Originally posted by Leper Messiah
right then, on the first count
I have in my time come across some endless analysis of Star Trek and Star Wars tech pitted against each other, and some come down on the side of Star Wars and some come down on the side of Trek. The truth is theres no way to really compare them unless there were (and there, probably thankfully, isnt) a canon Star Trek Vs Star Wars type film.
While in a sense I agree, they're both fantasy and it's silly/doesn't matter, whatever, but such things can be fun to ponder about for certain fans (I've been among them at times, I admit). In "story terms" we have no idea what would happen because of stuff like "The good guys always win," time travel, deus ex machina, and other cliches of fiction.
You cant look at it in scientific terms because its just a story and nobody has a clue how any of the tech would work in anything but the most basic terms.
If you look at some of the so-called "serious" verses discussions, they do implement some practical things that we might be able to guage, like the fact that it was estimated to have taken a Starfleet ship (which was considered highly advanced at the time of its launch) 70 years to cross from one end of the Milky Way Galaxy to another, going at maximum warp. That sets some paramaters on just how fast that ship can actually be. Of course Voyager DID get home in seven years, thanks to tons of luck and technobabble inventions, lost technological devices, and super beings who helped them along. The point is that such extraordinary means aren't needed by SW ships traveling similar distances.
Other ways that people have tried to determine just how "powerful" the tech really is is by measuring say how much energy it would take to fragment an earth-size planet, like the Death Star does, in such a short time. Likewise measuring hyperdrive by how long it takes Darth Maul to (apparently) get from Coruscant to Tatooine, or how long it takes the Death Star to circle the planet Yavin, or how long it took the Falcon to get from point A to point B.
There's a ton of assumptions of course, such as that the laws of physics are the same in both galaxies (Star Trek is supposed to take place in our galaxy, centuries in the future), and that the humans in both galaxies are the same as modern humans in terms of physiology, etc.
There's some suspension of disbelief involved too and a lot of agruments about what is canon and what isn't, but that's how it goes.
If you see a Star Destroyer "vaporizing" asteroids with single turbolaser shots, but the Enterprise has to fire and fire to destroy one (and it isn't even vaporized) that too can tell you some stuff about it.
Then there's basic stuff like the Ground Forces we've seen of Trek vs. the Ground Forces of wars. That sort of thing.
Factor in things like continuity errors and its all downright unreliable.
True, but even then you can still get a certain basic ballpark estimate of how things would go, assuming you define your parameters ahead of time. If you're only talking about the movies, or if you rule out some source, then you have to define that too, but it's still possible to say "well it would be almost impossible for the Federation to beat the Empire" or "the Borg wouldn't stand much chance against the Rebel Alliance" based on all the available "evidence." Obviously a story-writer could come up with any number of ways to beat the odds, limited only by their imaginations.
Also such arguments annoy me because they too have continuity errors in them, a particular example springs to mind from a pro-Star Wars tech argument which dismissed a comment from Star Trek The Next Generation that Federation ships were capable of avoiding damage from Lasers and suchlike (obviously heavily employed in Star Wars among other sci fi) without even having to use their deflector sheilds by saying that Star Wars Laser tech was probably different to the Star Trek Laser tech,
I remember this exact argument. It goes like this, in the TNG episode "The Outrageous Okana" Picard and Riker are derisive when they hear that some alien ships are using "lasers." "They won't even scratch our navigational deflector!"
This argument is taken to the extreme in some debates, with Trek side people saying "well the Death Star is said to use a super LASER so therefore it would be unable to harm the Enterprise."
Of course, such a claim is outrageous on the face, because such a blast destroyed a PLANET, in an explosive fashion. That would have taken so much energy it would have easily overwhelmed the shields of any federation starship, much less the weak navigational deflector of the Enterprise D. The argument would assume that somehow the Enterprise has a magical ability to defeat "lasers", regardless of magnitude, rather than a better explanation, which is that laser weapons that the E-D crew were familiar with tended to be fairly weak compared to phasers.
But the real counter to the "no lasers" argument is that the weapons used in Star Wars bear no resemblance to what we would call "lasers" at all. And there are numerous examples in real life of things having a name that has little to do with the original definition of what it is, and this applies to science fiction too (such as "blue prints"; or "rifles" when applied to science fiction weapons). Likewise, within the TNG canon there are other episodes where lasers are mentioned and they are not so harmless.
