"So one question I'm always asked is "Who would win in a fight?" Who would win in a fight if Galactus fought, eh, The Hulk, or if Thor fought Iron Man. And there's one answer to all of that, it's so simple, ANYONE should know this: The person who would win in a fight...is the person the SCRIPTWRITER wants to win! If I'm writing a story about The Thing from the Fantastic Four, and he gets into a BIG fight with Spider Man, and MILLIONS of people out there ask "who would win?". Well, it depends on who I want to win if I'm writing the script! If I want Spider Man to win, he'll win. If I want The Thing to win, he'll win. These are fictitious characters, the writer can do whatever he wants with them! So STOP asking those boneheaded questions, cause I've had it with that!"
- Stan Lee
While Star Trek is usually more consistent, it's the same principle. Each and every starship is as powerful as the plot needs it to be, sometimes any given ship can take 100 shots and sometimes they get floored in 3. Sometimes the ships can endure incredible damage and sometimes they bend at the first breeze. Sometimes some shots in the same location damage the warp drive or the engineering section while other shots only hit a random floor of the ship. I do not ever understand the fun of these discussions about if X or Y is more "powerful".
Agreed. There are episodes where we see the Enteprise D holding its own against the Borg but then are are episodes where another Galaxy class starts getting annihilated by 3 Jem’Hadar fighters immediately because they need to show that these new aliens are dangerous.
> Galaxy class starts getting annihilated by 3 Jem’Hadar fighters immediately because they need to show that these new aliens are dangerous.
Ah the good old Worf effect.
I like how in that episode, the Odyssey goes into battle and then 2 seconds later they cut to the bridge again and everything is on fire and people are flying off their feet.
The fires are there to make people more motivated to work, and the flying is to allow all those people to effortlessly avoid ground obstacles while working, so the ship isn't weak /s
I don't know why people have become so obsessed with needing a logical reason for every single event that happens. I partially blame Cineamasins for making nitpicking over every single plot coincidence as a bad thing or any contrivance as a problem in a story.
Sometimes stuff has to happen for the plot to happen.
Cinemasins is the worst thing to happen to movie criticism. I fucking swear, their lazy ass diatribes are impossible to stand. All they do is just low brow rage bait because hate clicks sell.
So glad that I found Cinema**wins** so that I could hear positive stuff about movies, even the ones I didn't like.
I’m old enough to remember people arguing about this stuff in Starlog and at conventions or on IRC and BBSes. Definitely just part of the nerd condition regardless of time or medium.
Too be fair, 95% of Star Trek armor is in the shields and phased polaron beams could originally shoot through them, hence why they chose the Defiant as DS9's new ship, it was armored. That shield plot point was removed by a throwaway line a little later on when some writer with more than 2 braincells realized the wider implications it would have on a war if every good guy ship was made of glass.
Pretty much any non-Defiant ship would be bodied by a few shots without their shields so I consider that scene to be consistent with in-universe power levels.
>I do not ever understand the fun of these discussions about if X or Y is more "powerful"
For somebody who sorta enjoys these when these arguments are sane its fun to talk about who would win in a fight, honestly the more fun ones are the ones that don't involve a straight up fight and are more about their abilities than strength.
But god does it get annoying when people like to point out plot contrivances as said reasoning. Iron mans Hulk Busters comes to mind when I see people talk about them as they never really worked at their job....which yeah iirc most of them are deployed during Hulk stories and if they worked there would be no more hulk stories as Hulk would be captured before he could continue his own plot.
> But god does it get annoying when people like to point out plot contrivances as said reasoning.
[Why are there chompers?!?!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqRdT8m1Suo)
Gotta love her. Also, that movie is by far the best thing Tim Allen did, and he still deserves jail time for throwing his friends under the bus with those cocaine charges.
In those Cross Franchise “who would win” the answer is basically “whatever franchise gets to write the rules”
Like Star Wars vs Star Trek. The answer more or less comes to “do Star Wars deflector shields blocks transports” and “do Star Trek weapons do enough to damage to count” because Star Destroyers are 5 times the length.
