Starfleet Jedi

http://www.scifights.net/SciFights.net/Welcome.html

Interesting move, to use video instead of text, but he really presents some insightful arguments.

I'd recommend that you watch his videos on ICS's, even if you are the most rabid Trekkie alive.

I recommend watching the armor section for ST, even if you're the most Rabid Warsie of all... ;)


And he did make one mistake when discussing armor:
In the Klingon escape example, from TNG, the Phasers the guard fire have the same effects (sparks and smoke) as the Klingon ones, which we know were set to kill...
Yet he assumes the first few shots from the Starfleet guard were on stun...
Their effects on all three shots were identical, so we can easily assume they were on kill...
Which shows Klingon armor capable of resisting lower kill settings...
One shot kills in DS9 implies then the use of more powerful settings...

I'd recommend that you watch his videos on ICS's, even if you are the most rabid Trekkie alive.

I would recommend paying attention to the fact that the book gives guns to the Acclamator WHEN NONE HAVE EVER BEEN SEEN IN FILM OR TCW...
But of course, Brian didn't notice this... :)

Oh god... now I'm remembering the phantom gun discussion and the picture where the guns were circled... oh that was good for a bunch of laughs.

There are a few discrepencies in the acceleration scenes as well, although there are some undisputable evidence (Dooku's orbit and a few others)...

As for ST analyses, his Federation Territory analysis ignores DS9 examples entirely, sometimes ignores that his speed examples were at lower Warp Speed, etc...

And again, he perpetuates the "Arrow to the back of the neck/bodyglove" fallacy, while his HD video clearly shows it protruding from the backpack part of the trooper's armor... :)

Hyperspace tracking video is very interesting... :)

Praeothmin wrote:There are a few discrepencies in the acceleration scenes as well, although there are some undisputable evidence (Dooku's orbit and a few others)...

Well, we can argue the Acclamator's guns all we want, but it doesn't really matter. Dooku's sail-ship scene in AotC is quite indisputable evidence of SW acceleration speeds, from which one can exprapolate reactor power. From there, everything else can be estimated easily enough.

Based on the Geonosis scene; if it Padme took 10 seconds to rush over to her boyfriend and Obi Wan, the sailboat had to have accelerated at 20,000 G's. If a star destroyer could accelerate at roughly this speed; they are consistently portrayed as being faster than the Millennium Falcon, and we estimate its mass as a 200 meter by 1000 meter cylinder that is 10% solid made out of iron, its engine power alone would be around 2.2 * 10^22 watts.

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:Based on the Geonosis scene; if it Padme took 10 seconds to rush over to her boyfriend and Obi Wan, the sailboat had to have accelerated at 20,000 G's. If a star destroyer could accelerate at roughly this speed; they are consistently portrayed as being faster than the Millennium Falcon, and we estimate its mass as a 200 meter by 1000 meter cylinder that is 10% solid made out of iron, its engine power alone would be around 2.2 * 10^22 watts.

Trying to quickly reverse engineer that number using Saxton's formula (P=F*c), I got a number that was a little different, but at least within an order of magnitude of yours, which is good enough for now. (Don't know which one was the more correct; maybe we rounded our numbers differently. This time of day, I'm not even sure I did my maths right.)

In any case, the problem with estimating engine power based on acceleration would be that in the EU, we have multiple mentions of Star Wars engines using mass lightening technobabble of the kind that's seemingly become endemic to visual sci-fi in recent years. Which makes estimating the "m" part of F=ma ... difficult, to say the least.

Plus, total reactor power does not directly translate in firepower, as the movies so nicely demonstrated...

And, ST ships have shown similar accelerations too... :)

General Donner wrote: In any case, the problem with estimating engine power based on acceleration would be that in the EU, we have multiple mentions of Star Wars engines using mass lightening technobabble of the kind that's seemingly become endemic to visual sci-fi in recent years. Which makes estimating the "m" part of F=ma ... difficult, to say the least.

I do not recall the EU ever mentioning mass lightening technology. The closest we have are inertial dampeners, and it is an incredible leap in logic to assume that they actually lower an objects mass, rather than its interia.

And if they really could magically lower an object's mass by several orders of magnitude (the amount needed to make the two universes even remotely comparable in reactor power), why could they not install them on AT-ATs and have them jump around like mechas? Why not install them on on tank turrets and let infantry carry a 200 mm cannon in each hand, firing them without slightest bit of recoil or strain? The ability to handwave conservation of mass lets you effectively break physics to ridiculous margins.

You could argue that mass lightening devices are incredibly complex and only work on sizes larger even than AT-ATs, but this would not rationalize the ability of single manned starfighters to also accelerate at such high speeds.

