Transcription
Tumblr post by arctic-hands:
When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly “Borg Cube”, but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.
So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said “Death Star”.
So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.
Reply from evilsoup:
An image depicting the story of the “Judgment of Solomon”, where Solomon is labelled “stargate fandom”, and the two women are labelled “star trek fandom” and “star wars fandom”. The Star Wars lady is standing grumpily with her hands on her hips, while the Star Trek woman gestures with open arms. Between the two of them, on the floor, is a baby in a wicker basket. Solomon sits over them in judgment.
Realistically, technology is just there to support the story that’s being told in Star Trek. When writing about the implications of mind meld space AIDS, the ethical considerations of eternal punishment, or weak metaphors for racism, the writers don’t really care about what the technology can and can’t do. See the literal “techno babble here” in some of the scripts where the actors just made things up on the spot.
The people in Star Trek may be absolute idiots, but if the Empire had any staff that made it through high school they would’ve crushed the rebels so many times over. A reasonable explanation could be that, like the nazis they’re designed after, their leaders were on drugs 24/7.
In both cases, their weapons are ridiculously imprecise to make for cool action scenes. Automated aiming systems we had decades ago could easily hit enemies taking evasive manoeuvres that ships take in either franchise. The problems we have today with real life killer robots isn’t that they have storm trooper aim, but rather the ethical considerations and where to put the blame when one of the robots starts murdering children. I think either Enterprise or Voyager already did an episode on that, and in Wars combat drones are just accepted, so these flaws in technology really shouldn’t be happening.
The incompetence on display is something I really dislike especially about the recent Treks. I know people like their inter personal drama, but if you’re having an emotional little sob on the bridge of any important starship, you need to get out and be replaced until you can work through whatever you’re going through. At least in Star Wars, where the bridge is cold and rather boring unless Jedi show up, everyone is doing their jobs.
That’s also one of the reasons I’m looking forward to the show about cadets, because there the characters can have all of their interpersonal issues and such without the universe around them pretending that they’re the best of the best.