1189 replies to this topic

[Polymorphyne]

Coal and Oil ARE solar energy. A barrel of oil is basically a solar panel that has been left in the sun storing energy for over a million years. This shows just how much better oil is compared to solar panels.

[Kaine Vulpayne]

Longsword, on 28 February 2012 - 07:20 AM, said:

Coal and Oil ARE solar energy. A barrel of oil is basically a solar panel that has been left in the sun storing energy for over a million years. This shows just how much better oil is compared to solar panels.

More specifically coal and oil are solar energy converted IN THE (prehistoric) PAST. It's basically organic matter compressed by gravity. But when the deposits from the past are finally gone, this insight doesn't help us in the future. In the end we can only use the energy that is available. Which is still enough.

[Catamount]

Kaine Vulpayne, on 28 February 2012 - 03:46 AM, said:

Well, regarding nuclear energy production based on uranium and plutonium there is a problem with this vision of a nuclear future. From what I know the (currently known) uranium resources are very limited and will be depleted long before oil or anything else. Yes you can "recycle" old nuclear fuel to some extend by enriching it or by recycling old nuclear warheads, but the former requires to put energy into it before you get new energy out of that, so the efficiency drastically decreases. And for the latter, well every nation only has so and so much obsolete arsenal. Right now it is said that the U.S. takes 2/3rd of their nuclear fuel requirement from old arsenals. What if these are used up?

The last report I read was from the Army Corps of Engineers, and iirc, they estimated the Uranium could satisfy the entire world energy demand, alone, for about 60 years. If it's only satisfying, say, half the world demand, that's 120 years.

Also, thorium is vastly more abundant them uranium, orders of magnitude more abundant, as I understand it. The biggest drawback is a requirement for a bit of fissile material like uranium to catalyze the reaction.

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And what about the waste? If we build more nuclear plants we get more waste. Where to put it for the next 300000 or how many years?

Coal power produces considerable amounts of radioactive waste too; what would you rather do, bury a little bit of it in the ground, or billow it out of a smokestack?

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Also with all the bin Ladens (or his disciples) and Achmadinedshads and other maniacs I don't like the thought that our landscapes are dotted with small nuclear plants. This will become uncontrollable. Sounds like a hell of a world scenario to me.

France has that setup right now, had for a long time, with no incident. Besides, you'd probably have to detonate every nuclear plant presently in the entire United States to kill anywhere near as many people as the worst fossil fuel disasters have. Since new ones are being made to sustain jet impacts, that's a lot of ordinance there... (way more than a terrorist group has).

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Of course fusion could save the world, but we don't have it yet. Also ppl tend to mix up fission and fusion and see fusion as a technological extension or the next evolutionary step to fission. I don't think that is correct. Fusion works vastly different. IF it works one day...

Here's a working fusion reaction, practically built from a box of scraps




The problem isn't making fusion work; IEC (Inertial electrostatic confinement) fusors are easy to build and are used right now as a low-volume source of neutron production. The problem is getting net power from a fusion scheme.

Tokamak reactors suffer the problem that, at least as I understand it, the design inherently leads to to much electron loss (simply too much surface area for the volume of the reactor? It's probably a billion times more complex than that, but that's my understanding), so building a sufficiently large reactor is just going to be a monumental undertaking with that concept. ITER is wholly expected to generate 500MW of energy for 50MW of input, but it's just that: a huge reactor. Still, we'll know for sure if it works before decade's end, barring major delays. DEMO, ITER's successor, should be producing real-world fusion power for the market (several GW worth), by around 2030.


The Navy, on the other hand, expects Polywell reactors to be producing commercially viable fusion within a decade. Polywell is under an information embargo; the Navy is allowing out fairly little information. However, quarterly progress reports that are released indicate the increased efficiency with scaling, which is the key to reactor working, like with all fusion, is holding. That is to say, there's been a lot of debate on whether Polywell reactors can generate net power, even if you make them bigger (do they get efficiency enough with increased size?), and so far, the results are backing EMC2's researchers it seems. Scaling is coming along nicely, and WB8, the current test reactor, is behaving just the way that had been hoped (http://en.wikipedia....ll#FY_2011_Work).


We may differ from the Europeans in method of power generation, but one day isn't a particularly good descriptor for the type of progress on either side of the Atlantic. If it works, great, if it doesn't, back to the drawing board (and we've got two different designs here, only one of which needs to function), but either way, we'll know whether either or both of them work by 2020.

