Metaphysics(Star Wars, Star Trek, Etc.)

[Mental-Rectangle]

<An X-Wing or upgrade Tie-Interceptor could kill anything ever put in space in Star Trek.>

Pintos... Ford Pintos, all of them.

[Trev-MUN Hates AOL]

Originally Posted by Exoduselder

Alright for those of you who believe star trek is superior two words: Death Star. None of those Fed capital ships could get to the core of that thing and I have never Repeat and reiterate NEVER seen a single Fighter in star trek.

Actually, there is a Federation fighter-like craft in the TNG series, but it's barely used. Apparently the Star Trek faring races think fighters are too worthless to use.

The Fed's fighters appear briefly in the one episode thingy where the Borg reach Earth - some base on Mars sends out a few of these little fighters and they go "WEEEEEEEEEEEE" and the Borg goes ">(" and blows them all up and they go "F**K! D:"

I don't know what they're called. I want to say Pengerine fighter, but I dunno.

The only other instance of a fighter-type craft in Star Trek that I can recall is the Jem Hadar fighter thingies.

Originally Posted by RangerAidian

There are other types of plasmas that are cooler and less obtrusive, but have the same general characteristics of being made up of masses of charged particles.

Yup. Just to add to that, there's a space.com article which touches in the creation of real-world "cold plasma."

http://www.space.com/businesstechnol...ma_000724.html

Apparently they think these condensed plasmas are the best shot at some type of force field like in Star Wars or Star Trek, and they say these things could lessen the damage dealt by lasers via scattering the light.

Or something like that.



About the Star Wars blasters and turbolasers and gahoozits - I support the idea that they're some kind of particle beam myself, and not plasma. Lasers, for one, do not give off a glow in space. Technically they can't give off a glow at all, but higher energy ones like weapons grade lasers can generate enough photons (Edit: When in the atmosphere or another gaseous environment) to create the glow we see in science fiction, apparently.

Intuitor.com's "insultingly stupid movie physics" touches a lot on that and other "hollywood physics."


Now, here's one to boggle your mind... i don't know if it's already been brought up, though - how do you explain artificial gravity on Star Wars/Star Trek starships?

[Priest4hire]

Jedi can do anything. They can do anything the Force wants them to do, and the Force does some of what they want the Force to do for them. Like Ben said on the Millenium Falcon, it obeys your comands but it gives them to you in the first place. The Force shows people what they need to see to do what it wants to happen, and then gives them the power to do it. It has been benevolent so far, so I think it can be trusted to continue as such. I mean it got rid of the ineffective Old Republic, got rid of the stagnant and self-righteous Jedi Counsel and their ways of teaching, unified the galaxy under the Empire, and then turned it over to the New Republic. All from using both Jedi and Dark Jedi or Sith(not necessarily the same thing, but usually used interchangably nonetheless).

That's not what Ben said.

Ben "Remember, a Jedi can feel the force flowing through him."
Luke "You mean it controls your actions?"
Ben "Partially, but it also obeys your commands."

He is not talking about the force as some kind of puppetmaster. He is talking about the force as a power that guides but only according to the will of the person using it. This is important because one of the central themes of the OT is personal choice and the results of that. Luke chose to confront Vader. It was Luke's own strength that kept him from turning. It was the weaknesses of men that resulted in the downfall of the Republic and Jedi, not some all powerful puppetmaster force.

Otherwise there's simply no point in anyone even trying, is there? If it's all up to some god (that is what we are talking about) then why even bother trying. Luke didn't need to train, and he didn't have to fight against the dark side. No matter what he did the outcome was assured by the force, right? Even Vader's sacrifice was meaningless since he was nothing but a puppet. I can not believe the OT was that shallow.

Plus, note that Luke says actions, not thoughts or will. Note that Ben only admits to the force partially controlling actions, but says it obeys the will.

A fighter could just sit where the guns couldn't shoot and tear it apart with lasers anywere, or drop a few Proton Torpedos into the engines where the shields are weakened, and then maybe tear open a hole near the generator and put the rest of its Torps in there.

Where is that exactly? The ST ships don't have guns, they have computer guided energy beam weapons. No matter how fast a fighter is, it's not a fraction as fast as light. One could argue there are no fighters in ST because with the perfect accuracy of computer controlled beam weapons there'd be no point. Any fighter would be destroyed long before coming into range.

Besides, ST shields are vastly superior to SW shields. Consider that any ST ship's shields can stop energy attacks as well as matter.

(Damn, is it geeky to debate ST vs SW ships or what? Still, it's just a fun thread so I suppose it's not too bad.)

Now, here's one to boggle your mind... i don't know if it's already been brought up, though - how do you explain artificial gravity on Star Wars/Star Trek starships?

Good question. Officially in the ST universe the ships generate some kind of field of force. The same field is used to counter the inertia and thus prevent the crew from being splattered during the jump to warp speed. But what kind of field is not mentioned.

