1189 replies to this topic

[Nebfer]

ilithi dragon, on 05 December 2011 - 04:30 PM, said:

I can't recall that instance off-hand. Do you happen to remember the episode and circumstances?

It's also important to note that a lot of Trek's sublight acceleration comes from the artificial mass reducers that are a major part of their impulse engines. When these systems are damaged or power is limited (such as the ramming scene in Nemesis, when both were the case), sublight acceleration is much lower.

Thats the Schizoid man
Their orders where to come to the aid of a old but very important man, but along the way a transport ship sends out a distress call. Worf mentions they can beam down the away team to help the man and use the planet's gravity to sling shot them around to make up for the lost time (transport was venting atmosphere).

Mass reducing technically dose not help you here.

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The TNG Tech Manual directly describes phasers as operating thus, and on-screen references and the observed effects of phasers support the NDF effect (see the vaporization of people - and asteroids (such as in TNG: "Booby Trap")). Other tech manuals and encyclopedias make reference to materials that are resistant to phasers. This does not mean that the armor of ships from other universes would be "completely useless" - I never said such. It means that the effective yield of phasers and disruptors would be much higher against the armors of other powers that are not hardened to resist the NDF effect. Now, the armor materials of these other franchises might just happen to contain materials resistant to phaser effects, but given that no other franchise demonstrates the use of any weapon any kind of effect like the phaser/disruptor NDF effect at all (with the sole exception that I am aware of being the superlaser beam and related weaponry of Star Wars), it is highly unlikely that they would have armor designed to resist the NDF effect as well as the armor of Trek ships. Even Trek ships sometimes have trouble resisting the NDF effect if the weapons involved can be adapted to bypass their hardening, as was quite clearly demonstrated in the First Battle of Chin'Toka in DS9 "Tears of the Prophets."

Any thing that is written is explicitly not canon, so tech manual is not canon.

And then theirs the minor fact that most of the universes that can compete with trek also have shields which the NDF dose not work on.

Edit: Bobby trap in fact dose not have phasers NDFing asteroids they tryed it and it did nothing to them (well it made the issue for them worse in fact). They used photon torpedos to destroy the ship and a asteroid (or two).
It's another episode that uses gravitational sling shots as well, though used in a more realistic manner. Though it was strange for the thrusters not be able to move the ship even though they could change direction with them, and the fact that none of the asteroids where big enough to have much of a gravitational effect.

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But throw those same mechs into a team battle instead of a 1v1 duel, and the time it takes to kill a single mech goes down drastically. Even in the relatively small battles of Mechwarrior IV, a properly coordinated team would concentrate fire, and even with just a handful of mechs concentrating together, the time it took to kill an enemy mech dropped radically. Now imagine that scaled up from a couple dozen combatants to three thousand combatants. Of course ships are going to be popping left and right in fleet engagements. They're facing off against a coordinated enemy fleet that is going to have whole squadrons of ships concentrating fire on single targets, and even after the battle devolves into a close-quarters general melee, you'll still see ships popping left and right because there are so many ships involved. What we saw of fleet battles in DS9 were brief glimpses of massive engagements viewed while following a highly-maneuverable ship as it wove through the furball of both fleets. We see ships getting hit and nothing happening and we see ships getting hit and going up in one shot, because we only see them briefly, we only get a tiny snapshot of their role in the battle, we don't see the firepower they sustained beforehand, and we don't see the damage inflicted afterward.

even at beginnings of fights?

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There are some instances that suggest lower speeds, but a much greater number that suggest higher speeds, and much higher still than the figures I have listed. The speeds I have listed are most consistent with the production materials, and most consistent with the more common figures (also, it's worth noting that the "Bloodlines" figure of 300 billion ly in about 20 minutes, or about 900c, is likely a math error on the part of the production staff, since they have well-established the maximum velocity of the E-D as being about 9,000c, both in other episodes and in the tech manuals and back-stage materials).

Math errors on the production staff is irrelevant, also note the Canon policy for trek is only TV shows and movies are canon. But being able to move at say 9,000x C dose not disprove the fact that we know that they can not maintain max speed for "very long" (how long is not stated) and that every time they go on a long duration journey it drops way down.

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Furthermore, as the TNG:TM notes, the actual speed of a given warp factor fluctuates by local variations in subspace. Warp factors are assigned by the warp field strength, not actual velocity. This is part of where the popular explanation of 'subspace lanes' comes in, because canonically, warp drive mileage does vary.

Not even canon. Remember only the TV shows and movies are canon.

