Could the Federation defeat Star Wars' Empire in an all-out war?
Would a Federation warship like the Defiant out gun a Star Wars Star Destroyer? Who has a bigger armada? Who has the tactical advantage? Don't forget that The Federation includes the Klingons, who love warfare and have fast, agile, heavily armed ships, with cloaking devices, and the Vulcans with superior logic and tactical planning.
I think Trek has better weapons, do they not? I'm not a Wars fan (have seen them each once and "meh").
From what I do remember, It took an entire Death Star the size of a small moon to destroy a planet. Don't most federation ships carry enough armament to easily do the same?
AFAIK (again, not a Wars fan/expert) but don't they use mostly laser weapons which are primitive and easily shrugged off by 24th century shields?
Assuming my memory is correct, then I'm going to say the Defiant itself could probably take out most of the Empire single handedly.
That comes into an argument of lightsaber assembly.
Some wielders prefer to overcharge their saber, while others use unstable Kyber crystals. While it makes for a much more powerful blade, any damage to the hilt makes it even riskier than a standard saber due to the sheer energy output. Hell, it can start breaking itself apart if not built correctly.
IIRC, in the pre-Disney EU days, there were wielders who still carried around modified power packs, so they could give their saber an extra boost if needed.
That's not even taking in the other ways they have been used, like a rifle that uses them as the ammunition. All the power of a focused beam of plasma launched from a snipers perch with pinpoint accuracy.
Thats good context, but i think "standard" phaser vs "standard" lightsaber is still going to be a weak show for the lightsaber.
I cant think of any door melting feats for phasers, but they are commonly used to heat up rocks during cave ins, and are shown to heat room temperature stone to red hot in a couple of seconds, likely raising the temps 1000f in that time frame.
I know those were special super dense blast doors, but I still think the phaser seems to have a much higher energy output.
Sustain is likely a winning category for the saber, but if the power output discrepancy is on the order of 100 or 1000x, that's still not really a win.
Most of the time they're "blasters," sometimes they're "turbolasers" or "lasers." Star Wars canon is a hot mess but they are most commonly defined as charged particle beam weapons, i.e. they're phasers by a different name.
Not really. I think the only time in Trek we see a planet outright destroyed by a ship is Species 8472 fighting the Borg. Many Trek ships could maybe render an undefended planet uninhabitable, but not pulverized, and probably not with standard weapons. There are random superweapon techs like the Thalaron Pulse or biogenic weapons that could kill everything on a planet, or the trilithium bomb that Soren used & that the Bashir changeling almost used that can cause stars to go nova.
Then in Star Wars EU you have things like single star destroyers doing a Base-Delta-Zero where they essentially raze the surface of a planet. The power levels of Star Wars weapons are really kind of all over the place, with many of the old Legends specs having insanely high energy yield for things like turbolasers.
IIRC some of the "hard numbers" put out would have things like a single turbolaser shot exhausting the shield capacity of a Sovereign-class.