Me vs Jedi Master Spock

[Luke Skywalker]

I was given permission by JMS to post this debate online. Note that my debating skills/knowledge on the issue were not as polished back then (ah, the classic excuse xd), and some of my view points have changed. Oh, and although JMS did not notice this, one of my video links was later shown to have included fan-made material, although obviously that was unintentional of me.

I originally mistakened JMS for darkstar, so I was sending the message as a critque of his website. I had tried to email darkstar personally, but his email address blocked me out as spam.

Me:

First off, is this darkstar? Sort of wondering. I tried sending an email to darkstar, but apparently his server thought that my email was spam.

Here was the email:


Ok, so I've read a lot of your site. I'll say that your calculations seem to be accurate for the most part and you're clearly knowledgeable on the laws of physics and make some good points. However, I do have a few criticisms to make:

1. Your FTL calculations are simply implausible. Star Wars is a galaxy spanning civilization. Casual travel across large portions of the galaxy is commonplace in Star Wars. However, by your calculations, traveling across the galaxy would take years, sometimes even decades, which Star Wars clearly shows isn't true for them:

a) Obi Wan goes to Kamino, stated to be in the outer rim, casually without any large amount of time passing. Based on your calculations, it would have taken him years to do that.
b) Darth Maul travels across a large portion of the galaxy in a matter of hours.
c) In many of the Senate meetings, you see senators representing solar systems across the galaxy. If your travel times were correct, those senators would have to have spent years just to get to Coruscant; which clearly isn't true, because otherwise Padme would have had to have started traveling to Coruscant right after TPM ended.
d) The Millennium Falcon is seen traveling across major portions of the galaxy without any large of time passing.
e) The Death Star could not possibly have been constructed as fast as it was with transport ships as slow as you claim they are.
f) Yoda travels to Kamino, examines the clone troopers, mobilizes them and brings an army to Geonosis in a matter of hours or maybe a day or two. This would have taken years if it were based off of your speed calculations.

2. Your weapons ranges are cherry picking the lowest Star Wars ranges and the highest Star Trek ranges. There are many cases in which Federation ships go within 10 km to hit a HUGE borg cube that wasn't moving that fast relatively either. Meanwhile, the Battle of Endor shows Star Wars ships battling at thousands of miles range.

3. Again, your blaster damage showings cherry picked the lowest showing and ignored the showing of them making giant holes and explosions in other scenes.

4. Your imperial fleet size estimates are sketchy, since they're based off of casual conversations in which the characters would not be speaking in precise.

5. Your debunking attempts of the ICS are ignoring the fact that the 2 kiloton figure is the MAXIMUM figure. I'll admit that perhaps the 2 kiloton figure is somewhat misleading, but from it still stands; in practical combat the ship would be firing at lower power settings in order to allow for rapid firing capabilities. Also, your "vaporize a small town" quote is not only taking a quote that isn't necessarily literal literally, but is the calculations are out of context. Mos Eisley is a town in Tatooine, a relatively unpopulated planet (a VERY unpopulated planet). The quote was about the battle of Coruscant. Coruscant's surface is basically one giant city, so it can be hard to determine any calculations from this quote.

6. You analyze the AT-ST, but not the many other more powerful Star Wars ground vehicles, and other Star Wars ground troops. I'll admit that the AT-ST is a joke of a vehicle, but it isn't the only military vehicle available to Star Wars; note that Star Trek doesn't have any.

7. You ignore the huge population and industrial disparity and how Star Wars is at least several thousand times larger than Star Trek. Star Wars would therefore have vast industrial capabilities and a vast recruiting pool, allowing them to overwhelm Star Trek even if the ship firepower were comparable.

8. While Star Wars hyperdrive is fast enough and long ranged enough for them to invade the Federation if the two sides are somehow close enough for this scenario to happen, the Federation would not be able to mount an invasion on any Star Wars galactic government. Federation warp drive wouldn't even have enough fuel to get to the core worlds, nor would they know how to get there (after centuries of exploring the Federation hasn't mapped out its own galaxy yet, so mapping out that of another one would be infeasible in any short amount of time) or sustain any supply line.

Thanks for reading.









Popular rumor has it that all pro-Trek debaters with intelligent-sounding arguments are the same person, but I would suggest to you that I am not he.

1. One of the major issues in Star Wars is that neither the galaxy's size nor its geography are well defined in the movies themselves. Since the EU is subject to numerous inconsistencies, this is problematic. My main website's articles are based entirely on the contents of the films themselves.

You'll note that I consider a very wide range of speeds plausible from the movies. Almost no distances are established. Kamino, for example, could be only a few hundred light years from Coruscant; Kamino could be ten thousand light years from Coruscant. The upper range of SW speeds is generally preferred if we think of the Old Republic and Empire spanning most of a Milky Way sized galaxy; the higher end I quote on my site is ~1,000,000c, which is sufficient to cross the Milky Way from end to end in about a month, and more than sufficient to travel from the center to the edge of a civilization contained within a galaxy in a very short span of time.

The core problem is that hyperdrive moves at the speed of plot - no faster, no slower - and Lucas didn't really have a consistent notion of the scale or speed.

2. First, there's actually very broad agreement within Star Trek references on long ranges - within dialog. While we sometimes see ships firing at each other within visual range, ships are almost never cited as out of range of each other.

Endor shows a space battlefield a few hundred kilometers in scope. The action takes place all quite close to the second Death Star. (The main issue with this are the assorted inconsistent scales used for the DSII, some of which are strikingly large.)

Visual depictions are quite similar in both franchises - tens of kilometers of apparent distance is the norm for ships firing on each other. However, Star Trek distinctly contains a large body of evidence citing explicit ranges and demonstrating high orbital attacks, and exhibits superior accuracy.

3. The blaster damage I show on *my* website seems entirely typical. There are plenty of cases in which blasters fail to leave even a mark.

4. You might be mixing up your websites. You might want to examine my fleet size estimates. They're fairly loose:

http://www.starfleetjedi.net/h8.html

5,000-50,000 ISD-equivalents is a very loose estimate, to say the least. The traditional EU count is 25,000 Star Destroyers, which what ST-v-SW cites. Neither figure is especially controversial IME.

5. Regarding the ICS, I would actually direct you to an ongoing project on the SFJ forum:
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... ?f=8&t=886
The ICS is highly inconsistent with both the movies and the EU. The Slave I guns discussed on ST-v-SW are but the tip of the iceberg.

6. No, ST-v-SW isn't my website.

7. Not quite true. The Federation has 150 member worlds; the Empire claims a million systems, a hundred thousand of which were in the Old Republic. Several thousand times larger, while a reasonable figure in some ways, is actually an upper, rather than lower, limit; many of the worlds the Empire has annexed, such as Tatooine, are quite sparse, while the Federation membership doesn't appear to include the numerous colony worlds, which Kirk grandly counts as a thousand.

The population and geographic resources of the Empire are more aptly estimated as being on the order of several hundred times the Federation's. This is something I consider in my accounts of how a conflict would likely proceed. I consider the destruction of the Empire probable; its conquest, improbable.

