Star Trek

i'm gonna back up ravens point about star trek weapons > star wars weapons. The biggest gun in the galactic empire can take out a planet? In Generations, the trek universe busted out a weapon that was able to take out a star. Real life humans have had the power to destroy a planet for decades already, remember the cold war? nukes?  just sayin...

Thanks "Klingon Jedi" for your vote of support, but you actually somewhat missed the point I was trying to make. (And btw, the Star Wars EU does have weapons capable of destroying stars as well) It's not about which franchise has the most wankerificly powerful weapons ever. My point is about honestly and integrity. If I believed for one moment that the Star Wars movies actually supported the claims of the radical Warsies and their oft quoted EU sources (like the ICS books), then I would have no choice but to concede that Star Wars weapons and technology are vastly superior no matter how ridiculous or wanky they might seem; but the truth is that, in all most all cases, the movies DO NOT support their claims, and more often then not show the exact opposite. So what it comes down to is that I'm just tired of people endlessly regurgitating utter nonsense without once stopping to consider if it is true. The Star Wars universe is grand and spectacular enough as it really is, without having to resort to artificially inflating the capabilities of its technology through deceptive and dishonest means.

Standoff.'Nuff Said.

Two words: Borg....Duh!

Raven_CWG:

While like you I'm going to try to avoid becoming embroiled in another one of these endless and repetitive debates, I feel I should point out that the ICS firepower figures have actually been explicitly confirmed to still be considered canon recently by Leland Chee (Star Wars Continuity Administrator) in his Holocron Continuity Database questions thread - the question was asked here on 18th October 2011 at 15:16 with the answer given on 19th October 2011 at 14:03:

Darthy: ... My second question regards what seems to me and many others to be controversial statistics in the Incredible Cross Section books. In Star Wars Attack of the Clones Incredible Cross-Sections on Page 23 regarding Republic Assault Ships it states: “Armament: 12 quad turbolaser turrents (200 gigatons per shot); 24 laser cannons (6 megatons per shot);”. I’ve looked all over star wars canon and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that quad turbolasers or any other weapon short of the super laser of the Death Star has this type of firepower. This would mean that the primary lasers of the Republican Assault Ships are over 33,000 times more powerful than their secondary weapons.

To put this in perspective, a nuclear weapon having a yield of 200 gigatons would level of the state of California and cripple most of the continent of North America in a single shot. This just doesn’t seem realistic to me based on what I’ve seen in the movies, the clone wars series, clone wars animated movie, and the rest of the expanded universe. Even in conventional RPG books the primary weapons of capital ships only range between 50% to 200% more powerful than their secondary weapons.

In Star Wars Revenge of the Sith Incredible Cross Sections on page 16 regarding the Invisible Hand toward the bottom of the page there's a line pointing to a quad turbolaser canon that says "Quad turbolaser cannon's maximum yield is equivalent to magnitude-10 earthquake" which most people conclude to then have the equivalent yield of a teraton or 1000 gigatons.

These books are one of the few sources that try to pin an exact yield value of star wars weaponry. Often times in hypothetical versus scenarios, these figures are brought up and treated as factual. My question here is, how seriously should these ICS yield stats be treated in regards to overall canon?

Leland Chee: ... The Cross-Section stats with regard to firepower are considered canon.

I think it should also be noted that we simply haven't seen capital ship weaponry demonstrated onscreen in a quantifiable manner in the movies - seeing ships shooting other ships is of no help as it is impossible to gauge the amount of energy being absorbed by the shields or hulls. There are hints however at higher levels of firepower; the shockwaves released by fighter-scale Seismic Charges are able to smash through large tracts of an asteroid field without visibly slowing down, and The Clone Wars cartoon has explicitly mentioned even ground forces possessing 100 megaton weapons.

Most the time Canon dose not include books

Hi Vorta_the_point,

Actually Mr. Chee, while he may have replied to the question, didn’t REALLY answer the question at all, not the real question that Darthy was asking anyway. What he did instead was to give a very safe, very politician-esque, copout answer, by simply quoting the party line of “its considered Canon”. But Darthy wasn’t asking if the figures are “Canon” but rather if the figures are accurate—those are two totally different things. And therein lies the fundamental flaw in the way that Star Wars Canon is defined—it’s completely possible for something to be “Canon” and completely wrong at the same time—and this is a prime example. Now I do understand the position that Mr. Chee is in; he really doesn’t care if the figures are accurate or not—to him they are just a bunch of fictional, made-up, nonsense numbers anyway—the only thing he’s concerned about, and the only part that falls within the jurisdiction of his job, is whether or not those figures are directly and explicitly contradicted by something in the movies or some other standing Canon source. Since there aren’t any Canon sources that directly and explicitly state that those figures are wrong, no matter how absurd or controversial they may be, as far as he is concerned, they meet the official definition of Canon. Just to be entirely clear, he is NOT making a judgment call as to whether the figures are accurate or if they make sense in the context of what we see in the films.

