Trekkie Argument Cheat Sheet

[RedImperator]

Since I've contributed so very little useful information in this forum before now, I've decided to offer my services and create a cheat sheet with common Trekkie newbie arguments and the Warsie response. I've used only information from the films so as to avoid any "the EU is invalid!" arguments. Feel free to cut and paste, instead of wasting valuable Nazi-flaming time typing out the same rebuttals we've all heard before.

1. ST ships are immune to SW weapons, because SW uses lasers and ST navigational deflectors block all lasers.

Response: SW weapons are not lasers. They travel slower than light (numerous examples). They are visible in a vacuum (numerous examples). They can burst like flak shells (TESB, Battle of Hoth and Milennium Falcon chase scene, before the Falcon entered the asteroid field). Multiple beams can be merged into a single beam traveling at a different angle from its component beams (both Death Stars). It's irrevelant WHAT George Lucas or characters in the movies decided to call them. They don't bear the slightest resembalance to lasers, and therefore they aren't.

Furthermore, the quote in "The Outrageous Okana" was in reference to the weapons carried on two primitive sublight patrol craft. In "Q Who?", the Enterprise-D is carved up "like a roast" by what is described as a Borg cutting laser. In the season 2 episode "Loud as a Whisper", Picard refuses to take the E-D into a war zone where lasers are being used so as not to endanger his ship--a curious reason if Federation starships are totally immune to all lasers.

Finally, even if SW weapons WERE lasers and the navigational deflectors COULD block lasers of any power level automatically, as Mike Wong pointed out, the KENETIC energy of a 700MT turbolaser bolt would be enough to tear the navigational deflector off its hull mounts and slam it into the warp core (see the DS9 Ep. "The Jem'Hadar", where the USS Odyssey's navigational deflector is slammed back into its warp core, destroying the ship, by a Jem'Hadar fighter moving at most at a kilometer per second).

2. The Milennium Falcon is the fastest ship in the galaxy, and it only makes .5 past lightspeed, so the fastest any SW ship can go is 1.5c.

Response: Utter nonsense. Darth Maul traveled from Coruscant in the Core to Tattooine in the Outer Rim (a distance of tens of thousands of light years) in less than a day (The Phantom Menace). The Falcon travels from Tattooine to Alderran (also a Core world) in several hours (ref: In ANH, Han Solo emerged from the cockpit of the Falcon saying "Well, you won't have to worry about those Imperial slugs," implying they'd just recently entered hyperspace, and then adding, "We should be arriving at Alderran at 0200", implying they'd arrive at 0200 the same day, since he never specified a day they'd be arriving, just a time). The Death Star travels from Alderran to Yavin (Outer Rim) in less than a day. (ref: Darth Vader: "This shall be a day long rememberd. It has seen the end of Obi Wan Kenobi, and it shall see the end of the Rebellion.") In ATOC, Obi Wan looks at a map of the SW galaxy and it is clearly a spiral galaxy, not a small irregular or elliptical galaxy. All known spiral galaxies are more than 70,000 light years across, and some are much larger (the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across). The speed of light is not magically faster in the SW galaxy or "a long time ago". Increasing the speed of light would alter countless constants in physics, not least of which increasing the value of "c" in E=Mc^2, which determines how much energy is released by nuclear fusion, and thus how brightly stars shine.

3. The Galactic Empire has only 1000 ships or less. Han Solo said so.

Response: Solo also just stated that the Empire can't destroy a planet (it just did), and later would state that the Death Star wasn't a space station (it was). So he's not infallible. And Solo's exact quote went, "It would take 1000 ships with MORE FIREPOWER THAN I'VE EVER--" (emphasis mine). The quote is cut off because a TIE fighter flies past the cockpit, but it could easily be interpreted to mean "It would take 1000 ships of a type far more powerful than anything the Empire has". This would, in fact, be partially correct--except it only took one gargantuan ship with firepower millions of times greater than the largest Imperial warship. Or, Solo could have just been babbling because he'd emerged from hyperspace expecting to see one of the premier planets of the galaxy and found a debris field that nearly pummeled his ship into fragments. If you were piloting a small plane through fog over say, Lake Michigan, and you emerged from it over where Chicago was supposed to be and there was nothing but a smoking crater there, would YOU be capable of making coherent statements about anyone's military capabilities or fleet sizes?

