What if Earth today was attacked by the Empire? Assume they want conquest and don’t use the Death Star. Go by the movies, not EU.
I think Earth would stand a pretty good chance against them.
Empire has better technology… however it may not be as affective against solid projectile weapons (like a shell). The Falcon had no trouble getting through the Star Destroyer’s shields in ESB. All it takes is a kamikaze A-Wing, or in our case, an explosive-laden drone.
Supersonic jets would be too fast for TIE fighter blasters and turrents. Our radar-guided missles would give us a huge advantage over long distances.
SAMs firing at the TIE fighters. Much more accurate than the lasers.
Many of the Empire’s ground weapons don’t have indirect or long-range fire capabilities. Tomahawks and batteries miles away would have easy pickings.
Stormtroopers’ aim is bad, would get cut down by automatic weapons before they could recalibrate their aim. Stormtroopers’ armor is weak, if it can’t deflect Ewok rocks, bullets should have no problem.
Nuclear weapons. Empire doesn’t have the equivalent of that. If a crashed A-wing can take out a super Star Destroyer, imagine what a well-placed nuke could do.
They have the advantage of strength in superior numbers. If they can rule an entire galaxy, they should have enough man power to overrun one planet. Especially considering our nations are hardly united enough to co-ordinate mass defence properly.
Also, radar-guided missiles would have (i think) to be programmed with the various TIE-fighter signatures in order to be able to track them - that would take time… possibly time e dont have.
Anyway, if the battle looked tough, I think the Empire would be more likely to send in a lone sith to ‘mind-trick’ governments into surrender…
Nah. If it turns out that TIE fighters don’t reflect radio waves, or don’t emit heat, that would be a problem. Otherwise, there’s no reason why radar-guided or heat-seeking missiles shouldn’t be able to at least get a lock on them.
It would be easy. We just hijack an old TIE fighter, and sneak into the main star destroyer. Then, since all intergalactic beings apparently use the apple operating system, we upload a virus, and boom!
They aren’t terribly consistent, but I think at least some of the time Star Wars-style shields will stop solid objects. In Return of the Jedi, the Rebel fighter is able to take out the Super Star Destroyer’s bridge only after someone says “The bridge shields are down! Concentrate all forward batteries…make sure nothing gets through!” In Star Wars, I think they mention that the Death Star’s shields have gaps big enough to slip a fighter through between the edges of the shields (though God only knows why this is the case–one reason why Earth would win in Earth vs. the Empire is that it’s an ironclad law of the Star Wars Universe–and of many other fictional universes–that the Good Guys always win, in part due to the elementary blunders of the Bad Guys). Evidently that particular design-flaw has been corrected on the the Death Star II–the Rebs notice the DSII’s remotely-generated shields are still up when a Rebel fighter smacks into them and explodes.
So, why didn’t the Avenger bridge crew just laugh and say “Hey, look at this idiot–he’s about to commit suicide on our forward deflector shields?” Like I said, the writers aren’t always that consistent about this sort of thing.
Since our space technology is primitive to the point of embarrassing, the big question is: How are TIEs in atmospheric flight? What would be the effect of ship lasers on our jets (I’d assume devastating)? If I were in charge of the attack, I wouldn’t even scramble the fighters. I’d just sit there and give the US, USSR, and UK capitals and military leadership centers a nice healthy dose of orbital bombardment.
How much energy can the SD shields absorb? Would a few dozen megaton ICBM be too much for them? How about several?
I can’t believe I’m the first person to point this out, but the Empire’s superior weapons would be of no value of them because THEY CAN’T AIM. What damned good would all the lasers in the galaxy do them if they can’t hit anything?
It’s well established in the films that the only thing a Stormtrooper can hit with any accuracy is a Jawa landship. We don’t have any Jawas, so we’ll be okay. And except for the Death Star superweapon, no Imperial weapon matches the nuke, so we can nuke them in orbit.
OK, if we go by the movies, then all this empire/rebellion stuff happened “a long time ago.” If the Empire is still around, they probably have advanced enough to take on even the Enterprise “E” or whatever that ship was in “All Good Things …” with the cool top mounted laser cannon thingy.
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Only in the book on tape version, and perhaps the novelization. I don’t have a cite, (way too much SW info on the net, google was flooded) but that scene was never in the film version. All the rebel fighters turn in time. Check your videotape.
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I don’t think we’d stand a chance. All they’d have to do is hang out beyond the Moon’s orbit and throw rocks at us 'til we give up- who needs nukes? We might be able to kick some Empire butt in our atmosphere, but we can’t touch 'em outside it.