ST v SW

[Simon_Jester]

No matter how scaling occurs, it's still apples and oranges. The very act of setting up a scale-o-rama scenario introduces a fudge factor that spoils the resolution of the conclusions; the fact that one side has to be bent so far out of its' own proper shape to make it an even comparison also makes it an inaccurate one, little more than an excuse for an argument.

Which is a shame, because I can see what (I hope) the OP and some of the subsequent posts are trying to get at, their respective grasp of the operational art, their cohesion and tactical dexterity, the human, cultural and command factors, just consider them as two separate groups of people.

YES. This is it exactly; the idea of imposing a "pull them out into the hands of a higher power" solution to prevent one side from using its superior toys to knock the other over the head is excellent, and probably better than what I'd been playing with about scaling.

LaCroix, did you not get the entire point of this thread?

The point is to deliberately scale down Imperial capabilities so that a meaningful comparison of strengths and weaknesses becomes possible. So that the dispute doesn't boil down to "LOL gigatons star destroyers generate more electricity and win." "LOL gigatons" is fucking boring and we've all seen it before. Those debates were settled years ago.

And yet there's still this residual tendency to say "advantage to the Empire" in every capacity, in every respect. I understand that, but it defeats the purpose of trying to scale appropriately.

...As far as I see, Baffalo's point in this thing is to take everything away from the Wars side, until Trek wins. This had nothing to do with the original thread...

So, if the point of the thread wasn't "let's put them on equal standings and compare their tactics" but "let's scale the empire down until the federation can rape them", then I in fact did miss the point of this entire thread.

It's not Baffalo's thread; objections to his particular scenario aren't the same as what would go into a discussion of the original topic- which ECR has done a good job of outlining: it's about the Empire and the Federation as two groups of human beings and as comparative sociopolitics, not about the toys.

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Re: Norade:

I do not want to get sucked into a swamp of one-line back and forth refutations with you. It would be an utter waste of both our times, would serve no purpose- not even the purpose of debate, because we're not actually arguing over any real proposition that can be supported or refuted. Your target of attack is the premise of the entire discussion, for reasons I must admit are unclear to me- I can see why you don't want to participate, but I can't for the life of me understand why you want to actively come in and kick the thing to pieces.

So I am going to make some general comments, regarding not only the specific lines quoted, but also other things you say elsewhere that fall under the same broad headings. Because, I repeat, I do not want, and do not think you should want, to waste hours in line by line bickering.

You'll also of course note the fact that such a fluke shot was only possible due to the ship being deep in a gravity well and having been pounded by the entire rebel fleet. Even after such a beating had it not been for the engine misfire carrying it in a poor direction and there being a gravity well, the ship would have likely recovered and continued to stand against the rebel fleet. This is in stark contrast to Trek where we see consoles exploding and systems dropping off-line from as little as a single attack that doesn't even drop the shields. Of course with the way you're deep throating Trek cock to try to make even a more balanced scenario favor them it's no surprise that you'd ignore the facts in favor of presenting a simplistic view of things.

...Interesting.

What facts? What realities? Again, I think you are willfully ignoring the entire point of the discussion from the perspective of the more mature members of the audience: that there is a conversation to be had about the contest between the brutal militaristic autocracy of the Empire (with its vices) and the more open, far less warlike, culture of the Federation (with its vices).

As ECR points out, it would be worth talking about the cultures, the personalities, the human beings, not just endless bickering and squabbling over bits of hardware and power consumption figures and exploding bridge console this and "Star Wars ships are tough and have redundant systems!" that.

You seem to be putting a lot of effort into keeping the debate on that plane, though. You would rather be talking about the things than about the people. I understand that you, personally, do not wish to participate in a discussion of cultures or philosophies or command presence or military strategy or diplomacy. Perhaps you find all these things dull and uninteresting compared to pointing and sniggering at exploding bridge consoles.

But why are you taking it upon yourself to suppress all other attempts to discuss the question, by people who have nothing to do with you, in a place where you are free to totally ignore what they are saying?

We have no choice, even scaled back to have the Empire unable to do the things that caused them to fight war the way they are used to defeats the point of even having them in this scenario. Their doctrine on both offense and defense relies on them being able to BDZ planets, shift from one end of their territory to the other in a matter of a day or two, be able to mass large fleets and ground armies, and to build planet destroying super weapons. Any attempt to take that away from them results in us getting an army that is no forced to fight in a way they aren't used without the tools they have always used to win battles, how can we even start to compare?

Imperial doctrine would work quite well with nuclear-equivalent firepower on the ships: their star destroyer parks in orbit and starts lobbing tens or hundreds of megatons per second at the planet below. That is enough to ruin a continental civilization in a matter of minutes or hours if it's targeted intelligently; granted it doesn't achieve the level of "leave no stone standing atop another" that the (EU-only) Base Delta Zero does, but for deterrent purposes does it really matter? Does it actually make a difference whether the Empire kills 100% of your population as punishment for defiance, or 'only' kills 80% and leaves the other 20% to wander the landscape homeless and half-dead from radiation poisoning?

Is it really a different culture because of that?

Ditto for ship speeds. Imagine if someone who's watched the movies is told it takes battlefleets two weeks to fly across the full extent of the Empire. How much does this really change? Is it really that inconceivable? It may not be true of the Empire as portrayed in the movies plus fifty pounds of EU novels plus God knows how many sourcebooks and other ancillary material. But it would not change the essential character of the beings involved in the storyline of Star Wars if travel took them longer. The Empire would still be a ferocious military despotism prone to grandiose projects and rule by intimidation, even if it took longer for the Imperial fleet to cross its domains.

And so on.

How much of the basic nature of the Empire really hinges on our obsessively detailed calculations of turbolaser firepower and hyperdrive speed and whatnot? It seems to me that in most cases where that's a factor, it's one that we've filled in ourselves: we first locate an example that supports it taking a day to cross the galaxy, then posit Imperial military doctrine and methods of rule based on that inference about their capabilities.

Whereas most of the broad-level impressions that the artists actually put any effort into, the ones they care about their audience walking away with, are of something rather different: "The Empire is huge, it has big military garrisons, it can blow you up from orbit, its legions of stormtroopers exist to crush rebellion, blah blah blah." None of that hinges critically on whether turbolaser power output is measured in teratons, gigatons, or megatons; none of that hinges critically on whether it takes one hour, one day, or one week to cross the Empire.

What I really want to see is a comparison of the societies, the attitudes towards warfare, the way the combatants would think about each other and the way they'd interact with neutral third parties. Things like that, which make plot rather than special effects when translated into story terms.

I've read the main page like everyone else; if I want to hear another round of "haha heavy industry" and "200 gigaton turbolasers, bitches!" I will just read it the main page again. It is quite well written and well organized, and contains all the arguments of that type that I will ever need to hear for the rest of my life.

Indeed, I have already heard as many of those arguments as I will ever need. So I find this idea of what amounts to a crossover between Star Trek and deliberately scaled down alt-hist Star Wars interesting, and don't want to see it drowned in "LOL gigatons."

So you're asking for something that we're given painfully little information on in either series' cannon.

...what?

I'm asking for personalities, for command structure, for social attitudes toward conflict and diplomacy, for the motives and fears that drive people into armed conflict in the first place, for the relative degree of ability to deal with strategic distractions and the fear of the unknown. Things like that.

There is a ton of information on that in both series' canon... because that's what the shows are about. They are not about whether turbolaser power output is measured in megatons, gigatons, or teratons. They are about people; this is why they are popular enough that significant numbers of people keep watching them.

The difference is that such a debate is not well served by having memorized a bunch of statistics- and is better served by having a sense of historical perspective and human behavior. I don't think that's unreasonable; that strikes me as a far more interesting discussion than another round of "LOL gigatons."

Would the essential nature of the Empire be changed if ISDs were built to roughly the same physical and energy-throwing scales as Federation starships? I doubt it; for practical purposes, in terms of plotting, it makes very little difference whether an ISD is 500 or 1500 meters long. It's still a powerful symbol of Imperial oppression that can blow apart your town from orbit or chase the Millenium Falcon while smashing down its deflector shields with light turbolaser fire.

Yes, it would be. Without the threat of a BDZ we'd likely see an Empire where worlds never bothered to purchase and maintain planetary shields or large ground-to-space defenses capable of disabling a large warship in a single shot. If suddenly the worst threat a world can face are torpedoes lobbed from orbit we would instead expect to see large scale ABM systems defending key worlds. This means that the DS, designed for cracking planetary defenses wouldn't need to be built.

Oh, I don't know. For one, you grossly underestimate the amount of threat something capable of lobbing tens or hundreds of megatons of energy weapon fire per second would pose to inhabited areas. That's plenty of motivation to invent shields capable of deflecting such bombardments, and planetary defense guns capable of shooting back against such bombardments.

It really, really is, and if you don't believe me consider how well "mutually assured destruction" works on Earth between military powers with a few gigatons of (relatively easily intercepted) nukes pointed at each other- let alone arsenals of laser beams that could drop hundreds or thousands of gigatons during a sustained bombardment.

At which point, yes, you get escalation- and the idea of the Giant Space Station with its (technobabble rather than brute energy transfer) planet-exploding weapon becomes appealing to the militarists. Only now the threat it's devised to combat is the idea that anyone might survive an Imperial bombardment, rather than the idea of planetary shields that can soak up dozens of dinosaur-killer events without even flinching.

The huge numbers we throw around for Star Wars performance are, more often than not, the product of mutual escalation, not "necessity," to achieve the kind of plot described. From one scene we infer that X's laser cannons must output enough energy to vaporize an asteroid this big, and therefore Y's shields must be able to resist an equivalent amount of firepower, and so on and so on.

And yet the story would work very nearly as well with the numbers shrunk down by orders of magnitude, and the on-screen visuals had been scaled back to reflect this: smaller amounts of energy being thrown around in the special effects would not really change the dialogue, the personalities, or anything else.

And yes, at this point we are no longer doing a versus comparison based on on-screen visuals. So what? That's an argument that's been fought and won years ago. It's decided; yes the on-screen visuals from ST and SW make it very clear which one throws bigger explosions. That's settled. No one here has anything material to add to the Turbolaser Commentaries.