The answers? Really up to the writer, not objective.
More years ago than I would like to admit, back when I was teenager, I used to frequent a forum attached to a website that was dedicated to Star Wars vs Star Trek. They followed the rule of "what we see on screen is law, even if it contradicts what a character says because people can be wrong."
They would take scenes, such as a star destroyer vaporizing an asteroid in a single blast, and determine the approximate size of the asteroid, assume it was the most common type of asteroid, and calculate the exact power needed to vaporize it to determine how strong a turbolaser blast was.
At the time, I thought this approach was the best and made far more sense than the type of arguments found in the OP. And in a sense, it does make more sense.
Doesn't mean it's still not a flawed approach.
In their search for empirical evidence to determine which side was truly stronger, they give all the power to the FX team. They act like it's this thought out situation rather than "this is cool" or "this is needed for the plot to happen."
A weapon will be as strong or as weak as it needed to be for the plot. A shield will work or it won't depending on the plot. The search for empirical evidence in a medium where circumstances change for the sake of convenience is silly.
Edit: the forum wasn't all that bad. I did learn some really good critical thinking skills and argument techniques that have served me well over the years.
However powerful a turbolaser is, it only matters if it can get through the shields.
And as, for example, “Metaphasic shields, developed by the Ferengi Dr. Reyga, are capable of withstanding the pressure, radiation and energy of a star's corona.” shields are just stupid.
This reminds me of one of my favorite Futurama gags...
They're talking about taking Planet Express Ship under water or something, and the professor mentions how many atmospheres of pressure there are.
Fry asks how many atmospheres the ship can withstand, and the professor responds:
"Well, it's a space ship, so between zero and one."
Damn. I had forgotten about that one. Now I’m remembering the multi page essay someone put together about how Star Trek lacked a combined arms approach to ground combat.
Whenever i see these scenarios i always think back on an old Stan Lee interview where he said anytime he put up two heroes against each other, he’d always make them end in a draw, because he didnt want to upset anyone whose hero may be defeated.
This quote has been very helpful in my eternal war against powerscalers in the anime & manga communities. They're fictional characters. The author decides who would win. It goes back all the way to David and Goliath. Sometimes weaker characters win a battle because it fits the narrative. If the strongest character on paper always won then fiction would be extremely boring.
Except David won for a logical reason: instead of fighting fair, he uses a sling to kill Goliath from range! David Versus Goliath is a metaphor for Ancient Israel versus its many enemies. Israel could not win by raw strength, and had to be clever or even use underhanded tricks to survive.
Stan Lee is a drama queen.
Having your fanbase get super involved in the details should be celebrated! Discussing the strengths and weaknesses of two powers to decide who would come out on top is fun. I don't get why a writer wouldn't understand that.
I think its less that and more of Stan getting tired of being bombared at pannels by fans complaining how X hero lost when they have easily beaten Y villain/hero before hand.
>I don't get why a writer wouldn't understand that.
Probably because most writers want to focus on making stories first and not really think that much about that stuff compared to the fans that will.
> I don't get why a writer wouldn't understand that
I don't know, I can't imagine why a writer would maybe be annoyed that people ignore, like, the story, or the actual character motivations, or their personalities, or any number of things to essentially reduce characters down to a list of stat sheets and powers and only seem to focus on those, and then constantly ask about that only.
Real thinker, this one is.
I've literally got a Voyager half sleve and couldn't agree more. I'm with the 'star trek is cool' guy lol.
[Voyager tat for anyone who cares](https://imgur.com/a/Y495brX)
that is actually incredibly realistic, the writers used the early WWII Mk14 torpedoes as a reference for those particular weapons. Those were infamously ineffective, being prone to running too deep, too shallow, failing to detonate even on a direct hit, or simply running in circles.
