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Both Voyager and Enterprise share one other thing in common, they were largely run by two Paramount executives Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. Not even Manny Coto's surprising good final season of Enterprise could pull the show out of the nosedive that Berman and Braga had put it into.

Personally Enterprise failed because it got everything wrong. Wrong tone, wrong characters, wrong plots, wrong settings, wrong acting, wrong characterization, wrong logic, wrong common sense.

My personal pet peeve is episodes that just didn't make any sense. For example, there was an episode where they could have transported a crewman and an alien up to the ship, but they couldn't change the temperature in the transporter room to match the temperature on the planet so the alien would have died from the temperature change? What they don't have thermal blankets they can use? WTF? So they decide to send a shuttle down instead, but it took them something like 20 hours to adjust the shuttle so they could put the heat up high enough on the shuttle (WTF?) and the pair on the planet nearly died from dehydration while they waited (WTF?). If the transporters were working, so why didn't they transport a bottle of water down? If they couldn't do that, why didn't they send a shuttle down early, drop off some bottles of water, some food, and a tent so they could arrange a shelter? Why risk the death of the crewman and alien by doing nothing whatsoever to help them while they were waiting for a stupidly long plot device? I know the answer is "narrative" but it should still make some god-damend sense. This was endemic to first few seasons, stupidly obvious plot holes that would leave anyone with a lick of sense wondering how such amazing huge incompetents ended up running a starship*.

Actually, according to the pilot episode we know why Archer was pilot, his dad designed the ship. And the rest of the crew was hand picked by Archer. Good old nepotism. Of course that begs the question of why anyone would ever do something so stupid as put the son of the designer in charge...

I don't think anyone referred to this yet, but http://www.stardestroyer.net/E... . This old essay has been around the net forever and outlines the case for the Federation being Communist in more detail.

In the prequels, we saw them on the Naboo fighter ships. Also, don't forget the destroyer droids with their bubble shields, and the Gungans with their animal-mounted battlefield shields, and even hand-held shields. There are plenty more examples from the next two movies as well.

In the original trilogy, I don't recall seeing the shields themselves, but both the rebels (on Hoth) and the empire (on Endor) protected their assets with large, ground-based shield generators. There are also references in the dialogue as well ("Switch your deflectors on - double front!").

You really blocked out a lot, didn't you...

This will protect us from cosmic rays: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/HateMail/Edam/ST2.jpg

Did you completely forget the scene in Episode VI where the snubfighters blow up the shield generator on the Executor after which an A-Wing plows through the bridge causing it to crash into the Death Star? Those spheres on all star destroyers are their shield generators.

No they aren't. Those are sensor domes. Do some reading.

Anyone pretending to know what they're talking about in a "empire versus federation" argument owes it to themselves to take a look at the very thorough technical analyses from the Tubolaser Commentaries, if for no other reason than to get a handle on the completely absurd amount of firepower shown to be produced by Star Destroyers in the films.

Take a look at http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/FiveMinutes.html and you'll realize that Slave-1, a bounty hunter's ship, could have made short work of the Enterprise-D. There really is no comparison between the two universes when it comes to ship to ship combat. The Federation wouldn't stand a chance against the Empire.

Comparing quality of writing and story telling, however, is a different argument. There's a lot more good Trek than there is good Star Wars.

This issue has been thoroughly settled for years.

In case you're too lazy to follow the link, published figures have Slave-I substantially out-performing the Enterprise-D. To address the AC GP, Star Wars vessels routinely travel cross-galaxy in a matter of hours, while Star Trek vessels would take decades to travel across a significant fraction of the galaxy. I'm not the site's author, but I was thoroughly impressed with the analysis and technical knowledge brought to bear on the subject.

If that fanfic is as "unbiased" as that site's "Technology comparison" I'm assuming that it involves Luke Skywalker farting which results in the entire trek universe collapsing in on itself...

"star wars V star trek
the science fiction fan's ultimate cause for suicide and/ or homicide"

Actually if you look hard there are some good, relatively unbiased fan-fics in this genre.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Fanfic/Conquest/index.html

Honestly, would a completely random person you've never spoken to before mislead you?