Huh, so Brian's back at it again. In all honesty, I'm really disappointed in his site. Granted it is not finished, but the Federation territory commentary is the biggest piece of cherry picking I've ever seen. Not to mention, the examples Brian provides are mostly all TNG, not DS9, VOY, barely any TOS, and no ST:ENT. It's as though Brian were still stuck in the early to mid 1990s.

A really blatant example of Brian's cherry picking and likely outright dishonesty is found in the clips from "The Chase". He shows the map of the galaxy seen in Picard and Galen's conversation, which is a good start, but then selectively pulls out of context quotes to make it seem as if all starships in the Federation need months. to travel that distance. Furthermore, he (likely) deliberately did not point out that Galen's path is traced over a 40,000 light year long swath! So slow freighters and a shuttle require "months". So a slow little shuttle or tramp freighter can average 400 light years a day, assuming "months means a little over 90 days). Furthermore, the purpose of the route tracing was to mark out a series of destinations that had to be stopped at, possibly for a number of days or weeks to investigate the DNA puzzle. But don't take my word for it, here's the dialog of the whole scene, courtesy of Chakotay.net (aka Chrissie's Transcripts):

GALEN: Good morning, Mister Picard.

PICARD: Professor.

GALEN: The Vulcan ship will take us as far as DS Four. An Al-Leyan transport is scheduled to arrive at the station three weeks later. They'll take us as far as Caere, and then we'll use the shuttle to get us to Indri Eight, our first stop.

PICARD: Professor, I'm afraid I won't be going. The Enterprise isn't something that I can leave and then come back to. If I go, I go for good. It's not something I'm not prepared to do.

GALEN: This is not some undergraduate study project that you're turning down. This is the chance of a lifetime. Don't make the same mistake twice.

PICARD: You don't believe that my career in Starfleet has been a mistake.

GALEN: What are you doing at this very moment? A study mission. You're like some Roman centurion out patrolling the provinces, maintenancing a dull and bloated Empire.

PICARD: We both know that's not true.

GALEN: I know this. I know that as a scholar, you're nothing but a dilettante. Years ago, I gave you the opportunity to become the finest archaeologist of your generation. Your achievements could have outstripped even my own, but no, you decided to reject a life of profound discovery. You walked out on me.

PICARD: I never wanted to become

GALEN: Will you come with me?

PICARD: I can't.

GALEN: I'll be going.

PICARD: But Professor, you're not scheduled to catch the Vulcan ship for another two days.

GALEN: There's nothing for me here. Goodbye, Captain.

However, before that Brian missed the big doozy of a qualifier:


GALEN: I'm cannot, Mister Picard. That information comes with a price. Your agreement to join me on the final leg of this expedition.

PICARD: For how long?

GALEN: Three months, perhaps a year. iIf I had complete diplomatic access and a starship, t'd be a matter of weeks. But as it is, we'll have only my shuttle and whatever arrangement we can make with transports, combined with our talents.

PICARD: Why do you need my help in this?

That's enough, right. Wrong. The Enterprise-D, which is at that time probably among the fastest Federation starships can do that route as outlined in days:

TROI: I know how much the Professor meant to you and how much you want to find out what happened, but staring at these numbers isn't going to bring him back. The conference on Atalia Seven has been scheduled for six months. Starfleet is relying on your mediation efforts to

PICARD: Counsellor, this is not simply a case of me taking the Enterprise and its crew on some wild goose chase to purge myself of guilt and remorse. I will not let Galen's death to be in vain. Now, if that means inconveniencing a few squabbling delegates for a few days, then so be it. I will take the full responsibility.
(and he goes back to staring at numbers)

TROI: Captain.

So the E-D can traverse 40,000 light years in as little as 2 days and as high as 6 days tops (otherwise it won't be a "a few days", but many).

That's just for starters. Brian's Body Armor commentary is just as bad with significant omissions, simply because for some strange reason, he's stuck in the early 1990s where Trek is concerned, and he fails, again perhaps deliberately, to show us the body armor worn in DS9, namely the armor seen in "Nor the Battle to the Strong ", which you can see here:



And then there's the strange humanoid armored thing from "Business as Usual":



That looks more armored than any clonetrooper or stormtrooper we've ever seen in the SW movies or TCW. Speaking of TCW, I've yet to see any commentary on him from that, and he keeps on touting the stormtrooper armor as being airtight spacesuits with built-in mini-HUDs and so on, which is never, ever shown in the canon of the movies or TCW!
-Mike

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:http://www.scifights.net/SciFights.net/Welcome.html

Interesting move, to use video instead of text, but he really presents some insightful arguments.

I'd recommend that you watch his videos on ICS's, even if you are the most rabid Trekkie alive.

I did watch that finally, and I see nothing new being brought to the table, except the same tired old fallacies. Other people here have brought up the flaw, and I even put in a pretty detailed deconstruction of part of his Federation Territory "Case Study", which clearly cherry picks and even presents only TNG series and one TOS examples, and then not a complete one.

