industrial replicators, exocomp and nanite labor ers, holocrew, Soong type androids... Look out.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Alpharius Walks wrote: The Empire also possesses Interdictor star destroyers which could disrupt warp travel and trap the Federation's smaller numbers.
Frazzled wrote: Well the Fed is weak against more evolved races. Against those of equal or near equal level they are very tough.
Remember the Fed had advanced sufficient ly that it developed Shields and weaponry such that a mid-level ship could destroy multiple cubes with one or two shots (series end of Voyager).
If voyoger can take out a cube with a shot, what can it do to a Star Destroyer?
That Voyager tech was the result of Admiral Janeway violating the Temporal Prime Directive and bringing in weapons from a timeline that will never exist. And that was just over losing Seven. Imagine what Janeway, now an admiral, would do if the Empire killed her whole crew.
The Federation has a lot more advanced technology than many others, yes, but as YE showed, they would lose a prolonged war with the Klingons. The Dominion is very much like the Federation without it's morals, and we saw how that translated into a vast empire with a crazy industrial base. The Federation's main weakness is their morality based restraint. However, it is also one of their greatest assets, as that is no doubt why all the godlike beings seem to keep them around.
If the Federation ever went for an all out war of annihilation, it could raise an insane force in just a few years. Industrial replicators, exocomp and nanite labor ers, holocrew, Soong type androids... Look out.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Alpharius Walks wrote: The Empire also possesses Interdictor star destroyers which could disrupt warp travel and trap the Federation's smaller numbers.
Are those canon in Disneywars?
Yes. They were in Rebels, and a number of new canon books.
Honestly, who wins is entirely down to the parameters the person asking the question sets up.
Do SW shields block transporters like ST shields do or not? Can the Empire track ships moving at Warp speeds? Does the Empire have to bother with mapping hyperlanes or not? How do Imperial weapons interact with Federation shields? And so on and so on. How you answer these questions will decide who wins.
I tend to follow Stardestroyer.net's numbers more when it comes to the debate, so in a straight up match the Empire would likely crush the Federation. However, Star Trek is a show all about exploring special circumstances and unique people, so it seems a waste not to consider them. more fully. Also, while the Empire might be under-militarized for a war with another galactic rival, the Federation is practically sitting on its hands when it comes to combat potential. The UFP has at least a half dozen planet killers, some of which can be delivered from light years away (like the soliton wave, or a better version of the Cardassian dreadnought torpedo). They have the technology to expand their forces extremely rapidly and effectively if they ever went that route (industrial replicators and Holofactories, holocrew and android clones, see below). They have the ability to turn any warp capable vessel into a time machine. They have the potential to become an unstoppable foe if the Empire hits them hard enough to break their principles. Would it be in the spirit of the show? No, but it would be fun to think about.
Vaktathi wrote: There are so many plot and science holes in both universes that either would instantly implode the second you tried to compare them realistically.
For instance, with Start Trek and the concept of transporters, basically anything that isnt actively shielded could be instantly obliterated at will if they so chose (oh look your shields are down, I can beam your crew off the ship and into space, or just say screw it and molecularly disassemble the ship and the crew and just not rematerialize it all in the blink of an eye) and yet...they never do that. Transporters by themselves basically break most of Star Trek when looked at critically
Eh. Transporters have trouble beaming through certain rocks. I have no problem assuming Stardestroyer hulls would block transporter beams. Besides, there's a good chance that a phaser set to disintegrate is using the same basic technology in a more efficient method for weaponry.
The real potential with transporters is what they can do strategically. We've seen them clone brilliant officers (or at least William Riker), heal the terminally ill (Pulaski) and store patterns indefinitely (Scotty). They should by all rights be capable of resurrecting the dead (Thomas Riker or William Riker was created from unliving matter, after all, and Pulaski was restored to her previous pattern of existence), likely only prevented from doing so out of moral concerns or squeamishness. Imagine a clone army of Soong type Androids pumped out as fast as you can transport some ingots into a padful of Datas. Imagine the industrial applications--transporting most of a starship's components into existence and into place at the same time.
You could create a ship and veteran crew faster than I can type this...imagine building a word vli e army in a few minutes. Or never, just have them in the memory bank and transport millions whenever desired.
Torture droids should prove most effective at obtaining that information, no?
All goes back to one of my first points. The Federation never, ever, shoots first. That means The Empire has all the time it needs to do proper, efficient recon.
But then you get into an Angel's Pencil situation where most Fed members have no idea what Starfleet is capable of or even what its weapons are. A torture droid can ask about the Federation's deadliest weapons but it won't learn anything beyond photon torpedoes or tricobalt devices because every member thinks their actual deadliest weapons are really things that just make crops, or deliver packages to neighboring stars, or learn jokes from Joe Piscopo.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: But then you get into an Angel's Pencil situation where most Fed members have no idea what Starfleet is capable of or even what its weapons are. A torture droid can ask about the Federation's deadliest weapons but it won't learn anything beyond photon torpedoes or tricobalt devices because every member thinks their actual deadliest weapons are really things that just make crops, or deliver packages to neighboring stars, or learn jokes from Joe Piscopo.
Not seeing how the empire is going to be able to go ranging through Fed space with torture bots. That's a pretty heavy cassus belli.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also if they are now bordering the Empire their threat level assessment would undoubtedly rise to hyper Cold War level. Production of "peaceful" ships would rise substantially with contingencies in place for total war
Automatically Appended Next Post: On the flip side if the Empire could identify key Federal planets before the Feds ramp production it could hyperspace in overwhelming forces for each location. Even if local forces fight well they would still be pinned in place or the fixed manufacturing plant (ie planet and satellite s) obliterated from orbit.
On the flip side...why would they. Other powers exist in the Empire's Galaxy.
Frazzled wrote: Again. We are closing over the fact Federation ships move and fight at speed where SW weapons literally can't hit them. It is the ultimate stealth tech.
This is not technically true. The warp fields move that fast, but they are permeable to various natural phenomena and can be affected by gravitational fields and the like.
Which means a humble Interdictor Cruiser puts those tactics right out.
One should also remember that warp speed sniping is a hit-and-run tactic. The IDS's are designed to take damage, from weapons of similar demonstrated destructive power, over and over and OVER again in a flat-out point-blank slugging match. It's quite possible that by the time a warp-speed sniper gets back into firing position the ISD's shields have already regenerated the damage done in the first pass....
Automatically Appended Next Post:
BobtheInquisitor wrote: I tend to follow Stardestroyer.net's numbers more when it comes to the debate, so in a straight up match the Empire would likely crush the Federation. However, Star Trek is a show all about exploring special circumstances and unique people, so it seems a waste not to consider them. more fully. Also, while the Empire might be under-militarized for a war with another galactic rival, the Federation is practically sitting on its hands when it comes to combat potential. The UFP has at least a half dozen planet killers, some of which can be delivered from light years away (like the soliton wave, or a better version of the Cardassian dreadnought torpedo). They have the technology to expand their forces extremely rapidly and effectively if they ever went that route (industrial replicators and Holofactories, holocrew and android clones, see below). They have the ability to turn any warp capable vessel into a time machine. They have the potential to become an unstoppable foe if the Empire hits them hard enough to break their principles. Would it be in the spirit of the show? No, but it would be fun to think about.
True, but what they lack is any way to reach the Imperial home galaxy. Remember, Imperial ships can go intergalactic in a reasonable time and cross the whole Federation within days at most. It takes Fed ships weeks to months to cross the Federation, and going intergalactic would take a generation ship. And if the Imperials have even half a brain, the Federation won't even have any idea WHICH other galaxy they come from. Heck, it's quite likely that until they get proof to the contrary, they'll believe the Empire is in some unknown portion of their own galaxy...
Alpharius Walks wrote: The Empire also possesses Interdictor star destroyers which could disrupt warp travel and trap the Federation's smaller numbers.
Doesn't work. The interdictors work by creating a gravity field, which the Federations warp drive ignores.
However that piece of info comes from a very early source and might well have been retconned by Lucas/Disney.
One should also remember that warp speed sniping is a hit-and-run tactic. The IDS's are designed to take damage, from weapons of similar demonstrated destructive power, over and over and OVER again in a flat-out point-blank slugging match. It's quite possible that by the time a warp-speed sniper gets back into firing position the ISD's shields have already regenerated the damage done in the first pass....
This came up in an earlier iteration of this subject, but the winner is a humble Runabout with a cloaking device and transphasic torpedoes. Exploding inside the ISD will hollow the entire thing out and no need for a slugging match.
Vaktathi wrote: There are so many plot and science holes in both universes that either would instantly implode the second you tried to compare them realistically.
For instance, with Start Trek and the concept of transporters, basically anything that isnt actively shielded could be instantly obliterated at will if they so chose (oh look your shields are down, I can beam your crew off the ship and into space, or just say screw it and molecularly disassemble the ship and the crew and just not rematerialize it all in the blink of an eye) and yet...they never do that. Transporters by themselves basically break most of Star Trek when looked at critically
Eh. Transporters have trouble beaming through certain rocks. I have no problem assuming Stardestroyer hulls would block transporter beams.
Shouldnt be an issue, they transport through hulls all the time and in this instance you wouldnt need to be maintaining any sort of signal coherency or transmissions, if nothing else, just turn the transporter on the hull, and molecularly disassemble it, or transport material out to poke a bunch of holes in the hull
Besides, there's a good chance that a phaser set to disintegrate is using the same basic technology in a more efficient method for weaponry.
It is difficult to imagine a more efficient weaponry than a ranged ability to simply disassemble matter. Phasers are still ostensibly merely directed energy weapons, albeit apparentlt orders of magnitude more powerful than lasers in ST.
The one exception would be photon torpedoes armed with antimatter warheads, given that matter-antimatter interactions have a perfect energy conversion rate. These are another thing ST portrays...poorly. a torpedo with a kilogram of antimatter would displace most of earths atmosphere and obliterate any ship, but are often portrayed as being no more powerful than something like a modern artillery shell, even against planetary targets
The real potential with transporters is what they can do strategically. We've seen them clone brilliant officers (or at least William Riker), heal the terminally ill (Pulaski) and store patterns indefinitely (Scotty). They should by all rights be capable of resurrecting the dead (Thomas Riker or William Riker was created from unliving matter, after all, and Pulaski was restored to her previous pattern of existence), likely only prevented from doing so out of moral concerns or squeamishness. Imagine a clone army of Soong type Androids pumped out as fast as you can transport some ingots into a padful of Datas. Imagine the industrial applications--transporting most of a starship's components into existence and into place at the same time.
theres all sorts of things that largely go unexplored. You could create infinite clones (once its in the buffer...just re-energize as nausem), rip critical components from other vessels, send the same thing different places, etc.
But the main point was that the transporter (and replicator) basically breaks most of ST by itself, and both franchises have weird stuff that rapidly causes analysis and compariaon of them to collapse.
Frazzled wrote: Again. We are closing over the fact Federation ships move and fight at speed where SW weapons literally can't hit them. It is the ultimate stealth tech.
This is not technically true. The warp fields move that fast, but they are permeable to various natural phenomena and can be affected by gravitational fields and the like.
Which means a humble Interdictor Cruiser puts those tactics right out.
One should also remember that warp speed sniping is a hit-and-run tactic. The IDS's are designed to take damage, from weapons of similar demonstrated destructive power, over and over and OVER again in a flat-out point-blank slugging match. It's quite possible that by the time a warp-speed sniper gets back into firing position the ISD's shields have already regenerated the damage done in the first pass....
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BobtheInquisitor wrote: I tend to follow Stardestroyer.net's numbers more when it comes to the debate, so in a straight up match the Empire would likely crush the Federation. However, Star Trek is a show all about exploring special circumstances and unique people, so it seems a waste not to consider them. more fully. Also, while the Empire might be under-militarized for a war with another galactic rival, the Federation is practically sitting on its hands when it comes to combat potential. The UFP has at least a half dozen planet killers, some of which can be delivered from light years away (like the soliton wave, or a better version of the Cardassian dreadnought torpedo). They have the technology to expand their forces extremely rapidly and effectively if they ever went that route (industrial replicators and Holofactories, holocrew and android clones, see below). They have the ability to turn any warp capable vessel into a time machine. They have the potential to become an unstoppable foe if the Empire hits them hard enough to break their principles. Would it be in the spirit of the show? No, but it would be fun to think about.
True, but what they lack is any way to reach the Imperial home galaxy. Remember, Imperial ships can go intergalactic in a reasonable time and cross the whole Federation within days at most. It takes Fed ships weeks to months to cross the Federation, and going intergalactic would take a generation ship. And if the Imperials have even half a brain, the Federation won't even have any idea WHICH other galaxy they come from. Heck, it's quite likely that until they get proof to the contrary, they'll believe the Empire is in some unknown portion of their own galaxy...
I didn't mention interdictions because I wasn't sure they were canon. Although we don't know how effective they would be against warp drives, I'm fine assuming a Starfleet captain won't risk causing a STTMP style warp imbalance.
Most Federation weapons probably won't harm a Stardestroyer....but if they go all out with transphasic or protomatter/Genesis torpedoes? Ouch.
As for the distance...neither entity is likely to start a war in a distant galaxy. Most VS scenarios assume some sort of space time connection or wormhole connecting the two galaxies.
Vaktathi wrote: There are so many plot and science holes in both universes that either would instantly implode the second you tried to compare them realistically.
For instance, with Start Trek and the concept of transporters, basically anything that isnt actively shielded could be instantly obliterated at will if they so chose (oh look your shields are down, I can beam your crew off the ship and into space, or just say screw it and molecularly disassemble the ship and the crew and just not rematerialize it all in the blink of an eye) and yet...they never do that. Transporters by themselves basically break most of Star Trek when looked at critically
Eh. Transporters have trouble beaming through certain rocks. I have no problem assuming Stardestroyer hulls would block transporter beams.
Shouldnt be an issue, they transport through hulls all the time and in this instance you wouldnt need to be maintaining any sort of signal coherency or transmissions, if nothing else, just turn the transporter on the hull, and molecularly disassemble it, or transport material out to poke a bunch of holes in the hull
Besides, there's a good chance that a phaser set to disintegrate is using the same basic technology in a more efficient method for weaponry.
It is difficult to imagine a more efficient weaponry than a ranged ability to simply disassemble matter. Phasers are still ostensibly merely directed energy weapons, albeit apparentlt orders of magnitude more powerful than lasers in ST.
The one exception would be photon torpedoes armed with antimatter warheads, given that matter-antimatter interactions have a perfect energy conversion rate. These are another thing ST portrays...poorly. a torpedo with a kilogram of antimatter would displace most of earths atmosphere and obliterate any ship, but are often portrayed as being no more powerful than something like a modern artillery shell, even against planetary targets
The real potential with transporters is what they can do strategically. We've seen them clone brilliant officers (or at least William Riker), heal the terminally ill (Pulaski) and store patterns indefinitely (Scotty). They should by all rights be capable of resurrecting the dead (Thomas Riker or William Riker was created from unliving matter, after all, and Pulaski was restored to her previous pattern of existence), likely only prevented from doing so out of moral concerns or squeamishness. Imagine a clone army of Soong type Androids pumped out as fast as you can transport some ingots into a padful of Datas. Imagine the industrial applications--transporting most of a starship's components into existence and into place at the same time.
theres all sorts of things that largely go unexplored. You could create infinite clones (once its in the buffer...just re-energize as nausem), rip critical components from other vessels, send the same thing different places, etc.
But the main point was that the transporter (and replicator) basically breaks most of ST by itself, and both franchises have weird stuff that rapidly causes analysis and compariaon of them to collapse.
1. According to the ICS, an ISD's hull is full of neutronium or something like it. Transporters have trouble with Neutronium. Now, those space cancer-causing dimensional shifters the space terrorists use on TNG, on the other hand....
2. Phasers are said to work by causing a nadion pulse. We don't know what that is, but they clearly disassemble matter without having to pump explosive amounts of heat into it...like a transporter. In that way, they are more than just directed energy weapons, causing damage in excess of the sheer heat pumped into a target. Transporter confinement beams seem to use sub space pockets to bypass barriers like starship hulls, yea, but that just makes them more finicky to use, and apparently easier for random ion storms or kelvinite rocks to block.
Photon torpedoes are in the tens of megaton range per blast. Quantum and tricobalt torpedoes are supposedly an order of magnitude more powerful (I guess. Have we seen any difference?). Even if we go with the crazy The Die Is Cast torpedoes, it would still take an huge number of them to hurt an ISD. The Federation won't be one-shooting the Imperial ships without breaking a dozen treaties.
3. The transporter pretty much does break the setting.
First off yes, I give the Empire numbers, I give it to them in the first post and make it clear I'm assuming more of a ship to ship situation.
Let's look at the supposed advantages of the Empire:
Speed - this is a tough one since both warp and hyperspace are made up and used inconsistantly. Generally hyperspace seems faster, but as mentioned many, many times you need to stick to known routes and calculate your jumps carefully. In a new galaxy the Empire's ability to move would be sharply restricted to what they'd mapped out. Plus it can't be used in combat. Warp speed can be used in real space, can be used in battle. The Federation has a history of tracking ships going FTL, the Empire explicitly cannot.
Fighters and bombers-Unshielded, slower than light sleds. They'd just be targets for the Federations' weapons. Imperial ships seem to run on a WWII style system where a human has to aim and fire the guns. Federation weapons are auto-targeting and would munch through them pretty fast.
Numbers - Something to keep in mind, the Federation is not afraid that Vulcan will rise in rebellion if the USS Yorktown leaves orbit. The Empire is. In fact the Empire never really fought a war of conquest, they were installed by a coup, replaced the Clone Force and mainly focused on internal security. Which they failed at miserably. The Empire would never be able to bring the full force of its numbers to bear without losing control of its own empire. The Federation's worlds are there because they want to be, to work together for a better galaxy. They can focus. Moreover the Federation's tech edge makes this something like the First Gulf War or some even bigger mismatch.
Firepower - The idea of just using transporters to disassemble a ship is nothing new. I always assumed phasers (which I remind you disintegrate matter!) were just unambitious transporters. They don't care about armor (barring super special plot armor stuff like the Doomsday Machine's neutron star hull) either you have shields or you are ash. Period. I've never seen anything to imply SW weapons (barring maybe lightsabres) play at anything like that level.
Adaptation - The Empire will reverse engineer Federation tech? The Empire will reverse engineer? The Empire? The Empire is a racist, mono-culture dictatorship against people who have a proven track record of sciencing their way past vastly superior forces and minor gods. If anyone's going to be reverse engineering stuff, coming up with new defenses, hacking the enemy's systems etc. it'll be the Federation.
So barring a 1000 to 1 numerical superiority I just don't see the Empire winning.
First off yes, I give the Empire numbers, I give it to them in the first post and make it clear I'm assuming more of a ship to ship situation.
Let's look at the supposed advantages of the Empire:
Speed - this is a tough one since both warp and hyperspace are made up and used inconsistantly. Generally hyperspace seems faster, but as mentioned many, many times you need to stick to known routes and calculate your jumps carefully. In a new galaxy the Empire's ability to move would be sharply restricted to what they'd mapped out. Plus it can't be used in combat. Warp speed can be used in real space, can be used in battle. The Federation has a history of tracking ships going FTL, the Empire explicitly cannot.
Fighters and bombers-Unshielded, slower than light sleds. They'd just be targets for the Federations' weapons. Imperial ships seem to run on a WWII style system where a human has to aim and fire the guns. Federation weapons are auto-targeting and would munch through them pretty fast.
Numbers - Something to keep in mind, the Federation is not afraid that Vulcan will rise in rebellion if the USS Yorktown leaves orbit. The Empire is. In fact the Empire never really fought a war of conquest, they were installed by a coup, replaced the Clone Force and mainly focused on internal security. Which they failed at miserably. The Empire would never be able to bring the full force of its numbers to bear without losing control of its own empire. The Federation's worlds are there because they want to be, to work together for a better galaxy. They can focus. Moreover the Federation's tech edge makes this something like the First Gulf War or some even bigger mismatch.
Firepower - The idea of just using transporters to disassemble a ship is nothing new. I always assumed phasers (which I remind you disintegrate matter!) were just unambitious transporters. They don't care about armor (barring super special plot armor stuff like the Doomsday Machine's neutron star hull) either you have shields or you are ash. Period. I've never seen anything to imply SW weapons (barring maybe lightsabres) play at anything like that level.
Adaptation - The Empire will reverse engineer Federation tech? The Empire will reverse engineer? The Empire? The Empire is a racist, mono-culture dictatorship against people who have a proven track record of sciencing their way past vastly superior forces and minor gods. If anyone's going to be reverse engineering stuff, coming up with new defenses, hacking the enemy's systems etc. it'll be the Federation.
So barring a 1000 to 1 numerical superiority I just don't see the Empire winning.
So... Some responses.
Speed. The only real edge I'd give the Federation, because the only types of battles that will matter will be sub-light. Federation ships being able to fight at Warp means absolutely nothing if the guys they are fighting, can't go to Warp. There never seems to be any hard concrete evidence on what Imperial capital ships sublight speeds are, but on screen indication always seems to show that the Federation ships can be pretty nimble.
Fighters/Bombers. If we're talking Prime universe, and not new movie universe, the fire output that the Federation ships have is just simply to slow to deal with fighter/bomber swarms, and combat capital ships at the same time. An ISD-2 carried a complement of 72 Tie's, and 2 Light Cruisers. Sure, the Phaser blasts from a Fed ship will one shot them, but that's 74 shots, which will take Federation ships a long time to put out. Meanwhile Tie Bombers are pumping off Concussion Missiles and Proton Torpedo's, which are both considered capable of getting mission kills on capital ships. In terms of those phasers also being able to hit the fighters... I'd like to point out that they routinely miss ships that are 300-600m in size, moving at much slower speeds.
Firepower. In Empire Strikes back, we see a single shot from a tubrolaser completely vaporise numerous 20m wide balls of iron. They carry 60 of those lasers, as opposed to the 5-7 Phaser arrays that a standard Federation ship had. ISD-2's also had 60 Ion Cannon emplacements, which will also play hell on Federation ships.
Numbers. 25,000 ISD's were known to have been built. Most planetary watching duties could be handled by smaller classes of ships. Victory class and Arquitens seem to have been more common for keeping control of planets that rebellion was a concern on, as shown in Rebel's. Gathering a fleet of 10,000 capital class vessels would not have been a major issue for the Empire, if it felt it was necessary. If we want to look at the Legend's lore, Palpatine was building that fleet for the express purpose of mass ship battles, not just keeping control of rogue planets.
Adaptation. The Empire was xenophobic on the outside, yes, but the leadership was smart, and used alien's to their maximum extent. This was evident in a Post-Yavin novel (Canon) when Luke was sent on a mission to repatriate an enslaved Cryptographer. The Empire was not a technologically stagnant society, and had access to hundreds of millions of scientific minds to reverse engineer new technology, with the resources to do it.
If you think that phasers are slow firing weapons, you need to watch a few episodes of DS9 where the Defiant goes into battle. They can fire almost none stop, the length of the shot only having to be as long as necessary to rip apart the target. You always saw the Enterprise firing long slow blasts because they were always fighting other capital ships with significant shields to be over come. The fighters and bombers from the Star Wars universe would require fractions of a second to atomize, a war ship like the Defiant could churn through 74 of them in less than a minute without breaking a sweat and honestly even an exploratory ship like the Enterprise could likely do the same.
Having said that the Empire would win in the end. Honestly they don't give an frak about anything, if it came down to it they would just hyperspace a couple of ISD's into every planet the federation has and call it a day while the Federation looked on in horror. The Federation has a significant technology edge but the Empire isn't *that* far behind and they'll sacrifice their assets without a second thought.
Regarding the time it takes to shoot down fighters, you don't even have to go as far as DS9. The TNG episode where they were mind wiped and tricked into attacking someone else showed that the Galaxy-class's phasers could track, target, and shoot down dozens of fighters in a matter of seconds.
Come to think of it, if we take the JJ-verse into consideration, they could just use the transporter to teleport doomsday bombs halfway across the galaxy. If anything, the JJ-verse skews things even more.
Tannhauser42 wrote: Regarding the time it takes to shoot down fighters, you don't even have to go as far as DS9. The TNG episode where they were mind wiped and tricked into attacking someone else showed that the Galaxy-class's phasers could track, target, and shoot down dozens of fighters in a matter of seconds.
Come to think of it, if we take the JJ-verse into consideration, they could just use the transporter to teleport doomsday bombs halfway across the galaxy. If anything, the JJ-verse skews things even more.
Yeah, I think we have to draw some lines, keeping the JJ-verse out. I'm trying to stay clear from Star Wars Legends (cause they just get ridiculous).
Speed. The only real edge I'd give the Federation, because the only types of battles that will matter will be sub-light. Federation ships being able to fight at Warp means absolutely nothing if the guys they are fighting, can't go to Warp. There never seems to be any hard concrete evidence on what Imperial capital ships sublight speeds are, but on screen indication always seems to show that the Federation ships can be pretty nimble.
How does the ability to go to FTL at-will and become untrackable by the enemy mean "absolutely nothing"? Jumping to Warp speed doesn't mean you can't interact with non-warp targets. Unless the Empire somehow gets a way to track FTL targets they won't even know they're under attack until they're hit.
The idea that sub-lightspeed fighters or bombers without shields would be a serious threat to ships that can just jump out of range at-will is kinda ludicrous.
Firepower and the rest is completely irrelevant in the face of the fact that the Empire cannot track FTL targets. You can't shoot what you don't know is there.
Even if the Empire could track them, the Empire couldn't hit them. Their weaponry is at or below light speed. The Federation is not limited in similar fashion.
Frazzled wrote: They were not fighting at warp. In STOS we're talking warp speed conflict.
STOS is practically an entirely different universe to the movies and later series. The Constitution class from the old series had some off the walls firepower and abilities...except when it didn't. The show was pretty inconsistent, and it gives a very different impression than the deliberately toned down, more "grounded" successor series.
Another thing to bear in mind is the very first thing we ever saw on the screen in a Star Wars movie.
"A long time ago in a galaxy far far away..."
Even if you consider 'a long time ago' to be the year 1900, well, the Federation won't be capable of putting up much of a fight if it's conquered three hundred years before it's formed....
Even if you consider 'a long time ago' to be the year 1900, well, the Federation won't be capable of putting up much of a fight if it's conquered three hundred years before it's formed....
Even if you consider 'a long time ago' to be the year 1900, well, the Federation won't be capable of putting up much of a fight if it's conquered three hundred years before it's formed....
You'd be surprised.
Again, though, STvSW debates assume some sort of wormhole or other magic thingy somehow connects the two together in their respective time periods.
The problem with all these hypothetical superweapons for Star Trek is that they are just that: hypothetical. We don't see transporters beaming enemy crew into space. We don't see FTL combat. We don't see the use of time travel as a weapon. Etc. So we have one of two conclusions:
1) The Federation is run by ing idiots who are too ignorant of their own abilities to use their ships properly, in which case they lose the war no matter what.
or
2) These hypothetical abilities do not exist. The various tech gimmicks fans have invented do not work in the "real" world, and the Federation's ships are limited to their (rather low) conventional firepower and slow, short-ranged attacks.
