As far as I understand, Photon torps are stronger than phasers, anyway. From what I’ve seen in the shows, phasers are more accurate, though, and hence are used to target specific sections of an enemy ship.
The USS Enterprise with its phaser weapons? An Imperial Star Destroyer with its dinky lasers? Time to put away the kid’s toys, gentlemen, 'cause the Japanese know how to do deep-space destruction right.
Case in point: The Super Dimension Fortress-1 Macross. according to http://macross.anime.net, the Macross (from the show Chohjikuu Yosai Macross and NOT from Robodrek) is 1200 meters long with a bow-firing energy cannon that can disintigrate anything this side of a Death Star, four 178 cm railguns, eight large beam cannons, a plethora of “large automatic anti-ship missile launchers” and, lest we forget, a compliment of upwards of 300 VF-1 Valkyries (all armed with vulcan cannons, multiple laser mounts, and tons of missile launchers) as opposed to the mere 72 TIE Fighters on the standard ISD, and the ten or so shuttlecraft on the Enterprise. Minna-sama, welcome to @$$-whup country. Oh, and I also forgot to mention that failing everything else, if it gets close enough, the Macross can actually PUNCH (yes, as in Muhammad Ali) the heck out of either of the aforementioned ships.
It’s enough to make Capt. Kirk wanna go back to Iowa, eh? 
Rick Payne
GEEKS!
(ahem) with that out of the way, here’s my .02 of a dollar regarding this all-important debate:
I think it’s paramount (sorry about that) to stop debating turbolasers vs. phasers and the like without a frame of reference. Without a solid basis of power, etc. its just apples trying to vaporize oranges.
But, I also think it’s possible to get some perspective my looking at relative technologies. In this, I think you’ll all agree the Federation has it hands down on the Empire. The Fed, after all, has replicators, transporters, matter/antimatter reactors, cloaking technology, and mo-fo tough shields. In fact, the only place where Wars seems to have it over Trek is in AI technology – and even this is questionable. While every mechanical whatsit in the Wars universe seems to have a (irritating personality) Data and even some of the stupider Federation Artificial Intelligences seem to be much more capable. God knows, C3PO seems barely competent to tend bar, while Data can serve a bitchin’ Mai Tai.
As for ‘paranormal abilities’, much has been said of that unimaginative villain Vadar and his long-range choke hold. Hell, kiddies, keep in mind that the Trek Universe has more than it’s fair share of very, very, very powerful critters – including some that could wipe out a civilization by just crossing their eyes. Troi or Spock would detect any Empire anti-social behavior and that would be it.
As for relative power, remember that it took the Wars universe a HUGE station to destroy one planet, while Picard and the old Federation always had the ability to pretty much toast anything in space. Looking at size vs. firepower, once again the Feds win hands down.
Now, please, get on with your lives – or at least more important debates … such as the Dominion vs. the Borg, the Borg vs. the Empire, or the crew from Futurama vs. Space Ghost.
The USS Enterprise with its phaser weapons? An Imperial Star Destroyer with its dinky lasers? Time to put away the kid’s toys, gentlemen, 'cause the Japanese know how to do deep-space destruction right.
Case in point: The Super Dimension Fortress-1 Macross. according to http://macross.anime.net, the Macross (from the show Chohjikuu Yosai Macross and NOT from Robodrek) is 1200 meters long with a bow-firing energy cannon that can disintigrate anything this side of a Death Star, four 178 cm railguns, eight large beam cannons, a plethora of “large automatic anti-ship missile launchers” and, lest we forget, a compliment of upwards of 300 VF-1 Valkyries (all armed with vulcan cannons, multiple laser mounts, and tons of missile launchers) as opposed to the mere 72 TIE Fighters on the standard ISD, and the ten or so shuttlecraft on the Enterprise. Minna-sama, welcome to @$$-whup country. Oh, and I also forgot to mention that failing everything else, if it gets close enough, the Macross can actually PUNCH (yes, as in Muhammad Ali) the heck out of either of the aforementioned ships.
It’s enough to make Capt. Kirk wanna go back to Iowa, eh?
Rick Payne
GEEKS!
(ahem) with that out of the way, here’s my .02 of a dollar regarding this all-important debate:
I think it’s paramount (sorry about that) to stop debating turbolasers vs. phasers and the like without a frame of reference. Without a solid basis of power, etc. its just apples trying to vaporize oranges.
