Why does the SW vs ST debate still exist?

[Stark]

Man, those early episodes had way more conceptually interesting stuff... way better than the amazingly lame and stupid QUOTE PERCENTAGE NOW crap. They should just overly a hitpoint bar over ships in combat scenes, it'd save time.

[Cesario]

Man, those early episodes had way more conceptually interesting stuff... way better than the amazingly lame and stupid QUOTE PERCENTAGE NOW crap. They should just overly a hitpoint bar over ships in combat scenes, it'd save time.

Maybe Worf got sick of doing the same sort of math over and over again when making his tactical assessments, so he programmed all that math into the computer and made it display a hitpoint bar for him.

Then it caught on, because it makes figuring out exactly how screwed you are in a stressful situation like combat a lot easier.

[mutanthamster]

Batman

Targeting systems:
In Star Wars, guns are mounted in turrets that physically turn to bear on target. The films depict these guns firing and missing a great deal.
In Star Trek, phasers are able to fire instantaneously at any angle. Federation ships hit their targets most of the time and only have difficulty against warp driven targets. Against sublight targets they never miss.

You replied:
Blatant lie. They routinely miss capital ships inside Sidewinder range. Capital ships essentially sitting still. If you're referring to those turrets in ANH, thank you for intentionally ignoring those were capital ship guns firing at fighters.

Blatant lie? Dude, calm down. This whole debate is just harmless fun. I think that you have spent so much time arguing that the Empire is too powerful to be beaten that you have gone over to the Dark Side.

Cheers

[Stark]

Man, those early episodes had way more conceptually interesting stuff... way better than the amazingly lame and stupid QUOTE PERCENTAGE NOW crap. They should just overly a hitpoint bar over ships in combat scenes, it'd save time.

Maybe Worf got sick of doing the same sort of math over and over again when making his tactical assessments, so he programmed all that math into the computer and made it display a hitpoint bar for him.

Then it caught on, because it makes figuring out exactly how screwed you are in a stressful situation like combat a lot easier.

Damage control teams do the same thing! If only there were more debuffs combat might have more steps than 'shoot'.

It's particularly lame because it makes combat a sequential flow like a NES game with one dimension of boredom. Hit point bars + regular system wide failures = Uninteresting combat. Of course, when it isn't the heroes, the rules are different and arguably more interesting, but the shows need time for people to pontificate or exposit.

[Batman]

Tons 'is' a unit of energy

No, it isn't. It's a unit of weight or mass, depending on if you're using the Imperial ton or the metric ton.
Neither of them is a unit of energy.
Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiloton
Notice where it redirects.
TNT equivalent is a method of quantifying the energy released in explosions. The ton (or tonne) of TNT is a unit of energy

You were saying?

To define the tonne of TNT, this was arbitrarily standardized by letting 1000 thermochemical calories = 1 gram TNT = 4184 J (exactly)

ohes noes the real world has a meaning for 'equivalent' explosive energy going back to an arbitrary standard
inconceivable

EVERY unit of measurement is arbitrarily standardized. Thanks for playing.

Note if Worf was quantifying the energy, he'd simply say "the power was xxxx watts".

Err no he wouldn't. He'd say the energy was xyz J, or tons, or kilotons, or whatever unit of energy you would care to use. He'd use watts to quantify the power (which is what he did).

There's no need for additional verbiage or to explain the nature of the weapon.

There wasn't any. Its firepower was a measly 40 MW, that's all.

And I also notice how you cleverly left out the second attack-you know, the 400GW one-which pretty much anybody on the bridge thought to be a serious threat

Why would I quote it? It's the same thing. Do you repeat the setup every time you say something?

That'd be the part where a 400GW beam is apparently enough to kill the big E's shields.

BTW wanna know what happens after this?
PICARD
Damage?

WORF
Superficial -- but I am having
trouble reassembling the shields!

Which means-what, exactly, other then a 400GW beam is apparently enough to drop the Big E's shields?

Batman
You replied:
Blatant lie. They routinely miss capital ships inside Sidewinder range. Capital ships essentially sitting still. If you're referring to those turrets in ANH, thank you for intentionally ignoring those were capital ship guns firing at fighters.
Blatant lie? Dude, calm down. This whole debate is just harmless fun. I think that you have spent so much time arguing that the Empire is too powerful to be beaten that you have gone over to the Dark Side.
Cheers

You're welcome to admit that you're so ignorant of the subject that you genuinely thought your comments to be accurate. And there's SciFi
powers that could roll over the Empire like it wasn't there all over the place (the Who big guys, Xelee, Culture, the Perryverse big ones, heck a lot of the Perryverse 'Younger Races' equivalents). The Federation, whoever, is not among them.

