If Star Trek and Star Wars fight, which side will win?

[Timo]

The DS for one thing would need A LOT of time to get anywhere at sublight, and as I mentioned before, it would also take years (probably decades if not a century or more) for the Empire or the Republic to chart areas of space of a new galaxy or territory in general to avoid getting lost or colliding into a star.

I'd trust the Imperials to be able to perform a chain of short hyperhops, shorter than the mean free distance between stars, so no risk of collision. A hundred lightyears might take a hundred days that way, but it wouldn't be that big a problem.

...I'd actually think they would launch scouts for each leg. If the scout doesn't return immediately, the next one does a slightly shorter hop. If that one does return, the fleet / the DS at once follows the tested route. That way, 100 ly -> 100 hours (and perhaps a hundred scouts expended, but that's the Imperial way).

And the Empire could always confiscate some star maps from the locals.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Frodo Lives]

While I'm loathe to wade into this ridiculousness, for some strange reason I feel the need to comment on the Stormtrooper armour vs blasters or phasers debate.

Now, we've seen stormtroopers take hits from blasters while in armour and pretty much go down straight away, now this could mean that blasters are just so strong that the imperial armour couldn't stand up to them - however, in ROTJ we see Leia take a hit in the shoulder from a blaster and it seemed to have the effect of only a minor flesh-wound.

If the blasters are so powerful, shouldn't it have killed her, no matter were it hit? The guys wearing armour take direct hits and go down, but Leia takes one and keeps on ticking: seems the armour isn't that strong and the blasters aren't that powerful after all.

Now, we've seen Star Trek hand phasers with the ability to completely vapourise a target, something we've never seen a Star Wars blaster do. This leads me to believe that Trek's hand-guns at least are more powerful than Wars'.

But this has absolutely no bearing on the ship battles, so I'll quietly wander off with what little dignity I have left. My apologies for wasting everyone's time.

 

[Timo]

Blasters might be optimized for penetration. When they encounter something as soft as human tissue, they just make a clean hole (with some secondary burns around the entry and exit points) - and if that hole doesn't puncture a vital organ, the victim only gets a narrow self-cauterized scar within his or her body.

Phasers clearly behave differently, but do not necessarily demonstrate "more power" as such.

But yeah, the vast majority of evidence does suggest that blasters are two and a half steps weaker than flintlocks.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

Also ... phasers are usually set on stun.
There are references in which they left considerable damage to the body if set on high enough setting.
Plus there are several movie references where the phasers leave a very visible hole on the victims body.

Maximum setting would completely vaporize the victim, but as stated before, SF prefers to avoid killing.

I would say blasters can do crude damage to a single point of the body (which is effective in doing what it does) whereas phasers that are fired disrupt molecular structure in the entire body (if I'm not mistaken).

 

[Deimos Anomaly]

Phasers are just... weird. At max power, shoot a phaser at a person, and it completley vapes them but magically doesn't cause any collateral damage. The floor their feet was standing on isn't even scratched.

Using our known physics today, the energy to vapourise a human body entirely, would also inflict massive heat/blast damage on the objects immediately around that person.

 

[Timo]

So most probably, the effect is not vaporization, but rather phasing the body into a different realm - hence "phaser". (The TNG Tech Manual goes to some length on this, citing a mixture of traditional heating effects and gradually more and more important phasing effects as the setting is increased.)

And the effect might wish to propagate in material of certain density, being unable to make the hop from flesh to air. Although it can generally make the hop from flesh to cloth, this already consumes most of the oomph of the effect, making it all the less likely that it would hop from the body to the nearby wall.

This would also fit the case where Chekov fires at the metal kettle, phasing it to oblivion but not harming the non-metal food inside. But generally, there would be so much oomph in a hit that an enemy's phaser would be erased along with his hand (perhaps assisted by the energies of the enemy's phaser also being released?).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

The thing is that the phaser is a weapon of the future.
Probably it was made so it's target is the only thing that gets vaporized ... unless it was modified to vaporize multiple objects.

 

[JuanBolio]

Re: If Star Trek and Star Wars fight, which side will win? *DELETED*

Post deleted by JuanBolio

 

[Wingsley]

Neither side would win.

The two universes apply the Laws of Physics differently; the propoulsion technologies would not mix. The only way one side would win would be if the opposite side were to invade the first side's universe, and the invading side suddenly found their technology didn't work anymore, so the defending side would clobber the invading side.

 

[Ronald Held]

That may be the major problem: two sets of Physics. As was stated above, an easy victory for the forces of the "home" universe, if nothing on the invading vessels work or work properly.

 

[Vance]

Well, let's just look at the main weapons of each faction, shall we? On screen evidence only:

Personal: Heavy Blaster vs Phaser

Hand Phasers are shown vaporizing buildings as early as TOS. On the other hand, Heavy Blasters cause some wounding damage to an unarmored hand. Advantage: Trek

Beam Ship Weaponry: Phaser vs Turbolaser
This one is a no-brainer. Turbolasers are shown in battle in Hoth, Mos Eisley, etc. They do about as much damage as a modern day machine gun - and these are the big vehicle mounted weapons. Trek? TOS phasers are shown taking out large structures with ease. Advantage: Trek.

Proton Missiles vs Photon Torpedoes
Oddly, we don't have a lot of experience with proton missiles. We see ONE effective shot, but it was a deliberate shot at a power coupling, so its actual damage is hard to make out. Photon Torpedoes are shown, and explicitly stated to be, more powerful than phasers. Photon Torpedoes are also FTL. Advantage: Trek.

