Galactic Empire vs Orions Arm Sephirotic Civilisations

[Mobius IO]

It's big - so what?

You really don't know do you.

If it's a sphere, it will collapse under it's own gravity once you make enoug cuts into it.

If it were going to collapse under its own gravity it would do that with or without the holes, lol.

If we are talking about dyson swarms, simply blow up the individual platforms. It might take more time, but it's the same basic tactic.

And you could try and drain an ocean by haveing a few kids sip at it all days with straws, you would have about as much luck.

Alternatively, blow up the star.

With what?

[Mobius IO]

Ever heard of jamming? Around the Death Star, it was so powerfull that it distorted space-time.

ANYTHING with mass distorts space-time, that is what gravity is.

So by your own burden of proof give me some hard numbers on how effective this "space-time" jamming is.

[Ghost Rider]

So are we going to get number for the OA, or like every other debate have more screaming how they will

- Reverse Engineer things and obviously make huge leaps in technological and economical growth because (insert pithy phrase)!

- Don't need numbers to prove my side is superior because I SAY SO.

or finally

- Vague examples of power in unspecified terms and scenario to demonstrate massive something thus leaping to a win based on this logic.

I know I missed one or two, but it has been a while since I've seen this mess pop up again.

[Mobius IO]

So are we going to get number for the OA, or like every other debate have more screaming how they will

- Reverse Engineer things and obviously make huge leaps in technological and economical growth because (insert pithy phrase)!

- Don't need numbers to prove my side is superior because I SAY SO.

or finally

- Vague examples of power in unspecified terms and scenario to demonstrate massive something thus leaping to a win based on this logic.

I know I missed one or two, but it has been a while since I've seen this mess pop up again.

The only tech they need is FTL travel. The rest of there tech and industry is at least on par with the Empire. They also demonstrate a proficiency with nano-tech that seems to vastly exceed the Star Wars Universe.

I love how you demand numbers without providing any of your own. How many ships can the Empire field? How long does it take them to assemble? How long to find all of the important OA civilizations?

And most importantly where is the proof that the Empire can adapt to nano-tech assault or any of the other advantages OA has.

Edit:
OA tech etc:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b3edd2afc03

[Serafina]

Really? Somehow every little crazy ass idea in Star Wars is valid cannon yet I have to prove not only that within the OA universe the great minds are hugely more intelligent than human mind but that it is absolutely possible?

No.
The problem is that YOU are using pseudscience to extrapolate the capabilities of OA, while i am using observed capabilites of SW.
Whether or not it's scientifically plausible has no bearing on that - it's about the method of analysis you use.

And before you go on I never said OA was possible I said it was "much harder sci-fi" because nothing CONTRADICTS know science and it is internally consistent.

Provide evidence for this.

So show me your proofs for the Death Star, Hyperspace, Hyper matter, etc or accept that the OA minds have the capabilities they are clearly shown in the fiction to have.

The proof is, as they say, in the pudding.
Or rather, in the canon - we SEE that the Death Star blows up a planet. Under suspension of disbelief (the best method for VS-debates and analysis of capabilities), we treat what we see as if we saw it in real life.

If it were going to collapse under its own gravity it would do that with or without the holes, lol.

We need a facepalm smiley.
Obviously, not, since the forces in a sphere chancel out each other - as long as the sphere is intact.
Breach it, and that no longer applies.

And you could try and drain an ocean by haveing a few kids sip at it all days with straws, you would have about as much luck.

So, how many platforms do they have?
Let's say a trillion - 1.000.000.000.000.
Let's send a hundred Star Destroyers. Each ships has to destroy 10.000.000.000 - 10 billion platforms.
Suppose one medium turbolaser (200 GT) is enough to destroy a platform. A ISD II has about 35 such weapons, including the heavy turbolasers. Therefore, each Star Destroyer has to fire about 285.000.000 times.
At a refire rate of about once every two seconds - that gives us 9.500.000 minutes - about eighteen years.
There - simple math shows that that method is impractical.

So, alternate options? Sure - just up the numbers. Namely, use missiles.
To destroy a trillion platforms, we would need a trillion missiles. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it?
Well, according to the OA-wiki, there are about a dozen of these uber-AIs.
And we have a problem with the launch platforms as well.
Looks bad, eh?
Well, the simple answer is: Go for an area effect.

Which brings us back to our star.
Star Wars has Torpedoes that are capable of blowing up a star and are still small enough to fit on a fighter. Originally, it was placed on the Sun Crusher, an extremely powerfull vehicle.
While both are lost, including the (top-secret) technology, it might be possible that they can be recreated.


