Star Wars vs Star Trek

Discussion in 'SciFi & Fantasy' started by Pollux V, May 9, 2002.

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Which universe would win?

  1. Star Trek

    227 vote(s)
    35.5%
  2. Star Wars

    268 vote(s)
    41.9%
  3. Spaceballs

    47 vote(s)
    7.3%
  4. Farscape

    12 vote(s)
    1.9%
  5. Dune

    50 vote(s)
    7.8%
  6. Stargate

    36 vote(s)
    5.6%
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  1. Shogun Bleed White and Blue! Valued Senior Member

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    I got the size of the cube wrong, my bad, but the SSD is MASSIVE. If the Super TTGL is literally WAY off the charts.

    Lets get back on topic, Thrawn is a tactical genius.
     
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  3. Omega133 Aus der Dunkelheit Valued Senior Member

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    Besides commanders, the Imperials are mostly expendable as well. And the way Vader kills his officers puts doubt on the notion that officers are valued. I'm not really sure the Empire could take on the Borg alone. Or perhaps at all. But perhaps if they keep building mega weapons, they might just find something they can use without being destroyed by a fighter.

    Who's EMH?

    Not sure she could do damage unless she was inside the ISD. Even the Trek Marines had a hard time stopping her.(they failed I think, been a while since I saw that episode)

    In some ways. But she's not very dangerous when calm. It takes rage to get her really destructive.

    What was Cold Fire about again?
     
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  5. Omega133 Aus der Dunkelheit Valued Senior Member

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    Thrawn is possibly the best strategist of Star Wars. But i'm not sure he knows how to fix his ship.
     
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  7. Ilithi_Dragon Dragon Overlord Registered Senior Member

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    Eh... IMO, Janeway's a sub-par captain, and she was a downright idiot at times. Picard is the tactical and strategic genius of the five captains.

    Thrawn's a brilliant tactician and strategist, but also part of the EU and not part of the official SW canon.

    Technologically, the largest weapons yield aside from the Death Star superlaser (which appears to be some kind of reaction-inducing weapon and not a direct-energy-transfer (DET) weapon), is in the low kiloton range for fighter/Light Attack Craft missile warheads. Light secondary armament or anti-fighter turbolaser batteries are in the low terajoule range, which scaled up to heavy turbolaser batteries and observed rates-of-fire coincides nicely with fighter swarms toting high-megajoule range cannons (asteroid cratering from Slave I's cannons in AotC) and a missile payload of several 20-50 kiloton warheads. The warheads from a squadron of fighters would be a notable threat to a capital ship, but individually fighters would be largely inconsequential.


    Conversely, in Trek, we've seen photon torpedo yields from at least several megatons bending-over-backwards, with a few dozen megatons much more likely (~42 megatons per the TNG:TM's listed standard warhead yield of 1 gram each of matter and anti-matter fits nicely), we've seen phaser yields in the low petajoule range in raw energy discharge, and low exajoule range in raw damage effects against unhardened targets. We've had dialogue implying that terajoule range outputs in phaser intensity could potentially phase invert a planet's atmosphere, and that not going over the output limit could be potentially challenging for a Galaxy class. We've seen multi-megaton-sized fireballs on more than one occasion, and we know that a fleet of just 20 Trek warships, 10 roughly comparable to a Galaxy class, and 10 roughly comparable to a Federation cruiser, were capable of blasting an approximately Earth-sized planet down to its nickel-iron core in approximately five hours, and observed compound fireballs generated in the initial bombardment that were roughly the size of Western Europe, and individual starships are reputedly capable of laying waste to entire planets.

    Trek ships frequently engage at ranges as high as tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of kilometers with high degrees of accuracy, and torpedo ranges upwards of several billion kilometers have been observed, even by relatively primitive races like the Kazon. Wars ships typically park broadside to each other and engage at point-blank-range in pitched battles, or trade fire at several kilometers to several dozen kilometers, with a thousand kilometers the maximum speculated range (observed ranges have not exceeded dozens of kilometers).

    Wars acceleration is in the 10-20g range. Trek acceleration ranges from 3500g to over 400,000g.

    We have no requirements from the official canon that SW is a galaxy-spanning civilization, and notable evidence to the contrary, and no reason to believe that SW FTL speeds are significantly greater than Trek FTL speeds, with notable evidence that SW FTL speeds are roughly comparable to, or even significantly inferior to Trek FTL speeds.

