You mean the Star Destroyer that's so advanced that they can be fooled like this?



It's space opera, so it's supposed to be fun.  I really have no problem with this in context of the movies.

But since we're all nerds here, you tell me, if you were playing a space RPG and you told your GM "I'm going to stick my ship on theirs and they'll never see me", your GM would stop the game and tell you out of character that's not going to work.

There's no way the tie fighters zipping around would miss them, and there would be windows and ports covered up, not to mention the "clunk" noise when they attached, as well as the commanders would have to be hideously stupid not to realize a ship they were just chasing had to go somewhere.

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/

OK, so you don't want to bother reading through this whole site, right? OK, here's the drill for you impatient people:

Why does anyone care about this stupid subject?

Why do you care? Don't pretend not to care; if you didn't click "back" as soon as you figured out what this website was about, you're interested. You may not want to admit it, but that will just be our little secret, OK? Now read on.

Definition

First, Star Wars vs Star Trek normally means "could the Empire kick the Federation's ass". If it's a question of taste (ie- "do you like Star Wars more than Star Trek"), debate becomes impossible because the answer is subjective. Anyway, once we agree that we're talking about military prowess, people like to perform substitutions: instead of Federation vs Empire, suddenly it's the Borg vs the Empire, or Species 8472 vs the Empire, or the Q vs the Empire, or perhaps the race that built the Dyson Sphere vs the Empire, because all of them showed up at some time or other in Star Trek. But lest we forget, Star Trek is basically about the Federation, remember? That's the technology base. Subject changes are quiet admissions that the Empire would wipe the floor with the main characters of Star Trek, so you've got to resort to one-episode wonders (even if they're long-gone, or just as likely to turn on the Federation, or if they've been stymied by the Federation in the past, which would call their abilities into question).

I've Played X-Wing Rogue Squadron, and Star Wars ships don't seem that tough to me

I've also played F-15 Strike Eagle II, and in that game, an F-15 can take a half-dozen direct hits from SAM's before it goes down (in reality, one proximity hit will kill it easily). Can we agree that it's silly to use computer gameplay as a basis for technological assessments? Generally speaking, the sheer scale of the Empire (millions of planets, able to build moon-sized Death Stars) is vastly greater than that of the Federation, so Trekkies try to take the sheer size and numerical advantage of the Empire out of the equation, and simplify matters into straight ship vs ship comparisons. Leaving aside the tacit admission of defeat already implicit in this practice, there are several different popular ways to decide what is and isn't valid evidence:

The Lazy Man's Method

Simply grab figures from the official publications. Of all the voluminous Star Wars and Star Trek publications out there, only one for each series gives meaningful specifications in real-world units: Star Wars Episode II Incredible Cross-Sections (SW2ICS) and the Star Trek Next Generation Technical Manual (TNG TM).

Star Wars: Acclamator troop transport

Star Trek: Enterprise-D

Light guns: 300 million GW (6 megatons per shot, 24 guns, assume 1 shot every 2 seconds for time-averaged power output rather than peak output)

Main phasers: 3.6 GW (5.1 MW per emitter, 200 emitters in the main phaser array, 2 full-sized saucer arrays and 3 smaller roughly half-size arrays on the stardrive section, p.123). Note that phasers appear to have a chain-reaction effect so their raw power output may be deceptively low.

Heavy guns: 2.4 million megatons (200 gigatons per shot from each turret, 12 turrets)

Photon torpedoes: 64 megatons max theoretical (based on 1.5 kg antimatter payload, p.129)

Sublight acceleration: 3500G

Sublight acceleration: 1000G (design goal, p.75)

Operational range: 250,000 light-years (before refueling)

Operational range: 2750 light-years (7 years at warp 6 before refueling, p.3)

Shield heat dissipation: 70 trillion GW peak

Shield heat dissipation: 3311 GW peak (473 GW per generator x 7 generators, p.138)

Reactor power: 200 trillion GW max

Reactor power: ~4 billion GW at max warp 9.6 (scaled from the warp power chart on p.55 which uses units of joules for power; we assume this is a simple mistake). From the chart, their fuel supply for 7 years of warp 6 cruising would be roughly 2E23 J (enough to run an Acclamator's reactor at full power for just 1 second).

Max hyperspace speed: not stated (however, the ability to travel "halfway across the galaxy" in a matter of hours as demonstrated in ANH, TPM, and AOTC requires speeds in the range of 10 million to 100 million times c).

Max warp speed: ~2000c (warp 9.6), sustainable 12 hours for a single sprint of roughly 3 light-years. This appears to have increased to roughly 3000c for newer ships such as the Intrepid-class.

