Galactic Empire vs. Galactic Empire

[SAMAS]

Just a weird thought I had: The Imperial Fleet from the battle of Endor vs. the Imperial Fleet from the Battle of Astarte (See LoGH battles thread).

Could the Astarte fleet wear the Star Destroyers down with sheer numbers, or would the outcome work out more like this?

[Simon_Jester]

Given the amount of effort it seems to take for LoGH ships to take down each other, I have to say that unless we posit more impressive firepower than I'd expect from the series, the canon firepower of Star Wars ships makes the need for numerical disparity truly immense. I'm not sure just how many ships the Goldenbaumist Empire had at Astarte, but I suspect it wouldn't be enough.

Then again, I don't know enough of the numbers to say with confidence.

[Vehrec]

20,000 ships. Against the 30 something ships of Death Squadron. Commanders may matter highly here, will Death Squadron be rooted by orders as they were at Endor?

[KlavoHunter]

Sounds like it's time to start looking at calcs for weapons yield, to see how they stack up against Star Wars....

[Darth Hoth]

In the main series (episode 20, I believe) the main cannon of the Geiersburg fortress (an artificial planetoid held by the nobles opposing Reinhart's coup) is stated to be at 740 terawatt, and being almost as powerful as the one at Iserloen. Which is, by all accounts, huge overkill against their biggest battleships.

So, firepower-wise, I doubt they would pose much of a threat against ISDs, even if there are literal thousands of them.

About range and manoeuvrability, I cannot think of anything immediately quantifiable, but others probably have more complete recollections of the series than I.

[Omeganian]

Less than 200 KT per second? You'll need millions, not thousands.

[Sarevok]

Considering enemy numbers and their ineffective weapons the phrase bugs splashing against the windshield of a speed truck comes to mind...

[Simon_Jester]

In the main series (episode 20, I believe) the main cannon of the Geiersburg fortress (an artificial planetoid held by the nobles opposing Reinhart's coup) is stated to be at 740 terawatt, and being almost as powerful as the one at Iserloen. Which is, by all accounts, huge overkill against their biggest battleships.

Honestly, that's probably too small to blow away whole fleets the way those fortress guns are able to do. I don't care what the ships are made of, they shouldn't just disintegrate in large numbers under that kind of fire on the timescale we see the gun engaging them.

[Ryan Thunder]

It might've been the flux it could produce. Hundreds of terawatts per square metre can't be good for anybody.

[Darth Hoth]

Honestly, that's probably too small to blow away whole fleets the way those fortress guns are able to do. I don't care what the ships are made of, they shouldn't just disintegrate in large numbers under that kind of fire on the timescale we see the gun engaging them.

Well, that might well be so. It was a while ago I watched it, so I do not remember the visuals in all that much detail. Might secondary explosions of munitions, power reactors or whatnots explain the discrepancy? If not, I would not know what. Perhaps the beams are not strictly DET kills? Or maybe their "Zephyr Particles" play into it somehow.

The 740 terawatt number was, in any case, directly stated by the narration, and as far as I can recall, it is the one number that was. Are there any calcable instances otherwise that might set a benchmark?

[takemeout_totheblack]

Yeah, the thing about the 740TW number is that it doesn't really correlate with what we've seen the Fuck-You Cannons do. Sure, it's an impressive number to people in the eighties, back when the world was primitive and cassette tapes roamed the earth, but a couple hundred kilotons wouldn't do what we see it do as literally THOUSANDS of 600m-1km long ships, each one weighing several hundred thousand tons at least, melt, evaporate, and dissolve away in a massive cascade of facerape. Even if the ships were made of simple steel (which they certainly are not) anything less than a couple megatons just isn't going to do it.

Effective range of guns has been stated at 6 million kilometers, but that just against shields (yes, they do have them) and unshielded targets are presumably far more vulnerable at farther ranges.

But yeah, the SDs have every possible advantage.

Edit: clean up for sake of readability

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, the thing about the 740TW number is that it doesn't really correlate with what we've seen the Fuck-You Cannons do. Sure, it's an impressive number to people in the eighties, back when the world was primitive and cassette tapes roamed the earth, but a couple hundred kilotons wouldn't do what we see it do as literally THOUSANDS of 600m-1km long ships, each one weighing several hundred thousand tons at least, melt, evaporate, and dissolve away in a massive cascade of facerape. Even if the ships were made of simple steel (which they certainly are not) anything less than a couple megatons just isn't going to do it.

