The great debate.

Oh boy

Thank you William Shatner, you have waded into the oldest and most impossibly stale argument in geekdom and you've kicked off a new phase in the war. For those of you that don't know Shatner did an interview on his youtube page saying Star Trek was better than Star Wars.

Of course he was going to say Star Trek. There are two reasons for this, both are that it's William god-damn Shatner. The only thing more legendary than his acting is his planet sized ego. Anyway Carrie Fisher decided to open a Youtube page herself and challenge that.

She of course says that Star Wars is better, her reasons mostly focus on the idea that Star Wars was a series of films while Star Trek was a syndicated TV show. She's also gone into to the budget differences and a few other things. All the stuff people have poked fun at since the 60's and the show started.

Shatner's position is a little more interesting, and I'm on his side for this. Star Trek was conceived as a morality play first, entertainment second. It shows a future where we are better people than we are now. Where we have put aside our hatred, differences and disagreements and because of that we can achieve the stars.

Star Wars is a fantasy story, set in space. There is nothing more there. It's entertainment only, there's no message, it's not aspiring to be more than fiction and to me that limits it.

This is my personal opinion, but when there is a passion behind the writers work, when they have an opinion and want to share it through their writing, even if you don't agree with the message, gives it a drive that other stories lack. Please follow this Star Wars tries to play with the idea of good, bad and redemption but it doesn't go anywhere with it. Looking at it as a writer it's completely hollow. They end up as literary codes and conventions, nothing else. Star Wars doesn't ask us to forgive, or look at the issues around that act, it glosses over those issues and spoon feeds a solution. Star Trek has looked at the issues and often does.

For example the Next Generation had an episode (season two's The Survivors) where a god like creature kills an entire species for murdering his wife. The episode ended with the idea that his crime was so big that we, as mortals, had no way of measuring it. Even more interesting is the question was it the right thing for him to do. The race he destroyed was violent, destructive and killed discriminately for fun all over space.

The episode raises questions I don't have answers to. Star Wars doesn't have that depth. Vader's redemption is spoon fed to us and we see him happy at the end with his friends. Everything's forgiven.

Now don't get me wrong here I like Star Wars. The original trilogy is a fantastic story told over several hours. With pro's and cons but there was more thought and more promise with Star Trek. Mostly because they had more time and writers to get to the issues.

Still there is another side to this mess. A more hotly debated side that people have ben found fighting in the streets over. The old "who would win in a fight" and I want to look at this too.

Now there is a lot out there on this, peoples opinions, facts, figures, essays and ideas all coming from different angles. The fact of the matter is it can never, ever, happen and its all tied up in the idea that my show is better than yours. If I was going to do that I could invent figures and rules bias one way or another. So for this part I'm going to have to disappoint everyone! The perfect compromise.

Now, if I was going by the insanely geeky figures that my research shows it's a rather one sided fight. A single X-wing could take on the Enterprise E and blow through from stem to stern. Now to be fair if I'm going to ignore that Trek fans have to agree to something else That is after all the point of a compromise. Lasers. Star Trek has a habit of shrugging off lasers as ineffective at best, laughable at best. First of all Star Wars lasers are plasma based energy weapons. Not just focused light waves. So they are effective, even against federation shields

So we need a base line where we can compare and contrast like for like and I'm choosing the X-Wing for Star Wars and the Delta Flyer from Star Trek Voyager. Let's say these two are about on par with each other. The Delta Flyer is larger, but shields and weapons wise they match up fairly well. A standard Federation shuttle is an underarmed fat target and a Runabout is a small spaceship that would clean, flat out, win against a snubfighter. The Delta Flyer can defend itself, is manoeuvrable and is about the right proportions without vastly over powering it's opponent.

So if we assume that baseline and set up a Federation Vs Empire fight you've got a nice argument! Tie fighters, being unshielded, wouldn't survive very long but Star Destroyers could hammer Federation ships into the ground. Sounds sort of fair don't you think? Well not really.

Take the Victory Class Star Destroyer. An outdated, bottom of the range, standard ship. Otherwise known as a 900 meters (2950 foot plus!) long death machine with ten quad turbo-laser batteries and forty double turbo-lasers, eighty concussion missile tubes and at least two squadrons (48 in total) of Tie Fighters. It doesn't matter if Federation shields are that much better, a Vic's going to win. Hands down. It's closest comparison is the Constitution class (classic Enterprise). Vastly smaller, delicate and crowded, despite having a smaller crew. It's only 289 meters (less than a third) long and only 12 phaser banks, in total. It's ordinance is for defence only, and against a warship designed at the hight of a galactic war hopelessly out matched.

The next level, or the refit, Victory II is again more than a match for the refit Constitution class and even the Excelsior Class. The Constitution refit is faster and has another 6 phasers but that's still not enough to make an impact. Boiling it down to this level a fleet of Victory Star Destroyers could take on anything from the Original Star Trek and movies easily.

