What sci-fi nation would be a fair match vs The Empire?

[CaptJodan]

Seems to me the Culture didn't come up because the thread is "a fair match vs The Empire", not "give me a list of everyone who can beat the Empire".

[Aaron]

]I'm not so sure about the Tyranids; they're scary as hell on the ground, but much of their effectiveness in Warhammer 40k depends on their ability to jam Warp communication and travel in their vicinity, which would have no effect at all on a Star Wars faction. Orks would be tricky, because on the one hand there are so many of htem and they can hammer together starfaring warships out of scrap iron, but on the other hand they're strategically incompetent and tactically predictable.

SW ability to engage the 'Nids is limited unless they can pull them out of the Warp or disrupt their communications. Otherwise they are free to manoeuvrer inside the Empires space.

Hive Fleets can run into the thousands of ships, the one in Warriors of Ultramar had three hive ships (one was over 8kms long) and IIRC thousands of lesser ships, most capable of taking down IoM frigates with relative ease.

The 'Nids are also drawn to planets that already have a Genestealer presence (usually from a multi-generational cult), so one would expect that the Empire would be experiencing rebellions, sabotage and random fuckery from them as well.

[Serafina]

Once the Empire was aware of it, they could propably counter genestealer cults with relative ease.
After all, they have analysis tools that can detect subcelluar lifeforms (midichlorians) the size of a mobile phone.
And Genestealer mutations are easier to detect than that.

Otherwise, my bet is still on the various 40K-forces.
They are a good match in ground battles, and seem to be on the same order of magnitude in space. They suffer from slower speeds (with the exceptions of Eldar and Necrons) and they do not have the industrial capacity to withstand the GE on the long run, but they should be able to put up a good fight (IoM, Orks, Tau, Tyranids) and put up some nasty surprises, too (Chaos, Eldar, Necrons, Psykers in general).
And these surprises would, if not stop the GE, at least slow it down significantly. Once you have run into a Chaos incursion, you will propably slow down a bit, if only because you make sure that it does not happen again.

[Ghost Rider]

Found it.

That thread really should be re-stickied, or at least a summary of it, since as this thread demonstrates the question still comes up regularly.

Because a year old topic, and that this is the newest try at an old bird should be restickied.

The reason is quite obvious why it wasn't kept a sticky given both the rarity and the death rate of these topics. They rarely generate anything except possible wishful thinkings, half posts that lead nowhere, and maybe a couple fanfic ideas. I'd put a stick of Stargate what if's given it generates more material then this particular.

[Balrog]

The Systems Alliance (the human faction) from Mass Effect are probably on a par with the Federation, at least before the Dominion war fleet buildup; roughly comparable technology, similar sized ships and fleet, smaller industrial base but more military competence. The unified Citadel species fleets are probably a reasonable match for the alpha quadrant alliance (Klingons+Feds+Romulan fleets as seen in late DS9).

I doubt it. The most powerful space based weapon they have is a dreadnaught mass accelerator, which is about 38 kilotons, though there are antimatter bombs of yield great enough to enact significant and detrimental climate change around a planet. They may have an advantage in range (dreadnaughts are said to fight at tens of thousands of kilometres), but they almost certainly have much lower accelerations: military warships use antimatter fuelled drives which are said to produce accelerations beyond that of fusion rockets, so maybe a few tens of gees? This is on top of the fact that Stark Trek can trivially deal with waste heat, whereas heat management is pretty much the defining factor of all warship engagment in Mass Effect. Fleet numbers are harder to judge: the Turian Heirarchy has 37 dreadnaughts, and is the largest fleet in Citadel Space, but it's hard to judge how many ships they have total. I think there's a number given for Alliance Navy ships around the time of the Relay 314 incident, though I can't recall it.

Of course it's a completely different matter on the ground, but being better at ground combat than Star Trek is like being better at golf than a salmon.

The Systems Alliance only has six dreadnoughts, with a seventh under construction, but that's an artificial limitation placed there by treaty; can't let anyone have more dreadnoughts than the Turians, Masters of Space Combat! They also only have a dozen colony worlds with military/industrial/etc. outposts on one hundred others. As for numbers, IIRC they had about two hundred warships by the time of the First Contact War, but that includes everything from dreadnoughts to small destroyers.

