Wow. I hesitate to argue with a guy who has such an emotional investment in this topic that he registered specifically for the purpose of defending Star Trek, but…
Thumperdude,
This has already been mentioned:
But hey, no skin off my nose either way. Obviously there are some folks who feel that SW blows the crap out of ST hands down, and some folks who feel otherwise. There is really no correct answer. It’s just fun to argue about it. Try not to let it upset you.
Aw, crap! I just realized I wasted my 200th post pointing that out!
Oh well.
I think the debate should be restricted to only what has been shown on the screen or stated in dialogue. Federation starships are more than a match for Imperial vessels, I will state my case by listing what we have actually SEEN as to the capabilities of Imperial warships.
To my memory only three times did we see the Star Destroyer fire its weapons. 1. Princess Leia’s ship was disabled with minor damage only from the SD’s guns, granted they were not trying to destroy it but the damage was minimal. 2. Chasing Han Solo’s ship from Tatooine, could not destroy it or even damage it enough to board. 3. Blasting some asteroids in ESB. All in all not a very good showing of Imperial firepower.
The best case of the SD weakness comes from two incidents. ESB An imperial admiral reporting to Vader about all the damage the fleet was sustaining from pursuing Solo through the asteroid field, asteroids should not have had any effect on a properly shielded ship. When Solo was out maneuvering the fleet damage was incurred from the SDs running in to each other. ROJ A Super Star Destroyer was put out of action by only three fighters. Two X-wings destroy its shield generator then a collision with one A-wing took out the bridge and the SSD plunged out of control into the new Death Star.
Dialogue in SW states the death star has the fire power greater than half the star fleet, so you need half the Imperial Navy to destroy a planet far far below what a single Federation Starship can do. Han Solo also supports this view, when encountering the debris of Alderan (sp?) he states the ENTIRE star fleet could not destroy the whole planet it would take a THOUSAND ships, which also means the empire has less than 1000 capital ships.
ESB Star Destroyer taken out of action with only two shots from Hoth’s ion cannon.
Imperial SDs can’t maneuver, compare the lumbering around they did in ESB compared to the Federation fleet in “Sacrifice of Angles” in DS9.
I will give you the Death Star’s superior firepower, no Federation starship could survive that, although I think they would have trouble hitting such maneuverable targets as starfleet vessels.
Discussions like this are great fun but being objective is impossible, Trek fans will pick the Feds, SW fans the Empire. Maybe we should throw in the Minbari fleet just to make it interesting.
Already addressed. Turbolasers are not lasers. Phaser rifles are not internally ridged projectile weapons. Disruptor cannons are not 16th century smoothbore projectile weapons. TLs don’t look like lasers and they don’t act like lasers.
No, these episodes simply make it clear that the writers for those episodes have no idea what they were talking about. The nature of a weapon, while not irrelevant, is a lot less important than the power of the weapon. This is like saying that the deflector makes the Ent-D immune to matter. While it does protect the Ent-D from incidental dust and debris, it does not make it immune to something like ramming attacks from other ships. If we take these statements at face value, we also have to take other statements at face value. Statements like when Data expresses in Joules the amount of energy the shields can take. The problem is a school bus traveling at highway speeds would deliver more energy, than the figure given by Data. In both cases I write it off as bad writing and look at performance rather than “magic character statements.”
Name one scene where there were 500 troopers after Luke and Leia. There isn’t one. It is very hard to hit a moving target at a full run with a carbine class weapon. I would like to see you try. In addition the main characters were protected by “The Director’s ForceField,” just like Trek charcters are. After all Klingons are so tough that an unarmed, pregnant Bajoran woman can take out three armed Klingon Warriors. 
If you want to know what really happened on Endor read the Novelization. There were only a hundred troopers (the rest fell back to protect the base) vs. tens of thousands of Ewoks. And until the commando raid on the AT-ST the troopers were winning handily. Even after that, without Solo’s ruse the troopers would have been able to secure the area easily. The local commander got cocky and paid for it. He didn’t even bring the AT-AT seen earlier into play. In the end a few hundred troopers died vs. thousands of Ewoks.
