re: Star Wars vs. Star Trek in a battle for all the marbles...who wins?

quote:

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Star Wars:
- superior ship numbers
- superior maneuverability
- MUCH faster galactic travel
- superior ground armor
- superior troop numbers

Star Trek:
- superior ship-based shield technology
- transporters
- superior phaser targeting
- cloaking


Each have unique tactical and strategic advantages.

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Also I give the edge to SW as well because of starfighters. You can destroy capital ships with Y-wing bombing runs for instance.

I have to give the edge to Star Wars on this.

Regarding technology: as stated, hyperspace travel is FAR faster than warp travel. Empire can engage in hit-n-run attacks, engaging totally on their terms, as to where and when they want to fight. They also have extreme numbers on their side. Those two factors alone would allow for luring any Trek capital ships out away from preferred targets, and then blitz that target.

Also regarding tech- when the Falcon disappears in ESB (hiding on the back of the hull), the captain mumbles something about that ship being too small to have a cloaking device. That statement confirms that SW has cloaking; that big ships can be cloaked; and based on the battles we have witnessed, cloaking is a tech that has been determined not very useful (since they don't use it).
I guess the ability to quickly drop in and out of the scene literally with hyperspace drives has trumped the ability to hide... cloaking is useless once you take a shot and reveal your position, unless you destroy the majority of the opposing force with that first shot. You won't do that with an Imperial battle group with hundreds of fighters; you expose your position and the Imperials will flood the battle with a ton of ships. The longer the battle stays, the more the Empire can quickly throw into the fray.

Star Trek has not shown much of an answer to the Star Wars fighter squadrons; in DS9, the Federation capital ships had trouble hitting the smaller Jem H'Dar ships, and one was destroyed by a kamikaze run.
In ST Beyond, they had a lot of trouble dealing with a swarm of fighter-sized ships, and had to resort to jamming the communications.

For any ground-fighting, the transporters would aide Star Trek in mobilizing movements, but it seems limited in the quantity of troops they could quickly move. To offset that, Star Wars has the large Imperial forces, and if they so desire, they could likely reopen the battle droid factories in a few months. Might not take them much longer to bring the clones back online too. With such a large and fast-moving fleet, that gives Star Wars huge offensive invasion capability, you simply swamp the defending Star Trek forces with numbers, and focus on taking out the transporter platforms. Once that occurs, there's no chance to handle it.

Not going to go into the Q and other such entities in Star Trek, other than to say I would imagine the Force might have an as-yet-unseen counter, possibly Force sentience at a metaphysical level that could match the Q Continuum. That seems totally plausible, considering the Force seems to be playing with the lower (mortal) lifeforms in Star Wars throughout the series, with the Light and Dark Sides playing chess over the milleniums.

On a more political side, I wouldn't trust the Klingons or Romulans a whole lot, if I were the Federation fighting the Empire. Seems like the Klingons in particular would be fairly receptive to the Dark Side... Vader might become their new hero-warrior, and then you have switching alliances.