For example there is an episode ("Loud as a Whisper") where there is a civil war going on, and the combatants are said to be using "lasers" and the Enterprise is afraid to venture into that territory without shields raised. If lasers could not harm the Enterprise-D, why would they be afraid to enter for fear of his ship? Secondly there is the episode where the Enterprise D first encounters the Borg. The Borg use a "laser" to cut into the hull of the ship! If Lasers were stopped by the puny navigational deflector such a thing would have been laughed off. Yet it easily "carved them up like a roast" ... slicing out several sections of deck and allowing it to be captured by the Borg.
Sorry to get off track, but there you see why it's a goofy argument...
Sure we can say we don't know what turbolasers or phasers really are, since they don't exist in reality. However we can make some assumptions about their capability by what they have been shown to DO (ie: their effects) in the canon. That's the secret.
however later in the same argument the point was made that some Star Wars vessels were capable of tracking cloaked ships in response to the possible advantage Romulan and Klingon ships might have over Star Wars ships, leaving out the possibility that these technologies might also be different.
This isn't something I'm super familiar with, but IIRC it's based on how in the EU, in the Thawn novels, the Empire (?) comes up with an advanced sensor system to detect cloaked ships, called "CGT Sensors."
And the way the cloaked ships are described in Star Wars (again, outside the movies, since we've never seen a cloak actually used onscreen), they are completely invisible to both the naked eye and to sensors, but the ship is also blind. In Star Trek cloaked ships can be detected a number of different ways, including "tachyon grids" and by tracking their ion trail and emissions. So we "know how they work" and based on that we can say how they would behave.
So trying to compare the technology of the two universes is hideously inaccurate. The one and only indesputeable canon advantage one has over the other is hyperspace travel, everything else is pure speculation.
Not so, for those and other reasons. Trek has planet destroying weaponry, but in most cases the weapons have been shown to operate based on "chain reactions" against unshielded targets. The Death Star can apparently do it against a shielded planet, through sheer brute force. Also in terms of pure industrial capacity the Empire and the Republic in SW vastly outpaces any of the powers portrayed in Star Trek. The Empire is supposed to have over a million star systems, whereas the United Federation of Planets is less than 200.
And The Borg possess such travel (however they call it transwarp) although nobody can really say which is the faster. Species 8472 on the other hand go even better than that, they can appear wherever the hell they want to.
Species 8472 defiately seem to be able to open vortexes all over, but less is known about them than the Borg. The transwarp abilities of the Borg are impressive by Trek standards, but in Voyager there is evidence that they need to build "conduits" in order to travel from one place to another.
This complicates the debate also, in that there is some evidence in the EU that SW ships need "navigational data" to make hyperjumps and that there are "hyperspace lanes" etc. Of course the rebuttal on the SW side is that they could simply send out probe droids to send back navigational data in unfamiliar space, and that it's not that they can't USE hyperdrive in unfamiliar territory, it's just risky.
The main problem with the Borg is that their combat tactics leave so much to be desired (obviously done for writing purposes so that the heroes would be able to defeat them, ie: limit their abilities), that they wouldn't seem to pose much creddible threat to anyone on the Star Wars side. They let people board their vessels and wander around without arresting them until they've started to do actual damage. They slowly lurch towards you a few at a time and try to grab you and insert "assimilation tubiles" into your neck, and have a major weakness against kinetic energy attacks (bullets, knives, bludgeons, etc) that their acclaimed "adaptability" seems to be no use for. They have never been shown to use ranged weaponry in infantry combat (the exception being renegade Borg who were seperated from the Collective and no longer under their control) in any canonical situation (unless of course this has happened in season 7 of Voyager, which is the only Star Trek I still haven't seen all of).
on the second count
Borg Cubes a pretty sizeable craft, i forget exactly how big im not sure if any canon measurement was ever given, but then again a Vong ship could be destroyed by splash damage from the explosion of a Star Destroyer so theres no advantage of one over the other there.
http://www.merzo.net/)
This site lets you compare sizes of all those ships, except the Vong.
on the third count
"shoot first, ask questions later, don't trust these inferior races" is a very broad description and doesnt really fit either race, in 8472s case it was "Get shot at first, and kill everything in sight which looks like it might have had even slightly something to do with it, dont trust these inferior races....yet" because it was shown they could be talked to. In the Vong's case their attitude was "examine, invade, kill the infidels and their abominations"
Could the Vong be negotiated with? I'm not trying to say they are 100% identical and if you can show some differences then there is no clear shared ideas between the two. Rather there's enough similarities to show support for the notion that it's either 1) one was inspired by the other or 2) they both borrowed from the same source.
