ST v SW

[LaCroix]

Even on a 1:1 parity, there is a simple difference in design policy that is a decisive factor.

A SW ship is built to fight until it explodes. Redundant shields, redundant power, no central computer, weapons can be operated manually.
A Federation ship has everything centralized. 90% of the fight time on screen, the ship gets in trouble because of that. Still, no one cares to redesign that.

Even IF they finally want to deal with that flaw, there is no way to properly refit the existing ships or come up with and produce new ship designs in numbers before they are overrun.

Also, about the SW needing troops at home to suppress dissent. Why are you assuming the Federation won't? As soon as the fight starts, who wants to bet the other AQ powers won't try to get a piece? Demilitarized zone? Klingon space? Cardassians? I doubt all these powers are instantly aware that the empire wants to conquer them all and will forget all troubles and unify against a common enemy.

[Baffalo]

I like this thread, and I'll throw my own interpretations in and we'll see how things mesh. This is simply how I see both sides responding to the situation, based on the relative psych profiles we typically see. I'm not in favor of one or the other in writing this.

In order to envision this scenario, I'm going to set everything in a single galaxy, the Star Trek one, with the Federation surrounded on almost all sides by alien powers. On the edge of their territory will be an expanse surrounding a cluster of stars that, for whatever reason, will cause travel to be quite limited for both sides. Both will be equal in speed, but the cluster inside this empty expanse will be larger and more densely packed than the Federation. The analog to the Empire will be a civilization that functions as a mostly corrupt military dictatorship that has the means to cross the expanse and explore, but has never had a real drive to do so given the mindset that there is nothing of value beyond their own cluster.

A starship from the Federation, ever expanding and exploring, finds the expanse and the Federation sets up an outpost that will be used as a staging point for a small flotilla to cross the expanse and establish a similar base on the other side, to let ships cross the expanse and refuel before continuing on to the cluster. The ships gather enough provisions and begin the crossing of the large expanse. They arrive and find a large civilization that immediately reacts to the arrival of a small, unknown fleet, completely shattering their image that there is anything of value beyond the expanse. Immediately, the Empire begins trying to capture these enemies or destroy them, wanting to obtain intelligence on whether this is an invasion, a scouting party, or what is coming their way.

The Federation ships try to be diplomatic, opening hailing frequencies in an attempt to negotiate. The Empire plays along until they're ready, and then attack. The starships are heavily damaged and either destroyed or captured, but not before an emergency signal is sent to alert Starfleet. The local Moff takes this news to the Emperor, where it becomes a hot topic in the Imperial court. Immediately, all information about the new Federation is censored, and the fleet is ordered to alert. Some advocate a defensive posture, while the majority advise the Emperor to order an attack to establish a beachhead beyond the expanse. The Emperor considers this, and orders a fleet to cross the expanse to ensure they can counter a Federation assault.

Meanwhile, the emergency transmission reaches Starfleet, and an emergency session is called of the Federation High Council in regards to what is quickly labelled the "Empire Incident" in the media. The CinC tells the High Council that the starships only acted defensively, and advocates moving a force to the outpost on the Federation side of the expanse to deal with a possible expansion of hostilities until a diplomatic solution can be reached. The Council agrees, and a small fleet is assembled at a deep space station and sent. However, they will arrive in time to watch the outpost be taken by an Imperial fleet numbering over three times the force of the Federation fleet. Starfleet retreats, though not before noting the enemy use of fighters. The Imperial commander, eager to taste victory, orders pursuit.

The Starfleet vessels retreat back to the assembly point, putting out an emergency signal to any nearby starships to assist. However, being on the edge of Federation space, only a few ships show up. They arrive and are soon confronted by the pursuing Imperial force. The commander, despite outnumbering the Federation forces three to one, knows an attack would deplete his force. However, he also wants to incur favor with his superiors, and so he pushes the attack. Here, the Imperial focus on warships shows its clear advantage as they deal damage to the Federation ships. However, Starfleet's ships are built tough as well, and inflict their own wounds. Many perish in the attack, but Starfleet fights like a cornered tiger, and so the Empire takes almost 50% losses. The station falls, and many Starfleet personnel are captured and tortured for information.

With the force beyond the expanse depleted, the Empire has been committed to a war with a far flung power. The information bureau cooks up a story about increased unrest and rebellion as a cover for the sudden military build up, and all activity about the movements near the expanse are kept quiet by government censor, with anyone trying to break the story arrested and interrogated. The fleet sends backup for the depleted force, though this time a senior admiral goes to make sure any glory gets soaked up by someone with the brass to use it properly. There is quite a bit of political bitching and moaning about the appointment, because of the particular moff in charge or whatever. Posturing and infighting between admirals causes tensions within the fleet as each admiral tries to justify also going to help fight the Federation.

With the loss of a deep space station, Starfleet goes on full alert. Every ship is pulled out of mothballs, Utopia Planetia goes into full production, and the President goes on the news to explain that a previously unknown force has suddenly begun attacking Federation interests on the edge of Federation space. Lots of reporters ask what will be done to counter the threat, and the President informs them that a fleet is being assembled to ensure the invading force is contained before they can attack any more. While the fleet is being assembled, the President also orders a single starship to be sent to the captured outpost to try and talk to the Empire before they attack any further. The ambassador goes, and he meets with the senior admiral in charge. The admiral tries to impress the ambassador and show the might of the Empire, while interpreting the presence of the ambassador as a sign of weakness.

As the ambassador leaves, the Admiral makes note of his vector and orders a ship to tail the ambassador back to the nearest outpost, intending to add it to the Empire's collection beyond the expanse. The ambassador returns to the closest Federation world with decent industrial capacity, and the Empire readies its forces to attack. They hope to carve a swath into Federation space before the Federation can adequately respond or sue for peace. As the fleet disembarks, they don't know of the Federation fleet that arrives. The Empire walks right into a huge fight, this time outnumbered. The admiral in charge of Starfleet's forces orders an attack, knowing that if the Empire escapes, they'll return in larger numbers. The Imperial fleet is attacked and some escape, but the Federation has its first winning engagement.

With their computer controlled phasers, they can easily cut through the TIEs and other ships, though are a bit weak on the firepower in regards to Star Destroyers. Regardless, the recent Dominion War has made many Federation starship captains excellent fighters, and so the Federation gives almost as good as it gets. The engagement and subsequent victory is cause for celebration throughout the Federation, with many news agencies claiming that the blow will discourage future attacks and that maybe peace can come at last. The Imperials return to the force defending the captured expanse station and file their report, detailing how the TIE fighters weren't very effective against the lasers that could also cut through their shields. The precision control is cause for concern, having been dismissed from the engagement before as simply lucky shots.

The failure by the senior admiral is cause for his being dismissed (read executed) and his replacement by a younger officer who must try and understand the alien tactics used by Starfleet. With higher maneuverability, gunnery crews must train hard to hit the fast moving ships. Meanwhile, the CinC of Starfleet calls his best and brightest on Earth to figure out weaknesses from the data gathered from the three fleet engagements so far. Both sides are now trying to reinforce their positions in anticipation of attack or counterattack. Both sides watch the other with scoutships, counting ships and jockying for position. Eventually, the Empire makes the next move, using a large fleet to attack the Federation. The forces are, for the first time, equal.

The Federation fights fast, accelerating and turning rapidly to avoid enemy fire while using their weapons to cut through fighters and the Star Destroyer shields. The Imperial gunners enjoy more powerful weaponry, and when they score a hit, it's usually devastating. The thick armor means Federation ships must concentrate attacks, but their precise phasers can target the vulnerable bridge and engines, causing control to be diverted elsewhere. As the Federation ships move around and pick at the Empire, the Empire concentrates on trying to get ground forces onto the planet to take control from the surface, but the safest place to launch from, low orbit, will leave the Empire vulnerable. So the Imperial admiral orders a direct push towards the planet, using brute force to try and land his troops. The Federation responds by continuing their assault on the SDs and trying to shoot any landers that launch, with moderate success.

However, the sheer numbers of troops means they can still field a large standing army, and begin their invasion. Because the fleet is vulnerable while trying to launch and recover ships, some maneuver semi-independent to try and defend their sisterships and keep Starfleet away. Starfleet knows they cannot field an army of their own on such short notice, and so are forced to directly engage the Imperials in an attempt to stop the invasion. As the two fleets bring the hammer down, losses on both sides begin to mount while the ground forces land. Starfleet's only option at this point is to try and destroy the Imperials or force them to withdraw and then threaten the ground forces. The Imperial ships are holding their own due to their thick armor and heavier weapons, but the attrition from the earlier part of the engagement has taken its toll. Both sides are losing numbers, fast.

The Imperial admiral knows he must secure victory or he'll end up disgraced and/or dead. Starfleet can't let a colony fall to the Imperials. Both are rigidly fixed on their objectives and cannot retreat without orders. Finally, one admiral or both are killed when their ships go up, and the leading captain orders the fleet to withdraw. If Starfleet withdraws, they evade enemy fire until they can warp to safety, and then fall back to lick their wounds and report on the engagement while the Imperials secure a stronger foothold on Federation territory. If the Imperials retreat, they lose a ground force who promptly surrenders in the face of orbital bombardment. Regardless of who retreats, they do so with a much better understanding of their enemy. Starfleet will face the need to raise an army to secure planets and fight the Imperials on the ground. The Imperials will begin to field smaller, more maneuverable units to help counter some of Starfleet's increased agility. Both sides will begin to adapt to one another.