Now, can we try something interesting that's not such a total foregone conclusion, as a purely hypothetical discussion without getting shouted down by "LOL gigatons" for a change?

Even without a massive speed and firepower difference between combatants Trek has still shown itself to be so utterly blind to the idea of an effective space force that they have consoles that literally explode when the ship takes a hit at a point nearly as far away from the bridge as can be placed. We also see that their designs waste so much space that BoP's which are about a third the Enterprises size can be a one-on-one threat to it. We see ground forces equipped with unergonomic weapons, we see entire plots made possible by the fact that the crews of these starships often forget what their own vessel is capable of doing (ie every time the Enterprise is boarded and they don't use the knock out gas force field increase gravity method of holding the foe at bay). Hell you can't even argue that the captains of the ships we spend time with are any better as 1/5th of the captains we spend any time with is a batshit insane idiot barely capable of commanding toy soldiers let alone a starship.

This is a more significant objection- though I wonder how often we've seen plots in the Star Wars EU that could be circumvented by clever application of some other item from the EU; it's an occupational hazard when you have a lot of content in your setting.

But yes, this is an example of a far more sustainable objection, one that actually fits in well with the discussion of what happens to the two sides when they can't dominate the situation by creative use of toys: that the Federation is persistently unwarlike in the design of ships and the mindset of crews.

[Connor MacLeod]

Connor: You're missing a couple of critical points. First off, the mini-Empire simply can't industrialize to that degree. Yes, they will have a higher initial industrial capacity, but they are unlikely to be able to expand it too much.

Based on what, exactly?

They don't trust aliens, so any alien-controlled planets are not going to be industrialized to any great degree; they aren't going to build lots of industrial capacity on planets that are hotbeds of dissent, like Alderaan; and any heavily-industrialized planet is going to need a lot of resources going into it (it does no good to have lots of industrial capacity if you don't have the resources to fully use it).

See this just introduces a new problem. As I recall there are some millions of races encompassing the Republic and the Empire, in addition to allt he human/near human spinoff races. Are we just going to cast off or scale them down? If so then throwing the alien components out and incorporating only hte major human worlds (say the core, where the Empire is strongest) is probably the answer to go. This is still going to require massive pruning in any event.

Moreover, what does it matter if they industrialize alien worlds? They don't even need to do that. They're perfectly capable of building infrastructure and shipbuilding facilities in space and away from planets, nevermind general industrial shit. World Devastators, mobile shipyards, the fact the Death Star wasn't built in a shipyard, etc.

On reflection, I'm starting to question just how thoroughly you thought this out.

Second, even though the mini-Empire would not lose the ability to produce Death Stars and Super Star Destroyers, such powerful vessels (especially the Death Star) would represent a far greater proportion of its industrial capacity than normal. I have no idea how much, but the Death Star's diameter is equal to 100 ISDs end-to-end. And remember that the Death Star is a sphere, meaning that thousands and thousands of ISDs could fit inside its volume. Just the equatorial slice has an area of more than 20,000 kilometers. If you fit each ISD facing forwards (I am assuming a rectangle, 1.6km x .8km, for an area of 1.28 km), you could fit somewhere around 15,000 ISDs in it - and that's just one slice.

See, this only reinforces my idea you aren't thinking this thorough. The DS1 is 120-160 km in daimeter (Depending on source) which is equivalent to roughly many millions of STar Destroyers (assuming similar construction materials are used, and ignoring fuel mass, since the DS is going to have an insane amount of fuel compared to regular starships.) The DS2 is orders of magnitude bigger in terms of mass/volume (depending on diameter used), which only makes it even worse. The mass/energy required to build and power such constructs has IMMENSE implications for industrial and military ability independent of the territorial sizes.

This isn't even factoring in insane shit like the abilities for single shipping fleets (eg only a part of their overal transport capacity) to transport terrestrial oceansthat are at least as massive as Earth's (1e18 tons to be precise.) When you couple this with their automation ability the implications are staggering.

So I think the Death Star is out for the simple fact that it would take too much of the mini-Empire's industrial capacity (they could probably build a smaller one, but if it gets too small, what's the point?). The Super Star Destroyers would be in, but they would probably take a long time to build (since they are something like five times the size of the Imperial Star Destroyer). For that matter, with the reduced industrial capacity of the mini-Empire, it wouldn't be easy to replace lost ISDs either.

Yet again, I question whether you've given any thought to the Empire's established capabilities. I'm not talkign about what they have done, I am talking abou twhat they are capable of. Motivation and potentail are two entirely different things.

Moreover, if they can build the Death STars, they still have some measure of logistical ability to acquire and transport that amount of mateiral in a reasonable timeframe, which has implications for the logistics as well. Of course it's just as reasonable to point out they don't HAVE to use that in a conventional manner. If the Federation is deemed enough of a threat, they'd probably use it more in a "ICBM" like effect - stick a hyperdrive on a hull crammed full of explosive, and launch them at the Federation (or whoever they're fighting.) In fact, as I pointed out, being smaller than the Federationmakes such an outcome MORE likely.

[Connor MacLeod]

This discussion is not "minimalist Star Wars versus Star Trek;" even on those terms we all know who wins and it's gotten boring.

This is "deliberately scaled down Star Wars," something that preserves the basic cultural template, philosophies, and attitudes of the Empire without being so incomprehensibly old and vast that it rolls over its opposition with trivial ease using infinitely superior numbers and technology.

Except I question whether it's just a matter of "scaling down territory" and then everything else scales down. Like I already pointed out, how about the millions of cultures and races apparently under the Empire? The implications of the Death Stars and SSD's still remains too, since that can essentailly remain true independent of territorial size. I'm also not really convinced that culturally things will remain the same, even if you throw them into some dwarf cluster (It's not a bad idea, I just don't think it's going to scale simply or predictably.)

Hell, I've tried doing sw vs 40K or sw vs Renegade Legion, or 40K vs RL or alot of other vs. the more I look at it beyond simplistic "comic book" style tatics (EG DS mass worth droid controlled warship fleets created right off the bat and thrown en-masse at the Federation to grind it under heel.) thge more problems I find.

I'm actually starting to think it would be better to just say "fuck the Empire" (at least Palpy's empire) and go with one of the Remnant empires or fringe empires, like Daala's, Zsinjs', Thrawn, or Pellaeon's splinter Empire. That would fit the requirements without nearly as much downsizing speculation. Or the Empire of the Hand.

Hell you can even rationalize the downgrades of technology like power generaiton or firepower through those methods if you're inventive enough and still maintain internal consistency. Or hyperdrive, or whatever. Let's say they're cut off from tibanna, hypermatter, and perhaps lose extensive holonet access. Maybe the factions have to use shorter ranged hyperdrives, or something. There's no reason to assume SW operates at the limits fo tehir technological capabilities all the time.

[Connor MacLeod]

Of course they're not the worlds most efficient designs themselves, but we can see in Star Trek that you can get a ship with roughly the same ability to fight as the Enterprise out of BoP's that are about a third the size. Given that the Klingons usually lose we can likely say that as a warship the Enterprise could have the same fighting strength if it were only half to one third the same size showing that even in universe the Federations designs are hardly the best at what they do.

First off, what evidence are you basing this conclusion off of? Second, I'm not sure you're accounting for all facts (like the one that a BoP is designed to move like a fighter and does not appear to have any rear firing capability. Nevermind its use of pulse weapons may or may not impose a range limitation. And this doesn't address things like FTL capability, operational/combat endurance, maintenace issues, etc.) Thirdly, despite being called a "warship" (not as if warship is a singular term exactly), the GCs was designed with alot of comrpomises in mind. Yes, that makes it suck as a warship, but it was quite evident that in their highly misguided idealism that the TNG era federation felt they could safely move away rom a militaristic mindset. As it turns out, they were quite wrong (which lead to shit like the defiant.)

Looking at Star Wars we see that hanger space takes up relatively little volume on the ship as does the ability to send a ground force into combat.

Again based on what? I'm looking at the ICSes (both the original ones I had and the complete version) and I'm noting that it looks like the ISD takes a HUGE portion of it (at least 1/3 to perhaps 1/2) its internal volume in non-warship functions (materials storage takes up a hefty chunk as well.) And if we go with the RPG materials, there is the "6 year consumables" bit to consider - when you can cross the galaxy in days, and have hundreds or thousands of LYs of range on two different forms of communication (nevermind having other FLT capable craft), why do you need so much onboard capacity?

The Venator is not much better off either, and that's only based on what I can see in the ICS, the underside has huge ramps and other stuff for loading/offloading troops.

Unlike the federation we also see that Star Wars has the knowledge and ability to correct these flaws in things such as the Tector-class vessel which is otherwise very similar to a normal ISD. Not to mention the other classes of ship that the Empire has at its disposal including dedicated transports, anti-fighter platforms, dedicated carriers, and the like. This stands in stark contrast to the one size fits all method we see Trek display.

And you know the Federation "didn't correct" such flaws how? We know nothing about the Tector's design other than "it doesn't have a hangar" that hardly means that it's an effective combat design. If for no other reason it probably still has windows and that fuckoff huge command tower like all other ISD designs have.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm broadly on board with this, Connor, since (as said before) my main goal is to get a 'decontextualized' comparison of the two societies.

The biggest, most obvious example: we know the Empire suffers more heavily from faction feuds and the problems of personality-cult leadership; ECR had a point when he identified it as being seventeenth-century in its basic form. On the flip side, they're also more 'warlike' than the Federation, in ways that would carry over quite well even given technological parity.

Things like that.

So I don't mind something like what you describe, Connor; I'm just looking for any way to render the technological gap irrelevant so we can talk about something more interesting than rehashing the same old turbolaser arguments.

[Batman]

It's not necessarily a different culture, but if you take away their strategic mobility it'll be a different military. The Imperial Navy is bound to be designed around the fact that they can redeploy pretty much anywhere in their domain in a matter of days at worst. You can't do that with Trek level stardrive speeds, not unless you have the Minipire be considerably smaller than the UFP. If anything, they'd be a lot more heavily militarized, because they can't count on being able to move in reinforcements on pretty much a moment's notice, and would thus need a lot more local forces to provide the presence they could otherwise have moved in quickly.
You either still give them considerably faster stardrive than the UFP, which turns this into another curbstomp, just nowhere as bad as usual, have their territory be ridiculously small, or have them have a military completely different from the one we were shown, and both of those mean it's no longer the Empire.