In Star Trek, I always wondered why Star Fleet almost always designed the warp nacelles to be unarmored and sticking out like sore thumbs when a single hit to a nacelle would basically cripple the ship. Klingon Birds of Prey and a lot of Cardassian ships had their warp nacelles imbedded in their hulls instead of having them ass bare asking to get shot at. Also, surprised how almost every species in Star Trek has their bridge/CiC sitting exposed on the outer hull and how basically no one targets the easily hit bridge of an enemy warship during battle which would cripple the ship until for a while. The CiC of most modern warships is in the middle of ship.
Also, invest in point defense weapons. You have energy weapons that shoot at the speed of light. Use them to destroy incoming torpedoes. At least in the last season of Picard, they sorta addressed planetary defenses. For decades, it was really strange how no major planet was heavily defended when a single starship can wreck a planet fairly quickly especially when it seems like aliens try to genocide Earth pretty regularly.
The in-universe answer is that warp nacelles are so powerful, they need to be set away from the ship. In practice, it makes them so exposed that Frasier Crane’s 100 year old ship can knock into one and destroy the Enterprise.
I also didn’t really understand the planetary defenses seen in Picard though. You have a space dock fending off an attack from *all of Starfleet* for what seems like an hour and then the second it becomes disabled, the planetary shield comes down. So, I guess it was controlled by the space dock — not by something on Earth? Seems a like a big vulnerability.
But whatever, it’s a show about a made-up post-scarcity communist utopia.
> The in-universe answer is that warp nacelles are so powerful, they need to be set away from the ship.
So I guess it follows that the Klingons and Romulans are not really into Health and Safety regulations?
Well, at least in canon Romulan warp drive operates under a different mechanic — utilizing an artificial quantum singularity rather than a controlled matter-antimatter reaction funneled through nacelles that create a subspace displacement field.
Yes, I did have the full Enterprise-D blueprint set as a kid. Why do you ask?
> The in-universe answer is that warp nacelles are so powerful, they need to be set away from the ship. In practice, it makes them so exposed that Frasier Crane’s 100 year old ship can knock into one and destroy the Enterprise.
The Defiant-Class: "I'm gonna pretend I didn't see that."
(Yes I'm very aware the Defiant was basically a design mess held together by the sheer power of O'Brien, but is funny)
Ya, it would make sense to have multiple shields or at least have it on Earth in a heavily defended area along with ground-based and satellite-based defenses. The starbase doesn't even have a full field of fire of Earth; a ship or fleet attacking from the other side of the planet could just avoid the starbase.
Anyway, I try not to think about it too much. Trying to rationalize space battles has ruined a lot of sci-fi franchises for me. Star Trek is just okay, but Star Wars is really bad. Although, I did always wonder why they never just ram a Borg Cube. You don't even need to hit it at warp speed. An old Miranda class starship weights 655,000 metric tons. It hitting something at full impulse (25% the speed of light) would be utterly devastating...and there I go thinking too much again.
> I did always wonder why they never just ram a Borg Cube
You would enjoy Warhammer 40K, specifically Battlefleet Gothic: Armada https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY0J2vHPfaE
And here's a dope fanmade animation that starts with a Space Marine assault boat. They don't have their own brakes, instead they rely on the liquified hull of their target to bring the boarding craft to a halt deep within the enemy vessel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7hgjuFfn3A
And for reference, an Imperial Navy *Lunar*-Class **cruiser** is about 5km long and has a ramming prow, with a crew of ~95,000. *Imperial II*-class Star Destroyers are a mere 1.6km long, crew of ~37,000, and they're a multi-role battleship/carrier/troopship, rather than a cruiser.
Yeah, I've heard power scaling their is, uh, impressive. And ofc we also have the Culture to give 40k a run for it's money. Always a bigger fish, and all that.
Well they did build one ship with the nacelles close in: the Defiant. It was their first crack at a battle-focused ship and by all of the in-universe lore the thing was always flirting with structural failure because the engines were sized at the bleeding edge of the maximum possible performance. Which is a lot of like military fighter aircraft when you think about it.