That was kind of my point.

Sheer numbers are going to make this a long fight for the SW Empire, but... well, at odds of roughly one to ten thousand to one, you need weapon output on the order of several gigatons per second in order for a massed fleet to start threatening star destroyers credibly, as I recall the numbers.

You need shields a great deal tougher than that to stop ISD gun hits from blowing away your ships on a one-to-one basis. Their accuracy is an open question, especially at typical LoGH engagement ranges (the question of how much ECM is employed in LoGH to ensure that capital ship beam fire winds up missing a lot at range is relevant too).

I'm not optimistic about LoGH having the firepower, and I'm almost sure they don't have the shielding. Though I would find it enormously entertaining if this were written up with the LoGH fleet scaled up in terms of energy output and such until it was more of an even match.

Actually, that's something I'd like to see more: crossovers that are deliberately normalized, so that it doesn't always boil down to a question of "whoever generates the most electricity wins." Because I like competitions between the social systems and the personalities involved more than I do the hardware, in a context (SF) where you can make your hardware invincible just by daring to dream bigger.

[Darth Hoth]

Actually, that's something I'd like to see more: crossovers that are deliberately normalized, so that it doesn't always boil down to a question of "whoever generates the most electricity wins." Because I like competitions between the social systems and the personalities involved more than I do the hardware, in a context (SF) where you can make your hardware invincible just by daring to dream bigger.

The same thing is pretty much true for those, too, though - only instead of writing "the destructor beam has a duration of ten seconds and average output of e28 watts," one writes "in Wanktopia everyone who matters has 'uploaded' into a 'super-intelligent' AI with total 'post-scarcity' and personal FTL, and so on, and so forth." Social systems and personalities are just as easy to uberwank.

I think the reason the vs debates tend to settle for tech comparisons is that "personal" factors are usually not objectively quantifiable. So they render themselves poorly for debates and rational arguments. Of course, in the vs fanfiction (the good one, anyway) it was always the character/system interactions that were important; Mike Wong, for example, did "normalise" firepower in his crossover.

[Omeganian]

Sheer numbers are going to make this a long fight for the SW Empire

Even the smaller , faster firing guns will probably be one hit kills. Since there is about a hundred of these of an ISD, I would say - not that long.

[Simon_Jester]

The same thing is pretty much true for those, too, though - only instead of writing "the destructor beam has a duration of ten seconds and average output of e28 watts," one writes "in Wanktopia everyone who matters has 'uploaded' into a 'super-intelligent' AI with total 'post-scarcity' and personal FTL, and so on, and so forth." Social systems and personalities are just as easy to uberwank.

Hoth, you're missing the point. Most SF settings don't wank their social systems, and I'm not really interested in the ones that do. What I'm talking about is the fundamental nature of characters.

To take an easy example, how would Han Solo and Malcolm Reynolds interact? Not as guys operating arbitrary pieces of futuristic bling, but as men? They're similar in some ways: smugglers with a hidden heart of gold. They're different in others: Han is (during the movie era) kind of a loner except for his trusted pal Chewie, whereas Mal is a leader by instinct and is practically inseparable from his crew.

I could imagine interesting stories about those two men interacting, if we could only abstract out the hardware differences between their respective settings.

And yes, those hardware differences are massive- on the one hand you have galaxy-hopping tramp freighters and handguns that blow buildings apart, on the other hand you have sublight tramp freighters and handguns that are basically bastardized Wild West revolvers. I am not contesting that.

But at heart I don't give a shit about how the Millenium Falcon generates ten orders of magnitude more electricity than Firefly or whatever. Yes, it does, fine, fine, OK, I'm not arguing with the math, we get it already. Those arguments began and ended years ago, before I even realized they were happening. I don't have any stake or emotional investment in them.

So for me, the question is: now what? Can we get on with our lives? Can we actually have fun? Or do all crossover concepts bog down into endless comparisons of how much electricity the two sides generate, or how powerful their computer support is, or whatever? How do I go about recovering the sense of fun that I could get from a good crossover that didn't bother itself so much in the technical details, but was instead oriented on the interaction of individual human beings with real personalities?

How do I find a story about the man Reinhard von Lohengramm, or the man Wilhelm Tarkin, or any other individual character in science fiction, without it turning into an obsessive dick-waving match about the relative tech level of the two settings?