Trek would simply steamroll them if it came down to total war. In truth I suspect they would have trouble with the Earth Alliance from B5, much less the Federation.

[Surlethe]

What is the upper limit of Culture weaponry? Has the Culture demonstrated the ability to melt planetary surfaces?

Vaporize the the whole planet, actually. I found an old thread with a quote on this :
<snip>

I hope you'll pardon my skepticism of that quote - not just because it uses the retarded "1e55 J" number, but because it provides no citations*. I think Culture vs. Star Wars is due for a rematch soon.

* Two additional points. First, destroying an orbital is not that impressive: a giant rotating ring is under enormous stress; even separating it at one point should be enough to destroy it. (And where did this idea that the Vavatch orbital is made of a substance almost as "strong" as Suncrusher armor come from?) Second, I'm skeptical of the 1.45e14c number for speed: IIRC from my reading, it often takes Culture ships weeks or months to get from one place to another.

[Aaron]

Once the Empire was aware of it, they could propably counter genestealer cults with relative ease.
After all, they have analysis tools that can detect subcelluar lifeforms (midichlorians) the size of a mobile phone.
And Genestealer mutations are easier to detect than that.

Well by the fourth generation they are indistinguishable from the host species (some may have oddities though), so at that point it becomes how willing and able the Empire is to scan everyone. And yes those devices exist, how widespread they are, who knows.

[Starglider]

The Systems Alliance only has six dreadnoughts, with a seventh under construction, but that's an artificial limitation placed there by treaty; can't let anyone have more dreadnoughts than the Turians, Masters of Space Combat!

Dreadnoughts are prestige ships, similar to the Galaxy class. The Federation only had a handful of those prior to the Dominion war buildup. Also the Systems Alliance has an unknown number of carriers, which are described as equal in size to dreadnoughts (in the 1 to 2km range) but lacking spinal mount guns.

In truth I suspect they would have trouble with the Earth Alliance from B5, much less the Federation.

B5 has no shields and AFAIK no hyperkinetic weapons. Their ships fight at close range with beams and slow-moving blobs of plasma. Any mass effect ship would just pound them to scrap from extreme range.

The most powerful space based weapon they have is a dreadnaught mass accelerator, which is about 38 kilotons, though there are antimatter bombs of yield great enough to enact significant and detrimental climate change around a planet.

Relativistic mass accelerators are useful because a) they can be used at reasonable range, b) they're too fast for the point defence to shoot down and c) they punch through shielding. Antimatter-tipped missiles exist but unlike Trek ships, Mass Effect ships actually have competent point defence (GARDIAN systems), so they're useless except on crippled ships. Even short-range fighter-carried missiles are armed with special gravitic warheads rather than simple antimatter explosives, because the shield-penetrating effect is more useful than raw yield. Trek PTs will be useless against ME ships if they're traveling at the low velocities we've observed on screen; they won't even faze the point defence unless they're launched at warp. Phasers will work but ME ships seem to be much more amenable to engaging at long range than Trek ships, and/or letting their fighters prosecute the attack. Meanwhile Trek ships have a horrible track record against kinetic impacts, plus observed PT yields are often down in the tens of kilotons anyway, so I expect ME weapons to work pretty well.

but they almost certainly have much lower accelerations: military warships use antimatter fuelled drives which are said to produce accelerations beyond that of fusion rockets, so maybe a few tens of gees?

So? Federation impulse drives are also fusion rockets with optional antimatter injection. Both sides use mass-reduction technology to achieve transit times far lower than you'd normally expect. Both sides have warp-based FTL that can be used tactically, with speeds in the hundreds to thousands of c range. Both sides have large ships that wallow around like cruisers in fleet actions and smaller ships that zoom around like aircraft - though ME has more excuse, since the one fleet action we saw was a desperate defense of a single strong-point against a surprise attack, whereas DS9 fleet actions are fleets meeting in open space.