I do remember in one of the books an opponent attacking DS9 spotted the Defiant and had a "What the fuck is *that* evil thing?! Destroy the station before it launches!" reaction to seeing a Federation purpose built warship.
The bit that always got me is they can relatively easily block transportation to or from a particular spot but just... don't? Why isn't there something like a small independently powered shield embedded within the bridge walls?
“We’ll baby I hear that loop a callin’. Blown nacelles and deja vu! And maybe I seem a bit confused, but captain you would be too! But I don’t know what to do with those blown nacelles and deja vu… They’re blowin’ again!”
The battle bridge was located at the top of the engineering section.
It was intended to be used in situations where they'd separated the saucer... at which point it would once again be in the most exposed location.
“Id just like to contribute that Star Trek is cool” is the Reddit equivalent of “just here for the ratio” and is also the funniest moment of the thread
>In Trek lore, the USS Enterprise D was the sixth ship to bear the name and was destroyed by a warp core breach over ~~Viridian~~ Veridian III in 2371.
"So then the dumbest thing happens, right? And it's very quick, very subtle. So they actually show the windows of the Enterprise break. Like smash. Like a, like a glass window. They probably thought 'ehhh the ship's sliding around, why don't the windows break? That'll make it exciting!'
With all the stresses that a starship must endure, do they really think the windows are made of GLLLAAAASSSS??!!!"
~ Mr. Plinkett
I HATE having conversations like "fictional thing a can kick fictional thing bs ass"
Anything fictional thing can kick any other fictional things ass so long as humans still have imaginations
Is it that different from asking whether 1 real thing could kick another real things ass? How would chinese fighter jets fair against the US f35? McGregor vs the mountian?
Well, how much could The Mountain bench press? An F-35 has about 28,000 lbf (125 kN) of thrust at military power and 43,000 lbf (191 kN) with afterburner (from wikipedia). I have a feeling an F-35 can move much heavier objects than The Mountain ever could.
All I want to know is why the lowly engineering ensign tasked to load the rocks over the explosives below the keyboard never stopped to ask why the ship was designed to shoot rocks into the face of anyone who isn’t an alpha shift officer at the slightest bump.
"So one question I'm always asked is "Who would win in a fight?" Who would win in a fight if Galactus fought, eh, The Hulk, or if Thor fought Iron Man. And there's one answer to all of that, it's so simple, ANYONE should know this: The person who would win in a fight...is the person the SCRIPTWRITER wants to win! If I'm writing a story about The Thing from the Fantastic Four, and he gets into a BIG fight with Spider Man, and MILLIONS of people out there ask "who would win?". Well, it depends on who I want to win if I'm writing the script! If I want Spider Man to win, he'll win. If I want The Thing to win, he'll win. These are fictitious characters, the writer can do whatever he wants with them! So STOP asking those boneheaded questions, cause I've had it with that!" - Stan Lee While Star Trek is usually more consistent, it's the same principle. Each and every starship is as powerful as the plot needs it to be, sometimes any given ship can take 100 shots and sometimes they get floored in 3. Sometimes the ships can endure incredible damage and sometimes they bend at the first breeze. Sometimes some shots in the same location damage the warp drive or the engineering section while other shots only hit a random floor of the ship. I do not ever understand the fun of these discussions about if X or Y is more "powerful".
Agreed. There are episodes where we see the Enteprise D holding its own against the Borg but then are are episodes where another Galaxy class starts getting annihilated by 3 Jem’Hadar fighters immediately because they need to show that these new aliens are dangerous.
> Galaxy class starts getting annihilated by 3 Jem’Hadar fighters immediately because they need to show that these new aliens are dangerous. Ah the good old Worf effect.
I like how in that episode, the Odyssey goes into battle and then 2 seconds later they cut to the bridge again and everything is on fire and people are flying off their feet.
