1189 replies to this topic

[GaussDragon]

So it's agreed: Star Trek is OP, starting a motion to nerf some of their curbstomp factor.

[Ilithi Dragon]

Xhaleon, on 03 December 2011 - 04:53 AM, said:

Hey Catamount, ya don't have to type up a gigantic essay telling people about the ICS. Just direct them to sites like http://www.st-v-sw.net/. If they didn't already get that the ICS is literally literary fanwank and is illegible for serious discussion, then they will never get it.

Perfecto Oviedo, on 03 December 2011 - 05:27 AM, said:

I was literally JUST about to post to that page....good show though, I'm glad more people know about it.

For those interested in how the Federation and the Empire would stack up, here's the overview page to that website: http://st-v-sw.net/STSWcompare.html

I find it to be a balanced look at the strengths and weaknesses of both powers.

Aha! Finally other people who appreciate G2K's far more scientific analysis of STvSW, and recognize the fanwankery involved in much of the EU! I know I can speak for Catamount as well as myself when I say that we're VERY glad to find people who are capable of telling the difference between more-or-less proper scientific inquiry and fan wankery. } : = 8 D

G2K's site isn't perfect, partly because he just doesn't have the time to put into it and so much of it is still 'incomplete', but most of his analyses are pretty solid, and he tends to low-ball Trek in his figures while high-balling Wars, and still comes out with massive Trek superiority. His Trek torpedo warhead yields are a little on the high side (canonically, 'standard' photon yields are in the 42 megaton range for most of TNG, with a theoretical max yield of 64 megatons, with a warhead upgrade late in TNG / around the start of DS9 bumping that up to 64 megatons standard yield with a theoretical max yield of 500 megatons, but his calculation figures are close enough for rough estimating).

Xhaleon, on 03 December 2011 - 04:53 AM, said:

I did vote Star Trek, of course. The moment they realize their advantage of Faster Than Light realspace combat abilities (I am not sure of the capabilities of a number of series in the poll), they will abuse, Abuse, ABUSE it. Practically no one could touch them, and they could adopt scorched earth tactics on the defensive or offensive because lolreplicators.

Yeah, FTL ship combat is a HUGE advantage. It does have -some- limitations because of their effective weapons ranges being only around a light-second or so for phasers and a dozen or so light-seconds for torpedoes, so high-warp straffing against sublight targets would basically allow them to strike with impunity, but it would be very brief windows of fire between long, drifting turns. Lower warp-speed velocities would be much more likely against sublight targets, and even just Warp 1 or 2 would allow them to strike with impunity.

Even at sublight, Trek ships would have a huge advantage over most enemies, because their impulse engines allow them to accelerate to high percentages of c in a very short timespan (we've seen examples of accelerations of thousands of Gs on multiple occasions), and they pack huge amounts of firepower into tiny, very maneuverable packages, with precision targeting. Even in TOS, with their old ball-turret phasers, they were capable of tracking and striking at distant targets moving at FTL, while also maneuvering at FTL. Modern phaser arrays are vastly more accurate, eliminating most moving parts from the entire phaser assembly, particularly the aiming and tracking systems, and they have demonstrated extreme precision and accuracy. Trek ships would be able to perform high maneuvers at range and still be able to accurately, and precisely hit the ships of any other franchise, often well beyond their effective weapons range, and well beyond their effective targeting range against such small, highly mobile targets.

Xhaleon, on 03 December 2011 - 04:53 AM, said:

That, and a few of the more eccentric methods of them "winning" include 1: TimeFleet patrolling the timeline to save their butt anytime someone from another universe comes and attacks them (breach of normal timeline and avoidance of time paradox), who with their time-based weapons and defenses would absolutely RAPE RAPE RAPE most other universes, and 2: Q loving Picard so much that he casually flicks any invaders back into their own universe when the Enterprise gets threatened.

AKA justified and weaponized plot armor.

I generally discount these - we've seen no indication that Trek maintains such a fleet, and Q is too unreliable to depend on, not to mention the rules of both groups prohibiting such interference.