[Connor MacLeod]

It's not necessarily a different culture, but if you take away their strategic mobility it'll be a different military. The Imperial Navy is bound to be designed around the fact that they can redeploy pretty much anywhere in their domain in a matter of days at worst. You can't do that with Trek level stardrive speeds, not unless you have the Minipire be considerably smaller than the UFP. If anything, they'd be a lot more heavily militarized, because they can't count on being able to move in reinforcements on pretty much a moment's notice, and would thus need a lot more local forces to provide the presence they could otherwise have moved in quickly.

You either still give them considerably faster stardrive than the UFP, which turns this into another curbstomp, just nowhere as bad as usual, have their territory be ridiculously small, or have them have a military completely different from the one we were shown, and both of those mean it's no longer the Empire.

That depends on if the distances covered scaled down approximately as well (tens of thousands of LY.) and what sort of enviroment/territory they encompass - after all, it's not as if hyperdrive speeds are consistent even within the SW universe - it can go from tens of thousands of c to hundreds of millions of c. IT's also quite possible that if you reduce their output their speed goes down as well,

There would be some advatnages to those changes as well. Speed might go down but its quite likely endurance would go up (as it is now you probably can't count on hyperdrive lasting more than a few hours without refuelling.) and even if transit times lengthen on average that would more than likely justify an increase in milistary size - after all.

In terms of their militant approach and their tactics used to rapid response times, that wouldn't change much. I'm actually more worried about the economic side, since that's both harder to predict and a generally more pervasive influence.

[Norade]

Re: Norade:

I do not want to get sucked into a swamp of one-line back and forth refutations with you. It would be an utter waste of both our times, would serve no purpose- not even the purpose of debate, because we're not actually arguing over any real proposition that can be supported or refuted. Your target of attack is the premise of the entire discussion, for reasons I must admit are unclear to me- I can see why you don't want to participate, but I can't for the life of me understand why you want to actively come in and kick the thing to pieces.

So I am going to make some general comments, regarding not only the specific lines quoted, but also other things you say elsewhere that fall under the same broad headings. Because, I repeat, I do not want, and do not think you should want, to waste hours in line by line bickering.

I fully understand your desire not to get into line by line arguments and admit that I was over-eager to engage you, so I'll keep my replies short and on point.

You'll also of course note the fact that such a fluke shot was only possible due to the ship being deep in a gravity well and having been pounded by the entire rebel fleet. Even after such a beating had it not been for the engine misfire carrying it in a poor direction and there being a gravity well, the ship would have likely recovered and continued to stand against the rebel fleet. This is in stark contrast to Trek where we see consoles exploding and systems dropping off-line from as little as a single attack that doesn't even drop the shields. Of course with the way you're deep throating Trek cock to try to make even a more balanced scenario favor them it's no surprise that you'd ignore the facts in favor of presenting a simplistic view of things.

...Interesting.

What facts? What realities? Again, I think you are willfully ignoring the entire point of the discussion from the perspective of the more mature members of the audience: that there is a conversation to be had about the contest between the brutal militaristic autocracy of the Empire (with its vices) and the more open, far less warlike, culture of the Federation (with its vices).

As ECR points out, it would be worth talking about the cultures, the personalities, the human beings, not just endless bickering and squabbling over bits of hardware and power consumption figures and exploding bridge console this and "Star Wars ships are tough and have redundant systems!" that.

You seem to be putting a lot of effort into keeping the debate on that plane, though. You would rather be talking about the things than about the people. I understand that you, personally, do not wish to participate in a discussion of cultures or philosophies or command presence or military strategy or diplomacy. Perhaps you find all these things dull and uninteresting compared to pointing and sniggering at exploding bridge consoles.

But why are you taking it upon yourself to suppress all other attempts to discuss the question, by people who have nothing to do with you, in a place where you are free to totally ignore what they are saying?

I'm mainly looking to point out that once you start changing the way the Empire operates by lowering the number of systems they control, changing the speed of ships, and changing firepower and thus military doctrine you won't particularly be comparing the Empire from the movies and EU. If we wanted to know about how they would deal with each other we really don't need such a contrived scenario at all, we could have random deus-ex disable all the weapons for both sides when a ship comes within weapons range of a ship not of its own universe. I would be fine with some utterly nonsense way of nerfing the Empire, but the changes that are being made in the scenarios outlined here all but ensure that one of the two forces will not actually be a force from Star Wars as we knwo it.

We have no choice, even scaled back to have the Empire unable to do the things that caused them to fight war the way they are used to defeats the point of even having them in this scenario. Their doctrine on both offense and defense relies on them being able to BDZ planets, shift from one end of their territory to the other in a matter of a day or two, be able to mass large fleets and ground armies, and to build planet destroying super weapons. Any attempt to take that away from them results in us getting an army that is no forced to fight in a way they aren't used without the tools they have always used to win battles, how can we even start to compare?

Imperial doctrine would work quite well with nuclear-equivalent firepower on the ships: their star destroyer parks in orbit and starts lobbing tens or hundreds of megatons per second at the planet below. That is enough to ruin a continental civilization in a matter of minutes or hours if it's targeted intelligently; granted it doesn't achieve the level of "leave no stone standing atop another" that the (EU-only) Base Delta Zero does, but for deterrent purposes does it really matter? Does it actually make a difference whether the Empire kills 100% of your population as punishment for defiance, or 'only' kills 80% and leaves the other 20% to wander the landscape homeless and half-dead from radiation poisoning?

Is it really a different culture because of that?

Ditto for ship speeds. Imagine if someone who's watched the movies is told it takes battlefleets two weeks to fly across the full extent of the Empire. How much does this really change? Is it really that inconceivable? It may not be true of the Empire as portrayed in the movies plus fifty pounds of EU novels plus God knows how many sourcebooks and other ancillary material. But it would not change the essential character of the beings involved in the storyline of Star Wars if travel took them longer. The Empire would still be a ferocious military despotism prone to grandiose projects and rule by intimidation, even if it took longer for the Imperial fleet to cross its domains.

And so on.

How much of the basic nature of the Empire really hinges on our obsessively detailed calculations of turbolaser firepower and hyperdrive speed and whatnot? It seems to me that in most cases where that's a factor, it's one that we've filled in ourselves: we first locate an example that supports it taking a day to cross the galaxy, then posit Imperial military doctrine and methods of rule based on that inference about their capabilities.

Whereas most of the broad-level impressions that the artists actually put any effort into, the ones they care about their audience walking away with, are of something rather different: "The Empire is huge, it has big military garrisons, it can blow you up from orbit, its legions of stormtroopers exist to crush rebellion, blah blah blah." None of that hinges critically on whether turbolaser power output is measured in teratons, gigatons, or megatons; none of that hinges critically on whether it takes one hour, one day, or one week to cross the Empire.

While a change in firepower may seem like a trivial thing it will certainly change the way a war is fought. Instead of a weapon dealing damage over hundreds or thousands of kilometers and nailing multiple cities or resource centers with a single shot you now have weapons that cover less than a tenth of that area meaning that we would expect to see shields over single cities, majors mines, or military bases instead of such large and expensive planetary shields. When you will have wide spread destruction out to 800km and third degree burns out to around 3500km you have an incentive to cover multiple targets with larger shields and a reason to ensure that, by shielding or weaponry, shots never strike at all. On a map of the US if you fired a 200GT laser at the White House all of Florida, parts of Nebraska, and the vast majority of Quebec and Ontario would be burnt to cinders. If you landed a Trek torpedo scaled blast you'll still effect an appallingly large area by modern standards, but it's going to be much easier to justify just defending key regions and riding out the storm that way especially considering that environmental damage on that scale would be well within their capability to fix in short order.

Changing the travel time will vastly change the way the military fights and is organized. Suddenly you find fleets either spread far more thinly than they are currently or we'll simply see more ship and a more militarized Empire to project the same amount of force. Either of which likely means you'll need a broader class of officers able to organize and handle their own fleets than we see in current cannon. Not to mention that an attack will have far longer to accomplish its goals and while firepower will be far lower so too will shield strength meaning that in relative terms planets relying on static defenses may not be able to hold out long enough before shields fail around key points.

While it can be argued that increasing travel time wouldn't change things on the largest scale, I doubt that this is true. Imagine that while you can get around your city just fine, that it now takes you two weeks at best to reach Europe again. Suddenly the way business is conducted changes as we can no longer have face to face meetings anywhere in the world on short notice, world leaders would again rarely leave their nations boarders weakening things like the UN. Companies would have to be far more wary of outsourcing goods because with shipping times increasing by nearly an order of magnitude you'll need far more or far larger transport ships to move cargo at the same rate we're used to. Hell even things like airlifting a patient to a better hospital become suddenly impossible if we use this change on a scale we're used to.

While you can claim that the artists never gave a shit and that things will ultimately stay the same because of this you can't ignore the fact that all we currently know about the series supports the fact that travel times are short, firepower is high, and that these things effect everyday life for at least some of the people that live in there. Not to mention the fact that I already showed how major scenes in the movies would need to change for reduced speed and firepower.

Oh, I don't know. For one, you grossly underestimate the amount of threat something capable of lobbing tens or hundreds of megatons of energy weapon fire per second would pose to inhabited areas. That's plenty of motivation to invent shields capable of deflecting such bombardments, and planetary defense guns capable of shooting back against such bombardments.

It really, really is, and if you don't believe me consider how well "mutually assured destruction" works on Earth between military powers with a few gigatons of (relatively easily intercepted) nukes pointed at each other- let alone arsenals of laser beams that could drop hundreds or thousands of gigatons during a sustained bombardment.

At which point, yes, you get escalation- and the idea of the Giant Space Station with its (technobabble rather than brute energy transfer) planet-exploding weapon becomes appealing to the militarists. Only now the threat it's devised to combat is the idea that anyone might survive an Imperial bombardment, rather than the idea of planetary shields that can soak up dozens of dinosaur-killer events without even flinching.

The huge numbers we throw around for Star Wars performance are, more often than not, the product of mutual escalation, not "necessity," to achieve the kind of plot described. From one scene we infer that X's laser cannons must output enough energy to vaporize an asteroid this big, and therefore Y's shields must be able to resist an equivalent amount of firepower, and so on and so on.