This is on top of the fact that Stark Trek can trivially deal with waste heat, whereas heat management is pretty much the defining factor of all warship engagment in Mass Effect.

Exactly what magic waste-heat-disappearing technology does Trek have that ME doesn't? I don't recall any ever being mentioned. IMHO ME happens to mention it in the fluff whereas the Trek writers were too lazy to.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I hope you'll pardon my skepticism of that quote - not just because it uses the retarded "1e55 J" number, but because it provides no citations*. I think Culture vs. Star Wars is due for a rematch soon..

Unless Wars can find some way to neutralize the insanely fast tactical decision cycle of the Culture (measured in nanoseconds) and the Effectors, I don't think there is much to discuss. Force users could of course be used to foresee some tactical scenarios, but I doubt the Empire could deploy enough of them to make any difference on a strategic scale. As for firepower: I believe there is a list in "Consider Phlebas", which mentions a large number of planets destroyed during the Culture-Idiran war. In addition to grid fires the Culture also has Concentrated Anti-Matter, which as far as I can tell is some kind of wanky super-condensed version of real life anti-matter.

Second, I'm skeptical of the 1.45e14c number for speed: IIRC from my reading, it often takes Culture ships weeks or months to get from one place to another.

Quite rightly so. The fastest speed for Culture ships I could find is "only" 233,000c as mentioned in "Excession", which makes them much slower than SW ships. However, as mentioned before Cultureverse ships can use sensors and weapons from high FTL speeds against targets in normal space.

[Serafina]

Statistics
Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on
logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%). Losses: ships (all classes
above interplanetary) - 91,215,660 (± 200); Orbitals - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings -
1; Spheres - 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) - 6.
Historical perspective
A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01%
by stellar population. Rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater
amounts of time and space... Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy's elder civilisations rate the
Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those
singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days.

So yes, several planets were destroyed - and a shitload of orbitals, which are more or less equivalent. This also gives us a nice sense of scale for the Culture - they took these losses and still remained quite powerfull (altough these losses were for both sides, but it gives an order of magnitude).
The small number of destroyed planets is more due the fact that there are more orbitals than planets.

With Grid weapons and compressed Antimatter, what is essentially a Culture Battleship can completely annihilate a planet. And the Culture gave such ships away to what were more or less merchants (demilitarized, but nonetheless).
Thats like building a Death Star and then stripping the Superlaser from it to give it to a merchant organisation.

[Starglider]

In addition to grid fires the Culture also has Concentrated Anti-Matter, which as far as I can tell is some kind of wanky super-condensed version of real life anti-matter.

That's Condensed Anti-Matter. It could just be antineutronium. That substance is perfectly possible in reality, though obviously we have no way to make it or keep substellar lumps stable.

Quite rightly so. The fastest speed for Culture ships I could find is "only" 233,000c as mentioned in "Excession"

That's a sustained speed. The very high numbers are usually quoted for tactical burst speeds. As you noted though, it won't make that much difference, being able to fight and maneuver effectively at even 100,000c is already enough to make their ships practically untouchable by the Empire.

[Balrog]

The Systems Alliance only has six dreadnoughts, with a seventh under construction, but that's an artificial limitation placed there by treaty; can't let anyone have more dreadnoughts than the Turians, Masters of Space Combat!

Dreadnoughts are prestige ships, similar to the Galaxy class. The Federation only had a handful of those prior to the Dominion war buildup. Also the Systems Alliance has an unknown number of carriers, which are described as equal in size to dreadnoughts (in the 1 to 2km range) but lacking spinal mount guns.

...and? Even Mirandas pack more firepower in their torpedoes and phasers than ME dreadnoughts, and they went through those during the DomWar like tissue paper. Long ranged, hard-to-aim spinal guns aren't going to be much help when the enemy fleet warps in to engage at close range like the Feds usually do, and if Systems Alliance forces try to run the Feds can actually chase after them. Fed logistics and technology is simply too superior (hell, if there's a smart Fed commander their fleet could just use the Picard Maneuver all day and win).

In truth I suspect they would have trouble with the Earth Alliance from B5, much less the Federation.

