Hello n00b! Glad to have someone with your superior intellect amongst us.
I will try to be civil in my reponse, also try to use several (unbiased) sources of information I have to refute your claims.
I will not, at any point of my reply, try to beat some sense into you with a photon two-by-four with a rusty antimatter nadion nail in it.
Andrew Joshua Talon wrote:Ah yes, here it is. The one debate all ST/SW fans must come to terms with at some time: Who would win in a fight between the Enterprise-E and an Imperial Star Destroyer? Fine. My answer is the Enterprise.
Freedom of speech of course, allows everyone to voice their opinions. But also with power comes responsibility.
Now, before you start throwing stones, allow me to defend myself. Let us analyze first the primary means of power for both ships:
Imperial Star Destroyers use REALLY big, powerful fusion reactors as their primary mode of power. Essentially, they have a small sun nestled in their hull. The Enterprise-E, like every other Federation starship, uses a matter/anti-matter annihilation reactor. Let's compare the power outputs first:
It's been stated that an ISD can produce enough energy equivalent to a small sun. Nowhere it says that it actually contains a small sun inside it. It has not been stated that it uses nuclear fusion either.
(snipped attacks on the poor raisin)
Anti-matter is the most efficient and powerful fuel source known in the Universe we know of, in real life as well as in Trek. It doesn't matter if the Star Destroyer's reactor is bigger than the Enterprise's warp core: The Enterprise will always have an equal or higher power output for less mass in comparision.
According to some of my non-technobabble, hard-fiction sourcebooks, a fusion reactor that produces the same amount of energy as an anti-matter reaction would be rougly 5.6 times the size of said anti-matter reactor. Even a fission power plant could produce the same amount of power while being only 20.8 times the size of said anti-matter plant.
Also, the anti-matter annihilation process would consume said anti-matter in the process, and would need refueling every 5 years or so. The fusion reactor, OTOH, would need replacing approximately every 200 years.
You could argue (as has been done numerous times, too many to count) that the Star Trek universe uses a more advanced form of anti-matter. This is akin to stating that they have a more advanced version of helium - which of course can be done adding two spoonfuls of treknology additive to a 1-gallon tank of helium.
Also, from a scientific point of view, the most efficient and powerful fuel source would be a total-conversion device, which transforms solid matter into pure energy, in the amounts stated in the conservation of energy theory (or whatever). Either an anti-matter or fusion reaction only harnesses the heat or particles released by such reaction (matter-antimatter annihilation produces an explosion of some kind -small or large- which is used exactly the same way as a fusion reaction)
Speaking of which, the Star Destroyer IS really frikking big, isn't it? What's the mass, say 50 million tonnes? 60? The Enterprise-E, in contrast, is a mere 3.5 million tonnes. This makes the E-E faster and far more manuverable at sub-light speeds. You can't destroy your enemy if you can't catch them
By that definition, a crop-duster would also be much faster than a Concorde jet. Which is heavier? Which is faster?
On the manoeuvrability point, just replace the Concorde jet with a MiG-29. Which is more manouevrable? That is correct, the MiG. Faster too.
And speaking of methods of destruction, what's the armament on Star Destroyers anyway? A hundred or so turbo laser batteries and ion cannons. Remember WWII? Ships then had scores of anti-aircraft guns all over the deck, intended to put up a cloud of flak to keep aircraft away.
If you ever open a book about WWII or battleships, you'll notice that in addition to flak cannons, they also had main cannons. These were used to bombard other seaships, with *aimed* shots (unless you think they saturated the water with hundreds of 200mm heavy explosive armor-piercing shells, of course). They were also larger than flak cannons, and were placed in a similar fashion as the Star Destroyer main guns (the Heavy Turbolaser Turrets).
Sure, the Empire has better methods of coordination than WWII warships, but the essential thinking is still there: Masses of less powerful weapons to pelt an enemy until it's destroyed.
We agree on this then. They have masses of less powerful weapons to pelt enemy fighters until they are destroyed, to compliment their more powerful main weapons which are used to destroy other large, less manoeuvrable ships.
Keep in mind that the Empire is using lasers: Starfleet uses phasers, which are significantly more advanced than such weapons. Phasers use multiple frequencies of energy that are combined in a catastrophic (for whoever's on the receiving end ^_^) nadion release, degrees of magnitude above a laser. This, coupled with the Enterprise's exceptional power output, would allow her to punch through Imperial sheilding like it wasn't even there.