[LaCroix]

The commander, despite outnumbering the Federation forces three to one, knows an attack would deplete his force. However, he also wants to incur favor with his superiors, and so he pushes the attack. Here, the Imperial focus on warships shows its clear advantage as they deal damage to the Federation ships. However, Starfleet's ships are built tough as well, and inflict their own wounds. Many perish in the attack, but Starfleet fights like a cornered tiger, and so the Empire takes almost 50% losses.

So you are arguing that a force 3 times larger, much more and heavier weapons, stronger shields, and ships built to fight to death will take 50% losses, against a outnumbered, smaller weapon, half-effective shielded power whose ships show massive damage and loss of fighting prowess due to just about any hit, just because they 'fight like a cornered tiger?'

If the Imperium, even at firepower parity, were outnumbering the Federation, it will be a slaughter! An ISD is 13 times the volume of a Galaxy - that means if they outnumber the Fed forces by a factor of three, they had about 30-40 times the fighting power! And take 50% losses?

Can I have some of whatever you're taking?

Utopia Planetia (and every other factory they have) go into full production - that's what? a handful small ships per year? Utopia takes 4 years to build a Galaxy!

The precision control is cause for concern, having been dismissed from the engagement before as simply lucky shots.

So the Empire is only eye-balling their shots and have never heard of fire control. Right, and suddenly, they don't deploy ECM anymore...

With higher maneuverability, gunnery crews must train hard to hit the fast moving ships.

So the people used to fight in battles that have swarms of fighters no bigger than a dozen meters, and operating at thousands of g's (you know, the ones the Federation is supposed to pick off like gnats) do have problems hitting a sluggish moving Galaxy class? You know that your arguments are highly contradicting?

[Baffalo]

So you are arguing that a force 3 times larger, much more and heavier weapons, stronger shields, and ships built to fight to death will take 50% losses, against a outnumbered, smaller weapon, half-effective shielded power whose ships show massive damage and loss of fighting prowess due to just about any hit, just because they 'fight like a cornered tiger?'

If the Imperium, even at firepower parity, were outnumbering the Federation, it will be a slaughter! An ISD is 13 times the volume of a Galaxy - that means if they outnumber the Fed forces by a factor of three, they had about 30-40 times the fighting power! And take 50% losses?

Can I have some of whatever you're taking?

Utopia Planetia (and every other factory they have) go into full production - that's what? a handful small ships per year? Utopia takes 4 years to build a Galaxy!

I am going on the assumption that, since we are dealing with similar technologies, that the firepower is similarly scaled. After all, turbolasers themselves would have evolved over the thousands of years of galactic history, and so their firepower would also increase as plasma is more tightly contained, better managed, etc. And if you look at the appropriate scales of each ship, they are roughly similar in size. So I am reasonably assuming that the two are fairly evenly matched. If you wish to contend this, be my guest.

So the Empire is only eye-balling their shots and have never heard of fire control. Right, and suddenly, they don't deploy ECM anymore...

The Empire employs heavier firepower in terms of their turbolasers. Larger guns naturally weigh more, and therefor take more time to move due to inertia. Not only that, but turbolasers actually have to track and fire. For relatively minor angular velocities, the turbolasers will track quickly and be on target, but Starfleet ships have traditionally enjoyed fairly high maneuverability vs. the maneuvering we see the typical star destroyer using. This means that in amongst the fleet, Starfleet enjoys a slight advantage.

So the people used to fight in battles that have swarms of fighters no bigger than a dozen meters, and operating at thousands of g's (you know, the ones the Federation is supposed to pick off like gnats) do have problems hitting a sluggish moving Galaxy class? You know that your arguments are highly contradicting?

I am doing no such thing. The Empire doesn't use their huge turbolasers, the ones that are built for ship-to-ship combat, to swat fighters. They employ smaller turbolasers for such a task, as well as their own fighters. Because of the size of the galaxy class ships, the larger turbolasers are going to be used as well as the smaller ones, so of course the large guns are going to have problems tracking. I'm sorry if I made a few things inconsistant or contradictory, but I also don't think the arguments are completely invalid.

[Connor MacLeod]

They also have Palpatine, who is sitll looking to exert and maintain political control. Having the Federation gives him a viable threat, except it will be more of an actual war than a "Clone Wars" type war.

They're going to be larger than the Federation no matter how you swing it - they have at least "thousands" of systems by this "mini galaxy" interpretation (ROTS, nevermind the novels) they just may be more densely packed together. THey're bound to have at least a slightly faster FTL simply due to the fact that they still have a bit more territory to cover (it may just be tens of thousands of c rather than millions). Offsetting that is the general under-militarizaton of the Empire (yes they are more warlike, but they've never had any real, serious external threat to challenge them. It's always been internal and those have been far smaller than the Empire itself even then. And the clone wars was of course a contrived joke, albeit a costly one.) Maybe they only have hundreds or thousands of ISDs as opposed to tens or hundreds of thousands, etc.

All of the above is really minor quibbling. The real change (unless you handwave that away somehow) is that they still have massively insane industrial capacity. I'm assuming their ability to build Death Stars and Executor class starships has not vanished. That represents a considerable advantage in terms of handling mass and energy, even assuming the DS worked by technobabble (which in this scenario I assume it does.) Even granting an equality of gun firepower and power generation tech, the ability to build bigger gives them an edge in that regard (ISDs will still have more power output and firepower by virtue of size. And probably durability, although shield piercing technobabble will offset this some.)

There's also the fact they have droid armies, droid controlled warships and fighters, etc.

The only real difference that scaling down makes in the scenario is that the Federation is potentially a greater threat, and can inflict more overall damage (possibliy destabilizing or bringing down the Empire economically or potlicially) before being defeated. This, however, is not a GOOD thing for them, since the industiral capabilities have not been changed, and the Empire being smaller makes the Federation more of a genuine threat, which the Empire is likely to recognize especially if the Federation kicks their asses in the intiial conflicts (which it very well could.) There is still no way the Federation can match that industrial capability if they bring that into play, no matter how it gets used.

One can strip out the Death Star, Executor, etc and the implied advantages, but then one wonders how long this really will go on, because if you keep trying to equalize the two sides, we're not (as others noted) dealing with SW as we know it anymore, and everything becomes essentially fan fiction (not that this really differs from some of the vs debates I've known in the past.. but hey..) It might work good for a story, but it would be fairly pointless as a vs debate.

[Norade]

Something else to consider, even if tech is roughly equalized the Empire will still have a per ship advantage by not wasting space on stupid shit like Arboretums and family quarters on their warships.

[Serafina]

The real question is "what do we want to equalize".
Number of planets? Based on average or total population, industrial output or other factors?
Military numbers? Based on vessel size, volume, number, ships per population, number of crewmen or other factors?
Strategic speed? What about the differences within one faction? What about the logistical implications?
Tactical speed? Then what about maneuverability, what about usage of tactical FTL, what about the range of weapons?
Firepower? Based on what - size of the guns, firepower per ship, firepower per reactor size?
Defenses? Based on "can take contemporary fire for X time" or based on the other sides firepower? What about armor and redundancy and special weapons such as ion cannons?

The list could go on and on like this. The more you pick, and depending on your exact choices, the less SW will resemble the Star Wars we know. Based on just "same military numbers by volume, planets by industrial output, percentual strategic speed reduction and size-scaling firepower/shields", the Empire clearly wins. IMO, everything else is over-the-top and clearly designed to favor Star Trek even more.

[Metahive]

Honestly? Take Thrawn and Sisko (or whoever counts as the most capable strategist on either side) and let them play Chess against each other. That way material equivalence is a given and only smarts count.

[Formless]

The big question, in fact, the 80 km radius question is:

Can and is Mini-me Empire building a Death Star?

They definitely have the will to do so, presumably Mini-me Tarkin and his technocrat buddies are all out in force clamouring for something like this. And while a Death Star is big it's not so big to be out of the league of everyones favourite fascists. And it's a large, grandiose project which appeals to these types.

Mini-me Death Star probably started life as an attempt to mount a planet based weapon (like the ion cannon in 'Empire') on a ship and it grew from there. While it (presumably) lacks the ability to turn an planet into twinkly lights it's still a mobile battlestation with a BFG.

If conflict breaks out, what would be the Federation's reaction to this monstrosity being built?

Its not hard to fit the Death Star's planet busting capabilities into this scenario. Just tweak the superlaser to be more "exotic technobabble" and less "sheer brute force". There are at least three options which have precedent in Star Trek:

1) trekkie/Eu minimalist classic: instead of brute force have it be a chain reaction weapon of some type. Maybe the beam is an advanced version of the Phaser, scaled up for really shattering rock. Maybe its an advanced use of transporters, and sends the majority of the mass flying off into subspace/hyperspace as some EU fans have proposed. Either way, the precedent for chain reaction planet busters in Star Trek exists-- Species 8472 had such weapons, yet they were still on rough parity with the Borg.

2) NuTrek style: the laser is an outgrowth of mining technology, and the planet-buster itself is some kind of special charge. First the laser drills down to the planet's core, then the charge is beamed/propelled into the hole. Since it was purpose built for this mission it would necessarily be more efficient at planet busting than the ad hoc methods used by Nero. The beam could have a force field at the center that facilitates shooting the charge down the hole as soon as it reaches the right depth while protecting it from attempts to shoot the charge down, or have a built-in transporter stream doing the same thing. The charge itself could be based on Red Matter (IIRC, technically old Spock, Nero, and Red Matter were from the [future of the] original timeline, even though the rest of NuTrek is of a different continuity), it could replicate the destructive effects of the Genesis device, it could be an Omega Molecule that the Empire somehow managed to sufficiently contain for this purpose, it could be a huge trilithium charge, etc. As a nice plus, this could explain why the Death Star needs to be so large-- in order to contain whatever special charge that can detonate a planet, you need a big ass container. It might even be hollow inside! Like a balloon.

