General idiocy concerning SW vs. ST

[Oskuro]

Wasn't there a wide-area beam sweep mode to the phasers? I remember seeing it on a DS9 episode, where they are hunting Odo who is posing as a Founder for training purposes.

[Swindle1984]

Because they eventually realized that maybe having weapons you can actually AIM might be a good idea afterall?
Not that I see what pulse vs beam has got anything to do with them being weapons as opposed to tools.

A phaser, by firing a continuous beam on various settings, can be used to heat up rocks, cut through obstacles, or even project force fields when combined with random junk (darn it, Voyager, it's a gun, not a Swiss army plot device!).

Try doing that with a weapon that only fires short pulses, like a blaster firing individual bolts. We've never even seen alternate settings (stun, disintegrate, provide warmth from rocks, cut, etc.) out of the movie rifles. The Voyager rifles seem to be a transition from the old Type III phasers and the purely military ones seen in the films from First Contact on.

Wasn't there a wide-area beam sweep mode to the phasers? I remember seeing it on a DS9 episode, where they are hunting Odo who is posing as a Founder for training purposes.

Yes, and instead of harming him it simply exposed his disguise, though it could be argued that they wouldn't deliberately hurt him in an excercise.

Tuvok also used the wide-beam setting to stun everyone on the bridge when Chakotay started spirit-walking his ass all over Voyager and doing random shit instead of just leaving a message saying, "hey, I'm disembodied and there's aliens trying to kill you. Tell Neelix to stay the fuck out of my room."

[Darth Wong]

It's a simple matter of grade-school mathematics that a wide-beam attack will either have vastly less intensity at any given point or vastly more power consumption. I don't know how Trekkies could be so fixated upon the idea of the wide-beam kill shot unless they flunked grade-school math.

As for dumping the Swiss Army knife weapons, that makes sense if you're rapidly training up a lot of warm bodies for a war. You can't trust them not to drain their power cell in the first three seconds of a firefight unless you simply take away that option from them, and give them a rifle which only shoots pulses.

[NecronLord]

A phaser, by firing a continuous beam on various settings, can be used to heat up rocks, cut through obstacles, or even project force fields when combined with random junk (darn it, Voyager, it's a gun, not a Swiss army plot device!).

Try doing that with a weapon that only fires short pulses, like a blaster firing individual bolts.

I direct you to the Star Wars novellisation, where Luke uses one to cut through obstacles (or rather, melt a hole) in the form of the prison cell door. Needless to say, this also heats the surroundings.

[Darth Servo]

IIRC, there's a brief clip of beam-sweeping when Kirk and McCoy are beamed up from Rura Penthe in ST6. Though that's with disruptors. And they've already got fairly decent ergonomics.

You're right, although it was a last-minute desperation attempt to prevent Kirk and Bones from escaping. Its also kinda funny that the idiot Klingons are the only ones to ever think of such a thing. OK, granted, this was TOS, before the species had devolved into the space vikings of TNG.

[Darth Servo]

A phaser, by firing a continuous beam on various settings, can be used to heat up rocks, cut through obstacles, or even project force fields when combined with random junk (darn it, Voyager, it's a gun, not a Swiss army plot device!).

Try doing that with a weapon that only fires short pulses, like a blaster firing individual bolts.

I direct you to the Star Wars novellisation, where Luke uses one to cut through obstacles (or rather, melt a hole) in the form of the prison cell door. Needless to say, this also heats the surroundings.

Hell, just look at the film itself. Detention center elevator door and garbage chute cover.

[Aratech]

I see Fooldo is claiming that Data has perfect recall. Well, I suppose if you want to get technical he might. Of course, perfect recall is of limited use when you can't even get a simple surface area calculation to within the correct order of magnitude.

[Ted C]

I see Fooldo is claiming that Data has perfect recall. Well, I suppose if you want to get technical he might. Of course, perfect recall is of limited use when you can't even get a simple surface area calculation to within the correct order of magnitude.

Data doesn't have perfect recall.

In "Evolution", he claims there is no precedent for a computer error causing a false sensor reading, even though Worf caused just such an error in the prior episode "Peak Performance".

In the same episode, he also claims there is no precedent for a catastrophic systems failure on a starship, even though just such a failure destroyed the USS Yamato and nearly destroyed the Enterprise in the prior episode "Contagion".

So no, Data definitely does not have perfect recall.

[Aratech]

I see Fooldo is claiming that Data has perfect recall. Well, I suppose if you want to get technical he might. Of course, perfect recall is of limited use when you can't even get a simple surface area calculation to within the correct order of magnitude.

Data doesn't have perfect recall.