B5 has no shields and AFAIK no hyperkinetic weapons. Their ships fight at close range with beams and slow-moving blobs of plasma. Any mass effect ship would just pound them to scrap from extreme range.

They have no problem fighting at ranges of thousands of kilometers, though in truth they're most likely jump in to fight at hundreds or less, and more importantly their lasers and other energy weapons, which joule for joule are just as powerful as a dreadnought's main gun, completely ignore kinetic barriers. EarthForce outnumbers them in numbers and tonnage; a dreadnought might be a match for an Omega destroyer, but SA only has seven while EF has hundreds (two hundred were lost at the Battle for Earth in A Call to Arms according to Crusade).

[Starglider]

Even Mirandas pack more firepower in their torpedoes and phasers than ME dreadnoughts

All firepower is not equal. ME dreadnoughts almost certainly carry multimegaton missiles for anti-planetary work, but they're not a primary weapon in fleet engagements because they're useless against targets with point-defence and shielding. The Miranda's PTs will not get through GARDIAN, which is designed to handle massive swarms of incoming projectiles and fighters. Their phasers might do decent damage, if they can hit with them.

Long ranged, hard-to-aim spinal guns aren't going to be much help when the enemy fleet warps in to engage at close range like the Feds usually do, and if Systems Alliance forces try to run the Feds can actually chase after them; hell, if there's a smart Fed commander their fleet could just use the Picard Maneuver all day and win.

Where do you get this impression that Trek warp drives have more tactical flexibility than ME FTL? FTL in ME is in fact exactly the same thing as their STL propulsion, just with more power to the mass-lightening core. They could pull the exact same tricks if they wanted to, but they don't because fighting at such absurdly close ranges makes no tactical sense. In fact relativistic combat is the norm in ME, rather than the exception that it seems to be in Trek.

They have no problem fighting at ranges of thousands of kilometers, though in truth they're most likely jump in to fight at hundreds or less, and more importantly their lasers and other energy weapons, which joule for joule are just as powerful as a dreadnought's main gun, completely ignore kinetic barriers.

Wrong. The Geth Armatures in ME use a plasma bolt weapon, and aside from travelling absurdly slowly it has relatively little effect on the shields of an APC. Which is exactly as you'd expect; particle beams and 'plasma bolts' both rely on massive particles, and kinetic barriers stop those just fine. Thus B5 plasma guns and particle beams will not work. The only type of weapon that bypasses such shielding is lasers (because photons are massless), but since ME actually has realistic beam dispersion, those only work at relatively close ranges. ME ships will not hang around at point blank range waiting for B5 ships to shoot them; they will FTL off to a safe distance and then pound the B5 ships with accelerator fire.

[ThomasP]

Void Trilogy Commonwealth (Hamilton) could probably be a good match for the Empire considering the weapons/shields etc they have, the only area they would lag behind in is industry.

This is one I'm actually curious about. From the first two books so far, we don't get a lot of information about their real capabilities or extent in that era.

Some things I can recall off-hand:

- Top-end stardrive gets something like 55 light-years per hour, and can reach the galactic core (more or less) in about 40 days*
- They've circumnavigated the galaxy, several times over, but I'm not sure if there's any mention of how many systems they control.
- Quantum-buster devices that can blow apart planets and stars at will seem to be common armament
- The m-sink mini-black-hole, good for recycling used machinery or a whole planet
- Teleportation
- Force-field technology that seems to be up there with the Culture's in terms of observed capability
- Some kind of stealth technology that makes the Star Trek cloak look like a flashlight in a dark room
- Fairly robust infantry level power-armor and weapons**

I don't have the books on-hand at the moment and unfortunately I can't provide any further numbers or quotes to help derive numbers, though maybe somebody else can chip in.

What I wonder about is how the schism between ANA/Highers and Advancer culture will affect their economics and industrial capability, because there doesn't seem to be a high level of cohesion between the inner and outer worlds.

Hamilton seems to be suggesting that the Commonwealth, or at least the inner worlds, learned their lesson from the Primes - and one of the main reasons they nearly lost that war was due to lack of industrial output. Without more detail, though, it's really hard to make a comparison.