It could be that "bio-tech races" were just in chic at the time, and being "out of ideas" (having recycled the "Dark Jedi/Super Weapon threatens the galaxy/former Imperial with delusions of being the next Emperor" plots once too often) they just adopted this to see how it would sell.
I hear Babylon 5 had that too, but I can't say since I've only seen the pilot episode.
now i grant you ive seen better villain races than either. at the time of their introduction, 8472 annoyed me immensely, because a lot of fans had been waiting for Voyager to run into The Borg (pretty simple connection for the fans, Voyager gets stranded in Delta Quadrant, its already been established in other Trek series that thats where the Borg hang their coat, so it was eagerly anticipated and there was even a teaser episode where they found a derelict Borg Cube) they finally did and whats happened? The Borg are getting their arses handed to them. Nobody wanted to see that. The Borg were supposed to be the baddest of the bad and nobody wanted to see some new race wiping the floor with them.
It's a classic villian cliche in Star Trek. Introduce badass villian species/race/whatever. Then make them weak and prone to become friends with the good guys, so you can make room for the introduction of another "badass" race/species for an enemy. Rinse, and repeat.
The Borg got totally ruined from that point out, their finest hours were in The Next Generation and the movie First Contact.
Actually I'd say that First Contact was the start of the downfall of the Borg. Remember that they didn't assimilate people (Picard was an exception) in TNG, there was no evidence of that. Instead they went after technology. They were "not male or female," even. They didn't have the "assimilation tubiles" and they used slightly better tactics. They were a true collective, there was no "Queen." They were a lot more powerful, generally. Now sure, you can say that the Borg changed or that the Federation didn't fully understand them at the time and Q was lying, but there you go. At the time of the Borg's creation, when Roddenberry was still alive and in control of the franchise, that's how the Borg were. At the end of TNG you could surmise that the collective was in chaos and on the verge of collapse (Hugh's and Lore's renegade Borg were symptoms of the collapse of the Collective as a whole). They were simply no longer a threat to the galaxy they once were. Then all of a sudden in First Contact we're supposed to believe that this was no big deal, it was only a few Borg that were affected and everything we thought we knew about them was wrong. They're just space vampires with delusions of grandeur.
I agree that the Vong are not really Star Wars-style aliens but I dont think they are Star Trek style aliens either because Trek has never had a race that waged undiscriminating and unstoppable war against all races because they were "infidels"
So the religious nature of the desire for conquest is what makes the Vong unique? Trek is notorious for using religion in its plots, especially where villians are concerned. The Dominion for example were worshipped as gods by their slave races and were seeking to conquer the Alpha and Beta quadrants. They did try to use any means to get what they wanted, and they were racists (believing "changelings" to be superior lifeforms).
The Borg too could be said to be religious fundamentalists, believing themselves to be perfect (or closer to perfection than other non-cybernetic races). They sought to impose their lifestyle on other races through conquest, ignoring the "rules of war" and other such things. Just because they don't talk about their gods (well, one could say that Seven of Nine worshipped the Omega Particle, in the episode "Omega Directive" and claimed that the Borg did in a sense) doesn't mean their goals were not similarly motivated.
Species8472 seemed to more be racists, but still.
As to the Babylon 5 quote, that's certainly interesting, but not having seen the series I can't really say for sure. Maybe they were copied off of by both SW NJO writers and the Voyager writers.
Voyager introduced Species 8472 in Season 3 of Voyager (1997). Babylon 5 began in 1994 (though I'm not sure what parts of the show you're talking about specifically).
The first NJO book was released in 2000.
Of course the Borg in Star Trek were introduced way back in TNG's season 2 (1988).