But, I also think it’s possible to get some perspective by looking at relative technologies. In this, I think you’ll all agree the Federation has it hands down on the Empire. The Fed, after all, has replicators, transporters, matter/antimatter reactors, cloaking technology, and mo-fo tough shields. In fact, the only place where Wars seems to have it over Trek is in AI technology – and even this is questionable. While every mechanical whatsit in the Wars universe seems to have a (irritating) personality, Data and even some of the stupider Federation Artificial Intelligences seem to be much more capable. God knows, C3PO seems barely competent to tend bar, while Data can serve a bitchin’ Mai Tai.
As for ‘paranormal abilities’, much has been said of that unimaginative villain Vadar and his long-range choke hold – but that’s all that the Wars folks seem to be able to muster. Hell, kiddies, keep in mind that the Trek Universe has more than it’s fair share of very, very, very powerful critters – including some that could wipe out a civilization by just crossing their eyes. In the Trek camp, Troi would detect any Empire anti-social behavior and that would be it.
As for relative power, remember that it took the Wars universe a HUGE station to destroy one planet, while Picard and even the old Federation ships always had the ability to pretty much toast anything in space. Looking at size vs. firepower, once again the Feds win hands down.
Now, please, get on with your lives – or at least more important debates … such as the Dominion vs. the Borg, the Borg vs. the Empire, or the crew from Futurama vs. Space Ghost.
Macross, we’re talking 'bout the Enterprise vs. a Star Destroyer here… I can bring up a bundle of other ships that can dish out damage in huge amounts. Anyone read the Jedi Academy trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson? They introduce a ship called the Sun Crusher which is the size of a starfighter and is capable of destroying stars. It had near-invincible armoring (they needed to throw the damn thing into a black hole to destroy it). So if you wanna talk about size/power ratios (and other ships, t’boot), can I just toss that little nipper in?
(Don’t ask me why I’m taking this the least bit seriously…but I think we can settle this AQAP (as quantitatively as possible))
I think the key point that has been mostly ignored in this thread was brought up by carniverousplant and reiterated by M. Christian, using a common reference point to determine weapons firepower.
Specifically, presuming planets are roughly the same in both reference frames, Trek ships are much more powerful. I believe it has been well established that a Trek ship can destroy an entire world (wasn’t the evil Kirk from the mirror universe supposed to destroy a planet on on old episode…I haven’t watched in years), while Star Wars folks made a big deal out of the fact that the Empire had a planet-killer weapon. I think it is safe to say that Star Trek weapons are orders of magnitude stronger than Star Wars weapons.
If this isn’t enough to make the fight conclusive, we can also infer that the shields are roughly proportional to the strentgh of the weapons, since (order of magnitude) Trek ships and Wars ships can sustain a number of hits from their own genre’s weapons before the pyrotechnics begin.
If we really want to dissect this, we can analyze comparative advantages in key technologies, but if firepower and defenses are conclusive, I don’t see where the Wars ships are going to make up the deficit.
SPOOFE Bo Diddly wrote:
Yeah! And besides, neither the weapons nor the Varitech fighters of the Superdimension Fortress Macross can hit anything moving faster-than-light. 
MetallicAsh wrote:
However, when a ship “destroys a planet” in a Star Trek episode, it usually just destroys the surface of the planet to wipe out anybody living thereon and make it uninhabitable by future settlers.
When the Death Star destroyed Alderaan in Star Wars, it blew up the whole planet – crust, mantle, core, and all. This requires a far bigger bang than is required for merely razing the surface. In fact, it would require millions or even billions of times more energy.
And what’s scariest about this, if Han Solo is to be believed, is that it would only take 1000 ships (presumably star-destroyer-sized ships) to do the same amount of damage. If it takes, say, 10,000,000 times more energy than the Enterprise can dish out to completely obliterate an entire planet, but it only requires 1000 Star Destroyers to accomplish this feat, then that would mean that a single Star Destroyer packs 10,000 times the whallop of the Enterprise!
Man, Tracer, you took the words right out of my mouth. There’s a big difference between scorching the surface of a planet and shattering the thing into itty-bitty pieces. It’s been explained (through the numerous novels, such as the Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn, that an Imperial Star Destroyer can do the same thing to a planetary surface. Heck, humanity can currently do that to Earth (based on the estimated number of nuclear weapons and the average strength of each one).
So from this we can judge that Turbolasers and phasers are approximately equal in power, using this basis of comparison.
