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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 5:37 pm
by Mike DiCenso
The episode in question is "The Best of Both Worlds, Part 2", when the E-D is chasing the Borg cube back to Earth, both the cube and the E-D at various points drop out of warp near Saturn and make their way towards Earth at sublight speeds. In the E-D's case, of course, that was explicitly stated to be impulse power.
-Mike

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2012 4:12 am
by Mike DiCenso
Mike DiCenso wrote: If that's what you think, then you truly missed the supreme irony of Brian's ICS statements. First and foremost people should be trying to do everything they can to disprove a theory.
StarWarsStarTrek wrote:This is true. But "disprove" has higher standards than making a physics violating concept up and saying that this 'could' explain the events as well...even if the new explanation presents hundreds of plot holes.
No, disproving and proving are both held to the same high standards. If you claim that your theory is the right one, then it is up to you to gather all the data, then test your hypothesis to very rigorous standards. You then publish your results. If you find that your testing shows that your hypothesis is questionable, then you need to accept that and either modify your hypothesis or you need to throw it out. If you wind up making too many ad hoc defenses for your hypothesis, then it is probably wrong.

Unfortunately in the case of analysing science fiction movie and television, we have no way to directly examine or test what we are seeing. This leads to the big "debate part".

Mike DiCenso wrote:The fact is that you can start with any number of assumptions, but if your assumptions are wrong, then it doesn't matter how well you do the math, it's still wrong. And this is one your biggest problems here and why you get into so much trouble with everyone else ; you don't know how to get past the idea that the math is added up properly, but the assumptions and data they are based on are false, misleading, or just flat out wrong. [/quote
StarWarsStarTrek wrote:Brian Young and Saxton only assume that Star Wars follows newtonian physics, and here you are complaining about their methods being unscientific, while your initial reaction is to bring up a physics-violating alternative explanation?
Simply speaking, yes. Because if we assume that star destroyers or any SW ship is operating on our understanding of physics, then you can't simply cherry pick what you like and throw out the rest. So if you want big power output, you chose Newtonian physics and say that it takes X number of joules to do that. Well, the problem then becomes, if it is that, then how do you get this insane, Conservation Law-violating energy output without coming up with a physics-busting explanation? Oh wait, they did.... hypermatter reactors.

See how that works? And if you do that for one SF franchise, why not the others? You wind up going into a deep rabbit hole there, and Brian's unequal application of standards is my point. That's why I used the E-1701's run from Earth to Jupiter in ST:TMP as an example. That conservatively sets a relatively small and primitive Trek ship at 5.8E17 watts from the impulse engines alone.

Also, as has been pointed out already, there's evidence now of mass-lightening in SW. It's C-canon to be sure, but it's not contradicted by G or T canon, so that's something that has to be considered. This is technically backed up in the G canon during the novelizations when Luke muses over how repulsorlifts and antigravity drives work.
StarWarsStarTrek wrote:So there is a magical barrier between "we can only accelerate at 4 G's, we are WW2 fighters..." and "ZOMG NOW WE ARE 20,000 G'S ACCELERATION!" now?

Because the quotation provided does not make any sense whatsoever. What happens if you accelerate to relativistic speeds, and then turn off this mass-lightening? Does your ship now have massive kinetic energy, despite having been accelerated with far less? Does it magically slow down in space?
No, what you are doing is presenting a false dilemma issue. Note that I'd made comparison to modern real-life rockets. All Dooku's ship has to do is apply it's mass-lightening field once it reaches whatever point is required, then it accelerates much more quickly, and it flies in a trajectory that takes it straight up out of the thickest portion of the atmosphere. We see the Falcon do something similar in ANH during liftoff from Tatooine. I certainly don't recall Mos Eisley spaceport or the stormtroopers and local populace being fricasseed and their cooked remains sent flying by the Falcon's engine and thruster backwash. Furthermore, what happens when you turn the mass-lightening off is irrelevant. We only need know that it exists and is used to reduce the mass of SW ships. The same with ST or other franchises. It's no different than any other exotic super-tech, like transporters, phasers, shields, inertial dampers, gravity plating, etc.
-Mike

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 12:22 am
by StarWarsStarTrek
Mike DiCenso wrote:
No, disproving and proving are both held to the same high standards. If you claim that your theory is the right one, then it is up to you to gather all the data, then test your hypothesis to very rigorous standards. You then publish your results. If you find that your testing shows that your hypothesis is questionable, then you need to accept that and either modify your hypothesis or you need to throw it out. If you wind up making too many ad hoc defenses for your hypothesis, then it is probably wrong.

Unfortunately in the case of analysing science fiction movie and television, we have no way to directly examine or test what we are seeing. This leads to the big "debate part".
Since when is the possibility that the ships could be using an imaginary, magical mass reducing technobabble enough to make my ‘hypothesis’ (read: observation and basic mathematics) “questionable”?

Do you realize that this works both ways? That, if my own theory is inaccurate because there could be magic involved here, then the magic theory is also inaccurate because the magic might not exist. Meaning that it is completely impossible, by your very peculiar scientific viewpoint, for any theory to be correct. I suppose that gravity could just be the result of an imaginary brown monkey who can move objects at will, who decided to move objects based on their mass and distances relative to one another, right?

The acceptable theory is the one that best fits with all known facts. The magic theory does not fit with conservation of energy, and it introduces several plot holes as well. Mine introduces no plot holes, fits with the events observed, fits with the ICS’s, and fits with physics. It is better.


