tracer:
of course it would work, someone on that ship would figure a way to beam through the shields. C’mon, one episode where they couldn’t figure a way to beam through some shield or atmosphere before the last quarter hour of the show… i didn’t think so.
So yeah, it would work. Like i said, The Enterprise won. Darth is a Klingon kid’s rattle, and the ISD is a new coral reef for some yet to evolve species on some vague moon.
-i’m just this regular guy, ya’ know? ~Zaphod Beeblebrox
tracer:
of course it would work, someone on that ship would figure a way to beam through the shields. C’mon, one episode where they couldn’t figure a way to beam through some shield or atmosphere before the last quarter hour of the show… i didn’t think so.
So yeah, it would work. Like i said, The Enterprise won. Darth is a Klingon kid’s rattle, and the ISD is a new coral reef for some yet to evolve species on some vague moon.
-i’m just this regular guy, ya’ know? ~Zaphod Beeblebrox
Soulsling, as much as I appreciate ranting, I should let you know what your little spiel sounded like…
“The Enterprise is great and amazing and wonderful and joyous and the Star Destroyer sucks!! The Enterprise would win!!”
C’mon… try to give some REAL reason why you think the Enterprise would win. All of your suggestions (while sound) would probably take the starfleet crew several minutes to think about. And I don’t care what anyone says about the Enterprise… several minutes of delay, with the vast amount of firepower that can be brought to bear on them, would spell certain doom for our dear Federation friends.
I realize that the crew of the Enterprise is great at thinking on their feet… but standard procedure (they DO follow it, even if they often use unorthodox ideas) is for the captain to ask his bridge crew for suggestions (this happened dozens of times). He gets a few suggestions from random crew members, picks one, and implements it. And the suggestion he picks doesn’t always work (one Star Trek episode had the Enterprise in a temporal loop… and they kept blowing up. Another ship was on a collision course, their maneuvering wasn’t working… they kept trying to use the tractor beam to push the other ship of course). The point is, that’s a long process (from a battlefield standpoint, where a single second can mean life or death). The most likely tactic the Enterprise would use would be run away and analyze battle data… and THEN come back and implement something nifty.
However, if the Enterprise sticks around too long and tries to fight a conventional fight… it has no chance.
-SPOOFE
Cecil said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Relax, I’m not as Dave as I look!- A Wallified sig!
yeah yeah, i’m not trying to stick my tounge out and say the Enterprise rocks and the ISD sucks, i think the ISD is much more fashionably correct, but were talking about the logistics of the actual crews/ships vs. one another aren’t we? if we go by what we’ve seen on both movies/show, and even including all the technical manuals i so proudly don’t own, the Enterprise just keeps showing up the ISD. Yes, if the ISD just decided to come up and unleash its firepower on the Enterprise the benevolent crew and their ship would be toast. Give them both a half hour episode together, or even a full hour, and the ISD becomes a museum artifact in some starfleet academy. The posts previous to mine all mention the firepower, technology, and crew reactions to situations. In a debate, one takes a side. I took the side of the Enterprise, because it seems (Spoof) took the side of the ISD. I could just as easily argue the other way round. But i’m on the Enterprise team 'till suggested otherwise or someone really decides to close the topic. Then i would just bring it back up arguing the other side most likely. So, any rebuttals?? 
Oh, thank godlessness the Great Debates forum is back up! I missed you guys! sob!
Anyhow, SPOOFE Bo Diddly wrote:
And I’ll bet you cheered your head off every single time the Enterprise blew up 
Hey, hey, hey, now, Tracer… I love the Enterprise. I was upset when they blew it up for good in Generations. But you gotta admit, that temporal loop episode was cool.
Anyway, to re-iterate the two different outcomes that have been set up in this thread…
A: The two ships meet. The Star Destroyer opens fire first, completely surprising the Enterprise. Enterprise isn’t able to to get away in time. Enterprise loses.