Name one technology that the Fed has that the Empire doesn’t. Holosuites? Got them. Replicators? Got them. High powered weapons? Got them. Shields? Got them. Cloaking Devices? Got them. FTL travel? Got it. Advanced power generation designs? Got them. Teleporters? Interestingly enough no. But considering the level of tech in Star Wars my best guess is that the highly questionable moral issues involved in their use procluded their development or use. Remember teleporters in Star Trek don’t move matter. They destroy it in one place than recreate it in another. The end result is not the first individual, it is a clone of the individual. This is verified over and over again by their use on the show. In fact we have characters created out of data when their bodies were destroyed (Scotty & Picard). We have duplicates created (Kirk and Richer). We have modifications made to characters in mid transit (Picard, Guynin, Roe, along with every use with the biofilters on). You couldn’t pay me enough to use the vile things.
In general everything the Fed has the Empire has only in a more advanced state. FTL travel (The Empire moves at hundreds to thousands of times faster than the Feds). Power generation (The Empire has reactors that can generate millions of times the power of the sun (the Death Stars)). The list goes on and on. In the end the Empire is a conglomerate culture that has been spacefaring for millenia. The Feds have only been doing it for a couple of centuries. In the end it shows.
Yes, Lucas “borrowed” items from Star Trek. Just like Roddenberry “borrowed” quite a bit from other SF writers. Just like most shows on TV “borrow” concepts from other programs, <mock suprise mode on> A show about a group of wacky friends living in NYC? Like I haven’t seen that before. <mock suprise mode off>
In the end yes Star Trek is very pretty. But they aren’t a galactic power yet.
DAmmit, they. aren’t. lasers.!!!
AAAAAHHHH!!!
Anyhoo, a few other points-cloaking devices don’t really work in the SW universe, I’ll give you that-they make the cloaked ship blind as well.
At Endor, the ewoks and the rebels used guerilla warfare-it was like the Soviets in Afghanistan-no one is going to say that the Red Army was incompetant, but there you go!
Besides, everyone KNOWS Star Wars has way better music.
“Duel of the Fates” is John Williams’s BEST piece EVAR!
A ridiculous idea. Star Trek simply has much more on-screen footage than Star Wars, and the books are officially considered canon.
This is innaccurate info. First, the Executor was being focused on by the entire rebel fleet (Remember Ackbar ordering them to “Concentrate all firepower on the Super Star Destroyer”?).
As for the asteroids: What do you think would happen to the E-D if a 350 meter asteroid rammed it?
This whole paragraph is erroneous. For this particular quote, that comparison is between the standard weaponry, not including the superlaser. (Considering that the Empire had roughly 25,000 SDs…well, that’s a whole lotta firepower).
Not to mention the fact that people are prone to great exaggerations when discussing something so phenomenally significant, which might be plausible in this situation.
Two things: 1) The Planet Defender Ion Cannon is the most powerful Ion cannon deployable (Notice how huge the thing was?). 2) Kinda goes to show how devasting Ion attacks on ship systems are, don’t it?
They don’t NEED to maneuver very well, nor would their much greater mass than the E-D enable them to (yet they still have relatively good maneuverability compared to their size).
Here are some things from the ST:TNG Tech Manual that are really frustrating, but are relavant to this thread.
More power than thought before, but still slower than its opponent.
It also says 10E9 mega-joules = 500 photons. Or about 2,000 terra-joules per torpedo. Which one is correct?
A new take-
Now the low ball estimate gives the Feds an equal weapon to the Imperial heavy weapons (and the top end a ridiculously over powering weapon), and speed means nothing in this fight (because it will be fought in normal space since both opponents cannot fight the other in cruise modes of Warp and Hyperspace).
So, I think that it matters who lines up whom first with a good shot. Both opponents can outrun by acceleration the main weapons of the the other, unless said weapons are fired really close.
It’s a dogfight with the ISD having fighters for distractions and the E-D diplaying the superior agility of the two capital boats.
With the new calculations, I’ll say that the E-D will win after getting into position and launching 10-20 unexpected torpedos up the Imperial engine exhausts.
yay! (wadda you mean I did the math wrong…)
You’re all forgetting something very, very important! Namely that Lucasfilm does the effects for both ST and SW, therefore the ISD wins hands down as the Enterprise’s equipment suddenly fails for some “inexplicable” reason and the nearest TIE fighter proceeds to blast Picard and crew into bits!
