Reason with me on my questions and statements. Please.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Why did zero_exe think 50-100 MW/m^2 meant MW per square inch? You fail at basic maths worse than you fail at basic logic.

Let's use your surface area numbers, oversimplified though they are. 9.2E7 m^2 and 100MW per square metre yields 9.2E9 MW or 9.2E15 W (helpful tip, there's no such thing as "Megawatts per second," MW is MJ per second anyway). Which is (with 4.814E15 J per megaton) 1.9 megatons per second. And that's a threat. Since you're using fan-made videos as evidence, I think it's safe for us to use something a little more canon; the ever-dreaded ICS.

Acclamator-I assault ships, as seen in AOTC, mount 24 point-defence laser cannons rated at 6 megatons per shot. So, based solely on those numbers, a small assault ship's point-defences can deliver a lot more energy than the E-D's shields can handle in a single shot.

Also, could you please stop the random capitalization of words and using the caps lock? It's really annoying.

[Batman]

Oh so that's what zeromoron meant by 'vaporizing the atmosphere of an entire planet'. I was kinda wondering what the hell he was talking about. It's been a while since I saw that episode but all I remember the Big E doing was something technobabbly chain reactionish that cleansed the atmosphere in a completely unquantifiable way (not that the guy's all that hot on quantification anyway from what I've seen so far).

[Havok]

Yeah. And that video makes it seem like Enterprise is attacking the planet, not burning off something harmful, like it was actually doing. That video is hilariously dishonest and like I said, assumes and counts on us not actually liking or watching Star Trek.

[biostem]

And what irks me the most about the whole "lasers can't penetrate our navigational deflectors" is that that assumption is never tested. It's just a boastful claim made against a much smaller and less advanced vessel. Where's Starfleet's vaunted superior tech when Roga Danar managed to break out of a transporter beam or shrug off phaser blasts? What about the multitude of Starfleet shuttles lost due to bad landings, vs Luke's X-Wing which managed to survive a crash into a swamp, then full submergence into said swamp, then takeoff with virtually no maintenance in between?

[Batman]

What in Valen's name have any of those got to do with superior technology? We already know there's people resistant to phaser stun thanks to writer's fiat alien biology, and Luke didn't crash, he just picked a bad landing site. Note how both he and Artoo have ample time to get off the X-Wing before it sinks. An actual crash would have ended up with the X-Wing's nose being buried a metre deep into the swamp's ground.

[the atom]

And what irks me the most about the whole "lasers can't penetrate our navigational deflectors" is that that assumption is never tested. It's just a boastful claim made against a much smaller and less advanced vessel.

Contrary to idiots who don't know what context is, I think they were talking about those lasers specifically.

What about the multitude of Starfleet shuttles lost due to bad landings, vs Luke's X-Wing which managed to survive a crash into a swamp, then full submergence into said swamp, then takeoff with virtually no maintenance in between?

When did this happen? All I remember as far as crashes are concerned is an episode of Voyager where a shuttle ploughs through dozens of feet of solid rock with it's occupants mostly unscathed.

[biostem]

And what irks me the most about the whole "lasers can't penetrate our navigational deflectors" is that that assumption is never tested. It's just a boastful claim made against a much smaller and less advanced vessel.

Contrary to idiots who don't know what context is, I think they were talking about those lasers specifically.

What about the multitude of Starfleet shuttles lost due to bad landings, vs Luke's X-Wing which managed to survive a crash into a swamp, then full submergence into said swamp, then takeoff with virtually no maintenance in between?

When did this happen? All I remember as far as crashes are concerned is an episode of Voyager where a shuttle ploughs through dozens of feet of solid rock with it's occupants mostly unscathed.

There was the episode where I think Troi crash lands, she's like the only occupant still alive, the shuttle is heavily damaged, and the rescue is blocked by that oil/tar creature. IIRC, the planet was portrayed as desert like with virtually no wind.

[Batman]

And what irks me the most about the whole "lasers can't penetrate our navigational deflectors" is that that assumption is never tested. It's just a boastful claim made against a much smaller and less advanced vessel.

Contrary to idiots who don't know what context is, I think they were talking about those lasers specifically.

And I rather think that was his point. The amount of really seriously ludicrously powerful lasers being ignored by the E-D's shields-navigational, combat, or otherwise-is zero. Borg cutting laser cuts through the hull like it isn't there, laser impacts that couldn't budge a modern day MBT make the ship visibly shake (maybe they should dial down the mass reduction during combat? )
Of course we appear to be talking to a for want of a better word person who seems to think that regardless of the fact that since there's one off-the-cuff quote saying that hopelessly underpowered WRT Federation tech laser were no threat to the E-D, and that there's also things labelled lasers in TNG that can't be, this therefore means that everything labelled a laser anywhere in SciFi they would naturally be immune to.