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And again regarding RE. There are more than wind and sun.

There are wave plants that go up into the 10MW already. Also they have the side effect of reducing erosion of the coast line...
And geothermal energy is also an option. At the moment it is limited to spots with favorable geological conditions, but this limitation could be neglected by better technology. Drilling lots of deep holes into earth's crust might be dangerous though.

That may sound like a lot, but again, we need 15TW of energy. As far as I know, renewables can't do that feasibly.

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Some company genetically modified an algea to produce fuel (i cant remember what exact carbon-hydrate it was, but you could make normal gasoline out of it), with this technology we could even keep our old gasoline-based cars. You could probably setup a factory in the desert where you got lot's of light for the algae (you would need a seawater pipeline from the coast, though). Utilizing natural photosynthesis might be much more efficient than solar panels. Plus maybe the algae could be modified to produce methane, which then could be fed into the gas network. This would make one huge buffer for energy that is already available! CHP power plants can produce electricity and heat and are highly efficient (90%).

You can't violate the laws of thermodynamics, though. See my post above; the sun just doesn't reign enough energy down on us. If 50% of the TOA energy reaches the surface of the Earth, that's about 680W/M^2, so even if your algae plant was gargantuan, and I mean even if it was a square kilometer in size, and even if it was 100% efficient, which it won't be, that's only 680MW of energy, for a plant the size of my entire town, and it'd be a complex plant to keep the algae alive, supplied with nutrients, and to collect the energy, in short, way more difficult than just building a more traditional power station (and we can't have that, or the market won't go for it).

Longsword, on 28 February 2012 - 07:20 AM, said:

Coal and Oil ARE solar energy. A barrel of oil is basically a solar panel that has been left in the sun storing energy for over a million years. This shows just how much better oil is compared to solar panels.

Hmm, so all we have to do, is invent a time machine, continually go forward in time to collect the oil generated by dying plants, which is what oil basically is, keep taking all the oil from successive future time periods, then fight off our past selves when they try to take our oil that way, but make sure we successfully fight off our future selves when they try to do that to us, then somehow stop our future selves from consuming their oil, while stopping our past selves from doing that to us...

and once we've conquered all the paradoxes, solving all of oil's horrendous pollution problems ought to be a cakewalk!

BAM! Infinite energy!


but then... why not just power the world this way?

Edited by Catamount, 28 February 2012 - 08:01 AM.

[GDL Rahsan]

Ok going to collect cats and toast and some butter I bet this time of nature ffriendly, except for cats, energy will be the thing that rockets us to the future.

[Catamount]

Just you wait; we'll have cat farms for power yet

[guardian wolf]

ilithi dragon, on 27 February 2012 - 04:38 PM, said:

I used to be a Super Star Destroyer like you, then I took an A-Wing to the Bridge...

Nice, +1 to this.

[Polymorphyne]

The cat-toast generator also has great applications in transportaion- as the cat/toast assembly will never hit the ground, instead of spinning above the ground, you could use a set of them attached to a vehicle to make an effective hovercraft.

Another revolutionary design in power generation is the Red Shirt vs Stormtrooper array- Both red shirts and stormtroopers are incapable of hitting any target, but both also are incapable of surviving a firefight. Get a team of each to fight each other and the resulting paradox should output alot of energy (but risks tearing a hole in the fabric of the space time continuum)

[Catamount]

You just divided by zero, didn't you...

[guardian wolf]

*Gasp* (dammit, had a motivational poster coming up, but it won't let me)

[Ghost Dragon]

Whilst I've only registered on here to probe B-tech lover brains for info, I was browsing through and saw this thread and thought I'd add my ha'penny worth on stuff I have, ignoring Gods and treating the civilisations of the settings as the adversaries.


Star Wars : Depending on the era, SW will have a huge and motivated galactic empire as the major polity. Fast FTL, fleets capable of devastating a planet, and hundreds of thousands of planets worth of strategic depth. They should crush Starcraft enmasse due to the small scale of that setting. Trek would be extremely vulnerable to defeat in detail of its fractured civilisations, BSG a speed bump, most Stargate civilisations similarly, not sure about the animes. 40k would be a big big fight

Trek: Lots of variable power levels, exotic weaponry, not very unified, nor are there many truly large scale civs like the Galactic Empire, Imperium of Man etc.

