So many words, so little intelligence ...

EnterpriseSovereign · Post by **EnterpriseSovereign** » 2006-11-10 05:22am

How would stormies kill them before they reached the ship? Would they stand on the hull and fire at the redshirts like fish in a barrel? I know that their armour when sealed would protect them, but could they walk on the hull like that? I assume there would be airlock hatches nearby for the troopers to emerge from. And leaving aside all the defences and troops, the only thing in Trek that can leap through space is Data and since he's dead, what do the Feds have?

LeftWingExtremist · Post by **LeftWingExtremist** » 2006-11-10 06:13am

EnterpriseSovereign wrote:How would stormies kill them before they reached the ship? Would they stand on the hull and fire at the redshirts like fish in a barrel? I know that their armour when sealed would protect them, but could they walk on the hull like that? I assume there would be airlock hatches nearby for the troopers to emerge from. And leaving aside all the defences and troops, the only thing in Trek that can leap through space is Data and since he's dead, what do the Feds have?

Heh just use space troopers, thats what the're for, I'm sure one could rape the entire force.

Darth Servo · Post by **Darth Servo** » 2006-11-10 12:24pm

EnterpriseSovereign wrote:the only thing in Trek that can leap through space is Data and since he's dead, what do the Feds have?

B-4?

EnterpriseSovereign · Post by **EnterpriseSovereign** » 2006-11-10 04:07pm

I wasn't going to mention him, or Lore. And without Data, sentient androids are even rarer, so they'd be even less inclined to risk him

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-11-10 05:20pm

I love the way the people who envision this tactic obviously have no grasp of the physics of the situation at all. Imagine how perfectly the Fed spacejumpers' velocity must line up with the ISD's velocity in order to make this tactic viable.

Having trouble imagining the problem? OK, imagine this: suppose you're trying to jump onto a moving 18-wheeler truck moving at highway speeds. From a standstill. Pancake against the grille, right? Instant death, right? Now that truck is only moving at 60 mph, or less than 30 m/s. Now imagine trying to jump onto a vessel that is capable of accelerating at 30,000 m/s^2. The slightest change in the vehicle's acceleration or even a casual turn to port or starboard will result in you being either left thousands of metres behind or smashed flat against the hull like a bug on a windshield.

Buggerboy Christ, I can't believe how goddamned stupid Trektards can be. Shouldn't this be obvious? Why does any of this even need to be explained? Perhaps next these morons will explain to us how a Syrian MiG can defeat an F-22 by having someone strapped to its wing, who jumps off in mid-flight, controls his free-fall through the air with small hand-held rockets, lands on the fucking F-22, and then kills its pilot. The Imperial stormtroopers won't need to fight the Federation spacejumpers; they only need to clean them off the hull afterwards.

EnterpriseSovereign · Post by **EnterpriseSovereign** » 2006-11-10 05:30pm

Trektard: "yeah, but because of intertial dampeners and structural integrity fields, that won't matter"

Darth Servo · Post by **Darth Servo** » 2006-11-10 07:00pm

Darth Wong wrote:Buggerboy Christ, I can't believe how goddamned stupid Trektards can be. Shouldn't this be obvious? Why does any of this even need to be explained?

Because of their unspoken assumption that an ISD will just sit there waiting for nothing.

Aratech · Post by **Aratech** » 2006-11-10 07:04pm

Eh, is it really that much worse than a claim that a fleet of 40 UFP ships could have blown up the DSII at Endor?

Darth Servo · Post by **Darth Servo** » 2006-11-10 07:16pm

EnterpriseSovereign wrote:Trektard: "yeah, but because of intertial dampeners and structural integrity fields, that won't matter"

I wouldn't be surprised that some of those tards actually tried to float that turd even though space suits don't have inertial dampeners or SIFs.

Elfdart · Post by **Elfdart** » 2006-11-10 08:23pm

Being overly generous, I was assuming the ISD wasn't moving and somehow the Feds in spacesuits managed to get within a few klicks, the ISD's weapons for some reason that just screams "BULLSHIT!" can't fire, nor can TIEs be sent aloft and so on...