One thing that bothered me is Brian's insistence that Yavin is bigger than our own real-life Jupiter without even the slightest offer of evidence for that. We can't use the Rebel command center graphics since it clearly is not an accurate scale representation, but we can get a good idea from the Falcon's approach to Yavin and the the X-wing flight sequence to get an idea of Yavin's size to the Yavin IV moon. To be honest, if Yavin IV is Venus or Earth-sized (approximately 12,000-13,000 km), then Yavin Prime itself is not that huge. One EU graphic shows that Yavin and Yavin IV in comparison here. Yavin IV is only 4.2 times smaller than the gas giant, which means assuming Y4 is Earth-sized at 12,750 km, Yavin Prime is 53,833 km wide, which in turn is much smaller than the 142,700 km Jupiter. In fact, Yavin Prime is only slightly larger than our real life Neptune and Uranus. If this bears out, it would severely reduce any acceleration numbers derived from it, including the Death Star's maximum velocity.
-Mike

General Donner wrote:

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:Based on the Geonosis scene; if it Padme took 10 seconds to rush over to her boyfriend and Obi Wan, the sailboat had to have accelerated at 20,000 G's. If a star destroyer could accelerate at roughly this speed; they are consistently portrayed as being faster than the Millennium Falcon, and we estimate its mass as a 200 meter by 1000 meter cylinder that is 10% solid made out of iron, its engine power alone would be around 2.2 * 10^22 watts.

Trying to quickly reverse engineer that number using Saxton's formula (P=F*c), I got a number that was a little different, but at least within an order of magnitude of yours, which is good enough for now. (Don't know which one was the more correct; maybe we rounded our numbers differently. This time of day, I'm not even sure I did my maths right.)

In any case, the problem with estimating engine power based on acceleration would be that in the EU, we have multiple mentions of Star Wars engines using mass lightening technobabble of the kind that's seemingly become endemic to visual sci-fi in recent years. Which makes estimating the "m" part of F=ma ... difficult, to say the least.

This is a big problem for Star Trek as well as Star Wars. Mass lightening tech is quite probable. What I find funny is that Brian claims things are inescapable, yet we routinely here on this site and on others find all kinds of way around it. The fact is, neither he nor Saxton or anyone else didn't truly try to disprove anything. They made up their minds and went with the numbers they wanted. Furthermore, if you can apply that thinking to Star Wars, why not apply it to Star Trek or any other SF franchise? I mean we do know the mass of the TOS Enterprise and Voyager (nearly 1 million long tons and 700,000 metric tons respectively)and we have seen them perform feats of acceleration far in excess of their Star Wars counterparts. The Enterprise in ST:TMP's run from Earth to Jupiter requires at least a 34,000 m/s², or 3,460 gs acceleration, which if we plug the numbers in:


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Inputs:
mass (m) ton long ton metric ton short
velocity (v) meter/second



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Conversions:
mass (m) = 1000000 ton long = 1016046908.7994 kilogram
velocity (v) = 34000 meter/second = 34000 meter/second


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Solution:
kinetic energy (K) = 5.8727511328607E+17 joule


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Other Units:
kinetic energy (K) = 5.8727511328607E+17 joule
kinetic energy (K) = 5.5662940670648E+14 british thermal unit
kinetic energy (K) = 1.4026825099983E+17 calorie
kinetic energy (K) = 3.6654813564618E+36 electronvolt
kinetic energy (K) = 5.8727511328607E+24 erg
kinetic energy (K) = 4.3315189477277E+17 foot-pound
kinetic energy (K) = 5.8727511328607E+17 newton-meter
kinetic energy (K) = 5566272186.2839 therm

About 5,800 petajoules. And this from a mid-size Federation starship on impulse power only. If we use the E-D, which we can reasonably extrapolate is 6-24 times more massive than Voyager or the Constitution-class Enterprise, the power output gets really scary since the E-D has managed to get from Saturn to Earth in 19 minutes on impulse power only.
-Mike

Just for grins I decided to do some more quick and dirty math using this screen cap found here. The distance from Yavin Prime and it's Y4 moon cannot be accurately determined, but we can with photometrics get a rough idea. Assuming 70 mm film, Y4 subtends 13.15 mm or 5.32 to 1 in ratio. Assuming Y4 is 12,750 km wide, that would 5.32 x 12,750 = 67,830 km distance from the relatively stationary camera. Unfortunately for Brian Young, this means that since he claims Red and Gold squadrons are passing by Yavin Prime, the gas giant cannot be Jovian-sized, and is likely in the size range I calculated earlier using the EU comparison drawing. His conclusions are inescapable in a pig's eye.
-Mike