Well, Ranger stole my thunder on the Jar Jar Binks thing, and so many people are calling Boba Fett a badass when ll I’ve seen him do is deliver a incapacitated smuggler to Jabba the Hutt (with safe conduct provided by Vader Himself, no less), and get eaten by a Saarlac, that I’m sure the books are being discussed, so I’m staying out of it.
But I still second Ranger’s point. The absence of Jar Jar Binks makes Roddenberry’s universe the better one, by default.
No Jar-Jar, but there is Wesley Crusher (boo…hiss).
Are the Empire White Armored Stormtroopers the equivalent to the Enterprises Redshirts?
“I don’t want to beam down… I’ll be killed! No, don’t make me beam down!”
Photon torpedoes: 64 megatons, at best.
Heavy Turbolaser Battery: 200 gigatons, at LEAST.
Well yeah, it probably would. 'Course, it’s like a hundred times their size and they’re pure fighters. Make them Tie bombers or an equivalent sized ship and things would be much more interesting.
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Gosh, I must have missed the episode where Q joined the Federation. (Not that the Q are omnipotent anyway, though they’re certainly potent enough)
Achernar, you’re gonna have to give some kind of reasoning. Things being well-used and begrimed doesn’t automatically mean they’re lower tech than things that are all shiny and pretty. Oh, and comparing fighter missiles to capital ship torps is again, kinda uneven.
Uh a “universal translator” is not an explanation unless somebody can put forward a possible way for it to work. SW’s concept of there being a common language that most speak makes far, far more sense.
And the Federation really need a lot of advantages to make up for the fact that Empire ships can travel about 10,000 times as fast.
Well, Empire ships pretty clearly don’t have mass conversion of matter. Given that Star Destroyers dump garbage before they go to hyperdrive instead of converting it to energy that’s fairly obvious.
And that’s a huge disadvantage right there.
No, no – didn’t say that Q joined the Federation. Just that the Federation gets to go outside and play with Q every once in a while. 
Hey, they rock. Capitalist aliens are our friends!
NOTE: I didn’t mean to imply that only Starfleet/the Federation has transporters and replicators, just that the ST galaxy does and the SW galaxy dosen’t.
“Faster than light, no left or right.” Thats a good guide; not recommended, but still not impossible.
Nope, they use even more powerful forms of power generation. They can do things like that in fiction.
The only Federation advantage is the ability to create sparkly glowly things with their technology. That’s really about it. Their weapons are far less powerful - photon torpedoes, according to the tech manual, carry 1.5 kilograms of matter and 1.5 kilograms of antimatter as reactant, giving them a high-end yield of 64 megatons. Heavy turbolasers, the large turrets on the dorsal, have, based on calculations derived from the asteroid vaporization scenes in TESB, have long been estimated to have the ability to dish out blasts measuring in the dozens to hundreds of gigatons, low-end. More recently, according to the recent AOTC ICS (Incredible Cross-Sections), this figure has been given a more solid figure of 200 gigatons, at least, for an older ship of less than half the size of a Star Destroyer.
What’s more, the same book puts large ship shield strengths for the Empire in the teraton range. Some calcs for ISD’s go around 40 teratons. This essentially means that you’d need well over a thousand Federation ships all firing simultaneously at each Imperial ship in order to have a chance against it.
FURTHERMORE, the Empire vastly outnumbers the Federation… whereas current estimates put the peak of Federation fleet numbers into the 8,000-12,000 range, the Empire had, at its height, 25,000 Imperial Star Destroyers alone… this doesn’t even include smaller ships such as frigates, dreadnaughts, cruisers, corvettes, gunships, or the like.
Speed: It was going to take Voyager, a top-of-the-line hotshot ship with the best warp speeds around, 75 years (ignoring technobabble solutions) to cross 70,000 lightyears. Conversely, an Imperial ship can do that distance in a matter of days (as seen in AOTC and TPM, where starships travelled from Core worlds to the Outer Rim in a few hours… “days” is a conservative estimate). This essentially means that Imperial ships can strike anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant, without warning, with impunity.
To put things simply: A dozen Imperial Star Destroyers can destroy all the major worlds of the Federation inside a week.
Eh. Just about anything disrupts a transporter beam. Hell, minor atmospheric disturbance - not even thunderstorm level - will disrupt a transporter. Further, since they can’t be used unless the host ship lowers its shields… well… I think you get the idea.
As for replicators… nope, yer wrong, SW’s got 'em. 'Cept they’re called “synthesizers” and they don’t make things magically appear in a sparkly cascade of pretty CGI-ness.
A parsec of water? Do you know how enormous that would be?
The Federation actually has black people. The only black people in the Star Wars universe are Mace Windu and Lando Calrissian.
I have trouble buying that. But we’re also dealing with a universe where the Millenium Falcon can gets between solar systems WITHOUT hyperdrive in a reasonably short period of time.
Unless maybe c is different in the SW universe than in the ST universe. Maybe c in SW is 186,000,000,000,000,000 miles per second. If that’s the case the SD would be in trouble after crossing over.
Or maybe they’re in a galactic core where the stars are all very close together. But I don’t think that would work based upon the stellar population visible during ESB.
And if a SD could deliver a 200Gigaton blast with ONE TurboLaser[sup]TM[/sup] why the hell bother with the Death Star? One SD should be able to do it fairly easily.
And so, there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war upon the Milky Way Galaxy. For years, the mighty Imperial Star Destroyers tore across the empty wastes of space and time, and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across – which happened to be Qo’nos – where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a medium-sized targ…
How about Federation vs the Earth Alliance?
I’d have to say about your question is obvious. Stability. The Empire doesn’t have as much stability as the Feds, so this is always a weakness.
Of course the Empire has stability. It has Darth Vader.
So what you’re saying is that they’re a military dictatorship who’d just love a nice little external campaign to unite their people that they can play up as a major threat but actually win easily?
And this is good for the Feds how?
Seriously, that’s the fault of Palpatine really. If Thrawn, or even Vader say, takes over things should be somewhat less crazed. The Imperial Remnant as of twenty-something years later is if anything more stable than the New Republic.
The other way round surely. For all we know he’ll prefer the Imps. Anyway, my point was that he hey hardly count as a Federation advantage, he’s hey’re way too unpredictable.
Jonathan Chance, start playing with c and things get really confusing. And the idea of the DS wasn’t just to sterilise a planet, it was to make one go kaboom through a shield. Considerably harder (like zettatons or thereabouts). Not my favourite toy, but kinda fun.
Yeah, the second quote should be by Monstre. Sorry.
As far as scientific consistency in science fiction goes, Star Trek is pretty bad, but Star Wars is INFINITELY worse. It’s absolutely horrible. As I recall, one tech manual gives the top speed of the Death Star as 1.2c. I completely gave up on making any sense of numbers in Star Wars a long time ago.
Oh, and another thing. The Empire’s dead. The Federation isn’t.