In other words, all the absurd hoops one has to jump through for this moronic plan to get off the drawing board

A squad of stormtroopers (let's assume all the others are hors de combat thanks to an outbreak of the Twilek Clap) or those MPs opens a shielded hatch, aims their weapons and opens fire. Thanks to Vympel's figures, we know that standard-issue blasters from the Clone Wars have a rate of fire roughly equal to AKMs and MG-42s. It's a turkey shoot with the Feds being massacred before they can get within a mile of the ship.

There are ways to rig a scenario where the Trekkies have a chance to win the one-in-a-million fight, but none of them are so goddamned stupid.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2006-11-11 01:06am

Wait a minute...if you're resorting to boarding tactics, you're already conceeding shipboard phasers can't cut Imperial armor...but hand phasers carried by the spacejumping boarding party can? Why don't you just equip the ships with hand phasers then, since they're obviously more effective.

Forget stormtroopers shooting at the redshirts through open hatches. Just leave the redshirts out there until their spacesuits run out of oxygen. The Federation would get better results deliberately shooting the spacejumpers into the ship at high speed. That's a lot of kinetic energy, after all.

EnterpriseSovereign · Post by **EnterpriseSovereign** » 2006-11-11 11:20am

Aratech wrote:Eh, is it really that much worse than a claim that a fleet of 40 UFP ships could have blown up the DSII at Endor?

I heard something very similar on ST.com, they substituted the Borg Cube at Wolf 359 for the DSI and they wondered whether the 40-odd early-TNG-era Federation ships would win or not. Seriously.

Jim Raynor · Post by **Jim Raynor** » 2006-11-11 11:52am

Oh please, that's nothing. I've seen (and continue to see) Trektards claiming that one drone set loose on the DS2 could assimilate the whole thing

EnterpriseSovereign · Post by **EnterpriseSovereign** » 2006-11-11 12:16pm

How many thousands of troops does that thing have?

Ritterin Sophia · Post by **Ritterin Sophia** » 2006-11-11 01:01pm

Forget the number of troops, the Deathstar has it's own gravity well allowing a Stormtrooper to safely walk out of it without any extra equipment, an Stormtrooper needs a Spacetrooper suit to do that from an ISD.

Batman · Post by **Batman** » 2006-11-11 06:27pm

General Schatten wrote:Forget the number of troops, the Deathstar has it's own gravity well allowing a Stormtrooper to safely walk out of it without any extra equipment, an Stormtrooper needs a Spacetrooper suit to do that from an ISD.

That makes absolutely no sense. Not only doesn't it say beans about the number of stormtroopers on the DS, but since we never HAVE seen (or read about) the inability of a Stormtrooper to walk on the outer hull of an ISD what are you basing this on?
The presence of Stormies outside (presumably) the pressurized parts of the DS mean that
1. ST armour functions as a space suit, and
2. artificial gravity extents beyond the pressurized parts of the hull.
This is NOT the case for an ISD because of?

EnterpriseSovereign · Post by **EnterpriseSovereign** » 2006-11-11 08:44pm

Jim Raynor wrote:Oh please, that's nothing. I've seen (and continue to see) Trektards claiming that one drone set loose on the DS2 could assimilate the whole thing

I suppose they conveniently forget how one drone is supposed to set up an assimilation chamber from scratch in order to properly assimilate anything, let alone taking on everyone on board.

Master_Baerne · Post by **Master_Baerne** » 2006-11-17 10:20pm

I have a few (hundred thousand) problems with Alex600's post.

1: Federation bases hiding in planets would simply get the planets BDZed.
2: It takes a Star Destroyer a few hours to cross Fed space. The Empire would not delay in the obliteration of the Federation, so how do they have time to install cloaks?
3: Since when do phase cloaks work, anyway?
4: The Empire has billions of ships. Losing a few hundred to "unconventional warfare" that relies on transporters that almost certainly don't work through shields is not a problem.
He wins the point about medtech, but...
5: Anyone who thinks the Federation would employ biological weaponry against identical life-forms is insane. The Empire has no such problems.

The Feds are squashed. Who knew?

[/i]

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2006-11-17 10:42pm

It's a bit of an exaggeration to say that the Empire has billions of ships. But they certainly have thousands of very large capital ships which easily dwarf anything built by the Federation and pack enough firepower to totally devestate a terrestrial planet even using a fraction of that firepower to do the job. Those ships can also easily cross galactic distances in a matter of hours as opposed to decades for any Federation ship.

