Trek-Nology in Context vs SW, B5, etc.

[Mansa40]

Last night I was watching the TNG Episode where the Enterprise inadvertatly causes a Star to explode. Just power got me thinking about how Star Trek tech differs from SW. The internet was unfulfilling and all I found was alot of Fanfic about Star Wars SSDs conquering the Borg in a week. I love most Sci-Fi and have read most extended universes, so I thought I might start a thread that people can add too comparing the tech curves of various Sci-Fi's vs ST. This might get long but what the hey I am at work. I will build this over time

ST FTL Flight:

Star Trek: Warp is the primary means of travel in ST. Most of the Space Faring Species (Endotherms) in the Galaxy use it in one form or another. As a FTL drive Warp is interesting, when compared to other FTL drives it seems to be rather slow but also it is also very economical. TransWarp, Slipstream, Subspace Fractures/ other insta travel are another matter. All of these seem to be able to propel a ship across most if not all of the entire Galaxy in weeks or months. Considering where Voyager was when they discovered Slipstream that technology would seem to be able to span the Galaxy in 1-2 years at max. Trans-Warp appears to be much faster. It seems to me that there are many levels of transwarp ranging from the lower end that the Voth use to the high end that is used by people like the Borg. The various forms of near instant travel in ST; wormholes, fractures, Q-Flash, the Traveler are really quite something. They are all absurdly fast being able to cover huge distances in a matter of minutes. They are all like Trans Warp, exceedingly rare owned only by a few races or few individuals in the case of the Q, though I wont go into the Q.

SW:
When compared to Star Wars Warp is very slow, Hyperdrive apparantly carries Star Wars ship across the entire Galaxy in hours or a few days. It ST the same trip would take a hundred years. However, Warp seems to be a little more economical than Hyperdrive. Almost everything in ST has Warp, including small shuttles while in Star wars the whole TIE/Droid series (except Vaders little ship) lacks a FTL drive. The lower end of Transwarp seems to be behind Hyperdrive while the higher end seems to be above it or equal. The super ST methods of travel are vastly faster then Hyperdrive. The Bajoran Wormhole was constructed and carries ships 60,000ly in less than 5 mins. Likewise the Traveler was able to propel the Enterprise across the Universe in 40 seconds.


[FONT=Calibri]Comparing the two it appears that SW has faster mainstay propulsion while ST has better exotic transportation. The Traveler is obviously the fastest as he could cross either Galaxy in less then second. Considering how fast the Enterprise made it to the end of the Universe. [/FONT]

 

[nx1701g]

I seem to recall that there were many, many, many debates about which technologies were the most advanced in the Sci-Fi universe.

I recall though that there is a Star Wars Reference manual where the author admitted he was ordered by Lucasfilm to review the Star Trek Technical Manuals and then make the Star Wars vessels - even the X-Wings - have more firepower than the most advanced Federation Starships.

 

[sojourner]

LOL, then he failed utterly.

 

[JuanBolio]

I seem to recall that there were many, many, many debates about which technologies were the most advanced in the Sci-Fi universe.

I recall though that there is a Star Wars Reference manual where the author admitted he was ordered by Lucasfilm to review the Star Trek Technical Manuals and then make the Star Wars vessels - even the X-Wings - have more firepower than the most advanced Federation Starships.

Ridiculous when you see their weapons yields onscreen.

As to warp drive vs. hyperspace - Faster though they may be, Star Wars ships can't maneuver or fight at FTL speeds, while Trek ships CAN. A squadron of Federation ships on warp-strafing runs would tear apart any Star Destroyer or group thereof, wallowing like garbage scows at sublight. Their only option would be to retreat into hyperspace.

 

[kv1at3485]

99% of any theoretical superiority on one side or the other would be irrelevant. What it may do hardly matters compared to how it's actually used.

Merging tech fantasies in any way shape or form yields no stellar victories, no great revelations, and certainly no greater intelligence on the parts of the universes denizens.

 

[JuanBolio]

Merging tech fantasies in any way shape or form yields no stellar victories, no great revelations, and certainly no greater intelligence on the parts of the universes denizens.

Yeah, but its fun.

