Which universes can Star Wars beat?

[Khas 12,158]

Okay, given that we see that Disney's new canon has significantly nerfed Star Wars firepower (not counting superweapons like the Death Star or Starkiller Base), well, we have to ask ourselves - which sci-fi universes can Star Wars defeat in ship-to-ship firepower?  

 

Here are my guesses:

 

Star Wars can defeat:

Firefly

New Battlestar Galactica (at least, until the nukes start flying)

Cowboy Bebop

 

Star Wars might defeat:

Babylon 5 (at least, the younger races - if only because of shields.  Elder races, like the Vorlons and Shadows should have no problem with SW ships - to say nothing about what the Thirdspace Aliens can do)

 

Any other universes that SW can actually win against?

[IkaikaKekai 10,518]

Tempted to say Star Trek, at least the Federation.  Feds have almost no Carriers or Carrier-type ships, most Old Republic/Empire ships are large and made to take on both larger ships and have some defense against smaller fighters while their own fighters and bombers harras/knockout key systems.  Most Imperial warships are not only usually larger than most (if not all) warships the Feds have, I would think Fed ships are  more agile than Imps, but still, they're outgunned.  All those smaller cannons that would be used to fend of fighters would now be pointed at one target, reducing it's shields faster, to go along with whatever assault fighters and bombers are doing.  That's just ship to ship fighting.

If we're talking about actual boarding, I would put hands down on the Empire or even the Rebellion.  Imperials have a healthy contingent of Stormtroopers on board, actual combat troops, as opposed to Security Guards on Federation Ships.  Not sure if transporters would go through Star Wars shields, but pretty sure an Imperial Assault shuttle would go through a Star Trek Shield.  Klingons might be the wildcard in this case, they probably have the strongest chance to repel an Imperial Boarding party, but I can't see them winning if they were boarding an Imperial ship.  There's gonna be a blood and shit strewn mess between where they boarded and where they were stopped, but they will be stopped.

[Khas 12,158]

If we were going with the old SW canon, as well as Pre-STO ST canon I might agree with you.  But alas, some... interesting developments happened in both universes.

 

The first, was that, as of Star Trek Online, the Federation has developed dedicated carriers.  Or rather, the Caitians (a Federation member species) donated their dedicated carriers to Starfleet.  Behold, the ~1.2 km-long Atrox-class:

 

And, as we saw in DS9, Starfleet DID make use of fighters (and continues to do so into the Star Trek Online era):

 

The Peregrine-class Attack Fighter:

 

And the Stalker-class Stealth Fighter:

 

And, here we see why fighters don't appear too often in Star Trek, unless there's a fleet engagement, or a recon or escort mission:

 

As for starship sizes, well, that's no longer too much of a factor, considering that we now have ships like the 1,062 meter-long Odyssey-class (the Enterprise-F being an example of one):

 

And another being the 1,500 meter-long Jupiter-class:

 

Your bog-standard Imperial Star Destroyer is 1,600 meters long, while a Rebel Mon Cal Cruiser is 1,200 meters long.  A Romulan Warbird is about 1,300 meters long.

 

So, technically, size isn't too much of a factor any more.

 

Another big decider is ship firepower.  Take this scene from the Deep Space Nine episode "The Die Is Cast":

 

And yes, there is that talk about the "transponder sending back false readings", but remember, the surprise didn't come until AFTER those life-form readings - the devastation of the planet's crust was about what they were expecting.  And it was said earlier in the episode that the fleet was expected to boil that planet (about the size of Earth) down to its core after 6 hours of bombardment.

 

High-end for their weapons?  Sure.  But not even close to the highest firepower showing/tanking.

 

Now, compare this orbital bombardment season from the Rebels episode "Zero Hour"

 

 

Though, I do agree that the Empire would beat the Federation in ground warfare.  Even though a phaser is a superior weapon to a blaster.