Battlestar galactica: NewBSG would do better than oBSG, but the FTL NBG has is really good for shock attacks, it might help them versus a larger opponent.

Battletech has great ground forces, I don't think they've got as much power in space.

Warhammer 40k: Huge and powerful civilisations, lots of minor powers as well, the imperium is oneof the larger civilisations out of all the unvierses listed. powerful weapons, agressive alien species abound. schizo technology, but their starships have got powerful guns, and they've got copious ground forces. </p>

Stargate is a bit like trek, lots of small powers with variable power levels. Potential is there for major stuff, but it doesn't always follow through on potential.

Halo is up and down like a tarts drawers, Spartans kick arse though.

[Zakatak]

I have to question Star Trek's power generation again, hopefully I don't skip an order of magnitude this time.

Enterprise-D power generation maxes out around 12.75 Exowatts, which can be run at for short time periods. Borg Cubes operate on just under 19 Exowatts. 71kg of Antimatter per second, and 105kg of Antimatter per second, respectively. But I'm not sure if the Borg use antimatter or some kind of pure-energy conversion or zero-point energy, so let's kick them out. And to be fair to E-D, let's assume she's running a third of her maximum potential, at 4.25 Exowatts (this about right for combat situations, yes?).

Umm...

Explosions the size of 1 gigaton, per second. Antimatter doesn't just nicely transform itself into electrical energy, it explodes. The E-D is having explosions inside the ship that are 16 times more powerful then the torpedoes it fires. It the Federation has materials that shrug off 1+ gigaton explosions (inside a fully enclosed chamber I might add), why would they need shields at all? I suppose the E-D could have a thousand different mini-chambers producing 1 megaton each, but I have no reason to believe that.

Catamount/Dragon, can you flatten my argument please? I don't see how that is possible.

[Catamount]

Unfortunately, I can only speculate, since little has ever really been discussed on the exact nature of the reaction that takes place in the core (much to my relief; there's enough technobabble in Trek already). Obviously, it's not like it makes heat and powers a turbine. There's a pretty much instantaneous conversion to "electroplasma" (since the enegry goes right to the EPS grid).

Beyond noting that you're right about the core's sustained output (likely must lower than the stated figure, which is clearly being stated as a maximum all things considered), all I could say with any confidence, at least without trying to dig further in to see if further specifics are ever mentioned, is this:

1.) The reaction must be contained through energetic means, not material means (and this is supported by plenty of dialogue, and just the fact that the core can "breach" or even be detonated on purpose, in the first place)

2.) The very nature of the conversion of the A/M reaction to useable energy must utilize it in such a way that there isn't a constant explosion of that magnitude battering the chamber that needs to be beating back with said shielding, otherwise they'd expend as much energy containing the reaction as the reaction produced.

So at least partially, the answer is that the "explosion" is simply converted into useable energy that then gets transferred through the EPS grid; that seems to be all that's happening in containment (again, a super-strong shield would defeat the purpose of running the reaction in the first place). We have seen all sorts of odd effects when containment is dropped, which do indicate absolutely gross quantities of energy are contained within A/M reactors/warp cores, namely, there have been instances of huge explosions generated. Enterprise (NX-01) once disabled an attacking ship by detonating a reactor next to it, and in Insurrection, the Enterprise E detonates its warp core to stop a subspace reaction.

Whatever the process that takes the A/M reaction and turns it into useful energy, instead of having it just blow the reactor apart, we know subspace is directly involved in the reactor operation, again, as per Insurrection, when the warp core itself pulled the aforementioned subspace "tear" towards the ship. Beyond that... who knows, maybe Ilithi knows more specifics.

It should be noted that photon torpedoes are not a serious threat to larger ships, except in very large numbers. The Enterprise E (a large cruiser by size) experienced barely more than a couple of very minor rocks from two photon torpedo hits, this, from the shield grid that's only a fraction of the power that the core outputs.