Grayson Pryde, on 02 December 2011 - 09:02 AM, said:

There are way to many things to vote. And even if i like Star Wars, Star Trek and Battletech but Warhammer 40k would easily win. Just think about the deamon ships and the freaking warp. It doesnt matter if you have shields or anything when hell itself manifests on your ship and slaughter your crew.

I dunno... Trek has shown some pretty innovative ways to defend against some pretty exotic stuff. Hell, Voyager had an episode about this very sort of problem, and they had quickly developed a defense against it. the two-parter "Equinox" featured aliens that attacked Voyager and the Equinox in almost this very same manner (though because the Equinox had been killing them to make their engines go faster, instead of chaotic destructive tendencies), and both ships were able to easily and quickly adapt their shields to protect against the attacks, on-the-fly with no additional resources. With the full weight of Starfleet's R&D resources behind the project, they could probably easily come up with a defense that would effectively neutralize the daemon ability to breach into real space inside a Trek ship.

althorin, on 03 December 2011 - 07:12 AM, said:

I like alot of Scifi but i have to vote WH40K.

There is a vast scale differance between 40k ships and trek for instance torpedoes trek ones come in @ about 2m long where as 40k regularly quotes them as the size of a large office block and the ship-torpiedo scale is about the same.

Well, big ships don't mean all that much. With contemporary technology/capabilities, size is a HUGE factor, but only with contemporary tech. The Lysian Command Center in TNG "Conundrum" was a massive starbase, dwarfing the Enterprise-D, yet the Federation's tech advantage over the Lysians (a difference of "more than a hundred years", or 'pre-TOS' tech probably in the general range of the original Enterprise when she first launched and was under command of Captain Pike in the 2240s and '50s) was so huge that Riker figured that "One photon torpedo ought to do it."

The warheads in 40K appear to be fusion-based. Very large fusion-based warheads, but still fusion-based nonetheless. This puts significant limits on their maximum firepower, because the maximum theoretical mass-to-energy conversion yield of fusion reactions is just 1%. That's 1% of the mass of the fuel used converted to energy. With Matter/Anti-Matter (M/AM) reactions, that is 100% mass-to-energy conversion. So a Fed photon torpedo has an effective yield equivalent to a 40K warhead at least 100 times its size (if 40K has near-100% efficient fusion reactions, like Trek's near-100% efficient M/AM reactions). By that same token, the power generation in 40K is largely fusion-based, putting significant restrictions on their maximum energy outputs, whereas the primary power generation for Trek ships is largely M/AM-based (there are fusion auxiliaries, but big ships like the Galaxy class and Sovereign class carry a dozen or more impulse reactors to their one M/AM reactor, and they still generate only a paltry fraction of the power their main M/AM reactor generates).

Sure, 40K ships are much bigger than Trek ships, but pound-for-pound, Trek ships are vastly superior because they pack at least a hundred times more firepower into the same volume. Now, 40K ships might be able to match or exceed Trek ships one-on-one with fusion power alone if they're big enough, but that means that 40K ships have to be huge and unwieldly, and vastly more expensive and resource-intensive to build and maintain than Trek ships.

They will also run into the same problem of hitting ships that I mentioned above. 40K missiles are described as ranging up to 200 feet long, or about 61 meters, and are described as having extremely limited tracking abilities, against the massive and wallowing 40K warships. This means that their ability to hit a maneuvering Trek ship all on their own will probably be laughable, at best. Add onto this the fact that they can be shot down by 40K fighters and point-defense, coupled with Trek's insanely precise beam weaponry, and Trek ships would be able to easily shoot down incoming torpedoes before they even got close, possibly even as they were leaving their launch tubs.

By comparison, Trek warheads are tiny, yet pack an incredibly powerful punch for their size, are very fast, maneuverable, very precise (an old TOS warhead was capable of hitting a 1-meter target at 90,000 km while the ship it fired from was maneuvering), and are shielded. Shielded enough that modern Trek ships don't even bother trying to shoot them down most of the time. If 40K could even hit a Trek warhead in the first place, they wouldn't be able to hit it with enough firepower to penetrate its shields before it hit.

althorin, on 03 December 2011 - 07:12 AM, said:

and the warp is a complete oddball in terms of power as it does not annialate but corrupts and changes but battleship lances are good lazer equivilents and broadside batteries are also mentiond

Warp is a funny thing, from what I understand of it. But Trek has already shown an ability to develop defenses for similar attack methods on-the-fly with limited resources, so while initial attacks might prove devastating, Trek would be able to quickly adapt defenses.

althorin, on 03 December 2011 - 07:12 AM, said:

so tech wise i would say battletech on a bigger scale + the warp for chaos fleets.

