Sci-Fi Tech At what point did Star Trek Federation Technology surpass Star Wars Tech?

[Sailor.X]

We all know the raging debate that has been going on for decades when it comes to Star Trek and Star Wars. But it is time to pretty much face facts. The UFP has developed Tech that surpasses what the Empire and New Republic has fielded. This thread is to determine the exact point in Federation History that they went beyond what the factions in the Star Wars Galaxy could develop.

Was it the 23rd Century (TOS Era)
Was it the Mid 24th Century (TNG Era)
Was it the Late 24th Century (DS9, Voyager, Lower Decks, Picard)
Was it the Early 25th Century (Star Trek Online)
Was it the 27th Century (Temporal Starfleet)
Was it the 31st Century (Daniels Temporal Agency)
Was it the 32nd Century (Discovery Season3......... I think I just threw up in my mouth)

For me I think it was the late 24th Century. With the tech Voyager brought back from the Delta Quadrant. And all the war tech that was developed during the Dominion War. The Federation basically has Leap frogged anything the Star Wars Galaxy could develop.

And I say this as also being a Star Wars Fan.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I like both Star Wars and Star Trek, but it always seems to me that the tech difference is paradoxical.

The Federation has replicator technology that should make manufacturing fleets of ships trivial, and yet they apparently don't seem to use it. Losing 39 ships at Wolf 359 was apparently considered a massive blow to Starfleet. And then by the time of the Dominion War, there are only like 3 major fleet actions and the Federation only contributes maybe a hundred ships at most. Meanwhile, the Republic and the Separatists were pumping out thousands of ships for a war that only lasted a few years.

Star Wars hyperspace drives are objectively better than warp drive. It would've taken Voyager - a state of the art Federation exploration vessel - 75 years to travel back to Earth. Meanwhile, Star Wars ships can cross the galaxy in a matter of hours.

I don't remember if the faster-than-light communication was depicted in the original trilogy (did Naboo try phoning up the Republic before Amidala went there in person?), but it doesn't matter because again, a messenger can reach anywhere in hours. Whereas in Star Trek, it is regularly a plot point that Federation ships are out of range to talk and would take hours/days (or in the case of Voyager, decades) to reach communication range.

Star Wars has the lead in artificial AI, as the droids are sentient and almost act like real people, and Star Wars seems to have countless different droids. Meanwhile, the Data series (Data, Lore, and Data's daughter) are the only beings a Federation civilian created that have true artificial intelligence, and it seems that nobody else was able to replicate that feat (Data tried with his daughter but her positronic brain broke down a short time after activation).

Star Wars also seems to have the lead in genetic engineering, as the Kaminoan were able to pump out a near identical/perfected copy of Jango Fett, and alter the clones so that they grew rapidly. Clones in Star Trek are very, very rare, and IIRC always seem to be botched.

The Federation seems to lead utility wise, as they can complete makeover people's appearances and make them look near identical to aliens within a few hours in sick bay, and then revert the changes with no scarring. Hyposprays that instantly make you immune to almost everything in Starfleet's database. Also, Phasers being used to blowtorch/weld/melt/light fires/stun people/kill people/disintegrate people. Transporter technology. Incredible sensors that can detect anything from orbit. Also, if you include the Federation's secret banned stuff like their phase cloak that not only turns their ship invisible, but allows it to fly through stuff like asteroids, or their sniper rifle that can see through walls and beam bullets into people's bodies, then yeah the Federation has the edge here. The Federation also has life extension technology that anyone can get.

When comes down to ship to ship combat, it's hard to say, but it seems that the Federation has the upper hand. In the Berman era of Star Trek, Starfleet ships are depicted as being superior to almost anything else. They can catch up to any ship be it at warp or at impulse. Their shields can shrug off anything that isn't a Romulan Warbird, a Dominion ship, or one of those 1%ers like the Borg or the Undine. Starfleet ship phasers are capable of drilling through a planet's crust, blowing up asteroids, and can pretty much destroy any non Romulan or Dominion ship within seconds. Phasers also have pinpoint accuracy and are instantaneous.

