scvn2812

Races to start a petition to name it "Planet"..... Please tell me someone on this board gets the reference. If not, go to good old games and download Alpha Centauri, still the greatest empire builder of all time in my opinion.

That is probably in my top ten of favorite demotivationals of all time.

Interesting write up about how it works Its basically here, in the testing stages. A practical, wearable computer. Its hard to say if this is going to take off but my gut is telling me in ten years they'll be as ubiquitous as smart phones and tablets. The interesting thing is that while the iPhone sort of looks like a tricorder if you cross your eyes and PADDs so much like iPads you can almost bank on there being Trekkers at Apple, there's no clear, ubiquitous analogy to this in visual scifi. The pen and paper rpg Shadowrun, a mid-21st century cyberpunk / D&D mash up is probably the only thing that immediately comes to mind that saw this coming.

In broad strokes that would be a fair comparison to make.

Where's Khas? I handled the talent part of the competition, he can judge the swim suit competition.

They went to the edge of the galaxy in TOS, you can't really fault him for thinking there's nothing wrong with going to the center of the galaxy. Obviously no one thought to tell him or his writers that warp speed was being tamed. This might even have been before the retcon limiting warp speeds and the area of the series to the tiniest of portions of the Milky Way.

For the sake of argument, I'm just going to arbitrarily decide to declare the two universes on similar footing for energy output. I don't feel like starting another ten or more page argument on whether The Die is Cast or the TOS movies or Enterprise is the most authentic showing for Trek firepower. To paraphrase Tyralak on the Star Wars EU, anything you can find to support a value for Trek, I can find three counter examples. ;-) The Defiant is a much more rugged design due to being solid and compact to the fairly open design of White Star but not nearly as acrobatic as the White Star. I haven't taken detailed measurements, but I suspect neither one has a significant advantage in acceleration in combat but I could be mistaken. Defiant has never been seen to do a back flip to bring her guns to bare so I'm going to call that a significant point in the White Star's favor.

Inevitably the issue of Voyager would probably come up with regards to warp highways. Given that travel to the Delta and Gamma quadrants is considered extremely arduous, there are likely no charted warp highways leading out there. They may be exceedingly rare and may fluctuate in reliability. Obviously in her time exploring the Delta Quadrant, Voyager's path might as well have been a piece of thread in a Hobby Lobby for all the more territory she was able to cover in relation to the scale of space. I'm not sure if I'm fully sold on the idea but I don't reject the notion of warp highways out of hand.

As one of my friends would say YKINMK "Your Kink Is Not My Kink" I guess I was expecting a bit more than pin up girls with starship parts attached to them.

One day I'd love to see a good B5 follow up with modern effects. I've seen fan versions of a higher quality Omega and it's quite drool worthy.