[CrateriaA]

I would reply to this topic, but I'm not a particularly good debater, so I guess I conceded and bow out. But I'm still of the opinion that Star Wars would wipe the floor with Trek. I ask someone to respond effectively to the points made to me.

[Batman]

Ignoring all the other idiocy of your post that means that a measly 400 GW beam actually did damage the Big E, if only superficially. Therefore 400GW is enough to drop, or at least get through her shields.

[Stark]

If the beam was similar to shield limit, it'd down the shields but do superficial damage to the ship. Since they were trying for intimidation, you could say they just really well-judged their shot.

[Batman]

Ignoring

That's what you Warsies do best, isn't it?

No, it's what you Trektards do best.

The same broken record shit over and over again.

Yes. From you. But fine, since you want to go over it in detail...

That a ton is not a unit of energy, and it isn't.
What you just quoted is a "ton of TNT", which isn't the same as ton.

As for determining the energy of an event err yes it is. That's what a megaton being 4,18E15 J is based on. Take it up with the people who came up with the definition.

Similarly, "equivalent firepower [to some unknown thing]" and "power" aren't the same thing.

Yeah. Somebody saying '400GW' totally doesn't mean '400GW', he means 'the 400GW equivalent of him firing pixie dust shield ignoring turns everybody into a unicorn stuff'. 400GW. It dropped their shields.

Here's a real world example. Have you ever bought a fluorescent lamp? At least in my part of the world, the packaging sells them as "60 watt equivalent" or "100 watt equivalent".

Which means the blast was...equivalent to 400 GW. And you do know that example actually only serves to show that while the effects might have been 400GW, the actual firepower was even lower, right?

[Connor MacLeod]

What settings did they have the shields at? Were they at full power? How long do they ramp up to full capacity? How was the 400 gigawatts delivered? A 400 GW beam delivered over a few square cm could be just as effective as a TW or even PW beam over a larger area. We also know they seem to favor optimization of some attacks against anothers (partly the frequency thing, but I imagine other things) - they might be less effective at stoppping particle beams if they are (for example) optimized to block certain kinds of radiation.

[Connor MacLeod]

Semantics is pretty dull. Almost as dull as discussion as to what is canon. Besides why should we assume "equivalent" is important anyhow? If we're going to go that route we could just say "megawatts are actually a unit of energy in Star Trek" because language has changed, time travel fucked up joules and whats, or whatever.

It's not as if 400 GW is particularily vital or anything for trek nowadays. they ave megawatt and GW level beam weapons (TW level something or other) and they had GW level beam weapons back in Enterprise. I doubt they've regressed in all that time.

[Connor MacLeod]

Power doesn't matter. I doubt the power is going to vastly greater than the energy input since they're clearly not delivering the energy in a microsecond, and thats assuming the pulses represent discrete bursts (rather than just pulses along a invisible continuous beam - like a turbolaser!) In any case even after getting hit by the Multi-gigawatt beam of doom the shields didn't stay down permanantly, the apparently kept popping back up after a hit, and they didn't act as if the hits were fearsome or terrible weapons (significant maybe, but not unbeatable.)

Oh yeah and that should be 500 GJ phasers (with the possibility for TJ) rather than power.

[Connor MacLeod]

Besides which the "400 gigawatt" bombardment lasted for several seconds judging by the clip here That actually suggests the energy sustained would be greater since its a sustained bombardment attack.

Edit: I should probably have said "power doesn't matter in this case" given the timeframe operating. I need to really watch how I phrase shit.

[mutanthamster]

No they don't They fight while under Warp drive. Not quite the same thing.

No they wouldn't, as there is exactly zero evidence for that tactic having ever been used. At best, they chase each other at Warp with decidely superluminal relative velocities.

One wonders why they never do that then. Oh wait-they can't. They can duke it out FTL when they're chasing each other, nothing more. Relative velocities are still STL.

That is definitely incorrect. In Star Trek space ships fight at warp speeds, and engage targets that are traveling at impulse speed or even towards each other. A battle between a Star Fleet ship and an Imperial ship would be like a battle between a jet fighter and a WWII propellor driven fighter. This would give Star Fleet a big advantage.

