Star Wars vs Star Trek

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

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Which universe would win?

  1. Star Trek

    227 vote(s)
    35.5%
  2. Star Wars

    268 vote(s)
    41.9%
  3. Spaceballs

    47 vote(s)
    7.3%
  4. Farscape

    12 vote(s)
    1.9%
  5. Dune

    50 vote(s)
    7.8%
  6. Stargate

    36 vote(s)
    5.6%
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  1. Layman Totally Internally Reflected Valued Senior Member

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    I thought that is what they used the main deflector dish for. For a while I didn't realize what they used for this either, but then after watching TNG I think in one episode they mention having to do work on it for something to do with the shields. Then it seems like they can create any type of stream of particles from the deflector dish, then it seems to really make sense on why it would be called a "deflector" dish. What would it be deflecting if it was not a part of the shield systems? Anyways, that would make it seem like they would be more effective even if they didn't require as much power, even though the force of gravity is not that strong they are still able to create gravitational fields that can make big changes in acceleration into minor jolts with the inertial dampeners. I still think they would be smart to use seat belts and low power relays that extend to their main stations that should not be on the bridge because they tend to explode.

    http://www.stardestroyer.net/mrwong/wiki/index.php/Deflector_dish

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shields_(Star_Trek)
     
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  3. Layman Totally Internally Reflected Valued Senior Member

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    It may just be used to create the shield grid itself. It seems like it would be easier to collect charged particles with the gravitational force if you could create a strong force of gravity at a certain location. I could never figure out how they could keep the shields in a bubble around the ship. It seems like the deflector array would have to be able to create the particles and then control them to be in the desired locations. You wouldn't be able to effectively do that with the electromagnetic force. That would be something that they where unable to do in Star Wars. They only had shields in locations where they could be directly emitted from a device to device imbedded in the walls. Then weakness in the shields can be at different locations in different classes of ships, I think this has to do with the arrangement of the deflector array. It could have a harder time getting full effectiveness out of the shields between locations of the deflector array where other parts of the array besides the main deflector are not completely obvious, but there is an array not just the main deflector that does this.
     
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  5. Layman Totally Internally Reflected Valued Senior Member

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  7. Nexarc Troper In Training Registered Senior Member

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    The primary role of the Deflector Dish is not combat-related but is a navigational safety piece. It projects a low-level force field to prevent interstellar dust and matter from colliding with the ship when at warp. At very high speeds even the smallest grain of dust can create immense damage to an unprotected hull so the navigational screens "deflect" them away along with certain forms of radiation (why lasers normally don't penetrate them). Long range sensors are located near the dish to minimize subspace distortion from the field. Otherwise when not active it is still the largest particle and antenna array on most vessels so it can be configured to serve other roles as necessary.

    The shield grid as the name implies uses emitters placed in key locations on the hull to form a network that projects the shields. Federations shields at least are graviton-based backed by subspace fields. Probably the reason why in-universe they use the plural than the singular form. The graviton field acts to protect against kinetic weapons (probably implies that things 'fall away' the hull due to gravity reversal) while subspace fields are known to act against energy based weapons.

    Where shield frequency is concerned, since all forms of energy (and matter of a single homogenous material) oscillate at certain frequencies, the entire emitter network would have to be set at a single frequency at a time to minimize self-interference. Of course this allows weaponry tuned to this frequency to bypass them all together so shield frequencies in the later series are randomly changed in combat to prevent such. Think wineglass and opera singer for a similar situation. Since glass vibrates at a very high frequency, if one sings at the correct pitch, harmonic resonance can shatter the glass.
     
  8. Layman Totally Internally Reflected Valued Senior Member

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    Ya, you are thinking more along the lines of encounters with the Borg, and I was thinking more along the lines of episodes where they penetrate the shields with a shuttle craft. There was a couple of episodes where this happened. Then they had to do this at a certain location in the shield grid.
     
  9. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    In theory, a Federation ship could easily penetrate the shields of another Federation ship; example being Wrath of Khan. Knowing something such as the prefix codes to the ships computer would allow you to take remote access and power down ship systems. Additionally, federation shields should be able to easily match the frequency and nutation of another federation ships shields, allowing them to either overlap or, as we see with the shuttle craft, penetrate the shields entirely. Granted, in that episode they were LETTING it happen (it was a ruse to fool the Maquis) but still, the theory was solid enough that the Maquis bought it

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  10. Hellblade8 Valued Senior Member

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    ...You can block or deflect energy weapons with gravity too. There's a reason why even light can't escape the grasp of a black hole.