And how, exactly, did the Empire rule, through fear and sheer military force, an entire galaxy with only 1000 ships? In an average sized spiral galaxy, that equals one ship for every 100,000,000-4,000,000,000 star systems. Tarkin explicitly states there are 1 million systems in the Galactic EMpire, presumably full member systems, since it's not likely he'd need a Death Star to cower uninhabitable systems with M, A and O class primaries into submission. With 1000 ships, that's 1 ships for every 1000 worlds, and that number gets even more ridiculous if you consider that the Imperial fleet isn't composed entirely of Star Destroyers--there should be many smaller vessels for each single destroyer.

4. Wars uses primitive fusion to generate power, while Trek uses M/AM reactors. Trek ships are therefore more powerful.

Response: It doesn't matter what type of fuel they use (and it's impossible to generate the power levels observed in Wars using nuclear fusion, anyway). All that matters is the OBSERVED, MEASUREABLE output of Imperial ships and weapons as compared to that of Federation (or Klingon, or Dominion, or Borg, or anyone else) ships. And that absorbed output is orders of magnitude greater than anything we've seen in Trek (ref: TESB asteroid vaporization scene, TIE fighters which fragment in high speed asteroid collisions being vaped by weapons fire in all three movies, DS1's planet-shattering blast, DS2 utterly vaporizing kilometer long MonCal warships at Endor).

5. I have one argument which will prove Trek bets Wars once and for all blah blah blah my head is in my colon blah blah blah.

Response: Read the website, fucktard. Your brilliant arguments have been seen and refuted before. The Wars position is grounded in an understanding of science, engineering, and military history. Yours is grounded in fanboy wanking. And even if you DO manage to win one argument, do you really think you alone amongst all who debate for Trek are going to be the one who overturns a mountain of evidence gathered over a period of years? You're as arrogant as you are stupid.



These seem to be the four most common Trektroll arguments, plus one generic one for any outlandish Darkstarish theories that come up. It makes sense these are common because if they were true, they'd devastate the Wars side as thoroughly. Unfortunately, they're not. Like I said in my intro, I tried to stick to the movies only to avoid any pointless arguments about what's allowable and what's not (and the EU only really serves to increase the severity of the Imperial blanket party, anyway). Feel free to add more or correct me if I'm mistaken. (Thanks to Mike Wong for the ST canon database and the point about kinetic energy and shields, as well as SD.net in general).

[EmperorMing]

Suggestion:

You might want to clarify that quote in "The Outrageous Okana" with the dialogue before and after that quote. After reading it somewhere's else it would seem Trekkies are taking it out of context.

[Failed Glory]

Response: Read the website, fucktard. Your brilliant arguments have been seen and refuted before. The Wars position is grounded in an understanding of science, engineering, and military history. Yours is grounded in fanboy wanking. And even if you DO manage to win one argument, do you really think you alone amongst all who debate for Trek are going to be the one who overturns a mountain of evidence gathered over a period of years? You're as arrogant as you are stupid.

I agree that these arguments are old and stale and I've been here all of a month.

However, I do have a problem with that one sentence.

Science is defined as the state of knowing; knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding. You cannot fully explain a turbolaser, so please don't say your arguments are based on science.

You can't build a turbolaser nor a solar reactor so please don't say that these arguments are based on sound engineering.

Military history changes. I would hope by the 50,000 odd years the Empire is ahead of our technology, that we aren't using the same technology or tactics.

Both Sw an ST arguments are based on fiction and nothing more. The fiction quoted for SW is far more powerful than ST. That is all. No science, engineering, nor current military history are involved and should be considered non-sequitor arguments.

