The Glade 4.0

This.

Star Wars tech is not definable or compatible on a comparitive scale to Star Trek. Trek is actual science fiction. Every single technology in Star Trek has some scientific basis (whether or not it's actually feasible or accurate.) There are real physics behind the fantastical. Star Wars tech is no less mystical or arcane than the stuff the jedi masters pull - it is fantasy, not science fiction. This makes Star Wars vs. Star Trek comparisons comparable to, say, Gandalf vs. Batman. You might as well ask whether Harry Potter could beat a Xenomorph.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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No they can't. Where are you getting this from? The fact that people mysteriously vaporize when hit by phasers? Nothing else does, so the reason for that cannot possibly be power. It's some sort of interaction between the phaser and the types of molecules found in bological material, or anything hit by a phaser would vaporize. Yet we don't see Trek ships hit by phasers disapperaing in this manner.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Star Wars does bigger & badder, not more efficient and compact.

Their solution to superweapons is to build a moon-sized space station around a moon-sized weapon. That doesn't mean that the Federation has technology to withstand the moon-sized weapon, just because they might allegedly have the technology to fit something of equivalent power into something merely twenty times the size of their largest ships.

That's like standing in front of a 32 lb cannon and saying "Your antiquated technology doesn't scare me; we make automatic rifles and I have kevlar armor on."

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

You're making the mistake of trying to apply science to Star Trek. Phasers are magic missiles that vaporize people, but do negligible harm beyond some surface charring to anything else.

Though, if you insist on persisting in applying science, this analysis leads to the another logical disconnect that simply replaces it: if phasers don't disintegrate inorganic material, why don't red shirts wear body armor with ceramic plates or something in them?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I've always kind of wondered why Federation starships even have phasers. Whenever they are used in the tv show, they do absolutely no damage. It's always the torpedoes that do the actual damage, and even those usually don't do any damage.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

That's hilarious. As a matter of fact, you can observe the capabilities of a xenomorph and Harry Potter and objectively compare them to determine which is more likely to win a confrontation, although the conditions of the fight would also be a big factor.

In any case, Star Wars is no more or less "Fantasy" than Star Trek is. Plenty of beings in Star Trek exhibit mystical powers. Capabilities of ships and other machines in Trek are not based any more on physics than Star Trek, or BSG or any other major sci fi franchise.

All Trek does is dress it up in a lot of Trechnobabble; Data being the worst offender. Star Wars does not spend as much time talking about the science of it ebcause in Star Wars, they are not primarily engaging in exploration and research, while in most Star Trek series that, ostensibly, is a major goal of Star Fleet.

In any case, they certainly can be compared objectively. To the greatest degree possible, we compare things based on the way we already know the universe works. When we encounter things that we don't know how they work, we observe their capabilities, and that allows us to compare them to each other, to real life objects, or to other sci fi series and determien their relative capabilities. We can certainly measure the energy output of turbolasers, phasers, and photon torpedoes because there are numerous instances where they can be observed, giving us plenty of data points. Occasionally there are anomolies, which means a plausible explaination for the anomoly must be found, and usually one is available in the conditions of the anomolous event. However, some things like phasers have lots of anomolies, and that requires a more exotic explaination to fit the facts, such as the "reduction to neutrinos" hypothesis.

We certainly can't figure out how things work because they are presumably based on laws of physics that the characters of those universes know and we don't, but we certainly can figure out what they do. More importantly, we observe that things like gravity, the speed of light, the human body, and most other day-to-day things work the same way as they do for us. The only reason to say that Star Wars technology is "magical" is that it's advanced beyond anything we have here, and the characters spend little time discussing how it works. The only difference with Star Trek is that the size and power of what they can build is lower, and they babble incessently about technology and science, often inaccurately.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm not making a "mistake" at all. There are a lot of ways to explain phasers. The one I've seen that seems to make the most sense is the "reduction to neutrinos" theory, that says that the phaser reduces what it hits to neutrinos, which have mass and momentum, but can pretty much pass through people and objects without effect. This explains why sometimes people go flying back when hit by them; occasionally an abnormally large number of neutrinos go in one direction, perhaps because that is the direction the beam is coming from.

The reason it vaporizes people according to this hypothesis is that people are largely made up of very light elements, while starships and such are mage up of strong metals, rpesumably including things like depelted uranium, tungsten, etc, which require far more phaser energy to reduce an equivalent mass.