    Whom God's Destroy clearly indicates that the planet in question is entirely covered with a planetary shield. The Enterprise was to strike at the opposite side of the planet, where the forcefield was weakest in order to get a shuttle down (the plan was of course, dismissed as being too risky). So there is clear precedence for shields that encompass the entire planet. It's not really hard either, you just need the power and shield emitters to cover the entire planet.


    Really? Because that's not at all how it's actually described. It's described as a warship, plan and simple. The only part comparing it to a GCS was its warpcore; it could generate the same sort of energy as a GCS, but that's not the same thing as being as powerful as a GCS. An updated Excelsior was able to fight the Defiant to a near stalemate (albeit with the advantage for the Defiant). It is more accurate to say that pound for pound, the Defiant is more heavily armed and is one of the most heavily armed and armored ships in the Alpha-Beta Quadrant political sphere.

    However, in an actual battle with a GCS, the Galaxy can launch a half dozen torpedoes from one launcher and pretty much blast the Defiant into stray particles. The Defiant can, to be fair, deliver a heavy black eye with two quantum torpedoes and a volley of pulse phaser fire, but the GCS is likely to survive, where as the Defiant would not.

    Uh, no.

    True Q
    It is in fact, 5 billion gigawatts, would come out to 3.035 gigatons per second.

    It's really not that much of an issue. We know that Trek energy/particle weapons are based on some really sketchy NDF rules. Gigawatts for a weapon like that is actually pretty powerful. Consider that a small phaser bank has an output of about 4 gigawatts. The heavy phaser array of a GCS is worth effectively kilotons per second, though that assumes slightly different tactics than shown in the show (ie, GCS's are supposed to maintain fire at all times, not short phaser strikes--but TV drama).

    I don't think they have structural integrity fields back then. I think that was more of a TNG thing. They most likely of course, did have hull polarization.


    I always find it rather weird when people start talking smack of a guy who I've spoken to personally and who doesn't jump at the chance for teratons. Believe me, if Darkstar was a 'wanker' or something of the sort, you would see a very, very different argument on his site.

    Uh...you do realize that there are entire episodes in the Clone Wars where fleets engage each other in atmosphere of a planet and don't doom the land beneath them. That in fact, we see kiloton-sized explosions from ground-based artillery forcing an Acclamator landing fleet to retreat?


    Which is interesting, but given that SW ships don't constantly put out energy beams throughout a battle...I'm going to say it doesn't really matter all that much.

    You better hope that isn't the case or they're in a lot of trouble from weapons that use sub-atomic particles.

    Why would it? Not that it really matters.

    I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit on this. The ICS has some really, really bad numbers in it. Like, laughably bad. Hell, Saxton claims gigajoule level weaponry for anti-personnel weapons. Each blast from one of those should be making massive craters about as large as fighters. And these are the things on front of the AT-TEs. That's not even getting into the fact that the Acclamator, as I said, was taken down by roughly kiloton explosions.

    It's also about technology. Ancient Rome wouldn't be able to do shit against the London.


    Yeah...let's back this up.

    Do they have more troops?

    Well yes and no. In the Clone Wars era? Hell no. The Clone Army has been strictly put at around 3 million, with a few more million thrown in a year or so later. Dooku himself said in the first Clone Wars episode that his droid army outnumbers the Clone Army a 100 to 1. That's 300 million for the CIS and 3-4 million for the Republic. Now, that's a lot of soldiers...probably more than even Starfleet has save for a state of total war. But those numbers aren't going to really mean anything when they engage Starfleet in a ground battle that they have no hopes of winning.

    Now the Empire, they have much, much more. I forget the exact number, but I'm pretty sure it was single or double digits billions or trillions of soldiers.

    Jumping from there to ship numbers is also interesting. Clone War era...uh, kinda hard to tell. In fact, downright impossible. But the Empire does give us some solid numbers. It indicates that they several million ships (again, 15 million I think? Don't have the numbers). However, those numbers are also somewhat...er, misleading. First off, your entire battle group is going to be based around the ISDs--which themselves count as the entire economical output of a planet's entire year. So losing one of those is bad, really, really bad. And all those other ships? They're far weaker than the ISD. In fact, some of those ships have been in service for decades or even centuries.

    As for war, also no. While yes, Star Wars has had in general, a long-lasting state of wars throughout its existence, the Clone War era clearly showed a lack of understanding for ground combat; people lined up in pretty rows and it took years of warfare for them to start switching to more modern tactics. Even the Empire-era seems to have more of a WWII feel than a modern combat military, though I'd say that this is more of the focus of the movies, since we don't see any of their better toys. Starfleet however, has centuries of warfare to call upon and their ground technology is far, far superior to what the Empire brings to the table.

