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

[Ford Prefect]

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

The titular mass effect technology allows for a ship to lighten their mass, thus allowing them to travel at faster than light speeds. It's just much slower than travel via mass relay, though it's perfectly serviceable for in-system travel or between relatively nearby stars. It's also not great for very long distance travel because you will eventually electrocute yourself if you don't discharge the mass effect core.

Do we really know anything about the size of the Necron presence?

We know they were a multi-galactic empire once upon a time, though no longer.

[DrStrangelove]

Starglider really needs to read the ME codex and reconsider what he's said

http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Codex

[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.

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.

While the Doctor may have doubted his people's ability to win, it probably would have ended as a war of mutual destruction, since the Time Lords had developed the ability to control temporal paradoxes, lock worlds into time loops, and keep creatures like the Reapers at bay, and that is fairly comparable to Osiran abilities. But I'd agree that the Osirans would probably also wipe out the Empire.

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?

Rassilon was able to defeat them with kinetic penetrator weapons. Granted that we have very few details on the war with the Vampires, but a scientific culture should be able to analyse their strengths and weaknesses and devise an appropriate weapon as the Gallifreyans did.

[NecronLord]

Lensmen

Late-series Lensman setting? The scale is comparable in terms of numbers of planets involved. The setting's capital ship energy weapons are powerful enough that solid materials not covered by force fields cannot withstand them even briefly, which suggests megaton-range firepower or better.

Later Civilization would tear the Empire apart like wet tissue paper. There are billions of inhabited worlds, and similar numbers of warships, millions upon millions of Jedi-Knight equivalents who fight at full effectiveness. Their individual spacesuits have FTL and invulnerability devices, and they are content to spam FTL planets into other planets if they have no other choice.

Late period Lensmen have far superior FTL to the Empire, too.

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.

Actually, in Children of the Lens, the ploorans predict that Civilization will soon develop a means of projecting a sunbeam through a hyperspatial tube, giving them the ability to fire one (or many) at any point they choose. They are discussing concepts to protect themselves against such a thing.

It can't be stressed enough that the Sunbeam is almost irrelevant at the end of the series, by which point they are routinely teleporting planets into the path of their targets.

Systems Commonwealth

System's Commonwealth was supposed to be the same size magnitude (3 galaxies), but I don't remember their tech or their military ability.

Their slip-fighters can carry Nova-bombs, which explode stars, and are equipped with FTL. The Systems Commonwealth has ships individually much less powerful (they use antimatter power and metaton-missiles) though competant and brave, and they would pick and choose their battles. Most likely, the Empire would be forced to make a settlement for fear of the Commonwealth's superweapons. Every single warship is as powerful as the Sun-Crusher on the offensive.

40K races

Imperium of Man from 40k is iffy, but I'm pretty sure the Orks, Nids, or Necrons could certainly match or give the Empire a run for its money.

Orks would be negligable. Nids would be a menace, but too strategically slow. Any significant number of Necrons would be a curb-stomp. Far superior speed will do that.

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).

There are implied to be a great many Tomb Worlds. At their peak, the Void Dragon was said to have been worshipped in a thousand galaxies. There are other quotes to the same effect, too (The Nightbringer exterminating whole galaxies for pleasure) - this seems like their numbers are potentially radically higher than they are now. There are a small number of active 'crons. Given the scope of their Empire in the past, it is reasonable to think that the number of tombworlds known about is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Mind you, the C'tan should be able to just take over the Empire by replacing Palpatine.

The Culture

This far through and no one's mentioned The Culture; although I suppose that's not really a fair match up. They have much faster computers and amazingly powerful weapons but comparatively rather slow FTL travel. I can see a Clture/Empire war being rather similar to the Culture/Idirian war. ThE Culture starts off losing a lot of space as the fall back to consolidate their forces and get on a proper war footing and then coming back out of the corner and steam rolling the empire.

Whyever would they fall back? Even the Death Star couldn't so much as hurt a single Orbital.

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

Ahahaha.

Every single ship, even their semi-military couriers - we have ever seen, has the capacity to destroy planets, with no chain reaction shit, either. They just teleport a form of black hole inside it, or 'compressed anti-matter' and it variously gets sucked up, or goes bang. There are tens of millions of these at least.

