Some fan arguments end with “because I like this one better.”
Michael Wong brought mechanical engineering to the fight.
The site opens as an Imperial military recruitment pitch before admitting what it really is: a long-running attempt to compare Star Wars and Star Trek military hardware as rigorously as the source material allows.
Wong says the site was born on August 1, 1998.
Treat the fictional evidence like evidence
The archive is organized around questions that Internet fandom still fights about today: what counts as canon, how evidence should be analyzed, what sources can be trusted, and how far a numerical estimate can reasonably be pushed.
Wong’s engineering background shapes the whole site.
Instead of stopping at screenshots and quotations, he works through weapon effects, ship capabilities, energy estimates, materials, tactics, and other technical questions. He also states the limitation clearly: these are back-of-the-envelope calculations based on fictional observations, not laboratory measurements.
That caveat matters.
A calculation showing one fictional weapon as 50 percent stronger than another may be too imprecise to mean much. A hundredfold difference is a different story. That is a surprisingly sensible epistemology for a website whose front page is trying to recruit you into the Galactic Empire.
The technical notes are equally useful as web history.
The original pages were written in Netscape Composer. Later editing happened in tools including OpenOffice, kwrite, vi, cooledit, and WordPad. Image work moved through scanners, DVD capture, and GIMP. Wong even notes that the site works, with varying success, in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, Mosaic, and Lynx.
That is an entire era of browser culture preserved in the maintenance notes of a fandom argument.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes specialist fan sites because they often contain far more original analysis than the phrase “fan page” suggests.
This one built an engineering department for a war that never happened.
And then documented the browser support.