[guardiandashi]

ok I am going to say that some of this is techno babble based speculation.

my understanding of how the m/am warp power reactor core works is that the federation style cores start out as a very basic design in the newer ships.

the tall cylender with all the pretty lights in the engine room is the core the reason it is designed as it is (tall cylender with a "fat middle" at basically floor level) is that at the top and botom of the core there are a set of injectors, one set of injectors input miute controlled amounts of hydrogen fuel at a specific rate, that gets shot into the reaction chamber (the fat middle part) the injectors at the other end of the reactor do the same thing but with antimatter. under ideal circumstances (and assuming that the injectors insert single atoms or streams of single atoms) the matter and antimatter hit each other in the exact center of the reaction chamber every time with no misses or losses and anhiliate each other completely releasing their combined mass as capturable energy.

some indications however are that there MAY be additional matter mass (plasma) in the assembly that is brought to a highly energetc state by the m/am reaction and is channeled to various locations in the ship to provide the energy needed for various operations.

now this part is somewhat unclear and speculation.

The federation also uses dylithyum (and in some fiction trylithium) crystals to somehow increase the efficiency of the system the exact nature of how this helps varies and so i am going to offer a list of the methods I have read.

the nature of dylithyum crystals, some references (how much for just the planet? novel) indicates that dylithium crystals are not 3 dimentional objects but are actually 4 dimensional (this is relavent for one of theoretical uses of dylithium) so their crystaline structure actually works both in space and also extends through time, therefor to "cut" a crystal you have to hit it hard a week ago, today, and next week.

with that note about the 4 dimensional structure of dylithium this indicates that 1 theory is that dylithium crystals can actually channel energy through time so if I dump a megajoule of energy through the crystal for 4 hours, at any point in that 4 hours (and some time before and after) I can tap and bleed off energy without necessarally reducing the entire energy amount in the crystal (personally I think that violates the conservation of energy laws but shrug)

another described use of the crystals is to inject the matter and antimatter reaction point inside "gaps" in the crystaline molecular structure of the crystals and using the dylithium crystals essentually as control rods, and/or additional shielding inside the reactor

the theoretical (speculative) reason this would work is that the crystal actually functions as additional shielding vastly reducing the amount of shielding needed to contain the reaction/explosion(s) in the core.

Correction (the star trek TNG RPG manual indicates the fuel is duterium (an isotope of hydrogen) and that the dylithium crystals work along the lines of the "shielding model" as dylithium crystals are one of the few materials that do not really react to antimatter

[Polymorphyne]

One thing that needs to be considered, for those who have been saying that they would prefer the trekkies to win against 40k on an ideological standpoint.
The military of the imperium of man, and the emperors psychic presence, is all that is holding back an unimaginably vast tide of aliens, daemons, the warp itself, mutation, psyker threat, etc. If you somehow defeat the imperium, you would be damning the galaxy completely. Yes, the Imperium is harsh, but it has to be to protect mankind (they have to be intolerant of psykers and mutants because allowing psykers to go unregulated would lead to every planet turning into a daemon world eventually). If the imperium fractured, no element of humanity could survive even one of the threats that face it.

Look at the tyranids- a gestalt hyper-evolutionary race which is fully organic tech that exists only to feed on biomass. Their organic ships can survive the kind of firepower imperial ships put out (yes, organic tissue that can survive explosions in the petatons), their method of ftl causes the destination planets gravity wells to be messed up causing mass earthquakes, they have been known to be able to adapt the dna of their smaller organisms so fast as to become immune to tau pulse weaponry within a matter of weeks, and their larger vessels became immune to all Ion weaponry within months, and the fleets that have swamped large parts of the imperium, leaving many worlds, systems and even space marine chapter homeworlds as dead husks are merely the forward scouting tendrils of an extragalactic swarm of unknown size that has likely fed on countless other galaxies.

Then you have the necrons- soulless automations bound to the C'tan Star gods (the earliest sentient life forms to exist, the C'tan are vast energy creatures that used to live by essentially draining suns until the suns were lifeless and dead, now the few that are left from their war against the Old Ones and among themselves have developed a taste for the energies of mortal life forms). They can self repair at an astounding rate, have starships capable of draining stars dead within weeks, and their basic gauss rifles (which destroy things at a molecular level) can take on battle tanks.

Then, there is the daemons of the warp- any psyker who is not either an eldar (protected by their soulstones and technology and centuries of training) or soulbound and trained by the imperium (and those are at constant battle with the warp to stay safe) can at any moment at best lose his sanity, in the middle be possessed by a single daemon, or at worst have his body ripped apart by a warp portal flooding a world with daemons. If the daemons run unchecked, the world can be flooded with warp energy and turned into a daemon world where the laws of physics are thrown out the window, the rivers run with blood, etc. Even looking upon a daemon world from orbit could make your sanity snap, and even walking upon its surface could turn you inside out or have some other random injury inflicted on you by the complete irrationality of the place.