But let's forget about that for now, and use something far simpler:
Strategy.
No matter how good the AI, it's useless without resources. Simply intercept every ship that attempts to travel to the AI. If necessary, blockade the wormholes. Given the superior speed, this should not be too much of a problem.
Given that complex machinery inevitably needs maintenance, it will break down on it's own while being virtually useless.

[Serafina]

The only tech they need is FTL travel. The rest of there tech and industry is at least on par with the Empire. They also demonstrate a proficiency with nano-tech that seems to vastly exceed the Star Wars Universe.

I love how you demand numbers without providing any of your own. How many ships can the Empire field? How long does it take them to assemble? How long to find all of the important OA civilizations?

And most importantly where is the proof that the Empire can adapt to nano-tech assault or any of the other advantages OA has.

RTFMS (read the fucking main site). It has an extensive analysis of SW-capabilities.

And nano-tech is wanktech. Sure, miniturisation is nice - but it doesn't provide more power, is useless as a weapon and for large-scale construction.
Besides, we know that the Empire can construct things at atomic level, so they DO have nanotech.

And why is it useless as a weapon?
Simply because they ARE so small. They can only take a pittyfull amount of energy, a simple EMP would blow them out of the sky. Against shields that can take petatons of firepower, they will do squat.

[Junghalli]

How do we 'know' that? I don't see any estimates beyond 'Ray Bradbury said' which is pretty hilarious. Does OA have any specifics for anything, or is it just the giant circlejerk it appears to be?

That reminds me, the article does give some numbers for how common these sorts of constructs are, I really should have included them in my original post.

As of this writing there are 34 hypernodes in operation within the Negentropy Alliance, 17 operating in the MPA, and 109 in use or under construction in various locations across the rest of the Civilized Galaxy.

Moving beyond the bounds of Sephirotic civilization, over 117,000 hypernodes have been observed in operation within the Panvirtuality, with more than half having been confirmed as of the “Omega Class” type.

Not that great as quantification, but if we consider that this is as of ~12,000 CE we can derive an absolute lower limit for the Panvirtuality of being able to build these constructs at an average rate of 11-12 per year, and between 1 every 300 years (Negentropic Alliance) and 1 every 500 years (MPA) for the other powers. It's unclear whether the difference is due to capacity or will.

The Panvirtuality at least seems to have any demonstrated Star Wars industrial feat that I know of beaten pretty handily.

[Serafina]

Actually, you just have to show that OA is comparable to the Culture.
Of course, you already lack FTL or being untouchable when in it while still firing back
You also provide no proof of scale - numbers of ships etc.
You also have demonstrated nothing even nearly approaching gridfire.
You also do not construct Dyson spheres just because it's fun.

Either way - if you can show that OA is comparable to the Culture, they should be able to beat the GE.
Of course, the Culture has the numbers on it's side, while you don't provide any.

[Junghalli]

Actually, you just have to show that OA is comparable to the Culture.
Of course, you already lack FTL or being untouchable when in it while still firing back
You also provide no proof of scale - numbers of ships etc.
You also have demonstrated nothing even nearly approaching gridfire.
You also do not construct Dyson spheres just because it's fun.

Either way - if you can show that OA is comparable to the Culture, they should be able to beat the GE.
Of course, the Culture has the numbers on it's side, while you don't provide any.

... I'm not getting this. I'm pretty sure the Culture is brutally overpowered to beat the GE, i.e. you could be a lot weaker than the Culture and still beat the GE.

[Serafina]

Actually, you just have to show that OA is comparable to the Culture.
Of course, you already lack FTL or being untouchable when in it while still firing back
You also provide no proof of scale - numbers of ships etc.
You also have demonstrated nothing even nearly approaching gridfire.
You also do not construct Dyson spheres just because it's fun.

Either way - if you can show that OA is comparable to the Culture, they should be able to beat the GE.
Of course, the Culture has the numbers on it's side, while you don't provide any.

... I'm not getting this. I'm pretty sure the Culture is brutally overpowered to beat the GE, i.e. you could be a lot weaker than the Culture and still beat the GE.

Ah, yes - it's more about them both being ruled by post-singularity AIs.
I'm not saying "you have to be as strong as the Culture", but rather "show that having PS-AIs makes you anywhere that good".
So far, OA's technology has been pretty underwhelming compared to SW, mostly due to lack of numbers.

[Ford Prefect]

Ever heard of jamming? Around the Death Star, it was so powerfull that it distorted space-time.

