The Glade 4.0

No I'm not getting butt-hurt DE, and that statement loads tons of credibility to your position.

The statement was made that lasers do not penetrate navigational shielding. So they don't - until we witness it happen to that vehicle - they don't. That is canon. Canon is not making leaps about the limits or how the limits of fantastical machinery work, when its a given it is impossible to know.

Lasers don't penetrate navigational shields, regardless of how super they are.

Quoting someone whose fantasy seems to be jerking off to calculation about Star Wars does not change the canonical evidence one bit.

Simply because your sci fi guys like to fire lasers at each others, no matter how big they are, does not in the least affect the canonical realities of another sci fi universe - regardless of how much you or someone else really really wants it to.

Untill there is canonical cross over where we see any laser from Star Wars penetrate the shields, they wont. You still have your ion cannons and torpedoes.

We've never seen SW shields stop phasers, so they probably can't."

"We've never seen SW shields stop transporters, so they probably can't."

"We've never seen ion cannons disable ST technology, so they probably don't."

There are hundreds of variations upon this theme, some of which go so far as to claim that a SW ship venturing into our galaxy would be shieldless, blind, and trapped at sublight speeds, and that any Jedi Knights on board would lose their powers, by virtue of the fact that they've never demonstrated any of their capabilities in our galaxy. They are treating all unobserved phenomena as impossibilities. You could also call this a "false limit" fallacy if you wish. The problem is that although the observation of a phenomenon can conclusively prove that it is possible, the failure to observe a phenomenon does not prove that it is impossible. It leaves open the possibility that it is impossible, but it does not act as proof. It would be unwarranted to assume that it is impossible, and it would also be unwarranted to assume that it is possible, in lieu of any supporting evidence either way. To make projections either way, we would need more information.

For example, if someone claims that it is impossible for a 30mm shell to punch through the armour of a main battle tank, we can easily disprove him by observing the infamous A-10 "Warthog" in action. However, if someone notes that we've never seen an M-1 Abrams' armour stop a projectile made entirely of Play-Doh, this would hardly constitute proof that an M-1 cannot survive Play-Doh shells! Although it is true that the observation of an event is the only absolutely conclusive proof that it can happen, it is wrong to assume that everything we have failed to observe is impossible (particularly when we are limited to a less than ten hours of observations, as is the case with Star Wars).

If you're going to make the claim that something can or can't happen, you have to quantify energies and/or describe mechanisms. You can't simply say "we've never seen this particular event, so it's not possible." In the case of the Play-Doh shells, we've never seen an M-1 Abrams survive a hit from Play-Doh weaponry but the kinetic energy and thermomechanical properties of a reasonably-sized Play-Doh projectile should make it less dangerous than other weapons which the M-1 has been observed to easily shake off. Therefore, there is no justification for claiming that the M-1 would be helpless before attackers armed with Play-Doh.

Similarly, although we've never seen SW shields stop phasers (for the obvious reason that we've never seen a crossover SW/ST movie or television episode), we have seen them survive attacks from energy weapons of similar or greater energy yield. And although we've never seen SW shields stop transporters, we have seen that transporters are actually very easy to stop (having been stymied by everything from radiation to the presence of certain minerals, or by "inhibitor fields" which are so weak that they stop nothing else). And although we've never seen ion cannons acting on ST technology, we know that they disrupt electrical equipment, and we've seen enough arcing and sparking components on the bridge of the Enterprise to know that electricity is still being used heavily. So we don't have conclusive proof that these things can happen (since we would need direct observation for that), but we certainly don't have any grounds for stating that they are impossible.

Another problem with this type of argument is that it's mindlessly one-sided. One could just as easily take all of those arguments and reverse them: "we've never seen phasers knock down or penetrate SW shields, so they probably can't", or "we've never seen transporters go through SW shields, so they probably can't", or "we've never seen ST technology withstand an ion cannon attack, so it probably can't." If you're going to claim that one technology will be unstoppable against another technology, you have to provide better reasoning than "we've never seen it, and any unknown should always be assumed to go in the direction most favourable to my side".

At some point, we have to concede the importance of fair play. After all, we're talking about a pair of fictional universes, and even the most objective analysis must contain some underlying assumptions related to fair play. I have noticed that a common thread among Trekkie debaters is to spend all their time trying to tip the playing field to their advantage, by inventing technobabble reasons why SW technology would be useless against unfamiliar ST technology (but of course, ST technology will be omnipotent against unfamiliar SW technology). I hope it should be obvious why such tactics are blatantly one-sided and unreasonable. A debate about sci-fi is virtually impossible without the following assumptions:

The laws of physics are constant, and shared between both universes in the crossover (ie- no silly claims about subspace not existing in the SW galaxy, or hyperspace not existing in the ST galaxy).

Canon events really happened (ie- suspension of disbelief).