If the 40k and trek universes collided, the best result would be for the 40k imperium to win quickly, so it can subsume the trek worlds into the relative safety of the imperiums membership. Any other result would lead to the trek universe having its own equivalent of the age of strife- thousands of psykers being born on every world, and almost every psyker losing control, causing daemons to flood most worlds.

(Vulcan would be screwed, the combined repressed emotion swirling around the place, and the fact the entire population is psychic would likely destroy the world, create a warp vortex like the eye of terror, and even birth a new chaos god- a similar thing happened to the eldar, and they were used to the effects of the warp.)

Edited by Longsword, 01 March 2012 - 02:27 AM.

[Ghost Dragon]

There is some stuff I've noticed whilst skimming that seems a bit off. Hope I'm not repeating anything.

ilithi dragon, on 23 February 2012 - 12:19 AM, said:

This is significant for our purposes here because 40K ships are powered by fusion reactors, where as Trek ships are powered by M/AM reactors. Now, Trek ships do have fusion reactors powering their sublight engines and that serve as auxiliary power generators (and fusion makes a good back-up for M/AM power, because while anti-matter has to be manufactured, or possibly harvested from the upper atmospheres of gas giants, where their electromagnetic field interacts with the upper atmosphere and the solar wind, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe), however, the primary power generation method on Trek ships is a matter/anti-matter reactor. The fusion reactors only serve as back-ups. This means that pound-for-pound, a Trek ship is going to be equivalent to a 40K ship 100 times its size, even if everything else were exactly equal.

40k ships primary power generators are plasma reactors. Plasma power generation isn't fusion power. Plasma torps and fusion torpedos are different weapons. Secondary reactors and power generation systems are also present in 40k ships ranging from bonfires to "plasma dynamo's" and blokes on bicycles!

Plasma power can use anything as fuel, its been described as "high energy plasma annihilation" and 40k plasma technology produces "self sustaining plasma storms" with some cyclonic torpedo systems. Its not fusion power.

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Of course, the Federaiton has its industrial centers and its agricultural centers, just as any nation, and of course a new colony is not going to be able to match the industrial capacity of the Utopia Planetia Fleet Yards, but the point is that all but the newest, just-recently-settled colonies are going to be able to make a notable industrial contribution to the war effort, and the capability for the Federation to rapidly scale up its industrial capacity cannot be overstated.

The IoM has thousands of forge worlds devoted to the manufacture of war material, along with each world being tithed for their contribution. Hive worlds are vast manufacturing complexes, and even a Feral world has been described with enough orbital industry to construct a multi-kilometer Cruiser.

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That's because a replicated Tommy Gun, or any real weapon would not have worked. The Tommy Gun Picard used only worked because it wasn't firing real bullets, it was firing holographic bullets. Those weren't lead slugs that ripped through those drones, they forcefields with photons projected onto them. It was a weapon the Borg had probably never encountered before (unlike ballilstic projectiles), so their defenses weren't adapted against it.

If forcefields were simulating the effect of bullets, i.e. a projectile that physically smashes things, penetrates etc, then what is the functional difference?

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The standard Starfleet photon torpedo has a standard warhead yield of 1.5 kg of matter and 1.5 kg of anti-matter. The annihilation of that gives a detonation yield of ~64 megatons, per the DS9 Technical Manual (the TNG:TM lists the standard yield of 1kg of matter and anti-matter, with a maximum yield of 1.5 kg of each, though it notes in-progress development of the warheads, and the DS9:TM notes the upgrade, making the 1.5 kg payload the new standard yield with theoretical maximum yields ranging up to about 500 megatons). 40K warheads may well achieve higher detonation yields per weapon, but Trek warheads achieve it in much smaller, much faster and much more maneuverable packages that they can fire in greater numbers with greater frequency. The standard photon torpedo isn't an experimental super-doomsday weaponn in Trek, it's a standard weapon that they toss out like candy. I've linked to this thread a number of times in the past, detailing some of the calculations for Trek phaser yields.

The large size of 40k torpedoes reflects their requirement to physically penetrate armoured hulls and survive point defence fire. It can be speculated that the is some requirement for shield Penaids as well, given that the velocity threshold for penetrating 40k shielding is murky, and that some void shields have stopped torps. The standard anti-shipping torpedo has several charges, as opposed to one warhead.

