Star Trek vs Star Wars (multiple scenarios)

[GarfieldJL]

like I said i'm not familer with Star Trek and I don't remember any guy named Q but every time I hear you guys talking about it I think of this guy

 

 

http://filmcrithulk.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/q-desmond-llewelyn.jpg

 

yeah that guy beating everyone.

 

But from what I know about Physics and Star Wars I can say with out a doubt the Empire doesn't have a chance against Star Trek.

 

I love Star Wars to death but I also know what i'm talking about when I say it isn't as powerful as fanboys make it out to be.

 

To give you a rough idea of how powerful Q is, he is pretty much a demi-god, he can turn planets into bowling balls, the Death Star into a Christmas Tree ornament, the Emperor into roast duck (literally), Vader into a pair of boots, well you get the idea.

 

He probably wouldn't help the Sith, he'd be more likely to make their lives a living hell because he thinks only a Q has the right to be as self-absorbed as he is.

Edited August 13, 2012 by GarfieldJL

[Astarica]

To give you a rough idea of how powerful Q is, he is pretty much a demi-god, he can turn planets into bowling balls, the Death Star into a Christmas Tree ornament, the Emperor into roast duck (literally), Vader into a pair of boots, well you get the idea.

 

He probably wouldn't help the Sith, he'd be more likely to make their lives a living hell because he thinks only a Q has the right to be as self-absorbed as he is.

 

Err no I'm sure Q will just gladly hand his power to the Sith since one of the thing he really likes to do is tempt human with promise of mega power and obviously any self respecting Darth whatever will make a pact with him.

 

Now it's entirely possible that a couple Sith getting a fraction of Q's power ends up wiping their galaxy plus Star Trek's galaxy out and then we wouldn't have any discussion left, but Q is definitely not strictly aligned with 'good'. Q cannot undo events without time traveling, i.e. if he gave Darth X the power to blow up a planet, that guy blew up Earth, he can't undo just undo that event without some kind of time traveling which has some chance to fail (pretty sure there are multiple Star Trek episopdes that has the identical scenario). So while he can definitely take his power back, he might not be able to take it back quick enough before everyone that mattered already died.

[Astarica]

Neither Star Trek nor Star Wars is anywhere close to 'hard' science fiction. You can basically replace the word 'magic' where they use their technology and you'll get exactly the same thing. I mean anyone can say this weapon uses Graviton Beam which causes a subatomic vibration inflicting 15 points of damage, but that doesn't mean it's science. The above the statement is basically same as "I cast Magic Missile on you for 15 points of damage". Therefore the specs are pretty much meaningless. All you can do is go by the extent of devastation they bring out, which is limited to planetary devastation in both worlds, not counting the weapons Q use, but those are only used for fighting other Qs so I doubt the Q Continum will let lesser races borrow these weapons to fight other lesser races.

 

For the navigation issue, stuff like planets and suns do not change daily. Once you map it out you obviously know where the planet is for the purposes of hyperspace calculation. Assuming a Q just stepped in and make the two galaxy border each other, so that the location of the planets are relatively unknown for both sides. Well, Star Wars guys obviously colonized their galaxy, so they know how to map this stuff out. You can just say instead of the Yuuzhan Vong from the unknown region they found the Star Trek galaxy there instead. Once they mapped out a planet, there's basically no way for Star Trek to defend against it because the speed disadvantage is too massive. Even if you knew exactly every spot Star Wars is attacking the Star Trek fleet simply can't keep up. There might be some fringe planets that nobody really knows how to get there (this is alluded to in the war against Yuuzhan Vong) but you've to assume most of the planets are easily mapped out because hyperspace traveling is a very common activity in Star Wars.

 

For things to make sense either Hyper Drives need to be slowed down or Warp Drives need to be sped up, which can be done with Q's intervention. But the next problem you have is the scale of battle. Star Wars has seen wars where a quarter of the sentinent beings in the galaxy died while Star Trek universe seems to think it's a big deal an outpost with 10 guys is being attacked. Number-wise, Star Trek universe can't match the production capability of Star Wars (hundreds versus millions of planets), and even if they could Star Trek's political system can't handle the kind of war where having a planet or 10 bombed to the stone age is rather normal.

 

So for the battle to make sense I guess you need Q to make basically an arena, like each universe controls 10 planets and the side that loses them all is considered the loser, with normalized hyperspace traveling, and any contradictory technological specs resolved. At this point it's a relatively fair fight in terms of specs, but Star Wars universe is blessed with more military leadership since they spend all their time fighting each other. So the question to ask which general/admiral gets to lead the Star Wars troops. If Borsk Fey'lya is head of state and Wedge Antillies is the Supreme Commander then the Star Trek will be doing pretty good. If it's Thrawn and Bel Iblis leading the fleet, it might as well be over before the fight started. In general the leadership of Star Wars is much better, but it is also quite turbulent since the same environment that leads to great leaders also kills those leaders as well. I'd think for Star Trek to have a chance the fight would have to happen when either Borsk is head of state, or when Admiral Daala is the supreme commander.

 

The "Wars" on Star Wars isn't just there for decoration. The universe of Star Wars indeed is focused around all kinds of wars. Star Trek seems to take war like some kind of 19th century deal where you've a professional army (fleet) fighting somewhere and when one side is clearly winning the other side gives up and surrender and very few people actually die. Even the Borg made sure to broadcast to let you know that resistance is futile and they don't even bother attacking anything they deem to be of no threat. On the other hand you probably can't become a Darth without commiting multiple crimes against humanity. Bomb them to the stone age is preferred tactic of quite a few faction, and even Jedi/Republic factions are quite capable of commiting great atrocities in order to win. Even someone like Borsk who seems to harm his faction more than helps is probably going to strap on a stack of detonite and blow himself up in a diplomatical meeting with Star Trek guys if he feels his universe is losing because the kind of stuff is just perfectly normal in Star Wars.

Edited August 13, 2012 by Astarica

[ProfessorWalsh]

Btw, as far as troop battles, you got stormtroopers and AT-AT, we got Horta.

