Therumancer said:
*snip*
Honor Harrington (David Weber Novels) gets even worse because it's not only using those kinds of engagement distances but a space travel technology/logic that simply makes a ship invulnerable from most directions, and the directions it's vulnerable from require an obscene energy output or a missle basically carrying it's own "impeller wedge" to penetrate. Most engagements involving fleets firing hundreds of thousands of missles that have their own "star drives" at each other. Again a diametrically opposed concept, and arguably taking place in a smaller universe than Star Trek, but one where if you use everything as it was written these guys would probably dust anything they came up against.
Getting hit by the broadside yield of say 40 "Honorverse" Superdreadnaughts is going to dust most space fleets from other science fiction from millions of miles away with little they can do about it.
... and of course I have no doubt that in the cosm of science fiction when it comes to competing logic, there are things that can trump that.
The point is that as amusing as these conversations can be, there is never going to be any real resolution, and if your favorite science fiction universe takes a pounding in a debate about another one, never fear there is something out there that will trump that one too.
>>>----Therumancer--->
damn we think alot alike. i agree with everything your saying.
i think that in most of this debate alot of basic things are getting left out in the chase to say 'my team is uba, yurz is teh suxorz'.
if i had to pick ONE sci-fie universe to dominate them all id pick ........ the Dahak series (also by david weber)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armageddon_Inheritance
basicaly the earth moon is a war ship. but unlike the death star its AI is self aware and truly 'alive'. the weapons are a combination of 'energy guns' and hyper torpedos with warheads from chemical, nuclear, anti-mater, and gravitonic (think small black holes generated on command).
powerful enough in its own right, but it gets better (or worsed depending) this is ONE 'picket ship' of the 4th imperiums battle fleet. turns out that the imperium before it fell, due to i might add creating a bio weapons that was capable of killing any living thing (plant, animal, anything, so much for the tyranids) it came in contact with and persisting on being deadly for EONS after words. this weapons was spread throughout the 4th imperium by instiant teleportation it had access too between ALL its planets. anyhow before this imperium fell it had created entire FLEETS of these moon sized ships. the entire home system of the 4th imperum was shielded out to 4 light minuts from the central star (your getting into dyson sphere sized objects now) and with shields capable of standing off whole fleets of Dahak sized ships
in the books i referance a group of something like only 20 of these battle moons (and the 4th imperium before its fall had built millions of them) takes out an entire fleet of 4 million PLUS, 20 mile long enemy battle ships. it was crazy mad combat, the first half consisted of Dahak simply going supra-light inside a solar system and causeing a sun to Nova wiping out the mear 250,000 or so 'scout ships' of the enemy fleet in the process and it only got worse from there.
hell in the 'small' battles at the beging of the book the enemy moves a moon from saturn i think it was and tryed to use it as a bullet to hit earth only to have dahak show up and blow the whole funcking MOON to hell with a hand full of gravitonic warheads.
heh yeah warhammer 40K is 'over the top' but ive yet too see anything that could stand up to the 4th Imperiums weapons. you dont GET any more powerful than using black holes as weapons.....
super psyker, chaos gods, jedi, or necrons not excepted.
the bottom line fact is that dahak and a couple of backups would fucking rip shit up against the Star wars AND 40K millitarys combined, ALL of them, chaos, necrons, rebels, empire, imperium, eldar, AND necrons. the tyranids wouldnt even be a speed bump.
i may have sounded like im going rather far from the topic, but im not, there is more too this subject that im seeing from alot of posters. biggest weapons ARENT the only factor, since there is a limit on how powerful ANY weapons can be. black holes are that limit, once you can generate black holes and use them to wreck shit you wouldnt NEED anything else. and once your capable of creating this ultimate weapons it THEN becomes a question of logistics and range. can you get more of your black hole guns to a specific battle faster than the enemy? THAT is where the importiance of fleets come in. all things being equil and all sides have a 'black hole' gun than the side with the most of them and the ability to get them into the right spot at the right time wins.
theru and i agree 100% on the Star TREK points too. ive ALLWAYS felt that star trek ships would hand the empire its ass just because of the exact things he listed. and while id take some exception too the idea that the SD's of the honor harrington univer would be the ultimate wrecking maching he think, its only because they are using basicaly simple bomb pumped lasers or normal megaton nuclear warheads. i KNOW that the star trek ships have shields that can stand up too that kind of damage without even a flicker. hell in TNG they developed some kind of phase shield of some shit IIRC that allowed them to land on a sun, even in TOS the enterprise stood up to "quadra-megaton salvos" from the romulans in 'ballance of terror' so i dont think that the Honor harrington ships themselves would really stand up.
HOWEVER. take that same fleet idea, give those ships gravitonic warheads and star trek shields and then you have something that would in fact kick ass and take names. the tactics in the honor harrington novels are masterful the ONLY weakness is the limits of weapons and shields. and this iw what this all really comes down too. all weapons being more or less equil than its the tactics and logistics that make the difference.
now finaly for the love of God, all you half whits that are going on and on and on about the necrons, shut up allready, if they were this uba leet death force your obsessed with they would have ALLREADY won the war. obviously since they HAVENT they CAN be beat ........ just like anyone else.
well except george lucas himself that is. *snicker*