The Empire, on the other hand, has no such need for gimmicks. It doesn't need some obscure fan theory about how some random piece of technology in episode #23540345 is an instant win. The Empire simply produces ships with vastly superior firepower/defense numbers and vastly superior strategic speed, and it produces them in obscenely large quantities*. And the Empire has no moral objections to using them. The Empire can put a fleet of star destroyers into orbit around every Federation planet, effortlessly brush aside any attempt at defense, and annihilate everything on the surface via orbital bombardment. The "war" will be over as soon as the Empire produces hyperspace maps to its targets, and the Federation's only hope is unconditional surrender and giving up its resources to the Imperial war machine.
*Note that the 25,000 star destroyer number is incredibly conservative. The Empire's actual industrial capacity, as demonstrated by the sheer size of the death stars it built, is much greater. The conclusion is that the Empire considers the 25,000-ship fleet to be adequate for its current needs, a peacetime fleet built with concern for not allowing naval construction to divert resources away from consumer goods. The Empire under full-scale war production would be capable of building far, far more capital ships.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Federation weapons are auto-targeting and would munch through them pretty fast.
I really really wish Wayne Poe's 'Trekmiss' videos were still anywhere on the internet (they were in .rm format as I recall to give you an idea of their age)... You can pretty much just ignore the the phrase 'auto-targeting' when it comes to Federation weaponry.
Also, why the assumption that Star Destroyers etc can't track ships travelling at warp speed? They can't track hyperspace jumps (usually) because the target ships flips into another dimension so is no longer physically there to track. I might might be wrong but doesn't warp drive wrap some sort of laws-of physics-negating bubble round the ship so it can go at theoretically impossible speeds? It's still physically present so can be tracked given a large enough sensor area.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Federation weapons are auto-targeting and would munch through them pretty fast.
I really really wish Wayne Poe's 'Trekmiss' videos were still anywhere on the internet (they were in .rm format as I recall to give you an idea of their age)... You can pretty much just ignore the the phrase 'auto-targeting' when it comes to Federation weaponry.
.
Doesn't really matter, weapons hit when the writers want them to hit. And we see Star Trek weapons hit their targets far more often than Stormtroopers do.
Due to the sheer length and breadth of ST shows available, pretty much every example showing something performing poorly is countered by an example of that same something performing exceptionally well another time.
And this is where we fall into the usual problem I see with every one of these debates: SW is allowed to have all of its best stuff, with every assumption made to allow it to perform the best at all times, with none of the same consideration granted to ST.
Peregrine wrote: The problem with all these hypothetical superweapons for Star Trek is that they are just that: hypothetical. We don't see transporters beaming enemy crew into space. We don't see FTL combat. We don't see the use of time travel as a weapon. Etc. So we have one of two conclusions:
If you don't remember all of the FTL combat in SNG alone you need to go back and re-watch a bit. It happened all the time, it was just boring as hell because it's basically ship A following ship B at the same apparent warp speed firing phasers, both ships look like they're standing still. Boring as hell but happened a fair bit, I always thought it was due to limited budgets more than anything.
And the Federation doesn't use time travel as a weapon because there are accords outlawing it. Most of the "But the Federation could use..." things that they don't normally is because the Federation outlawed it. Which is why I agree with your assessment of over who would win. The Empire is big and has no F's to give. By the time the Federation got desperate enough to use the crazy stuff they've outlawed it would likely be too late.
Except you're forgetting that time travel means it's never too late. And if Kirk can get his crew to take a ratty BoP back in time for some whales, and Janeway will take her shuttle back to save Seven, there's bound to be a lot of Starfleet's trademark Crazy Admirals willing to go back and break a few regulations.
But yeah, in a straight up fight with no fancy tricks allowed, the faction that relies on brute force over fancy tricks will definitely defeat the faction that prefers fancy tricks to overcome brute force.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Except you're forgetting that time travel means it's never too late. And if Kirk can get his crew to take a ratty BoP back in time for some whales, and Janeway will take her shuttle back to save Seven, there's bound to be a lot of Starfleet's trademark Crazy Admirals willing to go back and break a few regulations.
But yeah, in a straight up fight with no fancy tricks allowed, the faction that relies on brute force over fancy tricks will definitely defeat the faction that prefers fancy tricks to overcome brute force.
Ok, so the Federation ship enters warp, and the Empire ship doesn't. In the blink of an eye, the Federation ship is out of weapons range. They gained absolutely nothing.
That ship, presumably, sent out a distress call to the rest of the Federation. The Federation gained knowledge.
The guys in Star Wars wouldn't because they were afraid of being force choked for their failure.
Sure, the thousand Fed ships tie up twice their number in Imperial ships.
In the meantime, the other 8,000 ships in the Imperial expeditionary force go conquer the Federation, or at least trash the major shipyards. And if they lose, next time the Empire sends 20,000, likely with better technology. In the meantime the Feds STILL don't know which galaxy to search to find Kuat Drive Yards...
The Empire doesn't need some silly wormhole to go extragalactic, after all.
A functional immunity to attack is worth much more than a 2:1 ratio.
There's also the slight issue of what would happen to a Star Destroyer that got rammed by something travelling at Warp. A version of the Cardassian Dreadnought missile wouldn't even need a warhead; if the enemy can't even see your autonomous ship they can't do anything about their impending demise. This isn't done in-universe because subspace sensors handily defeat such tactics, but the Empire doesn't have those, do they?
AlmightyWalrus wrote: A functional immunity to attack is worth much more than a 2:1 ratio.
There's also the slight issue of what would happen to a Star Destroyer that got rammed by something travelling at Warp. A version of the Cardassian Dreadnought missile wouldn't even need a warhead; if the enemy can't even see your autonomous ship they can't do anything about their impending demise. This isn't done in-universe because subspace sensors handily defeat such tactics, but the Empire doesn't have those, do they?
The Empire also allowed this...
...to happen. Swap the Falcon for the Defiant, and see how that ends for the Star Destroyer.
The Federation loses. Their FTL technology sucks compared to Star Wars. Hyperdrives can travel across the galaxy in a few weeks. Star Trek Warp Drives can't even cover 10% of the Galaxy in 70 years without some form of cheating.
Vulcan wrote: In the meantime the Feds STILL don't know which galaxy to search to find Kuat Drive Yards...
It's based on Kuat, in the core worlds. It isn't hard to find, it's shipyard forms an artificial planetary ring with enough mass for AT-ATs to walk on it, and I imagine there's a ton of communications traffic.
The Empire doesn't need some silly wormhole to go extragalactic, after all.
The wormhole leads to another part of the Milky Way galaxy, the Gamma Quadrant.
The Empire goes extra-galactic when it visits one of the satellite galaxies, the Rishi Maze (Kamino) being the example most people will be familiar with; which isn't the same thing as going to Andromeda.
Grey Templar wrote: The Federation loses. Their FTL technology sucks compared to Star Wars. Hyperdrives can travel across the galaxy in a few weeks. Star Trek Warp Drives can't even cover 10% of the Galaxy in 70 years without some form of cheating.
Was there ever a point that the speed of hyperdrive was established?
AlmightyWalrus wrote:And the fact that they can just run loops around the Imperial ships and shoot them with impunity.
...
A functional immunity to attack is worth much more than a 2:1 ratio.
You keep posting stuff like this without any basis.
dogma wrote:
Was there ever a point that the speed of hyperdrive was established?
No, because hyperdrive isn't just speeding up. Also, different ships have different 'multipliers' (RPG game term), Solo boasted about the Falcon making "0.5 past lightspeed" (which doesn't make any sense but at least establishes speed variances).
We can extrapolate that hyperdrive is far faster than warp though just by watching the films. In the Prequels the action flits between Coruscant in the Core and various planets in the Outer Rim even within the same film. The principal characters in Episode 1 probably travel twice the distance that Voyager has to in a matter of hours (and certainly Darth Maul is able to get from Coruscant to Tatooine in time to spend time tracking Qui Gon etc)
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dogma wrote: Swap the Falcon for the Defiant, and see how that ends for the Star Destroyer.
The Defiant is considerably larger than the Falcon and not as manoeuverable so... ?
A single line ISD would have an issue with cloaked ships, but only a trifling one as weapons powered by what Federation ships can output can't really be considered a threat to Imperial shielding or hull armour.
Also there are (or were, probably no longer canon) crystal gravtraps to track gravitational shifts in space as cloaked vessels move.
AlmightyWalrus wrote:And the fact that they can just run loops around the Imperial ships and shoot them with impunity.
...
A functional immunity to attack is worth much more than a 2:1 ratio.
You keep posting stuff like this without any basis.
But it is a functional immunity. Look at it this way, all the way through the films guns are shown as being manually tracked across zones of fire. We have the guns of the falcon. We have the lasers on the deathstar. Now imagine trying to track those guns across a target travelling at the speed of light?
dogma wrote:
Was there ever a point that the speed of hyperdrive was established?
No, because hyperdrive isn't just speeding up. Also, different ships have different 'multipliers' (RPG game term), Solo boasted about the Falcon making "0.5 past lightspeed" (which doesn't make any sense but at least establishes speed variances).
So warp speeds which represent multiples of the speed of light is slower that a ship going a fraction past lightspeed? We have no frame of reference.
We can extrapolate that hyperdrive is far faster than warp though just by watching the films. In the Prequels the action flits between Coruscant in the Core and various planets in the Outer Rim even within the same film. The principal characters in Episode 1 probably travel twice the distance that Voyager has to in a matter of hours (and certainly Darth Maul is able to get from Coruscant to Tatooine in time to spend time tracking Qui Gon etc)
I don't think we can extrapolate that. Ships travel in both media simply as fast as they need to, to suit the plot.
dogma wrote: Swap the Falcon for the Defiant, and see how that ends for the Star Destroyer.
The Defiant is considerably larger than the Falcon and not as manoeuverable so... ?
A single line ISD would have an issue with cloaked ships, but only a trifling one as weapons powered by what Federation ships can output can't really be considered a threat to Imperial shielding or hull armour.
Also there are (or were, probably no longer canon) crystal gravtraps to track gravitational shifts in space as cloaked vessels move.
Since SW fighter craft have sufficient firepower to overload the shields of imperial vessels I would aver that Federation ships are a threat. Unless you're stating that an xwing has more firepower than a constitution class?
Frazzled wrote: Again. We are closing over the fact Federation ships move and fight at speed where SW weapons literally can't hit them. It is the ultimate stealth tech.
Ok, so the Federation ship enters warp, and the Empire ship doesn't. In the blink of an eye, the Federation ship is out of weapons range. They gained absolutely nothing.
The point Fraz is making is that ST ships can also attack while at warp speeds.
Generally, Star Trek is full of tricks, where Star Wars is full of brute force. Which one wins in the end? I don't know, other than the fans usually lose because tempers flare, and things go downhill quickly.
Frazzies point is plain wrong to begin with. Let us dissect this.
Most battles occur at sublight and at relatively sedate speeds. We know the Federation can fire at speeds faster than that, so we will abstract this as meaning the Federation can move and shoot while the Empire can move or shoot with sublight speeds accumulating to effectively akin to speed 0. Now how fast can Federation star ships move, pretty fast at emergency warp, but they cant hold that for long and also cant engage. Also pretty fast is a relative term, it takes a few days to cross a subsector and the idea that any ship is 'the only one in range to respond' is well established in canon. Empire ships can cross the galaxy in down time, and while the speed has been properly been formulated (I wont bother going into the actual speed of Star Destroyers). Voyager needs shenanigans to cross from the delta quadrant in less than several decades, and spends years setting up that. Rebel ships hide sufficiently away from the galactic plane they can see the whole galaxy outside the side window. A distance further than Voyagers great journey by several orders of magnitude. To make matters worse the Rebel fleet deployed fighters before the jump restablishing the fact that the journey could be made by a small vessel without cabin space. So to boil is down the Empire and equivalent factions can cross a galaxy in hours in a fast ship, though many drives are substantially slower, most military vessels including Star Destroyers are not in the category. it would take at least a century for the fastest ship in the Federation to make the same crossing.
However lets be utterly unreasonably generous here. Let us restrict the imperial fleet to a thousand time the speed of the Federation one, we will handwave away any further speed advantage with "logistical restrictions" aka Imperial ships can move faster than that but can't remain in supply or command chain and do so. Let us also assume a Federation starship is twice as powerful, no lets be more generous, ten times as powerful. We are assuming here that Federation shields completely block turbo laser fire making most engagements ineffective for Imperial forces. I have no reason to believe this, the opposite could equally well be true, we don't know as we are comparing apples to oranges. Even so lets tip the hand in the Federations favour anyway. The truth is they still lose.
Game it out in your head. You have a hex map with star systems an average of three hexes away from each other. Federation ships have attack and defence 10, a movement of 1 and can move and shoot, Frazzies advantage. There are three times as many stars to defend as there are Federation ships. Imperial ships have an attack and defence 1, a movement of 1000 and can move or shoot. There are exactly as many Imperial ships as Federation ones. If they land on a hex with a Federation warship the Federation can attack, if there is no Federation ship present on a system the Imperials can raid bombard or invade the system by ground assault. The Federation loses if it looses "too many" star systems to bombardment or invasion, it can be assumed that holding enough planets to ransom will force unfavourable peace terms.
You have the scenario, now is there any way the Federation can hold more than ten systems?
In a nutshell it is a match of pawns vs queens. In chess either piece can take the other, but the queen is valued more highly due to its superior mobility. Sorry but the Federation will be utterly pwned. The only way out is if Kirk gets his shirt off and finds a central kill switch and presses it while looking awesome and dishing out a one liner, or the Q provides free transportation (and in all likelihood a temporary gun upgrade). Or timewars. The scenario above assumes that all unresolved variable such as ship quality are assumed heavily in the Federations favour, which I must stress there is no excuse to believe and even if it was true the Federation tech that the Empire is lacking is easy to steal once you invade a Federation world as it is freely distributed and mostly unguarded, so much of what advantage the Federation has is temporary.
QED. The Federation lose even if all unknown variables are in their favour because the nature of the Federation government system is that it can be held to ransom by a hegemonic power willing to commit geocide, which the Empire under Sidious clearly falls into the category of. I challenge Kid Kyoto and any and all pro Federation viewpoint holders to contradict the above logic, first assuming they have the tech advantage, and then if the unknown tech variables are equal. I doubt you will be able to do even the former without timewars, and heavens help you if the Sith steals that technology
AndrewC wrote: I don't think we can extrapolate that. Ships travel in both media simply as fast as they need to, to suit the plot.
Of course they move as the plot dictates, but that doesn't prevent us from getting approximate speeds. Star Trek ships are consistently portrayed as being very slow. It's a plot element of an entire series that they can't cross the galaxy in any practical length of time, ships are out of range and unable to help, etc. In Star Wars, on the other hand, we consistently see much shorter travel times. Ships cross the galaxy without even bothering to bring a change of clothes for the passengers. And we never see a plot element where slow travel is required, there is never anything that explicitly contradicts the demonstrations of cross-galaxy travel on the scale of hours.
Unless you're stating that an xwing has more firepower than a constitution class?
Probably. We know that Star Wars capital ships have orders of magnitude more firepower than Star Trek capital ships, so presumably that x-wing operates on the same general scale (at least when armed with anti-capital torpedoes).
Automatically Appended Next Post:
vonjankmon wrote: If you don't remember all of the FTL combat in SNG alone you need to go back and re-watch a bit. It happened all the time, it was just boring as hell because it's basically ship A following ship B at the same apparent warp speed firing phasers, both ships look like they're standing still. Boring as hell but happened a fair bit, I always thought it was due to limited budgets more than anything.
Ok, let's consider budget limitations. We can't get anything useful from low-budget scenes because the creator is constrained by budget limits, and the most informative examples are the ones with the highest budgets. That means the movies, and in those movies we consistently see combat happening at slow speeds and visual ranges. When presented with the opportunity to give the final authority on Star Trek combat, with as much of a budget as the creators would ever have, they decided to make it barely more impressive than a fight between ancient sailing ships.
And the Federation doesn't use time travel as a weapon because there are accords outlawing it. Most of the "But the Federation could use..." things that they don't normally is because the Federation outlawed it. Which is why I agree with your assessment of over who would win. The Empire is big and has no F's to give. By the time the Federation got desperate enough to use the crazy stuff they've outlawed it would likely be too late.
The "it's illegal" explanation doesn't make much sense. First of all, the Federation doesn't even use time travel when faced with an existential crisis like a Borg threat closing in on earth. Nor does it use time travel when suffering heavy losses in a major war, a war it is not guaranteed to win. It just isn't believable at all that no captain would break the rules and take the automatic win, even if the price of saving their civilization is jail time. Second, remember the time Kirk went back in time to retrieve some whales and his only "punishment" was for the theft of the ship, a demotion to the captain's role that he wanted in the first place? That sure doesn't seem like a world where the legal status of time travel is so thoroughly outlawed that nobody would ever do it.
The obvious solution to this problem is that time travel doesn't actually work. The "many worlds" interpretation is the correct one, and time travel simply branches off another alternate timeline. So you can create an alternate timeline where you win, but you disappear from your original world and are never seen again. That might be useful if you know you're going to die anyway, choosing to win at least somewhere even if you can't save the world you started in, but it's not terribly useful from the point of view of saving this world.
We can extrapolate that hyperdrive is far faster than warp though just by watching the films. In the Prequels the action flits between Coruscant in the Core and various planets in the Outer Rim even within the same film.
But no mention is made of how much time passes between those moments. How long were Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan on Tatooine?
The Defiant is considerably larger than the Falcon and not as manoeuverable so... ?
The Star Destroyer could barely hit the Falcon even when it's evasion strategy was "Run in a straight line." An actual, maneuverable warship would probably fair better.
dogma wrote: But no mention is made of how much time passes between those moments. How long were Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan on Tatooine?
No explicit mention, but they don't even bother changing clothes, no mention is made of lots of time passing, etc. It's clearly presented as a "later that day" situation, and even the most absurdly generous pro-Star-Trek interpretation is that it took a few days. It's certainly less than the centuries required to accomplish the same feat in Star Trek.
The Star Destroyer could barely hit the Falcon even when it's evasion strategy was "Run in a straight line." An actual, maneuverable warship would probably fair better.
Let's not get too smug about that, given the laughable inaccuracy shown in Star Trek:
(Not to mention the utter failures of leadership and tactics that should have resulted in the entire command staff of the Enterprise being executed.)
Peregrine, I would like to point out that ST is science fiction, SW is space opera. So one will always show a grittier more realistic version of travel. Also the release of the Last Jedi, kind of throws the entire faster than though attitude out the window as the entire plot premise is based on how long it takes for the ships to get to the rebel base.
Xwing fire power, since many people seem to love the depiction of explosions as proof of power, I would humbly present the evidence of the various strafing runs that fighters make both on planet and in space versus various targets both armoured and 'naked' those are awfully small explosions. So no Xwing are not more powerful.
There's also the fact that a small craft ramming a Star Destroyer at Warp speeds is going to be far more powerful than main battery fire from said Star Destroyer. And the fact that we're (for some reason) just taking for granted that Imperial shields and/or hulls prevent torpedoes from jus being beamed aboard. I don't care how good armour you think you have, if a quantum torpedo goes off right next to your main power core you're going to have a bad time.
As I said in my first post, it all depends on what assumptions we make about how the respective technologies interact. There is no objective way of determining the outcome of such a conflict.
AndrewC wrote: Peregrine, I would like to point out that ST is science fiction, SW is space opera. So one will always show a grittier more realistic version of travel. Also the release of the Last Jedi, kind of throws the entire faster than though attitude out the window as the entire plot premise is based on how long it takes for the ships to get to the rebel base.
Xwing fire power, since many people seem to love the depiction of explosions as proof of power, I would humbly present the evidence of the various strafing runs that fighters make both on planet and in space versus various targets both armoured and 'naked' those are awfully small explosions. So no Xwing are not more powerful.
Cheers
Andrew
We can learn little to nothing from the weapons visuals. because they are edited for effect. In one scene Kirk running and narrowly dodges multiple disruptor blasts from a Klingon Bird of Prey. Now admittedly the shots missed but they landed by his feet, one might expect some splash damage from weaponry capable of taking on capital ships.
AndrewC wrote: Peregrine, I would like to point out that ST is science fiction, SW is space opera.
Lolno. Star Trek is space opera, just with technobabble instead of space wizards with laser swords. Nothing about it is in the conventional genre of science fiction, as in realistic attempts to extrapolate into the future based on real science.
So one will always show a grittier more realistic version of travel.
Nothing about Star Trek's FTL is realistic in any way. Slow is not realism.
Also the release of the Last Jedi, kind of throws the entire faster than though attitude out the window as the entire plot premise is based on how long it takes for the ships to get to the rebel base.
You're still talking about days at most, not centuries, using sublight engines to get there. Remember the part where they explicitly don't jump into hyperspace because they don't have enough fuel to make a jump after that if the pursuit continues?
Xwing fire power, since many people seem to love the depiction of explosions as proof of power, I would humbly present the evidence of the various strafing runs that fighters make both on planet and in space versus various targets both armoured and 'naked' those are awfully small explosions. So no Xwing are not more powerful.
On the other hand, when a Star Trek capital ship fired on "god", within a few feet of a bunch of officers wearing nothing but cloth uniforms, the effect was considerably less than a real-world mortar shell. X-Wings, on the other hand, are seen vaporizing the armored hull of the death star with those strafing runs. Even assuming that the death star's armor is no more durable than plain steel it's enough for the x-wing's cannons to have firepower on the scale of nuclear weapons.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: There's also the fact that a small craft ramming a Star Destroyer at Warp speeds is going to be far more powerful than main battery fire from said Star Destroyer. And the fact that we're (for some reason) just taking for granted that Imperial shields and/or hulls prevent torpedoes from jus being beamed aboard. I don't care how good armour you think you have, if a quantum torpedo goes off right next to your main power core you're going to have a bad time.
As I said in my first post, it all depends on what assumptions we make about how the respective technologies interact. There is no objective way of determining the outcome of such a conflict.
Yes we can because the conflict can be won without direct fleet to fleet action by targeting planets for bombardment or invasion. Sun Tzu would argue it is a superior form of victory. Please remember the Star Destroyers need to defeat the Federation, not Federation warships.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: There's also the fact that a small craft ramming a Star Destroyer at Warp speeds is going to be far more powerful than main battery fire from said Star Destroyer.
And yet this tactic is never used in Star Trek canon, despite the clear advantage to be gained from trading a drone shuttle for a capital ship. The obvious conclusion is that warp ramming is not possible for whatever reason. Perhaps aiming is impossible, perhaps something about the warp drive causes the ship to no longer interact the same way with objects outside of warp.
And the fact that we're (for some reason) just taking for granted that Imperial shields and/or hulls prevent torpedoes from jus being beamed aboard.
Transporters are shown to be blocked by everything from active shields to natural mineral deposits, and "beam a torpedo into their reactor" is a tactic that is never used. The obvious conclusion is that transporter bombs are incredibly unreliable outside of weird edge case scenarios against a defenseless ship and nobody considers them a serious weapon.
On the subject of Warp Speeds in Star Trek, am I right in thinking that most, if not all, Warp Drives can’t maintain the higher speeds indefinitely?
I’m fairly sure that’s covered in some of the episodes, but I’m not 100%.
As for Hyperdrive. We know that needs careful plotting to avoid gravity Wells (which is why the Interdictor is such a danger). So for initial forays into the Milky Way, The Empire can’t make a great deal of use of their Hyperdrives, as they just don’t have the maps. But, as with much of the argument here regarding tech, that just means they first need to steal/buy them. There’s plenty that’ll sell them, and a fleet (typically 4 ISD-1’s would have no problem overwhelming a single Federation ship to plunder it.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: On the subject of Warp Speeds in Star Trek, am I right in thinking that most, if not all, Warp Drives can’t maintain the higher speeds indefinitely?
I’m fairly sure that’s covered in some of the episodes, but I’m not 100%.
As for Hyperdrive. We know that needs careful plotting to avoid gravity Wells (which is why the Interdictor is such a danger). So for initial forays into the Milky Way, The Empire can’t make a great deal of use of their Hyperdrives, as they just don’t have the maps. But, as with much of the argument here regarding tech, that just means they first need to steal/buy them. There’s plenty that’ll sell them, and a fleet (typically 4 ISD-1’s would have no problem overwhelming a single Federation ship to plunder it.
Why plunder, send a Lambda shuttle to a trade station and buy a starmap. Then go plundering. You will also know what planets have what to steal from the trade route info.
No explicit mention, but they don't even bother changing clothes, no mention is made of lots of time passing, etc. It's clearly presented as a "later that day" situation, and even the most absurdly generous pro-Star-Trek interpretation is that it took a few days. It's certainly less than the centuries required to accomplish the same feat in Star Trek.
Hyperspace is also presented as a series of lanes that bold people map out.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: On the subject of Warp Speeds in Star Trek, am I right in thinking that most, if not all, Warp Drives can’t maintain the higher speeds indefinitely?
I believe Warp 10 is stated as being impossible, but transwarp is a thing; as is time travel.
Hyperspace is essentially The Warp in 40k. But stuff in real space can cast a gravity shadow - which you need to avoid.
Hyperspace Lanes are often considered along the lines of The Webway, physical corridors within that dimension. But that’s not my reading of it. Rather, it’s my understanding (I may be wrong!) that they’re instead routes where the movement of the spheres don’t affect things. The closest equivalency would be looking to run from one corner of a field, to the other. The Perimeter of the field is known to be relatively flat. One could leg it diaganollay right across the field - but there’s all sorts of possible hazards that could turn your ankle when moving at speed. Some have taken the diagonal route, getting where they need to go nice and quickly. But others have done their ankles in. But everyone that’s taken the perimeter route has arrived at their destination,
So whilst Hyperspace Lanes do exist, they more well trodden, reliable paths, rather than an absolute restriction.
It also allows for different sized ships to have different options in terms of what’s a safe route. Consider that a specific route goes through a star system. Due to gravity masses, there may be areas where a larger ship would fall foul of them, but a fighter sized craft can slip between them, just as there’s some roads a HGV can’t go, but a cyclist can.
That’s all just my understanding of it though. It’s quite possible that I’m wrong!
And yet this tactic is never used in Star Trek canon, despite the clear advantage to be gained from trading a drone shuttle for a capital ship. The obvious conclusion is that warp ramming is not possible for whatever reason. Perhaps aiming is impossible, perhaps something about the warp drive causes the ship to no longer interact the same way with objects outside of warp.
Why didn't all of the combatants in Star Wars engage in hyperspace ramming?
dogma wrote: Why didn't all of the combatants in Star Wars engage in hyperspace ramming?