Simply speaking, yes. Because if we assume that star destroyers or any SW ship is operating on our understanding of physics, then you can't simply cherry pick what you like and throw out the rest. So if you want big power output, you chose Newtonian physics and say that it takes X number of joules to do that. Well, the problem then becomes, if it is that, then how do you get this insane, Conservation Law-violating energy output without coming up with a physics-busting explanation? Oh wait, they did.... hypermatter reactors.
Nope. You see, it is extremely unscientific to dismiss an observation because it does not fit with our current observation of physics. We can observe, infer and calculate power generation for ISD’s comparable to small stars.

Mind you, unlike darkstar and JMS, Saxton and, to a lesser extent, Wong, wrote extensive dissertations on attempting to make the various observable feats of SW technology fit with physics. Do you think that Curtis just made up bullshit to explain technobabble in the ICS’s (which is what 99% of EU authors typically do)? You guys just say “well, I know that my theory doesn’t make sense from a scientific perspective, or an engineering standpoint, but who the fuck gives a shit?”

Problem: effects of turbolasers precede the actual bolt.

Warsie solution: Clearly, the bolt is either not the damaging component of the turbolaser, or not the only. Therefore, there could be an invisible portion of the bolt that outpaces its visible component, or the bolt itself is merely a tracer round, similar to rounds in real life.

Trekkie solution: Obviously, it is an SFX error. Done.

Problem: Death Star.

Warsie: Mathematically speaking, the Death Stars require a set of resources and manpower far surpassing anything the Federation could ever hope to produce, by seven orders of magnitude.

Trekkie: You do not know how many resources the Empire put into it.

Warsie: True, perhaps, but even if 101% of the imperial budget were used, it is still more impressive than anything the Federation could physically produce with 300% of its budget.

Trekkie: OK, but you cannot substantiate any correlation between X tonnage of Death Stars and, say, an ISD.

Warsie: …except that, from an engineering standpoint, building a moon sized battle station would make going to the moon seem like a walk to the gas station. It would actually be easier, as it always is, to produce several smaller ships, because you do not have to worry about the enormous stresses such a battle station would undergo, or the various…

Trekkie: You are attempting to use real life engineering concepts to analyze a soft science fiction genre. Stop it!

Problem: Death Star [again

Warsie: In order to accelerate at even 1 km/s^2, the Death Star’s hull would have to be made out of a material 300,000 times stronger than structural steel.

Trekkie: Obviously, the used mass lightening technology.

Warsie: Which is a blatant violation of CoE.

Trekkie: Dude, it’s popcorn sci fi. Who cares?

See how that works? And if you do that for one SF franchise, why not the others? You wind up going into a deep rabbit hole there, and Brian's unequal application of standards is my point. That's why I used the E-1701's run from Earth to Jupiter in ST:TMP as an example. That conservatively sets a relatively small and primitive Trek ship at 5.8E17 watts from the impulse engines alone.
My own calculations for ST power generation is actually substantially higher, so your point doesn’t amount to much at all.


As for mass-lightening, it cannot possibly work inside a gravity well without negating Conservation of Energy. The quote itself implies this, but strangely uses an atmosphere and touching the "ground" as modifying parameters (even though both are completely meaningless in the context), but this is likely simply a superficial correlation, the real one being the presence of a gravity well. Yet the Death Star circumnavigates Yavin Prime within its gravity well; the ISDs circumnavigate Endor within its gravity wells, and Dooku's sailboat does its haxxx acceleration not only within Geonosis's gravity well, but within its atmosphere as well!

The conclusion being that the speeds referenced here are actually those in the absence of "mass-lightening"; that, with the technobable, SW ships are even faster, such as the Falcon traveling to a separate star system within a reasonable timespan.

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2012 3:48 am
by Lucky
StarWarsStarTrek wrote: Problem: effects of turbolasers precede the actual bolt.

Warsie solution: Clearly, the bolt is either not the damaging component of the turbolaser, or not the only. Therefore, there could be an invisible portion of the bolt that outpaces its visible component, or the bolt itself is merely a tracer round, similar to rounds in real life.

Trekkie solution: Obviously, it is an SFX error. Done.
If the happen every time they are suppose to be there.

If it happens a minority of the time it is likely a visual effects goof.

In the case of blasters, Lasers, and Turbolasers in Star Wars they galvened particle beams. The galvening is likely an invisable force field of some sort that extends somewhat beyond the bolt, and contains the particles letting them have that flak effect..
StarWarsStarTrek wrote: Problem: Death Star.

Warsie: Mathematically speaking, the Death Stars require a set of resources and manpower far surpassing anything the Federation could ever hope to produce, by seven orders of magnitude.

Trekkie: You do not know how many resources the Empire put into it.

Warsie: True, perhaps, but even if 101% of the imperial budget were used, it is still more impressive than anything the Federation could physically produce with 300% of its budget.

Trekkie: OK, but you cannot substantiate any correlation between X tonnage of Death Stars and, say, an ISD.