[biostem]

And what irks me the most about the whole "lasers can't penetrate our navigational deflectors" is that that assumption is never tested. It's just a boastful claim made against a much smaller and less advanced vessel.

Contrary to idiots who don't know what context is, I think they were talking about those lasers specifically.

And I rather think that was his point. The amount of really seriously ludicrously powerful lasers being ignored by the E-D's shields-navigational, combat, or otherwise-is zero. Borg cutting laser cuts through the hull like it isn't there, laser impacts that couldn't budge a modern day MBT make the ship visibly shake (maybe they should dial down the mass reduction during combat? )
Of course we appear to be talking to a for want of a better word person who seems to think that regardless of the fact that since there's one off-the-cuff quote saying that hopelessly underpowered WRT Federation tech laser were no threat to the E-D, and that there's also things labelled lasers in TNG that can't be, this therefore means that everything labelled a laser anywhere in SciFi they would naturally be immune to.

Exactly - It's just like how I prefer to write off Han's boast about making the Kessel run in udder 12 parsecs as him being full of hot air, and betting that Luke wouldn't know enough to call him out on it.

Here's how I take that scene - a much inferior ship comes up and starts threatening the Ent-D - they make a few cute remarks about how "quaint" it is and carry on...

[Korto]

Zero, in case you wander back, I'm really curious about this bee in your bonnet you seem to have about hardness, and in particular the way you seem to feel hardness and melting point are directly related. I would point out that ice is harder than talc, and yet has a significantly lower melting point.
I realise you have another bee in your bonnet about every single point being sourced directly from explicit text from the movies, and I'm afraid I have no cannon source for ice having a lower melting point than talc, so if required I will concede the point.


PS. Starsword, in regard to D13, I direct you to Simon_Jester's current sig, and say no more

[Formless]

Since when is a Victory the size of a Borg cube? The damned thing is like 3 km a side! A Victory is 900m long and not exactly anywhere near cubical.

Tonnage, Bats. We know a Victory I Star Destroyer has a cargo capacity of 8,100 metric tons. Unfortunately, I checked Memory Alpha and they have no comparable stat on Borg Cubes, but just because it has a volume of 3 km to a side doesn't say squat about the tonnage of a ship that we know has big hollow sections that may not even have atmosphere in them dedicated to assimilation and processing. And that's before the effects of Inertial Dampeners as well. So I always kept my estimate that a Victory is probably about as massive, and an imperial class even more massive; especially once you see the original Cube's relative size compared to the Enterprise D. This may just be me, but I do not believe that that ship is 3km to a side, though other cubes could be.

[Batman]

Um-8100 metric tons is pathetic for something the size of a Victory by modern day standards and sorry, yeah, when somebody says 'big' I do kinda assume they're talking 'dimensions'. For mass/weight, the terms I expect to see are 'massive/heavy'.

[Formless]

That's just the cargo capacity alone, I assume the ship is even more massive than what it can store in its cargo bays. Unfortunately, its the only relevant statistic I can find about the ship.

Whatever. My point was that the average Imperial warship is as big or bigger than the flagship of the Federation, so if tractor beams come into play a given Imperial ship could easily immobilize a Starfleet ship due to the mass difference at play. Whether a Borg Cube is closer in mass/volume to an Imperial class or Victory class vessel is pointless nitpicking.

Also, Bats, "big" is the kind of imprecise term that most native english speakers understand from Kindergarten can refer to height, weight, or volume depending on context. Its basically a perception thing, not a unit of measurement. I know you're a native German speaker, but I figured you knew that was an ambiguity, not precise language.

[StarSword]

^Do we have any mass measurements for ships that we could scale up/down from to get an approximation?

[biostem]

Well, Wikipedia lists the largest supertanker as 458.45 meters long, with a dead-weight tonnage, (which means it includes the oil, crew, provisions, ballast, etc), of over 560,000 tonnes. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_tanker]

For dry cargo ships, it lists Chinamax cargo ships as being up to 360m x 65m and carrying up to 400,000DWT [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinamax]

So, a Victory-I at 900m and an ISD at 1.6km is quite impressive. Of course, these aren't cargo ships, and have all sorts of facilities for the crew, power/shield generators, thick armor, etc.

