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Tumblr post by arctic-hands:
When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly “Borg Cube”, but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.
So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said “Death Star”.
So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.
Reply from evilsoup:
An image depicting the story of the “Judgment of Solomon”, where Solomon is labelled “stargate fandom”, and the two women are labelled “star trek fandom” and “star wars fandom”. The Star Wars lady is standing grumpily with her hands on her hips, while the Star Trek woman gestures with open arms. Between the two of them, on the floor, is a baby in a wicker basket. Solomon sits over them in judgment.
Would the Death Star weapon be described as a laser weapon? Because IIRC canonically in the Trek universe, lasers are a very weak outdated weapons technology, easily blocked with modern shielding tech.
No, because they don’t behave like lasers (like, they don’t move at the speed of light). They’re more like massive, short lived light sabers, which are plasma within a forcefield.
Star Wars does make the laser / blaster bolt distinction like Star Trek makes the laser / phaser distinction.
But it also calls it the “main Death Star laser”. Which is probably just a holdover from before a lot of that got hammered out in the old EU and carried into the new Star Wars stuff. But would also require some retcon backflips to make it “not a laser”.
People use wrong terminology a lot, no reason to think people in the Star Wars galaxy are any different there.
For example, we have these powerful handheld computers we call ‘phones’ simply because they are the current generation of a technological line that began with actual phones.
So a beam weapon of any kind could very reasonably be called a laser even if it has been decades (or even longer) since the technology moved past that.
Oh that’s interesting. I didn’t realise SW made that distinction like ST does. When you say “hammered out in the old EU and carried into the new Star Wars”, is “new” referring to post-Menace, or post-Awakens? Because I don’t remember the prequels and Clone Wars incorporating a distinction between laser and blaster, but I may just be failing to remember it.
Mostly meant the current Disney canon, which IIRC is all the live action movies, and the shows/books/etc made after the Clone Wars cartoon.
I don’t think it shows up a lot, but every once in awhile one author or another will find out about it and use it as a plot point. The reference that comes to mind is one of the really old books (want to say Splinter of the Mind’s Eye?) making a distinction that the ‘ancient’ security droids they run across at one point use lasers. I think it comes up in some of the 90s games like Dark Forces too. Probably some comics. I think like “regular” guns (slugthrowers in SW) they’re mostly filed under “weird” weapons the occasional bad guy will use to try and counter lightsabers.
Don’t really know if it shows up in the Disney stuff. They’re pretty scattershot with what is/isn’t canon from the pre-Disney EU.
Just because it’s outdated doesn’t mean it can’t do damage if it’s big enough.
For example the Enterprise gets bodied by large asteroids all the time. That means a Starship can be damaged by someone throwing a rock at it- just scaled up to the extreme.
But massive brute force with an archaic weapon can still do a lot of damage… the whole question would be how much can it withstand? Before starting to fail.