Warsie: …except that, from an engineering standpoint, building a moon sized battle station would make going to the moon seem like a walk to the gas station. It would actually be easier, as it always is, to produce several smaller ships, because you do not have to worry about the enormous stresses such a battle station would undergo, or the various…

Trekkie: You are attempting to use real life engineering concepts to analyze a soft science fiction genre. Stop it!
Rifter: 1)The Death Star does not translate to its mass in ships. If you turned the Death Star into Star Destroyers you would end up with lots of empty hulls. Hulls without the guts like hyper-drives, reactors, sub-light drives, life support, computers, and such are kind of useless, and that assumes the Death Star is made from Star ship grade materials. You are also forgetting the death Star was mostly empty space from what we see of it.

2) The Xindi made a Death Star in Enterprise. Building a Death Star in Star Trek is not that hard.

3)Star Trek Powers like the United Federation of Planets have had the weapons needed to turn a planet into an asteroid field for a long time by the Episode Boobytrap, and the Enterprise-D drilled almost half way through a planet in about 20 seconds..

4) Bigger in modern times tends to be a sign something is less advanced in modern times because iut tends to be easier to build it big.
StarWarsStarTrek wrote: Problem: Death Star [again

Warsie: In order to accelerate at even 1 km/s^2, the Death Star’s hull would have to be made out of a material 300,000 times stronger than structural steel.

Trekkie: Obviously, the used mass lightening technology.

Warsie: Which is a blatant violation of CoE.

Trekkie: Dude, it’s popcorn sci fi. Who cares?
Rifter: Dude, the Death Star also magically shatters planets and keeps them in orbit. You are worrying about the wrong stuff. How do you know the Death Star isn't mostly empty space like we see anyway?

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 4:52 am
by Mike DiCenso
StarWarsStarTrek wrote: ]Do you realize that this works both ways? That, if my own theory is inaccurate because there could be magic involved here, then the magic theory is also inaccurate because the magic might not exist. Meaning that it is completely impossible, by your very peculiar scientific viewpoint, for any theory to be correct. I suppose that gravity could just be the result of an imaginary brown monkey who can move objects at will, who decided to move objects based on their mass and distances relative to one another, right? But you have to prove that the "magic" does not exist.
Here you go again. You are going out of your way to misrepresent another person's point of view. Yes, speculating is all we can do. But to declare, flat out that the only possibility is that a SW ship is doing nothing but magically brute forcing it's way into space ala Newtonian mechanics (defying the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy) is sheer dishonesty, especially when other people bring up the inconvenient possibility, backed by evidence from a highly placed source (the ANH novelization), that such things exists (repulsorlift, antigravity), you then try to use flowery language to dismiss it. We know such things exist and we know it's an integral part of the drive systems that SW ships use.
StarWarsStarTrek wrote:The acceptable theory is the one that best fits with all known facts. The magic theory does not fit with conservation of energy, and it introduces several plot holes as well. Mine introduces no plot holes, fits with the events observed, fits with the ICS’s, and fits with physics. It is better.
It does not. Because you and those who wrote the Episodes II and III ICS cherry picked the evidence and ignored anything else. Which gets us back to Brian's Case Study, in which he dishonestly oversimplified the process, which we know to be false since the outed emails from Wayne Poe's secret little cabal group show us that they did this all with the goal of "making things look better in comparison to Trek".
Simply speaking, yes. Because if we assume that star destroyers or any SW ship is operating on our understanding of physics, then you can't simply cherry pick what you like and throw out the rest. So if you want big power output, you chose Newtonian physics and say that it takes X number of joules to do that. Well, the problem then becomes, if it is that, then how do you get this insane, Conservation Law-violating energy output without coming up with a physics-busting explanation? Oh wait, they did.... hypermatter reactors.
Nope. You see, it is extremely unscientific to dismiss an observation because it does not fit with our current observation of physics. We can observe, infer and calculate power generation for ISD’s comparable to small stars.

Mind you, unlike darkstar and JMS, Saxton and, to a lesser extent, Wong, wrote extensive dissertations on attempting to make the various observable feats of SW technology fit with physics. Do you think that Curtis just made up bullshit to explain technobabble in the ICS’s (which is what 99% of EU authors typically do)? You guys just say “well, I know that my theory doesn’t make sense from a scientific perspective, or an engineering standpoint, but who the fuck gives a shit?”
Wait, wait a minute. Do you think that writing excessively long and often meaningless dissertations are a qualification for acceptability from a scientific standpoint? Really? JMS and Anderson have both written here on this board as well as on their own websites very detailed essays on the nature of science fiction technologies. By that rationale, JMS and RSA have both equalled or surpassed Saxton and Wong many times over. But that's not how things work. The evidence has to be brought to bear. In the case of Saxton and Wong, and in the case we are focused on here, Brian Young, the evidence was clearly cherry picked or misrepresented to achieve the highest possible power outputs for SW ships, and in some cases, they did so with the ulterior motive of achiving superiority over Trek.

StarWarsStarTrek wrote: Problem: effects of turbolasers precede the actual bolt.

Warsie solution: Clearly, the bolt is either not the damaging component of the turbolaser, or not the only. Therefore, there could be an invisible portion of the bolt that outpaces its visible component, or the bolt itself is merely a tracer round, similar to rounds in real life.

Trekkie solution: Obviously, it is an SFX error. Done.

Problem: Death Star.

Warsie: Mathematically speaking, the Death Stars require a set of resources and manpower far surpassing anything the Federation could ever hope to produce, by seven orders of magnitude.

Trekkie: You do not know how many resources the Empire put into it.