The one store of obsolete warships "Rapid Offensive Units" we saw in Excession, who'd been put there because they chose to become inactive until they were needed to fight, would kill the Empire with no trouble. The main barrier for the Culture would be the sheer time travelling around Imperial worlds. Even the entire Imperial Fleet, assembled, wouldn't match a single, obsolete, Limited Offensive Unit.

These guys have every weapon a planet-buster, fight battles lasting fractions of a second, and can fight entirely from hyperspace.

The only consolation is that the Culture are consummate good guys. They'd just fly to Coruscant and start brain-raping the Empire's leaders into actually benevolent guys, and let them get on with it.

Doctor Who

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.

I don't know what you're basing this on. There's no quantifying some of these other cultures, except that they're much faster strategically. And small planet destroying bombs are quite common.

Obviously, the single-world cultures and such would have negligable chance usually, but the likes of the Second and Fourth Human empires? Or the Shadow Proclamation (who're supposedly across the entire universe) - there's no way you can tell how effective they are, except they have better FTL.

Hell, I think the Sarah Jane Adventures' Trickster simply pausing time as Mace Windu flies out the window and offering to swap him around with Palpatine would do the trick for 'destroy the Galactic Empire' though it's obviously underhanded. He can after all, look into someone's past and swap around who falls into the sea like that canonically. No Order 66, no proclamation of Empire? While Mace may not survive, I can see the Jedi Dictatorship taking off under those circumstances.

Unfortunately for the Empire, Palpatine is a single-point-of-failure for a lot of their operations, as shown in the post RotJ EU.

[Surlethe]

Would you mind posting the quote where it's said an ROU (err, sorry, "Very Fast Picket") could literally destroy a planet?

[Zac Naloen]

This is paraphrased from Consider Phlebas, but these are the official losses from the Idiran Culture War : -


"The war resulted in the destruction of 91,215,660 (±200) starships above interplanetary, 14,334 orbitals, 53 planets and major moons, 1 ring and 3 spheres, as well as the significant mass-loss or sequence-position alteration of 6 stars."


Have the Empire ever shown the ability to extract significant mass from a Star?

[NecronLord]

Would you mind posting the quote where it's said an ROU (err, sorry, "Very Fast Picket") could literally destroy a planet?

It will be unarmed, although it will have the equipment we think you may need, including some close-range hyperspace spectographic analysers, should the Mind conduct a limited destruct.'
'How can you be certain it'll be "limited"?' Horza asked sceptically.
'The Mind weighs several thousand tonnes, despite its relatively small size. An annihilatory destruct would rip the planet in half and so antagonise the Dra'Azon. No Culture Mind would risk such a thing.'

Page 16, Mind (Older model) Self Destruct can 'tear a planet in half.' I mention this purely because that's what the computer can do without a warship around it.

'All we do is drop a micro black hole into the centre of the planet. Simple as that; no untidy debris left floating about, no big, vulgar flash, and, if we do it right, no upsetting the rest of the solar system. It takes longer than displacing a few tonnes of CAM into the core, but even that has the advantage of giving the humans time to reflect on their past follies, as their world is eaten away beneath them. In the end, all you'd have left is something about the size of a large pea in the same orbit as the Earth, and a minor amount of X-ray pollution from meteoric material. Even the moon could stay where it is. A rather unusual planetary sub-system, but - in terms of scale as much as anything else - a fitting monument, or
memorial -' (Here Li smiled at me. I winked back.) '- to one of the more boringly inept rabbles marring the face of our fair galaxy.

The State of the Art, P101, GCU

The only solid battle scene we see makes extensive use of both nanoholes and CAM as main ship-to-ship weapons, while we know that both are capable of destroying planets. I could go on, but those are the most direct quotes.

As for a standard Very Fast Picket carrying armament equal to a GCU, and thus planet busting:

'Xeny; you are a million-tonne starship; a Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit. Even -'
'But I'm demilitarised!'
'Even without your principal armament, I bet you could waste planets if you wanted to -'
'Aw, come on; any silly GCU can do that!'

Indicates quite strongly that VFPs carry equivalent armament to GCUs, which can (see above) destroy planets.

