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Well it's certainly wanked, with their 'frozen in time' superlasers and nanowank.

By the time of Heretics of Dune, there were machines that allowed FTL without space navigators. They do have no-ships and weapons of the BDZ scale, but doubtful of the scale of Star Wars. However, their use of genetics could produce a number of clone commanders who are very capable.

SirNitram wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:I thought it was established that the Empire could simply wipe out the spice and massively cripple the Duneverse. Wasn't one of the major plot points of the original book the fact that they could effectively hold the entire empire for ransom by threatening to destroy the spice?

Yep. Since they refuse to use computers, they need Navigators to use their FTL drives. Since Navigators rely on being immersed in a solution heavy in Spice, if you simply fry Arrakis, they are crippled and STL.

The FAQ on the Dune site says that the Humans/machines had FTL before the Butlerian Jihad (It just didn't compare to the obscene speed allowed by folding space).
It is canon (Sadly in some cases), and is apparently based on Frank's notes.
However we don't know anything about it other than inter-system travel was fast and not long, and that travelling across the galaxy could be detected (The strike on Earth) and stopped by the machines.

Much, much, much later in the series, they find a non-spice FTL system. But that's ridiculously late in the series.

It happened sometime after Leto 2's demise, though a few thousand years is far along in the series in-universe wise.

Of course, if they'd just stop their infantile hatred of thinking machines, it'd be easy...

Yeah... Let's ignore the fact that most of humanity was enslaved or wiped out, and that "Hunters" shows a surviving Omnius probe coming back to wipe out humans over the universe.
To be fair though, it was humans (The prophet from Teilax and Agamnon and co') that turned the machines into weapons. Problem is when the machines got smart due to the hedonist of the group delegating it too much freedom.
A better analogy would be humans from "Terminator" wanting to smash and 3 laws robots they might encounter, they'd be wrong, but who'd blame them .

Omega Guy wrote:What about the Core and the Arm from Total Annihilation?

Unknown, apparently their resource/industrial capacity is ludicrous (Depleting a Galaxy over a few thousand years), and ground-wise they'd stomp via the nano-wank.
Space-wise we have no idea (Which is the important part), though I do recall a fanfic being made canon which had the Supreme commander having a machine gun firing black holes into orbit or some-such wank (I didn't read it)

Wait, if I recall the last book of the prequels, the FTL was fairly new and the machines did not have it. Prior to that, it was sublight travel with very fast and obviously efficient sublight drives especially if they allowed a ship to traverse light years back and forth for months. Then along came the fold space devices sans the navigation device because they refused to use the device that was constructed to aid navigation.

Of course, but the end of the reign of Leto II, the Ixians were giving serious thought to the idea of navigator machine and by Heretics of Dune we know that the ability to manufacture spice with axolote tanks arrived and the spice supply wasn't as constricted as it used to be.

The thing about Dune shields however, is that they are too darn repulsive and they literally stop dead a lasgun beam cold to the extent you have some subatomic fusion and goes boom. They do however have good "cloaking devices" in the form of no-fields but they apparently suffer a similar problem given that there are no-mines.

Elheru Aran wrote:Define 'competetive'. If you mean by 'on par with', there are a few-- 40K as mentioned before (more powerful infantry, weaker ships) for one. If 'better than', there's shitloads.

Gah!!! I suck, I somehow left "that I know of" out of that post. I meant that there were very few sci-fi verses that I knew of that were competitive with the Empire, but due to stupidity, the crucial words were not typed.

Star wars seems to be in the curious position of being a middle ground sci-fi universe, considerablely stronger then most well known sci-fi, but much weaker then many others, finding those which are actually comparable and is much weaker or much stronger is diffcult.

I say among the well known universes, WH40k does indeed comes closet, matching and at times exceeding on ground, but losing still in space, though the margin is not nearly as large as many others, like ST etc.

OmegaGuy wrote:What about the Core and the Arm from Total Annihilation?

An interesting choice, given the fact that either side is pretty goddamn destructive to an environment on their own, but I hadly think they'd be able to do much in terms of actually defeating a foe in a brick-for-brick battle of quality.

Problem is mostly that the Core and Arm battle came down to the fact that the Core are a bunch of Von Neumann machines and the Arm are frankly pretty psychotic cloners who make even the non-Traviss SW Cloners look like they're working with petri dishes. They pretty much wrecked their galaxy by fighting, but the fact that they never really resolved much of anything for that long time doesn't really prove they were DOING much of great significance.

Also, we hardly see much in terms of offensive power. The most damaging things you can expect to run into are nuke barrages, being on the wrong side of an plasma-firing artillery cannon, or a Commander's D-Gun. The D-Gun, while certainly capable of ripping open anything a SW group could field in terms of physical armor plating, has very nebulous shield penetration capability. And since the rest of the units in the game are pretty reliably eaten by nukes, lasers, and rockets... I don't think we're exactly talking GT-level weaponry here.

The one thing I'd give them is the Core's self-replication ability combined with the Core Commander's matter to energy to matter conversion capability. He can suck up anything he sees, even living matter and the giant building-sized tank the living matter is using to shoot the Core Commander with, and then use that to construct other little robots, or dollhouses, or nuclear power plants. Given that the Nanolathe can assemble anything, given time, and all it requires is power--some of which the commander produces himself--and that the Core Commander can create additional power systems using his Lathe, I think you could create a situation where the Core could field an army of relatively impressively sized evil robots. Unfortunately, I doubt any of them would be capable of doing any damage to nearly anything in Star Wars above the size of a Stormtrooper.

Now, if the Commander had been capable of creating other D-Gun equipped commanders... then that would have been impressive. They don't even seem to have any variety of space force, and launching nukes into orbit against Star Wars vessels is pretty laughable.

--edit--

The Commander DOES need metal to make things, but he can create metal on his own via his own magical energy to matter to energy conversion. You probably could actually compute the amount of power it takes to assemble objects in TA. The first level power plants are Solar. I know game mechanics are never very seriously considered on the forum, but it's just an interesting thing to note in a discussion about the Core versus Anyone.

I know someone who could contend with the Galactic Empire;

Thank you for stating the fucking obvious...or did you fail to read the first fucking post in this thread?

Ghost Rider wrote:Thank you for stating the fucking obvious...or did you fail to read the first fucking post in this thread?

It is painfully obvious that I didn't.


I don't think there's any group outside of the Imperium that could take on the empire. Nothing else that I can think of is of a comparable scale.

Major Maxillary wrote:

Ghost Rider wrote:Thank you for stating the fucking obvious...or did you fail to read the first fucking post in this thread?

It is painfully obvious that I didn't.

Ahahaha... this actually made me laugh out loud. Reminds me of a line I heard... somewhere. I forget. The character had been caught doing something they shouldn't.

"Did you really think you could get away with this?"
"Well it'd be stupid to say yes now..."