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

[T'Girl]

Maybe like the idea for fourth generation nuclear weapons, where half the energy is directed down on the target in a narrow cone, while the other half go up in a simular cone.

Except all the energy goes in a single direction.

The torpedo could orient itself in the last moment before detonation. Better to hit a wildly malnuvering ship, you wouldn't have to actual strike it with the torpedo. Just it's energy.

 

[Anwar]

To be honest, I always figured that the reason the Wars Hyperdrive could take you across the galaxy was because the Wars galaxy is physically smaller than the Milky Way. I mean Wars seems to revolve around the same 12 or so systems...

 

[Deks]

To be honest, I always figured that the reason the Wars Hyperdrive could take you across the galaxy was because the Wars galaxy is physically smaller than the Milky Way. I mean Wars seems to revolve around the same 12 or so systems...

It is indeed a possibility that the SW galaxy is incredibly small in comparison to the Milky Way ... although we have no canon reference to go on in order to substantiate this claim.

 

[Saquist]

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]

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.

Here are the facts. (I've posted them before)

Phaser vs. Turbolaser
The Galaxy Class Starship has displayed far superior firepower to the light anti-fighter weapons of the Star Destroyer. Best estimates show that a phaser burst of one second can have 60 times the destructive firepower of the Light Turbo Laser (Q-Who)

Additional:

1.Apparently the Heavy Ship to Ship Turbo Laser uses far greater Firepower than the Light Turbo Laser as seen in the Return of the Jedi as the Mon Calmari cruiser blows away an Imperial Star Destroyer (apparently unshielded at the time)

2. The Type X phaser can be augmented as it was in Ninth Degree even becoming near white. Photo editing programs show the contrast increases nearly 3 times that of the standard orange particle beam. (this really means nothing) But obviously the weapon here was for more powerful than had ever be displayed.

3. The Star Destroyer's Heavy Guns miss the Mon Calmari by a very large margin for two ship that were in a geosynchronous orbit.

4. Fighters in Trek are easily vaporized while despite the Claims from Incredible Cross Sections nothing but rocks are seen vaporized in Star Wars.

Advantage: Star Fleet.

Hyperdrive vs. Warp Drive.

Millions of Times the Speed of Light against 7,000 times c.
Star Fleet is at a distinct disadvantage, forced into a defensive campaign around planets and Star Bases. A swift surprise First Strike would end Earth and any other world in the small sphere of Federation influence. The Federations key ship yards would be wiped out in hours and Federations worlds would be forced into Castle like Sieges.

Additional:

1. Transwarp is a technology that has eluded Star Fleet for more than a hundred years. The slipstream tech brought back would be useless for the one ship it would cover.

2. Reason dictates it is likely the Federation could not easily adapt it to it's ships with out first understanding it. Time is not on there side and the Federation has an almost American like tendency for procrastination.

Advantage: Imperial Navy

Numbers

At the Height of the Empire (Return of the Jedi) the Imperial Navy according to Heir to the Empire and Dark Force Rising was a force of 25,000 Star Destroyers.

Star Fleet as of the USS TITAN has commisioned 80,000 plus Starships of every Class. Star Trek officers have admitted to 35,000 of these ships active between the Hood and Voyager. Unfortuantly there are a large quantity of these ships that are vessels that are not combatants. More than likely Star Fleet consists of a large number of dedicated science vessels. Even if half and half 17,500 ships is a very strong defensive force against the movement of 25,000 Star Destroyers. Unfortuantly Star Destroyers aren't the Empires only warship in large numbers.

Advantage :Imperial Navy

 

[TonyC]

Saquist,

Where did you get those figures for ST v SW? I post a lot over at startrek(dot)com, and I'm tired of reading even over there that SW can beat ST in every category. Maybe if I had some facts I could get some ppl over there to concede defeat.

I'm really tired of seeing that Slave 1 by itself, could destroy a Galaxy class starship.