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The distance the Cube traveled is somewhat curious, though not greatly given standard cruising speeds at the time on the order of 2,000c or so. It would take a typical Federation vessel three to seven years to cross that distance, and even the E-D, the fastest ship in the fleet at the time, would have taken over two-and-a-half years to get back. That the Cube took only a year to cross that distance, suggesting a sustained cruise velocity of 7,000c if they set couse for the Federation and ran their engines continuously, would have been surprising. Especially since it's highly unlikely that even Federation ships can keep their engines running constantly for a solid year.

Which supports my point, they can travel at speeds in the +10,000x C range but only for a relatively short amount of time, however for their long duration trips this drops way down. To what we see in DS9 and Voyager.

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This leads to damage inflicted through the shields (if the energy is high enough before the shield spike to bleed a significant enough amount of energy through), as well as surges in the ship's EPS grid. Given the amount of energy flowing through the ship's power grid, the minor flashes and fireworks-sized overloads we see are actually pretty remarkable, since even relatively small EPS taps on a Light Cruiser can have the energy equivalent of almost 1.2 megatons of TNT flowing through them every second (VOY "Revulsion", Kim notes a live EPS tap has "five million gigawatts", or 5 petawatts, flowing through it). If even a thousandth of a percent of that energy leaked out, it would be the equivalent of a 12 ton bomb going off.

Is not this the scene that has 7 of 9 saying that her body can tank this kind of energy? Which is a bit odd, as it would imply that borg should be immune to just about anything (even regular human flesh bits)...

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Yes, much of the combat we observe is at closer range. But a lot of it is also at longer ranges, and ranges in the hundreds of thousands of kilometers and more have been observed. We also have valid reasons for why most of the engagements against other Trek ships would be at well below maximum range - weapon travel times makes hitting targets as maneuverable as Trek ships difficult, and engagement at closer range also reduces response time (as Riker noted to the commander of the Klingon sleeper ship that was getting ready to attack the E-D). This is especially significant when you consider how Trek shields operate - the lower the response time to weapons fire, the greater the 'bleed-through window' against the target's shields, so the more energy you can slip past the target's shields to inflict damage directly to the ship. Weapons, especially phasers and disruptors, would 'hit harder' at closer ranges, because more energy would bleed through the target's shields.

Their maneuverability is not as good as your clamming, it's better than say star wars, but their not all that good, theirs more than one movie that has them being bit sluggish at times. Never mind this good maneuverability would of been useful at times but dose not happen (even out side of combat, like avoiding things). And interestingly a largely static asteroid field in Genesis is considered to much of a hazard for the enterprise to enter.

Though yes closer ranges dose make it harder to dodge, even in B-tech one can see this (in a way) in 60 seconds a ship at one G can move over 17km (part of the reason why weapons fire at capital scale dose not take the entire turn).

Though where is this evidence for billion km ranges is found?

Edited by Nebfer, 05 December 2011 - 11:13 PM.

[Mechwarrior Of Rock]

Hmm... Well..... Star Wars has the Star destroyer and star trek has the Galaxy class and Battlestar has Pegasus...
I voted for star wars because there was no Freespace or Homeworld.
I think if FS or HW were here they would be the last 2 standing. Then FS coming out on top. but that`s based on logic, if it was based on favoritism i think Star Wars would win.

[Catamount]

Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 06:55 PM, said:

Any thing that is written is explicitly not canon, so tech manual is not canon.

Actually, that's not necessarily true. Trek canon has always been a bit difficult to precisely define (Roddenberry didn't even consider all of the films canon), and more than that, has been in flux recently.

TAS wasn't canon either, until recently. As for the TMs, employees from Viacom (parent company of both CBS and Paramount, the rights holders to the Trek franchise) have stated, in more recent years, that the TMs are, in fact, part of canon. To what extent that might be true is unclear. For one thing, the TNG TM seldom, if ever, contradicts on-screen canon, but the DS9 TM is horribly written, and constantly contradicts on-screen information, for another, the nature of the statements, as being representative of the official position, is not completely clear.

That makes the status of these works unclear, but possibly canonical, on some level.


Even if they aren't, the TNG TM is written by the people who are arguably most responsible for writing the canon, at least on the technical side, so at the very least, it shows the intentions of the canon writers, as they are basically writing a work that, in essence, says "we, the technical canon-authors, say that Star Trek works like this", and the works themselves are derived from the production materials. At the very least, that makes them worth serious consideration, and debaters on ALL sides of vs debates have usually considered the TNG TM admissible. Where do you think Wong et al get the "only 64 megatons" claims? They're citing the TNG TM. If it's considered admissible in every other vs debate, why not here, especially given recent statements about possible canonicity?


Furthermore, the writers manuals (which I have all of) also support Ilithi's statements. The Writers manuals are backstage production material, specifically written as an internal Paramount document to inform the story writers of the nature of Trek technology, to maintain consistency. Is it hard canon? Almost certainly not (though, again, the franchise holders may consider some canonicity), but it is still absolutely hard evidence of how the writers of the technical canon view Trek technology.