I'd say there's significant value in professional-level editing. One of the last "books" I read was self-published directly to the web, and while it was good fun and had an interesting premise, it was in dire need of editing/revision. Community input can only do so much.

Of course, just needing editing and maybe a little promotion cuts out a huge chunk of the existing book publishing business. Not to mention retailers.

(If anyone's curious, the novel I mentioned above is The Salvation War. The writer is a military geek, which can be interesting or a bit cheesy sometimes.)

On a related noted, the scenario I originally mentioned is kinda ripped from this: Salvation War: Armageddon over at Stardestroyer.net. Basically, God tells mankind to go to hell, entrance to heaven is closed. Mankind tells him to sod off and gets the military rolling. Kinda Tom Clancy style military porn, but great fun to read.

I didn't say we should literally dematerialize it, I said we should disassemble it. There are multiple paths for doing this [1,2]. All of the planets are at the bottom of various sized gravity wells -- if you have sufficient energy to move the matter out of the well you can "quickly" disassemble the planet. If one has a significant fraction of the Sun's power available (~10^26 W) then the disassembly of Mars takes ~176 days [3]. In actual practice it is likely to take longer due to the fact that one would have to divert power from Matrioshka Brain "thought" into planetary disassembly so there is a fair amount of politics involved ("whether to think or disassemble that is the question..."). The likely path in our solar system disassembles the asteroids first and then uses the swarm resulting from that to bootstrap the disassembly of Mars and/or Mercury. I discuss this further in the chapter "Under Construction" from the collection of essays in "Year Million". In solar systems lacking an asteroid belt one would probably start with the planet closest to the star (e.g. Mercury) since it has the largest planetary solar insolation as starting energy base.

Yes, I agree that humans have pursued a lot of things just for the fun of it. On the other hand I take a fairly "moral" approach here. Humanity looses ~40+ million lives a year due to aging. If the long term choices include saving that number of lives (each year) and providing them with either multi-thousand year lifespans (in biological form) or multi-billion year lifespans (as minds uploaded into a Matrioshka Brain) vs. sending a few dozen people to drive around or build "Quonset huts" on Mars then I chose the first as a more noble goal. One can easily incorporate the "colonization" adventure into a Matrioshka Brain vision -- just survey Mars completely before you disassemble it (or as you disassemble it) and construct a simulation of it to play on/in once ones mind is uploaded (you have seen the Matrix series I presume). Or if you were addicted to playing in a "real" world reconstruct a Mars-like mini-planetoid with the leftovers from the Mars disassembly process (there is likely to be a lot of iron and oxygen left over from inner planet disassembly which isn't particularly useful from a nanotechnology standpoint). People who are choosing romantic colonization notions need to reconcile whether to dedicate intellectual and financial resources to those notions or whether they should be used to solve real problems (people lacking choices with respect to how, when and if they die). My personal preference is solving real problems.

1. Incineration, highly parallelized rail gun launches, extreme mountain building, spinning up the planet, etc. Kaku's approach to building a "Death Star" (really "Stars" if you want to disassemble the planet quickly), as seen on the Science Channel, is close -- he just doesn't realize that you can have the entire solar power output at your disposal if you have nanotechnology enabled solar power satellite construction methods.
2. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Beam/DeathStar.html
3. http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/OSETI3/4273-32.html

Or vaporize it with a very powerful laser. Something like this, maybe.

Show me a graph with the volume of ice over time as well and I might care. If there is 16*10^6 km^2 that averages say 1 m (a random number) in thickness or if another situation involves the same amount of area, but now the ice is 10 m thick, there is a huge difference. With 10 m of ice a warm summer will leave more surface area of ice behind than 1 m at the end of the summer, obviously. Obviously having thicker ice that stays around reflecting heat due to the high reflectivity of ice for more of the year would make the global climate cooler. However, that information is not present in that graph, and a trend towards thinning ice is something that would indicate a warmer climate and would also indicate that less ice may be present in the future, with more warming.