As for which option to vote for, I'm going to pick Star Trek Online. STO tech isn't much further than what we saw in the TNG/DS9/Voyager era, but it's more about the scale. The game begins with the Federation being at war with nearly every other power in the setting (Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, Breen, Borg, Borg, and hundreds of others), and the Federation is seen as holding its ground. It might also be the presentation. In Star Trek, we hardly see fleets of Star Trek ships (just Wolf 359 and those three fleet actions in DS9, and maybe the end of Voyager when they went back to Earth?), but in STO you see fleets of Starfleet ships everywhere (as in NPCs in the missions, not other player characters). Feels like the Federation finally started putting that replicator tech to use.

 

[Agent23]

Disney basically ended the debate in favor of Trek, IMHO.

I'd rather live in a universe with transporters and replicators and all the weapons calcs were eviscerated by BoBF and the ST.

 

[stephen the barbarian]

I don't remember if the faster-than-light communication was depicted in the original trilogy (did Naboo try phoning up the Republic before Amidala went there in person?),

tfm shows a real time call from the Naboo council to palpatine on coruscant right before the tf invade.
aotc has obi won send a message from geonosis to the jedi temple using the radio on his fighter and padme's ship as a relay.
multiple members of the jedi council are off world but still able to witness when ani is appointed as palpatines rep.
order 66.
in esb Vader and palpatine have a real time conversation about luke.

coms in the sw movies seem to be quite good

 

[Sailor.X]

tfm shows a real time call from the Naboo council to palpatine on coruscant right before the tf invade.
aotc has obi won send a message from geonosis to the jedi temple using the radio on his fighter and padme's ship as a relay.
multiple members of the jedi council are off world but still able to witness when ani is appointed as palpatines rep.
order 66.
in esb Vader and palpatine have a real time conversation about luke.

coms in the sw movies seem to be quite good

The comms are good but they had one fatal flaw that the Empire of all things showed. If you have a Tyrannical government in charge of a Communication network. Opposing groups have no chance of using it securely. Hence why during the years of the Empire the Rebels had to revert back to courier message transfer. Subpace Comms don't have that limitation.

 

[Bear Ribs]

In terms of vs. debates? The second Disney threw out the Expanded Universe and made it all legends. I recall there was literally a vs. debate on SB at the time that completely reversed from Wars Stomp to Trek Stomp in the space of perhaps five posts as people realized all the EU powers and superweapons were rendered non-canon in an instant, especially the ICS.

Outside that context, I think both universes have a fair amount of edge on each other, in different areas of development.

 

[Sailor.X]

In terms of vs. debates? The second Disney threw out the Expanded Universe and made it all legends. I recall there was literally a vs. debate on SB at the time that completely reversed from Wars Stomp to Trek Stomp in the space of perhaps five posts as people realized all the EU powers and superweapons were rendered non-canon in an instant, especially the ICS.

Outside that context, I think both universes have a fair amount of edge on each other, in different areas of development.

To Be fair George Lucas himself thought the ICS calcs were Bullshit. Just another case of writers getting carried away in writing a book that does not line up with what is seen on screen.

 

[Bear Ribs]

To Be fair George Lucas himself thought the ICS calcs were Bullshit. Just another case of writers getting carried away in writing a book that does not line up with what is seen on screen.

Yeah, but you wouldn't know it from the vs. debates. ICS was written by Curtis Saxton, who was a staunch vs. debater in favor of Star Wars who frequently collaborated with Mike Wong. There's every probability that the BS numbers he wrote in were specifically to win vs. debates on sites like SpaceBattles.

 

[Sailor.X]

Yeah, but you wouldn't know it from the vs. debates. ICS was written by Curtis Saxton, who was a staunch vs. debater in favor of Star Wars who frequently collaborated with Mike Wong. There's every probability that the BS numbers he wrote in were specifically to win vs. debates on sites like SpaceBattles.

Which is a shame because it did the fanbase a disservice. Scifi books are at their best when what you see in a show or movie lines up with what you are reading in the book.

 

[Battlegrinder]

The Federation has replicator technology that should make manufacturing fleets of ships trivial, and yet they apparently don't seem to use it.

Having a replicator =/= having a starship sized replicator.

