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My favorite Enterprise vs Star Wars ship that I've seen
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Two things: crew size and phasers.
The Aluminum Falcon can be operated by a crew of 2. If you want both turrets being operated, it's 4. The enterprise has a crew of hundreds. That gives an idea of the size difference between the two, and the difference in capabilities. If the Falcon takes damage, one of the crew has to go and do repairs, reducing the effective crew to 1 or 3. If someone is injured (say by an exploding panel) it's 1 person down, and another to provide first aid, so either autopilot (crew of 2) or one of the turrets is no longer manned (crew of 4). Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, all that happens is that the junior X steps up while the senior X is taken to sick bay and treated by the dedicated medical crew.
Then there are phasers. In Star Wars, the main ship-to-ship weaponry seems to be "laser" cannons, that shoot significantly slower than light-speed projectiles. The things are even slow compared to 2020s bullets, as you can actually follow their path through space. In addition, the weapons are either aimed with manned turrets or are boresight weapons, firing directly forwards (X-Wings, TIE fighters, etc.) Meanwhile, the Enterprise uses phasers, which seem to be close to light speed, and more importantly seem to be something you can aim using a computer and just come out of the front of the ship in whatever direction they're aimed. They very rarely seem to miss. It's just a question of whether or not the target's shields hold. In this case, they're aiming at a small smuggler's ship. They might miss, but if they hit it's unlikely the shields would hold out for very long against weapons that were designed to take on other 100-crew starships.
Star Destroyer vs. Enterprise might be interesting. Or, Delta Flyer vs. Falcon. Or a DS9 "Runabout" vs. the Falcon. But, Falcon vs. Enterprise is not a fair fight. No question the Enterprise would crush it.
Size comparisons aren't particularly useful when the tech gap is so large. A single relatively small Culture ship would annihilate the Empire and have a grand old time doing it. Going by supplemental technical books from both franchises, Star Wars is insanely, hilariously, beyond the Federation in the ability to project energy. The printed values for Star Wars are frankly absurd and make very little sense, but if we took them at face value the Falcon would be a nigh unstoppable menace. Like throwing some AA guns on a tugboat and harassing some previously uncontacted tribes in the Pacific.
Using estimates from what we see on screen lessens the gap considerably, but still puts Star Wars in general on a higher rung of the Kardeshev scale. I don't know if it still exists, but stardestroyer.net used to have some great calculations of blaster energy levels based entirely from OT footage, with full breakdowns of their math and estimations. As for the "lasers," that's just old nomenclature from long since outdated weapons, blaster tech drives the vast majority of Star Wars weaponry. In new canon, they're plasma weapons. In old canon, there were several flavors, including plasma, but most were particle weapons that used some very exotic fictional particles that didn't interact much with normal matter except thermally, like how dark matter doesn't react much except gravitationally.
And really. It just makes sense. Star Wars technologically plateaued ages ago. The invention of FTL tech is prehistory. Star Trek is only a couple centuries ahead of us.
And yet, they don't have computer-aimed turrets. They still rely on people getting into turrets and aiming at their targets using some kind of low-fi 1970s era CRT to assist them. They may have plateaued ages ago, but it seems like their plateau was pretty low. They never developed transporters, they never developed replicators, AFAIK they don't have cloaking devices. They have robots, but the robots seem pretty primitive in a number of ways -- certainly they don't have any robots that are advanced enough to be mistaken for humans / humanoids.
It's also hard to estimate the power of "laser" cannons based on what you see on screen.
On one hand, a specialty space station was created that was powerful enough to blow up an entire planet in the matter of seconds. Even if the weapons they use for ship-to-ship fire are 1000x less powerful, 1/1000th of the power needed to destroy a planet is absurdly huge. Maybe the weapons are incredibly powerful, but we don't know because the shields are also incredibly powerful.
Meanwhile, the Star Trek world only got warp drive recently, so recently that the individual who created it is still in living memory. But, just because it's recent doesn't mean they're not even more technologically advanced. Everything we see in Star Trek suggests that they blew past the plateau that Star Wars hit, and kept going. Transporter beams, replicators, holodecks, limited time travel, androids with positronic brains that can pass for humans, artificial intelligence both at an individual scale (robots and sentient robotic aliens) but also at larger scales, like the ship's computers.
Maybe in Star Wars world, there are no really advanced aliens, so all the alien races got brought into the same empire. Since there's no outside influence creating pressure to come up with new technologies, there's technological stagnation. In Star Trek's universe, they keep finding new aliens, many of whom are so advanced they're godlike. That has to keep inspiring inventors. In addition, instead of one giant empire, there are multiple empires, many of whom are hostile to one-another. One thing that tends to result in technological development is arms races against aggressive neighbors.
I tend to ignore what they say at places like stardestroyer.net because the more you look into these Sci Fi universes (and probably the George Lucasverse more than most) the more contradictions and paradoxes you see. I find I can enjoy them more if I just let my imagination fill in the details, based on what I see on-screen.