Also, an animated map showing the age and thickness would also be useful as well, but I would like a pony as well. Or perhaps you could submit to a beating with a cluestick, but I don't expect any of this out of you or any other AGW deniers who are not climatologists.

Also, try reading this link so that you might understand the frustration that many of us with physical science degrees have with the uneducated:

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Myths/Myth_Science.html#Education

Anyway, Star Wars can still trounce Star Trek any day of the week. And Luke ain't no Commie stooge, like Picard is.

Anyway, Star Wars can still trounce Star Trek any day of the week. And Luke ain't no Commie stooge, like Picard is.

That sounds like something right out of Stuart Slade's http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=118771Salvation War. Hopefully they will get more chapters up soon, and yah-yah will get his ass kicked just like Satan did.

I'm confused. What made this a "trek" movie? The fact that they put in the accents? Because to me it was just an "action movie in space", and very little with Starfleet.
Sure, there was a "Fear corrupting the timeline" reference/joke, but what more was there? You basically saw no meaningful interaction between Kirk/Bones/Spock, just a bunch of confrontations, after which the movie hurried along to the next action scene. there was some rowdy stuff in a bar, there was a sex joke/something (with the green chick and uhura) that reminded me more of yet another college 'humor' film than Trek, and there was pointless driving around in cars and motorcycles, to make Kirk seem like a player. But what was there to remind anyone of a civilization/culture that was about space exploration, in stead of, say, police academy? (And what happened to the Utopia Planetia shipyards?) Where was the backstory?
OTOH, there was the guy that roamed the universe not destroying anything for 25 years (why?+yawn@his plight/pain), Spock and Scotty were on the same planet (how+why?), and there was a "Romulan" ship - which looked like an idiotic can opener - that doesn't explode when big ships ram it, but does when a little ship flies into it. (why?) Further, there was katana fighting and orbital skydiving.(huh?) The amount of text in this flick was pretty minimal, with Scotty/Sulu/Checkov getting few lines beyond their introduction, and Kirk & Spock really only talking for the first time when they were slugging it out after barbs that were at the highschool level, (my 12yo sister has more control over herself than "Spock" the tormented guy) there were vulcan kids bullying others (Abrams wanting to mock the superior people who have emotional control? yawn), but there is still nothing that reminded me of Star Trek. A review I saw somewhere mentioned Pike as a "father figure", but you only see him twice, and interacting with Kirk only once; the same goes for pretty much everything: it's all in the interest of making an action flick.

Lastly, I'm tired of fight scenes where bad guys catch but then don't finish off good guys. If you want "believable", just don't let them get caught. This plot device where the bad guy suddenly goes "shit, I'm suddenly distracted by something else, so I'm going to let you live so that you can finish me off in a few minutes" is just crap, and was a boring plot device even before James Bond happened.
Basically, although the plot holes were slightly less annoying than in Nemesis, this was (imho) only the case because of the fast pace of the movie, which doesn't really give you time to wonder. But really, there was hardly any meat to the story. And while it isn't necessarily worse than most summer action flicks out there, it isn't a grain better either; more importantly, it had nothing to do with Star Trek to me.

> Most of the series were logial in their application of science

Sure Whatever you say.

Why would the TNG cast make Nemesis?

So that someone would make a fan site about the movie?

They had been set to "kill" ever since ST:Nemesis.

However, I'd really like to know if the same crowd gave ST:Nemesis some mild golf-clapping rather than boos. If so, their response is meaningless.

I'm thinking every review that doesn't mention how badly ST:Nemesis sucked should automatically be discounted. And if this guy is reviewing, I'll be paying full attention.

.... I'd hate to see this guy have to do another plot synopsis ;)

I really dont get it why people dislike the movie.

This guy explains it more eloquently than I can. NSFW language.

Yes. Generations utterly ruined Data's character for the sake of an "Oh.... shit!" joke, destroyed the Enterprise-D for the sake of an action scene and killed off Picard's family for the sake of a cheap shock and never bothered to explore the ramifications of this.