The Empire uses blasters. Ship-mounted blasters are coloquially called lasers. Large blasters with independent power sources are called Turbolasers. Phasers are phased emissions of radiation, which is a definition that could also be applied to LASERs. (since LASER is also a phased emission of radiation, with a different name. If it weren't phased, it would be out-of-phase, whatever that means). In practice, though, both are sci-fi future-tech made-up energies (blasters and phasers) and the only conclussive evidence of their power are achieved by observed behavior (which one can blow more stuff up, better). I think we all agree that we have seen blasters and turbolasers perform larger feats of power.
Enterprise's exceptional power output couldn't be much larger than a fusion reactor roughly 5.6 times the size of its anti-matter reactor.
Ion cannons? These weapons are designed to launch highly-concentrated bursts of EM at ships in order to burn out their systems, allowing them to be captured.
How many kg of EM is launched in each burst? 5 kg? 10 kg? What is this EM compound you refer to?
Federation sheilding is designed to block out high EM spikes that invariably accompany weapons fire of all kinds, and as we're talking about a smaller target than the Star Destroyer, with a high power output for it's size and a very concentrated sheilding system, the Star Destroyer probably couldn't put a dent in the Enterprise's sheilds.
My spike-suppresor is also designed to block out high electric spikes that go from street electricity to my computer, yet I highly doubt it would withstand a direct blast of lightning if I hung it outside during an electric storm. But anyway, this clears some things out since if all what Federation shields do is filter out spikes, that explains why still a large amount of destructive energy goes thru while the shields are still active and down to 90%.
Since the Enterprise shield is ripped apart by simple ion storms, I highly doubt your claims that the Star Destroyer couldn't put a dent in it. You have been reading too many Trekkie-made crossovers.
Now we're up to our long distance dedi-oops, wrong opener, heh. Next is torpedo technology! The Empire uses proton torpedos, the Starfleet photon torpedos. The difference lies in the warhead type: Proton torpedos are fusion-based, just your average nukes powered by a fusion-charged rocket. Photon torpedos are anti-matter based projectiles designed to operate at faster-than-light speeds. A photon torpedo at Warp 1 will obviously cause more damage to an enemy target than a proton torpedo at say .1c, as the only means of FTL travel in the Star Wars Universe is via jumping into hyperspace, and thus is useless to you if you want to accelerate a projectile in normal space.
Again the fusion vs matter anti-matter argument. Of course since anti-matter is so difficult to contain, you can only store minute amounts of it (the same reason the anti-matter reactor is so small) while a nuclear warhead is basically any size you want. But since you stated that an anti-matter reaction is more powerful than a fusion reaction regardless of size, you could also try to argue that a paper-thin sheet of steel would withstand more damage than a 500-meter thick rock wall, because the steel is more resistant than dirt.
Proton torpedoes are fusion based? I haven't really read that but I'm not very well versed in EU.
If I detonate an H-bomb inside a building, do I release a much smaller amount of energy than by ramming it with the bomb at 500 km/h?
Quatum torpedos (my favorite weapon ^_^) cannot be used at FTL speeds, but they make up for this by being several times more powerful than the standard photon torpedo. They use a zero-point feild generator that phases them into subspace slightly, meaning that when detonated they "snap" a peice of subspace with them, increasing the power of the blast.
But it has been show that subspace interacts poorly with realspace, so a really large amount of power would be lost. In fact these torpedoes were developed only because of the need to overpower the phased-whatever shields of the Dominion, because they wouldn't even make them blink, not because higher firepower requirements.
I wonder indeed what it would look like if a quantum torpedo hit a Star Destroyer. One word comes to mind: Boom ^_^
I agree totally. It would probably produce that effect, whether it hit the Death Star, a Star Destroyer or a world-sized moon. Explosives usually go boom.
And so that's my opinion, that Trek tech kicks Wars tech around the block in combat. If you have objections to anything in this article, feel free to voice them in an intelligent manner. Otherwise, don't say anything and be gone.
How can we even dare to compete with your unbiased, scientific and objective view of the world? We will strive to make ourselves better to reach your high standards.
Thank you thank you thank you...