:d&r for his life:
Others have dealt with this quite well. I’m proud of them. They all get gold stars for the week.
The same stormtroopers that managed to invade and decimate a numerically superior and tactically advantaged force when invading the Tantive IV in the opening of ANH. The same stormtroopers that managed to invade and nearly succeed in destroying the base of the New Republic’s best X-wing squadron (they were thwarted by a Force-sensitive member of the squadron). The same stormtroopers that have managed to inspire fear throughout the entire galaxy.
Those stormtroopers.
Icerigger…
This would only be an appropriate course of action if both series had an equal amount of screen time. They do not. ST has hundreds of hours of visual evidence, SW has about ten.
Take another, closer look at that scene. The turbolaser blast didn’t even strike the Tantive IV directly… instead, for some reason, the bolt “stopped” and made a sharp “downward” (I know there’s no “down” in space) turn towards the corvette. It’s assumed that the corvette’s damaged shields channeled the blast towards itself.
Proves nothing. A single high-powered blast would’ve been enough to completely eradicate the Falcon. Further, a Star Destroyer is not an anti-starfighter platform… it is an anti-capship platform. Considering that they managed to hit the Falcon at all testifies well to the marksmanship of the Empire.
Those asteroid blasts indicate that the heavy turbolasers have far greater firepower than the Enterprise’s phasers ever put out.
Why? Asteroids have mass. When they’re moving, they have kinetic energy. Is this energy supposed to magically vanish?
Wrong. A Super Star Destroyer was put out of action by the combined firepower of the entire rebel fleet.
That dialogue was clearly hyperbole. Dialogue also stated that the Death Star was “the ultimate power in the universe”… but it was destroyed, so this can’t be right, can it?
Wrong. No single Federation starship can destroy a planet. In fact, no combined strength of Federation starships has ever been shown to be capable of destroying a planet.
Hyperbole again. We ignore it. We know for an undisputable fact that the Empire had over 25,000 Star Destroyers alone. Their fleet strength most likely numbered well over a hundred thousand.
Big whup, that’s what planet-defender grade ion cannons do. Further, its removal from action was temporary. The novelisations describe it as being up and running again within the hour.
Jeu_D’esprit…
That’s funny. Mega-joules aren’t a unit of power. They’re a unit of energy.
Basically, the technical manual is chock full of errors… and it’s contradicted quite often by on-screen evidence (for example, one technical description of the Enterprise’s warp core power output was a mere terawatt… which has got to be woefully inaccurate).
Why use that as a basis for judging torpedo strength? The same manual also says that a photon torpedo carries 1.5 kilograms of antimatter. Using E=mc[sup]2[/sup], we find that to be about 270,000 tera-joules. Looks like the TM is off by a few orders of magnitude…
Note: 270,000 tera-joules translates into roughly 65 megatons (less half that, however, when you consider that not all the energy would be directed at its target). That’s a nice-sized blast… but paltry compared to the ISD’s main guns.
And what “low ball” estimates would these be? The TM estimates the E-D’s entire phaser array at 1.02 gigawatts of energy. One estime of heavy turbolaser firepower (based on the Base Delta Zero action) puts its strength at 47 million terawatts for a single blast.
SPOOFE
Exactly. This is why this arguement can be so hard. Simply put Star Trek is chock full of contradictions. In the end you have to balance competing numbers. Generally this means ignoring dialog and looking at what the thing actually does on screen. Most writers couldn’t tell a kiloJoule from a MegaParsec. In fact the shows would be better if they droped the TechnoBabble, as they generally get it wrong.
SPOOFE
Not to mention that no reaction is ever 100% efficient (pesky laws of thermodynamics). Also not to mention these multi-megaton weapons do not vaporise unshielded ships when they hit. They simply puch holes in the ships. They do a lot of damage sure, but no where near KiloTon range let alone MegaTon range. In the numbers I gave earlier I gave Star Trek the benefit of the doubt and used 10 MT as the deliverable yield for photon torps. I think we should be able to agree that nearly 1000 times more powerful than Little Boy (Hiroshima) is more than generous considering the on-screen evidence.