As for why don't they wear body armor... well, the Federation has a truely appalling grasp on ground combat, as do most of their opponents. Part of it seems to stem from ridiculous political objections to anything appearing too "military" which left them, at one point, with handguns that looked more like hand vaccuums than weapons. Perhaps they feel body armor would encourage boarding actions and fighting rather than asking the alien menace to please stop being naughty? Given their total lack of many other major combat systems for ground fighting, such as armored vehicles, artillery, crew-served weapons, or.. much of anything, I'm not he least surprised that they have no body armor. They rely almost totally on Starfleet for combat power.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Actually, you greatly underestimate the research and thought that goes into Trek science.

For all the star trek shows, they kept various scientists on retainer to give them plausible (at the time of publishing) means by which the current tech they want to use might operate by the laws of physics. They have "bibles" as they call them, huge volumes of technical info on how every last element of tech in the Star Trek universe works. Now, as science becomes more advanced, a lot of theories and ideas used to explain various tech have since been deemed unlikely or even utterly disproven, but none of it ever gets made up from scratch. The technobabble you make fun of is typically real. Not only that, a lot of ideas that trek tech has been so soundly thought out, that real world engineers took the ideas and applied them for real world application.

The same cannot be said for any type of telepathic racial abilities given to a few trek races, it's true. But we're talking tech, here. With rare exceptions, Star Trek technology is hardcore speculative sci-fi. Star Wars makes absolutely no attempt at such explanations. This doesn't make one better or worse than the other. It makes them entirely different genres. People think Trek and Star Wars are the same thing, because they're both about spaceships and outer space. But that is the only similarity. Star Wars has far more in common with Lord of the Rings than Star Trek. It's a fantasy story set in outer space. Comparing them isn't just 'comparing apples to oranges.' It's comparing apples to wombats.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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As someone who owns "Star Trek: The next generation technical manual", let me just say, this thread is amazing. Carry on!

And do you know that all apples are not extremely ill tempered? Maybe some are...

And how do you know Wombats do not have a crisp and crunchy texture when bitten?

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Except that it is no such thing. Star Trek does not keep scientists on staff, and their bibles are exactly that - nothing more than continuity manuals to keep the universe as consistent as possible. Their technical advisors are no different than technical advisors for any other series. In fact, Trek is ridden with basic mistakes such as confusing power units with energy units and in disucssions of energy output - when the Enterprise is stationary, or at least not using its weapons or shields and engines for nothing mor than station-keeping, the charcters have been known to discuss how much energy it is supposedly generating. Where, pray tell, might this energy be going? The ship is obviously not overheating, so is it simply being radiated into space? If so, why generate it at all, unless someone's "scientists" somehow managed to forget about basic thermodynamics - and I mean basic as in what you learn in high school.

I'd like to know exactly what these "a lot of ideas" are that supposedly were the inspiration fo real-world application.

They are mildly different genres, but Star Trek is anything but "hard core". The only reason Trek appears more scientific is that it is about science and exploration. Star Wars doesn't go into these details because that is not what the story is about.

If you want to see a series that actually tries to adhere to physics with something approaching realism, check out the Honorverse series.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Last I checked, the technical manuals, novels, and pretty much anything except the movies and TV shows are not canon by Paramount's policy.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You're wrong, DE. Star Trek has always been well grounded in real science, and they always had real scientists on retainer (excluding this most recent movie) as consultants for their science and "technobabble." Of course, you wouldn't go read a book that discusses it, but there you go.

National Geographic comments on plausibility of Trek tech
Trek techs made real

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

There isn't/wasn't enough thinking going into the applications of the "science" they have for Trek. They never really thought out the implications of weaponizing transporters and inertia dampeners, for example...

Or that transporters are apparently immortality/unlimited Kirk clone/supply machines...

Nobody is saying they don't have a few narrative issues, but that's not really the point. The consequences of the tech isn't what we're discussing.

There have been a few cases where Trek tech actually violated known laws of physics at the time. As the story goes, Time magazine's writers followed Star TrekTNG very closely, and enjoyed comparing the tech explanations on the show to the very real theories and ideas scientists were throwing about. When confused whether something was possible or not, they would actually call a contact in the production team and get the scoop, and it always checked out as, at the very least, theoretically possible. There was one exception that stood out, and the Trek staff were well aware of it in advance -- Transporters appeared to violate Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Still, in a "technobabble" conversation, Geordi was heard to mention the "Heisenberg Compensators." Impressed with the thought put behind all the other tech up to this point, they called their contact and asked him, "How do the Heisenberg Compensators work?"

The response was classic.
"They work very well, thank you."

Trek techs had no idea how to justify overcoming this obstacle even using wild speculation - but even their use of the term "Heisenberg Compensators" implied they were well aware of this problem. It was an acknowledgement of this issue, and an inside joke for the science-types watching the show.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I'm sorry, Talya. Protest all you want, but, at best, Star Trek is *way* more "Imported Alien Phlebotinum" than "Minovsky Particle," much less "FTL Travel" on the Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Meh, that scale is invalid. FTL travel is theoretically possible, now. Scientists themselves outsmarted einstein. "Really hard SF - FTL is not possible" isn't SF at all. It's not even science. It's just skepticism.

