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A Star Wars vs Star Trek website started in 1998 by a Canadian engineer named Michael Wong. Compares the strengths and weaknesses of both franchises, examining them with real science. The site has been inactive for over a decade, to the point that Star Trek Nemesis (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005) are still marked as new movies, but the forum remains active.
Probably best know for Star Wars vs Star Trek crossovers Conquest and Star Crossed. Once hosted The Unity Saga before the story moved to its own site, though The Unity Saga was very forged from the same mould as Conquest and Star Crossed.
Tropes used in StarDestroyer.Net include:
- Adaptational Badass: Any SW fan will fully admit that the Galactic Empire is a textbook example of Stupid Evil, populated by General Failures who can't use their engines of war effectively, citing how quickly they were brought down by a rebellion that they realistically should have been able to crush in short order. In SD.Net's works, the Empire is a Lawful Evil No-Nonsense Nemesis who can steamroll anyone in their path.
- Adaptational Heroism: Taking inspiration from Timothy Zahn's works in Star Wars Legends, the Galactic Empire in SD.Net's works is more of a Bread and Circuses/Space Romans state rather than the "A Nazi by Any Other Name" state that it's shown to be in the Original Trilogy.
- All Crimes Are Equal: Wong's approach to all his arguments against the Federation and its societal flaws. In his mind, the Federation having evolved beyond television is just as bad as them employing a morally ambiguous medical doctor.
- Anti-Protagonist Morality: Any post about Star Trek will operate on this, automatically assuming the worst intentions about the United Federation of Planets' altruistic actions. It's almost Evil Cannot Comprehend Good.
- Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: If SD.net had its way, society would do away with such notions as tolerance and prosperity for all. Society would instead be a Faux Affably Evil fascist regime.
- Caustic Critic: Most of the posters. There's even a whole page dedicated to hate mail from people that the site pissed off.
- Cavemen vs. Astronauts Debate: Who would win in a fight between the Enterprise and a Star Destroyer? That would be the Star Destroyer of course.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Shroom Man777, label: FUCKIN' DICK STABBER. Location: Bleeding breasts and stabbing dicks since 2003. Alternates between making perfect (if frenzied) sense and utter lunacy with little to no middle ground.
- Critical Research Failure:
- In a post analyzing the episode "I, Borg", Wong notes that Starfleet officers are terrible soldiers. Seemingly missing the many times across the franchise where it's made clear that the rank and file Starfleet officers like Picard are not soldiers. They're more akin to the Red Cross or a Coast Guard than anything else.
- Another talking point is Wong panicking about their being no personal ships in Starfleet as proof that the state owns everything. But Starfleet is a state entity, all of its ships are naturally owned by the government. There are many personal crafts in Star Trek but thinking they would serve in Starfleet is like excepting a private citizen's vehicle to serve in a military convoy.
- One of Wong's arguments about how the Federation is evil is how they exiled Tasha's homeworld of Turkana IV when it descended into civil war, arguing that the reason no Federation planets have any strife is because they revoke the membership of any world that has any. The only problem with this argument? Turkana IV was never a member of the Federation. It had relations with the Federation that it severed when it fell to war but it never joined. This was mentioned in the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
- Deconstruction: The site's mission was to poke holes in the premise of the United Federation of Planets being utopia. Mike Wong also wrote at length about how the small towns he's lived in are not the idyllic paradises the movies portray them as.
- Everyone Has Standards: The one time that Mike Wong came to the defence, relatively speaking, of Star Trek was when a Christian guest poster took offence to Trek's hardline atheism, particularly that the Starfleet crews always treat the Physical Gods, Eldritch Abominations and Negative Space Wedgies as problems to solve and demystify rather than miracles perpetuated by a higher power. As Wong pointed out, that mindset is the scientific method, which is how societies evolve and advance.
- Humans Are Bastards: Mike Wong's belief and why he seems unable to wrap his head around Star Trek's utopian view of the future and that humans might one day rise above their base instincts.