Not to mention the bad-decision making:

Picard: "Guinan, can I leave the Nexus?"
Guinan: "Where would you go?"
Picard: "I don't understand."
Guinan: "Time has no meaning here. So if you leave, you can go anywhere, at any time."
Picard: "Alright, I know precisely where I want to go. Veridian III, just before Soran launches the missile. Because, even though I obviously don't care about changing the past and preserving the time-line as I once did, I don't feel tempted to go back a few more weeks to warn my brother about a fire and to inspect the Amargosa observatory for trilithium, arresting Soran before the Romulans even bother attacking. No, I want to give Soran a chance to succeed. Again. You want to come?"
Guinan: "Can't. But there's somebody else who might help. Just don't mention the details of your stupid plan or it's going to depress the hell out of him that the Enterprise is in your hands."

First Contact was an enjoyable standalone film but utterly destroyed whatever continuity we had from TNG for the sake of creating a single villain for the audience to focus on. It also didn't really do justice to Troi or Crusher. Actually come to think of it, none of the movies did them justice.

They stripped away everything that was original about the Borg with the introduction of the Borg Queen. However, I think they did fine with Troi and Crusher. They're not meant to be major characters. The TNG episodes that focused on Troi or Crusher were always horrible, they're just not very strong characters. They're good on supporting roles, but when you try to give them a bigger piece of the pie just to be fair, you end up with the situation on Insurrection. Yes, let the psychologist and doctor have better aim with their phaser rifles than the Klingon who used to be the security chief. That makes sense.

And don't even get me started on Nemesis. This guy summarizes Nemesis way better than I could ever hope to.....

That summary of Nemesis is spot on, except for the little chat between Picard and Janeway. She wasn't promoted while they passed Picard on for promotion. They offered the admiralty to Picard on several occasions during the series. If anything, Picard would be snickering that she's behind a desk, while he gets to go to Romulus.

Were all of them crap?

Yes. Generations utterly ruined Data's character for the sake of an "Oh.... shit!" joke, destroyed the Enterprise-D for the sake of an action scene and killed off Picard's family for the sake of a cheap shock and never bothered to explore the ramifications of this.

First Contact was an enjoyable standalone film but utterly destroyed whatever continuity we had from TNG for the sake of creating a single villain for the audience to focus on. It also didn't really do justice to Troi or Crusher. Actually come to think of it, none of the movies did them justice.

and Insurrection was pure Trek, albeit perhaps a bit too cheesy.

Perhaps? It was incredibly cheesy. And don't even get me started on Nemesis. This guy summarizes Nemesis way better than I could ever hope to.....

What was wrong with Nemesis? It's not like it was a badly written ripoff of Wrath of Khan with better eye candy..... oh, n/m

Ya know what I don't understand? If they were going to do 'Wrath of Khan' with Romulans why didn't they pull something out of TNGs past? Sela would have been a good bet and would have had the added bonus of including Denise Crosby in the TNG sendoff. Instead they write some lame plot involving a clone and try to transplant Spock's sacrifice (complete with katra transfer) onto Data. WTF?

This guy sums up Nemesis in four pages. TNG deserved a better sendoff :(

Not anymore apparently ;)

I bet you have also calculated the thrust to weight ration of a TIE fighter.

Approximately 3000:1.

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/tie.html#propulsion
http://www.stardestroyer.net/mrwong/wiki/index.php/Acceleration

Actually, as much as I love Star Trek, and have never really been as big a fan of Star Wars, one of the old ST vs. SW sites, by a pro Star Wars person put it best: Apparently in the 24th century they lack the necessary technology to make fancy devices like circuit breakers......

Theoretically... but this is science fiction television... if it keeps the show going, rules were made to be broken.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of obsessed fans cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has been revealed.

New Age mysticism: Oddly enough, while Christianity has apparently been wiped out, popular New Age ideas such as transcendental meditation, seances, tribal superstitions, pseudoscientific quasi-religions and Eastern spirituality are all acceptable in the Federation. This would seem rather contradictory until you ask yourself what kinds of spirituality are popular today in Hollywood. Apparently they don't believe that God made Man in his own image, but they do believe that Hollywood should remake mankind in its image.

