Star Wars vs Star Trek

Or did they rip through the fabric of spacetime ( aka wormhole ) and traveled through it to travel through time?

If they did that then......wow, Star Trek wins period.

 

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Yes, and no. Mr. Anderson, like Mr. Wong, is an active member of the VS community who owns and operates his own site presenting an analytical examination of the general topic of ST-v-SW.net, with mostly his own work along with some guest authors, and notes and corrections made from guest commentary as applicable, and his conclusions tend towards the Star Trek side of things.

This is where they begin to diverge. Unlike Mr. Wong and his site (which is what I originally started following when I first dipped into the VS debates), Mr. Anderson takes a conservative scientific approach. He deliberately avoids jumping on extremely high figures and usually takes pains to give Wars the benefit of the doubt when reasonably possible. Not always, but he doesn't jump on spinning up the absolute bottom-end figures he can generate, and usually doesn't use the lowest end of the range his estimates cover for Wars figures. He also documents his figures quiet well (at least on the more developed pages; unlike Mr. Wong, Mr. Anderson devotes a relatively small percentage of his available time to the maintenance of his website).

Also unlike Mr. Wong, Mr. Anderson does not foster and promote a community of militantly rabid Trek fanboys, where the primary attack choice is ad hominem, vitriol and hostility. He DOES return in kind, and after over a decade (Mr. Anderson has been involved in these debates since the late '90s) of dealing with the attacks and threats of Mr. Wong and his community, Mr. Anderson pulls no punches and gives them no benefit of the doubt when it comes to courtesy, returning vitriol in kind, though he reached an agreement with a Mr. Poe a couple years back, and subsequently removed all negative references to Poe from the sections of his site listing the attacks he has received from the SDN crowd, and he criticizes the bashing of Wars fans in general without just cause.

To put this into some perspective here for behaviors and attitudes promoted by either, I am a product of ST-v-SW.net, and that general 'side' of the VS community. Ricrery is a product of SDN and its affiliates, and his behavior is very typical of the denizens of that community. The worst Mr. Anderson has generated against Mr. Wong and the denizens of SDN have been snide/self-superior comments on his own site and in private emails, and a general dismissal of that crowd. Mr. Wong and his community have produced multiple death threats against Mr. Anderson, deliberately tracked down and posted online his personal information and private and work contact information with the full knowledge that Mr. Anderson was dealing with a stalker at the time, and even wrote a murder fantasy where Wong and other notable members of his general community/alliance tracked down Mr. Anderson, brutally beat him into saying Star Wars was superior, and then murdered him.


Ultimately, the best way to judge either site is to look through them when you get the chance. Look at the data and calculations on ST-v-SW.net and compare them to the calcs on SDN. Or the raw data sources. The canonwars.com site is very well-documented.

Yes, it does. Wookiepedia is also heavily influenced by the SDN crowd, much like they took over SpaceBattles, and other sites.

*nods* I understand. Getting into that is complicated, and I agree that "author's intent" can get sticky. But we're not talking about the gist of the story the author intended to tell, we're talking about the fact that Saxton was a known VS debater before writing the ICS books, and that he consulted with Wong and other SDN denizens while writing the book. If I wrote an officially-licensed ST technical manual and consulted with pro-Trek VS debaters, it would be just as biased, especially if my intent was to create yields so high that Wars could never compete.

Yeah, I don't read many Trek books, either. I know enough about how the tech works that I have trouble reading books where authors get everything so horribly wrong...

Ugh... I know. That is the dumbest forum restriction I have ever encountered.

 

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At the same time, it's the guy who said:

Which is basically just as bad as the overzealous 40kers who think "stellar energy levels" means stellar luminosity wattage, if not worse ...

I think we'll have to agree to disagree, but when one's methodology is taking such quotes literally, taking one seriously is not plausible. No offense intended.

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It is? They seem more like the hyperinclusionist crowd (who cherish EVERY piece of SW trivia no matter how silly or downright retarded it is). Star Wars versus fans tend to want to ignore the more humorously underpowered parts of the EU.

You would arguably be "biased" but, assuming that Paramount changed the Trek canon policy to include tech manuals, I would still have to take your work seriously and look at it objectively. It would be a canon source, after all. "Bias" on part of the author doesn't really factor in when one uses suspension of disbelief to analyze the sources (although bias on part of a notional in-universe narrator might).

Well, now I'll soon have 20 posts at least so I don't have to bother with it ...

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How so? Ignoring the fanciful bit about dragons (we don't live in suns or fusion reactors } ; = 8 P ), the line nonetheless expressly states that "fusion furnaces [power] everything from starships to Podracers." THAT part is not garbage at all, nor is it affected by the fanciful children's fairytale about dragons in suns. The fanciful story is obviously a means of teaching young children that what powers Wars society is the same thing that powers a star (i.e. fusion), and while this doesn't reflect very well on the education standards of Tatooine (and possibly the Republic as a whole, though probably just Tatooine), it does nothing to negate the fact that fusion power was expressly stated to be the primary power generation method of the Galactic Republic. We can take the statement of fusion power at face-value while completely ignoring the fanciful fairytale about fusion dragons. Now, if Mr. Anderson had tried to ascertain the specific type of fusion/the fusion fuel and fusion cycle (and thus some more specific estimates of power generation capability) based on the dragon story, you would have a case, but he makes no such claim.

Perhaps they maintain dominance today; I haven't paid much attention to Wookiepedia in a long time. I do know that the SDN crowd is very pro-active and very vocal, and they seemed to have at least a significant presence in the Wookiepedia community at one time.

