The Starship Vs. thread!

[Herkimer Jitty]

I wouldn't take Han Solo's word for it.

He's rather prone to hyperbole. The "half the Imperial fleet" is likely an exaggeration.

 

[YARN]

^^^ Fair Enough.

I'll take Dr. Manhattan vs. your best Starship.

There's no source of information that gives the impression that Dr. Manhattan has any ability anywhere near the weapons range of your average Federation Starship.

Dr. Manhattan vs. Federation Starship

1. Knows the future?

Dr. M - YES

Starship - NO

2. Can hang out on the surface of the Sun.

Dr. M - YES

Starship - NO

3. Can reassemble if atomized?

Dr. M -- YES

Starship - NO

4. Needs external resources to survive/hold position.

Dr. M -- YES

Starship - NO

5. Ability to directly materialize anywhere at will

Dr. M -- Yes

Starship -- Can travel FTL, can transport crew members
in a fixed range.

Who is winning?

 

[T'Girl]

I wouldn't take Han Solo's word for it.

That quote actually came from Dodonna, a Rebel General who had studied the death star plans, and who was giving the briefing to the Alliance pilots prior to the big attack at the end of the 1977 movie.

 

[Satyrquaze]

^^^ Fair Enough.

I'll take Dr. Manhattan vs. your best Starship.

There's no source of information that gives the impression that Dr. Manhattan has any ability anywhere near the weapons range of your average Federation Starship.

Dr. Manhattan vs. Federation Starship

1. Knows the future?

Dr. M - YES

Starship - NO

2. Can hang out on the surface of the Sun.

Dr. M - YES

Starship - NO

3. Can reassemble if atomized?

Dr. M -- YES

Starship - NO

4. Needs external resources to survive/hold position.

Dr. M -- YES

Starship - NO

5. Ability to directly materialize anywhere at will

Dr. M -- Yes

Starship -- Can travel FTL, can transport crew members
in a fixed range.

Who is winning?

He see's the future in glimpes and in most occasions cannot tell what is happening between the future or the present.

I'm just saying I don't recall Alan Moore giving a description as to how far he could see. Last I checked he is limited to line-of-sight. He can likely see the entire EM spectrum, but as far as I know he is still limited by the speed-of-light as to what he can perceive and react to. Which puts him at a distinct disadvantage against any Starship.

 

[YARN]

He see's the future in glimpes and in most occasions cannot tell what is happening between the future or the present.

No, his vision was merely disrupted by a burst of tachyons. Most of the time his vision is clear.

NOTE: The Enterprise D can emit tachyons at will. If they knew of his weakness, they could take advantage of it.

I'm just saying I don't recall Alan Moore giving a description as to how far he could see. Last I checked he is limited to line-of-sight.

No, he disappears from an enclosed room and teleports to Mars.

I think Manhattan would be a Q-Like being in the Trek verse.

 

[Albertese]

The Star Trek Encyclopedia lists the normal maximum for a Starfleet vessel as warp 9.2 at a slick 1,649x the speed of light. Bear in mind this is a dash speed, not a cruising speed. But a ship in hyperspace moves at millions of times the speed of light.

If you're opening this up to non-on screen material, then the original Star Trek Maps explain that there was a "Cochrane Factor" multiplier which is applied to warp factors, so TOS era starships were actual moving at several hundred thousand times light-speed.

Ah, yes, the so-called "chi" factor. I'm actually a big believer in the chi-factor as it's the only way to explain several instances of ships moving at the "speed of plot."

Travel from Coruscant to any planet in the Outer Rim seems to be matters of hours, not weeks.

It occurs to me that claims of the speed of the SW ship is base of the size of our galaxy. But the size of the galaxy "far far away" is a unknown. All we know from on screen evidence is that it's a spiral galaxy.

NGC3928 is a spiral galaxy and has a diameter of about 8,000 light years. The Milky Way has a diameter of about 100,000 light years. If the entire SW galaxy were little more in size than the Federation itself, then speed estimates drop considerable.

That's a fair point.

it always boils down to how "ubur powerful" the wars weapons are.

Problem there is, there's no on screen indication as to how powerful those SW weapons are.

This isn't quite true. While there is no technically reliable dialogue discussing the power involved, there are visual effects. We see turbolasers vaporizing asteroids in the Anoat system in ESB. Now, there are several assumptions to be made: the material of the asteroids (based on their color we can assume they're likely iron based), the size of the asteroids (admittedly variable and a bit wonky in anyone's visual effects - Trek or Wars, but 40 m is a fair guess), and how long it takes to go from perfectly intact asteroid to GONE asteroid (a few frames of film). With these fair guesses in play, one can fairly easily deduce the power needed to disrupt a given volume of a given material in a given space of time. All things considered, the turbolasers need to be awfully powerful in order to accomplish what they did on screen.

We've seen the power of the Death Star to blow up a planet, and we're told that the Death Star's firepower is equivalent to fifty percent of the firepower of all the other ships in the imperial fleet combined.

True, but we don't know that the Death Star was firing it's main weapon at full strength to crack Alderaan. Only that it can at a minimum destroy a world with the mass of Alderaan. We have no reason to know whether or not that is the most it is capable of. This is important when we consider how to parse the power of the Imperial Star Fleet as a whole...

So the bigger the imperial fleet is, the less firepower each ship possesses. But we have no idea how big the imperial fleet is, but the same goes for Starfleet.

********************

if the imperial fleet has 100 ships, then each ship has on average 1 percent of the firepower of the Death Star. If the fleet has 10,000 ships, then each ship has 1/100 of 1 percent of the firepower of the Death Star.

You know why I like you, T'Girl? You always end with a smiley. That makes me happy inside.

--Alex

 

[Satyrquaze]

I think Manhattan would be a Q-Like being in the Trek verse.

I'd personally put him the area somewhere between Q and Superman. But, that's just me.

 

[BK613]

Imperial vessels, be they Star Destroyers or Death Stars, will always lose to Star Fleet ships because they are required--being antagonists' vessels--to have a Fatal Design Flaw which can be exploited to their Doom.