ST.com

[Mike DiCenso]

I would hazard a guess that if George Lucas actually did something like that, it would be just so that he could assert once and for all just who Star Wars really belongs to, and what it is about. ;-)
-Mike

[watchdog]

Well I remember reading once that Lucas was a Trekkie and after his success with American graffiti, he was trying to buy the rights to trek. Speculation at best. I would imagine that if he came out and claimed that some elements of trek could easily beat wars (I dont for a moment believe that he would say trek is better than wars), the warsies would be mostly split. some would take his word for it but many others (including I think Mike Wong) would ignore him compleatly pointing out that despite his oppinion there is no evidence in the films to support his oppinion (ignoring the fact that there is no evidence in the films to support their wankery). I'd like to think that if they annoyed him enough, he just might make another special edition ment to destroy all their preconcieved notions wink,wink.

[Praeothmin]

JMS, they really seem not to like you... :)

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... &start=450

[GStone]

The pic on that page showing an R something unit getting hit by a beam is actually interesting. The level of the explosion is what? Somewhere less than a couple claymores. It's doubtful these are supposed to be just love taps. So, if they weren't at full power, the Trade Fed's TLs were probably pretty high.

[Mike DiCenso]

I'am curious: since where or when has JMS claimed that the droids on Amidala's ship were destroyed by flack bursts?

Did I miss a thread, or is this Aratech guy just pulling this all out from his ass?

Based on what I'am reading in this thread so far, it seems that they are going off on some partial truths and a lot of mistakes, and or deliberate misquotings from JMS' site and what JMS has written elsewhere. For example this one from our beloved Kane Starkiller:


Kane Starkiller wrote:

Kane Starkiller
Padawan Learner



Joined: 21 Jan 2005
Posts: 485

Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2007 2:46 pm Post subject:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What I want to know is from whose ass did JMSpock pull that 100 gigaton number for Enterprises main deflector beam.
_________________

As far as I know, the only time JMS ever mentions 100 gigatons for anything is for the amount of work the Romulan plasma weapon has to do to literally crush down to dust and debris Earth Outpost 4 and it's at least 2-mile wide asteroid in "Balance of Terror" [TOS1]
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

Ah, never mind, I finally after a couple weeks of not paying any attention to the messy business at ST.com, checked up there, and found that JMS estmates the E-D could have output possibly hundreds of gigatons for the nav deflector weapon used against the Borg cubeship in the BoBW episodes.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

I actually mentioned where the figure came from - warp core power generation figures, but apparently I didn't stress it heavily enough for all spectators.

The deflector beam weapon is stated to use the full maximum warp core output of the Enterprise, which - by the fact that the Enterprise can go to warp right next to a sun-like Star - is then around 100 GT/s. The total energy of the beam, then - recall that the beam is sustained for quite some time - is actually on the order of teratons, which fairly closely matches the ICS figures.

It could, by some evidence, be up to two orders of magnitude higher on the rate, but I find that rate of antimatter burn mildly implausible.

I did suggest that the droids were blown off by flak bursts, because that's precisely what the low resolution YouTube shot suggests. The screencaps posted in the SDN thread show otherwise. I have been known to be wrong, and I don't have a problem admitting that when it happens.

I still have trouble believing that the Trade Federation ship was actually aiming for the droids, rather than getting them by sheer luck in the barrage of shots that they were firing, but it's quite a bit more plausible with good resolution screencaps.

They don't seem to like me at all, but there's a lot more posting going on by them in the SDN thread than the ST.com thread, and very little material argument at all. My first (and longest) post in the new thread wasn't replied to at all.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Oh, and would anyone care to drop Peptuck on SDN a note to the effect that I explained precisely what "limited range without refueling" means regarding warp in the second thread, in that first post of mine?

Which is really a red herring (aside from being refuted countless times in TNG and DS9). It doesn't matter how fast they move, its whether it is sustainable and they have the range to get where they're going - which is, oh, apparently limited by fuel concerns, which comes out to the exact same problem.

Apparently, this retard has never paid attention to real wars, like World War II's Pacific campaign.

He's apparently failed to notice the quantity of the range (sprints ~1000 light years, which is enough for defensive coverage of the Federation), or that I've noted this limits the Federation's offensive options against the Empire, or that I've quantified precisely how much better we can expect the Empire's ships to be deployed as a result:

The Empire is actually at a peak firepower disadvantage to gauge by the bulk of the evidence (higher canon in particular), in spite of its much larger ships. The ICS figures are outliers; I can and have found similar outliers for Trek ships.