    Trek ships also have the added advantage of being able to engage sublight targets while in FTL.


    Wars ships would never even be able to get close enough to hit a Trek ship, and even if they did, it would be pathetically weak, with the vastly smaller Trek ships hitting Wars with vastly superior firepower.

    I posit that it is no contest with Trek as the winner, and that most of the advantages typically attributed to SW/The Empire are not factual, and that the Federation not only maintains vast technological superiority in almost every respect to the Empire, but also maintains a vastly larger military force.
     
  8. ProphetofWisdom Almighty Tallest Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    297
    *Sign* Thrawn is canon unless directly contradicted by the movies or another higher canon source in a way that can not be reconciled.

    And what makes you say that? The novel Death Star explains away anything that appears to be technobabble or chain-reaction as a side effect of the Death Star hitting the planet so hard a large part of it is thrown into Hyperspace which still requires massive amounts of energy.

    At least terajoule range. We have no reason to believe they were firing at full firepower (the same can be said of lower firepower) against the asteroids in TESB.

    An 800 meter HTL bolt in RoTJ completely vaporized an ISD, and if it wasn't the HTL bolt that would mean the reactor which would require something in the high MT to low GT range for what we see.

    "Concentrate your fire on their power generators. If we can
    knock out their shields, our fighters might stand a chance against
    them."
    - Admiral Ackbar, page 445 of the SW Trilogy

    They might stand a chance against capital ships after shields are down. This is one spot where the EU is clearly thrown out on.

    Fireballs? I do not recall the TDiC having nothing that look like fireballs from a nuke going off.

    Hogwash, we rarely see these ranges used, and in every fleet battle I can recall they always close to point blank range.

    Quote please. The highest I've seen for a Photon Torpedo was under 10 million kilometers.

    - Page 449 the SW trilogy

    That sort of range is so rare they don't know a thing about it.

    Hogwash, that is not their max. acceleration. Low thousands of Gs acceleration is required for the Imperial fleet to move around from the other side of Endor in the time it did in RoTJ.

    Other than the maps that show planets spread out over a 120,000 light year galaxy? And this reminds me you never replied to me before on territory size. And even if we give them a smaller territory size the Empire still clearly holds a massive industrial that the Federation could never overcome.

    Which is? I believe I asked for this before but you either missed the post or ignored it.

    So since when could Trek ships cross the entire galaxy in a matter of days?

    A number of times that I can count on one hand unless I'm mistaken.

    Hogwash. ST ships modus operandi in most battles is to close to visual range and will flying around at speeds that can be seen by the naked eye easily. And I'd say their more on par with each other really.

    Trek is more advance in most areas, but when it comes to super weapons SW has many more from the EU I believe. Ones that can hit you from the otherside of the galaxy, or ones that can tear apart entire worlds in a matter of months and have a huge fleet as the end result. Hell, the Empire was building yet another Death Star above Endor after the second one was lost.

    Also what proof do you have of a larger military force? Because I'm calling BS on it given there are 25,000 ISD's, dozens of SSD's, and millions of other ships in the Imperial Starfleet. Federation high end is 70,000, mid end is 30,000, low end is 10,000 and below. Most likely Starfleet falls between 10,000 and 30,000.
     
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2010
  9. alpinedigital Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    370
    No disrespect but did you actually just counter the previous post? Seriously? What a waste of time...
     
  10. ProphetofWisdom Almighty Tallest Registered Senior Member

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    297
    None taken. But if your going to say this would you be kind enough to point out the mistakes I made?
     
  11. Ilithi_Dragon Dragon Overlord Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    191
    @PoW: I was light on the evidence in the last post because I was short on available time, and was just intending to get the conversation back on-track with a quick run-down of my base position.

    Save for weekends (and iffy even then with my work schedule right now), I don't have time to go into a full-blown massive post of evidence on every single point right now, so putting one together for everything would take some time (and easily become confusing with dozens of points being discussed simultaneously). Might I suggest we proceed with a couple points at a time? That way we can focus on each properly, and you don't have to wait a week or two for me to make a run at finding a post character limit.

    The first thing we should address is the issue of canon. You say the EU is canon save where it is contradicted, I say only the movies, their scripts and novelizations are canon. I have a list of quotes from Lucas, and others, backing up the idea that the EU is a separate, self-contiguous universe that is parallel to the main SW universe, but not a part of it. Do you have a quote from Lucas backing up your position?
     