And yet the story would work very nearly as well with the numbers shrunk down by orders of magnitude, and the on-screen visuals had been scaled back to reflect this: smaller amounts of energy being thrown around in the special effects would not really change the dialogue, the personalities, or anything else.

You'll note that I never said that shields and the like wouldn't be used to reduce the threat and lethality of a ship parked in orbit. I did however posit that defenses may become smaller in scale simply due to the fact that a single blast no longer causes the widespread destruction of nearly six percent of an Earth sized worlds surface per hit. Such wide scale destruction obviously creates a much larger incentive for large defenses than blasts that cover a far smaller area.

Also, MAD would cease to work to the same degree if major population centers and weapons stockpiles could be defending with the level of certainty provided by a shield system. Hell, even ABM raises the question of MAD as a viable defense which is why some nations so strongly oppose it.

While some scenes would almost certainly work the same way and the Empire may still want a weapon that can threaten worlds that have wide scale defenses we would lose some of the things that made the movies memorable and shaped in universe history. For example changing industrial capabilities would mean that a large system like the DS would be far less ideal and changing the size of the DS to fit a new scale loses us the trench run and while it would certainly be possible to change the scene I'd debate how desirable changing a classic franchise would be. While it might seem oxy moronic to say that lowering firepower would change things when the creators certainly didn't care when they shot the scenes it would actually change a ton to be stuck working with only Trek scale weapons and ship building techniques. I've mentioned one scene, but lowering the speed would mean no Luke going to see Yoda because he could no longer take a single seat fighter and go there on his own on the word of a force ghost, the asteroid scene would also be much different if we had to constrain ourselves to far lower limits of firepower.

I cut the last bit because we agree on it and repeating it again would be pointless.

---------------------------------------------------

Of course they're not the worlds most efficient designs themselves, but we can see in Star Trek that you can get a ship with roughly the same ability to fight as the Enterprise out of BoP's that are about a third the size. Given that the Klingons usually lose we can likely say that as a warship the Enterprise could have the same fighting strength if it were only half to one third the same size showing that even in universe the Federations designs are hardly the best at what they do.

First off, what evidence are you basing this conclusion off of? Second, I'm not sure you're accounting for all facts (like the one that a BoP is designed to move like a fighter and does not appear to have any rear firing capability. Nevermind its use of pulse weapons may or may not impose a range limitation. And this doesn't address things like FTL capability, operational/combat endurance, maintenace issues, etc.) Thirdly, despite being called a "warship" (not as if warship is a singular term exactly), the GCs was designed with alot of comrpomises in mind. Yes, that makes it suck as a warship, but it was quite evident that in their highly misguided idealism that the TNG era federation felt they could safely move away rom a militaristic mindset. As it turns out, they were quite wrong (which lead to shit like the defiant.)

Are we going to ignore that a far smaller by length and volume ship manages to inflict damage and cause casualties to the Enterprise D? (Shown in Generations) Looking at the evidence we see that even in universe it is possible to get roughly equal firepower into a far more compact package. While I stated that a BoP was a third the size, that is a gross misrepresentation of the difference in mass of the two ships given that even at an exact one third smaller in all dimensions means that a BoP is using 64 times less volume for a roughly equal level of firepower. While there will obviously be factors other than fire power, on a resource for resource basis one side obviously has a ton-for-ton advantage in a stand up fight as well as having goodies such as a cloaking device meaning that rearwards fire and range are less of an issue.

On the Defiant, that's great, it's also a single newly produced class of warship.

Looking at Star Wars we see that hanger space takes up relatively little volume on the ship as does the ability to send a ground force into combat.

Again based on what? I'm looking at the ICSes (both the original ones I had and the complete version) and I'm noting that it looks like the ISD takes a HUGE portion of it (at least 1/3 to perhaps 1/2) its internal volume in non-warship functions (materials storage takes up a hefty chunk as well.) And if we go with the RPG materials, there is the "6 year consumables" bit to consider - when you can cross the galaxy in days, and have hundreds or thousands of LYs of range on two different forms of communication (nevermind having other FLT capable craft), why do you need so much onboard capacity?

The Venator is not much better off either, and that's only based on what I can see in the ICS, the underside has huge ramps and other stuff for loading/offloading troops.

You're still ignoring the fact that unlike a Galaxy-class at least some of the space that isn't being used for weapons is devoted to fighters and ground forces which each provide it with options for combat that a Federation vessel will lack. You're also ignoring the fact that we know that Trek ships will suffer damage from attacks even with shields up, and that unlike the Federation the Empire's ships largest and most damaging vessels don't rely on a limited number of torpedoes to deal their damage. While exact combat endurance numbers will be near impossible to find that fact that Wars ships stand up better to fire from a ship considered their peer already makes them better than a Trek vessel with equal power output per unit of reactor volume.

Unlike the federation we also see that Star Wars has the knowledge and ability to correct these flaws in things such as the Tector-class vessel which is otherwise very similar to a normal ISD. Not to mention the other classes of ship that the Empire has at its disposal including dedicated transports, anti-fighter platforms, dedicated carriers, and the like. This stands in stark contrast to the one size fits all method we see Trek display.

And you know the Federation "didn't correct" such flaws how? We know nothing about the Tector's design other than "it doesn't have a hangar" that hardly means that it's an effective combat design. If for no other reason it probably still has windows and that fuckoff huge command tower like all other ISD designs have.

While we see the Federation rush in new classes of ship when they realize that the old ones aren't capable enough, the Empire lacks this need. Even if they ISD is a horrid waste of space they still have many other ships that don't meet the multitool standard of the ISD and as shown in research done by Publius these vessels will be the bulk of the Imperial fleet. Trek will still be saddled with a fleet containing mainly older designs and given their demonstrated industrial capabilities they won't be getting vast fleets of proper warships anytime soon.

[Simon_Jester]

It's not necessarily a different culture, but if you take away their strategic mobility it'll be a different military. The Imperial Navy is bound to be designed around the fact that they can redeploy pretty much anywhere in their domain in a matter of days at worst. You can't do that with Trek level stardrive speeds, not unless you have the Minipire be considerably smaller than the UFP. If anything, they'd be a lot more heavily militarized, because they can't count on being able to move in reinforcements on pretty much a moment's notice, and would thus need a lot more local forces to provide the presence they could otherwise have moved in quickly.

You either still give them considerably faster stardrive than the UFP, which turns this into another curbstomp, just nowhere as bad as usual, have their territory be ridiculously small, or have them have a military completely different from the one we were shown, and both of those mean it's no longer the Empire.

A fair point.

What if, as a hypothetical, since I'm not that enthusiastic about downscaling, we also make warp travel faster? Yes, this invalidates the entire premise of Voyager; I can live with that. It makes a number of the more dramatic TOS episodes where they interact with the galactic rim or core more plausible; it also makes the idea of the Federation exploring the Alpha Quadrant somewhat more viable, as opposed to them exploring "this little bubble about ten thousand light years across."

Really, this is secondary in my mind to the goal of achieving some kind of parity so we can compare the societies and command structures, but I think it can be done.

While a change in firepower may seem like a trivial thing it will certainly change the way a war is fought. Instead of a weapon dealing damage over hundreds or thousands of kilometers and nailing multiple cities or resource centers with a single shot you now have weapons that cover less than a tenth of that area meaning that we would expect to see shields over single cities, majors mines, or military bases instead of such large and expensive planetary shields. When you will have wide spread destruction out to 800km and third degree burns out to around 3500km you have an incentive to cover multiple targets with larger shields and a reason to ensure that, by shielding or weaponry, shots never strike at all. On a map of the US if you fired a 200GT laser at the White House all of Florida, parts of Nebraska, and the vast majority of Quebec and Ontario would be burnt to cinders. If you landed a Trek torpedo scaled blast you'll still effect an appallingly large area by modern standards, but it's going to be much easier to justify just defending key regions and riding out the storm that way especially considering that environmental damage on that scale would be well within their capability to fix in short order.

All right.

Now, looking at the high-level context of Star Wars, what would this actually change? Where do we see planetary shields, really? Not in the movies: we see theater shields in Episodes V and VI, not full planetary coverage. Even in the early EU, we see them on Coruscant- capital of an ancient and wealthy society, and one which is almost entirely urbanized such that you can't lob even megaton-range weapons at the place without killing millions of people.

I don't know when the idea of planetary shielding as a routine, casual feature of the EU entered popularity, or if it's something that's more inferred-to-be-true on this site because it explains the Death Star so well. I really do not know. But the 'look and feel' of the Empire would not be dramatically changed in the absence of teraton-absorbing planetary shields and the weapons needed to breach them. The only possible exception is the Death Star, which could easily, easily be explained in technobabble terms without changing the spirit of the Star Wars setting.

Changing the travel time will vastly change the way the military fights and is organized. Suddenly you find fleets either spread far more thinly than they are currently or we'll simply see more ship and a more militarized Empire to project the same amount of force. Either of which likely means you'll need a broader class of officers able to organize and handle their own fleets than we see in current cannon. Not to mention that an attack will have far longer to accomplish its goals and while firepower will be far lower so too will shield strength meaning that in relative terms planets relying on static defenses may not be able to hold out long enough before shields fail around key points.

This is part of the reason for scaling down the physical Empire along with the technology- you can reasonably hit a sweet spot where travel times across the Empire are "a few days." This is quite consistent with what hyperdrive actually gives them- there are some cases of rapid movement over galactic distances in a matter of hours, but there are also plenty of trips that make a lot more sense if they're stretched out to take days.

One obvious example is the flight of the Millenium Falcon to Alderaan in Episode IV: this is the only formal Force training Luke receives before he meets Yoda, the only time he spends in company with Han before their adventures later in the movie, and a large fraction of the time he spends with Obi-Wan before Obi-Wan dies. Thematically, even though the trip was covered by one scene, it would make a lot more sense if they'd gotten a few days to get to know each other. I imagine a lot of people in the theaters wouldn't have batted an eyebrow if they'd said that they had, because it fits.

While you can claim that the artists never gave a shit and that things will ultimately stay the same because of this you can't ignore the fact that all we currently know about the series supports the fact that travel times are short, firepower is high, and that these things effect everyday life for at least some of the people that live in there. Not to mention the fact that I already showed how major scenes in the movies would need to change for reduced speed and firepower.

