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[mainiac]

Because you get a level of control with fighter bomber you don't get with nukes. The Death Star sole purpose is to blow up planets. If a KKV could do it at a fraction of the cost they'd use that. In a world with KKV, the Death Star would be the equivalent of designing an gigantic airship that can litterally drop a million tons of TNT on your target so you get the effect of a nuke without a nuke.

A death star might actually be more cost effective then a KKV.

[Amperzand]

Very true. Once built, instead of losing a starship every time it fires, you just use some generic starship fuel. Spacecraft RKKVs are basically kamikazes: Effective, but dubious in a number of ways.

[mainiac]

I think they are less like kamikazee and more like ammunition.  Comparing the Death Star to a KKV is like comparing an M1 tank to a M829 shell.  Looking at the shell doesn't tell you a whole lot about the actual cost of the system since most of the cost is in getting that shell going fast in the right direction and the supply lines to do that.

[Amperzand]

Well, you can build KKVs that are just ammunition, torpedos in effect, but just taking scrapyard spacecraft and throwing them at the foe under automated control is very kamikaze-esque.

[Sergarr]

I seem to remember from Star Wars Expanded Universe that most planets in Star Wars are supposed to have some kind of shields that usually prevent anything too high-velocity (like a RKKV) from destroying it, and that Death Star is unique and special because it pierces these shields by using exotic hyperspace effects.

But that's no longer canon since Disney took over, so

[mainiac]

Well, you can build KKVs that are just ammunition, torpedos in effect, but just taking scrapyard spacecraft and throwing them at the foe under automated control is very kamikaze-esque.

Once again, the difficulty is not in acquiring the mass.  The difficulty is in accelerating it to a speed close to 1c (which no starship in either cannon does) and aiming it.  To do that you would need some sort of giant mass accelerating weapon... like a massive star station. This is a bit like someone talking about a super advanced advanced battery and you pull out your pocket change and say "hey dont worry, I have a variety of metals right here".

[Amperzand]

It very much looks to me as if various fighters and craft in at least Star Wars have engines that mess with their realspace velocity and don't need much fuel. That gives you near-c capabilities. If they don't have that, then my point is fairly meaningless, but it looks as if they do.

[Culise]

Star Trek does, too (the impulse engines are basically sufficiently advanced deuterium fusion rockets), though I wouldn't be surprised if they did use low-level warp fields to reduce their inertial mass even at sublight speeds given on-screen non-Newtonian behaviour.  We also know that Star Trek routinely utilizes shielding technology sufficient to deflect anything from micrometeroids to asteroids even on wee little shuttles while moving at superluminal velocities; basically, anything with a warp drive has to mount a navigational deflector of some scale to prevent it from getting shredded.  It wouldn't take much speculation to extrapolate outwards to much more powerful deflector/tractor beam systems utilized as meteor defense networks, given the lack of observed kinetic WMDs in that universe. 

Honestly, I suspect another stopping point for KKVs as WMDs in either 'verse is FTL sensor technology.  One of the advantages of an RKV is that it travels at a velocity rather close to the speed of information; by the time you see it and process that information, you've been hit.  The Killing Star works in large part because humanity never sees its death coming.  If you can see outward and process data taken in from a sphere at least ten light-years radius in a matter of seconds with the sensors and computers aboard a single starship, you'll be able to identify incoming projectiles fairly quickly and place countermeasures in effect for once those projectiles actually arrive.

[mainiac]

It very much looks to me as if various fighters and craft in at least Star Wars have engines that mess with their realspace velocity and don't need much fuel. That gives you near-c capabilities. If they don't have that, then my point is fairly meaningless, but it looks as if they do.

If they were increasing their kinetic energy they would have inertia when they turned.  That energy would need to go somewhere.

[NRDL]

Okay, for another Sci Fi faction, how about the Daleks from Doctor Who?  How would they do against any of the forces presented in Star Wars and Star Trek?

[Culise]

Hmmm, you know, it occurs to me that I've never seen all that many stairs on Federation starships.  I don't think they'd be able to handle a proper Dalek outbreak.

[mainiac]

Star Trek has ladders but the Daleks strike me as a pretty dangerous foe with the time travel.  Hard to say how the Federation would respond because it's time travel and all.  The Federation of the 22nd to 24th centuries shies away from weaponizing time travel but the Federation of the 31st century seems to have an active interest in defending against time travel.  But we dont know very much about the 31st century federation. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'd say Dalek Empire and Temporal Federation are about evenly matched, given that both seem to have the ability and willingness to tie knots of time around their enemies. However, the Daleks have a major experience advantage and at least a minor motivational advantage. They don't have perfect time war capability and so it's possible the Temporal Federation could defeat them or become one with them leading to the creation of the Borg,

Star Wars is massively, but not completely fucked. While time travel negates almost all other weapon advantages Star Wars is definitely closer to the Dalek's conventional power level. The fucked part comes in when there's very little time manipulation in SW. The exception is that force users seem to have almost universal limited precog, which eliminates some but not all time attacks (can't pop out of an air vent and shoot you, can still go back and glass your homeworld before you're born). The most likely path for a SW victory is if the threat of the Daleks is enough to bring out the Force's direct intervention. As a universal energy field that can mess with time, if the Force is pushed to direct action the Daleks don't have a chance in hell.

[Sheb]

And what about the Imperium of Man vs. Star Trek?

[Sergarr]

Imperium of Man loses horribly, due to their insanely slow reaction times, massively fractured military with constant infighting, and zero technological advancement.