General Dodonna says: "Also, their field generators will probably create a lot of distortion, especially in and around the trench. I figure that maneuverability in that sector will be less than point three." I suppose you could interpret 'distortion' as meaning 'distortion of spacetime', but I'm not entirely sure why you would. He could just be referring to its effect on their instruments, which directly impinges on their ability to control their fighters. Or it could just referring to how their sensors will have a great deal of difficulty imagining the surrounding trench, so it will be difficult to perform any hard maneuvers, simply due to it being unsafe. Either is about as plausible as assuming that Imperial jamming can alter the curvature of spacetime in any significant way.

[Ghost Rider]

Actually, you just have to show that OA is comparable to the Culture.
Of course, you already lack FTL or being untouchable when in it while still firing back
You also provide no proof of scale - numbers of ships etc.
You also have demonstrated nothing even nearly approaching gridfire.
You also do not construct Dyson spheres just because it's fun.

Either way - if you can show that OA is comparable to the Culture, they should be able to beat the GE.
Of course, the Culture has the numbers on it's side, while you don't provide any.

... I'm not getting this. I'm pretty sure the Culture is brutally overpowered to beat the GE, i.e. you could be a lot weaker than the Culture and still beat the GE.

Quite so. But then again, in comparison to this topic, Culture fans have shown why in combat it's bad, and while there is some discussion of how bad, it's not so far that one wonders if said fans are just using outliers. Though at least less one shot weaponry and more the complete and total sum of the technology the Culture can bring to bear is more then the GE could withstand. Thank god, less gridfire wank...

I'd just like something to show the OA military or something that would allow one to go they would defeat said GE and not make the fans go "So...the GE stands there and takes the rape?".

[Stark]

Wait for in a vs for Sephirotic civ we're using numbers from ... guys outside the Sephirotic civ? Oh dear.

It's difficult for me to care about the outcome of this vs however, since OA is -literally- nothing but a circlejerk. It's the equivalent of me being annoyed Draka gets defeated by Mobile Infantry, and nobody really cares about culture/photino birds/etc beating all and sundry.

If the aim was to advertise how awesome OA is, mission : failed.

[Ghost Rider]

Wait for in a vs for Sephirotic civ we're using numbers from ... guys outside the Sephirotic civ? Oh dear.

I know, might as well wait for the Sun to turn red.

[Serafina]

Either way, they could not get their torpedoes in due to jamming, not due to bad computers.
And they actually hit the shaft, the torpedoes just had insignificant telemetry to make the turn.

[Junghalli]

Wait for in a vs for Sephirotic civ we're using numbers from ... guys outside the Sephirotic civ? Oh dear.

Yeah, I was sort of debating with myself whether I should put that in, but I decided to err on the side of presenting as much information as possible, given that it's one of the few hard numbers I could find.

The only other hard numbers I could find doing a quick look around their site were construction times for Cableville: 277 years for a group of 27 low-level transapients to build this thing. Unfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to tell how big it is except that it's significantly larger than the star sitting inside it, which going by the size of our sun should give it a minimum diameter of at least a couple of million km, and the loop is described as going around the star 50 times. The sun has a diameter of ~1.4 million km, and the thing looks like it might be at least 2-3 solar diameters wide assuming we're viewing it edge on, so that would make it at least a couple of AU long if unravelled. Then again it's a dimmer star type than our sun, so it might be smaller.

Sorry, I know that probably isn't worth much. Somebody who cares about this debate more than me can trawl through their megaengineering pages in detail to see if there's anything else there; a quick look around didn't turn up anything in the way of hard numbers for industrial capacity. I'm going to be honest and say that, like Stark, I'm fairly apathetic to this whole debate and really don't care enough to trawl through page after page of OA articles in search of the occassional nugget of construction time quantification.

[Cykeisme]

But let's forget about that for now, and use something far simpler:
Strategy.
No matter how good the AI, it's useless without resources. Simply intercept every ship that attempts to travel to the AI. If necessary, blockade the wormholes. Given the superior speed, this should not be too much of a problem.
Given that complex machinery inevitably needs maintenance, it will break down on it's own while being virtually useless.

That's interesting, the Empire will get a bunch of astronomical sized brain-in-jar prisoners to disassemble and play with.

[Manthor]

Eh.You know what?Personally in the 1st scenario the GE is more or less capable of fighting the Sephirotics.FTL travel and multiple fleets of planet busters would do a number on them.

In the 2nd scenario I'd reckon the Sephirotics would have a better outcome than the GE,once they get the reverse-engineering done.

Honestly I cannot give then numbers because I don't know where they start but from this initial foray into the forum I can see what the standards for debating are and will probably come here with a stronger case next time. oh well. Win some and lose some.

