Brom O'Berin wrote:Easy answer - Dahak planetoid, handsdown.
Dahak is a warship, designed to go against and destroy other warships of her own (or equivalent) class, with anti-ship weapons and shields to stop opponent weapons.
Death Star is a moving fortress, designed as a terror weapon to destroy planets (ie stationary targets) if necessary with its one & only "main gun". Recall when the Death Stars fought the two rebel fleets, the primary offensive weapons were their "parasitic" fighters and/or accompanying fleet of warcraft. DS defenses were short-ranged, and seemed mostly anti-fighter. The DS is very much akin to a lightly armored vessel, with a very unique big gun that is only usable in limited circumstances.
Where on earth did you come up with the idea of "mostly anti-fighter"?
Do recall how in the original movie, when rebel fighters came in, they had to use fighters because the guns were made to hit BIGGER TARGETS.
Official loadout of the DS 2,
30000 big guns, 7500 antifighter weapons.
That´s the firepower of about 150 ISD I per "side", if assumed that all guns can fire either one way or the opposite.
It´s nasty powerful against ships and specifically WEAK against fighters.
The supergun just means it can oneshot kill anything, beyond what it can do with normal guns.
The supergun is NOT the "main gun", THAT is the TERROR weapon.
And likewise, where the heck did you get "lightly armored" from? It has enough shields to barely bother with aknowledging regular hostile ships.
The rebels attacked the DS with fighters because even a FLEET of capital ships were considered fishfood level of opposition.
Add in a single "main weapon"
Where DO people get these weird ideas?
vs the ability to spit out THOUSANDS of missiles of almost the same power in almost any direction, and I don't think the Death Star would last more than a few seconds at best.
That assumes that Dahak´s missiles actually work against the DS. Missiles tend to be somewhat ineffective in the SW universe.
Still, when you talk about weapons capable of shattering a planet, you can at least come up with a reasonable estimate. Such weapons have to be in fairly similar ranges of power, unless you want to start assuming one fictional universe has much more dense planets than the other... which is ludicrous on the face of things, since we're talking about two universes supposedly inhabited by apparently standard humans with the same level of tolerance for gravity. If you do want to pretend that, it's pure handwavium and likely wishful-thinking bull crap. If you don't, then the general weapon power levels must be essentially very similar.
Hardly! Even looking at existing superweapons in various fiction, there is a wide range of ways how they work, and THAT determines what power level is needed.
And that´s the part where the DS gets kinda scary, because unlike many other planet killers, it´s just pure raw firepower in insane amounts.
Yet at Kano, Dahak lurched "like a broken-masted galleon" despite taking at least two hits (likely more, given that at last count 20 missiles made it through the close-in defenses) from a later generation of gravitonic warhead than his own stocks... plus several antimatter warheads (which aren't exactly powerless in their own right) at essentially the same time. Even with less focus, I would be highly surprised if three or four of those gravitonic weapons were not at least as much raw energy as the Death Star's superlaser. Add in the other ~15 antimatter weapons and it would take some serious handwavium to pretend otherwise. Yet Dahak survived all of that firepower, with nothing more than some superficial surface damage.
And the SW universe has antimatter as infantry weapons...
But generally not for antishipping with a few specialist exceptions. One reason being that antimatter warheads rarely get past the meteor shields, at all.
I´ll say this, the DS is extremely unlikely to hit with its supergun, but if a Dahak is hit by it, it´s bye-bye.
The massive amounts of "turbolaser" batteries will probably also be enough to make itself felt on a Dahak.
Then you add in that Dahak is obviously much more maneuverable, much faster firing, and with much greater range, and the only way I could see the Death Star winning would be by firing first when Dahak wasn't expecting to be fired on. Now I suppose if such a situation occurred and the Death Star's super-laser actually got a shot off on the original Dahak it might succeed in blasting through the shields (because of point-focus) and destroying him or at least so heavily damaging him that the rest of the fight would no longer be a mismatch. Dahak II would likely shrug it off and proceed to kick the Darth Sideous' butt without even taking a scratch.
You´re making lots of assumptions.
What actually makes me give the likely win to Dahak is the fact that it´s 30 times bigger, and built for fighting 1st rather than terror first fighting second.
I rather doubt it would be easy though, because all the bullshit aside about the death star not having antiship weapons beyond the stupergun, lots of the techs the Dahak use relies on concepts known in the SW universe, but not used because there they are too ineffective.
Dahak speed in normalspace along with its massive size advantage should definitely have it end up winning however.
But if the DS supergun hits, it´s game over, end of story.
Hyper missiles would ignore the Death Star shields, and could well pop up inside the Death Star's hull
Right, because noone in the SW universe would ever have tried that already?
Same with Dahak's beam weapons - the Utu-class Dahak's beam weapons were stated to shatter molecular bonds; the weapons of the Asgerds and Trosans of the Empire were even more dangerous, shattering atomic bindings, inducing instant fission. Neither of those happen to be direct energy weapons along the lines of Star Wars weaponry.
Indeed, despite the fact that such weapons exist in the SW universe, ships do not use them.
Also, given how close it looks to Alderaan (and to Yavin IV when it prepares to fire) the range must be far less - yes, I know the original post asked about DSII, but we never saw it blow up a planet, so... Dahak can fire from dozens of light-minutes away, at which distance a planet would be only a point of light - no visible disk.
That´s movie reasoning. If there´s a Dahak movie made, do you really think they wouldn´t pull the same stuff there?
