You really thought so? I thought that the inter-species relationships weren’t really explored in the movies… the novels, however, depicted lots of discriminations (Trandoshans hated Wookiees - and even enslaved them - Quarren disliked the Mon Calamari, Gamorreans hated EVERYBODY). Keep in mind that they had 25,000 years of Civil Rights movements… that’s bound to do something…
Something I thought both SW and ST do is always depict humanity is “on top of the heap”, super-intelligent and far more resourceful than any other species. I see no reason why this should necessarily be the case…
Yeah, but the difference is, the 15-watt nightlight doesn’t explode with the force of a grenade when it gets shaken up a little. Standardization is nice, yeah, but it’s just stupid when it creates a major hazard. Hell, 90% of the injuries on ST ships seem to be derived from exploding touchscreens.
Yeah, but in Star Wars they use fighters and the capital ships are 10x the size of the biggest Federation ship.
I would think Federation fighters would be better suited for supporting ground troops anyway.
Anyway, here’s what I noticed about ST:
Landing party on a hostile planet always consists of the bridge crew and two guards who get vaporized in 2 minutes. Theres no Federation Marines or security teams that can go instead?
How about making a gunship varient of those shuttle craft for close air support? I’m sure its comforting having the Enterprise orbiting 100 miles overhead (assuming its always geosynchrinous), but what about a little local air support for those situations that don’t require massive orbital bombardments or when the transporters break?
3)Phasers are great direct fire weapons but what about targets that aren’t in direct line of sight? I would think they could make some great mini guided-warheads for grenade launchers and mortars 300 years from now.
Where are all the unmanned probes? Occasionally we see space probes or a robot if it is part of the story line. But why not have a small, dumb probe with a tricorder and maybe a small phaser on it (think the imperial probe from Empire Strikes Back)? It maight save a few red-shirts lives.
Speaking about red-shirts, why not camofladge uniforms when they are in actual combat? No wonder red shirts always get killed.
What’s up with the verbal commands? The captain has to tell someone else to fire, or turn, or whatever. Wouldn’t he get faster reaction times if he controlled it himself? Obviously, he can’t do everything, but all the time-critical stuff should be at his fingertips. I think the verbally repeated commands, aside from making the action more clear and dramatic, are there as a holdover from old wooden ships stories, where slow moving 72-gun sailing vessels could take an extra few moments to relay orders.
I always wonder why they beam down all facing in one direction. Wouldn’t it help to have the guards facing all around?
And those phasers are the world’s lamest weapons. Everyone dodges phaser beams…let’s see them dodge a low-tech bullet! And why can’t the phaser be put on continuous beam and used like a light saber? There’d be no way to miss then.
The fighters in Star Wars don’t seem terribly useful against capital ships either. The only successes fighters have against big ships in the Star Wars movies are the kamikaze attack against the Super Star Destroyer in Return of the Jedi (and there were rebel capital ships involved in that fight too, pounding away at the deflector screens beforehand), and when Anakin accidentally blew up a ship from the inside in The Phantom Menace.
Besides, we’re talking Trek here…apples and oranges and all that.
Incidentally, the Sovereign-class (Enterprise-E) is apparently classified as a warship.
Here’s another stupid tactic: fly the ship overtop of the threat and strafe them. EXPOSING YOUR ENTIRE BIG FLAT UNDERBELLY! Geez, you’re in space! Can’t you fly sideways and expose only a thin little cross-section?
A squadron of X-wings, if properly deployed and equipped with skilled pilots, can disable a Star Destroyer. However, you’re missing the fundamental use of fighters… they’re meant to COMPLEMENT a capital ship, not replace it.
True. What ST calls “fighters” would actually be considered gunboats or even light corvettes in SW.
Yeah, they have all those “omni-directional” phasers, yet they only seem to fire in one direction…
IIRC, in a couple of episodes of Voyager, they used the transporter to beam away parts of other ships, like their warp core. Once they beamed a torpedo into a Borg sphere, rigging it to explode after approx 5 seconds. Voyager always was just a little more willing to cross that Federation ethical line than the TNG or DS9-ers.
Personally, I think the Federation would be a lot better off if they were like Voyager was remembered to be by an alien species in ‘Living Witness’ or something like that. Borg assault drones, 20 phaser cannons, 12 heavy photon torpedo launchers, plauge devising android doctors, etc. ‘When diplomacy fails, violence…It’s the Federation way.’
As to the fighters, in ST they would be much less effective than in SW, due to the fact that phasers are much more accurate than the Turbolasers in SW. The biggest advantage fighters have over larger capitol ships is their ultra-maneuverability. This is lost in the ST universe, because of their more accurate weapons.