This is a good question. Clearly there is some limiting factor that we haven't been told about, and it isn't a viable strategy under normal circumstances. But nobody is claiming hyperspace ramming as a strategy here, the Empire still wins easily even if you assume that hyperspace ramming does not exist. As I said, the Empire doesn't need gimmicks and one-shot tricks to win, they simply have superior numbers in every relevant category: better ship vs. ship combat power, vastly better strategic mobility, and no ethical problems with annihilating helpless planets via orbital bombardment. The Empire can simply make a frontal assault on every relevant Federation planet, brush aside any defenses, and kill everything on the surface. All the Federation can do is run away and watch helplessly as their entire civilian population is reduced to ashes.
Federation guards the shipyards and other key planets, starts cranking out Defiant Class ships until they have enough to flood the board (galaxy). I also don't think the Klingons would just stay away from a fight like that.
This is a good question. Clearly there is some limiting factor that we haven't been told about, and it isn't a viable strategy under normal circumstances.
But nobody is claiming hyperspace ramming as a strategy here, the Empire still wins easily even if you assume that hyperspace ramming does not exist. As I said, the Empire doesn't need gimmicks and one-shot tricks to win, they simply have superior numbers in every relevant category: better ship vs. ship combat power, vastly better strategic mobility, and no ethical problems with annihilating helpless planets via orbital bombardment. The Empire can simply make a frontal assault on every relevant Federation plaet, brush aside any defenses, and kill everything on the surface. All the Federation can do is run away and watch helplessly as their entire civilian population is reduced to ashes.
The Empire sure did a great job annihilating all those defenses on Hoth, when it had to land outside the planetary shield the rebels erected.
As to strategic mobility: how fast is the class 2 hyperdrive on an ISD2?
Bran Dawri wrote: Federation guards the shipyards and other key planets, starts cranking out Defiant Class ships until they have enough to flood the board (galaxy). I also don't think the Klingons would just stay away from a fight like that.
dogma wrote: Why didn't all of the combatants in Star Wars engage in hyperspace ramming?
This is a good question. Clearly there is some limiting factor that we haven't been told about, and it isn't a viable strategy under normal circumstances. But nobody is claiming hyperspace ramming as a strategy here, the Empire still wins easily even if you assume that hyperspace ramming does not exist. As I said, the Empire doesn't need gimmicks and one-shot tricks to win, they simply have superior numbers in every relevant category: better ship vs. ship combat power, vastly better strategic mobility, and no ethical problems with annihilating helpless planets via orbital bombardment. The Empire can simply make a frontal assault on every relevant Federation planet, brush aside any defenses, and kill everything on the surface. All the Federation can do is run away and watch helplessly as their entire civilian population is reduced to ashes.
They don't have better ship vs ship combat power. Every ship in startrek is capable of fighting at warp speed which is exponentially faster than light speed by a factor of up to 9.9. Starwars ships are basically using ww2 ERA tech in space. Their turbo lasers can't track small fighters - they certainly can't track ships at warp speed then. Startrek ships would destroy starwars ships like fish in a barrel. It's not like the empire would just suddenly pop into existence - every planet would be heavily defended with only a relatively small force of federation ships required to repel even a large imperial force - because they can't even target the federation ships. The starwars antihyper space tech would have no affect on warp tech - it's an entirely different mechanism.
There is also an argument to be made that starwars ships wouldn't even be able to duke it out at sub warpspeeds against startrek tech. First the startrek ships are more maneuverable (they are immune to inertia) starwars ships are show to be very sluggish. You can almost right off the fighters from starwars as being useless as well. Essentially they would be fodder agaist a heavy phaser bank which can split it's fire and knock out multiple fighters in a single shot (you don't see phasers missing a lot in startrek or fighters really - probably for this exact reason). Second - outside of the deathstar - starwars weaponry is very basic conventional type weaponry. Startrek uses antimatter torpedos that fly at warp speed (can't be intercepted) and phasers are shown to inflict mortal damage to a ship when it is unshielded. It's really looking pretty bad for starwars here in my eyes man.
No explicit mention, but they don't even bother changing clothes, no mention is made of lots of time passing, etc. It's clearly presented as a "later that day" situation, and even the most absurdly generous pro-Star-Trek interpretation is that it took a few days. It's certainly less than the centuries required to accomplish the same feat in Star Trek.
Hyperspace is also presented as a series of lanes that bold people map out.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: On the subject of Warp Speeds in Star Trek, am I right in thinking that most, if not all, Warp Drives can’t maintain the higher speeds indefinitely?
I believe Warp 10 is stated as being impossible, but transwarp is a thing; as is time travel.
This is correct - warp 10 is stated as being transwarp. Which you inhabit every point in the universe at every point in time. It's not impossible. It's been shown in many episodes - it's been show to be very unsafe and therefore unusable. There are also multiple instances in TNG and Voyager in which ships from the future were using a form of it to travel time and instantaneously move to any place in time and space.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: There's also the fact that a small craft ramming a Star Destroyer at Warp speeds is going to be far more powerful than main battery fire from said Star Destroyer.
And yet this tactic is never used in Star Trek canon, despite the clear advantage to be gained from trading a drone shuttle for a capital ship. The obvious conclusion is that warp ramming is not possible for whatever reason. Perhaps aiming is impossible, perhaps something about the warp drive causes the ship to no longer interact the same way with objects outside of warp.
And the fact that we're (for some reason) just taking for granted that Imperial shields and/or hulls prevent torpedoes from jus being beamed aboard.
Transporters are shown to be blocked by everything from active shields to natural mineral deposits, and "beam a torpedo into their reactor" is a tactic that is never used. The obvious conclusion is that transporter bombs are incredibly unreliable outside of weird edge case scenarios against a defenseless ship and nobody considers them a serious weapon.
I already mentioned that subspace sensors are why warp ramming doesn't work as a strategy and that the Empire doesn't have those. There's little point in trying to ram a target that can see you and demolish you, but one that can't track FTL targets? What are they going to do?
Transporters aren't used in that way in-universe because Star Trek shields block (normal) transporters. We have no way of knowing whether the Empire's shields work against transporters or not, which illustrates my entire point: you're making assumptions that favour the Empire.
Star Wars Turbolasers, despite their monicker, are [i)not[/i] laser weapons as we understand them. It’s a misnomer, as in ‘less than 12 parsecs’ is confusing a unit of time for a unit of distance (well, until Solo arguably clears it up in a few weeks time).
Star Wars blasters and turbolasers are plasma Weapons. Not lasers. Turbolasers double charge said plasma. And Turbolasers can fire every two seconds. An ISD carries 60 batteries of Turbolasers. And they go about in capital ship squadrons of four....
So far as I can tell, those weapons are comparative to Romulan. Klingon and Ferengi Disruptors.
Seriously. How long will any Federation ship stand up to such a barrage?
AlmightyWalrus wrote: There's little point in trying to ram a target that can see you and demolish you, but one that can't track FTL targets? What are they going to do?
Any evidence that Star Destroyers et al can't track and target ships using warp drive or are you just making assumptions that favour the Federation?
WAY too much of this going on. Seriously, the numbers were ran decades ago using calculations based on on-screen evidence, Star Wars power generation is orders of magnitude over Star Trek and we can extrapolate that to guess that Star Wars shields would be unphased (sorry) by Star Trek weaponry and that just a Turbolaser shot or two would see so many sparks erupting from bridge consoles you'd think it were Bonfire night/4th July/insert big firework holiday here.
dogma wrote: That is also quite the assumptive answer.
It's also the only acceptable answer. We do not see hyperspace ramming at any other time, despite the clear potential advantages for winning battles with it. The obvious conclusion is that hyperspace ramming isn't a viable tactic in normal circumstances, even if we don't yet know exactly why.
The Empire sure did a great job annihilating all those defenses on Hoth, when it had to land outside the planetary shield the rebels erected.
That's Star Wars planetary shielding. Star Trek has no equivalent. Nor do they have any equivalent to Vader's desire to capture his son alive instead of turning everything outside the shield to molten glass and leaving the protected area to die.
As to strategic mobility: how fast is the class 2 hyperdrive on an ISD2?
We don't know an explicit answer. We do know that Star Wars hyperspace speeds in general are uniformly presented as fast, crossing the galaxy on the scale of hours to days at most. We know that the rebellion's fleet made the jump from Yavin to Scarif in a matter of minutes at most. And we have no suggestion that star destroyers are meaningfully slower in this context. Even if they're only half as fast as the rebel fleet they're still orders of magnitudes faster than anything Star Trek has.
They really do. People have done the calculations based on on-screen evidence. Star Wars ships have firepower (and therefore defense) orders of magnitude higher than Star Trek ships. It's a case of 1500s sailing ship vs. WWII battleship.
Every ship in startrek is capable of fighting at warp speed which is exponentially faster than light speed by a factor of up to 9.9.
And yet they regularly fight at slow sublight speeds, and still manage to miss near-stationary targets at point blank range! This supposed FTL combat capability seems highly overstated.
First the startrek ships are more maneuverable (they are immune to inertia) starwars ships are show to be very sluggish.
Star Trek ships are, over and over again, shown on-screen to be barely capable of maneuvering. And yet somehow this laughable level of maneuverability is enough to cause enemy shots to miss!
Startrek uses antimatter torpedos that fly at warp speed (can't be intercepted)
Except when those antimatter torpedoes fly at very slow sublight speeds and do about as much damage as a 15th century cannonball smashing through the target.
and phasers are shown to inflict mortal damage to a ship when it is unshielded
Except when they barely scratch an unshielded target.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Again, if you're arguing for Star Trek you need to watch this:
Aside from the sheer execution-worthy incompetence of everyone involved this is what the creators of Star Trek decided to portray when they had the maximum possible budget for a movie, without the limits of a TV episode. Both ships are moving at slow sublight speeds, the Enterprise's "evasive maneuver" of very slowly turning a bit is enough to cause the Klingon ship's disruptor fire to miss entirely, and despite the shield penetration gimmick the Enterprise appears to take very little damage. At no point does the Klingon ship, despite having the ability to ignore the Enterprise's shields, beam a bomb into the Enterprise's warp core. At no point does either ship go FTL or use their magic auto-hit phasers or warp speed torpedoes. In fact, despite the Enterprise supposedly having only two seconds to deliver a kill shot once the cloak starts to engage their torpedo shot moves incredibly slowly across the very short distance between ships, taking well over two seconds in the process. Both ships have considerable incentive to use the supposed high-end capabilities of Star Trek ships, and they don't. The inescapable conclusion is that these capabilities do not exist.
Peregrine wrote: The inescapable conclusion is that these capabilities do not exist.
No, the inescapable conclusion is that they are trying to create a spectacle that will make people pay £10 to sit in a movie theatre for 2 hours. It would be a pretty short film if they just transported a photon warhead over.
Startrek uses antimatter torpedos that fly at warp speed (can't be intercepted)
Such Warp. Much FTL. Maybe the movie is just shot at 1/1000000000th speed? Then the ships on screen might also be doing that fancy warp strafing that never seems to actually happen.
Peregrine wrote: The inescapable conclusion is that these capabilities do not exist.
No, the inescapable conclusion is that they are trying to create a spectacle that will make people pay £10 to sit in a movie theatre for 2 hours. It would be a pretty short film if they just transported a photon warhead over.
Cheers
Andrew
Nah, the inescapable conclusion is because we see a thing happen one way once, then the hundreds of times we see it happen in other ways don't matter.
Peregrine wrote: The inescapable conclusion is that these capabilities do not exist.
No, the inescapable conclusion is that they are trying to create a spectacle that will make people pay £10 to sit in a movie theatre for 2 hours. It would be a pretty short film if they just transported a photon warhead over.
Cheers
Andrew
Nah, the inescapable conclusion is because we see a thing happen one way once, then the hundreds of times we see it happen in other ways don't matter.
When are we shown the other way happening hundreds of times? Genuine question as I am not that familiar with TOS but can anyone cite episode numbers for warp speed strafing/combat? Or torpedoes that fly at warp speed, because that would mean they are going faster than light and thus not visible?
AlmightyWalrus wrote: A functional immunity to attack is worth much more than a 2:1 ratio.
There's also the slight issue of what would happen to a Star Destroyer that got rammed by something travelling at Warp. A version of the Cardassian Dreadnought missile wouldn't even need a warhead; if the enemy can't even see your autonomous ship they can't do anything about their impending demise. This isn't done in-universe because subspace sensors handily defeat such tactics, but the Empire doesn't have those, do they?
Except they have developed them as of TLJ, and were researching them as far back as Rogue One.
Startrek uses antimatter torpedos that fly at warp speed (can't be intercepted)
Such Warp. Much FTL. Maybe the movie is just shot at 1/1000000000th speed? Then the ships on screen might also be doing that fancy warp strafing that never seems to actually happen.
I believe he’s meaning protype Cardassian torpedoes as used by the Maquis ( not de sade) in a DS9 episode.
dogma wrote: Was there ever a point that the speed of hyperdrive was established?
An exact velocity? No.
But Anakin and Padme took the equivalent of a bus from Coruscant in the core to Naboo in the Outer Rim territories instead of a cruise ship. It couldn't have been more than a couple days.
Not to mention Yoda making it from Coruscant to Kamino to Geonosis within a couple days, and several dozen Jedi getting there from... wherever... in the same period.
And in the original series the Rebel fleet was based clear outside the galaxy - indeed, several times the width of the galaxy outside the galaxy - and regular travel back and forth is implied. You just can't do that unless you've got a REALLY good hyperspace drive. Just climbing out of the gravity well of the galaxy is an impressive feat.
In contrast, it takes even the Ultrawarp Enterprise-D months just to cross the Federation, which itself is only a small portion of it's galaxy...
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Bran Dawri wrote: Federation guards the shipyards and other key planets, starts cranking out Defiant Class ships until they have enough to flood the board (galaxy). I also don't think the Klingons would just stay away from a fight like that.
You assume the Emperor wouldn't be goading them on to weaken them AND the Federation before making his move to conquer both.
I can promise you, Palpatine would not overlook that option.
For that matter, what if Palpatine decides to reprise his plan to take over the Republic... and uses politics to take over the Federation from the inside? Remember, this man is one smooooooth operator. The Jedi Council trusted him almost completely. The only way they found out he was the Sith Lord was when he told Anakin point-blank... and even THAT was part of his plan. As faction-ridden as the Federation has been shown to be, I'll take Palpatine in a political takeover of the Federation every time.
Which means by the time the Fleet arrives, he's a) already the Federation President, and b) sent ALL the plans for all the Federation's nifty toys back home to be incorporated into his fleet...
I can say the same thing in regards to imperial star destroyers power.
There's a scene in RoTJ where a medical frigate is going toe to toe with an imperial star destroyer broadside. The star destroyer is putting out a seemingly equal number of shots as the medical frigate yet the star destroyer should have about 30 times the firepower per their specs in starwars literature.
Can you show me in film? A star destroyer using all 50 turbo lasers 50 ion cannons and 25 concussion missile launchers? A star destroyer has never once in film been show firing a missile. Yet I can show you in film - photon torpedoes evaporating ships in a single shot.
In fact - in a star wars movie we have never actually seen a star destroyer utilizing it's weapons in an effective way. Typically they sit back and let their fighters do the work.
You can probably show me a few scenes in film where photon torpedos aren't doing as much damage as they should be (it's just not thematic to see the enterprise being 1 shot by a bird of prey) We really just need to focus on what the capabilities of the ships should be knowing what we know.
We know startrek ships can fight at warp speed
We know that star destroyers weapons are ineffective against fast moving targets.
The only conclusion that can be drawn is that starwars ships would be ineffective against startrek tech.
The only tech in starwars which is even close to the power of startrek is hyperspace travel. I mean heck - looking at TLJ - how hard would it be for federation ships to stay out of effective range from turbo lasers (which actually arc in space like an artillery shell) and just blast them away with photon torpedos which are effective at 300k kilometers?
dogma wrote: Was there ever a point that the speed of hyperdrive was established?
An exact velocity? No.
But Anakin and Padme took the equivalent of a bus from Coruscant in the core to Naboo in the Outer Rim territories instead of a cruise ship. It couldn't have been more than a couple days.
Not to mention Yoda making it from Coruscant to Kamino to Geonosis within a couple days, and several dozen Jedi getting there from... wherever... in the same period.
And in the original series the Rebel fleet was based clear outside the galaxy - indeed, several times the width of the galaxy outside the galaxy - and regular travel back and forth is implied. You just can't do that unless you've got a REALLY good hyperspace drive. Just climbing out of the gravity well of the galaxy is an impressive feat.
In contrast, it takes even the Ultrawarp Enterprise-D months just to cross the Federation, which itself is only a small portion of it's galaxy...
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Bran Dawri wrote: Federation guards the shipyards and other key planets, starts cranking out Defiant Class ships until they have enough to flood the board (galaxy). I also don't think the Klingons would just stay away from a fight like that.
You assume the Emperor wouldn't be goading them on to weaken them AND the Federation before making his move to conquer both.
I can promise you, Palpatine would not overlook that option.
For that matter, what if Palpatine decides to reprise his plan to take over the Republic... and uses politics to take over the Federation from the inside? Remember, this man is one smooooooth operator. The Jedi Council trusted him almost completely. The only way they found out he was the Sith Lord was when he told Anakin point-blank... and even THAT was part of his plan. As faction-ridden as the Federation has been shown to be, I'll take Palpatine in a political takeover of the Federation every time.
Which means by the time the Fleet arrives, he's a) already the Federation President, and b) sent ALL the plans for all the Federation's nifty toys back home to be incorporated into his fleet...
The dominion actually had a shape shifter in command of Starfleet trying to destroy them from the inside - they were caught - they failed. The federation beat the dominion - which is the startrek analog to the empire. Though they are seemingly more powerful - often fielding fleets over over 1000 wearships in film. I've never seen a fleet bigger than 25 ships in starwars. Is the empire really that strong?
I believe he’s meaning protype Cardassian torpedoes as used by the Maquis ( not de sade) in a DS9 episode.
Oh the one Torres helped make and randomly ran into in the delta quadrant? (what're the odds?)
So like most Trek plans in this thread, it's a prototype/experimental bit of tech seen in one episode and never used in anger for reasons, and yet is being cited as "Trek has this and Wars has no counter". I'll just file it with "Time Travel would be constantly used to negate all speed/firepower/shielding/armour/number advantages" and "Q would snap his fingers for insta-win".
Automatically Appended Next Post: In the same damn post!
You can probably show me a few scenes in film where photon torpedos aren't doing as much damage as they should be (it's just not thematic to see the enterprise being 1 shot by a bird of prey) We really just need to focus on what the capabilities of the ships should be knowing what we know.
.........
The federation beat the dominion - which is the startrek analog to the empire. Though they are seemingly more powerful - often fielding fleets over over 1000 wearships in film. I've never seen a fleet bigger than 25 ships in starwars. Is the empire really that strong?
So in the first instance we need to focus on knowing what we know (what a character has said in engineering maybe, or data pulled from a technical manual), and ignoring the on screen events. But then by the end of the post we can safely jettison what we know (the Empire rules with an iron fist over thousands of systems) and go with the visual evidence.
I'm just about out here, it's nothing but handwaving and phrases starting "we know..." without actually producing evidence. Equating Palpatine's democratic coup with the Dominion's enemy agent infiltration saying "he would get caught" is a staggering display of ignorance. Ignoring all firepower calculations with "well they couldn't hit them anyway" even when the vast majority of ST combat that isn't the Defiant is two ships floating in space firing a shot every second or so at an equally slow target.
The Dominion War is damning on most Federation claims because it shows an absolute failure to perform any of the killer tactics often cited as up the Federation's sleeve when faced with a numerically and technologically comparable (let alone superior) enemy force. Crank out awesome Defiant-class vessels to deal with the invaders? Well, they managed to make at least 2 more during the war, and in some of the long shots there might have been a couple more, but vast wings of the things destroying all before them? Miraculously failed to happen. And how do you crew all these cranked out ships? Conscription? Nope, we're hearing now about holo-crews, or crews brought magically into existence via transporter cloning (no ethical concerns there, no sir).
It's okay though because Section 31 don't mind getting their hands dirty. They can just make a nerve agent that targets... humans (oops) or send an assassin to take down Vader or Palpatine (hmm).
Xenomancers wrote: There's a scene in RoTJ where a medical frigate is going toe to toe with an imperial star destroyer broadside. The star destroyer is putting out a seemingly equal number of shots as the medical frigate yet the star destroyer should have about 30 times the firepower per their specs in starwars literature.
The shot is also an extreme closeup where most of the star destroyer is off camera. This means nothing.
Can you show me in film? A star destroyer using all 50 turbo lasers 50 ion cannons and 25 concussion missile launchers?
Can you give me a reason to care? We know that the star destroyer has a lot of guns in its main battery, as they're clearly visible on the model. And we know that it has secondary weapons that are invisibly tiny at the distance that we most commonly see the ship. Is there any reason to doubt the 50/50 estimate as at least roughly accurate? Keep in mind that Star Wars firepower levels are orders of magnitude higher, so even "proving" that it only has half as many guns and zero missiles would be worthless.
Yet I can show you in film - photon torpedoes evaporating ships in a single shot.
And I can show you photon torpedoes doing damage on par with 15th century cannonballs.
In fact - in a star wars movie we have never actually seen a star destroyer utilizing it's weapons in an effective way. Typically they sit back and let their fighters do the work.
Wrong. We see them shooting in multiple scenes, even though the fighters are typically the focus of most shots with the capital ships in the background.
(it's just not thematic to see the enterprise being 1 shot by a bird of prey)
Theme is irrelevant, only results matter. It doesn't matter why we see pathetic firepower levels, it only matters that we see them. And we do.
We know startrek ships can fight at warp speed
And we also know that, when given the opportunity to do so (with a movie-level budget to do whatever the creator wants to portray) they fight at slow sublight speeds and extremely short range. And despite this they still manage to miss!
I mean heck - looking at TLJ - how hard would it be for federation ships to stay out of effective range from turbo lasers (which actually arc in space like an artillery shell) and just blast them away with photon torpedos which are effective at 300k kilometers?
Pretty difficult given the failure to live up to those ranges on-screen, and the pathetic firepower levels involved. It's quite likely that, even if you grant the absurd range advantage in direct contradiction to canon evidence, the star destroyers could simply enter orbit, ignore the pathetic damage from the incoming torpedoes, and slaughter the entire population on the surface while the Star Trek ships watch helplessly.
And in the original series the Rebel fleet was based clear outside the galaxy - indeed, several times the width of the galaxy outside the galaxy - and regular travel back and forth is implied. You just can't do that unless you've got a REALLY good hyperspace drive. Just climbing out of the gravity well of the galaxy is an impressive feat.
Yavin is inside the prime Star Wars galaxy, so is Hoth., so is Tatooine. They're all in the amorphous thing called the Outer Rim.
It's also the only acceptable answer. We do not see hyperspace ramming at any other time, despite the clear potential advantages for winning battles with it. The obvious conclusion is that hyperspace ramming isn't a viable tactic in normal circumstances, even if we don't yet know exactly why.
The other conclusion is that The Empire, supposedly populated by ruthless people, is also populated by dumb people.
dogma wrote: Yavin is inside the prime Star Wars galaxy, so is Hoth., so is Tatooine. They're all in the amorphous thing called the Outer Rim.
And note that travel time to get to this meeting point outside the galaxy was so short that they didn't bother trying to get Luke to a local hospital to deal with a major injury, they took him straight to the rebel fleet.
On screen it's clearly a galaxy, the script says it's a galaxy, the novelization says that it's a galaxy, and the person in charge of deciding Star Wars canon explicitly said that it is the Star Wars galaxy.
On screen it's clearly a galaxy, the script says it's a galaxy, the novelization says that it's a galaxy, and the person in charge of deciding Star Wars canon explicitly said that it is the Star Wars galaxy.
No, I am citing canon sources, including a statement from the person whose job is to determine what is and isn't canon. The fact that you don't like what canon statements imply for Star Wars travel speeds does not concern me.
Not that your weird crusade here really matters, as there are plenty of other canon sources for travel speeds vastly higher than what Star Trek ships are capable of. The rebel meeting point outside the galaxy is merely the most dramatic one.
dogma wrote: You lead with "citation needed", and are following with a personal attack; why?
I led with "citation needed" because you made a claim that directly contradicts multiple canon sources, providing no higher canon sources of your own to back up the claim. According to multiple canon sources, including an explicit statement from the person whose job is to determine what is and isn't canon, the object in question is the Star Wars galaxy.
dogma wrote: Yavin is inside the prime Star Wars galaxy, so is Hoth., so is Tatooine. They're all in the amorphous thing called the Outer Rim.
And note that travel time to get to this meeting point outside the galaxy was so short that they didn't bother trying to get Luke to a local hospital to deal with a major injury, they took him straight to the rebel fleet.
Sorry Peregrine, that is not a galaxy. You can see the stars from the backdrop through the fields surrounding the central glow.
Peregrine refuses to accept that startrek ships are capable of fighting at warp speed. Citing times they aren't fighting at warp speed - ignoring all the times they are.
Orlanth wrote: It's a matt image added to green screen. But it represents a galaxy.
Star Wars lasers aren't lasers because they don't look/perform like lasers, even though they're called lasers. That Star Wars galaxy is a galaxy even though it doesn't look/perform like a galaxy, because it's called a galaxy. You can't have it both ways.
Star Wars Turbolasers, despite their monicker, are [i)not[/i] laser weapons as we understand them. It’s a misnomer, as in ‘less than 12 parsecs’ is confusing a unit of time for a unit of distance (well, until Solo arguably clears it up in a few weeks time).
Star Wars blasters and turbolasers are plasma Weapons. Not lasers. Turbolasers double charge said plasma. And Turbolasers can fire every two seconds. An ISD carries 60 batteries of Turbolasers. And they go about in capital ship squadrons of four....
So far as I can tell, those weapons are comparative to Romulan. Klingon and Ferengi Disruptors.
Seriously. How long will any Federation ship stand up to such a barrage?
I don't think federation ships would do well getting hit with 60+ plasma weapons repeatably - though startrek shields seem superior to starwars shields in that they actually seem to do something. Supposedly an Xwing has shields right? However - a twin laser cannon from a tie fighter seems to cause catatrophic damage every time with a single hit (unless it just knocks out a stabilizer). In strektrek though - small craft that have shields (runabouts/shuttles) are able to repel firepower from much larger ships - for quite a long time. I am forced to use such a weak reference but starwars warships rarely ever fight (yet they are supposed to have have 100 weapons systems in fluff - never actually mentioned in film once)
I led with "citation needed" because you made a claim that directly contradicts multiple canon sources, providing no higher canon sources of your own to back up the claim. According to multiple canon sources, including an explicit statement from the person whose job is to determine what is and isn't canon, the object in question is the Star Wars galaxy.
What is "higher cannon"? When was that statement made, and by whom?
Orlanth wrote: It's a matt image added to green screen. But it represents a galaxy.
So in otherwords, Peregrine requires photographic proof of an event while claiming that photographic evidence presented by himself doesn't actually represent what he's claiming?