 

I knew that you were a biased trek fan, despite your claims. This kind of proved it. I don't trust anything you say on this matter... The Tech manuals say otherwise and they are canon, your personal observations are not canon.

[jarjarloves]

I knew that you were a biased trek fan, despite your claims. This kind of proved it. I don't trust anything you say on this matter... The Tech manuals say otherwise and they are canon, your personal observations are not canon.

 

sigh no they are not they break G-canon.

 

But it doesn't matter as I proved it doesn't matter if they have the power of 1000000 nuclear bombs they will never touch a Star Trek ship as Star Wars plasma based weapons can be easily repelled with a magnetic field.

[ProfessorWalsh]

sigh no they are not they break G-canon.

 

No they don't. In order for them to break G-Canon in a movie they would have to say, "We fired our weapons at full power." Which they don't. That is how the canon rules work. Other than that, you have proved that you were wrong. You can't use our physics to determine anything as physics in Star Wars don't work the same.

 

You are not the arbiter of canon.

[Astarica]

I don't know why people even argue about the 'science' part like 'plasma weapons have no effect on shields' when it's obviously not founded in actual science (since we don't have shields or plasma weapons to use). At best you cau can say the science (or lack there of) of the two universes contradict each other. If Lucas came out today and say Star Wars shields blocks all phaser weapons for free and whoever made Star Trek came out and said Star Trek shields block blaster bolts for free, that doesn't mean it is now completely impossible to resolve this just because two guys said some equally contradictory nonsense.

 

Since none of the shields in any of these universes are meant to be imprevious to certain type of damage at best you can say Star Trek shields are more resilient against plasma weapons even though that still is just a variant of the 'my universe stuff totally stops yours'. Let's take something that's at least easy to compare: armor. The Quantum Armor plating on the Sun Crusher in Star Wars is physically impenetrable. It can take a hit from the Death Star superlaser and it still wouldn't break. Now I guess a lot of science fiction in general call this 'Neutronium', except Neutronium in most science fiction just means 'something that takes a ton of damage'. For example, in Master of Orion franchise the Orions and the Antarans have Neutronium armor which is why they're the most advanced race. The tech on Neutronium Armor basically says the same things (neutron packed as tight as possible, offering near indestructible protection) but Neutronium Armor is only 10X the base HP compared to standard armor. Alpha Centauri's highest grade armor is the Stasis Generator. I think the description says it creates a temporal stasis on the material and since no damage can occur without time passing it means the resulting armor should be imprevious to attack because without no damage can occur without the passage of time. So that's two universes where you can find the Sun Crusher armor plating outfitted on virtually every unit at the high end. Stasis Generator is even better than indestructible since force cannot pass through without the passage of time, whereas Sun Crusher still recoils from impact.

 

But obviously both of these 'impossible to destroy' armor are quite easy to destroy in the game that features them. They're after all just the highest level of defense technology you can research but it'd be pretty uninteresting to have a game every where every unit is indestructible. So Neutronium Armor/Stasis Generator of MOO/AC is not nearly as indestructible as the Quantum Armor plating on the Sun Crusher even though they're basically the same thing, but then the armor on the Sun Crusher is meant to be one of a kind. So it doesn't matter that your universe claims your armor is totally indestructible. Unless you can back it up by showing all the fights in your world looks like what happens when the Sun Crusher is used (which utterly rams through whatever it wants) then clearly it's not as indestructible as they claim.

 

It doesn't matter if you call the armor Durasteel or Tritanium or Adamantium, most of these just translated to 'stuff that's hard to destroy'.

 

Likewise since you don't see people firing a regular Star Wars or Star Trek weapon that accidentally destroyed a planet, you've to assume even though the specs may claim it does a bizillion point of damage, since it doesn't actually wipe out a planet it's probably not that powerful. For that matter, both blaster bolts/phasers can hit a regular guy not wearing any kind of armor/shielding without killing them, so clearly the weapon is not even more powerful than a typical hand gun. In fact, for the purpose of infantry combat, a machine gun is way better than any infantry issued firearm in either universe since relatively few people in either universe wear armor.

Edited August 13, 2012 by Astarica

[ProfessorWalsh]

Likewise since you don't see people firing a regular Star Wars or Star Trek weapon that accidentally destroyed a planet, you've to assume even though the specs may claim it does a bizillion point of damage, since it doesn't actually wipe out a planet it's probably not that powerful. For that matter, both blaster bolts/phasers can hit a regular guy not wearing any kind of armor/shielding without killing them, so clearly the weapon is not even more powerful than a typical hand gun. In fact, for the purpose of infantry combat, a machine gun is way better than any infantry issued firearm in either universe since relatively few people in either universe wear armor.

 

This is mostly true. This was even touched on in the "First Contact" movie in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg cannot adapt to solid state weapons. That is why despite all of the times they have faced them melee weapons always work. In that movie Picard is smart enough to use a Tommy Gun in the Holodeck and he tears apart three Borg with it.

 

In the case of Phasers and even Blasters they are both, on par, slower than a typical bullet.

 

The explanation for this in Star Wars is that armor, such as those worn by Stormtroopers, render such weaponry less than effective. In the case of Stormtroopers there were weak points though where any of the black of the armor (which wasn't armor at all) was located was easily penetrated, this is "supposedly" what let the Ewoks kill them.

 

The problem with any Trek vs Wars argument always boils down to this:

 

1. Trek fans insist on ignoring the Star Wars canon because they don't feel that the numbers are fair. (IE that they are higher than their personal favorite franchise.)

 

2. Trek fans have a hard time reconciling that Wars tech operates on an entirely different set of physics. This is despite the fact that many of the things in Star Trek (Such as the "Warp Bubble") have been debunked and wouldn't work either.

 

3. Trek tech is simply insanely inconsistent. Star Wars would have this same problem too but Star Wars has less screen time to look at. Trek tech can do whatever it wants to do whenever it wants to do depending on what the writer needs.

