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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.

The Plot wins everytime, as well as magic.
At a loss of anything intelligent to say I will just add this;

The Federation has morals.

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

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.

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:

http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/FiveMinutes.html

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
The Federation has morals..

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.

Send in an Astromech. Watch it switch off the Federation's computers.

Enjoy flying by hand, cretins!

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.

 LordofHats wrote:

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.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:


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.

Yeah. Still kind of fun though

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.

And let us not forget the humble Ion Cannon.

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!

 Frazzled wrote:

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 Empire had evil space wizards capable of taking down ships on their own and a planet sized planet destroying ship.

Gonna go with the evil space wizards, hands down.

Its a simple case of mathematics.

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.

 djones520 wrote:

 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.

Yes but imagine the epic speeches Picard could have, Churchill like in defiance, at least before Q kicks the EMPIRE back to their own Galaxy.

I rather think Q would defect. Far more fun to be had siding with The Evil Empire.

Q doesn't strike me as one who is into authority figures.

Interesting that in the ST universe there are at least 3 races that could wipe out the Empire with little more that a thought, and that's just STOS.

 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.