And in the original series the Rebel fleet was based clear outside the galaxy - indeed, several times the width of the galaxy outside the galaxy - and regular travel back and forth is implied. You just can't do that unless you've got a REALLY good hyperspace drive. Just climbing out of the gravity well of the galaxy is an impressive feat.
Yavin is inside the prime Star Wars galaxy, so is Hoth., so is Tatooine. They're all in the amorphous thing called the Outer Rim.
Rewatch the end of The Empire Strikes Back. That's where the actual FLEET was, as opposed to a ground-base of X-Wings, or the Rebel Army.
In contrast, it takes even the Ultrawarp Enterprise-D months just to cross te Federation, which itself is only a small portion of it's galaxy...
A large portion of the Star Wars Galaxy is classified as "Unknown Regions" because hyperspace explorers don't want to go there.
Considerably less than half. In contrast the Federation is a small part of one arm of the galaxy.
And yes, it's 'unknown', but how long did it take Rey to travel deep into it to find Luke? Days, at most.
For that matter... when they get the missing piece of the map to Luke, it clearly shows a map of A GALAXY, and the route to Luke covers over a third the diameter of it, maybe even half.
For those arguing about the destructive power of ST weapons vs. SW weapons. We actually have a good benchmark of both. Both are used, in canon, to destroy an asteroid in one shot on screen. In ST it happened in the wormhole mishap during the (first) Motion Picture. During SW it happens repeatedly in the Hoth asteroid field.
We can argue all day long about relative sizes of asteroids, but it's clear that the asteroid in ST is big enough to destroy the Enterprise... which puts it in roughly the same order of magnitude as the asteroids shown being vaporized by Imperial guns. Much smaller relative to an ISD, yes, but then so is the NCC-1701(R).
Are more powerful weapons developed and used through TNG, DS9, and Voyager? Yes. But they're never THAT much more powerful that they're insta-kills against comparable starships. Barring the 'Best of Both Worlds' Enterprise Wave Motion Gun, anyway... and that existed only in an alternate timeline. So we have a definite benchmark for photon torpedoes and (at the very least) the main battery of an ISD having similar destructive power. (If the shots show in ESB are the secondary batteries, the Feds are in real trouble...)
We can also start to evaluate the effectiveness of SW shields from this, as ships on both sides stand up to that level of firepower quite well except at point-blank range.
The WEG stats of 80-odd heavy turbolaser main batteries on an ISD is an obvious error. Both technical drawings and screenshots quite clearly show 16 main guns emplaced on the ISD. This is in the form of four twin turrets on either side of the superstructure, similar to the weapon placement on the Clone-War-era Venator class. Technical drawings say the rear turret on each side is paired heavy ion cannon, and the other six turrets are paired heavy turbolasers. Then there's a heavy secondary battery (where 80-odd is a believable number) scattered around. Sadly lacking is any sort of point defense battery, which is why three Y-Wings take an ISD down in Rogue One...
So, while the Enterprise(R) is shooting at the ISD with six phasers and two photon torpedoes, the ISD is returning fire with 12 heavy turbolasers (call it the equivalent of 6 photon torpedoes) and 60ish secondary guns (let's be generous and say ten secondary lasers is the equivalent of a phaser, so 60=6 phasers)... and is inflicting more damage that it's taking.
And yes, X-wings and TIE fighters have pretty heavy firepower for their size. It's even worse for the target when you realize it's shooting from within their shield perimeter... which is a mission SW pilots train for and ST helmsmen (aside from the Defiant) do not.
Orlanth wrote: It's a matt image added to green screen. But it represents a galaxy.
So in otherwords, Peregrine requires photographic proof of an event while claiming that photographic evidence presented by himself doesn't actually represent what he's claiming?
No that isnt what happened, reread it.
Xenomancers wrote:Peregrine refuses to accept that startrek ships are capable of fighting at warp speed. Citing times they aren't fighting at warp speed - ignoring all the times they are.
What relevance does the fact that ST ships can fight each other at warp speed have? The Empire doesnt have warp technology. Are their any examples of ships at warp attacking ships at sublight speeds? I cant think of any, for example in Nemisis the Romulan ship attacks the Enterprise when they are both at warp but as soon as the Enterprise goes sublight so does the Romulan. Are there any examples to the contrary?
Which is the ultimate point. Yes, we see ST ships fighting at warp speeds. We see it a lot. What we NEVER see are ships at warp speed firing at targets that are NOT at warp speed...
Automatically Appended Next Post: How did I miss this, last time around?
Vulcan wrote: In the meantime the Feds STILL don't know which galaxy to search to find Kuat Drive Yards...
It's based on Kuat, in the core worlds. It isn't hard to find, it's shipyard forms an artificial planetary ring with enough mass for AT-ATs to walk on it, and I imagine there's a ton of communications traffic.
Sure, once they reach the SW galaxy it won't be too hard to find.
Out of the thousands of galaxies visible to the Federation, WHICH ONE HAS KUAT IN IT? And more to the point, how does the Federation get there in less than a millennia?
Out of the thousands of galaxies visible to the Federation, WHICH ONE HAS KUAT IN IT? And more to the point, how does the Federation get there in less than a millennia?
*sigh*
AGAIN, any SWvST debate assumes that something (wormhole(s), etc.) creates a viable connection between the two in their respective time periods. Otherwise, it simply doesn't work at all due to the words "A long time ago...".
Warp attacking sublight happens quite a bit more than warp attacking warp in startrek. Usually it's an installation or something.
There are also subspace weapons. If it came down to it - the federation could always summon a massive subspace wave and destroy their planets one at a time. All without ever leaving warp.
Which is to also assume that would even be necessary. Startrek ships seem to have much higher effective range and they specialize at destroying many small unshielded targets - making tie fighters worthless (because phaser banks can be splitfired against many small targets extremely accurately [pretty hard to miss with a raking laser beam using an advance targeting computer]). Plus another thing - the federations most notable talent is improvising a strategy when outmatched by an opponent. Say the empire alpha struck really hard - it wouldn't be long until the federation figured out how to counter this hyperdrive and destroy a system strategy from the empire. Literally - the only leverage they have is essentially instant teleportation of their entire fleets. A little insane they have such a powerful travel ability but still use manned fighters with hull mounted lasers. Which just goes to show you how silly this question really is. Startrek (thought still very unrealistic) at least attempts realism. Starwars is basically magic by comparison.
Out of the thousands of galaxies visible to the Federation, WHICH ONE HAS KUAT IN IT? And more to the point, how does the Federation get there in less than a millennia?
The one that The Federation is presumably going to. The point of this argument is that The Empire and The Federation can find one another and fight.
On screen it's clearly a galaxy, the script says it's a galaxy, the novelization says that it's a galaxy, and the person in charge of deciding Star Wars canon explicitly said that it is the Star Wars galaxy.
On screen it is clearly a star and solar system in formation. There is no evidence of stars within the debris rings (they would be glowing due to the light output of the stars in the bands if it were a galaxy).
For reference, this is what Andromeda looks like from a ground-based telescope here on Earth:
I hope you won't seriously try to argue that a ship sitting in intergalactic space (which is still dotted with stars for some reason), can see less detail in the galaxy it is next to than a telescope looking through the atmosphere of a planet at an object over 2.5million light years away.
Xenomancers wrote: [pretty hard to miss with a raking laser beam using an advance targeting computer]
And yet Star Trek ships often miss very easy targets. Do I need to post the video again?
Plus another thing - the federations most notable talent is improvising a strategy when outmatched by an opponent. Say the empire alpha struck really hard - it wouldn't be long until the federation figured out how to counter this hyperdrive and destroy a system strategy from the empire.
First of all, it doesn't matter how smart you are if you're outgunned by orders of magnitude. Star Trek weapons likely can't even damage a star destroyer if it just passively sits there taking damage, and even the smallest Star Wars fighter-scale weapons are a serious threat to a Star Trek capital ship. It's like playing a game of 40k with a single tactical marine against a 50,000 point army. It doesn't matter how clever you are, you're going to lose as soon as your opponent declares an attack and rolls dice.
Second, the Federation does not have time to figure out a counter. Within hours of the war beginning every single Federation planet will be a lifeless ball of ash, and every Federation citizen not on a starship in deep space will be dead. The absolute best possible response the survivors can make after the opening few hours, even granting them the ability to magically improve their firepower/defense numbers to the point that they can hurt the Imperial fleet, would be to kill some star destroyers out of petty revenge before their supplies run out and they join the rest of the Federation in the afterlife. The only way the Federation survives more than a few hours is through immediate unconditional surrender, being absorbed into the Empire as the price of avoiding a massacre.
Startrek (thought still very unrealistic) at least attempts realism.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA. JFC no. Nothing about Star Trek is at all realistic. Having technobabble instead of religious nonsense is not realism.
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dogma wrote: What is "higher cannon"? When was that statement made, and by whom?
Higher canon is the script for ESB:
Luke wriggles his fingers, makes a fist, and relaxes it.
His hand is completely functional.
He gets up and walks over to Leia. There is a new bond
between them, a new understanding. Leia is thinking about
Han; Luke is thinking about his uncertain and newly
complicated future. Together they stand at the large window
of the medical center looking out on the Rebel Star Cruiser
and a dense, luminous galaxy swirling in space. Luke puts
his arm around Leia. The droids stand next to them, and
Threepio moves closer to Artoo putting his arm on him. The
group watches as the Millennium Falcon moves into view,
makes a turn, and zooms away into space.
Higher canon is also the person in charge of determining what is and isn't canon making an explicit statement that the object in question is the Star Wars galaxy:
Q. what is the official explanation for the end of ESB when the main characters appear to be looking at the galaxy from a distance?
LC: Since that image (or one similiar from AOTC) has been used as the backdrop for published galaxy maps, I think it is pretty clear that it is the galaxy that you are seeing.
This is indisputable fact, like it or not. The rebel fleet's rendezvous point is located far outside the galaxy, and the rebel ships were able to get there in a very short time. Star Wars travel speeds are vastly faster than anything Star Trek is capable of.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: Do we ever get a description of how big the Star Wars galaxy is?
Nope - could be a dwarf galaxy for all we know but even in such a case - hyperspace is so many magnitudes faster than warp it's not even worth addressing. From the looks of the galaxy in the above image it appears to be a standard sprial galaxy (which gives us a basis for it's size) it should be similar in size to the milky way.
Xenomancers wrote: [pretty hard to miss with a raking laser beam using an advance targeting computer]
And yet Star Trek ships often miss very easy targets. Do I need to post the video again?
Plus another thing - the federations most notable talent is improvising a strategy when outmatched by an opponent. Say the empire alpha struck really hard - it wouldn't be long until the federation figured out how to counter this hyperdrive and destroy a system strategy from the empire.
First of all, it doesn't matter how smart you are if you're outgunned by orders of magnitude. Star Trek weapons likely can't even damage a star destroyer if it just passively sits there taking damage, and even the smallest Star Wars fighter-scale weapons are a serious threat to a Star Trek capital ship. It's like playing a game of 40k with a single tactical marine against a 50,000 point army. It doesn't matter how clever you are, you're going to lose as soon as your opponent declares an attack and rolls dice.
Second, the Federation does not have time to figure out a counter. Within hours of the war beginning every single Federation planet will be a lifeless ball of ash, and every Federation citizen not on a starship in deep space will be dead. The absolute best possible response the survivors can make after the opening few hours, even granting them the ability to magically improve their firepower/defense numbers to the point that they can hurt the Imperial fleet, would be to kill some star destroyers out of petty revenge before their supplies run out and they join the rest of the Federation in the afterlife. The only way the Federation survives more than a few hours is through immediate unconditional surrender, being absorbed into the Empire as the price of avoiding a massacre.
Startrek (thought still very unrealistic) at least attempts realism.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA. JFC no. Nothing about Star Trek is at all realistic. Having technobabble instead of religious nonsense is not realism.
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dogma wrote: What is "higher cannon"? When was that statement made, and by whom?
Higher canon is the script for ESB:
Luke wriggles his fingers, makes a fist, and relaxes it.
His hand is completely functional.
He gets up and walks over to Leia. There is a new bond
between them, a new understanding. Leia is thinking about
Han; Luke is thinking about his uncertain and newly
complicated future. Together they stand at the large window
of the medical center looking out on the Rebel Star Cruiser
and a dense, luminous galaxy swirling in space. Luke puts
his arm around Leia. The droids stand next to them, and
Threepio moves closer to Artoo putting his arm on him. The
group watches as the Millennium Falcon moves into view,
makes a turn, and zooms away into space.
Higher canon is also the person in charge of determining what is and isn't canon making an explicit statement that the object in question is the Star Wars galaxy:
Q. what is the official explanation for the end of ESB when the main characters appear to be looking at the galaxy from a distance?
LC: Since that image (or one similiar from AOTC) has been used as the backdrop for published galaxy maps, I think it is pretty clear that it is the galaxy that you are seeing.
This is indisputable fact, like it or not. The rebel fleet's rendezvous point is located far outside the galaxy, and the rebel ships were able to get there in a very short time. Star Wars travel speeds are vastly faster than anything Star Trek is capable of.
Wow - if the empire is that strong. Kind of interesting that they were defeated by a rag tag group of rebels with like 3 cruisers and 100 fighter craft. It's also begs the question - why even build a deathstar if they are already capable of doing a coordinated strike against 1000 heavily defended planets simultaneously - they aren't. Plus in the starwars universe they have practically 0 resistance - in startrek universe - they'd be fighting ships they can't even see or even track with their weapons.
BTW - heres some film that includes everything you are denying. The second scene shows a galaxy class destroying 6 ships (much larger than fighters + they have shields) with 2 heavy phaser banks (it's got 4 of these) in about 2 seconds. It also shows the galaxy fighting at warp speed + gives you reference to it's combat power. Notice how it actually engages enemy ships instead of standing off - out of weapons range like a carrier does (kind of like all warships in starwars do).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d734afLFPds
I think it should also be pointed out that the Federation would easily gain the aid of any anti-Imperial factions within the galactic Empire (which on their own have been shown in universe to be capable of defeating the Empire). A cloaked vessel could scout the Empire whilst contacting rebel groups for information and access to imperial technology in exchange for information, technology and a promise to allow them to set up a democratic government after the war was won. Think of how much more effective the rebel alliance could have been with transporter technology, for example.
In contrast, the Galactic Empire would have a hard time getting any support for their cause from any of the major players in the Star Trek universe. The Federation would consider them tyrants, the Klingons would view any attack on them or subjugation to a foreign emperor as a grave insult to the honour of the Klingon empire, the Romulans wouldn't ally with what they consider an inferior race, the Vulcans wouldn't agree with the Empires logic etc.
Wow - if the empire is that strong. Kind of interesting that they were defeated by a rag tag group of rebels with like 3 cruisers and 100 fighter craft. It's also begs the question - why even build a deathstar if they are already capable of doing a coordinated strike against 1000 heavily defended planets simultaneously - they aren't. Plus in the starwars universe they have practically 0 resistance - in startrek universe - they'd be fighting ships they can't even see or even track with their weapons.
Because it was a weapon that was built to destroy planets.. It wasn't meant to be practical, it wasn't meant to be used in a sensible manner as it was a weapon of terror to inspire fear against those that would rebel. If they decided to harbor Rebels.. Well, goodbye planet. Now the main thing is that a few star destroyers are able to create a rapid rate of bombardment upon a concentrated zone on a planet from full orbit with this for example. In general there are a few issues with such.. Though I really would not call many federation planets "Heavily Defended". The issue is that they could pop in, bombard cities and get out once they feel support may arrive.
Funny how the lasers are effective at that range - in TLJ their super dreadnaught destroyer thing's shots were bouncing off the Mon Cal for about 2 hours of continuous bombardment. True - not every planet in the federation is heavily defended - the important ones are. They have to be ready for surprise romulan invasion
I find things make better sense when you just ignore TLJ entirely considering how many issues it's brought up with standard canon, just like one doesn't take Abram's movies into account with Star Trek as a whole.
Luke wriggles his fingers, makes a fist, and relaxes it.
His hand is completely functional.
He gets up and walks over to Leia. There is a new bond
between them, a new understanding. Leia is thinking about
Han; Luke is thinking about his uncertain and newly
complicated future. Together they stand at the large window
of the medical center looking out on the Rebel Star Cruiser
and a dense, luminous galaxy swirling in space. Luke puts
his arm around Leia. The droids stand next to them, and
Threepio moves closer to Artoo putting his arm on him. The
group watches as the Millennium Falcon moves into view,
makes a turn, and zooms away into space.
Higher canon is also the person in charge of determining what is and isn't canon making an explicit statement that the object in question is the Star Wars galaxy:
Q. what is the official explanation for the end of ESB when the main characters appear to be looking at the galaxy from a distance?
LC: Since that image (or one similiar from AOTC) has been used as the backdrop for published galaxy maps, I think it is pretty clear that it is the galaxy that you are seeing.
This is indisputable fact, like it or not. The rebel fleet's rendezvous point is located far outside the galaxy, and the rebel ships were able to get there in a very short time. Star Wars travel speeds are vastly faster than anything Star Trek is capable of.
So now you're backtracking and saying that if it's written down then its acceptable? Please pick a line and stick to it. Either A everything put forward in evidence must be in visual format ie the movies/series or B written descriptions are acceptable as evidence despite visual evidence contradicting? You can't have it both ways.
ZebioLizard2 wrote: I find things make better sense when you just ignore TLJ entirely considering how many issues it's brought up with standard canon, just like one doesn't take Abram's movies into account with Star Trek as a whole.
I'd like to imagine it didn't happen but it did. I really don't see it being retconned. It's cannon.
Xenomancers wrote: Wow - if the empire is that strong. Kind of interesting that they were defeated by a rag tag group of rebels with like 3 cruisers and 100 fighter craft.
Those rebels were using Star Wars technology, and able to fight at a 1:1 ratio with the Empire when they picked their fights correctly, even if their total numbers were lower. Star Trek doesn't have this advantage.
It's also begs the question - why even build a deathstar if they are already capable of doing a coordinated strike against 1000 heavily defended planets simultaneously - they aren't.
Because the death star is a terror weapon. It instantly destroys a planet, no matter how well defended it is. Planetary shields can hold off a bombardment for a long time, and even when the defenses are down the orbital bombardment still leaves a ruined planet behind. The death star says "nope" to all of that and turns the planet to dust with a single shot.
And Star Trek planets are not defended by Star Wars standards. Nothing they have will even delay the deaths of their planets.
BTW - heres some film that includes everything you are denying. The second scene shows a galaxy class destroying 6 ships (much larger than fighters + they have shields) with 2 heavy phaser banks (it's got 4 of these) in about 2 seconds. It also shows the galaxy fighting at warp speed + gives you reference to it's combat power. Notice how it actually engages enemy ships instead of standing off - out of weapons range like a carrier does (kind of like all warships in starwars do).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d734afLFPds
Might want to watch at 30 seconds in your own video, where the Galaxy misses a capital ship (which is barely moving) at point blank range. Or all the times in your video where the ships appear to be a few hundred feet apart and barely moving, casting serious doubt on your claims of extreme maneuverability and FTL combat.
So, slow sublight speeds, maneuverability that is barely better than a star destroyer, and ranges on the level of "reach out the window and touch them". Why do you feel that this is impressive?
Perigune you are off your rocker man. The defiant flying through enemy formations while dodging incoming fire and doing 360s around enemy ships is not star destroyer manuverability. Star destroyers have a had time not running into each other they are so unmanuverable...They also have trouble shooting down tiny Corelian frieghters.
Like I said - not even a match for federation ships straight up. If in the event they were outmatch - they could just utilize warp hit and run attacks.
You have any video evidence of Star destroyers being manuverable? You don't have to answer - I know the the answer.
Since I'm not familiar how many different types of ship does the Federation have? I know everyone loves to just use the standard ISD 1 and 2, TIE fighters, and Bombers from the scene but general canon has far more different types of ships for the Empire. ISD's shots against smaller ships are because they are meant to be shooting other capital ships. They've got a contingent of TIE's and smaller shots for better tracking of smaller ships. Not counting the Tector class which had no hanger.
Out of the thousands of galaxies visible to the Federation, WHICH ONE HAS KUAT IN IT? And more to the point, how does the Federation get there in less than a millennia?
*sigh*
AGAIN, any SWvST debate assumes that something (wormhole(s), etc.) creates a viable connection between the two in their respective time periods. Otherwise, it simply doesn't work at all due to the words "A long time ago...".
Which, as I pointed out, makes the Imperial conquest of Federation space quite easy.
Out of the thousands of galaxies visible to the Federation, WHICH ONE HAS KUAT IN IT? And more to the point, how does the Federation get there in less than a millennia?
The one that The Federation is presumably going to. The point of this argument is that The Empire and The Federation can find one another and fight.
The problem with that is, the Empire might trip over the Federation in the course of intergalactic exploration, which they can do because their ships are that fast.
Since the Federation ships are NOT that fast, they will not be tripping over the Empire in the course of THEIR intergalactic exploration. They can't even follow the Imperial ships a fraction of the distance to their home galaxy before the Imperial ships race out of sensor range.
When your enemy can attack your home systems, and you can't attack theirs, that's a decisive advantage. That's why Japan lost WWII, they couldn't touch America's industrial capacity while America outright leveled theirs.
On screen it's clearly a galaxy, the script says it's a galaxy, the novelization says that it's a galaxy, and the person in charge of deciding Star Wars canon explicitly said that it is the Star Wars galaxy.
On screen it is clearly a star and solar system in formation. There is no evidence of stars within the debris rings (they would be glowing due to the light output of the stars in the bands if it were a galaxy).
For reference, this is what Andromeda looks like from a ground-based telescope here on Earth:
I hope you won't seriously try to argue that a ship sitting in intergalactic space (which is still dotted with stars for some reason), can see less detail in the galaxy it is next to than a telescope looking through the atmosphere of a planet at an object over 2.5million light years away.
They look similar enough to me.
Now, consider that picture again. See how there are stars in it, just like there are stars visible in the ESB footage? That tells us the viewpoint for that galaxy is within another galaxy. Therefore the Rebel fleet is hiding in a small satellite galaxy of the main SW galaxy. I imagine the view of the Milky Way would be similar if seen from the Magellenic Cloud (either of them).
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A Town Called Malus wrote: I think it should also be pointed out that the Federation would easily gain the aid of any anti-Imperial factions within the galactic Empire (which on their own have been shown in universe to be capable of defeating the Empire). A cloaked vessel could scout the Empire whilst contacting rebel groups for information and access to imperial technology in exchange for information, technology and a promise to allow them to set up a democratic government after the war was won. Think of how much more effective the rebel alliance could have been with transporter technology, for example.
When the cloaked ship finally reaches the Imperial galaxy some thousands of years later, sure.
In contrast, the Galactic Empire would have a hard time getting any support for their cause from any of the major players in the Star Trek universe. The Federation would consider them tyrants, the Klingons would view any attack on them or subjugation to a foreign emperor as a grave insult to the honour of the Klingon empire, the Romulans wouldn't ally with what they consider an inferior race, the Vulcans wouldn't agree with the Empires logic etc.
Hearts and minds, folks, hearts and minds.
You don't suppose Palpatine might have had to deal with similar cultures in the SW galaxy during his tenure as Chanccellor, do you? You don't suppose he managed to bring the vast majority of them around to his viewpoint and get them to democratically vote him in as Emperor by a landslide, do you?
ZebioLizard2 wrote: Since I'm not familiar how many different types of ship does the Federation have? I know everyone loves to just use the standard ISD 1 and 2, TIE fighters, and Bombers from the scene but general canon has far more different types of ships for the Empire. ISD's shots against smaller ships are because they are meant to be shooting other capital ships. They've got a contingent of TIE's and smaller shots for better tracking of smaller ships. Not counting the Tector class which had no hanger.
Why do none of these ships show up in any of the 9 starwars films? They could have been very useful considering the primary mode of attack for all rebels is with fighters. Is the empire so stupid as to not place these ships in a place they know they are going to be attacked by a large contengent of fighters to defend their most important asset? These are the people that are supposed to defeat the federation which has defeated - the Borg, the Dominion, the Cardiasians, and the Klingons?
If we really want to go to these levels of insanity.
How bout this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFzufch254k I mean I really didn't want to pull out this voyager shenanigans (because I thought the last few season of voyager were total crap) but it really settels the debate.
Voyager brought so much technology back with it. Transphasic torpedos (they 1 shot borg cubes). Transwarp coils (essnetially hyperspace tech). Along with some insane combat armor. This means the empire has literally nothing on the federation.
I'm just going to use one comment from that video given how things tend to work in Star Trek
And here we have yet another awesome, game changing defensive technology that is just so cool, Starfleet immediately ignores it and decides to never use it on their ships again.
Why do none of these ships show up in any of the 9 starwars films?
Well lets see.. The first three concern the Republic, which used entirely different ships while being a mostly peacetime civilization as a result many things had to be quickly brought to bear and used by the clone armies.. With some of the better tech going into the Empire's stuff... And as for the new trilogy you have advanced versions (Chromatically superior coloring as well. ) with the First Order's TIE fighters being innately superior with shielding and overall higher training, and the TIE Special Forces being TIE fighter with additional gunner and missile/torpedo (It's the ship Finn and Poe steal to escape) though in general it seems like the First Order just took the basics of the Empire and kitted them better.
In general though you have such a minor timeframe because it's a movie with the OT coming first.. It's kind of like basing everything the Federation has upon the first Gene Roddenberry series rather then what comes after. Many new tech shows up in the supplemental series being used by Inquisitors, with TIE Defenders showing up in Rebels being so innately superior in all things that they had to cripple them before the end of the series to explain why the Empire didn't just use them to completely screw over the Rebellion given how superior they were to every single other ship shown.
The Empire lost against itself. It is one big house of cards that is one push from collapsing on itself. It is pretty much the definition of a paper tiger, as all its military power is undermined by their politics, demographics, incompetence, etc.
This is indisputable fact, like it or not. The rebel fleet's rendezvous point is located far outside the galaxy, and the rebel ships were able to get there in a very short time. Star Wars travel speeds are vastly faster than anything Star Trek is capable of.
Star Wars cannon states that the rendezvous was by a protostar orbiting the Star Wars Galaxy, not exactly extra galactic travel in the sense you mean. And how long did the Yuuzhan Vong take to get to The Star Wars Galaxy?
ZebioLizard2 wrote: Since I'm not familiar how many different types of ship does the Federation have? I know everyone loves to just use the standard ISD 1 and 2, TIE fighters, and Bombers from the scene but general canon has far more different types of ships for the Empire. ISD's shots against smaller ships are because they are meant to be shooting other capital ships. They've got a contingent of TIE's and smaller shots for better tracking of smaller ships. Not counting the Tector class which had no hanger.
Why do none of these ships show up in any of the 9 starwars films? They could have been very useful considering the primary mode of attack for all rebels is with fighters. Is the empire so stupid as to not place these ships in a place they know they are going to be attacked by a large contengent of fighters to defend their most important asset? These are the people that are supposed to defeat the federation which has defeated - the Borg, the Dominion, the Cardiasians, and the Klingons?