The US Navy has 16 Ohio-class subs available right now (two of those are scheduled for retrofitting to carry Tomahawks and two others are already undergoing or prepping to undergo this conversion). Twelve of those carry the Polaris D5 missile, and the remaining four carry the Polaris C4 missile. The D5 is capable of handling up to eight warheads, while the C4 can handle six. Of the 2880 warheads thus deployable (assuming all Ohios sailed at the same time), 2496 are W76 warheads with yields of 100kT, while the remaining 384 are W88 warheads with yields of 475kT.

The Navy also has 320 nuclear-armed Tomahawk cruise missiles in its inventory, though none are deployed. Each of these carries a W80-0 warhead (150kT yield).

The Air Force's ICBM inventory includes 150 Minuteman III with single W62 warheads (170kT yield), 50 with three W62 warheads, and 300 with three W78 warheads (335kT yield). There are fewer than 40 Peacekeeper MX missiles, each with 10 W87 warheads (300kT yield).

The Air Force's inventory also includes 430 ALCM (Air-Launched Cruise Missile) and 430 ACM (Advanced Cruise Missile), each capable of carrying a single W80-1 warhead (150kT yield). There are also 800 B61 (variable yield, from 0.3kT to 170kT) and 650 B83 gravity bombs (variable yield, from 30kT to 1200kT). There are other weapons scattered about for various reasons, mostly semi-deployed, but scheduled for collection and dismantling, so we'll leave those out of our calculations.

So, we have the following warheads/weapons, their counts/maximum yields/radius for near-certain death/radius for widespread destruction of buildings/radius of third-degree burns/area of widespread damage:

• B61 series -- 800/170kT/1500m/4000m/5600m/551 sq km
  
• B83 -- 650/1200kT/2900m/7700m/12,600m/6284 sq km
  
• W62 -- 300/170kT/1500m/4000m/5600m/551 sq km
  
• W76 -- 2496/100kT/1300m/3400m/4500m/286 sq km
  
• W78 -- 900/335kT/1900m/5000m/7400m/1273 sq km
  
• W80-0 -- 320/150kT/1500m/3900m/5400m/495 sq km
  
• W80-1 -- 860/150kT/1500m/3900m/5400m/495 sq km
  
• W87 -- 400/300kT/1800m/4900m/7100m/1124 sq km
  
• W88 -- 384/475kT/2100m/5600m/8600m/1998 sq km

For conversion purposes, 1000m = 0.6214 miles, and 1 sq. km. = 0.3861 sq. mi.

So we get a total area of near-certain death, assuming optimal air burst altitude and flat terrain conditions, of 8,351,188 square kilometers. The Russian arsenal is probably about the same, so we can call it, for sake of convenience, 17 million square kilometers. The world's land surface area is about 149 million square kilometers, and the total area is 510 million square kilometers. Thus, we have the capability to have 11.4% of the world's land mass fall into the 'wide-spread third-degree burns' category, but only 3.3% of the total world's area including oceans. We could have some effect, but it would not kill everything.

Start at stardestroyer.net for Some information on Star Trek and Star Wars. It has excellent links to a number of other useful sites and the forums have more than a view people who are quite knowledgeable about a lot of areas of sci-fi and can probably recommend good sites for other universes.

Heh. Sorry, but no:

The DS9 TM states that quantum torpedo yield is roughly 50 isotons, while photon torpedoes are limited to a theoretical maximum of 25 isotons. Since the theoretical maximum yield from a photon torpedo is roughly 2.7E17 joules, this would suggest that a quantum torpedo's yield is roughly 5.4E17 joules...Star Destroyers should be able to withstand roughly 1000 photon torpedoes or 370 quantum torpedoes before losing shields. This estimate is based on the ISD shield strength of 1E20 joules

Look, any argument that the Federation could ever even match the Empire is ridiculous. They're both space operas, but that doesn't mean their tech levels are necessarily at all comparable. Since they're entirely fictional, the power and advancement of their tech was set arbitrarily. Star Trek takes place a few hundred years in our future. Star Wars is set in a place where the Empire rules over a galactic state with millions of member worlds that have had interstellar travel for thousands of years. The matter simply admits no rational argument. Pitting the Federation against the Empire would be like sending a single Roman legion from 15AD to fight the 101st Airborne Division from 2006AD. the Empire would utterly cream the Federation.