I'd also want to know what kind of capability ANA has up it's sleeve, as far as things like the deterrence fleet and whatnot.

I get the strong suspicion that, while they might stand up on a ship-to-ship level if quantum-busters magic effect works, the setting really relies on too much handwavium to make any real comparison; and further we've got too little information about their real industrial output to know what they're actually capable of.

They might stand a chance, being a fairly high-end magic-tech civilization, but I don't think there's enough information to say with any surety.

* Contingent on my memory being accurate
** If Paula Myo's battle in The Temporal Void is any indicator, that is.

[Darth Hoth]

I doubt it. Their ships mass substantially less than SW ships, less acceleration, and lower firepower (e20-e21watt range is their benchmark for power generation based on Second STage Lensman and Gray Lensman. Also by the sunbeam.) Its implied their guided munitions are more powerful (planet killing at least.) Inertialessness gives them some advantage as do ultrawaves (some advantage in weapons range, at least) but their effective FTL is slower (in galaxy) and they're fucked without shields. Negaspheres and free planets would help keep things interesting though as well. Ship numbers? tens or hundreds of millions of ships at least as of Gray/second stage lensman, perhaps billions. Fairly rapid shipbuilding implied. Scope as big or bigger than SW post Gray Lensman/SSL. On the ground they have some formidable artillery, their powerful space armor, their weaponry is strong, etc.

They have enough abilities to be a challenge but its hardly a curbstomp.

Negamatter does not require planetary masses; smaller warheads are also used (first in Second Stage Lensman; Children of the Lens implies man-portable munitions). Depending on their interaction with Wars shields (an unknown, admittedly) they could potentially be a major problem. Lensman combat manoeuvring makes at least partial use of inertialess drives, which means that accelerations are not very important in that regard. Moreover, use of hyper-spatial tubes gives Lensman a strategic FTL that is considerably faster than hyperdrive (seconds or minutes of effective travel time over multi-million LY distances).

Industrial capability is rather extreme; the Thrale-Onlonian Empire can produce and deploy millions of "first-class battleships" literally within hours' notice as of Second Stage Lensmen. Civilisation is noted as holding in excess of 60 billion inhabited worlds in Children of the Lens.

Interaction between the Galactic Empire and the Lensman people could get weird in military terms. The Lensman setting makes no distinction between FTL and STL drives; they do everything by rendering their ships inertialess and speeding up until their exhaust plume is exerting a force balanced out by the friction of the interstellar medium... which is vastly faster than c. The only way to actually hurt the damn things is to grab hold with a tractor beam and pound away while they can't slip aside; try hitting them with beam weapons under normal conditions and the momentum transfer will knock them flying so fast that you don't get appreciable energy transfer.

Primary beams (and possibly any ultra-wave weapon) can destroy inertialess ships. Electromagnetics, however, would require tractoring as I recall it.

As for your initial impression, the individual Lensmen don't have anything like the raw power of individual Green Lanterns. Insofar as they have any abilities they're mostly telepathic, and only a handful of Lensmen in the galaxy are powerful enough telepaths to be truly dangerous even one on one in psychic terms. Lensmen are arguably more dangerous by virtue of their rigorous selection and training as a sort of bizarre cross between elite law enforcement, commandos, and intelligence operatives. The real muscle of the galactic societies is their starfaring fleets, which range up to and including armed mobile planets that fly around using inertialess drives. Although having Lensmen gives the good guys a powerful edge over their equivalently armed enemies.

Lensman abilities are not to be sneered at, even if they are less "flashy" than a psyker or Scanners-style psychokinetic. Even a bog-standard Lensman has the supernatural powers of mind-reading and being able to decipher any code written in a frame of reference he can understand (a limit given in the series was that a human Lensman could only imperfectly understand a mind thinking in four spatial dimensions). Moreover, non-human Lensmen have more overt abilities (such as offensive telepathy, for Z-type beings). Multiple Lensmen can link their minds to amplify their powers. They are also all absolutely incorruptible and cannot in any way be broken or compromised.