The effects are, I think, less clearcut than you present them as; see above. Changing speed and firepower will have consequences, but in most cases they're simply not as critical as you make them out to be.

You'll note that I never said that shields and the like wouldn't be used to reduce the threat and lethality of a ship parked in orbit. I did however posit that defenses may become smaller in scale simply due to the fact that a single blast no longer causes the widespread destruction of nearly six percent of an Earth sized worlds surface per hit. Such wide scale destruction obviously creates a much larger incentive for large defenses than blasts that cover a far smaller area.

Also, MAD would cease to work to the same degree if major population centers and weapons stockpiles could be defending with the level of certainty provided by a shield system. Hell, even ABM raises the question of MAD as a viable defense which is why some nations so strongly oppose it.

Yes, but all we really need is for the long-term balance of power to favor the attacker- I can build a shield that protects me from a Star Destroyer's bombardment for a good long while (as at Hoth and Endor), but I cannot build one that protects me indefinitely- they can park in orbit and keep shooting until either the whole continent is a burning wasteland around me, until my shield cracks, or both.

Does it make that big a difference whether the ISD needs five shots or five thousand to achieve this?

We really don't see that much evidence of comprehensive planetary defenses in Star Wars, unless we go fairly far out into the EU. We certainly don't see as much conspicuous evidence of them as one might expect; why didn't Naboo have a planetary shield in Episode I? They are not an impoverished world, and yet the Trade Federation was able to deploy its ground troops in unopposed landings, with not so much as a single defensive ion cannon emplacement or even the lightest planetary shield.

I don't think that planetary shields, or the weapons heavy enough to make them so necessary, are as critical a component of Star Wars as you make them out to be. Nowhere near the level of, say, the Force. Or cheap robotics.

While some scenes would almost certainly work the same way and the Empire may still want a weapon that can threaten worlds that have wide scale defenses we would lose some of the things that made the movies memorable and shaped in universe history. For example changing industrial capabilities would mean that a large system like the DS would be far less ideal and changing the size of the DS to fit a new scale loses us the trench run and while it would certainly be possible to change the scene I'd debate how desirable changing a classic franchise would be.

I'm not sure how much physical distance the trench run covered; given the visuals, the fact that the scene is only about three or four minutes long, and that the speeds the fighters exhibit on and around the surface really aren't that different from WWII fighter planes, you could scale the Death Star down to something quite a bit smaller while still giving them four minutes of time flying in a trench.

While it might seem oxy moronic to say that lowering firepower would change things when the creators certainly didn't care when they shot the scenes it would actually change a ton to be stuck working with only Trek scale weapons and ship building techniques. I've mentioned one scene, but lowering the speed would mean no Luke going to see Yoda because he could no longer take a single seat fighter and go there on his own on the word of a force ghost, the asteroid scene would also be much different if we had to constrain ourselves to far lower limits of firepower.

We'd keep FTL-capable light fighters- this can legitimately be an area where the Empire does have an edge in technical sophistication. FTL-capable shuttlecraft are a feature in Star Trek as well, where their FTL drives are much slower and less capable than those of full-up starships. So I'd keep this as a Star Wars edge: the ability to install full-speed FTL drives on a fighter-sized unit (if possibly short ranged; we don't know how far Dagobah is from Hoth, or whether Luke made some intermediate refueling stops to get there).

Again, this matters less to me than being able to look at the men without obsessing over the capability- instead of worrying about how FTL-capable fighters change the setting, I... well, I've already repeated my opinion on this.

Are we going to ignore that a far smaller by length and volume ship manages to inflict damage and cause casualties to the Enterprise D? (Shown in Generations) Looking at the evidence we see that even in universe it is possible to get roughly equal firepower into a far more compact package.

A World War One destroyer was quite capable of damaging a battleship- even damaging one severely- despite being something like one twentieth the battleship's tonnage. And this with both ships fully optimized for warfare.

The destroyer got away with this by:
-Relying on small target profile and greater speed at the expense of damage resistance
-Shorter combat endurance: relying heavily on a limited supply of ordnance for attacks, rather than a large magazine of gun ammunition
-Shorter operational endurance: having less fuel, inferior crew accomodations, and less systems redundancy

I would not be surprised to learn that a Bird of Prey functions much the same way.

That said, I do expect that, all technical constraints being made equal for both sides, the Empire will tend to build tougher ships better suited for warfare than the Federation. Their social system is not without advantages.

[Norade]

While a change in firepower may seem like a trivial thing it will certainly change the way a war is fought. Instead of a weapon dealing damage over hundreds or thousands of kilometers and nailing multiple cities or resource centers with a single shot you now have weapons that cover less than a tenth of that area meaning that we would expect to see shields over single cities, majors mines, or military bases instead of such large and expensive planetary shields. When you will have wide spread destruction out to 800km and third degree burns out to around 3500km you have an incentive to cover multiple targets with larger shields and a reason to ensure that, by shielding or weaponry, shots never strike at all. On a map of the US if you fired a 200GT laser at the White House all of Florida, parts of Nebraska, and the vast majority of Quebec and Ontario would be burnt to cinders. If you landed a Trek torpedo scaled blast you'll still effect an appallingly large area by modern standards, but it's going to be much easier to justify just defending key regions and riding out the storm that way especially considering that environmental damage on that scale would be well within their capability to fix in short order.

All right.

Now, looking at the high-level context of Star Wars, what would this actually change? Where do we see planetary shields, really? Not in the movies: we see theater shields in Episodes V and VI, not full planetary coverage. Even in the early EU, we see them on Coruscant- capital of an ancient and wealthy society, and one which is almost entirely urbanized such that you can't lob even megaton-range weapons at the place without killing millions of people.

I don't know when the idea of planetary shielding as a routine, casual feature of the EU entered popularity, or if it's something that's more inferred-to-be-true on this site because it explains the Death Star so well. I really do not know. But the 'look and feel' of the Empire would not be dramatically changed in the absence of teraton-absorbing planetary shields and the weapons needed to breach them. The only possible exception is the Death Star, which could easily, easily be explained in technobabble terms without changing the spirit of the Star Wars setting.

We do see what looks to be a planetary shield defending Alderaan from the Death Star though it flickers and fades in the blink of an eye on screen. Proof can be seen here in an image taken from the main site:



As for planetary shields being common place, they are and they aren't. Generally they are said to be rather expensive and difficult to maintain so only worlds with a lot of free cash and a reason to feel they need one tend to have them. Thus a planet like Naboo which was rather backwater with a population of 1.2 billion and likely didn't have one because it trusted in the Republic to keep it safe. Worlds like Coruscant, Nal Hutta, or Alderaan have both the money and desire to fund such defenses and it is worlds such as these that the Death Star and Torpedo Spheres were designed to crack.

Changing the travel time will vastly change the way the military fights and is organized. Suddenly you find fleets either spread far more thinly than they are currently or we'll simply see more ship and a more militarized Empire to project the same amount of force. Either of which likely means you'll need a broader class of officers able to organize and handle their own fleets than we see in current cannon. Not to mention that an attack will have far longer to accomplish its goals and while firepower will be far lower so too will shield strength meaning that in relative terms planets relying on static defenses may not be able to hold out long enough before shields fail around key points.

This is part of the reason for scaling down the physical Empire along with the technology- you can reasonably hit a sweet spot where travel times across the Empire are "a few days." This is quite consistent with what hyperdrive actually gives them- there are some cases of rapid movement over galactic distances in a matter of hours, but there are also plenty of trips that make a lot more sense if they're stretched out to take days.

One obvious example is the flight of the Millenium Falcon to Alderaan in Episode IV: this is the only formal Force training Luke receives before he meets Yoda, the only time he spends in company with Han before their adventures later in the movie, and a large fraction of the time he spends with Obi-Wan before Obi-Wan dies. Thematically, even though the trip was covered by one scene, it would make a lot more sense if they'd gotten a few days to get to know each other. I imagine a lot of people in the theaters wouldn't have batted an eyebrow if they'd said that they had, because it fits.

While a longer travel time might fit for the flight to Alderaan, it makes little sense for the attack on the second Death Star or for Palpatine's rescue of Vader. The EU, which you seem dismissive of has many more examples of things that would make less sense without such short travel times.

While you can claim that the artists never gave a shit and that things will ultimately stay the same because of this you can't ignore the fact that all we currently know about the series supports the fact that travel times are short, firepower is high, and that these things effect everyday life for at least some of the people that live in there. Not to mention the fact that I already showed how major scenes in the movies would need to change for reduced speed and firepower.

The effects are, I think, less clearcut than you present them as; see above. Changing speed and firepower will have consequences, but in most cases they're simply not as critical as you make them out to be.

I think they would have larger changes than you think because even big picture changing something as simple as transit speed will have massive effects on trade and cutting scale and the number of planets for the Empire changes even more. I honestly think we should be boosting Treks per ship abilities and give them a larger fleet to do this instead.

You'll note that I never said that shields and the like wouldn't be used to reduce the threat and lethality of a ship parked in orbit. I did however posit that defenses may become smaller in scale simply due to the fact that a single blast no longer causes the widespread destruction of nearly six percent of an Earth sized worlds surface per hit. Such wide scale destruction obviously creates a much larger incentive for large defenses than blasts that cover a far smaller area.

Also, MAD would cease to work to the same degree if major population centers and weapons stockpiles could be defending with the level of certainty provided by a shield system. Hell, even ABM raises the question of MAD as a viable defense which is why some nations so strongly oppose it.

Yes, but all we really need is for the long-term balance of power to favor the attacker- I can build a shield that protects me from a Star Destroyer's bombardment for a good long while (as at Hoth and Endor), but I cannot build one that protects me indefinitely- they can park in orbit and keep shooting until either the whole continent is a burning wasteland around me, until my shield cracks, or both.

Does it make that big a difference whether the ISD needs five shots or five thousand to achieve this?

We really don't see that much evidence of comprehensive planetary defenses in Star Wars, unless we go fairly far out into the EU. We certainly don't see as much conspicuous evidence of them as one might expect; why didn't Naboo have a planetary shield in Episode I? They are not an impoverished world, and yet the Trade Federation was able to deploy its ground troops in unopposed landings, with not so much as a single defensive ion cannon emplacement or even the lightest planetary shield.

