I’ve heard just about all the arguments both ways, and I still can’t decide how it would end. A few points:
It was always my understanding that phasers were useless at FTL velocities (i.e. warp) and that torpedoes were the only offensive option.
As far as the Borg wanting hyperdrive, I’m not so sure it would be a major improvement. Transwarp technology is closer to hyperdrive, and the time necessary to integrate it into the Collective’s ships would not be a proper use of resources. Also, the shield-draining weapon that the Borg has used in the past would probably have a damaging effect to an ISD’s shields, although its effectiveness would be reduced until the Borg adapted to Imperial shields.
No one has considered that the Enterprise could use shuttlecraft to attack. Just load them up with antimatter payloads and autopilot them into the ISD’s shields. They could help weaken the shields enough to make the E-D’s weapons effective.
Constant warp jumps by the E-D would be suicide. The structural integrity field and inertial dampers would be shot after about 4 consecutive high-warp accelerations and decelerations in a short period. At that point, the E-D is pretty much dead in the water for a long time. Game over.
Now, let’s get to the really fun battle: Millennium Falcon vs. the USS Defiant.
Um… The Falcon’s a (very fast and well-piloted) frieghter with guns. The Defiant’s one of the few ships in Starfleet that is dedicated to war. It also has a cloaking device. Han’s hyperdrive is notoriously unreliable.
Han outmanuevers them and/or jumps to hyperspace, and Sisko decides he isn’t worth tracking down. Best case scenario. No way Han could win in anything approximating a fight.
As for the E-D, I think we’re undervaluing the technical acumen of the crew, and the technobabble capabilities of the writers :). Assuming the ship survives first contact with the ISD with all systems functioning, I see it backing off to maximum sensor range and examining its opponent very carefully while Worf swats smaller patrols of TIE’s until the ISD and main body of fighters get close enough to make things hairy. Then fly around at warp and repeat.
This being a big-name Trek ship, they crew will find out some weakness to exploit. Maybe they’ll find a way to approximate ion cannons (similar tech has been seen in Trek) with the deflector disc. Then, a gutsy Picard Manuever on the ISD, fllowed by a hairy battle agaisnt whatever fighters were active on the time, followed by a protracted bombardment on the crippled ISD until it was finally neutralized.
That’s IF they survived the first attack. And we’re counting on the writings to be in Deus ex Machina mode.
Honestly, I think the Defiant may have a better shot at the thing. It can always just hide and lick it’s wounds while working out a strategy.
I think the Enterprise would win. Size in this case doesn’t really matter. Take a World War II battleship and then put it up against a modern day destroyer (A U.S. Destroyer, not a star destroyer, lol). Which would win? The destroyer, it has weapons like cruise missles that could hit the carrier from miles away. The carrier wouldn’t know what hit them. They only have old weapons which have a limited range.
The SD has weapons like lasers while the ED has phasers and photon torps. It might take about 50 or 60 photons to take out a SD if you didn’t know where sensitive parts of the ship were located but it would still only take a few minutes. The ED is capable of firing 5 or 10 torpedoes per second out of either launcher (I remember reading it was either 5 or 10). The SD might win if the ED somehow lost shields before the fight but they would get the hell beat out of them while hitting the unprotected ED. The SD’s weaponry seems to be comparable to the original enterprise. Not kirks ship, the enterprise on the new show ENTERPRISE.
The TIE fighers might as well be bugs. Their lasers are so weak they probably couldn’t even scratch the hull even without shields.
Well, they’ve been used, but only against other ships that were also at warp. And since the ISD can’t go to warp…
Hyperdrive is still faster than transwarp. At least, the Voyager-era transwarp. But, then again, there’s just so many things that Voyager screwed up (for instance, the Borg apparently need a transwarp station - or something - for transwarp to work…).
I don’t see why they wouldn’t be able to do this. For the sake of debate, we have to assume that all shields are pretty similar.
An interesting idea, but it’d have to be the kind of thing they’d have to plan out beforehand. During a heated battle, there just wouldn’t be enough time to set up a magnetic containment field for the antimatter. Additionally, shuttlecraft are a lot easier to shoot down than a photon torpedo.