Defensive Screens
Both series have these, but their effectiveness is questionable in Star Wars. In fact, there isn't a good shot ANYWHERE in either trilogy that shows that screens can defend against a turbo-laser. On the other hand, Trek explicitly shows a shield halting the damage of a 10MT nuclear explosion. Advantage: Trek.

Hyperspace vs Warp Speed
This is the tricky one. Hyperspace, in Star Wars, is an effective dimension jump. The ships literally go 'somewhere else' for the duration of their trip. Star Trek ships never actually LEAVE space, they bend it. A Trek ship can track, maneuver, and attack at warp, explicitly well beyond the capacity of a Star Wars vessel (ESB). Tactically, 99 percent of the time, the advantage is Trek here. On the other hand, if a Wars ship jumps, a Trek ship might lose them, unless they learn how to track a jump (ANH).

 

[Deimos Anomaly]

TL's vaped asteroids in the hoth field, calcs on this gave a couple of GT per shot. This was before the ICS and all that.

 

[Timo]

...And asteroids vaped SD's.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JuanBolio]

Deimos Anomaly said:
TL's vaped asteroids in the hoth field, calcs on this gave a couple of GT per shot. This was before the ICS and all that.

Those rocks were pretty damn small, and its debatable whether or not they were actually vaporized. If Star Destroyers have point defense lasers that yield several gigatons per shot, you'd think they'd make a bigger boom. Whenever they impact ships, they seem to strike with all the force of an artillery round.

 

[Timo]

...Or less. Which could mean that the ships are exceptionally tough or well shielded, at least against turbolasers if not against asteroids or ramming attacks.

The good old "how many Joules does it take to vaporize this and this many cubic meters of realistic rock" calculations are fairly meaningless in Star Trek, where "vaporizing" is not necessarily conducted according to the known laws of physics. But it's quite possible that they would yield useful results for Star Wars.

OTOH, any calculations of "kinetic energy" or "maneuverability" or even "rate of fire" must take into account the very real possibility that space combat in both Trek and Wars may be filmed in slow motion.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

Energy calculations are problematic in the Trek universe, because their Physics is different enough. Also, somethings may not be vaporize but disrupted and the extra energy/mass goes somewhere else?

 

[Garibaldi O'brien]

I think the extra energy from the Phasers in the Star Trek universe goes into powering the SF discussion boards on the internet.

It is the only logical.

 

[Vance]

Deimos Anomaly said:
TL's vaped asteroids in the hoth field, calcs on this gave a couple of GT per shot. This was before the ICS and all that.

I wouldn't trust fan-site calculations, really. You get some insane numbers from them (gigaton explosions? Puh-leaze). But, going by what you see on screen, the turbo-lasers don't really do all that much. This is fine though, for the context of Star Wars, which, at its heart, was a 'star-dropped' retelling of Pulp Serials and WWII flicks anyway. Given that, the low-yield weapons make sense, because they're emulating WWII pistols, rifles, etc.. that's what they're supposed to be.

Star Trek, on the other hand, was very much meant to be a 'harder' sci-fi view of technology with a few generations (the original work-ups for Star Trek were THIS century) of technological improvements. Therefore it's tech had to, at least, SOUND advanced (even if it eventually wound up being primitive by today's standards).

So, yes, naturally, Trek will win out most technological discussions, because the express goal of the fiction is emulating technological advancements, while Star Wars is emulating 1940's technology with a sci-fi backdrop.

 

[Deimos Anomaly]

JuanBolio said:

Deimos Anomaly said:
TL's vaped asteroids in the hoth field, calcs on this gave a couple of GT per shot. This was before the ICS and all that.

Those rocks were pretty damn small, and its debatable whether or not they were actually vaporized. If Star Destroyers have point defense lasers that yield several gigatons per shot, you'd think they'd make a bigger boom. Whenever they impact ships, they seem to strike with all the force of an artillery round.

IIRC the hoth calcs gave yields for the PD guns which were then upscaled to approximate the probable yield of the main battery.

 

[Deks]

Ronald Held said:
That may be the major problem: two sets of Physics. As was stated above, an easy victory for the forces of the "home" universe, if nothing on the invading vessels work or work properly.

Nothing on screen or otherwise indicates that 2 different universes (in this case Trek and Wars) employ a different set of physics.
All we have witnessed are different kinds of technologies at use, nothing else.
Trek itself has demonstrated diverse enough pool for propulsion technologies for example.

I think there's a good possibility that the events occurred in various universes would be the ones that differ, but the laws of physics would remain the same.

Star Wars for example could have extremely powerful/fast propulsion technology in comparison to Trek's Warp drive, but their weapons/shields could also be utter garbage in comparison to Trek's counterparts.

Voyager crossed into another dimension (different universe), and using a `different laws of physics theory` would render the ship inoperable the moment it entered fluidic space (and vice versa for species 8472 when they entered our own universe) ... but, the point is, it didn't happen.
That points to the possibility that the laws of physics aren't the ones that change from universe to universe ... it's the events that occur, making some things that didn't happen in one universe happen in another universe.
Laws of probability are affected.
What is less probable to occur in one universe, doesn't mean it wouldn't happen in another.

Our current understanding of the universe in which we reside in is hardly in the 0.1 % range.
Postulating that the laws of physics have to be different in another universe is hardly what I would say under these circumstances.