I don't think that planetary shields, or the weapons heavy enough to make them so necessary, are as critical a component of Star Wars as you make them out to be. Nowhere near the level of, say, the Force. Or cheap robotics.

I made a note about planetary shields above. Like it or not they were the stated reason for building the Death Star because torpedo spheres took too long to acquire a firing solution to exploit fluctuations in large shield networks. Without a larger firepower smaller defenses would likely be more popular as they would be all you need to save key areas and unlike with larger weapons it wouldn't only take a single shot that strikes a shield to wipe out a large area. While your defenses could be worn down that is always true even with a planetary shield.

While some scenes would almost certainly work the same way and the Empire may still want a weapon that can threaten worlds that have wide scale defenses we would lose some of the things that made the movies memorable and shaped in universe history. For example changing industrial capabilities would mean that a large system like the DS would be far less ideal and changing the size of the DS to fit a new scale loses us the trench run and while it would certainly be possible to change the scene I'd debate how desirable changing a classic franchise would be.

I'm not sure how much physical distance the trench run covered; given the visuals, the fact that the scene is only about three or four minutes long, and that the speeds the fighters exhibit on and around the surface really aren't that different from WWII fighter planes, you could scale the Death Star down to something quite a bit smaller while still giving them four minutes of time flying in a trench.

I was more worried about the fact that a reduced Death Star would likely have a narrower trench and even a few meters would make the run impossible, it would also likely mean a smaller exhaust port making the shot itself impossible.

While it might seem oxy moronic to say that lowering firepower would change things when the creators certainly didn't care when they shot the scenes it would actually change a ton to be stuck working with only Trek scale weapons and ship building techniques. I've mentioned one scene, but lowering the speed would mean no Luke going to see Yoda because he could no longer take a single seat fighter and go there on his own on the word of a force ghost, the asteroid scene would also be much different if we had to constrain ourselves to far lower limits of firepower.

We'd keep FTL-capable light fighters- this can legitimately be an area where the Empire does have an edge in technical sophistication. FTL-capable shuttlecraft are a feature in Star Trek as well, where their FTL drives are much slower and less capable than those of full-up starships. So I'd keep this as a Star Wars edge: the ability to install full-speed FTL drives on a fighter-sized unit (if possibly short ranged; we don't know how far Dagobah is from Hoth, or whether Luke made some intermediate refueling stops to get there).

Again, this matters less to me than being able to look at the men without obsessing over the capability- instead of worrying about how FTL-capable fighters change the setting, I... well, I've already repeated my opinion on this.

Yes, but spending a week in a single seat fighter makes no sense and just wouldn't be possible. It would also make the idea of a dozen seat FTL capable shuttle really stupid.

Are we going to ignore that a far smaller by length and volume ship manages to inflict damage and cause casualties to the Enterprise D? (Shown in Generations) Looking at the evidence we see that even in universe it is possible to get roughly equal firepower into a far more compact package.

A World War One destroyer was quite capable of damaging a battleship- even damaging one severely- despite being something like one twentieth the battleship's tonnage. And this with both ships fully optimized for warfare.

The destroyer got away with this by:
-Relying on small target profile and greater speed at the expense of damage resistance
-Shorter combat endurance: relying heavily on a limited supply of ordnance for attacks, rather than a large magazine of gun ammunition
-Shorter operational endurance: having less fuel, inferior crew accomodations, and less systems redundancy

I would not be surprised to learn that a Bird of Prey functions much the same way.

That said, I do expect that, all technical constraints being made equal for both sides, the Empire will tend to build tougher ships better suited for warfare than the Federation. Their social system is not without advantages.

You're also ignoring the fact that while a battleship had armor it didn't cover everything and armor wasn't very effective against torpedoes. Against shields that require you to fire a powerful enough shot to defeat them or get energy to bleed through. While it is possible that they do cut corners to get a good power to size ratio it's hard to argue they don't put good firepower into a small package.

[Batman]

While getting the same firepower as a Galaxy's out of a smaller ship is pretty much a 'D'uh' given that ship is an unholy mix of luxury liner/science vessel/battleship so of course you can do that with the same tech base, I'm leery of using Generations as evidence of it being possible in something as small as a Bird of Prey. Not only did the BoP get to ignore E-Ds shields thanks to frequency technobabble, but the big E hardly fought back. For whatever reason (quite possibly including, given the fundamental interconnectedness of all things approach Starfleet engineering seems to be taking in the 24th century, her losing the ability to do so due to those first few hits) the quite considerable offensive potential of a Galaxy was not used in that sequence. They fire all of one phaser blast. No rapid fire from all bearing phaser arrays, no torpedo spreads (not even when they finally technobabble off the BoPs shields and Riker explicitly orders a torpedo spread-the killing blow is one lone photon torpedo), nothing.

As for the scaling issue, I think giving the Trek side a boost is far easier than bringing Wars all the way down to Trek levels, if you want to compare societies. As S_J said Warp speeds are already inconsistent as hell as it is, and a, say, order of magnitude boost to Warp speeds would allow a minipire that at least militarily roughly equals the Empire-as-known without unduly changing the setup of the Alpha Quadrant (which frankly wouldn't work with Warp speeds as stated to begin with anyway).

[Simon_Jester]

We do see what looks to be a planetary shield defending Alderaan from the Death Star though it flickers and fades in the blink of an eye on screen. Proof can be seen here in an image taken from the main site...

Ahem.

Take a step back and think about this. We have one frame of picture that can be plausibly interpreted as a planetary shield. In several movies. How large and important a piece of evidence is this, anyway?

Saying that there were no planetary shields in Star Wars would not change the movies all that much, if that's all we've got. Again, the entire point of the exercise is to do something with Star Wars other than envision it as the super-powered setting the laborious calculations of this site imply... simply because the superpowers turn it into a boring invincible culture.

Or, hell, planetary shields exist (why not)... they're just calculated to withstand bombardments in the range of "hundred megatons per second" instead of "hundred million megatons per second." Again, a bombardment measured in megatons per second, over an extended period of time can cause massive planetary destruction; it is not unreasonable for the kind of wealthy, paranoid planets you describe to have them in response to that level of threat.

While a longer travel time might fit for the flight to Alderaan, it makes little sense for the attack on the second Death Star or for Palpatine's rescue of Vader. The EU, which you seem dismissive of has many more examples of things that would make less sense without such short travel times.

For the attack on the second Death Star, the attack force all jumped into reach at once; having to fly for a few more days to get to the staging point wouldn't have changed things critically. For the ending of Episode III... well, I admit that would be tricky, but it would hardly be difficult for Palpatine to have a "bad feeling" about Anakin's chances, via prescience, in time to rescue him from Mustafar.

Yes, it would change some details of the movies. But from a 'flavor' perspective, it would still be very similar, I think.

I think they would have larger changes than you think because even big picture changing something as simple as transit speed will have massive effects on trade and cutting scale and the number of planets for the Empire changes even more. I honestly think we should be boosting Treks per ship abilities and give them a larger fleet to do this instead.

I'm on board with this to a point. Increasing Trek speed somewhat would be reasonable in my opinion- as Batman notes, it really would make the Star Trek setting fit together better.

Honestly, as I've said before, I consider how to impose some kind of quasiparity on the settings less important than that material factors be made quasiparity so that we can see the two groups of people interacting as two groups of people.

I am open to any suggestion on how to do this.

I was more worried about the fact that a reduced Death Star would likely have a narrower trench and even a few meters would make the run impossible, it would also likely mean a smaller exhaust port making the shot itself impossible.

I see no reason why a battlestation 25 or 50 km in diameter wouldn't have a trench dozens of meters across, or an exhaust port "only two meters wide." Remember, I'm not saying an exact scale replica of the Death Star; the equatorial trench portrayed in the movie is really very narrow compared to what we see in far-off shots of the Death Star as it is.

Yes, but spending a week in a single seat fighter makes no sense and just wouldn't be possible. It would also make the idea of a dozen seat FTL capable shuttle really stupid.

It mostly depends on range and willingness to make 'hops.' At Trek warp-ish speeds (maybe faster, I don't really care about exact figures here), it would still make sense to have FTL shuttles for covering day-long distances. Guys in single-seat fighters would need to stop every day or so, and it wouldn't be a comfortable way to travel, but you could do it.

And, to repeat, I don't mind scaling down the Empire and scaling up Trek warp speeds, as long as some kind of approximate material parity is preserved. The numerical speed matters less than that goal of approximate parity.

ECR's idea of an externally imposed scenario forcing both factions to work under conditions of material parity, with no upscaling or downscaling, that I like.

[Serafina]

Well, we DO have better evidence of large-scale shields covering planets in TESB and ROTJ:
The shield covering the Rebel base on Hoth, and the shield surrounding both the second Death Star and Endor.

Now the first one only covered part of the planet, but it was already strong enough to "deflect any sort of bombardment" Vaders fleet (including several Star Destroyers and the Executor) was capable of performing, despite being projected from a ragtag rebel base. Extrapolating from there (strong, partial shield on an ice planet) to full planetary shields on richer worlds is not that big of a leap.
Oh, and i think we can also get rough estimates on the height of the projected shield based on when the Rebel transports pass trough it. If we assume it's a dome, we get the area it covers.

The second one clearly enveloped the entirety of Endor, otherwise opening part of the shield to land there would have been unnecessary. In addition to that, it could penetrate a shield around the entire Death Star, with a lot of distance from it to boot! Just look at the distance the rebel starfighters have to make a rapid turn around to avoid crashing into the shield, that was hardly close to the Death Star.


So we DO have G-canon evidence that Star Wars has the technology to build full planetary shields. That's doesn't necessarily mean that Alderan has a planetary shield, but that scene was never supposed to provide general evidence for planetary shields. Rather, it was so over-analyzed because Darkstar over-analyzed those same effects in order to claim that the planet was destroyed by some sort of chain reaction. A planetary shield is the more logical and better explanation.
Combine said G-canon evidence for the possibility of full planetary shields and then look into the EU, then it's pretty damn obvious that Star Wars DOES have them. They're not some figment of imagination, made up by Star Wars fans based on a single frame of video - they are firmly based on material from the original films.