There are many other quotes about destroying planets and such (like the one above) but they are not as explicit. However, there's never any contradiction of the ability of all Culture Ships above interplanetary (possibly excluding the unseen 'cruise ships') to mass-scatter or implode a planet.

[NecronLord]

Have the Empire ever shown the ability to extract significant mass from a Star?

At least two of those were induced novae, during one Battle. The Sun Crusher managed to induce quintiple Supernovae on one occasion.

[Zac Naloen]

I was aware of that, but inducing Novae by magi-tech is different to affecting a stars sequence by removing a significant amount of it's mass surely?

[NecronLord]

I was aware of that, but inducing Novae by magi-tech is different to affecting a stars sequence by removing a significant amount of it's mass surely?

I am reminded of a science demonstration in school when I was 10, where the teacher took a two litre plastic pop (coke/soda, whatever) bottle and half-filled it with water, then shovelled dry ice into it, sealing the top, and standing well back. He told us to listen for the sound of the gas escaping.

It took a while to realise that the large explosion of the bottle was in fact, the sound of the gas escaping.

When a star explodes, it loses a significant amount of its mass. Its position on the HR chart, if it survives the nova, will be changed.

[Zac Naloen]

You still aren't seeing my point.


There is a significant technological difference between inducing an reaction and controlling and harnessing that reaction.

The Federation can blow up a star, so that ability on the grand scale of Sci-fi is obviously not that big of a deal.


I remember the quote from the relevant book, at least two of those stars were induced SuperNova's.

So what about the rest?

[Starglider]

Starglider really needs to read the ME codex and reconsider what he's said

Do you have a specific point or are you just being a peanut gallery troll?

[dragon]

Starglider really needs to read the ME codex and reconsider what he's said

Do you have a specific point or are you just being a peanut gallery troll?

Hell if we go by that site the damage their ships can dish out they are no match at all. Their dreadnoughts main weapon only does

Each slug has the kinetic energy of 38 kilotons1 of TNT

And each ship does have their own FTL drive but use the relays for long distance.

[Simon_Jester]

Later Civilization would tear the Empire apart like wet tissue paper. There are billions of inhabited worlds, and similar numbers of warships, millions upon millions of Jedi-Knight equivalents who fight at full effectiveness. Their individual spacesuits have FTL and invulnerability devices, and they are content to spam FTL planets into other planets if they have no other choice.

Late period Lensmen have far superior FTL to the Empire, too.

The warship count is accurate, but the individual ships project far less power than their Star Wars counterparts. The Lensmen are not full Jedi-equivalents; only a handful of them actually have the kind of mental power to be comparable. At their best they're 'mere' special forces; the Lens is used for communication, not to grant them psychic weapons or tactical precognition

Likewise, with respect to the spacesuits... I've noted a conspicuous lack of invulnerability. The toughest suits are resistant to high caliber bullets and hand-held energy weapons, but that just means you need to get a bigger energy weapon. As for their ability to go inertialess... I don't think their propulsion systems are up to the task of long distance interstellar flight. Do you have a counterexample?

Ship FTL is debatable. Hyperdrive is still faster as best as I can determine, but going free lets you maneuver at FTL speeds in normal space, and do so casually. If they had decent computer support they could do what Star Trek can't: effective warp strafing.

Actually, in Children of the Lens, the ploorans predict that Civilization will soon develop a means of projecting a sunbeam through a hyperspatial tube, giving them the ability to fire one (or many) at any point they choose. They are discussing concepts to protect themselves against such a thing.

Yes, and they will develop this technology eventually; it is described as something they might invent "within the century."

It can't be stressed enough that the Sunbeam is almost irrelevant at the end of the series, by which point they are routinely teleporting planets into the path of their targets.

All right, let's compromise: mid-series Lensmen, at the time of "Gray Lensman" and "Second Stage Lensman." Civilization doesn't have the hang of the hyperspatial tube. Mobile planets are dangerous, but their shielding is light enough that Star Wars fleets stand a credible chance of cracking it even from long range.
__________

The Culture
Whyever would they fall back? Even the Death Star couldn't so much as hurt a single Orbital.

True, but the Culture tends to be a bit nonconfrontational and cautious with the lives of their citizens, right? They might very well fall back just to give themselves a clear space to fight in.