 

[Deks]

One thing I'd like to add to the original post is that Slisptream tech in v1 state would allow a ship to traverse 60 000 ly's in 3 months time.
v2 was much faster due to the Voyager crew tinkering with it and 7 of 9 likely using Borg TW methods to create a hybrid which allowed the ship to travel thrugh 10 000 Ly's in 1 minute before shutting down the core inadvertently because of the phase varience problem (which only has to be solved by SF technicians in order to work reliably).

It was mentioned after all that Slipstream and TW are quite similar ... so it's not beyond reason to think that the Borg had a slower TW version themselves before assimilating Arturis ship and getting their hand on the Slipstream tech (although they would have likely gotten a hold of the tech in question when they assimilated his entire system and race just after the battle with 8472 finished in Season 3).

As for which universe's ships would be more advanced in terms of firepower ...
Quite frankly I don't know.
We also don't know just how large the SW galaxy is (non-canon statements not withstanding).
It's entirely possible that SW ships have a more advanced FTL method of travel, but the defensive and offensive systems are essentially puny in comparison.
It wouldn't be the first time an interstellar race had access to one tech that was much more superior to others.

Also the fact that SW universe constructs very large ships and stations is not necessarily an indication of technological superiority when it comes to firepower.
The Federation has huge mushroom type starbases and their ships have displayed some quite phenomenal feats given their size.
The fact the Federation never made a moon-sized space station is just a display that they have no need for such things.
That ... and they can already blow up planets or stars utilizing casings that are 2 meters long.
Want pure firepower?
50 isotons in a gravimetric torpedo is able to blow up a small planet ... I would say a moon-sized starbase would easily fit into such a category.
And they were able to increase the charge to 80 isotons.
It's obviously not a regular photon torpedo that's for sure ... although it shows the Feds can create WMD's if there's a need for them, and pack them into tiny objects.
I have not seen SW technology as being able to do that really since the emphasis there seems to be on size.

 

[Mansa40]

True I had forgotten that about Warp, ie that you could fire at ships while in it and that it was more agile. Ok here is my second tech write up.


Weapons: ST has a vast array of weapons that range from the very weak to the very strong. In no way could ST be said to have the most powerful weapons in Sci-Fi as in Andromeda they fire controlled black holes and in Total Annilation/Supreme Commander they have a gun that destroys the whole Universe and puts it back together w/out your enemies. When compared to SW, the analysis becomes very interesting; Star Trek Weapons can be categorized as: regular armament, and super weapons. The main powers of ST (Klingons, Federation, Romulans, Dominion, Krenim, Hirogen, etc) all seem to use variations of a half dozen of types of technology but mainly they are either types of beams, cannons or types of torpedoes. Some of these are more powerful than others but it seems that the main quantifier of strength is how many bank/cannons you have on your ships. IE 7 phaser banks is better than one. Scientifically these beam weapons seem to destroy targets by just pounding them with kinetic energy that breaks down shields and melts armor. They all do their job which is usually to destroy other ships of 200-400 people or to assault Space Stations. Torpedoes are better using explosive damage to smash things. However, all of them seem to be very effective against
[FONT=Calibri]Planets. In several places the weapons on a few ST ships are used to “destroy the planetary crust”. While this doesn’t ‘blow up the planet’ it seems to effectively make the planet barren. Species 8472 and others can actually blow up a planet by most torpedoes/beams are sufficiently advanced that they can nuke a planet to the point where it is useless. Torpedoes , Deflector Dishes, and Various Explosives also have the ability to cause Star to go Nova or become unstable and cause large Solar flares. The torpedoes used by the Enterprise when they accidently nuke a star are widely available and common. Likewise when the Dominion trys to nuke Bajor’s Star they need only a small craft and some explosives. ST has very few ‘Super Weapons’ though some exist like Vger. [/FONT]

 

[Jono]

Almost everything in ST has Warp, including small shuttles while in Star wars the whole TIE/Droid series (except Vaders little ship) lacks a FTL drive.

We've seen that X-Wings, B-Wings, Y-Wings, A-Wings were are all small fighters and are hyperspace capable. So if you limit it to just the OT movies than the vast majority of small craft do have ftl drives.