BT does have some impressive tech, but compared to many of the other franchises, it's still pretty limited. BT scaled up is still going to get curb-stomped by Star Trek, and even Stargate in a one-on-one fight for that matter (assuming as of SG:U), though Stargate has a limited economic/industrial base.

althorin, on 03 December 2011 - 07:12 AM, said:

and as for Q put him up against any of the chaos gods and see how long he lasts.

I generally discount such things for the purposes of these debates. Not only are such entities unpredictable and unreliable by nature (both character and the type of plot device/antagonist they are), they're not really relevant to the discussion, and they kinda ruin the fun of the discussion...

[Grayson Pryde]

@ilithi dragon

I realy like your argumentation and i have to agree about the ships because the warhammer 40k space battles are more like seafights in the 20th or 19th century. I still play Battlefleet Gothic so i should know that. The problem with the 40k Navy is that their tactics arent as good as the Starfleet tactics. Buzt their fiepower is MUCH bigger then any ship from the Star Trek universe might have. And the Imperial Navy is realy good in wasting millions of ammo shells.

I cant say much about their torpedos but i think i remember that they were not all fusion based. I think, they just had a fusion-based engine because they are so big.

And i am unsure about the warp and if they can find easy ways to develop something against the deamons. I have to admit that i havent seen the Star Trek episode you meant so it would be nice if you could post a link.

[Ilithi Dragon]

But how much more firepower? We've seen Trek ships dish out tremendous amounts of firepower before, especially when you consider the Nuclear Disruption Force or NDF effects of phasers and disruptors, that literally disrupt the strong and weak nuclear forces bonding matter together (protons and neutrons and electrons in atoms, and the quarks in the protons and neutrons), with results similar to what happens when anti-matter contacts regular matter, and does it in a chain reaction effect. We know that a fleet of just twenty Trek ships, ten of them powerful Romulan warbirds that have more firepower than a Galaxy class and ten of them Cardassian battleships that would only be roughly comparable to a big Federation Heavy Cruiser, was capable of blasting a planet down to its core in about five hours or so. Add another couple hours and those twenty ships would have been able to make a planet go away. Now, that is not directly representative of their effective yields against each other because most Trek ships are hardened against the NDF effect of phasers and disruptors, so their after-shot effects are greatly reduced and they act more like DET weapons (though NDF effects still magnify effective damage even against Trek ships). 40K would not be very likely to have materials resistant to this effect, and they would not have the structural integrity fields that Trek ships use to further reinforce their hulls and protect against the NDF effect.

So I'm not so sure that 40K ships could actually output more raw firepower than Trek ships, certainly not pound-for-pound (they may be able to do it through sheer size of the ship), and absolutely not more raw firepower on-target.

As for Equinox, here's a link to the Memory-Alpha page (no YouTube links available right now): http://en.memory-alp...rg/wiki/Equinox

[Catamount]

You're right, of course, about the ICS books. It is rather blaringly obvious.

Of course, some of that post was on the nature of Wars canon too, but more than that, it's just fun to occasionally read the riot act on Wong et al


As for 40k, there seems to be a lot of love for that franchise, or at least what I think are grave overestimations of how it would fare against the classical top-tier science fictions, and for that matter, a lot of underestimation or undue passing over of Stargate, which shows great exotic tech and high power estimates.

I'll have to do a post on bother later.

[Alizabeth Aijou]

Warhammer 40,000 aka Battlefleet Gothic has my vote.
Planetkiller? Blackstone Fortresses? Nova Cannons?
Not to mention the battleships themselves.
Sustained planetary bombardmend from one can damage a planet to the extend that it'll break apart under its own gravity.

