934 replies to this topic

[ManDaisy]

Who will be the winner? Who would be the absolute loser? Now... DANCE MY MONKIES DANCE! MUGAGASHAHAHAHA!

Edited by ManDaisy, 05 February 2012 - 06:07 PM.

[Nebfer]

Some of these forces I know little about, though many are also dependent on what time frame one is looking at....

Battletech: Is at best in the single digit kilotons (though some high end calcs can put them in the low triple digit kilotons), it lacks gravity generation and energy shields, it's FTL drive is capable but highly restrictive, sub light speeds is restricted to less than 15 gravity's (acceleration).

Starwars: Most calculations often put it in the megaton to gigaton range for it's capital weapons, they have shields that can take this energy and can generate gravity (not to mention a less restrictive FTL drive, thats vastly faster), sub light speeds are hard to put down but in the dozens of gravitys.

Startrek: Most calcs put them in the megaton range, with energy shields ships capable of withstanding these energys, they also have gravity generation for their crews, and a less restrictive FTL drive (though B-tech is roughly on par speed wise), sub light speeds are similar to Starwars.

Gundam: using the Universal century figures, they have good firepower but low armor, no shields, low fuel endurance / acceleration rates (Earth to moon ~2 days), they also have no FTL drives nor gravity generation.

Macross: I know little about it's tech but I am familiar with it. It depends on the time frame, by Frontier their fighters have better acceleration rates than B-techs, at the lest their some what better than B-tech in most departments.

Zone of Enders: I know nothing about this game
Eve Online: I also know nothing about this game

Starcraft is very hard to get reliable calculations but it's above B-tech but below Starwars/Startrek in the capital ship departments.
I do know that Terran Marines use a rifle with the effective capability's of a 50 cal HMG.

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Though Battletech dose have some good infantry kits, it's battlearmor is quite good, their ground weapons are powerful but their "range" is at the lest problematic. Aerospace fighters are also good as well.

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Though it depends on how this brakes down, whats the forces available, all out war? Is this ground combat or space only?

Edited by Nebfer, 28 November 2011 - 01:53 PM.

[Strayed]

EvE Online - Titans doomsday weapons pretty much kill most ships under supercap in one shot.

[Kodiak Jorgensson]

i went with star trek, depends on the faction Borg 8472 or Q. Borg cube and a 8472 bioship can regenerate themselves pritty fast Q simply put, is an omnipotent being, but since its space battles ill go with one of the follwoing two

borg ship's will quickly adapt(a few seconds) to a sheild system and use its cutting beam to slive it up, alternative engage tractot pulse pull it into the main hold, and assimilate its technology and crew, or simply board the ship and take control of it XD 1 borg cube carved its way through federation and romulan territory. entire fleet of klingon and federation ships wasnt able to stop it. (wolf 359)

borg space is vast and 8472 nearly annihilated them in a couple of months 8472 is a stupidly powerful race ships are higlhy regerative pilots or telepathicly linked to the bioship given them a reaction time advantage. there not impossible to kill, just incredibly hard to kill

[Dlardrageth]

EVE-Online because the NC would just blob out the sun making navigation for the others impossible.

[blackbane]

Macross, while a much bigger fan of Battletech the SDF-1's main gun is rather OP

[Geist Null]

gundam. they are willing to drop a space station on your planet as an opening salvo

[Catamount]

Star Wars is almost a non-starter from the get-go in these kinds of contests, because the EU writers grossly inflated every power figure imaginable, and then made up technobabble "hypermatter" reactors that contradict massive numbers of references to Star Wars using fusion power in the novelizations (in short, the EU writers weren't satisfied with "real" Wars tech, so they retconned everything and made it a billion billion times more powerful).

Most of the output figures come from the ICS (Incredible Cross Section) books written by Curtis Saxton, but the figures are based on entirely circular reasoning, which works something like this:

Star wars is uber powerful because Curtis Saxton says so in the ICS books, and Curtis Saxton says so in the ICS books because Star Wars is uber powerful. Prior to authoring those books, he was a very vocal VS debater, and so, never a very objective voice on the subject. Basically, after years of canonical evidence not holding up to Star Wars not curb-stomping everybody, Saxton wrote the ICS books to make Wars curb-stomp everybody, just so it could be the best.