We also see what pretty clearly appears to be the NDF in various episodes. We see people get vaporized by small hand phasers, not just burned to death, but entirely vaporized. Either the NDF effect is real within Trek, or Trek weaponry is a few orders of magnitude more powerful than we're giving credit for, because that would require well over a hundred megajoules of energy to accomplish in a DET weapon, and considering the constant power draw of a Type III phaser (phaser rifle) was measured at 1.05MW (TNG Mind's Eye), that leave more than a bit of a discrepency, given that that would mean that considerably smaller (and almost certainly less powerful) weapons were capable of outputting the power of a couple of minutes of fire from that rifle. It's possible that they were firing the rifle at lower power, but given that they were doing output tests, I find that unlikely.

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And then theirs the minor fact that most of the universes that can compete with trek also have shields which the NDF dose not work on.

Really? You've seen a Stargate ship get hit with a phaser? What episode was that in? It must be one of those SG:U episodes, since I haven't finished that series

Besides, this statement is a complete tautology. Basically what you're saying is "races which have the technology to resist Trek weaponry have the technology to resist Trek weaponry". Really? No kidding!

It is likely that there are other franchises with sufficiently advanced technology as to be able to stand up to Trek weaponry, and to return fire competitively. Contrary to your interesting assumption, we really have no idea specifically how well the defenses of these other franchises would hold up to Trek weaponry, anymore than we know how Trek shields would hold up to the weaponry of these franchises, but it's clear there are other franchises with very advanced technology owned by some of the races: The Asgard, the Alterans, the humans of EVE, maybe a few others, but you're only making Ilithi's point for him: namely that there are some races which ave sufficiently advanced technology to compete with the Federation, while others would just get curb stomped. An Aurora Class battleship would probably be able to match or even beat even a large Trek ship (since they're huge battleships with hyper-advanced technology); a Leviathan class, on the other hand, would probably be killed by the opening shots of either a Galaxy class or Aurora class, and probably wouldn't get a shot off itself.

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Their maneuverability is not as good as your clamming, it's better than say star wars, but their not all that good, theirs more than one movie that has them being bit sluggish at times. Never mind this good maneuverability would of been useful at times but dose not happen (even out side of combat, like avoiding things). And interestingly a largely static asteroid field in Genesis is considered to much of a hazard for the enterprise to enter.

Though yes closer ranges dose make it harder to dodge, even in B-tech one can see this (in a way) in 60 seconds a ship at one G can move over 17km (part of the reason why weapons fire at capital scale dose not take the entire turn).

I fail to see the relevance of the asteroid field. If the field was too dense to make entry practical, that's going to be true regardless of how maneuverable the ship is.

Beyond that, trek ships have easily been shown outside of warp, on ample occasions, to be able to effortlessly engage at speeds that are a considerable fraction of C. In Star Trek Generations, when the captain notes a "quick run around the block" that's taking them out beyond Pluto, he's asked "will there be a chance to test out the warp drive?"; the trip was being done at sublight. In TMP, the Enterprise raced rapidly across the solar system, making Earth disappear in seconds at, and achieving a speed of about 1/3 c (and no, they weren't using the warp drive; it was offline). In DS9 Blaze of Glory, two Jem'Hadar attack ships close on a fleeing Danube class runabout, closing a distance of about an AU, in just a few minutes, despite the runabout running away.

Trek ships have respectable turn rates, but they have absurd sub-light acceleration capabilities. Any weapon that's not superluminal or guided is going to have a lot of trouble hitting a ship from more than a short distance away. Even at 0.01c, a Galaxy class can move out of the way of an object in a little over 1/5,000 of a second (the time needed for a phaser to travel 60km).

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Though where is this evidence for billion km ranges is found?

I assume you know that torpedoes are FTL-capable weapons when fired at warp. At even 5,000 C, a torpedo would cover about a billion and a half kilometers every second.

At sublight? Ranges employed for various classes of torpedoes have varied, but in Voyager (in which the ship is carrying several classes of advanced photorp), they have an apparent effective range of ~8 million kilometers.

Edited by Catamount, 09 December 2011 - 02:53 PM.

[Serpentine]

I'd love to see some 'Mechs take on the AT-STs and AT-ATs.

[Valdor Constantine]

Warhammer 40k ftw i just don't see anything else standing up to the forces of the imperium, standard imperial warships alone carry enough lance batters macro cannons and if the need arise virus bombs to turn planets into uninhabitable barren rocks, a basic ship alone is crewed with over 50,000 crewmen and anti boarding parties and imperial guardsmen ready for drop onto battlezones or ship to ship combat now imagine countless amounts of these ......and dont make me pull out the spacemarines cause things just get messy from there...

http://www.youtube.c...e&v=h67JpMyrOVE

Edited by Valdor Constantine, 17 December 2011 - 07:30 PM.

