Who would win? Writer's choice

[Eodin]

I've never liked those quasi-philosophical, too-many-beers-and-not-enough-pretzels questions. (But then, I always hated analyzing stories in Literature class.) The answer is on who would win... whoever the screenwriters picked.

 

Superman vs Batman....whoever the screenwriters picked.

Spiderman vs Captain America....whoever the screenwriters picked.

Dick Tracy vs TJ Hooker....whoever the screenwriters picked.

Death Star vs Enterprise....whoever the screenwriters picked.

Enterprise A vs Enterprise D....whoever the screenwriters picked.

Bush vs Kerry....whoever the screenwriters picked.

 

See, it's all very simple

 

Now a Klingon Bird of Prey against a B5 Shadow Vessel, that could be interesting

Or not

 

And by the way, I'm not insulting or flaming anyone here, this is all in fun. This is a bulletin board, and everyone should post what interests them. If anyone takes offense at this, please accept my apology.

[AlHazred]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

Personally, I'm waiting to see Aliens vs. Predator vs. Ashe. I wonder who'll win?

[keithcurtis]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

I agree in principle, but would modify it by simply saying "writer". Not all of these arguments are cinema-based. In fact, around here I'd say the majority are comic-based.

 

Keith "pickin' more nits" Curtis

[tkdguy]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

I'd like to see how a Bird of Prey can stand up to a Shadow Vessel. Okay, it's got a cloak, but I think the Shadow Vessel does too. Besides, can the Bird of Prey's photon torpedos penetrate the Shadow Vessel's hull? I know it's the writer's choice, but personally, I'd have to take a long hard look at that one.

[tmutant]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

I'd like to see how a Bird of Prey can stand up to a Shadow Vessel. Okay' date=' it's got a cloak, but I think the Shadow Vessel does too. Besides, can the Bird of Prey's photon torpedos penetrate the Shadow Vessel's hull? I know it's the writer's choice, but personally, I'd have to take a long hard look at that one.[/quote']

Also, In B-5, ships don't have shields. So, will Shadow weapons penetrate BoP shields? If it's in the script!

[Aroooo]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

Also' date=' In B-5, ships don't have shields. So, will Shadow weapons penetrate BoP shields? If it's in the script![/quote']

 

Actually some of the advanced races do have shields (in B5).

 

Aroooo

[shadowcat1313]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

Vorlons vs a borg cube

[tkdguy]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

Tough call, that one. The Borg became increasingly pathetic in Voyager. Of course, the Vorlons became rather pathetic themselves at the end of the Shadow War.

 

Sheridan: We don't need you anymore. Go away!

 

Vorlons and Shadows: Uh... okay.

[DrTemp]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

What I do not understand in all these X vs X threads is: WHY THE HELL DOES NO ONE USE THE HERO COMBAT SYSTEM TO SOLVE THE ISSUE?

 

*Aehem*

 

Really, one can argue several thousand times "X will, no Y will, because...". Or one can simply have one fight, using your facvorite RPG system, and the issue is closed. Why all the pointless blabla?

 

Step 1. Create the stats.

Step 2. Define the combat situation.

Step 3. Resolve the combat according to the rules.

 

And then you know. :-)

[tkdguy]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

The problem with that is coming up with the stats. If a certain bias is present, it would be a one-sided affair. The best way to use the HERO system combat is to find write-ups of these vehicles from different writers and then resolve combat.

[Eodin]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

Anyone willing to write up a Klingon BoP and a Shadow Vessel, get someone to help duke it out between them, and let us know how it went? And of course, the situation (ambush, surprise, existence/lack of planets and asteroids in the battlezone, etc.) makes a BIG difference in tactics.

 

Realistically, it'll take a few hours+ to write up each ship, so unless you have time on your hands, I doubt there are any takers on that challenge. Personally, I relegate these questions to the 'would be interesting but we'll never really know' group.

 

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

Hero would be the way to work out the combat, if everyone could agree on the stats.

 

The problem is, how are you supposed to know whether or not a SW turbolaser has triple Armor Piercing only vs ST shields?

[dbsousa]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

Who would win a fist fight, George Lucas in his prime, or Gene Rodenberry in his prime? By Prime, assume that Lucas had never written Episodes I,II,III, or VI, and Rodenberry had never thought up Andromeda or First Contact, or whatever that Alien series was called...

[DrTemp]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

The problem is, how are you supposed to know whether or not a SW turbolaser has triple Armor Piercing only vs ST shields?

 

Now that is easy- you use Occam's Razor. If no author mentions anything in either source material that indicates this makes sense, there is no reason to assume that it did. You use the model of said vessel which requires the least assumptions for explaining every fact available.

 

Of course, in a written scenario, writers are free to introduce any such a thing for the sake fo the plot.

 

But the problem with the "writer's choice" answer is that it does simply not answer the question at hand. Nobody wants to know how the _writers_ would resolve the issue within a storyline because to _that_ the answer is just arbitrary. What people who ask for "X vs Y, who would win" really want to know is: "From all the available established source material, how do those units compare, combat-wise, all 'divine' interventions aside?"