So before even getting into Wars, we'd have to talk about what to include and exclude, and what to go with over the mass number of contradictions caused by the EU writers not being satisfied with the established lore.


So setting Star Wars aside for a moment, because it's an unmitigated disaster on the technical side, I'm not familiar with all of these, but here's what I'd consider for some of them:



Star Trek trumps most science fiction. M/AM power is pretty darned effective, and the matter-disrupting effects of weapons is extremely potent. In DS9 The Die is Cast, a small fleet of only 20 starships calculated that they'd successfully blow a planet down to its core in under 5 hours (which, pound for pound, puts whatever they were using at least on par with the Death Star, and probably a few orders of magnitude ahead). Trek also is one of the few series to features FTL combat and weaponry. Trek also features more exotic tech than almost any franchise, save Stargate (which, if in this contest, might well walk away ahead of everyone). Total fleet sizes seem to number in the low-mid tens of thousands for major powers (the Dominion had 30,000 ships during the late Dominion War).


That said, the EVE universe is also clearly very advanced. Like Trek, they pop antimatter warheads like candy, and their other ordinance is no less powerful. Their on-board FTL systems are capable of 6AU/s, which matches the best Trek FTL estimates I've ever seen (backstage or calculated from, say, time estimates on Voyager's trip across the galaxy). They also have a network of very fast FTL conduits which basically surpass anything I've ever seen elsewhere (admitted that that's just to make the game playable), again, save maybe the poor forgotten Stargate franchise. That said, there's little evidence of any kind of abundance of exotic tech in EVE.

Fleet sizes for all of EVE come from ~300,000 players, so we'll just call it roughly that many combat ships. That puts the entire EVE universe, across all races, roughly on par with Trek, across all the major players who might take place in any conflict (so no Borg).

On the whole, I'd probably rate EVE and Trek to generally be on par with each other (with Trek having better exotic tech, but vastly inferior FTL). All of humanity in EVE would probably beat the Federation by numbers, but not necessarily the Federation/Klingons/Romulans and assorted other races who might take part in a galactic war, which might include the Dominion, Cardassians, Breen, and a few other major relatively players.




Starcraft I don't have much of a basis for comparison on. I can't find much information at all on the specifics of their weapon energy outputs, nor on fleet sizes. That said, there are/were references to "anti-matter cores" for power generation, so we can assume power generation capabilities roughly on part with Trek and EVE. Win or lose, it's hard to say exactly, but it probably wouldn't be a curb stomp either way.



For the anime robot franchises, there's little specific data, but my impression is that, based on what I've seen, they just don't have the energy outputs to compete with the above franchises.



Battletech... yeah, that's going to fall near the bottom. Too much turmoil has seriously hampered what could have been a thousand years of great advancement, so I'm not seeing the BT universe beating anyone, just base on technological limitations.



In short, wherever you'd fit franchises specifically, Trek, EVE, and Starcraft would probably all fight for the top, while BT would be stuck at or near the bottom.

Edited by Catamount, 28 November 2011 - 05:44 PM.

[Nathan Wassenar]

I'm sorry but this superweapon is the best.



We're talking the complete obliteration of EVERYTHING in like a 100km wide 60,000km long cylinder!

Spacefolding FTL tech, shields, advanced spacecraft. Thats a hard show to top.

[baofengyu]

Hard to top a ship that can vaporize asteroids with one shot.



Reflex/Reaction weaponry from Macross is equally impressive, but I think it is more inline with the Super Laser from Star Wars



In the end, it is all about what one prefers.

[Daiichidoku]

this poll is invalid without a Space Battleship Yamato option

WMG FTW! the Yamato never dies! It has unlimited 3rd bridges!

[GryphonTA]

Daiichidoku, on 28 November 2011 - 06:26 PM, said:

this poll is invalid without a Space Battleship Yamato option

WMG FTW! the Yamato never dies! It has unlimited 3rd bridges!

you mean this?


There's just something about the original tho.

Edited by GryphonTA, 28 November 2011 - 06:59 PM.

[Damocles]

Nothing beats Davion ramming speed!