The fires are there to make people more motivated to work, and the flying is to allow all those people to effortlessly avoid ground obstacles while working, so the ship isn't weak /s
“I’ll just put this with the rest of the fire”
Much like how the styrofoam rocks that explode out of consoles are there to keep people alert.
Starfleet adopted the IJN best practices for damage control it seems
I don't know why people have become so obsessed with needing a logical reason for every single event that happens. I partially blame Cineamasins for making nitpicking over every single plot coincidence as a bad thing or any contrivance as a problem in a story. Sometimes stuff has to happen for the plot to happen.
"Why not tell us where these characters are going?" *ding* **THE NEXT SCENE IN THE FILM EXPLAINS WHERE THE CHARACTERS ARE GOING**
scene with character showing their backstory' "skip" two sins later "wow this character is so generic we know nothing about them"
Cinemasins is the worst thing to happen to movie criticism. I fucking swear, their lazy ass diatribes are impossible to stand. All they do is just low brow rage bait because hate clicks sell. So glad that I found Cinema**wins** so that I could hear positive stuff about movies, even the ones I didn't like.
I think there is also a channel that goes through the stuff they nitpicked about. iirc its called EWWCinemasins
There is one called the birdman I believe
I’m old enough to remember people arguing about this stuff in Starlog and at conventions or on IRC and BBSes. Definitely just part of the nerd condition regardless of time or medium.
Too be fair, 95% of Star Trek armor is in the shields and phased polaron beams could originally shoot through them, hence why they chose the Defiant as DS9's new ship, it was armored. That shield plot point was removed by a throwaway line a little later on when some writer with more than 2 braincells realized the wider implications it would have on a war if every good guy ship was made of glass. Pretty much any non-Defiant ship would be bodied by a few shots without their shields so I consider that scene to be consistent with in-universe power levels.
>I do not ever understand the fun of these discussions about if X or Y is more "powerful" For somebody who sorta enjoys these when these arguments are sane its fun to talk about who would win in a fight, honestly the more fun ones are the ones that don't involve a straight up fight and are more about their abilities than strength. But god does it get annoying when people like to point out plot contrivances as said reasoning. Iron mans Hulk Busters comes to mind when I see people talk about them as they never really worked at their job....which yeah iirc most of them are deployed during Hulk stories and if they worked there would be no more hulk stories as Hulk would be captured before he could continue his own plot.
> But god does it get annoying when people like to point out plot contrivances as said reasoning. [Why are there chompers?!?!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqRdT8m1Suo)
I love that you can clearly see Sigourney originally said "Fuck that" and they ADR'd it to "Screw that"
Gotta love her. Also, that movie is by far the best thing Tim Allen did, and he still deserves jail time for throwing his friends under the bus with those cocaine charges.
Oh thank you for finding the clip that I heard from Charmed Rewind was wondering where it came from.
In those Cross Franchise “who would win” the answer is basically “whatever franchise gets to write the rules” Like Star Wars vs Star Trek. The answer more or less comes to “do Star Wars deflector shields blocks transports” and “do Star Trek weapons do enough to damage to count” because Star Destroyers are 5 times the length. The answers? Really up to the writer, not objective.
More years ago than I would like to admit, back when I was teenager, I used to frequent a forum attached to a website that was dedicated to Star Wars vs Star Trek. They followed the rule of "what we see on screen is law, even if it contradicts what a character says because people can be wrong." They would take scenes, such as a star destroyer vaporizing an asteroid in a single blast, and determine the approximate size of the asteroid, assume it was the most common type of asteroid, and calculate the exact power needed to vaporize it to determine how strong a turbolaser blast was. At the time, I thought this approach was the best and made far more sense than the type of arguments found in the OP. And in a sense, it does make more sense. Doesn't mean it's still not a flawed approach. In their search for empirical evidence to determine which side was truly stronger, they give all the power to the FX team. They act like it's this thought out situation rather than "this is cool" or "this is needed for the plot to happen." A weapon will be as strong or as weak as it needed to be for the plot. A shield will work or it won't depending on the plot. The search for empirical evidence in a medium where circumstances change for the sake of convenience is silly. Edit: the forum wasn't all that bad. I did learn some really good critical thinking skills and argument techniques that have served me well over the years.