The big question regarding Borg Cubes is what their mass is. Internal shots of them show them to have large empty voids, and the layout doesn't seem to indicate structures to hold cargo or to be configurable to processing & assimilating large numbers of people without significant adjustments to the internal structure [http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:Bo ... stered.jpg]

[Simonoz]

I like it how zero assumes that all non conventional lasers are the same thing.

[Batman]

Not that the term nonconventional laser makes any sense to begin with. It's either a laser or it isn't. Of course, if we accept laser as nothing more than a shorthand for some sort of glowy ScifI weapon (you know, like it's actually used in SciFi a lot, anybody remember oBSGs laser torpedoes or megalasers?) that means his 'waah waah immune to lasers' whining goes right out the window, because 'laser' actually implies a pretty specific damage mechanism, while 'glowy SciFi weapon' does not, regardless of what its users decide to label it.

Mind you, we're talking about a for want of a better word person who needed it explained to him that the very fact that we can see Wars laser/turbolaser bolts means they can't possibly be actual lasers.

[Formless]

I like it how zero assumes that all non conventional lasers are the same thing.

Or that all weapons on a Star Destroyer are turbolasers?

But I repeat myself.

A Victory I class has between 20 to 80 missile tubes depending on configuration and warhead size. In fact, missiles were supposed to be the main weapon of the Victory I. Its a 900m long missile boat. When they go into battle, they are supposed to unleash missile spam the likes of which is normally only seen in anime. Similarly, both the Acclamator and the venator from the Prequels have 4 torpedo tubes apiece. Victory II's, which are the immediate predecessor to the Imperator/Imperial class, are actually the first class of Star Destroyer to dispense with launchers altogether, in exchange for ion cannons. And of course, all of these ships have huge hangar bays and fighter squadrons that can serve various mission profiles depending on design. Oh, and I completely forgot in my original massive post to mention imperial jamming technology. Wow.

Of course, its not surprising that he's never heard of Victory class ships, since it originally appeared in an RPG sourcebook and later Tomothy Zhan novels. Everyone wants to talk about the Imperial class, or the Acclamator (where we get the 200GT figure). I guess its not too surprising when Imperial I and II's appeared so prominently in the movies, and the ICS is treated as the gold standard by lazy debaters on the Star Wars side. Why plug the figures yourself when Curtis Saxton did it for you? Why look to sidestep arguments when you can bludgeon people with canon status of something they hate? Why bring up Ion canons or fighter-bombers or mass differences when we can pat ourselves on the back about a book that most fans don't care much about unless they specifically want to troll trekkies or really love high tech machine porn?

I don't know, I can't call it an invalid argument exactly because "no lasers" is so stupid. But it is a little disappointing that so many people lack the creativity to think outside the technical manuals, just as its disappointing that Trekkies always run to the same standbys like "no lasers" that they ran to ten years ago. Nothing changes. Maybe if people would show a little more variation in the standard responses to trekkies, trekkies would show a little more variation in their arguments instead of going back to ideas that were disproved over ten years ago.

Course, Zero likely would dismiss my posts, since he's interested only in the movies, and lots of the stuff I've talked about are from the EU or novelizations. But we already have seen that its a double standard, and that he has no intention of sticking to canon sources for Star Trek, and uses wikis as his guide. And besides which, the movies still contain a lot more variation in weapons and tactics than Trekkie arguments want to talk about. Starfighters, tractor beams, boarding actions (they only just cut shots of the boarding craft from the final script. They re-used the model in Empire to depict shuttles and bombers), ion cannons... a full military operation, you know? But then, I'm surprised that no one tried pointing him to the original website for a movie-only study of Star Wars, for the same reason I'm unsurprised every time everyone uses the ICS as a go-to for turbolaser figures.

You know, it would actually be interesting to see a different kind of encounter between these civilizations for a change. It could even be a VS, but between someone other than the usual go-to factions. Heck, you could even do alliances or something. Like, maybe a Team Up with the Federation from Star Trek Online and the New Republic! The New Republic could make an alliance with the Federation and give them ships under a lend lease program. Like, maybe the Federation gets to play with obsolete Star Wars ships that the Republic was going to phase out anyway. It would be cool to see if Starfleet could refit Victory SD's and Acclamators and Venators with Federation Treknology, or have like a scene where the Starfleet captain learns that the 900m long ship he's been put in charge of can actually land on a planet. Imagine the faces of the crew when they are told to go to Blue Alert in a ship bigger than a Galaxy class. We could have, like, a VS scenario where the allied Federation and Republic take on, I don't know, Tyranids or something. Allied with the Vong. That would be cool.

