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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HeavenShallBurn" data-source="post: 3423421" data-attributes="member: 39593">Like I mentioned neither are truly sci-fi, both are really fantasy dressed up as sci-fi I never contested that point.  But while a great deal of B5 was steeped in fantasy tropes they were truer to a sci-fi approach than many.  The human ships especially remained far more in line with newtonian physics than is usual aside from the jump space end-run.  Their design and the manner in which they fought seemed far more plausible from a technical and tactical point of view given the limitation of mainstream TV they were working under.  Many of the plot points were directly pulled from fantasy, the looped time effect of the last war and Sinclair(or was it Sheridan it's been a long time since they were on air?) going back in time to fight the previous shadow war with the Membari and its repercussions.  The telepaths and the telepath wars could have easily been magic in any different setting.  The Shadows and Vorlons taking the place of inexplicable fey by way of inexplicable aliens.  Many more, but in large part these were fantasy within the plot rather than the technology.  Whereas in Star Trek the actual "technology" they are using is a direct stand-in for magic.  Both had fantasy elements but they were applied with exceptions in a different manner. Just TNG here:And how many times did they fail to do even the most simple things resulting in a crisis?  How often has the Enterprise moved into a hostile situation with shields down?  How many times has the Enterprise been boarded of all things.  Even after being repeatedly boarded they station no guards at the bridge, they have no comprehensive offensive internal security system when it is one of the first things a competent captain would see put in place given how many times they've been boarded.  (We see in DS9 that there are ways other than shields a vessel can be made either highly resistant or impervious to transporters through its construction yet none of these supposedly military ships have implemented this?)They send the most senior members of the ship planetside into hostile situations on missions that some junior lieutenant or ensign should be commanding.  Here's a great example, they find an ailing ship full of apparently semi-retarded aliens who don't understand their own tech.  Who do they send over, their chief engineer of all people, nearly alone on a potentially hostile unknown vessel.  That sort of incompetence would end in a court-martial in any first-world Navy.  Forget the name of the episode but a shuttlecraft crashes and the stereotypical malign alien entity kills all but one crewman who it keep hostage.  As a command officer beyond the fast access of the diplomatic corps it's his responsibility to deal with this himself even though today the State Department would normally be called in.  However he comes down to meet with the entity alone placing himself in danger of capture and placing the command authority of his vessel in danger.  This sort of thing would ensure he never saw another command in the U.S. Navy.  In other episodes I've actually seen him take the watch standers, the entire senior officer group who would normally ensure continuity of the chain of command and perform a commando raid of all things.  That is the worst example of incompetence I've ever seen.You need more than rank badges, uniforms, and firearms to be military.  The Forest Service has all those things, does that make them a military organization?  Based on what I've seen in TNG there are no signs of military protocol among the crew. They do appear to be comparable to a quasi-paramilitary organization though much as the police or forest service based on their protocols.  I'd say they are most like a paramilitary version of the Oceanographic and Survey Service.  They have civilian non-combatants including their own spouses and CHILDREN onboard the ship.  They appear to have no dedicated ground combat force akin to the army or marine corps, not even the Naval Infantry that have been reformed recently.  Other than shipboard weapons they appear limited to the equivalent of pistols and rifles.  No signs of support weapons of any kind even light squad level support weapons.  Their uniforms are not merely ill-suited for combat, they're impractical at a daily level.  Thin tight-fitting bodygloves with no pockets?  Their footwear isn't even up to par with Navy shipboard footwear.  The key is examining the design in comparison to potential capabilities.  First sturdiness.  given that this is supposed to be a military vessel and as a Galaxy class should be their equivalent to a battleship.  Enterprise-D relies upon its shields in combat mostly, yet it's shields are apparently a single system.  There is no redundancy.  Either the main shield works or it doesn't.  Given the hull volume of the enterprise it could fit at least a single fully redudant backup to take load if the primary fails, yet it doesn't.  It has a single vulnerable central computer controlling everything on the ship, a military vessel would have this distributed as a network of many redundant individually smaller control systems each managing only a portions of the ship's systems to reduce point-source failure.  Next armor, battleships usually had between 28 and 35 percent of their displacement(I'll go with mass for the sake of the enterprise) as armor.  Now armor might be useless if weapons are relatively of a high-enough power, but given that DS9 took quite a few unshielded hits from phasers or torpedos over the sake of the series without breeching and that the unpowered Promethian warship took more than five torpedos to destroy I'll go with the assumption that it is effective.  Yet according to the TNG:Tech Manual the skin of the Enterprise is under 13cm thick and most of that a non-armor grade foamed composite.  This is not the way you build a capital ship.  Nor is its frame strong enough since it deforms under the load of a single gravity without its structural integrity field.Second armament.  How much of the internal volume of the ship is taken up by its offensive systems?  It possesses only three photon torpedo launchers.  And it's magazines take up only a fraction of the available volume.  The phaser banks are based on the pictures and diagrams in the TM comparitively very small in comparison to the available volume in the saucer.  Let's use the bizmark for example since she was a paragon of battleships.  Just under forty percent of her displacement was devoted to weapons and munitions storage.  I can tell you right now the Enterprise is barely a fraction of this certainly not over ten percent.  At the very least the saucer should be stuffed with subsidary reactors to feed multiple phaser banks.  Also, where are their point defense weapons?  Even destroyers have dedicated CIWS to automatically intercept incoming munitions, yet these are entirely lacking from the Enterprise.  Photon torpedoes.  Based on the warhead description in the TM and even in the series occasionally they react 1.5kg of antimatter with the same amount of matter.  Even assuming unatainable 100 percent efficiency that 64.3 megatons.  During the Cold War fusion bombs of a size equal to and slightly greater than this were tested.  And nuclear weapons aren't nearly as deadly in space due to the necessary design of ships and characteristics of space.Phasers.  Honestly I can't get a single lock on how powerful these things are.  One minute their effects appear quite limited and in the next episode they do something with enormous evergy requirements.  they're effectively a plot device and operate solely at the power necessary for the plot.True about the Enterprise-D, True about the Defiant, though I've seen less of the original series it appears to apply equally to that Enterprise.  Have you ever seen a picture of the berthing spaces of a modern naval vessel?  Most crew get a bunk barely as wide as their shoulders with just enough headroom to prop a book up on your chest.  On many ships they hot-rack with three crew to a bunk in shifts.  Compare that to the conditions on even the Defiant, it's like a Hilton by comparison.  Have we ever even seen the conditions of the enlisted crew?  Aside from one chief, who had quarters as good as an officer, it seems the entire crew is made up of officers based on who appears on the show and their rank conventions.  Even the red-shirts are ensigns.  On the Enterprise-D in particular this "warship" has the vast majority of its saucer taken up by ridiculous apartments in spaces better served by redundant back-up systems, extra weapons or munition space.  Or even electronic warfare equipment.This isn't pushing the boundaries of what might be realistic, the technology itself is purely plot-device.  Enormously capable one episode and useless the next.  With no linking justification except for meaningless names jumbled together.</blockquote>

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