3) The empire could be the same civilization that built the Doomsday Machine from the OST episode of the same name. The Death Star would be either a re-development or re-discovery of the same technologies, using a sheer quantity of anti-matter to cut a planet apart. Of course, this option makes the mini-empire (or at least its ancestors) quite powerful, but would neatly tie in with Trek's history. The trade off would be the wasted anti-matter.

And of course there is room for imagination, so long as you obey the general rule "cannot use brute force".

[Formless]

The real question is "what do we want to equalize".
Number of planets? Based on average or total population, industrial output or other factors?
Military numbers? Based on vessel size, volume, number, ships per population, number of crewmen or other factors?
Strategic speed? What about the differences within one faction? What about the logistical implications?
Tactical speed? Then what about maneuverability, what about usage of tactical FTL, what about the range of weapons?
Firepower? Based on what - size of the guns, firepower per ship, firepower per reactor size?
Defenses? Based on "can take contemporary fire for X time" or based on the other sides firepower? What about armor and redundancy and special weapons such as ion cannons?

The list could go on and on like this. The more you pick, and depending on your exact choices, the less SW will resemble the Star Wars we know. Based on just "same military numbers by volume, planets by industrial output, percentual strategic speed reduction and size-scaling firepower/shields", the Empire clearly wins. IMO, everything else is over-the-top and clearly designed to favor Star Trek even more.

I think the point of this exercise is to facilitate comparisons between the social-cultural and institutional elements of the two universes. Obviously, you must first remove the "200 gigaton turbolasers, bitches!" aspect if you don't want people missing that point.

Granted, the industrial and economic aspects of Star Wars inform the institutions and society of Star Wars, but I think Simon's "isolated star cluster" idea covers all that quite elegantly.

[jaimehlers]

@all: Just wanted to point out, since some have (rightly) mentioned that even scaled down, the mini-Empire would still have the likelihood of winning. The intention of this scenario is not to ensure the Federation's victory, but to give it a reasonable chance of winning - which it assuredly would not have against the full-scale Empire or even a sizable portion of it.

I'm not good at rating odds, but in a general sense, I would say that the Empire would have a very good chance of winning (at least 3-1) if it could prosecute the war quickly, but the Federation would have a reasonable chance of winning if the war took longer than a year or two, for various reasons (the Rebellion, the Empire's anti-alien bias, the fact that the Federation could establish alliances of convenience with its neighbors, etc).

----

Baffalo: It would take years for the Federation to shift to enough of a wartime footing to be able to outproduce the Empire, if at all (furthermore, building new Galaxy or Sovereign ships is going to take years no matter what). Furthermore, it would not be especially likely for the Federation fleet, already outnumbered 3-1 and outgunned, to inflict 50% casualties on the Imperial side (that means that the Federation fleet destroyed half again its own numbers). Even in situations where both sides have the same general composition, a 3-1 local advantage in numbers is an almost guaranteed win; the Federation would be lucky to destroy 25% of the Imperial fleet.

Even leaving all of that aside, the loss of most Federation ships in the vicinity would allow the Empire to make significant territorial gains before the Federation could assemble enough forces to stop them (forget producing new ships, unless they were the equivalent of shuttles or runabouts; by the time the Federation could produce enough new large ships, they would be well on the way to losing the war entirely). Even if you assume that the Empire only took lighly-defended systems and didn't take any of the core systems (shipyards and population), it's still going to be a crushing blow to morale to lose that much. So contrary to what you wrote, your scenario increases the likelihood of a quick Alpha Quadrant loss by a good amount.

----

Connor: You're missing a couple of critical points. First off, the mini-Empire simply can't industrialize to that degree. Yes, they will have a higher initial industrial capacity, but they are unlikely to be able to expand it too much. They don't trust aliens, so any alien-controlled planets are not going to be industrialized to any great degree; they aren't going to build lots of industrial capacity on planets that are hotbeds of dissent, like Alderaan; and any heavily-industrialized planet is going to need a lot of resources going into it (it does no good to have lots of industrial capacity if you don't have the resources to fully use it).

Second, even though the mini-Empire would not lose the ability to produce Death Stars and Super Star Destroyers, such powerful vessels (especially the Death Star) would represent a far greater proportion of its industrial capacity than normal. I have no idea how much, but the Death Star's diameter is equal to 100 ISDs end-to-end. And remember that the Death Star is a sphere, meaning that thousands and thousands of ISDs could fit inside its volume. Just the equatorial slice has an area of more than 20,000 kilometers. If you fit each ISD facing forwards (I am assuming a rectangle, 1.6km x .8km, for an area of 1.28 km), you could fit somewhere around 15,000 ISDs in it - and that's just one slice.

So I think the Death Star is out for the simple fact that it would take too much of the mini-Empire's industrial capacity (they could probably build a smaller one, but if it gets too small, what's the point?). The Super Star Destroyers would be in, but they would probably take a long time to build (since they are something like five times the size of the Imperial Star Destroyer). For that matter, with the reduced industrial capacity of the mini-Empire, it wouldn't be easy to replace lost ISDs either.

[Connor MacLeod]

Something else to consider, even if tech is roughly equalized the Empire will still have a per ship advantage by not wasting space on stupid shit like Arboretums and family quarters on their warships.

No, they just waste it by sticking massive crews onboard and making everything a hybrid warship (eg its a carrier with guns and land assault capability.) Maybe not as bad as Federation designs, but let's be serious here.

For thta matter, how do things like the arboretums and family quarters stack up in tmers of actual volume (relative to what the other systems, weapons etc. take up? I'm not sure it would neccesarily offer any added advantage. (The same actually may not be true of ISDs though, considering the huge crew sizes and much of the empty spaces, at least in the ICSes, given over to crew capabilities. But since the ISD's guns are optimized to use its full reactor output, you can't really cram more firepower onto the ship without compromising something else.

The only exception in either case would be munitions, but since SW and ST are well known to use potentialy volatile materials in warships, this may simply be a greater risk to the ship itself (it would necessitate greater safety measures for one thing.)

[LaCroix]

I am going on the assumption that, since we are dealing with similar technologies, that the firepower is similarly scaled. After all, turbolasers themselves would have evolved over the thousands of years of galactic history, and so their firepower would also increase as plasma is more tightly contained, better managed, etc. And if you look at the appropriate scales of each ship, they are roughly similar in size. So I am reasonably assuming that the two are fairly evenly matched. If you wish to contend this, be my guest.

Similiar? A Galaxy is 640 meters long, and the ISD 1600 meters! That's three times!
And since most of that lenght is due to the strange shape, the ISD has more than 10 times (most likely 13 times) the VOLUME. Where do you see 'similar'? That's like saying baseball and a football have similar size. And volume means space for energy generation, armour, shield generators, weapons. This means if the ISD would use Federation technology, it still would more than ten times more powerful than a Galaxy, by pure virtue of size.

The Empire employs heavier firepower in terms of their turbolasers. Larger guns naturally weigh more, and therefor take more time to move due to inertia. Not only that, but turbolasers actually have to track and fire. For relatively minor angular velocities, the turbolasers will track quickly and be on target, but Starfleet ships have traditionally enjoyed fairly high maneuverability vs. the maneuvering we see the typical star destroyer using. This means that in amongst the fleet, Starfleet enjoys a slight advantage.

I'd like to refer you to that site, which has a in-depht analysis of ST combat manouverability. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tac ... uver1.html

Relative speeds of 300m/s and 180° turns that take several seconds are hardly untrackable. We see heavy turbolasers barely miss starfighters at the attack on the Death Star. The only things hard to hit would be Peregrines or Defiant class (which not many do exist), and these are inferior to TIE fighters in manouverability, ynd would be dealt with by them. (And Galaxy's won't have the time to fire at these. If they do that, they would be pulverized by the ISD's.)

The Empire doesn't use their huge turbolasers, the ones that are built for ship-to-ship combat, to swat fighters. They employ smaller turbolasers for such a task, as well as their own fighters. Because of the size of the galaxy class ships, the larger turbolasers are going to be used as well as the smaller ones, so of course the large guns are going to have problems tracking. I'm sorry if I made a few things inconsistant or contradictory, but I also don't think the arguments are completely invalid.

And they nearly manage to hit these things. There are numerous scenes that show near misses. And since they managed to nearly hit 10-20 m long fighters giving their best to evade, why would they miss 600m long capships with less than a quarter of their mobility?

[Simon_Jester]

I'll address Baffalo's scenario later.

It seems to me that even with a greater parity of forces the Empire would still likely win this scenario simply by virtue of being ready to engage in combat. They have, though scaled back to reasonable levels, planetary shields, ground based weapons and multitudes of defense stations as well as large forces deployed to protect key worlds. The UFP leaves even key worlds and shipyards undefended or defended by at most a handful of star ships. Even if we take down the fleet counts to a 1:1 parity, the Federation still has to deal with a greater number of space stations, planetary shields, and other stationary defenses than the Empire does.

