Enterprise vs. Star Destroyer... again!

In My Humble Opinion
61

My days on the fence are over. With brianjedi’s assessment of the E-D’s multiple accelerations to warp being limited to a small number (<4) in a short time period it seems the battle would have to be limited to normal space. Looking at the numbers provided by Bartman the ISD’s greater conventional power is pretty apparent. The ISD’s fighters/bombers should be enough to counter the E-D’s greater maneuverability in normal space.

Chalk me up as voting for the ISD (until someone objects to these figures, which will probably happen shortly). The E-D looks to need a good fixin’ of techno-babble to get out of this one. That or replicate a few stormtrooper outfits, smuggle some folks on board the ISD and use sabotage.

62

Oh, man, I am LOVING this UTTERLY POINTLESS debate!

Put me in the “ISD blows the crap out of ED” camp.
Most of the points I thought of have already been mentioned.

Heck, Picard ususally doesn’t even raise shields until the first volley has come in, then he wastes more precious seconds trying to hail the bad guys, telling them that if they don’t quit it, he’s gonna have to shoot back at them, and he really means it this time, okay Mister Worf, target their weapons array…BOOM (Enterprise explodes in a strangely noisy manner…)

However, one point (re: technobabble): In an extended, hit-and-run type scenario, I would possibly give an edge to the ST crew. In the SW universe, the galactic civilization is extremely ancient, relying on tried-and-true technology millenia old. Whereas, in the ST universe, the Federation has basically bootstrapped itself (I know, they had some help from the Vulcans, but they came up with warp drive on their own) into a starfaring civilization in only a few hundred years. Federation crews have a tradition of questioning assumptions and constantly fiddling with their tech. Look at the increase in capabilities from TOS to TNG.
Therefore, when confronted with a previously unknown technology, the Federation would be much quicker to adapt than the stodgy old Imperium.

Assuming the Federation survived the initial encounter. Which they wouldn’t.

63

While I love this debate, I sometimes find it a bit hard to play within the constraints of what each ship would do based on past encounters. The Enterprise, as the “good guy,” obviously tries all diplomatic tactics first and rarely resorts to brute force. The ISD, as the “bad guy,” swats everything it can without bothering to think. So, I propose broadening the scope.

I couldn’t agree more, Spoofe. Therefore, I summon all Imperial Grand Moffs and Starfleet Fleet Admirals to this thread, where we can debate a full scale war between the Federation and the Empire. Enterprise vs. ISD? Bah! Let’s try Galaxy Class Starship + Sovereign Class Starship + Defiant Class Starship + (and so fourth) vs. ISD + SSD + TIE Fighter + (and so fourth).

See you there…

-Fleet Admiral Psi Cop

64

While not really holding strong opinions on one side or the other (though holding a soft spot for the good guys) I offer this thought out.

I seem to recall in a companion book to my Star Fleet Technical Manual (yes, I have it in hardback from the mid seventies…I bought it when I was 9 or 10) that the Enterprise-A has phasers powerful enough to destroy the surface of a planet within an hour. For the sake of argument let’s assume that Enterprise-D phasers are quite a bit more powerful and that there are more of them.

Contrast this with Han Solo’s disbelief that Alderaan could be completely destroyed. I believe the quote is something like, “It would take more than a thousand ships…”

I think it’s reasonable to assume that, if one Galaxy-class Starship can destroy a planets surface then 10(?) could destroy a planet. Certainly in that one episode (the one where Matt Frewer tries to con the crew like he’s a historian from the 26th century) they had phasers capable of drilling deep into a planetary crust.

So it comes down to possibly 10 Galaxy-class Starships being able to lay the equivalent planetary smackdown of ‘more than a thousand ships’ or even ‘the entire fleet’.

Just food for thought for those leaning ISD. Remember, Imperial technology is, by and large, stagnant. Very few new developments over time. Federation technology is thriving. What’s useful one year is obsolete the next.

And that’s power, ladies and gentlemen. That’s power.

65

But, JC (pardon my familiarity), there is a difference between “destroying the surface” (presumably meaning destroying all life, maybe topsoil, what-have-you), and actually blowing a planet apart, as the Death Star did.
So you may be exaggerating the power difference.

66

Oh, I guess I should read the entire post.
You thought of that.
Still, I would challenge the assumption that it is only 10 times harder to blow a planet apart than to scour it’s surface. I would think more on the order of several hundred to 1000 times harder, just off the top of my head (our out of my nether region…)

67

No, I don’t think so.

My reasoning:

Yes, the Empire had the ability to blow a planet to flinders. But only with the Death Star (Mark I and presumably Mark II). ISD couldn’t acheive the goal.