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Hoth, you're missing the point. Most SF settings don't wank their social systems, and I'm not really interested in the ones that do. What I'm talking about is the fundamental nature of characters.

To take an easy example, how would Han Solo and Malcolm Reynolds interact? Not as guys operating arbitrary pieces of futuristic bling, but as men? They're similar in some ways: smugglers with a hidden heart of gold. They're different in others: Han is (during the movie era) kind of a loner except for his trusted pal Chewie, whereas Mal is a leader by instinct and is practically inseparable from his crew.

I could imagine interesting stories about those two men interacting, if we could only abstract out the hardware differences between their respective settings.

And yes, those hardware differences are massive- on the one hand you have galaxy-hopping tramp freighters and handguns that blow buildings apart, on the other hand you have sublight tramp freighters and handguns that are basically bastardized Wild West revolvers. I am not contesting that.

But at heart I don't give a shit about how the Millenium Falcon generates ten orders of magnitude more electricity than Firefly or whatever. Yes, it does, fine, fine, OK, I'm not arguing with the math, we get it already. Those arguments began and ended years ago, before I even realized they were happening. I don't have any stake or emotional investment in them.

So for me, the question is: now what? Can we get on with our lives? Can we actually have fun? Or do all crossover concepts bog down into endless comparisons of how much electricity the two sides generate, or how powerful their computer support is, or whatever? How do I go about recovering the sense of fun that I could get from a good crossover that didn't bother itself so much in the technical details, but was instead oriented on the interaction of individual human beings with real personalities?

How do I find a story about the man Reinhard von Lohengramm, or the man Wilhelm Tarkin, or any other individual character in science fiction, without it turning into an obsessive dick-waving match about the relative tech level of the two settings?

As a fan of crossovers, I understand completely. What always drew me to them was wondering how different characters, polities, ideologies and philosophies would interact. The reason these debates tend to boil down to the ability of civilizations to apply destructive power is that such is usually the basis of such debates. A great many start out as 'such-and-such vs hoohaa, who would win!?' If you've got powers like the Galactic Empire (various) that are taken to be willing and able to engage in violent expansion, then expose them to other civilizations (whether via 'Plot Wormhole' or some other means), then logically the result will be war, or at least the very high possibility of it. The capacity of one civilization to defeat another in combat is very important, because it governs to a considerable extent how those two civilizations will interact with one-another. If the SW Empire can crush the LOGH Empire as easily as is made out, then there's a good chance the SW Empire would go for it, for much the same reasons described by Darth Wong in the SW vs ST context.

This has been a problem for me as a fanfiction writer, since it tends to limit one's options. For example, I've often toyed with the idea of a Warhammer 40000xCode Geass crossover, but because the world of Code Geass has little or no hope of resisting the violent attentions of the Imperium of Man, half the story goes without saying. This same issue applies to a great many crossovers (including Star Wars vs Star Trek). If the Imperium spots the world of Code Geass and decides to incorporate it into the Imperium, then there's very little that Lelouch or Suzaku or Charles can do about it. The question becomes whether to fight or not, opening up different storytelling possibilities.

[Darth Hoth]

Hoth, you're missing the point. Most SF settings don't wank their social systems, and I'm not really interested in the ones that do. What I'm talking about is the fundamental nature of characters.

I am not really contesting that, as I think the second part of my post would have showed. I just objected to the implication that societies are any less easy to wank or "make invincible" in writing than technology. Especially with everything we have been hearing about "super-intelligence" and the like since the "transhumanism" and "singularity" stuff entered quasi-mainstream written sci-fi. Partially a conditioned knee-jerk response, I suppose.

As for the rest, certainly. I understand the point, and have felt the same at times. Vs debates and crossover/fanfiction are not the same thing, although they touch on very closely related subjects, and one can ruin the other if brought too close together. (Giving birth to the infamous "curbstomp-fics".) Although I personally like the vs debate aspect of sci-fi, obviously; otherwise, I would not have registered here to begin with, since that was what drew me in.

One way I sometimes resolve the problem, when simple character interaction is the game, is simply transplant a character (or group of them) from one setting to another - tweak the details a bit and pretend they were always there. In the Firefly example, just give the Serenity crowd a hyperdrive (and so on), exchange the Alliance for the Empire wherever they touch on the backstory, and say they were always a crew in the Tion Hegemony (or whatever), where they can meet up with Han Solo the smuggler. In another case, where I actually did some work on a story (rather bad, and long since lost to an old hard drive), I put some fantasy series characters into the Tales of the Jedi-era Old Republic. Although this will not always work, it can be fun when it does. Or so I think, at any rate.