As you can see, the officially published figures are massively in favour of the Empire, even if you disregard the fact that an Acclamator is not a particularly powerful warship by Imperial standards (an Imperial Star Destroyer is roughly 10 times larger (by volume) than an Acclamator and presumably 10 times more powerful, even if we disregard the fact that an Acclamator is just a transport). In fact, the only way to generate a remotely close match between an Imperial ship and a Federation ship is to use a small patrol craft such as Jango Fett's Slave-1:


Star Wars: Slave-1

Star Trek: Enterprise-D

Main guns: 64000 GW (2 kilotons per shot, 480 rpm firing rate onscreen in AOTC for time-averaged power output rather than peak output)

Main phasers: 3.6 GW

Missiles: 190 megatons (tail-launched missiles; seismic charge mines are roughly 12000 megatons)

Photon torpedoes: 64 megatons max theoretical

Sublight acceleration: 2500G

Sublight acceleration: 1000G

Operational range: not stated (however, Obi-Wan's starfighter has an operational range of 150,000 light-years, and is probably similar).

Operational range: 2750 light-years

Shield heat dissipation: not stated (however, Amidala's personal yacht has shield dissipation of 2 billion GW peak, and is probably similar)

Shield heat dissipation: 3311 GW peak

Reactor power: not stated (however, Amidala's personal yacht has power output of 7 billion GW max, and is probably similar)

Reactor power: ~4 billion GW at max warp 9.6

Max hyperspace speed: not stated (however, same-day flight from core to galactic outer-rim systems requires speeds in excess of 10 million c)

Max warp speed: ~2000c (warp 9.6)

Even this seemingly Trek-biased matchup seems to heavily favour the Empire, with Jango Fett's small patrol craft able to hit the Enterprise-D with much heavier firepower than it can dish out in return. Small wonder, then, that despite the simplicity and convenience of the lazy man's method, most Trekkies prefer to avoid it.

Just What You See, Pal

Some people prefer to pretend the books don't exist on either side, and talk about only the movies (or movies and TV shows, in the case of Trek). This approach has strengths and weaknesses; the visual look of each series is often more consistent than published material (particularly in the case of Star Trek, where the TM contradicts itself repeatedly and has several astonishingly bad science errors. Moreover, the ST books' status has been officially stated as mere "speculation" (see John Ordover), although SW books are supposedly "quasi-canon" (see the Star Wars Encyclopedia foreword). In any case, a lot of people prefer to stick to the shows and movies regardless of what the "official" stance is.

Having said that, the comparison is little better. In Star Trek, most of the figures from the show are reasonably compatible with those from the TM's (not surprising, since the people who worked on the TM also worked on the show), and in Star Wars, most of the figures from the SW2ICS are based on observations of the original trilogy (from Dr. Curtis Saxton). There are limits to how inaccurate one can reasonable expect the TM and SW2ICS to be, and sure enough, analysis of direct observations from the shows and movies tends to generate similar results, albeit with more ambiguities.

Note that it is difficult to gauge the effect of weapons in any meaningful sense unless they are applied to inert objects (if a shell hits an aircraft wing-tank and causes the plane to burst into flames, you cannot attribute all the energy of the resulting conflagration to the shell). This means we need to look for weapons striking inert objects such as rocks, planets, asteroids, etc. I'm afraid this is a rather complicated subject, and you should really look at the rest of the site if you want to know more. However, the following table should help clarify matters:

Star Wars

Star Trek

Planetary destruction: Death Star blast (roughly 20 billion trillion megatons, ie- the number "two" followed by 22 zeroes). Planet blown apart at 5% of the speed of light. Even if we assume the shot was time-lapse photography (not that there's any reason to), the absolute lower limit is roughly 50 quadrillion megatons. Note that even if you scale this monster down by a factor of 10 million (to the volume of a Star Destroyer), you'd still have 5 billion megatons. More than a match for poor Enterprise.

Planetary destruction: 30-ship bombardment in "The Die is Cast" (surface-level explosions create fireballs in the megaton range at most, judging from fireball duration). No sub-orbital ejecta launched from planet's surface at all. Trekkies attempt to ignore weak-kneed appearance of attack and focus on semantics in order to exaggerate the figure.

Asteroid destruction: Jango Fett's seismic charges destroy asteroids in a radius of 5-10 km in AOTC.