Second-Stage Lensmen are probably in the range of Alpha-Plus psykers in being able to kill thousands by telepathic attacks or concurrently mind-control many (Clarrissa held a considerable amount of telepathic Lyranians in Children of the Lens). Reaction times for mental attacks range from milli- to microseconds, which potentially means that they are able to kill most enemies without precognition before they can react. However, there are only five of them at any one time.

The actual Children of the Lens are more in line with demigods than psykers. Psychics on these levels are hard to quantify, but basically their telepathic abilities are as far ahead of the second-stagers as they are the ordinary Lensmen. Unlike them, their powers also appear to include psychokinesis; they can create Lenses (psi-enhancing devices with numerous secondary functions) apparently out of thin air in rapid order

Yeah. I really don't know how the numbers play out, but they're close enough that I'd expect a two-sided battle. I specified late era because their weapons evolve rapidly; by the end of the first round of major wars between Civilization and Boskone, they can do weird tricks like cutting tractor beams, they're flying between galaxies lightly (their drive actually works better in intergalactic space than within the galaxy, in contrast to Star Wars hyperdrive), and they have the capability the ~10^26 watt output of a main sequence star into a weaponized beam. They can't do it on a mobile platform, though, which does give them a disadvantage against large SW forces fighting a mobile campaign.

As of Children of the Lens, the Ploorans had developed sunbeams with interstellar range (no closer description of mechanism), as well as defences against them (which apparently redirected the beams, somehow).

[Darth Hoth]

That's a sustained speed. The very high numbers are usually quoted for tactical burst speeds. As you noted though, it won't make that much difference, being able to fight and maneuver effectively at even 100,000c is already enough to make their ships practically untouchable by the Empire.

As I recall it the "trillions of c" number occurred only once as an outlier (in Excession), with most other instances pointing to slower speeds. Nonetheless, as noted, the point is moot; not only does the Culture fight at FTL speeds, it is also capable of hiding in Banksian Hyperspace (a realm with four spatial dimensions and a faster lightspeed limit) while sniping at targets in the real spacetime continuum.

[Ford Prefect]

So? Federation impulse drives are also fusion rockets with optional antimatter injection. Both sides use mass-reduction technology to achieve transit times far lower than you'd normally expect. Both sides have warp-based FTL that can be used tactically, with speeds in the hundreds to thousands of c range. Both sides have large ships that wallow around like cruisers in fleet actions and smaller ships that zoom around like aircraft - though ME has more excuse, since the one fleet action we saw was a desperate defense of a single strong-point against a surprise attack, whereas DS9 fleet actions are fleets meeting in open space.

Star Trek has accepted accelerations measured in thousands of gravities (and there is at least one demonstrated instance on screen, from one of the films), and Federation Warp Drive is significantly faster than conventional mass effect FTL, given that Mass Relays are described as instantaneously moving ships across distances which would take centuries to travel via conventional FTL. It would exceedingly generous to suggest that it is referring to a jump across the entire galaxy, given that most mass relay jumps are a ten or twenty thousand lightyears, and the longest is maybe forty thousand. Voyager is expected to take 75 years to make the 70,000 lightyear journey home.

Exactly what magic waste-heat-disappearing technology does Trek have that ME doesn't? I don't recall any ever being mentioned. IMHO ME happens to mention it in the fluff whereas the Trek writers were too lazy to.

Are you missing the point on purpose? Mass Effect ships will cook their crews if they're in combat for too long (battles in the habitable life zone of star systems are described as 'frantic'). Can you think of any instance where waste heat from combat exercises was doing anything detrimental to a Trek ship? You mention GARDIAN earlier on, which loses efficency over time due to heat build-up: it is only super accurate and only has super fast response times at the beginning of a battle. Continuous use will melt the lenses, too.

[Nephtys]

The Systems Alliance (the human faction) from Mass Effect are probably on a par with the Federation, at least before the Dominion war fleet buildup; roughly comparable technology, similar sized ships and fleet, smaller industrial base but more military competence. The unified Citadel species fleets are probably a reasonable match for the alpha quadrant alliance (Klingons+Feds+Romulan fleets as seen in late DS9).