B: The two ships meet. The Star Destroyer opens fire first, but the Enterprise sees it coming a mile away. After a few seconds of battle, they realize that they can’t win here and now… so they run, repair, and plan. They return, fly circles around the Star Destroyer, and chalk up another battle (though I don’t think that the Star Destroyer would be blown up… if it has a smart captain, it’d run-- it can go faster in its’ FTL mode than the Enterprise-- or it’d be disabled and the benevolent Enterprise would ask for their surrender).
Any other ideas from y’all?
don’t know why i’m so involved in this thread…
ok, situation (A), sounds totally reasonable, there goes the series.
Situation (B): sounds like it would take a good chase before the Enterprise cought up and found a way to either ask for their surrender with or without damaging the ship enought first. So, in Situation B, what type of interaction would possibly take place when the two ships, aware of each other in time, meet within the correct distance.
question: whats the range of the ISD’s weapons? Enterprises?
more to come, i’m sure…
The range of the Enterprise’s photon torpedoes, as given in The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual section 11.3 page 130, is 3,500,000 kilometers.
That’s about 8 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, for those of you playing along at home.
I don’t think there’s a well-established distance for ISD’s weapons. In the novels and movies, it’s a sure thing that they can bombard a planet from orbit, which can be a few hundred kilometers or a few thousand kilometers. In the games, the range is just a couple of kilometers (which is the extreme low-end of the spectrum, which is why I never use the games as a reference). The highest range estimate I’ve heard for turbolasers is 8,000 kilometers, though I don’t know of any official resources on that one.
So, for the purpose of argument, I think it’s a safe bet to put the turbolaser range at roughly a 300-400 kilometers… any dispute…?
Of course, even 8,000 kilometers is pitiful compared to the range of a photon torpedo. But something that bugs me is the speed of the suckers… in “First Contact”, a spread of torpedoes (yes, I know they were quantum torps and not photon torps) were launched at Dr. Cochran’s ship (the Pheonix?), it took fifteen-twenty seconds for them to traverse that distance (and the Enterprise… the E, actually… was closer than 3,500,000 kilometers). So if the Enterprise fires from that distance, there’s a chance that a Star Destroyer can take evasive action (yeah, they CAN maneuver… slightly… sorta…).
So the ‘Prise would wanna shoot from a closer distance… which increases the likelihood of the Star Destroyer getting at it on its’ own, etc. etc… so, either way, it’s a risk.
Maybe we should petition George Lucas and whoever owns the rights to Star Trek to collaborate on this for a TV special.
I guess the wings on the fighters were for operating in atmosphere, but they ran their engines constantly which one would not do in a weightless vacumn, and banked and dove and climbed as though they were ‘flying’ instead of maneuvering (ha! I have my dictionary now) in space. The X-15 for example had control surfaces for atmosphere and control jets for the near outer space it reached.
BTW upon reflection I must admit that if Troi were driving the Empire would be victorious.
Upon reflection, in at least one episode it is mentioned that NCC 1701 (no A, B, C or Bloody D)can destroy a planet. The Empire created the Deathstar for that specific purpose. I submit that Enterprise has heavier armament that the Empire Crusier. Actually, 1701 was a crusier. (The Search For Spock) I think 1701 is a the equivalent of our battleship although it is called Galaxy Class.
I think the more appropiate contest would be to put NCC1701 and Kirk up against a Death Star, or NCC 1701D against a Death Star and an Enpire cruiser.
Surely Trekkers would agree that any Federation vessel would be toast after a direct hit from a Death Star.
SPOOFE Bo Diddly wrote:
I chalk that up to the same effect that allowed Riker to SEE and DODGE a hand-phaser beam fired at him in the first-season episode “Conspiracy”.
Namely, dumb special-effects artists and even dumber scriptwriters who show futuristic weapon effects moving much more slowly than they should.
If the Enterprise fires the straight-line-flight slow-as-molasses torpedoes they used in First Contact, my grandmother could take evasive action against them. (And she died over a decade ago! That’s how slow those torpedoes were.)
Thing is, not only do “real” photon torpedoes (ST:TNG Tech Manual section 11.3) travel at warp speeds, in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, they rigged a photon torpedo to track and home in on a target. (A target with a cloaking device, no less!) So the Star Destroyer would have to (A) be able to detect an FTL torpedo coming at them, and (B) be able to maneuver faster than the torpedo can alter its own trajectory, in order to evade one.