I can't prove that; my knowledge of the Culture is second hand.

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.

Is that truly wanky? Physically there's no reason why you couldn't have electron-degenerate antimatter or anti-neutronium. In practice, if you have the technology to handle hyperdense states of matter, you're doing it with force fields and not physical containers anyway... in which case doing it with antimatter isn't actually harder.
________

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.

True, but that doesn't make them transcendantly dangerous. They'd be a major problem for the Star Wars side, just as they are for Boskone, but they wouldn't be able to decide the war simply by existing. The Second Stage Lensmen are more of a threat in that department; I would regard them as the functional equals or superiors of Jedi Masters- with different skill sets, of course. But there are only about four to five of them.

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).

As I said, I think it would be best to specify the mid-series, where all that is still twenty years in the future (at Lensman R&D rates... ). Remember that we're looking for a fair fight.

As of the time of Galactic Patrol, with no primary beams, no hyperspatial tube, no cosmic energy screens, no advanced superconductors and insulators from Medon, no ability to cut tractor beams, and so on, Civilization is almost certainly less powerful than the Star Wars Empire at its peak. Some time during the course of the series, that changes and they would be on roughly equal terms. I think that happens somewhere in the middle of the four main Lensman books.
________

Each slug has the kinetic energy of 38 kilotons1 of TNT

And each ship does have their own FTL drive but use the relays for long distance.

How much do we know about how Star Trek shields handle kinetic projectiles? A 38 kt penetrator round might do a lot more damage than a 38 kt energy weapon or fireball.

[Serafina]

True, but the Culture tends to be a bit nonconfrontational and cautious with the lives of their citizens, right? They might very well fall back just to give themselves a clear space to fight in.

I can't prove that; my knowledge of the Culture is second hand.

Prooving this wrong was more or less the whole point of Consider Phlebas. The Culture may be an anachistic, hedonistic society - but don't tick them off, or they whack your ass.

I am currenlty re-reading Consider Phlebas, and Culture ships are actually capable of hiding inside a sun. Not just inside the Corona either, but at the core - and for at least some hours, too.
Now i admit that i can not do any calculations for that, but i am fairly sure that puts their shields (or rather, fields, but more or less the same thing) at an impressive level.

Edit: Scratch the part about "core of a star". It talks about the Photosphere, which is more or less te outermost layer of the stellar body (below the Corona).

He folded his arms across his bulky chest and looked around. Stars were everywhere. He had no idea
which one was Sorpen's. So the Culture ships could hide in the photospheres of stars, could they? And
a Mind - even if it was desperate and on the run - could jump through the bottom of a gravity-well, could
it?

[dragon]

Each slug has the kinetic energy of 38 kilotons1 of TNT

And each ship does have their own FTL drive but use the relays for long distance.

How much do we know about how Star Trek shields handle kinetic projectiles? A 38 kt penetrator round might do a lot more damage than a 38 kt energy weapon or fireball.

Actualy a lot.

Now that you've seen the pretty pictures, let's crunch some numbers. Let's suppose a 70 metre wide asteroid strikes a ship while moving at roughly 1 km/s (as all long-time Star Wars vs Star Trek people know, this is similar to the asteroid which hit an ISD bridge tower in TESB, as seen in this Divx5 video clip). This is considered a benchmark for an ISD's resistance to physical impacts, albeit somewhat over-conservative. Remember that all the ships had already sustained damage beforehand (from prior asteroid impacts, and perhaps also from the Battle of Hoth and a near-collision with two other Star Destroyers), the shields may have been down to permit the holo-transmission, and neither the bridge tower or its shield generators would be as robust as the main hull and its defense systems. As a slightly off-topic exercise, ask yourself what this incident tells us about the structural strength of the bridge tower (hint: does the asteroid pulverize against the tower's surface, penetrate deeply inside, or fly right through and out the other side?)