 

In one episode the shielding and hull on the Enterprise (Encounter at Farpoint) cannot stop a laser, as it carves a piece out of the USS NCC 1701-D, in another a grandiose claim that lasers can't harm them is made. In one episode a single torpedo can obliterate an asteroid, in another they need a Q to accomplish the same feat. Reversing the ion/positron flow through the main deflector array can do about thirty different things and is in fact the most common solution to problems in the Star Trek universe.

 

Technology is simply skittish between the two.

 

In Star Wars, for example, a 9 year old boy can create a droid that has a more complex brain than Data who is created by the Galaxy's most brilliant robotics expert. In fact C3P0, when he is first turned on, is more socially adapted than Data is after years of studying humans.

Edited August 13, 2012 by ProfessorWalsh

[Astarica]

This is mostly true. This was even touched on in the "First Contact" movie in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg cannot adapt to solid state weapons. That is why despite all of the times they have faced them melee weapons always work. In that movie Picard is smart enough to use a Tommy Gun in the Holodeck and he tears apart three Borg with it.

 

In the case of Phasers and even Blasters they are both, on par, slower than a typical bullet.

 

Yeah, it's pretty ironic you talk about how much one universe's tech owns the other but in the ground fight, a 21th century machine gun would pretty much own anyone in either universe unless you ran into:

 

1. A 'resilient species' (Wookies and so on) but then such species tend to shrug off weapons from their own universe too.

 

2. A Sith Lord or a Jedi Master, and in that case you're already screwed because no infantry weapon from either universe could deal with one of these guys anyway.

 

I mean let's not even worry about Stormtrooper armor which you can say in theory it's made out of this material that can stop bullets but not blaster bolts. Most of the characters in Star Wars/Star Trek simply do not wear armor at all. Why would you need a weapon that does more damage that obviously travels slower than a bullet? Nobody can dodge bullets in real life and yet both universes depict perfectly ordinary people dodging blaster bolts/phasers by reacting (Jedi/Sith do it more often but it's by no means limited to them).

 

Star Trek, like the name suggests, is about the journey to the unknown. War is pretty much a last resort in Star Trek and even the bad guys can be negotiated with some limited success. It'd be weird if this kind of universe produced better enivornment suited for war compared to Star Wars where they're used to seeing trillions of sentinent beings die in a war. Even if you hold production the same and give Star Trek an edge in technology, I still don't see how Star Trek guys can possibly cope with a foe that has no problem bombing a planet to oblivion the moment they come into orbit.

[PaerisKiran]

Star Trek, like the name suggests, is about the journey to the unknown. War is pretty much a last resort in Star Trek and even the bad guys can be negotiated with some limited success. It'd be weird if this kind of universe produced better enivornment suited for war compared to Star Wars where they're used to seeing trillions of sentinent beings die in a war. Even if you hold production the same and give Star Trek an edge in technology, I still don't see how Star Trek guys can possibly cope with a foe that has no problem bombing a planet to oblivion the moment they come into orbit.

 

I believe Starfleet term is General order 22. Which effectively destroys planet.

Such order was issued by captain Garth (His crew started mutany over it) and Kirk bluffed about it few times. It was even considered in "Operation: Annihilate" as last measure of stoping certain parasites. (however McCoy and Spock came up with different idea)

[jarjarloves]

No they don't. In order for them to break G-Canon in a movie they would have to say, "We fired our weapons at full power." Which they don't. That is how the canon rules work. Other than that, you have proved that you were wrong. You can't use our physics to determine anything as physics in Star Wars don't work the same.

 

You are not the arbiter of canon.

 

no it can break it by breaking what is show. We have seen on multiple occasions the strength of Star Wars weapons and they are not that strong.

 

As for physics not working the same?? If you go that route then you can't for one single instance say what the strength of their weapons are because guess what? You have to use physics to determine it.

 

Oh wait a minute? They did say the weapons strength.

 

I refer to you Mr. Han Solo

 

"The entire starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet. It'd take

a thousand ships with more fire power than I've..."

 

 

Like I said before not a single Star Wars laser shot would even be able to touch a Star Trek field. As you said yourself they are all plasma based weapons and plasma based weapons can easily be repelled with magnetic fields.

 

Funny people talked about you around here like you were some sort of expert. But it seems you have no clue to what you are talking about.

[jarjarloves]

This is mostly true. This was even touched on in the "First Contact" movie in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg cannot adapt to solid state weapons. That is why despite all of the times they have faced them melee weapons always work. In that movie Picard is smart enough to use a Tommy Gun in the Holodeck and he tears apart three Borg with it.

 

In the case of Phasers and even Blasters they are both, on par, slower than a typical bullet.

 

The explanation for this in Star Wars is that armor, such as those worn by Stormtroopers, render such weaponry less than effective. In the case of Stormtroopers there were weak points though where any of the black of the armor (which wasn't armor at all) was located was easily penetrated, this is "supposedly" what let the Ewoks kill them.

 

The problem with any Trek vs Wars argument always boils down to this:

 

1. Trek fans insist on ignoring the Star Wars canon because they don't feel that the numbers are fair. (IE that they are higher than their personal favorite franchise.)

 

2. Trek fans have a hard time reconciling that Wars tech operates on an entirely different set of physics. This is despite the fact that many of the things in Star Trek (Such as the "Warp Bubble") have been debunked and wouldn't work either.

 

3. Trek tech is simply insanely inconsistent. Star Wars would have this same problem too but Star Wars has less screen time to look at. Trek tech can do whatever it wants to do whenever it wants to do depending on what the writer needs.

 

In one episode the shielding and hull on the Enterprise (Encounter at Farpoint) cannot stop a laser, as it carves a piece out of the USS NCC 1701-D, in another a grandiose claim that lasers can't harm them is made. In one episode a single torpedo can obliterate an asteroid, in another they need a Q to accomplish the same feat. Reversing the ion/positron flow through the main deflector array can do about thirty different things and is in fact the most common solution to problems in the Star Trek universe.

 

Technology is simply skittish between the two.