[IkaikaKekai 10,518]

(Did Thrawn just bitch out or is this one of those 'step 1 of a 23 step chess move' type deals?)  I'm still thinking in the confines of a Federation Vs Empire setting the Empire would have the upper hand in terms of numbers.  Most of the time we see Federation ships they're usually alone and off doing something, Imperial ships are rarely alone.  It'd be like a Coast Guard Cutter armed with a Railgun doing a Rescue Patrol being ambushed by a Carrier Task Force composed of battleships, heavy cruisers, and they can all launch VTOL fighters and have at least a battalion compliment of Marines onboard that's told to either collect Taxes or make an Example out of people and we're not going to bother checking if they paid before you made an example of them.

[Khas 12,158]

(Thrawn was under orders to capture the Rebel leaders alive.)

 

And Federation ships used to go by themselves.   That was until the Dominion War.  As we saw in "Sacrifice of Angels", during Operation Return, large fleets had become common.  A task force composed of 627 Federation and 300 Klingon ships was sent to retake Deep Space Nine, and went against a fleet of 1254 Dominion and Cardassian ships.  With another 2800 Dominion ships waiting on the other side of the Bajoran wormhole.

 

 

By the time the Dominion War was further underway, the Federation-Klingon-Romulan Alliance was launching fleets of that size fairly regularly:

 

We also know from the Battle of Tyra (which occurred off-screen) that a Federation fleet of 112 ships was all but wiped out in an engagement with a Dominion fleet.

 

And then, there was the final battle of the Dominion War - the Battle of Cardassia:

 

Also, Jem'Hadar "fighters" - unlike Starfleet's fighters - aren't what we'd really normally consider starfighters.  They're about the size of Princess Leia's ship or a Klingon Bird-of-Prey, and have a crew of 43.

[IkaikaKekai 10,518]

Guess I am a little biased.  SWG was my stomping grounds, grew up liking Star Wars more than Trek.  I still regret not decking out my B Wing and slaughtering shit in Space before I stopped playing.  Then again I was doing pretty good with a 2 gun Bellballab towards then end.  There were some times when I'd come in for a strafing run, destroy a couple turrets and be outrunning the lasers before whipping a tight U turn and starting over.

[Khas 12,158]

Heh.  Most people are biased in one way or another. Don't feel bad, this wasn't even close to the worst I've seen.  (Looking at you two, KirkSkywalker and StarWarsStarTrek.)

[Captain Seafort 17]

And Federation ships used to go by themselves.   That was until the Dominion War.  As we saw in "Sacrifice of Angels", during Operation Return, large fleets had become common.  A task force composed of 627 Federation and 300 Klingon ships was sent to retake Deep Space Nine, and went against a fleet of 1254 Dominion and Cardassian ships.  With another 2800 Dominion ships waiting on the other side of the Bajoran wormhole.

 

Doesn't really help when the Empire can deploy similar numbers (as at the Battle of Coruscant) and Imperial light guns are about as powerful as the best the Feds have (low Mt LTLs shown against the Falcon in ESB vs maybe-Mt PTs in The Pegasus and Rise, and the low-Mt deflector dish weapon derivable from BoBW and Deja Q.)

 

 

If we were going with the old SW canon, as well as Pre-STO ST canon I might agree with you.  But alas, some... interesting developments happened in both universes.

 

Your bog-standard Imperial Star Destroyer is 1,600 meters long, while a Rebel Mon Cal Cruiser is 1,200 meters long.  A Romulan Warbird is about 1,300 meters long.

 

So, technically, size isn't too much of a factor any more.

1) Do you have any evidence that the online game is cannon, given how consistent Trek has been that only live-action TV series and movies count?

 

2) Assuming the existence of such evidence, I fail to see how the fact that Trek capital ships are starting to approach the size of Imperial escorts helps them.

 

Another big decider is ship firepower.  Take this scene from the Deep Space Nine episode "The Die Is Cast":

 

And yes, there is that talk about the "transponder sending back false readings", but remember, the surprise didn't come until AFTER those life-form readings - the devastation of the planet's crust was about what they were expecting.  And it was said earlier in the episode that the fleet was expected to boil that planet (about the size of Earth) down to its core after 6 hours of bombardment.