If we really want to go to these levels of insanity.
How bout this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFzufch254k I mean I really didn't want to pull out this voyager shenanigans (because I thought the last few season of voyager were total crap) but it really settels the debate.
Voyager brought so much technology back with it. Transphasic torpedos (they 1 shot borg cubes). Transwarp coils (essnetially hyperspace tech). Along with some insane combat armor. This means the empire has literally nothing on the federation.
Except their inherently pacifist nature. They do not strike the first blow. Ever.
So you can rock on up, show off your muscle - and just bide your time.
Or do a proper Palpatine, and arrange a few wars in the Alpha Quadrant first. Let them beat themselves bloody, sweep in and take over power. Remember, the Federation may have high ideals - shame about the general human populace on frontier worlds. So you let High Command get sick of war. Let them start to make overtures of peace to their aggressors (also Alpha Quadrant natives, because you're manipulating events), whilst ensuring the general populace is so brutalised and angry, that your sudden arrival to take on 'The Bad Guys' has you seen as a saviour. Popular opinion on your behalf, take over the Federation.
Might want to watch at 30 seconds in your own video, where the Galaxy misses a capital ship (which is barely moving) at point blank range. Or all the times in your video where the ships appear to be a few hundred feet apart and barely moving, casting serious doubt on your claims of extreme maneuverability and FTL combat.
That ship was not an actual ship but a psychic projection from the planet created by an incredibly powerful psychic lifeform, akin to the Q.
It was merely trying to scare the Enterprise away.
dogma wrote: But not the scripts for any of the other cannon movies? That's pretty selective.
If you can provide a contradictory script element from one of the other movies that addresses a specific scene from ESB then yes, you'd have a canon conflict. But AFAIK none of the other movies have the same location in them, and they could not contradict anything from the ESB scene.
Star Wars cannon states that the rendezvous was by a protostar orbiting the Star Wars Galaxy, not exactly extra galactic travel in the sense you mean.
And higher canon, the actual movie, disagrees with whatever EU licensed product had the protostar claim. In a conflict between the movie and a third-party tie-in book the movie wins, especially when the person whose job is to make decisions on what is and isn't canon has stated that the object in question is the Star Wars galaxy.
And how long did the Yuuzhan Vong take to get to The Star Wars Galaxy?
Don't know, don't care. That dumpster fire is not canon anymore, thank god.
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Xenomancers wrote: Perigune you are off your rocker man. The defiant flying through enemy formations while dodging incoming fire and doing 360s around enemy ships is not star destroyer manuverability.
The Defiant is the rare exception to the rule, and even the Defiant is pretty slow. It may be a bit more maneuverable than a star destroyer, but it's hardly an impossible target like you want to present it.
Like I said - not even a match for federation ships straight up.
Except in firepower and defense, where the Star Wars ships have orders of magnitude better numbers. The star destroyer can ignore any Federation attacks while it exterminates everything on the planet it is orbiting, while even a single hit from its guns will likely annihilate a Federation warship.
Remember, in the old Star Wars canon we got actual firepower numbers: ~200 gigatons per shot from a Clone Wars era troop transport's main guns. That's ~30 times the entire world's nuclear arsenal, per shot. And before you protest that the old EU is no longer canon, those numbers were based on scaling from on-screen evidence. The current canon number may be somewhat different, but it is not going to be sufficiently off to matter when compared to the high-end official (though not canon) firepower numbers for photon torpedoes at ~64 megatons per shot.
If in the event they were outmatch - they could just utilize warp hit and run attacks.
And do zero damage. Hit and run attacks don't help when the enemy is busy exterminating your entire civilian population. You either stand and fight to the death to stop them (which the Federation can not do, because its weapons and defenses are orders of magnitude weaker than the star destroyers), or you concede total defeat and run away to save your own lives at the cost of the (incredibly tiny) chance of miraculously saving your civilization.
ZebioLizard2 wrote: Since I'm not familiar how many different types of ship does the Federation have? I know everyone loves to just use the standard ISD 1 and 2, TIE fighters, and Bombers from the scene but general canon has far more different types of ships for the Empire. ISD's shots against smaller ships are because they are meant to be shooting other capital ships. They've got a contingent of TIE's and smaller shots for better tracking of smaller ships. Not counting the Tector class which had no hanger.
Why do none of these ships show up in any of the 9 starwars films? They could have been very useful considering the primary mode of attack for all rebels is with fighters. Is the empire so stupid as to not place these ships in a place they know they are going to be attacked by a large contengent of fighters to defend their most important asset? These are the people that are supposed to defeat the federation which has defeated - the Borg, the Dominion, the Cardiasians, and the Klingons?
If we really want to go to these levels of insanity.
How bout this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFzufch254k I mean I really didn't want to pull out this voyager shenanigans (because I thought the last few season of voyager were total crap) but it really settels the debate.
Voyager brought so much technology back with it. Transphasic torpedos (they 1 shot borg cubes). Transwarp coils (essnetially hyperspace tech). Along with some insane combat armor. This means the empire has literally nothing on the federation.
Except their inherently pacifist nature. They do not strike the first blow. Ever.
So you can rock on up, show off your muscle - and just bide your time.
Or do a proper Palpatine, and arrange a few wars in the Alpha Quadrant first. Let them beat themselves bloody, sweep in and take over power. Remember, the Federation may have high ideals - shame about the general human populace on frontier worlds. So you let High Command get sick of war. Let them start to make overtures of peace to their aggressors (also Alpha Quadrant natives, because you're manipulating events), whilst ensuring the general populace is so brutalised and angry, that your sudden arrival to take on 'The Bad Guys' has you seen as a saviour. Popular opinion on your behalf, take over the Federation.
Depending on interpretation Photon Torpedoes are either orders of magnitude weaker than the 200 gigaton figure given by Peregrine above, at a mere 64 megatons each, or three times more powerful, at 690 gigatons. That's one Photon Torpedo for every 3 turbolaser hits, and then some. This isn't taking into account Quantum Torpedoes, Transphasic Torpedoes, tricobalt devices or any other non-Photon Torpedo weapon.
Peregrine went with the lower estimate, which would indeed make the Federation unable to fight back. That figure, however, is based on present-day understanding of physics (the output of a 3kg matter-antimatter annihilation is around 64.4 megatons) and contradicts other information from the same source, which states that Photon Torpedoes release energy roughly equivalent to a 100 cubic meter tank of antideuterium, which gives us the 690 gigaton figure.
The numbers are obviously BS. The millennium falcon gets hit unsheilded by turbo-lasers at least a few times. It did not receive 30 times the impact force of the entire worlds nuclear arsenal. Plus are you seriously trying to tell me the melenium falcons sheilds can repel 30 times earth arsenal of nuclear weapons?
Remember, in the old Star Wars canon we got actual firepower numbers: ~200 gigatons per shot from a Clone Wars era troop transport's main guns. That's ~30 times the entire world's nuclear arsenal, per shot. And before you protest that the old EU is no longer canon, those numbers were based on scaling from on-screen evidence. The current canon number may be somewhat different, but it is not going to be sufficiently off to matter when compared to the high-end official (though not canon) firepower numbers for photon torpedoes at ~64 megatons per shot.
Those numbers are based on BS. Either you never saw the movies, or you never saw a nuclear detonation. But given that multi-kilometer long fireballs that reshape the landscape do not happen every time a turbolaser fires, we can dismiss any claim of gigatons. In fact, because of the Rebels tv series, we can dismiss any claim of notable firepower for Star Wars.
In my experience with starwars fans (I don't mean this in a bad way) they care a lot more about the printed literature than what is actually in film. It is the opposite with star-trek fans. They seem to care more about what happens in the episodes. I guess it probably has a lot to do with the fact there is about 1000 time more startrek film compared to starwars.
The part that bothers me the most is when the text tries to override the film or make sense of the film is a really stupid way. Like this nuclear weapon powered turbo laser...When in fact turbo lasers in the film are portrayed as working like a 5" gun on a WW2 battleship - firing lots of shots and not doing a lot of damage. They make up ion-cannons and missle launchers on ISD when there were never used in a film once from an ISD.
Also because how popular the films are. Everyone watched the films, regardless if they were fans or not. So a true SW fan needs to go beyond the films.
Of course, sometimes they forget that Star Wars is about the films, and everything else expands on that.
Xenomancers wrote: They make up ion-cannons and missle launchers on ISD when there were never used in a film once from an ISD.
Have missile launchers ever been shown on screen as a major part of a ships armament?
I suppose proton torpedos might count as a missile, but what else?
To my knowledge I've never seen an ISD fire a missle - or anything but a green turbo laser (I think ion cannons are supposed to be blue) They also disable ships functions...why didn't they shoot the MF with it? It would have been immobilized? It's supposed to have 60 of them! I've never seen a missile mounted on the ship ether.
Federation ships are commonly seen firing phasers/ photon torpedos/ quantum torpedos/ using their defelctor dish to do some weird science crap/ launching tachian burst/ and a whole host of other stuff. They don't need to make up content because it is in the film.
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Tyran wrote: Also because how popular the films are. Everyone watched the films, regardless if they were fans or not. So a true SW fan needs to go beyond the films.
Of course, sometimes they forget that Star Wars is about the films, and everything else expands on that.
True - to be a true startrek fan all you need to do to prove your worth is watch all seasons of voyager but refuse to watch startrek enterprise. Then you are in the club.
If you can provide a contradictory script element from one of the other movies that addresses a specific scene from ESB then yes, you'd have a canon conflict. But AFAIK none of the other movies have the same location in them, and they could not contradict anything from the ESB scene.
So "higher cannon" is what George Lucas envisioned, and Leigh Bracket/Lawrence Kasdan wrote? Again, that is a really restrictive standard; one which completely eliminates the new trilogy from cannon.
And higher canon, the actual movie, disagrees with whatever EU licensed product had the protostar claim.
You're talking about the script of the actual movie, not the movie itself. And the protostar "claim" is in cannon sources, the fact that you consider it EU does not change that.
Frazzled wrote: Imagines the feds using transphasic and Genesis torpedoes, and theleron wave emitters from a cloaked ship...oh my.
The Defiant is the rare exception to the rule, and even the Defiant is pretty slow. It may be a bit more maneuverable than a star destroyer, but it's hardly an impossible target like you want to present it.
There are multiple Defiant-class ships, it's not an exception. Then there are all the other Federation ships designed to fight the Borg.
This is indisputable fact, like it or not. The rebel fleet's rendezvous point is located far outside the galaxy, and the rebel ships were able to get there in a very short time. Star Wars travel speeds are vastly faster than anything Star Trek is capable of.
Star Wars cannon states that the rendezvous was by a protostar orbiting the Star Wars Galaxy, not exactly extra galactic travel in the sense you mean. And how long did the Yuuzhan Vong take to get to The Star Wars Galaxy?
Yuuzhan Vong is not canon any longer.
But sure, let's discard the extra-galactic hideyhole.
We still have the Millenium Falcon crossing half a galaxy to find Luke. And then coming BACK in less than the 18 hours it takes the Resistance fleet to run out of fuel. While crossing the same distance in Star Trek takes decades, if not centuries.
Game, set, and match. Hyperspace is MUCH faster than Warp Drive.
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Xenomancers wrote: In my experience with starwars fans (I don't mean this in a bad way) they care a lot more about the printed literature than what is actually in film. It is the opposite with star-trek fans. They seem to care more about what happens in the episodes. I guess it probably has a lot to do with the fact there is about 1000 time more startrek film compared to starwars.
The part that bothers me the most is when the text tries to override the film or make sense of the film is a really stupid way. Like this nuclear weapon powered turbo laser...When in fact turbo lasers in the film are portrayed as working like a 5" gun on a WW2 battleship - firing lots of shots and not doing a lot of damage. They make up ion-cannons and missle launchers on ISD when there were never used in a film once from an ISD.
Which is why I never mentioned them, and went strictly from the film. One turbolaser blast destroys one asteroid ON FILM. Two photon torpeodoes destroy one asteroid ON FILM.
Thus do I determine the two are of roughly equivalent firepower.
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Frazzled wrote: Imagines the feds using transphasic and Genesis torpedoes, and theleron wave emitters from a cloaked ship...oh my.
Which is why it is rather hard to have a consistent conversation about Star Trek in any capacity. Star Trek is all about 'just making some s...tuff up' when they're in a bind.
dogma wrote: But not the scripts for any of the other cannon movies? That's pretty selective.
If you can provide a contradictory script element from one of the other movies that addresses a specific scene from ESB then yes, you'd have a canon conflict. But AFAIK none of the other movies have the same location in them, and they could not contradict anything from the ESB scene.
Star Wars cannon states that the rendezvous was by a protostar orbiting the Star Wars Galaxy, not exactly extra galactic travel in the sense you mean.
And higher canon, the actual movie, disagrees with whatever EU licensed product had the protostar claim. In a conflict between the movie and a third-party tie-in book the movie wins, especially when the person whose job is to make decisions on what is and isn't canon has stated that the object in question is the Star Wars galaxy.
And how long did the Yuuzhan Vong take to get to The Star Wars Galaxy?
Don't know, don't care. That dumpster fire is not canon anymore, thank god.
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Xenomancers wrote: Perigune you are off your rocker man. The defiant flying through enemy formations while dodging incoming fire and doing 360s around enemy ships is not star destroyer manuverability.
The Defiant is the rare exception to the rule, and even the Defiant is pretty slow. It may be a bit more maneuverable than a star destroyer, but it's hardly an impossible target like you want to present it.
Like I said - not even a match for federation ships straight up.
Except in firepower and defense, where the Star Wars ships have orders of magnitude better numbers. The star destroyer can ignore any Federation attacks while it exterminates everything on the planet it is orbiting, while even a single hit from its guns will likely annihilate a Federation warship.
Remember, in the old Star Wars canon we got actual firepower numbers: ~200 gigatons per shot from a Clone Wars era troop transport's main guns. That's ~30 times the entire world's nuclear arsenal, per shot. And before you protest that the old EU is no longer canon, those numbers were based on scaling from on-screen evidence. The current canon number may be somewhat different, but it is not going to be sufficiently off to matter when compared to the high-end official (though not canon) firepower numbers for photon torpedoes at ~64 megatons per shot.
If in the event they were outmatch - they could just utilize warp hit and run attacks.
And do zero damage. Hit and run attacks don't help when the enemy is busy exterminating your entire civilian population. You either stand and fight to the death to stop them (which the Federation can not do, because its weapons and defenses are orders of magnitude weaker than the star destroyers), or you concede total defeat and run away to save your own lives at the cost of the (incredibly tiny) chance of miraculously saving your civilization.
After reading some of your arguments, like how it is a new Galaxy and not a Protostar, I have come to the conclusion that Leeland Chee is probably the worst thing to happen to Star Wars. That is a pretty big achievement, since he is taking the belt from George himself on this. If it is a new Galaxy, why are they not colonising it? Further, if it is a new Galaxy, why are they there when they haven't even explored 90% of the Galaxy they are currently in? They don't need to go to a new Galaxy to hide, most of the one they are in hasn't even been explored yet. It makes no sense and it is an incredible waste of resources for such little gain.
It makes absolutely no sense for it to be a new galaxy and if Leeland Chee is the one who said it was, Leeland Chee is a moron.
Xenomancers wrote: They make up ion-cannons and missle launchers on ISD when there were never used in a film once from an ISD.
Have missile launchers ever been shown on screen as a major part of a ships armament?
I suppose proton torpedos might count as a missile, but what else?
In Return of the Jedi, the Millennium Falcon is seen firing concussion missiles at the second Death Star's main reactor. Also, in the prequels, Jango Fett's Slave I fires a missile at Obi-wan Kenobi's Jedi Starfighter, and the Vulture Droid starfighters shoot missiles at Anakin and Obi-wan in the space battle in ROTS.
dogma wrote: But not the scripts for any of the other cannon movies? That's pretty selective.
If you can provide a contradictory script element from one of the other movies that addresses a specific scene from ESB then yes, you'd have a canon conflict. But AFAIK none of the other movies have the same location in them, and they could not contradict anything from the ESB scene.
Star Wars cannon states that the rendezvous was by a protostar orbiting the Star Wars Galaxy, not exactly extra galactic travel in the sense you mean.
And higher canon, the actual movie, disagrees with whatever EU licensed product had the protostar claim. In a conflict between the movie and a third-party tie-in book the movie wins, especially when the person whose job is to make decisions on what is and isn't canon has stated that the object in question is the Star Wars galaxy.
And how long did the Yuuzhan Vong take to get to The Star Wars Galaxy?
Don't know, don't care. That dumpster fire is not canon anymore, thank god.
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Xenomancers wrote: Perigune you are off your rocker man. The defiant flying through enemy formations while dodging incoming fire and doing 360s around enemy ships is not star destroyer manuverability.
The Defiant is the rare exception to the rule, and even the Defiant is pretty slow. It may be a bit more maneuverable than a star destroyer, but it's hardly an impossible target like you want to present it.
Like I said - not even a match for federation ships straight up.
Except in firepower and defense, where the Star Wars ships have orders of magnitude better numbers. The star destroyer can ignore any Federation attacks while it exterminates everything on the planet it is orbiting, while even a single hit from its guns will likely annihilate a Federation warship.
Remember, in the old Star Wars canon we got actual firepower numbers: ~200 gigatons per shot from a Clone Wars era troop transport's main guns. That's ~30 times the entire world's nuclear arsenal, per shot. And before you protest that the old EU is no longer canon, those numbers were based on scaling from on-screen evidence. The current canon number may be somewhat different, but it is not going to be sufficiently off to matter when compared to the high-end official (though not canon) firepower numbers for photon torpedoes at ~64 megatons per shot.
If in the event they were outmatch - they could just utilize warp hit and run attacks.
And do zero damage. Hit and run attacks don't help when the enemy is busy exterminating your entire civilian population. You either stand and fight to the death to stop them (which the Federation can not do, because its weapons and defenses are orders of magnitude weaker than the star destroyers), or you concede total defeat and run away to save your own lives at the cost of the (incredibly tiny) chance of miraculously saving your civilization.
After reading some of your arguments, like how it is a new Galaxy and not a Protostar, I have come to the conclusion that Leeland Chee is probably the worst thing to happen to Star Wars. That is a pretty big achievement, since he is taking the belt from George himself on this. If it is a new Galaxy, why are they not colonising it? Further, if it is a new Galaxy, why are they there when they haven't even explored 90% of the Galaxy they are currently in? They don't need to go to a new Galaxy to hide, most of the one they are in hasn't even been explored yet. It makes no sense and it is an incredible waste of resources for such little gain.
It makes absolutely no sense for it to be a new galaxy and if Leeland Chee is the one who said it was, Leeland Chee is a moron.
Well there are many reasons. First off, hyperspace needs to be mapped to make it "safe" to travel because you might hit something if you make a long range jump into the middle of nowhere(see Han talking to Luke when they are calculating the jump in ANH).
Its entirely likely that the small satellite galaxy the Rebels went to at the end of ESB is mapped out while chunks of the main galaxy are not. The galaxy is big, and while their hyperdrives are capable of traveling from one end to the other quickly, its only if you have charted all the physical space in between for hazards.
Its sort of like a dark room with a bunch of legos strewn about. You could get to the other end of the room in 2 seconds, but you'd end up hurting yourself if you just blindly walked across without using a light of some kind to look for all the lego pieces. In this case, the satellite galaxy was already mapped somewhat, maybe because it was relatively easy. Perhaps the Rebels mapped it with their own hyperspace mappers to provide them some hiding places that aren't on conventional star charts.
And who is to say it isn't being colonized/has been colonized? The Star Wars universe isn't just a single civilization. Its made up of thousands upon thousands of space faring civilizations, both extant and extinct.
We still have the Millenium Falcon crossing half a galaxy to find Luke.
It goes from the Unknown Regions to the Outer Rim, both largely undefined areas of the Star Wars Galaxy; specifically so. Also, it's the Falcon, it is a special case.
And then coming BACK in less than the 18 hours it takes the Resistance fleet to run out of fuel. While crossing the same distance in Star Trek takes decades, if not centuries.
But the ships in Star Wars can run out of fuel. I'm fairly certain that a Federation ship has never run out of fuel.
Well there are many reasons. First off, hyperspace needs to be mapped to make it "safe" to travel because you might hit something if you make a long range jump into the middle of nowhere(see Han talking to Luke when they are calculating the jump in ANH).
But that isn't "higher cannon" as it isn't in the script from ESB.
Its entirely likely that the small satellite galaxy the Rebels went to at the end of ESB is mapped out while chunks of the main galaxy are not.
The Rishi Maze wasn't mapped out, Obi-Wan couldn't even find it in the Jedi archives, and that actually is a galaxy according to cannon. But a satellite galaxy, which did not canonically host the rebels.
Xenomancers wrote: They make up ion-cannons and missle launchers on ISD when there were never used in a film once from an ISD.
Have missile launchers ever been shown on screen as a major part of a ships armament?
I suppose proton torpedos might count as a missile, but what else?
In Return of the Jedi, the Millennium Falcon is seen firing concussion missiles at the second Death Star's main reactor. Also, in the prequels, Jango Fett's Slave I fires a missile at Obi-wan Kenobi's Jedi Starfighter, and the Vulture Droid starfighters shoot missiles at Anakin and Obi-wan in the space battle in ROTS.
No the Millenium Falcon uses blaster fire to blow up the Death Star.
Slave 1 does fire a missile and so do the vulture droids.
So missiles are seen in the prequels but not in any of the original trilogy.
dogma wrote: But that isn't "higher cannon" as it isn't in the script from ESB.
Sigh. I don't know why you keep posting sarcastic comments like this as if they're actually funny. The script for ESB is higher canon when discussing a scene from ESB. It isn't some magic highest canon to the exclusion of all else, or the final source on events in other movies. If something in a different movie contradicted the ESB scene then you'd have a canon conflict and it couldn't be resolved simply by citing the ESB script like when an EU product tries to disagree with ESB. But that canon conflict does not exist. Across all of the Star Wars movies hyperdrive is consistently portrayed as extremely fast, crossing the galaxy in a matter of minutes to hours, days at most. The ESB scene is entirely consistent with this portrayal, and you have no justification for denying it.
No, they are clearly missiles as consistently described in multiple sources and shown on-screen. Notice how they look nothing like blaster shots:
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Dreadwinter wrote: After reading some of your arguments, like how it is a new Galaxy and not a Protostar, I have come to the conclusion that Leeland Chee is probably the worst thing to happen to Star Wars.
Why? Because he cited the original creators of ESB instead of a random EU source that you like?
If it is a new Galaxy, why are they not colonising it?
It isn't a new galaxy, it's the Star Wars galaxy seen from a distant perspective. The fleet simply pointed itself out into deep space and ran away, Luke is looking back on where they started.
Falcon is definitely tiring concussion missiles there. As do the A-Wings when knackering the Executor’s Shield generators.
One other thought....the Federation, not using snub fighters, would struggle to take out a Deathstar. Sure, a Runabout could go where the Falcon goes, but wouldn’t handle the trench run at all.
Oh, and we also see the use of Proton Torpedoes to wreck the Deathstar.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Falcon is definitely tiring concussion missiles there. As do the A-Wings when knackering the Executor’s Shield generators.
One other thought....the Federation, not using snub fighters, would struggle to take out a Deathstar. Sure, a Runabout could go where the Falcon goes, but wouldn’t handle the trench run at all.
Oh, and we also see the use of Proton Torpedoes to wreck the Deathstar.
Federation has fighters - they use them in DS9
For more fun lets match the Terran Empire against the Galactic Empire
The script for ESB is higher canon when discussing a scene from ESB. It isn't some magic highest canon to the exclusion of all else, or the final source on events in other movies.
You're treating it as though it is "highest cannon", excluding the movie itself and all other cannon sources.
Peregrine wrote: Across all of the Star Wars movies hyperdrive is consistently portrayed as extremely fast, crossing the galaxy in a matter of minutes to hours, days at most. The ESB scene is entirely consistent with this portrayal, and you have no justification for denying it.
I don't think anyone is denying that hyperdrive is fast, the question is "How fast?"
It is the highest canon, other than ESB itself, for that particular scene. Why is this so hard?
You just said that there is no such thing as a "magic highest cannon" and that movies matter more than script; which is confusing the argument you led with.
dogma wrote: You just said that there is no such thing as a "magical highest cannon".
Not for every possible event or object in Star Wars. There is, however, a different highest canon for each question related to Star Wars. The script for ESB is not a magical highest canon in the sense that it can tell you how much firepower the death star in ANH had, because it is not a relevant source for that part of Star Wars. But it is the second-highest canon (after ESB itself) when trying to answer a question about a scene in ESB.
Not for every possible event or object in Star Wars. There is, however, a different highest canon for each question related to Star Wars. The script for ESB is not a magical highest canon in the sense that it can tell you how much firepower the death star in ANH had, because it is not a relevant source for that part of Star Wars. But it is the second-highest canon (after ESB itself) when trying to answer a question about a scene in ESB.
"Second-highest cannon (after ESB itself)." Not the script of ESB, but the movie? I thought the script was the most important.
dogma wrote: "Second-highest cannon (after ESB itself)." Not the the script of ESB, but the movie? I though the script was the most important.
You're still mixing arguments.
JFC this is getting absurd. ESB is the highest possible canon for things occurring in ESB. The script (along with the novelization and any other explicit explanations from the people who made the movie) is the second tier of canon, and provides explicit written explanations of things that may be ambiguous in visual form. It is canon unless it directly contradicts the on-screen evidence. For example, if the script had the window scene happening aboard one of the Hoth transport ships instead of the medical frigate then the on-screen version would be the canon one. But in this case there is no contradiction. The script says "it is a galaxy" and the on-screen scene shows an object that looks like a galaxy. And no other movie-level source contradicts the scene either. Conclusion: it is a galaxy, no matter how inconvenient the resulting conclusions about hyperspace speeds are for Star Trek fans.
You don't get a contradiction until you get to the lower tiers of canon, EU tie-in products. That material is canon, but only so long as it doesn't contradict the higher levels of canon material. If a kids book version of ANH says that Luke flew a y-wing at Yavin then the EU source is wrong. If a random EU source says that the galaxy in ESB is a "protostar" then the EU source is wrong.
Interesting stuff, but for me the easy answer to weapons power is the ships' capability.
The Federation turns matter into energy and vice versa so they can make tea, so they can avoid the monotony of a long shuttle flight. They've got nuclear submarines while the Empire has coal fired dreadnoughts.
Weapons power is obviously driven by the plot, weapons are as effective as the plot requires no more, no less.
But those plots routinely have the Federation tearing apart space and time and matter and energy while the Empire has never shown that ability. The Federation routinely improvises solutions and adapts new technologies on the fly, an ability, again, the Empire was never shown to have.
The point about hyperspace is interesting but, not surprisingly, ST has had its own subspace conduits and other counterparts.