The reason fighters aren’t as widely used is because the massive, 650 meter Galaxy-class ships seem to be just as maneuverable as the tiny shuttles (even the Delta Flyer, which was supposed to be an exceptionally fast/maneuverable ship).
The phasers aren’t remarkably accurate. Just watch almost any battle scene in Voyager… they miss four times out of five. And people accused SW Stormtroopers of being inaccurate… sheesh.
“All-powerful?” I can’t recall a single instance where rerouting whatever through the deflector dish accomplished diddly-squat. For example, in “The Best of Both Worlds,” it was crucial to the cliffhanger, Riker shoots his captain with the deflector array! Which fizzled, of course, so they had to opt for the Data miracle cure.
This is the only instance I have at my fingertips, but I’d swear that the deflector dish, besides failing at its main job of stopping phaser damage to decks 14 to 16, also fails at any other job you’d care to give it. Maybe Voyager had a better quality dish?
When those dashboards explode, why are they up and running ten seconds later? You let THAT much smoke and sparks out of a current computer, mil-spec or not, and you’ve got a trip down to Best Buy ahead of you.
Also, when Picard was on the Borg cube and the Boobyprize was being tractor-beamed into the Borg cargo bay, why didn’t Riker go to warp? I cannot imagine it would be healthy to be half a block away when someone opened a warp field. Maybe the Federation folks wouldn’t have survived, but that would be better than all those other Fed ships getting it later. And the Borg would think twice about messing with us.
from the desk of Vice Admiral Saint Zero, aboard the flagship USS Straight Dope:
Starting now, when Federation ships are fired upon by ANYONE, for whatever reason, RAISE THE DAMN SHIELDS FIRST!, THEN call your Captain’s sorry ass to the bridge.
Failure to follow this simple order is punishable by being teleported to the nearest airless asteriod, sans clothing.
You never watched Voyager, did you? They rerouted EVERYTHING through the deflector dish, even the raw sewage. Scanners, “fermion fields”, “polaron bursts”, and any number of oddball energy manipulations. Heck, they used the deflector dish to open a “singularity” to enter fluidic space (y’know, where Species 8472 lived?).
People don’t even backup their 20 gig HD and you expect them to backup their 120 googlebite HD?
Another thing that always got me it that when the situation is dire the capt’n always makes a complex engineering suggestion that solves the problem (can we route the plasma discharge initiators throught the disgromificator and creat an inverse warp field bubble) - like the capt’n would know that more then a trained engineer.
Why is it, both in ST and SW, 99.999999% (approximately) of the time, all ships in space meet oriented the same way - “right side up” - we never see a scene where the Enterprise meets a ship that is rotated 47 degrees to port (or starboard). Only once or twice, when it is a plot-point (Wrath of Khan, for example) do they seem to even realize they have 3 dimensions of space. I am discounting “swooping” fighter-like moves, too. And in 3D space, wouldn’t you want a weapons array on the bottom of the engineering section of the Enterprise that’s just as powerful as the one on top of the saucer section?
Okay, now supposing they actually obeyed the prime directive, how smart is that? Suppose they stumble on race X that’s just about to hit warp technology. Race X are a xenophobic warlike bunch that make the Klingons look like a bunch of dead cats, WTF do they do? Do they let Race X get warp drive and fly around the cosmos kicking everybody’s ass, or do they stomp ‘em before then? Also, HTF are they supposed to enforce the prime directive? There’s waaaaay too much space for them to monitor, to think that they could park a protective ship around every world that has a primitive society on it (talk about your dull assignments). Why wouldn’t someone (like say, the Ferengi) come along and exploit those people? Sure, you can say that replicators eliminate the need for people to rob primitives of gold, etc. (but everyone loves gold pressed latinum, whatever the hell that might be) and holosuites, make the need for sex slaves evaporate, but I ain’t buyin’ it.
Besides, every adolescent with access to a shuttle craft is gonna wanna go to some under developed society and do things like buzz the capitol or perform anal probes :eek: on some poor schmuck.
Actually, according to the Technical Manual the Enterprise is supposed to have phaser arrays: at the aft end of the engineering section on both the dorsal and ventral sides, on each of the nacelle pylons, at the forward end of the engineering section on the ventral side, and on the back and underside of the “neck” of the engineering section where it meets the saucer section, in addition to the two big ones on the saucer section itself. Of course, we never see those used in the series, presumably because either no one thought to write them into a script or because they never had time to put together the effect.
(The Technical Manual contains a number of things I would have loved to see in the series itself. The Captain’s Gig is another example, although not relevant to this thread.)