8. One of the most curious things about warp drive is that it works quite quickly inside the Federation. A 8,000 LY Federation can be crossed or circumnavigated easily in months. Most of the AQ seems easily navigable in "The Chase." In order to disrupt galactic government quickly, the Federation needs either the wormhole to be close to the core, the SW galaxy to be small, the Empire to be small, or hyperdrives to be widely commercially available to humans shopping in the SWG in the event that they really ARE that fast. None of these is particularly strange.









Sorry, mixed you up with darkstar.

1. So then your website concedes that, even with the ridiculous assumption that the Star Wars galaxy in somehow smaller than ours, even though it's been stated to be 120,000 LY in diameter, Star Wars hyperdrive is still faster than warp drive by almost 3 orders of magnitude.

2. Most Star Trek battles are fought within 10 km distances. Examples are borg cube battles, attacking the doomsday machine and multiple battles against the dominion. And no, Star Trek does not exhibit superior accuracy; it's accuracy is pretty bad. For example, in numerous Federation vs Dominion battles we see ships missing each other within ranges that are almost literally spitting distance, and said dominion ships were unable to fend off fighters that we almost literally right next to them.

3. And there are plenty of instances in which blasters make large holes in metallic walls or blast apart battle droids in a single hit.

4. Interesting, since your website actually shows figures arguably higher than Star Wars canon, which gives the imperial fleet at its height 25,000 ISDs.

5. There are also sources supporting the ICS. These include Star Wars: Slave Ship, arguably many LOTF novels, the numerous examples of BDZs, scaling from the death star, some guidebooks and irrc the ROTS ICS.

6. Fair enough then.

7. Actually, the Empire has a million systems, but apparently has 12 million inhabited planets. Most of those are probably not that populated, such as Tatooine, but it is still completely larger than the Federation by several orders of magnitude.

8. But you see, none of these would actually work out against any major Star Wars civilization. Not only is the Star Wars galaxy 120,000 LY in diameter, it has such a huge industrial and logistical advantage that conquest of it by any Star Trek civilization short of Q like beings is basically impossible. Basically, it would be like Germany invading Russia multiplied by quite literally over a million, with the Federation having to somehow get by planetary shields, sustaining a supply line, fighting off an industrial base at least hundreds of thousands of times larger than its own...invading any major Star Wars civilization is little short of suicide on the Federation's part.









http://starfleetjedi.net/wiki/index.php ... ek_weapons
1. No. There are two pieces to that comparison. While the canon of Star Wars sharply underdetermines hyperdrive speeds, the canon of Star Trek, like the SW EU, overdetermines warp speed. There are apparently contradictory figures for warp speed.

There are two major bodies of warp speeds. One gives long-range cruising speeds of mere thousands of times the speed of light for major starships, i.e., as in Voyager's long-haul speeds, with "high" warp speeds in the range of tens of thousands of times light speed (VOY, long-term exploration speeds in ENT, about half of TNG, trans-quadrant travel in DS9)

The other gives speeds in the range of tens of thousands for slow ships limited to warp 5 (NX and runabouts), hundreds of thousands of times the speed of light for modern ships, with high ends creeping up into the millions. (TOS, "rushed" travel in ENT, about half of TNG, and local travel in DS9). If you run through the references on my site, you'll see this explained.

The only way to try to reconcile these two families of references is to assume that warp speed is highly variable based on good navigational data or "warp highways" (much , the hyperspace lanes exhibited clearly in the SW television-canon and EU-continuity materials). The result is that while we expect a warp drive vessel to have trouble crossing the galaxy compared to a hyperdrive vessel, there's little if any appreciable difference in performance over short distances in known territory. Hyperdrive through a major lane may be faster by as much as an order of magnitude over short distances, but the major lanes are few and far between.

>1. So then your website concedes that, even with the ridiculous assumption that the Star Wars galaxy in somehow smaller than ours, even though it's been stated to be 120,000 LY in diameter, Star Wars hyperdrive is still faster than warp drive by almost 3 orders of magnitude.


2. False. Most Star Trek battles that you can see both participants may seem to follow this pattern, but then, if you were >10 km, you would have trouble making out ST ships. See here:

http://starfleetjedi.net/wiki/index.php ... ek_weapons

We canonically know that the NX-01 could land hits at 100 km, for example, from "The Aenar." Almost every single stated range within the entire series is greater than 10 km. The mistake you're making here is assuming that the VFX are the only canon.

>2. Most Star Trek battles are fought within 10 km distances. Examples are borg cube battles, attacking the doomsday machine and multiple battles against the dominion. And no, Star Trek does not exhibit superior accuracy; it's accuracy is pretty bad. For example, in numerous Federation vs Dominion battles we see ships missing each other within ranges that are almost literally spitting distance, and said dominion ships were unable to fend off fighters that we almost literally right next to them.

3. Causing a battle droid to break apart, or blowing a fist-sized hole in the wall, is impressive by modern standards for something the size of a submachine gun, but it's not spectacular the way phasers' ability to disintegrate humans is.

>3. And there are plenty of instances in which blasters make large holes in metallic walls or blast apart battle droids in a single hit.

4. As I said, it gives a wide realistic range. There's not much in the higher level of material that nails down Imperial fleet strength much. The classic EU estimate of 25,000 Star Destroyers (note: The figure is given precisely that way, and that count presumably includes the lesser Star Destroyers common in the EU) is generally widely acceptable to most people in the debate. A few fringe figures think that the main strength of the Imperial fleet lies in purported millions and millions of cruisers, or in vast numbers of super star destroyers.


>4. Interesting, since your website actually shows figures arguably higher than Star Wars canon, which gives the imperial fleet at its height 25,000 ISDs.


5. None of the examples of BDZs within EU literature actually support the ICS interpretation of it. On the whole, the ICS just don't fit. Even Slave Ship's reference to gigatonnes of recoil (which could be taken to be a unit of force, actually) don't fit with the teratons the ICS wants to line up. The problem with the Saxtonite interpretation of the Death Star as a 1e38J killing machine? It doesn't fit at all with anything else, in particular the superlaser on the Eclipse and the novel Death Star.

>5. There are also sources supporting the ICS. These include Star Wars: Slave Ship, arguably many LOTF novels, the numerous examples of BDZs, scaling from the death star, some guidebooks and irrc the ROTS ICS.

7. The problem with that is that the Old Republic only had a hundred thousand systems, some of which were fairly sparsely inhabited. Imperial territory is a very loose term in some sources. We're best of analogizing the 100,000 core worlds of the Old Republic with the 150 member systems of the Federation. The sparsely inhabited thousands of colonies / "million systems" can also be compared, but that's the best comparison, and it gives a rough size ratio of 700:1. Since that's almost three, "several" is more or less appropriate.

>7. Actually, the Empire has a million systems, but apparently has 12 million inhabited planets. Most of those are probably not that populated, such as Tatooine, but it is still completely larger than the Federation by several orders of magnitude.