- Hypocrite:
- When discussing the superweapons of Star Trek, the site deconstructs every Hand Wave to show why said weapons don't make any sense. When discussing the superweapons of Star Wars, they trust the Hand Wave.
- Wong refuses to take into account any of Star Trek's various one-off Forgotten Superweapons and Forgotten Phlebotinums during SD.Net's analyses, arguing, not without merit, that since such tech wasn't used in the Federation's later conflicts, it shouldn't count as being part of their arsenal. But when it comes to all the one-off weapons of Star Wars, it's fine to count those among the Empire's arsenal. It also limited Star Trek to what the Federation had in the aftermath of the Dominion War but used a Fanon version of the Empire of what the Empire could have been had an Ass Pull resulted in their victory.
- Wong also has a fixation on a moment in the first season TNG episode "The Neutral Zone" where Data says that television is dead, Wong citing it as part of Star Trek's "cultural snobbery". A moment that's largely been reduced to Early Installment Weirdness and retconned to mean that TVs themselves no longer exist. The Interface is the successor where programs are now broadcast. Yet Wong, despite accusing Trekkies of doing so, resolutely sticks to the outlier moment that proves his point.
- Wong dislikes religion, his wife's parents having tried to pull a Parental Marriage Veto as he wasn't of their faith. Yet he chides the United Federation for being an atheist society, giving praise for their being a chapel in "Balance of Terror" on the original Enterprise but hating on the Enterprise-D for lacking such a room in "Data's Day".
- Moral Myopia:
- More or less how the site operated. If it's red-blooded humans doing it, it's fine. One post had the site defending the humans' genocidal and colonial actions in Avatar, noting that they needed Pandora's rich resources to repair the damage humanity had done to Earth yet, in the same post, denounces the Martians from The War of the Worlds, whose world died for environmental reasons beyond their control, for invading Earth.
- Much of their debates about the Federation and the Empire feature the argument that the Federation, even in a Necessarily Evil context, committing X is unforgivable and, despite it keeping the peace in its galaxy, it should be dismantled immediately. But when the Empire has committed X, largely For the Evulz, let's hit pause before dismantling it. After all, the Empire keeps the peace in its galaxy.
- No True Scotsman: Just look at some of the entries on this page.
- Original Position Fallacy:
- A lot of posts have this problem. The staff always assumes that if Star Wars were to meet another property, it would be doing so from the flagship of an Imperial fleet and have dozens of Star Destroyers to call on. A few comments on fictional match-ups note that if an average individual who lived in Star Wars' Ungovernable Galaxy made it to anywhere that wasn't a Crapsack World, they might want to stay; an idea that even Luke, Han and Leia have toyed with in comics.
- In Mike Wong's post alleging racism and white supremacy in Star Trek, he calls out the franchise's reliance on Half-Human Hybrids feeling torn between both sides of their heritage, noting that since his Asian/Caucasian children don't feel such a conflict, it's unrealistic to portray mixed race children as such. Sadly though, many mixed race children very much do feel that.
- Parental Marriage Veto: Happened to Wong. Part of the reason he dislikes religion. Ironically the Federation being atheist is another reason why he dislikes it.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: Star Wars vs. Star Trek posts usually operated on this principle. For example, in a post examining racist stereotypes in both franchises, Mike Wong defended The Phantom Menace's depiction of Gungans and Neimoidians, alleged black and Asian stereotypes respectively, by pointing out that their alien appearance and society made it so that he didn't project human values onto them and opining that most of the allegations came from society's subconscious and/or Political Correctness Gone Mad. But when it comes to Star Trek's, admittedly heavy-handed, proclamations that one has to take Blue and Orange Morality into account when dealing with alien cultures, Wong loses it, even somehow rationalizing one of Star Trek: The Next Generation's Very Special Episode about this, "Ethics", as saying that Riker was offended that Worf hadn't been completely culturally assimilated.
- Values Resonance: It operated on this. Most of its posts about the culture of Star Trek: The Next Generation are saying that 20th century Western culture was fine and being unable to comprehend that the 24th century would have had some cultural evolution, the posters being very much unable to grasp that humans might one day move beyond capitalism.