I see your position, and I think you see mine, and I think we both understand what each other is saying, but disagreeing on one or two key principles. Regardless, I think we both agree that the ridiculously-high yields of the AOTC:ICS books, and anywhere else they conflict with what can be established on-screen, is overruled by the 'higher canon' if we are using the SW:EU canon, or are not canon at all if we are using the OSW canon, so the point is largely moot (as my masters-in-philosophy friend would say, we're doing a lot of talking but not actually saying anything).

Huzzah! } : = 8 D

 

So, Illithi, I gave you a link, why haven't you responded to it? I mean, it is from this site you know.

 

Hmm? I probably missed it. Can you repost it? Thanks!

 

Here.

 

Okay, now what am I looking for again?

 

Star Wars firepower yields. Just read all of it.

 

As Paramount-Roddenberry Estate and LucasArts/George Lucas have stated specifically, since both Star Trek AND Star Wars books frequently contradict each other, among other things, NONE OF THEM ARE CANON. Period!

 

That's funny...

In fact, C Canon and all of EU is canon unless it directly contradicts the movies.

 

I hate to say it Apocalypse, but he's right. The only way EU is not Canon is if it contradicts the movies.

 

Not to mention - when RSA/Mr. Anderson started posting links to the attacks against him by the SD.net community, SD.net took it upon themselves to REDIRECT said links to both pornographic websites AND virus-laden websites.

It is the reason I will NEVER go there without first sequestering my computer from the rest of my home network... I cannot trust anyone that pulls stunts like that.

 

It says children are told so. It's not a statement of fact by an omniscient narrator that this is actually the way it is. The very idea that the same kind of engine powers a small podracer as the huge multi-kilometer starships in the universe (let alone the Death Star!) is highly questionable at best. (And to boot, aren't podracers chemically powered?) I may have been a little harsh but basically I stand by what I said. That passage shouldn't be interpreted literally.

I don't think the onscreen visuals actually contradict the ICS, at least not on the major issues of debate (ie, starship accelerations and firepower). I'll agree it's plainly clear a lot of the rest of the written EU does, though, so that's also basically a moot point.

Yeah....

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Ricrery, I'll go over that and give you a response when I get the chance (I need to find a roommate to replace the current one that's moving at the end of the month, plus get things set up for school, so it'll take me a bit to go through everything and produce a proper response; I also have a low tolerance for vitriol-laden posts right now, which this L-W's seems to be heavy on, so it will take me longer than usual to go through).

I can agree with this on the dragon part, but why the mention of fusion power? What reason would there be to tell children that everything is powered by fusion when it isn't? I agree that the dragon part shouldn't be taken literally, nor should it be used to assume that the fusion cycles of a Wars reactor are the same as the fusion cycles of a typical star, but I do not agree that we should disregard the basic statement of fusion power being the primary and ubiquitous method of power generation in the Galactic Republic.

As for podracers, their fuel appears to be hydrocarbon-based, yes, but then in TESB novelization, we're told that the Rebel speeders have flammable fuel. In the RotJ novelization, the doomed DSII has pipes flowing with flammable gas of some type in the hangar bay. And in the RotS novelization, we learn that the fuel for The Invisible Hand is a volatile liquid similar to gasoline or jet fuel, and the fuel that is used for podracers.

Presumably (since it's doubtful that The Invisible Hand was powered by jet turbines or diesel engines), the volatile liquid is merely a carrier vessel for the ship's fuel (hydrogen, the most likely candidate for fusion fuel or at least part of the fuel mix, can be stored in much greater densities in a complex hydrocarbon molecule such as those found in gasoline or other volatile hydrocarbon liquids than in its pure form).

For a civilization that has had cheap fusion power for millennia, it should be no surprise that they would have large reactors for big ships and small, mini-reactors for smaller purposes, like the little power generator Luke uses to charge R2-D2 in TESB, which the script calls a "fusion furnace."

Well, the weapons yields demonstrated do not. Anything anywhere near the 836.8 exajoule (200 gigaton) range should be generating Tsar Bomba-level events any time it hits any kind of natural surface. Remember that these are supposedly light turbolaser batteries on a troop transport. If a starfighter's cannons produce 1/100th of the power of those guns per shot, and the Rebel speeders in TESB do 1/40th of THAT, then every single stray shot from one of those speeders that did NOT hit Imperial armor should have produced an explosion that looked something like this. The supposedly more-powerful AT-AT guns should have produced even larger explosions every time they hit the ground. Hell, a shot at 1/1000th THAT energy level would have yielded an explosion comparable to a 50 kiloton bomb, and just one single shot could have easily wiped out every single Rebel soldier that was not in one of the armored towers.

The largest explosion we see in the entire battle on Hoth is when the lead AT-AT blows the shield generator with a max-power shot, and that is in the single-digit kilotons a best.

We just do not see anything anywhere near that kind of raw energy discharge in SW outside of the DS superlasers.

 

Why would they exaggerate about the fusion power part... how many young children (under the age of say, 8) do you know that know what nuclear power actually is? I reckon not many... so why would the children of said age in Star Wars knows what Fusion power really is...?

 

Well, I knew what the difference was at that age, and I would assume that any advanced civilization like the Galactic Republic would have standards of education high enough that even young children could grasp the basic concept of fusion (two atoms are mashed together making a single new atom with left over bits that are energy), and grasp the basic idea of fusion powering everything, especially if it was a ubiquitous technology that had been in use ubiquitously for hundreds or thousands of years.

 

For them, fusion power is probably like making a fire to us.

 

Anyone going to answer my questions? I am really curious, seriously.

I have another question, does the Lorentz-FiztGerald Contradiction apply for Star Trek?

 

Umm.....but his claims does contradict the movies.....