Why I Don't Like SW vs. ST

[Stark]

Are you characterising the board by a single thread when you describe narrative discussion as a 'general reaction' over or against numerical analysis? Bear in mind the entire history of the board is publicly visible.

[the atom]

Except that's always been a stupid way to compare anything and reinforces the simplistic idea that numbers hold prime importance, thus distorting the discussion (if you can even call that a discussion).

History demonstrates over and over and over that numbers, one way or another, hold quite a bit of importance. Discussion about the political and diplomatic dimensions of such an interaction is incredibly limited if you don't even have much of any real idea as to how both sides compare militarily. It'd be like trying to determine the outcome of an interaction between Qing China and the British Empire without knowing anything about the difference between an ironclad and a Chinese junk.

[Stark]

I don't know if you're just an idiot, but this reply you stripped of context was in response to Batman saying he's a 'numbers guy' (by which he means repeating numbers his authorities tell him) and that he simply looks at numbers and sees what is bigger.

Do you think this is a) not simpleminded or b) interesting?

And your example is pretty poorly chosen, because there are plenty of interesting things to talk about regarding Chinese/British relations and history that have nothing to do with WHICH NUMBER IS BIGGER. Imagine if every time someone said 'the social costs of the initial contact between -' 'fuck you noob Royal Navy base delta zero slaughter billions I win'.

[the atom]

I don't know if you're just an idiot, but this reply you stripped of context was in response to Batman saying he's a 'numbers guy' (by which he means repeating numbers his authorities tell him) and that he simply looks at numbers and sees what is bigger.

So fucking what if he's more interested in the technical side of the issue? This has absolutely no bearing on the validity of my response in context of yours. Pointing out that one side has bigger guns or more ships then the other is a perfectly relevant and valid observation to make

And your example is pretty poorly chosen, because there are plenty of interesting things to talk about regarding Chinese/British relations and history that have nothing to do with WHICH NUMBER IS BIGGER. Imagine if every time someone said 'the social costs of the initial contact between -' 'fuck you noob Royal Navy base delta zero slaughter billions I win'.

Excuse me? How exactly do you have a meaningful discussion about social relations between China and the British Empire without understanding the role hard power played in cultural and social exchanges? How do you understand the impact hard power plays without understanding how it works or it's limitations? There's sort of a reason why people champing at the bit to go push over Assad and all the Muslims in Syria are considered so mind-bleedingly ignorant.

[Stark]

I just want to say 'thank you', because you made my day.

Regardless, I can see I was too nice to you and you have indeed totally missed the point. Non-pew pew discussion was mentioned because people talked about a step away from the 'WHOSE GIGATONS' style of discussion that has been the norm for a decade, and that they feel there are other discussions to be had. Batman the Cretin appears and declared 'numbers debates' easier (of course, he simply repeats numbers others develop through research and analysis so it's pretty easy) and made the bizarre claim that SDN has a 'general response' towards non-numbers, narrative discussion, a statement which is so divorced from reality even someone who actually pretends to be a fictional character could not defend it.

In this way, you can see that your bold defence of the Boards Biggest Idiot a week after the fact is a bit misplaced. You took my quote out of context and attacked it with your asinine HISTORY LOL nonsense, because you don't understand what the discussion was actually about.

PROTIP - it's not about how Star Trek could 'defeat' Star Wars. Its about how that whole idea is lame and boring and done to death and there are more interesting vs style scenarios to discuss. Its also (for me) about how the primacy of numbers based, slide-rule vs debating has depreciated any other type (as you yourself so clearly demonstrate) to the point where people not only struggle to discuss fiction any other way, but see those discussions as a threat and invent a 'general response' against their 'easier' method.

You know, like how you support the idea of hijacking any discussion into LOL YOU DUMB WE HAVE THE GIGATONS LOOK AT THIS SCREENSHOT. The delusions of historical relevance are just the icing on your enormous Missed The Point cake.

