Worlds Spanner wrote:Hi everyone.
Hello.
But before I start writing here, I have to get something out of the way: regarding the vs. scenario in a philosophic context, I must ask, what do you think Michael and other good sci-fi analysts
do?
Philosophy needn't entail some Kantian subjectivism. Think of how a pragmatist would approach the SW-ST question.
It seems to me that most ST/SW debates occupy too much of a vacuum. Watching videos and trying to calculate turbo laser and phaser output is all well and good, but I feel that it ignores the different spirits of the Star Trek and Star Wars universes, and especially the philosophical differences between the GE and the UFP (which is what I’ll focus on since it’s the classic scenario).
One could argue that there are certain differences in the ethos of the Roman Empire and that of the United States, but what bearing does that have on who'd win?
Furthermore, how do you define "spirit"? Star Trek or SW are greater than the sum of their parts, how?
The point? Yes, GE ground forces > UFP ground forces, but who cares? That doesn’t tell us anything about the technological capabilities of the GE in relation to the UFP, because only one side has even tried (seriously).
That's true, but it's not the only means by which one can compare the technical sophistication of the Empire to the UFP. Indeed, the very
difference in their "philosophies" is a point in the Empire's favor; it is, after all, *war-like*.
I suspect that if they wanted to do so, UFP could develop a technology that would destroy worlds quickly and easily, and if not then some silly script writer would technobabble in a few singularities and temporal shifts and make it happen that way. And it would be cannon if it showed up on screen. But in whining about canon and technobabble I digress. The point is that it doesn’t matter if the UFP could or could not destroy a world, because they wouldn’t.
Then they lose even faster.
Suppose that Star Trek people are right, and turbo lasers are really weak and have tiny ranges. Guess what? It doesn’t matter, because an ISD has tons of them and it looks scary as shit! In fact, it could be argued that it would make sense for the GE to design low yield weapons and put lots of them on each ship – the purpose of the ships is to safeguard the GE against small threats that lack the facilities to build many really serious capital ships (the only ones they do fight, Calamari Cruisers, seem to rely on fighters) and to launch TIE fighters and ground invasion forces. Furthermore, this explains having things like the DS -> it fills a gap in the ISD’s mission, as well as being scary as anything. I realize that here I’m ignoring the BDZ scenario, but my point is that if we try to psychologize the GE it’s more interesting than if we just try to calculate the destructive power of its toys.
Which is akin to playing theoretical semantic games with the Iraqi military rather than assess it with objective figures.
If you were going into a war, which would you prefer to have: a whimsical, subjective description of a craft--e.g., "big and scary with lots of weapons"--or would you like to know
exactly how many guns it has, how powerful they are, how many such ships exist, and so on?
I would prefer the hard figures. This IS a war scenario, so they're appropriate.
The UFP on the other hand (which if you haven’t noticed I’m a little more educated about) was envisioned as a future for our real world. Nuclear war – FTL travel – alien encounters – and boom! Mankind realizes that war is bad and money is evil, and they build a nice utopia and set out to explore and be happy.
If we're to speak truly
"philosophically" about Trek matters, do you not think it's a bit hasty to simply dismiss money as "evil"? That's somewhat similar to what happens in ST:TNG, yeah, but if this is such an utopia, how come it's passed said judgment on money?
I would argue that the UFP represents the utopian ideal, and as such focuses on utopian ideas like love and harmony, and the positive aspects of humans and of individuals (which I’ll come to next). As such, UFP ships are meant to carry out scientific experiments, look pretty so other races aren’t scared, etc, and have the prime directive and so on. Since they aren’t intended to kill and only kill as efficiently as possible, its silly to compare them to something that is.
If you truly believe their starships are designed with aesthetics foremost in mind, you're kidding yourself.
And indeed, it's NOT silly to compare them to dedicated warships. The Federation's fought Borg, Jem'Hadar, Klingons, Romulans, Tholians, Cardassians, Breen--ALL of them have warships.
Now let’s look at the individual factor. Here’s another major area where the good guy / bad guy divide comes into play between the GE and the UFP, and it’s fairly important. GE officers are essentially mindless goons that do as they’re told, follow procedures, and do the sorts of things that their training and responsibility for an ISD force them to.