True, but if the Federation concentrates on defense they tend to perform better- they can mass large fleets to defend or attack key objectives.

It's during periods of relative peacetime, or when 'the front' is very remote, that you see the Federation covering important targets with only light forces. Which makes sense: the bulk of their military is better used during peacetime for other purposes than sitting in orbit around Earth.

This does make them vulnerable to sudden surprise attacks, if you can get your ships to the target faster than they can redeploy. This is not easy, but is certainly possible.

Even on a 1:1 parity, there is a simple difference in design policy that is a decisive factor.

A SW ship is built to fight until it explodes. Redundant shields, redundant power, no central computer, weapons can be operated manually.
A Federation ship has everything centralized. 90% of the fight time on screen, the ship gets in trouble because of that. Still, no one cares to redesign that.

...Am I the only one here who's having flashbacks to Executor's bridge windows? One kamikaze hit, one very small kamikaze relative to the immense scale of the ship, and the Imperial flagship loses helm control and plows into the Death Star.

Now, I'm sure they'd have been able to restore control from a secondary node given a bit more time. I'm sure there were complicating factors. But this was during perhaps the single highest-profile battle in the Star Wars canon, in which a single lucky hit had a decisive effect on the largest non-Death Star vessel we see during the movies.

I'm not sure that Star Wars is in a great position to throw stones at Star Trek when it comes to making ships redundant and tough enough to be nigh-immune to critical systems failures.

Also, about the SW needing troops at home to suppress dissent. Why are you assuming the Federation won't? As soon as the fight starts, who wants to bet the other AQ powers won't try to get a piece? Demilitarized zone? Klingon space? Cardassians? I doubt all these powers are instantly aware that the empire wants to conquer them all and will forget all troubles and unify against a common enemy.

It's a tossup. The AQ powers may decide to attack and get a share of the spoils; they may unite against a common external threat. A lot depends on Federation diplomacy.

The most obvious precedent is the Dominion War; what happened then?

...
So the people used to fight in battles that have swarms of fighters no bigger than a dozen meters, and operating at thousands of g's (you know, the ones the Federation is supposed to pick off like gnats) do have problems hitting a sluggish moving Galaxy class? You know that your arguments are highly contradicting?

LaCroix, did you not get the entire point of this thread?

The point is to deliberately scale down Imperial capabilities so that a meaningful comparison of strengths and weaknesses becomes possible. So that the dispute doesn't boil down to "LOL gigatons star destroyers generate more electricity and win." "LOL gigatons" is fucking boring and we've all seen it before. Those debates were settled years ago.

And yet there's still this residual tendency to say "advantage to the Empire" in every capacity, in every respect. I understand that, but it defeats the purpose of trying to scale appropriately.

They're going to be larger than the Federation no matter how you swing it - they have at least "thousands" of systems by this "mini galaxy" interpretation (ROTS, nevermind the novels) they just may be more densely packed together. THey're bound to have at least a slightly faster FTL simply due to the fact that they still have a bit more territory to cover (it may just be tens of thousands of c rather than millions)...

This discussion is not "minimalist Star Wars versus Star Trek;" even on those terms we all know who wins and it's gotten boring.

This is "deliberately scaled down Star Wars," something that preserves the basic cultural template, philosophies, and attitudes of the Empire without being so incomprehensibly old and vast that it rolls over its opposition with trivial ease using infinitely superior numbers and technology.

I think the point of this exercise is to facilitate comparisons between the social-cultural and institutional elements of the two universes. Obviously, you must first remove the "200 gigaton turbolasers, bitches!" aspect if you don't want people missing that point.

Granted, the industrial and economic aspects of Star Wars inform the institutions and society of Star Wars, but I think Simon's "isolated star cluster" idea covers all that quite elegantly.

Quite right.

What I really want to see is a comparison of the societies, the attitudes towards warfare, the way the combatants would think about each other and the way they'd interact with neutral third parties. Things like that, which make plot rather than special effects when translated into story terms.

I've read the main page like everyone else; if I want to hear another round of "haha heavy industry" and "200 gigaton turbolasers, bitches!" I will just read it the main page again. It is quite well written and well organized, and contains all the arguments of that type that I will ever need to hear for the rest of my life.

Indeed, I have already heard as many of those arguments as I will ever need. So I find this idea of what amounts to a crossover between Star Trek and deliberately scaled down alt-hist Star Wars interesting, and don't want to see it drowned in "LOL gigatons."

To take an example, yes, the Empire builds enormous planet-busting gun platforms. How big are those platforms? Quite large, hundreds of kilometers across. Would the essential nature of the Empire be changed if the ships and platforms were physically smaller than the numbers we get from measuring their on-screen sizes? A 20-kilometer battlestation is much less imposing physically than a 160-kilometer one, or a 900-kilometer one... but it's still large enough to provoke "that's no moon..." and similar comments from the protagonists. It's also closer in physical scale to something we can imagine the Federation building... if they were a military dictatorship governed by a ruthless tyrant and didn't mind heavily taxing the people to construct it.

Would the essential nature of the Empire be changed if ISDs were built to roughly the same physical and energy-throwing scales as Federation starships? I doubt it; for practical purposes, in terms of plotting, it makes very little difference whether an ISD is 500 or 1500 meters long. It's still a powerful symbol of Imperial oppression that can blow apart your town from orbit or chase the Millenium Falcon while smashing down its deflector shields with light turbolaser fire.

If the special effects from the movies had been scaled down to the point where these kinds of figures were the ones we drew from the films, the basic nature of the movies would remain the same. We would still have the same basic story, it would still be in a real sense 'the same' Empire in social terms if not technological ones.

And yes, at this point we are no longer doing a versus comparison based on on-screen visuals. So what? That's an argument that's been fought and won years ago. It's decided; yes the on-screen visuals from ST and SW make it very clear which one throws bigger explosions. That's settled. No one here has anything material to add to the Turbolaser Commentaries.

Now, can we try something interesting that's not such a total foregone conclusion, as a purely hypothetical discussion without getting shouted down by "LOL gigatons" for a change?

[Norade]

It seems to me that even with a greater parity of forces the Empire would still likely win this scenario simply by virtue of being ready to engage in combat. They have, though scaled back to reasonable levels, planetary shields, ground based weapons and multitudes of defense stations as well as large forces deployed to protect key worlds. The UFP leaves even key worlds and shipyards undefended or defended by at most a handful of star ships. Even if we take down the fleet counts to a 1:1 parity, the Federation still has to deal with a greater number of space stations, planetary shields, and other stationary defenses than the Empire does.

True, but if the Federation concentrates on defense they tend to perform better- they can mass large fleets to defend or attack key objectives.

It's during periods of relative peacetime, or when 'the front' is very remote, that you see the Federation covering important targets with only light forces. Which makes sense: the bulk of their military is better used during peacetime for other purposes than sitting in orbit around Earth.

This does make them vulnerable to sudden surprise attacks, if you can get your ships to the target faster than they can redeploy. This is not easy, but is certainly possible.

They tend to do better? Relative to what? I mean this is trek we're talking about, the biggest baddest threat to them likes to send in one cube at a time to do battle and even that takes deus ex machina to defeat. We know that if given ample time the federations ground forces will not even bother to build the rudest of defenses as per 'The Seige of AR-558'. In one of the few big battles we see represented on screen the federation nearly loses to idiots who's brightest tactic is ramming. Yet you're trying to imply that the Federation has a level of competence at defense?

Even on a 1:1 parity, there is a simple difference in design policy that is a decisive factor.

A SW ship is built to fight until it explodes. Redundant shields, redundant power, no central computer, weapons can be operated manually.
A Federation ship has everything centralized. 90% of the fight time on screen, the ship gets in trouble because of that. Still, no one cares to redesign that.

...Am I the only one here who's having flashbacks to Executor's bridge windows? One kamikaze hit, one very small kamikaze relative to the immense scale of the ship, and the Imperial flagship loses helm control and plows into the Death Star.

Now, I'm sure they'd have been able to restore control from a secondary node given a bit more time. I'm sure there were complicating factors. But this was during perhaps the single highest-profile battle in the Star Wars canon, in which a single lucky hit had a decisive effect on the largest non-Death Star vessel we see during the movies.

I'm not sure that Star Wars is in a great position to throw stones at Star Trek when it comes to making ships redundant and tough enough to be nigh-immune to critical systems failures.

You'll also of course note the fact that such a fluke shot was only possible due to the ship being deep in a gravity well and having been pounded by the entire rebel fleet. Even after such a beating had it not been for the engine misfire carrying it in a poor direction and there being a gravity well, the ship would have likely recovered and continued to stand against the rebel fleet. This is in stark contrast to Trek where we see consoles exploding and systems dropping off-line from as little as a single attack that doesn't even drop the shields. Of course with the way you're deep throating Trek cock to try to make even a more balanced scenario favor them it's no surprise that you'd ignore the facts in favor of presenting a simplistic view of things.

Also, about the SW needing troops at home to suppress dissent. Why are you assuming the Federation won't? As soon as the fight starts, who wants to bet the other AQ powers won't try to get a piece? Demilitarized zone? Klingon space? Cardassians? I doubt all these powers are instantly aware that the empire wants to conquer them all and will forget all troubles and unify against a common enemy.

It's a tossup. The AQ powers may decide to attack and get a share of the spoils; they may unite against a common external threat. A lot depends on Federation diplomacy.

The most obvious precedent is the Dominion War; what happened then?