Further, we can specualate the shield-strength/size of ship ratio is roughly the same, which would give the Enterprise roughly the same amount of shield strength of a medium-sized cruiser. Since the Enterprise also takes damage from the “feedback” of the energy that its shields absorb, it can be speculated that a volley or two of turbolaser/ion cannons would be capable of disabling the Enterprise.
Based on the different natures of the crew, I think it’s a very very likely bet that the Star Destroyer would open fire first (in a counter brought about by pure chance, no foreknowledge involved). Which leaves the Enterprise with the only obvious advantages being its sublight speed and maneuverability and its numerous non-combative, unorthodox tactics.
Spoofe wrote:
Ah, but this “feedback” only seems to affect bridge consoles. That’s the only parts of the ship you ever see explode when their shields are up. (You’d think Star Fleet’s engineers would know enough not to wire firecrackers to their computer consoles by now!)
But… the bridge is the only part of the ship we ever see. Well, unless one of the main characters is somewhere else. Or if you count the exterior shots of the ship.
Here’s a good rule of thumb for Star Trek dudes… if a camera is pointed at you, get away from a computer screen, consol, wiring, or anything else that can emit a shower of sparks.
First of all, I’d like to point out two things:
- This is the longest thread in the Straight Dope GD Forums. That’s pathetic.
- I’ve been lurking in SD Forums for six months and this thread is the one that finally drove me to register. I’m pathetic.
We need to dismiss the dramatic tendencies of the scriptwriters as much as possible. An earlier post noticed that the Enterprise frequently sustained damage but survived, but that Star Destroyers were either menacingly intact or blowing up like fireworks. That’s because ST is TV and SW is a movie. With TV you need damage to create drama, but survival for the next episode. In a movie, things can be final and irreversible, especially if there is more than one ship to go around.
From a pure tech viewpoint (and I must say that reading the contents of this thread had educated me beyond belief, beyond what I would ever admit to anyone) the ST universe seems more advanced in that they have managed to create peace. It’s a fallacy, albeit an easy one to make, that the wartime machinery of SW is superior because it bristles with guns and smoke-colored blaster scars. But in reality (a term I hesitate to use) it’s the weapons that create détente that are most powerful. Case in point: nuclear weapons here in the real world have ensured no super-wars between superpowers.
Similarly, the gentle diplomatic policy of the Federation should be interpreted as a result (at least partially) of having created phenomenal technology. Along with transporters, replicators, holodecks, uniforms that don’t stain or wrinkle, free love, and non-surgical medicine that cures everything, the Federation has created massive, massive weapons. Ones which create peace.
Star Wars is about rough, gritty combat with weapons that are impressive by our standards but still not advanced enough to assure the annihilation of those who use them. That the Empire is still trying to develop weaponry at all betrays the insufficiency of those weapons. The SW movies are a metaphor of the grueleing necessity of fighting in the face of tyranny, whereas the ST shows are more about the rewards of sustained diplomacy. It’s a more advanced vision, and necessitates more advanced technology. The bloodless pansy-ass violence of the series may lure us into thinking that they’re wussies, but that’s myopic. Picard is nice because he can be. Vadar is a Nazi because he has to be.
And really, in the history of warfare size has always taken a back seat to range, just as ferocity takes a back seat to strategy. Enterprise would detect the SD from a million miles away, Picard would hail, Vader would threaten, Deanna would confirm, Worf would detect a power-up, Data would warn that the SD weapons were crude but nasty. Plenty of time to leave, or launch torpedoes, from a million miles away.
That said, I prefer a good SW movie to a ST episode, because violence is more entertaining.
A final note: Never mind the surface controls on SW fighters or the speed differential on warp-speed weapons. Since when is there NOISE in space? Or fiery explosions in a vacuum?
Love this thread, love it!
Oh, you kids.
The Enterprise would pound the crap out of the ISD, and I’ll tell you why: in the Star Trek universe, starship battles invariably happen at warp speeds, but in Star Wars it’s all much slower than C.
FTL travel in the Star Wars universe is a Big Deal. To travel at FTL speeds, you have to drop out of normal space and into “hyperspace”, where you are flying blind with respect to real space. And one doesn’t just pop in and out of hyperspace at will.
Compare that to Star Trek, where you can travel at warp speeds and still see your way around in normal space. And you can even fire your weapons while in warp.