Mindless goons? They're efficient soldiers in a military that is trying to bring stability to their galaxy. The entire Empire cannot be dismissed as evil, no moreso than one could decide every German Wermacht soldier in WWII was a staunch believer in Hitler's bullshit.
One could just as easily call Starfleeters mindless hippies who, in spite of their smug superiority, are
still racist, still very judgmental, and are so stupid as to
not even fully understand the equipment they operate.
The on screen effect? The human factor is irrelevant. Vader routinely kills officers that fail in their missions, because any other officer would do just as well. This is in keeping with the bad guy image of the GE.
Note your phrasing: "image."
In fact, what’s going on here is the elevation of Picard as the good guy, as the *hero*: the one who comes in to save the day, and his being smarter than everyone else is a plot device to make us like him. The GE doesn’t have any heroes, so there’s no need to make any of their officers less than any of the others.
No heroes at all?
What constitutes a hero, exactly? And how does being heroic save you from a broadside of turbolaser fire?
Let’s look at the potential importance of individuals in the context of my favorite debate, the GCS Enterprise bumps into an Imperator ISD for no reason in the middle of nowhere. The ISD follows standard procedures and starts shooting, since that’s what ISD’s do.
Actually, we don't know that such is Imperial SOP. I seriously doubt they gun down every stray ship they run across.
If I were commanding the Enterprise, knowing what I know about the GE’s agenda and tactics, I’d execute the Picard maneuver to close before long-range fire or TIE’s could harass me and attack the weak area of the ISD’s bridge.
How would you know anything if it's a first-contact scenario? And why is the ISD's bridge "weak" when it's shielded?
I have no doubt that I would destroy the ISD with minimal damage to the Enterprise, and thus fulfill every Federation cultist’s wildest fantasies. But let’s gain some perspective.
If Picard were commanding the Enterprise, he’d try to negotiate, possibly figure out what was going on quickly since he always seems to be at the center of conflicts and he is the good guy and the hero, then slog his way through all of the ISD’s fire and attack it, hitting the bridge (or any weak point) if this week’s script writer had bothered to have a tactical scan done and decided it would be effective, but no doubt getting the Enterprise beat up enough for Geordi to have to roll under the blast door in Engineering, and then maybe the Enterprise would win and maybe the ISD would.
IF it was a real Star Trek episode, the E-D would take a few of the lighter turbolaser hits, lose shields and some crew, then warp away from the scene. They shake in their shoes for awhile, realizing they might face said new threat again someday.
If any schmuck were commanding the Enterprise (or if Picard was having a bad day), he would be unwilling to return fire without knowing everything he could about the ISD. Therefore when the engagement started he would fall back to run a threat assessment, and the TIE’s would come after him. He’d probably shoot a few, or a few dozen, and without bothering to get into the TIE power arguments, I’ll suggest that the Enterprise might be destroyed without ever even engaging the ISD itself.
If they're standard TIE Fighters, I say that's actually unlikely. I also don't think Picard would bother attacking the fighters. He'd retreat.
So what am I saying here? Obviously I didn’t type all of this just to tell you that figuring out terajoules of pretty lights per meter or whatever has no value, because then I’d just be telling all of you that you’re wasting your time and you should go home and never come back here. That would be no fun at all.
I guess that what I’m asking is that we should be aware that both Star Trek and Star Wars are more than just conjectural figures. Making statistical comparisons is fun, but I sort of feel that it rips the soul out of the material that I assume we’re all here because we love.
To a small extent I agree. It's no fun to realize that the entire Federation Starfleet couldn't dent an ISD.
Then again, that's what fan fiction is for.
So why don’t we change it up? Why don’t we have scenarios that take into account human actors and real Star Wars and Star Trek tactics, or a scenario pitting the UFP against the New Republic, so they’re both “good guys?”
I realize that this makes it harder to be objective and thus “prove” that your side is right or wrong, but I think it would be loads more fun.
I realize this has been pretty long, so thanks for reading it,
Worlds Spanner
It makes it utterly impossible to be objective. You have to have *some* kind of footing in reality to make a debate fun, anyway.
) but claiming the UFP has superior firepower is ridiculous, and this site was set up to counter that, hence the focus on numbers.
