Star Trek VS Other Sci-Fi unfair?
Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 4:42 am
I came across this a little while ago, and have been meaning to post it here to see what you guy think of this analysis of Star Trek.
Therumancer [url]http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=220209&page=93[/url] wrote: Bringing Star Trek into any kind of debate like this with other popular science fiction universes resolves the conflict right off the bat.
The thing to understand is that most popular science fiction universes are designed to appeal to the "yahoo" factor with zipping space fighters going up against huge capital ships and similar things. Star Trek on the othr hand was designed around a much more realistic version of space combat, especially when you understand it.
The thing to understand is that in space things like mass and weight don't matter after a certain level of development. Space fighters are more or less impractical, as cool as they might be, because speed is a matter of power output. The humn logic of "smaller means faster" doesn't apply, as a big ship, with bigger engines, and a bigger power plant is going to be able to move faster than a small ship with a smaller power plant. What's more a small ship having less energy isn't going to be able to produce weapons that are viable against a bigger ship while powering it's other systems.
This is why in Star Trek's canon you really don't have space fighters, though various video games and such have added them. Simply put the fighters could never catch a ship to engage it.
You might say "okay, but we're dealing with concepts, and obviously these other forces have things like Space Fighters whcih somehow work"... but that gets into another not-so-little point. Despite how things look in Star Trek at times, the battles are taking place at ranges of tens of thousands or even millions of miles. They aren't the kind of close range engagements that allow the use of space fighters, where guns are firing a couple of miles, or some really ginornous weapon might be able to fire a couple thousand.
It's also important to note that in Trek, the blast radius on the weapons is also crazy. Remember that back in the original series when Kirk did that whole mafia episode he stunned multiple city blocks by sitting his ship's phasors to stun. In "The Next Generation" there was an episode whe the crew was being psychicly manipulated (by this alien disgused as a crew member that just appeared and yet was somehow accepted as having been there all along) so they would use the weapons on their ship to resolve a war between that race and another relatively primitive species. It was pointed out that a single federation Torpedo can pretty much wipe out a continent, and they could have resolved a war that had been going on centuries with a trivial effort.
The point of this is that against most other science fiction universes, a Star Trek level ship, from any species, can pretty much sit back at a ridiculous range, beyond what most of those civilizations are probably capable of with sensors, and pretty much sweep their guns back and forth and kill everything. No chance of a counter attack, and really even without a cloaking device in play it's unlikely that the guys on the receiving end would even know what hit them. It would be one second their fleet was there, another second massive energy pulses come in and blow everything to chunks.
Blowing up planets is also a trivial matter for Star Trek, it's just that even the bad guys don't see a point in doing it (a waste of perfectly good planets that could be conquered). Indeed, one of the things The Federation does is use their technology to REPAIR planets and stars and such, with the chance of destroying them by accident in the course of the repairs being the risk. There was a whole episode of TNG based around such a planetary repair, with the central drama that a scientist from that planet working with them was due for execution due to his age, and requested asylum until his work was done (A variation on "Logan's Run"). Pretty much every ship in Trek is potentially a "Death Star" capable of coring a planet if they really want to.
On the field of special abillities, most other science fiction universes have orders of guys with special powers who are fairly rare. While they don't show up as cast regulars, Star Trek has entire races of powerful psionics like the Betazoids who can **** brains if they want to (but usually when they are around, combat isn't the episode theme). You might wind up with like one Jedi or psionic per planet per generation in most science fiction universes, in Trek they have trillions of them living in their own little mini-empires. This is to say nothing of the rare psychic of other races as well that does the same basic thing, in TNG they had an episode called "Tinman" where there was a really powerful human psychic working with The Federation.
In terms of personal weapons and the general nature of technology, the reason why phasors are called "phasors" is because they use what are called "phased particles" or simply put they manipulate a broad spectrum of matter and energy through multiple dimensions. This is why a phasor is supposed to be capable of such diverse, and physics defying things, because by phasing particles it can perform limited changes to reality. This is also how phasors can be "modulated" to penetrate shields and such, by sending the energy to it's target through a parallel dimension the target doesn't have a counter-energy field availible to stop. Weapon and shield modulations and frequencies being a matter of trying to match or avoid relative dimensions and power outputs. What this means is that most defenses used by various science fiction races, either personal or on ships, are largely irrelevent. Crude energy shields and such DO exist in Trek (again think of the primitive space faring races where a couple of Torpedos would have ended a war that was going on for centuries) they just don't matter a hill of beans against the real empires that the stories revolve around. Arguably most science fiction universes would count as "primitive starfaring civilizations".
The point is that when you look at the numbers, and the way the concepts are defined (and demonstrated in the series) there really isn't much popular televised/movie-based science fiction you can stack Trek up against (there are however things in books).
If you say whip out the old ship book from Last Unicorn Games for "Star Trek: TNG" and say the ship stats from D20 Star Wars, and look at what the weapon ranges have listed in actual distance (ignoring game mechanics which aren't compadible) you can sort of see where I'm coming from. The same applies to pretty much any science fiction universe that has some kind of hard info for it. RPG mechanics generally seeking to emulate stuff from tech manuals and released design notes for the canon. Sometimes they are pointless when the only measurement is subjective to the game, but if you have solid, real-world distances and such definded, it becomes usable for making a point.
I'm sure that even if people read this rant, 15 seconds later fanboyism will take over, as nobody really wants a definitive answer, but I figured I might as well try.
Also incidently, I'm not a huge Trek fan, I like a lot of science fiction universes a heck of a lot better than Trek. I'm simply trying to be objective. Most people who get into these things tend to think in terms of "OMG, the Death Star can destroy planets" or Inquisitors inflicting extrminatus, which are epic things in their own universes, and while they might sort of have the realities of trek in the back of their mind from various episodes they saw, it rarely "clicks" that stuff like that really isn't epic in Trek, it's stupidly easy, it's just viewed as a pointless waste. Nobody is going to level a valuable type M planet without the most extreme reasons for doing so. In cases where a planet is infested by something they can't deal with, they will usually just quarantine it and check back once in a while to see if it's gone, or if they can find a way to deal with the problem.
