Capsuleers vs. The Empire
So I recently went back and read through the Star Trek vs Star Wars discussions on stardestroyer.net, and I got to thinking about Star Wars vs Eve Online.
Did some searches, and while apparently the question has been brought up by others before, I don't see any serious discussion of the matter. So...just sort of thinking out loud here, but...
Ship Size
If we check a
size chart, with the exception of the Death Star, Eve capital ships
definitely larger than Imperial Star destroyers. For example, the 19km length of a Super Star Destroyer is slightly longer than the 18.144km length of the Minmatar Titan, compare widths. The Star Destroyer is relatively flat, with some Eve Titans being two to two and a half times thicker.
And while any discussion of this topic will eventually lead to the Death Star which is depending on your source is either in the 120-160km range or as wide as 900km. As described
here first generation titans like the Imud Habrau and the Soltueur were so large that construction of two of them required that an entire mineral-rich world be stripped bare of resources simply for construction material. It was simply deemed not cost-effective to build ships so large. I've yet to find any exact dimensions listed, but "all metal on a planet divided by two" seems like it would build somethign rather large.
Related, how big are Eve stations? Because by zooming out, it looks to me like joe-average corporation in the Eve galaxy is capable of building stations roughly an eight to a tenth the diameter of the moons they orbit, and there are
thousands of these stations. In fact they're built so big that stations offer complimentary cargo bay storage up to
one million cubic meters to any traveller just as casually as a public restroom or water fountain.
Some number crunching would be needed, but it's possible that Eve wins on the scale of construction technology. Even if we don't, I'm pretty sure we're comparable.
Empire size
According to Grand Moff Tarken in episode IV, the empire controls "a million worlds." That's obviously bigger than Eve, but according to a quick search, there are
66,869 planets in Eve, of which 44,364 of which can be considered habitable. So, Star Wars wins there by a factor of 15 to 22 to one. But what exactly constitutes a world? For example, or the 5000 inhabited realspace star systems in Eve, how many moons are there? I've seen individual systems with as many as 90 moons, and a large portion of moons are being used for mining operations.
In any case, it looks like the empire is probably bigger in terms of sphere of control. Possibly by a significant degree.
....but then again, not necessarily. For example, Endor from return of the Jedi was a moon. It had an imperial base on it, even though it didn't appear to be highly populated by humans. Would Tarkin have counted that in his million figure? Because if moons count simply by virtue of the fact that they have facilities constructed on them...Eve moons are
most definitely used for mining operation, so we might be able multiple the size of Eve's sphere of control by a large amount. We'd need numbers for moons though, I'm having difficulty finding that.
Ship speed
At first glance it looks like the Empire wins here. But I'm not sure they do. A standard shuttle craft in Eve goes 6 AU/sec. That's 3000c. An interceptor goes 13.5 AU/sec. That's 6750c. These speeds re very slow by Star Wars standards. But...these speeds are purely for
intra-stellar travel. Some searching...and the maximum range for an Eve jumpgate appears to be 5 lightyears. And that trip takes roughly ten seconds.
That works out to 15,768,000c, which is totally on par with Star Wars speeds.
And, gates are not the only sources of jump technology. Even if jumpgates are somehow destroyed, every titan, every carrier, every dreadnought...even sub-capital black ops battleships have jump drives that are also capable of jumping. Plus, jumpclones can be used for instantaneous travel even from extreme opposite ends of the galaxy.
I think that Star Wars does
not have a huge advantage here.
Weapons
This is complicated. But, first I'd like to note that, as described on the turbolasers page on stardestroyers.net, Star Wars turbolasers do
not propagate at light speed, whereas most Eve weapons
do. With the exception of missiles, most Eve weaponry is
faster than Star Wars weaponry.
But how powerful are Eve weapons? Somebody would need to do some math here. Just at a glance, I get extremely different results depending on how I compute it. For example, you could conceivably claim that since an Eve
Mega Beam laser consumes 52 gigajoules per shot, that 52gj is an upper limit to its per-shot output, which is utterly insignificant in comparison to Star Wars guns.
But, those Star Wars guns analysis' in the trillions of gj are all computed by estimating the energy cost to convert asteroids to gaseous vapor, based on scenes in the movie, because they assume since there is no visible debris clearly the asteroid was vaporized. Well, there's no debris when I blow up large collidable structure in Eve either.
We could do the same, by taking one of those multi-kilometer-wide collidable structures from a mission and compute how much energy it takes to vaporize that many thousands of tons of metal and diving it by the number of shots.
I'm not prepared to do that math...but I suspect that if we use the same methods that stardestroyers.net does, we might get similar results.
Fleet Size
Pretty sure Eve wins this. Figure I see being tossed around for the Imperial fleet is
25,000 Imperial Star Destroyers. That's nothing. Eve typically has over 30,000 players online at any given moment. Check the ship sizes. Standard imperial star destroyers are a similar size as Eve battleships, which we
don't even consider to be capital ships. And how many battleships does the average player have? Personally, I've had as many as two at a time. And Eve has half a million players. Even if they they only average one battleship each, that's
twenty times the size of the Empire's star destroyer fleet.
Ok, but what about the big ones? The
super star destroyers? According to
this only "over 20" executor class star destroyers were built. Those are the big 19km long ones. How many Titans are in Eve? According to
this there were 164 Titans of as 2010. We have, any any given moment, 8 times as many supercapitals as the Empire has built, ever.
We've so got this.
Production capacity
I'm pretty sure Eve completely slaughters Star Wars here. What is it, four hours to build a battleship? The average station has what, 50 production slots? And there are
5168 npc-owned stations, plus whatever exists in nullsec? So...highsec alone could potentially build 1.5 MILLION battleships per day?
In
one day, highsec alone could produce
sixty times the entire Imperial fleet.
Even if we take the massively inflated 900km diameter estimate for Death Star 2 from
stardestroyers.net industry page, DS2 was 60% finished in six months...doing the math...that works out to roughly the construction capacity of 142,857 star destroyers in six months. ISD's and Eve battleships are similar order of magnitude of size, though without actually doing the math, ours appear to have greater volume since they're not flat like ISD's, and yet even so...what they can do in six months...we can do
ten times that every single day.
Again...we've
so got this.
Special tech
We have capsuleer immortality. If they somehow manage to destroy our 30,000 players online, they all instantly transfer their consciousnous to a station where they keep their ships. If the Empire loses a star destroyer, how long does it take to deploy a new one? Me, if my ship gets blown up, I can be in a new one and ready to fight in under a minute. Last I checked it only takes about 45 minutes to get from the galactic core to the extreme edge of nullsec. It's highly likely that ships lost on our side in a given battle would be replaced by new ships piloted by the same people.
We have AoE weapons. Sure, star destroyers field more fighters than our carriers do, but how many smartbomb hits can a tie fighter take? Again, we'd need math of weapon output, but if 2-3 ships can cycle their pulse weapons and completely clear the field, what can they do to stop it?
We have teleportation. Jump clones and jump portals.
Webifiers. Sure, both the Empire and Eve have interdiction and tractor beams to prevent ships escaping, but we have the ability to target their fast-moving hard-to-hit fighters and slow them to a crawl to bring heavy guns to bear.
Conclusion
Somebody would need to do the weapon and shield math, but I think Eve could totally mop up the Empire.
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Topic: Eve Online (Read 274344 times)