 

[Deks]

Saquist

you are forgetting something though in terms of SW hyperdrive.
It requires exact maps of the galaxy and positions of stars and navigational buoys, otherwise a ship travelling through it can easily end up lost or smash itself into an asteroid belt, a star or a whole bunch of other interstellar phenomena.
It's essentially useless if fought in an unfamiliar territory, and since SF ships are capable of FTL combat ... warp strafing would serve them in this instance to pipe down on the numbers.

Trek sensors are much more powerful and can see outside Warp or Slisptream.
It allows ships to travel independently through the galaxy and change course in either method of FTL travel.
Although in case of the Borg, they specifically constructed the TW hub for example that gives them much faster access to areas of the Galaxy that ships would reach independently (even though they are still quite fast).

 

[T'Girl]

I'm really tired of seeing that Slave 1 by itself, could destroy a Galaxy class starship.

Especially since it seem to have so much trouble targeting and destroying a single fighter. Slave I is nothing but an armed transport.

Trek sensors are much more powerful and can see outside Warp or Slisptream.

If a SF vessel can fire on, or lay mine field in front of, a oncoming imperial ship it would be destroyed. Star wars ships in FTL flight are blind, nothing on screen has ever been shown different. If they could scan ahead, then Han Solo during "The New Hope" would have known that he was going to be decelerating into the remains of Alderaan. Simple speed (which I concede) is not a perfect defense, the weapons can not target a enemy and any return fire would, at best, be random and again blind.

 

[Maurice]

...in Total Annilation/Supreme Commander they have a gun that destroys the whole Universe and puts it back together w/out your enemies...

fap, fap, fap fap, fap...

 

[stupidname]

This site - http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWhi2.html has some rather enjoyable comparisons.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

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"?

The thing about post-TMP "on-screen treknology" is that not one bit of it is remotely to anything resembling "real scale."

In real spacecraft interactions, you'd never have two ships "bumping-against-each-other-close." If you could see a tiny dot of light in the distance, you'd be almost "too close."

Believe it or not, this is borne out by the WORDS used in latter-day Trek (say, TNG). They'll state that two ships are "2 million kilometers apart" yet in the SFX shots, both are visible. (Which would mean that those are some pretty freakin' huge ships... far larger than anything Abrams could've come up with!)

SO... if the words in the scripts differ entirely from what we see in the SFX shots, and if the words used in the scripts make sense while the SFX shots don't... we have only one real choice. That choice is to assume that the SFX shots are "stylized representations" of a reality which, if we were watching it, would be utterly boring to watch.

Now, I've got my own "personal conceit" as to how this works. See, I absolutely and utterly reject any suggestion that the "main viewscreen" is a window, or remotely resembles a window. Rather, it's a computer monitor, and what it shows is intended to provide useful information, not visual accuracy.

So, it creates "3D iconic representations" of any ship it's intending to display, but dramatically overscaled so that they're visible, and adjusted (remember, deep space lighting is almost nonexistant, thus you wouldn't see anything anyway most of the time) for "studio lighting."

The ships are scaled waaay up so that you can see them. And what we see on-screen is "scaled" in the same fashion... what we see are "viewscreen images," not "realistic in-space images."

What does this have to do with the topic at-hand?

Well, the explosions we see on-screen would also be "scaled for usability" rather than shown realistically.

Remember, the original Enterprise had the capability of wiping out the entire surface of a planet... and in fact this was something that most "class one starships" would be able to do. Hell, they even had a general order to regulate how this would be done. That's a hell of a lot of firepower for a ship of that size. You need massive weapon yields to accomplish that.

But... a couple of dozen 1-isoton warheads could accomplish this quite nicely, I think.