I think it might be useful to draw some parallels to the real world. Real world navies are not lists of rock, paper, scissors balanced units that are the same for all factions as in the Total War franchise. Every government, planetary or interstellar, makes decisions about how to arm themselves based on geography, their economy, their skill sets (both martial and industrial), where they expect to fight, who they expect to fight and what peace time purposes their military serves - repressing the downtrodden who might want to trod on the ruling elite, defacto economic stimulus to help private industry by setting out an all you can eat government trough, reproductive organ measuring for the patriotic, exploration, scientific research, humanitarian aide, anti-piracy - all of which are either historical or modern secondary missions that navies might have besides defense. Generally speaking, being a jack of all trades is a game for the rich. Right now for example, the United States Navy is realistically the only one that can perform virtually any mission anywhere in the world without straining too hard. Everyone else has more limited resources and infrastructure to play with and has to decide what their priorities are. For the typical third world strongman, that priority is: make it as painful as humanly possible for peers or regional / global powers to attempt regime change. The weapons of choice are generally shore based missile batteries, mine layers, missile boats and diesel subs - the numbers and balance of these depending on how well off and what infrastructure the nation has. These are all relatively cheap and massed, they can make even super powers think long and hard about whether or not you're really worth setting off a few hundred million in ordinance and putting tens of thousands of tons of shipping built at a cost of billions at risk of needing tens of millions in rearming or hundreds of millions in repairs because one of your cheap knock offs of a first world super sonic missile with myopic sensors and shoddy maintenance actually got through the layered defenses of counter missiles, electronic warfare and close in weapons. While you can adequately defend your territory and launch raids into that of close neighbors, missile boats and diesel subs generally do not have anywhere near the capacity for fuel and other provisions to be able to strike outside of the region of interest for the local strongman. Iran for example, can close the straight of Hormuz or attack its neighbors if it so desires through sheer density of missiles, mines and artillery but has no ability whatsoever to strike at Hawaii as the Japanese did in WW2, let alone the mainland US. I would argue that this is probably an analogy for Cardassia and the other races that do not appear to have wide spread influence but nonetheless have managed to bleed the Federation at times. For a nation like the United States with far flung defense commitments all over the globe, things are tricky, even with ridiculous amounts of cash to throw at your problems. You can simultaneously have the world's largest and most powerful navy and still have no where near enough ships to be everywhere that something bad might happen. There's just too much world for the size of the navy that the US can practically field. There aren't enough frigates and destroyers to escort every last cruise liner and freighter by the coast of Somalia for example. If war broke out over Taiwan, things could get very messy by virtue of China taking the poor nation's approach to defense except with a rich nation's budget: not having global ambition frees China up to field a powerful but range limited defensive fleet of missile boats, submarines and a few frigates and destroyers - all of which have the option to fall back to the coastline where they can fight underneath an umbrella of land based aircraft and shore batteries. The US could arguably take the sledge hammer approach and launch a major offensive with nearly every operational carrier in their inventory if the Chinese navy decided to play turtle this way but there is virtually no way to come off clean in any shooting war in the front yard of a regional super power and the world's #2 economy, it would probably be messy. Consider World War 1. Prior to the entry of the United States, the naval situation was, I think, not all that dissimilar to our hypothetical Klingons vs Federation scenario. On one hand you have Great Britain, with the most powerful surface fleet in the world but who has only half heartedly invested in submarines. They also have a vast, global empire to defend and because of how spread out this empire is, its very dependent on shipping to move war supplies around. Great Britain still managed to pin the German High Seas fleet for virtually the entire war after the Germans realized they couldn't win on the surface against the Royal Navy so the Germans invested heavily in submarines. The submarines could act with impunity, sink isolated warships and wreak havoc on supply lines. Each submarine might sink several times its own mass in warship and merchant shipping before meeting its fate. Replace all references to submarines with "cloaked starships" and you've basically got the Klingons with the ability to wage brutal, unrelenting asymmetric warfare on the Federation, with each Klingon ship potentially being worth several Federation ships by virtue of being able to do what a ship without a cloak cannot: choose its battles. The Klingons can strike where the Federation is weak and there's not a thing the Federation can do about it besides spread out their fleet to try and protect their territory or sacrifice all of those one stoplight and a gas station colonies and concentrate their forces around their most important systems while the Klingons chip away at the Federation's war making capability by turning these fortress systems into islands cut off from all contact and trade from one another. So in a nutshell, comparing fleet numbers and territory sizes does not tell the whole tale. It very rarely does actually. Concentration of forces, strategy and a host of other variables determine outcomes.

The particles of a particle beam would probably interact with the atmosphere so there would be some effect. Given the close range, it could be a radar or microwave weapon or just a low power (by our standards) broad footprint laser. The craft was hovering fairly low, maybe a few stories up.

I was just watching the X Files with my family and was blown away when a UFO flies over a group of alien rebels. There's an electric hum, some panels on the bottom light up and the aliens are incinerated with no visible beam as if someone stuck them in front of the business end of a weaponized microwave oven. Episode 111 if I recall correctly.