Warsie: True, perhaps, but even if 101% of the imperial budget were used, it is still more impressive than anything the Federation could physically produce with 300% of its budget.

Trekkie: OK, but you cannot substantiate any correlation between X tonnage of Death Stars and, say, an ISD.

Warsie: …except that, from an engineering standpoint, building a moon sized battle station would make going to the moon seem like a walk to the gas station. It would actually be easier, as it always is, to produce several smaller ships, because you do not have to worry about the enormous stresses such a battle station would undergo, or the various…

Trekkie: You are attempting to use real life engineering concepts to analyze a soft science fiction genre. Stop it!

Problem: Death Star [again

Warsie: In order to accelerate at even 1 km/s^2, the Death Star’s hull would have to be made out of a material 300,000 times stronger than structural steel.

Trekkie: Obviously, the used mass lightening technology.

Warsie: Which is a blatant violation of CoE.

Trekkie: Dude, it’s popcorn sci fi. Who cares?
Again, here we go again with the misrepresentation of your opposition. A classic bad Warsie tactic, if ever there was one. Too bad there's not another mod, this would grounds for another warning. It's been pointed out to you that only one TL bolt ever observed did that. If that was a Trek phaser doing that, Warsies would declare it to be a statistical outlier and dismiss it. The Death Star issue has been stomped to death and you keep ignoring the huge Spacedock and Starbase 74 space stations, among many others that are bigger in volume than even the largest SSDs. Each one of the SB 74 stations are big enough for 11,000 or more Galaxy or Sovereign class starships. And there are at least 4 such stations. But this has been all brought up to you before, and you have hand waved it all away. Never even addressed how such a thing factors into the resource and industrial capability of the Federation.

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:My own calculations for ST power generation is actually substantially higher, so your point doesn’t amount to much at all.
Proof? Where's your numbers? You've tossed out a random number in the past, but how does that compare in context to a small, primitive starship from the 23rd century on impulse power only?

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:As for mass-lightening, it cannot possibly work inside a gravity well without negating Conservation of Energy. The quote itself implies this, but strangely uses an atmosphere and touching the "ground" as modifying parameters (even though both are completely meaningless in the context), but this is likely simply a superficial correlation, the real one being the presence of a gravity well. Yet the Death Star circumnavigates Yavin Prime within its gravity well; the ISDs circumnavigate Endor within its gravity wells, and Dooku's sailboat does its haxxx acceleration not only within Geonosis's gravity well, but within its atmosphere as well!
Why not? Proof? Where is the evidence? Repulsorlift is used inside gravity wells, and even antigravity is used near it as per the Death Star's approach to Alderaan in the ANH novelization when the battlestation got within "anti-gravity range". The Space Shuttle flew right up out of the Earth's atmosphere and accelerated, just like every other modern rocket. That is done to get out of that dense lower atmosphere and so not have to suffer the negative effects of drag while it accelerated to orbit. The same can be done with Dooku's ship while it uses exotic drives like repulsorlift and anti-gravity to achive orbit and accelerate away. The tech mentioned is G-canon and mass-lightening is C-canon and the three are not in contradiction with each other. End of story.

But if you go that route, why don't we calculate the energy required for the heavily damaged Galileo shuttlecraft in TOS' "The Galileo Seven" to achive orbit on a secondary power source in just a matter of seconds.

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:The conclusion being that the speeds referenced here are actually those in the absence of "mass-lightening"; that, with the technobable, SW ships are even faster, such as the Falcon traveling to a separate star system within a reasonable timespan.
That is a very skewed and faulty conclusion at best. You have to show how these known, canon technologies can be dismissed (they can't), and you have to show why they violate CoM&E. Or if they do, why they do not negate the CoM&E issues brought up by by the bad assumption that a SW ship is raw powering it's way to and from space.

Furthermore, you still have to explain why Brian nerfed them. He mentions them, and he hand waves them away in his little finding excuses video, but doesn't really address them.
-Mike

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 8:28 am
by Mr. Oragahn
Mike DiCenso wrote: Again, here we go again with the misrepresentation of your opposition. A classic bad Warsie tactic, if ever there was one. Too bad there's not another mod, this would grounds for another warning.
-Mike
That is why multiple reports get ignored? Why bother with another mod? You know this is silly. There is one thing you, as a mod, can still do.

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 9:35 pm
by StarWarsStarTrek
Mike, I'm not a scientist nor an engineer, but half of your problems could be solved by some self study of your own on basic structural and scientific principles.

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Here you go again. You are going out of your way to misrepresent another person's point of view. Yes, speculating is all we can do. But to declare, flat out that the only possibility is that a SW ship is doing nothing but magically brute forcing it's way into space ala Newtonian mechanics (defying the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy)
Wait, since when do Newtonian mechanics defy CoE now?

And what you do not seem to understand is that, if we go only by primary canon, “brute force” is the only possible way for anything to work! Could you imagine going up to a scientist and telling him “how do you know that the chemical reaction you just made produced an equal mass of products? You just assume that the reaction brute-forced its way using Conservation of Mass!”?

Your argument is still the ridiculous “well, you are assuming that observable facts are true…Einstein’s theory of relativity could be false!” that ignorant debaters just love to toss around. Your argument is this:

It is an assumption, not a fact, that Star Wars should be analyzed using Scientific data.

Which proves my entire point here.