Don't eat it all at once.

[the atom]

I would've loved a taste of this Missed the Point Cake, if not for the fact that you hadn't already mashed your entire face into it. Yuck.

I just want to say 'thank you', because you made my day.

Regardless, I can see I was too nice to you and you have indeed totally missed the point. Non-pew pew discussion was mentioned because people talked about a step away from the 'WHOSE GIGATONS' style of discussion that has been the norm for a decade, and that they feel there are other discussions to be had. Batman the Cretin appears and declared 'numbers debates' easier (of course, he simply repeats numbers others develop through research and analysis so it's pretty easy) and made the bizarre claim that SDN has a 'general response' towards non-numbers, narrative discussion, a statement which is so divorced from reality even someone who actually pretends to be a fictional character could not defend it.

In this way, you can see that your bold defence of the Boards Biggest Idiot a week after the fact is a bit misplaced. You took my quote out of context and attacked it with your asinine HISTORY LOL nonsense, because you don't understand what the discussion was actually about.

If your response to batman was purely 'there is more to the debate then who has big numbers' I would have quietly agreed and moved on, but then you went along and said:

Except that's always been a stupid way to compare anything and reinforces the simplistic idea that numbers hold prime importance, thus distorting the discussion (if you can even call that a discussion).

I suppose this might be code for something, since you're apparently of the literary school that thinks poorly communicating and then being very smug about it constitutes 'wit', but really? Numbers aren't important? Fuck me, this is news to just about every civilization that's ever existed ever.

Upon a casual rereading of the thread you'll hopefully notice, beyond your hysterical straw manning, that nobody in this thread has ever actually claimed or implied that there's nothing else to the debate, or that all debates should be about numbers. I'm just pointing out how saying 'numbers don't matter' is unspeakably stupid.

[Channel72]

I never understood the fire-power analysis nonsense either. The visual effects used to derive these figures are wildly inconsistent (leading to various excuses about "settings"), and for Trek at least, a lot of the effects dating back to the 60s and 80s are preposterously dated, meaning we should, at best, consider them as a rough approximation of what occurred in a fictional universe, rather than actual footage that can be used to derive accurate figures.

[Batman]

What else should we use in your opinion? For those of us who care about the numbers that footage is all we have to derive the numbers from. And you'll notice that a lot of the people doing the number crunching DID hedge their figures by stating 'can't be less than/can't be more than' rather than blithely stating they were presenting accurate figures.

[Lord Revan]

I never understood the fire-power analysis nonsense either. The visual effects used to derive these figures are wildly inconsistent (leading to various excuses about "settings"), and for Trek at least, a lot of the effects dating back to the 60s and 80s are preposterously dated, meaning we should, at best, consider them as a rough approximation of what occurred in a fictional universe, rather than actual footage that can be used to derive accurate figures.

As Batman pointed out we don't get accurate figures from visuals but rather a range.

how ever visuals tend to be the most consistent sources as they don't rely as much on the people involved being aware of the physics involved and also don't have problems dialoge can have (humans can after all exagrate for effect among other things) even if we assume the people involved knew the science. While everything we got is low quality sources (we can't after all take a phaser or turbolaser and test the yield since they don't exist), it's best to seek the most relible and unbiased source.

[malguslover]

Hey, folks. I joined this forum a couple days ago to weigh in on Into Darkness, and, though I had heard of the site before, I had no idea how old and traditional the SW vs ST debates were.

Now, confession time: I'm half-Trekkie, on my mother's side, and probably wouldn't have seen any of the Star Wars movies more than a couple times if not for Messrs. Nelson, Corbett and Murphy. My experience with this up to now has been in the last half-hour, reading this forum, the "five minutes" thing, and a few of the essays. But even with experience of only one side of this conflict, I still think it's pointless to discuss.