Finally, the Empire never conquered anywhere, it came to power via a coup and lasted ~20 years. This does not imply a particularly stable or competent administration.
Yeah it looked cool and talked a good game, but the results are there.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: The Federation turns matter into energy and vice versa so they can make tea, so they can avoid the monotony of a long shuttle flight.
And? Raw numbers are what matter, not the source of the power. Making tea requires negligible power, so it is irrelevant to combat. And when you look at feats demonstrating raw firepower numbers the Star Wars ships win by orders of magnitude. It doesn't matter if the energy comes from antimatter or fusion or whatever, X megatons of firepower is still X megatons.
Weapons power is obviously driven by the plot, weapons are as effective as the plot requires no more, no less.
Then how can you conclude that Star Trek wins? If power is driven by the plot then a plot where the Empire wins would have Star Trek ships with pathetic weapons so they can fill their plot role of the designated loser. Your argument here is essentially "my plot is that the Federation wins, therefore they must have the best weapons".
The Federation routinely improvises solutions and adapts new technologies on the fly, an ability, again, the Empire was never shown to have.
Again, because the Empire doesn't need one-time technobabble inventions. Like real-world scientists and engineers the Empire develops standardized products and makes them work. They don't have to technobabble up a new solution every episode because the stuff they already have gets the job done.
Also, there is no time for improvisation because the Federation's entire population will be dead within hours of the war beginning.
The point about hyperspace is interesting but, not surprisingly, ST has had its own subspace conduits and other counterparts.
None of which work on the level of hyperspace. Remember, it is a plot point of an entire series that Star Trek ships can not cross galactic-scale distances within a human lifetime.
Finally, the Empire never conquered anywhere, it came to power via a coup and lasted ~20 years. This does not imply a particularly stable or competent administration.
You don't need stability to win a single battle. The Federation is still dead even if the Empire self destructs the next week.
It seems to me that Star Trek's advantage of moving and fighting from FTL speeds is tactically incomparable. The Imperial ships would be rapidly destroyed by weapons arriving from the future, which they simply could not see or defend against.
The strategic side is completely different, though. Clearly the Star Wars ships have much better FLT speed between systems. If they can find out the Federation stars and planets, they can jump round and as long as there are no defending ships, they will win all those sieges by weight of numbers.
It seems to me that Star Trek's advantage of moving and fighting from FTL speeds is tactically incomparable. The Imperial ships would be rapidly destroyed by weapons arriving from the future, which they simply could not see or defend against.
The strategic side is completely different, though. Clearly the Star Wars ships have much better FLT speed between systems. If they can find out the Federation stars and planets, they can jump round and as long as there are no defending ships, they will win all those sieges by weight of numbers.
Could someone clarify how the FTL fights would work? Do the ST ships fly around in circles round the SW ships at FTL speed or do they nip in, get a few shots off then zoom away again?
Also why can't transporters convert the energy of a shield into matter (like butter or oxygen or something) then just blaze away at the ship now it has no shields?
Since ST ships can make stuff out of nothing with their replicators why don't they all have mass drivers and make huge blocks of matter out of nothing (maybe lead or uranium or something) to fling at other ships or planets or whatever. Do they already do this?
I imagine an FTL versus non FTL fight would work like this.
The FTL ship strafes in, firing weapons.
Its target can't see the attacker or incoming fire, because they are moving faster than light, and the target's sensors can't detect them. (Star Trek ships do have sensors that work to detect things at FTL speeds, but SW ships don't.) All the target knows is that it suddenly gets hit by loads of enemy fire out of nowhere from a ship it can't detect.
The FTL ship makes invulnerable firing passes until the target is destroyed or retreats by jumping to light speed.
The target ship will simply experience hits, because the incoming fire is moving faster than the light signals (visual, radar, etc) which it gives off.
It would be like being blind and listening for supsersonic missiles coming at you. You would only hear them when they had gone past or if they hit you.
So what I imagine is that the overall attack/defence levels of SW and ST ships are roughly comparable in terms of hitting power and armour/shields, so the ST ships are as capable of destroying the SW ships as SW ships are, in terms of the number of shots needed.
But the SW ships are never able to shoot at the ST ships because they can't see them until they aren't there any more.
Therefore every tactical battle would be a walkover for ST. The only survivors from the SW fleet would be the ones that managed to get into hyperspace quickly enough to avoid being hit.
This is where the weight of numbers comes in. Suppose the SW fleet has 20 star destroyers, and the ST fleet has 1 cruiser. Suppose the ST cruiser is capable of destroying a star destroyer in 60 seconds. Suppose it takes the star destroyers five minutes to understand what is happening, decide to retreat, and get up to speed for transition to hyperspace. Clearly the SW fleet will lose 5 ships, the rest will escape and the ST ship will not be able to catch up with them.
Xenomancers wrote: They make up ion-cannons and missle launchers on ISD when there were never used in a film once from an ISD.
Have missile launchers ever been shown on screen as a major part of a ships armament?
I suppose proton torpedos might count as a missile, but what else?
In Return of the Jedi, the Millennium Falcon is seen firing concussion missiles at the second Death Star's main reactor. Also, in the prequels, Jango Fett's Slave I fires a missile at Obi-wan Kenobi's Jedi Starfighter, and the Vulture Droid starfighters shoot missiles at Anakin and Obi-wan in the space battle in ROTS.
No the Millenium Falcon uses blaster fire to blow up the Death Star.
Slave 1 does fire a missile and so do the vulture droids.
So missiles are seen in the prequels but not in any of the original trilogy.
I was specifically refering to ISD's not using any of it's amrments and it's arments being highly uneffective. Yet in Starwars books and EU content they are said to have 60 turbolaser batteries 60 ion cannons and like 20-40 concussion missle launchers. ISD only ever used 1/3 of that. Plus that 1/3 of it's firepower was shown to be pathetically weak - bouncing off freighters. It wasn't really until Rouge 1 that we saw a star destroyer actually kill something and it was Vaders ship Coming in and blasting a Mon Cal about to jump to light speed - I guess it's shields were down (though maybe RTJ we can claim they were doing some damage - but getting beat up by a MUCH smaller fleet)
The target ship will simply experience hits, because the incoming fire is moving faster than the light signals (visual, radar, etc) which it gives off.
It would be like being blind and listening for supsersonic missiles coming at you. You would only hear them when they had gone past or if they hit you.
So what I imagine is that the overall attack/defence levels of SW and ST ships are roughly comparable in terms of hitting power and armour/shields, so the ST ships are as capable of destroying the SW ships as SW ships are, in terms of the number of shots needed.
But the SW ships are never able to shoot at the ST ships because they can't see them until they aren't there any more.
Therefore every tactical battle would be a walkover for ST. The only survivors from the SW fleet would be the ones that managed to get into hyperspace quickly enough to avoid being hit.
This is where the weight of numbers comes in. Suppose the SW fleet has 20 star destroyers, and the ST fleet has 1 cruiser. Suppose the ST cruiser is capable of destroying a star destroyer in 60 seconds. Suppose it takes the star destroyers five minutes to understand what is happening, decide to retreat, and get up to speed for transition to hyperspace. Clearly the SW fleet will lose 5 ships, the rest will escape and the ST ship will not be able to catch up with them.
Yes - but where are we getting these huge numbers from? We've never seen a fleet larger than that at Endor in RoTJ and that was about 25 ships or so.
In any case - The federation in DS9 assmebled a fleet of over 1000 ships - and this was after taking huge losses in a several year long war previous to that. I'd say the federation actually has a larger fleet than the empire does.
Finally, the Empire never conquered anywhere, it came to power via a coup and lasted ~20 years. This does not imply a particularly stable or competent administration.
Yeah it looked cool and talked a good game, but the results are there.
The Empire fell because it was decapitated in a surgical strike by a commando force, headed by a boy who just happened to be the son of the Empire's penultimate commander. That commander then turned traitor and toppled the dictator at exactly the right moment. It's such an absurdly long set of odds* that using it as a yardstick to judge the stability of the administration isn't really fair. Had Luke failed, there really wan't anyone who could stop the (basically immortal?) Emperor from ruling indefinitely.
You don't get a contradiction until you get to the lower tiers of canon, EU tie-in products. That material is canon, but only so long as it doesn't contradict the higher levels of canon material. If a kids book version of ANH says that Luke flew a y-wing at Yavin then the EU source is wrong. If a random EU source says that the galaxy in ESB is a "protostar" then the EU source is wrong.
This book's summary explicitly states that it isn't written for kids. It isn't EU, it is cannon. There are no tiers of cannon, there is just "cannon". Unless you're trying to argue that anything made since The Mouse took over the franchise doesn't exist.
Rather than boil water with fire and mix in leaves like some kind of barbarian, the Federation finds it much more efficient to convert some of the ship's excess energy to matter.
I remember seeing an interview with the Captain of the USS Nimitz (a nuclear carrier). He mentioned that his top speed was 30 knots. But that he could only sustain that for... 20 years or so. Nuclear carrier y'know.
The Enterprise can spare 5 megatons of energy to make tea for each and every crewmember.
The Empire is not even playing on their level. It's not just coal dreadnoughts vs nuclear subs, it's more like sailing galleys vs nuclear carriers.
Finally, the Empire never conquered anywhere, it came to power via a coup and lasted ~20 years. This does not imply a particularly stable or competent administration.
Yeah it looked cool and talked a good game, but the results are there.
The Empire fell because it was decapitated in a surgical strike by a commando force, headed by a boy who just happened to be the son of the Empire's penultimate commander. That commander then turned traitor and toppled the dictator at exactly the right moment. It's such an absurdly long set of odds* that using it as a yardstick to judge the stability of the administration isn't really fair. Had Luke failed, there really wan't anyone who could stop the (basically immortal?) Emperor from ruling indefinitely.
*It makes for a great story/RPG campaign, though.
Except their Tiff was irrelevant. The rebels blew up the death star 2 with the emperor on it.
Finally, the Empire never conquered anywhere, it came to power via a coup and lasted ~20 years. This does not imply a particularly stable or competent administration.
Yeah it looked cool and talked a good game, but the results are there.
The Empire fell because it was decapitated in a surgical strike by a commando force, headed by a boy who just happened to be the son of the Empire's penultimate commander. That commander then turned traitor and toppled the dictator at exactly the right moment. It's such an absurdly long set of odds* that using it as a yardstick to judge the stability of the administration isn't really fair. Had Luke failed, there really wan't anyone who could stop the (basically immortal?) Emperor from ruling indefinitely.
*It makes for a great story/RPG campaign, though.
That's not really the sign of a stable system there. Does anyone think that if [insert world leader here] died tomorrow the country would fall apart and be replaced by a new republic? Stable countries have lines of succession and contingencies. The Galactic Empire had worse contingency plans than North Korea.
The New Order at least managed one peaceful change of rulership.
Yes - but where are we getting these huge numbers from? We've never seen a fleet larger than that at Endor in RoTJ and that was about 25 ships or so.
In any case - The federation in DS9 assmebled a fleet of over 1000 ships - and this was after taking huge losses in a several year long war previous to that. I'd say the federation actually has a larger fleet than the empire does.
Or at least a larger fleet to spare. The Empire can never bring the full weight of its numbers to bear, not if they want an empire to come home to, because the fleets and armies are what's keeping the systems in line. The Federation has no such impediment. From day one the Empire is fighting at least a two-front war against the Federation and its own people.
In any case - The federation in DS9 assmebled a fleet of over 1000 ships - and this was after taking huge losses in a several year long war previous to that. I'd say the federation actually has a larger fleet than the empire does.
Though the Federation was only able to muster 40 ships on short notice to defend Earth at Wolf 359 a few years prior - so a lot probably depends on whether the Federation has sufficient opportunity to recall all the exploration ships from wherever they're off exploring.
Finally, the Empire never conquered anywhere, it came to power via a coup and lasted ~20 years. This does not imply a particularly stable or competent administration.
Yeah it looked cool and talked a good game, but the results are there.
The Empire fell because it was decapitated in a surgical strike by a commando force, headed by a boy who just happened to be the son of the Empire's penultimate commander. That commander then turned traitor and toppled the dictator at exactly the right moment. It's such an absurdly long set of odds* that using it as a yardstick to judge the stability of the administration isn't really fair. Had Luke failed, there really wan't anyone who could stop the (basically immortal?) Emperor from ruling indefinitely.
*It makes for a great story/RPG campaign, though.
That's not really the sign of a stable system there. Does anyone think that if [insert world leader here] died tomorrow the country would fall apart and be replaced by a new republic? Stable countries have lines of succession and contingencies. The Galactic Empire had worse contingency plans than North Korea.
The New Order at least managed one peaceful change of rulership.
And it did so after the previous ruler was assassinated by a traitor second in command. So the First Order had a better line of succession than the Galactic Empire by quite a fair margin as even if the assassin had fully turned sides, Hux could still have taken over.
In any case - The federation in DS9 assmebled a fleet of over 1000 ships - and this was after taking huge losses in a several year long war previous to that. I'd say the federation actually has a larger fleet than the empire does.
Though the Federation was only able to muster 40 ships on short notice to defend Earth at Wolf 359 a few years prior - so a lot probably depends on whether the Federation has sufficient opportunity to recall all the exploration ships from wherever they're off exploring.
And? Raw numbers are what matter, not the source of the power. Making tea requires negligible power, so it is irrelevant to combat. And when you look at feats demonstrating raw firepower numbers the Star Wars ships win by orders of magnitude. It doesn't matter if the energy comes from antimatter or fusion or whatever, X megatons of firepower is still X megatons.
Those numbers come from sources you would consider to be EU, much as Timothy Zahn's explanation of why turbolasers can't be used to bombard a planet would be EU.
In any case - The federation in DS9 assmebled a fleet of over 1000 ships - and this was after taking huge losses in a several year long war previous to that. I'd say the federation actually has a larger fleet than the empire does.
Though the Federation was only able to muster 40 ships on short notice to defend Earth at Wolf 359 a few years prior - so a lot probably depends on whether the Federation has sufficient opportunity to recall all the exploration ships from wherever they're off exploring.
I believe this is called The Federation getting angry.
In any case - The federation in DS9 assmebled a fleet of over 1000 ships - and this was after taking huge losses in a several year long war previous to that. I'd say the federation actually has a larger fleet than the empire does.
Though the Federation was only able to muster 40 ships on short notice to defend Earth at Wolf 359 a few years prior - so a lot probably depends on whether the Federation has sufficient opportunity to recall all the exploration ships from wherever they're off exploring.
That could also be explained by the Federation being complacent and overconfident, not truly believing the capabilities of the Borg.
And it is also possible that the 40 ships might have been enough if the Borg didn't have access to starfleet knowledge from Picard's brain.
That could also be explained by the Federation being complacent and overconfident, not truly believing the capabilities of the Borg.
It did take Q throwing the Enterprise D in front of a cube to make Picard realize that there are scarier things than Nausicaans, Romulans, and Klingons.
Though Picard also subsequently went back in time to protect Cochrane from the Borg.
We still have the Millenium Falcon crossing half a galaxy to find Luke.
It goes from the Unknown Regions to the Outer Rim, both largely undefined areas of the Star Wars Galaxy; specifically so. Also, it's the Falcon, it is a special case.
Sure, the Millenium Falcon is 'the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy'. Now let's look at Episode 2, where Anakin and Padme travel from Coruscant to Naboo (along the outer edge of the Mid-Rim) in a spacegoing BUS, with no evidence of intermediate stops.
And then coming BACK in less than the 18 hours it takes the Resistance fleet to run out of fuel. While crossing the same distance in Star Trek takes decades, if not centuries.
But the ships in Star Wars can run out of fuel. I'm fairly certain that a Federation ship has never run out of fuel.]
Hit Netflix up for Star Trek: The Animated Series. The Enterprise very nearly runs out of antimatter fuel in one episode. And then there's the Kobyashi Maru, a NEUTRONIC FUEL CARRIER...
Xenomancers wrote: They make up ion-cannons and missle launchers on ISD when there were never used in a film once from an ISD.
Have missile launchers ever been shown on screen as a major part of a ships armament?
I suppose proton torpedos might count as a missile, but what else?
In Return of the Jedi, the Millennium Falcon is seen firing concussion missiles at the second Death Star's main reactor. Also, in the prequels, Jango Fett's Slave I fires a missile at Obi-wan Kenobi's Jedi Starfighter, and the Vulture Droid starfighters shoot missiles at Anakin and Obi-wan in the space battle in ROTS.
No the Millenium Falcon uses blaster fire to blow up the Death Star.
Nope. On the OFFICIAL Star Wars cross-section, there is a concussion missile launcher mounted between the mandibles. And where does the shot that takes out the DSII's main reactor come from? Between the mandibles. Although if you want to be pendantic about it, we can call it a proton torpedo instead, since canon has shown those to be glowing projectiles that don't at all resemble what we would call a torpedo in our world.
The only blaster mounted on the Falcon is the repeater mounted on the underside, used in ESB to fend off Snowtroopers. The dorsal and ventral quad mounts are light laser cannon... which, of course, means something very different in Star Wars than the laser of the real world.
Remember, this is Star Wars. Just because it's called a concussion missile doesn't mean it will resemble anything our world would call a missile.
In any case - The federation in DS9 assmebled a fleet of over 1000 ships - and this was after taking huge losses in a several year long war previous to that. I'd say the federation actually has a larger fleet than the empire does.
Though the Federation was only able to muster 40 ships on short notice to defend Earth at Wolf 359 a few years prior - so a lot probably depends on whether the Federation has sufficient opportunity to recall all the exploration ships from wherever they're off exploring.
The borg strike without warning. This is probably representitive of the type of responce you could expect after a hyperdrive attack from the empire. 20-40 ships travling at maximum warp to assemble for a battle.
Xenomancers wrote: The borg strike without warning. This is probably representitive of the type of responce you could expect after a hyperdrive attack from the empire. 20-40 ships travling at maximum warp to assemble for a battle.
So, 20-40 ships traveling at "maximum warp" and arriving weeks/months after the entire Federation population has been killed and the Imperial fleet has moved on to other goals? Because given the relative travel speeds involved and the Empire's ability to annihilate planetary targets via orbital bombardment that's the end result.
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dogma wrote: There are no tiers of cannon, there is just "cannon".
Nonsense. Of course there are tiers of canon, because that's the only way to resolve a conflict between "canon" sources. If you allow a random EU tie-in product or toy package or whatever to overrule what we see in the Star Wars movies then you have a nightmare of contradictions and retcons and general questioning of why you have a concept of "canon" in the first place.
Sure, the Millenium Falcon is 'the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy'. Now let's look at Episode 2, where Anakin and Padme travel from Coruscant to Naboo (along the outer edge of the Mid-Rim) in a spacegoing BUS, with no evidence of intermediate stops.
That took long enough that Jar-Jar had to assume Padme's duties.
Kilkrazy wrote: I imagine an FTL versus non FTL fight would work like this.
The FTL ship strafes in, firing weapons.
Its target can't see the attacker or incoming fire, because they are moving faster than light, and the target's sensors can't detect them. (Star Trek ships do have sensors that work to detect things at FTL speeds, but SW ships don't.) All the target knows is that it suddenly gets hit by loads of enemy fire out of nowhere from a ship it can't detect.
The FTL ship makes invulnerable firing passes until the target is destroyed or retreats by jumping to light speed.
This sounds like a pretty accurate description. Unfortunately it doesn't match at all with what we see on-screen in Star Trek. Ships don't make FTL strafing runs and deliver shots out of nowhere, even when firing against stationary targets (like DS9). They fly at very slow speeds with limited maneuverability and exchange fire at short visual ranges. And their weapons fly slow enough to be seen visually, clearly not at FTL speeds.
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dogma wrote: That took long enough that Jar-Jar had to assume Padme's duties.
Because of the travel time between point A and point B, or because of the length of time they were expecting to spend at point B? And even in a situation where travel time is most of a day it would make sense to designate a representative, given the sheer size and complexity of galactic scale politics.
Also, remember that their trip is just one of many that are consistent with each other. Han goes from the outer rim ("if there's a bright center to the universe you're on the planet it's farthest from") to Alderaan (a core planet) then to Yavin apparently within the same day, while the Empire's scout ships make it to Dantooine ("too remote to be an effective demonstration") and back in a similarly short amount of time. Luke makes the trip to Dagobah from Hoth in a single-seat fighter, without showing any signs of being miserable about stuck in that tiny cockpit for a long period of time. The rebel fleet makes the trip from Sullust to Endor in the short time that the rebel strike team is dealing with the shield generator. Hell, the rebel fleet in Rogue One makes the trip from Yavin to Scarif within minutes.
Kilkrazy wrote: I imagine an FTL versus non FTL fight would work like this.
The FTL ship strafes in, firing weapons.
Its target can't see the attacker or incoming fire, because they are moving faster than light, and the target's sensors can't detect them. (Star Trek ships do have sensors that work to detect things at FTL speeds, but SW ships don't.) All the target knows is that it suddenly gets hit by loads of enemy fire out of nowhere from a ship it can't detect.
The FTL ship makes invulnerable firing passes until the target is destroyed or retreats by jumping to light speed.
This sounds like a pretty accurate description. Unfortunately it doesn't match at all with what we see on-screen in Star Trek. Ships don't make FTL strafing runs and deliver shots out of nowhere, even when firing against stationary targets (like DS9). They fly at very slow speeds with limited maneuverability and exchange fire at short visual ranges. And their weapons fly slow enough to be seen visually, clearly not at FTL speeds.
I actually looked that up after people were making the claim earlier. It happened in two different episodes of TOS, once the Enterprise at warp under command of a rogue computer torpedoed a freighter at sublight speed, the second time a Klingon ship used this Warp strafe attack against the Enterprise after her engines were sabotaged. How bizarre that for all the series after they forgot they had that ability.
Nonsense. Of course there are tiers of canon, because that's the only way to resolve a conflict between "canon" sources. If you allow a random EU tie-in product or toy package or whatever to overrule what we see in the Star Wars movies then you have a nightmare of contradictions and retcons and general questioning of why you have a concept of "canon" in the first place.
You have spent this entire thread stating that scripts overrule movies, and insulting me when I disagree. I assume you're trying to bait me, but I'm not going to give in.
And yes, both Star Wars and Star Trek are nightmares of retcon. That's what happens when you change writers, producers, and directors.
While I agree that the Empire has vastly more numbers and Hyperdrive, like someone mentioned earlier, Star Trek is all about super science and out sciencing their enemies. All it would take is for them to capture one SW ship with hyperdrive and SW would lose the advantage in mobility. ST has always been good at swiftly updating ships to new tech. At least in the SW films, technology has seemed to have mostly stagnated.
The tech level difference is huge. I am not sure the brute force of the Empire would be enough.
Which has no evidence, and directly contradicts other examples of hyperdrive being extremely fast.
You're explicitly stating, again, that there is a conflict between the script and the movies.
WTF? I have said over and over again that there is NOT a conflict. The conflict is with a third-party licensed product.
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AdeptSister wrote: All it would take is for them to capture one SW ship with hyperdrive and SW would lose the advantage in mobility.
Maybe if the Federation had a long time to study it. But the entire Federation will be dead within a day or two of the war beginning. There is no time for reverse engineering or capturing ships.
Sure, the Millenium Falcon is 'the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy'. Now let's look at Episode 2, where Anakin and Padme travel from Coruscant to Naboo (along the outer edge of the Mid-Rim) in a spacegoing BUS, with no evidence of intermediate stops.
That took long enough that Jar-Jar had to assume Padme's duties.
Not because of the length of travel time, it was because she was going to be hiding out for an extended period.
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Tyran wrote: Little reminder that a fleet of ISDs lost to whales in the Rebels finale. ISDs are gak warships.
In the grand scheme of things, yes. But better than Star Trek where all the various military forces have the collective military acumen of a gnat.
If we're talking all Sci-fi together, Star Wars doesn't do well. But they do better than Star Trek which is what we care about here.
Dreadwinter wrote: After reading some of your arguments, like how it is a new Galaxy and not a Protostar, I have come to the conclusion that Leeland Chee is probably the worst thing to happen to Star Wars.
Why? Because he cited the original creators of ESB instead of a random EU source that you like?
Because the original creators of ESB are so wishy washy on what actually happened in the movie that they have changed it what, 2-3 times since release much to the disdain of the fans.
In any case - The federation in DS9 assmebled a fleet of over 1000 ships - and this was after taking huge losses in a several year long war previous to that. I'd say the federation actually has a larger fleet than the empire does.
Though the Federation was only able to muster 40 ships on short notice to defend Earth at Wolf 359 a few years prior - so a lot probably depends on whether the Federation has sufficient opportunity to recall all the exploration ships from wherever they're off exploring.
Itself a considerable improvement over ST 1 when they could only raise 1 ship to stop V'ger and ST 4 where they could only get 1 StarFleet ship and one Warbird filled with wanted criminals to stop the Whale Probe.
My head canon is that post WWIII/Eugenics War/Post Atomic Horror Earth has a strong pacifist streak ala post-war Japan and stationing warships (or what the peace faction considers warships) around Earth is a political 3rd rail.
Which has no evidence, and directly contradicts other examples of hyperdrive being extremely fast.
There are hyperdrive classes, that's why the Falcon is stupidly fast relative to everything else in Star Wars. Though we don't know what ".5 past lightspeed" actually is.
dogma wrote: There are hyperdrive classes, that's why the Falcon is stupidly fast relative to everything else in Star Wars. Though we don't know what ".5 past lightspeed" actually is.
There are hyperdrive classes, but all of them are fast. It's the difference between "Tatooine to Alderaan in an hour" and "Tatooine to Alderaan in an hour and a half". Remember, the rebel fleet made the jump from Yavin to Scarif, a distance which seems to be half the length of the galaxy, in a matter of minutes. So unless you're going to make the absurd claim that the rebel fleet is orders of magnitude faster than imperial ships the Falcon's trips are arguably on the slow side of evidence for hyperspace speeds.
You straight up said that the ESB script is higher cannon than ESB the movie, and apparently higher cannon than anything related to ESB.
WTF are you talking about? Of course the script is not higher canon, but the two do not disagree. The canon conflict is between the script plus an official statement by the IP owner that the script interpretation is correct and a licensed third-party "Star Wars 101" guide.
Even if something I originally said was possibly ambiguous I have subsequently clarified, multiple times, that the order of canon is ESB -> ESB script -> third party licensed material. You have no excuse for repeating this straw man argument, so please stop doing it.
Even if something I originally said was possibly ambiguous I have subsequently clarified, multiple times, that the order of canon is ESB -> ESB script -> third party licensed material. You have no excuse for repeating this straw man argument, so please stop doing it.
If you can provide a contradictory script element from one of the other movies that addresses a specific scene from ESB then yes, you'd have a canon conflict.
...on page 6, and never clarified it; except to write this...
I have no idea WTF you are going on about here. You quote me explicitly saying "the script is the highest canon, except the movie" as proof that I claimed the script is higher canon than the movie. At this point I can't tell if you're arguing out of sheer stubborn determination to argue, long past the point where I have explained very clearly what my actual position is, or out of a desperate attempt to make Star Trek somehow win this comparison.