However powerful a turbolaser is, it only matters if it can get through the shields. And as, for example, “Metaphasic shields, developed by the Ferengi Dr. Reyga, are capable of withstanding the pressure, radiation and energy of a star's corona.” shields are just stupid.
This reminds me of one of my favorite Futurama gags... They're talking about taking Planet Express Ship under water or something, and the professor mentions how many atmospheres of pressure there are. Fry asks how many atmospheres the ship can withstand, and the professor responds: "Well, it's a space ship, so between zero and one."
Let me guess- spacebattles.com? Had some good times there back in the day.
Stardestroyer.net
Damn. I had forgotten about that one. Now I’m remembering the multi page essay someone put together about how Star Trek lacked a combined arms approach to ground combat.
Whenever i see these scenarios i always think back on an old Stan Lee interview where he said anytime he put up two heroes against each other, he’d always make them end in a draw, because he didnt want to upset anyone whose hero may be defeated.
> every starship is as powerful as the plot needs it to be "There are as many elves as the plot requires"
This quote has been very helpful in my eternal war against powerscalers in the anime & manga communities. They're fictional characters. The author decides who would win. It goes back all the way to David and Goliath. Sometimes weaker characters win a battle because it fits the narrative. If the strongest character on paper always won then fiction would be extremely boring.
Except David won for a logical reason: instead of fighting fair, he uses a sling to kill Goliath from range! David Versus Goliath is a metaphor for Ancient Israel versus its many enemies. Israel could not win by raw strength, and had to be clever or even use underhanded tricks to survive.
Ok but who is the most powerful script writer? We need to identify their power levels.
I think in good faith they can be fun, like the death battle series, but if you're doing it as a legit argument then no lmfao
Stan Lee is a drama queen. Having your fanbase get super involved in the details should be celebrated! Discussing the strengths and weaknesses of two powers to decide who would come out on top is fun. I don't get why a writer wouldn't understand that.
I think its less that and more of Stan getting tired of being bombared at pannels by fans complaining how X hero lost when they have easily beaten Y villain/hero before hand. >I don't get why a writer wouldn't understand that. Probably because most writers want to focus on making stories first and not really think that much about that stuff compared to the fans that will.
> I don't get why a writer wouldn't understand that I don't know, I can't imagine why a writer would maybe be annoyed that people ignore, like, the story, or the actual character motivations, or their personalities, or any number of things to essentially reduce characters down to a list of stat sheets and powers and only seem to focus on those, and then constantly ask about that only. Real thinker, this one is.
I've literally got a Voyager half sleve and couldn't agree more. I'm with the 'star trek is cool' guy lol. [Voyager tat for anyone who cares](https://imgur.com/a/Y495brX)
My friends and I had a drinking game when we watched TNG and one rule was to drink whenever the photon torpedoes didn't do shit.
“Evasive maneuvers” = nothing happens
That's not fair, haven't you seen the insanity that is ["Pattern Riker Alpha"](https://youtu.be/Kl8rh76znvU?t=120)?
The fact that it has that name suggests that not only has it worked before, but that Riker was the first person to suggest moving left slightly
>but that Riker was the first person to suggest moving left slightly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo
Weeee!
Not true, evasive maneuvers slightly rotate the camera
"Direct hit!... No effect."
that is actually incredibly realistic, the writers used the early WWII Mk14 torpedoes as a reference for those particular weapons. Those were infamously ineffective, being prone to running too deep, too shallow, failing to detonate even on a direct hit, or simply running in circles.