It's never described but particle cannons are in play. Weapon satellites were being used to target hackers in one episode. I can't remember the exact effect but it also wasn't very showy.

I suppose if you can't judge a book by its cover, you can't judge a series by its trailer. I'm very rarely in the mood to just veg out in lieu of playing games, reading or getting into fights on the Internet about things virtually everyone I know would roll their eyes at.

*shrug* George Lucas says a lot of things, a lot of things that contradict other things he says. He says he wants people to take a cartoon explicitly aimed at children as seriously as live action movies, good for him but also good luck with that. That said, unless they show the actual conception (unlikely) or leave it beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was a natural occurrence, then it would be a reasonable assumption that these children didn't come into the world the old fashioned way. Maybe one of these days I'll start watching Clone Wars. The pilot / movie / blatant attempt to sell MOAR TOYS FOR THE CASH GOD was awful but I hear the series itself has redeeming qualities. I don't ever actually get to see many of those because my only exposure to it is what I see of it on here and not a lot of it really sucks me in. Voyager and Enterprise probably could use second chances too but there are shows I actually want to watch first.

There's more where that came from, not many but I do recall a few other hybrids being complained about elsewhere at some point or another. With as many people involved in creating material for the EU any trope with a less than 0% chance of finding its way into the EU will do so eventually. This is why on my more forgiving days I regard it as being about as canon as the Iliad is historical.

Hard to say, its been a while since I saw the movie but I don't think his personal charisma / Vulcan mind powers on steroids would fully explain how everyone thought they were going to some place called the center of the galaxy. It could be a colloquial name or it could be evidence of the theorized warp highways that would allow rapid travel across great distances but along very narrow corridors, explaining oddball stars that seem to be impractical to be part of what we consider to be Federation space. Although given that the E-nil was capable of "5 year missions" hypothetically, there is nothing barring the colonization of stars that are impractical for trade or defense by expeditions or sentient species met at those distances from becoming members of the Federation, even though it would be impractical to maintain close ties with systems that would require a year or more of travel time.

Good catch, that seems to be a glaring oversight. Perhaps they intended to come up with a theory about it but it never came to fruition like a lot of the content on there that has been in progress for the better part of a decade.

Except for Alpha Centauri and Wolf 359, my astronomy is a bit weak. I recalled reading about how there were a handful of stars that were very far out in comparison to the warp speeds implied by the series and most of the other stars mentioned. This is the site I found: http://www.stdimension.org/int/Cartography/cartography.htm

This is probably one of a handful of things the EU does well I will concede. The vast majority of Imperial hardware is probably produced by contractors. Given the Geonosians were supplying droids to the Confederacy and the Kaminoans supplying clones to the Republic in the movies and the general abundance of individuals motivated by personal gain, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the Empire used Space Lockheed Martin to build the Death Star since Space Lockheed and Space Boeing probably build most of their stuff. They obviously have way better data security though, seeing as Lockheed and Boeing get hacked about every over second and the Empire's military industrial complex kept detailed specs of the Death Star out of the hands of the rebels for 2 decades and the knowledge that there was a second Death Star in the works out of the hands of the rebels until it was practically online and ready to smash planets. I'm sure someone, somewhere would consider this to be a Big Deal but I don't really see why this matters, other than to add color to the setting and confirm a theory that most people probably think is pretty reasonable. If someone cares to frame this in context of a VS debate, then I don't see how it would be better or worse than the Federation having no meaningful differences between their starship manufacturing and government, that's a function of competence not structure in my opinion. So neither better nor worse, just a different approach that probably makes more sense for the Federation as their economy likely resembles nothing we can really conceptualize where as Star Wars is probably more like our global economy, just on a galactic scale and with a megajoule of energy being cheaper than a bottle of water but just as scrambled and incoherent with just about every conceivable economic system existing simultaneously somewhere I would imagine. Other than that, cheers to Kevin Smith for having a joke rant be insightful enough to take on some quasi-canon status by the man himself.