Additionally, all calculations are derived here from scientific principles that ultimately stem from CoE. When you try to calc the energy needed for a phaser to vaporize a human, your math is based on the "assumption" that the breaking of molecular bonds requires energy to be transferred; CoE.

is sheer dishonesty, especially when other people bring up the inconvenient possibility, backed by evidence from a highly placed source (the ANH novelization), that such things exists (repulsorlift, antigravity), you then try to use flowery language to dismiss it. We know such things exist and we know it's an integral part of the drive systems that SW ships use.
Repulsorlifts still require energy. Read Shadows of Mindor. If I recall, I have already explained this; and antigravity, as Young explains perfectly, only accounts for one G, and even that energy isn't free, because the gravitational potential energy that the craft would otherwise have had has to go somewhere. Same thing with repulsorlifts. No free energy here.

It does not. Because you and those who wrote the Episodes II and III ICS cherry picked the evidence and ignored anything else.
Brian Young presents several examples of high acceleration feats from both trilogies. This isn’t an outlier, and it certainly is not “cherry picking”.

Mind you, Brian Young himself does not care for the EU. So, based on solely on the movies and perhaps the movie-novels, you have various instances of indisputable high-acceleration feats, and, as a premise, you presume that the SW universe can be explained scientifically; ergo, you get the numbers he gets.

Which gets us back to Brian's Case Study, in which he dishonestly oversimplified the process, which we know to be false since the outed emails from Wayne Poe's secret little cabal group show us that they did this all with the goal of "making things look better in comparison to Trek".
Who is “misrepresenting” one’s position now? This ridiculous libel is a conspiracy theory minded, fucking crazy delusion. As though Saxton would risk his reputation and career to win an online debate. Do you really think that we value this silly diversion from real life as much as you do?

1. At no point has Saxton ever commented on Star Wars’s technical capabilities in relation to Star Trek. At no point has he ever implied that he is a fan of Star Trek, or knows anything about it. To claim otherwise is to suggest that Saxton has been deliberately hiding his role in the debate for what…15 years? Ever since the early years of the internet! Did he and Wong have it all planned out ahead of time? Did Saxton spend god-knows how much time writing a detailed website for the sole purpose of winning an online fantasy debate? Why is he hiding this from you? And why would he thank Mike Wong and other Warsies at the end of the ICSII, if he were secretly conspiring with them?
2. If Saxton wanted to win the debate with the ICS’s, he could have done so, with ridiculous ease. Simply add in snippets rationalizing every possible contradiction to his sources. Trust me; he certainly did not write the book with any such intention.
3. Have you ever considered the possibility that Saxton consulted Wong and other Warsies because many of them have relevant university degrees, and Mr. Anderson does not? Have you ever considered why all of the scientists and engineers favor the Warsie side, and that, to my knowledge, not a single scientist, engineer or anyone with a relevant degree has ever been confirmed to support Trek?
4. Have you ever wondered why, for example, Atomic Rockets, a completely unrelated, but scientifically centered site, cites stardestroyer.net as a source, yet nobody ever goes to this website for scientific information?

Really, this mentality of yours that there is an Evil Warsie Conspiracy to win a nerd debate is completely self delusional. Are you attempting to boost your own ego here?

Wait, wait a minute. Do you think that writing excessively long and often meaningless dissertations are a qualification for acceptability from a scientific standpoint? Really?
Saxton’s work is only “meaningless” because half of it is completely beyond all of us to calculate or replicate.

But your entire argument here is that we cannot "assume" that conventional physics apply to X incident in Star Wars. On this premise, every calculation you have EVER made is completely bunk, because it is based on modern scientific thought, and all of it collapses like a house of cards if you throw out CoE at a moments notice.
JMS and Anderson have both written here on this board as well as on their own websites very detailed essays on the nature of science fiction technologies. By that rationale, JMS and RSA have both equalled or surpassed Saxton and Wong many times over. But that's not how things work. The evidence has to be brought to bear. In the case of Saxton and Wong, and in the case we are focused on here, Brian Young, the evidence was clearly cherry picked or misrepresented to achieve the highest possible power outputs for SW ships, and in some cases, they did so with the ulterior motive of achiving superiority over Trek.
No, Darkstar’s scientific knowledge is not a fraction of that of Saxton’s or Wong’s, but he still feels entitled to call them out of using "bad science". Could you imagine how many head would roll if we hired a team of scientists to cross check your own theories on Star War technology and yields?

“I don’t assume that Newtonian physics apply to Star Wars.”

Again, here we go again with the misrepresentation of your opposition. A classic bad Warsie tactic, if ever there was one. Too bad there's not another mod, this would grounds for another warning.
No, it would not. Calling me a faggot would, but in a board inhabited by neo-cons, could I be surprised that homophobia is tolerated here?
It's been pointed out to you that only one TL bolt ever observed did that.
Nope. The blaster bolt that hits Luke Skywalker’s artificial hand in RotJ does as well.
If that was a Trek phaser doing that, Warsies would declare it to be a statistical outlier and dismiss it.
Really? Feel free to show me a single instance in which Mike Wong EVER breaks suspension of disbelief in analyzing primary or even secondary canon. The only time I have ever observed him doing this was in the case of magically changing ship sizes.

Saxton has never done this with primary canon, not even for the sound in space!

The more you suspend SoD, the more you shift away from a Scientific analysis of canon to a literary analysis of canon, and that’s my entire point.