Star Wars tech and Star Trek tech exist for different reasons: In Star Trek, FTL warp drive is still a limiting factor in speed. When a specific speed is used, it's usually in order to add a ticking clock of some kind; and what happens on the journey takes up a significant amount of time before the destination. In Star Wars, saying that a ship has traveled "halfway across the galaxy" is a quick and sensational way to show the ship is fast and has gone far, even if that stretches the Empire's technology level into the improbable.

Now, I don't mean to say that ST is better than SW for this, just that it's apples and oranges. You can't ask who would beat whom because you can't reconcile the two.

I can understand this. I mean it really is the crazyist thing ever. We are trying to gain actual numbers and facts from movie special effects of a fictional universe.

It literately is trying to explain magic.

[harbringer]

I haven't posted in a while for a couple of reasons, which actually are relevant here. In my point of view the firepower debate in the light of the complete reboot of Star Trek is actually harder as all the figures have to be redone for the new ... universe if you will. Just as it will be intriguing what happens to Star Wars in the post Lucas era.

However discussions on social questions are more accessible to those of us without engineering degrees. The military discussion in terms of tactics with the little hover bike thing is obvious to all and a discussion that changes things but is also accessible to most people here. Has anything in the new movies for trek been destroyed that would allow a reliable real world calculation?. I'm willing to be proved wrong but that's the way I see it.

[PainRack]

I thought the problem was that comparing social issues, themes and etc is much more difficult than military pew pew.

How would one compare in a vs the Galactic Empire manufacturing vs the Federation? The Star Wars droid rights group vs the Federation attitude towards Data and AI?

[StarSword]

I can understand this. I mean it really is the crazyist thing ever. We are trying to gain actual numbers and facts from movie special effects of a fictional universe.

It literately is trying to explain magic.

You don't have to explain something to quantify its in-universe effects within a reasonable range, and extrapolate what those effects might imply. For example, the fact that the Empire was able to construct 60-some-odd percent of a 900 km diameter mobile battlestation in about six months (date range from the ROTJ novelization, I believe; feel free to correct me on this, guys) gives you a rough idea of their industrial and logistical capabilities. We've got three or four planets covered entirely in cities with no arable land; how do they feed their population? If they import food, that says something about the civilian transportation infrastructure.

On the Star Trek side of the coin, the fact that losing 39 ships at Wolf 359 was considered a crippling loss for Starfleet gives you an idea of Starfleet's size during the first half of TNG. It also tells you roughly how big of a reaction force a peacetime Starfleet can scramble in a given area on short notice, and how long it takes for their allies to respond to calls for help (the Klingons promised to send ships to Wolf 359 but they didn't arrive in time). Follow on with them being able to field high hundreds to thousands of capital ships during the Dominion War a few years later. You can look at that as a demonstration of how readily they can shift gears from humanitarian, exploration, and peacekeeping work to fighting wars against similarly sized polities, and how long it takes them to ramp up from peacetime to "holy shit, there are Borg out there!". Also what ships they use: Peacetime duty (some of TOS, all of TNG) seems to require only one, maybe two ships per trouble spot and favors large multipurpose ships like the Connie, the Excelsior-class, or the GCS. In DS9, when they're fighting an actual war instead of intermittent skirmishes that they're able to talk their way out of most of the time, smaller, faster, more durable purpose-built fighting ships like the Defiant-class appear to perform better (and note the Klingons follow this model most of the time, too). Also also the pitfalls of trying to use one model in the other situation: when Starfleet tried the "send a single GCS to show the flag and solve the problem" trick against the Dominion, the Jem'Hadar gave them the finger, drove the Odyssey off, and even rammed them after they'd already decided to retreat just to make a point.

And all this is just from basic critical thinking without any actual physics, math, or frame-by-frame scaling and measurement work involved. (Honestly most of the time that comes up here it goes straight over my head. I can keep track of the political stuff better.) My point is, this is what this board does. If you don't like it, go somewhere else.