Could Star Wars beat up Star Trek?

who would win?
the fans

seriously tho, i am a fan of both... if you really want to know who would win, you would need to go over to the Fleet Junkies, who know all the technical aspects of ships and such.
and the Death Star's superlasers couldnt even scratch the paint on the Enterprise E. or D.
Evidence? sure i got it. In one episode of TNG (i forget which one), a planet threatens to blast the Enterprise D out of the sky with its laser. Riker gets a funny look on his face, and looks at the captain, saying "A laser? that wouldnt even penetrate our navigational shields"
i think they're called navigational shields; anyway, what those do is basically to make sure that small asteroids and such dont scratch the paint, or maybe even put a ding in the hull. So turbolasers would be ineffective. good thing for Star Wars that turbolasers are not their only weapons

 

Only most Star Wars weapons aren't lasers at all, despite their names. Look at how relatively slow the beams go, they're some type of energy weapon. Also very powerful, looking at how they can level cities in minutes.

-P!-

 

The GFFA > Milky Way Galaxy, so yes, SW could beat up ST.

 

I'm sure I read some big long spiel about how turbolasers are actually plasma weapons with a laser guidance system or something like that. Hot things, anyway.

 

Star Trek wouldn't even turn up for the fight. It would be trapped inside a malfunctioning holodeck.

 

I'm sure I read some big long spiel about how turbolasers are actually plasma weapons with a laser guidance system or something like that. Hot things, anyway

i always figured they were lasers, due to the name. however, a few ppl have brought to my attention that they are not, in fact, lasers. so i concede the point.

 

Only most Star Wars weapons aren't lasers at all, despite their names.

Neither are phasers.

 

it just hit me: slicers. the shields of Star Trek ships run on a certain frequency, harmonics, or whatever. you put someone like Ghent on that in battle, and he'll have them shut down in no time.

 

The Star Wars weapons are not lasers. Observation shows they cannot be, as they have very different properties from a laser. At least one official source explains that "turbolasers" and "blasters" are all, in fact, plasma weapons, which is the best explanation for the observed characteristics (bolts travelling slower than a terrestrial bullet, not beams travelling at the speed of light).

Also, one has to consider the observed power, no matter what the name of the technology is. Laser or not, the Death Star's main weapon destroyed an entire planet in one shot. Can the Enterprise's main phaser array do that? Apparently in an episode of I believe Voyager, Worf states that the reactors' entire power output is about 800 Gigawatts (GW). Shield power must of course be less than this number. Calculations in the Technical Commentaries establish the power of a Star Destroyer "turbolaser" as between 250 and 2000 Terrawatts (TW).

Most ST-oriented sources have a tendency to underestimate the power and sophistication of SW technology. There is no actual logical reason to assume that the starship weapons in Star Wars are any less powerful than the phasers or disruptors of Star Trek. When you add in the differences in starship scales (a Star Trek battleship is the size of a Star Wars frigate), and in fleet sizes and resources, it's really not much of a contest.

 

Well, Star Trek is still Earth. And when Earth is the underdog, you better watch out.

And don't forget the Borg. Their cubes could shred a Star Destroyer apart like paper.

 

To add to eaglejedi's post, you also have to remember that the Republic (which became the Empire) alone has been a spacefaring civilization for about 29,800 years longer than the people of Star Trek... nevermind how long individual worlds in the GFFA had been in space. Even if the GFFA had been technologically stagnant for 26000 of the 30,000 years it's been around (and that's a big if), that's still a 3,800 year technological gap between the Republic/Empire and the Federation.

And I get sick of hearing the argument that Trek ships "look more advanced, therefore they are." This is ridiculous. I've seen 10 year old gaming rigs that look more advanced than say... a beige box cray supercomputer... but they aren't. Looks mean nothing. You can put the guts of a commodore in an alienware tower, but it's still just a commodore.

In the words of Han:

"She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts."




»Who dares wins«

 

Dude, if Star Wars had been evolivng techonlogically like they should have been for the past few thousands of years, they would be far moer advanced than they are. Heck, they would probably have become noncorporeal beings, like the elemist (Coompletely different fanboty enrd thing). No, the GFFA has been technologically stagnate for thousands of years.

[image=http://www.badmovies.org/tvshows/startrek/kirk.jpg] vs. [image=http://www.ludd.luth.se/users/kerberos/sci-fi/starwars/char/rebel/solo/solo.jpg]

Hmmm...

 

Quite simply - if Rick Berman continues to helm the Star Trek franchise then it is doomed...

At this point in time, Star Wars is on top...

 

Thanks, Robal, for conceding. Otherwise I'd have to unload my uber-physics skillz. Turbolasers are in fact plasma-based weaponry. The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels refers to them as "turboblasters" on some occasions, ostensibly to weed out the misnomer. Tough task.