[Nebfer]

Catamount, on 28 November 2011 - 05:42 PM, said:

Star Wars is almost a non-starter from the get-go in these kinds of contests, because the EU writers grossly inflated every power figure imaginable, and then made up technobabble "hypermatter" reactors that contradict massive numbers of references to Star Wars using fusion power in the novelizations (in short, the EU writers weren't satisfied with "real" Wars tech, so they retconned everything and made it a billion billion times more powerful).

Don't like it to bad it's canon, Their are however accounts of the deathstar consuming enough energy firing it's main weapon that would of been produced by a (several?) main sequence star over a week, the Mk II is stated to have been vastly more powerful (IIRC Hundreds of super giant stars). So technobabble or not the power requirements are considerable.

Though it's funny you knock Starwars for this particular bit of technobabble and yet do not mention any of the vast amounts of technobabble that Star trek uses in many of it's episodes.

Though technically IIRC the Death star had hypermatter reactors for quite some time in real life, as even Antimatter reactors are just to inefficient to power the stations planet busting shot (Which is around 1E33-38 Joules IIRC, your looking at a not so small amount of antimatter if it was one). Though hypermatter reactors do use fusion reactors to regulate them (It seems hypermatter reactors are a form of A/AM reactors in any case).

Also note that even ISDs are said to use more energy in a single hyperspace jump than a planet (inhabited) in it's life time and the bigger ships equal the power production of main sequence stars at full power.

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Most of the output figures come from the ICS (Incredible Cross Section) books written by Curtis Saxton, but the figures are based on entirely circular reasoning, which works something like this:

Star wars is uber powerful because Curtis Saxton says so in the ICS books, and Curtis Saxton says so in the ICS books because Star Wars is uber powerful. Prior to authoring those books, he was a very vocal VS debater, and so, never a very objective voice on the subject. Basically, after years of canonical evidence not holding up to Star Wars not curb-stomping everybody, Saxton wrote the ICS books to make Wars curb-stomp everybody, just so it could be the best.

Don't like it to bad, crying about it dose not invalidate that starwars can be that powerful via these books. Though I will give you this many debaters tend to limit their use of info from the ICS for various reasons.

Also note lower canon can be over ruled by higher canon if theirs a direct contradiction.

And technically your objectivity on the subject can be questionable as well. The fact that he is pro SW in a debate side is irrelevant to what he wrote. Considering his day job (astrophysicist IIRC), I would think that he simply used his knowledge and applied it to various bits of Starwars fluff and examined them, his results indicated that SW ships required this amount of firepower to due what the situation required or this amount of energy from it's reactor... He latter used this info when writing his books.

Though IIRC part of the reasoning behind these firepower levels comes from the stated ability of ISDs being able to slag worlds by them selves in only a few hours.
Theirs also the Dodanna quote which technically would make SW have even more firepower than the ICS values... (SW4 during the rebel briefing on the death star it was mentioned that the death star has firepower greater than half the starfleet... based off the energy used to blow up a planet, and spread it to the starfleet, gives each ship massive amounts of firepower).

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So before even getting into Wars, we'd have to talk about what to include and exclude, and what to go with over the mass number of contradictions caused by the EU writers not being satisfied with the established lore.

This is true for MOST series, as even Trek is hardly a bastion of consistency.

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Star Trek trumps most science fiction. M/AM power is pretty darned effective, and the matter-disrupting effects of weapons is extremely potent. In DS9 The Die is Cast, a small fleet of only 20 starships calculated that they'd successfully blow a planet down to its core in under 5 hours (which, pound for pound, puts whatever they were using at least on par with the Death Star, and probably a few orders of magnitude ahead). Trek also is one of the few series to features FTL combat and weaponry. Trek also features more exotic tech than almost any franchise, save Stargate (which, if in this contest, might well walk away ahead of everyone). Total fleet sizes seem to number in the low-mid tens of thousands for major powers (the Dominion had 30,000 ships during the late Dominion War).