Also, the weapons in Star Wars all travel far slower than light (with the possible exception of the big, difficult-to-aim and slow-to-fire Death Star planet 'sploder ray). Star Trek’s photon torpedoes appear to be slow, dumb-fire weapons, but (depending on the season and the mood of the SFX guy) phasers generally travel instantaneously.
So. In my opinion, the Enterprise would stay at warp 1 or above, and make phaser strafing runs on the ISD until either the ISD dropped into hyperspace (run home to momma, boys!) or blowed up real good. The ISD wouldn’t be able to dodge because phasers travel faster than light. All it could do is fill the air with turbolaser shot and hope it got in a lucky shot.
In closing, I’d to say this is the geekiest thing I’ve written in weeks, so I’m going to go listen to the P-funk until I feel more centered.
Star Trek battles happen at the speed of light? I’ve never seen this happen. I admit I haven’t seen ALL of the Star Trek episodes out there, but I’ve seen at least 85% or so.
And the reason Hyperspace is “flying blind” would probably be because it’s a LO-O-O-O-OT faster than Warp. Whereas it takes Voyager 75 years (estimated, from season 1) to cross 70,000 lightyears of distance, a Star Destroyer would be able to cross their galaxy (which, in Star Wars’ case, is 150,000 lightyears in diameter) in under a month (again, that’s estimated, based on other travel arrangements mentioned in sourcebooks and novels).
The essential problem with firing from Warp is that after only a few seconds, the Enterprise would be out of range (even with the amazingly excellent range that its’ weapons have). So they’d be zipping back and forth, taking a potshot here and there, which wouldn’t be nearly sufficient to take out the ISD. The larger ship would probably realize the futility of staying to fight after only a few passes of the E, and they’d just leave and blow up a Federation science station or Ferengi ship or something.
And even if the Enterprise used hit-and-run tactics (going to warp to reach a safe distance, dropping out of warp to fire, going to warp again, repeat), they’d still need to perform this maneuver precisely several dozen times to have any effect. With the massive amounts of weaponry that the Star Destroyer has, all it needs is a single good hyperspace jump, a single tractor beam locked-on, and a few volleys from its’ guns.
As for the Han Solo quote… the danger he was talking about was directed at long-distance travel (hundreds or thousands of lightyears), not a few hundred-thousand or million kilometers. In “The Corellian Trilogy” Book I, an NRI agent (in a very dilapidated freighter, not a top-notch military starship) performed a microjump of a few hundred thousand kilometers. Her ship would have survived well enough if it, coincidentally, hadn’t been designed to fail after a single hyperspace jump (it was part of her alibi to sneak onto the planet Corellia).
I like Tracer’s (was it Tracer’s?) long-previous idea of both ships going into the battle prepared, with a chosen battlefield and all that. The E’s best chance would be finding a good planet and play hit-and-run tactics there, popping up over the horizon and disappearing again. Heck, even an asteroid field would work.
Karellen wrote:
And
- You registered with a username of Karellen, the leader of the Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. That’s pathetic.
Spoofe wrote:
In Dark Force Rising, the Kimura (a Star Destroyer) made a 350-light-year journey in 5 days. This works out to 25,000 times the speed of light. And that was a sustained cruising speed – the Kimura could probably travel much faster over short distances, if you wanted to chance overloading the hyperdrive.
Not if it flew around the Star Destroyer in circles! (In the unofficial Trek wargame Star Fleet Battles, a starship going twice the speed of light can turn in a 20,000 kilometer radius – but this game is notorious for its compressed time scale. Such a short turning radius at 2x lightspeed would allow you to make a complete circle 5 times per second!)
Oh – and if the Enterprise were circling the Star Destroyer at warp speed, it could make tiny random changes in its course as it went, thus preventing the Star Destroyer from predicting where to point their guns.
Hello Folks.
Before I get into this argu–erm, ahem–debate, I’d like to make it clear that I am heavily in favor of the Star Wars genre Imperial Star Destroyer winning this battle for several reasons…
A: The “Phasers and Torps at Warp Speed” theory is complete and total bunk. If that was the way it worked, why didn’t they blow the smack out of the Borg Sphere in Star Trek: First Contact?
B: Where the Enterprise has one “security officer” (aka Worf) to direct the fire of weaponry, the ISD has a bridge crew numbering into the several score (exact numbers, I don’t know), each responsible for a different system. This enables the ISD to target several key points on the Enterprise (Namely, those wussy little posts that hold the Warp Nacelles on) AND keep the whole ship running at tip-top shape. Additionally, the Imperial Star Destroyer has a full 360 degree firing arc.