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As for the ballistics weapons of 40K... That's iffy. Obviously, a big enough gun is going to penetrate anything, no matter how well-shielded and well-armored, but a properly-equipped Trek soldier is geared to take hits from Trek phaser rifles and pistols, and it takes a 40K tank gun to compare to the upper outputs of even a hand phaser. The energy that a 40K bullet can impart is only going to be so high. More than likely, a Trek trooper equipped with a personal shield will be effectively invulnerable to anything any 40K soldier can throw at her. She could probably take a couple hits from a 40K tank and survive. Without shields, Trek infantry armor will probably stop any bullet 40K fires, though explosive rounds might be a bit more effective, but mostly through splash damage rather than direct penetration.

Do we know that a "properly equipped" Trek soldier is equipped to survive the attentions of the proposed "upper outputs"? We see Jem'hadar, Klingon boarding troops, and they aren't equipped with bullet proof armour, shields etc. While we are at it, they don't open proceedings with vast death ray blasts disintigrating huge volumes either. The 40k equivalent of a teleported boarding team would be a mob of rampaging Orks or Astartes in tactical dreadnaught armour.

If a Squad of termies had 'ported on Board DS9's bridge instead of the Klingons, are we really saying that someone would suddenly have remembered they've got a "destroy thousands of tons of rock " setting and blown them away?

Similarly, Federation guys don't generally equip themselves with the sort of stuff you seem to be describing. Trek body armour stopping any bullet "40k" fires seems a wholly ridiculous statement to make, given the existence of bolter rounds, high caliber sniper rifles, railguns, monomolecular rounds etc. Armour cannot defend universally against all things, and the one Trek guy in DS9 we see with something that vaguely resembles armour (mr injured trooper fighting klingons) wasn't wearing anything that screamed "I can take full auto machine gun fire)

He also didn't have an energy shield. In fact, The defence of earth requires the stockpiling of personal energy shields, energy shields of unknown capability to boot.

Incidentally, you don't have to breach armour to damage what its protecting.

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Horus Rising
The force of his bolts, both torso-shots, threw the soldiers back against the wall, where they
slithered to the ground. Abaddon had been wrong. The armour of the interex warriors was masterful, not weak. His
rounds hadn't penetrated the chest plates of either of the men, but the sheer, concussive force of the impacts had
taken them out of the fight, probably pulping their innards.

This would probably work for shields as well, the projector of a shield is by necessity, anchored somehow.

Some things, like Gauss Flayers or Wraith Cannon , both carried by "infantry", if souless robots, and robots powered by souls can be called infantry, can ignore shields, blast through material regardless of material properties, or simply suck someone into the Warp.

The Imperium of Man might be the biggest coherent civilisation in 40k, but the Necrons, Eldar, Chaotics, Tyranids and Orks are its "peers". Any one race would be a significant, apocalyptic threat in Trek, outnumbering and outgunning most Trek polities on their own.

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Besides, even if it were a battle between your preposterous "let's just throw logic to the wind" torpedoes, and TDiC level firepower, the very fact that an Imperium vessel would never be able to strike a Federation starship with any kind of weapon (almost certainly not at sublight speed, and most certainly not at FTL), renders a minor firepower advantage, one that's questionable at best given 40k's apparently inability to ever display the slightest bit of consistency, moot.

I don't quite understand how you reconcile throwing out torpedoes because you don't think science fiction should be able to achieve something we can't, and you know....Star Trek.

Why wouldn't an Imperium vessel be able to hit a Federation starship with any kind of weapon? Federation vessels routinely engage in visual range combat for a start. Imperial weaponry can hit targets at tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of kilometers, and they use a variety of weaponry, from high velocity Macro-cannons to lightspeed particle beams and lasers.

Whilst they can't hit them at FTL speeds, its not like the Federation starships can shoot at a target that isn't at warp either. Nor will they be able to shoot the Imperial ships whilst they are in FTL.

I find comments on the consistency of 40k laughable when the context is Star Trek!