Oh and by they, why don't you compute the time you have to aquire the target, get a firing solution, and fire if you're passing the target at a 100 c.

I would have to concede that firing at 100 times light speed does seem to be an insurmountable challenge in real life, but then this is science fiction. If you only allow for technology that is practical in real life, then rule out warp drive and hyperspace travel altogether; along with phasers, blasters, light sabres and the rest. This seems to be a rejection of an advantage to Star Fleet just through an unwillingness to concede that the Imperial Fleet could be inferior in any way.

[Batman]

That is definitely incorrect. In Star Trek space ships fight at warp speeds, and engage targets that are traveling at impulse speed or even towards each other.

Show me one example where the involved parties were traveling FTL relative to each other.

A battle between a Star Fleet ship and an Imperial ship would be like a battle between a jet fighter and a WWII propellor driven fighter.

No it wouldn't, it would be like a YF-12 at top speed engaging a triplane, only a thousand times worse. Not that this ever actually happened anyway, probably because in a rare bout of clear thinking somebody on the crew realized that the engagement window would be measured in microseconds. Oh, and there's only one o in propeller.

This would give Star Fleet a big advantage.

Yes, in that they couldn't be effectively shot at. Since they can achieve that by simply staying away I'm not sure what the point is as there's no way they're going to land any hits (that are going to do jack shit anyway) that way.

Oh and by they, why don't you compute the time you have to acquire the target, get a firing solution, and fire if you're passing the target at a 100 c.

I would have to concede that firing at 100 times light speed does seem to be an insurmountable challenge in real life, but then this is science fiction. If you only allow for technology that is practical in real life, then rule out warp drive and hyperspace travel altogether; along with phasers, blasters, light sabres and the rest. This seems to be a rejection of an advantage to Star Fleet just through an unwillingness to concede that the Imperial Fleet could be inferior in any way.

No, it's based on the fact that Star Trek ships at least as of the TNG+ era routinely miss each other at single figure km ranges while maneuvering like modern day commercial airliners and they typically require reasonable fractions of a second (if not longer) to get a targeting lock (with decidedly STL relative velocities no less) yet you blithely assume they can acquire, lock, and fire in miniscule fractions of a second while blasting past the target FTL.

Onus to show they can do that is on you.

[Batman]

From BALANCE OF TERROR:

KIRK: Full astern! Emergency warp speed!
(A red plasma blast is heading towards them)
KIRK: Do we have emergency warp?
SULU: Full power, sir. It's still overtaking us. If we can get one phaser working, sir, one shot might detonate it.
KIRK: Navigation?
STILES: Estimate it'll overtake us in two minutes, sir.
KIRK: Phasers, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: Impossible, Captain.
KIRK: Feed this to the space recorder and jettison immediately.
RAND: Captain, should I continue log entry?
KIRK: Yeoman. Affirmative. Continue log entries.
RAND: Yes, sir.
SULU: Ten seconds to impact. Captain, It's dissipating, sir.
STILES: It must have a range limit.
(Rand stands as close as humanly possible to Kirk)
SULU: Five, four, three, two, one. Impact!

Relative FTL speeds, and discussing shooting down an enemy projectile.

As per your say so. []All[/i] it says is they were moving [/i]at[/i] Warp, nothing more. Ability to engage while at Warp was never contested.Relative speeds are completely undetermined.

STILES: We'll enter the Neutral Zone in one minute, Captain.
MCCOY: Do we violate the treaty, Captain?
SPOCK: They did, Doctor.
MCCOY: Once inside, they can claim we did. A set-up. They want war, we furnish the provocation.
SPOCK: We're still on our side, Captain.
KIRK: Let's get them while we are. Before we enter the Neutral Zone. Full ahead, Mister Sulu. Maximum warp.
SULU: Ahead, sir. Maximum.
KIRK: Phasers, stand by.
STILES: Sir, at this distance?

Again, a warp strafe with relative FTL (closing) speeds.

Not from those quotes it ain't.

[Bakustra]

If the plasma torpedo can gain on the Enterprise, and the Enterprise gain on the Romulan vessel, then they are obviously moving at relative speeds to one another and engaging while they do so. Since they are both FTL and FTL speeds are more than single digits, they are almost certainly FTL relative to one another as well.