[Next of Kin]

Both Sw an ST arguments are based on fiction and nothing more.

Really? Who made this startling revelation!

[Master of Ossus]

Response: Read the website, fucktard. Your brilliant arguments have been seen and refuted before. The Wars position is grounded in an understanding of science, engineering, and military history. Yours is grounded in fanboy wanking. And even if you DO manage to win one argument, do you really think you alone amongst all who debate for Trek are going to be the one who overturns a mountain of evidence gathered over a period of years? You're as arrogant as you are stupid.

I agree that these arguments are old and stale and I've been here all of a month.

However, I do have a problem with that one sentence.

Science is defined as the state of knowing; knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding. You cannot fully explain a turbolaser, so please don't say your arguments are based on science.

You can't build a turbolaser nor a solar reactor so please don't say that these arguments are based on sound engineering.

Military history changes. I would hope by the 50,000 odd years the Empire is ahead of our technology, that we aren't using the same technology or tactics.

Both Sw an ST arguments are based on fiction and nothing more. The fiction quoted for SW is far more powerful than ST. That is all. No science, engineering, nor current military history are involved and should be considered non-sequitor arguments.

A better statement might have been "Pro-Wars positions are based on OBSERVATION."

[Kuja]

But this has been a very good thread anyway.

[Master of Ossus]

But this has been a very good thread anyway.

Agreed. It was necessary and proper.

[Kuja]

Thank you.

[Failed Glory]

A "startling revelation" that seems to be forgotten at every turn when discussing any subject when defending a position with unsubstantiated claims of superior science and engineering.

As has been pointed out, observation and canon are more than enough to destroy all the aforementioned ST arguments without breaching the gap and claiming that fiction is science. It places doubt in your writing by appearing to necessitate a claim of legitimacy.

Anyways, it's a fool's argument. Thanks again for the thread. It should become mandatory reading before signing up to avoid dead issues.

[Kuja]

the trekkies would just click through it.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

A nice overview of the dumbest Trekkie arguments. I'm sure we all miss the days when that was all they spewed out...

[SWPIGWANG]

Ha you forgot so much stuff.

6. Wars targeting have no chance against FTL warp strafing as it is canon that their weapon can not hit fighter sized targets at no more than 100 meters moving at low speed.

7. phased cloaked uber-connie genesis torpedo ship of doom shall win

8. ST engineers are capable of reality twisting with technobabble and defeat SW warships by remoduating the subspace phased frequency to interact with quantum siguarity to cause a combinatory energy surge within SW shields causing them to be ineffective.

9. Rocks > ISD

[thecreech]

you also forgot that because star trek is more realistic that means that the weapons would be more powerful... Yes i have had a trekkie tell me that

[SWPIGWANG]

hey, at least it is not 103245421234yottaton phasers

[jegs2]

Most trekkies pull out the trusty "two million plus borg cube bum rush," and say that their sheer numbers would overwhelm Imperial defenses.

[CmdrWilkens]

Ha you forgot so much stuff.

9. Rocks > ISD

That one's the easiest though. Response is simple:
1)Shield's were down, they have to be to communicate via Holonet like they did.
2) The ship wasn't killed, hell the bridge is still there its outline is visible in unaltered form moving against the Executor.
3) "Continuous" barrage of asteroids whihc were like "muilti-megaton compresion bombs"

That should shut them up quickly enough.

[seanrobertson]

Since I've contributed so very little useful information in this forum before now, I've decided to offer my services and create a cheat sheet with common Trekkie newbie arguments and the Warsie response. I've used only information from the films so as to avoid any "the EU is invalid!" arguments. Feel free to cut and paste, instead of wasting valuable Nazi-flaming time typing out the same rebuttals we've all heard before.

1. ST ships are immune to SW weapons, because SW uses lasers and ST navigational deflectors block all lasers.

Response: SW weapons are not lasers. They travel slower than light (numerous examples). They are visible in a vacuum (numerous examples).