They probably also have the largest ships in pretty much any of the fictional universa.
(The largest of the black outlined ships is 4-5km long.)

Edited by Alizabeth Aijou, 03 December 2011 - 09:28 AM.

[saber15]

The Enterprise is powered by plot and has pretty much no physics constraints placed on it. It'd win in a battle, I would say.

If there was TRUE physics being followed, Halo (at least the human ships), BattleTech, and maybe some WH40K ships would come out on top.
The Enterprise would get the saucer carved off in an instant and the armor is paper thin (it has windows!).
Star Trek's space fighter pilots would instantly run out of fuel or be crushed from G-forces.
Stargate I don't remember many battles from it, but what I remember usually involved a bunch of ships sitting around shooting each other until they jump away, which would be the dumbest thing you could do in a battle in space, save for flying in a straight line.

Never seen any of the anime space battles.

[Grayson Pryde]

Okay you won with the ships when we think about their technology and tactics of the human part of the warhammer 40k franchise but sorry man you cant compare the equinox with chaos daemons of 40k.

Edited by Grayson Pryde, 03 December 2011 - 09:26 AM.

[spectre 1]

althorin, on 03 December 2011 - 07:12 AM, said:

I like alot of Scifi but i have to vote WH40K.

There is a vast scale differance between 40k ships and trek for instance torpedoes trek ones come in @ about 2m long where as 40k regularly quotes them as the size of a large office block and the ship-torpiedo scale is about the same.

and the warp is a complete oddball in terms of power as it does not annialate but corrupts and changes but battleship lances are good lazer equivilents and broadside batteries are also mentiond

so tech wise i would say battletech on a bigger scale + the warp for chaos fleets.

sensor wise 40k has mid range sensors but also has astropaths which can sense/communicate across large sectors of the galxay.

and as for Q put him up against any of the chaos gods and see how long he lasts.

well said althorin I must admit I am an avid 40k fan myself and the imperium and/or chaos would probably trump everything else just by being ridiculously over the top in terms of tech but as expected i am also a massive mechwarrior fan (why else would I be on this site).

[Grayson Pryde]

saber15, on 03 December 2011 - 09:23 AM, said:

Never seen any of the anime space battles.

Its always the same. But i recommand you "The Legend of Black Heaven" because the theme song is awsome!

[Vincent Vascaul]

I am gonna throw a monkey wrench in here, how bout the Doctor Who universe?

[Sludgecrawler]

Let us not forget the Eldar, Necrons, Tyranids and Tau when arguing pointlessly like this!

[Grayson Pryde]

Sludgecrawler, on 03 December 2011 - 12:35 PM, said:

Let us not forget the Eldar, Necrons, Tyranids and Tau when arguing pointlessly like this!

Never, Eldar and Tyranids are the most anoying races in Battlefleet Gothic! But yeah i think i forgot them because i dont want to remember them. Damn Xenos!

[Joanna Conners]

saber15, on 03 December 2011 - 09:23 AM, said:

The Enterprise is powered by plot and has pretty much no physics constraints placed on it. It'd win in a battle, I would say.

If there was TRUE physics being followed, Halo (at least the human ships), BattleTech, and maybe some WH40K ships would come out on top.
The Enterprise would get the saucer carved off in an instant and the armor is paper thin (it has windows!).
Star Trek's space fighter pilots would instantly run out of fuel or be crushed from G-forces.
Stargate I don't remember many battles from it, but what I remember usually involved a bunch of ships sitting around shooting each other until they jump away, which would be the dumbest thing you could do in a battle in space, save for flying in a straight line.

Never seen any of the anime space battles.

You do realize those windows aren't made of glass, right? The absurd movies not withstanding.

[Ilithi Dragon]

Alizabeth Aijou, on 03 December 2011 - 09:20 AM, said:

Sustained planetary bombardmend from one can damage a planet to the extend that it'll break apart under its own gravity.

........ You know what, I'm going to let Colonel Sam Carter respond to that.

Planets cannot break apart under their own gravity. Gravity is the very thing that holds them together. The only way you're going to have gravity ripping anything apart is in areas of high gravitational sheer, where the force of gravity differs by huge margins in a very small space, like around a black hole.

