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 Riquende wrote:

 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.

Honestly, I'm out at this point.

 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.

Federation, the first timelords!

What does "first" mean to a Timelord?

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
What does "first" mean to a Timelord?

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
What does "first" mean to a Timelord?

Don't bother me with your timey wimey!

 djones520 wrote:

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.

And the fact that they can just run loops around the Imperial ships and shoot them with impunity.

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.

 Vulcan wrote:

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)




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 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.

 Riquende wrote:

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?

 Tannhauser42 wrote:

 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.

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

Evil Space Wizards people. You send somebody like Darth Maul or Revan. Darth Bane or Vader.

Yeah, Federation is gone.

 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.

 Riquende wrote:

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?

 Riquende wrote:

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.

Cheers

Andrew

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.

 Peregrine wrote:

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.