[Lord Helmet]

Now the first one only covered part of the planet, but it was already strong enough to "deflect any sort of bombardment" Vaders fleet (including several Star Destroyers and the Executor) was capable of performing, despite being projected from a ragtag rebel base. Extrapolating from there (strong, partial shield on an ice planet) to full planetary shields on richer worlds is not that big of a leap.

I always thought that to beat down or bleed through the hoth shield the ships would have destroyed the base and all the rebels so they opted to use ground forces, after all if the ships weapons were as powerful as some claim they could have fired at the ground just outside the perimeter of the shield and still killed everything under it with the shockwaves ect.

The second one clearly enveloped the entirety of Endor, otherwise opening part of the shield to land there would have been unnecessary.

The picture of the shield covering the DS2 in the movie showed it covered a small area of endor not all of it and they still had to open part of it to get inside the area and land.

I will try to find the image.

[Serafina]

I always thought that to beat down or bleed through the hoth shield the ships would have destroyed the base and all the rebels so they opted to use ground forces, after all if the ships weapons were as powerful as some claim they could have fired at the ground just outside the perimeter of the shield and still killed everything under it with the shockwaves ect.

There is no evidence either way. They just say that it is powerful enough to stop (or deflect) the bombardment.
It's pretty clear that Vader did not want to annihilate the base. But that also rules out the "melt the crust outside the shield"-tactic, so there is really no reason to assume that the shield could have been cracked with sufficient force.

The picture of the shield covering the DS2 in the movie showed it covered a small area of endor not all of it and they still had to open part of it to get inside the area and land.

I will try to find the image.

That image is a diagram. In real life, diagrams are not necessarily 100% accurate - in fact, their purpose is to show what is relevant to the viewer. Stuff that is not relevant is often not shown, because it might distract from the important stuff. In that image, it was pretty clear that "the DSII has a shield around it" was the relevant part. So the lack of a shield surrounding Endor in that diagram is quite explicable.

However, if the diagram was accurate, then it would have been trivial to land on the planet without opening a gap in the shield to do so. Yet the Rebels had to steal an imperial shuttle and the proper codes in order to land on the planet. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Endor was fully shielded.


Also, i already said that G-canon only gives us evidence for the technological capability for full planetary shields. At the very least, Endor projected a giant shield around the Death Star (far larger than the second death star, which already had a diameter of 900 km!), at a considerable distance no less. That shield was obviously strong enough that the Rebel fleet could not penetrate it.
It'd be trivial to build several of those stations on a planet in order to cover it completely.

[Lord Helmet]

There is no evidence either way. They just say that it is powerful enough to stop (or deflect) the bombardment.
It's pretty clear that Vader did not want to annihilate the base. But that also rules out the "melt the crust outside the shield"-tactic, so there is really no reason to assume that the shield could have been cracked with sufficient force.

That one is a bit of a pain in the ass, i mean IF he did not wanna blast the base from space and wanted prisoners then he would have been always going to use ground forces and if that is the case then why be pissed about the shield being up because even after its up they do not bombard the docking bays, x-wings or ion canon ect from space.

That image is a diagram. In real life, diagrams are not necessarily 100% accurate - in fact, their purpose is to show what is relevant to the viewer. Stuff that is not relevant is often not shown, because it might distract from the important stuff. In that image, it was pretty clear that "the DSII has a shield around it" was the relevant part. So the lack of a shield surrounding Endor in that diagram is quite explicable.

However, if the diagram was accurate, then it would have been trivial to land on the planet without opening a gap in the shield to do so. Yet the Rebels had to steal an imperial shuttle and the proper codes in order to land on the planet. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Endor was fully shielded.

I suppose that is one perspective i never really thought of, but it seems to me that in a diagram used for the planning of the attack that included the rather important factor of them getting through the moons shield would show said shield. As far as landing is concerned the Empire is hardly gonna let any ship passing to land on the moon so stealing a imperial shuttle and landing inside the area shown on the diagram like its a standard delivery was really the only option.

I am not saying planetary shields do not exist obviously but dismissing that a vital component to be overcome in the plan was not shown in the planning diagram with "diagrams are not necessarily 100% accurate" is really not such great reasoning.

[Darth Tedious]

I suppose that is one perspective i never really thought of, but it seems to me that in a diagram used for the planning of the attack that included the rather important factor of them getting through the moons shield would show said shield. As far as landing is concerned the Empire is hardly gonna let any ship passing to land on the moon so stealing a imperial shuttle and landing inside the area shown on the diagram like its a standard delivery was really the only option.

But shielding over the moon wasn't a crucial factor in the attack- the shuttle landing was to be done by subterfuge anyway.

I am not saying planetary shields do not exist obviously but dismissing that a vital component to be overcome in the plan was not shown in the planning diagram with "diagrams are not necessarily 100% accurate" is really not such great reasoning.

The Rebels do have a habit of using inaccurate diagrams. In ANH, the superlaser dish was illustrated as being on the Death Star's equator.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, we DO have better evidence of large-scale shields covering planets in TESB and ROTJ:
The shield covering the Rebel base on Hoth, and the shield surrounding both the second Death Star and Endor.

Both of which I already mentioned, and both of which are theater shields as you note.

Thing is, saying shields exist says nothing about the strength of the shields. If the bombardment firepower of an Imperial star destroyer is 10 to 100 megatons per second, it's entirely reasonable to construct theater or even planetary shields to repel that kind of firepower- you do not want them parking in orbit for a few hours and hammering on unshielded planetary surfaces; while civilization as you know it might survive, it's not going to do your property values any good.

Even relatively 'weak' weapons in Star Wars make it totally logical for people in Star Wars to invest in theater and planetary shields. But ultimately, the plot of Star Wars does not hinge on the existence of planetary shields; this is a backstory reason for the Death Star's existence, but one that could be changed without any noticeable difference in the top-level canon.

We can easily extrapolate from Hoth, let alone Endor, that the technology to build planetary shields exists. We can reasonably infer that they do exist on wealthy planets in the setting. But very little that is really essential to the nature of Star Wars, that could not be changed without altering the setting beyond recognition, depends on those planetary shields.

In the EU, we see more references to planetary shields. But (this is partly addressed to Norade, who asked about this earlier) we can have a very clearly recognizable "Star Wars" without trying to incorporate every bit of the massive EU canon with letter-perfect precision. It will not be quite the same, but again, I'm more concerned with the characters for this purpose than I am with the hardware.

The basic nature of the Empire, socially and politically, is laid out quite well by the movies alone, supported by even a relatively minimal sampling of the EU.

...

However, let's consider the entire 'parity' idea. To get the basic social context of the Empire, we need them to be an old culture, one that has been at its current state of technological and economic growth for a very long time. This great age is enough to justify the existence of planetary shields, in and of itself; on worlds that have been settled for many centuries and have seen many rounds of internecine conflict, having defensive shields to protect the planet from orbital bombardment is a logical precaution. This remains true even if such shields are very expensive and difficult to build, or if the bombardments they're designed to withstand are "only" (!) measured in megatons per second.

So even in a 'scaled' setting, I do not think it unreasonable for the great worlds of the Empire to be protected by planetary shields. That is a predictable consequence of the cultural history of the Empire and the Republic. It's much like the way that there are fortifications or the remains of fortifications around many European cities, but relatively few such fortifications around American cities of comparable size: the European cities date back to an era of much greater internal warfare on the continent, and so accumulated defenses ranging from medieval walls to World War-era gun turrets and trench systems. Less history of sustained conflict in the Americas means, as a rule, less effort poured into the creation of fortifications.

The only thing that changes, really, is how many kilotons of beam weapons those shields are rated to withstand. Which is, I think, not critical to the question of how two different cultures interact. Which, I keep trying to repeat, is what I'm more interested in here.

However, if the diagram was accurate, then it would have been trivial to land on the planet without opening a gap in the shield to do so. Yet the Rebels had to steal an imperial shuttle and the proper codes in order to land on the planet. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Endor was fully shielded.

On a side note:

The Rebels had to land close enough to the generator to reach it on foot through thick jungle in a reasonable amount of time. That limited their options and may have forced them to land inside the shield even if the shield covered "only," say, a circle fifty kilometers in radius.

Also, the Rebels had to fly in restricted space patrolled by the Imperial fleet, under Imperial guns, just to get to Endor at all. If their shuttle hadn't been cleared to land, they would probably have been shot out of the sky as spies before approaching Endor at all. So they'd still need the codes for landing clearance, not just to get someone to "open the shield..." but even if they did need the shield opened, all it proves is that the shield covers enough of Endor that you can't land your shuttle close enough to the generator without passing through it.

It does the Rebels no good to land on the other side of the forest moon entirely; they'll still be hiking across country to the shield generator when the Rebel strike force shows up.

[Serafina]

They could have easily taken a large variety of small, fast ground-vehicles, such as the speeder bikes we saw being used right under the shield canopy in the middle of the forest.
That option would have been far superior to stealing a shuttle and codes you're not even sure would work. The sensible explanation why they did not do it is quite simply that they could not have landed anywhere on the planet without those codes.

[Simon_Jester]

They could have easily taken a large variety of small, fast ground-vehicles, such as the speeder bikes we saw being used right under the shield canopy in the middle of the forest.

I see a big problem with that.

The rebels don't know the local terrain in detail. They know it's a "forest moon," but they don't know about the Ewoks and it's pretty obvious that Endor is in the middle of nowhere- there probably aren't detailed maps and guides of surface conditions.

While the part of the moon immediately around the Imperial garrison is virgin forest with a high canopy and is relatively open at ground level, other parts of the moon might feature impassable tangles of vegetation that would make it hard for ground vehicles (including speeder bikes) to move along the surface. Even a little more brush and vines near the ground would have made it suicide to use speeder bikes to move quickly across the surface, and made use of heavier, more durable vehicles difficult.

You cannot count on being able to cover great distances through a poorly explored jungle in fast-moving vehicles. You can be more confident of being able to pass through shorter distances jungle on foot- though even then, the Rebels were taking a gamble trying to land in the jungle and sneak in on foot. They took the risk, as I recall, mostly because they realized as soon as they got a look at the scale of the garrison that it was too big for them to try a direct approach. Landing the shuttle in the middle of the bunker complex and blowing up the shield generator from that end would have meant fighting their way through the entire garrison; hence their search for another entrance.