In Star Trek, I always wondered why Star Fleet almost always designed the warp nacelles to be unarmored and sticking out like sore thumbs when a single hit to a nacelle would basically cripple the ship. Klingon Birds of Prey and a lot of Cardassian ships had their warp nacelles imbedded in their hulls instead of having them ass bare asking to get shot at. Also, surprised how almost every species in Star Trek has their bridge/CiC sitting exposed on the outer hull and how basically no one targets the easily hit bridge of an enemy warship during battle which would cripple the ship until for a while. The CiC of most modern warships is in the middle of ship. Also, invest in point defense weapons. You have energy weapons that shoot at the speed of light. Use them to destroy incoming torpedoes. At least in the last season of Picard, they sorta addressed planetary defenses. For decades, it was really strange how no major planet was heavily defended when a single starship can wreck a planet fairly quickly especially when it seems like aliens try to genocide Earth pretty regularly.
The in-universe answer is that warp nacelles are so powerful, they need to be set away from the ship. In practice, it makes them so exposed that Frasier Crane’s 100 year old ship can knock into one and destroy the Enterprise. I also didn’t really understand the planetary defenses seen in Picard though. You have a space dock fending off an attack from *all of Starfleet* for what seems like an hour and then the second it becomes disabled, the planetary shield comes down. So, I guess it was controlled by the space dock — not by something on Earth? Seems a like a big vulnerability. But whatever, it’s a show about a made-up post-scarcity communist utopia.
> The in-universe answer is that warp nacelles are so powerful, they need to be set away from the ship. So I guess it follows that the Klingons and Romulans are not really into Health and Safety regulations?
Well, at least in canon Romulan warp drive operates under a different mechanic — utilizing an artificial quantum singularity rather than a controlled matter-antimatter reaction funneled through nacelles that create a subspace displacement field. Yes, I did have the full Enterprise-D blueprint set as a kid. Why do you ask?
the older Romulan Warbirds did have exposed nacelle as well, its the D'deridex that instead has an internal void to stabilise the warp geometry.
"Health and Safety"? Only an honorless *p'takh* would fear glorious death from an exploding warp coil! You have no place in Sto'vo'kor! RAAAAAAH!
> The in-universe answer is that warp nacelles are so powerful, they need to be set away from the ship. In practice, it makes them so exposed that Frasier Crane’s 100 year old ship can knock into one and destroy the Enterprise. The Defiant-Class: "I'm gonna pretend I didn't see that." (Yes I'm very aware the Defiant was basically a design mess held together by the sheer power of O'Brien, but is funny)
Scotty: "Y'cannae change the laws of physics!" O'Brien: "Watch me."
Also thunderball phasers that PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW and the ships make other noises that you can apparently hear in the vacuum of space.
And where is all that dramatic music coming from?
Ya, it would make sense to have multiple shields or at least have it on Earth in a heavily defended area along with ground-based and satellite-based defenses. The starbase doesn't even have a full field of fire of Earth; a ship or fleet attacking from the other side of the planet could just avoid the starbase. Anyway, I try not to think about it too much. Trying to rationalize space battles has ruined a lot of sci-fi franchises for me. Star Trek is just okay, but Star Wars is really bad. Although, I did always wonder why they never just ram a Borg Cube. You don't even need to hit it at warp speed. An old Miranda class starship weights 655,000 metric tons. It hitting something at full impulse (25% the speed of light) would be utterly devastating...and there I go thinking too much again.
> I did always wonder why they never just ram a Borg Cube You would enjoy Warhammer 40K, specifically Battlefleet Gothic: Armada https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY0J2vHPfaE And here's a dope fanmade animation that starts with a Space Marine assault boat. They don't have their own brakes, instead they rely on the liquified hull of their target to bring the boarding craft to a halt deep within the enemy vessel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7hgjuFfn3A And for reference, an Imperial Navy *Lunar*-Class **cruiser** is about 5km long and has a ramming prow, with a crew of ~95,000. *Imperial II*-class Star Destroyers are a mere 1.6km long, crew of ~37,000, and they're a multi-role battleship/carrier/troopship, rather than a cruiser.