Hmm...not necessarily, Red. They're not "just" lasers, but they do
have a lightspeed component (AOTC _ICS_). You'll want to file
that away before someone surprises you with that one.

They can burst like flak shells (TESB, Battle of Hoth and Milennium Falcon chase scene, before the Falcon entered the asteroid field).

Hmm...I still dunno about the flak burst thing. What if those are
just turbolasers exploding against deflectors? So far as I know,
there's no canon indication that all Wars shields maintain a certain
distance from their respective hulls, or that they aren't somewhat
"reactive." You might talk to Brian Young about this; he's studied
it far more than I have. (His e-mail address is available through
the link in my signature.)

Multiple beams can be merged into a single beam traveling at a different angle from its component beams (both Death Stars). It's irrevelant WHAT George Lucas or characters in the movies decided to call them. They don't bear the slightest resembalance to lasers, and therefore they aren't.

That's a nice way to put it. I disagree with the idea that they don't
bear any likeness to lasers whatsoever, though, so you might
want to change that to accomodate the _ICS_ a bit better.

Furthermore, the quote in "The Outrageous Okana" was in reference to the weapons carried on two primitive sublight patrol craft.

True. That's actually fleshing out the context more than is necessary,
however, if you heard the contempt in Worf's voice when he said the
word, "lasers." That episode did indicate that nav deflectors would be
very resilient to laser beams--not just the type put out by that extremely
primitive craft. (Btw, I don't think they were sublight craft, but I could
be wrong. That's also a bit beside the point. If the United States
and former Soviet Union built a spacecraft that carried those nations'
nuclear stockpiles mounted on missiles, it'd certainly be *sublight*
but its inventory would amount to over a gigaton.)

Infinitely resistant? Obviously not. Given the function of nav deflectors,
which extend supposedly several hundred meters to kilometers ahead
of the ship to push dust and micro-meteorites out of harm's way,
it's amazing that they'd even STOP a laser. Why would they?

Anyhow, they do, but I also fail to see why this point is relevant.
If Wars lasers are only so in a lexical sense, why talk about how
the E-D stands up to laser beams? It seems as if you almost
don't believe what you said regarding the whole thing of turbolasers
*not* being lasers.

In "Q Who?", the Enterprise-D is carved up "like a roast" by what is described as a Borg cutting laser.

After their shields were down.

In the season 2 episode "Loud as a Whisper", Picard refuses to take the E-D into a war zone where lasers are being used so as not to endanger his ship--a curious reason if Federation starships are totally immune to all lasers.

No, because those ships were *also* armed with particle beams and
rockets.

Finally, even if SW weapons WERE lasers and the navigational deflectors COULD block lasers of any power level automatically, as Mike Wong pointed out, the KENETIC energy of a 700MT turbolaser bolt would be enough to tear the navigational deflector off its hull mounts and slam it into the warp core (see the DS9 Ep. "The Jem'Hadar", where the USS Odyssey's navigational deflector is slammed back into its warp core, destroying the ship, by a Jem'Hadar fighter moving at most at a kilometer per second).

As I recall, the most critical damage to Odyssey was when a superheated fragment from one of its nacelles slammed into the engineering hull. Nailing the nav deflector alone won't necessarily
blow up the ship, though a 700 megaton laser probably would do
the job.

Anyhow, Red, before you go much further, please note the criticisms
above. They're not meant to undermine your conclusion--I agree
with it whole-heartedly--but I *do* disagree with some of your premises.
The fact remains, lasers never harmed a shielded E-D throughout The
Next Generation. Someone might try to stuff me full of straw in saying,
"Well, Sean, so you think lasers can't hurt them?!" but that'd be *their*
stupidity for saying so, not mine.

I'm not saying anything of the aforementioned variety. But it IS
important to have your facts straight, to minimize the irrelevant
extra details (e.g., "primitive sublight ships," which does not speak
to their armament at all...it intimates it's subpar, but that's a guess),
and to focus on one thing: even if the nav deflectors could "block"
lasers of any power, they wouldn't block turbolasers because they're
NOT purely laser weapons. That's all that needs saying...you could
add the bit about how the nav deflector would ultimately be ripped
off by so much laser power, even if it DID stop the lasers altogether,
but that's superfluous IMO.

