Praeothmin wrote:"But lasers will not even penetrate the navigational Deflectors, so surely even Turbo-lasers have no chance!"
I agree with this, since it was fusion-powered lasers just like on the ISD's .
"But our troopers wear armor, so even if it is cheap, white and offers no protection, surely that allows our troopers to kick pajama-wearing hippies' asses!"
It's flack-protection, not direct-hits. Same with modern body-armor, i.e. it will stop flack or small-arms ammo, but nothing will stop a high-powered rifle or grenade at relatively close range.
"But Obi-Wan said that they were super precise, it doesn't matter that they can't hit the broad side of a barn at ten paces, the barn must be a Force user or have character shields!"
Obi-wan was talking in comparison to Sand-people, whom the Stroomtroopers had presented as the attackers on the Jawa's transport. Remember in the beginning of Ep. IV, one Sand-person wants to shoot Luke's speeder, but the other one rebuffs him; obviously their weapons aren't accurate enough to hit the speeder.
Meanwhile, we've never seen Stormtroopers fight anyone who wasn't shooting back in retreat, so a lot of it was likely suppression-fire-- which isn't intended to hit anyone, just to keep them from shooting back. That's why we see a lot of it in the opening-scene aboard Princess Leah's ship, despite few people being hit/shot.
Meanwhile we do see Owen and Beru burned up without any real damage to the homstead itself, indicating a well-placed incindiary device.
"But our shields are gravitation-based, so no weapon can even hope to hit our vessels, no matter the fact that objects have hit our fully shielded crafts before!"
Only graviton-based weapons, or better (like phasers, phased polarons, photon torpedoes, anti-matter plasma weapons etc). Also the ships have deflector-beams, not just deflector-shields; nav-deflectors alone can sweep things out of the ship's path while it's travelling at over 1000C, so that's pretty impressive.
In fact, travelling via space-warp
requires shields and energies of such god-like proportions and ranges, that it's like nobody's business; so it would seem that they toned them
down quite a bit in the episodes in order to avoid "Balance of Terror" becoming "The sensors say there was a nuclear explosion on our hull, but I didn't feel a thing!"
"But they can adapt to anything, no matter the fact they couldn't adapt to the psychic insect-like species with no mouth and planet destroying ships!"
That species was from outside the universe with nanite-destroying antibodies, so "anything" is a relative term.
And planet-destroying ships can obviously wipe out a Borg cube before they have a
chance to adapt, if they can do it fast enough. Remember in BobW, the Enterprise devised a weapon that would have destroyed the Borg ship, and which only failed due to a security-leak through Picard; if they used that on every Borg cube, it would meet the same fate.