I, on the other hand, am making a judgment as to their accuracy; and in my judgment and that of a great many Star Wars fans, those figures are a bunch of utter nonsense and do not fit in any way, shape or form with what we see on screen. Part of the problem for me is that I know where those ridiculous figures come from. I’ve been involved with these kinds of VS. debates off and on for the better part of twenty years now. I am fully aware of who Curtis Saxton is, I am quite familiar with his long-standing participation in VS. debates over the years, and I know EXACTLY what his agenda is. I know how he and Mike Wong over at StarDestroyer.Net and other Warsie extremists have cherry-picked though countless obscure EU sources, taking this partial quote, combining it with a bunch of other completely non-related quotes, taking them all grossly out of context, exaggerating them to the Nth degree, then combined with a generous amount of pure speculation and the occasional outright lie all to create total fabrications (such as the infamous “Base Delta Zero” fallacy) which they then quote as absolute irrefutable “Canon” proof that they and they alone are right and everyone that disagrees with them is wrong. Its one big house of cards all built on a lie. I didn’t swallow their BS back when they first started shoveling it and it’s no less horse manure now that Saxton has managed to get his drivel printed in a book form. And I’m sorry but I refuse to bow down and kiss his boots now just because he is this “great” published author, or because Mr. Chee or anyone else chooses to “legitimize” Saxton’s nonsense with the “revered” status of “Canon”. Not going to happen…not now, not ever. Sorry.

As to the points that you made…

[quote]

I think it should also be noted that we simply haven't seen capital ship weaponry demonstrated onscreen in a quantifiable manner in the movies - seeing ships shooting other ships is of no help as it is impossible to gauge the amount of energy being absorbed by the shields or hulls.

[/quote]

Actually we HAVE in fact seen capital ship weaponry demonstrated MANY times, they just haven’t shown what you and others who swallow Saxton’s fake numbers want to see. So you all make up excuses, such as—

“Well, those weren’t the “HEAVY” turbolasers. They were ACTUALLY some far less powerful weapon.”  (Yah right!)

“Oh, its because their uber-powerful shields (that just happen to be invisible of course) absorbed most of the damage which is why it didn’t appear to be as powerful”

Or…

“Seeing ships shooting other ships is of no help as it is impossible to gauge the amount of energy being absorbed by the shields or hulls.”

Are you freaking kidding me?!!! We have clearly seen, on several occasions, weapons (including heavy turbolasers) striking unprotected hulls. I say unprotected (as in unshielded) because we saw the blasts impact the hull, saw them do damage. There were NO huge nuclear-type explosions, no massive shockwaves, nothing at all to indicate the kind of energy discharge, not even remotely, on the scale that Saxton claims. It’s not that the evidence is “impossible to gauge”, it’s that the evidence you want to see isn’t there because what you except as fact is actually a lie. Furthermore, Saxton also tries to claim that fighter craft weapons do “kilotons” worth of damage, yet we have seen fighters fire their weapons numerous times while still within an atmosphere, and yet once again there has NEVER ONCE been any indication of a huge, powerful, Hiroshima or Nagasaki  type explosion…not even remotely close. Once again, there is no evidence of the weapons being that super-powerful, because the weapons are NOT that powerful. It’s really not that complicated people! The Saxton figures are WRONG!

[quote]

There are hints however at higher levels of firepower; the shockwaves released by fighter-scale Seismic Charges are able to smash through large tracts of an asteroid field without visibly slowing down, and The Clone Wars cartoon has explicitly mentioned even ground forces possessing 100 megaton weapons.

[/quote]

First of all, I’m not sure what “fighter-scale” has to do with anything. Is the fact that a weapon is small enough to be carried by a fighter (or in the case Slave I) supposed to indicate that it is automatically weak and inferior to the weapons carried by larger ships? Modern nuclear warheads aren’t any bigger (if as big) then those seismic charges used by Jango Fett. Besides if size was the defining criteria to determine a weapon’s power then the shells fired from the 16-inch (406 mm) / 50-caliber Mark 7 naval guns of an Iowa-class battleship should be nearly a powerful as a tactical Nuke, but obviously it is not.