In any case, given nickel-iron composition and roughly 7000 kg/m³ density, this asteroid would have roughly 1.25 million tons mass, therefore its momentum would be 1.25E12 kg·m/s and its kinetic energy would be 6.25E14 J (roughly 150 kilotons). We might leap to the conclusion that a Star Destroyer's shields must be limited to 150 kilotons for any weapon regardless of whether it possesses mass or not (assuming its bridge shields were, in fact, up at the time despite the holo-transmission which normally requires shields to be lowered), but this conclusion is oversimplistic and wrong. Knowing what we know about collision physics, we know that the shields must apply enough reaction force to reduce the asteroid's velocity to zero before impact. From another scene in ROTJ where a stricken fighter explodes against an ISD bridge tower's shields, they appear to be less than 10 metres away from the hull. This would give them less than 0.02 seconds to stop the asteroid, and the reaction force would be at least 6.25E13 N (note that we are ignoring the fact that no shield interaction was visible in the asteroid impact, so we are humouring the common Trekkie belief that the shields were up). This defines the physical stress applied to the shield generator's mounts, and stress causes structural failure.

link

[Starglider]

Each slug has the kinetic energy of 38 kilotons1 of TNT

How much do we know about how Star Trek shields handle kinetic projectiles? A 38 kt penetrator round might do a lot more damage than a 38 kt energy weapon or fireball.

We've seen Jem Haddar attack ships ram similarly sized (and fully shielded) birds of prey at hundreds of metres per second (in DS9) and both ships are instantly torn to shreds. If both ships are about 10,000 tonnes (i.e. over twice the tonnage of a wet navy ship of similar size) and collide at a kilometre per second (frankly it looked like less, on screen), that's about two kilotons of kinetic energy. If that's representative of Trek ship KE resistance in general (and from the Galaxy nacelle-tap explosion farce I suspect it is), Mass Effect cruiser guns will be one-shotting Mirandas, never mind the dreadnoughts.

Again, the reason Mass Effect relies on linear accelerator guns so heavily is that they're good against shields and point defence. They have multimegaton nuclear and AM warheads, just like Trek, but they're not much use in fleet combat.

Actualy a lot.

Erm, what? He asked about Trek shields and you quoted a Wars analysis?

[Balrog]

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.

Evidence that dreadnoughts actually carry around multimegaton missiles, missiles which can be targeted at enemy ships?

As for GARDIAN, perhaps you forgot about the fact that the system is only 100% accurate in the beginning phases of battle (and assumes that the lasers are being aimed correctly), that its performance degrades as heat builds up inside the ship (something which Trek ships are not hampered by), and that the shielding on photon torpedoes are strong enough they can survive passage into a star? Those are going to have to be some godly lasers mounted on their ships to punch through that (an unlikely fact considering laser ranges for most ME ships are in the "close knife fight" range of 10km or less).

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.

Except they can't, considering A) they have no FTL sensors and B) their FTL drives have a hard 50-hour limit. ME ships can try running, but Trek is still going to be able to track them and easily keep up given the slow non-Mass Relay FTL speeds, and the ME ships that have been engaged are left with the choice of frying themselves or stopping and getting blown up.

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.

Um, bullshit:

Geth Armatures
Armatures are quadruped all-terrain heavy weapons platforms, akin to the
armored fighting vehicles of other races. Geth being synthetic intelligences,
armatures are not crewed vehicles, but intelligent entities, capable of
independent decision-making and learning.

Armatures are equipped with heavy kinetic barriers. Their main cannon mounted
on the articulated 'head' turret, appears to be a highly efficient
conventional mass accelerator. It is capable of firing in anti-personnel and
anti-tank modes. Some armatures carry drones into battle, presumable for
reconnaissance purposes. Others host a swarm of insect-sized repair microbots.

Ablative Armor
A warship's kinetic barriers reduce the damage from solid objects, but can
do nothing to block GARDIAN lasers, particle beams, and other forms of Directed
Energy Weapon (DEW). The inner layer of warship protection consists of
ablative armor plate designed to 'boil away' when heated. The vaporized
armor material scatters a DEW beam, rendering it ineffectual.

A scaffold was built around the interior pressure hull, with sheets of
ablative armor hung from the structure. Ships typically have multiple layers
of armor separated by empty baffles, spaces often used for cargo storage.
Cruisers, which lack the internal space to fit dedicated fighter hangers,
store the shipboard fighter complement in the baffles. It is not unknown
for enlisted crew to build illicit alcohol distilleries in some obscure corner
of the baffles, safe from prying eyes.