No... just accept that the on-screen SFX are "stylized representations" and that the reality is much more in-line with reasonable reality and in-scripts commentary.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

You could go the other way too, Cary. Though partly it's due to plot contrivance, we have-for example--in the Gundam universe where space craft fight at ranges of a few dozen to several hundred kilometers, even with beam weapons and missiles. In a funny kind of way, this reflects the nature of how big space really is; a battlespace in a sphere just five hundred kilometers wide is practically a whole universe for maneuvering craft that can move in all three axis (unlike naval vessels, where three hundred kilometers is a flat plane, and even then it's a pretty huge space).

We can either ditch the VFX entirely and go with a more TOS-style approach (starships fighting at relativistic velocities and ranges all the time) or we can retcon the supports for those references and accept that starship sensors/weapons aren't as omniscient as we've been lead to believe and can only get good targeting fixes over more "conventional" ranges. This way we'd also have to omit any notion of impulse engines being relativistic rockets (with or without driver coil assistance) and accept warp drive as being STRICTLY a long-distance/high energy transportation system.

This does three things for us.
1) It allows us to justify the use of "fighters" by either Starfleet or the Suliban or god knows who else. Smaller craft would have certain advantages at close range and using conventional engines, especially if they don't have to lug huge warp engines around.

2) It lets us justify the lack of "warp strafing" after TOS and the close ranges where combat seems to take place: warp drive is too fast to be used in combat while most impulse drives are just fast enough.

3) In the "weaponized warp" thread I described photon torpedoes as being a type of kinetic kill vehicle, using a sort of adapted warp engine to tunnel through enemy deflectors and then accelerate a tiny portion of the enemy hull to a high warp factor. This wouldn't be visually spectacular (like a nuclear warhead or an antimatter bomb) but it would do alot more physical damage to the ship than a burst of radiation that ordinary forcefields could easily contain.

That, at the moment, is MY personal conceit. And it developed out of the sense that impulse engines would be totally redundant if warp drives really were capable of being used in combat; you could just set your warp engines to "warp point one" or something and maneuver just slowly enough to out-maneuver your opponent and still have a firing solution.

 

[T'Girl]

I've always assumed that the main viewer was showing a sensor image, not something from a camera. The Klingon ships appear smooth in TOS episodes because that's the best the scanners can do, the Klingon ships are blue, not because of reflected sun light, but because the computer assigns that color to all Klingon vessels. Green to all Romulans. The same way that the US military assigns red to hostiles on their displays.

The most "realistic" space battles would probably be from David Weber's Honor Harrington book series. Enemy ships are tens or hundreds of millions of kilometres apart, travel time for missiles could be twenty minutes or more - at the end of the last book a cluster of missiles was to take weeks to arrive at their target.

That, at the moment, is MY personal conceit. And it developed out of the sense that impulse engines would be totally redundant if warp drives really were capable of being used in combat; you could just set your warp engines to "warp point one" or something and maneuver just slowly enough to out-maneuver your opponent and still have a firing solution.

The more time I spend on this board (and on flare) the less sense the impulse engines make. The original idea I had was that they (impulse) were somehow "cheaper" to use than the warp drive at sub-light speeds. If anything it seem that they would use more fuel, not less. If a impulse engine reduces the ship's mass so as that a small engine can really push a big ship at hundreds of gees, why aren't the engines tiny? Every (non-canon) depiction I've seen of a impulse engne show a large machine. The exhaust nozzle on the E-D is the size of a apartment building. The exhaust nozzles on the E-B take up the entire aft section of the saucer section.

Increasingly MY personal concept is that the impulse drive isn't a advanced rockel engine, but instead a junior warp drive, a non-FTL engine that uses less resources, fuel - power - wear and tear, than the main warp drive, to archive the same sublight results.


T'Girl

 

[kent]

Star Wars would win. Hands down.

Lasers are obsolete by startrek standards, and won't make it past even the weakest of sheilds. The torpedo's are ENOURMOUSLY powerful. A teaspon of M/AM colliding would have the same explosive effect of 23-25 current space shuttles external fuel tanks going all splody at once. Imagine 1.5 Kilo's of matter and antimatter colliding? I haven't seen a torpedo in SW do anything like that. The range of Starfleet's beam weapons is hundreds of kilometers, which to me seems much bigger than the seeming range of SW beam weapons. And the photon torpedos have a millions of KM range.