If the whole stardestroyer.net is too much to read, try the 5 minute synopsis. It sums it it exquisitely.

Heh. Sorry, but no:

The DS9 TM states that quantum torpedo yield is roughly 50 isotons, while photon torpedoes are limited to a theoretical maximum of 25 isotons. Since the theoretical maximum yield from a photon torpedo is roughly 2.7E17 joules, this would suggest that a quantum torpedo's yield is roughly 5.4E17 joules...Star Destroyers should be able to withstand roughly 1000 photon torpedoes or 370 quantum torpedoes before losing shields. This estimate is based on the ISD shield strength of 1E20 joules

Look, any argument that the Federation could ever even match the Empire is ridiculous. They're both space operas, but that doesn't mean their tech levels are necessarily at all comparable. Since they're entirely fictional, the power and advancement of their tech was set arbitrarily. Star Trek takes place a few hundred years in our future. Star Wars is set in a place where the Empire rules over a galactic state with millions of member worlds that have had interstellar travel for thousands of years. The matter simply admits no rational argument. Pitting the Federation against the Empire would be like sending a single Roman legion from 15AD to fight the 101st Airborne Division from 2006AD. the Empire would utterly cream the Federation.

If the whole stardestroyer.net is too much to read, try the 5 minute synopsis. It sums it it exquisitely.

The answer is the Star Wars Empire. The answer is still the Star Wars Empire against the entire star trek galaxy. See this site that I ran into the other day for details, forums and a bunch of other stuff that I haven't completely read.

Not only are particle-shields referenced in the SWEGWT as well as every other official source, but we saw specialized particle-shields in TPM such as the Gungan "hydrostatic" field that kept water out of the Otoh Gunga underwater city-spheres as well as the "Bongo" personal watercraft. Furthermore, the canon ANH novelization clearly states that the Falcon's deflector shields saved it from instant destruction when it emerged from hyperspace into the "meteor shower" that was Alderaan.

They're not lasers. There's a variety of speculative explanations for the name "turbolaser", most common among them being semantic drift-- i.e. a turbolaser is no more a laser than one of us "dialing" or "hanging up" a cell phone involves spinning a numbered plastic dial or hanging a heavy earpiece on a spring loaded hook. From StarDestroyer.net:

Turbolasers fire intense blasts of energy at their targets. There is some debate as to whether turbolasers are lasers or some sort of particle-beam weapon such as a plasma cannon (either function would be consistent with the word "turbolaser"). The SWVD states that blasters and turbolasers "use high-energy gas as ammunition, activated by a power cell and converted into plasma. The plasma is released from a magnetic bottle effect to fire through collimating components as a coherent energy bolt". Obviously, this strongly suggests that the plasma-weapon interpretation of turbolaser operating principles is valid.

Can mobs of various primitive, semi-sentient beings repeatedly defeat large imperial armies (presumably with state of the art training and equipment), by throwing random objects at them?

(from StarDestroyer.net:

Training: According to the SWE, stormtroopers live in a totally disciplined, militaristic environment, and their intense dedication and training means that they cannot be bribed or blackmailed. Their marksmanship is generally very good and is sometimes superb. If you monitor their combat effectiveness in ANH, TESB, and ROTJ, you will note that they regularly score hits at ranges of more than 20 metres while shooting from the hip, which is as much as anyone can reasonably expect. One stormtrooper missed Han Solo's head by less than an inch in the ANH detention centre battle, and stormtroopers hit Leia and R2D2 with snap-shots from all the way across the clearing in ROTJ. They also inflicted heavy casualties on the Ewoks in ROTJ despite the Ewoks' advantages of surprise, terrain familiarity, large numbers of traps, small size, and camouflage colouration.