The dominion war wasn't even close to the scale that a war with even a weakened Empire could be. I mean just use your head for a minute, one was a battle fought at a single choke point, the other is a war that could break out across any front with no single easily held position to mass forces to defend at. Unlike the retards that Trek is used to fighting we have no reason to assume that the Empire wouldn't send large fleets to overwhelm the smattering of defenses they would find at the first worlds they choose to target. Once the average citizen realizes that their government's lone space ship per several systems defense is allowing them to be easily overrun things start to change.

...
So the people used to fight in battles that have swarms of fighters no bigger than a dozen meters, and operating at thousands of g's (you know, the ones the Federation is supposed to pick off like gnats) do have problems hitting a sluggish moving Galaxy class? You know that your arguments are highly contradicting?

LaCroix, did you not get the entire point of this thread?

The point is to deliberately scale down Imperial capabilities so that a meaningful comparison of strengths and weaknesses becomes possible. So that the dispute doesn't boil down to "LOL gigatons star destroyers generate more electricity and win." "LOL gigatons" is fucking boring and we've all seen it before. Those debates were settled years ago.

And yet there's still this residual tendency to say "advantage to the Empire" in every capacity, in every respect. I understand that, but it defeats the purpose of trying to scale appropriately.

We have no choice, even scaled back to have the Empire unable to do the things that caused them to fight war the way they are used to defeats the point of even having them in this scenario. Their doctrine on both offense and defense relies on them being able to BDZ planets, shift from one end of their territory to the other in a matter of a day or two, be able to mass large fleets and ground armies, and to build planet destroying super weapons. Any attempt to take that away from them results in us getting an army that is no forced to fight in a way they aren't used without the tools they have always used to win battles, how can we even start to compare?

They're going to be larger than the Federation no matter how you swing it - they have at least "thousands" of systems by this "mini galaxy" interpretation (ROTS, nevermind the novels) they just may be more densely packed together. THey're bound to have at least a slightly faster FTL simply due to the fact that they still have a bit more territory to cover (it may just be tens of thousands of c rather than millions)...

This discussion is not "minimalist Star Wars versus Star Trek;" even on those terms we all know who wins and it's gotten boring.

This is "deliberately scaled down Star Wars," something that preserves the basic cultural template, philosophies, and attitudes of the Empire without being so incomprehensibly old and vast that it rolls over its opposition with trivial ease using infinitely superior numbers and technology.

Yet in this evening out of forces one side is making no attempt to keep the Empire's war fighting capability even close to where it would need to be to allow them to fight in the way they were designed an trained to.

I think the point of this exercise is to facilitate comparisons between the social-cultural and institutional elements of the two universes. Obviously, you must first remove the "200 gigaton turbolasers, bitches!" aspect if you don't want people missing that point.

Granted, the industrial and economic aspects of Star Wars inform the institutions and society of Star Wars, but I think Simon's "isolated star cluster" idea covers all that quite elegantly.

Quite right.

What I really want to see is a comparison of the societies, the attitudes towards warfare, the way the combatants would think about each other and the way they'd interact with neutral third parties. Things like that, which make plot rather than special effects when translated into story terms.

I've read the main page like everyone else; if I want to hear another round of "haha heavy industry" and "200 gigaton turbolasers, bitches!" I will just read it the main page again. It is quite well written and well organized, and contains all the arguments of that type that I will ever need to hear for the rest of my life.

Indeed, I have already heard as many of those arguments as I will ever need. So I find this idea of what amounts to a crossover between Star Trek and deliberately scaled down alt-hist Star Wars interesting, and don't want to see it drowned in "LOL gigatons."

So you're asking for something that we're given painfully little information on in either series' cannon.

To take an example, yes, the Empire builds enormous planet-busting gun platforms. How big are those platforms? Quite large, hundreds of kilometers across. Would the essential nature of the Empire be changed if the ships and platforms were physically smaller than the numbers we get from measuring their on-screen sizes? A 20-kilometer battlestation is much less imposing physically than a 160-kilometer one, or a 900-kilometer one... but it's still large enough to provoke "that's no moon..." and similar comments from the protagonists. It's also closer in physical scale to something we can imagine the Federation building... if they were a military dictatorship governed by a ruthless tyrant and didn't mind heavily taxing the people to construct it.

So long as the platform is still capable to doing what it was designed for and can blow up planets then Trek still has no answers for it. You're now also pushing power generation by mass as well as fuel density numbers to even more ludicrous degrees than they already were. Not to mention the fact that physically larger objects were built in Star Trek already and thus something a mere 900km fits in even more easily than something like a Dyson sphere. You're also ignoring the fact that the trench run would have been an impossible scene if you wanted this scale, and that was kind of an important plot point.

Would the essential nature of the Empire be changed if ISDs were built to roughly the same physical and energy-throwing scales as Federation starships? I doubt it; for practical purposes, in terms of plotting, it makes very little difference whether an ISD is 500 or 1500 meters long. It's still a powerful symbol of Imperial oppression that can blow apart your town from orbit or chase the Millenium Falcon while smashing down its deflector shields with light turbolaser fire.

Yes, it would be. Without the threat of a BDZ we'd likely see an Empire where worlds never bothered to purchase and maintain planetary shields or large ground-to-space defenses capable of disabling a large warship in a single shot. If suddenly the worst threat a world can face are torpedoes lobbed from orbit we would instead expect to see large scale ABM systems defending key worlds. This means that the DS, designed for cracking planetary defenses wouldn't need to be built.

I mean, we can't even have the same scenes if we lower one sides power that much. We'd need to cut the trench run (likely the destruction of Alderaan as well), the asteroid chase scene, the sandcrawler being trashed by hand weapon, the Executor's death would need to be changed otherwise even at a 3rd of its old length it would be crashing into something only a third its size, the entire attack on the DSII and it's destruction would need to be changed. I mean it's like you never even thought of what the changes you're thinking of would do to memorable scenes from the original movies.

Trek scales we've seen that they can hit a planet with torpedoes that have less power than a hand grenade. I mean 64 megaton torpedoes, that's a sad cruel joke when IRL we've built and tested a 50 megaton weapon that could have been ~100 megatons if a stage hadn't been removed. The Empire was supposed to be this grand impressive thing that we couldn't hope to struggle against and that was shown from the very first scene where a massive ship loomed high over the Tantive IV.

If the special effects from the movies had been scaled down to the point where these kinds of figures were the ones we drew from the films, the basic nature of the movies would remain the same. We would still have the same basic story, it would still be in a real sense 'the same' Empire in social terms if not technological ones.

If the special effects had been changed to match Trek than the movie would have looked like a cheap TV show on such a shoe string budget that they had to invent a new form of transportation to avoid showing shuttle flights down to planets. How well would that have translated to the large screen?

And yes, at this point we are no longer doing a versus comparison based on on-screen visuals. So what? That's an argument that's been fought and won years ago. It's decided; yes the on-screen visuals from ST and SW make it very clear which one throws bigger explosions. That's settled. No one here has anything material to add to the Turbolaser Commentaries.

Now, can we try something interesting that's not such a total foregone conclusion, as a purely hypothetical discussion without getting shouted down by "LOL gigatons" for a change?

Even without a massive speed and firepower difference between combatants Trek has still shown itself to be so utterly blind to the idea of an effective space force that they have consoles that literally explode when the ship takes a hit at a point nearly as far away from the bridge as can be placed. We also see that their designs waste so much space that BoP's which are about a third the Enterprises size can be a one-on-one threat to it. We see ground forces equipped with unergonomic weapons, we see entire plots made possible by the fact that the crews of these starships often forget what their own vessel is capable of doing (ie every time the Enterprise is boarded and they don't use the knock out gas force field increase gravity method of holding the foe at bay). Hell you can't even argue that the captains of the ships we spend time with are any better as 1/5th of the captains we spend any time with is a batshit insane idiot barely capable of commanding toy soldiers let alone a starship.

[Norade]

Something else to consider, even if tech is roughly equalized the Empire will still have a per ship advantage by not wasting space on stupid shit like Arboretums and family quarters on their warships.

No, they just waste it by sticking massive crews onboard and making everything a hybrid warship (eg its a carrier with guns and land assault capability.) Maybe not as bad as Federation designs, but let's be serious here.

For thta matter, how do things like the arboretums and family quarters stack up in tmers of actual volume (relative to what the other systems, weapons etc. take up? I'm not sure it would neccesarily offer any added advantage. (The same actually may not be true of ISDs though, considering the huge crew sizes and much of the empty spaces, at least in the ICSes, given over to crew capabilities. But since the ISD's guns are optimized to use its full reactor output, you can't really cram more firepower onto the ship without compromising something else.

The only exception in either case would be munitions, but since SW and ST are well known to use potentialy volatile materials in warships, this may simply be a greater risk to the ship itself (it would necessitate greater safety measures for one thing.)

Of course they're not the worlds most efficient designs themselves, but we can see in Star Trek that you can get a ship with roughly the same ability to fight as the Enterprise out of BoP's that are about a third the size. Given that the Klingons usually lose we can likely say that as a warship the Enterprise could have the same fighting strength if it were only half to one third the same size showing that even in universe the Federations designs are hardly the best at what they do.

Looking at Star Wars we see that hanger space takes up relatively little volume on the ship as does the ability to send a ground force into combat. Unlike the federation we also see that Star Wars has the knowledge and ability to correct these flaws in things such as the Tector-class vessel which is otherwise very similar to a normal ISD. Not to mention the other classes of ship that the Empire has at its disposal including dedicated transports, anti-fighter platforms, dedicated carriers, and the like. This stands in stark contrast to the one size fits all method we see Trek display.