  12. Shogun Bleed White and Blue! Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,635
    Actually there is evidence. It have been stated many times that they can travel half-way across the galaxy in a matter of hours. Do you remember Kamino and Obi-Wan traveling to Kamino in a mere starfighter. Also what evidence you have that it is comparable or significantly inferior?
     
  13. alpinedigital Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    370
    Not sayin you made mistakes. Just saying I would not have bothered entertaining that post her responded to. :shrug:
     
  14. Ilithi_Dragon Dragon Overlord Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    191
    Well, first, being able to travel to Kamino from Coruscant in a mere starfighter is no indication of being capable of pan-galactic travel.

    The map rooms gave no clear indication of the Republic's size, but the areas Obi-Wan indicated for Kamino's location, and the area the map zoomed into to show Yoda the suspiciously absent star were both well inside the edge of the galaxy, approximately half-way between the center and the edge, yet Kamino was said to be well beyond the Outer Rim.

    As for the first point, "They could be half-way across the galaxy by now!" and "I've been from one side of the galaxy to the other," are both hyperbolic statements. It's like saying "The could be on the other side of the world by now!" or the numerable comparable statements made in Trek referring to the galaxy as a whole, or "the entire Alpha Quadrant" (a popular one in DS9), when we know for a fact that the main Trek civilizations come nowhere near close to spanning or influencing the entire quarter of the galaxy known as the Alpha Quadrant, let alone the entire Milky Way.

    Furthermore, there is the line in the ANH novelization where it is stated that the Empire occupies "a small corner of a modest-sized galaxy," and Tarkin's statement that the Empire controls a million worlds. A modest-sized galaxy would be 36,500 lightyears in diameter or less even if you exclude all the galaxies below 10,000 lightyears in diameter. Even at half the average stellar density of the Milky Way, you could easily fit a million worlds with plenty of room to spare into an area only 4,000 lightyears in diameter.

    So aside from two hyperbolic statements (one of which comes from Han Solo, of all people), there is nothing in the hard canon that requires a galaxy-spanning civilization or pan-galactic FTL capabilities.
     
  15. Shogun Bleed White and Blue! Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,635
    Would a modest sized galaxy have a satellite galaxy? ( Rishi Maze )
     
  16. Ilithi_Dragon Dragon Overlord Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    191
    It's certainly possible, yes. Rishi Maze may not even be a satellite galaxy, but a neighboring galaxy in their local cluster that happens to be on a collision course.

    In fact, given the apparent distances between the two galaxies, I would say that it is extremely unlikely that the Rishi Maze is a satellite galaxy; it is much too close to be orbiting the SW galaxy, and is more likely on a near-miss flyby or collision course.
     
  17. ProphetofWisdom Almighty Tallest Registered Senior Member

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    297
    I understand, it was just that things like the weapons range when you said “frequently” for phaser range and “billions of kilometers” for torpedoes made me go :bugeye: since I've never seen that hinted at in Trek before.

    Heh, same for me mostly to, just so much to do during the week. And agreed, lets go over a couple points at a time.

    Not a quote from Lucas, and I don't have it on hand, but Leland Chee who is in charge of SW canon stated in 2006 that there is Move and Movie+EU (I'll see about finding the quote if I can to make sure we're not missing any context). And then there is also the OP of the theard here:

    So the OP allows the SW EU to be used for this debate.

    That also reminds me, Lucas took the name for the galactic capital from the EU Thrawn books. You also have to consider the fact T canon is still EU yet Lucas himself has (or had, I haven't been keeping up with the show) a hand in creating the moive and some of the episodes.

    EDIT: Here are a ton of quotes that show EU as canon per the people Lucas put in charge of it all.

    Edit Again.

    A conversation between Lucas and John Knoll in a web diary during the production of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith showed more of the movie/Expanded Universe relationship:

    "So how did Anakin get that scar, George?" asks John Knoll.
    "I don't know. Ask Howard," says George, referring to President of Lucas Licensing Howard Roffman. "That's one of those things that happens in the novels between the movies. I just put it there. He has to explain how it got there. I think Anakin got it slipping in the bathtub, but of course, he's not going to tell anybody that."


    Novels between the movies can only mean the EU.

    That depends on where Kamino is in relation to the Unknown Regions or Wild Space. Both are "beyond the Rim" which is the outer most area of the known civilized galaxy.