[Skarr]

I'm going to go with teleport 10 terminators aboard a federation ship and all their fancy tech will count for naught.

The sheer number of ships the 40k Imperial navy have, is likely to cause serious problems for the federation.

Also a factor for EVE since you have the 300k capsuleers but on top of that you have each factions military navies so you are more likely looking at something like 1m ships and on top of that you have drone and fighter support I'd estimate about half of those ships would have drone capability which puts the number of drones somewhere between 2.5m-5m. Also I'd say 1m ships is pretty conservative.

Compared to the estimate of the SWvsST site of 10.000 federation vessels.

For any sort of fleet engagement the federation fleet would be looking at a minimum of 1k+ targets.

Edited by Skarr, 17 December 2011 - 08:37 PM.

[Alizabeth Aijou]

Reply to Valdor:

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I'm going to go with teleport 10 terminators aboard a federation ship and all their fancy tech will count for naught.

Indeed.
What sort of weapons does the federation have against armour that can withstand being inside a plasma reactor?
Or orbital reentry for that matter.
Or being stepped upon by a Warlord-class Titan...

(Warlord-class titans are easily 2-3 times taller than an Atlas, and easily weighs 15 times as much.)

Edited by Alizabeth Aijou, 18 December 2011 - 04:06 AM.

[steelwraith]

I'm surprised nobody brought up Star Trek's transporter technology, let alone replicator and cloaking tech. A single shuttle could have easily destroyed the death star simply by flying under its shields and transporting a photon warhead or two pretty much anywhere inside. Any ship that doesn't have shields that can specifically stop transporter beams is dead, its size is irrelevant.

As for how long it takes to destroy a planet, who cares when you have the technology to make the star its orbiting around go nova at your whim. Or being able to outflank your opponent because they can't see through your cloaks. Or self replicating drones/mines...

Fact is, Star Trek technology is far more versatile than than any others except Stargate... and in the end, that's what will win a war.

[Valdor Constantine]

steelwraith, on 18 December 2011 - 05:45 AM, said:

I'm surprised nobody brought up Star Trek's transporter technology, let alone replicator and cloaking tech. A single shuttle could have easily destroyed the death star simply by flying under its shields and transporting a photon warhead or two pretty much anywhere inside. Any ship that doesn't have shields that can specifically stop transporter beams is dead, its size is irrelevant.

As for how long it takes to destroy a planet, who cares when you have the technology to make the star its orbiting around go nova at your whim. Or being able to outflank your opponent because they can't see through your cloaks. Or self replicating drones/mines...

Fact is, Star Trek technology is far more versatile than than any others except Stargate... and in the end, that's what will win a war.

40k has teleporters..........hell they have teleporters that can transport titans, just throwin that in there

[John Frye]

You missed the option of Babylon 5...

[ice trey]

While I generally dislike the 40K universe, I've got to hand it to them - not giving two sheep about realism and operating solely on "rule of cool" means that they can make battleships that are just way, way too large to be economical - or logical. On that note, the size of the known (and unknown) universe makes them plentiful.

Battletech has never really been about space combat, so it really suffers in that regard. On the other hand, Battletech tends to be more successful in ground combat than 40K, which relies VERY heavily on infantry formations.

[The1WithTheGun]

It depends. If we include Asgardian or Ancient-level technology (which earth basically has at the end of SG1 and Atlantis) my gut goes with Stargate. The Asgard's level of technology far outstrips anything seen in the list above (at least as far as my knowledge of the various Sci Fi goes). Their ships can travel to points within galaxies in a matter of minutes, and between galaxies in a matter of days. They can fix dying stars. They can build microwave oven-sized objects that create time-dilation effects on a lightyear scale. They have teleportation and replication (matter transmutation) technology and their ships can withstand attacks from even the Ori ring ships. The ancients built a device the size of a large building that could sterilize an entire galaxy, a ship-based weapon that could obliterate planets, not to mention the network of stargates that connect planets around our galaxy (and even to at least 2 other galaxies).

Now, if we are talking about the Gua'ould or other races in the Stargate Universe, I'd say they are roughly equivalent to Star Wars or Star Trek in many ways. And those two universes have their powerhouses as well; The Empire, Borg and Undine have some pretty powerful tech - even in the planet-busting range. Actually you could probably include Babylon 5's First Ones in that group as well (though the younger races in B5 don't even come close to the average galactic society in Star Trek or Star Wars).

The lowest on the totem pole from that list is probably Battletech/Aerotech which, aside from the very limited FTL and naval energy weapons, is not all that sci-fi at all. Battlestar Galactica would be down there as well (at least they have artificial gravity).