Hyperdrive has an advantage on the large scale; warp ships only move at hyperdrive speeds for relatively short distances... such as would be seen defending the Federation. On the minus side, Federation ships - unlike those seen in Star Wars - can track FTL ships.

Unfortunately, warp has severe tactical advantages. You can jump to warp more quickly, easily, and within gravitational fields a hundred times more intense than what completely blocks hyperdrive.

To top it off, Federation ships have impulse drive, which is several violations of normal physical behavior past ion drive, meaning that Federation ships have the advantage of tactical mobility in both FTL and STL terms.

Now, not only do they have superior tactical mobility, and somewhat firepower, they have a complete lock on sensors, fire control, and range. While an ISD should, by sheer brute size, be able to come close to competing in sustained firepower, Federation starships can fly and fight circles around them... and there are close to as many Federation starships as ISDs.

The military equation reads thus:

Brute force to the Federation ten to one, ship for ship.
Tactical mobility to the Federation, ten to one, ship for ship.
Accuracy and range to the Federation, a hundred to one, ship for ship.
Sensors to the Federation, a hundred to one, ship for ship.
Dirty tricks to the Federation a thousand to one.
Weapons of mass destruction to the Federation ten to one. The Federation has destroyed more planets by accident than the Empire intentionally.

Numbers of ships to the Empire, five to one in serious warships, with most likely fifty to one in independent scouts that cannot stand up to a serious warship of either franchise.
Strategic mobility to the Empire, a hundred to one for operating range of its biggest ships, meaning the Federation can expect to only engage with a tenth its fleet.

The Empire could, if fully engaged, thus deploy fifty serious warships to every one the Federation does - possibly - with an advantage of five to one in brute force, and a disadvantage of two to one in actual effective firepower, with the Federation ships able to choose when the fleets engage and disengage.

Advantage: To the defender for an invasion - Federation through superior ships, Empire through depth of territory to be conquered.

Strategic equation:

Annihilation is not an option politically. Mutually assured destruction is a technological possibility given sufficient effort, but the Empire is about conquest rather than destruction, and the Federation usually does not engage weapons of mass destruction unless it feels its survival is threatened.

The Rebellion tore apart the Empire without Federation aid, and effectively prevented it from operating any Death Stars. Federation and Rebellion will, realistically speaking, help each other a great deal.

Commitments "back home" in the Empire, including particularly the effort of keeping the Rebels from overthrowing the Empire and civil order, require the bulk of the numbers of the Imperial fleet stay home.

The Federation, however, can often call on allied support, allowing them to shake loose the equivalent of their entire fleet in deployable and allied forces for a defensive war in some cases, and deploy close to half their fleet in others.

Technological adaptivity favors the Federation in the short term; Federation ships are remarkably well designed for duplicating and adapting new technologies on the fly. It favors the Empire in the long term; once Imperial shipyards gear up to include Federation technologies, they will probably have a hundred times the production.

Long story short?

The Empire invades; takes a few worlds, gets a bloody nose, disintegrates much more quickly due to the Rebellion's more rapid successes combined with the short-term decline in Imperial military strength within the Star Wars galaxy.

Alternately, taking the wormhole the other way, the Federation discovers the Empire, gets on the wrong side of a Moff, "liberates" a few worlds, and ends up funding the Rebellion covertly while militarily deadlocked.

[watchdog]

As powerful as these guys claim those weapons are, a single glancing shot should have taken out all of the droids, and if they still think the TF was bullseying those droids, they need to get a better quality of crack to smoke

[Mr. Oragahn]

I actually mentioned where the figure came from - warp core power generation figures, but apparently I didn't stress it heavily enough for all spectators.

The deflector beam weapon is stated to use the full maximum warp core output of the Enterprise, which - by the fact that the Enterprise can go to warp right next to a sun-like Star - is then around 100 GT/s. The total energy of the beam, then - recall that the beam is sustained for quite some time - is actually on the order of teratons, which fairly closely matches the ICS figures.

It could, by some evidence, be up to two orders of magnitude higher on the rate, but I find that rate of antimatter burn mildly implausible.

I don't get the relation between the star's g field and warp.
For me, warp seemed so exotic that it ate little energy for folding space or whatever this thing does, no matter where it was used really.

I did suggest that the droids were blown off by flak bursts, because that's precisely what the low resolution YouTube shot suggests. The screencaps posted in the SDN thread show otherwise. I have been known to be wrong, and I don't have a problem admitting that when it happens.

The droids are directly hit, but all bolts explode in the exact same manner.

They didn't notice, of course, that despite the nearby flack and the fact that the bolt could brush against the hull so close even with the shields up, the droids were not troubled at all by the flak all around the ship.