[LaCroix]

LaCroix, did you not get the entire point of this thread?

The point is to deliberately scale down Imperial capabilities so that a meaningful comparison of strengths and weaknesses becomes possible. So that the dispute doesn't boil down to "LOL gigatons star destroyers generate more electricity and win." "LOL gigatons" is fucking boring and we've all seen it before. Those debates were settled years ago.

And yet there's still this residual tendency to say "advantage to the Empire" in every capacity, in every respect. I understand that, but it defeats the purpose of trying to scale appropriately.

As far as I see, Baffalo's point in this thing is to take everything away from the Wars side, until Trek wins. This had nothing to do with the original thread.

The original thread was - what if the empire were as big as the AQ and technological on par. So we were talking about only thousand systems, speed scaled downt to thousands of c and firepower reduced to Turbolaser=phaserarray in order to scale them down.

Baffalo decided that it of course means that the empire has never heard of fire control, so the empire is unable to hit things that move slower than the fighters they use, even if these things are 50 times bigger!

He also decided that parity means that one ISD, ignoring the fact that it is more than ten times bigger and carries a shitload of weapons, is just as powerful as a galaxy, which means that the Imperium suddenly is like ten times inferior in technology.

And they even lose 50% of their force if they are outnumbering their foe 3 to 1.

So, if the point of the thread wasn't "let's put them on equal standings and compare their tactics" but "let's scale the empire down until the federation can rape them", then I in fact did miss the point of this entire thread.

[Baffalo]

I am NOT saying that the Empire hasn't heard of fire control. If you want to make that claim, go right ahead. However, you made that claim even after I clearly stated I was referring to the really big guns that would have trouble hitting the more maneuverable Star Trek ships. The smaller guns, the same ones meant to handle snub fighters, will have no problems using the ship's fire control to combat Starfleet. What I am getting tired of is you putting words in my mouth that I have already tried to clarify. So let me rehash a bit.

When I made the statement about Starfleet being cornered, you must understand that when the chips are down, Starfleet can sometimes pull a win even against long odds. We saw this most clearly in First Contact when a fleet of ships managed to batter the Borg down enough to allow Picard to arrive and help deliver victory. Even with severe damage, the Defiant was able to keep going and even tried to ram the Borg ship. While noble and possibly of little consequence, we also saw similar behavior by George Kirk to save the lives of his crew as they escaped. Members of Starfleet knew that to save their friends and comrades, they had to make the ultimate sacrifice.

While I'm not saying that the Empire doesn't have similar behavior when the chips are down, we have seen it numerous times when Starfleet is backed into a corner. They fight with everything they have. Sometimes, that still isn't good enough, and I might have gotten the number of ships destroyed a bit wrong (It was at the end of a long work day), the fact remains that Starfleet, knowing they had to hold off a much larger force, chose to fight hard. Sometimes, it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. Sure, one on one, a Galaxy will get assraped by a Star Destroyer. That's fine. I'm not contending that. I'm sure you're going to yank that last sentence out of context and beat me over the head as being contradictory, and that's fine. I don't care.

What I'm saying is that if we are going to make things a little more equal, you have to realize that maybe, just maybe, Starfleet has a chance to go head to head with the more powerful Empire, even if it's on a more even playing field, and sometimes winning. That's the entire point, is if we make things more equal, then fine. However, if you want to make the argument that it's entirely about strategy, then do this.

Take two taskforces of equal size, two planets with equal industrial output and population, put in command of one a Starfleet commander and in command of the other a typical Imperial commander, and then tell them that they must achieve what their own governments consider to be 'victory'. For the Empire, that can be either total annihilation or conquest. For Starfleet, diplomacy or occupation. Then step back and let them go at it.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

No matter how scaling occurs, it's still apples and oranges. The very act of setting up a scale-o-rama scenario introduces a fudge factor that spoils the resolution of the conclusions; the fact that one side has to be bent so far out of its' own proper shape to make it an even comparison also makes it an inaccurate one, little more than an excuse for an argument.

Which is a shame, because I can see what (I hope) the OP and some of the subsequent posts are trying to get at, their respective grasp of the operational art, their cohesion and tactical dexterity, the human, cultural and command factors, just consider them as two separate groups of people.

It could be done- but I think you would have to go to a scenario that takes all their toys away, or at least makes them irrelevant. A race instead of a fight, somehow get them running parallel instead of head to head.

Something like the Metron situation, the duel imposed on Kirk and the Gorn captain, may work; although finding a higher power to judge between them that wouldn't of it's own political inclination lean to one side or other is problematical. It would have to be a very far out of sorts GSV that wouldn't come down on the side of the Federation, for a start.

Something more contrived may work- Imperial task force arrives through wormhole, Fed/allied battle fleet assembles to meet it, wormhole destabilises and rips a patch out of local space, whiplashing them all to a third, neutral universe where they can play out their strengths and weaknesses divorced from the strategic context, as products of but not connected to their respective civilisations- that might be a useful bell jar for looking at the purely human side.


To be honest, in their own contexts, I think the Federation does have the relative performance advantage. How many wars have they won, how many enemies beaten off or converted into allies? Compare their record to that of the Galactic Empire and the late Republic before it, which managed to win, just, a rigged war, oppress a largely defenceless galaxy, fumble several campaigns against the parts of it that fought back, fail to squash the Rebellion and ultimately fell to a decapitation strike it failed to parry. From the Romulan War on, the Federation's strategic record is actually brighter than the Empire's.

[Norade]

No matter how scaling occurs, it's still apples and oranges. The very act of setting up a scale-o-rama scenario introduces a fudge factor that spoils the resolution of the conclusions; the fact that one side has to be bent so far out of its' own proper shape to make it an even comparison also makes it an inaccurate one, little more than an excuse for an argument.

Which is a shame, because I can see what (I hope) the OP and some of the subsequent posts are trying to get at, their respective grasp of the operational art, their cohesion and tactical dexterity, the human, cultural and command factors, just consider them as two separate groups of people.

It could be done- but I think you would have to go to a scenario that takes all their toys away, or at least makes them irrelevant. A race instead of a fight, somehow get them running parallel instead of head to head.

Something like the Metron situation, the duel imposed on Kirk and the Gorn captain, may work; although finding a higher power to judge between them that wouldn't of it's own political inclination lean to one side or other is problematical. It would have to be a very far out of sorts GSV that wouldn't come down on the side of the Federation, for a start.

Something more contrived may work- Imperial task force arrives through wormhole, Fed/allied battle fleet assembles to meet it, wormhole destabilises and rips a patch out of local space, whiplashing them all to a third, neutral universe where they can play out their strengths and weaknesses divorced from the strategic context, as products of but not connected to their respective civilisations- that might be a useful bell jar for looking at the purely human side.


To be honest, in their own contexts, I think the Federation does have the relative performance advantage. How many wars have they won, how many enemies beaten off or converted into allies? Compare their record to that of the Galactic Empire and the late Republic before it, which managed to win, just, a rigged war, oppress a largely defenceless galaxy, fumble several campaigns against the parts of it that fought back, fail to squash the Rebellion and ultimately fell to a decapitation strike it failed to parry. From the Romulan War on, the Federation's strategic record is actually brighter than the Empire's.

When looking at which side has had more success you have to take into account that the typical enemies that Trek goes up against have less brains than the average rock. I mean can you really applaud a faction for shooting guys rushing you with worse than swords melee weapons? How about winning a battle where the enemy had decided that suicide ramming was the only effective attack? The worlds worst one ship-at-a-time hive mind isn't exactly the kind of thing that takes a tactical genius to defeat either.

The Empire was defeated in part due to a force prophecy and the manifest destiny that this caused. If it wasn't for a supernatural enhanced pilot making a seemingly impossible shot the Empire would have plain and simply crushed the main strain of rebellion in one blow. Even after that they still chased the rebellion down and wrecked their shit at Hoth. Outside of the movies you have guys like Thrawn reading a race's strengths and weakness from their art, what does Trek have?

[jaimehlers]

Norade:

1. You have to remember that the Federation's ground tactics are largely based around the fact that everyone and their brother has a transporter. There is not much point in setting up a sophisticated defense in depth if your opponents can beam assault troops practically anywhere they need. Yeah, stuff that neutralizes transporters can be effective, but only if it can't be detected and destroyed by shipboard weapons. I think that faced with the Empire, which makes a much greater use of more traditional ground assault techniques, that they would adapt their ground defense techniques to it.

2. While I don't doubt that the Executor could have been recovered had it not crashed into the Death Star, according to the novelization of RotJ, the kamikaze A-wing caused the Executor to completely lose its main navigation system, on top of all the other stuff that had happened to it. So I don't think they had sufficient redundancy to deal with a catastrophe like losing the entire bridge tower in enough time for it to matter.

3. Please refrain from making accusations of bias ("deep throating Trek cock"). They do not help your case (in fact, they tend to demonstrate a lack of objectivity more than anything) and they tend to make any discussion go off-track.

4. Leaving the Dominion War aside, the fact is that the Federation did not need to heavily defend systems that were substantially behind the front lines in previous conflicts, because they would probably detect any substantial incursion attempts in time to gather a defensive fleet. I think it is unreasonable to say that their general wartime policy for threatened systems would be only one ship to defend several systems, especially given the Empire's speed advantage.