2. The Milennium Falcon is the fastest ship in the galaxy, and it only makes .5 past lightspeed, so the fastest any SW ship can go is 1.5c.

Response: Utter nonsense. Darth Maul traveled from Coruscant in the Core to Tattooine in the Outer Rim (a distance of tens of thousands of light years) in less than a day (The Phantom Menace). The Falcon travels from Tattooine to Alderran (also a Core world) in several hours (ref: In ANH, Han Solo emerged from the cockpit of the Falcon saying "Well, you won't have to worry about those Imperial slugs," implying they'd just recently entered hyperspace, and then adding, "We should be arriving at Alderran at 0200", implying they'd arrive at 0200 the same day, since he never specified a day they'd be arriving, just a time). The Death Star travels from Alderran to Yavin (Outer Rim) in less than a day. (ref: Darth Vader: "This shall be a day long rememberd. It has seen the end of Obi Wan Kenobi, and it shall see the end of the Rebellion.") In ATOC, Obi Wan looks at a map of the SW galaxy and it is clearly a spiral galaxy, not a small irregular or elliptical galaxy. All known spiral galaxies are more than 70,000 light years across, and some are much larger (the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across). The speed of light is not magically faster in the SW galaxy or "a long time ago". Increasing the speed of light would alter countless constants in physics, not least of which increasing the value of "c" in E=Mc^2, which determines how much energy is released by nuclear fusion, and thus how brightly stars shine.

That's good. IIRC, there's a source that indicates the Wars galaxy
is BIGGER than ours, roughly 120,000 ly in diameter.

Also, rather than focus quite so much on the no. of hours or days required to traverse certain distances (which you'd have to substantiate with an official map; otherwise, the hard-core Trekkies won't accept it), or in *addition* to that, you might simply note that travelling at 1.5c would
be an awful slow journey just to the CLOSEST STAR, let alone covering
any meaningful territory; e.g., Solo's quote to the effect that he'd
been from one side of the galaxy to the other, and he'd never seen
"anything" to make him believe in the Force, etc.

3. The Galactic Empire has only 1000 ships or less. Han Solo said so.

Response: Solo also just stated that the Empire can't destroy a planet (it just did), and later would state that the Death Star wasn't a space station (it was). So he's not infallible. And Solo's exact quote went, "It would take 1000 ships with MORE FIREPOWER THAN I'VE EVER--" (emphasis mine). The quote is cut off because a TIE fighter flies past the cockpit, but it could easily be interpreted to mean "It would take 1000 ships of a type far more powerful than anything the Empire has". This would, in fact, be partially correct--except it only took one gargantuan ship with firepower millions of times greater than the largest Imperial warship. Or, Solo could have just been babbling because he'd emerged from hyperspace expecting to see one of the premier planets of the galaxy and found a debris field that nearly pummeled his ship into fragments. If you were piloting a small plane through fog over say, Lake Michigan, and you emerged from it over where Chicago was supposed to be and there was nothing but a smoking crater there, would YOU be capable of making coherent statements about anyone's military capabilities or fleet sizes?

And how, exactly, did the Empire rule, through fear and sheer military force, an entire galaxy with only 1000 ships? In an average sized spiral galaxy, that equals one ship for every 100,000,000-4,000,000,000 star systems. Tarkin explicitly states there are 1 million systems in the Galactic EMpire, presumably full member systems, since it's not likely he'd need a Death Star to cower uninhabitable systems with M, A and O class primaries into submission. With 1000 ships, that's 1 ships for every 1000 worlds, and that number gets even more ridiculous if you consider that the Imperial fleet isn't composed entirely of Star Destroyers--there should be many smaller vessels for each single destroyer.

Very good.