Trying to shoot down a ship with hand grenade level shots.

I still have trouble believing that the Trade Federation ship was actually aiming for the droids, rather than getting them by sheer luck in the barrage of shots that they were firing, but it's quite a bit more plausible with good resolution screencaps.

However imagined that pityful excuse must be on crack. They couldn't even make most of the bolts hit the ship.
Aiming for small specs on the back of the ship would be stupid. Especially since the TF ship started to fire on the yatch even before the droids were out. Let's again notice that the accuracy didn't change at all from before and after the presence of the droids on the hull.
This is just such a stupid claim, it's pathetic one could actually believe in that nonsense even one second.

And, of course, we see the level of energy provided by these cannons.
We also need to remind them that when the shields were down, the ship was still rocked by explosions. The flak, the same explosions rocking the ship the same exact way when she had her shields up.

And of course, these are the same quad cannons used to shoot down fighters, which didn't get utterly vapourized when they were being hit.

They don't seem to like me at all, but there's a lot more posting going on by them in the SDN thread than the ST.com thread, and very little material argument at all. My first (and longest) post in the new thread wasn't replied to at all.

Most funny is that they didn't realize that it was, above all, a mockery of their own distorted logic. A cheap shot, showing where it can lead Star Trek if you apply the same amount of dishonesty, ignorance and cherry picking.

You admit, yourself, that you don't follow those wanked out interpretations.
The difference with them is that they do.

You got to love the irony (say hypocrisy), once more, when the spiritual leader jumps into the discussion to offer some of his much precious enlightment:

It's amazing how much information Trekkies can extract from so little as a single sentence fragment in dialogue. Even Christian fundamentalists are often loathe to be so reckless in their interpretation of Scripture.

Because it's not what they did with the BDZ definitions, and the way they reference the ICS has nothing to do with religious bigotry either. Of course.

[SSFPhoenix]

You should see them over. I thought I had seen them bashing the best they could before.....and making crap up.

oh yeah you might just wanna see their "poll" on the E-D.

[Mr. Oragahn]

You should see them over. I thought I had seen them bashing the best they could before.....and making crap up.

oh yeah you might just wanna see their "poll" on the E-D.

Well, it seems that you made a lot of mistakes in your argumentation as well, didn't you?

[Mr. Oragahn]

If you thought that pictures showing turbolasers bullseying R droid units will convince the Trekkies think again. Here is one from starfleetjedi and their ST.com thread:

Kane, since you're reading this, since you quote me, since you have an account here, why don't you post here. I'm not going to eat you, you know.
We have been in disagreement, just as we also found ourselves agreeing over a couple of points, and that even against Trek.
So what the hell are you on now?
Why bother calling me a Trekkie by the way? You've been on SFJN enough time to note that I've said multiple times I hardly was one. I proved, and that's funny, my actual lack of knowledge on just so many things on Trek, and have shown a passing interest for Trek that is largely inferior to that of many of you, at SDN.
I also directly attacked ideas the Trekkies usually took as granted, or greatly favoured, and I went on to show how even some data present on the homepages is not reliable.

Basically, for anyone in touch with reality, they'd know I'm all safe a Trekkie.
But the deal is that there's no in-between. It's either SDN or SFJN. I don't count on SB.com, since SDN's people have this site in their grasp, any reasoned debate about Star Wars that would start to dispute extravagant claims is impossible over there. Just as much as it's impossible over SDN, in fact.
Even more. The fact that I find myself arguing against lots of claims that originate from SDN don't make me more anti-SW than you.

So I go where we still can use all of the canon, and particularily the highest canon, and debate with an open mind. This does not mean most of the guys at SFJN are not biased towards Trek. Everyone has some bias, to some extent, for something in particular. Like a fictional universe. Otherwise, we wouldn't be there, would we?

Now, since despite having an account on SFJN, you're just to lazy to post here, and want to play some telegram game between two boards, let me at least disagree on a couple of points.

However imagined that pityful excuse must be on crack. They couldn't even make most of the bolts hit the ship.
Aiming for small specs on the back of the ship would be stupid. Especially since the TF ship started to fire on the yatch even before the droids were out. Let's again notice that the accuracy didn't change at all from before and after the presence of the droids on the hull.
This is just such a stupid claim, it's pathetic one could actually believe in that nonsense even one second.