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Constant warp jumps by the E-D would be suicide. The structural integrity field and inertial dampers would be shot after about 4 consecutive high-warp accelerations and decelerations in a short period. At that point, the E-D is pretty much dead in the water for a long time. Game over.
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Makes sense (and also explains why they never try this tactic), but was there any episode or sourcebook that mentioned this? Just curious.
Well, this assumes that the ISD would stay in one place. If the scenario has it trying to subjugate/invade a planet in Federation space, then that makes sense (it also helps explain why the two vessels would start fighting). But if it’s a random encounter in deep space, the ISD wouldn’t hang around if its target had disappeared.
Ion cannons, maybe. But no Picard Maneuver… that’s suicide. It only works if you can destroy your target in a few seconds. The end result would be the Enterprise being VERY close to a very pissed-off ISD.
Probably. They’d have to fight a smarter battle (it’s strong for its size, but it’s not as powerful as the E-D). If they just go in with guns blazing, they’ll get squashed.
You can’t have it both ways, Spoofe. If the Enterprise tractor beams wouldn’t be effective against the ISD, I don’t see a reason why the ISD tractor beams would be effective against the Enterprise. After all, referring back to “New Hope,” if ISD tractor beams are capable of capturing a large ship (and the Enterprise is larger than Leia’s frigate), why didn’t they use them? A blind wombat could have taken out the engines and weapon emplacements with great precision when the target wasn’t moving at all.
I’m not saying that everything has to be exactly fair, but assuming that the Enterprise would sit 200 feet off charged bow guns is rather unlikely. More likely that Picard would give his “Prime Directive crap” from a distance outside weapons range. After all, you don’t become a Captain by trusting everyone initially. Especially if it’s large, visibly armed, and has active energy shields. Either they both have to be prepared to go to fight, or they don’t have fighting intentions at first. No double standards in this case.
On the Borg… I’ve heard various measurements for their length. I think the 2.5 figure I heard was at the Star Trek main site, but I can’t access it right now to verify. I notice that the Daystom Institute (linked to earlier in this thread) gives 3k figures, so we’ll go by those.
Once again, I’ll go back to that same episode. They blocked later on by rotating the shield modulation constantly. Somehow I can’t see the Empire randomly rotating shield modulation for the heck of it. The Borg would get right through the first few times, and that’s all they need. You also mentioned that the Borg are vulnerable to projectile weapons. Fair enough, but ISDs don’t have large banks of torpedos or missile launchers. They mostly depend on TIE-delivered warheads, correct?
One Borg cube destroyed 39 Federation starships at Wolf 359. Three squadrons of X-Wings have destroyed ISDs before (at least in the many SW books I’ve read), and I can personally testify that I’ve taken out an ISD with two squadrons of X-Wings in computer games. If 36 X-Wings take out an ISD, and a Borg Cube takes out 39 Starships, a logical statement would be to say that a Cube takes out an ISD. Unless you’re saying that an X-Wing is more powerful than a Federation Starship…
Also from “The Best of Both Worlds,” you might recall that the Cube (correctly) judged the Enterprise weapons as unable to cause significant damage to the cube. While the power of ISD weapons are part of the dispute in this thread, I think that it would be fair to say that the Borg could assess whether the weapons would provide a significant threat to them. If they would provide a threat, and it attacked, I think the Cube would quickly take out the ISD.
If I’m not mistaken, the ONLY time some smaller ship was able to take out an SD was during the Battle of Endor, when a small Y Wing, I believe, did a kamikaze on the bridge of one of the SDs, which collided with the Executor.
Another thing is, what IF the crew of the Enterprise was able to beam themselves aboard the ISD? They’d be slaughtered by Storm Troopers, Imperial Guards, etc etc.
For the sake of argument, let’s say they beam themselves onto the Chimaera, flag ship of Grand Admiral Thrawn. In addition to the stormtroopers, they’d be up against Thrawn’s personal body guards, the Noghri. And you DON’T piss off the Noghri!!!
