That's why Star Wars is space/fantasy and Star Trek is science fiction. (ducks the thrown rocks, shoes, Molotov Cocktails, and artillery strikes)

I'll have you know, sir, that I once saw an episode of Star Trek* in which a character facing away from an external window heard a ship fly past in space and turned to look at it through the window. Star Trek has no business calling itself "science fiction" anymore.

* Granted, it was an episode of 'Enterprise', but it was still the same universe.

That's why Star Wars is space/fantasy and Star Trek is science fiction. (ducks the thrown rocks, shoes, Molotov Cocktails, and artillery strikes)

I'll have you know, sir, that I once saw an episode of Star Trek* in which a character facing away from an external window heard a ship fly past in space and turned to look at it through the window. Star Trek has no business calling itself "science fiction" anymore.

* Granted, it was an episode of 'Enterprise', but it was still the same universe.

Is it tho?

Is it tho?

In the Darkest Timeline, yes.

Well, everyone knows that's only because the impulse engine bends the fabric of space, and the ship was close enough that the ripple effect was affecting the hull, causing vibrations the character heard.

... *coughcoughbullhockeycough*

lol Yes, in many ways Star Trek is just as guilty. I've always enjoyed how the phasers and weapons make noise, as do the ships and explosions. It's also always bugged the hell out of me that when the shields are hit, the ship shakes (let's hear it for the inertial dampener!).

Yes, there isn't much sci fi I've found that treats space combat realistically because it's not very glamorous at all. The closest I've found is The Contested Zone, which treats it like submarine warfare. The ships engage each other at a range of hundreds of thousands of miles, stealth and ECM are heavily relied on, energy weapons can't be seen, missiles cloak after launching them, and it's more tension based than adrenaline inducing. You really didn't see much of anything in space except the ships (and not always even them), but inside the cockpits and on the bridge of warships, they had holo overlays of incoming fire based on passive and active sensor readings. Didn't pick up everything, but helped pilots/commanders follow fields of fire that were near misses.

Yes, there isn't much sci fi I've found that treats space combat realistically because it's not very glamorous at all...

'Battlestar Galactica' (2000's version) did it very well for me - with dulled external sounds, vector flight of ships and so forth. Kept it exciting, gave enough of a wink to say "we know how reality really is, but this is more exciting."

Oddly, 2009's 'Star Trek' by J. J. Abrams was one of the few Star Trek productions to make a similar nod towards realism, when a bunch of crew get blown out into space through a hull breach. The camera follows them out through the hole, and as soon as it's outside of the hull there's just haunting silence. Of course, the rest of the film then happened, but y'know, it's the little things...

That's why Star Wars is space/fantasy and Star Trek is science fiction. (ducks the thrown rocks, shoes, Molotov Cocktails, and artillery strikes)

I'll have you know, sir, that I once saw an episode of Star Trek* in which a character facing away from an external window heard a ship fly past in space and turned to look at it through the window. Star Trek has no business calling itself "science fiction" anymore.

* Granted, it was an episode of 'Enterprise', but it was still the same universe.

Honestly - and I do love Star Wars, but for different reasons - I blame Star Wars for this.

BEFORE Star Wars ('77) came out, Original Series Star Trek did a fairly decent job with the assumption of continued growth in weapon and propulsion technology from the present day (granted they whiffed totally on computers - but it's difficult to imagine growth of something that has only just recently been invented - and to be fair, we still aren't at even TOS Trek level of voice recognition and processing - but I digress). IE., in TOS Trek, the bridge view screen wasn't mean to be a literal "looking out the window" like it is in newer Treks - it was a sensor representation of what was out there. Because the weapon ranges WERE tens of thousands of kilometers. "Close range" was 40,000 kilometers away (IE., way, WAY outside visual range). Combat ALWAYS happened at warp speed - the ship was considered a 'sitting duck' when it had to fight at impulse, both phasers and torpedoes and everything worked at faster-than-light speeds, period. The weapons were powerful enough to 'accidentally' destroy the surface of a planet if they tried to attack a base on the surface.

Which all made sense given the series was supposed to be set a few hundred years in the future.

But then Star Wars happened, and suddenly audiences wanted to see ships flying close to each other - slow passes - weapons fire that dug into hulls like cannon fire - and from 'The Wrath of Khan' forward (so TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, all the movies, etc), Star Trek was completely changed to accommodate the audience expectations that Star Wars set...vastly dumbing down the tech, slowing everything down, and weakening the weapons.