Anything above FTL Travel on that scale doesn't also qualify as "Sci Fi," because the things that make it sci fi are missing. Sci fi is about FUTURE tech, things we do not yet have. That's the purpose of it. Everything from "4. No FTL" and higher is not just theoretically possible, it's currently feasible with a large enough expenditure of resources. That's not Sci Fi anymore, it's just Fi.

All "hard sci fi" tech needs to put it at the top of the hardness scale is a theoretically possible explanation with any current scientific theory that has not already been disproven at the time of writing. Also, one cannot look at unexplained events in a story that are beyond the understanding of the protagonists and factor them into the hardness scale. For instance, divine/super-advanced alien intervention left unexplained doesn't affect anything, it's not "tech" on the show. The universe is packed full of **** we don't yet understand in real life - that doesn't make it less real. The point is, the tech the protagonists have is explained by real science.

I like the alternate scale endorsed by several people in the discussion page at the link you provided, Kaffis.



By this rule, Star Trek is solidly between 3 and 4 with regard to most of their tech, with a select few episodes going as far as 2.

(and the most recent movie being a solid 1.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I'm supposed to take a bunch of chumps who had to use a purely qualitative scale seriously in their criticisms of science fiction?

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

You know, for a bunch of supposed Sci-Fi and Fantasy geeks, you guys either have horribly selective memories or fanboi streaks two or three miles long. There exist single space vessels much smaller than a Victory Class Star Destroyer capable of destroying a planet in the Star Trek universe. There exist warships smaller than the Enterprise D capable of destroying Dominion World Ships by themselves. And, there exist the Q.

So, when it comes to technology as magic/at the level of magic, I'm fairly certain the universes are about equal.

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A Q could destroy every single Jedi and dark Jedi in a blip.

*shrug* the Q were shown to have power on par with an Abrahamic God, if not beyond it (since the Q actually manipulate time with ease, and are capable of lying), making power comparisons with anyone pretty silly.

I can't even think of a character that has this level of demonstrated power outside perhaps one or two in comic books (which are invariably trumped by something else, or some joint force of superheros defeats them, the Q on the other hand, are actually without peer, casually annihilate species, planets, stars, galaxies and universes, even time itself.

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None of which come close to the power of Q. The fact that those characters are either defeated, or protagonists means they have limits to their power. The only thing that directly challenges the power of the Q are the Q themselves.

Apparently, you do not read much in terms of comic books, so I'll give you a pass on this.

Galactus transcends the limits of this universe. He existed before it, will exist after it, and is capable of destroying or recreating all existence on a whim. He chooses not to.

The Silver Surfer is the single known entity capable of actually destroying Galactus in the entirety of the Marvel Universe. He is the one being Galactus fears.

Death (Marvel) is in the same category as Galactus.

The Watchers are synonymous in power with the Q. They are, in fact, so immensely powerful that a single Watcher (Oatu) is in charge of maintaining the separate of all realities involving the planet Earth.

Franklin Richards is a beyond Omega Level Mutant. His mutant power is, quite literally, the ability shape reality to his will.

The Scarlet Witch, Magneto, Professor X, Jean Grey (with or without the Phoenix Force), Vulcan, and Mikhail Rasputin are all Omega Level Mutants. This means they are, at the very least, as powerful as a single Watcher by themselves.

My list, amusingly enough, was just a few characters which possess reality altering and shaping power. We could also add to it Black Bolt, a man whose whispers destroy planets; the Incredible Hulk; Dr. Strange; Dr. Doom; Thanos; Adam Warlock; Odin; Loki; The Enchantress ...

I think you are insufficiently familiar with the power of these entities to make the proclamation you have.

And, I should note, I have yet to start mentioning DC Comics because of a little thing called ...

The Green Lantern Corps. Pick a Green Lantern; any Green Lantern ...

And then, just to make it easy, pick the one Lantern who possesses more raw power than the Corps combined by himself and GIVE him all of their combined power ... and you have Hal Jordan. Let's not forget Superman who willed Krypton back into being (Fixed) and Lois Lane (although this time as a Kryptonian without their weaknesses) ...

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The mere fact that any of these can be defeated, by definition means something short of omnipotence. The Q on the other hand ARE actually omnipotent.



While true that I'm not as familiar with comic books, I don't need to be. In order for a character to be a protagonist they must actually have limitations otherwise there is no story, no struggle. All these characters, while capable of reality warping, are held in check by other powers. The Q have no check. Not once are they threatened, challenged or even slowed by anything else but themselves.