I think it valid to postulate that several federation capital ships COULD destroy an entire planet.

Heck, one NON-phaser way to do it would be to simply teleport a large section of a planets mantle elsewhere and wait for the crust to collapse.

Anyway…

I think my thesis stands. 10 Galaxy-Class Starships = 1000 Imperial ships.

or…

Enterprise-D = 100 Imperial Ships

68

Not to mention that Empire has in the past destroyed the eco systems of entire planets-The Noghri planet, for example, or Camais or Emberlene?

69

Whoa, I can’t believe I’m letting myself be drawn into this argument…

Assuming you could transport large chunks of a planet’s core out into space (or just turn them to energy…I assume that’s what you’d have to do, or they’d just fall back down), the planet would just collapse in on itself, not be blown apart. Which would still be quite nasty if you were on the surface, but it wouldn’t produce the kind of debris field found after Alderaan blew up. It would also take a lot longer than a DS-style blast, as the transporters can’t transport that much stuff at once.

70

I was going to back Ferrous up on the planet destroying issue, but my calculations turned up an intermediate value.

When you’re scouring the surface of a planet, how deep are you cutting? Let’s say 10km, I’d be pretty bummed if the top 10km of Earth disappeared. Let’s also assume we’re talking a roughly Earth-size planet, and that the fire-power required is proportional to volume. The top 10km of the Earth has a volume of approx. 5e9 km^3, the entire planet has a volume of approx. 1e12 km^3. If one Galaxy class ship can vaporise the top 10 km of an ‘M-type planet’ (I think I got the jargon right), then a mere 212 should suffice for taking out the whole thing.

So perhaps one Galaxy class ship = 5-20 ISD’s? This still clashes with the other figures posted in this thread. Maybe 10km was too generous. I suppose the Federation could use other clever techniques (Ferrous’s hollowing-out-with-transporters method, drilling to the core and destabilizing it with technobabble, etc.), but those wouldn’t really compare raw fire power.

71

If you adjust ‘the surface’ to 1km, you need 2000 Galaxy class ships.

And I should add the detail that these are actually ‘Galaxy class ship hours’ I’ve calculated, as Jonathan Chance’s surface destruction figure was one Federation capital ship destroying a planet’s surface in an hour.

Who knows how long Han Solo thought it would take the thousands of imperial ships? An instant like the Death Star? Several days of bombardment?

I don’t think there’s enough information about the surface destruction comparison to come to a conclusion about relative firing power.

72

Well hello, Psi Cop, we meet again.

Gotta point out that the Enterprise IS only a fancy, albeit nicely armed, luxury cruiser. Others more knowledgeable than I have gone into the amount of space it wastes for comfort and when was the last time you saw a military ship cruising around with all the families on board. Put the non-combatants in the sub-light saucer? Bah, I’ll destroy it with a smile while still dishing out death and destruction to the remainder of the Enterprise.

While you are using your phasers to knock out TIE’s, I have set flank speed and am closing fast. Don’t bore me with photon torpedoes. They are merely souped up cruise missles that I should be able to knock down with my close quarter weapons designed to deal with small, fast-moving targets. One pissed off ISD with a surly commander is closing fast.

The question of stand-off range is a good one and important to this arguement. Its funny, but in many of the movies about WWII, when battleships lobbed shells up to 20 miles, the target often appeared only as a dark shape on the horizon. You seldom if ever saw opposing capital ships in the same camera shot. Contrast this with both SW and ST scenes where almost all battles between the heavy warships occur within one shot, the two ships no more than a kilometer or so apart. My guess is that energy beam weapons lose much of their punch as the range increases.

In that case, the ED can’t win as they can’t do serious damage at a distance and won’t be able to close to knife fighting distance without getting there little tushies waxed. ED’s only real option for survival is to stay as far away from the ISD as possible. Game-Set-Match to the Emperor

73

Hmmm, then the E-D has nothing to lose but dearly wants to waste your Imperial butt.

Sucide run anybody?

Shields full up, warp in and flood the anti-matter chamber with positive energy Mr.Worf.

Say hello to Mr. 10E9 terrajoule explosion (taken from the Enterprise D tech manual), or in terms of the heaviest turbo lasers carried by the ISD … approximately 19.4 million hits.

The winner, and still champion, the vaccum of space!

74

Indeed my best chance for survival is to stay backed off… so why not do so? I can stay outside your range for as long as I want, while picking off your puny fighters.

Your “flank speed” reminded me – an ISD has a lot more mass than the Enterprise, and therefore a lot more inertia. What are you going to do when I warp myself around to the other side and fire torpedos at your engines?

