Great Match-Ups of Science Fiction #3

USS Enterprise vs. Star Destroyer!

A very old argument Trekkies try to win through the power of trivia. I am such a Trekkie...

FACT: Star Destroyers are equipped with lasers.

FACT: "The Outrageous Okona" states that lasers cannot punch through the Enterprise's shields.

FTW: Duh.

The above mash-up is more generous, but comes to the same conclusion.

Comments

LiamKav said…
Have you not seen the hilarous lengths the fans go to about this stuff, starting from simple statements like "although they are called 'lasers', they aren't actually 'lasers' as we mean it", to some authors constantly inflating the size and capabilities of weapons in the SW universe until the Death Star II is 50 billions times bigger than the previous one, and the X-Wing can fire blasts equivalent to Hiroshima-destroying nuclear bombs.

Fans are funny things.
De said…
Couldn't the Star Destroyer deploy a buttload of TIE Fighters? They have blasters instead of lasers (according to Han in The Empire Strikes Back).
Siskoid said…
But they're small fighters. They might give a shuttle problems, but as the video shows, they're no match against a large starship.
Siskoid said…
Of course, the Star Destroyer can kamikaze the Enterprise to death, either with fighters or itself.

But that's hardly sporting.
Jeff R. said…
Oy.

The TIE Fighters aren't a threat themselves, they're designed mainly to escort the TIE Bombers, which are designed as anti-capital-ship weapons with shield-depleting ION cannons and massively destructive torpedoes.

The main tech that the Enterprise has that the SD doesn't is the transporter, but that's of limited use here, since even the capital ships in that Star Wars universe tend to be fantastically fragile, even brittle, once their shields are down anyhow.

Quite possibly an even matchup here.

You don't see carrier-like capital ships in Trek, probably due to budgets at first and tradition later. Is there a convincing in-universe explanation of why that model doesn't work?
Siskoid said…
At a guess, I would say it's the way power systems work in the Trek universe. Starship warp cores are incredibly powerful and cannot be installed on smaller support craft. That's why such ships are never as fast, tough or aggressive as a starship (with the possible exception of the Dominion, which does use something akin to that strategy).

Overpowered starships may also explain why the computer consoles can apparently electrocute you.
LiamKav said…
Galaxy-class phaser banks can be quite rapid and accurate. I imagine a flight of TIE Bombers would last about as long as the sentry pods did in "Conundrum".

Regarding support craft, there might be a size issue. The Galaxy-class is pretty much the largest of the TV Starfleet ships, and most Imperial ships are bigger. There's also the question of why they have them. The support craft in Star Wars are usually designed to shoot and blow stuff up. That's obviously not the case in Star Trek, so there's no real need to have them.
LiamKav said…
Oh, they used that Conundrum clip. I should have checked. I should also probably check to see if I'm labelling the episode correctly.

I'd agree that the Death Star could probably blow the Enterprise apart, since it's highly unlikely that their shields can withstand something designed to blow up a planet in one hit. Of course, we don't really know the comparison between the Death Star weapons and a Star Destroyer. We also know that the Defiant has enough power to turn a planet to "cinder" (according to Broken Link). So I'd suggest that ST ships are probably a bit stronger weapon wise.

Star Wars does have better music though.
Jeff R. said…
Okay, I can certainly see that computer-assisted targeting in Trek is miles ahead of anything in Wars (where the doctrine is clearly spray-and-pray [spray-and-Use-The-Force, at least]), which could make a lot of difference. On the other hand, those point-defense systems aren't all that effective against missiles or mines or, well, anything other than the small fighter and bomber swarms that nobody ever uses. Which speaks fairly well for the designers who manage to keep them in the budget for each new ship design...

Set the battle in a random exotic particle cloud that stops that automated targeting (or let the Empire find a stash of Tetrion Particle paint beforehand), though, and the Federation ship is helpless, since it'll probably take them a few hours just to re-engineer the controls to where manual firing is even possible...