Star Wars vs. Star Trek

First of all i have to say i like star wars better the trek. BUT i still love trek quit alot

 

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So why do they nver do that?

 

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just to give the enemy an edge, you know, cause it's cool to miss like that

k that made absolutely no sense

 

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Picard always wants to use the homing torpedoes, but Worf always starts crying things like "That's so lame..." and "There is no honor in that". A crying Klingon on your bridge can be VERY enervating, so they let him have his way!

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True - but not the entire Star Trek galaxy taken together! How would Imperial star destroyers face up to Borg cubes? Or Krenim temporal erasure weaponary? To say nothing of the Q, of course... I know a single Q has been outwitted by humans, but it was his fellow Q who reigned him in.

(I'd like to see the Borg assimilate a Hutt...)

Then there are sub-Q, but still fairly omnipotent, Star Trek entities: such as Kevin Uxbridge the Douwd, who snuffed out an entire species of 50 billion in a single temper tantrum. I doubt that Darth Vader would seem very threatening to him.

I voted for Trek, you might have guessed: interesting to see, though, that the scores are still 50:50.

 

Introducing NCV-474439-G, USS Relativity, any attempt to distrupt the time line such as starting a war with SW universe will be "corrected" without noticing.

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Borg cubes? Hah. Tie fighter swarm would ruin it. Star Wars have the best pilots ever. They use magic, er the Force.

Yeah, Q would eat the Star Warsians alive.

 

Two points here. First, it seems silly to assume that deflector shields make a starship invulnerable to all laser fire just because the deflector shields on the Enterprise will protect it from the lasers of one particular species that’s known to be very technologically inferior. Each blast from a Star Destroyer’s turbo-lasers hit with the energy equivalent of a large nuclear weapon. The Empire is from a civilization that is vastly older and more technologically sophisticated than the Federation, let alone the weakling race mentioned in "The outrageous Okona". I don’t think you can consider their weapons to be equivalent.

Second, the weapons in starwars aren’t lasers, they’re turbo-lasers. It isn’t really clear what the difference is, but the weapons depicted in the starwars movies obviously have rather different properties than normal lasers.

It’s true that Star Destroyers aren’t very maneuverable, but they aren’t supposed to be. Their entire battle strategy is “fly up to the planet, smash anything that gets in your way, and then smash the planet if the defending fleet doesn’t surrender.” Yes, Federation ships would be more maneuverable than a Star Destroyer, but Star Destroyers were specifically designed to fight smaller, more maneuverable ships. They have heavy turret mounted guns that can track and fire in any direction, so ‘dogfighting’ isn’t really an issue for then.

Also, in addition to fantastically more powerful weapons, a Star Destroyer is much much larger and more massive than an Enterprise class starship.

 

Here are some interesting numbers from the startrek and starwars technical manuals:

Federation photon torpedoes produce an explosion of about 64 megatons, which is a pretty big blast by today’s standards. An Acclamator class star destroyer, on the other hand, has 12 heavy guns that each deliver 200 gigatons/shot. This means that one shot from a Star Destroyer’s heavy guns would be equivalent of getting hit by over 3000 photon torpedoes. And since Star Destroyers were built to survive heavy combat against ships with equivalent weapons, it isn’t clear that Federation starships would even have much chance of damaging a Star Destroyer.

 

Hi Nasor! First of all: I really like the discussion with you...more on the technical side, not these Yedi vs. Q style discs. ;-)

OK, this may sound like nitpicking, but the yield of Federation torpedoes is measured in the fictional unit "ISOtons", not Megatons. This measurement was never clearly defined, but it has to be something bigger than megatons. Trek takes place ca. 400 years in the future...64 megatons seems a bit too weak for this time.

Nasor...If you are interested AND if you got the time, I can recommend a good article on this issue about the strength of Federation torpedoes on www.ditl.org
It's one of the better Trek-Sites...At the bottom navigation, simply choose "Articles" and then select on the left "Torpedo yields".

Well...enjoyed reading your thoughts on this classic topic...now it's definately time for bed....or maybe a last cigarette!