Also, Federation FTL drives are MUCH more flexible than hyperdrive from what I've seen. You can use your sensors, fire weapons during, go anywhere without the need of a map at the drop of a hat, and thanks to breakthroughs you can now fire phasers at warp. I've not seen anything that flexible in SW.

The shields of Starfleet also seem much more powerful than anything in SW. And what's with the death star? The thing just screams shoot at me. They defiant could run circles around it and probably destroy it pretty easily.

However, three big advantages that SW has over star trek: BILLIONS of troops, cloning is legal, and the force could be used in battle.

In an all out fight, force free, the Federation would wipe the floor with the Imperial army, easy.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The more time I spend on this board (and on flare) the less sense the impulse engines make. The original idea I had was that they (impulse) were somehow "cheaper" to use than the warp drive at sub-light speeds.

I no longer believe impulse engines operate anywhere near "sub light" speeds in any meaningful sense. Maybe orbital velocity, on the order of a few hundred kilometers per second, but nothing close to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

The requirement for impulse engines would simply be that warp drives are not suitable for orbit changes because they do not impart lasting momentum on the starship. Nor are warp drives suitable for maneuvering close to starbases and asteroids where accelerations of six to ten gravities might be required in a pinch (and maneuvering thrusters just won't do).

If there is any need to move at sublight velocities--and if starships are even capable of doing so--there ought to be a setting in the warp drive that could accomplish this (simply set the warp engines to "warp point seven" or something; jet engines don't have to ALWAYS break the sound barrier, right?). If warp drives can't do sublight at all, even in a highly inefficient manner, then they are simply strategic engines, used for short jumps into and out of light speed like B5 jump engines or Macross' space fold engines.

If a impulse engine reduces the ship's mass so as that a small engine can really push a big ship at hundreds of gees, why aren't the engines tiny?

They ARE tiny compared to the ship. Besides that, it's simple math: even if you reduce the ship to a mass of a few thousand tons, you still need several hundred meganewtons to push it to any appreciable acceleration. That's going to require some pretty hefty engine power and a big throat to spit it all.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

If a impulse engine reduces the ship's mass so as that a small engine can really push a big ship at hundreds of gees, why aren't the engines tiny?

They ARE tiny compared to the ship. Besides that, it's simple math: even if you reduce the ship to a mass of a few thousand tons, you still need several hundred meganewtons to push it to any appreciable acceleration. That's going to require some pretty hefty engine power and a big throat to spit it all.

Yeah, this is really the problem with Sci-fi versus reality. So many people who've watched Sci-fi for years have a truly inadequate understanding of the real speeds we're talking about, or the massive amount of energy required reach those speeds (or to stop, for that matter, from those speeds). We tend to think in terms of things we've experienced in our own lives.

T'Girl, if you want to understand this, try running some "basic physics" numbers. Assume a ship of a given mass and calculate just how much energy is required to required to achieve those sorts of velocities. It's MASSIVE.

That's the whole point behind the origination of the "driver coil" concept (which originated with Sternbach and Okuda in the TNG tech manual). They, correctly, recognized that it was literally nonsense to assume that any ship... even if it was nothing BUT an impulse engine... could accelerate anything remotely like how we see on-screen.

To have a thrust-based solution be practical, in the timeframes we see on Trek, you simply need an "assist"... a cheat.

The idea, however, that "impulse" is actually not Newtonian and is in fact just another "warp drive" system is silly... because if that were the case, why not just use the warp drive?

No, you need this to be something totally separate from what "warp drive" is... and (and I'll keep harping on this) you simply cannot call it "impulse" unless it principally Newtonian... F=ma. All the "subspace-assisted impulse" is doing is applying "fudge factors" to this equation.