Who Would Win: an Imperial Star Destroyer or the USS Enterprise?

Fuckin’ nerds.

Ermm… which Enterprise? The pic shows the D, but I would think the E is a more worthy opponent. Nevertheless, let the discussion begin!

Imperial Star Destroyer… hands down….

Well, the Enterprise would win of course. …’cause the Imperial Star Destroyer is just a model.

First of all lets takes the facts. Just because the Stardestoyer is larger it would get obliterated by the Enterprise, even the the one in the old series. Why? Because the Starwars ships only have lasers and their shields are only made to capable of shielding from lasers. Phasers on the other hand are light years ahead of lasers and the Enterpirse’s shileds are built to withstand phasers. Remeber in an episode of Generations where they encountered a ship with lasers. They commented that they couldn’t even penetrate their hull let alone their shields. The Enterprise’s phasers would cut the Stardestroyer in two like going through butter. They wouldn’t even have to use their phasers. It would be over before they could even launch their Tie’s and even if they could their weapons would be like shooting at a tank with a beanshooter. If Vader’s Force was so powerful why didn’t he just choke out Skywalker before he shot off the fatal blow the Deathstar instead of chasing him down. His pwers only go so far. Then they could even beam over a one photon torpedo and be done with it. Since they multiple tansportes on board they could simutaneously beam torpedos over to each Stardestroyer and blow them all up at the same time. Thats the truth if you want to go science for science.

Let’s go through it more-or-less scientifically.

**Death Star:**

I think the death star’s planet-destroyer would be more powerful than anything the Federation had – a Trek ship’s phasers could drill into a planet’s crust to some extent, yes, but it couldn’t destroy an entire planet. However, Trek ships are extremely manuevreable, and this is a weapon designed to pump energy into an entire planet – so it would simply be useless against a Federation ship.

**Phasers & Sheilds:**

I believe that the Star Destroyers DO have energy shields of some kind, but they work differently to Trek shield – and yes, Star Wars lasers are incapable of penetrating them – iirc the rebels had to destroy the shield generators (those spheres sitting above the command deck) before they could strike.

In Trek combat, the goal, iirc, is to exhaust the enemies shields with phaser bursts, and use photon torpedoes (which are anti-matter bombs) against the hull. I don’t know if Star Destroyer shields can be exhausted the way Trek shields can be; it may be that their reliance on laser technology simply made the point moot for the purposes of the rebel’s attack.

The shields/hull materials are a serious issue for the Star Destroyer (and note that the USS Defiant from ST:DS9 has physical armour as well as it’s energy shields, so knocking out their shields is only the beginning of the fight) – yes, their lasers would be useless. But would their ion cannons be as useless? Trek ships can get into trouble encountering ion storms in space (see the Badlands, for example). I don’t know if a Star Destroyer could muster the raw power of nature like that, but at least in principle, an ion cannon might make a dent in the Enterprise (even it’s shields).

Let’s consider it logically:

**Ion Cannons:**

An ion cannon – which, from it’s name, presumably projects a magnetically confined beam of ionized gas (plasma) at a target – ought to be capable of depleting a Trek ships shields and doing damage to the hull, fulfilling both of the goals of Trek combat. But how much damage could they do to the hull? Trek ships *can* navigate the Badlands, and they *can* get pretty close to a star without being destroyed, so even if their shields fall, they are able to withstand a great deal of the damage wrought by ionized gases found in nature – and it’d be pretty unlikely that an ion cannon on a Star Destroyer could muster the same force as the sun itself (if that were so, the Star Destroyer wouldn’t last very long carrying that stuff around).

So, based on the performance of Federation ships in natural environments containing high energy ionized gas, while their shields would fall, they could certainly take quite a beating from an ion cannon.

**Photon Torpedoes:**

AFAIK Star Wars technology has no antimatter reactors or weapons, so the explosive yield of a photon torpedo (don’t even worry about “quantum” torpedoes” – whatever those are supposed to be…) is absolutely greater than any equivalent sized armament a Star Wars ship could muster. Antimatter can theoretically convert the total mass of a matter + antimatter mix into energy. If you have 5kgs of antimatter, 10kgs of mass can be turned into pure energy. It’s simply physically impossible to get a more powerful explosion from 10kgs of any other explosive imaginable.