Not really. The Die is Cast is a rather problematic episode in of it self, theirs a few oddity with the timing and stated ability's, and worst of all it's not very consistent with the many other showings in there series. Like how do you reconcile it with Pegasus where they require most of their torpedoes (which is over 200 IIRC) to get rid of an asteroid thats only a few dozen km in size.
Or Conudrum where a single photon torpedo was considered adequate to destroy a station that had a shield out put of 4.3 kilojoules (while likely including the ability to destroy the station, with shields that weak a few shots from the phasers should of been just as effective. FYI -4.3 Kj can be defeated by a three round burst from a M16 Rifle). Or Night Terrors where their entire payload of torpedoes was inferior to a large "chemical" explosion. If each torpedo had the ability of Gigatons of TNT, their would of been many situations that would of been vastly different if they had it. Incidentally this is one of the reasons the SW ICS firepower calculations are not used often as they are in the debates I have read.

Though even their use of FTL combat is rare and some times contradictory (IIRC theirs even one time where even though they where at warp they where decidedly not at FTL speeds -I.e. IIRC counting down range in ~100,000km intervals every second or so and not sounding rushed).

Though the trek M/AM reactor also uses technobabble as well...

On the other hand lets not get into a debate with SW and Trek as that road can lead to many a flame war.

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Starcraft I don't have much of a basis for comparison on. I can't find much information at all on the specifics of their weapon energy outputs, nor on fleet sizes. That said, there are/were references to "anti-matter cores" for power generation, so we can assume power generation capabilities roughly on part with Trek and EVE. Win or lose, it's hard to say exactly, but it probably wouldn't be a curb stomp either way.

Never assume that when one uses one type of power generation that it must mean they have the same ability's of another universe that has a similar device. Or in other words even if they both have anti mater reactors one could have vastly better power generation than the other. Or one my have anti mater the other oh lets say some sort of fusion reactor and the "fusion" produces far more power....

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For the anime robot franchises, there's little specific data, but my impression is that, based on what I've seen, they just don't have the energy outputs to compete with the above franchises.

Macross can give a decent showing but is not as capable as the others on the list, Gundam is not as capable as Macross.

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Battletech... yeah, that's going to fall near the bottom. Too much turmoil has seriously hampered what could have been a thousand years of great advancement, so I'm not seeing the BT universe beating anyone, just base on technological limitations.

I will agree with you their, though battletech can edge out gundam, but its not quite as capable as Macross.
And if you want ground combat it can do even better.

Edited by Nebfer, 28 November 2011 - 11:19 PM.

[Strayed]

GryphonTA, on 28 November 2011 - 06:56 PM, said:

There's just something about the original tho.

The Bathtub! The final frontier!

[AJC]

this kind of topic makes me wish bandai namco would put in battletech in a Super Robot War game...also with macross and gundam in the same game so that battletech meets it's biggest eastern influences.

[Christian Davion]

Damocles, on 28 November 2011 - 09:37 PM, said:

Nothing beats Davion ramming speed!

You need to get a pic of the Charger Mech

[GreyGriffin]

Macross, hands down.

Remember, the SDF-1 was a small destroyer landed on earth, an abandoned part of the Supervision Army's fleet left as a booby trap for Breetai's Zentradi. The ship was then salvaged and jury rigged together by late 20th century humanity. In its prime, the SDF-1 Macross could fire a beam ten thousand miles long and a mile wide, capable of destroying everything in its path. It also sported the Omni Directional Shield Barrier, which, when it malfunctioned, turned Montreal into a crater. Which is why they continued to employ the essentially impenetrable pinpoint shields.

This same technology, expounded on by humans, created such weapons as the Grand Cannon, a weapon that was able to wipe out thousands of ships across a hemisphere of earth in one sweep.

Sure, the zentradi's planetary bombardment was pretty weak in the grand scheme of planet breaking. But the size, volume, and power of their ships (Numbering in the hundreds of thousands), and allied with the new Protoculture of earth, combined with the techonology that later created respectable fleets of Macross class carriers and resulted in humanity populating a significant portion of the galaxy, probably has the edge.

Then, you have Macross 7...

[SquareSphere]

If we allow for plot shields, then macross wins. why? cause muddafapping music/culture/love is teh greeteest weepaon of all!

[Catamount]

Nebfer, I don't have a horse in this race, since frankly, I think pretty much every franchise here is downright silly in most respects. It's part of why we love them, but it also means that I consider any such analysis to be rather silly, and only half-scientific to begin with, because these are universes where weapons can spontaneously change power, FTL scales can grow and shrink and grow again on a whim, and ships can spontaneously gain and lose size, all for no reason at all.