Of note is that the Klingon obsession with personal glory has led to a fleet structure that is their greatest advantage and weakness. If you sneeze at a Bird of Prey, it will explode but for the mass of a Galaxy-class, you can have a couple dozen or so Birds of Prey that can be marauding through someone's colonies and raiding their supply lines. They are well set up for asymmetric and attritional warfare, Birds of Prey likely being able to be much easier to replace than even a Miranda but in a major fleet action, Starfleet's heavier framed ships would take a lot of putting down by the relatively puny Klingon warships. As I've said before, while Starfleet ships have a bit of fat on them from the science facilities, it can't be that much or they'd have been easy prey for the Klingons and Romulans since their weaponry is not decisively better, so Starfleet's bigger ships ought to be challenging for the Klingons' smaller, lighter ships to take down.

I think Fishy probably has the best fan theory. Its an area core ward but not the true center of the galaxy any more than the North Pole is the same as the North magnetic pole. On the other hand, we do have some very far flung star systems that would be very difficult to reach from Earth being part of the Federation such as Sirius which is something like 2k light years away if I remember correctly. There's a site I've seen that did a great job of cataloging and proposing theories for possible geographies for the Alpha and Beta quadrants. So maybe there is reason to believe that there are corridors that allow greater absolute speed per warp factor. Under this scheme, warp factor wouldn't be an absolute velocity, it would be engine output and your mileage would vary depending on the region of space you were traveling through. So the Federation could span 7,000 light years but it would be laid out more like a tangled string of christmas lights with the strings being corridors that allow higher velocities and the bulbs being zones of space around member worlds. I think that given the geographic issues like the Klingons invading the Cardassians and having been in at least a hundred year cold war with them previously, in spite of the fact that they'd either have had to go around or through Federation space, maybe we should look more at the age of colonialism as our model for Star Trek geography. Each major power has a heart land as the European powers did and these heart lands are relatively close to each other but they also have far flung colonial possessions where a lot of intrigue takes place away from the watchful eyes of each other's patrols and large diameter sensor arrays and plausible deniability rather than treaties holds sway, explaining and justifying how the Cardassians, Tholians and others can get away with massacring colonies and it taking 3 days for help to arrive so often. This is contradicted by in universe maps which show homogenous blobs of contiguous territory more like the settled borders of modern nation states than the imperial era but I think the colonial model fits the facts better as well as the original Horatio Hornblower / Wagon Train to the Stars / USA and USSR intriguing throughout the 3rd world model of Star Trek.

I think its pretty silly to have separate forums for Star Trek vs Star Wars and everything else when only 1 has an active topic at any given time if that and in extreme cases I might vaguely recall seeing 1 in each. Given that ST vs SW is the name of the board I can sort of understand wanting to hang on to a forum with that name but having one sitting virtually unused for legacy reasons only seems a bit sad and unnecessary.

You forget, the Klingon Empire had a civil war several years prior to the Dominion war over the succession to the chancellorship, fought a war with Cardassia, fought a limited war with the Federation, had been at war with the Dominion for over a year at this point and then spent several weeks having to hold off the Breen, Dominion and Cardassians single handedly while the allies scrambled to find a fix for the Breen energy dampening weapon. If anything, that they were able to pull it off without the Dominion rapidly gaining a decisive advantage speaks to A. The Klingon war making ability B. The logistical difficulties involved in capitalizing on the momentary vulnerability of the Federation and Romulans or C. A little of both A and B. In all likelihood holding the line against the Dominion, Breen and Cardassians forced the Klingons to commit far more of their reserves and thus they lost a substantially greater portion of their fleet both in absolute terms and relative terms during the war than the Federation and Romulans did. The Federation and Romulans got a breather for all intents and purposes, the Klingons had to fight the whole war and part of it alone.