And we have seen that the (probably much lower) energies involved in crashing and exploding ships & reactors are capable of destroying the hulls of Star Wars vessels. So it may just come down to the fact that Trek ships have torpedoes capable of penetrating Star Wars hulls.

**Tie Fighters:**

Tie Fighters are the major advantage posessed by Star Destroyers. Starfleet does have an equivalent – crappy little one-man fighters that only appear briefly in the show (because they are boring) – but these are not carried on board starships, and we don’t know much about their combat capabilities. However, considering that the shield and phaser capabilities of a non-military runabout (from DS9) are comparable (although much weaker than) a small Federation starship, I imagine Federation fighters could stand up well against imperial ones.

The best use of Tie Fighters against a Federation starship would *undoubtedly* be to make kamikaze runs. Federation phasers are powerful and very good at hitting their targets (they can routinely pick out specific points on the hull of an enemy ship), so a wave of Tie Fighters would suffer losses before even reaching their target. However, you never see more than a dozen or so beams coming from a phaser array at a time – and it seems there is a trade-off between number of phaser beams and the power of a beam. (Federation weapons all draw power from a single source, and they use *so much* energy that it must be allocated (this is a feature of the Trek universe in general – for example, Romulans can’t fire weapons while cloaked)). So if you throw enough Tie Fighters at them, some *will* get through the phaser barrage.

So, unlike the death star’s weapon, a tie fighter is targetable enough to hit a Trek ship; unlike a laser, it can probably make it through an energy shield; and they are numerous enough that they could overcome Federation starships’ targeting abilities with sheer numbers. Crashing ships in Trek rarely do very well, so a kamikaze tie fighter will do some damage to the hull (and maybe it’s engine would do some damage in exploding). This is where the fight would turn in the Star Destroyer’s favour (assuming they have survived the starfleet vessels’ phaser and antimatter bombardment thus far – which is definitely not guaranteed). And if a fighter managed to aim for the warp core, they have a shot at causing a core breach (of course, a warp core breach is an even *larger* antimatter explosion than a photon torpedo, so it might well take out the Star Destroyer regardless!).

The USS Defiant, of course, would have that extra hull shielding to protect it. But against the USS Enterprise, a successful kamikaze tactic is a definite possibility, given enough fighters.

**Transporters**

But ultimately, the transporters of a Federation ship are likely to be a game-changer. Some up above mentioned beaming live torpedoes on board the Star Destroyer – if the shields are down, sure. A better tactic would be beaming *out* the pilots of the tie fighter wave. Trek transporter chiefs are quite capable of this sort of pinpoint accuracy, and even if Star Destroyers have weak energy shields, fighters certainly do not. More importantly, transporters use far less energy than phasers, and it appears to be possible to operate more transporters at one time than phaser beams. So transporters are probably the Trek ships best defense against a wave of kamikaze tie fighter pilots.

From that point on, it’s a matter of the skill, efficiency and speed of the starship crew/fighter pilots, versus the ability of the Star Destroyer to hold out against a superior barrage of armaments. An Imperial pilot versus a Federation transporter chief.

No doubt their skill would be comparable. But their psychology may not be. If you really want to get into it, the Federation crew are fighting for a utopian society – something they have a tangible stake in, something they care about to the core of their being. The imperial pilot, however, is fighting for an autocratic regime – who has just demanded that he make a suicide run for the Emporer’s sake! They may not have had a choice to join up. They have far less of a stake in what happens. They may be thinking of their family, back home on the farm, suffering under imperial taxes.

Chances are, the overwhelming display of Federation firepower, and the psychology of an oppressed (doped up?) Imperial soldier (and I assume a fighter pilot – who needs skill and intelligence – would tend to have less mind-numbing indoctrination than a Storm Trooper), would result in Tie Fighters simply fleeing the battlefield.

I think a Federation ship has the overall advantage.