Personally, I think it would be interesting to see them battle each other face to face.
Or Vader vs. the Borg-with just one fist clench, they’d be toast!
(I admit I know next to nothing about ST, only that it sucks.) Well, except for Leonard Nimoy-he’s pretty cool-with all the documentaries and intellectual stuff he’s done.
The guy has class-and with pointy ears that’s hard to do.
Bah! A more biased page I’ve never seen. All I had to do was look at Empire vs. Borg <grin>. I wouldn’t use that as a cite if I were you… the cites that I’m willing to trust compare things in the same universe. They might bias towards Rebel or Empire or Klingon or Federation, but not an entire universe. But you were right – it certainly was of interest. To laugh at <grin>.
I admit to not being up on the full canon of both universes, but E-D vs ISD always seemed to me as a battle between a fancy yacht with some neat weapons vs an industrial strength can of whoop ass.
Just not convinced that the photon torpedo would be all that effective against the ISD as a long range weapon. The ISD’s layered defenses should be able to track them and if so, it can target and destroy the torpedoes. (Inbound torpedoes would not have a relative bearing change for the guns to work with. Visually the torpedo would appear as a pinpoint growing larger and larger until impact with no other sign of movement apparent.) Modern day systems, like the Phalanx, can handle a Mach 2+ cruise missle, I wouldn’t doubt SW or ST technology, which routinely handle FTL calculations, could do the same on a faster scale.
My guess is that ST phasers lose their punch fairly quickly as range increases. Weapons with an actual projectile component (ie SW blasters) would hold a full power punch over a longer range.
The only way the E-D wins is by dancing around outside the ISD weapon range until the ST writers technobabble the ISD to death. Otherwise, the E-D stands off while taking potshots at the ISD with weapons that don’t even create a ripple in the ISD shields.
As the ISD closes, the E-D weapons will start to hurt more, but not enough to keep the ISD out of its prefereed weapons range. And if the ISD closes, the E-D will dish out some moderate to heavy damage but is quickly overwhelmed by the ISD’s superior fire power, or, more likely, an ion cannon assault and boarding of the E-D.
Aha! Grand Poobah of the World Forces, we meet again! And once again on opposite sides, it seems. Well, Fleet Admiral Psi Cop is ready for battle, Grand Moff Boxcar! The Enterprise shall triumph.
Fancy yacht indeed. Hmph. For your knowledge, the Enterprise is the flagship of Starfleet, fully capable of carrying out all tasks from scientific research to a showdown with an ISD. I see no reason why the Enterprise couldn’t simply stay out of the ISD firing range and wait for the inbound TIE fighters and either pick them off or warp around to the other side of the ISD. At that point, good bye to the Destroyer. The bridge of the ISD is rather inconveniently placed for combat – send out a few torpedos and phaser blasts to punch a hole through. The Enterprise bridge isn’t nearly as accessable unless it happens to be oriented so the upper saucer section is pointed towards your ship. Not having a bridge doesn’t render you totally impotent, but it certainly makes things a lot harder.
Why couldn’t the Enterprise crash a remotely controlled shuttle going at warp speed into the ISD?
I guess the ISD could always crash a small fighter (in hyperspeed) into the Enterprise also.
(I never could figure out why nobody in any Star Trek series ever used relativistic bombs (crashing a shuttle into any Earth-sized planet at any warp factor > 1 would destroy the planet). I mean, what better way of fighting? Why couldn’t Starfleet crash shuttles going warp three or four or whatever into Borg cubes? The whole cube would be obliterated at the cost of a shuttle!
Well, with ships, I suppose shields are a factor (but probably not). Then maybe they could use two shuttles, one a tiny fraction of a nanosecond behind the first.
Read Flying to Valhalla by C. Pellegrino for more information on crashing objects travelling relativistic speeds into planets.)
But they never do anything like that. Every single time there’s a battle on Star Trek, the two ships sit there and leisurly exchange phaser blasts, occasionally launching photon torpedoes to shake things up. (Oh no! A photon torpedo! Boom!) I don’t think I saw a single instance of the Enterprise shooting down a torpedo in any of the way too many hours of “Next Gen on TNN!” I watched this past week.