Asteroid destruction: according to Riker, it would take the entire photon torpedo payload to destroy a single 5km wide hollow asteroid in "Pegasus". In other words, it would take the entire payload of the Enterprise-D (a capital warship with a crew of a thousand) to equal just one of Jango Fett's seismic charges (a bounty hunter's weapon).

Combat range: in ROTJ, combat initially occurs at ranges of a few thousands kilometres, eventually closing to a few hundred kilometres ("point blank" according to Lando) until Rebel ships are within a few dozen kilometres of the Executor.

Combat range: fleet actions in DS9 uniformly feature engagements at ranges of 5 km or less, just as they do in TNG's Klingon wars or Borg engagements. In "The Die is Cast", Sisko actually orders the Defiant to approach to 500 metres (while taking fire) before shooting at a Jem'Hadar attack ship, presumably due to some disadvantage incurred at longer range. The only long-ranged incidents involve stationary or near-stationary targets.

Speed: travel from galactic core systems to outer rim systems ("halfway across the galaxy" as Amidala put it) is shown repeatedly in ANH, TPM, and AOTC. It is invariably same-day traffic, typically a few hours.

Speed: Voyager took 7 years to crawl across part of one quadrant of the galaxy, even with repeated assists from alien races, stolen technology, and even the occasional shove from a godlike being. Not hours ... years.

If you want to know more about how to glean bits of information out of the shows and movies, check out the rest of the website. But for now, let's just say that this battle would be a one-sided massacre in favour of the Empire.

Other Combinations

What difference does it make? Since the film vs film and book vs book approaches both yield the same result, you can mix and match film vs book policies in any order you want (tech books for both, tech books for neither, tech books for ST but not for SW, tech books for SW but not for ST), and the result is the same.

Conclusions

In a straight-up fight, the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Even with its numerical advantage removed, the Empire would still squash the Federation like a bug. Accept it.

It took the best pilot in the rebel alliance using the force to make that shot, one who had plot armor which means he could not be killed.

There's obviously one glaringly obvious flaw in this plan.



The Enterprise would not be able to get into the trench to make a direct shot into the exhaust port with their torpedoes.  And since they don't have any fighters, and definitely no small craft that can carry photon torpedoes, they'd get chewed up by the stations defenses that were designed to repel capital ships.

Sure, silly but fun plot device.  Want me to point out all the silly plot devices used in Star Trek?

What windows?  There don't seem to be rows upon rows of glass so that every cabin has a panorama view of the void like Federation ships seem to require.  I'm sure the kindergarten on the enterprise has a lovely view, a design flaw the Empire doesn't share.

The "best pilot in the rebel alliance" was a farm boy with zero training who blasted whomp rats for shits and giggles, didn't know who his father was, and did make out with his own sister.

Oh, wait, you mean the enemy was implacable, invincible, and undefeatable except by a story?

SPACE OPERA.

Not sci-fi.

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Say, what's the terawatts or megajoules or whatever put out by the Gungan boomas they carry around in wagons?

Gungan technology is measured in hyperderps.

I agree.

The prequels are an abomination of Lucas.  I say the same about the Ewoks, too.

Didn't you see all the scenes of the major planets toppling statues and celebrating?



(yeah, those pissed me off too)

Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile

The Enterprise doesn't have to fly the trench.  It can aim.  It's only "glaringly obvious" if your fire control technology is on par with a B17's waist gunner.



Federation has better sensors, better aim, better technology.  They don't need to get within spitting distance to hit a target.

Star Trek is precise.  Star Wars is just about big.

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Were the Federation to send a specific ship, they'd send the Defiant.

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Also, how much does the Empire suck that they have only one weakness to the Death Star, they know about it, the enemy knows about it, they know the rebels know it, yet they only send a handful of tie fighters and Darth "Joe Biden to the Emperor's Barack" Vader to deal with it?  Seriously, with all this advance warning, with psychic premonitions and everything else, they send a handful of tie fighters and Darth "Second In Command" Vader?

The Empire is a colossal failure.  It seeks to be a military dictatorship of the galaxy, and yet it's defeated by some desert white-trash whose only training was doing handstands on an unihabited swamp world with a crazy 900 year old hermit who talks to himself.

Yup...TNG is my favorite Star Trek series.

Oh, I can roll with it if it's space opera.

As sci-fi, nope, not gonna fly.  The Cohms and the Yangs were silly, the Way to Eden was pretty damned bad, and there's plenty of bad to go around in Star Trek, but if you're citing the super-badassness of the Empire, who are fooled in effect by something as unsophisticated as "peek-a-boo", that does not lend any creedence to claims of badassery.  They fail on a technical level that just doesn't work when considering a conflict between the two.

simple star trek can fire on targets while in warp

hyper space means no target engagement until out of hyperspace.

so the federation stays at warp and fries everything they see.