The Systems Alliance isn't going to have much of a choice in the matter in a war with the Earth Alliance. They can try to fight at range, but EA ships not only are capable of fighting at thousands of kilometers, but most likely will just jump in at close range and engage them instantly. Of course, you still have the problem that for every dreadnought the SA has, the EA has a dozen or so Omegas.

[XaLEv]

Culture ships don't actually require any armament to destroy a planet.



This shows roughly the low level structure of the universe in the Culture series. The central black line is the three dimensional plane of realspace. The blue parts are the four dimensional hyperspaces. The red are the two Grids, rather poorly described regions full of energy in some way. Ships from the Culture and other high level civilizations are able to extend force fields into the Grid to extract energy from it, and push against it to propel themselves. Pushing against the Grid distorts it, and sufficiently high accelerations can cause these distortions to reach into realspace. This is effectively the most basic form of Gridfire. A quote from Excession, about a massive wave of Gridfire launched against a fleet of Culture warships:

To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, like a wooden sea-ship encountering an atomic blast. This was a fireball of energies from beyond the remit of reality; a monstrous wall of flame to devastate anything in its path.

A wave of Gridfire striking a planet would not be like a solid impactor or a wave of some fluid; rather it would progress unimpeded by anything in its path, affecting everything within the volume where it intersects realspace.

Here's the description of the destruction of Vavatch by proper, controlled Gridfire produced from a distance, rather than the improvised version described above:

Gridfire struck the Orbital. Horza paused and watched the screen as it lit up suddenly, flashing once over its whole surface until the sensors coped with the sudden increase in brilliance and compensated. For some reason Horza had thought the Culture would just splash the gridfire all over the massive Orbital and then spatter the remains with CAM, but they didn't do that; instead a single narrow line of blinding white light appeared right across the breadth of the day side of the Orbital, a thin fiery blade of silent destruction which was instantly surrounded by the duller but still perfectly white cover of clouds. That line of light was part of the grid itself, the fabric of pure energy which lay underneath the entire universe, separating this one from the slightly younger, slightly smaller antimatter universe beneath. The Culture, like the Idirans, could now partially control that awesome power, at least sufficiently to use it for the purposes of destruction. A line of that energy, plucked from nowhere and sliced across the face of the three-dimensional universe, was down there: on and inside the Orbital, boiling the Circlesea, melting the two thousand kilometres of transparent wall, annihilating the base material itself, straight across its thirty-five-thousand-kilometre breadth.

Vavatch, that fourteen million kilometre hoop, was starting to uncoil. A chain, it had been cut.

There was nothing left now to hold it together; its own spin, the source of both its day-night cycle and its artificial gravity, was now the very force tearing it all apart. At about one hundred and thirty kilometres per second, Vavatch was throwing itself into outer space, unwinding like a released spring.

The livid line of fire appeared again, and again, and again, working its way methodically round the Orbital from where the original burst had struck, neatly parcelling the entire Orbital into squares, thirty-five thousand kilometres to a side, each containing a sandwich of trillions upon trillions of tonnes of ultradense base material, water, land and air.

Vavatch was turning white. First the gridfire seared the water into a border of clouds; then the outrushing air, spilling from each immense flat square like heavy fumes off a table, turned its load of water vapour to ice. The ocean itself, no longer held by the spin force, was shifting, spilling with infinite slowness over one edge of every plate of ruptured base material, becoming ice and swirling away into space.

The precise, brilliant line of fire marched on, going back in reverse-spin direction, neatly dissecting the still curved, still spinning sections of the Orbital with its sudden, lethal flashes of light - light from outside the normal fabric of reality.

[...]

The relentless line of fire completed its circuit of the Orbital, back almost to where it had started. The Orbital was now a rosette of white flat squares backing slowly away from each other towards the stars: four hundred separate slabs of quickly freezing water, silt, land and base material, angling out above or underneath the plane of the system's planets like flat square worlds themselves.

There was a moment of grace then, as Vavatch died in solitary, blazing splendour. Then at its dark centre, another blazing star patch rose, bursting white as the Hub was struck with the same terrible energy which had smashed the world itself.

