darthy2 wrote:
In reverse order: That clip does not show a phaser, or at least no type or setting of phaser that's usually seen; phasers don't generally cause blood loss from open wounds. It's irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Even still, it would be on you to demonstrate that the purely-kinetic effectiveness of the whatever-it-was blast is equivalent to being hit in the head with a fifteen-pound rock.
Definitely wrong there. The durability of the one wearing the armor is a factor. Like if superman were wearing stormtrooper armor, we would know that a stun setting would not affect him. Stormtroopers drop like flies. This makes it more likely that a stun setting can affect a stormtrooper.
Your reply has nothing to do with my statement. You have repeatedly failed to provide calculations supporting your claim, a violation of Debating Rule Five: Back Up Your Claims. Demonstrate that the weapon in your clip is a phaser even though it causes bleeding wounds instead of burns or vaporization, calculate the KE imparted by the blast, and show the equivalence to large rocks and SW stun blasts.
Say it with me: kinetic energy and energy weapons fire are not the same thing. They have nothing to do with each other, except in the higher-abstraction physics sense.Just because it's possible to knock somebody out through their armor via momentum transfer has no relevance to knocking them out with a stun blast, unless you can prove it does using actual facts and figures. Kinetic weapons - rocks, clubs, etc - can knock stormtroopers down by direct momentum transfer unbalancing them or out by directing that momentum transfer against the head, sloshing the brain around inside the skull. Demonstrate that phaser fire can provide sufficient purely-kinetic energy to accomplish either.
The zero gravity scene in Star Trek 6 with the first law of motion proves that phasers transfer kinetic energy. They were motionless in zero gravity then they moved when hit with the phaser. The movement proves that a kinetic force from the phaser acted on them. Not to mention the star trek 3 scene that everyone is trying to forget and dismissing as an outlier.
You've provided three scenes allegedly showing this, one of which (Quark) did not show anything of the sort, the second of which (STVI) may not have involved a phaser at all and certainly didn't impart enough KE to matter (I invite you to demonstrate otherwise), and the third (STIII) takes place on an artificial planet with uncertain physical characteristics, uses an uncertain power setting, and is as far as I know unlike
any other single phaser firefight in the entire series. One of your claims is a lie, the second has yet to be proved, and the third is the very definition of an outlier. You're at best one for three. Do better. How much KE do phasers impart under normal combat (i.e., within normal gravity) conditions? I await your calculations.
We know for a fact that the Rebels quote is wrong, since stormtrooper armor protects against all those things Batman listed as a logical necessity as well as from film evidence. I'm not buying a Rebels DVD just to demonstrate that to you. Moreover, even without anything but the clip you provided it's obviously false, because instead of being knocked out the two in armor were dazed for a few seconds and were fine immediately after.
We don't know that it was wrong. Maybe you're just interpreting it wrong. When he said that the armor does not block anything, he was probably just talking about the things you would expect the armor to be able to block, not insects to the face or sunburn or whatever other desperate counter-examples people threw out there. The stormtroopers went down with a stun setting, in a similar manner to how Quark went down when being hit with the lowest stun setting of a phaser.
Such as what, smoke, gas, shrapnel, the actual stunning effects of stun bolts instead of a few moments' dizziness? Dialogue is imprecise. Prove that stormtrooper serves no useful purpose, which is what you're effectively claiming. Your continued insistence on this is a violation of Debating Rule 3: No Broken Record Tactics.
Being knocked out by Sabine Wren, a highly-trained bounty hunter, commando, and former soldier wearing armor of uncertain capabilities has nothing to do with resistance to phaser fire because, once again, resistance to kinetic energy and to energy weapons fire are unrelated
Not unrelated. Durability of a stormtrooper and blocking ability of the armor are factors in determining whether a stormtrooper can be knocked out from a stun setting. She hit a stormtrooper in the helmet and the stormtrooper went down. In one hit. That scene is an embarassment to stormtroopers.
Do you think armor works like video-game hit points? Medieval plate armor was effectively impervious to (non-specialized) stabbing attacks, which is why a primary weapon for late-era knights was the mace. Modern NBC suits offer excellent defenses against fallout, biological, and chemical weapons, and none whatsoever against bullets. 'Blocking ability' depends on threat profile; it's not some universal factor that applies equally to everything.
To summarize, you have repeatedly claimed that a lowest-power stun blast from a phaser will reliably knock out a stormtrooper. Your reasoning for this is that stormtroopers are knocked down (not out, unless you can prove it) by kinetic weapons thrown by abnormally strong aliens, that they are knocked down (not out, unless you can prove it) by Star Wars-technology stun blasts, and that stormtrooper armor serves no useful purpose despite the Empire buying billions of suits of it for decades. If you can provide
hard evidence showing that:
1) Star Trek phaser stun blasts are more powerful than Star Wars blaster stun bolts,
2) Phasers impart significant kinetic energy, at least equal to a fifteen-pound rock to the head,
3) Phasers will work through the armor material, when their effectiveness is clearly highly dependent on target material, and
4) Stormtrooper armor is equally-vulnerable (/resistant) against all threats, even those with massively different mechanisms of action (i.e., phaser stun blasts and rocks to the head), then I'll cheerfully admit you were right all along. I await your evidence, with attendant calculations and citations.
The question of
what would make for an enjoyable show/movie/story is completely irrelevant to the current debate and I'm not going to dignify it with further discussion. We operate under suspension of disbelief here; appeals to fictionality carry no weight.
“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb