How did you enter ST vs SW debate?

[Mad]

(Grr@lackofedit)

Over on SB, I think I inadvertantly created the Cult of Connie by posting the first "what if the TOS and TNG+ were separate timelines, and fought each other?" type thread after seeing the suggestion appear here and there. After I posted that thread, it became much more common.

Sorry.

[Patrick Degan]

I think I entered into it in earnest when Darkstar was spewing his idiocies on this board; specifically in the "Superlaser Trick" thread. I was relatively new here but a veteran flamewarrior from three other boards. I made two observations on his defective logic, he commenced his attack, and the contest was on. We were nine days into our exchanges when he got his ass kicked off the site.

[PainRack]

(Grr@lackofedit)

Over on SB, I think I inadvertantly created the Cult of Connie by posting the first "what if the TOS and TNG+ were separate timelines, and fought each other?" type thread after seeing the suggestion appear here and there. After I posted that thread, it became much more common.

Sorry.

You know, the Connie was blown up by Anakin storyboard seems to have deflated everyone else save E1701.

[Ender]

I found SD years before entering the debate, I was in 8th grade and sent Mike a PM denouncing his excessive plan, as I figured TIE bombers could kill Trek capital ships easily by just hitting the narcells. After that it died down for me for a while.

Then it came up at anther forum I visited at a time. I fought viciously that the Executor would bitchslap the E-D. I got PMed a link to SB. I was there when B5, Trek, and Wars had their main ships considered equal to each other (though how B5 was considered even close to the ther two is still beyond me). I was also there the day the debate died: When HDS posted the magic words "200 Gigatons".

After that I went to boot camp, came back, first day on liberty weekend I hopped on Stardestroyer.net to read what Mike thought, and found the forum. When I got my computer at charleston, I stopped lurking and signed up.

[Cromag]

I lurked for the most part on ASVS. I finally got into the debate when someone posted a vs. debate between Kirk and Darth Maul, and someone suggested Kirk could win.

I posted a long, 3 situation story. Didn't focus too much on actual data, but I felt reasonably certain that my conclusion was correct (ie. Kirk, short of orbital bombardment, is toast.) Unfortunately, the debate died shortly after my post, and not actually because of my post. I moved on to SB and got into more involved debates where I could, and now I reside here, chiming in whenever I don't feel outclassed by the ones who have already spoken.

[generator_g1]

I first read a SW vs. ST scenario in Wizard magazine, where in an ISD and a GCS go at it, ending with the GCS winning because of the "Federation shields are imprevious to lasers" fallacy. Wanting to know more, I looked in the net and eventually found my way to SD.Net and the forums. Now I use what I learned here in the site / forums to debate the Trek fans in our local SF club.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

In April of 2002, I wanted to find out more about Attack of the Clones before it was released, and ended up stumbling upon TheForce.net, and eventaully SWTC, and this site. I wasn't into the SW vs. ST debate, though. However, I did believe in the myth of low sublight speeds for SW spacecraft until I cam here.

[Mange]

I've been a Star Wars fan for some twenty years now. However, I do like much of Star Trek, TOS, the first six movies and a miniscule of TNG. As strange as it may sound, but I like the original cast from TOS and I think that the charactarizations of the characters are unparalled in the Star Trek franchise, as the characters of later series seems to be cardboard cut outs. Voyager was dreadful, but Enterprise is sometimes really good. I first came into contact with the SW vs. ST debate a couple of years when I visited Star Destroyer.net and Wayne Poe's site. I wasn't looking for the debate in particular, but found them to be interesting. Originally, I found the sites through dr. Saxton's excellent Technical Commentaries site. I then started to expand my search to see the debate from a Trekker POV. I was surprised that the debate was so heated with so much resentment. I resent the language used in the debates, especially when it comes to Mike Wong and Darkstar. Of course, the language does make the debates more interesting, but the language isn't worthy of academics, even in this type of debate. I have a Master's degree in Social Science, and I would never think of calling High School kids the things they sometimes does. This isn't meant as personal attacks on Mike or Darkstar (Darkstar is easy enough to attack on other grounds ), merely the language. Mike must also endure terrible personal attacks. IMO the worst was the racist slander by that nutcase Zero.
I've recently challenged Darkstar to a debate. I know that this is almost pointless, but hey, I thought I would give the guy a chance. I've set up some terms, a.o. no personal attacks, slander or "bad words" in the debate. Since I haven't got a degree in physics or any other natural sciences (not that I have a great deal of knowledge, but I can't speak with authority on those subjects), I will concentrate on the enourmous number of logical errors and fabrications found on his site. I haven't seen any signs yet that Darkstar will accept a debate on those terms. If he does agree, and if you're interested, I will repost the debate here.

