The trouble with the state of debate per se is that a certain frange of warsies (I stress on certain), later identified as members of SDN, have mounted a structured and sufficiently well presented front, full or ready to pick arguments for both sides, wars or trek.
Of course, many are just pure nonsense, and Robert does make good points, though he's far from being a saint either, but he's pretty much one against a whole community.
At this time, Trek has nothing like a solid community of well informed debaters. They're all disbanded, and most of the time, greatly ignorant trekkies prove to be cannon fodder for SDN, which doesn't make the trek side look good at all.
This is not a call to copy SDN in style and substance, far from that.
As for spacebattles... what's to say? The days of the "Trek triumvirate" are long gone, the versus is piloted by very pro wars people who
If I had to pick a sample from SBC's thread, I'd choose that one:
CrossoverManiac wrote:If you're talking about the Ep. 2 ICS, then yes, it's fanwank since it was written by a fan irregardless of the visuals like.
Cpl_Facehugger wrote:I find it extremely hard to consider anything in the ICS wank given the existance of the Death Star.
Just like saying US troopers carry gigajoules level rifles because the US army posseses megaton level nukes. You got to admire the ingenuity of the argument. [sigh]
Above all, you got to admit that when you get to deal with that kind of stupid logic, from a long term (and pro wars) debater, who's also an active mod of the forum in question, you know this is not going to get anywhere soon, and certainly not to any place called "intelligent discussion". I pretty much had a good taste of it when I discussed about
wars' firepower, though CPL's comment was to be found in another thread, but is all to know that the situation is totally locked in favour of wars, with the wank firmly held in place.
Making a comparison of sources and data is not hard. I did it, and it's rather easy to see how ICS barely fits in that. And yes, it always returns to the ICS. It would be particularily naïve or ignorant, or even dishonest, to bash someone because he pours gripes against those EU books (including the Worlds of SW bits Saxton also placed).