The Enterprise totally blows in a firefight. The only reason it lasted more than 2 seasons is that every time it gets blown up (which is frequently) it turns out to be a dream or a time warp or what have you, and they just try again until they get it right and manage, by the grace of god, to survive.
Star Destroyer kicks Enterprise ass. And don’t you forget it.
I didn’t say that the Enterprise’s tractor beam wouldn’t be effective… I just said it’d be more of a nuisance to the Enterprise than it would be for the Star Destroyer. It’s like this: If you were fighting with, say, Mike Tyson, would you want to grab onto Mike’s shirt to try to keep him still? No… because that would also be keeping you still, and then Mike’s fist will collide with your face.
Uh… that hasn’t ever happened. Not once. Whenever meeting a new, strange vessel, they ALWAYS move to visual range to conduct proper first-contact procedures.
Except that SW shields don’t function on a frequency basis. There are no “holes” in the shields that can be exploited.
They have a missile launcher, and one is enough. But you mis-read my posts. The Borg ships have never been able to successfully adapt to weaponry. Individual drones have, however, which leads me to suspect that their adaptation technologies have a certain energy threshold at which they stop being as effective.
Not “many”… the closest that they got was in the X-wing book The Bacta War, where a squadron (Rogue Squadron, the best pilots the rebels had) managed to take down a Victory-class Star Destroyer. However, even then, they had help from an automated cruiser that managed to ambush the Vicstar.
So, while a trio of X-wing squadrons could theoretically deal massive amounts of damage to a Star Destroyer, we’ve never seen one do it in any of the novels. The best we’ve seen destroyed have been Lancer frigates, or Yevethan thrustships.
The computer games are soooooo not canon. In fact, a friend once calculated that if proton torpedoes moved at the speeds shown in the games, it would have taken Luke’s missile a half hour to travel to the Death Star’s reactor core in ANH.
That would be a logical statement, if it were accurate. But 36 X-wings can’t take out an ISD (it’s fighter cover alone would make sure of that). And further, it assumes that all 39 of the starships destroyed at Wolf 359 were all of a powerful kind… if I recall correctly, several were of the near-ancient Oberth-class, for instance. And, finally, the Borg had advantages against the Fed ships that it wouldn’t necessarily have against a Star Destroyer (the ability to take advantage of shield frequencies, for instance).
Just because they can scan one kind of system, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t scan another. Again, this advantage of the Borg had disappeared by the time Voyager came around, which indicates that such an ability is not a universal constant.
And that would be a very intelligent tactic, and one of the few that would allow the Enterprise to win. But, A: there are methods to counter this tactic, if need be, and B: the Enterprise crew has long shown an insistence at fighting at close ranges. Don’t ask me why.
I’m not concerned with what they can do so much as what they would do.
Now, if you want to get into the whole “Empire vs. Federation” debate (which is a LOT thornier than this one), you’ll start seeing tactics like yours above surfacing, as the Federation would quickly learn that they have a massive range advantage.
Guin…
'Twas an A-wing… and that was at the tail end of an hours-long battle (as described in the movie novelisation). Essentially, that instance with the A-wing is often touted as proof of SW fragility, when in truth it was simply the toothpick that broke the camel’s back.
Studi…
Another viable tactic, although I think it’s been explained that warp travel “alters” space-time to make it so that something travelling at 1000c isn’t really travelling at 1000c (don’t ask me to explain why… this came up to explain how the NX-01 - from the new series - can travel at warp without a navigational deflector). Additionally, this would be the sort of thing that the Enterprise would probably try only as a funky desperation maneuver… ultimately, I think that their photon torpedoes would still be much more successful as a projectile attack.
::shrug:: All I know is that in hyperspace, a vessel doesn’t really interact with matter, only its gravity. And it takes a lot of gravity to have a significant effect at all. That’s why little specks of space dust don’t cause them to be constantly dropping out of hyperspace.