4. Wars uses primitive fusion to generate power, while Trek uses M/AM reactors. Trek ships are therefore more powerful.

Response: It doesn't matter what type of fuel they use (and it's impossible to generate the power levels observed in Wars using nuclear fusion, anyway). All that matters is the OBSERVED, MEASUREABLE output of Imperial ships and weapons as compared to that of Federation (or Klingon, or Dominion, or Borg, or anyone else) ships. And that absorbed output is orders of magnitude greater than anything we've seen in Trek (ref: TESB asteroid vaporization scene, *TIE fighters which fragment in high speed asteroid collisions being vaped by weapons fire in all three movies*, DS1's planet-shattering blast, DS2 utterly vaporizing kilometer long MonCal warships at Endor).

Err...now that's taking it a bit too far. The asteroid vaporization scene
is certainly not beyond Trek's abilities. I don't understand the lines I denoted with *s, so I won't comment on them.

I also disagree that "Trek" in general--which is what I assume you're
contending, since you didn't specify any one organization--couldn't
"utterly vaporize" klick long Mon Calamari ships with single shots.
There are certainly powers in Trek that *could* pull that off.

I'd limit the power-centered commentary to the Death Star's ability to blow up planets with apparent ease...it starts to sound greedy when you resort to making flimsy contentions such that no Trek ship could vaporize a small asteroid/put out a few thousand terajoules with one shot. I'd leave that off; frankly, it's not true, and even if it was, it wouldn't support the position any better than simply saying, "Death Star, Death Star, Death Star!" over
and over again.

[phongn]

Most trekkies pull out the trusty "two million plus borg cube bum rush," and say that their sheer numbers would overwhelm Imperial defenses.

Just pull out the Marina O'Leary Fleet Estimate in response

[The Yosemite Bear]

Star Trek vs. Star Wars RTS

lol

Borg Rush

Wait, what's that line of Golon platforms doing destroying all of those cubes, darn those fixed defenses.

[Master of Ossus]

Flak burst effect was seen clearly in RotJ when not connected even remotely with starships. It is clearly not an effect of shields and turbolasers.

[CmdrWilkens]

Most trekkies pull out the trusty "two million plus borg cube bum rush," and say that their sheer numbers would overwhelm Imperial defenses.

Just pull out the Marina O'Leary Fleet Estimate in response :twisted:

Alternatively accept the Han Solo "thousand ships" quote at face value and use the "half a starfleet" quote to remind them that even 2 million cubes ain't gonna do shit to the average Imeprial warship.

[phongn]

Most trekkies pull out the trusty "two million plus borg cube bum rush," and say that their sheer numbers would overwhelm Imperial defenses.

Just pull out the Marina O'Leary Fleet Estimate in response

Alternatively accept the Han Solo "thousand ships" quote at face value and use the "half a starfleet" quote to remind them that even 2 million cubes ain't gonna do shit to the average Imeprial warship.

I think I like using Marina's fleet calcs better. 378 million FTL warships is a nice number

[phongn]

Just pull out the Marina O'Leary Fleet Estimate in response

Alternatively accept the Han Solo "thousand ships" quote at face value and use the "half a starfleet" quote to remind them that even 2 million cubes ain't gonna do shit to the average Imeprial warship.

I think I like using Marina's fleet calcs better. 378 million FTL warships is a nice number

Actually, if one wanted to be Evil, combine the thousand ship quotes with the Marina calcs

[CmdrWilkens]

Alternatively accept the Han Solo "thousand ships" quote at face value and use the "half a starfleet" quote to remind them that even 2 million cubes ain't gonna do shit to the average Imeprial warship.

I think I like using Marina's fleet calcs better. 378 million FTL warships is a nice number

Actually, if one wanted to be Evil, combine the thousand ship quotes with the Marina calcs

Yes 378 million FTL ships with 1e33W firepower average

[VF5SS]

Yes 378 million FTL ships with 1e33W firepower average

If you don't mind me saying this, DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN!!!! That's one bad motherfucker!