The Death Star issue has been stomped to death and you keep ignoring the huge Spacedock and Starbase 74 space stations, among many others that are bigger in volume than even the largest SSDs. Each one of the SB 74 stations are big enough for 11,000 or more Galaxy or Sovereign class starships. And there are at least 4 such stations. But this has been all brought up to you before, and you have hand waved it all away. Never even addressed how such a thing factors into the resource and industrial capability of the Federation.
No, I did not. I simply pointed out to you that none of this even adds up to a fraction of the engineering feat that the Death Star is, because none of these space stations needed to go FTL, because none of them needed to be able to handle the inconceivable levels of stress needed for this moon sized battle station to accelerate at even one km/s^2 without immediately collapsing upon itself.

You don’t seem to understand that a single larger object, with a few exceptions, is exponentially more difficult to construct than several smaller ones, because the stresses and logistics involve increase tenfold for every tiny mass and volume increase. Do you think that countering the construction of the Empire State building with the fact that numerous cathedrals were constructed in the 16th century puts the 16th century Spanish on parity with the 20th century United States in industrial and engineering capabilities?

Your immobile space stations don’t need to worry much about size at all. A battle station capable of circumnavigating a gas giant does. Remember that strength increases by area; gravity and stresses will be proportional to volume.

To go back to my Empire state building example, the structure has to withstand the force of gravity by more than a smaller structure; this scales cubically. Yet its increased loading strength only increases by a power of two. And the Death Star must be able to accelerate far faster than the force of gravity.

So:

1. All of the Federation’s observed space stations, built up over decades or even centuries, combined with its entire Starfleet, don’t add up to a single Death Star in mass; never mind the imperial fleet, or the various space stations the Empire possesses that make your own look like Hoovervilles.
2. The difficulty needed to build a larger structure is exponentially larger than the difficulty needed to build a smaller one.
3. The Death Star must be able to handle the stresses of rapid acceleration; your space stations don’t.

Proof? Where's your numbers? You've tossed out a random number in the past, but how does that compare in context to a small, primitive starship from the 23rd century on impulse power only?
Wait, you’re asking me for proof that my own numbers are higher than yours now? Yes, I understand that impulse power could be e17 watts; I also know that:

1. Impulse engines can warp. They are obviously not conventional drives.
2. Impulse power has, on multiple occasions, been diverted to help boost main power, which implies that there is no four orders of magnitude in difference between the two for your calculation to compare with my own.
Why not? Proof? Where is the evidence? Repulsorlift is used inside gravity wells, and even antigravity is used near it as per the Death Star's approach to Alderaan in the ANH novelization when the battlestation got within "anti-gravity range".
And in order to not make gravitational potential energy magically disappear, anti-gravity must require energy, as would repulsorlifts. They are not free energy. If Dooku used repulsorlifts, that the ship did not have to make the potential energy of the craft go somewhere.


But if you go that route, why don't we calculate the energy required for the heavily damaged Galileo shuttlecraft in TOS' "The Galileo Seven" to achive orbit on a secondary power source in just a matter of seconds.
I haven’t seen the footage. If you possess several examples of this consistently occurring in Trek, as I have myself, then sure.

That is a very skewed and faulty conclusion at best. You have to show how these known, canon technologies can be dismissed (they can't), and you have to show why they violate CoM&E.
[/quote]

Because if you decrease mass, you decrease energy. Conservation of mass states that any lost mass must be converted into energy. Repulsorlifts and anti-grav exist in Wars, but they must require energy. So no, this isn’t a “skewed and faulty conclusion at best” to anyone who understands basic physics.

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 10:53 pm
by Mr. Oragahn
StarWarsStarTrek wrote:Mike, I'm not scientist or engineer.
. . .

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Thu May 03, 2012 11:51 pm
by Mr. Oragahn
I'm going through the ICS mov file. It already starts out with the same BS as before. The only difference, I'm afraid, is that it weighs 177 megabytes instead of 20 kilobytes.