I know this is an old post, but just wanted to share. There's a good argument (and I wish I could remember the source) that in the Star Wars universe, they've solved the PvNP problem. That effectively makes the idea of a secure network/computer impossible, since all systems can be hacked trivially. This is backed up by how every system can be easily hacked in minutes, if not seconds, and how security is mostly physical (the only way into this database is at this location, instead of a global network).
That means a much higher reliance on people than you'd expect, since getting hacked is a real threat and easy for your enemy to pull off.
Also, how commonplace sentient droids are, paired with how droids are universally discriminated against means there could have been a replicator/rougue AI incident in the past.
Not trying to say Star Wars is better than Star Trek here, just wanted to share some of the lore!
That makes some sense, but it seems like a backward explanation for the bad worldbuilding.
Like, the lack of computer-aimed turrets. You might not want a completely AI powered ship, but this is more the difference between "cruise control" and manually controlling the vehicle. Not using computer-assist is basically risking your life. As we see in the movies, humans are pretty shit at using the turrets. Computer-assisted aim would mean the ship is much more likely to survive. And, if someone did manage to hack your turret, you could turn off the computer-assist like you'd turn off a malfunctioning cruise-control.
Also, if computer systems are hacked trivially by droids, why do they have hackable ports all over the star destroyer? Wouldn't they only put them next to human-guarded posts?
In addition, airgapped systems are a simple way to deal with this sort of thing. Like, your refrigerator or dishwasher probably has microprocessors, but they're not on the network, nor do they have a port you can plug into. Maybe there is one buried under a panel somewhere, but you don't have to worry about them being hacked.
And yes, droids are treated like slaves in some ways, but in other ways they're trusted to be bounty hunters, military troops, etc. If you trust / allow a droid to pilot a ship, why wouldn't you trust a turret to be equipped with computer-assisted aiming?
All that's fair! IMHO it does get a little closer to the nitpicky level of scrutiny that Star Trek doesn't really hold up to either, you know?
I do think droids are the airgapped system, it's why the droid army in the prequels had physical droids sit in the seats and operate ships instead of having a main computer run everything.
Ok, but droids have those manipulator arms that go out that let them hack other systems. So, it doesn't help much if your air-gapped system interacts with other networks.
But yeah, nothing really holds up to scrutiny if you dig too deep. Having said that, I think Star Trek (at least the modern version) does a bit better at it than Star Wars. Star Wars suffers from it being a 1977 movie where George Lucas just went with the "rule of cool" instead of worldbuilding. Star Trek (at least the modern version) seemed to think at least a bit beyond what they showed on screen.
Yeah for sure! At least we have both (well, kinda, Star Wars after The Last Jedi just doesn't do it for me anymore haha). I think the pre-Disney EU had more effort into fleshing out the world, now it's even more "rule of cool" than when Lucas was running the show
I'm not too interested in most of the new Star Wars stuff, but it's still good special effects so I watch it while doing other things. But, I did really like Andor. It was a real departure from the typical Star Wars fare which is low on plot but loaded in special effects. For most of the new Star Wars stuff, you can tune it out and only pay attention when there's a battle or something. But, Andor actually had a real plot with some actual twists... and good special effects.
A phaser beam is made up of nadion particles, which to my eyes seems to move through space at about the same speed as a Star Wars laser bolt.
I think a more fair fight would be a Danube runabout vs. the Falcon, but my money is still on the Starfleet ship.
In Star Trek, photon torpedoes seem to go about as fast as "laser" cannons in Star Wars:
https://youtu.be/j2DEo305CXk?t=35
Phasers are "nearly instantaneous", which is slow compared to light speed, but means there's maybe one video frame where the phaser has been fired and it hasn't yet hit.
https://youtu.be/j2DEo305CXk?t=346
In Star Wars, the "laser" cannons are slow enough that you can see individual bursts flying through the air at once. To me, that suggests it's even slower than 2020s bullet speeds.
https://youtu.be/LVHnyqhl3Bk?t=28
Anyhow, my money is always on the Star Trek ships. The Star Wars universe still seems to use human aiming most of the time, where the Star Trek universe uses computer targeting and target locks. It's basically 1950s tech but with "lasers" vs 2020s tech but with "phasers".
You forget that bullets aren't illuminated unless they're tracer rounds. If you watch an IRL tracer round at night it looks a lot like the lasers from turbo laser cannons.
I'm not arguing against the falcon getting destroyed I'm just saying the turbo lasers on a starship are moving much faster than it seems simply because they're illuminated.
Bullets are small and don't give off any light. Those are pretty much the only reason you can't see them moving. It's not instant you just can't see it.
I was specifically thinking about tracers when I was saying that turbo lasers seem slower than bullets. Look at this footage and say that it seems slower than turbo lasers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LZuNUqZ4TE
Compare that to the ship-to-ship "turbo lasers" from the clip I shared, it seems very similar. It's hard to compare because you'd need to look at things of the same scale from the same distance, but it seems comparable to me.
The thing about blaster bolts in the OT is that they usually are on screen for roughly the same number of frames, no matter the shot. So in close in fights, they can be pretty slow, for long shots, especially the chase of the Tantive IV, they are incredibly fast.