5. The differences you are talking about are only a matter of degree, not of substance. The technology - by itself - did not make the Empire the Empire; it was the way in which they used the technology they had. For example, taking a couple of weeks to cross the galaxy instead of a few days would not make a particularly large difference in how the Empire responded to rebelling planets. The same generally applies to all the other concerns you raised here.

Your argument boils down to "they aren't the Empire if we start reducing their capacities, so why should we even bother?" Well, the whole point of this exercise is to be imaginative - to come up with ways for the mini-Empire to function the same way as the Galactic Empire despite not having all the same tools. If you don't think it can be done, so be it, but at least have the decency to step out of the way to let others try instead of actively trying to get in their way too.

7. Instead of complaining about "one side" making no attempt to keep the Empire's war fighting capability at the level it would need to be, how about giving examples of what that capability would need to be?

8. I think there's plenty of information in both series' canon to make use of, and if there isn't enough, we can extrapolate from what we do know.

9. Star Trek has dealt with planet-killing machines before. The Doomsday Machine had impenetrable armor and the only way to stop it was to blow up a starship after entering its only aperture (which was directly in line with its planet-killing weapon to boot). Even then, it only forced a permanent shutdown instead of destroying it.

Also, the exact numbers don't matter so much as "does it do what it's supposed to do?". It doesn't matter if a mini-Death Star can blow a planet apart or just render it totally uninhabitable, because the whole point of the Death Star in the first place was to demonstrate that rebellion against the Empire was suicide.

10. What makes you think that scaled-down ISDs couldn't bombard planetary defenses into rubble? It's a matter of degree, not of substance. Put a couple dozen ISDs in orbit and they could level a planet's defenses within days, if not hours - and with the speed reduction, they'd have the time to do it too.

Furthermore, you're missing at least one point of all this - you don't have to be able to recreate the scenes in Star Wars: A New Hope to be able to set up a wargame scenario between Star Trek and scaled-down Star Wars. I mean, I can't really have the memorable and dramatic scenes from the Sengoku Jidai in Japan (for example, Oda Nobunaga's betrayal and forced seppuku at Honnou-ji by his retainer, Akechi Mitsuhide) using the ruleset of Shogun 2 Total War, but I can play an enjoyable "conquest of Japan by whatever faction" scenario.

11. This is a completely irrelevant point. This isn't about making a revised Star Wars movie, it's about making a wargame scenario on paper based on a confrontation between Star Trek and scaled-down Star Wars.

12. Regarding exploding consoles, I don't think anyone who actually takes sci-fi seriously is going to assume that a ship's consoles would actually explode based on battle damage. This of course excludes Trek writers who are only looking for ways to artificially increase the drama of a TV show episode by having consoles blow up.

The Galaxy-class starship was not designed as a warship. The Federation is capable of designing warships - the Defiant took on a Galaxy-class ship in one episode, and as I recall, did pretty well.

And again, you have to remember that we aren't doing Star Trek episodes here, we're doing a wargame simulation. Meaning we don't have to deal with episode writers who aren't even capable of maintaining consistency with themselves, let alone with anyone else.

[Serafina]

1. You have to remember that the Federation's ground tactics are largely based around the fact that everyone and their brother has a transporter. There is not much point in setting up a sophisticated defense in depth if your opponents can beam assault troops practically anywhere they need. Yeah, stuff that neutralizes transporters can be effective, but only if it can't be detected and destroyed by shipboard weapons. I think that faced with the Empire, which makes a much greater use of more traditional ground assault techniques, that they would adapt their ground defense techniques to it.

We've seen transport inhibitors (in ST:I). They're not big targets, hardly larger than a human. They could certainly be put into cover, and remember that Starships are not necessarily always available.
As for your claim that "they'll adapt" - is there ANY evidence for this? We've never seen anyone use "tactical transporters" in order to circumvent the enemy while engaged in battle anyway. Furthermore, in cases where conventional tactics would win the day (such as during the siege of AR-558), the Federation never employed them. Anything beyond "bunch of guys with phaser (rifles)" seems to be beyond them. They do not erect fortifications, lay traps or barbed wire, do not have any squad support weapons and so on. So they clearly can NOT adapt like you claim.
If you've got any evidence that their tactics are just so abyssal because they have transporters, please show where
-Transporters are used in battle, rather than just as a replacement for shuttles to get on the ground.
-The Federation employs good ground tactics where appropriate

2. While I don't doubt that the Executor could have been recovered had it not crashed into the Death Star, according to the novelization of RotJ, the kamikaze A-wing caused the Executor to completely lose its main navigation system, on top of all the other stuff that had happened to it. So I don't think they had sufficient redundancy to deal with a catastrophe like losing the entire bridge tower in enough time for it to matter.

They had mere seconds to react before they crashed into the Death Star. In normal space combat, you do not have armored battle stations you're floating next to, so you have more time to reroute the controls.

5. The differences you are talking about are only a matter of degree, not of substance. The technology - by itself - did not make the Empire the Empire; it was the way in which they used the technology they had. For example, taking a couple of weeks to cross the galaxy instead of a few days would not make a particularly large difference in how the Empire responded to rebelling planets. The same generally applies to all the other concerns you raised here.

Um...what? Seriously, that's just stupid.
The ability to travel there within a single day means that you can employ large fleets to do so. That's why the Empire used "sector fleets" which were not stationed at any specific planet, but rather in a sector of space, but could be brought down upon any planet in that sector within short notice.
Seriously, that's like claiming that modern travel speeds did not change society, and that our society would not change significantly if we would need a few weeks just to travel a few hundred kilometers, and months to cross the Atlantic instead of hours.

9. Star Trek has dealt with planet-killing machines before. The Doomsday Machine had impenetrable armor and the only way to stop it was to blow up a starship after entering its only aperture (which was directly in line with its planet-killing weapon to boot). Even then, it only forced a permanent shutdown instead of destroying it.

How is that in any way applicable to the Death Star or superlaser-armed ships? They do not have such a glaring weakness (even the first Death Star was better protected, and the second had that weakness removed).

11. This is a completely irrelevant point. This isn't about making a revised Star Wars movie, it's about making a wargame scenario on paper based on a confrontation between Star Trek and scaled-down Star Wars.

That's like saying "let's make a wargame of USA vs. some third-world shithole, but let's scale down the USA to their enemies level."

If you want to compare tactics, do so. The Empires tactics in both space and ground combat is far superior. They actually employ proper squad tactics, make use of armor and NBC-protection and carry a variety of weapons. In space, their ships are made for combat instead of leisure cruises, they are capable of concentrating their fire at long ranges and their officers are actually properly trained for war.
You can't realistically compare strategies, because you'd have to drastically reduce hyperdrive speed to get anything close to parity, but such a change would make the Empires strategic situation unrecognizable. It'd be like reducing modern mechanized forces to medieval speeds.

Taking out the numerical advantage is fine and doesn't necessarily change the Empire that much (you could even claim that it's just a small imperial remnant or such). Taking out the strategic speed advantage is far trickier, since it starts changing the Empires technology and it'd invalidate the entire strategic doctrine of the Empire. Changing firepower also changes the technology, but if you just want to compare tactics it's viable.

But you're not properly comparing tactics. When you see something in the Federations tactics you do not like (such as their terrible ground combat) you handwave it away - this is not proper analysis.

12. Regarding exploding consoles, I don't think anyone who actually takes sci-fi seriously is going to assume that a ship's consoles would actually explode based on battle damage. This of course excludes Trek writers who are only looking for ways to artificially increase the drama of a TV show episode by having consoles blow up.

If you take that approach, you're throwing suspension of disbelief right out of the window.
There actually is a good explanation for the exploding consoles: The engineering of the ship is shitty (plenty of evidence for that) and high-power plasma conduits are routed trough the consoles. It'd be like routing a high-pressure steam tough a thin pipe - it can be fine as long as the pressure is kept steady, but when it's not (say, you take damage), it'll blow right open.

[Norade]

Norade:

1. You have to remember that the Federation's ground tactics are largely based around the fact that everyone and their brother has a transporter. There is not much point in setting up a sophisticated defense in depth if your opponents can beam assault troops practically anywhere they need. Yeah, stuff that neutralizes transporters can be effective, but only if it can't be detected and destroyed by shipboard weapons. I think that faced with the Empire, which makes a much greater use of more traditional ground assault techniques, that they would adapt their ground defense techniques to it.

This makes defenses useless how exactly? We saw that when under attack by a force that was not teleporting into their midst they made no attempt to bolster their defenses. It also doesn't explain not carrying any heavy weapons or not having a single combat worthy ground vehicle as standard on even the most prestigious star ships in the fleet.

2. While I don't doubt that the Executor could have been recovered had it not crashed into the Death Star, according to the novelization of RotJ, the kamikaze A-wing caused the Executor to completely lose its main navigation system, on top of all the other stuff that had happened to it. So I don't think they had sufficient redundancy to deal with a catastrophe like losing the entire bridge tower in enough time for it to matter.

Ignoring the fact that they had the vast majority of a powerful rebel fleet blasting them before such an event was even possible while fighting deep in a gravity well. Not to mention the fact that the Trek vessels suffer from even worse centralization of systems, systems that actively start showering you with sparks when you're being hit in combat might I add.

3. Please refrain from making accusations of bias ("deep throating Trek cock"). They do not help your case (in fact, they tend to demonstrate a lack of objectivity more than anything) and they tend to make any discussion go off-track.