 

The problem with the scene is that it directly contradicts everything we've seen concerning capital ship beam weapons against rock.  In A Matter of Time, Legacy and Inheritance, phasers were drilling phaser-width tunnels through rock at about 100m/s, and suffering worrying feedback from ore concentrations in the latter.  In The Pegasus, Riker didn't even consider using phasers against the asteroid, instead advising using hundreds of PTs even through TDiC-scale phaser firepower would have destroyed it in a fraction of a second.  Likewise, Voyager used one of her "irreplaceable" PTs to destroy the Rise asteroid, even though it was a fraction of the size of even the Pegasus asteroid.

 

High-end for their weapons?  Sure.  But not even close to the highest firepower showing/tanking.

 

Where have we ever seen anything close to that sort of firepower in the TNG era?  The only thing I can think of is the planet-cracker from Obsession and The Immunity Syndrome, and frankly, given that TOS repeatedly demonstrated the sort of speeds that would have had Voyager home in months, I'm not convinced its capabilities can be reconciled with the TNG-era.

[Khas 12,158]

Doesn't really help when the Empire can deploy similar numbers (as at the Battle of Coruscant) and Imperial light guns are about as powerful as the best the Feds have (low Mt LTLs shown against the Falcon in ESB vs maybe-Mt PTs in The Pegasus and Rise, and the low-Mt deflector dish weapon derivable from BoBW and Deja Q.)

 

 

1) Do you have any evidence that the online game is cannon, given how consistent Trek has been that only live-action TV series and movies count?

 

2) Assuming the existence of such evidence, I fail to see how the fact that Trek capital ships are starting to approach the size of Imperial escorts helps them.

 

 

The problem with the scene is that it directly contradicts everything we've seen concerning capital ship beam weapons against rock.  In A Matter of Time, Legacy and Inheritance, phasers were drilling phaser-width tunnels through rock at about 100m/s, and suffering worrying feedback from ore concentrations in the latter.  In The Pegasus, Riker didn't even consider using phasers against the asteroid, instead advising using hundreds of PTs even through TDiC-scale phaser firepower would have destroyed it in a fraction of a second.  Likewise, Voyager used one of her "irreplaceable" PTs to destroy the Rise asteroid, even though it was a fraction of the size of even the Pegasus asteroid.

 

 

Where have we ever seen anything close to that sort of firepower in the TNG era?  The only thing I can think of is the planet-cracker from Obsession and The Immunity Syndrome, and frankly, given that TOS repeatedly demonstrated the sort of speeds that would have had Voyager home in months, I'm not convinced its capabilities can be reconciled with the TNG-era.

 

Didn't you watch the "Rebels" episode "Zero Hour", and how HTL bombardment delivered, at most, gigajoules of energy into the target during the orbital bombardment?  The Disney canon is very, VERY different from the old.  Granted, Thrawn WAS under orders to take the Rebel leaders alive, but if the HTLs really did have even kiloton-level firepower, he could have just targeted areas near the shield, and let the debris from the explosions overwhelm the shield generator.  To say nothing about how an Imperial light cruiser was split in half by sub-kiloton warheads in "Ghosts of Geonosis" - and the explosion occurred in-atmosphere, so there's no real way to get around it being that low.  It was also mentioned in the new-canon novel "Tarkin" that the devastation caused to the planet Murkhana occurred after YEARS of orbital bombardment, and that planet still supported some native multicellular life, and its oceans and atmosphere were mostly intact.  And then there was the time the B-Wing prototype used an experimental laser canon to one-shot an Imperial light cruiser.  Yeah, ever since the 

 

As for Star Trek Online and its being canon, more info can be found here: http://forums.asvs.org/index.php?/topic/1148-star-trek-online-and-its-canon-status/- basically, Star Trek Online is "soft canon" - meaning that it's canon unless contradicted.  The ships, technologies, and stories are canon, but the game mechanics and player actions aren't.  So, since the 10 km weapons-range shown in-game is a game mechanic, it's not canon.  Star Trek Online is the only bit of Trek media that falls into soft-canon.