    Yeah...not really.

    http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/_...ages/1/19/Acclamators_damaged_over_Ryloth.png

    Or you know, this:

    http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/_...wars/images/0/0b/SpaceBattleOfUmbara1-PoD.png

    And of course, this beauty:

    http://www.nexusroute.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ionbomb.jpg

    Which did this:

    http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/c/c5/Bomb_on_Malastare_droid_forces.png

    Yeah...you're going to get only a few kilotons--single digit kilotons, from that.

    And that bomb? That bomb is huge:

    http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/d/db/Malastare_EP_bomb_run.png

    You can see it under the red one's belly in this image right here. Somehow, if the small blasters on the front were so uber powerful, we'd have just seen one of them strafe the army and fire several dozen GJ or TJ blasts and put the entire army out immediately without resorting to a new superweapon that required special permission from the Chancellor himself. In fact, I'd have also guessed that when their Godzilla reference went on a viscious rampage both on Malastare and Coruscant, they would have cranked up the firepower given how useless it was against them on any claimed lower setting.

    The ICS yields don't just fail at the starship level, they fail at the ground-base level.


    Which is really just silly since this doesn't apply; we're asking if the Star Wars era is more advanced than the Star Trek era. I mean, if we're going to play that card, we can go to Q saying that humanity eventually becomes so powerful that even the Q can't see what they become. Not even mentioning the bit where the Federation becomes a temporal power.
     
  11. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Heh... the Temporal Federation is... insanely potent. Who needs a BDZ... hell, who needs to fight a war at all... when you can just go back in time and prevent your enemy from ever having crawled from the primordial ooze...
     
  12. NeedleOfInquiry Registered Member

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    Hey, Kittamaru. I'm debating some people on SB who think daleks can defeat Q. What are your thoughts on the subject?

    Also, I just read the last 200 pages of this thread. You're the man!

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  13. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Heh, thanks Needle. As far as the Daleks defeating the Q... I rather think the Daleks would be in for an... unpleasant surprise, shall we say?... when they hit Q with their gunsticks and he turns around, glares at them, snaps his fingers, and they suddenly find themselves turned into, oh, I don't know, an Alverian Dung Beetle.
     
  14. NeedleOfInquiry Registered Member

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    12
    Yeah, that's pretty much what I said, only I said he'd turn them into "Kumquats."

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    Now I'm in a 4 on 1 debate against some serious wankers. It's pissing me off. I know that I could take any one of them in a 1 on 1 debate, but I'm burried under so much bullshit I don't even know where to start. It's not like I'm on the computer 24 hours a day. I'm working on a theory now. I heard somewhere that Transduction barriers can be breached by thoughts and concepts. If Q is anything like The Traveler, thoughts, matter, and energy are all the same to him. Could Q then breach a transduction barrier?
     
  15. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Well, the Q have shown that, when they fight, their battles manifest themselves outside the Coninuum as massive super-novas that threaten to destroy the entire universe... and those are their "handheld weapons", more accurately a physical manifestation of the weapons that Janeway and Co were capable of understanding. As far as Transduction Barriers... well, the Q pretty much alter reality at the sub-quantum and temporal level. There is no "barrier" that could stop their desires, at least none that is known. After all, Q, on his own, did some pretty incredible stuff... imagine what the Continuum as a whole could do

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    And to the Q, thoughts, matter, time, energy, and even reality are all... hm... how do you put it... they are minor constraints of perception and understanding that they allow themselves to fit into when interacting with Humanity only for the sake of Humanity's limited ability to perceive... they have seen countless multiverses flare into existence and fade into the void.
     
  16. NeedleOfInquiry Registered Member

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    Indeed. Q is at the top of the food chain. If I had to guess, Q weapons work, not because they actually overpower Q defenses, but because the Q "decide" that the weapons will work on them. An arbitrary process.
     
  17. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Well... sort of? It's more like the rest of the Continuum overpowers them in a way. Just like how they can strip the powers from Q when he was being too rambunctious
     
  18. NeedleOfInquiry Registered Member

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    I see. Wow, this thread has gone on for 1179 pages. It's gotta be the longest ST vs SW discussion in history. But it seems that no one is left to continue. Do you think the debate is finally over?
     
  19. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Truth be told, the debate will never really be "over". I feel we have proven sufficiently that Star Trek would, ultimately, prevail through a combination of scientific progress, analysis of their enemy, and the ability to rapidly make changes to overcome new obstacles. Others will come to the great debate... it is... inevitable.
     
