We interrupt your regular programming for an important historical note: Today is the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition, the disastrous social experiment that did very little to curb the behavior it was designed to end, but did manage to make some very bad people very rich and powerful while bringing appalling levels of violence to the streets of American cities. (See also Drugs, War on.) As I’ve noted before, I find it endlessly amusing that my home state of Utah, home of the tee-totaling Mormons, was the one that cast the deciding vote in favor of repeal. (In a nice bit of historical symmetry, Utah was also the deciding vote in ratifying the Constitutional amendment that created Prohibition in the first place, so perhaps it was only fitting that we undid it as well.)
I’ve been on quite a run of epic nerdiness lately — you’re very kind to say you hadn’t noticed, but please, we both know better — and I’m beginning to worry about alienating that segment of readers who don’t know an alluvial damper from a flux capacitor. Therefore, as a favor to all you non-fanboys and fangirls out there, I promise that none of the following links has anything whatsoever to do with Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or any of the other shows whose titles I used to scribble on my notebook covers back in elementary and middle school…
For many years, it’s been something of a parlor game among the nerdy classes to speculate on what would happen if one of the starships Enterprise from the Star Trek franchise faced off in battle against an Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars. In fact, this particular hypothetical has been such a common topic of discussion in sci-fi fan circles that it’s become a tremendous cliche: Much like those 2 a.m. college dorm-room discussions in which someone suggests that maybe, just maybe, our lives are only dreams and none of the other people in the room are real and how damn trippy would that be?, it’s the topic that everybody has encountered at some time or another.
The outcome of this debate is both inevitable and inconclusive: it ultimately comes down to simple partisanship, i.e., which franchise the debaters happen to be a bigger fan of. The Trekkies usually cite Star Trek‘s defensive shielding technology (which seems to be lacking or at least far less impressive in George Lucas’ universe) and the seemingly infinite flexibility of phaser weapons as the decisive reason why the Enterprise would kick butt. Meanwhile, the arguments of Star Wars fans (Warsies?) usually depend on the sheer scale of Imperial machinery and the brute force commanded by those British-sounding guys in gray.*
This video (one of the better-made ones I’ve seen in this particular sub-genre) introduces a hitherto ignored factor into the equation:
Picard and those guys on the Enterprise sure are smug bastards, aren’t they? You think whoever made this clip was making a comment about the Trekkies he’d encountered? (Seriously, there’s a subset of Trekkies that can be downright insufferable… Star Wars fans generally seem to be a lot more relaxed about their pet obsession, as long as you don’t mention Jar Jar Binks.)
* For what it’s worth (and at the risk of sounding even geekier than I did when I analyzed the provenance of the USS Kelvin the other day), I tend to side with the Warsies on this one. It’s been established time and time again that the Enterprise‘s deflectors can only take so much abuse, so I think the Empire could win simply by dropping a hundred or so TIE fighters to pound away at the Big E while the Destroyer hangs back out of phaser range. The TIEs would be too small and fast for the E to efficiently take down with its artillery-scale phaser banks; meanwhile, the fighters’ weapons might be puny against the E’s shields but they would take their toll. It might take all day, but eventually the shields would collapse; then a couple of well-placed turbolaser blasts and it’s back to Coruscant for a round of cold ones with Palpatine… but that’s just my theory.
