This video details the point defense capabilities of Star Wars' and Star Trek's starships, using dialogue and events from the episodes themselves to reach it's conclusions.
Let’s be honest, a ship with energy weapons that’s controlled by a computer(even if said computer is controlled by a person) will curb stomp a space version of a WW2 anti aircraft gun manned by a human. Even if said computer is damaged or destroyed(Tuvok controlled that phasers in one of the clips and still did a pretty good job).
I forgot this detail but by the time of TNG and Voyager, Federation computers are so powerful that they ended up creating artificial intelligence, on accident. Even the Prometheus(albeit experimental) was able to disable a Nebula Class starship with relative ease with less than 100 people, and was able to destroy a D’deridex warbird with only two holograms. Both requiring atleast a few hundred personnel to operate.
@@CosmicFearUkuleleHonestly, calling SW ships "scifi WW2 warships" is an insult to WW2 warships. ESPECIALLY then-modern US Navy warships. At the Battles of Santa Cruz and Philippine Sea, US Navy AA guns wiped out a good chunk of the attacking enemy aircraft. SW warships cannot be bothered to his anything 1 inch smaller and the slightest tad more agile than a freighter.
But the real king of point defense.... The Battlestar Galactica (BS-75). It may be a mix of 1970s and late 21st Century technology by Star Trek Standards and wouldn't last a second against a Starfleet vessel (Of any era except maybe the NX-01 before it acquired Phase Cannons and Photonic Torpedoes) but for it's setting it was quite excellent. I doubt such flak fields would dissipate or fend off shielded Photon Torpedoes and would be completely ineffective against Phasers. The Hull itself might be able to take quite a bit (It's ridiculously durable). But a Starship would simply target it's reactor or fuel line and wouldn't waste time with the main hull. Pinpoint low yield Phaser strikes can easily defang a Battlestar in quick order.
By this point, I have the suspicion that (just like with Jin Erso) ALL the Imperial Engineers were secret Rebel sympathisers that kept adding obvious weakspots to the Imperial hardware, because they're basically giant targets waiting to be shot at. In fact, in both the former Expanded Universe and the current Disney Canon when it came the Rebel/New Republic turn to make their own Star Destroyers they were far more powerful than the Imperial ones (Nebula class in the old EU, Starhawk class in the Disney canon).
it's a conceptual thing, Star destroyers where first imaged to be impressive but super fallible, they are the baddies, they are going down like it or not. Star Trek's first imaged ship was imaged to be prepared against the unknown, to be unasailable, and to be able to perform some good old cowboy diplomacy, we bring peace, even if you don't like it. Star destroyers are meant to go down in a big ball of fire (and fire in space tells you just how much thought was put into them). Star trek is sci-fi, a thought experiment on how things might be in 300 years from a naval stand point. Star wars is fantasy, everything was designed to look like WW2 but in space and for the sake of good shots and amazing movies, which they clearly accomplish perfectly. Two different things, the argument is pointless. Like comparing Lord of the Rings and starship troopers, to each it's own.
Precisely, the Rebel/New Republic ships are far better designed, in fact in both the old EU (Nebula-class) and the new Disney canon (Starhawk class) when it came time for them to get their own capital ships, those were far better than the ISDs.
The Lord of the Rings films completely ripped off Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. Orcs are a poor imitation of the Arachnids and I don't understand Legolas. Who needs a bow in a nuke fight anyway? All you gotta do is push a button.
1:38 something that irks me in this scene. Every missed weapons strike would surely cause an explosion that would engulf Voyager and Every ship around it in the equivalent of a Nuclear blast right?... Sure they'd survive such a thing. But the area around them wouldn't lol.
i think the issue is starfleet ships don't have enough phasers on board. for example the sovereign class one of hte most poweful classes in trek starfleet. Energy Weapons 16x Type-XII Phaser Arrays Torpedo Launchers 1 forward turret 3 forward 5 aft Torpedo Payload 300 Photon Torpedoes 150 Quantum Torpedoes that's it for a tactical ship?
Each phaser array is composed of hundreds of emitters, so effectively a sovereign class has thousands of phaser emitters that should be able to fire independently if the power allocated to each is low enough. And if low power shots are unable to destroy the targets that you're trying to perform point defence against then there are bigger issues than not having enough phasers imo.
16 Phaser Arrays is like thousands of tiny emitters. With dozens firing at once forming the single "Beams". Tremendously excellent firing arcs and weapon placement. Depending on the number of Emitters firing and the power output behind them a single "blast" on maximum power can vaporize a typical starship sized chunk out of a Borg Cube or simply graze a Shuttlecraft while disabling it's weapons or other sensitive systems.
We should take a minute to thank the folks that invented Star Wars. Think about it, there were a bunch of folks who just did not have the mental ability to get Star Trek and they gave them something to watch. Signed , the other 364 days of the year
Don't go short-selling Star Wars. George Lucas' movies, when taken as a single, grand dramatic tale, is probably the *_best_* melodramatic fiction story of all time. The relevant issue here is, *Star Trek wasn't trying to do that.* Star Trek was going for _scientific accuracy_ - the original Star Trek was written by a lot of military folk, and they drew from real engineering as well as real military strategy. Anyone who _actually_ knows Star Wars, knows that scientific accuracy was never the intention. Neither was military accuracy. So, comparing Star Wars' combat abilities to Star Trek creates a very obvious outcome: Star Trek massacres the competition.