Edited by The1WithTheGun, 18 December 2011 - 07:27 PM.

[Alizabeth Aijou]

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Their ships can travel to points within galaxies in a matter of minutes, and between galaxies in a matter of days.

Necrons, perhaps?
They are one of the few races in 40k which doesn't use the warp for FTL travel, and can even penetrate soem of the most heavily defending locations in the 40k universe - Mars.
The Slann would also be a strong contender for the most technologically advanced, who supposedly created all modern advanced races in 40k except for the Necrontyr (with which they had a galaxy-wide war). Their technology being thus advanced that it might as well be magic.
Then there's mankind's Dark Ages of Technology, most of which is lost and held to be a holy grail when recovered.
Stuff like true A.I. Anti-Gravity, Gravity Cannons, Ship-Cloaking, Standard Templace Constructs, Interplanetary Teleporters (between forgeworlds only, mostly), and Vortex Grenades (which create a tear in reality, sucking everything nearby into the warp).

[Catamount]

Skarr, on 17 December 2011 - 08:37 PM, said:

I'm going to go with teleport 10 terminators aboard a federation ship and all their fancy tech will count for naught.

The problem, on both ends, is that that "fancy tech" isn't just for show.

Federation hand phasers have demonstrated effective outputs comparable to the mounted lascannons on Leman Russ tanks. So those "Terminators", don't ask how you're going to get them on the ship (Trek can block teleportation tech of many types, from races vastly more sophisticated than the Imperium), and once there, even if a simple hand phaser didn't completely obliterate one of them, there's far more powerful weaponry onboard.

What's more, the Federation doesn't have to fight; they can just beam the Terminators harmlessly into space, or contain them in forcefields that easily take relatively fast releases of gigajoules of energy to break through (if not more), which is far more than these boarders would be capable of outputting (you're talking the power of dozens or hundreds of Leman Russ tanks).

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The sheer number of ships the 40k Imperial navy have, is likely to cause serious problems for the federation.

Except that a single photon torpedo WOULD CRACK A BATTLESHIP IN HALF. I'm sorry for the caps, but it's hard to overemphasize this.


Let me run through how Ilithi and I figured that, It's not that hard to roughly determine.

The Leman Russ is the only thing I'm aware of which has an actual energy output given, so it's usually the basis for comparison I start with.


Lasguns/lascannons are considered fairly advanced weapons in the Imperium, so you have a large, tank-mounted advanced weapon, and its output is "triple-digit megajoules", according to the 40k wiki (which cites numerous "Imperial Armour" works). Now that could technically mean 100-999MJ, but they didn't say "hundreds", they said "triple digit", as if it was notable that it was actually getting up into that range, so it sounds like low hundreds, which would also keep it from having absurdly long recharges being powered only by an internal combustion engine (an M1 Abrams engine is only capable of 1120kw, and its sizable).


So let's assume 200MJ. Now, that lascannon isn't the primary armament, but it's at least as big, relative to the tank (and probably a good deal bigger, if you consider internals) than the reall big externally mounted guns on the Retribution Class Battleship are relative to that whole vessel.


so if we just get a rough size comparison of the tank to the battleship, we can get an idea of how powerful a scaled-up lascannon would be. The Lehman Russ is apparently 7.08m long by 4.86m wide, by 4.42m tall. The Retribution Class is harder to precisely determine, because a lot of small structures jet off very far from the main hull to make it appear much taller/wider than it really is. However, some rough estimates can be made without using a model and ray-tracing software (or buying a model and submerging it in water... "Eureka!" ).

The Length is pretty solidly 4750m (http://4.bp.blogspot...ShipClasses.jpg), and using that and other pictures, we got figures of 700m tall for most of the slender main hull, but up to ~2200m including the small bridge section and ventral protrusions. As most of the ship consists of the former, small figure, we subjectively decided on 900m tall, overall. Using a similar subjective process for width, we examined how much of the ship consisted of the narrow, ~500m main hull, and the 1500m wide small protrusions, and decided on a width of 700m.



So, a Retribution class is very roughly ~670 times longer, ~200 times taller, and ~150 times wider. So if we take our 200MJ figure, and multiply it by (670*200*150), then that lascannon scaled up by the tank-battleship size difference you'd get a weapon with an output of... *drumroll*... 4.02 Petajoules.

Yes, anti-climactic, isn't it?


For comparison, a standard photon torpedo is 64 megatons, or a bit larger than the Tsar Bomba. How much energy is 64Mt TNT equivalence? Just a hair shy of 270PJ.


So a single photon torpedo would outstrip our hypothetical scaled-up lascannon by about sixty seven times, and again, Lascannons are supposed to be fairly advanced, high-yield pound-for-pound weapons for the Imperium of Man, so to even compete with a single photon torpedo, that battleship would need a weapon that's, pound for pound, two orders of magnitude better than one of the most sophisticated weapons fielded by the Imperium.