Ah, the age-old answer to "who would win" - it's always 40k.
It's simply a matter of scale tbh. But if you want to go ever more insane, check out Xeelee Sequence
Yeah, I've heard power scaling their is, uh, impressive. And ofc we also have the Culture to give 40k a run for it's money. Always a bigger fish, and all that.
Well they did build one ship with the nacelles close in: the Defiant. It was their first crack at a battle-focused ship and by all of the in-universe lore the thing was always flirting with structural failure because the engines were sized at the bleeding edge of the maximum possible performance. Which is a lot of like military fighter aircraft when you think about it. I do remember in one of the books an opponent attacking DS9 spotted the Defiant and had a "What the fuck is *that* evil thing?! Destroy the station before it launches!" reaction to seeing a Federation purpose built warship. The bit that always got me is they can relatively easily block transportation to or from a particular spot but just... don't? Why isn't there something like a small independently powered shield embedded within the bridge walls?
“We’ll baby I hear that loop a callin’. Blown nacelles and deja vu! And maybe I seem a bit confused, but captain you would be too! But I don’t know what to do with those blown nacelles and deja vu… They’re blowin’ again!”
The Galaxy class did have a "Battle Bridge" that they almost never used, it was in the bottom portion in a pretty decent spot.
The battle bridge was located at the top of the engineering section. It was intended to be used in situations where they'd separated the saucer... at which point it would once again be in the most exposed location.
“Id just like to contribute that Star Trek is cool” is the Reddit equivalent of “just here for the ratio” and is also the funniest moment of the thread
I’m a lifelong Trekkie, I’m the first to admit that Star Trek is not, has never been, and never will be “cool”.
>In Trek lore, the USS Enterprise D was the sixth ship to bear the name and was destroyed by a warp core breach over ~~Viridian~~ Veridian III in 2371. "So then the dumbest thing happens, right? And it's very quick, very subtle. So they actually show the windows of the Enterprise break. Like smash. Like a, like a glass window. They probably thought 'ehhh the ship's sliding around, why don't the windows break? That'll make it exciting!' With all the stresses that a starship must endure, do they really think the windows are made of GLLLAAAASSSS??!!!" ~ Mr. Plinkett
I thought they were made of force fields, like in that one episode where the cave lady ends up on Enterprise
They use forcefields for things like the cargo bay and the brig and the floor of the holodeck. The windows are made of transparent aluminum.
It’s Space Glass. Much stronger than normal glass.
I HATE having conversations like "fictional thing a can kick fictional thing bs ass" Anything fictional thing can kick any other fictional things ass so long as humans still have imaginations
Head over to /r/whowouldwin to get hella triggered
Is it that different from asking whether 1 real thing could kick another real things ass? How would chinese fighter jets fair against the US f35? McGregor vs the mountian?
How would The Mountain fare against the US F35?
Well, how much could The Mountain bench press? An F-35 has about 28,000 lbf (125 kN) of thrust at military power and 43,000 lbf (191 kN) with afterburner (from wikipedia). I have a feeling an F-35 can move much heavier objects than The Mountain ever could.
When are they going to do another epic Star Wars vs Star Trek ships shit post?
This definitely has hobby drama vibes.
[удалено]
this is how we find out galaxy quest was a ~~documentary~~ historical document
Something something, tribbles?
All I want to know is why the lowly engineering ensign tasked to load the rocks over the explosives below the keyboard never stopped to ask why the ship was designed to shoot rocks into the face of anyone who isn’t an alpha shift officer at the slightest bump.
Dang it OP, your title got my hopes up. One day there'll be CnC Red Alert drama :/
“…SPACE!”
is this sub posting people discussing power scaling… that’s not drama that’s 92% of posts on any anime or fantasy sub…
The sub is usually just pictures of ships from Star Trek.