How-To Geek

Technological Superiority – Star Wars versus Star Trek [Comparison Chart]


  • Published 09/4/12

Comments (19)

  1. r

    my allegiances lie with Battlestar Galactica

  2. NotSteve

    Lets not forget that they have fricking laser guns in Star wars as well. In spaceships, the edge goes to Star Trek… they have full on shields, not just a deflector shield that is very easily taken out by a small fighter crashing into it.

  3. Grant

    You completely forgot the teleporter and holodeck. That’s some pretty cool technology that differentiated the franchises.

  4. Antonin

    Yep, teleporter would give the star trek world an edge especially since the star wars world would have no defense against it from the start ^.^

  5. Shane

    Hmm, if you’re going to talk star trek VS star wars, your missing a few key components.

    Star trek:
    Ability to turn energy into matter (food replicators, etc) since energy is more storage efficient than food, the star trek universe has an infinite advantage in drawn-out space conflict, as well as space efficiency.
    Time travel: There have been incidents of both accidental and purposeful time travel in star trek. Remove the temporal prime directive, and the entire star wars universe doesnt count for anything since the federation can blow it up before it even exists.

  6. Lewis Malone

    I am sorry, but The Force vs Vulcan neck pinch is just dumb. Why don’t you try the Force vs a Q?

  7. Call me Steve

    If Picard could convice Q, I’m sure he could help.

    Q: “Vadar, do you wish your mother hadn’t died? Let’s go back and save her…”
    Vader: “BFF”

  8. lu

    Dudes, These are just fictional shows and films with paid actors.
    Don’t lose any sleep over this.

  9. Call me Steve

    ^^ Dude if you just figured that out, congrats.

    And if this was Star Trek universe, I would just go back in time to get my sleep.

  10. Asumodeusu

    I would place my money on the Star Wars univers in a fight… but I can’t deny that it would be a tough fight.

  11. Tyler

    Energy more efficient storage than food? Did you forget about how atomic bombs used the mass of a few pounds of material (uranium/plutonium) to blow up whole cities? The amount of energy in the mass of even a snack would be enough to keep the enterprise going for a considerable amount of time. More efficient would be the ability to transform heavy materials like uranium through such nuclear reactions into food.

  12. badger_fruit

    Star Wars has Ewoks (meh)
    Star Trek has 7 of 9 (nom nom nom nom /drool).

  13. lizbit

    Star Trek, Star Trek, Star Trek

  14. bedlamb

    I enjoy most sci-fi. The only series that’s extremely popular, that I find boring, is Doctor Who.

  15. Paul

    @badger_fruit totally agree.

    Star Trek has many beautiful women (esp TOS). Memorable examples that stick in my mind are are Kathie Browne as Deela in “Wink of an Eye” and Angelique Pettyjohn as Shahna in “The Gamesters of Triskelion”.

  16. David

    Firefly/Serenity for ever!

    (Can’t stop the signal)

  17. Kevalin

    Star Wars has Ewoks (meh)

    Wait… wasn’t she called “10 of 10″?
    At least, that’s what a number of my male friends called her.

  18. Damino

    This in my mind really depends on how long ago “A long long time ago” is and how far away “In a galaxy far far away” is.

    I’d have my money on Star Wars in a fight, but that’s only because all the technology created in Star Wars is designed for war, where the majority of the vessels in Star Trek are designed for science and exploration.

    At the end of the day if the Q was involved there wouldn’t even be a battle, just a lot of shenanigans.

    Really the only question that need be asked is Voyager Crew against the Next Gen Crew. Janeway against Piccard. 7 or 9 against Data. Warf against Tuvok.

  19. TK

    The hangup is that both sets of numbers are wholly ‘informed attributes’ that don’t generally mesh with anything seen on screen- though insofar as Trek actually had a science adviser walk through the room on occasion, and maybe glance at those paperback technical manuals those numbers were derived from, it at least hangs together better-by a hair.

    If TIE fighters can manage 2,500g (and assuming that they have magical anti-inertia fields that prevent their pilots from being rendered into hamburger when they hit the gas- that’s about the acceleration received by a golf ball off the tee,) then any human fire control, Jedi-prescience-enhanced or otherwise, is straight up useless- and we have pivotal scenes of people aiming gun turrets and doing stick-and-rudder flying mixed with insinuations that droids and computers really aren’t too good at this sort of thing, and in general replicating the Battle of Midway in space- which naturally looks fantastic and fun but makes minimal sense.

    Those same goofy manuals also state that TIE fighters are unshielded and made of titanium, which means that as those WWII distances, hanging around 190 megaton blasts traded by fighters, let alone enormous Star Destroyers, would result in said winged titanium spheres being impulse killed as their surface ablated away explosively and cracked them like eggs. And the Death Star certainly makes a big boom (a boom that would necessitate energies on the order of annihilating a few cubic *miles* of antimatter) but that doesn’t exactly address why the Imperial military went through the trouble and expense of constructing Death Stars (and they must have been expensive, since a million-planet civilization only built two) that devote the overwhelming majority of their firepower to vaporizing the thousands of miles of uninhabited rock underneath any suspected Rebel base-nor, for that matter, what Dyson spheres the Empire is using to charge them up. And the population of Coruscant alone should be higher than that population figure for the whole Empire, if you take a second to do the back-of-the-envelope math.

    It’s almost as if the visuals were constructed first and foremost as homages to Buck Rogers serials and WWII flying movies, and the numbers were cooked up by the innumerate authors of children’s books…:-)

    Not that Star Trek necessarily does a whole heck of a lot better. There’s a moment where the power output of the Enterprise at rest is a figure that would necessitate radiating away enough energy to incinerate the planet below- and consume several ship’s-masses of antimatter every few hours to stoke the fires. Ships with sensors that can reach out light-minutes have their duels at what amounts to musket range, so they can be pretty in the same frame. There are a few moments where starship really haul and seems to accelerate at tens or perhaps hundreds of gees, but they still manage to move rather languidly in other situations where that kind of pep might be useful. No one seems terribly bothered by the concussive cloud of meat gas that would result from vaporizing a human being (which is probably why we stop seeing phasers completely vaporizing people…)

    Still, though, Trek hangs together a bit better in the technical department, for whatever it’s worth. Photon torpedoes are said on-screen to be antimatter missiles that can level cities at high yields, and everyone generally treats them as such- ships without shields are in serious danger of being toasted, and so forth. The creators made the phasers turrets into phaser phased arrays when TNG rolled around, because phased-array radars already ruled the technological roost for their ability to track fast moving targets. People do their flying by talking to computers. It all just hangs together a hair more coherently, because a smattering of science flavor mattered to their audience and the shape of their stories- though the Rule of Cool remained the highest in the land.