[SirNitram]

Reverse engineering from an entirely different basis of science is ridiculous. You can, for example, steal a Russian rocket in the Cold War and reverse engineer that, because the engineering behind it all goes back to a common group which also educated the NATO forces, the German rocketry specialists. You can't do it when there are thousands of years of difference in engineering and science. I don't care how much you jerk off to planet-sized computers.

As for any and every claim that Orion is 'hard'. Let's see some tech:
Shatterbomb: Increases local expansion of spacetime.
Babel Fish: Yes, it's the Whoverse/Hitchhiker's guide translator. Frantically handwaved as a 'genetically engineered computer'. Yes, the 'Decode the brainwave matrix' while hearing the guy ON A SPEAKER SYSTEM one.
Computronium: Magic matter that is somehow ideal for computing.
All instances of Goo. Learn the fucking square-cube law.
Biological ships. Do I NEED to explain why this is pants-on-head retarded?


Amusingly, GUT drives, one of my favorite mocking points, are gone now. We've had OA fanwankers here. Please consider reading this now dead thread from the last time they tried to be clever. Plancktech, hehe...

[Mobius IO]

Reverse engineering from an entirely different basis of science is ridiculous. You can, for example, steal a Russian rocket in the Cold War and reverse engineer that, because the engineering behind it all goes back to a common group which also educated the NATO forces, the German rocketry specialists. You can't do it when there are thousands of years of difference in engineering and science. I don't care how much you jerk off to planet-sized computers.

Of course you can. The FLT mechanisms of the Star Wars universe had to be engineered sometimes (well not really because like everything is SW it is hand waved, but lets forgo the SW wank everyone here ignores) so it can be reverse engineered.

Secondly looking at the history of technology in our world it is always easier to reverse engineer/figure out existing technology then it is to develop it the first time.

Third the scope of the minds doing the (reverse) engineering has everything to do with how fast and well it can be done.

Last of all the science behind the death star, hyperspace, etc is far less hard (read non-existent) then that in OA. Star Wars lacks any sort of internal consistency, just look at the Force in the clone wars cartoon vs the movies. Or the ever shifting history of the Mandalorians lol.

[Stark]

Did you just use out-of-universe fluff retcons to attack the scientific plausibility of something nobody suggests is hard scifi?

You're a fucking moron. Orion's Arm is more consistent (if indeed it is, since they've changed things in the past) because it's a tiny niche circlejerk and not a world-spanning, decades-old megalith of marketing and profit.

[Mobius IO]

Did you just use out-of-universe fluff retcons to attack the scientific plausibility of something nobody suggests is hard scifi?

You're a fucking moron. Orion's Arm is more consistent (if indeed it is, since they've changed things in the past) because it's a tiny niche circlejerk and not a world-spanning, decades-old megalith of marketing and profit.

A lot of insults with no substance. lol

[Stark]

By 'no substance' you mean 'my whole point was a giant red herring and deserves nothing but scorn', right?

The lamest part is that it's arguable hard-scifi AIs would be totally unable to conceive of soft stuff like hyperdrives, for the very reason they're hopelessly unrealistic. UH OH!

[Mobius IO]

By 'no substance' you mean 'my whole point was a giant red herring and deserves nothing but scorn', right?

The lamest part is that it's arguable hard-scifi AIs would be totally unable to conceive of soft stuff like hyperdrives, for the very reason they're hopelessly unrealistic. UH OH!

My point is either you accept OA and SW as written or demand scientific proof for both of them. If you do the first the OA has hyper-minds etc, and if you do the second then at least some of AO will survive where as all of SW falls apart.

Your just as far off on the second point too. If the OA verse was put in a setting where standard Sci-Fi FTL travel was possible they would be able to develop it fairly quickly. The reason they do not have it in the OA universe is because it is impossible, not because they lack the scientific understanding.

My supporting evidence is the vast power of S5 and S6 minds (in universe, regardless of if they are possible). OA is a setting where the singularity hypothesis is real and some of the intelligences there have gone through it six times. Where as the SW universe is one dependent on human scale intelligences.

S5 and S6 mind are no more or less wank then the Death Star, the huge (but never seen in the movies) fleets the Empire supposedly has, or any of the other things the Empires argument relies on.

[Stark]

No it isn't; your point is that SW is lesser because it's not OMG TEH HARD SCIFZ WE MADE UP. That's irrelevant to the vs. Obviously hyperdrive works; would an AI with absolutely no experience with any remotely familiar phenomena be equipped to deal with it, and is the history of the Mandalorians relevant here?

And yeah sorry every time you say 'if it is possible the AI will have it by magic', everyone on this entire site laughs at you.

I'm really curious to know if everyone involved in OA is as fat as you are, though.