8. Area of the UK proper: 240,000 sq km. Area of British Empire at its height: >30 million sq km. That's over two orders of magnitude. It's not actually unheard of for a small advanced power to conquer one or two orders of magnitude of expansion in terms of territory.

Could the Federation conquer the Galactic Empire? Not in the space of a generation, which is - coincidentally - how long the Empire lasted before collapsing on its own. Could it, or other major Star Trek factions, conquer a significant portion of it? Yes, and once begun, the Empire would likely rapidly start to disintegrate into component factions. Not a single year passed in the existence of the Empire that it wasn't in a civil war.

From Cortez to Queen Victoria, we've seen that technology gaps can be worth more than an order of magnitude. Now, could the Borg conquer the Galactic Empire in the space of a generation? Yes. The Empire doesn't have anything that can stop a Borg Cube short of a Death Star, and the Borg have many more cubes than the Empire has Death Stars.

The UFP invading the Galactic Empire is not Germany invading Russia multiplied by a factor of a million; that's a bad figure, derived from an illusion that the Empire is millions of times the size of the Federation. It ignores the fact that many of the million systems of the Empire are sparsely inhabited, and that the Federation likewise controls a large number of sparsely inhabited systems.

As a best estimate, the Empire seems to rule over hundreds of times the systems the Federation does; thousands at the most. (This is an appropriate estimate given that the Federation is about 8,000 LY across, while the Empire is, at least in the EU, 100-120,000 LY across). This is Germany invading Russia multiplied by a factor of a couple dozen.

What's really interesting is that the Empire, for all its territory, can't seem to concentrate much force anywhere in particular. Major battles - Endor, for example - show mere dozens of Star Destroyers.









1. Hey, this is strange. You're stating that warp drive is OVERSTATED in Star Trek, and that Star Wars EU UNDERSTATES hyperdrive? You do realize that this would support Star Wars, right?

Star Trek does have variable warp speeds, but even their highest showings are orders of mangitudes lower than the medium showings from Star Wars. Even the CWC, which pro Trek debaters cite as one of their primary criticisms of Star Wars capability, gives hyperdrive a speed in at least the hundreds of thousands of C.

2. With all due respect, your wiki doesn't have any citations supporting it. In particular, you claim gigaton max yield levels for photon torpedos when they clearly do not demonstrate anything near this level of yield, meaning that either the potential yield calculations (which you did not cite) are off or ST weapons are not that efficient.

In terms of weapons range, we do see some examples of Star Trek ships firing at extreme ranges, but most of the time they do not show this capability. Examples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJZbCNexctc

Here, Federation ships are moving within what appears to be a matter of hundreds of meters to hit a giant borg cube. The borg cube was strangely only firing at one ship at a time, and the Federation weapons were only causing not even kiloton level explosions, even when hitting the insides of the borg cube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJZbCNexctc

Here, Star Trek ships are yet again fighting in very close ranges. Their weapons are also causing rather small explosions when penetrating a ship. Take a look at the ship exploding from around 0.02 to 0.03.

Now compare it to the explosion here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cU0BYXl ... re=related

At around 0.57 to 0.59. Remember to scale; that is, that the ship destroyed was FAR larger than the ship destroyed in the other video. That attack wasn't even from the turbolasers of the star destroyer; it was from a SPHAT inside its hanger.

Therefore, the SPHAT's shot was able to make an explosion several times larger than several starships with their supposedly megaton level torpedos could do, and the SPHAT isn't even a ship! The SPHAT's main gun also appears to be unidirectional based, and yet STILL has a larger AoE radius than an omnidirectional torpedo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN5cR_1Y ... re=related

At around 2.15, there are eventually weapons fired that...blow medium sized holes in skyscrapers, maybe at modern day bunker buster level. Then, the heavy weapons come in...and cause kiloton level damage. So much for hundreds of megaton yields for photon torpedos, eh?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_EyBgja ... re=related

Near the beginning of the video, we can see a tactical display. Based on the size of the icons, the battlefield is only a decent amount of kilometers large; and the two fleets aren't even within attacking range! To be fair, the icons might have been enlarged so that the officers could see them. However, then a few seconds later we see dominion ships missing fighters that are almost literally within 10 meters of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aARI_GEx ... re=related

More examples of pathetic Star Trek accuracy. Then, at around 1:35, we see the Federation ships actually trying to rush through the dominion ships. Oh, and the two sides actually MISS each other when they're practically within a few hundred meters of each other. Then, the arriving klingon fleet arrives and attacks from similar ranges. There are more sub kiloton level explosions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMGMR_JZ ... re=related

At around 0:42, the Enterprise is firing at the doomsday machine...from a few hundred meters away?

By watching those videos, it's clear that Star Trek space battles are not on any comparable scale to Star Wars battles.

3. Except that phasers rarely ever show that capability in practical scenarios. Most of the time, they cause small damage and are stopped by packing crates. Possible explanations:

a. Federation redshirts are utter morons in terms of basic military tactics.
b. Phasers are impractical when fired at full power, and doing so significantly drains their power.

4. So then it's agreed that the imperial fleet strength is around 25,000 for capital ships. For the Old Republic it was likely somewhat smaller. For the Galactic Alliance it was probably in the thousands based on most estimates.

5. There are indeed examples of BDZs that have melted crusts and destroyed atmostpheres. As for the Death Star, what is it with trekkies using Star Wars: Death Star as evidence against the 10^38 watts claim? It's based on clear misinterpretations of the text, as Star Wars: Death Star confirms that the hardest part of making the Death Star was making a reactor big enough to fire it; the fact that it phased matter into hyperspace with its superlaser does not in any way imply a chain reaction or a weaker reactor than suggested.

7. Source for the 100,000 systems claim, when iirc the number was closer to a million? Since there are sources referring to 12 million inhabited planets, the 1 million figure is likely for the total number of established planets, which is still an extremely large number.

Interestingly enough, even given your low end estimates, which discount for the huge popularity disparity in terms of population per planet, a 700 to one advantage in size is absolutely massive. Assuming that it transfers to a 700 to one industrial advantage, which is actually low end given that Star Wars also has the capability of casual galactic trade due to hyperdrives, that's a disparity bigger than the disparity between the United States and Ethiopia. No well informed person would rationally argue that Ethiopia would stand a chance against the United States. A historical comparison is that a 700 to one disparity would be bigger by over 2 orders of magnitude compared to the industrial advantage the Allies enjoyed over the Axis near the end of the war, which many WW2 historians cite as one of the primary reasons why the Allies won.

To put it in perspective, a fully mobilized Star Wars galactic civilization can produce more tons worth of goods in a year than every Alpha quadrant civilization has in their history.

8. Hmmm...this is how suicidal it would be for the Federation or even the borg to invade any Star Wars civilization; let's say the Galactic Alliance.

Ok, so they get dropped off in wild space. Oh, they don't have any maps! Ok, so they could by some by posing as simple travelers (this might be hard for the borg to do, but let's be fair).