    It never says it was the Empire proper that occupies that part of the galaxy. For all we know he was zoomed in on the Core Worlds and referring to them. And Tarkin's million systems statement was clearly referring to only the inhabited worlds of the Empire since you can not keep systems with no population or at most a droid population in line through fear of the Death Star. Also the claim of "modst galaxy" is vague and depends on what Vader considers a modest galaxy (and if I recall correctly from an old book I have buried away somewhere modest galaxies back then were closer to the Milky Way in size), and the EU gives us a hard figure of 120,000 light years.

    End of TESB we see the SW galaxy and it was confirmed by Leland Chee that it is indeed the SW galaxy we see. Given there was only 4 years between ANH and RoTJ in-universe there is no way they could have made it that far out without the standardly accepted speeds.
     
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2010
  18. Shogun Bleed White and Blue! Valued Senior Member

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    I see, it have been stated in EU that it is satellite, but I got another idea. I guess they got the wrong idea about satellite while producing the movie. Nonetheless I got an idea that could use on screen evidence. IIRC the dude at the bar in the Attack of the Clones said the distance between Kamino and the edge of the galaxy, we can use that to calculate.
     
  19. Ilithi_Dragon Dragon Overlord Registered Senior Member

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    http://st-v-sw.net/STSW-WeaponRange-Trek.html

    Old ENT-era weapons mounted on old civilian freighters are seen with weapons ranges around 8 km. The only other time we get a similar weapons range is when the Dominion attack DS9, demonstrating a weapons range of ~10km. The problem here is that the ships are supposedly still at warp; the Dominion fleet was said to be headed towards the station, so the idiot VFX producer David Stipes (the eternal whipping boy of DS9 VFX goofs, since he engineered most of them) put the station visible in the background after the fleet fly-by shot.

    Of the 16 incidents listed in the link, only two demonstrate single- or double-digit kilometer ranges. One is of a civilian freighter that was antiquated in the 2150s, and the other is a VFX gaff. Of the remaining 14, one other shows an engagement at close range, but this is with a cloaked ship in planetary orbit, and as the link shows it indicates possible ranges of >200km.

    Of the remaining 13 instances, the minimum weapons range is 2,000 km, and extends out to ~200,000 km for phasers, with an absolute minimum observed Kazon torpedo range in VOY "Basics Pt1" of 4.5 million kilometers (if Voyager was traveling at Warp 1; if Voyager was Warp 9.9, which is 21,400c, the torpedoes would have demonstrated a range of 96.3 billion kilometers). Given that Voyager was likely traveling considerably above Warp 1, and that the Federation demonstrably out-techs the Kazon by a considerable margin in just about everything, a standard Federation photon torpedo range of a few billion kilometers seems reasonably fair.



    Well, it looks like we're addressing Trek weapons range and the canonicity of the EU.



    What you've just described is what I've maintained: That there are 'two canons': The official Star Wars canon that is the 'features' (live-action and CGI movies and episodes, their scripts, and their respective novelizations), and the Star Wars Expanded Universe, which is all the EU material in supplement to the movies.

    I generally focus on the official SW canon alone, because I generally like to focus on the Trek official canon (I've read only a few Trek books, and have trouble reading Trek books because they so often get things wrong relative to the official canon, and even the little things tend to throw it off for me), and because much of the EU technical materials, and much of the more recent EU books, have been heavily influenced, or directly written by pro-Wars members of the Vs community (such as with Curtis Saxton and the EPII ICS book).

    If the SW EU is going to be allowed, though, then I move to allow the Trek EU as well, in which case we get Genesis cannons.
    } ; = 8 P


    Yeah, he did, and he pulled a couple things from the comics (Lucas has read many if not most/all of the comics, but none of the novels). He's also pulled things from a myriad of other works, ranging from Buck Rogers and Buckaroo Banzai, to the Lord of the Rings and Space Battleship Yamato. Just because he pulled elements from them does not make the entire work part of the official SW canon.

    Last I heard of the Clone Wars CGI series, Lucas was becoming increasingly involved with the series around the end of Season 1/beginning of Season 2. I don't know if trend that continued or not, though.


    Here's a bigger list of quotes ranging from Lucas down to various underlings. Combined, with the context of the quotes and the ranking of their speakers, they point to the official SW canon being separate from and excluding the SW EU canon, while the SW EU canon includes the SW features.

    This seems to be something that we already agree on, though, as indicated by your above post, so the issue is not whether or not there is a distinction between official SW canon and official SW EU canon, but whether or not to use the SW EU in this debate.