With that said, you're grossly oversimplifying, if not entirely misrepresenting, Star Wars canon.



The ICS books, and any other books along with games, or whatever other material, may be canon EU, but canon Star Wars consists of the screenplays, films, film novelizations, radio plays. This is the canon policy that has been consistently maintained, by Lucas himself, and Lucasarts, consistently, for years.

Lucas Licensing has released statements that are somewhat contradictory, but you know what? George Lucas is the franchise owner; he outranks Lucas Licensing, no matter what any of their employees have said.


At best, anything outside of that, including Saxton's ICS books, can be called part of the EU canon, the continuity recognized by Lucas Licensing, as distinct from what's recognized by Lucas himself, as part of his franchise.



If you want to include EU, we can include EU in this discussion. I'd be happy to bring in discussions of the Genesis Wave series by John Vornholt, or plenty of other ridiculous tales of absurd forces, but I'm under the assumption we're sticking to strict canon here, such as the novelizations, which repeatedly, throughout (even in the prequel novelizations) refer to Star Wars power generation as fusion, and nothing more.

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The Die is Cast is a rather problematic episode in of it self, theirs a few oddity with the timing and stated ability's, and worst of all it's not very consistent with the many other showings in there series. Like how do you reconcile it with Pegasus where they require most of their torpedoes (which is over 200 IIRC) to get rid of an asteroid thats only a few dozen km in size.
Or Conudrum where a single photon torpedo was considered adequate to destroy a station that had a shield out put of 4.3 kilojoules (while likely including the ability to destroy the station, with shields that weak a few shots from the phasers should of been just as effective. FYI -4.3 Kj can be defeated by a three round burst from a M16 Rifle). Or Night Terrors where their entire payload of torpedoes was inferior to a large "chemical" explosion. If each torpedo had the ability of Gigatons of TNT, their would of been many situations that would of been vastly different if they had it. Incidentally this is one of the reasons the SW ICS firepower calculations are not used often as they are in the debates I have read.

I entirely agree, which is why I wouldn't use The Die is Cast to generally judge normal Trek weaponry, but to use your own logic on the high-end figures, it's canon, so tough luck.


The easiest explanation for the TDiC explosions would simply be special ordinance, or it could be a product of the reaction of materials not hardened to the rapid nadion effect of phasers (in use by the Cardassian Keldon class vessels), and the equivalent effects from Romulan disruptors.


It shouldn't be any surprise, given mention of the ability of simple hand weapons to vaporize entire large buildings (TNG frame of mind).


But I'm not in the habit of taking wild guesses of how much such things might play into these instances, anymore than I'm inclined to guess on the lower-end instances (the Pegasus episode is a perfect example).


For Trek, I usually stick to the ~250PJ range for warheads (give or take), since it's fairly solidly grounded in the annihilation of matter and antimatter in the quantities we're talking about, and then just assume phasers have roughly equal effectiveness. It's not a perfect approach, especially because, like any sci-fi, Trek has hillarious outliers on both sides of that figure (and because some of M/AM reactions go to useless neutrino production), but I find it usually gets me by.

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The fact that he is pro SW in a debate side is irrelevant to what he wrote. Considering his day job (astrophysicist IIRC), I would think that he simply used his knowledge and applied it to various bits of Starwars fluff and examined them, his results indicated that SW ships required this amount of firepower to due what the situation required or this amount of energy from it's reactor... He latter used this info when writing his books.

In a perfect world, I might be able to assume that every natural scientist is an objective individual, and that that objectivity extends to all aspects of their lives, but if I was ever that naive, it's been long since beaten out of me by seeing gross misconduct far beyond simple lack of objectivity, by scientists. It's not something I'd attribute to many, as indeed, the requirements of working in the sciences requires those of us in those fields is conducive to objective thinking, but there are exceptions to every rule, especially when dealing with human beings.

If I can watch, say, Patrick Michaels, walk into Congress and lie right through his teeth to them about HIS OWN FIELD, then I certainly would not put it past an equally passionate scientist to throw mere objectivity to the wind on something so ancillary was VS debates. Put simply, Saxton's status as a scientist guarantees nothing.