As for which option to vote for, I'm going to pick Star Trek Online. STO tech isn't much further than what we saw in the TNG/DS9/Voyager era, but it's more about the scale. The game begins with the Federation being at war with nearly every other power in the setting (Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, Breen, Borg, Borg, and hundreds of others), and the Federation is seen as holding its ground. It might also be the presentation. In Star Trek, we hardly see fleets of Star Trek ships (just Wolf 359 and those three fleet actions in DS9, and maybe the end of Voyager when they went back to Earth?), but in STO you see fleets of Starfleet ships everywhere (as in NPCs in the missions, not other player characters). Feels like the Federation finally started putting that replicator tech to use.

I think you're overstating the scale just a bit for STO. The Federation is really only at war with the Klingons*, there are conflicts with the other powers but they're very small scale, skirmishes and police actions for the most part.

I also wouldn't say you see "fleets" of ships all that often, you might see a small group of a dozen or so every once in a while, but for the most part it's one or two ships showing up. You don't see formations on par with what we saw on DS9 until the iconian war, and those are when large chunks of the allied power's entire navies are deployed. It's more likely we see bigger groups of ships because A) the federation is at war, and recalls isolated ships and consolidates them into larger fleets, and B) ships are faster now, and so fewer ships can cover the same amount of space.

There's also probably a fair bit of MMO number inflation going on. We know from the show that most ships cannot 1 v 1 a vessel of equivalent tonnage and emerge unscathed, but that will regularly happen within a single mission in STO, or worse you'll be up against multiple superior vessels (such as time traveling ships) and handily win. So what we see in game is probably not 1:1 equivalent to what's happening in reality. This is made even more likely because STO breaks rules in other ways, such as enemies beaming down reinforcements when they don't have a ship in orbit, ships warping in based on mission logic rather than story logic, such as when you have a mission to tamper with a set of 3 enemy satellites, and after you crush the first group at the first objective, when do the second objective they only send a few ships, despite knowing you must have beaten the first group, instead of sending 2 objectives worth of ships at once after you.


*And the Borg, but the actual scale of that conflict has never been particularly clear.

Yeah, but you wouldn't know it from the vs. debates. ICS was written by Curtis Saxton, who was a staunch vs. debater in favor of Star Wars who frequently collaborated with Mike Wong. There's every probability that the BS numbers he wrote in were specifically to win vs. debates on sites like SpaceBattles.

As far as I know, the "ICS was made to rig the debate" rumor originated with a few of Wong's equally crazy opponents, and there's never been any evidence to support it beyond "I, a person that thinks a few salvos of photon torpedoes can blast a planet's crust clean off, think GT range ship to ship weapons are implausible".....which is not the most solid premise.

Saxon doing that would be very unprofessional, and I really don't like the idea of impuning someone like that without a more solid basis.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Disney's incompetence at displaying it aside, Star Wars technology is rather impressive. As has been said, their FTL makes a mockery of most of science fiction, they've effectively miniaturised quantum entanglement technology, and lightsabres are all sorts of bullshit. Capital ship shielding is highly impressive as well, what with a star destroyer (that has already been cruising through an asteroid belt for hours) taking an asteroid hit to its bridge and the super structure didn't simply disintegrate. The weaponry of a star destroyer is also shown to be capable of slagging hundred metre plus asteroids in relatively short order. Even in the Disney era (which for the most part seems to be haplessly trying to cover for Dave Filoni not having enough budget or vision to properly portray an orbital bombardment in Rebels) we do have canon examples of orbital bombardment being capable of causing tsunamis.

In some respects, Star Trek really has not surpassed Star Wars.

 

[S'task]

Star Wars has the lead in artificial AI, as the droids are sentient and almost act like real people, and Star Wars seems to have countless different droids. Meanwhile, the Data series (Data, Lore, and Data's daughter) are the only beings a Federation civilian created that have true artificial intelligence, and it seems that nobody else was able to replicate that feat (Data tried with his daughter but her positronic brain broke down a short time after activation).

While mostly accurate, you're actually severely underestimating Trek here. Trek has the computational power to create AIs all over, they just choose not to do it due to the sticky moral implications. But the typical Federation starship in the TNG can create a fully sapient and sentient AI by accident (TNG: "Elementary, Dear Data") and while there was a power surge from initial creation, it did not seem to tax the computer to continue running it. Likewise you had The Doctor from Voyager, who again was functionally an accidental AI via hologram that while his program ended up having some issues with the sentience after a long while, the ship's computer never seemed to have issues with it. It wasn't just Federation ships that appear to have the spare computational power to run a full AI, as Vic Fontaine from DS9 also appears to have been a fully sapient and sentient AI, placing the required computational power for an AI down to commercial holosuit level.

