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Do blasters travel at the speed of light or slower?

Kylo's ability to catch them implies slower, but of course Force Users can see the future etc.

Well, they're plasma weapons rather than lasers. It's a superheated gas being projected, not light.

The Empire can't pilot or shoot anything well. In all of the Star Trek series and movies I don't remember a single time two capital ships accidentally ran into each other. The Empire has done it twice to my memory.

Edge to the Federation.

Now, here’s a thought.....

In Star Trek, one ship will know when another is charging Weapons, or attempting to acquire a lock.

Whereas in Star Wars, the most we see is a simple crosshairs type screen, which tells the pilot the optimum time to fire - other than that, they’re firing over open sights.

Why does this matter? Well, those seemingly nippy Federation Fighters will likely be able to computer plot a suitably evasive course once they know the enemy ship is acquiring a weapons lock on them.

Against The Empire? There’s nothing to detect. No sensors, no reading the opposing computer. And they appear positively lumbering compared to TIE craft - TIEs we see doing tight manoeuvres, Federation Fighters more sweeping.

Now of course, that’s not to say Federation Fighters are therefore relatively slow and lumbering, just that TIEs appear inherently more nimble craft. That could be because Federation Fighters have never needed to perform such tight turns and that - just we’ve never seen them have need to do such, not when they’re blowing chunks out of a Capital Ship with only a few Phaser/Disruptor Banks.

Against an Imperial Capital Ship, such as the relatively humble Imperial Class Star Destoyer? There’s a lot firepower to attempt to dodge.

Sure, you can do as the Rebellion did, and mitigate the vast majority by flying your assault craft ‘nap of the land’, as close to the ISD’s superstructure as possible, before popping up to blast away at the chosen target. But you’ve got to get there first...Rebellion included, and were therefore trained by, Clone Wars Veterans. The Federation? No such experience. And as The Battle Of Britain showed us, experience counts for a lot. Doesn’t matter how good your ship is, if your foe is simply a superior pilot, better versed in given strategies.

Federation fighters just fight at warp speed. Can't see them, can't track them, the SW weapons are literally slower than the Fed fighters move.

Imagine the Yamato(ISD) in a battle with an F22 (any federation ship with warp drive and weaponry). This is pretty close to the level of dominance the federation would have over the empire.

 Frazzled wrote:
Federation fighters just fight at warp speed. Can't see them, can't track them, the SW weapons are literally slower than the Fed fighters move.

Imperial Ships don’t travel at Warp Speed. Ergo, you’d just overshoot them. Every. Single. Time.

At least, so far as I’m aware, there’s no ‘documented’ example of a vessel at Warp attacking a vessel at Impulse?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Federation fighters just fight at warp speed. Can't see them, can't track them, the SW weapons are literally slower than the Fed fighters move.

Imperial Ships don’t travel at Warp Speed. Ergo, you’d just overshoot them. Every. Single. Time.

At least, so far as I’m aware, there’s no ‘documented’ example of a vessel at Warp attacking a vessel at Impulse?

There are multiple actually.

But if we went with no FTL combat then we have more maneuverable tie fighters vs. Fed fighters that target better and fire antimatter bombs. I would give it to the Tie fighters based on rule of cool.

Do the Federation fighters have the 360 degree phaser arcs like the larger ships? I know the phase cannons and all, but don't they also have phaser banks?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Federation fighters just fight at warp speed. Can't see them, can't track them, the SW weapons are literally slower than the Fed fighters move.

Imperial Ships don’t travel at Warp Speed. Ergo, you’d just overshoot them. Every. Single. Time.

At least, so far as I’m aware, there’s no ‘documented’ example of a vessel at Warp attacking a vessel at Impulse?

No - there are several examples.

 Formosa wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

 Col Hammer wrote:
Empire has a multitude of planetkillers that can only be taken out by snub fighters.

Federation has no snub fighters...?

Federation has fighters, featured prominently in DS9.

And unlike Imperial fighters they'd have FTL, shields, teleportation...

Advanced sensors, torpedo tubes for quantum or photons, ablative armour, pulse cannons and onmi directional phasers.

The Star Trek ship guide shows these fighters (mini starships) to be quite formidable, they were designed as a response to hideki class and dominion scarab class attack ships.

I’m kind of curious to how imperial star ships will even be able to his the more nimble Trek ships, don’t they use directed energy plasma cannons and not lasers ?

Invade in the TOS era.