- Curtis Saxton has zero interest in Star Trek and knows very little about it. SWTC and Saxton's distance from versus debates. Saxton was rather quick to edit those pages out as soon as he was told about this little find.
- Apology of Saxton's numbers because numbers had to be put into the SWTC. Namely, since Saxton was the obvious choice, there can't be anything wrong from LFL's position. But the problem has never been LFL's understanding of the crap in that book.
- Pulls the same Dooku escape in AOTC as evidence of super duper accelerations. Even counts the time elapsed on screen (11 seconds). Wow. SWST tried the same nonsense recently.
- The same old Death Star orbit argument to measure the speed of fighters and, again, a totally baffling ignorance of principles of editing. He notes that the decision to circle Yavin was stupid but doesn't explore the implications of why this happened, and prefers, indeed, to imply that the Imperial technicians are dimwits.
- Picks the short meeting of ROTS where Obi-Wan is about to move to Utapau and leaves the cruiser his fighter was in. BY counts everything in screen time, as he did for the rest. There's not a single reason to believe that the sequence of the briefing started just after the cruiser was seen passing over the camera as it barely begun taking off. But that doesn't seem obvious enough to BY, because camera cuts can't also cut off screen time. I bet you didn't know about that rule.
- He does it again with Obi-Wan leaving Mustafar or Pau City, Han leaving Mos Eisley, the first rebel convoy leaving Hoth. Fuck. He measures EVERYTHING in goddamn screen time. That must be a huge trolling video. Yet it's supposed to explain why the AOTC:ICS is so accurate and why he was put in the credits of the book. This level of chutzpah in dishonesty or sheer stupidity is staggering!
- Then again, as for Dooku leaving Geonosis, we're supposed to believe that those ships press the gas pedal and achieve thousands of gees while in the atmosphere of a planet, only to slow down to a crawl. Of course Vader wanted to land inside the Executor, but notice how he's still a far distance from it. With the multi-thousand gees of deceleration, if each of Vader's seconds are so precious as to punch the turbo boost from the moment the ship takes off (it has to, otherwise his ship couldn't achieve those ground to high orbit within 23 seconds if they had to reach a very high altitude on the usual subsonic/sonic/supersonic/hypersonic speeds), then why slow down to such a sluggish speed so far from the Executor, probably some 30 km away from the landing bay?
- Then another screen time measuring as the Millennium Falcon is chased by three TIE fighters and leaves Bespin. Let's notice that, for some odd reason, you don't see the Millenium Falcon use any of that mighty acceleration. Yet we're supposed to think they had accelerated to far distance within 6 seconds. BY thinks it might be possible it wouldn't be real time, but quite unlikely. Or "not necessarily but probably RT", as he said. :)
- The typical Endor circling jump to trap the rebels. Best solved with a small hyperjump. After all, Vader did it to save his butt from the Death Star explosion, as per the novel "Death Star". Eu is allowed, since we're dealing with another EU book. Let's notice that since the Imperial knew everything about Endor's system, its orbit and all that, they could have had planned a very careful and precise short jump many hours in advance and even made tests.
- More bullshit acceleration claims. You'll love the legitimation of the Acclamators' acceleration figures: they flew right into Geonosis' atmosphere unnoticed. It can only be explained by those thousands of gees (in atmosphere, of course). Guess we didn't see the much expected expanding wall of overpressure resulting from such an arrival, eh? Oh, wait. Was that supposed to be an objective scientific method?
- Thus hypermatter, thus troutatons, etc.
- Wait. Death Star firepower scaled down argument. If he had not pronounced 2012 at the beginning of the video, I'd believe he recorded that crap ten years ago.
- Slave-I blasting asteroids. Supposedly proves the terajoules.
- Turbolasers are pure light, thus multi-light minute ranges. The dude really belives his shit? No wonder why this whole debate went into circles. And the opposition supposedly was akin to creationists, according to Wongies. Let me laugh. He's really that clueless.

That's his definition of solid benchmarks.
Either he's really not that bright, or a sick sophist.

In fact, who's going to look at his videos, safe for those like us who have a morbid curiosity into reading outdated nonsense from someone who missed the whole crucial battle years ago?
No, really, it is just that pathetic. Just as the SDN thread. The amount of owed yet missed real criticism is huge. And apparently he pits ST vs B5(s young races and thinks that the UFP wins by a short arm. It's just gibberish.

Useless website. Spare your own time.

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Fri May 04, 2012 12:10 am
by Khas
Wasn't it agreed early on in the versus debate that B5 loses easily to just about every other sci-fi series out there?

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Fri May 04, 2012 12:39 am
by Enterprise E
I've heard that B5 can put up a good fight against New Battlestar Galactica and maybe a couple of others, but yes, against any force with shields, save for exceedingly weak sci-fi universes, of which I know none, it would likely lose. Against those without shields, though, it's wide open from what I hear.

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Fri May 04, 2012 12:43 am
by Khas
It's pretty much on par with nBSG and Firefly. That's really all I can think of that B5 has a chance against.

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Fri May 04, 2012 4:10 am
by Mike DiCenso
Mass Effect, potentially would be another. Probably a pretty even fight all things considered. Anyway, I'm thinking of a review of Brian's case study ST vs B5 video. I just viewed it and was absolutely disgusted at the horrible dishonesty, which took the form of blatant cherry picking to balance things out between B5 and ST, which really wouldn't be the case. It'd just be a total Federation stomping of the Minbari. One of the things that made me shake my head was when Brian held up the non-canon TNG TM and used non-canon numbers from it rather than compare actual canon TOS episodes against the known canon speed examples from B5 he gave. But then Brian knows that using canon examples would allow a totally lop-sided fight in favor of the Federation. So of course he won't mention that the Enterprise in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" traveled to the actual edge of the galaxy and back in a short time. Or that in "The Squire of Gothos", the ship was 900 light years from Earth, and yet made it back to Earth in the second season and to other distant parts of the Federation and other territories without it taking many years to do so.

And that's just the start. But I'll need some RL time, so that'll have to wait a little while.
-Mike

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Fri May 04, 2012 2:03 pm
by 2046
An extremely general review:

1. I hate videos and podcasts. Nothing angers me more than if I'm trying to look something up and the info I want is embedded in some video or podcast that takes ages to search through to get the tidbit I need. That's where text rules, not to mention that text puts you out there readily quotable.

Making a video-based site to appeal to modern audiences, as he suggests, is probably a really awesome thing to do from a marketing perspective, and there's a chance that sort of thing could go viral or something and make him famous. But I'll still hate it.