In "Evolution", he claims there is no precedent for a computer error causing a false sensor reading, even though Worf caused just such an error in the prior episode "Peak Performance".

In the same episode, he also claims there is no precedent for a catastrophic systems failure on a starship, even though just such a failure destroyed the USS Yamato and nearly destroyed the Enterprise in the prior episode "Contagion".

So no, Data definitely does not have perfect recall.

Heh, forgot about those. Of course, in the whole deal about the A.I. computer business, the rabid trekkies always seem to forget that the Enterprise's computer has inferior search capabilities in comparison to flipping google.

[Batman]

Not that I see what pulse vs beam has got anything to do with them being weapons as opposed to tools.

A phaser, by firing a continuous beam on various settings, can be used to heat up rocks, cut through obstacles,

Something I can do with a pulse weapon, too. Both of which, incidentally, being abilities phasers displayed as early as TOS, where phasers were clearly designed to be weapons.

Try doing that with a weapon that only fires short pulses, like a blaster firing individual bolts.

Entirely possible with a pulse weapon, especially one that is dial-a-yield. Like a blaster.

[Swindle1984]

I didn't say that blasters don't come with multiple settings. I said the movie phaser rifles only fire in individual pulses, like blasters do. Just because someone makes a fucking comparison for ONE aspect doesn't mean "lol, tey are teh identicals lulz". Just like when I compared a bolter firing like a conventional gun and then the gyrojet kicking in down-range to an RPG firing the round recoillessly and then the rocket sustainer kicking in; instead of intelligently making the comparison, people responded with "lulz, bolters aren't recoilless".

Now, let's think. Type I, II, and III phasers have all been used to heat rocks, cut through obstacles, disintegrate stuff (usually people), stun people, etc. They do this by firing a continuous beam, and things like heating rocks or cutting through stuff typically requires sustained fire.

The new movie rifles fire small pulses; we've never seen them fire a continuous beam like any of the previous phasers, including Voyager's. We've never seen any setting except "kill", though presumably you can also set it to stun. We've never seen them used for anything except shooting and killing people.

The Type I, II, and III phasers are all jack-of-all-trades tools that just happen to be useable as weapons, despite crippling ergonomics, a total lack of sights, etc. The movie phaser has a stock so you can steady it against your shoulder, a trigger guard, and an actual sighting mechanism. Clearly, these are designed specifically as weapons, probably developed as a result of either the Dominion War or the Borg, or probably both.

From all of this, we can make a reasonable guess that the movie-era phaser rifles are NOT jack-of-all-trades tools that just incidentally happen to be weapons. We've ONLY seen them fire in pulses, not sustained beams, we've ONLY seen kill settings and no other settings, we've ONLY seen them used as weapons and not tools, and their design makes them far more suitable to combat than other phasers, despite the whole "I broke my rifle clubbing some guy over the head with it" deal.



Now, blasters on the other hand, obviously have multiple settings and firing modes (semi, burst, full-auto, etc.) and just through sheer power alone can blow shit up and eliminate obstacles. Didn't the wolfman from the cantina (Lak Sivrak? Is that his name?) vaporize the corpse of his partner on Hoth so the Imperials wouldn't find it in one of the Tales novels?

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I got some moron insisting Ewoks defeated 10,000 troops based on one quote by Palpatine yet cannot understand that if there were only 40 troops onscreen, clearly Palaptine was either wrong or lying , as well as wanking the power of phasers

[NecronLord]

I got some moron insisting Ewoks defeated 10,000 troops based on one quote by Palpatine yet cannot understand that if there were only 40 troops onscreen, clearly Palaptine was either wrong or lying , as well as wanking the power of phasers

Palpatine was neither wrong nor lying. Though we don't know what an entire legion is (unless that godawful Travis article mentions it) there was one protecting the generator.

However, that does not mean that the legion was all engaged against the Ewoks and rebel commandos; only a platoon or two there, with some AT STs. Maybe a company.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Try doing that with a weapon that only fires short pulses, like a blaster firing individual bolts. We've never even seen alternate settings (stun, disintegrate, provide warmth from rocks, cut, etc.) out of the movie rifles.

You and I did watch the same version of ANH, right? The one where the Stormtroopers hit Leia with a stun blast and where Greedo got his innards fried by Han? I don't see why a blaster that can leave Greedo smoking wouldn't be capable of heating a rock.

[Finagle]

Try doing that with a weapon that only fires short pulses, like a blaster firing individual bolts. We've never even seen alternate settings (stun, disintegrate, provide warmth from rocks, cut, etc.) out of the movie rifles.