 

In Star Wars, for example, a 9 year old boy can create a droid that has a more complex brain than Data who is created by the Galaxy's most brilliant robotics expert. In fact C3P0, when he is first turned on, is more socially adapted than Data is after years of studying humans.

 

Stormtrooper armor? You mean the armor that can't withstand a simple wooden arrow?

[jarjarloves]

I don't know why people even argue about the 'science' part like 'plasma weapons have no effect on shields' when it's obviously not founded in actual science (since we don't have shields or plasma weapons to use). At best you cau can say the science (or lack there of) of the two universes contradict each other. If Lucas came out today and say Star Wars shields blocks all phaser weapons for free and whoever made Star Trek came out and said Star Trek shields block blaster bolts for free, that doesn't mean it is now completely impossible to resolve this just because two guys said some equally contradictory nonsense.

 

Since none of the shields in any of these universes are meant to be imprevious to certain type of damage at best you can say Star Trek shields are more resilient against plasma weapons even though that still is just a variant of the 'my universe stuff totally stops yours'. Let's take something that's at least easy to compare: armor. The Quantum Armor plating on the Sun Crusher in Star Wars is physically impenetrable. It can take a hit from the Death Star superlaser and it still wouldn't break. Now I guess a lot of science fiction in general call this 'Neutronium', except Neutronium in most science fiction just means 'something that takes a ton of damage'. For example, in Master of Orion franchise the Orions and the Antarans have Neutronium armor which is why they're the most advanced race. The tech on Neutronium Armor basically says the same things (neutron packed as tight as possible, offering near indestructible protection) but Neutronium Armor is only 10X the base HP compared to standard armor. Alpha Centauri's highest grade armor is the Stasis Generator. I think the description says it creates a temporal stasis on the material and since no damage can occur without time passing it means the resulting armor should be imprevious to attack because without no damage can occur without the passage of time. So that's two universes where you can find the Sun Crusher armor plating outfitted on virtually every unit at the high end. Stasis Generator is even better than indestructible since force cannot pass through without the passage of time, whereas Sun Crusher still recoils from impact.

 

But obviously both of these 'impossible to destroy' armor are quite easy to destroy in the game that features them. They're after all just the highest level of defense technology you can research but it'd be pretty uninteresting to have a game every where every unit is indestructible. So Neutronium Armor/Stasis Generator of MOO/AC is not nearly as indestructible as the Quantum Armor plating on the Sun Crusher even though they're basically the same thing, but then the armor on the Sun Crusher is meant to be one of a kind. So it doesn't matter that your universe claims your armor is totally indestructible. Unless you can back it up by showing all the fights in your world looks like what happens when the Sun Crusher is used (which utterly rams through whatever it wants) then clearly it's not as indestructible as they claim.

 

It doesn't matter if you call the armor Durasteel or Tritanium or Adamantium, most of these just translated to 'stuff that's hard to destroy'.

 

Likewise since you don't see people firing a regular Star Wars or Star Trek weapon that accidentally destroyed a planet, you've to assume even though the specs may claim it does a bizillion point of damage, since it doesn't actually wipe out a planet it's probably not that powerful. For that matter, both blaster bolts/phasers can hit a regular guy not wearing any kind of armor/shielding without killing them, so clearly the weapon is not even more powerful than a typical hand gun. In fact, for the purpose of infantry combat, a machine gun is way better than any infantry issued firearm in either universe since relatively few people in either universe wear armor.

 

we argue over it because the people arguing FOR IT try to use science to justify it and its strengths. So those of us who actually know science or have degrees in Physics like myself feel the need to shut them up.

[Celise]

Instead of the usual battles, I want to mix it up with multiple ones.

 

Species Rules: No force-users, military power only. No calling out-of-faction help.

 

The Galactic Empire(RotJ, not post-RotJ) vs The Dominion (DS9)

Dominion, because it is a well oiled machine as it were, its capabilites easily outmatch the imperialists.

 

The Undine(Species 8472 from Voyager) vs The Yuuzhan Vong.

not sure. it depends how numerous each side is.

 

The Borg Collective vs the Galactic Alliance.

Borg hands down, why destroy anything when a probe launching a nano-virus warhead on their worlds can convert the Galactic alliance into drones?

 

Klingon Empire vs The Sith Empire(TOR) (Special Rule of no Force Users stretched to allow Average Sith Warriors, etc... no big boys).

Klingons, simply because they wont give up, their ships are built directly for battle, as are the klingons themselves. as klingons have transporters and disruptor banks and even with sith lords, their best course of action is the escape pod when things go bad.

 

my reply in red, in the quote.

Edited August 13, 2012 by Celise

[Nydus]

Hello all, I have a few suggestions to improve this debate:

 

1. Read the Original Post: The first poster laid down some ground rules and posed specific scenarios.

 

2. Remove Q from the scenario folks: The first poster had the right idea by removing force users from the scenario. Star Trek fans need to remove Q from the scenario as well. If we don't, we are just arguing whether the Easter Bunny could beat up Santa Claus.

 

3. Star Wars Fans, the Star Trek Fans are also Star Wars Fans or they wouldn't be on these forums: Ignore posts that start with "the problem with Star Trek fans..." or "the problem with Star Wars fans...". This thread is plainly for fans of both series (or at least a knowledge of both series).

 

4. Size is Meaningless: The bigger ship doesn't win. The U.S.S. Monitor from the Civil War was quite a large ship. It could be taken out by a Cold War Destroyer. In fact, a Cold War Destroyer could probably take out a fleet of ironclad ships.

 

5. Technological Superiority Has Not been Established: Although my sympathies and gut is with the Star Trek side on this one, I've been satisfied enough by some arguments from the Star Wars side that there isn't a clear cut winner on this file. It is clear that each side has *some* technology that is superior to the other.