Partly because one of the technobabble factors in going FTL in realspace is ‘mass-lightening’, so your KE at warp is much less than it might seem. Partly because Starfleet doesn’t do suicide missions. Partly because it would be an intelligent tactic.
Well a few years ago I pulled information from as many sources as I could get my hands on and these were my final conclusions. (Sadly I have misplaced many of the sources and calculations, so sorry no cites.)
Galaxy Class ISD
Sublight Acc. 1000g to 1500g 1500g
Manuverability Fair Poor
Cruising Speed 1000c to 3000c .5 million c
Max Speed 3000c to 6000c .5 million c
Phasers 3.6E17 J ??? Ion Cannons
Photon Torps 3.2E18 J 1.2E20 J Heavy Turbo Lasers
Quantum Torps 6.4E18 J 9E19 J Light Turbo Lasers
Shields 2E19 J 1E21 J
Power 1E20 W 1E25 W
Transport Range 40,000 km None
Some notes on these numbers
Acceleration figures were pulled from various sources and confirmed by viewing analasys of relevant scenes.
Ion Cannons are “special weapons” they seem to knockout various systems and shields but do not appear to directly do damage. Of course some damage has to be imparted but I have not been able to find any information beyond wild guesses as to what that may be. Add into this mix the fact that Starfleet ships are uniquely and highly vulerable to Ion Fields/Streams. The GCC migh be disabled completely by a single Ion blast or it may be able to ignore them completely.
Shields for both were calculated from the known ability to resist several volys from comparable ships. These are very rough guesses, although the GCC figure is rooted strongly in figures given in the show.
Other notes
As has been mentioned the transporters are unlikely to work vs. the ISD’s shields. Transporters seem to need favorible conditions to work. They are regularly blocked by energy sources of all types including natural phenomina such as thunderstorms. They are also blocked by natural ore deposits and refined materials used in some ship hulls. They have also been blocked by force fields of pre-warp societies. In all probibility the transporters would not work against an ISD.
As far as weapon ranges are concerned it is unlikely that the GCC could achieve a superior weapon range. Simply put except against very large immobile targets, Federation ships need to close within tens of kilometers before they are in weapons range. And frequently they close to within a few hundred meters. There may be unspoken reasons for this. Perhaps the Star Trek races use jamming and other ECW techniques that require close range before the targeting systems can jam through and “aquire a lock.” Star Wars secondary sources specifically state that Imperial ships use jamming techniques and must close to target a jamming vessel. In any case we must assume that the combat will take place in exactly the manner shown time and time again. Both ships will close to relatively short range before opening fire.
Warp straffing and other FTL tactics. For some reason the Federation never uses such tactics beyond the famed “Piccard manuver.” We are never given the reason, but we must assume that all those officers raiding stationary bases (such as DS9) have a reason to close at slow speeds until they are within a kilometer instead of doing warp flybys. There is no instance of any warp combat against a non-warp opponent. This may be related to the reason for close combat ranges.
Sensors are also hard to pin down. The Federation sensors seem omnipotent one moment; being able to see large fractions of a light year with great detail. Then they have to remodulate their sensors to pick up radio signals. We have virtually no data on the quality of Imperial sensor suites other than that they have them and can detect FTL travel. My guess is that both will be able to find and track each other with equal ease.
Of course the are a lot of other factors as well including crew quality etc. but this is long enough as it is. So a lot of IMHO, but in the end I think the ISD with its superior weapons suit and shields should allow it to beat down a GCC.
Consider how the ships are portraid in their original source material.
In the Star Trek TV shows, the Enterprise is a pretty poor warship. It looses most of the fights it gets in to, usually having to resort to diplomacy or technobabble trickery in the end. And the Starfleet security officers reguarily get beaten up by whatever the alien of the week is. Very few times has the Enterprise won a straight fight on the TV show.
In the Star Wars universe, the ISD is a big mean effective killing machine. Not fancy, not subtle, but it blows stuff up really good. The rebels spend the first two movies running and hiding rather than face imperial fleet ships in a straight fight.
I think the “fancy yacht versus battleship” comparison is a pretty good one.