Ok, so the major Star Wars planets are near the galactic core...which is tens of thousands of light years away.

*a year or two go by* So the Federation/the borg have arrived at a major Star Wars planet with a fully mobilized fleet.

"sir, there's a planetary shield protecting the planet!" "Oh my! Fire at it!" They fire at it, but it does no damage, as even a quickly constructed Rebel theater shield could withstand sustained bombardment from the Executor.

"sir, these massive ships are appearing!" A group of several star destroyers come. Realistically, a single one would annihilate the entire Federation or borg fleet, but even if Star Trek somehow wins, they'd quickly be faced with a growing number of ships appearing at extremely fast rates, orbital defense systems and ground based defense systems.

By this time, the Star Trek invasion fleet is doomed. However, even if they somehow defeat the vastly more powerful Star Wars fleet, they still cannot get past the planetary shield. And even if they somehow get past the planetary shield, they still can't defeat the formidable Star Wars ground forces and keep control of the planet, which for major Star Wars planets has populations in the hundreds of billions, Corsucant having over a trillion. Oh my! They're trying to govern a planet with skyscrapers that dwarf mountains, thus allowing for an enormous amount of space for guerrilla warfare, and with a population perhaps larger than the entire Federation!

Oh, but then they'll face constant counterattacks from Star Wars fleets of astronomical sizes. Then they'll have to somehow sustain a supply line and go on to futilely attack more Star Wars planets, when a single developed potentially outnumbers the entire Federation.

Oh, and then the Federation will have to leave behind a garrison of ships and troops if they somehow capture a planet; a formidable one at that, since the defending fleet would not be able to expect help from the relatively slow Federation ships when being attacked by hyperdrive capable Star Wars ships, meaning that each planet garrison would have to be large enough to fend off a full scale attack from the Star Wars galaxy.

On the ground, Federation redshirts, even if they somehow manage to take over a planet, would be governing a population while maintaining what would be at best for the Federation a 1:100,000 garrison:population disparity. So for every redshirt, there would be 100,000 civilians each one would have to keep in line. Fighting a guerrilla war against a civilian base that outnumbers you 100,000 to one and has superior weapons technology is completely ridiculous.

Star Wars has about 100 quadrillion civilians. Assuming 1 million developed worlds, this is about 50 billion people per planet, maybe a bit smaller if you include the less developed planets. Even if we were to make the extremely generous assumption that each of the 150 member worlds of the Federation had 1 billion people; which is absurd, given that many Federation planets have populations below 1 million, that's 150 billion people, meaning that the entire Federation is outnumbered by a single major and largely populated Star Wars planet such as Coruscant. Even if we were to assume a 1:100 soldiers to civilian ratio for the Federation, even though the Federation is not heavily militarized and such a ratio is larger than the USA's ratio, that's 1.5 billion redshirts the Federation has as an absolute upper limit. Even if we assume that the Federation sent all their soldiers on this invasion (notice the huge amount of generous assumptions?, that's about 100,500 Federation troops per Star Wars planet. Given the 50 billion average civilian count per Star Wars planet, a Federation occupying force would have a soldier:civilian ratio of about 1 to 497,512.438.

So even if we were to assume ridiculously generous and ridiculously high end figures for the Federation, and that they'd somehow have the logistical capability to send their entire ground force across a large galaxy, they'd have to have every redshirt govern about 500,000 civilians. More evenly, the likely ratio would be 1:several billion.

This is still assuming that the Federation could somehow get past a Star Wars planetary shield, which they can't. Therefore, the result of a Federation invasion is that the invasion fleet gets wiped out in their first battle.

Also, do you have any objections to me posting this debate on the internet? I probably won't post it to stardestroyer.net (although I might), most likely spacebattles.com, and I promise that I won't spin doctor it, add in obviously biased editor's notes, or anything like that.









Not overSTATED, overDETERMINED. Within the Star Wars hexology itself, we have virtually no information about speeds. There are two distances given - "less than a parsec" and "hundreds of light years" - and the passage of time has to be inferred from the sequence of events. In all cases, that passage of time is under dispute, as you can see just by reviewing ST-v-SW.net's take on the subject ( http://st-v-sw.net/STSWaotcparsec.html and http://st-v-sw.net/STSWendorday.html ). Thus, hyperdrive speeds are underDETERMINED - we don't have enough information to offer more than wild-ass guesses (known as WAGs for short) without going into the EU.

Within Star Trek and the Star Wars EU, we have too much information - we have so much information, in fact, that it is contradictory. In "Heir to the Empire," Luke's X-wing travels half a light year in ten minutes (26,000c). In "Tyrant's Test," an Interdictor's top speed is firmly established as being less than 200,000c. At that speed, crossing the galaxy takes six months(!).

However, other parts of the EU suggest that Mustafar and Coruscant are most of the galaxy apart, and that information suggests hyperdrive speeds in the range of 10,000,000c or more. We can develop more examples on both ends, but the end take-away is that it's not consistent.

In Star Trek, we have the same issue of inconsistency that we do in the Star Wars EU. Regardless, though, while the low outliers for ST warp speed are generally lower than the low outliers for SW hyperdrive, the high outliers aren't far apart. In STV, the Enterprise clocks a speed of around 50 million times the speed of light.

What constitutes a "medium" showing in Star Wars: Hundreds of thousands to single digit millions of times lightspeed. This is an order of magnitude below the highest showings in Star Trek, and in the same order of magnitude as common cases such as "Arena," "The Chase," "Obsession," et cetera. The speeds seen in the Thrawn books, for example, would fit neatly into DS9 for short-range and within-Federation travel.


>1. Hey, this is strange. You're stating that warp drive is OVERSTATED in Star Trek, and that Star Wars EU UNDERSTATES hyperdrive? You do realize that this would support Star Wars, right?
>Star Trek does have variable warp speeds, but even their highest showings are orders of mangitudes lower than the medium showings from Star Wars. Even the CWC, which pro Trek debaters cite as one of their primary criticisms of Star Wars capability, gives hyperdrive a speed in at least the hundreds of thousands of C.

Look at the episode listings.

ENT:
"Silent Enemy": Enterprise engages at up to 200 km.
"Extinction": Urquat engage at 700 km.
"The Beach": Enterprise threatening a planet's surface and threatened by orbital batteries 600 km from it.
"Stormfront": A damaged Enterprise has trouble hitting targets from 100 km away.
"The Aenar": The Enterprise locks onto an enemy vessel 100 km away.

TOS:
"Changeling": Enterprise hits small probe at 90,000 km and vice versa.
"The Tholian Web": Tholians stand off at 90,000 km, threatening the Enterprise.
"Spectre of the Gun": Enterprise ready to shoot before target closes to 45,000 km.
"Spock's Brain": Enterprise ready to shoot before target closes to 43,000 km.
"Journey to Babel": Weapons fired just after a range of 75,000 km is called.
"The Deadly Years": Assorted ranges reported 50,000-100,000 km for attacking Romulan ships.
"Balance of Terror": Romulan plasma torpedo pursues warp-speed target for several seconds, implying range well over several light-seconds.
"The Alternative Factor" High orbital strike on a small target.
"A Piece of the Action" Another orbital strike from far out of sight.