When Kirk is in his prime?

The Empire wouldn't stand a chance.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Do blasters travel at the speed of light or slower?

Kylo's ability to catch them implies slower, but of course Force Users can see the future etc.

Blasters fire bursts of tibanna gas in a plasma state. The shots travel between 80 and 120 mph, based on calculations from film footage. Roughly at arrow speed, but with quite a bit more impact energy and with secondary burns.


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 Frazzled wrote:
Federation fighters just fight at warp speed. Can't see them, can't track them, the SW weapons are literally slower than the Fed fighters move.

And we only ever 'see' stuff at warp speed firing at sublight targets in the TOS era; they apparently forget how by TNG.

Or the warp speed fighters hit a gravitic anomaly and abruptly drop out of warp right in an ISD's sights, thanks to your friendly neighborhood Interdictor Cruiser...

(And yes, ST warp drives have been affected by various 'gravitic anomalies' in canon.)


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 Crimson Devil wrote:
When Kirk is in his prime?

The Empire wouldn't stand a chance.

That depends. If the Emperor has done his research he'll have Kirk occupied with a honey trap at the crucial moment...

Who promptly falls in love with Kirk and helps him save the Enterprise and the Federation. Probably by destroying the Deathstar with a scratch built cannon.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Do blasters travel at the speed of light or slower?

Kylo's ability to catch them implies slower, but of course Force Users can see the future etc.

Blasters definitely do not travel at the speed of light. They would not be visible otherwise. They do not even travel at the speed of sound, or they would not be so easily dodge-able. Every movie has them flying really slowly across the screen, so that the heroic main characters have time to dodge or deflect them, even if they are fired at nearly point blank ranges. It does not matter whether they can see the future. If it travels at the speed of sound, you would not physically be able to move fast enough, regardless of whether you know it is coming or not. At the ranges portrayed in the movies, with the speed of sound, the projectile would hit you in virtually the same instant as it left the barrel. Just like a bullet. You would not see it flying across the screen.

Well, if we go by that then Phasers are traveling at subsonic speeds too.

Federation attack fighter

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Federation_attack_fighter

When used by Starfleet from 2374 onward, the ship was equipped with several forward torpedo launchers and at least one phaser bank with two forward emitters. Captain Keogh referred to these vessels as "lightly armed shuttlecrafts," compared to the Dominion ships he expected to face. (DS9: "The Jem'Hadar") In keeping with its heritage, the ship was also used as a testbed and as a way to utilize foreign and salvaged equipment, and various runs of the ship were produced with experimental, improvised, and/or nonstandard weaponry.

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 Xenomancers wrote:
Imagine the Yamato(ISD) in a battle with an F22 (any federation ship with warp drive and weaponry). This is pretty close to the level of dominance the federation would have over the empire.

I prefer to think more like a 2018 Carrier group (with support like satellites) vs the navies of the world circa 1918. I would expect the carrier group to sink every WWI era ship with no losses.

 Crimson Devil wrote:
Who promptly falls in love with Kirk and helps him save the Enterprise and the Federation. Probably by destroying the Deathstar with a scratch built cannon.

All right, you got me on that one.

 Just Tony wrote:
Do the Federation fighters have the 360 degree phaser arcs like the larger ships? I know the phase cannons and all, but don't they also have phaser banks?

They do in the old technical readout but i didn’t see them used in the series

So basically the ONLY thing the Empire has going for it is one space wizard and hyperspace being potentially faster than warp, though we don't have ANY distances from Star Wars to go by. Not that it'd matter anyway, as a parsec is a measure of distance and it's used in Star Wars as a measure of time.

In the new Han Solo movie parsec is measurement of distance.

The route through the Kessel smog cloud is 20 parsecs long, but Solo takes a short cut through the smoke (only 12 parsecs long).




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I don't understand the "Federation ships always fight in warp space" claim.

Every show I've watched, the opposing fleets stand 100-200 meters of each other and move really slowly while firing phasers at each other.

The Super duper evasive maneuvre "Picard Theta one Beta" (or whatever) always makes the ship bank really slowly a few degrees to port or starboard. That maneuvre is enough to make the enemy miss their shots...

Phaser ranges are nothing to write home about. The ships need to be point blank to hit anything.

The torpedoes always seem to be fired in a shotgun spread to be able to hit other ships even when the opposing ships look like they are sitting stand still (relative to each other).