WTF are you talking about? The original page 6 comment was a response to YOU mentioning scripts. Let us review:
But not the scripts for any of the other cannon movies? That's pretty selective.
You asked about the scripts to other movies, I said that the canon conflict would exist if one of those scripts had a contradictory element. Nowhere in there does it say "scripts are higher canon than the movies".
And I honestly have no idea why you are so obsessed with "proving" that I said something incorrectly pages ago. I have subsequently stated exactly what my position is, and you know this. What exactly do you hope to accomplish, besides congratulating yourself on finally finding a victory?
Rather than boil water with fire and mix in leaves like some kind of barbarian, the Federation finds it much more efficient to convert some of the ship's excess energy to matter.
I remember seeing an interview with the Captain of the USS Nimitz (a nuclear carrier). He mentioned that his top speed was 30 knots. But that he could only sustain that for... 20 years or so. Nuclear carrier y'know.
The Enterprise can spare 5 megatons of energy to make tea for each and every crewmember.
The Empire is not even playing on their level. It's not just coal dreadnoughts vs nuclear subs, it's more like sailing galleys vs nuclear carriers.
How does this get buried with no responses? This, combined with everything stated about FTL strafing runs, leaves this as a non-debate.
Actually, the game ender goes like this: The Federation does some in depth research about the personnel of the Empire, collecting everything from assignments to duty stations. They go to all the planets of the Empire, use the transporters to obtain the patterns of the sisters of all the Imperial ships' officers. Fly up, beam copies of them aboard the ship that houses their siblings, and when they open mouth kiss their siblings (This is canon, after all. It appeared on film.) the Federation ships use the distraction to take the Imperial fleet apart. Finis.
Because it isn't a very compelling argument. It makes major assumptions about how replicators work, and even the 5 megaton conclusion is still well short of the 200 gigatons of a single shot from a Clone Wars era troop transport. The fact that it's "just tea" doesn't mean anything, it's quite possible that, like the aircraft carrier he mentions, the Enterprise's power supply runs at a fixed output 24/7. So when not firing weapons or using higher levels of engine power there's a lot of energy left over for frivolous things like making tea the stupidly over-complicated way. But that doesn't necessarily get the peak output up to Star Wars levels.
This, combined with everything stated about FTL strafing runs, leaves this as a non-debate.
The same FTL strafing runs that rarely, if ever, happen on-screen and contradict the countless examples of Star Trek ships fighting at very slow speeds and short ranges with weapons that are nowhere near FTL? I mean, it's pretty difficult to argue for FTL combat when we keep seeing photon torpedoes moving slower than real-world missiles.
Kilkrazy wrote: I imagine an FTL versus non FTL fight would work like this.
The FTL ship strafes in, firing weapons.
Its target can't see the attacker or incoming fire, because they are moving faster than light, and the target's sensors can't detect them. (Star Trek ships do have sensors that work to detect things at FTL speeds, but SW ships don't.) All the target knows is that it suddenly gets hit by loads of enemy fire out of nowhere from a ship it can't detect.
The FTL ship makes invulnerable firing passes until the target is destroyed or retreats by jumping to light speed.
This sounds like a pretty accurate description. Unfortunately it doesn't match at all with what we see on-screen in Star Trek. Ships don't make FTL strafing runs and deliver shots out of nowhere, even when firing against stationary targets (like DS9). They fly at very slow speeds with limited maneuverability and exchange fire at short visual ranges. And their weapons fly slow enough to be seen visually, clearly not at FTL speeds.
... ....
We have to bear in mind that the ST films are dramatic visual representations of things which are actually impossible, and if they were possible, would be impossible to detect visually, and would have to be simulated.
Kilkrazy wrote: We have to bear in mind that the ST films are dramatic visual representations of things which are actually impossible, and if they were possible, would be impossible to detect visually, and would have to be simulated.
Then you can apply the same principles to Star Wars. If what you actually see happening on the screen isn't accurate then how can you conclude that Star Wars ships have trouble with slow targets, have limited firepower, etc? Perhaps the movies are just "dramatic visual representations" of Culture-level combat and Star Wars would win even more effortlessly than I've been arguing.
You asked about the scripts to other movies, I said that the canon conflict would exist if one of those scripts had a contradictory element. Nowhere in there does it say "scripts are higher canon than the movies".
I asked about the scripts because you started treating the ESB script as higher cannon. Or, indeed, "highest cannon".
Ok, I'm done with this nonsense tangent. I have told you very clearly what my actual position is, and I'm done participating in your absurd obsession with trying to prove that I somehow changed my argument at some point. You know what the current argument is, the fact that some previous statement may have been unclear is not relevant. I can't think of a single thing you could hope to accomplish besides "be so infuriatingly nitpicky and stubborn that Peregrine gets banned for responding properly to it", and I'm not playing that game with you.
ESB > ESB script > third-party licensed products.
The movie shows an object that is probably, though not explicitly confirmed to be, a galaxy. The script states explicitly that it is a galaxy. The person in charge of determining what is and isn't canon in Star Wars has explicitly stated that it is the Star Wars galaxy. It is indisputable canon fact that the rebel fleet left the galaxy, and did so in a very short amount of time. A random third-party "Star Wars 101" book calling the galaxy a "protostar" does not overrule the higher canon sources stating otherwise. It just means that some third-party author writing about ESB decades after the people who made the movie said "this is a galaxy" made a mistake in their book.
Which has no evidence, and directly contradicts other examples of hyperdrive being extremely fast.
There are hyperdrive classes, that's why the Falcon is stupidly fast relative to everything else in Star Wars. Though we don't know what ".5 past lightspeed" actually is.
For what it's worth the old West End game has classes of Hyperdrive with lower numbers being faster. It a trip takes 1 day with a class 1 drive, it takes 2 days with a class 2 drive, 5 days with a class 5 drive etc. Most ships, in addition to a main drive had a backup class 10 drive as well. So if your drive went down you could still get somewhere, just not all that fast.
The Falcon has a Class .5 drive, which more or less makes the .5 past light speed line work. More or less.
There's also the arguments that either Han was spouting nonsense because he doesn't know what's he's talking about, or he was spouting nonsense to see if the rubes he'd picked up were smart enough to get it. In that version the farmboy is probably eating it all up while the former Jedi is silently laughing his ass off
Because it isn't a very compelling argument. It makes major assumptions about how replicators work, and even the 5 megaton conclusion is still well short of the 200 gigatons of a single shot from a Clone Wars era troop transport. The fact that it's "just tea" doesn't mean anything, it's quite possible that, like the aircraft carrier he mentions, the Enterprise's power supply runs at a fixed output 24/7. So when not firing weapons or using higher levels of engine power there's a lot of energy left over for frivolous things like making tea the stupidly over-complicated way. But that doesn't necessarily get the peak output up to Star Wars levels.
But we never see those 200 gigaton shots or anything like that, we see ray guns that can damage but not destroy unshielded fighters and freighters.
While turning matter into energy is how the Feds eat breakfast.
So if they can spare 5 gigatons (1000 cups of tea) of power for their crew's wake up drink (plus oh, lets say 20 gigatons more for pancakes and sausage) how much power can they put into weapons and shields? And that's just one example of what the Federation can casually do that the Empire cannot even come close to. The Federation would have real trouble with the Daleks, no hope against the Time Lords, but against foes who can't even 'beam', I just don't see the problem.
Even if we throw out linking this to real world numbers, plot drives everything and the Federation's continuity gives them a wealth of story-driven options they can use while the Empire has just numbers.
In the end they're the good guys and the Empire are someone else's mooks destined to lose.
Peregrine wrote: Ok, I'm done with this nonsense tangent. I have told you very clearly what my actual position is, and I'm done participating in your absurd obsession with trying to prove that I somehow changed my argument at some point.
I can't think of a single thing you could hope to accomplish besides "be so infuriatingly nitpicky and stubborn that Peregrine gets banned for responding properly to it", and I'm not playing that game with you.
I asked you nicely to stop yelling at me, swearing at me, and insulting me; I don't want you to get banned.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: But we never see those 200 gigaton shots or anything like that, we see ray guns that can damage but not destroy unshielded fighters and freighters.
"Unshielded" means nothing when you don't know how strong their armor is. To give an extreme example, both Star Trek and Star Wars could combine their entire fleets and fire at an unshielded Culture warship and it probably wouldn't even notice. Does that mean their guns are weak? No, it means that they're shooting at an insanely durable target. That's why you have to look at performance against known targets like asteroids, where the star destroyer in ESB vaporizing asteroids with its invisibly tiny secondary batteries scales up to those 200 gigaton primary weapons.
So if they can spare 5 gigatons (1000 cups of tea) of power for their crew's wake up drink (plus oh, lets say 20 gigatons more for pancakes and sausage) how much power can they put into weapons and shields?
Unknown. Again, your aircraft carrier mention is relevant. If reactor power is a constant 24/7 output of 10 gigatons (comparable to the aircraft carrier being able to maintain 30 knots indefinitely) then dumping 5 gigatons into breakfast when outside of combat is just using energy that would otherwise be wasted. But using "spare" energy on luxury items doesn't mean that the peak output is much higher, or that the ship could spend that much power on breakfast while also powering its weapons and shields.
Also, remember the difference between power and energy. Producing 5 gigatons worth of tea doesn't give you power output unless you know how fast those cups of tea are produced. If, say, the crew's breakfast is spread out over an hour that doesn't mean that the ship can maintain useful rate of fire with weapons that require 5 gigatons per shot.
And that's just one example of what the Federation can casually do that the Empire cannot even come close to.
Alternatively, it's an example of the idiot scientists/engineers in the Federation using a vastly over-complicated system to provide basic meals for its starship crews. It may be "casual", but only because the Federation is run by idiots who love technobabble over practical solutions.
Even if we throw out linking this to real world numbers, plot drives everything and the Federation's continuity gives them a wealth of story-driven options they can use while the Empire has just numbers.
Only if you have no imagination. The Empire has plenty of story-driven options, and the Federation's "story" options largely consist of technobabble. And "spew technobabble for 45 minutes" is a terrible story.
In the end they're the good guys and the Empire are someone else's mooks destined to lose.
The Empire was the rightful government of the Star Wars galaxy, overthrown by terrorists and mass murderers. They're clearly the good guys of the story, and destined to win eventually. Meanwhile the Federation is clearly a communist state, and we know that communists are bad and always lose in the end.
Kilkrazy wrote: We have to bear in mind that the ST films are dramatic visual representations of things which are actually impossible, and if they were possible, would be impossible to detect visually, and would have to be simulated.
Then you can apply the same principles to Star Wars. If what you actually see happening on the screen isn't accurate then how can you conclude that Star Wars ships have trouble with slow targets, have limited firepower, etc? Perhaps the movies are just "dramatic visual representations" of Culture-level combat and Star Wars would win even more effortlessly than I've been arguing.
If you apply the same principles to Star Wars, in Star Wars films you've got a dramatic visual representation of space combat at sub-light speeds, which is a thing which is physically possible, and could be visually captured on film if it happened.
Thus the SW sequences are a "real" representation of how SW space combat actually works.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: But we never see those 200 gigaton shots or anything like that, we see ray guns that can damage but not destroy unshielded fighters and freighters.
"Unshielded" means nothing when you don't know how strong their armor is. To give an extreme example, both Star Trek and Star Wars could combine their entire fleets and fire at an unshielded Culture warship and it probably wouldn't even notice. Does that mean their guns are weak? No, it means that they're shooting at an insanely durable target. That's why you have to look at performance against known targets like asteroids, where the star destroyer in ESB vaporizing asteroids with its invisibly tiny secondary batteries scales up to those 200 gigaton primary weapons.
You use the asteroid as a constant, but we also don't know the exact dimensions of asteroid compared to each starship, or compared to each other. Nor do we know the composition of said asteroids. For all you know, the ST:TMP asteroid could have been tungsten or something as fragile as sulfur. Should we assume that, since you're a rabid Warsie with no ability to look at things objectively that the Trek asteroid was tissue paper the size of a suitcase while the ESB asteroid was the size of an aircraft carrier and made out of diamond?
So if they can spare 5 gigatons (1000 cups of tea) of power for their crew's wake up drink (plus oh, lets say 20 gigatons more for pancakes and sausage) how much power can they put into weapons and shields?
Unknown. Again, your aircraft carrier mention is relevant. If reactor power is a constant 24/7 output of 10 gigatons (comparable to the aircraft carrier being able to maintain 30 knots indefinitely) then dumping 5 gigatons into breakfast when outside of combat is just using energy that would otherwise be wasted. But using "spare" energy on luxury items doesn't mean that the peak output is much higher, or that the ship could spend that much power on breakfast while also powering its weapons and shields.
Also, remember the difference between power and energy. Producing 5 gigatons worth of tea doesn't give you power output unless you know how fast those cups of tea are produced. If, say, the crew's breakfast is spread out over an hour that doesn't mean that the ship can maintain useful rate of fire with weapons that require 5 gigatons per shot.
We also know that power can be redirected from any nonessential systems on a Starfleet starship upon command and used to increase power and performance of other systems. So even IF they were limited to 10 gigatons (which is a fraction of the power that a starship can produce) it would be child's play for them to redirect power to weapons and slice through the IDS like it was tissue paper.
And that's just one example of what the Federation can casually do that the Empire cannot even come close to.
Alternatively, it's an example of the idiot scientists/engineers in the Federation using a vastly over-complicated system to provide basic meals for its starship crews. It may be "casual", but only because the Federation is run by idiots who love technobabble over practical solutions.
Or we are talking about a very smart way of handling space limitations on a ship, and resource management.
Even if we throw out linking this to real world numbers, plot drives everything and the Federation's continuity gives them a wealth of story-driven options they can use while the Empire has just numbers.
Only if you have no imagination. The Empire has plenty of story-driven options, and the Federation's "story" options largely consist of technobabble. And "spew technobabble for 45 minutes" is a terrible story.
So basically you dismiss everything from Trek as technobabble, but accept everything from a franchise built around space wizards with laser swords? Wait, sorry, plasma swords? That's what we call an unbiased analysis...
In the end they're the good guys and the Empire are someone else's mooks destined to lose.
The Empire was the rightful government of the Star Wars galaxy, overthrown by terrorists and mass murderers. They're clearly the good guys of the story, and destined to win eventually. Meanwhile the Federation is clearly a communist state, and we know that communists are bad and always lose in the end.
I could cast an entire TV series from the number of Enterprise crew/passengers who've ascended to legitimate, no @#$%, snap your finger and blow up a planet GODHOOD.
You can have Vader and Palpatine, I'll take Gary Mitchel and Elizabeth Dehner two of the low-end, inexperienced gods.
Really you don't want to take on ST universe in a contest of Space Magic.
A human with such natural knowledge of time, space, energy and propulsion that an alien being capable of travelling freely throughout the universe, including sending the Enterprise to M33 and then the end of the universe, thought him remarkable and an example of mankinds potential that could lead to them achieving the same capabilities.
I could cast an entire TV series from the number of Enterprise crew/passengers who've ascended to legitimate, no @#$%, snap your finger and blow up a planet GODHOOD.
You can have Vader and Palpatine, I'll take Gary Mitchel and Elizabeth Dehner two of the low-end, inexperienced gods.
Really you don't want to take on ST universe in a contest of Space Magic.
Indeed. If you go space God's, then the Organians decide everyone needs to play nice across both galaxies.
A human with such natural knowledge of time, space, energy and propulsion that an alien being capable of travelling freely throughout the universe, including sending the Enterprise to M33 and then the end of the universe, thought him remarkable and an example of mankinds potential that could lead to them achieving the same capabilities.
Conversely Star Trek has Wesley Crusher so looses by default.
A human with such natural knowledge of time, space, energy and propulsion that an alien being capable of travelling freely throughout the universe, including sending the Enterprise to M33 and then the end of the universe, thought him remarkable and an example of mankinds potential that could lead to them achieving the same capabilities.
Conversely Star Trek has Wesley Crusher so looses by default.
That is simply not true. Vader had apprentices. There are lots of force sensitives. Not to mention all the randoms running around that are just "lucky" out there. Also, are we discussing the Palp/Vader Empire here? New Trilogy Empire? Old Republic Era Empire? You better pray it's not Old Republic because your gods would be laughed at and mocked while being shocked and drained of life force. Regardless, I'm not too worried about what little gs the Federation has in their pocket.
Also, are those gods a part of the Federation? As in ranked members running around on ships? If the Federation has gods working for them why are they so terrible at almost everything?
Kilkrazy wrote: If you apply the same principles to Star Wars, in Star Wars films you've got a dramatic visual representation of space combat at sub-light speeds, which is a thing which is physically possible, and could be visually captured on film if it happened.
Thus the SW sequences are a "real" representation of how SW space combat actually works.
Do they ever say they are fighting at sub-light speeds? No. If you're going with the "dramatic visual representation" defense then you have no grounds for arguing that anything shown on-screen has any meaning. After all, it could just be "drama".
Also, no, Star Wars combat is not a thing that is physically possible. Objects in space don't move like WWII dogfight clips. So clearly it's a "dramatic visual representation" of high-FTL high-firepower combat that makes the Culture look weak.
Kilkrazy wrote: If you apply the same principles to Star Wars, in Star Wars films you've got a dramatic visual representation of space combat at sub-light speeds, which is a thing which is physically possible, and could be visually captured on film if it happened.
Thus the SW sequences are a "real" representation of how SW space combat actually works.
Do they ever say they are fighting at sub-light speeds? ...
Every battle shown in SW is specifically shown to begin after the ships involved exit from light speed, and the actions are broken off when the escaping ships make the transit to light speed.
Just Tony wrote: You use the asteroid as a constant, but we also don't know the exact dimensions of asteroid compared to each starship, or compared to each other. Nor do we know the composition of said asteroids. For all you know, the ST:TMP asteroid could have been tungsten or something as fragile as sulfur. Should we assume that, since you're a rabid Warsie with no ability to look at things objectively that the Trek asteroid was tissue paper the size of a suitcase while the ESB asteroid was the size of an aircraft carrier and made out of diamond?
Wow, "warsie", I haven't heard that one in a long time. Perhaps you have your own calculations for the scenes in question?
We also know that power can be redirected from any nonessential systems on a Starfleet starship upon command and used to increase power and performance of other systems. So even IF they were limited to 10 gigatons (which is a fraction of the power that a starship can produce) it would be child's play for them to redirect power to weapons and slice through the IDS like it was tissue paper.
That is not how it works. You can't just assume that component limits do not exist. For example, you can build a circuit that delivers the entire power supplied to your house through a single light bulb but that doesn't mean you can successfully increase its brightness to any arbitrary level.
And even delivering 100% of that 10 gigaton value to its guns, saving nothing for movement or defense (IOW, committing suicide to fire a shot), the Star Trek ship is still only getting 5% of the firepower of a single shot from a Clone Wars era transport. That's at least probably relevant on the scale of Star Wars combat and could maybe do damage eventually, but it's far short of effortlessly killing a star destroyer.
So basically you dismiss everything from Trek as technobabble, but accept everything from a franchise built around space wizards with laser swords? Wait, sorry, plasma swords? That's what we call an unbiased analysis...
Yes, of course I dismiss technobabble as good writing. Star Wars has fantasy elements, but it just takes them for granted and doesn't over-explain them. It's a lightsaber, but we hear far more about the philosophy and history of the weapon than some nonsense "explanation" of how it works. Meanwhile Star Trek is entire episodes of that cringe-worthy "midichlorians" scene. I mean, which do you think is better writing:
Star Wars: "Enemy ship! Open fire!"
Star Trek: "The enemy appears to be using an inverse tachyon phase array to modulate their plasma signature! We must reverse polarize our warp core to produce a subspace energy field that will allow us to lock on to their ship!"
Kirk: *shoots the technobabble officer, sleeps with your mom* "DIE KLINGON S! OPEN FIRE!"
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Kilkrazy wrote: Every battle shown in SW is specifically shown to begin after the ships involved exit from light speed, and the actions are broken off when the escaping ships make the transit to light speed.
That sure sounds like a "dramatic visual representation" of ships exiting hyperspace and fighting at slower FTL speeds. Remember, Star Wars ships can go FTL without hyperspace, as demonstrated by the Falcon's trip from Hoth to Bespin.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: Are we still ignoring the 690 gigaton figure for photon torpedoes?
Yes, because it's obvious nonsense. The problem with stating a mechanism for things, matter/antimatter annihilation, is that we know the maximum possible limit according to the laws of physics. Photon torpedoes can not have that much firepower, period. The only way to get there is to throw out their operating mechanism of matter/antimatter annihilation, but that requires throwing out vast quantities of canon evidence in favor of a single EU source.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: So obvious nonsense in Star Wars is fine because "higher canon", obvious nonsense in Star Trek is to be ignored because reasons.
I think this discussion's gotten as far as it ever will.
How is leaving the galaxy "obvious nonsense"? It argues for very fast hyperspace speeds, but we already have lots of evidence for very fast hyperspace speeds. And TBH the rebel fleet crossing half the galaxy from Yavin to Scarif in a matter of minutes probably demonstrates even higher speeds than the ESB scene.
And yes, there's a difference between throwing out a movie or TV scene, the highest level of cannon, and throwing out a third-party tie-in product.
If we're not going to use the Next Generation Tech Manual you also can't quote the 1.5 kg antimatter warhead, because that's where that is from too. Either it's a good enough source, in which case we can extrapolate the 690 gigaton figure, or we it isn't a good enough source, in which case we can't extrapolate the 64 megaton number. Either way the 64 megaton figure can't be accurate unless we selectively ignore parts of the same source.
You can throw out parts of a source without discarding all of it. 1.5kg and 64 megatons is consistent with what we see on-screen for torpedo size. 690 gigatons requires a much larger volume of antimatter than torpedoes are capable of holding, so that number must be wrong.
Space wizards are exaggerated in value - if the ship they are on blows up - they die.
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AdeptSister wrote: While I agree that the Empire has vastly more numbers and Hyperdrive, like someone mentioned earlier, Star Trek is all about super science and out sciencing their enemies. All it would take is for them to capture one SW ship with hyperdrive and SW would lose the advantage in mobility. ST has always been good at swiftly updating ships to new tech. At least in the SW films, technology has seemed to have mostly stagnated.
The tech level difference is huge. I am not sure the brute force of the Empire would be enough.
The brute force is exaggerated though. Just look at the MF running from an ISD for quite a long time. Being shot the whole time by a ship 1000 times larger than it - not being destroyed. In startrek a few photon torpedos would have destroyed such a pathetic ship.
Peregrine wrote: You can throw out parts of a source without discarding all of it. 1.5kg and 64 megatons is consistent with what we see on-screen for torpedo size. 690 gigatons requires a much larger volume of antimatter than torpedoes are capable of holding, so that number must be wrong.
There is no viable source that tells us how strong any of these weapon systems are. We have to look at the visual evidence and what we know about physics.
A photon torpedo has been shown to move at approx .75 the speed of light when fired from sublight. Which is roughly 225,000,000 mps - it has a mass of 260 kg. Simple math shows an energy release of 6 Mt of kinetic energy alone. More than enough to destroy any city on earth without even detonating the warhead. Reasonable to assume you wouldn't even need an antimatter warhead attached to it with that much power. However - perhaps sheilds are very effective at removing kenetic energy from and object - so a warhead putting out a 80 gigaton detonation was required lol.
Clearly these numbers are insane. No material could sustain these kinds of forces. Everything would be destroyed in 1 shot.
Even more disturbing - the red matter from 2009 startrek if weaponized is even more scary than a death star. A single cloaked ship could destroy every planet/ every fleet/ in the entire starwars galaxy without the empire ever even knowing it was the federation that was doing it.
"Unshielded" means nothing when you don't know how strong their armor is. To give an extreme example, both Star Trek and Star Wars could combine their entire fleets and fire at an unshielded Culture warship and it probably wouldn't even notice. Does that mean their guns are weak? No, it means that they're shooting at an insanely durable target. That's why you have to look at performance against known targets like asteroids, where the star destroyer in ESB vaporizing asteroids with its invisibly tiny secondary batteries scales up to those 200 gigaton primary weapons.
No it does not. At most you can get megatons out of that scene, and that would be assuming completely metallic asteroids.
Space wizards are exaggerated in value - if the ship they are on blows up - they die.
Depends on the Space Wizard. There are some that would just laugh about it.
Example please? Are we talking about Poppins Leia?
Palpatine, Bane, Nihilus, Old Republic Emperor(I forget his name)
That is only including the ones we get to interact with in movies/games/books while they are alive. So Exar Kun and the old old Sith, as in the original Sith Race, are not included in this.
Space wizards are exaggerated in value - if the ship they are on blows up - they die.
Depends on the Space Wizard. There are some that would just laugh about it.
Example please? Are we talking about Poppins Leia?
Palpatine, Bane, Nihilus, Old Republic Emperor(I forget his name)
That is only including the ones we get to interact with in movies/games/books while they are alive. So Exar Kun and the old old Sith, as in the original Sith Race, are not included in this.
All of these wizards were on a ship when it exploded in space and they didn't die? Yet every jedi in the republic minus 2 of them were killed by being shot in the back by storm troopers?
Space wizards are exaggerated in value - if the ship they are on blows up - they die.
Depends on the Space Wizard. There are some that would just laugh about it.
Example please? Are we talking about Poppins Leia?
Palpatine, Bane, Nihilus, Old Republic Emperor(I forget his name)
That is only including the ones we get to interact with in movies/games/books while they are alive. So Exar Kun and the old old Sith, as in the original Sith Race, are not included in this.
All of these wizards were on a ship when it exploded in space and they didn't die? Yet every jedi in the republic minus 2 of them were killed by being shot in the back by storm troopers?
All 4 have been through worse than a ship exploding in space(Nihilus was on a planet being destroyed by a doomsday device!) and made it out. Dark Side users are very powerful, that is why 2 is enough to overthrow a whole order of Jedi. They can do some crazy stuff, like consume the entire life force of a planet(Again, Nihilus) just to feed their power.
Sure, the Millenium Falcon is 'the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy'. Now let's look at Episode 2, where Anakin and Padme travel from Coruscant to Naboo (along the outer edge of the Mid-Rim) in a spacegoing BUS, with no evidence of intermediate stops.
That took long enough that Jar-Jar had to assume Padme's duties.
Which was prearranged, as they were going to Naboo to hide from assassins for an extended period. That is, an extended period ON NABOO, not in transit.
And then there's the Kobyashi Maru, a NEUTRONIC FUEL CARRIER...
Which existed in the 23rd Star Trek century, separate from the 24th Star Trek century. Star Trek technology advances, Star Wars technology does not.
Well, that's part of the Federation, is it not?
That's ANOTHER part of the problem involving the SW/ST fight. ST canon covers over a century and a half with widely varying technological levels. So... WHICH Federation is the Empire facing? Enterprise era? TOS/TAS? TOS movies? TNG? DS9/TNG movies? Voyager? All have different capabilities, some of which are less technological and more every bit as technobabble as SW technology.