TNG:
"A Matter of Honor" - Riker refers to 40,000 km as an unusually close range to fire at.
"The Wounded" - Cardassians and USS Pheonix exchange fire at 300,000 km.
"Skin of Evil" - high orbital torpedo strike.
(10 km ranges are also contradicted in "Legacy," "A Matter of Time," and "Inheritance" just due to drilling depth.)

DS9:
"The Search": 100,000 kilometres is "well within range" of the Jem'Hadar ships' weapons.
"Return to Grace": Cardassian system defence disruptors have a range of over 200,000 kilometres; targeting sequences may begin at 400,000-500,000 kilometres.

VOY:
"Caretaker": Voyager locks on tricobalt devices at 400 km.
"Ex Post Facto": Voyager locks onto Numiri at more than 4,000 km. Fires at 1,500 km. Numiri engage tractors at 2,000 km.
"The Swarm": Voyager arms phasers at 100,000 km, fires before 7,000 km.
"Non Sequitor": Nebula class ship knocks out Harry Kim's shields while still 5,000 km away.
"Equinox": Voyager shoots Equinox at 30,000 km.

If you're counting, that's twenty episodes involving ships as targets of weapons from 100 + km. Twenty. That's a non-negligible number. All of which are mentioned in the articles. I can't come up with a half dozen cases in which a ship is considered too far away to be hit.


>2. With all due respect, your wiki doesn't have any citations supporting it. In particular, you claim gigaton max yield levels for photon torpedos when they clearly do not demonstrate anything near this level of yield, meaning that either the potential yield calculations (which you did not cite) are off or ST weapons are not that efficient.

>In terms of weapons range, we do see some examples of Star Trek ships firing at extreme ranges, but most of the time they do not show this capability. Examples:

>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJZbCNexctc

>Here, Federation ships are moving within what appears to be a matter of hundreds of meters to hit a giant borg cube. The borg cube was strangely only firing at one ship at a time, and the Federation weapons were only causing not even kiloton level explosions, even when hitting the insides of the borg cube.

>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJZbCNexctc

>Here, Star Trek ships are yet again fighting in very close ranges. Their weapons are also causing rather small explosions when penetrating a ship. Take a look at the ship exploding from around 0.02 to 0.03.

Do we know why the action happens at close range? Yes, out of universe: It's to make for a nice dramatic picture. In universe? We just don't know why these ships often choose to close to knife-fighting range.

Now, regarding yields, weapons yields are demonstrated pretty neatly against inanimate objects in the phaser drilling cases, "Rise," and "Skin of Evil." Those are benchmarks. We can't use damage to ships as a very good benchmark, because almost all ships have structural integrity fields up even when shields are down, and most are constructed of absurd materials we don't know the properties of very well. Tritanium stays solid at twelve thousand degrees, for example.


>Now compare it to the explosion here:
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cU0BYXl ... re=related
>At around 0.57 to 0.59. Remember to scale; that is, that the ship destroyed was FAR larger than the ship destroyed in the other video. That attack wasn't even from the turbolasers of the star destroyer; it was from a SPHAT inside its hanger.
>Therefore, the SPHAT's shot was able to make an explosion several times larger than several starships with their supposedly megaton level torpedos could do, and the SPHAT isn't even a ship! The SPHAT's main gun also appears to be unidirectional based, and yet STILL has a larger AoE radius than an omnidirectional torpedo.


Are you looking at the same video I am? At 2.50 or so, please note the giant city-engulfing nuclear fireballs that crop up around 2.50 or so.


>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN5cR_1Y ... re=related
>At around 2.15, there are eventually weapons fired that...blow medium sized holes in skyscrapers, maybe at modern day bunker buster level. Then, the heavy weapons come in...and cause kiloton level damage. So much for hundreds of megaton yields for photon torpedos, eh?

Scaling icons is no good.


>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_EyBgja ... re=related
>Near the beginning of the video, we can see a tactical display. Based on the size of the icons, the battlefield is only a decent amount of kilometers large; and the two fleets aren't even within attacking range! To be fair, the icons might have been enlarged so that the officers could see them. However, then a few seconds later we see dominion ships missing fighters that are almost literally within 10 meters of them.

However bad accuracy may seem in some of the DS9 battles, it is even worse in Star Wars. You might want to look at the number of shots Jango Fett fires in the AOTC chase scene.


>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aARI_GEx ... re=related
>More examples of pathetic Star Trek accuracy. Then, at around 1:35, we see the Federation ships actually trying to rush through the dominion ships. Oh, and the two sides actually MISS each other when they're practically within a few hundred meters of each other. Then, the arriving klingon fleet arrives and attacks from similar ranges. There are more sub kiloton level explosions.
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMGMR_JZ ... re=related
>At around 0:42, the Enterprise is firing at the doomsday machine...from a few hundred meters away?
>By watching those videos, it's clear that Star Trek space battles are not on any comparable scale to Star Wars battles.

Actually, no. The "packing crate" myth is by and large just that - a myth. We've seen beams go straight through crates, as in "Who Mourns for Morn?" Barrels actually capable of stopping fire are generally made of some Treknobabble-tough material, such as duridium. We have seen phasers used on disintegration-level settings often enough for it to be quite striking.


>3. Except that phasers rarely ever show that capability in practical scenarios. Most of the time, they cause small damage and are stopped by packing crates. Possible explanations:
>a. Federation redshirts are utter morons in terms of basic military tactics.
>b. Phasers are impractical when fired at full power, and doing so significantly drains their power.

In the military of the Old Republic, there's an interesting - and troubling - issue: The military is clone-based. There are only so many clones. TCW has made it perfectly clear that Traviss was just toeing the LFL line when she said the Grand Army numbered in the mere millions, and that makes for a pretty small military.

>4. So then it's agreed that the imperial fleet strength is around 25,000 for capital ships. For the Old Republic it was likely somewhat smaller. For the Galactic Alliance it was probably in the thousands based on most estimates.

None that really hold up well to inspection. Regarding SW:DS, I recommend you read this thread:

http://starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=711

In particular the issue being discussed here:

http://starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopi ... 11&p=10514

The Death Star novel shows us very directly what it looks like if the Death Star's beam is divided into even thirds. If it were 1e38 joules, that would be virtually indistinguishable from the Alderaan explosion (just with slightly slower debris). However, even the second hit at third-strength fails to do more than crack the crust.


>5. There are indeed examples of BDZs that have melted crusts and destroyed atmostpheres. As for the Death Star, what is it with trekkies using Star Wars: Death Star as evidence against the 10^38 watts claim? It's based on clear misinterpretations of the text, as Star Wars: Death Star confirms that the hardest part of making the Death Star was making a reactor big enough to fire it; the fact that it phased matter into hyperspace with its superlaser does not in any way imply a chain reaction or a weaker reactor than suggested.