Both sides' technology performs normally (ie- a shield designed to stop energy weapons will stop energy weapons even in another galaxy, a weapon designed to disrupt electrical systems will disrupt electrical systems even in another galaxy, a superluminal propulsion system will move the ship at superluminal speeds even in another galaxy, etc).

Yes, these assumptions are just that: assumptions. But if you refuse to accept them, you're basically throwing the rulebook in the garbage, and saying that "anything goes." The assumptions are designed for the simple sake of fairness; remember fairness? Some people don't.

If you want to go with what you observe than we simply transport photon torpedoes onto your vessel's bridges, engines, or power cores. After all it was never observed that Star Wars shields can stop transporters, right?

DE, I agree with you re the "no limits fallacy", but I disagree with the claim that on-screen special effects are necessarily more useful/accurate than dialogue. The f/x guys don't have any better idea of what an xx-isoton explosion looks like than the dialogue writers do. The director just says, "give me a really big explosion....no, no, bigger....ok, yeah like that, and make the flames green, 'cuz that's what color the laser was." So, it's just as ridiculous for the stardestroy.net guy to calculate the precise power of the Death Star laser based on how long Alderaan looked all glowy before it asploded as it is for his interlocutor to argue that a throw-away line from Riker means no laser of any power could ever penetrate the Enterprise's shields.

It doesn't matter what the SFX guys know or don't know. We're comparing the power of the fictional universes. Just because the SFX guys may not have any idea of the power involved doesn't mean it would be any less. If we're going to have a comparison, we have to treat the films as if they were, say, documentary footage of real events.

It's not at all ridiculous to calculate how much power would be required to do something just because the person describing the event doesn't have any idea of that number. That doesn't even begin to follow.

And a Shadow Battle Crab would carve up either Universe's ships like a thanksgiving Ham.

Perhaps. The technology in that series for the humans was seriously inferior to either Star Trek or Star wars.

Dear Lord! Stop the wanktardfest that this whole thing has devolved into.

Bah!

Its fun :p

Minbari tech was likely around Star Trek TNG-DS9 tech though used more mind powers.

Vorlon and Shadow tech would be on par with Borg technology - able to bore a hole through the enterprise's entire structure.

As said the tech in both Star Wars and Star Trek had technology able to kill planets. Denuding planets of life was already possible by Wrath of Khan (without destroying the planet). And it seems the planet killing technology of both Star Wars and Star Trek was much more efficient than that of Bab.

We think so too!



Now I'm goint to go play some MTG, or Modern Warfare 2.

Most non first race tech in B5 lacked shields altogether and was armor dependent wasn't it?

Defiant was a modified runabout so its entirely possible to configure Star Trek to use fighters.

The biggest tactical player in SW to ST would actually I think be things like the defiant, small fast, heavily armed and cloaked vessels.

Let me clarify - I agree that it makes sense to roughly calculate how much power it would take to do something; I disagree that what we see on screen is equivalent to documentary footage of how that something plays out. Rather, the on-screen visuals are just representations intended to convey the idea that the writers have in mind (as is the dialogue). The Alderaan thing is a perfect example. We see (and are told) that the Death Star blows up Alderaan, so we're meant to understand that the Death Star is powerful enough to blow up a planet in a single shot. It therefore makes sense to run some numbers to get a rough idea of how much power would be required to accomplish that. It does not make sense to refine that rough estimate based on how long the f/x guys decided to make the explosion last on-screen.

As another example, the on-screen effects of hand phasers in the Star Trek universe are all over the map. In some scenes, a full-power shot hitting the wall causes a small explosion and some burn marks, while in other scenes, it vaporizes dozens of cubic feet of rock in a split second. It just doesn't make sense if you think of it as documentary footage, nor does it make sense if you take the dialogue ("full power!") literally. However, it's workable if you just think of the f/x and dialogue as representations of the writers' intent - hand phasers are basically intended to be powerful enough to blast your way through a rock wall when maxed out, and are adjustable downward from there. So, from that, you can estimate the power required to blast through a rock wall and get a sense of how powerful hand phasers are supposed to be, but it's misleading to calculate precisely based on the instantaneous vaporization depicted on screen for visual effect.

Dear Lord! Stop the wanktardfest that this whole thing has devolved into.

The cloak is down, so they engage at warp 13 back to Federation Space.

Yeah they changed the warp factor measurement between OS and TNG and then while they had a perfectly valid scale they had to break it in one episode.

Never understood that unless that was before they decided to change the scale.

Of course for plot reasons it makes sense to have a larger scale because there isn't much drama in the difference between warp factor 9.122 and warp factors 9.2 unless you understand what a tremendous difference in speed that actually is.

Gene Roddenberry stated that he wanted to avoid the ever-increasing warp factors used in the original series to force added tension to the story, and so imposed the limit of warp 10 as infinite speed.