Star Wars is much more to my liking than that socialist repressive conformist pc nightmare that is Star Trek where every energy effect/dust cloud/nebula/space fart disrupts the engines/shields/weapons/transporters.
With atrocious engineering and safety standards the federation isn't really any safer. There is a good article on that here:
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Ess ... ering.html. In fact I just finished watching the episode 'New Ground' mentioned in the link.
Jake wrote: Here's a hint: considering aliens in Wars are second class citizens, if you pop up as an alien you're already screwed.
There is actually only anecdotal evidence for this in the form of no aliens seen serving the Empire. I am unsure if the novelizations have more info in that regards. It should be noted before the Empire was formed Palpatine did have aliens in his personal staff.
All this stuff about which galaxy is the safer is kind of moot. The real world can be dangerous but do you go around every day thinking about how you can die, informing every decision you make? All's people have done has proved that both galaxies do have their danger as to be expected.
Junghalli wrote:Yeah, that's pretty much my impression of what they were going for: a society that had automation advanced enough that most of the grunt work was handled by machines and a small fraction of the population could produce enough surplus to keep the entire population alive in comfort, combined with a change in values toward a more cooperative, less competitive society.
Personally of late I've come to increasingly respect Trek for at least trying to present a vision of a future that's genuinely different from today (however ineptly it may have been executed), as I've come to find the usual "the future will be fundamentally just like the present, but in space, with lasers" deal increasingly tiresome. Which is probably one reason I've come to find the whole "lol commie evil dictatorship Federation" meme increasingly annoying of late. Although really I think that mostly it's just that the horse has been so thoroughly beaten to death by now, at least here.
I would agree that they have tried to showcase a better future. The idea of a post-scarcity civlization where energy/food/supplies are cheap and plentiful is appealing. However with no money it takes away a lot of your personal choice and freedom. People like to own things and short of the basic necessities and nick-nacks you don't have much of a choice in socialism. Look at the real world examples, Russia survived for barely 80 years with a mostly totalitarian form of communism. China isn't much better and they had to go partialy capitalist to survive. Neither had a benevolent government however.
The damning points with socialism is that it does not take into account human nature. All excess is shared so those who contribute, loose the incentive to exceed when they get no reward, usually in the form of money. People as a rule just ain't that selfless. In fact you can contribute less, and still get the same reward as someone who provides more. Not all jobs are equal but regardless of the job you do you get the same reward. So where is your incentive? (at least that was my cack handed attempt at remembering the points made in my high school history from 11 years ago)
You are right that they screwed it up, that they have glossed over things. Gene Roddenberry was a socalist and his views filtered into the Federation, they just don't work in reality. I do however like you respect their attempt to try and portray a better future.
RowanE wrote:Looking back, that is a bit of a contradiction. In the post I think you're referring to, I was somehow thinking of the bacta thing, and Padme's death, separately rather than as aspects of medicine in star wars. I'll accept that the quality of medicine is at least about as good as that in star trek.
Star Wars medicine is actually pretty impressive. Vader's spine was replaced with an artificial one and Grevious's brain along with his eyes, heart and lungs was transplanted into a droid body. Just two cannon examples.
RowanE wrote:
But, thinking about it, the deadliness of ships is relative anyway. The more relevant issue in question here is, can a star trek ship kill another star trek ship as easily as a similar matchup of star wars ships? And I can tell that's too vague a question to easily answer definitively, so is it best to just say it's about the same?
As deadily as Star Wars ships are, the defensive technologies are just as advanced so I would agree with you.
Stofsk wrote:Define 'easier'. We don't know how cheap/easy it is to get a personal starship in Trek, although even Quark managed to get a warp-capable shuttle one time in DS9.
The point is if you want a personal starship to do business with, you can do it in Star Trek just as readily as you can in Star Wars. People in this thread are acting like it's somehow impossible to get your own ship in Star Trek which is nonsense. We've seen independent traders and merchantmen, freighter captains, there was one guy in 'Operation: Annhilate' who flew his own ship into the Deneva's sun, we've seen mercenaries and rebels who have their own ships as well
By Picard's admission, there is no money in the Federation. How are you going to get a ship without money? Oh I agree there are ways and it is possible in Star Trek, likely however is something else.
The advantage of having a deadlier ship is that it's deadlier relative to the ships you fight, so you win those fights. Having ships that are good at killing ships in some other universe is worth fuckall to you. So "deadlier ships" doesn't make life in the SW universe better, unless you're shootng at things that's equally (not)tough, and equally (not)dangerous, in the ST universe. Which means unshielded civilian ships and planets, and random asteroids. Anything else you want to shoot up will be proportionally difficult in each universe, except for maybe different tactical considerations...