You and I did watch the same version of ANH, right? The one where the Stormtroopers hit Leia with a stun blast and where Greedo got his innards fried by Han? I don't see why a blaster that can leave Greedo smoking wouldn't be capable of heating a rock.

When he says "movie rifles" I'm pretty sure he means the phaser rifles from the Trek movies, not the blaster rifles from the Wars movies.

[Swindle1984]

Try doing that with a weapon that only fires short pulses, like a blaster firing individual bolts. We've never even seen alternate settings (stun, disintegrate, provide warmth from rocks, cut, etc.) out of the movie rifles.

You and I did watch the same version of ANH, right? The one where the Stormtroopers hit Leia with a stun blast and where Greedo got his innards fried by Han? I don't see why a blaster that can leave Greedo smoking wouldn't be capable of heating a rock.

When he says "movie rifles" I'm pretty sure he means the phaser rifles from the Trek movies, not the blaster rifles from the Wars movies.

Correct. We're talking phasers, not blasters. And again, I NEVER SAID BLASTERS DIDN'T HAVE MULTIPLE SETTINGS and, in fact, stated that they have multiple settings and modes of fire. Schatten needs to learn to fucking read.

The only instance I know of a blaster heating something instead of simply blowing it apart is in one of the horrible Jedi Academy books (I'm pretty sure, anyway) where the dude running the Kessel mine is hiding behind a sheet of metal that is glowing red from multiple hits from a blaster pistol. In other instances, like the movies, we see blasters simply blowing holes in metal walls and filling the room with smoke from the vaporized metal and plastic.

Given that the purpose of a blaster is generally to blow the shit out of something, I seriously doubt someone said "hey, let's add a setting so we can make rocks glow red hot in case someone gets stranded in the snow". Instead, they said "let's take a blaster in case we have to kill something and a fucking lighter so we can start a fire". Making a blaster into a multi-purpose tool like phasers makes about as much sense as using your pistol as a nail gun or to drill holes so you can run a cable through.

[Swindle1984]

I got some moron insisting Ewoks defeated 10,000 troops based on one quote by Palpatine yet cannot understand that if there were only 40 troops onscreen, clearly Palaptine was either wrong or lying , as well as wanking the power of phasers

Palpatine was neither wrong nor lying. Though we don't know what an entire legion is (unless that godawful Travis article mentions it) there was one protecting the generator.

However, that does not mean that the legion was all engaged against the Ewoks and rebel commandos; only a platoon or two there, with some AT STs. Maybe a company.

Historically, a legion was, what, a hundred men? Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

In any case, there were only 40 Imperials, plus the AT-ST's, on-screen during the battle and I've heard from Wong (who probably knows this shit) that the main force at the front door of the bunker didn't leave or engage the enemy because they thought the attack on the back door was a diversion.

[Aratech]

I got some moron insisting Ewoks defeated 10,000 troops based on one quote by Palpatine yet cannot understand that if there were only 40 troops onscreen, clearly Palaptine was either wrong or lying , as well as wanking the power of phasers

Palpatine was neither wrong nor lying. Though we don't know what an entire legion is (unless that godawful Travis article mentions it) there was one protecting the generator.

However, that does not mean that the legion was all engaged against the Ewoks and rebel commandos; only a platoon or two there, with some AT STs. Maybe a company.

Historically, a legion was, what, a hundred men? Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

In any case, there were only 40 Imperials, plus the AT-ST's, on-screen during the battle and I've heard from Wong (who probably knows this shit) that the main force at the front door of the bunker didn't leave or engage the enemy because they thought the attack on the back door was a diversion.

Roman Legions were typically six thousand men.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Varies by period; in the roman republic and early empire, a legion was a unit of about 5,000-6,000 men, the internal organisation did change but the overall numbers did not. A century was 100, later 80 men- a decrease in squad size.

later in the empire, around late 3rd century and after, the term was still in use, but the units to which it referred were a pale shadow of their former selves- not expected to display any real strategic mobility and very much smaller, barely two cohorts by the old standard.

The Imperial Sourcebook confirms, incidentally, p83, that "The level of organisation corresponding to a battlegroup is called a Legion."

Now, while the ISB may in itself be misusing the technical term 'battlegroup', that is at least definite, and a battlegroup is a division equivalent force, combat strength around ten thousand, with the stormtrooper legion having the quirk that they seem to have borrowed from the USMC, every man a rifleman. No support personnel, visibly anyway- it's all rifle strength, no ration strength on top.

One other issue- if they are one of his best legions, either they have a remarkably high paper efficiency or, more likely, they've distinguished themselves in action. In which case, they would certainly be understrength, possibly by a large margin.