His mere status as a vs debater also doesn't guarantee anything, save the fact that he has never been a bastion of objectivity, and his behavior in VS debates has always been charged and vitriolic.


And if you think his figures are merely extrapolations of his observations of canon, then first, it should be noted that pro-Wars debates have grossly inflated estimates from VFX and canonical statements to begin with, and secondly, those figures are irreconciblable with the canon novelizations.


Let's take the Death Star, for instance:

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Their are however accounts of the deathstar consuming enough energy firing it's main weapon that would of been produced by a (several?) main sequence star over a week

The problem is that you're assuming the Death Star is a DET weapon; this cannot be the case.

Your figures are actually low-balled (IIRC, the Death star uses YEARS of output from a star), but there's a problem with that.

Let's refer to the Death Star I explosion, from the exploding reactor, as described in the ANH novelization:

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"Space filled temporarily with trillions of microscopic metal fragments, propelled past the retreating ships by the liberated energy of a small artificial sun."

Now look at the phrasing there: the liberated energy of a small artificial sun. This clearly refers to a fusion reactor. If it was just trying to quantify the energy, it wouldn't have used the word articificial, nor is there any phrasing to indicate a comparitive statement to begin with.


But let's not dwell on one example.

Curtis Saxton has no problem using entirely EU sources that are not part of the Star Wars canon, including magazines, comics, video games.

Pro-Wars debates constantly try to claim that Saxton's E2 ICS book was based on careful examination of the film, but nothing could be further from the truth: http://st-v-sw.net/STSWICS.html

But Saxton also has no problem basing his books entirely off of fan-based inflations of canon, something I don't have to bring up because you already did:

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Though IIRC part of the reasoning behind these firepower levels comes from the stated ability of ISDs being able to slag worlds by them selves in only a few hours.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. That's not canon Star Wars! That's Base Delta Zero you're referring to, and not only is that is in no way part of Lucas' Star Wars, but in the way it's used by Saxton in the ICS books, it's not even canon EU!

The idea of slagging an entire planet is a big tall tale of fiction, based on nothing canonical, in Star Wars, or Star Wars EU, that's basically nothing but one big fan inflation to create a tale of something that never actually happened in canon.


It started as something real, at least in EU, a work called "Scavenger Hunt", which described the bombardment of a single Rebel base (not the entire surface of a planet), but the fans cherry picked words, until the tale grew and grew, and Curtis Saxton used it for figures in his E2 ICS book, which was then cited by others... until it became an entrenched part of EU canon, that never really was, and was just made up by some of the more fanatical fans.



But it gets better than figures that are merely innocently made up out of nothing.

Saxton got help with his ICS figures, by corresponding with other pro-Wars debates, who EXPLICITLY STATED that they were producing the figures they were SPEFICALLY to make Star Wars stronger than Star Trek, in correspondence with the same people you see credited in the ICS books by Saxton (namely, Mike Wong and Wayne Poe).


That was the stated goal behind much of the work that produced the ICS figures, not to make ICS books that were consistent with Star Wars canon, or that were scientifically sound, but specifically to write the ICS books out to make Star Wars stronger than Star Trek.


You're right; there's no way to prove my objectivity, but the notion of objectivity underlying the ICS books is laughable at best.





So where do we go from here?


You want to discuss Star Wars, WHICH Star Wars? The actual franchise, owned by George Lucas, or the EU continuity, and its myriad of inflated or downright made up figures that don't in any way even relate to the original canon?

Where do you want to draw that line?


This is why I pretty much just choose to not touch Star Wars.

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This is true for MOST series, as even Trek is hardly a bastion of consistency.

To some extent? Perhaps.

But no series is self-crippled to the sheer extent that Star Wars is, because no series suffers the particular problems of fan-inflated and intentionally biased figures, conjured up in relation to canon out of thin air for the express purpose of inflation, completely independent of the very canon its supposed to describe, not to the extent that Star Wars does.


Who knows, maybe in a war, Star Wars would beat any franchise out there, but I can't answer a question of who would win a fight with such problems making such a muddy situation out of what information should even be included in the first place.