In fact, they were clearly and decisively winning the battle despite being caught unawares without any heavy weapons or preparation (there is a strong possibility that their helmet threat identification systems didn't even pick up on the Ewoks at all). The film shied away from showing most of the Ewok casualties for obvious reasons (much as early WW2 propaganda footage glossed over the magnitude of D-Day casualties), but the novelization made it quite clear that after the complacent troops were ambushed, they quickly regained their composure and began to inflict heavy casualties, despite the forested terrain (which is naturally hostile to high-tech warfare) and their poorly chosen white suits (camouflage suits are also available, but they didn't use them).

Can (a)ships exploding in space not only make a lot of noise, but also (b)not annihilate other ships in close proximity?

(a) The explosion sound is either dubbed in later by the persons assembling historical footage with no sound, or it is the sound of EM noise from turbolaser hits heard and recorded via the common "guard" frequency of all ship radios. Yeah, cheap cop out arguments, but they're vaguely plausible. If you're going to attack the realism, you have to work from the premise that the footage was taken by combat photographers and put together by imperial or rebel propaganda departments.

(b) Apparantly so. They have shield technology, so why not?

Can you really cover the same distance in varying numbers of parallax seconds?

For the famous "Kessel run/parsecs" quote, it has been explained that the run in question is littered with an assortment of dangerous stellar objects. The safest

They're not lasers. There's a variety of speculative explanations for the name "turbolaser", most common among them being semantic drift-- i.e. a turbolaser is no more a laser than one of us "dialing" or "hanging up" a cell phone involves spinning a numbered plastic dial or hanging a heavy earpiece on a spring loaded hook. From StarDestroyer.net:

Turbolasers fire intense blasts of energy at their targets. There is some debate as to whether turbolasers are lasers or some sort of particle-beam weapon such as a plasma cannon (either function would be consistent with the word "turbolaser"). The SWVD states that blasters and turbolasers "use high-energy gas as ammunition, activated by a power cell and converted into plasma. The plasma is released from a magnetic bottle effect to fire through collimating components as a coherent energy bolt". Obviously, this strongly suggests that the plasma-weapon interpretation of turbolaser operating principles is valid.

Can mobs of various primitive, semi-sentient beings repeatedly defeat large imperial armies (presumably with state of the art training and equipment), by throwing random objects at them?

(from StarDestroyer.net:

Training: According to the SWE, stormtroopers live in a totally disciplined, militaristic environment, and their intense dedication and training means that they cannot be bribed or blackmailed. Their marksmanship is generally very good and is sometimes superb. If you monitor their combat effectiveness in ANH, TESB, and ROTJ, you will note that they regularly score hits at ranges of more than 20 metres while shooting from the hip, which is as much as anyone can reasonably expect. One stormtrooper missed Han Solo's head by less than an inch in the ANH detention centre battle, and stormtroopers hit Leia and R2D2 with snap-shots from all the way across the clearing in ROTJ. They also inflicted heavy casualties on the Ewoks in ROTJ despite the Ewoks' advantages of surprise, terrain familiarity, large numbers of traps, small size, and camouflage colouration.

In fact, they were clearly and decisively winning the battle despite being caught unawares without any heavy weapons or preparation (there is a strong possibility that their helmet threat identification systems didn't even pick up on the Ewoks at all). The film shied away from showing most of the Ewok casualties for obvious reasons (much as early WW2 propaganda footage glossed over the magnitude of D-Day casualties), but the novelization made it quite clear that after the complacent troops were ambushed, they quickly regained their composure and began to inflict heavy casualties, despite the forested terrain (which is naturally hostile to high-tech warfare) and their poorly chosen white suits (camouflage suits are also available, but they didn't use them).

Can (a)ships exploding in space not only make a lot of noise, but also (b)not annihilate other ships in close proximity?