Behold the surgical precision that can't even hit a ship coming straight at you at less than 2,000 meters.

It would be difficult for the Federation to get through the Empire's much stronger shields.  While they're trying in vain, the Empire would be planet hopping and taking over planets and destroying Federation bases.

The tech level of the Star Trek universe is far too advanced for the Star Wars universe to win.   Trek weapons, shields, drives, etc. would crush Star Wars tech.  Think about what would happen if you matched Panzer tanks from WW2 against modern M1 Abrams tanks.

There are Runabouts and Peregrine fighters that can carry torps. An ISD would not be able to out turn a Sovereign class and they could stay behind an ISD in their engine way chewing away all day. Defiant down the trench with Worf at them helm....if he couldn't lock the exhaust he'd stick the nose down the pipe and fire everything he's got as he hit. Not to mention beaming a warhead into the exhaust or having Worf hack Chewbacca to pieces with a bat'leth.

If Q joins the party, Star Trek, by a lightyear.  He could cause the entire Empire and the Force to simply cease existing.

how in the blue fuck can you take any SW tech seriously when the fastest ship in the galaxy can make .5 past light speed, but they can still travel 10,000 lightyears in a couple days?

I was thinking the opposite.  Space transportation and weapon tech in Star Wars has been developed over many thousands of years while Star Trek tech is very young, which would explain why Star Wars tech is orders of magnitude more powerful.

As said before, judging by Q's motivations in the past, he'd probably watch the Federation be obliterated just for kicks and grins.

That's the answer.  The Federation is so far past sublight travel and weapons that anything that travels at the speed of light is laughable.  Doesn't matter how hard it hits when it can't hit.  They have warp travel, FTL sensors, and transporters.   Beam mines in front of the enemy.  Beam mines/bombs inside their ships.   Attack them from warp.  They can't see you and can't hit you.  It might be slow, but Trek ships would eventually destroy Star Wars ships.

Of-course.  

Space opera, not sci-fi.

If you're writing off the prequels, you're writing off more than half of the Star Wars universe - because we're going with films, not with fanfic that was copied off some usenet group and pasted into a cheap publisher's book series.

Star Wars on film is pretty much just A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Holiday Special, Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith.

You can scratch out Holiday Special just like most of Voyager can be ignored, as well as the Way to Eden and Spock's Brain, but leaving out the prequels leaves out a lot of the movies.

Cutting the ewoks means you're down to two movies out of six.

That's a whole lot of pick and choose just to like the Empire... an Empire that at best was still beaten by a cousin-fucking cracker from a shithole planet.

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Stormtroopers.. not regular troopers, but the emperor's best stormtroopers (not played for comedy like ST5; and still from the two movies accepted as being empire-friendly):


Killed by rope:


Killed by an incestuous cracker who blasted whomp rats for shits and giggles:

So they fired more, and at various ranges?

So Ben Sisko likes his enemies to see who killed them, because he's a badassmotherfucker?

Point?

The trench is 59+/-17M.  Getting a 134M wide ship down it would require some Bondo.

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/ds/index.html#trench

And while I do concede that an Imperial II is not a race car, it's 72 fighters, 5 assault gunboats, multiple Skipray blastboats, and assault shuttles would make sure that nobody would park in its blind spot.

It's space opera, not sci-fi.  Space opera's fun, which is why it has devotees.  That's why SW gets a pass from its fans.

Sci-fi is superior.  Science.  

Q needs someone to toy with. With his experiences on Voyager he needed the humans.

The bad guy ships (Gem Hadar or whatever they are) were doing their best to shoot at the Defiant while it closed and yet couldn't even land a hit at less than 2,000.  It's safe to say that the Empire is able to hit a longer distances since that's just over one ship length on an ISD.

That's what makes the whole debate laughable.  Star Wars obviously doesn't even try to be sci-fi, whereas Star Trek takes their sci-fi very seriously and tends to not contradict itself within the same series, let alone the same film.

You are ALL noobs and will be pwned accordingly.

Wrong answer.

Q's motivation is that he's concerned that mankind will eventually surpass the Q.  His "judging" and everything else is an attempt by the Q continuum to decipher humanity as a long-term threat.

He'd find the Empire to be predictably dull army of clones that were created by a villain so transparent that citizens of Metropolis could've figured out it's Palpatine.  He'd also smugly say the same.