 

With the above in mind, I'd like to pose some specific questions regarding technology:

 

A. What role do you see transporters taking in a tactical engagement between a Star Ship and a Star Destroyer?

 

B. What role do you see warp drive taking in a tactical engagement between a Star Ship and a Star Destroyer?

 

C. What role do you see hyperdrive taking in a strategic engagement between Star Fleet and the Imperial Fleet?

 

D. Would a ST:TOR squad of troopers take on an away team? (i.e. phasers vs. blasters and shileds)?

 

E. What role do you see transporters taking, tactically, on a large-scale ground engagement between Star Fleet marines and Imperial Troopers?

 

I think we are best served by specific scenarios than fandom assertions that one side is superior.

 

- Arcada

Edited August 13, 2012 by Nydus

[Maaruin]

Funny people talked about you around here like you were some sort of expert. But it seems you have no clue to what you are talking about.

 

Well, he is an expert on what the Star Wars sources say and what is considered canon and in what way. And especially and expert on the Jedi.

 

You seem to be an expert on physics, though.

[jarjarloves]

Well, he is an expert on what the Star Wars sources say and what is considered canon and in what way. And especially and expert on the Jedi.

 

You seem to be an expert on physics, though.

 

but he is not even an expert in the canon if he can't remember the basic rules of Star Wars Canon

[ProfessorWalsh]

but he is not even an expert in the canon if he can't remember the basic rules of Star Wars Canon

 

You are the one who doesn't understand the basic rules of Star Wars canon my friend. Star Wars canon is VERY clearly defined, and it isn't simply, "If the movies don't seem to match up..." as that has been explained multiple times by Leland Chee, the guy in charge of canon.

 

You are getting dangerously close to ending up on my ignore list.

[ProfessorWalsh]

"The entire starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet. It'd take

a thousand ships with more fire power than I've..."

 

Referring to completely atomizing a planet, which is what the Death Star did. There was a small debris field remaining, not even an asteroid field, after the planet was hit.

[Astarica]

So far as ability to destroy stuff, Death Star is just way overkill. A single ship basically made Taris unhabitable for centuries. Therefore any world that can't immediately repel/defend (with some form of shielding) is going to get bombed to uselessness really soon. While Star Trek guys can do the same, this seems to go against their policy and it's not like the Star Wars guys aren't used to dealing with foes that do exactly this kind of stuff. An event like Taris would be devastating from a psychological point of view to Star Trek while to the Star Wars guys it'd just be another casuality of war.

 

So far as technology goes the most you can say both are space faring civilization that span the galaxy but the Star Wars one has been around for longer. Since the technology are pretty much nonsense on both side you can't really compare them in terms of science but the parts where both side have clear numbers (namely, Hyper Drive versus Warp Drive or number of years the galaxy has been colonized) is clearly in favor of Star Wars. There's no indication that Star Trek's technology came at a particular fast pace so just on the time spent as spacefaring civilization would mean Star Wars' tech should no weaker than that of Star Trek's. Therefore size does matter because we have no possible way of actually comparing most of the technology in either universe so all you can assume is that they're supposed to be making equal progress as a function of time/wealth and obviously Star Wars has a huge advantage here.

 

Now you can compare the unique technology that one side have but then you'd have to ask question like does Mag Pulse just stops everything from working on the Star Trek like it does in Star Wars? What about any of super weapons that you destroyed just in SWTOR alone? There's enough superweapons in just the Jedi Knight story to utterly defeat any similar progress civilization, since they're after all designed to defeat foes in the Star Wars universe.

 

So far as Transporter technology goes, boarding is not unusual in Star Wars. It's one of the primary ways Force users contribute in space combat via attacking/defending against such actions. Since the number of troops carried by a ship is a function of its size this means you wouldn't have any chance capturing any of the bigger ships (ISD, Mon Calamaris Cruisers, etc). I guess you could use it to capture a ship much smaller than you but then it's not exactly saing much. For this technology to matter you'd have to find a way to make the Star Wars guy underman their ships. Even Thrawn needed battle meditation from a Jedi Master to pull off this kind of distraction attack and obviously no one on the Star Trek side can access battle meditation, which is pretty much like cheating anyway. In fact, at least based on SWTOR it seems like everyone in Star Wars is extremely bad at preventing the ship from boarding you even if you're 10 times bigger than they are, so we can assume every ship in Star Wars is used to getting boarded since shooting the shuttle down before it gets there apparently never works.

 

At a glance it'd appear Star Trek capital ships are more nimble than their Star Wars counterparts, though both are depicted to move at a speed that can easily kept track with the naked eye, so it'd be trivial for any targetting computer to keep up with either ship once they appear in normal space. At any rate it's not like an ISD is designed to survive by evading enemy firepower, so while Star Trek should have some edge in terms of manuverability it's not clear if that is enough to matter. You can't assume a side has smaller and more firepower when you can't possibly compare to base technology to begin with. This isn't like say Protoss technology versus Terran technology where the former is clearly capable of having smaller but more powerful vessels (in fact that's what their tech doctrine is).

[Maaruin]

So far as ability to destroy stuff, Death Star is just way overkill. A single ship basically made Taris unhabitable for centuries. Therefore any world that can't immediately repel/defend (with some form of shielding) is going to get bombed to uselessness really soon. While Star Trek guys can do the same, this seems to go against their policy and it's not like the Star Wars guys aren't used to dealing with foes that do exactly this kind of stuff. An event like Taris would be devastating from a psychological point of view to Star Trek while to the Star Wars guys it'd just be another casuality of war.

 

Taris was destroyed by an entire fleet, not one ship. I think it was even Malak's main fleet. And the bombardment took hours, if I remember correctly.

 

And there were survivor's on the surface. Very few, but at least some Rakghouls managed it.

 

So far as technology goes the most you can say both are space faring civilization that span the galaxy but the Star Wars one has been around for longer. Since the technology are pretty much nonsense on both side you can't really compare them in terms of science but the parts where both side have clear numbers (namely, Hyper Drive versus Warp Drive or number of years the galaxy has been colonized) is clearly in favor of Star Wars. There's no indication that Star Trek's technology came at a particular fast pace so just on the time spent as spacefaring civilization would mean Star Wars' tech should no weaker than that of Star Trek's. Therefore size does matter because we have no possible way of actually comparing most of the technology in either universe so all you can assume is that they're supposed to be making equal progress as a function of time/wealth and obviously Star Wars has a huge advantage here.