[Batman]

No? Relative speeds are completely indeterminable from those quotes. Both ships are obviously moving FTL, that was never under contention, but nothing in those quotes shows they were moving FTL relative to each other.

[Bakustra]

No? Relative speeds are completely indeterminable from those quotes. Both ships are obviously moving FTL, that was never under contention, but nothing in those quotes shows they were moving FTL relative to each other.

So they, capable of moving at hundreds up to potentially thousands of times the speed of light, are somehow always within 1c of one another in the course of the episode, and yet the plasma torpedo can overtake the Enterprise quickly rather than over the course of hours despite that tiny discrepancy in velocities. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and guess what yours are?

[Cesario]

and they typically require reasonable fractions of a second (if not longer) to get a targeting lock (with decidedly STL relative velocities no less)

Not that Wars has any room to talk when you're talking about targeting computers.

[Stark]

TOS (and much older scifi in general) didn't have the hard break between 'sublight' and 'FTL' that is de rigeur in scifi these days. You have to keep in mind the context when you're talking about old stuff, and as far as I know the implication is that the Romulan ship is slower, but certainly not sublight only (which would be pretty fucking stupid). I think they were going for the whole diesel-electric submarine thing, but it was the 60s.

The phaser lock concept is an important one becasue while they can sometimes struggle to 'lock on' and it can take some time, once its achieved they have excellent control of their weapons, at least in the ranges shown. That said, non-hero ships miss (like Lakota), so maybe it's not as necessary as they sometimes make out and they're just doctrinally opposed to just banging off and hoping.

[Stark]

Since they're aware of all kinds of internal business in enemy ships, it could be that they're able to detect whatever process is used to 'aim' a phaser strip (magic space fields, or whatever) and know that they're ready to fire. Maybe they didn't need to do this in old stuff, cause they used their mechanical turrets (although they'd know if they were pointing at them too).

I figure the 'lock' business is readying their magic strips to shoot a predicted target, so rapidly moving targets or unknown targets are 'harder' for the computer to work out and ready the weapon. Once they work it out (and 'lock on'), unless something changes the computer will keep it tracked and ready.

[Eternal_Freedom]

IIRC, the E-Nil hits the Reliant without a phaser lock, as they're in the Mutara Nebula and everything sensor related goes squirrely.

SULU: Phaser lock inoperative sir
KIRK: Best geuss mr. Sulu, fire when ready.

LAter Checkov has to use manual targeting for the Torpedoes. And does rather well in fairness to him.

[mutanthamster]

Show me one example where the involved parties were traveling FTL relative to each other.

• Errand of Mercy - Enterprise is en route to a planet when it is attacked by a Klingon ship approaching it. A battle ensues in which the Klingon ship is destroyed by the Enterprise which does not come out or warp and is not chasing the Klingon ship.

• Journey to Babel - Enterprise is en route to a planet when it is attacked by a ship that approaches and passes it at warp 8.

• The Ultimate Computer - the Enterprise traveling at warp speed attacks and destroys a slower vessel.

• Elaan of Troyius - the Enterprise loses warp drive and is attacked by a Klingon ship traveling at warp speed, losing the fight until the Enterprise regains warp speed which it uses to counter attack.

These are all examples of battles at warp speed with speed differentials greater than light speed. (I am sure that there are other examples too, here at least are some.)

So I still say that Star Fleet ships will be able to attack the Imperial Fleet at superlight speeds while the Imperial ships can do battle only at sublight speeds, and that this will give Star Fleet a big advantage.

[mutanthamster]

The more I think about it, being able to fight while traveling faster than light gives Star Fleet an advantage over Imperial ships that cannot be overcome.

In Star Trek we see phasers fired that take several seconds to hit their target. The phasers are fired at warp speed, and accelerate rapidly away from the Enterprise, so phasers must be faster than a star ship at warp. This would give them a range of millions of miles (over 95 million miles for battles at warp 8 assuming only a 2 second range) which seems far greater than the ranges in Star Wars battles.

It seems unlikely that the sublight Imperial ships would know they were under attack until they were hit. And then they would not have the range to fire back.

Also, even if they did fire back, they are firing lasers and Star Fleet ships travel faster than light, so Star Fleet ships fired at by an Imperial ship could simply dodge the Imperial ships' fire. They could even out run it.

It seems difficult to imagine that Imperial ships could hit a Star Fleet ship except by luck.