[Batman]

The only one who used the ICSes in this thread other than pointing out they're officially canon but if you want to go movies only I'm game was, if I remember correctly,me, and I merely used them to show that simple downscaling from the DS1 makes things infinitely worse for the Trek side.
And why DO plug in the numbers when somebody else has done it already and their numbers have been verified time and again? Do you experimentally verify a math problem every time you're asked to assume that 1g is 9.81m/s^2, the boiling point of water is 100°C or its mass 1 ton/m^3?
Zeromoron asked movies only. Zeromoron GOT movies only, with people mentioning that incidentally, that's not the way it works on the Wars side WRT actual canon, but fine, we'll kick your teeth with movies only anyway, at which point he started to whine and wiggle.

[Formless]

Oh, wait a second. Maybe its just because its the holidays, but oops. People were linking to the main website. My bad.

[Crossroads Inc.]

We could have, like, a VS scenario where the allied Federation and Republic take on, I don't know, Tyranids or something. Allied with the Vong. That would be cool.

This has EPIC Written all over it.
Someone do it now! I want to see this in Fanfics!

[Formless]

The only one who used the ICSes in this thread other than pointing out they're officially canon but if you want to go movies only I'm game was, if I remember correctly,me, and I merely used them to show that simple downscaling from the DS1 makes things infinitely worse for the Trek side.

...you do realize that I was talking about a general trend, right? And that I was segueing off from the question "why does everyone on the Star Wars side think just as much in a box as Trekkies?"

And why DO plug in the numbers when somebody else has done it already and their numbers have been verified time and again? Do you experimentally verify a math problem every time you're asked to assume that 1g is 9.81m/s^2, the boiling point of water is 100°C or its mass 1 ton/m^3?
Zeromoron asked movies only. Zeromoron GOT movies only, with people mentioning that incidentally, that's not the way it works on the Wars side WRT actual canon, but fine, we'll kick your teeth with movies only anyway, at which point he started to whine and wiggle.

Saxton never showed how he got his numbers in the ICS. It simply says what those numbers are, and there's nothing anyone can do about it because the ICS is canon. By contrast, Mike and a lot of the old boys all went to the effort to show how they got their numbers, because that's how you establish that your numbers are credible if you don't have the ability to just dictate canon. No one does this anymore, because they perceive this debate to be over. I fear that it is a dying art, and that other discussions that aren't Wars VS Trek suffer from the same people displaying the same lazy attitude. And then wonder why stupid people with no analytical skills are attracted to these forums.

Now, I admit I lack the skills to calculate the energy needed to blow up a spherical iron asteroid with radius X, but that's why I practice other debating strategies like, say, pointing out the idiocy of assuming all you have to defeat are turbolasers. Creativity in debate (writing too) is also a dying art around here. But I repeat myself.

[Formless]

We could have, like, a VS scenario where the allied Federation and Republic take on, I don't know, Tyranids or something. Allied with the Vong. That would be cool.

This has EPIC Written all over it.
Someone do it now! I want to see this in Fanfics!

I would, but sadly I'm more interested in the potential dynamic between the Republic and the STO Federation than those villains. I just pulled them out of my ass; I find 40K too vile to read (and have not enough time for wargaming), and the NJO to be a tedious argument for de-canonizing much of the EU.

[Havok]

Uh, I think Saxon was one of the 'Old Boys' and Mike actually helped with the calcs IIRC. I think Curtis even thanked him or acknowledged him in the book.

[Formless]

Sort of, sort of... not? I always got the feeling that membership in the Old Boys Club was rather fluid. Curtis Saxton is Mikes' friend, but I always got the feeling he wanted to dissociate himself from the VS debate and debaters because he had no interest in Star Trek

However, the point was about the ICS itself, which only contains the numbers rather than the methodology. Without understanding the methodology, like how Mike always made sure his estimates were conservative even if the assumptions lead to things like perfectly spherical chickens made of iron, you can only know the ICS's are valid in the sense that the author(s) of them had the privileges of licensing and the all encompassing Lucasfilm canon system. Sorchus and I were talking about this, and we've both seen these numbers abused or misrepresented-- for example, the acceleration figure is almost certainly there for LINEAR (straight line) acceleration from its main engines, but he's seen people take it to mean an Acclamator or Star Destroyer could turn on a dime with its maneuvering thrusters. Or there is the more common mistake we've all seen of assuming that all capital ship turbolasers are 200Gt, even though we know there is a distinction between heavy turbolasers, light turbolasers, anti-fighter laser cannons, and so on plus different reactor outputs for different ships. But nope, everything gets 200GT's, like some kind of roleplaying game where you can have a 12 sided dice or a 20 sided dice, but no one seems to own a sixteen-sider even though they should exist.