 

Star Wars technology seems to progress very slow. There is not much difference between the TOR-era and the movie era. (Does Hyperdrive speed changes, by the way?) Star Trek on the other hand has significant technological advances throughout the series.

 

Now you can compare the unique technology that one side have but then you'd have to ask question like does Mag Pulse just stops everything from working on the Star Trek like it does in Star Wars? What about any of super weapons that you destroyed just in SWTOR alone? There's enough superweapons in just the Jedi Knight story to utterly defeat any similar progress civilization, since they're after all designed to defeat foes in the Star Wars universe.

 

Yes, Star Wars wins in terms of super weapons I guess. (I don't know much about Star Trek superweapons, though.)

 

So far as Transporter technology goes, boarding is not unusual in Star Wars. It's one of the primary ways Force users contribute in space combat via attacking/defending against such actions. Since the number of troops carried by a ship is a function of its size this means you wouldn't have any chance capturing any of the bigger ships (ISD, Mon Calamaris Cruisers, etc). I guess you could use it to capture a ship much smaller than you but then it's not exactly saing much. For this technology to matter you'd have to find a way to make the Star Wars guy underman their ships. Even Thrawn needed battle meditation from a Jedi Master to pull off this kind of distraction attack and obviously no one on the Star Trek side can access battle meditation, which is pretty much like cheating anyway. In fact, at least based on SWTOR it seems like everyone in Star Wars is extremely bad at preventing the ship from boarding you even if you're 10 times bigger than they are, so we can assume every ship in Star Wars is used to getting boarded since shooting the shuttle down before it gets there apparently never works.

 

The idea is not to conquer the ships, but sabotage them. Beam a team directly into engineering, sabotage the reactor, beam them out again. (But shields seem to block transporter technology.)

 

At a glance it'd appear Star Trek capital ships are more nimble than their Star Wars counterparts, though both are depicted to move at a speed that can easily kept track with the naked eye, so it'd be trivial for any targetting computer to keep up with either ship once they appear in normal space. At any rate it's not like an ISD is designed to survive by evading enemy firepower, so while Star Trek should have some edge in terms of manuverability it's not clear if that is enough to matter. You can't assume a side has smaller and more firepower when you can't possibly compare to base technology to begin with. This isn't like say Protoss technology versus Terran technology where the former is clearly capable of having smaller but more powerful vessels (in fact that's what their tech doctrine is).

 

We actually see a little about this when it is Federation against Borg. Now the Borg have the advantage that they can fire in all directions and repair their ships very fast. A single Star Trek ship could move behind a Star Destroyer and do some damage to the engines. In a Fleet, this wouldn't work anymore, though.

 

 

In my book Star Wars wins because of far superior numbers, even if Star Trek has a slight advantage in tech.

Edited August 13, 2012 by Maaruin

[Astarica]

Taris was destroyed by an entire fleet, not one ship. I think it was even Malak's main fleet. And the bombardment took hours, if I remember correctly.

 

And there were survivor's on the surface. Very few, but at least some Rakghouls managed it.

 

Wouldn't really matter if you keep both universes at their speed because it'd take days before anyone from the Star Trek universe can respond on time. If you have normalized hyperspace traveling then at least someone could get there on time, but it doesn't take long to ruin everything.

 

In the Thrawn trilogy, when Thrawn attacked a random planet with like 3 cloaked Dreadnaughts he was saying if they didn't fall for his ploy and surrender he's going to just start torching the planet, which implies 3 Dreadnaughts getting past the planetary shield can easily hit most vital stuff. So it takes very little to ruin a planet once you get past the fleet/shields. I don't know if it's standard process to have a planetary shield in every planet in Star Trek, but I'm thinking at least not every planet has a planetary shield in Star Trek let alone a fleet to defend it.

 

Star Wars technology seems to progress very slow. There is not much difference between the TOR-era and the movie era. (Does Hyperdrive speed changes, by the way?) Star Trek on the other hand has significant technological advances throughout the series.

 

 

Usually in science fiction you got two enablers for a space faring civilization:

 

1. Faster than light travel.

2. Perpetual energy (or close enough).

 

And once you get those stuff you probably aren't going to go much further unless you start doing stuff like developing weapons that do infinite damage (which should be quite possible with #2), but for obvious plot reasons it wouldn't make a very interesting story if you can accidentally blow up a planet by hitting the wrong setting on your handgun.

 

Obviously Star Wars guy have both of these things for a long time so they didn't come up with anything more infinite than before. Star Trek is a relatively new space faring civilization so you'd expect them to have initial rapid progress. That said the overall progress is clearly behind. Droid intelligence is another good one that's actually constant. In Star Wars world you can probably go down to a store and buy a 'build your own droid' thing, while Data is some sort of technological breakthrough in AI but he is definitely less adaptable to human society compared to C3P0 right out of the box.

 

The idea is not to conquer the ships, but sabotage them. Beam a team directly into engineering, sabotage the reactor, beam them out again. (But shields seem to block transporter technology.)

 

People do that all the time in Star Wars already. Heck every mission that involves a ship involves you defending or sabotaging something on a much bigger ship. Given Star Wars seems to have no concept of 'shoot the shuttle down before it boards you', the fact that you can beam people wherever you want isn't as powerful as it seems. At any rate there seems to be some unwritten rule that you can't just beam directly to the bridge and kill the captain unless you're the Borg. Otherwise you just beam someone strapped on a bomb to the other ship's bridge/drive/whatever and they can't possibly stop that. So I assume Transporters in the context of space combat just means you get to board people whenever you want, but you don't get to board whereever you want (because that'd make Star Trek space combat irrelevent too if they can do that, minus the Borg). That's certainly an advantage but based on the first two flashpoints in SWTOR, it's pretty clear a small ship can miraculously board a much bigger ship that it has no chance of beating so here Star Wars' inepitude to stop boarding parties means they're not significantly more vulnerable against Transporters.