[IkaikaKekai 10,518]

Alright, I'm gonna say it, Dune.

The Empire would probably have some difficulty at first with ground combat on Arrakis simply due to the sandworms but they would adapt in time.  Air and Space Superiority is no question.  To my knowledge there's no space combat ships in the Dune Universe, pretty much just giant cargo ships owned and operated by one guild, who's dependant on a resource exclusive to one planet to pilot said cargo vessels.  The Empire doesn't even need to set foot on Arrakis to lock shit down, setting up blockades around it would be enough, then they can set out and conquer nearby worlds for resources to build defensive stations around the planet.  Eventually the Guild will either roll over and be a good little bitch, thereby nullifying any actions any House might attempt, or they'll crumble into nothingness, again nullifying anything the Houses can do.

[Khas 12,158]

Star Wars would also beat The Expanse... but then, since The Expanse is limited to the Sol System, that might not be saying too much.

[Captain Seafort 17]

Didn't you watch the "Rebels" episode "Zero Hour", and how HTL bombardment delivered, at most, gigajoules of energy into the target during the orbital bombardment?  The Disney canon is very, VERY different from the old.

 

So we have an outlier or two. I assume you're talking about this, which seems to make HTLs about as powerful as the famous blaster rifle grate shot.  That doesn't change the overall conclusions any more that ST5 gives Trek hyperdrive-scale strategic mobility or MJ-scale torpedoes.

 

The "new cannon" still show ISD light guns vaporising asteroids in milliseconds, big chunks of the Tantive IV in seconds, and knocking the Falcon off its axis.  It still shows AT-AT guns likewise vaporising big chunks of the Hoth shield generator.  It still shows the Death Star blowing Alderaan apart at close to lightspeed.

 

Yeah, ever since the

 

Well?  Don't keep us in suspense.

[Khas 12,158]

So we have an outlier or two. I assume you're talking about this, which seems to make HTLs about as powerful as the famous blaster rifle grate shot.  That doesn't change the overall conclusions any more that ST5 gives Trek hyperdrive-scale strategic mobility or MJ-scale torpedoes.

 

The "new cannon" still show ISD light guns vaporising asteroids in milliseconds, big chunks of the Tantive IV in seconds, and knocking the Falcon off its axis.  It still shows AT-AT guns likewise vaporising big chunks of the Hoth shield generator.  It still shows the Death Star blowing Alderaan apart at close to lightspeed.

 

 

Well?  Don't keep us in suspense.

 

It's actually the Turbolasers vaporizing the asteroid  that's the high-end outlier now, since we saw this scene in "Ghosts of Geonosis":

 

Here we see the B-Wing protoype carry out a weapons test:

 

Notice how Hera says that it "has the firepower they need" - after making that small explosion..

 

Here we see it in action against light cruisers:

 

We also know from the Enterprise episode "The Expanse" that photonic torpedoes - the predecessors to photon torpedoes - could have their yield modulated.  From "knocking the antenna off a shuttlepod" at the low end to "putting a three-kilometer crater in an asteroid" at the high end.  I'd assume photon torpedoes would have similar "modulating" capabilities, as it would explain a LOT.

 

We also know that the Death Star's superlaser only reached full power after the kyber crystals - which draw energy from the Force - were put into its dish (courtesy of both "Rebels" and "Rogue One".  And it wasn't until the First Order discovered how to do it that they had hypermatter reactors small enough to fit inside starships, IIRC - the Death Stars used hypermatter reactors, but nothing else did at the time.

 

And according to the new canon Star Wars: Force Commander game, we learn that durasteel is "stronger than steel, but weaker than titanium".

 

And I think I was going to say "ever since the Disney Apocalypse, things haven't looked as good for SW 'versus' wise."