Also, one has to consider the observed power, no matter what the name of the technology is. Laser or not, the Death Star's main weapon destroyed an entire planet in one shot. Can the Enterprise's main phaser array do that? Apparently in an episode of I believe Voyager, Worf states that the reactors' entire power output is about 800 Gigawatts (GW). Shield power must of course be less than this number. Calculations in the Technical Commentaries establish the power of a Star Destroyer "turbolaser" as between 250 and 2000 Terrawatts (TW).

Worf's not in Voyager. Though there's some inconsistency in that, too. In another episode, Data states the power of the Enterprise's reactor as being 12.75 billion GW, while in the TM there's yet another yield given.

The prefix for "trillion" is "tera", not "terra."

The turbolaser figure is incorrect, actually -- or rather, an incorrect interpretation of correct data. Mr. Saxton and his cohorts in that area, notably Michael Wong and Brian Young, establish the power of a turbolaser as much larger. The figures you cited from Mr. Saxton are stated by both him and Mr. Wong to be an ABSOLUTE LOWER LIMIT. Mr. Saxton also wrote the Star Wars Episode II Incredible Cross Sections, a canon document. In it, he gives the power of a turbolaser at 200 gigatons. A gigaton is a thousand megatons, and a megaton is 4186 terajoules (TJ). A turbolaser blast, judging by frame-by-frame analysis from ESB, takes 1/15 of a second to do its work. Do the math with these figures, and you get a figure of roughly 1e10 TW per turbolaser shot, which yields a sustained output of 5e9 TW. Per gun. This holds a highly entertaining degree of consistency with Michael Wong's Base Delta Zero TL power calculations, which yield figures within an order of magnitude of the above TL power figure. Keep in mind that this figure is based on turbolasers used during the prequel trilogy. If we're operating on the TLs in the Classic Trilogy and post-ROTJ era, the figure will be larger.

12.75 billion GW is 1.275e10 GW, or 1.275e7 TW. As the shield power must be lower than the power of the ship, it would take no more than two shots from any SW capital ship to utterly obliterate the E-D. Not sure about the E, though. However, quantum torps only do as much damage as two proton torpedoes. Think about the power requirements necessary to maintain the monsters that are SW capital ships.

The TNG TM states the E-D's main phaser array can output 3.6 MW at full power. The Daystrom Institute Technical Library by Graham Kennedy gives a figure of 85,000 TW, based on things seen in the show. That's 8.5e4 TW versus 1e10 TW. A turbolaser is almost a million times stronger than a phaser, by those calcs.

It's kind of impossible to tell whether the actual blaster bolts move slower than bullets. Doubtful, really. Because it's impossible to tell, it's safe to assume that the bolts move at near-C. That notwithstanding, a plasma bolt such as the ones described HAS to move at near-C -- speeds slower than bullets would rob it of the heat and kinetic energy it uses to deal out damage, and such a state would certainly lack the punch to get through stormtrooper armor in a couple of hits, as we see blasters doing. Keep in mind that even though in many cases the stormtrooper armor survives intact, the sheer heat and kinetic force kills the person wearing it through energy transfer -- that is how all weapons do damage, is by transferring energy to a target, whether in terms of heat, or in terms of kinetic energy and its corollary, momentum. Plasma is by nature extremely unstable, and must be delivered at relativistic velocities to a target -- otherwise, it will lose both stability and the ability to do considerable damage.

If the example of stormt

 

Who let Data into the thread?

 

I let myself in with my mad ninja skillz.

You'll find that the guards are missing their consciousness, their wallets, and the phone numbers of their exes. Which says something about the people you employ to guard your threads, doesn't it?

 

Hmm so your judging that they arn't lasers by the way they look?

Yet it is perfectly ok in Star Wars verse that you can walk and talk and hell not have their skin melt in space with mearly a air mask on?

Physics really shouldn't be used to make proofs for star wars calculations since they weren't even concidered when it was created.

 

Hmm so your judging that they arn't lasers by the way they look?

Yet it is perfectly ok in Star Wars verse that you can walk and talk and hell not have their skin melt in space with mearly a air mask on?

Physics really shouldn't be used to make proofs for star wars calculations since they weren't even concidered when it was created.

No. We are judging that turboBLASTERS do not use lasers as their method of delivering damage based on the way the blasts behave in a physical sense.