 

[

We actually see a little about this when it is Federation against Borg. Now the Borg have the advantage that they can fire in all directions and repair their ships very fast. A single Star Trek ship could move behind a Star Destroyer and do some damage to the engines. In a Fleet, this wouldn't work anymore, though.

 

 

In my book Star Wars wins because of far superior numbers, even if Star Trek has a slight advantage in tech.

 

The Borg is obviously meant to be a special species even in its own universe. It'd be similar to how Protoss technology is superior to all other technology in Starcraft so you can have some uber ship that is just better in every way. That said similar to Protoss, the Borg is supposed to be few in number too. I know in theory they got a lot of Cubes at home but you'd have to assume for consistency, the Borg would only send one Cube against Star Wars and while it'd be pretty hard to take out a single Borg Cube, it's also only one Cube.

 

ISD have a bigger vulnerability at the bridge anyway and it's obviously not relying on manuever to keep the bridge safe. Really it's somewhat mystifying that why don't people just all attack the bridge on an ISD since that's clearly its weak point and it sure isn't going to dodge anything. Turbolasers are supposed to be 360 degree and canonically they pretty much cover every angle you can attack. From lore/game you always attack a blind spot in a capital ship by taking out the turbolasers in a particular area first and then they can't shoot that spot anymore, but in this case you don't really need superior speed/manueverabilty since even a slow ship can fire at a bigger ship safely once you wipe out all the turbolasers that can target a particular section.

[jarjarloves]

You are the one who doesn't understand the basic rules of Star Wars canon my friend. Star Wars canon is VERY clearly defined, and it isn't simply, "If the movies don't seem to match up..." as that has been explained multiple times by Leland Chee, the guy in charge of canon.

 

You are getting dangerously close to ending up on my ignore list.

 

then please by all means educate me. What does Star Wars canon say when something that is C-canon contrdaicts something that is in the movies?

 

Also please tell me do the Turbolasers have the plasma contained in a magnetic field?

[ProfessorWalsh]

then please by all means educate me. What does Star Wars canon say when something that is C-canon contrdaicts something that is in the movies?

 

Also please tell me do the Turbolasers have the plasma contained in a magnetic field?

 

The problem you are having is that you haven't seen a single "contradiction" and you are trying to claim that you have. In Star Wars in order for a "contradiction" to take place it has to be a clearly stated direct contradiction. That has always been the rule.

 

What this means, for example, is if for example you see a shot that, according to our physics, if the tech manual is correct, should have knocked a ship "a million miles away" but didn't that isn't a contradiction with the tech manual. That simply means:

 

A) An inertial dampener or other technological device is preventing that action.

B) It is one of the many physics differences in Star Wars.

C) The bolt that hit the ship wasn't set for maximum power output.

 

There are no known contradictions between the C-Canon tech manuals and the G-Canon movies at this time. Star Wars is very clear about how hard it is to actually make a contradiction.

 

A perfect example of this is with the Timothy Zahn Grand Admiral Thrawn trilogy where the book specifically states that the Clone Wars were when a group of Jedi were cloned and the clones went insane and started a war. The movies came out and said, "No no, this happened."

 

By your rules the GAT trilogy would be rendered null and void. Chee, however, explained that those events did happen during the clone wars but so did everything else that George said happened.

 

In order for that, specifically, to have been a contradiction it would have had to have been directly stated that there was nothing else to the clone wars at all.

 

Much like you use Han Solo's comments as gospel, when a character's statements are not canon. It is only canon that he said it, it is not canon that he is correct.

 

As to the tibana gas ejection used in blaster bolts, there is no clear statement how the plasma stays together. It is often speculated that there is an electromagnetic field in place, and we know an electromagnetic field is used with lightsabers, but we have no clear indication how the blaster bolts actually work.

 

Officially the tibana gas keeps its shape once charged due to a strange reaction within the gas itself. Which would indicate that the tibana gas "plasma bolt" may not have any need for an electromagnetic field. We also know that magnetically sealing walls and doors can reflect blaster bolts however they are only capable of doing this on hand blaster level weaponry.

[GarfieldJL]

You know it's amazing that Star Wars fans claim they know so much about Star Wars tech, and how little they know.

 

For the navigation issue, stuff like planets and suns do not change daily. Once you map it out you obviously know where the planet is for the purposes of hyperspace calculation. Assuming a Q just stepped in and make the two galaxy border each other, so that the location of the planets are relatively unknown for both sides. Well, Star Wars guys obviously colonized their galaxy, so they know how to map this stuff out. You can just say instead of the Yuuzhan Vong from the unknown region they found the Star Trek galaxy there instead. Once they mapped out a planet, there's basically no way for Star Trek to defend against it because the speed disadvantage is too massive. Even if you knew exactly every spot Star Wars is attacking the Star Trek fleet simply can't keep up. There might be some fringe planets that nobody really knows how to get there (this is alluded to in the war against Yuuzhan Vong) but you've to assume most of the planets are easily mapped out because hyperspace traveling is a very common activity in Star Wars.

 

If you read into Star Wars, you'd know that the hyperspace routes were the results of people flinging ships into hyperspace blindly and praying they didn't kill themselves. This took thousands of years, and they still don't have their Galaxy mapped out (or have you forgotten about the "Unknown Regions..."

 

If the two Galaxies are placed side by side (good luck getting through the Galactic Barrier), and we assume that the navigational hazard isn't present, Star Trek still has the advantage.

 

1. Star Trek ships can see where they are going while moving Faster than Light, they can detect planets orbitting stars from 20 Light Years away. They can tail another ship that has passed through a system even though said ship went through the area a few days prior. Even follow a ship's warp trail.

 

2. Star Trek ships are able to stay at Warp while moving through a gravity well, a Star Wars ship is yanked out of hyperspace. That means astrogation charts from Star Trek are completely useless to Star Wars ships, because trade routes for instance go through plenty of places where there are gravity wells and a Star Wars ship would be forced out of hyperspace routinely.