Let's recap the events shall we. The battleship opens fire and after a few moments the shield generator is hit directly thus disabling the shields on the yacht. After the repair crew approaches the generator in hopes of fixing it they are picked off one by one.
If after all of this you conclude that TF objective was to disable the ship and prevent the shield generator to come back online you are obviously a fanatic warsie. See some of the shots also missed and unless they display 100% accuracy then we can't possibly conclude that they intentionally aimed at the droids right? Because, as we all know, when you aim at something your accuracy will ALWAYS be 100%. It was blind dumb luck that Trade Federation just happened to hit the shield generator dead on and then pick off the droids again with dead on hits. Yeah that's it. Star Wars accuracy sucks.

Flak rocks the ship from the beginning, but only a direct shot brings the shields down.
This happens very quickly in fact. The yatch goes through a barrage of flak.
However, only direct hit is needed to take down the ship.
That said, as we see the shields drop on the console, we see more flak coming through the cockpit window, and the ships is rocked twice more, as two explosions occur close to the cockpit.
When the droids start to get released, once again, the ship is rocked.
That's for the same bolts which managed to knock the shields off in one direct hit.

The point is that considering what is only necessary to take down the shields, it's particularily unwise to still spam the target with more bolts, especially if they could have actually hit the ship directly, a second time.
I can't stress enough on how unmeticulous the TF is at trying to capture ships, if that's you believe they were trying to do.
You'll notice that many bolts really come extremely close to the hull, and had the yatch even started to bank and do half manoeuvers, she might have crossed the path of these bolts. Had the yatch changed a bit from a rather linear trajectory, the ship would have likely been hit by those glancing bolts.

Ok, no one said that the TF people were super smart either. They're quite painted the other way, and the fact that they sent no damn fighter against that ship is just another piece of the demonstration of their stupidity.

You could still pretend that the TF had fantastic aim and was trying to shoot down those droids, but I'd ask you which film have you watched then. Wait, which films have you watched, since there's one thing for sure, it's the demonstrated horrible aim of all the TF army, on all levels. DCA, troops, tanks.
Especially during the TPM era (and even in AOTC).
And if we use the EU, all of it, including that retconning about how a few million clonetroopers could pile up huge ratios against billions and billions of battle droids, it can only be explained by an horrible aim.
The same we see in TPM, anyway.

So claiming that the DCA on these big ships could be aiming for the droids, in the light of such evidence, is particularily audacious.
Or, at best, they could have been trying to do so, but there's too much evidence showing that there's a huge difference between what they wish, and they get.

I recon that I didn't account for the TF's low reaction times and stupidity.
But again, the way they spammed the ship was most awkward.

Besides, if the queen was to die, the Neimoidians would just cover the truth, talk about an attack against them, and that's all.
After that, they'd just appoint a new puppet, queen or governor, and coerce her or him to sign the treaty.

They just wanted the queen because it would make things easier.

Naturally after insisting that dead on hits against shield generator and the repair team were just luck he can go on to pretend that those droid blasting shots were full powered so he can claim that Trade Federation cannons are weak.

I notice that the same exact bolts (same lenght, same width, same luminosity) that took down the yatch's shields on a single direct hit, also blasted the droids repairing the ship, yet without any consequences for the ship's surrounding hull (and with two droids on three not being entirely destroyed, as we see legs and domes drift away).

The point is that the shields on that yatch were no particularily strong at all, and not even better than those of the N-1 launched later on.
During a battle where there was no point to hold back as much as they would have done for the queen's ship.

Notice that in that spacebattle, the bolts looked the same as well, as they did at the beginning of TPM. I'm not necessarily fond of the aspect of a bolt to demonstrate its power, but there's still the AT-AT on Hoth, showing how a more powerful yield did make the bolt significantly change the aspect of the bolts.

Now, this doesn't mean the bolts fired by the TF ship, in the final spacebattle, were fired at full power either. But considering the exact same bolt aspect, and similar level of damage caused to N-1s, we can see that it doesn't take kilotons of energy to destroy them. Not even gigajoules, really. Not does it gigajoules to take the yatch's shields down.

And yes, I checked, there were no droid fighters firing on those N-1 when one got shot down (no droid fighter in front, behind or on the flanks of the fighter wing), so it definitely came from the turrets.
That said, the DVD might make me wrong on that, but I doubt it.

This is not to say that the TF ship was necessarily firing at full power, but it's however largely pointing out that even the queen of Naboo can't even afford a ship with shields can resist bolts that don't even totally vapourize droids.

That said, it's not that surprising, and quite in touch with the megajoules necessary to take down a Delta-7's shields (Jedi starfighter seen in AOTC).