That reminds me – what’s to prevent me from parking myself in the middle of your engine wake? You might remember that Han Solo escaped once by skimming right along the engine wash so no TIEs attacked from that side. There were also no turbolaser blasts because you can’t exactly mount a turbolaser between your engines. Can we say “Radiation burns?” So put the Enterprise (the shields can stand a star’s energy for a significant amount of time) right behind the ISD… While you’re trying to swing about so your guns bear, I’m busy destroying all your engines.

-Fleet Admiral Psi Cop

By the way, join me in the fleet vs. fleet thread, Grand Moff Boxcar. Or whatever title you prefer.

75

The problem is that acording to my engine numbers (which are taken out of Next Gen and the Next Gen Tech Manual). The Ent-D had nowhere near the power necesary to accomplish such a task. It could spend days and not finish the job. In addition we have an episode in which it took the Ent-D 15 seconds (I believe, I am working from memory and may have the exact figures wrong.) to drill a 2m diamater hole 500m into a planatary crust. This was not using torps, but the phaser was at “full power” according to Data. Not bad at all but significantly less than you are suggesting. In addition we have DS9 scene in which a combined Cardasian/Romulan fleet try to destroy a planetary surface. They had over 150 ships and spent 45 minutes bombarding the surface and ended up destroying 15% of the surface. When they were done with that their weapons were all completely offline. They needed to cool, recharge, reload etc. They were left defenseless and destroyed in an ambush. So it is likely that such a rate could not be maintained for long. (OK I am really trying to remember if I have the numbers right on this one. I could be really off. If anyone has verified and correct numbers please feel free to correct me.)
The Empire also has a similar manuver called BDZ (Base Delta Zero). This calls for a single ISD to destroy a planatary surface in a few hours. Now in none of these cases are we informed of what “destroying a planatary surface” entails. So caculations are difficult to come by. I ended up reducing my figures for the ISD by about a factor of 100 in this case because it was too darn impressive. The Rommy and Cardy ships are hard to pin numbers on because they included ships that are more powerful than the Ent-D and others that are significantly weaker. In the end I used other numbers to calculate the Ent-D and used this instance as a sanity check. The two were within a factor of 10 so I thought it was reasonable.

Do you normally rely on smuglers for firepower estimates? :wink:

In fact to blow up Alderaan the way the DS did would require more energy than our sun will produce in 3 million years. Accelerating contenent sized pieces of rock to 10s of thousands of km/s in a fraction of a second takes a LOT of energy. (one estimate places this around 1E38 joules). So even although Solo is not the reliable source for power estimates, he is right. It would take a heck of a lot more than 1,000 ships to acomplish such a task.

76

SPOOFE:

Well, since you’ve already ceded that they have superior sublight manueverability (and, and I may be wrong in this, warp, while slower, seems to be less difficult than hyperdrive, not as much worrying about gravity wells and such), they can maintain the distance.

My bad. I meant that they’d P-M in to depoly the ion cannon, then blast away. It takes awhile to recover enough to return fire, no?

In any event, that’s just one example. My main point was that they’d be able to slip away until the technobabble factor kicked in. A way to render tibanna based weaponry useless? A method of passing through Lucasian shields? Troi spontaneously achieving Force mastery? Trek fans have seen more unlikely things happen in the past.

An unsatisfying answer? Perhaps. But an honest one.

77

Yeah, the Enterprise-A was far more powerful than the Galaxy-class ever was. Don’t ask me why. Canonly, a GCS is nowhere near powerful enough to pull the tricks that the original Enterprise pulled.

I guess Roddenberry thought that he had gone a little overboard. Either that, or a ripped-shirt Kirk is a very, very powerful weapon…

78

Whoops, hit reply too soon.

Another viable tactic. Picard would probably choose to run away before he goes kamikaze, though.

Have at the fighters. Heck, they’re pretty much defenseless boxes, anyway.

Turn around and kill you? An ISD can turn at a rate of about five degrees per second… not very good, but enough to get you back into another weapons coverage zone.

You’re 650 meters long, that’s what. There’s no “blind spot” on an ISD for a ship that size to hide.

Sure, but the point is that if the Enterprise manages to stay, oh, a million kilometers away from the ISD, the Imperials are bound to figure out what they’re doing. A single microjump - or, better yet, two slightly-larger microjumps - would put the ISD right on top of them.

So if the E-D wants a reliably safe chance to back off and plan a new tactic, they’ll have to head off to warp… if the ISD detects them, they’ll continue trying to attack.

79

I don’t think transporting sections out of a planet would be very effective - the transporter seems fairly limited as to what it can move - in Star Trek IV they could barely transport a cargo hold full of water.