My pet theory, and I present this mainly for laughs, is that the initial ewok frontal attack failed dismally, and the follow up Imperial counterattack got out of hand. Assume a web centric defence. One of four regiments guarding the dish itself, spaced three batallions around and one at the command bunker. Remember, could be sixty to seventy percent understrength.
The other three regiments stationed over a wide enough area to suppress the ewok population and guard against any major rebel ground force commitment- mobile reaction units.

When the ewoks attacked the bunker and were beaten back, that was all the cue the rest of the legion needed to commence attack on the clearly rebellious local populace, leaving only a limited rear guard to secure the bunker against strays and stragglers.

The AT-AT and in fact the rest of the legion were three or four horizons away on a merry ewok- butchering rampage, or if you prefer dealing with the evident threat, when Han and co snuck in.
The legion simply reacted, in a conventional forces manner, to an apparently conventional if primitive threat, and got blindsided by rebel spec-ops.

[NecronLord]

I believe the 501st were supposedly the legion the Emperor spoke of. Though there's been other accounts of what groups were engaged.

[Ritterin Sophia]

I believe the 501st were supposedly the legion the Emperor spoke of. Though there's been other accounts of what groups were engaged.

I don't think so. If Palpatine was being literal when he said it was his best legion, that would be his Guardsmen, so it couldn't have been the literal best. We didn't see the Storm Commandos, his best counter insurgents, since there weren't any black armoured troopers. So that leaves us with one last group, his most loyal, which would be COMPNOR recruits.

[Swindle1984]

Thanks for the correction regarding Roman legions, I was thinking of the century (I thought a centurion was in charge of a legion, hence my confusion).

It's possible Palpatine wasn't being literal when he called them a legion.

Consider the performance of the 40 troops (stormtroopers, scout troopers, naval troopers, and a couple officers), plus, what was it, 4, 5 AT-ST's seen at Endor. Attacked by hundreds of ewoks who had siege weaponry and hang-gliders, as well as massive, well-designed boobytraps. From what I saw on-screen, the stormtroopers, although taken entirely by surprise when suddenly attacked by what they believed to be harmless non-belligerents, repulsed the first attack and then ran off into the woods after them in two's and three's.

The rebels managed to surprise the remaining troopers guarding them as they responded to the attack and retrieved weapons and started fighting as well.

The stormtroopers wore standard white armor instead of camo armor that we know was available to them (both from EU comments regarding the battle and from Episode III), and ran off into the woods in two's and three's to fight a force of hundreds, getting ambushed and picked off. They were either woefully inexperienced or woefully over-confident.

That aside, they were STILL slaughtering the ewoks until Chewbacca hijacked an AT-ST and blew up the remaining walkers that hadn't fallen to ewok booby-traps. Only when their own light armor support turned on them did they actually begin losing. And they STILL would have won the battle if Han Solo hadn't tricked the officer in charge of the back door into opening the door to let reinforcements out. If the main force at the front door had responded, they'd have won as well.

Judging by the actions of the Imperials guarding the back door, they were either over-confident to the point that it bit them in the ass, tarnishing their reputation as one of Palpatine's finest legions, or they were badly inexperienced, which may be the result of troops who scored well enough in boot camp to get recruited into one of Palpatine's elite forces, but who spent all their time in parade formation and playing personal enforcers for Palpy rather than getting actual combat experience like the troops who only made average scores in boot.

[Darth Ruinus]

Judging by the actions of the Imperials guarding the back door, they were either over-confident to the point that it bit them in the ass,

Well, I wouldnt say overconfident, because (its been a long time since I saw the movie) but from what I remember, it was pretty amazing luck that the Rebels even found out about the Ewoks, let alone the Ewoks attacking the base and helping out the Rebels.

[Ender]

So l33t claims that the starscapes inside the cockpit and the one outside are different during the jumps to hyperspace. Even though this in no way disproves my point, I ask him to prove it because it was a weird assertion. His proof that the view inside and the one outside, consisted of two different shots from the inside, one before they engage the drive and one when they were streaks.

A and B are different, and I will prove this by showing you A twice and expecting you to trust my telling you B is different.

Gotta love SB

[lord Martiya]

Judging by the actions of the Imperials guarding the back door, they were either over-confident to the point that it bit them in the ass,

Well, I wouldnt say overconfident, because (its been a long time since I saw the movie) but from what I remember, it was pretty amazing luck that the Rebels even found out about the Ewoks, let alone the Ewoks attacking the base and helping out the Rebels.

Initially the Ewoks tried to EAT the Rebels after a meeting caused by a very stupid act from Chewie (trying to eat the meat of an obvious trap...). No wonder that the Imperials were over-confident, Rebels had an immense amount of luck.