[Outsider]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

It still comes down to writer's choice, though, even if the person being asked is cast in the role of writer.

 

In the classic SW vs ST debate, for example, it depends entirely on how the person in question rates the weapons and other systems. Sure the SW ships and weapons are physically large, and there are lots of them with lots of crewmen, compared to the ST ones, but it who is to say that that comparison is meaningful? 1000 men with rifles and body armor that is mostly proof against rifle fire might do fine against a comparable formation, but they are still dead meat if they are pitted against a tank with a .50 cal and armor that is absolute proof against rifle fire. Despite the fact that the 1000 men (+gear) might collectively mass 100 tons and fire 1000 shots per second, compared to the tank's 10 tons and 5 shots per second.

 

Unless you can find hard numbers in both sources stating their weapons power, sheild resistances, and so on, there really cant be a valid comparison.

[DrTemp]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

Unless you can find hard numbers in both sources stating their weapons power' date=' sheild resistances, and so on, there really cant be a valid comparison.[/quote']

 

Of course, there are usually much of these stats implicitly given in the available story material. For ships such as the ST Enterprise D, we even have some "hard" technical data. Also, even such general data as "uses Fusion power" gives raw ideas of how many power the ship can actually produce.

 

Of course, if no such thing is given either directly or implicitly, there is nothing to argue about. No data, so no conclusions.

[Outsider]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

By hard data I was thinking more along the lines of how many joules, ergs, or whatever, the weapons put out, and how many the defenses can resist.

 

Some things you might be able to infer from performance. Like... Just how much energy would you have to add to a 100 kg humanoid body to more or less instantaneously turn all the (liquid) water in it into super heated (gaseous) water? One of the FASA Star Trek products claimed that this was one of the things a hand phaser could be set to do. I never saw them use in on TV, though, probably because 1) it is way messy, and 2) it probably has a very high probability of causing collateral damage to anything near the now violently exploding target, such as the person with the phaser.

 

On the SW front, just how much energy does it take to blow up an entire earth size planet, leaving nothing but an expanding field of rubble?

[Zeropoint]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

You want hard numbers? Check this out:

 

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/

 

Zeropoint

[keithcurtis]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

On the SW front' date=' just how much energy does it take to blow up an entire earth size planet, leaving nothing but an expanding field of rubble?[/quote']

 

I always felt this was overkill (no pun intended). Why in creation would you need to destroy the entire planet when destoying the first couple miles of crust would be far easier and achieve the same results (i.e. kill everyone and break everything forever and ever)?

 

Keith "Death Star Planning Commission" Curtis

[Jhamin]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

You want hard numbers? Check this out:

 

That site can be a fun read, but I find that they tend to skew everything to the high end.

The site makes alot of noise about following cannon, but then interprets and hand waves cannon in a very odd way. They jump on sources and refrenced that fit their view and ingore or declare "non Cannon" refrences that don't fit their world view.

According to them there were four to six Death Stars, Star Destroyers were a low-mid sized ship that supported fleets of much larger ships (which were conveniently off doing more important things in ROTJ), and Endor is a barren Waste.

 

I'm not saying these are illogical or incorrect assumptions. I don't agree with them, but that doesn't mean my ideas are any more meaningful. Truth be told if you want a consistant universe you pretty much need to decide what to include and what to exclude just to make sense of anything.

 

This is just one more example of the kind of thing this tread is talking about. You can't deduce meaningful hard numbers from a work of Sci-Fi without letting personal judgements into the mix.

[DrTemp]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

This is just one more example of the kind of thing this tread is talking about. You can't deduce meaningful hard numbers from a work of Sci-Fi without letting personal judgements into the mix.

 

Well, if the "hard data" of the literature/movie source is arbitrary, then any conclusions from those are just as arbitrary. GIGO.

 

But there _are_ SF universes where this is not the case, as far as the technical data of ships is concerned. Of course, those are most common among RPG universes... but some TV shows qualify too. (We have hard technical data for the Star Trek Galaxy class, for example.)

 

Thing is- I've seen this kind of discussion on a local Battletech Mailing List, concerning several 'Mech types. From the same universe, with existing stats. But even under these circumstances, people preferred to do some blabla about why this or that was superior. They didn't even consider trying it out... Could have been so easy.

 

BTW can anybody tell which one is superior- a Xenovore Dreadnought from Alien Wars or a Tigress class dreadnought from Traveller?

[starblaze]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

How about the Andromeda Ascendant vs. the Minbari WhiteStar?

[Zeropoint]

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

 

I would also reccomend stardestroyer.net (whose name I didn't remember when making the earlier post) for a better analysis of the Star Wars technology, as well as a detailed side-by-side analysis of Imperial vs. Federation technology and tactics in many areas.

 

I also believe that it IS possible to get hard numbers from a sci-fi movie, although they will have a large degree of uncertainty. If you can estimate how large an asteroid is, you can estimate how much energy it takes to vaporize it, based on its volume and composition and the known properties of rock and metal. The minimum energy needed to explode a planet can be calculated based on well-established real-world science.

 

Zeropoint