[Sarevok]

I used to be a lurker after the forums went up. It was fun to observe the happenings at SD.net back in 2002. There were trolls like Azeron and Armunious who provided much entertainment.

[Enforcer Talen]

hemlock sent me a link to this site a week before the forums went up.

I thot wong had too much time on his hands, but that it was a pretty cool site.

[President Sharky]

I was born after (1988) all three original movies were released, so I was part of the second generation Warsies. I first watched ESB and ROTJ when I was 5 at my neighbour's house, and I was immediately hooked. For some odd reason they didn't own ANH, so I was left with only the sequels. I had watched ST so many times because my dad used to tell me it was educational and because it was almost as good as SW. You see, my dad did see the originals in theatres and he loved SW, and he made sure his two boys grew up loving it.

Eventually, as a 6th birthday gift, my father bought me ANH, and I truly began to be obsessed. When the THX versions of the Original Trilogy came out, my uncle gave me ESB and ROTJ. At the same time, I began having arguments with some of my school friends (young trekkies) about who would win. I of course backed SW, but since I was not as smart as some of these kids academically, they would always win.

I finally watched the Special Editions in theatres and in 1998, when I was only 10 yrs old, my mother bought me Shadows of the Empire, my brother the Children of the Jedi ( Even as a child I hated this book), and my cousin TTT, and so I was introduced to the EU, and I became known as the SW nerd at school.

Me and this girl were both pro-SW, and so we teamed up against the trekkies at school in vs. debates (using simple arguments like, ISDs would ram a GCS or the Borg would get whooped by the DS). I still remember this one time a kid was so disappointed that ST would lose that he cried.

I was 11 when TPM came out, and so it's kiddie feeling appealed to me (bravo George, at least it worked for your target audience), I even used to idolize Jar Jar Binks

In Junior High, I met this old friend of mine, who was none other than one of the hardcore Trekkies from kindergarten, but now he had switched sides to SW, and he introduced me to theforce.net, and so I lurked there every now and then. I also continued to read as much EU as possible, and since I was still quite young, I never saw the flaws in some books like Darksaber or the JAT.

Finally, AOTC came out, and I was old enough to fully understand the power of SW. One day, I wanted to see a list of all the ISDs ever mentioned in SW, and my search brought me to the SW Technical Commentaries. Reading Dr. Saxton's site for the first time, I reacted like many have: all the info there was bogus or totally exaggerated. I refused to believe the Endor Holocaust theory, the incredible yield of TLs (I also read the ICS), 17.6 km SSD, and that ISDs were poor combat ships. So I moved on.

I was looking at stats for Imperial warships at galacticempiredatabank.com later on, and I decided to look at the links; theforce.net was there, and then there were SW vs. ST links, woe and behold: SD.net was on that list.

Looking at Wong's site for the first time, I was somewhat taken aback by how badly ST would get whooped by SW. All these years I had thought that it would be an equal fight in terms of weapons yeild and that SW would be inferior in propulsion and some other things, only winning through sheer numbers and a massive edge in FTL drive. Somehow, though, I managed to understand Wong's reasoning better than Saxton's and I accepted the firepower yields of SW ships and all the other things presented on the site (perhaps it was because it was aimed against ST).