When did this board gain a contingent of manners police? Did the mocking of stupid people motto change while I wasn't looking?

4. Leaving the Dominion War aside, the fact is that the Federation did not need to heavily defend systems that were substantially behind the front lines in previous conflicts, because they would probably detect any substantial incursion attempts in time to gather a defensive fleet. I think it is unreasonable to say that their general wartime policy for threatened systems would be only one ship to defend several systems, especially given the Empire's speed advantage.

The fact that they don't have more than a single ship guarding the most important center of government and the shipyards shared by the same system is pretty damning if you ask me. Even more so considering all the enemies that, even with warp speeds similar to those employed by Star Trek, managed to reach the system unmolested. Not to mention that often they had no knowledge that a threat was coming meaning that they defense in depth tactic they have is utterly worthless.

5. The differences you are talking about are only a matter of degree, not of substance. The technology - by itself - did not make the Empire the Empire; it was the way in which they used the technology they had. For example, taking a couple of weeks to cross the galaxy instead of a few days would not make a particularly large difference in how the Empire responded to rebelling planets. The same generally applies to all the other concerns you raised here.

Your argument boils down to "they aren't the Empire if we start reducing their capacities, so why should we even bother?" Well, the whole point of this exercise is to be imaginative - to come up with ways for the mini-Empire to function the same way as the Galactic Empire despite not having all the same tools. If you don't think it can be done, so be it, but at least have the decency to step out of the way to let others try instead of actively trying to get in their way too.

You're really going to say that you would not change the way you fight when resupply and reinforcement now takes weeks when, by RotS, a trip from the core to the mid rim took only hours? If your are you're honestly either possessing a hollow void where your brain should be or heavily biased in favor of one side.

As for the rest, that's your job as OP, not mine as somebody responding to this thread. You need to be the one to prove that the Empire can be scaled back and still retain the ability to fight and govern itself as it has in all other cannon sources. I've already shown that without the ability to easily bombard a planet shields able to withstand a prolonged assault and defense guns able to repel even larger star ship would not exist; this fact alone would change military doctrine by a vast amount. Ballooning transit time from at most two days to two weeks vastly changes the way battles would be fought and forces moved, no longer can you call in forces as the battle is happening to fight wars. Removing planet busting capabilities removes a key event in the Star Wars timeline and thus alters everything that would come after it. If you want to reduce things you must show exactly why changing them will not effect the way the Wars side fights a war and governs itself, not just wave your hand and say that of course things will be the same.

7. Instead of complaining about "one side" making no attempt to keep the Empire's war fighting capability at the level it would need to be, how about giving examples of what that capability would need to be?

Because as stated above that is your job, as the one proposing the idea you and those who support the idea must show how the changes made don't effect the Wars side unduly, it is not my job to point out everything that must not change.

8. I think there's plenty of information in both series' canon to make use of, and if there isn't enough, we can extrapolate from what we do know.

Code for both sides will start pulling shit out there ass because at least one side, Trek, has painfully little information about the makeup of its territories and governments that is considered official cannon.

9. Star Trek has dealt with planet-killing machines before. The Doomsday Machine had impenetrable armor and the only way to stop it was to blow up a starship after entering its only aperture (which was directly in line with its planet-killing weapon to boot). Even then, it only forced a permanent shutdown instead of destroying it.

Also, the exact numbers don't matter so much as "does it do what it's supposed to do?". It doesn't matter if a mini-Death Star can blow a planet apart or just render it totally uninhabitable, because the whole point of the Death Star in the first place was to demonstrate that rebellion against the Empire was suicide.

Yes, they have dealt with a planet killer that had just the right weakness for them to exploit, you can't expect every system to have such a weakness that suitably meets their needs. Not to mention the fact that the DS was more than just a planet killing weapon containing vast fighter wings, a shielding system at leas on par with planetary shields, secondary weaponry able to demolish vast fleets of the next best vessels anybody had in service, and the ability to resupply even large scale capital vessels. It seems that people forget that the DS was more than just a single weapon, it was a package that if not exploited by what was essentially magic, would have been nearly invincible.

10. What makes you think that scaled-down ISDs couldn't bombard planetary defenses into rubble? It's a matter of degree, not of substance. Put a couple dozen ISDs in orbit and they could level a planet's defenses within days, if not hours - and with the speed reduction, they'd have the time to do it too.

Furthermore, you're missing at least one point of all this - you don't have to be able to recreate the scenes in Star Wars: A New Hope to be able to set up a wargame scenario between Star Trek and scaled-down Star Wars. I mean, I can't really have the memorable and dramatic scenes from the Sengoku Jidai in Japan (for example, Oda Nobunaga's betrayal and forced seppuku at Honnou-ji by his retainer, Akechi Mitsuhide) using the ruleset of Shogun 2 Total War, but I can play an enjoyable "conquest of Japan by whatever faction" scenario.

Because, if we're limiting them to commonly accepted higher end Trek weapons it would take 5.2 million 64 megaton torpedoes to complete a bombardment of Earth's landmass and accomplish the stated goal of a BDZ. A BDZ isn't simply an orbital bombardment, it is meant to leave planets not worth reclaiming because it's easier to terraform a new one. Removing even the ability to preform a shallow half assed imitation takes away at least part of the sting of the terror doctrine that the Empire relied upon. I've also mention several times now that a decrease in the effectiveness and speed of delivery of a bombardment would likely lead to different defenses, which would lead to different methods of attack, which would mean that we might as well be comparing Trek to a demented scribble scrawled by an autistic chimp that got its ass stomped in a versus debate and thus rallied pathetic defenders.

Also, if you're going to try to tell me that Shogun Total War or it sequel even come close to a reasonable simulation of a conquest of Japan you real need your head checked. Hell, it isn't even close to the resolution required to get even a passing nod at being realistic.

11. This is a completely irrelevant point. This isn't about making a revised Star Wars movie, it's about making a wargame scenario on paper based on a confrontation between Star Trek and scaled-down Star Wars.

Yet in doing so you're removing key things that define the Wars universe as we know it. I mean I might as well ask that we remove transporters from Trek for the amount of events that would change in Wars if we tried even a fraction of the down scaling you're talking about. At this point it's easier to say that Trek suddenly got a massive kick in the pants speed, firepower, and production wise and build from there.

12. Regarding exploding consoles, I don't think anyone who actually takes sci-fi seriously is going to assume that a ship's consoles would actually explode based on battle damage. This of course excludes Trek writers who are only looking for ways to artificially increase the drama of a TV show episode by having consoles blow up.

The Galaxy-class starship was not designed as a warship. The Federation is capable of designing warships - the Defiant took on a Galaxy-class ship in one episode, and as I recall, did pretty well.

And again, you have to remember that we aren't doing Star Trek episodes here, we're doing a wargame simulation. Meaning we don't have to deal with episode writers who aren't even capable of maintaining consistency with themselves, let alone with anyone else.

No, you don't get to ignore on screen evidence of exploding consoles and shit planning that litter Trek. In nearly ever on screen battle from TNG onward we see consoles showering their operators in sparks. We consistently see tools that should be used to repel boarders forgotten. In fact we see all this bumbling incompetence displayed far more often than we see anything resembling a decent plan or competence to the point where based on sheer numbers of occurrences horrible ineptitude must be taken as SOP for the crews of ships in Trek.

The fact that the Federation did finally build a half decent warship doesn't do anything for all the classes that are horrid wastes of space, nor does it allow them to be any better off against a wars ship with the same ton for ton potential that isn't wasted hauling needless hedonistic excess through space along with its guns.

[LaCroix]

Baffalo - you realize that pulling a victory out of dire situation is because the federation is the hero in the series?
If the show were called Starship Quaplah!, we would see a Bird of prey dissecting an Galaxy with ease.
All these feats were writers fiat, not based on facts. None of those are based on technology.

The rebels as well pulled amazing feats out of their asses, mainly the fact they won in the end.
Since they use Imperial technology, we could as well assume that the imperials are as able to pull victories out of their asses...

Thats why that isn't relevant to the analysis. (Which isn't really working, anyway, for reasons Norade has already stated much better than I could.)

But what matters is that the tinypire still has much more territory, more and bigger ships and a real war machinery, while the Federation only has border patrols. Will they cause casulties? Of course. Do they have chance in a military confrontation? Not unless they manage to get everyone else in the AQ to cooperate. If the Imperials get only one of the major powers on their side, or to mind their own business, the AQ is lost.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I tend to look to TOS when it comes to Trek, admittedly; and the military record of Kirk's Federation is not bad at all. TNG and after...I have to agree with most of the criticisms. Their record, and tactics, are cackhanded, and they do win through by basically deus ex machina. I think.

Both sides' forces have their non-military burdens to bear and their own flavour of dodgy physics to exploit/endure, and for the Federation, that is the worrying number of what I would call failed races, the one world ultratech civilisations of great mental power lying around everywhere that plagued Kirk so much.

I despise this, incidentally, it makes no sense to me, but it's part of the milieu and part of the challenge the forces involved have to deal with.

On the Imperial side, they have their own politics to worry about, and the Force is part of that. They also arguably have an essentially seventeenth century command setup, with old families and nobles embedded in the structure in a similar fashion to to something from the Dutch Wars. Profesionalism does not rule, and civil interference is considerable.

Incidentally, http://warships1discussionboards.yuku.c ... eak?page=1- yes, it's Trek fanfiction, or more accurately deconstruction- well worth it.