[Khas 12,158]

There's also this little scene from "Rogue One":

 

And given that we know an ISD has a mass of 40 million tons.

[Praeothmin 532]

Knocking the Falcon off its axis is not as impressive as ST torpedoes knocking a Klingon BoP OF ITS axis in ST VI...

Vaporizing self-exploding asteroids isn't impressive either...

We've seen in Khas's DS9 clips phasers and Cardassian weapons vaporizing great deals of hulls quite quickly as well, but I guess this will also be ignored...

[IkaikaKekai 10,518]

I'd have to agree with that.  Firstly, the Falcon isn't that big, the YT1300 is basically an intergalactic UHaul with beds and a couple of shotguns in the glovebox.  Where a Bird of Prey would be what?  A light Destroyer?  Maybe a Cutter/Corvette?  (Although I suppose more appropriately it'd be an Attack Sub)

[Khas 12,158]

A Klingon Bird-of-Prey has a length of about 110 or so meters, while the Millennium Falcon is 35 meters long.  Not even close.

[Khas 12,158]

Another universe Star Wars should be able to beat is Starfox.  Admittedly, not TOO hard with that one...

[IkaikaKekai 10,518]

"Do a Barrel Roll!"

"All ships, open fire."
*Sounds of Animals screeching over an open comms channel.*

[Khas 12,158]

Admittedly, the Arwing IS superior to a lot of fighters in Star Wars, with maybe only the X-Wing, B-Wing, or TIE Defender being superior... but Arwings are in a much, much more limited supply than the others, so sheer numbers could win out.

[IkaikaKekai 10,518]

That is more or less Imperial Doctrine.  Standard Ties don't have either a hyperdrive or shield generators, they have numbers en mass.  A B-Wing is designed to be an anti-ship fighter, so if one managed to score a hit it'd be pretty devastating.  You're also forgetting about the A-Wing (I know it doesn't get much screen time, but it is cannon) which I think would run circles around the Arwings (right before crashing into something).  I would definitely say X-wings are the Arwing's match, but with higher numbers giving them the advantage.

[Gunbird 519]

Even though a phaser is a superior weapon to a blaster.

 

 

There both bad weapons are ergonomic nightmares. 

 

Look how skinny the grip is on the phaser. http://www.weaponreplica.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Star-Trek-III-Phaser-Prop-Replica-Roddenberry.jpgAnd were is the trigger guard?

 

And I were is the stock on this weapon? I doubt that you can hit somebody beyond 10 meters with this thing! http://www.originalprop.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/star-wars-a-new-hope-imperial-stormtrooper-blaster-e-11-sterling-original-prop-02.jpg (I know the answer but, I want you guys to figure it out.   )

[Khas 12,158]

Well, 23rd century phaser pistols were badly-designed, sure.

 

What about 24th century ones?

 

 

And of course, the phaser rifle is a better weapon anyway:

[IkaikaKekai 10,518]

I was about to have a 'Seriously Gunny?' moment.  The E11/Sterling stock is right where it always is, not that you ever see it deployed in the movies (to my knowledge anyway).  I would imagine that a blaster doesn't have much if any recoil, so hip or 'pistol' firing one shouldn't throw off aim/stability that much.  But keep in mind that Trek and Wars wasn't made by 'gun guys' like you and me and props were done on the cheap.  Think of how much more Cheesey Trek would have been if the Phasers in TOS were dressed up Lugers, 1911s or Vaqueros, rather than a TV remote with a luger styled grip?

[Gunbird 519]

I know Ikaika, but It was a joke.

 

I would think the both weapons would have vary little recoil, if at all. But sight picture is still important to hit something beyond 5 to 7 meters.

 

As for the grip thing, I don't think the old Phasers have Luger styled grips. They just look like small pipe on a angle.

 

But you know what would be cool to have a weapon with a memory grip.

 

Oh and Obs. The 24th Phasers is even worst. The rifle look alright but were is the trigger?