I doubt it. The most powerful space based weapon they have is a dreadnaught mass accelerator, which is about 38 kilotons, though there are antimatter bombs of yield great enough to enact significant and detrimental climate change around a planet. They may have an advantage in range (dreadnaughts are said to fight at tens of thousands of kilometres), but they almost certainly have much lower accelerations: military warships use antimatter fuelled drives which are said to produce accelerations beyond that of fusion rockets, so maybe a few tens of gees? This is on top of the fact that Stark Trek can trivially deal with waste heat, whereas heat management is pretty much the defining factor of all warship engagment in Mass Effect. Fleet numbers are harder to judge: the Turian Heirarchy has 37 dreadnaughts, and is the largest fleet in Citadel Space, but it's hard to judge how many ships they have total. I think there's a number given for Alliance Navy ships around the time of the Relay 314 incident, though I can't recall it.

Of course it's a completely different matter on the ground, but being better at ground combat than Star Trek is like being better at golf than a salmon.

You can't quantify shit in Mass Effect. There's some snippets about their lasers, detection ability, strategic doctrine and such, but that doesn't mean much. All the talk of multi-kiloton mass drivers goes out the window in the final battle, where it ends up all the spaceships lurch around like beached whales, tossing slow-moving fireball broadsides at each other from within visual range.

So... what about this Stark Trek?

[mr friendly guy]

People actually watched Andromeda? I saw it once and realized that it was that fucking Hercules guy, and that was pretty much it for me. Especially when I saw that there was some kind of literary theme-based character called a Nietzchean or something. What the fuck.

It wasn't too bad in the first two seasons before Sorbocles took over, had the writer sacked and then we find out Sorbo's character was secretly a Greek God, er I mean an alien god (not that I was watching it at that point, but I rented out a few dvds here and there).

[Patrick Degan]

The Empire would be no match for the Time Lords or Time War-era Daleks. The Sontarans, by sheer weight of numbers, would make significant trouble for the Empire, which on the other hand holds the advantage over the potato-heads in WMD capability. None of the other Doctor Who cultures would have a chance.

[Manus Celer Dei]

Where do you get this impression that Trek warp drives have more tactical flexibility than ME FTL? FTL in ME is in fact exactly the same thing as their STL propulsion, just with more power to the mass-lightening core. They could pull the exact same tricks if they wanted to, but they don't because fighting at such absurdly close ranges makes no tactical sense. In fact relativistic combat is the norm in ME, rather than the exception that it seems to be in Trek.

What? Doesn't FTL travel in ME rely exclusively on the Mass Relays?

[Parallax]

The Empire would be no match for the Time Lords or Time War-era Daleks. The Sontarans, by sheer weight of numbers, would make significant trouble for the Empire, which on the other hand holds the advantage over the potato-heads in WMD capability. None of the other Doctor Who cultures would have a chance.

Depends how you classify 'cultures', I suppose. The Osirons (from Pyramids of Mars) would probably win since the Doctor seemed pretty sure that the Time Lords would lose to them in a conflict.

And how, do you think, the Empire would fare against Giant Space Vampires such as those the Time Lords fought at the beginning of their rise to power?

[Starglider]

What? Doesn't FTL travel in ME rely exclusively on the Mass Relays?

No. Only a tiny fraction of systems have mass relays. Even the loading screens show this; when you travel between clusters you get to see the ship activating a mass relay, when you travel between star systems in a cluster you see an animation of the ship in FTL drive mode.

[Shinova]

Necrons? I doubt they have the industry to go toe to toe with the Empire. From 40k novels, it is pretty clear they are only based on a couple of tomb worlds. (granted, no one actually knows how many tomb worlds are there).

Do we really know anything about the size of the Necron presence? I think it's fairly accepted fact that there are tomb worlds with Necrons of one form or another scattered throughout the galaxy.

In ship combat Necrons definetly have it since tomb ships can supposedly one-shot Imperial cruisers and take buttloads of return-fire without flinching, and their strategic speed and FTL makes Empire look hilariously snail-paced in comparison.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

I strongly doubt that 'a couple of tombworlds' would be sufficient to build a Dyson shell.

Which the Necrons are doing.