TPM novelization. The precise phrase is "ten thousand Jedi knights active on a hundred thousand worlds," and is echoed in the AOTC novelization, which tells us the Republic "was a vast network of tens of thousands of systems, and even more species, each with a distinct perspective." You can find a similar quote in "Clone Wars 3: Last Stand on Jabiim," an EU source:

"You must remember that there are over a hundred thousand inhabited worlds in the Republic, and there are now only a few thousand of us. Billions of beings have never seen a Jedi. Millions have never even heard of our Order. Or of the Force. When we do appear, we can be killers, but also healers. Thank the Force for that."

The size of the Republic is fairly well established between TPM and AOTC; the "hundred thousand worlds" is fairly compatible with the "tens of thousands of systems," and the way that the CIS was going to split the Republic into two. While there are EU sources that claim a larger number of systems, the fact remains that we've been given an explicit size for both the Old Republic and the Empire in the G canon, i.e., the material that everybody agrees is most authoritative. I consider the fact that SW VS debaters have been trying to push the higher figures at the same time as they ignore colonies and possessions when counting UFP worlds solid evidence that they're just trying to wank Star Wars as hard as possible. It's not as if anybody on the Trek side of the debate is attempting to seriously claim that the UFP is larger than the Empire.

Now, that said, Star Wars has significant issues with industrialization and scale. While there are a lot of worlds in the Empire, most of them don't seem to contribute much to it. A galaxy-wide conflict was fought using less than ten million clone soldiers. Even the Empire's dramatically expanded army and navy amounted to roughly one star destroyer per forty systems (or, to put it another way, one per four core worlds). Even in the EU, a couple dozen star destroyers is a mighty fleet. It's not clear that the Imperial economy is particularly powerful or efficient for its size; Starfleet has in service, as of the Dominion War, about one starship for each SD fielded by the empire, and they're better(!).


>7. Source for the 100,000 systems claim, when iirc the number was closer to a million? Since there are sources referring to 12 million inhabited planets, the 1 million figure is likely for the total number of established planets, which is still an extremely large number.
>Interestingly enough, even given your low end estimates, which discount for the huge popularity disparity in terms of population per planet, a 700 to one advantage in size is absolutely massive. Assuming that it transfers to a 700 to one industrial advantage, which is actually low end given that Star Wars also has the capability of casual galactic trade due to hyperdrives, that's a disparity bigger than the disparity between the United States and Ethiopia. No well informed person would rationally argue that Ethiopia would stand a chance against the United States. A historical comparison is that a 700 to one disparity would be bigger by over 2 orders of magnitude compared to the industrial advantage the Allies enjoyed over the Axis near the end of the war, which many WW2 historians cite as one of the primary reasons why the Allies won.
>To put it in perspective, a fully mobilized Star Wars galactic civilization can produce more tons worth of goods in a year than every Alpha quadrant civilization has in their history.

Planetary shields are at least as common in Star Trek as in Star Wars; your idea of comparative firepower is way off; even your comparison of ship sizes isn't that helpful. We know that a few dozen proton torpedoes - which are generously rated in the kiloton range by some EU sources - can bring down a Star Destroyer. Quite simply, the hexology is totally incompatible with ships that sling more than megatons around at the most, and that's if we're being very generous with the visual effects; the bulk of the EU is no better.

Did you know that a Galaxy class is fully one ninth of the volume of an ISD - and is actually larger than the lighter kinds of star destroyers? A D'deridex is the same overall length as a Mon Calamari cruiser. A Borg cube is comparable in size to a super star destroyer. (And as far as we know, the Borg have millions of ships.)


>8. Hmmm...this is how suicidal it would be for the Federation or even the borg to invade any Star Wars civilization; let's say the Galactic Alliance.
>Ok, so they get dropped off in wild space. Oh, they don't have any maps! Ok, so they could by some by posing as simple travelers (this might be hard for the borg to do, but let's be fair).
>Ok, so the major Star Wars planets are near the galactic core...which is tens of thousands of light years away.
>*a year or two go by* So the Federation/the borg have arrived at a major Star Wars planet with a fully mobilized fleet.
>"sir, there's a planetary shield protecting the planet!" "Oh my! Fire at it!" They fire at it, but it does no damage, as even a quickly constructed Rebel theater shield could withstand sustained bombardment from the Executor.
>"sir, these massive ships are appearing!" A group of several star destroyers come. Realistically, a single one would annihilate the entire Federation or borg fleet, but even if Star Trek somehow wins, they'd quickly be faced with a growing number of ships appearing at extremely fast rates, orbital defense systems and ground based defense systems.
>By this time, the Star Trek invasion fleet is doomed. However, even if they somehow defeat the vastly more powerful Star Wars fleet, they still cannot get past the planetary shield. And even if they somehow get past the planetary shield, they still can't defeat the formidable Star Wars ground forces and keep control of the planet, which for major Star Wars planets has populations in the hundreds of billions, Corsucant having over a trillion. Oh my! They're trying to govern a planet with skyscrapers that dwarf mountains, thus allowing for an enormous amount of space for guerrilla warfare, and with a population perhaps larger than the entire Federation!
>Oh, but then they'll face constant counterattacks from Star Wars fleets of astronomical sizes. Then they'll have to somehow sustain a supply line and go on to futilely attack more Star Wars planets, when a single developed potentially outnumbers the entire Federation.
>Oh, and then the Federation will have to leave behind a garrison of ships and troops if they somehow capture a planet; a formidable one at that, since the defending fleet would not be able to expect help from the relatively slow Federation ships when being attacked by hyperdrive capable Star Wars ships, meaning that each planet garrison would have to be large enough to fend off a full scale attack from the Star Wars galaxy.

Given that a few thousand clonetroopers are considered enough to take over a planet in ROTS, the claim below seems very silly. I'd like you to think about that for a minute: It takes very few clonetroopers to "conquer" a SW planet, and the clonetroopers aren't any more impressive than redshirts.


>On the ground, Federation redshirts, even if they somehow manage to take over a planet, would be governing a population while maintaining what would be at best for the Federation a 1:100,000 garrison:population disparity. So for every redshirt, there would be 100,000 civilians each one would have to keep in line. Fighting a guerrilla war against a civilian base that outnumbers you 100,000 to one and has superior weapons technology is completely ridiculous.

I also question your population figures on both ends. We know, for example, that the Federation anticipated 900 billion deaths as a result of the Dominion War - six times the "upper limit" you've attempted to establish. Most Star Wars planets are pretty lightly populated even in the EU; there are a handful of very heavily populated worlds, but most of them are very important worlds that we've heard of. Other "important" worlds have populations significantly less than 50 billion each.