So, provided those huge externally mounted guns on the Retribution Class (which are far bigger in volume than the "main batteries" it looks like) could kill a Retribution Class, in less than 67 shots, well, in the words of William Riker, "One photon torpedo ought to do it".


In short, a Miranda class, long the running joke among Trek fans for pathetic ships (because they're ancient by Federation standards, really small, and constantly get mission killed by weak assaults), by the indication of the power output figure we have for Imperium weaponry, would be able to absolutely cream the premier ship of the line of the Imperium of Man, without breaking a sweat. It wouldn't even have to unload both forward torpedo tubes to do it!


By contrast, a Galaxy class is capable of unloading no less than 10 torpedoes per fore and aft tube simultaneously , with many more on hot standby (afaik, it fired 12-13 at the Husnock warship in TNG The Survivors in two bursts of 6 or 7, and nearly comparable numbers on other occasions), and it has absolutely massive phaser arrays that are clearly capable of outputting far more energy than a single photon torpedo, in rather rapid shots (hence why it's being matched up with a 10-shot torp launcher).


The UFP wouldn't even have to give the Imperium targets to fire back at; they could fight solely from FTL if they felt like it.



It's really hard to properly convey just how big the technological gap seems to be here. The former Imperium of Man might have presented a real threat to the UFP; they might have even been able to handily beat the UFP, but the 40k Imperium, and its absurd preoccupation with mystic voodoo nonsense, and rejection of scientific knowledge as "dangerous and abhorrent", is just no match for a science-based society, in a science fiction franchise.

[Ilithi Dragon]

Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 06:55 PM, said:

Any thing that is written is explicitly not canon, so tech manual is not canon.

Previously, Trek canon policy regarding the tech manuals was unclear - the policy was that the on-screen material was canon, and the novels, etc. were not, but the tech manuals were not specifically mentioned. That has changed:

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Only the reference books (tech manual, encyclopedia, etc...) and two books by Jeri Taylor are considered canon outside the TV show and movies.

- Harry Lang, Senior Director of Viacom Consumer Products Interactive division, posts on StarTrek.com forum, January 2005.

So the reference books, plus the two novels written by Jeri Taylor, are officially considered canon (though the TV shows and movies would, of course, be higher canon and overrule them in the event of conflicts).

Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 06:55 PM, said:

And then theirs the minor fact that most of the universes that can compete with trek also have shields which the NDF dose not work on.

Edit: Bobby trap in fact dose not have phasers NDFing asteroids they tryed it and it did nothing to them (well it made the issue for them worse in fact). They used photon torpedos to destroy the ship and a asteroid (or two).

It's another episode that uses gravitational sling shots as well, though used in a more realistic manner. Though it was strange for the thrusters not be able to move the ship even though they could change direction with them, and the fact that none of the asteroids where big enough to have much of a gravitational effect.

First, we have no reason to assume that the NDF effect wouldn't work on the shields of other franchises. Second, regarding TNG "Booby Trap", that was a rather unusual situation in which the Enterprise was trapped in an energy-draining field that was directly stated to have affected the ship's energy output, and made their energy weapons ineffective, because their energy expenditures were drawn off by the field (and used to increase the strength of the field).

Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 06:55 PM, said:

even at beginnings of fights?

Of course. If fifty Federation cruisers concentrate their fire on a single Cardassian Galor class (or vice-versa), it's going to get popped really quickly. Just like a single Shadowcat will pop very quickly if fifty Chimeras all fired just their ERLL at it. That's an artifact of scaling up any battle. Two ships that can engage in a continuous fight for several minutes 1v1 will be popped very quickly if focus-fired by an enemy fleet numbering in the dozens to thousands. It's simple math. Five minutes of battle facing one ship, that's 360 seconds of battle facing one ship. Increase that to the equivalent of 50 ships of the same power, and those five minutes drop to 7.2 seconds. Five HUNDRED ships, all focusing on the same target, and it lasts for less than a second. Now, it's not practical to have that many ships focusing on a single ship (barring something like the Dominion Super Dreadnoughts or a Borg Cube), because that's just overkill, plus problems with positioning, etc. But even at the start of a battle that has hundreds or thousands of combatants on each side, ships are going to start popping all over the place, even right at the very beginning.

Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 06:55 PM, said:

Which supports my point, they can travel at speeds in the +10,000x C range but only for a relatively short amount of time, however for their long duration trips this drops way down. To what we see in DS9 and Voyager.