Anyway - now we are really off topic. Star Trek (TOS) was SciFi. Star Wars is Space Opera. AND I WANT MY GOSH-DANG EXECUTOR IN ARMADA!!

So to make my points more clear:

1. The cinematography of "thing so far away target cannot be seen fires, then it returns fire" being a boring intergalactic tennis match is why these things are not done.
2. Given that we know the sizes of the ships, and we can see how fast the blaster bolts travel on screen compared to ships at various points in RotJ (as one example), we actually can have at least some bounded idea of how fast the blaster bolts travel.
3. This rate of travel is dramatically lower than the speed of the actual ships (assuming they are not lying to us and traveling actually takes orders of magnitude longer than we think and Luke is, for example, 900 years old by the end of the original trilogy).
4. Therefore, we know the ships are capable of traveling far faster than blaster bolts.
5. Therefore, the admirals have to be mentally deficient to hold still.

This is why I make the point that abstraction done for the sake of entertainment value is something clearly accepted as a norm in Star Wars. Otherwise, many scenes just don't make sense (in fact, someone explain to me in credible scientific terms why a laser weapon is traveling at significantly less than the speed of light, as a beginning point). Why don't they make sense? Because we want a better story.

Given that we all seem to accept this as a starting premise, it means arguments about scale are equally meaningless. What is the correct scale? The scale at which the best story is told visually. That should be the binding constraint on FFG, nothing else, otherwise, again, the squadrons should all be tiny, featureless plastic dots to scale with the ships.

Edit: Xanderf has a good point about Star Trek having closer to reality fidelity for the combat, but makes the key point I was making: it's about entertainment value, not accuracy.

Yes, the tech in Star Wars makes even less sense when you take into account the claim that the current governmental body has existed for 10,000 years and essentially uses the same level of tech (baring minor advances) for pretty much the entire span of time.

Still, the poet might say this only proves the strength and purity of one's love of something; it doesn't have to make sense. More so, it usually doesn't.

For myself, I hope the Executor is coming. I see no insurmountable issues with it coming to the table, and even if it doesn't, I'm going to repaint my Collector Fleet SSD and use that with house rules.

As an aside, I want to thank everyone in this discussion for staying polite, professional, and having valid input. This kind of topic (fantasy tech or cross universe comparisons) all too often devolves into epic bouts of nerdrage. Give yourselves a pat on the back.

Yup, same here man.

There was definitely a record set for hard to flacid in there somewhere.

So to make my points more clear:

1. The cinematography of "thing so far away target cannot be seen fires, then it returns fire" being a boring intergalactic tennis match is why these things are not done.
2. Given that we know the sizes of the ships, and we can see how fast the blaster bolts travel on screen compared to ships at various points in RotJ (as one example), we actually can have at least some bounded idea of how fast the blaster bolts travel.
3. This rate of travel is dramatically lower than the speed of the actual ships (assuming they are not lying to us and traveling actually takes orders of magnitude longer than we think and Luke is, for example, 900 years old by the end of the original trilogy).
4. Therefore, we know the ships are capable of traveling far faster than blaster bolts.
5. Therefore, the admirals have to be mentally deficient to hold still.

I really don't get how you come up with point 3. We see blaster bolts catching up with ships, ergo blaster bolts are faster than ships. We never at any point see a ship 'outrunning' a blaster bolt, so...??

What would age have to do with anything? It's not like ships travel at sublight speeds their entire time they are out there - when they actually want to get somewhere of any distance, they jump into hyperspace. Which, I mean, yes, hyperspace is obviously faster than the blaster bolts - but ships cannot fight in hyperspace in Star Wars, so...?moot point? When they are not in hyperspace, they are clearly (as in - visually, we see it on screen) much slower than the turbolaser bolts, so...?

I honestly don't follow where point 3 comes from, which appears to be the thing your argument is hinging on.

I think we've strayed from the OP topic here. Let me help.

Tiny spaceships!

I'm guessing the age point comes either from the theory that time passes more slowly at light speed travels, or just the idea that traveling long distances (even at light speed) would take millennia (consider our own closest sister star is 4 years away at the speed of light). This is where we come back to the B5 question and answer; the ships move at the speed of plot.

If you really, really want to try to have an "in universe" answer; despite the repeated use of the term "light speed" in Star Wars, it has long been stated that hyperspace is dimensional travel, not velocity. Hyperspace is a place, not a speed. It is a reality that mirrors their own galaxy, but is warped by gravitational fields. "Distance" there is much shorter than in so called "real space" and gravity fields actually cancel out its existence (hence the Interdictors ability to pull you out of it). Even direction has nothing to do with distance in hyperspace, as it is often faster to go billions of miles out of your way on a hop-scotch series of jumps than it is to make a straight run from point A to point B. This is why there are so "few" hyperspace trade lanes, and why they are so valuable.