Not because of the length of travel time, it was because she was going to be hiding out for an extended period.
That isn't explained, all we hear is that Anakin is supposed to protect Padme.
Did you miss the part of the movie where they SHOWED Anakin and Padme staying on Naboo for an extended period? I'll grant you, those scenes were pretty awful, but they were there.
Rather than boil water with fire and mix in leaves like some kind of barbarian, the Federation finds it much more efficient to convert some of the ship's excess energy to matter.
I remember seeing an interview with the Captain of the USS Nimitz (a nuclear carrier). He mentioned that his top speed was 30 knots. But that he could only sustain that for... 20 years or so. Nuclear carrier y'know.
The Enterprise can spare 5 megatons of energy to make tea for each and every crewmember.
The Empire is not even playing on their level. It's not just coal dreadnoughts vs nuclear subs, it's more like sailing galleys vs nuclear carriers.
How does this get buried with no responses? This, combined with everything stated about FTL strafing runs, leaves this as a non-debate.
Actually, the game ender goes like this: The Federation does some in depth research about the personnel of the Empire, collecting everything from assignments to duty stations. They go to all the planets of the Empire, use the transporters to obtain the patterns of the sisters of all the Imperial ships' officers. Fly up, beam copies of them aboard the ship that houses their siblings, and when they open mouth kiss their siblings (This is canon, after all. It appeared on film.) the Federation ships use the distraction to take the Imperial fleet apart. Finis.
Sure, when the generation ships the Federation would need to use to REACH the SW galaxy finally get there in five hundred years or so. In the meantime Palpatine has already manipulated the various factions of the ST galaxy to fight to exhaustion and then either welcomed him as peacemaker (think an intergalactic 'Federation' to preserve peace)... or died in the war.
Which has no evidence, and directly contradicts other examples of hyperdrive being extremely fast.
There are hyperdrive classes, that's why the Falcon is stupidly fast relative to everything else in Star Wars. Though we don't know what ".5 past lightspeed" actually is.
For what it's worth the old West End game has classes of Hyperdrive with lower numbers being faster. It a trip takes 1 day with a class 1 drive, it takes 2 days with a class 2 drive, 5 days with a class 5 drive etc. Most ships, in addition to a main drive had a backup class 10 drive as well. So if your drive went down you could still get somewhere, just not all that fast.
The Falcon has a Class .5 drive, which more or less makes the .5 past light speed line work. More or less.
There's also the arguments that either Han was spouting nonsense because he doesn't know what's he's talking about, or he was spouting nonsense to see if the rubes he'd picked up were smart enough to get it. In that version the farmboy is probably eating it all up while the former Jedi is silently laughing his ass off
I seem to remember Ben rolling his eyes at that point...
Because it isn't a very compelling argument. It makes major assumptions about how replicators work, and even the 5 megaton conclusion is still well short of the 200 gigatons of a single shot from a Clone Wars era troop transport. The fact that it's "just tea" doesn't mean anything, it's quite possible that, like the aircraft carrier he mentions, the Enterprise's power supply runs at a fixed output 24/7. So when not firing weapons or using higher levels of engine power there's a lot of energy left over for frivolous things like making tea the stupidly over-complicated way. But that doesn't necessarily get the peak output up to Star Wars levels.
But we never see those 200 gigaton shots or anything like that, we see ray guns that can damage but not destroy unshielded fighters and freighters.
Yes we do. We see a turbolaser shot vaporize an asteroid during the Hoth asteroid field sequence. Just like we see a pair of photon torpedoes do the same in the wormhole sequence of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
The weapons are demonstrated ON FILM as being comparable in destructive power. There is no arguing around this, it's RIGHT THERE ON FILM. So when ST weapons have trouble destroying a fighter or freighter, that just demonstrates that SW weapons of the same period will ALSO have a hard time destroying said fighter or freighter.
Of course, this assumes the weapon that is having trouble destroying freighters and/or fighters is the main battery turbolasers mounted on those turrets flanking the superstructure, and not the secondary batteries along the rim of the ship, which we see firing in RotJ at Endor. It may be a hit from a primary batter would vaporize the fighter with ease... and the Imperials didn't use them because they wanted prisoners to interrogate. Or maybe the primaries do, indeed, have major problems targeting a small ship; this is assumed in the RPG, but never explicitly stated anywhere in the movies.
It also assumes that it was the main battery vaporizing that asteroid and not a secondary battery. If it was a secondary battery, well, one can assume the main battery would be a LOT more powerful than the secondaries, and that means the Federation is in a lot more trouble.
I'll grant you Next Gen stuff is probably more potent. But as so much else in this discussion, there's no way to prove HOW MUCH more potent. And if we're going to argue eras... how much damage might those heavy cannon on the Dreadnaught or Snoke's flagship do, especially at the very short dogfighting ranges Star Trek ships prefer to fight at instead of at the VERY LONG range (for both universes) we see them used at in TLJ?
The brute force is exaggerated though. Just look at the MF running from an ISD for quite a long time. Being shot the whole time by a ship 1000 times larger than it - not being destroyed. In startrek a few photon torpedos would have destroyed such a pathetic ship.
You assume they WANTED to destroy the Millennium Falcon. Given that Darth Vader EXPLICITLY ordered Boba Fett to capture them ALIVE, I think it's safe to assume he also issued the same orders to the forces under his direct command.
I don't know about you, but if I commanded an ISD under Vader, or even was a gunnery officer under Vader, I would NOT want to have to report back to him saying 'yeah, we blew them up so they wouldn't get away.' In fact, I'd go well out of my way to make sure I MISSED with every shot just to be safe. The gunners who DID hit the Falcon were taking a big risk with their own lives...
Now if numbers count- one planet from Star Wars, Kamino, can clone 200,000 of those Space Wizards every decade. If the Federation can't win in the first decade, we could have an army of Space Wizards.
Heck, an army of cloned bounty hunters killed the last army of Space Wizards in Star Wars. What could you do with that many Space Wizards?
Just Tony wrote: You use the asteroid as a constant, but we also don't know the exact dimensions of asteroid compared to each starship, or compared to each other. Nor do we know the composition of said asteroids. For all you know, the ST:TMP asteroid could have been tungsten or something as fragile as sulfur. Should we assume that, since you're a rabid Warsie with no ability to look at things objectively that the Trek asteroid was tissue paper the size of a suitcase while the ESB asteroid was the size of an aircraft carrier and made out of diamond?
Wow, "warsie", I haven't heard that one in a long time. Perhaps you have your own calculations for the scenes in question?
ANY calculations are useless with this many variables. What constants do we have in this equation, really? The size of the asteroid that's about to hit the Enterprise. I don't have speakers on the work computer, but I'm pretty sure they either mention the size of the asteroid or the mass of the asteroid. If they mentioned both, we'd have some good data to go by, but I'll have to look it back up with sound later. Anything else? Approximate energy needed to pulverize a solid piece of iron? Maybe. Size of the ESB asteroid? Nope. Composition of said asteroids? Nope. We don't have nearly enough data to make that a realistic comparison. I can see that, it's why I'm not a Trekkie despite being a Trek fan. You, however, are trying to use a formula that has a +/- in exponents. It's unrealistic and driven by fanboyism. That's why I said "Warsie".
Another thought: the Enterprise only used torpedoes because the warp drive malfunction made phaser fire impossible. So basically all Trek weaponry can destroy asteroids.
Peregrine wrote:
We also know that power can be redirected from any nonessential systems on a Starfleet starship upon command and used to increase power and performance of other systems. So even IF they were limited to 10 gigatons (which is a fraction of the power that a starship can produce) it would be child's play for them to redirect power to weapons and slice through the IDS like it was tissue paper.
That is not how it works. You can't just assume that component limits do not exist. For example, you can build a circuit that delivers the entire power supplied to your house through a single light bulb but that doesn't mean you can successfully increase its brightness to any arbitrary level.
And even delivering 100% of that 10 gigaton value to its guns, saving nothing for movement or defense (IOW, committing suicide to fire a shot), the Star Trek ship is still only getting 5% of the firepower of a single shot from a Clone Wars era transport. That's at least probably relevant on the scale of Star Wars combat and could maybe do damage eventually, but it's far short of effortlessly killing a star destroyer.
Except we've seen specific examples of EXACTLY that. Increased shield strength from redirected power? Yep. Tractor beam strength changed from redirected power? Yep. Weapon strength changed from redirected power? Yep. Hell, we've seen them modify the cool see through colored plastic thingies to increase output of whatever device they are using. It's not hard to see how they COULD get the weapons to overcharge, though it's not something sustainable, typically.
Also, where did the 10 gigaton value come from?
Not only that, you're also making some base assumptions about the armor rating of ISDs. Hand phasers can vaporize metal at maximum setting, why do you assume that a similar strike against ISD armor wouldn't net similar results? Is it magic armor? This is another example of where you're letting your personal fan feelings prevent objectivity. It's like all those DC fans that refuse to accept that Captain America can and would beat Batman.
Peregrine wrote:
So basically you dismiss everything from Trek as technobabble, but accept everything from a franchise built around space wizards with laser swords? Wait, sorry, plasma swords? That's what we call an unbiased analysis...
Yes, of course I dismiss technobabble as good writing. Star Wars has fantasy elements, but it just takes them for granted and doesn't over-explain them. It's a lightsaber, but we hear far more about the philosophy and history of the weapon than some nonsense "explanation" of how it works. Meanwhile Star Trek is entire episodes of that cringe-worthy "midichlorians" scene. I mean, which do you think is better writing:
Star Wars: "Enemy ship! Open fire!"
Star Trek: "The enemy appears to be using an inverse tachyon phase array to modulate their plasma signature! We must reverse polarize our warp core to produce a subspace energy field that will allow us to lock on to their ship!"
Kirk: *shoots the technobabble officer, sleeps with your mom* "DIE KLINGON S! OPEN FIRE!"
The one that is science fiction, as opposed to straight fantasy. Nothing about SW delves into the scientific realm, not even any sort of scientific base for what their technology does. I doubt Lucas thought that far into it. Trek at least goes for some semblance of science behind what it does. It may be unrealistically portrayed, but at least there is a base to build on. Magic plasma swords because magic plasma swords is far worse writing.
Rather than boil water with fire and mix in leaves like some kind of barbarian, the Federation finds it much more efficient to convert some of the ship's excess energy to matter.
I remember seeing an interview with the Captain of the USS Nimitz (a nuclear carrier). He mentioned that his top speed was 30 knots. But that he could only sustain that for... 20 years or so. Nuclear carrier y'know.
The Enterprise can spare 5 megatons of energy to make tea for each and every crewmember.
The Empire is not even playing on their level. It's not just coal dreadnoughts vs nuclear subs, it's more like sailing galleys vs nuclear carriers.
How does this get buried with no responses? This, combined with everything stated about FTL strafing runs, leaves this as a non-debate.
Actually, the game ender goes like this: The Federation does some in depth research about the personnel of the Empire, collecting everything from assignments to duty stations. They go to all the planets of the Empire, use the transporters to obtain the patterns of the sisters of all the Imperial ships' officers. Fly up, beam copies of them aboard the ship that houses their siblings, and when they open mouth kiss their siblings (This is canon, after all. It appeared on film.) the Federation ships use the distraction to take the Imperial fleet apart. Finis.
Sure, when the generation ships the Federation would need to use to REACH the SW galaxy finally get there in five hundred years or so. In the meantime Palpatine has already manipulated the various factions of the ST galaxy to fight to exhaustion and then either welcomed him as peacemaker (think an intergalactic 'Federation' to preserve peace)... or died in the war.
Assuming, of course, wormholes or assistance from one of the omnipotent beings of the Trek universe didn't expedite things. I could easily see Q flinging Picard into the Star Wars galaxy simply to see how he'd react to the situation.
Vulcan wrote: Yes we do. We see a turbolaser shot vaporize an asteroid during the Hoth asteroid field sequence. Just like we see a pair of photon torpedoes do the same in the wormhole sequence of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I couldn't remember it being two torpedoes, so I pulled up the video of the scene on youtube here at work. It's one torpedo.
Vulcan wrote: The weapons are demonstrated ON FILM as being comparable in destructive power. There is no arguing around this, it's RIGHT THERE ON FILM. So when ST weapons have trouble destroying a fighter or freighter, that just demonstrates that SW weapons of the same period will ALSO have a hard time destroying said fighter or freighter.
Of course, this assumes the weapon that is having trouble destroying freighters and/or fighters is the main battery turbolasers mounted on those turrets flanking the superstructure, and not the secondary batteries along the rim of the ship, which we see firing in RotJ at Endor. It may be a hit from a primary batter would vaporize the fighter with ease... and the Imperials didn't use them because they wanted prisoners to interrogate. Or maybe the primaries do, indeed, have major problems targeting a small ship; this is assumed in the RPG, but never explicitly stated anywhere in the movies.
It also assumes that it was the main battery vaporizing that asteroid and not a secondary battery. If it was a secondary battery, well, one can assume the main battery would be a LOT more powerful than the secondaries, and that means the Federation is in a lot more trouble.
I'll grant you Next Gen stuff is probably more potent. But as so much else in this discussion, there's no way to prove HOW MUCH more potent. And if we're going to argue eras... how much damage might those heavy cannon on the Dreadnaught or Snoke's flagship do, especially at the very short dogfighting ranges Star Trek ships prefer to fight at instead of at the VERY LONG range (for both universes) we see them used at in TLJ?
You're also assuming it took every ounce of destructive force of that torpedo to get the job done. It could be argued either way, so we still have no conclusive data to compare that holds up to scrutiny.
Sure, when the generation ships the Federation would need to use to REACH the SW galaxy finally get there in five hundred years or so. In the meantime Palpatine has already manipulated the various factions of the ST galaxy to fight to exhaustion and then either welcomed him as peacemaker (think an intergalactic 'Federation' to preserve peace)... or died in the war.
Well if we're worried about that then the Federation already won seeing as the Empire ceased to exist 'a long time ago'.
We'd really have to talk about how the Federation will do against the Much Newer Republic or the 23rd Order
Sure, when the generation ships the Federation would need to use to REACH the SW galaxy finally get there in five hundred years or so. In the meantime Palpatine has already manipulated the various factions of the ST galaxy to fight to exhaustion and then either welcomed him as peacemaker (think an intergalactic 'Federation' to preserve peace)... or died in the war.
Well if we're worried about that then the Federation already won seeing as the Empire ceased to exist 'a long time ago'.
We'd really have to talk about how the Federation will do against the Much Newer Republic or the 23rd Order
Or- by the time that happens, it's a Battlestar Galactica style time twist. The Galactic Empire destroyed the galaxy (using a succession of Death Galaxies), and eradicated most alien lifeforms before imploding. Then, a group of idealistic pacifist last survivors made it to a galaxy far, far, away and founded the Federation.
AlmightyWalrus wrote: Are we still ignoring the 690 gigaton figure for photon torpedoes?
Depends. Are we going to ignore the turbolasers destroying an asteriod just like the photon torpeodes do?
No one's been ignoring that, so I don't know where that argument's coming from. The argument was that Star Trek couldn't hold a candle towards the Empire because the Empire had 200 gigaton turbolasers while Photon Torpedoes were a mere 64 megaton. The existence of the 690 gigaton figure for Photon Torpedoes was ignored by Peregrine until I'd pointed it out three times, and then it was hand-waved away as being "inconsistent". No one's been ignoring the turbolasers.
Peregrine wrote: Because it isn't a very compelling argument. It makes major assumptions about how replicators work, and even the 5 megaton conclusion is still well short of the 200 gigatons of a single shot from a Clone Wars era troop transport. The fact that it's "just tea" doesn't mean anything, it's quite possible that, like the aircraft carrier he mentions, the Enterprise's power supply runs at a fixed output 24/7. So when not firing weapons or using higher levels of engine power there's a lot of energy left over for frivolous things like making tea the stupidly over-complicated way. But that doesn't necessarily get the peak output up to Star Wars levels.
This, combined with everything stated about FTL strafing runs, leaves this as a non-debate.
The visual aspect is so it’s fun to watch. If the weapons are shown in real FTL we wouldn’t see them which would be boring to watch. Star Wars does the same things the lasers would be invisible to the human eye but are slowed down visually for good TV/film.
I have just started rewatching Star Trek and have lost count of how many FTL battles I have seen. How can you argue against it? Torpedo’s come in a lot of different versions some unable to make use of FTL and some clearly have FTL. If you listen carefully they sometimes declare which mark of torpedo is being fired and change the mark of torpedo being used. I have seen weapons in FTL hitting none FTL targets, none FTL hitting FTL and FTL to FTL battles. In one noticeable battle a powerful torpedo was about to hit the Enterprise which went into warp to try to escape and the torpedo jumped into warp after them and hit. In another case they took out the explosive weapons and use the FTL torpedoes to carry a passenger very fast from a Star base to a ship. The weapons have been very clearly described in show as FTL and used as FTL.
The other thing about Star Trek Defence systems is they run on the principle it doesn’t matter how powerful or how much energy the weapon uses it’s the type of energy that matters. The shields/hull can absorb unlimited amounts of damage if configured against that type.
In the show they don’t even need shields to defend against lasers the deflector just deflect them without harm when shields are down. Another example they use Metaphasic shielding to withstand the pressure, radiation and energy of a star's corona which is far higher energy levels than turbolasers. Shields are often configured to be immune to certain weapons or certain energy types its a key part of Star Trek. Star Trek use phasors as lasers and Ion weapons are seen as obsolete and harmless no matter the power level.
It seems to me all the Federation have to do is create artificially gravity wells and stay in FTL and they could destroy the Empire without firing a single weapon. The gravity wells will shut down all the major hyperspace lanes and without them the Empire would collapse. Its also been established that gravity wells don't effect warp drives but stop Star Wars ships from FTL. Fed ships can use gravity well weapons to effectively disable Empire ships and then the fed ships can stay in FTL and pick off the Empire ships one at a time safely. Not that they need to as a bunch of cloaked Klingons dropping artificially gravity wells on major hyperlanes would disrepute the Empire.
I think there's also a difference between STOS and the other series on power levels. In STOS nukes are no biggie, ships routinely vaporize other ships when Shields are down, have the capacity to bombard all major cities on a planet, can stun everyone on a multiblock area, a hand phaser can kill thousands or one shot the side of a building, etc.
Kilkrazy wrote: I don't think Emporer Palatine would be able to con the Federation, because Commander Troi would sense hostility in him.
Commander Troi generally could only 'sense hostility' after whoever she was sensing finished threatening to blow up the Enterprise, usually while they were foaming at the mouth.
Palpatine, on the other hand, concealed that he was a Sith Lord from every. single. Jedi. Master. for. years. And not by keeping them at a distance, mind you; he interacted with many of them on a regular basis.
Not ONE of them had a clue.
Lwaxana, on the other hand.... maybe. Especially if she found him 'intriguing'...
The problem with Palpatine is that he lost any subtlety he had after RotS. The Empire is pretty much build around being evil for evil's sake. He is also so arrogant that he takes massive unnecessary risks because being wrong isn't something he can imagine.
Kilkrazy wrote: I don't think Emporer Palatine would be able to con the Federation, because Commander Troi would sense hostility in him.
Commander Troi generally could only 'sense hostility' after whoever she was sensing finished threatening to blow up the Enterprise, usually while they were foaming at the mouth.
Palpatine, on the other hand, concealed that he was a Sith Lord from every. single. Jedi. Master. for. years. And not by keeping them at a distance, mind you; he interacted with many of them on a regular basis.
Not ONE of them had a clue.
Lwaxana, on the other hand.... maybe. Especially if she found him 'intriguing'...
Yeah, but the prequel jedi were written so poorly that he could have been dancing around the jedi temple with a top hat, monocle and lightsaber cane whilst shooting lightning and singing about how great it is to be a sith and they'd still have managed to not realise.
Kilkrazy wrote: I don't think Emporer Palatine would be able to con the Federation, because Commander Troi would sense hostility in him.
Commander Troi generally could only 'sense hostility' after whoever she was sensing finished threatening to blow up the Enterprise, usually while they were foaming at the mouth.
Palpatine, on the other hand, concealed that he was a Sith Lord from every. single. Jedi. Master. for. years. And not by keeping them at a distance, mind you; he interacted with many of them on a regular basis.
Not ONE of them had a clue.
Lwaxana, on the other hand.... maybe. Especially if she found him 'intriguing'...
Yeah, but the prequel jedi were written so poorly that he could have been dancing around the jedi temple with a top hat, monocle and lightsaber cane whilst shooting lightning and singing about how great it is to be a sith and they'd still have managed to not realise.
True, but let's face it, many a Federation starship crew has been just as poorly written, leading to their demise in quite foolish ways. It's only the 'main character' crews who demonstrate any real competence, much less excellence, on screen.
This would lead to the Empire giving Star Fleet quite the drubbing until the 'current series' captain showed up to save the day, with technobabble and basic competence.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Romulan Ale is contraband, so we may never know.
Gotta love how it's illegal but literally every ship has some on board for the weekly shindig. I have always wondered - are they replicating it? Who has the authority?
Xenomancers wrote: Gotta love how it's illegal but literally every ship has some on board for the weekly shindig. I have always wondered - are they replicating it? Who has the authority?
I always figured it was illegal in the same way that Cuban cigars are in the US; meaning "illegalish".
Which was prearranged, as they were going to Naboo to hide from assassins for an extended period. That is, an extended period ON NABOO, not in transit.
If hyperdrive is so fast that transit time is not a consideration, why can she not zip back to Coruscant for an important vote? Attempts were made on her life, sure, but then stay in orbit on a starship crewed by people you trust (who you can pick up on Naboo) and use the HoloNet to appear live on the Senate floor. Hell, just use the HoloNet to appear live on Senate floor from Naboo. Palpatine was using something like that method to appear allover the galaxy.
Granted this is the Naboo government that couldn't afford a spare T-14 hyperdrive generator for the royal starship, but a junk dealer on Tatooine somehow has one; so money may be an issue.
Peregrine wrote: Because it isn't a very compelling argument. It makes major assumptions about how replicators work, and even the 5 megaton conclusion is still well short of the 200 gigatons of a single shot from a Clone Wars era troop transport.
Do you not understand how ridiculous 200 gigatons is?
The Tzar Bomba was .05 gigatons, extrapolations for a 1 gigaton bomb dropped on the UK include all of Western Europe, tidal waves and the alteration of orbits.
The number you're talking about means that a stray shot blows up a planet, at best, and it is therefore ridiculous because it means the Death Star has no reason to exist.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Romulan Ale is contraband, so we may never know.
Gotta love how it's illegal but literally every ship has some on board for the weekly shindig. I have always wondered - are they replicating it? Who has the authority?
Guess this settles things, no one ever risked jail for Bloo Milk.
Been off in a field scrapping over the weekend, hence I’ve not weighed in.
But I was randomly perusing Facebook, and clocked a Star Trek alien called a ‘Neptunian’ which I wasn’t familiar with. Turns out, it was an invention of the Mego Toy Company.
In finding that out, (thanks, Google!), I found this nugget.
With that in mind, we can work out the MPH of Warp 4.5, as that’s a canon from Enterprise. Now. According to the Internets, there’s 2.7 billion miles between the two. So at Warp 4.5, and not allowing for any turning speed (because Enterprise sucks, so I’ve not watched the episode), that’s 5.4 billion miles in 6 minutes, or, unless my maths is off, 54,000,000,000 MPH, yes?
Now what I’m not sure is whether or not Warp Speeds are ‘ranked’ in the same way as the Richter Scale - so Warp 5 being twice as fast as Warp 4.
Is there anyway we can use that canonical info to work out the top speed of Warp 9.9?
Yes they do, if I remember correctly and I may/probably be horribly wrong, in the old system each warp was a logical progression. Warp 1 was Speed of light, warp 2 was twice that etc. However with the advent of TNG they realised that the Federation was so big it would take 50 odd years to get to the Romulan border (Courtesy of the StarTrek RPG I think) so the warp system became a power system.
Warp 1 was the speed of light, warp 2 was (2*2) four times the speed of light, warp 3 was (3*3*3) nine times the speed of light and so on.
We also have a Gallifrey light transport jumping to lightspeed and going SPLAT! on the hull of Vader's Imperial Star Destroyer in Rogue One. So I think the mass and structure of the impacting object and the object hit might have a weee bit to do with it...
As I recall from the old technical manuals, Warp Speed in TOS was a cube function. Warp one was 1*1*1=1; lightspeed. Warp 2 was 2*2*2=8 times lightspeed; Warp 9 was 9*9*9= 729 times lightspeed. The transwarp drive could hit warp 14; 2,744 times lightspeed.
After the first season of TNG, they released the TNG technical manual. The new Enterprise used an Ultra-warp drive drive which functioned on the fifth power. Warp one was still lightspeed, but Warp two was 2*2*2*2*2= 32 times lightspeed, and Warp 9 was 59,049 times lightspeed. Call it 60,000 light years per year of travel.
The Milky Way is around 100,000 light-years across, so the Enterprise-D could, in theory, travel across the galaxy in back well within a five-year mission.
The trick is, this is directly contradicted in at least one episode and the entire Voyager series.
Contrast this with the Millennium Falcon, which covers half a galaxy in less than 18 hours. A lot less. Even if the SW galaxy is quarter the diameter the size of the Milky Way (25,000 light years), and the Falcon is ten times the speed of an ISD in hyperspace, and the Falcon actually takes the full 18 hours to travel the distance (All quite pessimistic assumptions, don't you think?)...
Well, the ISD that might theoretically have followed the Falcon just went 12,500 light years in 180 hours - 7.5 days. So that year-long trip for the Ultrawarp Enterprise D at 59,049 times the speed of light? An ISD makes it in 36 days; a full ten TIMES faster.
And that's the pessimistic calculation. In the West End Games version the ISD has a x2 hyperdrive, which means the x0.5 hyperdrive on the Falcon is only four times as fast. In the Thrawn books an ISD can make .4 past lightspeed, but we have no information as to whether that is faster or slower than .5 past lightspeed. So it's possible (but unlikely) that the military-grade hyperdrives are actually FASTER than the Falcon. And it's quite possible that instead of being smaller than the Milky Way, the SW galaxy is more like galaxy IC 1101, at twenty times the diameter of the Milky Way.
Indeed, the very speed of the hyperdrives combined with the large amount of unexplored space in SW canon argues for a much larger galaxy; however fast you can travel somewhere it still takes time to explore and chart a cubic parsec...
Real World-ish Tech (fusion power, sublight travel) - 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Expanse, Earthforce in Babylon 5 (since they got FTL from the Centauri)
The premise itself is a cliche XD
The Empire is a racist, mono-culture dictatorship against people who have a proven track record of sciencing their way past vastly superior forces and minor gods. If anyone's going to be reverse engineering stuff, coming up with new defenses, hacking the enemy's systems etc. it'll be the Federation. 
ing idiots who are too ignorant of their own abilities to use their ships properly, in which case they lose the war no matter what.
