Star Wars & Star Trek

Well, it depends which show you watched.

Star Wars, yes. I recall reading somewhere that Lucas and his friends used
WWII movies as reference for the dogfights in Star Wars. Fighter-based
combat also is used in the movies for plot purposes: since the story focuses
on individual characters, giving them individual ships is the best way to
handle combat. (It's one reason why anime likes battlesuits so much.)

Star Trek, the old show and Next Generation both use the silly "sit in one
place and blast the other ship" method of combat, mainly 'cause they want to
fit the fight on one screen, and don't have a big special effects budget. (One
of the big laughs, for me, in Wrath of Kahn was the line about "Kahn's
tactics clearly show two-dimensional thinking" - Star Trek always had
two-dimensional combat, to that point!)

Deep Space Nine and Voyager, however, thanks to computer graphics, did more
interesting space combat. It's still slow (to give the characters time to
explain their plans to the TV audience) and ridiculously close-ranged,
but they are more active.

Star Trek, however, is "soft" science - the dictates of a plot generally

override the dictates of Real World physics and thinking. If you start poking
holes in the inconsistencies of the show, you'll be poking all night...(Why
don't they use realistic decontamination methods to avoid alien infections?
Why don't they have decent firearms, instead of the slow and

underpowered phaser? Why don't they have zero-gravity training in
Starfleet?
Why are the Borg, supposedly an ultra-adaptable race, so dull and
predicatable? Why do we beam the command crew down to every hostile planet we
come across?)

Have fun poking.

> Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2000 21:01:26 -0800

> millitary science. In Star Trek you have large ships with heavy guns

> Actually, it doesn't really resemble much of anything. The ships don't