 

[Unicron]

* shrugs * I generally just avoid this sort of territory altogether, because while it can be fun it amounts to largely comparing apples and oranges. I enjoy BattleTech, and it seems like many ships in that universe would be decidedly "primitive" in comparison to Trek or Wars. They don't have fancy equipment like shields, their FTL capacity is far more limited with a maximum range of 30 light years per jump, and then only two jumps within a short span of time if the ship has a lithium fusion battery to hold spare energy. But a lot of the tech is intended to be more consistent with some of the modern weapons we have now, and not simply there because the effects look cool.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I seem to recall that there were many, many, many debates about which technologies were the most advanced in the Sci-Fi universe.

I recall though that there is a Star Wars Reference manual where the author admitted he was ordered by Lucasfilm to review the Star Trek Technical Manuals and then make the Star Wars vessels - even the X-Wings - have more firepower than the most advanced Federation Starships.

Ridiculous when you see their weapons yields onscreen.

As to warp drive vs. hyperspace - Faster though they may be, Star Wars ships can't maneuver or fight at FTL speeds, while Trek ships CAN. A squadron of Federation ships on warp-strafing runs would tear apart any Star Destroyer or group thereof, wallowing like garbage scows at sublight. Their only option would be to retreat into hyperspace.

And don't forget, Trek got its own version of "Hyperspace" (aka, Voyager's "Borg Transwarp Conduits") which did manage to bring Voyager home in what seemed to be mere minutes.

It's not "how is one better than another," it's "how often does one borrow from the other?"

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I believe Star Wrek 4 did exactly this, having the (satirized but otherwise accurate) Trekiverse basically go to war with the (satirized but otherwise accurate) Babyloniverse. The results were interesting, and quite entertaining.

 

[T'Girl]

Small craft FTL in SW seems to be in a state of relative fast development, the episode three showed fighters needing a adoptor to go into hyper space, four had an expermental fighter - vadar's - with one onboard, by episode five and six all the x-wings were so equiped.

SW craft certainly have a FTL speed advantage over Trek. It debatable whether two ships, one in hyper, one in warp could fire on, or even sense each other.

SW-verse also enjoys a larger size in terms of total planets, population and by inference, more industral capacity. Faster replacement of ships.

Might just come down to tactics, starfleet excels in this.

Of couse if we're talking about the republic and not the empire there most likely would be no war at all.

Want pure firepower?
50 isotons in a gravimetric torpedo is able to blow up a small planet ... I would say a moon-sized starbase would easily fit into such a category.
And they were able to increase the charge to 80 isotons.
It's obviously not a regular photon torpedo ...

I've alway held that, for whatever reason, that photon torpedoes real are not very powerful.

All tech-babel to the side what is a isoton?

 

[Cary L. Brown]

All tech-babel to the side what is a isoton?

The term "isoton" is a take-off on the measures we currently use to describe explosive yield. We describe nuclear weapons in terms of the equivalent amount of TNT required to produce that force of a blast. So, a 30 megaton bomb produces a blast equivalent to 30,000,000 tons of TNT.

Well, now... what does the prefix "iso" mean in the SI units system, then? The short answer... nothing. It does not exist. (Here's the basic WIKI page on SI prefixes, by the way - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix )

However, it's clear that Starfleet uses conventional Earth-based SI units for most measurements. And they're still measuring explosive force in a system which is an outgrowth of the one we use today (probably because the show is intended to be watched by people who've heard nuclear weapons descriptions in real life, at least once or twice!)

Ok, the highest prefix in the SI system, today, is "Yotta, "which is the same as 10^24, or (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) x (your number).

SI does prefixed by threes... that is, kilo - 10^3, Mega - 10^6.

If "Iso" is added to this chart in the future, it has to be at least 10^27. Since we haven't heard any other prefixes "added" to the system, I'll assume that this is the correct definition.

To put this into perspective, the Hiroshima bomb had a yield of 15 kilotons, and the Nagasaki bomb had a yield of 21 kilotons.

So, a "1 isoton" bomb will be 66,666,666,666,666,666,666,667 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, or 47,619,047,619,047,619,047,619 times as powerful as the Nagasaki bomb.