[Polymorphyne]

The 40k weaponry is fairly reasonable for its timeframe- it is the year 40,000. All of these years have been in constant warfare, which accelerates weapons tech, and many of these years before the age of strife were full of humanities rampant technological process- During the dark age of technology, mankind created an entire race of sentient AI robots (the men of stone) which then created their own race of sentient robots (the men of steel)- while star treks data being a sentient robot was an advanced prototype, no truly sentient robot had been created by any human before Soong in trek.

Also, with the nature of warp travel, it is very likely that at least one imperial fleet would arrive at star trek earth at the wrong time- possibly hundreds or thousands of years in the past, and conquer earth while the trekky earthlings are still in the renaissance. (Its commonplace for fleets to arrive at planets 150 years too late or too early)

[Catamount]

Longsword, on 01 March 2012 - 02:25 AM, said:

One thing that needs to be considered, for those who have been saying that they would prefer the trekkies to win against 40k on an ideological standpoint.
The military of the imperium of man, and the emperors psychic presence, is all that is holding back an unimaginably vast tide of aliens, daemons, the warp itself, mutation, psyker threat, etc. If you somehow defeat the imperium, you would be damning the galaxy completely. Yes, the Imperium is harsh, but it has to be to protect mankind (they have to be intolerant of psykers and mutants because allowing psykers to go unregulated would lead to every planet turning into a daemon world eventually). If the imperium fractured, no element of humanity could survive even one of the threats that face it.

Yes, we've beaten this topic to death a couple of times here.

It's the cheap copout the writers use to pass of questionable philosophical values; "No, no, no, really, guys, IT'S OKAY, these worse-than-hitler/pol-pot/stalin-combined theocratic bullies are actually REALLY COOL, because we've written the universe to make everything they do absolutely and completely justified! No objections needed!"

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If the 40k and trek universes collided, the best result would be for the 40k imperium to win quickly, so it can subsume the trek worlds into the relative safety of the imperiums membership. Any other result would lead to the trek universe having its own equivalent of the age of strife- thousands of psykers being born on every world, and almost every psyker losing control, causing daemons to flood most worlds.

(Vulcan would be screwed, the combined repressed emotion swirling around the place, and the fact the entire population is psychic would likely destroy the world, create a warp vortex like the eye of terror, and even birth a new chaos god- a similar thing happened to the eldar, and they were used to the effects of the warp.)

Quite frankly, that's absolute utter BS.

What would likely happen is that the Federation, rather than turning on science, would use it to develop counters to the warp across their worlds. We've seem them insulate against such extradimensional threats before (VOY Equinox), and upon realizing such threats were present to all life, everywhere, the Federation would do what they did in the Earth-Romulan war, and unite every major power in the galaxy (believe me, it'd be a smaller feat in many ways than what was accomplished in that regard founding the Federation; those member worlds downright hated each other), something I imagine would be fairly simple to do once you offered every race in the galaxy the Treknobabble anti-warp technology that would probably take Starfleet's notoriously good "rocks into replicators" engineers about an hour to come up with.

That's because unlike 40k, the races in Star Trek, particularly humanity if we're to compare here, have grown up. They don't ransack their civilization and turn their backs on everything they stand for every time hard times come about like the Imperium to the point of having no point in even surviving anymore.


What you're basically saying is that when faced with the kind of hardship the Imperium faced, there is absolutely no hope for humanity in any way to actually rise to that occasion and triumph over what faces it, while still remaining a race worthy of existence in the first place, still maintaining the most important aspects of humanity. Fortunately, Trek is a franchise that's built on the philosophy that humans can do just that (and ultimately will), that we're really a better race, capable of far more, than the 40k writers ever gave us credit for, and more than you're giving us credit for now, not that Trek is unique in that regard. The Ancients in Stargate would pretty much sort out any race from any franchise here in short order (anime races excepted), but then, they're fundamentally the same as the Federation in almost every regard, so they're another race that's more grown up than the Imperium.

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 05:38 AM.

[Ghost Dragon]

Catamount, on 01 March 2012 - 05:35 AM, said:

Yes, we've beaten this topic to death a couple of times here.

It's the cheap copout the writers use to pass of questionable philosophical values; "No, no, no, really, guys, IT'S OKAY, these worse-than-hitler/pol-pot/stalin-combined theocratic bullies are actually REALLY COOL, because we've written the universe to make everything they do absolutely and completely justified! No objections needed!"


Quite frankly, that's absolute utter BS.

Um, the entire point of the Imperium is that its a terrible, brutally oppressive regime that is constantly assailed by alien horrors.