Like a target, then, Vavatch blazed.

Just as Horza thought that the Culture would be content with that, the screen lit up once more. Everyone of those flat cards, and the Hub, of the exploded Orbital blazed once with an icy, sparkling brilliance as though a million tiny white stars were shining through each shattered piece.

The light faded, and those four hundred expanses of flat worlds with their centre Hub were gone, replaced by a grid of diced shapes, each exploding away from the others as well as from the rest of the disintegrating Orbital.

Those pieces flashed, too, bursting slowly with a billion pinpricks of light which, when they faded, left debris almost too small to make out.

Vavatch was now a swollen and spiralled disc of flashing, glittering splinters, expanding very slowly against the distant stars like a ring of bright dust. The glinting, sparkling centre made it look like some huge, lidless and unblinking eye.

The screen flashed one final time. No single points of light could be made out this time. It was as though the whole now vague but bloated image of the shattered circular world glowed with some internal heat, making a torus-shaped cloud out of it, a halo of white light with a fading iris at its centre. Then the show was over, and only the sun lit up the slowly blooming nimbus of the annihilated world.

And the warning message the Culture broadcast some number of days before:

WARNING/SIGNAL/WARNING/SIGNAL/WARNING/SIGNAL/WARNING : ATTENTION ALL CRAFT! VAVATCH ORBITAL AND HUB WITH ALL ANCILLARY UNITS WILL BE DESTROYED REPEAT DESTROYED MARAINTIME A/4872.0001 EXACT (EQUIVALENT G-HUB TIME 00043.2909.401: EQUIVALENT LIMB THREE TIME 09.256.8: EQUIVALENT IDIRTIMERELATIVE QU'URIBALTA 359.0021: EQIVALENT VAVATCHTIME SEG 7TH.4010.5) BY NOVALEVEL HYPER-GRID INTRUSION AND SUBSEQUENT CAM BOMBARDMENT. SENT BY ESCHATOLOGIST (TEMPORARY NAME), CULTURE GENERAL SYSTEMS VEHICLE. TIMED AT A/4870.986: MARAINBASE ALLTRANS ... SIGNAL SECTION END ... SIGNAL REPETITION NUMBER ONE OF SEVEN FOLLOWS: ........................ WARNING/SIGNAL/WARNING/SIGNAL/WARNING...

[NecronLord]

And as I mentioned last time gridfire was discussed, trillions upon trillions of tonnes is not on the order of a whole planet. The Culture can manufacture one and a half thousand orbitals from one earthlike planet. While logically it can destroy whole worlds, simply because other Culture weapons can, that quote doesn't prove anything Xalev.

[Starglider]

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.

Um, bullshit: Their main cannon mounted on the articulated 'head' turret, appears to be a highly efficient conventional mass accelerator.

Direct visual evidence beats fluff text. If you'd actually played the game, you'd know that armatures and collossi fire a bright glowing blob that moves at approximately 10 metres per second and takes down the shields of an APC by about 10%, for a direct hit. There is no way a mass accelerator slug could move at a mere 10m/sec and pose any sort of threat, or for that matter glow brightly and exhibit no gravity arcing. It is either an extremely inefficient and unnecessarily glowing unguided rocket (in fact it moves at about the same speed as the infantry-fired rockets), or an energy weapon.

[NecronLord]

The warship count is accurate, but the individual ships project far less power than their Star Wars counterparts. The Lensmen are not full Jedi-equivalents; only a handful of them actually have the kind of mental power to be comparable.

Umm. Bollocks?

The average jedi is a shit telepath - normally they can do the mind-trick thing. RotS novellisation has Palpatine say that the ability for a Master to actually read someone's thoughts is unusual. ("Master so and so, you're the telepath, tell me what I'm thinking!") Telepathically, the Jedi Order has nothing on Lensmen.

As for personal combat, yeah, the force provides more advantage there; and Lensmen have FTL Space Suits which they've been known to fight in. Similarly, they fight in fully sealed armour and with guns as well as melee weapons, I have little difficulty imagining them as at least as effective as one of the schmoes from Geonosis. Obi Wan, Anakin, Yoda (Canonically the most devastating jedi combattant in their history) Luke et al, are not average, they are amongst the most powerful ever to live, and should be compared to the Children of the Lens, which finds them lacking.