2. I really hate to say something so shallow (he was pretty nice by e-mail back in the day), especially given that he's a fellow resident of the southeastern United States, but dear sweet lord I can hear banjo music when he talks. I popped onto the Youtube vlog thingy and I just plain couldn't listen. There's something about the Alerbammer twang that takes it to a level beyond a Gawgia drawl or Cajun sloop or even a Mi'sippeh backwoods twang, though some Mississippians can come close.

That is, happily, an affliction I do not suffer from (though I do argue "ain't" is a perfectly good word, grammar nazis be damned).

That's actually why I think he has a chance of going viral and becoming famous, albeit perhaps not in the way he might wish. It's kinda like the fame of the Swamp People. ("Choot 'em, Obi-Wan, you mah only hope!")

But if it works for him, grand.

3. I like the old Gateway used as a lamp stand.

==============================

Specifics:

While writing the above, the .mov files were downloading for the ICS article and warp strafing, two topics I'm rather immediately familiar with.

ICS:

1. For all the talk of banjo music, there's such reverence when saying "Dr. Curtis Saxton" that even the accent seemed to drop away a bit. I was amused.

2. He opens with the old yarn from Saxton that Saxton doesn't care about Trek. Of course, one could describe that as one of the "silliest Saxtonist fallacies", to coin a phrase. Or would that be an act by an evil "Trekkist"?

3. Skipping forward a few minutes (I do NOT have a purty mouth, and I wish you'd stop saying so!), I came upon circa 14 minutes the apparent suggestion that the RotS fleet headed to Utapau got to orbit superfast, which is a claim I've never even heard before because no one should make it. 'How long was the meeting?' Really? Skipping further:

4. At 20 minutes we have the Imperial fleet trap from RotJ, which is known to be a crap example of velocity because emerging from behind the limb of the planet does not require a great deal of acceleration capability.

Besides which, given #3 and now this (both the sort of thing SWST's been on about of late), I'm led to wonder if SWST is in fact Brian Young. Next time I read one of SWST's posts I'm going to set it to banjo music and see if it fits. Onward:

5. 29:45 . . . oh good grief. I really don't like the argument where people take modern ship designations and try to apply it to the name "Star Destroyer" to make it out to be a small ship. That's just silly. He even argues that the ISD isn't much of a carrier.

Hell, it's larger than the Jedi Cruisers from a generation beforehand, and that Cruiser was quite largely hollow for fighter and small ship operations. And let's not forget the Trade Federation battleship which was hollow all the way around to the reactors.

Put simply, a Star Destroyer is a large and powerful warship in Star Wars. It isn't the largest, but it isn't some little weenie scarcely worthy of notice either.

6. 36:00 . . . is he really claiming ten light-minute weapons range in the canon? Oh wow, he's basing it on the luminance of the bolt as if that's the only limiting factor. Because galvened particle beams only go poof when the light goes off.

Oh my god, "too close to the system" means, he says, they're outside the system, and "they're already talking about bombing the planet" means it was within range. But we can see the bloody planet when they emerge from hyperspace!

Good lord, man. See, this is another reason why I don't like videos. Surely if he was actually writing this for a webpage he would've found it necessary to research it, but if you can just spout off on the topic in a convincing-sounding manner you've made a 'good' video. It's kinda like the speeches of a politician, really, and just as empty and disingenuous.

Warp Strafing:

He says circa 2:15 there are instances of warp-driven ships in TOS doing battle at warp perpendicular to one another (different vectors, he says, but he made an X with his hands). Where the hell is that? And if that's true, then how can you possibly argue against warp strafing? Such a battle would be even more troublesome from a technological level than a warp strafe!

4:29 . . . Sulu notes that the attack has been broken off and the Klingons are paralleling the Enterprise, yet Young is counting the seconds discussing how long it takes the Klingons to swing around for another pass. That's just insane . . . I mean, he's got the video of Sulu saying the attack is no longer going on right then! Good lord, man.

Skipping to 21:00 . . . I don't have time for a damn video. I could've read his entire argument by now.

He suggests that the high-warp "Journey to Babel" ship being missed by the E-prime would suggest that the Enterprise can't do warp-strafing. Um, hello, that ship was zipping by at warp 8. That's helluva-fast, and far faster than would be needed against a pre-warp or similar ship with crappy sensors and tiny range.

(Hey, why no Remastered?)

He argues one shot per 21 seconds as if to suggest that the rate of fire is a problem, but the ship was at warp 8!

28:15ish . . . Interesting note about the Picard Maneuver, disproving the suggestion that warp strafing events are really just dropping to sublight.

But then he says warp strafing couldn't work because you'd always be fighting at a planet. Didn't we just hear about Vader telling Ozzel he came out of hyperspace too close to the system?

35:00 . . . he concludes that warp strafing is possible, but not the end-all be-all on account of rate of fire and other issues. At least he concluded somewhat correctly, though he says it "takes about a minute" to swing around. Didn't he just say that it was one shot per 21 seconds for a screaming-fast ship?

That's another reason I hate video. You can contradict yourself within a couple of proverbial paragraphs and many people will fail to notice. And, of course, it's not like one can do exact quoting without a lot of effort. Ugh.

Okay, I'm done with this. If someone wants to do transcripts I'll read the arguments, but unless it's really important I really, really, really don't want to waste my time with this video crap again.

Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Posted: Fri May 04, 2012 2:07 pm
by 2046
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm going through the ICS mov file.
Crap. Wish I'd read that before wasting my time on it. Oh well. Good job . . . you were more patient than I given that you watched the entire thing.