See you later

 

Hi SchonLueckPikar. I have a star strek technical manual that give all sorts of interesting specs for the Enterprise, and it explains that a photon torpedo contains 1.5 kg of antimatter that's detonated to create the torpedo explosion. 1.5 kg of antimatter would work out to 3*c^2=2.7*10^17 joules, or about 64 megatons.

Trying to extrapolate the yield of a photon torpedo based on stuff seen in episodes and movies could be a fun physics exercise, but it’s no match for actual published numbers in my opinion.

Edit: Actually now that I think about it, a lot of the energy from a detonating photon torpedo would be wasted, because it would explode outward in all directions. Perhaps the photon torpedoes have some sort of ‘focusing device’ that would help direct the blast at their target, but it seems unlikely that all 64 megatons would actually impact the target. I seem to recall there being some sort of minimum range for photon torpedoes, so that would support the idea that the blast explodes outward in all directions.

 

What about the awesome manevourability of X-Wings, Y-Wings and Tie Fighters?
I don't think the Federation has a fighter class comparable to these, not to mention that they are piloted by the prescient. It'd be pretty hard to have a computer compete with that.
Weren't the swarms of Rebel fliers able to take out Star Destroyers in the Empire Strikes Back? So it is possible that the Soveign Class would be a threat. However, with pilots like Skywalker, Han Solo and Vader, the Fed pilots would be out of their league. The more agile Tie Fighters would outmaneouver the agile Sovereign Class. And if the Empire was in cooperation with the Resistance (as would be assumed since it's SW vs ST), then the Feds would also be outgunned, even with the help of Romulans and Klingons.

 

Earth at one of her peak time (1974) owned 27 gigatons of warheads. Right now the number drops to around 12 gigatons.

Anyway, in ST universe, there are some amazing anicent techs, like the 10,000 year old telecommunication array which span the entire galaxy, and the transwarp hub the Borgs were using are also very old.

In ST torpedo techs, Transphasic torpedo and Chroniton torpedo can both phase through shield. The transphasic one can even phase through hull and explode from inside.

 

Borgs are scary.

 

Given the explosions we've seen on-screen from photon torpedos (or quantum torpedos) its hard to believe that the isoton is even equal to a kiloton, let alone a megaton. The ships Star Trek depicts are seldom more than a few hundred metres long (even Borg ships are only about 4 km on each side), and such a vessel should be dwarfed by the fireball generated by a standard 10 megaton modern-day nuclear weapon, whether or not its shields protect it.

Photon torpedos always struck me as pretty lame, despite the scriptwriters' insistence that they use antimatter as a reactant.

Star Wars took an absurb opposite extreme in postulating the Death Star, with enough firepower to completely overwhelm the gravitational binding energy of an Earth-sized planet. I can't think of any sub-stellar energy source equal to the task - and the vast majority of stars wouldn't generate that much energy in a month.

 

I can't see a turbolaser blast being 200 gigatons. I could see that being the Death Star superlaser, but not on a run of the mill turreted weapon.

I can't see photon torpedoes being 64 megatons, either. Unless 99% of the energy is directed forwards, something that modern shaped charge weapons can't do with conventional explosives. I suppose you could give them leeway with four hundred years of time to research the things though.

This brings up the difficulty of matching the universes though. Not only are the universes' physics different, but they decide upon different ways to measure themselves as well.

 

Is this thread about the "Federation VS the Empire" or the "Star Trek Universe vs Star Wars Universe"

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Actually, the minimum energy of the deathstar super-laser (assuming Alderan was roughly the same size and mass as earth) would be somewhere around 3.7*10^33 joules, or about forty-two thousand billion gigatons. If a regular turbo-laser turret were 200 gigatons it would only be about 0.00000000048% as powerful as the super-laser.

 

I found that the Star Wars technical manual describes the Death Star as having a "hypermatter reactor" at its core. Maybe this means some sort of "strange" matter, or mass composed of the archaic particle classification hyperons (super-hadrons which, under Earthly conditions, decay in less than a nanosecond).

If vast quantities of hyperons could be stimulated to break down at once, it would certainly unleash a lot of power - but how could the hyperon mass be built up again for the next shot, without using the same amount of power to create them?

 

I recall hearing that the hypermatter is harvested from the edges of balck holes, or some such. It's kind of like dilithium in Star Trek. Used for power on starships, and such.