In truth, there is plenty of "in universe" evidence in the movies to support the idea that the ships reach near the speed of light using just their normal drives. In the Empire Strikes Back, the Falcon travels from Hoth to the local asteroid belt in what appears to be minutes, never-mind one planetary system to another without use of its hyperdrive. Now, according to the WEG sourcebooks, the YT-1300 carries 2 months of consumables. Being overly generous and presuming the Falcon's pantry was fully stocked, and that 2 months covers the crew of 2 and 6 passengers, we can stretch that out to maybe 6 to 8 months since it was just 2 persons and a wookie. You could even tie this in with a decent training montage for Luke.

So, traveling without the hyperdrive, they flew from one planetary system to another in about 8 months? And our own closest neighboring planetary system is 4 years away at the speed of light. Now granted, maybe those stars were just really, really close to each other. Way out on the edge of the galactic rim, where distances between systems made it easy to hide from the Empire...

This is going off memory compiled largely from the WEG rpg and several other sources. Please feel free to correct me if my memory is in error. No idea if this is currently a canon explanation in universe or not.

But again, this all goes right back to why I don't think we should try to "explain" how these things work. We just end up trying to use actual science to explain/justify something that was fabricated with no thought whatsoever put into the "reality" of how it works. Lucas said parsecs are time, not distance. Oh wait, no they're not, you all misunderstood. See, here's a retcon with a story explaining that he was talking about distance, and still have the story be impressive. Hyperspace is light speed travel. Oh wait, er, no it's not because...er, reasons? And it never has been. But they have always called it that? Because...er, reasons?

Heck, Astrology is more scientifically sound than the technology of Star Wars.

--edit--

"This is going off memory compiled largely from the WEG rpg and several other sources. Please feel free to correct me if my memory is in error. No idea if this is currently a canon explanation in universe or not." ~~ Arowmund

I know these sources are no longer canon, and never intended to give the impression they still are. I was using sources that were considered by some as canon at the time (and are still used to argue for or against certain things (coughcoughNebBcough) despite being swept away) and used them to address exactly what was being discussed simply to give the times and distances a more solid frame of context.

My last comment as to the current canon explanation of the Hoth to Bespin trip was not questioning if the sources were still considered canon, but was instead remarking that I do not know what the current canon explanation of the Hoth to Bespin trip is (or even if they've address it). Just because the sources are no longer canon doesn't mean they haven't gone with the age old standby of "Uh, sure, yeah, that sounds good!"

I think we've strayed from the OP topic here. Let me help.

Tiny spaceships!

No no no. We're talking Executor around here. Or should be. So, massive freaking huge spaceships!

I think we've strayed from the OP topic here. Let me help.

Tiny spaceships!

No no no. We're talking Executor around here. Or should be. So, massive freaking huge spaceships!

Fair enough. Let me modify my previous post:

Massive freaking huge tiny spaceships!!!!

never-mind one planetary system to another without use of its hyperdrive. Now, according to the WEG sourcebooks, the YT-1300 carries 2 months of consumables. Being overly generous and presuming the Falcon's pantry was fully stocked, and that 2 months covers the crew of 2 and 6 passengers, we can stretch that out to maybe 6 to 8 months since it was just 2 persons and a wookie. You could even tie this in with a decent training montage for Luke.

So, traveling without the hyperdrive, they flew from one planetary system to another in about 8 months? And our own closest neighboring planetary system is 4 years away at the speed of light. Now granted, maybe those stars were just really, really close to each other. Way out on the edge of the galactic rim, where distances between systems made it easy to hide from the Empire...

FWIW, there was an interview with ?Kasdan? some time back where that question came up - and the answer was that...it was more than minutes. I don't recall the exact number he gave, either 6 weeks or 3 months, but it did seem to me 'on the short side'...however, it was certainly intended to be a length trip (explaining how Luke gets so good at being Jedi compared to the short few scenes we otherwise got).

As noted earlier in the thread, I do tend to think that the Star Wars galaxy (in addition to not being a vacuum!) really does just have things much closer together than ours.

I mean, heck, the Falcon can do ".5 past lightspeed"? So it can travel at 1.5 times the speed of light? Great - at that speed, in our galaxy, it'd STILL take years to get between even the closest stars! Obviously that's not the case, there...