I became a lurker on the boards here and at theforce.net, and at first, I thought everyone was still somewhat overestimating SW power, but as I grew a little older, I came to accept everything, and I used it in debates against trekkies at school (I especially loved dropping the Federation is Communist point against them, seeing as we were reading 1984 )

I ran into an online debate on a Freespace 2 website (HardLight Productions), and a poster directed me once again to Saxton's site. This time, I read it much more carefully, and while I still didn't fully agree with some ideas (Imperator-class nonsense) I began using his site's info in minor debates against trekkies at HLP and some other FS2 sites. I continued to lurk SD.net, theforce.net, and eventually SB.com, until the beginning of this year, when I got a new Internet service, and I decided to join theforce.net (in January), and SD.net (about a week ago).

The online debate is of course over, but I was still there, watching the whole thing progress over the past years.

[PainRack]

I see we're not going to get our request dedication from Darth Wong......................

[Sunstreaker]

I created a Star Wars tactical board game back in the early 90's and converted it to a Star Wars and Star Trek game shortly after. Trek supporters always thought that Star Wars ships were a little too powerful, but after lurking on SD.net for a while it seams that I didn't make them powerful enough compared to Trek's ships.

Lately I've been debating Transformers vs Star Wars on seibertron.com and I've won those thanks to SD.net's info. I also win or at least stalemate the Unicron vs Death Star debates that pop up on the site from time to time.

[President Sharky]

Unicron would get superlasered in the first few seconds of the engagement. Goodbye Unicron. End debate.

[Darth Wong]

I think it would be interesting to here Wongs story of why and how he originally came into the "vs" world.

I was working the night shift.

No, seriously. When you're on the night shift, you need things to do. I stumbled onto ASVS, and tried to play it neutral at first because I had trouble believing people could take the subject seriously.

But it quickly became apparent to me that one of the two sides (ie- the Trekkies) was virtually wallowing in pseudoscientific bullshit. I could tell quite easily that they were high school kids who were using "web research" in order to pretend that they knew far, far more science than they really did. This irritated me greatly, and it continues to do so to this day.

I hate fucking posers, so I started flaming the Trekkie pseudoscience abusers. That's when they inevitably declared that I was a "warsie" for not agreeing with them, and I realized what kind of "you're either with us or you're against us, the truth doesn't matter" attitude that I was dealing with. That's when I went hardcore.

[Connor MacLeod]

I think it would be interesting to here Wongs story of why and how he originally came into the "vs" world.

I was working the night shift.

No, seriously. When you're on the night shift, you need things to do. I stumbled onto ASVS, and tried to play it neutral at first because I had trouble believing people could take the subject seriously.

But it quickly became apparent to me that one of the two sides (ie- the Trekkies) was virtually wallowing in pseudoscientific bullshit. I could tell quite easily that they were high school kids who were using "web research" in order to pretend that they knew far, far more science than they really did. This irritated me greatly, and it continues to do so to this day.

I hate fucking posers, so I started flaming the Trekkie pseudoscience abusers. That's when they inevitably declared that I was a "warsie" for not agreeing with them, and I realized what kind of "you're either with us or you're against us, the truth doesn't matter" attitude that I was dealing with. That's when I went hardcore.

That doesn't explain how you became acquainted with Curtis and Brian and the others.

[Darth Wong]

That doesn't explain how you became acquainted with Curtis and Brian and the others.

True, but that happened well after I had already gotten into it, so it's another subject. I imagine people are more interested in knowing how I "got my start".

[Connor MacLeod]

That doesn't explain how you became acquainted with Curtis and Brian and the others.

True, but that happened well after I had already gotten into it, so it's another subject. I imagine people are more interested in knowing how I "got my start".

True. So where were you working that you managed to browse ASVS for the time required to actually start posting? Did you work as a phone monkey like Scooter?

[Darth Wong]

True. So where were you working that you managed to browse ASVS for the time required to actually start posting? Did you work as a phone monkey like Scooter?

Nope, I was at home when I surfed ASVS. But when you work the night shift, your schedule is all fucked up. You get home at 2AM and you've only been awake since 2PM, so there's quite a few hours before you're ready to sleep and there's nobody else awake. So I really saw my wife only on weekends, and I had enough time to waste that I stumbled onto ASVS by accident.