That's one big firecracker.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I've always assumed an "isoton" was equivalent to the amount of energy a weapon will DELIVER to a specific target at its optimum firing range. Probably equivalent to one ton of TNT in terms of pure energy, or about 4.18 GW.

Different weapons are better at making that energy "stick" to their targets than others. So a 50GW laser cannon might only output 1.2 isotons while a 50GW pulse phaser might output 5 or 6 isotons. A photon torpedo could have yields in the hundreds of megatons, but it might deliver that energy in a form that only ten to twenty isotons would actually be absorbed by any given target.

But since I totally made that up a while ago, you can take that for what it's worth.

 

[JuanBolio]

I've alway held that, for whatever reason, that photon torpedoes real are not very powerful.

A 24th century photon torpedo annihilates 1.5 kilograms of matter with an equal amount of antimatter. Even taking into account unavoidable waste in terms of neutrinos and reactants that escape annihilation, you've still got a bomb equal to any city-buster nuke in our modern arsenal.

 

[T'Girl]

The point I've tried to make in other posts is that what you describing isn't what we're seeing.

What's on screen isn't multi-megatons or even several kilotons. It looks like the explosion from the equivalence of tens of tons of chemical explosive. Even with a focused detonation, super tough hulls, shields that absorb energy, a warhead the equal the the biggest old russian bombs (58 mt) would produce a ball of energy in space several miles across.

A isoton could be like the British Thermal Unit - BTU - a standard unit of measure that extremely small.

It begs the question, why are starfleet and their enemys producing "little warheads"?

 

[JuanBolio]

Answer - photon torpedoes have variable yields, and the weapons are as powerful as the plot needs them to be.

This annoys me too... I'd love to see what a photon torpedo can really do seen onscreen more than just occasionally. To be fair, though - they do show it. Single torpedoes have been shown smashing large asteroids to rubble, obliterating unshielded starships, and causing a fireball on a planetary surface hundreds of miles across. Just... not always.

 

[JuanBolio]

Answer - photon torpedoes have variable yields, and the weapons are as powerful as the plot needs them to be.

This annoys me too... I'd love to see what a photon torpedo can really do seen onscreen more than just occasionally. To be fair, though - they do show it. Single torpedoes have been shown smashing large asteroids to rubble, obliterating unshielded starships, and causing a fireball on a planetary surface hundreds of miles across. Just... not always.

 

[Manticore]

The point I've tried to make in other posts is that what you describing isn't what we're seeing.

What's on screen isn't multi-megatons or even several kilotons. It looks like the explosion from the equivalence of tens of tons of chemical explosive. Even with a focused detonation, super tough hulls, shields that absorb energy, a warhead the equal the the biggest old russian bombs (58 mt) would produce a ball of energy in space several miles across.

A isoton could be like the British Thermal Unit - BTU - a standard unit of measure that extremely small.

It begs the question, why are starfleet and their enemys producing "little warheads"?

I prefer to think of Torpedoes as shaped charges, directing most of their energy "forward" against the target, as otherwise, at least half of the energy would be wasted. While this would be difficult to do with an Antimatter/Matter warhead, I imagine that a short-lived forcefield, which according to the TM is already a significant part of the warhead anyway, could do the trick. So 99.999% of the the energy is blown into the target, and what's left over, which is what we see, looks like a "Gas explosion." It's not totally accurate, physically speaking...but they have warp drive and Transporters, so I'm willing to let that slide.

Plus, as Juan says, they are explicitly said to be variable yield warheads, so we can get the "cannonball" in TFF, and the massive explosions, like in that Voy episode where they vaporized an asteroid, or that gargantuan one in Skin of Evil on the planet's surface. I imagine that a good chunk of those explosions is also related to turning off the "shaping" component.

That might be why the waited to deploy photonic torpedoes in Enterprise. The forcefields necessary to shape the explosion and make them viable weapons were too difficult to miniaturize properly (and were, technically speaking, invented by Reed, but I like to ignore that ), so they chose to go more for the weaker "spatial" torpedoes that were more maneuverable, and could also be shaped. But they finally figured out how to do it with antimatter warheads, and deployed them to their capital ships, trading maneuverability for firepower.

Just my 2cp.