So wait, the Star Destroyer was chasing the Falcon for weeks without ever getting a disabling shot off, or getting it in a tractor beam, or calling in help to box it in? Or are we suggesting that the Falcon flew for weeks in the absolute vast emptiness of space, and the Imperials just happened to find them? Or are you talking about the trip to Bespin being like 3 months (to which I estimated a top of 8)?

As to being close together, EU sources cite that Hoth and Bespin are 1150 lightyears apart. 1150 lightyears traveled in a cited 3 months (or worse, 6 weeks?) at sub-light speeds?

"I mean, heck, the Falcon can do ".5 past lightspeed"? So it can travel at 1.5 times the speed of light? Great - at that speed, in our galaxy, it'd STILL take years to get between even the closest stars! Obviously that's not the case, there..." ~~ Xanderf

That speed (unless I recall incorrectly) is in hyperspace -- where distances are not the same. Remember, hyperspace is not lightspeed travel, it's dimensional travel. Or possibly both, travel at light speed while in another dimension. Either way, we're back to "speed of plot" and Astrology.

Though, to be fair, sources cite that the Falcon had a back-up hyperdrive at the time, which they used to travel to Bespin. ... Which begs the question why they didn't just use that to escape the Star Destroyer in the first place. Not to mention bringing in "limited range" on a hyperdrive, calling into question fuel and other resources. It goes from a mess to a nightmare in the blink of an eye. Hence my belief we shouldn't be trying to explain these things using science.

I am curious. Anyone know if someone has made custom cards and rules for the Executor? I confess I haven't done much in the custom area, so my info is woefully lacking.

So wait, the Star Destroyer was chasing the Falcon for weeks without ever getting a disabling shot off, or getting it in a tractor beam, or calling in help to box it in? Or are we suggesting that the Falcon flew for weeks in the absolute vast emptiness of space, and the Imperials just happened to find them? Or are you talking about the trip to Bespin being like 3 months (to which I estimated a top of 8)?

As to being close together, EU sources cite that Hoth and Bespin are 1150 lightyears apart. 1150 lightyears traveled in a cited 3 months (or worse, 6 weeks?) at sub-light speeds?

All EU sources are nuked, at this point, unless otherwise reinstated. Bespin and Hoth are, apparently, a lot closer than that.

As to the timeline - the impression I got was that the ~3 month (whatever it was) trip was from when Han detached from the Star Destroyer and decided on the Bespin system as something they could reach, and the time it took to get there. So, yeah, just flying for weeks in empty space (with Boba Fett following them all that time, apparently, and them somehow not noticing...)

Though, to be fair, sources cite that the Falcon had a back-up hyperdrive at the time, which they used to travel to Bespin. ... Which begs the question why they didn't just use that to escape the Star Destroyer in the first place. Not to mention bringing in "limited range" on a hyperdrive, calling into question fuel and other resources. It goes from a mess to a nightmare in the blink of an eye.

EU sources say that, sure. Which are all nuked. Falcon flew to Bespin on regular engines, Bespin is much closer to Hoth than EU sources assume, trip took some number of weeks.

Hence my belief we shouldn't be trying to explain these things using science.

Well, no, we shouldn't try to "explain these things using science". That's what a lot of the EU did, and it made a mess. Shouldn't be attempted!

But that doesn't mean that it's impossible to explain things. Just that you have to chuck your assumptions out the window as step 1. Just watch the movies. See what happened in them. THAT (what you saw) is how things work in this setting, so just work with that.

It's like the mantra for understanding the upgrade cards in FFG's games. "Do what the card says to do. Do not do anything the card does not say to do." And that's that - don't make any assumptions, just take what you see at face value and that's the end of it (even if it doesn't otherwise make 'any kind of sense' at all).

So here's a thought that can apply to the Executor and a dedicated carry (of either faction) to represent the vast hanger space without driving up point cost or unbalancing the game (maybe?).

What do you think of the idea of giving a lower squadron rating than the ship "should" arguably have (we can easily argue Executor should have around 3 to 5 times as many as an Imp class SD), and instead giving it a squadron cap; a max number of squadrons that may be deployed at any given time. The ship essentially has an "infinite" number of squadrons it can launch, replacing losses so long as it is in play, but doesn't immediately tilt the table in regards to how many it brings out at a time.

I know it does't have the opening power of just dropping a slew of fighters on the table, but at the same time it gives you "endless" waves of replacements for those that are lost.