The Federation is just AI shy, as previous attempts at AI and encounters with AI had made them very gun shy about using it (similarly, this is why you see only limited genetic engineering in the Federation, the Eugenics Wars had made such very verboten within the Federation). We see some examples of this in TOS with the The Ultimate Computer and I, Mudd.

So while I'd agree that Star Wars has more developed AI, the Federation isn't as far behind as you imply. They just choose not to create a lot of AI, even though they have clearly shown time and again to have the computational power to do so.

 

[Captain X]

Capital ship shielding is highly impressive as well, what with a star destroyer (that has already been cruising through an asteroid belt for hours) taking an asteroid hit to its bridge and the super structure didn't simply disintegrate.

Uh, yeah it did. They even showed the hologram of that ship's commander cringing at the impact before abruptly cutting out right after the shot of the bridge tower getting destroyed.

The weaponry of a star destroyer is also shown to be capable of slagging hundred metre plus asteroids in relatively short order.

Meanwhile, over on Star Trek, a small cargo freighter's phasers were shown to be capable of destroying an asteroid, but were not able to penetrate the un-shielded hull of a Klingon Bird of Prey, which didn't even think it was worth the effort to retaliate against the freighter for shooting at them.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Uh, yeah it did. They even showed the hologram of that ship's commander cringing at the impact before abruptly cutting out right after the shot of the bridge tower getting destroyed.

They had their comms damaged as like. The fact the captain was still alive to cringe indicates their shielding and well built superstructure kept them alive. Big bits of debris whacking Star Trek ships causes utter chaos as well, and I think an asteroid that big slamming into the bridge would put Enterprise out of commission rather quickly.

 

[Captain X]

The VFX makes it look like the bridge tower ceased to exist, and the hologram disappearing made it seem like they were saying the captain died on impact with the asteroid. I took it as an nice touch in detail, as well as a look at the culture of the Empire since no one else even flinched at that.

 

[Typhonis]

Star Wars has a 160km battlestation that can mass scatter a planet in one shot and is equiped with shields to withstand impacts from the debris of said shot.

 

[Captain X]

And a TOS-era Constitution was able to drill through Earth's crust and into the mantle.

You also had this during DS9:



An opening salvo by a combined Romulan/Cardassian fleet took out 30% of a planet's crust. It's not the Death Star, but even in Star Wars it was the exception and not the rule - that was the entire point of it, after all.

 

[Battlegrinder]

The issue with ST technology is that getting a baseline for what's possible is very hard, since ST occasionally struggles with plot consistency and keeping it's tech consistently.

For example, in TDIC, ships supposedly have enough firepower to vaporize a planet's crust. Also in TDIC, the observed firepower falls well short of that, and we have episodes like Deja Q where the Enterprise is trying to prevent a moon from crashing into a planet, and "spend a few hours slowly blasting the moon apart" is never considered as an opition, despite them having days to work on it.

Or with AI, the federation can accidentally create Moriarty, and his program can be stored and run on a handheld device without issue. Also, the federation is not capable of building another android like Data because they can't replicate something about his hardware, and without that building a functioning android seemingly isn't possible, and the fact they can get a sentient computer program to run on a device that would clearly fit into a human sized chassis is just ignored.

Likewise, the Doctor's mobile emitter cannot be replicated by the crew of voyager in any way. It's not that they cannot reproduce the device itself, the issue is they cannot even reproduce It's function, they could not just strap a holoprojector to a memory module and a power supply and make a crude mobile emitter, despite the obvious utility of such a device (and even if the idea just didn't occur to them before seeing the mobile emitter, they were still unable to replicate it years later, despite the mobile emitter being stolen or disabled repeatedly).

 

[Aldarion]

They had their comms damaged as like. The fact the captain was still alive to cringe indicates their shielding and well built superstructure kept them alive. Big bits of debris whacking Star Trek ships causes utter chaos as well, and I think an asteroid that big slamming into the bridge would put Enterprise out of commission rather quickly.

Except he wasn't alive. We see the bridge clearly destroyed, as there is nothing left in the dust.