I don't think you can deny that there would be better methods, but the Imperium isn't presented as "the only way" except by the dogmatic and entrenched theocracies and organisations that are left in control after the death of the Emperor.

The Great Crusade was supposed to unite and enlighten the entirety of humanity, and forge an enduring civilisation based on rational thinking, science etc. The Imperium is the bastardised remnant left after an apocalyptic civil war thats still technically in progress.

Its a tragedy, not a celebration of dictatorship.

Even then , the Great Crusade falters in the face of the existance of a bunch of hellish alien Gods from beyond the stars who really do want to turn the universe into their playground. They bring their own bizarre physical laws to the setting, which results in the some of the more difficult moral conundrums sometimes,

[Polymorphyne]

I doubt the trekkies would be able to come up with the technology to defeat warp entities in a reasonable timeframe, especially with daemons bursting out of the warp on every single world.

[Catamount]

Longsword, on 01 March 2012 - 06:33 AM, said:

I doubt the trekkies would be able to come up with the technology to defeat warp entities in a reasonable timeframe, especially with daemons bursting out of the warp on every single world.

A small, understaffed ship field-crafted such a solution, far removed from any help from civilization, in a matter of hours, in the aforementioned Voyager episode (okay, okay, I know... it's Voyager).

This wasn't a starbase, or a planet, with countless scientists on hand, and unlimited resources. It was a tiny survey vessel. How is that possible? Because this isn't the Federation's first time around with this stuff. They've spent centuries dealing with exotic threats of this sort. Any solutions would just be a slight spin on a previous solution.

Quote

Um, the entire point of the Imperium is that its a terrible, brutally oppressive regime that is constantly assailed by alien horrors.

I don't think you can deny that there would be better methods, but the Imperium isn't presented as "the only way" except by the dogmatic and entrenched theocracies and organisations that are left in control after the death of the Emperor.

The Great Crusade was supposed to unite and enlighten the entirety of humanity, and forge an enduring civilisation based on rational thinking, science etc. The Imperium is the bastardised remnant left after an apocalyptic civil war thats still technically in progress.

Its a tragedy, not a celebration of dictatorship.

Which is why I'm far less harsh on the 40k universe, than I am on the Wars universe, in which philsophies almost as questionable actually are celebrated, to the point that Lucas practically states the real world should work that way (mister "democracy is stupid and inefficual"; the ideal form of government is a 'benevolent dictator', because that's how one 'gets things done'").

I'm less harsh still because 40k is a game universe, originally intended as a parody of normal Warhammer, iirc, not something that was meant to be fleshed out into an actual fiction.


Nevertheless, the Imperium is petty and evil, and okay, so maybe the writers identify them as such, but why is no one in the 40k universe in any way virtuous? Does it not speak to how the writers view humanity (or sentient life in general) that in the face of great adversity, NOT ONE SINGLE, SOLITARY RACE rose to the occasion and met these challenges by doing anything besides becoming as bad as the chaos they're supposed to defend from?


You see, either way, the writers are making a statement here, and it's one that basically holds contempt for sentient life, portraying them as incapable of reacting to adversity with any kind of virtue. In fact, the universe is written to try to make science and technology as evil, which means the writers even went as far as to portray progress and virtue themselves as evil.

Quote

Even then , the Great Crusade falters in the face of the existance of a bunch of hellish alien Gods from beyond the stars who really do want to turn the universe into their playground. They bring their own bizarre physical laws to the setting, which results in the some of the more difficult moral conundrums sometimes.

In this way, these threats brought the Imperium to its knees in the most effective way. You see, there's an irony here.

There would be salvation for the Imperium in abandoning superstition, rising up, and actually trying to learn something about these threats, relying on science and reason, and allowing their massive, massive civilization to contribute literally TRILLIONS of points of view to the problem, through freedom of thought and celebration of different perspectives ("infinite diversity, in infinite combations", as the Vulcans say; how the Imperium could learn from such a more mature race), a combination of vast differing perspectives, and a collective reasoning power that would put no problem beyond their grasp. No insight, no possible soltuion, would be beyond their reach.

Instead, the threats around them convinced them to bury their heads in the sand, and fail to live up to their own potential. If there's one reason why the Imperium ends up being doomed, above all others, that there, will be it.

Edited by Catamount, 01 March 2012 - 08:10 AM.