It's the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs. I've outrun Imperial starships. Not the local bulk cruisers, mind you. I mean the big Correlian ships.



CLEARLY meant as a measure of time. The new movie was probably a simple matter of someone with a little OCD saying "Hey, that's a measure of distance. We need to make that make sense."


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Also, your average Starfleet ship is roughly 150 meters in length, so I'd say your description of close quarters combat is off a bit. In Wrath of Khan the fighting in the initial skirmish was close because Khan was setting up an ambush of sorts. Look at the rest of the battle, the ships are no closer than 5 ship lengths to each other until the Enterprise rises after the Reliant passes over. THEN the shots are happening at about that distance. Other episodes and movies have shots fired at distance as well.

 Just Tony wrote:
So basically the ONLY thing the Empire has going for it is one space wizard and hyperspace being potentially faster than warp...

Well, the space wizard, space wizard's apprentice and the teams of minor space wizards like Inquisitors (if they can be bothered to get involved) and...

Hyperspace being orders magnitude faster than warp, so that the Empire's strategic edge is insurmountable

Power generation capacities so far in advance of the Federation that whole Federation fleets would be unlikely to put even a small strain on Imperial shielding, let alone being unable to dent the thickly armoured hulls

Weaponry, even on mere transport ships, with destructive power enough to render any Federation target a cloud of debris near instantly. But hey, at least there wouldn't be sparks flying out of the consoles

A numerical advantage so great that on the odd occasion an Enterprise-focused episode saw an Imperial ship get taken out by Treknobabble or Kirk-fu, the Imperial admiralty can just shrug their shoulders and call up more ships

Phasers can wreck planetary crusts with just a few volleys (well, Disruptors can. See DS9).

Power Generation? Not sure on your source for that. Not saying your wrong, just wanting recommended reading.

Honestly, quite a bit of Riquende's post there can be disputed simply because we have no idea if the metric used to measure Imperial capability is the same as the metric used to measure Federation capability. It'd be like comparing quantity from one vs mass from the other.

Federation are the heroes of Star Trek. Gal.Emp. is the villain of Star Wars.

There is no way for Empire to win in the end. Villains always loses to heroes eventually.

 Just Tony wrote:
So basically the ONLY thing the Empire has going for it is one space wizard and hyperspace being potentially faster than warp, though we don't have ANY distances from Star Wars to go by. Not that it'd matter anyway, as a parsec is a measure of distance and it's used in Star Wars as a measure of time.

I would also say production capacity.they we're able to build a very large fleet, and moon sized planet killers.


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 Col Hammer wrote:
Federation are the heroes of Star Trek. Gal.Emp. is the villain of Star Wars.

There is no way for Empire to win in the end. Villains always loses to heroes eventually.

We could compare the Empire to the Dominion. But the Dominion has star Destroyer sized battleships ND their production capacity would be substantially higher.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Federation attack fighter

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Federation_attack_fighter

When used by Starfleet from 2374 onward, the ship was equipped with several forward torpedo launchers and at least one phaser bank with two forward emitters. Captain Keogh referred to these vessels as "lightly armed shuttlecrafts," compared to the Dominion ships he expected to face. (DS9: "The Jem'Hadar") In keeping with its heritage, the ship was also used as a testbed and as a way to utilize foreign and salvaged equipment, and various runs of the ship were produced with experimental, improvised, and/or nonstandard weaponry.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Imagine the Yamato(ISD) in a battle with an F22 (any federation ship with warp drive and weaponry). This is pretty close to the level of dominance the federation would have over the empire.

I prefer to think more like a 2018 Carrier group (with support like satellites) vs the navies of the world circa 1918. I would expect the carrier group to sink every WWI era ship with no losses.

Yeah - that would be a larger scale engagement. I would expect that an F-22 with ATS missles or smart bombs could easily sink the Yamato without the Yammy even knowing it was there.

 Col Hammer wrote:

The Super duper evasive maneuvre "Picard Theta one Beta" (or whatever) always makes the ship bank really slowly a few degrees to port or starboard. That maneuvre is enough to make the enemy miss their shots...

In First Contact: Federation ships fly loops around a Borg cube, most of them get chewed up; but The Empire is not The Borg.

Star trek ships have something called an inertial dampner. This device essential makes the ship immune to inertia. Which means they can turn their ship and go whichever direction they want almost instantaneously. Startrek ships capital ships are far more manuverable than starwars capital ships.