  20. NeedleOfInquiry Registered Member

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    I certainly hope so, I'm ready to kick some Warsie arse. XD

    But I'll do it with reason and thorough logical analysis, wouldn't want to be accused of being a fanboy.

    Long live Trek!
     
  21. Layman Totally Internally Reflected Valued Senior Member

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    Then they had this fear of change in the continuum as if altering their own actions in the continuum would lead to disastrous consequences. I was surprised that they didn't get destroyed from this conflict. I guess the rebel Q's where right and it was really nothing to be worried about or they found a solution to this problem or the Q's in charge actually won. I think it showed that they are not in foul-able. They seem to be from higher dimensional space, it could be that changes in the timeline would then drastically alter the space that they live in. They could be vulnerable to a drastic change in the timeline or the temporal multiverse sense they had so much concern about these types of issues. Then the Q that visited them in later episodes always had blue lips as though he had been somewhere really cold or that had a lack of oxygen. The Q that was trying to change the continuum ended up being locked away in a frozen asteroid.

    In the first episode of TNG, Picard was put on trial for the destruction of humanity. Then in the last episode he destroyed humanity because of the influence of Q. I think it should have been the Q in the first episode that was put on trial. He sealed his own fate from interfering with the captain jumping him through time. Otherwise he would have never known what to do that increased the anomaly that traveled back in time that would destroy everything.
     
  22. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Ah Layman, you have it backwards. Q helped Picard SAVE humanity in the end... yes, he allowed him to create the problem, but it was necessary. Picard is... special to Q, because Picard is able to see and understand more than most humans. That's part of why Q keeps "helping" him... everything Q has done so far has helped Picard and his crew in some way, from Encounter at Farpoint (opening their eyes to the fact that there are species far beyond their comprehension and understanding how some of these species view Humanities barbaric past) to Q, Who? Where Q forces them to encounter the Borg much, much too soon, which allows time for Starfleet to recognize and at least attempt to prepare for the threat. Then, in All Good Things, Q explains to Picard at the end that the "Trial Never Ended"... which isn't so much about Q putting Picard on trial, as it is about Picard and Co being on trial as they explore the universe; the dangers and chances and opportunities they will face.

    In all... I think Q has done a LOT to help Picard expand his horizons... and if you ever get the chance to read the books by David Mack, he does a wonderful job expanding on how Q is actually the... spokesman?... for humanity to the Continuum... remember, even in the series, Q has stated that humanity has the potential to surpass even the continuum if only they'd try... well, I like to think he's helping them try

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  23. Layman Totally Internally Reflected Valued Senior Member

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    I think their only interest in Picard was that he would have been one of the most important figures in Star Fleet history. Then Janeway as well because they would have made the first voyage across the galaxy. I think it was their second encounter where Q seemed to be worried about what changes the Enterprise would make across the galaxy. It was the most advanced ship built to date in the known galaxy. This could have had devastating consequences if it was in the wrong hands. They feared this ship creating a big change in the galaxy.

    I don't think Picard would agree that he was being helped by Q. He acted more like a nuisance. I think that comes from more of the inability of the Q to be able to interact with humanoid life effectively because of their "special powers". Then the continuum was not pleased in the way he handled himself.

    I always tended to the philosophy that if you where to remember events happening in an alternate timeline that the only way you could remember those events would be if those events still actually happened. But, like in some episodes they did not have memories of the way things use to be, like in the episode where Guinan was the only one that remembered glimpses of the way the timeline use to be. This is where Tasha Yar made a reappearance after he death in the original timeline. Since they had memories of the anomaly traveling back in time and destroying everything, I don't think it altered their own time but created an alternate timeline where things actually became destroyed from it. If it happened to their own timeline it would have created a time loop where the series would happen over and over again. Being destroyed, lacking a Picard that would destroy it, no longer being destroyed, having a Picard that would destory it again so on etc. Then since it seemed like Q had knowledge of these events that would mean he was from an alternate timeline that was destroyed since he had these memories of the events taking place.

    On another note, I think Janeway completely screwed a timeline over where she handed the Borg future technology. If every Borg in that timeline was not destroyed from their plan, then they would have advanced them enough to be able to wipe them out without them being able to develop the technology to defend themselves. Then she didn't have any change in her memories of past events in this episode either.

    Some episodes go from C to A to B that leads back to C, then some go from A timeline to B timeline. I would think that it would go from C to A to B, if the time traveler went a long distance in spacetime and then it goes from A timeline to B timeline when the time traveler goes a short distance in spacetime, and I believe that is consistent with all the episodes, as I watched them all with this in mind. I love thinking about time travel

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