Alizabeth Aijou, on 03 December 2011 - 09:20 AM, said:

They probably also have the largest ships in pretty much any of the fictional universa.
(The largest of the black outlined ships is 4-5km long.)

The Dominion Dreadnought is ~4.5km long. A Borg Cube is 3km long, and wide and tall. An Imperial Super Star Destroyer is 18-something kilometers long, and a Covenant CSO-class super carrier is just shy of 29 kilometers long. Of the fictional universes listed here, 40K has midling-sized ships.

Grayson Pryde, on 03 December 2011 - 09:25 AM, said:

Okay you won with the ships when we think about their technology and tactics of the human part of the warhammer 40k franchise but sorry man you cant compare the equinox with chaos daemons of 40k.

Why not? Sure, they probably are not the same type of tears in space, but Trek has demonstrated the ability to develop defenses against them, on the fly, with limited resources, quite easily. Might they have a tougher time of it than the Equinox aliens? Probably. But they have still demonstrated the ability to develop such defenses, and with the full weight of Starfleet's R&D resources behind the project, a defense solution would probably be developed fairly quickly, though they would run into problems in the first encounters.

spectre 1, on 03 December 2011 - 09:37 AM, said:

well said althorin I must admit I am an avid 40k fan myself and the imperium and/or chaos would probably trump everything else just by being ridiculously over the top in terms of tech but as expected i am also a massive mechwarrior fan (why else would I be on this site).

Ehh... No, the 40K guys do not trump anyone in technology. Their technology is rather primitive and crude - there are some interesting techs and innovative engineering here and there, but most of it is crude development and application, the hints of a once highly-advanced civilization gone all to hell. Star Trek and Stargate easily trump 40K in technology, even Star Wars trumps 40K in technology, and even BattleTech is fairly comparable to 40K in most respects, just in terms of technological capabilities (when you consider the best equipment available from the Star League era and the Clans). 40K does not shine at all in terms of technology.

40K doesn't do well in technology, they get their strength from brute force, and massive scaling. The Imperium of Man does not do finesse or solutions through scientific advancement or high feats of engineering. They solve problems by throwing a bunch of Space Marines at it, until the problem has gone away, or they've run out of Space Marines.

[Grayson Pryde]

I think you should say that you just speak about the "human population" of Warhammer 40k. And no you cant defend something from the warp when the chaos gods think its fun to "modify" it.

[Catamount]

Grayson Pryde, on 03 December 2011 - 02:14 PM, said:

I think you should say that you just speak about the "human population" of Warhammer 40k.

The technological difference between a power like the Federation in Trek, or the Alterans or Asgard in Stargate (or even late-franchise Earth), and some backwater sticks-and-stones entity like the Imperium of man is such that the gap is so big, it's hard to even frame a comparison.


We're not talking a lasers vs machine guns kind of disparity, more like a modern nuclear power vs poriferans. It's true that the rest of the Warhammer races are not so pathetic, helpless, and downright technologically regressive as the Imperium of Man, but it's important to phrase just how much stronger those races would have to be than humanity to even begin to pose a threat to these other franchises.

Quote

And no you cant defend something from the warp when the chaos gods think its fun to "modify" it.

Why? This wouldn't be Trek's first encounter with extradimensional beings, nor their first conflict. The same is true of the more advanced races in Stargate. I doubt the Chaos Gods are even equal to, let alone better than the ascended beings in Stargate, who have, even in their more subtle applications of force, caused entire advances races, across entire worlds, to cease to exist with little more than an effortless thought, yet nothing but simple Alteran technology (well, okay, not simple) completely obliterated the Ori.


The problem with Warhammer 40k is that despite the extreme age of the civilizations involved, the science demonstrated by nearly all of the races isn't just limited, it's not even just primitive; it's downright infantile compared to Trek or Stargate. The Atlantis expedition once made a mere technological oops that made an entire solar system go away.