As for their ability to go inertialess... I don't think their propulsion systems are up to the task of long distance interstellar flight. Do you have a counterexample?

Kinnison does exactly that in Galactic Patrol. Several times. Using fairly standard space armour. It takes a while thanks to the rather limited thrust and density of atmospheres, but he still manages interplanteray journeys.

Ship FTL is debatable. Hyperdrive is still faster as best as I can determine, but going free lets you maneuver at FTL speeds in normal space, and do so casually. If they had decent computer support they could do what Star Trek can't: effective warp strafing.

Late era lensmen have hyperspatial tubes which are orders of magnitude faster and able to traverse intergalactic distances.

Yes, and they will develop this technology eventually; it is described as something they might invent "within the century."

Even assuming Civilization's soldiers ran fleeing at the first hint of a stormtrooper, the Galactic Empire would still take centuries to try and occupy sixty billion worlds with any effectiveness.

All right, let's compromise: mid-series Lensmen,

Duh. And if you take the Time Lords of Gallifrey far enough back in their history, they couldn't take on the Galactic Empire.

The Culture
Whyever would they fall back? Even the Death Star couldn't so much as hurt a single Orbital.

True, but the Culture tends to be a bit nonconfrontational and cautious with the lives of their citizens, right? They might very well fall back just to give themselves a clear space to fight in.

No. There is even a saying in-universe. "You do not fuck with the Culture." The Culture doesn't squander lives easily, it has no need to. The Empire would have no defences whatsoever against their effectors. The Entire Imperial Starfleet, Armies, Death Stars, Other Superweapons and every fighter ever built by the empire could assemble to attack one Orbital, and it would lose. The Culture's only problem would be (much as I mentioned above) the sheer scale of what they've got to occupy.

The only harm they might be able to do would be with Wankatine's force storms.

[Serafina]

And as I mentioned last time gridfire was discussed, trillions upon trillions of tonnes is not on the order of a whole planet. The Culture can manufacture one and a half thousand orbitals from one earthlike planet. While logically it can destroy whole worlds, simply because other Culture weapons can, that quote doesn't prove anything Xalev.

We have, however, the casualty list quoted above, with lists severa, orbitals, rings, planets and stars.
Ergo, the Culture (and the Iridians) CAN and DID destroy planets.

[NecronLord]

And as I mentioned last time gridfire was discussed, trillions upon trillions of tonnes is not on the order of a whole planet. The Culture can manufacture one and a half thousand orbitals from one earthlike planet. While logically it can destroy whole worlds, simply because other Culture weapons can, that quote doesn't prove anything Xalev.

We have, however, the casualty list quoted above, with lists severa, orbitals, rings, planets and stars.
Ergo, the Culture (and the Iridians) CAN and DID destroy planets.

Umm? See above. I'm arguing that they can destroy planets with a single GCU's armament.

What I'm saying there, is that the time we actually see gridfire being used, it doesn't do anything special.

[NecronLord]

True, but the Culture tends to be a bit nonconfrontational and cautious with the lives of their citizens, right? They might very well fall back just to give themselves a clear space to fight in.

I can't prove that; my knowledge of the Culture is second hand.

Prooving this wrong was more or less the whole point of Consider Phlebas. The Culture may be an anachistic, hedonistic society - but don't tick them off, or they whack your ass.

I am currenlty re-reading Consider Phlebas, and Culture ships are actually capable of hiding inside a sun. Not just inside the Corona either, but at the core - and for at least some hours, too.
Now i admit that i can not do any calculations for that, but i am fairly sure that puts their shields (or rather, fields, but more or less the same thing) at an impressive level.

Edit: Scratch the part about "core of a star". It talks about the Photosphere, which is more or less te outermost layer of the stellar body (below the Corona).

He folded his arms across his bulky chest and looked around. Stars were everywhere. He had no idea
which one was Sorpen's. So the Culture ships could hide in the photospheres of stars, could they? And
a Mind - even if it was desperate and on the run - could jump through the bottom of a gravity-well, could
it?

Not that special, actually. Wars ships have the power to do this. As do some others who're far from Culture levels.