Second, although the seismic charges did demonstrate a fairly impressive yield, they didn’t really make particularly great weapons, owing to their concussive blast being confined to a single plane. This combined with the name itself has always led me to wonder if perhaps these were not originally intended to be used as weapons at all, but were instead some kind of asteroid mining charges. Perhaps Jango was only using them simply because they were cheap, powerful and easy to get—like modern terrorist using dynamite instead of trying to get his hands on military grade explosives.

Third, as to the ground forces in that Clone Wars episode you referred to having long range missiles with yields of 100 megatons, my question is so what? We (meaning the 20th century United States as well as Russia) have had the technological means to build 100 megaton hydrogen bombs since the 1950’s or 60’s, therefore I don’t find it at all surprising that military forces during the Clone Wars would have something like that. It seems more than a little stupid to use such powerful things as tactical weapons, but oh well. But let me also point out that the three such long range missiles that we actually saw explode clearly were not using anywhere near that size payload, as the observed explosions, while powerful, were most definitely sub-kiloton. So while those missiles may have had the option of carrying multi-megaton warheads, many of them clearly didn’t.

Fourth and lastly, neither of these two examples you offered prove anything. For one thing you are trying to compare apples and oranges, bombs to directed energy weapons. But besides that, proving that they have missiles with 100 megaton warheads is a far cry from suggesting, let alone proving, that Heavy Turbolasers can somehow produce 2,000 times more energy per shot.

Look, I am not coming at this as some rabid Trekie out to trash all things Star Wars. Yes I am a Star Trek fan, but I am also a HUGE Star Wars fan. This for me isn’t about some misguided need to prove I’m right just to win some stupid VS. debate; its about me being a fan of the real Star Wars, not some bastardized, interpretation of it created by a handful of extremists driven by arrogance and the obsession to “prove” at all costs that Star Wars is superior to every other sci-fi show out there. I’m sick of having to argue, over and over again, everywhere I go online, against these stupid Saxton figures that I know to be a lie, something made even more frustrating by people like Mr. Chee essentially legitimizing that lie by elevating it to “Canon” status.

Raven, gigaton level firepower was CLEARLY SHOWN ON SCREEN in TESB. Unless you have some numbers to refute Dr. Saxton's calcs, you're just another Trektard who is appealing to motive.

I loved this snippet:

...a handful of extremists driven by arrogance and the obsession to “prove” at all costs that Star Wars is superior to every other sci-fi show out there.

LOL...this is the first I have ever heard of some "bastardized interpretation" of Star Wars. Most in the Warsie camp know that there are powers who can defeat the Galactic Empire. The Imperium of Man and The Culture are but two. Just as Star Trek's inferiority to Star Wars in technological terms does not diminish it's appeal as a wholesome and entertaining show, neither does other sci-fi being able to kick the living crap out of the Empire diminish Star Wars in any way. Because the vs. debate has nothing to do with entertainment value.

If you want to knock down the ICS, go ahead and refute the ICS calculations. Dr. Saxton's methodology is available on the internet to examine for anybody who disagrees with his numbers, even you. Whatever subset of Star Trek fandom that still gives a flying frak about the ST v SW debate is free to prove Saxton's calc's wrong. The mere fact that not a single person has done so (let alone attempted to do so), and the fact that nobody with the necessary mathmatical skill to do it has taken up with the Trekkie side of the debate is far more telling than who's names are on the acknowledgements page of the SW:EP2ICS.

...we have seen fighters fire their weapons numerous times while still within an atmosphere, and yet once again there has NEVER ONCE been any indication of a huge, powerful, Hiroshima or Nagasaki  type explosion...

Oh, you must be referring to the incident on Kamino where Boba Fett shot Slave I's cannons at Obi-Wan Kenobi and left scorch marks on the deck. Ever think that maybe he dialed down the settings so he wouldn't blow out the platform from under his father's ship?

Maybe you're referring to when Anakin Skywalker blew up the Trade Federation ship from the inside with his Naboo Starfighter...hello, we're talking about a kid who barely knew how to work the controls.

Perhaps you're talking about Bespin, when the podships fired on the Falcon...hello, those were warning shots!

Link for Raven:

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/faq.html#1.3

Curtis Saxton's own words, where he states exactly how much his firepower calcs have to do with the STvsSW debate. ZERO. 

You know, when you make an accusation of dishonesty against somebody, you should back it up with evidence. Because otherwise you are just spewing bull$hit. The burden of proof is yours to show that Saxton was being deceitful or dishonest.