Even the Tau, who are considered to be in possession of the some of the most powerful conventional weaponry in 40k, use weapons that the Tauri would consider auxiliary in nature by the end of SG-1, and that the Federation would consider to be nothing more than quaint. Having the pincacle of one's technology by the deployment of a kinetic weapon via acceleration by magnetic fields might pass in Battletech, or Galactica, but it's not going to be considered a threat by races that pop antimatter warheads like candy, and have weapons that effortlessly cause the bonds between atoms to simply cease to hold. The Federation doesn't have to blast through armor with a rail gun type weapon; that's primitive and brutish by their standards. Instead, they'd just make the armor fall apart at the molecular level.

Edited by Catamount, 03 December 2011 - 02:50 PM.

[Ilithi Dragon]

Grayson Pryde, on 03 December 2011 - 02:14 PM, said:

I think you should say that you just speak about the "human population" of Warhammer 40k. And no you cant defend something from the warp when the chaos gods think its fun to "modify" it.

True, there are other powers in the 40K universe that are more technologically sophisticated than the Imperium of Man. The remnants of the Eldar empire, chiefly. The Tau Empire is pretty technologically sophisticated, and probably more advanced than the Imperium in some respects, as far as I understand, but is only comparable to or still playing catch-up to the Imperium in overall technology. The Necrons have a fairly high level of technological sophistication in their body structures, but not unlike much of the technology in the Imperium of Man, it's remnant technology, literally the undead corpse of a technologically advanced civilization that condemned themselves to mindless slavery of the C'tan in exchange for immortality and to help them in their bitter fight with the Old Ones. The Old Ones are gone or devolved. The Orks are even less sophisticated than the Imperium, and the Tyranids are even less sophisticated than that. The Tyranids have some impressive biotech, and so do the Orks, but technologically their focus is on numbers and/or "more dakka."

The Old Ones, the Eldar, the Tau and the ancient human civilization during the Dark Age of Technology are the only technologically-sophisticated empires in the 40K universe. the Old Ones are gone, the Eldar a fractured remnant, the Tau a tiny new upstart, and the Imperium is a bare shadow of human civilization during the 'Dark' Age. 40K is decidedly lacking in technological sophistication, most of its powers and forces operate through brute force, massive scaling, or just outright attrition.



As for the entities of the Immaterium... They are powerful, but not infinitely powerful, and with proper understandings of how the beings of the Immaterium operate, and push into real space, a defense could be devised. It may not be a perfect defense, and it may well be something that could be overwhelmed by a powerful Immaterium being if they put enough effort into it, but a defense could be developed.

[Grayson Pryde]

I know this is a serious topic but i have to do it. Just think about the "counterparts" of the Star Trek/Warhammer 40k universe and put them together.

So we have

Klingorks

Dark Remuldar

Vulkadar

Borgcrons

Spezies 847nids

If someone finds more feel free to post.

[Ilithi Dragon]

Catamount, on 03 December 2011 - 02:44 PM, said:

The Federation doesn't have to blast through armor with a rail gun type weapon; that's primitive and brutish by their standards. Instead, they'd just make the armor fall apart at the molecular level.

A clarification of the physics behind this. Phasers and disruptors don't make matter fall apart at the molecular level. They disrupt matter on the sub-atomic level. Phasers and disruptors disrupt, or cancel out, the nuclear strong and weak forces. This means that not only the forces bonding atoms together are canceled out (causing nuclear fission in the atoms involved), but the protons and neutrons that make up the cores of the atoms themselves are split apart into their constituent quarks (electrons aren't affected beyond being liberated from the atoms they orbit because electrons are elementary particles). On top of that, the matter and energy is phased out of sync with the rest of the matter in the universe, AND the effect produces a chain reaction that expands the damage beyond well the initial energy input of the weapon. Against non-hardened ship hull and armor materials, the magnifying effect is easily three orders of magnitude (based on the eating away of the hull of the Borg Cube in "Q, Who?" after the first shot - 1,315 times more volume was eaten away by the post-shot NDF effect than was vaporized by the beam itself before the Borg started to adapt), and the effects against 'regular' matter, like the surface of a planet, is far and away beyond even that (DS9 "The Die is Cast").

Trek phasers against 40K ships would cut through them like a hot knife through butter, and gut them internally, like the Romulan Warbird that took the opening shots of the First Battle of Chin'Toka.