[Lycanthrope]

Star Trek ships lack the brute firepower of Star Wars ships(e.g. Death Star. I know, don't mention the genisis missle, I could always bring up Sun Crusher as an equivolent principaled weapon of greater advantage). However, Starwars is found lacking in elegance and style. As Priest said, Star Trek shields are vastly supperior to those of Star Wars. And then theres the Tachion beam (which I believe someone already stated is the answer to all questions, as it can destort the very space time continuem around it; whenever the universe itself starts getting out of hand, a tachion beam always does the trick). Reguardless, a battle between Star Wars and Star Trek would consist of the Star Wars side sitting and firing with precision accuracy against a barrage of smaller fighters. Now, the only problem with this is target numbers. A Star Destroyer is equipt with a number of small anti-fighter weapons, while the Enterprise is armed with one main phaser, two proton torpedo tubes, and a tachion beam producer. Now the major advantage of the enterprise is the phaser, which could easily devistate anything and fires rapidly. On the side of the Star Destroyer, we have simple bulk, more weapons, and more fighters. If I were on the side of the Destroyer, I'd keep my fighters in ship until I'd killed the sheild on the other, so simply barrage it with Turbo Lasers and hope for the best. If the shields failed, Advantage Star Destroyer. The Enterprise only has one phaser array that seems to only be able to fire one shot at once. A wing of fighters surrounding an un-shielded Enterprise would prove rather difficult to fight against. sure, it could knock off two fighters every second without fail. but given enough fighters, this wouldn't matter too much. Of course, by this time, the enterprise has precious little power left, as they seem to be willing to drain power from everything except life support in order to maintain shield integrety. But I've only seen shield integrety lost in Star Trek a few times. The one problem with the technology is what I call the reliance factor. Whenever the shields take a serious hit, electronic equiptment on the bridge seems to explode. It's actually a pretty even fight, as even though the phaser would cause serious damage to the Star Destroyer, those buggers are built so that there is no single place that you can hit and knock it out. Virtually no matter what you do, the thing's still going to be shooting at you.

Now I don't claim to be the greatest scholar in either Star Trek or Star Wars, and I'm sure someone will call me on point so-and-so, with something to the effect of "But you seem to forget that in episode X, the enterprise fired at two seperate targets at once, thus proving your theory completely wrong." I am only operating on what I have seen and remember.

[Priest4hire]

The biggest problem with Star Trek technology is there's no consistency. I suppose it's the result of multiple writers over such a long period of time. If you were to take the original Star Trek as cannon for example, a single Constitution class starship packs enough firepower to destroy a planet. There's even an official Starfleet command to do just that. (Makes one ponder the 'peacefulness" of Starfleet, eh?)

Against a Star Destroyer I'd suppose that the starship's photon torpedoes would be the ace in the hole. They aren't an energy weapon and so shouldn't be stopped by the star destroyer's shields. And given the power of the antimatter they carry the damage should be considerable. Though Star Trek always underplays the power of a photon torpedo. Still, based on what is shown an unshielded barrage of them would be devastating.

Actually I suppose the battle could go however the writer wanted it to.

PS. V'ger is still more powerful than any Star Wars ship.

[Forever Zero]

Star Wars shields do stop physical objects. The Star Wars proton torpedo is a physical object as well that explodes on impact with a shield, and there is one book where Han is testing the shields of the Millinium Falcon, so he activates them while the shiip is in a docking bay and it holds the ship up with no landing gear, so SW shields stop physical objects as well. However other then that, I don't have a comment on how the battle would go, but I would favor Star Wars.

[Priest4hire]

Well, Lucas has said the books aren't cannon, and certainly the movies are more authoritative. That said, SW shield can seem to stop physical objects, but only very erratically. For example the Millennium Falcon sidles right up to a Star Destroyer to hide itself. No sign of shields there. Actually, on the whole shields in SW are just very iffy things. Sometimes they are impenetrable, like the shield around the Death Star in RotJ, but most the time they are dubious. Certainly they aren't the bubble of protection that ST shields are.

[Mental-Rectangle]

That is the main problem with Star Trek... inconsistency. In the fifth (dear god why did they make it) movie, the Enterprise jumped right to the center of the galaxy in no time at all. In Voyager, it took seven years for the bastards to get back home from only twice the distance (Even though their ship was fast enough to fly itself to little quantum bits). So, there's a really tricky timeline of technology to go by.

I just wouldn't compare the two. They rely on different physics for christ's sake. One has Jedi, one has Q's. It's a tie.

[Creamsteak]

A much more comparable set of metaphysics is star wars vs. babylon 5. Bab 5's ships are gargantuan behemoths with devastating weapons and turrets/fighters galore. Star Treks ships (except the new something destroyers that are as big as the largest romulan/klingon craft) are technically very small by comparison to any bab5/starwars capital ships.

Star Trek has "engineers" that can re-do anything in their inventory to give them the win, that alone is like the jedi. Their shields are not as great as some people think, though, because apparently all you need is a weapon with a specific "frequency" to shoot right through any shields.

[HRslammR]

i thought this was a discussion of the philosophy of all that jazz.

i'm studying metaphysics in philisophy. =-/