>Star Wars has about 100 quadrillion civilians. Assuming 1 million developed worlds, this is about 50 billion people per planet, maybe a bit smaller if you include the less developed planets. Even if we were to make the extremely generous assumption that each of the 150 member worlds of the Federation had 1 billion people; which is absurd, given that many Federation planets have populations below 1 million, that's 150 billion people, meaning that the entire Federation is outnumbered by a single major and largely populated Star Wars planet such as Coruscant. Even if we were to assume a 1:100 soldiers to civilian ratio for the Federation, even though the Federation is not heavily militarized and such a ratio is larger than the USA's ratio, that's 1.5 billion redshirts the Federation has as an absolute upper limit. Even if we assume that the Federation sent all their soldiers on this invasion (notice the huge amount of generous assumptions?, that's about 100,500 Federation troops per Star Wars planet. Given the 50 billion average civilian count per Star Wars planet, a Federation occupying force would have a soldier:civilian ratio of about 1 to 497,512.438.
>So even if we were to assume ridiculously generous and ridiculously high end figures for the Federation, and that they'd somehow have the logistical capability to send their entire ground force across a large galaxy, they'd have to have every redshirt govern about 500,000 civilians. More evenly, the likely ratio would be 1:several billion.
>This is still assuming that the Federation could somehow get past a Star Wars planetary shield, which they can't. Therefore, the result of a Federation invasion is that the invasion fleet gets wiped out in their first battle.

I don't mind you posting it as long as you post it accurately. I may, in such a case, copy our discussion onto the SFJ forums. I'd suggest you're more likely to get useful commentary on SB, but if you post it on SDN, you shouldn't have to worry about posters openly taking my side.

You'll probably want to format it in the forum-style with quote tags, and move the replies below what they're replying to, rather than above, as they have been in these e-mails.

>Also, do you have any objections to me posting this debate on the internet? I probably won't post it to stardestroyer.net (although I might), most likely spacebattles.com, and I promise that I won't spin doctor it, add in obviously biased editor's notes, or anything like that.

[Luke Skywalker]

Continued.


I apologize for the wait.

1.

"Not overSTATED, overDETERMINED. Within the Star Wars hexology itself, we have virtually no information about speeds. There are two distances given - "less than a parsec" and "hundreds of light years" - and the passage of time has to be inferred from the sequence of events. In all cases, that passage of time is under dispute, as you can see just by reviewing ST-v-SW.net's take on the subject ( http://st-v-sw.net/STSWaotcparsec.html and http://st-v-sw.net/STSWendorday.html ). Thus, hyperdrive speeds are underDETERMINED - we don't have enough information to offer more than wild-ass guesses (known as WAGs for short) without going into the EU.

Within Star Trek and the Star Wars EU, we have too much information - we have so much information, in fact, that it is contradictory. In "Heir to the Empire," Luke's X-wing travels half a light year in ten minutes (26,000c). In "Tyrant's Test," an Interdictor's top speed is firmly established as being less than 200,000c. At that speed, crossing the galaxy takes six months(!).

However, other parts of the EU suggest that Mustafar and Coruscant are most of the galaxy apart, and that information suggests hyperdrive speeds in the range of 10,000,000c or more. We can develop more examples on both ends, but the end take-away is that it's not consistent.

In Star Trek, we have the same issue of inconsistency that we do in the Star Wars EU. Regardless, though, while the low outliers for ST warp speed are generally lower than the low outliers for SW hyperdrive, the high outliers aren't far apart. In STV, the Enterprise clocks a speed of around 50 million times the speed of light.

What constitutes a "medium" showing in Star Wars: Hundreds of thousands to single digit millions of times lightspeed. This is an order of magnitude below the highest showings in Star Trek, and in the same order of magnitude as common cases such as "Arena," "The Chase," "Obsession," et cetera. The speeds seen in the Thrawn books, for example, would fit neatly into DS9 for short-range and within-Federation travel."

The thing is that, Star Wars sources agree that crossing large parts of the galaxy in Star Wars is no big deal. In Star Wars Clone Wars: Wild Space (novel), Bail Organa and Obi Wan were able to travel in a low profile civilian ship to a planet in wild space without really causing any commotion. This implies that they could travel there and back in a few days at most; note that this is not any fancy ship, but a civilian ship so that they don't draw much attention to themselves. Obviously, Star Wars hyperdrive can allow for travel across the galaxy in at most a few days; anything more would contradict the observable fact that traveling across large parts of the galaxy is not a very big deal for a middle class Star Wars citizen.

In multiple novels, many characters travel across large portions of the galaxy, do stuff, travel back, travel other places and hop around the galaxy...within a single novel. Said novels often times are in the span of only a few weeks or even less. Again, this implies cross galactic travel within in a few days at most.

In AOTC, Obi Wan travels to Kamino, a planet practically unknown to the galaxy at that time and presumably with no hyperlanes, and does not draw much attention to the fact that he's absent. Obviously, if he were gone for a few weeks or even a few days people would wonder where he was, but nobody did.

In some novels, random, low class civilians even brave hyperdrive travels into the far reaches of the galaxy...to meet somebody.

2. Really then? What's your justification for the low end showings then? Obviously it is not due to forced ambushes, or a need to reach a certain point, or anything of the like, because the examples I showed earlier do not involve such circumstances. There is no justification for having to go within a few hundred meters to hit a giant borg cube in those cases other than because their range really is crappy.

3.

"Are you looking at the same video I am? At 2.50 or so, please note the giant city-engulfing nuclear fireballs that crop up around 2.50 or so."

Such explosions are kiloton level. If you want, go look up the tsar bomb. Do you seriously think that those mushroom clouds in the attack on Earth equal the mushroom cloud of the tsar bomb?


"Do we know why the action happens at close range? Yes, out of universe: It's to make for a nice dramatic picture. In universe? We just don't know why these ships often choose to close to knife-fighting range.

Now, regarding yields, weapons yields are demonstrated pretty neatly against inanimate objects in the phaser drilling cases, "Rise," and "Skin of Evil." Those are benchmarks. We can't use damage to ships as a very good benchmark, because almost all ships have structural integrity fields up even when shields are down, and most are constructed of absurd materials we don't know the properties of very well. Tritanium stays solid at twelve thousand degrees, for example."

In vs. debates, we look for an in universe justification unless if there's absolutely no other option. The examples of long range showings do not involve large battles. The close range showings do. Therefore, the reason could be that, for whatever reason, the Federation can't seem to fight large scale battles in long ranges, possibly due to coordination problems.

As for the explosions, we see them hitting the inside of the hull. Therefore, they can still be shown to have a reasonable benchmark, especially since Trek armor is not exactly extremely durable, with its inability to withstand ramming attacks; to be honest, Star Wars hulls aren't that durable against kinetic impacts either, and even darkstar calculates the two to be on par. However, we see a SPHAT overcoming a Star Wars capital ship's ablative hull and blowing it in two in a matter of split seconds. On the other hand, we see photon torpedos taking several shots to penetrate the hull of another ship, and when they do still taking several shots to destroy an obviously far smaller ship. Note that SPHAT's are not even ships; they're ground artillery.


"Scaling icons is no good."

Maybe, except that iirc the movement speed of the icons matching the moving speed showed on screen implies a fairly proportional icon to battlefield size.