In fact, phaser blasts actually look and behave MORE like lasers than those of SW ships. They use rapid nadion reactions to fuel their blasts. The problem with rapid nadion reactions is that we don't know what the hell a rapid nadion is. Of course, no explosion ensues from a phaser blast to a living creature, so we must assume something else happens. Most phasers in fact are very ineffective against anything but living matter. Only the most powerful phaser rifles do much damage to anything else. Two measurements are available to ascertain this -- SEM and NDF. I forget what the first stands for, but it means destruction to living matter. The second means Nuclear Disruption Force. Some extremely powerful phasers have a high SEM:NDF ratio, but the most powerful phaser rifle in the Federation only has a 1:40 SEM/NDF ratio at the highest setting, and discharges...I'll calculate it in a bit.

Skin doesn't melt in space. It freezes. And if you'll recall the gas, there was clearly an atmosphere inside the creature's belly, as well as heating systems. We don't know much about the anatomy of physiology of 900-meter-long space slugs, but judging that Han and Leia could walk around in there I'd say we can judge what said anatomy and physiology does.

You're right that physics weren't considered in the creation of Star Wars. That doesn't erase the fact that it can be rationalized with physics. As much as many people hate KJA, he covered GL's ass with the Maw explanation of Han's quote about making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

Btw, I just pulled out my TNG TM. The shield rating of the Enterprise-D is 730,000 MW.

 

On the issue of Star Wars vs. Star Trek, SW definitely has better costumes, if that means anything.

 

So what are we supposed to base assumptions on? The default "trek ships look more advanced, therefore they are" argument?

Sure, power output and physics weren't considered when SW (the OT) was created because gee... Lucas thought story elements should be more than throwing around technobabble.

In the absence of any data from the source materiel, there's no choice but to go by observed characteristics. The calculations given by Saxton, Wong, and alpha_red seem to match up with what we see on screen... and the observed power of SW weapons seems to be far greater than those of Trek.






»Who dares wins«

 

Lucas thought story elements should be more than throwing around technobabble.

Now we're into subjective elements here. Some people would dispute that Lucas still thinks that way. I do not.

That's what I loved about the original Star Trek and to a lesser extent, TNG and DS9. Yes, I actually like DS9, though the original Trek exemplifies story elements and character instead of technobabble. The characters are so easy to get into and enjoy -- a feat that few series since then have been able to match. It has been said that Star Wars actually made Star Trek a moneymaker, because the increased interest in sci-fi following the CT's production led to the production of Star Trek movies and TNG.

As for my favorite ST movie, it'd have to be 4 and First Contact, followed by The Undiscovered Country and Insurrection.

Eva: That's why they make the various sourcebook materials for both franchises. I need to get my hands on a copy of DS9's TM.

 

Yeah, that's why I had that parenthetical nod to the OT. So far, the PT has been crap on film IMHO.

I'm not saying I don't like trek either. I thought the dominion war storyline from DS9 was better than your usual trek fare, and the original series was great.

I just think that in a war between the GFFA and the trek universe would be grossly one-sided in the GFFA's favour.

And yeah, I've read the technical manuals, but some of them seem to indicate that even Slave I could take out the Enterprise D with little trouble.

Who knows, maybe they're right.





»Who dares wins«

 

And yeah, I've read the technical manuals, but some of them seem to indicate that even Slave I could take out the Enterprise D with little trouble.

Who knows, maybe they're right.

They are. The Slave I's "laser" cannons deliver 64,000 GW into a target with each successful hit, according to the Incredible Cross Sections from AOTC. This is entertainingly close to Michael Wong's calculations of an X-wing's laser power in ANH, as having a lower limit of 30 TJ. Anything within about 100 times a given power yield is considered very close.

But that's not the point. The point is enjoyment.

Hell, give the Federation 20,000 years, and then we can talk about it. But I could just as easily imagine an alliance between the Federation and, well, the Alliance.

I like the PT so far, actually. TPM may not have had the best writing, but its historical significance is tremendous. A well-versed student of history will find an incredible amount of depth in the story it tells. I actually think it's cooler to show Anakin as a very young child -- it only accentuates the evil he becomes. And AOTC is good about the history, too, but its characters just ruled. I don't care what anyone says about Hayden Christensen -- he owns the screen, as do Ewan and Natalie.

Of course, no one's bothered to ask the real question yet. That question is:

Who would win in an Irish drinking contest, Kirk or Han?

 

TPM wasn't bad. In fact, the more I watch it, the more I like that film over AOTC. The story flows better, and it's a lot cleaner.

But TPM forces other, more important, aspects of Anakin's rise and fall to become too rushed. Episode III has to include a number of events that would have been better placed over the course of two movies than just one. I agree about what showing a very young Anakin does dramatically, but with a few alterations, AOTC would have been a better episode I.

But I'm getting way off topic here.

Kirk wins the drinking contest. He'd drink Han under the table and then take home a green alien babe on each arm.






»Who dares wins«

 

You dare ask this on a SW message board?