C: The ISD’s shields are much, much stronger than you people are making out. You’ve all seen the movies, right? Ever wonder what those frames with those mysterious white flashes were? You guessed it…weaponry being absorbed or deflected. Ever wonder, in Return of the Jedi, why that crashing A-wing that careened into the Mon Calamari Cruiser didn’t destroy it, or why that purpley funnel of an explosion didn’t quite touch the hull? Shields.
D: The range of weaponry is a completely moot point, especially since the only available statistics are from unofficial sources (I believe, this may be a refutable point) but, as has been pointed out, precision use of hyperspacing and micro-jumps could easily level the field.
On a more technical note…I propose this…was it a movie or an episode where Geordie (forgive the misspelling) was captured by some Klingon ladies…and they bugged his visor. They were all keen about finding the frequency of the shields, and once they recalibrated the shields to that frequency (or oscillation, or whatever the hell) the phasers went right through. That implies that phasers are nothing more than the same sort of energy as force fields…maybe they’re just pointy force fields? That would explain why the wounds on the hulls of the Star Trek ships look like slashes, rather than craters or just chunks ripped off.
Well, that’s my $.02. Thanks for your time.
Hello Folks.
Before I get into this argu–erm, ahem–debate, I’d like to make it clear that I am heavily in favor of the Star Wars genre Imperial Star Destroyer winning this battle for several reasons…
A: The “Phasers and Torps at Warp Speed” theory is complete and total bunk. If that was the way it worked, why didn’t they blow the smack out of the Borg Sphere in Star Trek: First Contact?
B: Where the Enterprise has one “security officer” (aka Worf) to direct the fire of weaponry, the ISD has a bridge crew numbering into the several score (exact numbers, I don’t know), each responsible for a different system. This enables the ISD to target several key points on the Enterprise (Namely, those wussy little posts that hold the Warp Nacelles on) AND keep the whole ship running at tip-top shape. Additionally, the Imperial Star Destroyer has a full 360 degree firing arc.
C: The ISD’s shields are much, much stronger than you people are making out. You’ve all seen the movies, right? Ever wonder what those frames with those mysterious white flashes were? You guessed it…weaponry being absorbed or deflected. Ever wonder, in Return of the Jedi, why that crashing A-wing that careened into the Mon Calamari Cruiser didn’t destroy it, or why that purpley funnel of an explosion didn’t quite touch the hull? Shields.
D: The range of weaponry is a completely moot point, especially since the only available statistics are from unofficial sources (I believe, this may be a refutable point) but, as has been pointed out, precision use of hyperspacing and micro-jumps could easily level the field.
On a more technical note…I propose this…was it a movie or an episode where Geordie (forgive the misspelling) was captured by some Klingon ladies…and they bugged his visor. They were all keen about finding the frequency of the shields, and once they recalibrated the shields to that frequency (or oscillation, or whatever the hell) the phasers went right through. That implies that phasers are nothing more than the same sort of energy as force fields…maybe they’re just pointy force fields? That would explain why the wounds on the hulls of the Star Trek ships look like slashes, rather than craters or just chunks ripped off.
Well, that’s my $.02. Thanks for your time.
Well, the info given for either universe may come from unofficial source books, but those books are officially recognized by each universe’s respective creators.
Photon torpedoes have basically been proven to fly at FTL speeds, while phasers don’t.
Karellen (Or whatever your name is) Weapons developed during peace time are NEVER as powerful as ones developed during conflict. For example…nuclear bombs were developed during war time, wheras during peace we’ve made, what…the F-22? Sure, it may be an advanced fighter jet, but can pack nowhere near the damage of a single nuclear weapon. The only good machinery developed during peace time are just improvements of older machinery, with very few if any new components, just refinements. In SW, each side is constantly developing new weapons to extinguish the other side (well, that’s the Empire’s tactic anyways). So since in ST they just refine current technology, it is presumable that in SW more powerful and devastating weaponry has been developed (ie Sun Crusher).
And everyone still forgets the chaos ion cannons would wreak on the Enterprise with just a few blasts (I mean, come on…in books it describes X-wings and small capital ships being reduced to fused metal and circuits with a blast or two)
Anyways, I may be wrong (completely or partially, I dunno) about some of this, but we do have some theoretical facts going in this thread (But hey, it’s all make believe)