Hitting fast forward, lets jump to Star Trek Next Gen. By then, more or less, Star Wars were up to Imperial class Star Destroyers. otherwise known as death incarnate. Seriously. Two Quad heavy turbo lasers, six dual heavy turbo-lasers, two heavy Ion cannons, two medium turbo-lasers and just for good luck sixty more standard turbo-lasers. It might not have any missiles, but an Imp star was designed to dominate whole planets! Unsurprisingly a Galaxy class ship isn't any bigger than an Imp star. in fact it's quite a bit smaller. 642 meters (0r Two thousand one hundred and eight feet) long, opposed to the Star Destroyer's 1600 meters (five thousand two hundred and forty nine feet). Even worse the whole Galaxy class is like a massive space shopping centre. Hospitals, schools, bars and the like. Again, just like the Constitution, Galaxy class ships are built to explore and investigate, not to fight. It's a jack of all trades. Never quite as good as the specialist vessels and somehow falling between the cracks along the way. When up against Imp Star it would be blasted into chunks. With only a dozen phasers and two torpedo tubes, even if they are extremely powerful, a Galaxy class doesn't quite match up does it?

Even worse there was only supposed to be six Galaxy class ships in the whole Federation. There was a reason the Enterprise D was a Flagship! Even at the hight of the dominion war there were only a dozen of them, at best. The Federation didn't have the resources to build anymore. In fact after the Galaxy Starfleet began building smaller ships, like Voyager's intrepid class, over the larger designs. There were scores of Imperial Star Destroyers, as well as all the left over Victory class and other assorted ships and I'm not even counting the Tie Fighters yet!

So right now it might look like I'm picking on Star Trek. Far from it. I want Star Trek to put up a fight, but it's like suggesting I could take on a professional boxer. I might get a few good hits in, but I'd be out classed and out done every step of the way. That's the big problem. The Empire has immense war ships, while the Federation doesn't. It might defend itself at a pinch but Negotiation and science is the goal of Starfleet. The Empire rules through intimidation and fear.

Lets move on to the next stage to really drive this point home. The Sovereign class (Enterprise from the Next Gen movies) meets a Super Star Destroyer. There isn't words for this. The Executor, Super Star Destroyer, is more than nineteen thousand meters long. That's sixty two thousand three hundred and thirty five feet. It's turbo-lasers are measured in the thousands, two thousand heavy turbo lasers alone. It also carries missiles one hundred and forty four ties and another two hundred assorted landing ships. What's the Sovereign compered to that? Answer seven hundred meters, at best when rounding up! You could fit the Enterprise E in the Executor's landing bay! Size might not be everything, but when you're biggest and most powerful flagship is out matched by a soon to be decommissioned twenty year old relic you need a new strategy.

Even more fun, in the expanded Star Wars universe there were at least four SSD's, and it only went up from there. The emperor's own Eclipse class (with it's own planet destroying super laser!) was more than seventeen kilometres long. There was two of those!

Speaking of planet destroying lasers I haven't even mentioned the Death Star. What has the Federation got that even comes close to that? Nothing

This is just ridiculous. even if I started halving the Empire's equipment the numbers fall short. In Star Wars the galactic empire rules four fifths of the galaxy and it's predecessor the Galactic Republic did so for more than ten thousand years! Starfleet has a few hundred worlds in a postage stamp sized portion of the Galaxy. I'm sorry but no. If it came to an out and out fight the Galactic Empire wouldn't just win, it would barely notice the Federation, or any of the other Star Trek races. The Borg might be a speed bump, same for species 8472, but on a plain basis Star trek loses. Flat out.

Now tactics, this is where Starfleet could claw back some points. First the Empire, as demonstrated by its ships that I've listed here goes for immensity. It's huge, relying on unlimited resources and vast clone armies. It swamps it's opponent with wave after wave of superior forces. The Federation isn't cut out for war, especially not on this level. When it fought the Dominion (again using cloned solders) it almost lost due to shear numbers. It was only a handy weakness that let the Federation get the upper hand (destroying the drug the clone Jem'hadar were addicted to to ensure loyalty killed them off).

Stormtroopers might not be good shots, but they haven't got that weakness. Even more fun that I have only touched on above is fighters. Sure one good phaser blast could destroy a tie effortlessly but when hundreds come screaming at you they're going to get through. With their capital ships coming up from behind? The Federation would run.

And that's the only advantage they have. FTL. If I was to go by what's out there with Warp Drive the Federation is the faster, in normal space. But hyperspace a better way of getting around from planet to planet. The Star Wars Galaxy is supposedly smaller than our own, but even if it's a dwarf Galaxy that's still huge and supposedly the Falcon can get from one side of their galaxy to another in the matter of a few days. Voyager admitted that it would take over 70 years at maximum warp to get across two thirds of ours. Starfleet while faster in at sprinting isn't set up for the long haul.

Tactically someone like Kirk or Sisko would use hit and run tactics, but in the end they'd need bases to launch said attacks. The Galactic Empire would hit those and shatter the foundation, invading Earth, Vulcan and the other home worlds.

As you can see I've spent far too much time thinking about this and every time Star Trek's forces lose.

So in summation Star Trek is, in my opinion, a better show with a wider range of stories and impact, while Star Wars is just a good escapist fantasy.

But in a fight Star Trek would lose.