I’m not saying that a Star Destroyer’s gonna be able to dodge missiles… I was trying to bring up a point that you can’t go by what you see in the movies or on TV due to, as Tracer pointed out, special effects wizards who don’t care about how things would REALLY look and instead think about what would look cool.
As for the “fighters continuously running their engines” bit, that’s sort of a pilot light of sorts… see, the engines need to be burning fuel to keep the reactor alive and running… the engines need to be kept burning so that shields, weapons, life support, communications, sensors, and such can be powered. To answer the maneuvering question (as far as X-wings go, at least) I offer this, from “Star Wars: Incredible Cross-sections”:
“The X-wing achieves its remarkable maneuverability through a combination of three factors. Differential thrust from its four fusial ion engines is the first. High-mass electromagnetic gyros in each of the four retro thrusters add a turning effect that helps to swing the ship in tight curves. Finally, precise bursts of retro-thrust fire forward through the turbine nozzles to add further control and five the ship a critical edge in combat.”
Of course, that all sounds quite techno-babble-esque, and the included diagram points to something that doesn’t look much like a maneuvering thruster… but it’s an explanation, I guess.
And I know that this is a huge tangent, but this whole thread has sorta become “Star Wars vs. Star Trek” instead of a Star Destroyer fighting the Enterprise… “when in Rome…”
i don’t care for tangents myself really. so to stay on the original topic…
yeah, the deathstar once powered up would cream, fry, shake up, and make one hell of a dilithium smoothie from the Enterprise. No need to enter the ISD into that fight. How big were the borg cubes? the deathstar was the size of a small moon wasn’t it? but the ISD vs. Enterprise… were still on situation B, what happens? we need scriptwriters…
This is strictly an eyeball comparison on my part about Borg cubes… but judging on the size of the Enterprise compared to a Borg cube, I’d say that they’re probably a bit over a thousand meters on a side. So not exactly “longer” than a Star Destroyer, but definitely more massive… however, nowhere near the size of the Death Star.
Of course, there’s no rule that says all Borg cubes have to be the same.
up as late as me spoof, your’e as sick as i.
so that still leaves the scenario of situation B.
I just want to point out one thing here. Everyone has been taking evidence from the TV shows and movies for the abilities of the E and the ISD. Well, that’s fine, because there is NO other source for this stuff.
But consider this:
In ST, the crew comes up with some bizarre and inovative tactic, or makes some funky modifications to the ship, everything works exactly as planned, and the good guys win.
In SW, the good guys fight with skill and bravery and good tactics and all that, everything goes exactly as planned (except in ESB) and the good guys win.
Of COURSE the Enterprise always wins – they’re the heroes! Of COURSE the ISD always loses, they’re the BAD guys!
My point is that it’s ridiculous to say, “Well, in one episode I saw Riker do this move, and they modified a tachyon photorp and fired it at warp 12 and blew up the Borg cube!” …and then take that as some kind of example of what they would do to the ISD. I mean, think about it: Don’t we all assume better qualities about the heroes of each little universe, and assume the worst about the villians? The only things about the heroes which is unlimited is their intelligence and bravery (and any other ‘good’ qualities you want to name), and the only unlimited quality about the villians is their depravity.
If we want to be fair about this, we should be comparing the Rebel fleet to Starfleet, and the Romulans (or Cardassians or whoever) to the Empire.
Perpetual winners vs. perpetual winners, and perpetual losers vs. perpetual losers. That way the skewed outcomes provided by mass-media presentations won’t affect our judgement…too much.
No contest. Picard says “No, wait we’ve got to talk!” and the Rebels blow him away. 
like your style carn.
rebels vs. starfleet, thats choice.
i’d like to point out that the rebels could use some definite help with their wardrobe, might give them a better edge. personally, i’ve always been a fan of the blasters from the Black Hole (i know it’s disney, so what.) those phasers look weak in ST. SW blasters definitely fit the fashion don’ts of the rebels carrying them.