StarWarsStarTrek wrote:I tried sending darkstar an email refuting some of his points, but it blocked me out, apparently because it thought that I was spam.
The email read like this:
Ok, so I've read a lot of your site. I'll say that your calculations seem to be accurate for the most part and you're clearly knowledgeable on the laws of physics and make some good points. However, I do have a few criticisms to make:
1. Your FTL calculations are simply implausible. Star Wars is a galaxy spanning civilization. Casual travel across large portions of the galaxy is commonplace in Star Wars. However, by your calculations, traveling across the galaxy would take years, sometimes even decades, which Star Wars clearly shows isn't true for them:
Galaxies come in all shapes and sizes, and there's no proof on-screen how big the SW galaxy is while in the novel they say that it's "modest-sized," which means
small[i/].
Look at a picture of ours:
You can see how it's immensely spread out, compared to canon-pics of the SW galaxy. That shows ours is about 10 times the diameter of the SW galaxy, and so it's about 1/1000 the size from simple volumetrics. That would mean about 200 million stars, and about as many planets.
a) Obi Wan goes to Kamino, stated to be in the outer rim, casually without any large amount of time passing. Based on your calculations, it would have taken him years to do that.
Or months, dependng on the size of the galaxy. However let's also not forget Special Relativity, and the fact that ship-time can pass at a different rate than galaxy-time.
Kamino could also have been on the space-lanes, but it was erased by Dooku over 10 years earlier.
b) Darth Maul travels across a large portion of the galaxy in a matter of hours.
On-screen? I didn't see any calendars hanging to show the time.
c) In many of the Senate meetings, you see senators representing solar systems across the galaxy. If your travel times were correct, those senators would have to have spent years just to get to Coruscant; which clearly isn't true, because otherwise Padme would have had to have started traveling to Coruscant right after TPM ended.
Again, we don't know the size of the galaxy. Also some routes could be faster, obviously those to Coruscant would be fastest.
Look at a map of any state: the roads to the capital are obviously faster than those to the boondocks.
d) The Millennium Falcon is seen traveling across major portions of the galaxy without any large of time passing
.
Then why was Lando wearing Han's clothes at the end of TESB? Obviously it was long enough for him to need a change. And who said it was a major portion?
e) The Death Star could not possibly have been constructed as fast as it was with transport ships as slow as you claim they are.
It took about 30 years; Luke grew up from infancy to manhood in about half the time it took to construct it. And slow transport ships are solved by simply having large numbers of them.
f) Yoda travels to Kamino, examines the clone troopers, mobilizes them and brings an army to Geonosis in a matter of hours or maybe a day or two. This would have taken years if it were based off of your speed calculations.
I remember reading that Genosians had their games on certain dates, so it could have been any amount of time between their being captured and executed.
2. Your weapons ranges are cherry picking the lowest Star Wars ranges and the highest Star Trek ranges. There are many cases in which Federation ships go within 10 km to hit a HUGE borg cube that wasn't moving that fast relatively either.
Point-blank is always better than long-distance, that doesn't change the max. The Borg could stop a beam from long-distance as well, like the archers in "Braveheart" were unable to harm the Scots, because they could see the arrows coming far in advance and simply held up their shields. Meanwhile they couldn't do this if cavalry road past at full speed and fired arrows without warning, they wouldn't be as able to stop it.
Meanwhile, the Battle of Endor shows Star Wars ships battling at thousands of miles range.
Darkstar says that SW weapons have a 5000 KM range max, so that's thousands of miles.
3. Again, your blaster damage showings cherry picked the lowest showing and ignored the showing of them making giant holes and explosions in other scenes.
More like those calculations are exaggerated, like saying meteors were "vapourized" when they were simply shattered. Anyone who's even played the game "Asteroids" knows that they don't disappear when you shoot them, just break into littler ones. And that's what happens in the movie too. Including the Seismic charges, they simply smash the asteroids like Memorex shatters a glass, they don't vapourize them.
4. Your imperial fleet size estimates are sketchy, since they're based off of casual conversations in which the characters would not be speaking in precise.
But they wouldn't say "thousands" if they meant "millions." No one with a clue would say that there were "thousands of soldiers fighting in WWII," when it was obviously millions.
6. You analyze the AT-ST, but not the many other more powerful Star Wars ground vehicles, and other Star Wars ground troops. I'll admit that the AT-ST is a joke of a vehicle, but it isn't the only military vehicle available to Star Wars; note that Star Trek doesn't have any.
Ground vehicles are a sign that a society is primitive, it would be like riding horses today: people only do it for nostalgia, or the fact that they are primitive.
7. You ignore the huge population and industrial disparity and how Star Wars is at least several thousand times larger than Star Trek.
Compare the Senate-chamber in the prequels, to the Federation chamber in "The Undiscovered Country." There aren't several thousand times as many seats there. More like ten times, at most.
Likewise, Star Wars doesn't have the Prime Directive, so the Repubic populates every planet they come across, which is why their technology and culture is so monolithic.
Meanwhile those of the Federation galaxy were so different, that they can combine to form a synergy of untold power ala "Nomad."
The Federation's strength is in its diversity, not just its size, and they value that so much that they refuse to taint the unique indviduality of pre-warp worlds by infesting them with post-warp technology.
Star Wars would therefore have vast industrial capabilities and a vast recruiting pool, allowing them to overwhelm Star Trek even if the ship firepower were comparable.
1. Star Trek replicators renders any such advantage moot, since they can produce just about anything in any amount, while SW industry is too dedicated; likewise it's monopolized among factions like the the Techno-union, Trade Federation and Banking Guilds who resist any competition. In short, the whole galaxy is glutted and stagnant.
Meanwhile ST is all an open market.
2. There's no comparison between ST and SW firepower, when ST weapons can destroy a star with a little torpedo, or destroy a planet with a Genesis device. Meanwhile SW needs a giant 120km station to destroy a planet.
8. While Star Wars hyperdrive is fast enough and long ranged enough for them to invade the Federation if the two sides are somehow close enough for this scenario to happen,
WHOAH, HOLD ON there cowboy! The G-canon ony says they can travel in the galaxy, not outside of it; the officer in TESB says that the Falcon can go anywhere in the galaxy, not outside of it.
And that means they can't travel even to nearby galaxies, while theirs is far, far away from ours: hundreds or thousands of galaxies away. So it's impossible for them to get here..
the Federation would not be able to mount an invasion on any Star Wars galactic government.
Not with their ships, but they could do it with other tech like warp-conduits, wormhole-travel, time-travel etc.
The Federation might also be able to do it using the DS9 wormhole, since the aliens there operate outside of linear time and space, particularly since Sisko is on of them and he's a Starfleet captain!
How many wormhole-aliens officers does Empire have, pal?
Federation warp drive wouldn't even have enough fuel to get to the core worlds,
The fuel regenerates ("The Mark of Gideon," TOS3).
Also they could use the same space-lanes as the other ships, so they could move even faster via their superior engines.
nor would they know how to get there (after centuries of exploring the Federation hasn't mapped out its own galaxy yet, so mapping out that of another one would be infeasible in any short amount of time) or sustain any supply line.
Unless they scanned them from a single ship in the galaxy, or simply hacked into the Empire's computers and hijacked their entire comm-system and network from online; remember that the Federation's engineers even impressed the Vorta.
For example in "I, Borg," and "Best of Both Worlds" they were able to figure out how to destroy Borg just by using hacking and computer-viruses, so they could do the same to the Empire too. Every computer, droid and ship would be under complete Federation control, particularly since the Federation has an android that can think, the Empire doesn't (except for R2D2, and he can't talk).