(a) The explosion sound is either dubbed in later by the persons assembling historical footage with no sound, or it is the sound of EM noise from turbolaser hits heard and recorded via the common "guard" frequency of all ship radios. Yeah, cheap cop out arguments, but they're vaguely plausible. If you're going to attack the realism, you have to work from the premise that the footage was taken by combat photographers and put together by imperial or rebel propaganda departments.

(b) Apparantly so. They have shield technology, so why not?

Can you really cover the same distance in varying numbers of parallax seconds?

For the famous "Kessel run/parsecs" quote, it has been explained that the run in question is littered with an assortment of dangerous stellar objects. The safest

Easy enough to rewrite.

Grab google maps API and this javascript atomic yield calculator.

I'd consider it a public service, since most people are under the misconception that modern nuclear arms would take out wide swaths of the entire country, when in reality all modern warhead yields are under 1 megaton.

Now extend it so that you can do more than just fight each other ships. Add appropriate minigames etc to incentivise research, exploration, negotiation etc and, most importantly, MAKE IT FUN.

Or you could just play Puzzle Pirates today, and just use your imagination to make it space-themed.

couple of whatever resource unit the game decides to use as currency (which is a major issue in itself)

Yes... especially as it's pretty clear if you actually look that the Federation is communist. (What human, operating within the law, has ever been shown to actually own anything like a shuttlecraft? I admit the linked essay surprised me, but the evidence is simply overwhelming, post-TNG. I'd much rather live now than in the Fed.)

But the MMO can just ignore that, fortunately.

Your argument is based on the premise that if a few American cities were attacked by nuclear weapons, civilization would collapse and the military would be neutralized. I think this is unlikely. Experience from World War 2 has shown that nations can absorb horrific damage without collapsing, and still retain most of their military strength. Also, if you look here (using 0.02 megatons for a Hiroshima-sized weapon) and compare it to this, you will find that the damage inflicted by Katrina is about the same, or greater.

Container bombs can also be stopped by intelligence. If the government is tipped off to expect a container bomb, the navy can be used to hold and inspect all ships to find the weapon(s). There will be some economic stress, but the attack will have been thwarted.

What I'm saying is that a government that is serious about conducting a nuclear war will use ICBMs in large numbers. For a state (even in the guise of state terrorism) to use a container bomb against a handful of US cities, leaving the military intact, would be suicidal. This is why missile defence is important.

Now, all they need to do is invent duranium for the structure and plating on the solid vehicle parts, and we'd be all set!

Check out stardestroyer.net. I had the misfortune to stumble across it many years ago. It's frightening. It's got pretty much everything no one else bothered to explain about hyperspace, the design of the death star's main reactor, and turbolasers. I only remember the URL because I was so appalled by the utter geekdom of its creator.

Your formula applies to launching a point mass with the mass of the Earth away from another planet the size of the Earth. Mine applies to dispersing all of the matter within the Earth to infinity, which I think is the correct thing to do.

a derivation of the gravitational binding energy formula. (Too lazy to type it in myself.)

And of course, the the response from a Star Wars fan.

Of course as you point out the kinetic energy is a bit of a problem, but think of the great case mods you could do on a Lego computer!

This picture actually shows a Stars Destroyer killing off a rebel satelite.

George Lucas is a huge visionaire.

Tom Petty, along with other artists like King Crimson and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, have been responsible for many hours of zoned out internet surfing to some of my favorite sites. You've been there - putting on some tunes, firing up your browser, zoning out and surfing away...
Two minutes later, an hour has passed, the album has ended, and you've been around the world and back and hopefully learned something new.

That's just how I started off the other night. I popped Tom Petty's Wildflowers cd into the drive, cranked up the volume, and fired up the browser. I was immediately sucked in by the sweet acoutic guitar sounds of the title track. Click... Click... Click... You Don't Know How It Feels comes up, I hear the sentimental lyrics, and I drift back to my younger days... Click... Click... Click... Another 30 seconds rolls by and half the album's over... Cabin Down Below just nails me with the big fat Telecasters running through tube amps turned up to 11 sound... Click... Click... Click... I finally make it to Wake Up Time ... "Time to open your eyes... And rise and shine..." and...

I'm accosted by the stench of burning pl