 

3. Star Trek actually does have a drive system that can match a Hyperdrive in speed, I think it is called Quantum Slipstream Drives... Btw, the Trek ship can see where it is going even while utilizing this, even at the same speeds Hyperdrives pull, making this drive more advanced than a hyperdrive.

 

You guys claim you know a lot about Star Wars tech, when in reality you know quite little... (Btw, the Yuuzhan Vong would get clobbered by an electronics countermeasure, Trek ships will sometimes will release small amounts of antimatter in a diffuse cloud so it can react with interstellar space dust to throw off weapons locks, Yuuzhan Vong's black hole drives and defensive measure would end up causing the Vong to wipe out their own ships)

 

You know about those interdictor cruisers that keep people from going to hyperspace or yanks them out. An interdiction field wouldn't even cause the Star Trek ship to slow down, much less yank it out of warp.

 

Then we have the changing technology, we see tech in Star Trek constantly advancing in leaps and bounds, in Star Wars there have been advances only for those advances to be lost and repeated again, things are actually rather stagnent in Star Wars.

 

Then we have Transporter Technology, heck a cloaked ship could beam a live photon torpedo into the Emperor's throne room in front of Palpatine and watch the thing detonate...

 

Transporters are common in Star Trek while it isn't even known to be possible in Star Wars. I'm sorry, despite Star Trek apparently having not had space travel as long (got news for people, but there are older spacefaring races than humans in Star Trek, in fact at least 3 of the 6 founding members of the Federation had interstellar space flight for centuries before humans developed their own warp drive).

 

Then there is holodeck technology, while star wars has holograms they aren't nearly as advanced as what we see in Star Trek.

 

Finally, it wouldn't be surprising if a Star Trek ship could actually hijack control of a droid army, considering Star Trek Computers processing abilities are actually faster than light...

 

The problem you are having is that you haven't seen a single "contradiction" and you are trying to claim that you have. In Star Wars in order for a "contradiction" to take place it has to be a clearly stated direct contradiction. That has always been the rule.

 

 

What this means, for example, is if for example you see a shot that, according to our physics, if the tech manual is correct, should have knocked a ship "a million miles away" but didn't that isn't a contradiction with the tech manual. That simply means:

 

How would a turbolaser blast knock something a million miles away... It is essentially a burst of plasma which would cause thermal damage for the most part since it would have very low mass.

 

F = .5m * v^2

 

Kinetic Energy from a TL is rather low.

 

A) An inertial dampener or other technological device is preventing that action.

 

Star Wars inertial dampeners work to counter the force of acceleration on a pilot/crew of a ship, that holds true for both Star Trek and Star Wars. The difference between the two is that Star Trek has Structural Integrity fields, it's why the Enterprise NCC-1701-D saucer section could plow through a mountain while Grievous's Flagship was falling apart in Star Wars Episode III "Revenge of the Sith"

 

B) It is one of the many physics differences in Star Wars.

 

If you're suggesting the speed of light is substancially higher in the Star Wars universe, then Star Wars ships are in serious trouble.

 

Star Trek ships energy output is summed up in Einstein's equation:

E=mc^2, c is the speed of light.

 

C) The bolt that hit the ship wasn't set for maximum power output.

 

That's more likely to be true in Star Trek than Star Wars, as I recall from the Vong series there actually had to be work done to the hardware of laser canons on starfighters to get them to fire those rapid low power bursts.

 

There are no known contradictions between the C-Canon tech manuals and the G-Canon movies at this time. Star Wars is very clear about how hard it is to actually make a contradiction.

 

There actually are quite a few things in the movies that contradict your claims as have been pointed out repeatedly...

 

Also Star Wars only has 6 movies and a some animated series...

 

Star Trek has 11 movies (1 is alternate timeline), 4 television series (3 seasons for ToS, 7 for TNG, at least 7 for DS9 (don't feel like looking it up)), who knows how many Voyager had, and then there was Enterprise).

 

You are holding Star Trek bloopers to a standard that is far above what you are holding Star Wars screw ups, when in reality it needs to be the other way around...

 

A perfect example of this is with the Timothy Zahn Grand Admiral Thrawn trilogy where the book specifically states that the Clone Wars were when a group of Jedi were cloned and the clones went insane and started a war. The movies came out and said, "No no, this happened."

 

It could have been the standard Imperial revisionist history, and Thrawn didn't know the actual historical reality...

 

By your rules the GAT trilogy would be rendered null and void. Chee, however, explained that those events did happen during the clone wars but so did everything else that George said happened.

 

Not at all. There are much simpler explanations that make both canon.

 

Much like you use Han Solo's comments as gospel, when a character's statements are not canon. It is only canon that he said it, it is not canon that he is correct.

 

Yes and no, his statement in a New Hope (considering his background) about 1,000 starships being unable to destroy a planet is canon (since he was in the Imperial Military he would have some knowledge as to the destructive power of Turbolasers). In other words Han Solo knew what he was talking about, if Luke Skywalker had made that comment then you would have a valid point, but since it was from Han Solo, given Solo's background, you don't.

 

As to the tibana gas ejection used in blaster bolts, there is no clear statement how the plasma stays together. It is often speculated that there is an electromagnetic field in place, and we know an electromagnetic field is used with lightsabers, but we have no clear indication how the blaster bolts actually work.

 

There was a lot more attention paid to science with Star Trek, than there was with Star Wars. Then again some of the production team for Star Trek actually had science backgrounds.

 

Officially the tibana gas keeps its shape once charged due to a strange reaction within the gas itself. Which would indicate that the tibana gas "plasma bolt" may not have any need for an electromagnetic field. We also know that magnetically sealing walls and doors can reflect blaster bolts however they are only capable of doing this on hand blaster level weaponry.

 

It more likely means that Tibana gas has some magnetic properties to it and a way for it to stay condenced into a cohesive bolt rather than diffusing as soon as it leaves the blaster barrel...

Edited August 13, 2012 by GarfieldJL