Which has not been disputed. Trek ships have a sprinting speed of 10,000+ c, with newer ships getting into the 20,000+ c range. Cruising speeds are in the range of 2,000 - 6,000c, and sustained speeds at really long distances (months-year+ travel time). Implications are that sprinting speeds can be maintained for at least several hours, and high warp speeds, between cruising and sprinting speeds, can be maintaiined for days. Cruising speeds can be maintained for much longer. There are some franchises that can go faster, and some that can go slower.

Trek ships have also demonstrated vastly higher travel speeds, on the order of hundreds to millions of times c, most likely due to ships taking advantage of known variations in subspace, giving Trek ships an advantage over relatively short distances/travel times (which would include all combat ranges and a majority of strategic-level movements), and a major home-field advantage with speeds comparable to some of the highest observed speeds in other franchises.

Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 06:55 PM, said:

Is not this the scene that has 7 of 9 saying that her body can tank this kind of energy? Which is a bit odd, as it would imply that borg should be immune to just about anything (even regular human flesh bits)...

7 of 9 thought that her exoskeloton could withstand inserting her hand into the conduit for a few seconds, and Kim strongly disagreed (one of the side-stories of the episode was Seven adjusting to her reduced durability after her partial de-assimiliation). Seven's statement that her exoskeleton could handle it would still be applicable to a full Borg drone, however this does not mean that a full Borg drone could withstand five petawatts of energy to the hand for several seconds. Undoubtedly the exoskeleton would have been reinforced by shields and forcefields, and the vast majority of the energy flowing through the conduit would not have passed into Seven's hand, most of it would have flowed around and past her hand, leaving her hand to absorb only a small percentage of that energy. Given that the Borg are capable of generated personal defense shields capable of shrugging off phaser shots in the at least dozens to hundreds of megajoules indefinitely after adapting, it would hardly surprise me if they were capable of generated a forcefield that could protect a single hand from a few seconds exposure to a high-energy EPS grid.

Valdor Constantine, on 17 December 2011 - 07:20 PM, said:

Warhammer 40k ftw i just don't see anything else standing up to the forces of the imperium, standard imperial warships alone carry enough lance batters macro cannons and if the need arise virus bombs to turn planets into uninhabitable barren rocks, a basic ship alone is crewed with over 50,000 crewmen and anti boarding parties and imperial guardsmen ready for drop onto battlezones or ship to ship combat now imagine countless amounts of these

......and dont make me pull out the spacemarines cause things just get messy from there...

Twenty Trek ships were capable of blasting a planet down to its nickel-iron core in five hours. In about five days of bombardment (maybe ten to allow for reduced fire rate over that great a timespan), and a single Trek ship could make an entire planet effectively go away. And they do it in a package several orders of magnitude smaller than the Imperium of Man.

Skarr, on 17 December 2011 - 08:37 PM, said:

I'm going to go with teleport 10 terminators aboard a federation ship and all their fancy tech will count for naught.

*cough* Through Trek shields? And once they're on board, what's to stop Trek ships from simply beaming them back out into space? Trek boarding parties have transport inhibitor/scrambler tech that can be used to prevent them from being beamed right back out of the ship, but what do 40K boarding parties have?

Besides, they would be facing off against security forces whose side-arms can fire shots comparable to shots fired from an IoM main battle tank lascannon. They would get wasted by the first modestly-equipped security force they ran into (and their armor would be a huge drawback for them, because it would make maneuvering in most corridors on Trek ships difficult and awkward). Now, they would probably present a serious challenge/threat to most Trek infantry, but they would not dominate infantry whose handguns and rifles can match or out-perform the main guns on IoM main battle tanks.

Skarr, on 17 December 2011 - 08:37 PM, said:

The sheer number of ships the 40k Imperial navy have, is likely to cause serious problems for the federation.

...

Compared to the estimate of the SWvsST site of 10.000 federation vessels.

Well, Ron Moore said in an interview that the Federation had some 25,000 - 30,000 ships as of DS9 (the number they assumed when writing episodes for the Dominion War), though prior to DS9, much of the fleet had been very widely dispersed. The fleet was generally dispersed across space, with a huge chunk of the fleet 'unavailable' on extended-duration missions in deep space that would take a prolonged length of time to get back from (though the First Borg Incursion and the introduction of hostilities with the Dominion appears to have caused a major shift away from this policy).

True, the IoM has a much larger overall empire and fleet to draw from, some million worlds or so, but their tech disadvantage is so horrendously high, as Catamount demonstrated, that they would still be at a major disadvantage even if they could bring their full fleet to bear, which they generally can't because their forces are so dispersed across the galaxy (and moving ships around with their 'Warp' drive is an iffy proposition...).

Alizabeth Aijou, on 18 December 2011 - 04:00 AM, said:

Reply to Valdor:

....

Indeed.

What sort of weapons does the federation have against armour that can withstand being inside a plasma reactor?

Or orbital reentry for that matter.