I don't think he's relevant to the discussion, though, since he basically exists in order to have more character driven plots and explore the human condition.

Sort of like the Trek villains that are implacable foes that exist as a vehicle for other plots.

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Face it, the whale probe could destroy the Empire because the Empire has no whales.

So you're citing the Gem Hadar missing as proof that the Federation is inferior?  We're talking about the Federation vs the Empire, not the Gem Hadar vs the Empire.

Even so, I'd bet on the Dominion against Imperial Stormtroopers and their "precision".

Well, there is an explanation for this...

One can have some discussion there within a series, after all, Star Trek suffers from different writers with sometimes changing views that often means a wonderful science solution one week can't solve a new science problem the next week.  Usually not, but sometimes.  There is a great body of work to be consistent with, after all.

Similarly, but to a much more marked degree, Star Wars suffers from a split between those who accept the prequels (and/or special editions) and those who reject them.

Star Wars has fans who seem to take some numerical scribblings by Lucas or some degenerate internet assburger as legitimate, or some absurd new ship/villain as the next big thing, where clearly they're just grasping at straws for new plots.

Say, like the "galaxy gun"...


Which blew up that Eclipse ship from a couple pages back.

Physicist geeks also say that humans are causing global climate change, and I don't believe them either.

Trek FTW.

ST has matter replicators, and if they were to build them on a large scale, they could quickly create whatever military forces were necessary to match numbers with the Star Wars fleets. ST tech is superior to SW tech, period. Given manufacturing capacity and will, they would win.

A white box?  Hmm...

That's like poetry man!

How many tens of thousands did she bring back? We haven't even started on the Victory class star destroyers yet...

I Galaxy spanning and dominating civilization the likes of which even the Borg have not achieved vs. a barely out of it's crib civilization that can't even get out of it's quadrant.



The Empire wins.  Their basic weapons are vastly more powerful than anything utilized by any of the Star Trek races.



Now if you want a battle have say the Emperor vs. Q

How can you take Trek science serious when they created "scientific formulas only to handwave some reason for breaking to rules because they get in the way of plot?





In answer to your question. Hyperspace is a different dimension and has different laws of physics. Light speed is much much faster than 299,792,458 m/s

My money would be on the Empire.  Do not remember ever seeing star trek ever in all out war footing much less capability.


Of course SciFi tends to underplay the destructive capability civilizations capable of FTL travel are capable of.  You do not need a death star to kill a planet accelerating a mass to high sub-light speeds and slamming it into a planet is more than sufficient to wipe out complex life.  Not sure you'd actually want to explode a planet though mining resources and such.

Empire wins.

I'm a hardcore Trekkie.

No way the Federation can win.  It takes them decades just to go from one end of a quadrant to the next.   They have so few ships compared to the empire that they count fighters in their fleet numbers.  

Even if you count the fighters, the Empire has far more capital ships.  FAR more.  And they can all go from one end of the galaxy to the next in like, a week.

Empire greatly outnumbers them, is far more mobile, and most importantly, far more willing to kill on a genocidal scale.  Sorry Feddies, but there's just no way to win.

Sort of.



the .5 is a hyperdrive rating.  The smaller the number the faster it can go in hyperspace.  Star Destroyers for instance have hyperdrives with ratings on the order of .9-1



And the line is "She'll make .5.  That's past light speed."  A hyperdrive with a .5 rating most certainly goes many times faster than light speed.  Why Han felt it neccessary to say that it was past light speed when any hyperdrive is... is a bit of a mystery... maybe he just didn't think Luke knew the first thing about space travel.



And in universe explanation.



Begin real explanation.  George Lucas knows nothing about physics.  Fortunately the authors of the books which expand the universe are much better informed.  They've even managed a plausible explanation of the 12 parsec thing.



 

Can someone give an idea why higher FTL speeds are more complicated???  If you can travel FTL...........i.e......break natures speed limit what would stop you from doing it multiple times over???


Would Mass Effects relay system be more realistic, by that I mean fixed point-to-point travel using a device far outstripping any vessel you can fit a gun to.

The same reason our Carries only do 32 knots instead of 87knots. It's all about power.

The faster you want to go the more power you need.




http://www.ditl.org
Edit: regarding your second point. Yes, being able to teleport an army across the galaxy would be a game changer. That's why the Federation destroys any gateway they come across.

THANK you.  Finally, someone who gets it.

So fit a bigger drive core.  For true space ships power source fuel, probably HE3 for fusion power would be easy to resupply.


Take the highest output engine you can, fit a main gun to it and build a ship around it.