[quote=Willy Vereb]
Imperium's firepower and weapons are pretty much medium grade in their setting.They go for quantity over quality.Their only special feature is the tachyon beam weapons and those are only broken against low tier/hard SF type defenses.Otherwise the only difference is that the beams reach a certain place faster than light. Which is actually pretty common in space operas if you take attention to the details.Anyways, if somebody doesn't want to deal with the Empire they just don't need to be in their neighborhood.The Empire's method of faster than light travel is similar to the Alcubierre Drive which warps space thus allowing an STL vessel to seemingly reach superluminal speeds.Even with that they're fairly slow, traveling roughly a few lightyears a day.This means via their standard drives to reach a civilization on the other part of the galaxy they'd need to travel for centuries.Really, getting scared because a large NPC civilization is actually strong?This game isn't just about space battles or duking it out with another race.You have to actually use your brain. Or jut go with the flow and enjoy governing your space civ.EDIT: Are you perhaps referring to the part where I mention imperial soldiers wear powered armors that can protect against less advanced weapons?Really?That's pretty much just how the advance of technology works. Their armor can protect against primitive firearms and less powerful energy weapons because otherwise they wouldn't be wearing it. A well-placed shot from advanced infantry weapons like phasers, blasters, railguns or whatever would take them out because there's no reason to design a weapon which cannot threaten an armor with comparable tech level.Seriously I don't know what's your deal here.
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Firearm technology doesn't suddenly stop evolving just because lasers or railguns come on the scene. In actuality--and this is going to deal with some serious real-world physics here--a railgun doesn't exactly scale down well because of power requirements and general inefficiency (firing the equivalent of a full-powered .50BMG cartridge using a railgun would require approximately 20,000 watts of power, which suffice to see is pretty ridiculous when you're trying to fire hundreds of rounds like this per minute at hyper-velocity speeds). You could handwave everything and claim that you're using marshmallow-sized nuclear reactors to power your weapon, but if you're at the stage where you can cram fusion or fission reactors into that petite of a size, then you're pretty much well beyond petty space naval engagements. At this point, you're busting planets. With extreme impunity.

With caseless ammunition using highly volatile superformance propellants and some sort of special rocket-assisted bullet (like a miniaturized HEAP/gyrojet hybrid round), you pretty much have a direct analog to a railgun. 

I'm going to ignore phasers and blasters. Those two weapons are pretty much made-up inventions native to science fiction that were created solely to function as high-tech and futuristic replacements for customary infantry arms because their creators thought that they looked cool and would wow the audience. 

But all of the above nonsense is besides the point. This is a Space Opera, so that stuff doesn't really matter, but it really bums me out that I have to use tachyon beam weapons to avoid being instanta-conquered by one of several war junkies lurking about on RPG.

[quote=Seiryu]
You honestly have no clue what ST is really capable of if you think thishttp://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Red_mattercase in point
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ST is pretty low on the sci-fi power scale. Warhammer 40k, Culture 'verse, Halo (Forerunners and Ancient Humanity), Xeelee 'verse, Star Wars (especially Star Wars) and old school BSG pretty much trash it in every category.