[Jedi Master Spock]

Thank Poe over on SDN for resolving - to some degree - the conundrum of the droids getting picked off:

But now there was a new threat. Unable to bring the weapons of their warship to bear in an effective manner, the Trade Federation command dispatched a squad of starfighters. Small, sleek, robot attack ships, they consisted of twin compartments attached to a rounded, swept-back head. As they roared out of the battleship bays, their compartments opened into long slits that exposed their laser guns.

So these are the attacks of approaching fighters, according to the novelization? This would help explain both the relatively low power, and helps explain how so many misses could suddenly transform into direct hits on the astromechs.

Unfortunately, it's not entirely consistent with the script, which Poe also posted an excerpt of, so it is not perhaps as good an explanation as it could be.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Interesting how a person can miss the forest from the trees. The guy states himself that first few hits break through shields AND penetrate hull plating AND take out the shield generator but when further hits fail to cause further damage to the ship even though the shields are now down he somehow concludes that they didn't decrease the power? How?

The thing is... the ship is not hit a second time. Just rocked by more nearby falk.
The very fact that a single direct hit was enough to completely bring down the ship's shields and damage the hull, should be enough to know that if the ship was hit a second time, we would have known it, quite obviously.

Remember when trying to ascertain the accuracy of starship cannons one should look to accuracy of tanks and troops. Yes that makes so much sense. Of course if his method for determining the accuracy of droids and tanks was the same as here (outright dismiss the dead on shots and declare them accidental) it's a small wonder his conclusion is "horrible aim".

Please read the part adressed to Peptuck.

Well that's it. They were the same length width and luminosity therefore they were of the same strength. Never mind that DS2 superlaser was of the same intensity as DS1 which was set to "blow up the planet".

Ah, but they were two different weapons. You can't know how the luminosity of the DS1 beam scaled up or down in comparison to the DS2 beam. Same for width, lenght, etc.

But again, I'm not hugely fan of that type of reasoning.

Don't worry though, I don't mean to keep answering his non points here but his question as to why I don't keep debating him reminded me of his post that convinced me he has no intention of conducting any kind of reasonable debate.

Pure lies. Anyone can check the threads here to see that's BS.

It is his response to my statement about Dooku's ship acceleration at the end of AOTC:

Not only is it irrelevant to that topic, but you have not managed to refute it. Using your former and irrelevant failures to reinforce your arguments won't help you that much.
You're still welcome to resume the discussion in the appropriate thread.

What kind of a complete dumb-shit are we dealing with here?

Does he honestly believe that space-based battle ships are going to have the same targeting systems as mass-produced battle droids or tanks?

Standardized military vessels? Not necessarily.

The Trade Federation, during TPM era? Very likely.

We have to remember a few things, to understand this.
First, this is not the Clone Wars. At that point, as I got it, the Trade Federation had just finished retrofitting many cargos to turn them into warships.
It's a conglomerate without, all evidence considered, any real experience of military tactics, doctrine or else. I think it wouldn't be hard to find EU quotes, and even novelization quotes, talking about how the Trade Federation went into a militarization all of the sudden, or something, right?

Secondly, when you have an industry, which is capable of putting impressive AIs (from our standards) into robots, make them move like bipeds and have them globally so well articulated that they're capable of fluids moves, yet completely fails to put any good aiming system coupled to servomotors and gyros into these same robots, up to the point where these mechanized troopers can't even hit a person standing still five meters in front of them (plenty of movie evidence), you know that you're dealing with hugely incompetent people.

The only way mass numbers can explain this, is following the idea that with a hundred robots firing at a target, there must surely be one which will hit it.
Using an extreme, but you get the point. However, this is still stupid, because you have to build a hundred robots with a complex AI, to get results similar to that of less robots, but with much better aiming skills.

And you think that the idiots behind that type of decisions would suddenly think different for other forms of weapons, notably spaceship weapons?

At that point, I don't see why the turrets, built by who knows and apparently strapped on those ships recently, during the whole retrofit campaign, would be any better, all scales multiplied.
In the end, it's the same dumb robots which couldn't hit a cow in a corridor, which still man tanks, which are also likely being behind the commands of these turrets.
And again, even if there was an AI inside those turrets, looking at the aim of the droid fighters, why would the Trade Federation put accurate AIs in their turrets, and just fail on the whole damn rest?

So, it still surprises you that they suck?

Thusly, don't be afraid. This is not used to say that all SW ships have horrible aim, if that's what make you crap your pants.

Following that line of thinking, every single soldier in the US military should be carrying an AEGIS.

US soldiers are not robots. That analogy is just plain wrong.
Besides, they still have an accuracy that's still a thousand times better than a battledroid's one.