@@Idazmi7 Thank you, I am not selling Star Wars short. Lucas did admirable work with the tech available He did a nice tribute to the Samauri and the Triumph of the Will (not sure I would have done that.)
@@Idazmi7 Yes they were Lucas did a nice job showing that, they were all regimented lining up in ranks for Vader etc. When I first saw it in 77 I was all in for the whole space opera thing. In later years I learned to appreciate the stagecraft
@@Idazmi7 "There are also plenty of other weapons that launch solid matter. Particle shields are one of the two main shields types in Star Wars and are the predominant shield to deal with physical projectiles…so, yes. Standard shields would be able to block them." Literally the first thing on google.
@@Idazmi7 As for the weak point defence, they're the equivalent of WW2 AA gunners, so fucking duh, of course they struggle to hit shit that can move in 3 dimensions around a ship in space. Would you like a medal for your observation, or a chest to pin it on?
@@001hellcat1 _"(...) Literally the first thing on google."_ And contradicted by every Star Wars film in existence. "Particle shields" aren't even mentioned in any of the scripts, and we know from _A New Hope_ that shields don't block proton torpedoes.
@@Idazmi7 TBF Imperial design is so ineffective that one wonders wether all their engineers were secretly Rebel sympathisers like Galen Erso and purposedly designed their equipment so it would have obvious weakspots. At least for the Rebel Alliance it makes a little more sense in that most of their ships are kitbashed civilian vessels or older ships that weren't exactly well-maintained prior to being captured. In fact, on both the former Expanded Universe (now Legends) and the current Disney Canon, when the Good Guys get to design their own dedicated warship, they end up being complete game changers despite being the same size (Nebula-class) or three times the size of an ISD (Starhawk), with the latter being literally made from the same parts ISDs are (long story short, the Rebels capture an Imperial shipyard full with parts of ISDs and go on to create a better design using those parts).
These are really silly examples. You're talking about objects that move at slower sublight speeds than starships. Imperial 1 and 2 class star destroyers were designed with very little point defense in mind. They were meant for cruiser or above engagements. Most of their armament is heavy turbolasers.
@@SuperGamefreak18 Phasers are more versatile, but the reason this is brought up a lot in star trek vs starwars, is because DS9 changed the way starship battles occurred. Makei raiders were somewhat gamechangers from ship to ship combat, same with Dominion fighters, a swarm of smaller starships at a faster sublight destroyed a galaxy class starship on their debut in the case of the Dominion. The federation learned from their mistakes, the empire did not. They relied heavily on a cheap, disposable fighter force, that couldn't go long in a battle, and didn't have the armament to engage capital ships, so versatility was out the window. Their average imperial star Destroyer would maybe have a dozen point defense canons, and majority weapons being light and heavy turbo lasers. If you look back to the clone wars, each Venator, had medium ship to ship armament with less than a dozen heavy turbolasers, with a healthy amount of point defense cannons, and a gigantic fighter bay, that could hold craft akin to the xwings, with good protection and armament, like Vwings, Arc170s, and z96 headhunters. Their focus was versatility, and being able to engage larger fleets in task-forces of 3-6. Palpatine was simply out of touch by the time of the empire.
If you think about it though, for something like a star destroyer to not have an emphasis point defense systems is basically asking a group of people to have much cheaper, more agile ships to destroy it. It's pretty much built to be destroyed by the Rebels in that regard. Of course it may have fighters, but looking back at history, once aircraft began to play a major role in naval battles, battleships became obsolete. Even before that happened, battleships had huge anti-air batteries. While I am comparing a battleship to something that may better be described as a carrier, battleships had much more comprehensive AA protection than a carrier. Plenty of carriers have been sunk in the past by aircraft. Knowing this, I think it helps show the massive flaws behind Imperial ship design in general. To be fair to the federation, none of their ships before DS9 were truly meant for combat. Later on you would have the Defiant, Enterprise E, and Voyager, which were better suited for such things. The Dominion was very much combat focused, and in DS9 we pretty much saw a perfected war machine against a faction that had very sparse conflict.
@@SuperGamefreak18 But even with all of that in mind, and starfleets tactical efforts to improve, it cannot be overstated that they were still losing battles on a 5:1 margin. They also were all still being outplayed by Makei hit and run tactics, to the point they needed a heavy interceptor like the defiant to keep up. I can only conclude that even during the height of the Dominion war, point defense among most of the factions in both quadrants were underdeveloped. If I'm going to fair, I'll do exactly what this video did, I'm going to take an extreme example that likely has no bearing but is a decent analog of what to expect in star trek space combat. Take the mirror universe episode where Sisko has to pilot the mirror defiant to disable a Negh'var, the most advanced klingon dreadnought of its time, with disruptor banks on basically every part of its hull, once a seasoned pilot of the defiant took control such as Sisko, they couldn't hit it once. The defiant is technically outdated Terran/Federation tech by comparison to the neghvar, since they spent a year bringing it up to specs. Starwars space battles put heavy emphasis on starfighter combat, while Heavy Cruisers batter eachother to go even in advantage. Star trek space combat is designed for heavy warships to try and exploit eachothers weaknesses with a Captain's intellect, and discover new niches, great example to support this is the Submarine motif from Balance of terror in TOS. It's not a fair comparison, starwars simply has more thought put into combat with smaller ships. Hell, that's intentional on a story level too, the little guy overcoming this gigantic war machine by trying to be light, and focused.
