The Lugz said:
Oh be serious, how could star-trek ever loose?
should have picked something else.. it's madness I tell you.
Yes, the discussion was kind of loaded. Especially seeing as Trek could have won based on the intent of the debate simply by it being pointed out that BSG was depressing, it by definition was out to be dark and suck all the joy and wonder out of space and space exploration, tainting pretty much everyone and everything that came up during it. Not to mention the ending where they decided to pull out trippy space angels to try and add a profound conclusion to a serious they wrote themselves into a corner with means that as an overall work BSG is going to fail hard compared to series like TNG which managed to have satisfying endings that overall didn't upset that many people and made sense.... also providing evidence to all of the horrible writers out there pulling garbage like they did with "Lost" that there really is no excuse.
That said if one was going to get into an academic debate rather than one based off of current popularity there are a few shows you could put up against Trek. One of course is "Andromeda" which was also based on Roddenberry's work, it went on for five seasons (as opposed to seven) and while it had it's problems it also tied up everything pretty well and also had several evolving metaplots over the course of the series along with one big one. "Babylon 5" was the same way, though I'm not sure if it would count given that they are on a space station, indeed B5 is one of the classic competitors of Star Trek in fan debates. Others are of course "Farscape" and if your not going to get on BSG for being too trippy you also have "Lexx" which was comedic but pulled down a 4 season run when you consider the movies that started it. I mention Lexx last because really to even begin to appreciate it you have to be fans of the genere (the shows we're discussing) to really find it amusing when Lexx mocks the tropes as ridiculously as possible, and on top of that I'll admit the style of humor in Lexx is an acquired taste.
Also I laughed during the whole "spit contest" thing. To answer the question seriously though when it comes to combat Trek's technology beats pretty much anything from any other science fiction series not done by Genre Roddenberry. The reason simply being that Trek tries to use more "realistic" distances when dealing with space and space combat. If you pay attention to the babble going on ships like The Enterprise engage as distances of tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometers despite how things "look" on TV (since showing two dots firing at each other zoomed out to a distance to properly represent it would be kind of dull). Some video games like "Star Trek Online" of course took major liberties with this in order to make things seem like the images from the TV shows and movies as opposed to the actual technology they talk about using. In comparison most other shows pretty much handle their space combat literally, it is what the images suggest in every aspect, meaning that ships are fight each other at relatively close ranges of a few miles tops, with fighters and stuff literally zipping by a few feet away from the hulls of larger structures, etc... In absolute terms Trek technology could pretty much kill anything from other space operas before they even knew they were being engaged. Making it even worse is the issue of blast radiuses which only come up a few times, such as when Kirk set the enterprise's phasers to stun and was knocking out entire city blocks with a single shot, or in another episode where when being tricked into intervening in a war among more primitive species it was pointed out the blast radius of a photon torpedo could pretty much take down good portions of a continent. In another episode (TNG) they are using their phasers to try and repair a planet's core meaning that something like The Enterprise could pretty much blow a hole through a planet given the desire to do so (ala, The Death Star) albeit instead of charging up for one blast it would probably have to sit there and literally drill a hole through one. The only real mainstream competition is Andromeda which had the same creator and used similar logic, with ships engaging at a similar level, again in that series destroying planets or even suns is relatively trivial if someone with a powerful ship really wants to, the ship the series focuses on carries "Nova Bombs" each one capable of blowing up a planet or sun, and it can rapid fire them. One early moral decision the hero faced (albeit shown via time travel before the series started) was whether to save the galaxy from the bad guys who took it over by wrecking their fleet by blowing up a sun on them... which was possible, but in violation of the intergalactic version of the Geneva Convention. As cheesy as it was this ultimately served to put the entire state of the galaxy on this guy's shoulders (which is why he felt he needed to fix it) since he put morality before well... the fate of even more people who died as a result.
Just a bit of high nerdism, but if anyone ever wants a literal answer to a question like "which ship would win" look at the engagement ranges. Trek is usually a sure fire winner when it comes to cinematic science fiction at least, without getting into omnipotent space magic and garbage... and even so, someone who can pretty much wipe our your fleet from 300,000 kilometers away when you can't even see them (no need for cloaking, it's that far away) given the targets not having equivalent technology, it's not much of a contest. Likewise is destroying a planet or star is considered a huge feat of power, it's not competitive, in Trek it's easy, it's just that it's a waste of habitable planets, you fly in and blow up a planet you generally don't get anything from it except wasted ammo/energy and a bunch of space rocks.