Or being stepped upon by a Warlord-class Titan...

....

(Warlord-class titans are easily 2-3 times taller than an Atlas, and easily weighs 15 times as much.)

They have side-arms capable of easily matching the shot-for-shot power of the lascannon on a Lemun Russ, and greatly exceeding the rate-of-fire. They might not be able to insta-kill a Terminator with a single hit, but several shots from a phaser rifle would do the job well enough.

As for Stargate, Trek ships produce and throw out more raw energy than Asgard ships typically appear to, though Asgard ships have vastly superior FTL capabilities. A Federation (or perhaps Romulan or Dominion to make hostilities more likely)/Asgard match-up would be very interesting because both have demonstrated superior capabilities in different areas. Overall, they're probably pretty comparable, though I think the Asgard would have a small but significant edge in tech, at least early on, though by the end of SG-1 they had been reduced to just one planet after the end of the Replicator Wars (making it a rather pyrhic victory for them).

Ancient/Lantean civilization is generally comparable to Trek in most ways, with a lot of advantages in several areas (mostly the same ones as the Asgard). I think the Lanteans at their height would probably have the advantage over any one Trek power, but not against all of them combined, and it would be a bloody fight for both sides either way.

[Miles Tails Prower]

WH40K would win. Their mythology's tech powers are like insane compared to the tech of other franchises. Plus their numbers span countless worlds and their government goes any distance to destroy their enemies, and their soldiers are so ruthless that they could easily be considered the villains from a neutral stand point.

WH40K isn't even a fair comparison. They are way too powerful compared to other series' mythology. The only reason the WH40K poll option doesn't drastically overpower everyone else is just for the fact that a smaller portion of people have heard of, let alone know the WH40K universe.

Edited by Miles Tails Prower, 22 December 2011 - 10:47 PM.

[ZnSeventeen]

You know, I think this largely depends on which time period and faction in all these situations. For example, Star Wars during the times of the Old Republic were totally different than during the times of the Empire, especially at its peak. Also, if we are talking Star Craft, each race will have different effectiveness against each enemy force. And the zerg could always infest ships. Just sayin. But due to ridiculous power levels that transcend space and time, I think I am going to have to go with Q.
Of course if you don't include Q from Star Trek, I am gonna have to go with Warhammer 40k, just by sheer numbers and random ridiculous tech. Not sure though.

[God of War]

Why has no one brought up Perry Rhodan, the Chuck Norris of Sci-fi?

[Ilithi Dragon]

Miles Tails Prower, on 22 December 2011 - 10:46 PM, said:

WH40K would win. Their mythology's tech powers are like insane compared to the tech of other franchises. Plus their numbers span countless worlds and their government goes any distance to destroy their enemies, and their soldiers are so ruthless that they could easily be considered the villains from a neutral stand point.

WH40K isn't even a fair comparison. They are way too powerful compared to other series' mythology. The only reason the WH40K poll option doesn't drastically overpower everyone else is just for the fact that a smaller portion of people have heard of, let alone know the WH40K universe.

I think you need to read the two posts immediately above yours. 40K's power output and firepower levels are paltry compared to Trek output and firepower levels. A hand phaser has an effective yield comparable to the lascannon on a Lehmun Russ main battle tank. A single photon torpedo would crack an IoM battleship in half.

[Miles Tails Prower]

ilithi dragon, on 23 December 2011 - 10:10 AM, said:

I think you need to read the two posts immediately above yours. 40K's power output and firepower levels are paltry compared to Trek output and firepower levels. A hand phaser has an effective yield comparable to the lascannon on a Lehmun Russ main battle tank. A single photon torpedo would crack an IoM battleship in half.

You don't understand the Imperium. They fight enemies with vastly superior technology on a regular basis. The Imperium doesn't stop fighting until every one of them are wiped out. They destroy their own planets, annhilate their own people if that secures ultimate victory. The species of Star Trek don't have that kind of stomach, they can't suffer losses on that scale. I'm talking beyond genocidal levels, I'm talking about extinction levels. The Imperium terminates everything that opposes them, and if they can't, then they continue trying until one side or the other is totally wiped out.

Space Combat isn't just about ship-to-ship warfare. You have to think about the elements behind who shot this torpedo at who, or who blasted this ship with phasers.

The Imperium doesn't have to worry about the petty politics that get in the way of ultimate victory. They don't have to worry about how to spend their money on their war machines. They don't have to worry about soldiers who have too much humanity. They don't have to worry about collateral damage.

The Imperium of Man is a civilization designed to survive in a doomed existence, that's why it's the "Dark/Grim Future of Warhammer 40,000." The Imperium is even prophesied to be defeated, but they carry on. Because the Imperium is the quintessential representation of humanities will to survive no matter what the costs are.

They are different from other species and civilization.