As to destroying a planet - take ball of dirt 3 feet in diameter, and a lighter. You could scorch the entire surface in an hour or so, but you would never be able to blow it up with that lighter - you probably couldn’t even raise it’s average temperature by much. A thousand lighters would scorch the surface faster, but still not destroy it. The Death Star can almost instantly explode an entire planet, and don’t forget it’s effectiveness against capital ships, as showin in RotJ - it was able to rapidly take out several large shielded ships with one shot each, and it’s shields are so powerful that when they are up it’s pretty much invulnerable against barrages from heavy weapons.

Phasers seem pretty ineffective as portrayed in ST movies and shows. In STII you see phasers slowly raked across the surface of a ship with it’s shields down and they don’t even completely penetrate the saucer section of the ship, seem to only explode the surface where they hit - and Federation ships are not heavily armored, they rely on shields for both protection and to maintain structural integrity. You’d have to hold them on one point for a long time to get any kind of penetration on a heavily armored ship like an ISD. Photon torpedoes are not that much more powerful, the Enterprise took several with it’s shields down and remained functional.

80

Something that no one seems to have touched on (if they did, I stand corrected), that I feel should be pointed out, is that laser technology is considered antiquated and obsolete in the star trek universe. As much as I love Star Wars, I also feel that trying to compare a battle between an ISD and the Enterprise D is like trying to compare an 18th Century Ship-of-the-line with the Battleship Missouri. Ships of the line were often armed with 150 cannons or more, and were the pride of the British Royal Navy and the terror of the high seas….IN THEIR DAY. But, bring one alongside the Mighty Mo and let it unleash broadside after broadside and see how long it takes before it runs out of cannon shot and is forced to withdraw.

I know that my claim sounds outlandish and mistaken, but it’s not. Anyone who has read or watched the early days of Star Trek knows that the Enterprise (The ORIGINAL Enterprise, not A B C D or E) was originally equipped with Heavy Lasers (You could call them “Turbolasers” if you want), and over time those were removed and replaced with the newer technology: phasers. From that time on, phaser technology has been the Federation industry standard.

It is clear that lasers are inferior, simply by watching episodes where the two weapons were compared. In a STTNG episode, vessels from two different planets approached the Enterprise D with grievances over a marriage dispute and stolen national treasures. When Picard refused to release the suspect into the custody of either planet, one of the vessels opened fire on the Enterprise. Picard broke into an incredulous grin and asked, “are they actually firing lasers at us??”. Worf snorted disdainfully and compared their ship to a Klingon “Glob Fly” (mosquito equivalent). Picard agreed and added that “They can fire until their lasers run dry and they won’t cause any damage to this vessel”. The lasers were not even enough to cause them to want to reinforce shields…they were that small of a threat.

There was another time when Picard and the crew had amnesia and were brainwashed into believing that they were at war with a race that, in actuality, they had never seen before. They went into battle, attacked the main home planet, took on the entire spectrum of planetary defenses, heavy lasers, fighters armed with lasers, etc. without a single scratch. In fact, it was the incredible ease of their accomplishment that caused Picard to realize that these people could not possibly be a mortal enemy of the Federation, since they were “clearly no match for one starship”.

I understand what the Pro-Star Wars people are saying, particularly about the size and purposeful construction of the Star Destroyer, the thousands of lasers and turbolasers, etc. but technology makes a big difference, and obsolete is obsolete. A large ship with a lot of guns is useless if those guns are harmless by Federation standards.

I’ve also read a lot of statements here, touting the might of the stormtroopers. Which stormtroopers are those? Do you mean the 500 stormtroopers who chased Luke and Leia through the Death Star, firing their blasters constantly from a distance of less than 100 feet and hitting nothing but the bulkheads and components of their own ship? Or the heavily armed stormtroopers who were beaten soundly by a wookie and a tribe of walking teddy bears living in the stone age? Tell me please, in the entire series, when did the storm troopers win a decisive battle that didn’t include Luke’s aunt & uncle, a passenger ship full of civilians or a sandcrawler full of Jawas? Please don’t say the Battle of Hoth…that was won by the Imperial Walkers, not by the stormtroopers.

I know that to those who are die-hard Star Wars fans, the Federation seems “sissy”, but the fact is, they are more technologically and tactically advanced, and they will win. And that’s not wishful thinking on my part, it’s just the way it is. Even George Lucas knows there is something about them, or he wouldn’t have borrowed the photon torpedo….OH I’M SORRY! I mean, the PROTON torpedo! My bad!

Look, for the record, I love both Star Trek AND Star Wars, but the former is the future, and the latter is “A Long Long Time Ago”, and IMHO it shows in the technology differences.