    I think this issue will have to wait until we decide whether or not we're using the SW EU, since most of this is an issue of whether or not the EU evidence is valid, since the only thing that establishes a massive Wars galaxy and a pan-galactic civilization are the EU materials (which are also wildly inconsistent with each other, as earlier EU materials place the Empire/Republic in a small region of the galaxy, which progresses through a civilization that spans a huge chunk of the galaxy with a huge chunk of the galaxy minimally or totally unexplored, to a pan-galactic civilization with the 'unexplored chunk of the galaxy' mutating into an entirely separate galaxy co-orbiting with the SW galaxy, or on a course to collide with the SW galaxy (interestingly enough, this shift towards a massive/fully-explored SW galaxy picks up speed around 2002, which coincides with increasing influence upon and even membership of pro-Wars vs debaters in the collection of SW authors)).

    I will note though that Tarkin's statement is ambiguous and can have more than one interpretation. For example, an alternative interpretation is that he was referring to every single system under the Empire's control (or that the Empire likes to think of as under its control), because he was obviously making a statement designed to sound impressive.



    At that range, they're millions of lightyears away. That would make intergalactic travel a trivial effort. And I don't mean just hopping over to the nearest child galaxy, I mean ranging across the entire local cluster with ease. Hell, traveling between galactic clusters would probably only be comparable to a naval voyage during the height of the Age of Sail. With that kind of FTL capabilities, and the tech the EU claims Wars has, building a great fleet and hopping galaxies to the other side of the universe to set up shop away from the Empire would be not much more challenging than early colonial ventures to North America.
     
  20. Shogun Bleed White and Blue! Valued Senior Member

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    I believe the reason is because they didn't plot safe hyperspace routes, and they doesn't want to commit suicide. There is also a barrier, and the Vong came through Vector Prime. Well, the Vong's FTL doesn't work in deep space ( they call it dark space ), I am not sure about Hyperspace, it should work. Perhapse they don't want to travel intergalacticly, in fear of civilizations far more powerful that can pose a very dangerous threat. Or they adopted a policy much like the Japanese isolation era?
     
  21. Omega133 Aus der Dunkelheit Valued Senior Member

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    1. I keep reading this yet don't know what it means. What is IIRC?
    2. The dude Is Dexter Jettster.
     
  22. Shogun Bleed White and Blue! Valued Senior Member

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    7,635
    IIRC is if I remember correctly. Okay, we use the information given by the dude as reference, then we calculate the size of the SW galaxy.
     
  23. alpinedigital Registered Senior Member

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    I wish I could confirm this but I think the whole weapons range stuff is lacking consideration in some very vital data. 'Weapons range' varies radically all the time.

    Well, first, let me share the experience that brings me to this conclusion. I flew fighter sims and understand air to air weapons with different stated ranges. You can of course use this for a base calculation but it's nowhere near concrete. The simplest example would be the variances in headings and velocities of both parties as well as the weapon's top speed and max distance:

    Simply put, one craft chasing another, both at mach2 at a distance well within the stated range of say 5 miles, but only has a top speed of mach2. Needless to say, the missile would just follow along until it had traveled its 5 miles and never catch its target. On the other hand, if the target is on fast approach, you could fire from well outside the weapons range, anticipating that the target would close the distance...

    So, fired from a stationary launcher at a stationary target - that's one thing: the weapons range 'base' I'm proposing. Evasive maneuvers means the weapon would travel it's maximum distance but not necessarily it's maximum effective range. An approaching target could allow for an effective range increase of twice as far depending on approach speed, and yet a fleeing target could render a weapon useless, or at least limit it's effective range depending on the weapon speed.

    Thing is, Im not sure they take all this into account, but I'm pretty sure if they're in pursuit, weapons range would be stated as a bare minimum, knowing they have to account for the weapon's own closing rate.

    As for beam weapons, that could also depend on mission-specific circumstances, like are you going in to try and destroy a target, or cripple it or take out some specific systems? The question of weapon speed reminds me of the old light bulb in a moving boxcar... when the bulb is turned on. does the light hit the far walls at the same time? Well if you fire a beam of light directly ahead while traveling faster than the speed of light, what do u get? (BTW, laser bolts and phaser blasts and all those beam type weapons - I don't buy into that crap about them traveling slower than the speed of light. They appear that way in video so they show up on a few frames.)
     
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