"However bad accuracy may seem in some of the DS9 battles, it is even worse in Star Wars. You might want to look at the number of shots Jango Fett fires in the AOTC chase scene."

Jamming, the Force, and the fact that Obi Wan's starfighter was maneuvering pretty darn fast. Jango did indeed hit Obi Wan's starfighter a few times; and when it did, Obi Wan's starfighter showed impressive durability.

"Actually, no. The "packing crate" myth is by and large just that - a myth. We've seen beams go straight through crates, as in "Who Mourns for Morn?" Barrels actually capable of stopping fire are generally made of some Treknobabble-tough material, such as duridium. We have seen phasers used on disintegration-level settings often enough for it to be quite striking."

Explain then, why in firefights the guys don't simply shoot straight through walls, packing crates and other cover to get to the other guys. Are you going to claim that random Trekkie locations have super armor designed in the case of a firefight breaking out?

"In the military of the Old Republic, there's an interesting - and troubling - issue: The military is clone-based. There are only so many clones. TCW has made it perfectly clear that Traviss was just toeing the LFL line when she said the Grand Army numbered in the mere millions, and that makes for a pretty small military."

The most reasonable explanation for this is that the majority of the military was not clone based, and that it was mostly made up of volunteer/maybe drafted troops. This has to be true, or some other explanation; the idea of a 3 million man army fighting a galactic war is absolutely ridiculous. The out of universe example if that Traviss is an idiot when it comes to a basic idea of scale.


"None that really hold up well to inspection. Regarding SW:DS, I recommend you read this thread:

http://starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=711

In particular the issue being discussed here:

http://starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopi ... 11&p=10514

The Death Star novel shows us very directly what it looks like if the Death Star's beam is divided into even thirds. If it were 1e38 joules, that would be virtually indistinguishable from the Alderaan explosion (just with slightly slower debris). However, even the second hit at third-strength fails to do more than crack the crust."

That's actually a good point. Conceded that the Death Star blast was not much more than the minimum needed to destroy a planet. However, we still know that the Death Star did indeed destroy Alderaan. The destruction of the prison planet proves that the superlaser is not some super-fast chain reaction, because it's clearly shown doing extinction level events at only 33% power, such events of which would not be possible via chain reaction.


"TPM novelization. The precise phrase is "ten thousand Jedi knights active on a hundred thousand worlds," and is echoed in the AOTC novelization, which tells us the Republic "was a vast network of tens of thousands of systems, and even more species, each with a distinct perspective." You can find a similar quote in "Clone Wars 3: Last Stand on Jabiim," an EU source:

"You must remember that there are over a hundred thousand inhabited worlds in the Republic, and there are now only a few thousand of us. Billions of beings have never seen a Jedi. Millions have never even heard of our Order. Or of the Force. When we do appear, we can be killers, but also healers. Thank the Force for that."

The size of the Republic is fairly well established between TPM and AOTC; the "hundred thousand worlds" is fairly compatible with the "tens of thousands of systems," and the way that the CIS was going to split the Republic into two. While there are EU sources that claim a larger number of systems, the fact remains that we've been given an explicit size for both the Old Republic and the Empire in the G canon, i.e., the material that everybody agrees is most authoritative. I consider the fact that SW VS debaters have been trying to push the higher figures at the same time as they ignore colonies and possessions when counting UFP worlds solid evidence that they're just trying to wank Star Wars as hard as possible. It's not as if anybody on the Trek side of the debate is attempting to seriously claim that the UFP is larger than the Empire.

Now, that said, Star Wars has significant issues with industrialization and scale. While there are a lot of worlds in the Empire, most of them don't seem to contribute much to it. A galaxy-wide conflict was fought using less than ten million clone soldiers. Even the Empire's dramatically expanded army and navy amounted to roughly one star destroyer per forty systems (or, to put it another way, one per four core worlds). Even in the EU, a couple dozen star destroyers is a mighty fleet. It's not clear that the Imperial economy is particularly powerful or efficient for its size; Starfleet has in service, as of the Dominion War, about one starship for each SD fielded by the empire, and they're better(!)."

First quote: not specifying that the worlds in which the Jedi were active on were all the worlds in the Republic. Some worlds might be simply too far out for the Jedi to possibly govern. This is further supported by the second quote, that confirms that many in the Republic; many as in probably backwater worlds, hadn't even heard of the Jedi Order.
Second quote: systems =/= planets

The thing is, star destroyers are among the largest military vessels in Star Wars. For every star destroyer, there would be many thousands or more smaller patrol craft across the galaxy.



"Planetary shields are at least as common in Star Trek as in Star Wars; your idea of comparative firepower is way off; even your comparison of ship sizes isn't that helpful. We know that a few dozen proton torpedoes - which are generously rated in the kiloton range by some EU sources - can bring down a Star Destroyer. Quite simply, the hexology is totally incompatible with ships that sling more than megatons around at the most, and that's if we're being very generous with the visual effects; the bulk of the EU is no better.

Did you know that a Galaxy class is fully one ninth of the volume of an ISD - and is actually larger than the lighter kinds of star destroyers? A D'deridex is the same overall length as a Mon Calamari cruiser. A Borg cube is comparable in size to a super star destroyer. (And as far as we know, the Borg have millions of ships.)"

Oh, what happened to Earth's planetary shield then? Did it just magically go away?

And where did you get this kiloton figure? EU sources put proton torpedos in as much as megaton or gigaton range.

As for the borg having millions of ships, where were they during their wars with the Federation? The classic Trekkie argument is that they didn't care enough about the Federation to send more than one cube, but I think that you might be able to figure out the accidental concession such a statement is.


"Given that a few thousand clonetroopers are considered enough to take over a planet in ROTS, the claim below seems very silly. I'd like you to think about that for a minute: It takes very few clonetroopers to "conquer" a SW planet, and the clonetroopers aren't any more impressive than redshirts."

Your idea that clone troopers are no more impressive than redshirts is ridiculous, and where is your evidence that a few thousand clone troopers can take over a planet?


"I also question your population figures on both ends. We know, for example, that the Federation anticipated 900 billion deaths as a result of the Dominion War - six times the "upper limit" you've attempted to establish. Most Star Wars planets are pretty lightly populated even in the EU; there are a handful of very heavily populated worlds, but most of them are very important worlds that we've heard of. Other "important" worlds have populations significantly less than 50 billion each."

Conceded that the Federation probably has more people than 150 billion. Sorry, my basis is that almost all noted colonies have populations below one billion. If, however, we take the 900 billion figure and multiple it by 100 to assume a 1% death state, that's still 90 trillion people...against 100 quadrillion? And said statistic would be for the entirety of the participants of the dominion war; most of the casualties are implied to have not been suffered by the Federation. As for the Star Wars side, plenty of EU sources suggest that the mountain sized skyscrapers seen in Coruscant are common among other developed Star Wars planets.










He did not respond.

[Panzersharkcat]

Quote tags are your friends.