Some time ago, in another and now long-forgotten thread, I had pointed out how, given the firepower and speed disparities, the Federation would not be able to cope with even a single stardestroyer on a mission of simple destruction: jumping randomly to each Federation world and delivering just a ten second bombardment from the heavy turbolaser batteries. The energy delivered to the planet surface would be equivalent to a large asteroid strike and would certainly devestate the biosphere and depopulate the target world before Starfleet could conceivably react to the event or move enough forces to defend those planet which might be next on the targeting schedule. Now, this is not to say that simple destruction would be the object of an Imperial mission into Federation space, but the thought-experiment illustrated just how ineffective the Federation's defences would be against a threat on the scale of the Empire.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-11-17 11:46pm

This reminds me of some good points raised in the "Argue the Opposite Side's Position" in the N&P forum. A hallmark of childish and ignorant political thinking is that you don't really know what the other side thinks because you've never given it any serious thought. You only caricature and attack them but you never examine their thinking or their motivations.

Similarly, childish and ignorant Trekkies tend to concoct theories about how to attack the Empire without giving any thought whatsoever to what an Imperial commander might do. They tend to make the laughable assumption that he will just sit there and take whatever you're dishing out, never thinking of counter-attacking or wondering why he's just sitting there in deep space with no particular mission or purpose other than to get attacked by you.

OmegaGuy · Post by **OmegaGuy** » 2006-11-18 04:51pm

Wait, since when does the Empire have billions of ships?

Maybe if you count fighters....

Master_Baerne · Post by **Master_Baerne** » 2006-11-19 09:57pm

Since they control the entire galaxy(with small exceptions), have had 2 major wars in 30 years, and are ruled by a bloodthirsty phsycopath who emjoys malicous schemeing with entire goverments.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-11-19 10:01pm

OmegaGuy wrote:Wait, since when does the Empire have billions of ships?

Maybe if you count fighters....

Well, if you count "ships" the way Trekkies do for Starfleet, and include everything from freighters to garbage scows, "billions" might even be an underestimate.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2006-11-19 10:20pm

The Empire certainly has the industrial and resourcee capability to build and field billions of ships if they chose to. On the balance they probably have tens of millions of smaller ships, hundreds of thousands of "Star Destroyer" vessels, and many thousands of larger ships (the so called 'Super Star Destroyers", including the Executors.) If you factor in local defense fleets (like LDY and Corellian navies) the auxiliaries (like the Rand Ecliptic and other armed merchant ships) and the mobile assets (like Death Squadron and Scourge Squadron) it probably comes close to hundreds of millions or billions.

Post by **Surlethe** » 2006-11-19 10:43pm

Darth Wong wrote:Similarly, childish and ignorant Trekkies tend to concoct theories about how to attack the Empire without giving any thought whatsoever to what an Imperial commander might do. They tend to make the laughable assumption that he will just sit there and take whatever you're dishing out, never thinking of counter-attacking or wondering why he's just sitting there in deep space with no particular mission or purpose other than to get attacked by you.

In any strategic conflict, be it a debate, invasion of a secular Arab nation, or thought experiment pitting two science fiction powers against each other, failure to understand the opposition well enough to anticipate his maneuvers is, quite literally, suicidal. It's like planning a sequence of moves in a chess game without taking into account what your opponent will do: any opponent worth his salt will disrupt your plan and counterattack, and since you haven't anticipated it, you'll be crushed.

OmegaGuy wrote:Wait, since when does the Empire have billions of ships?

Maybe if you count fighters....

Hmm. If you want a very rough estimate of the number of military ships in the Empire, perhaps you could get a rough estimate this way: we know there are maybe 25,000 ISDs, and, say, 350 Executor-class vessels. The volume of an ISD is maybe 4e8 m^3; the volume of an Executor is something like 4e11 m^3. If we assume a linear inverse relationship between volume and number of ships, we get something like N = -(6.2e-8)V + 25150. Integrating from 0 to 4.1e11 with respect to voume, we get something like 5e15 ships (of course, this includes fighters in the estimate). Now, that's very rough, and quite possibly a huge overestimate, but it gives you some idea of how many ships there are: a whole fucking lot.