That option would have been far superior to stealing a shuttle and codes you're not even sure would work. The sensible explanation why they did not do it is quite simply that they could not have landed anywhere on the planet without those codes.

...And this is sensible when there's enough Imperial firepower to blow your shuttle out of the sky if it can't present the proper codes? Or when a single shuttle is headed for the middle of open wilderness on the wrong side of the planet and can't or won't explain why?

[Connor MacLeod]

Are we going to ignore that a far smaller by length and volume ship manages to inflict damage and cause casualties to the Enterprise D? (Shown in Generations)

As I recall, the BoP in question had the ability to bypass the E-D's shields. There's also probably some issue with how she was fought, given Riker was in command. Lastly, have they settled on a particular size for a BoP, because last time I was that deep into debates there was actual disagreement over how fricking big they are.

Looking at the evidence we see that even in universe it is possible to get roughly equal firepower into a far more compact package.

Something that can be done in virtually any universe (or real life) depending on how you pull it off and what sorts of compromises you engineer into the design. This is one of the reasons precisely why details like context and shit matter.

While I stated that a BoP was a third the size, that is a gross misrepresentation of the difference in mass of the two ships given that even at an exact one third smaller in all dimensions means that a BoP is using 64 times less volume for a roughly equal level of firepower. While there will obviously be factors other than fire power, on a resource for resource basis one side obviously has a ton-for-ton advantage in a stand up fight as well as having goodies such as a cloaking device meaning that rearwards fire and range are less of an issue.

I take it this is what your "proof" basically amounts to? You cite one reference, interpret it in a certain way, and then hold it up as a standard? I'm willing to bet that, given this is trek, there's going to be a case somewhere to disprove it, nevermind the qualifications to this I highlighted above. Frankly I was expecting something a little more thought out and in depth.

On the Defiant, that's great, it's also a single newly produced class of warship.

Uh, its a single class? I'm pretty sure they made more than one. In fact, the prototype was destroyed in DS9 at some point, and they had to replace it.

You're still ignoring the fact that unlike a Galaxy-class at least some of the space that isn't being used for weapons is devoted to fighters and ground forces which each provide it with options for combat that a Federation vessel will lack. You're also ignoring the fact that we know that Trek ships will suffer damage from attacks even with shields up, and that unlike the Federation the Empire's ships largest and most damaging vessels don't rely on a limited number of torpedoes to deal their damage. While exact combat endurance numbers will be near impossible to find that fact that Wars ships stand up better to fire from a ship considered their peer already makes them better than a Trek vessel with equal power output per unit of reactor volume.

Uh who the fuck cares what they use the "extra space" for? That has no relavence to what I was pointing out, which was that they overly-hybridized design of Imperial starships detracts from its combat capbilities. Maybe I should have been clearer that is what I am talking about?

I'd address the rest, but again you' seem to be generalizing and I'm not sure exactly what you're basing your assessment of Federation combat capabilities on and nothing from my own limited memory WRT Trek is coming up and it's too bloody vague sounding as it stands.

While we see the Federation rush in new classes of ship when they realize that the old ones aren't capable enough, the Empire lacks this need. Even if they ISD is a horrid waste of space they still have many other ships that don't meet the multitool standard of the ISD and as shown in research done by Publius these vessels will be the bulk of the Imperial fleet. Trek will still be saddled with a fleet containing mainly older designs and given their demonstrated industrial capabilities they won't be getting vast fleets of proper warships anytime soon.

Again how does "not being hybrid" magically make them competent designs? There's far more to compare in making that sort of judgement. Indeed I can think of quite a few ways and reasons why SW isn't fighting and designing shit quite nearly as efficiently as they ought to. And this comes from a person who was a rather active contributor to Publius' site (and others besides.)

Let me try to simplify this down: You've made a bunch of claims WRT to the capabilities of the GCS (and ST ships in paritcular) in comparioson to SW ships. I'll grant you the possibility of this theory, but I remain in doubt that you've actually proven the point. This isn't something you can just point to "one example" to justify, since I am not interested in descending to "comic book fanboy" level tactics where everything is based on outliers. I want something a little more consistent, and that means a broader base of evidence than you have yet to present. After all, by that same logic we could extrapolate all sorts of absurdities about SW ships or craft from specific examples as often happens (TESB asteroid incident, A-wing crashing into a bridge in ROTJ, Ground vehciles being used to attack a Separatist Warship in the Clone wars series, atmospheric starship combat in TCW series, etc.)

[dworkin]

The Empire is a nasty totalitarian dictatorship ruled by an actual evil wizard. If ever a connection was established to an almost post scarcity utopia like the Federation then it would leak peopie like a sieve. People will become the no.1 top contraband as the Empire clamps down on it's citizens grabbing the nearest availiable transport and leave for a place where jackbooted thugs are not the order of the day.

The Federation is an almost post scarcity utopia populated by wacky idealists. Those wacky idealists will probably aid in people smuggling.

This is bound to lead to shooting because while Federation diplomats can and do talk opponents into submission the Empire is actually evil. It's not misguided politics or poor choices. The Empire is ruled by an evil wizard and the region it inhabits has good and evil as actual forces of nature.

[Baffalo]

The Empire is a nasty totalitarian dictatorship ruled by an actual evil wizard. If ever a connection was established to an almost post scarcity utopia like the Federation then it would leak peopie like a sieve. People will become the no.1 top contraband as the Empire clamps down on it's citizens grabbing the nearest availiable transport and leave for a place where jackbooted thugs are not the order of the day.

The Federation is an almost post scarcity utopia populated by wacky idealists. Those wacky idealists will probably aid in people smuggling.

This is bound to lead to shooting because while Federation diplomats can and do talk opponents into submission the Empire is actually evil. It's not misguided politics or poor choices. The Empire is ruled by an evil wizard and the region it inhabits has good and evil as actual forces of nature.

Maybe.

I say maybe for the simple reason that while I'm sure lots of people on the bottom would absolutely love to get out from under the heel of the Empire, not everyone will. Remember, large segments of society were content with where they were, and had no problem just sitting there letting the Empire do its thing so long as the Empire didn't get in their way. And really, as far as the majority of the population is concerned, they'd rather deal with what they know, flawed though it is, than go somewhere new.

As far as those who actively flee the Empire and head for the Federation, the Empire might just let them go. Provided a few other passengers get added to the manifest, such as some of the undesirables from Kessel and other Imperial prisoners. If people are so desperate to flee, let them go, and get rid of everyone in prison while you're going. The Empire may be evil, but the leaders aren't exactly stupid too. They're going to see an opportunity. If they don't want to let the prisons go empty, they'll probably police the wormhole and stop anyone who might be smuggling anything in or out, arresting people, and just accepting huge bribes to get past.

[Connor MacLeod]

The Empire is a nasty totalitarian dictatorship ruled by an actual evil wizard. If ever a connection was established to an almost post scarcity utopia like the Federation then it would leak peopie like a sieve. People will become the no.1 top contraband as the Empire clamps down on it's citizens grabbing the nearest availiable transport and leave for a place where jackbooted thugs are not the order of the day.

The Federation is an almost post scarcity utopia populated by wacky idealists. Those wacky idealists will probably aid in people smuggling.

And you base ANY of this on, what exactly? The Empire has primary control of the holonet and restricts access, so there's a finite limit to how fast (and how reliable) interstellar communicatons will be, so how exactly is this information to be spread? Perhaps even more ludicrous is your complete disregard for the logistics of the situation. Even at its most basic, you're proposing that a huge chunk of a populace will be able to easily relocate from one place to another without any troube, and that the Federation will help them every step of the way (setting up your hypothetical smuggling networks, finding territory to place them all, helping them get a leg up on survival and such, organizing all these myriad tasks, etc.)

I also like how you constantly tout the phrase "post scarcity utopia" as if this means something, in addition to all the other conjecture making up your post. It would have made just as much sense for you to shout MAGIC! in capitals and throw off little fireworks into the air as an explanation.

This is bound to lead to shooting because while Federation diplomats can and do talk opponents into submission the Empire is actually evil. It's not misguided politics or poor choices. The Empire is ruled by an evil wizard and the region it inhabits has good and evil as actual forces of nature.

This is an even more simple-minded level of reasoning than what you said above. And I analyze 40K as a hobby where the shit you spout would have a better odds of being true.

[Stofsk]

The Empire is a nasty totalitarian dictatorship ruled by an actual evil wizard. If ever a connection was established to an almost post scarcity utopia like the Federation then it would leak peopie like a sieve. People will become the no.1 top contraband as the Empire clamps down on it's citizens grabbing the nearest availiable transport and leave for a place where jackbooted thugs are not the order of the day.

The Federation is an almost post scarcity utopia populated by wacky idealists. Those wacky idealists will probably aid in people smuggling.

And you base ANY of this on, what exactly? The Empire has primary control of the holonet and restricts access, so there's a finite limit to how fast (and how reliable) interstellar communicatons will be, so how exactly is this information to be spread? Perhaps even more ludicrous is your complete disregard for the logistics of the situation. Even at its most basic, you're proposing that a huge chunk of a populace will be able to easily relocate from one place to another without any troube, and that the Federation will help them every step of the way (setting up your hypothetical smuggling networks, finding territory to place them all, helping them get a leg up on survival and such, organizing all these myriad tasks, etc.)

Well the Empire can't stamp out the Rebellion, which as per the movies continued to get more and more support in the Imperial governing body before the Emperor swept away the senate. Even if the Empire controls access to communication, it's obviously finite control and the Federation might ally themselves with the Rebellion if we have the latter transplanted into this scenario.

Also, you make a good point about the logistics situation, I don't think it would just be as easy as saying 'people will pack up and move', however don't we comment all the time on the Empire's and SW galaxy at large's logistic capacity to transport huge amounts of resources or people from a to b with short notice?

I also like how you constantly tout the phrase "post scarcity utopia" as if this means something, in addition to all the other conjecture making up your post. It would have made just as much sense for you to shout MAGIC! in capitals and throw off little fireworks into the air as an explanation.

Well to be fair, the Federation is a pretty sweet place to live. At least the President isn't an evil wizard!