[Simon_Jester]

Oh I know. It just gets... frustrating, sometimes. I would honestly have more fun with the idea of a LoGH Empire pitting its vast numbers against a moderately technologically superior SW Empire than I would with the "as is" empires fighting and ending in a crushing victory for Star Wars purely on account of George Lucas deciding to dream bigger than the creators of Legend of Galactic Heroes.

It's not quantification I'm tired of; it's versus debates that begin and end with the quantification and don't seem to explore the social or characterization aspects.

Incidentally, "Crew of Firefly in Star Wars" is an appealing enough idea that some friends on another forum tried to make a SW d20 RPG campaign out of it, playing by post. I played... Simon.

Sadly, that didn't get very far before the group drifted apart.

[Stark]

Pitting LoGH against anything with greater agility is stupid, because their entire form of combat is defined by their inability to quickly flank. B5 would rape LoGH, and thats got nothing to do with yields.

[Tornado Ninja Fan]

But it would be an interesting fight to watch if the writer tones down B5's greater agility so that the LoGH forces have a chance to win.

Of course writers should do that in moderation. Character interaction and alternative universes are great, but if you carry it too far you will get High School AUs.

[Simon_Jester]

TNJ, that's about what I'm getting at. What's interesting is watching people dealing with a problem that is sufficiently outside their normal context that they have to adapt or die, but not so crushingly superior to them that they're going to die whether they adapt or not. "Fuck, we're fighting an opponent more mobile than us, how do we deal with this," not "They're so much more mobile than us that anything we do is wrong and they will exploit it and we cannot possibly oppose them meaningfully."

Or "Fuck, we're fighting an opponent that has us outnumbered" or some such, not "they outnumber us a million to one and we've just been fighting a diversionary force that itself outnumbers us ten to one while they burned our homeworld with the other 999,990 fleets."

At a certain point dramatic tension goes screaming out the window.

[takemeout_totheblack]

I dunno, their beam weapons seem to have some sort of parity in power, and LotGH has YONKS greater range. Do even the Mimbari have 20 lightsecond beam ranges?, No? Huh, funny that. That in mind, B5s superior agility begins to equalize the event to where it actually becomes interesting. Also numbers are a factor, but whatever.

Would the Shadows see Reinhard's ambition to conquer the universe as something that could factor into their greater plan? If so, would they nurture his faction, or destroy it?

[Simon_Jester]

I dunno, their beam weapons seem to have some sort of parity in power, and LotGH has YONKS greater range. Do even the Mimbari have 20 lightsecond beam ranges?, No? Huh, funny that. That in mind, B5s superior agility begins to equalize the event to where it actually becomes interesting. Also numbers are a factor, but whatever.

Honestly I'm surprised that LoGH ships range that far (it's not a setting I know tons about). But taking that in mind...

You know, at those ranges you can dodge light speed weapons, by going to random evasion patterns if nothing else. That might help to explain why they miss so much; it's too difficult to predict where the enemy is going to be in twenty seconds, so a lot of those razor-thin lines of blue light just go crashing past their target harmlessly. In which case the ships are evading, but their evasion patterns are centered about predetermined points in a larger formation.

No, I don't know if that's supported by the visuals, but it has appeal to my way of thinking...

[Gunhead]

There is evidence to suggest LoGH ships can detect incoming beams to some extent. They also use ECM extensively which does affect their ability to hit targets long ranges. Then again ECM might be needed to negate their ability to detect beams before they hit. They also have decoys that show up as ships to their sensors which I presume could be used to produce false targets. Same decoys are employed against enemy missile swarms.

-Gunhead

[Vympel]

They definitely can. Yang vs the 11th Fleet is just one example - they detect and fire on the 11th Fleet at 6.4 light seconds, of course the incoming fire is picked up before it hits. After all, the beams clearly fire at c and so they'd take about 6.4 seconds to reach them, right?

But yeah, there are other times when they detect a hit incoming before it happens.

B5 would rape LoGH, and thats got nothing to do with yields.

What, in terms of your usual space battle? Why? Leaving aside that the average single LOGH fleet is probably bigger than every single fleet of the major powers combined, I'm not sure there's any evidence that the average GE or FPA warship takes much longer to turn than a B5 ship.