ISA: Why no Victory-based designs?

[Balance]

Another interesting idea would be to base a design off the idea that I've seen in a few sources that indicated that the Excalibur never received her Vorlon-based armor. Basically, take the existing Victory and cover it with a layer of Green Stuff and paint it like a White Star...

 

[tneva82]

Another interesting idea would be to base a design off the idea that I've seen in a few sources that indicated that the Excalibur never received her Vorlon-based armor.

It looks identical to victory and victory certainly had vorlon based armour(or something lot better than EA standard armour)...So if there was difference in armour(which I doubt) it wouldn't be visually different looking.

 

[Locutus9956]

Victory didnt have Vorlon adaptive hull armour, it was built after the Vorlons had left the galaxy and the ISA and Minbari did not have the know how to reproduce it (the same reason they couldnt build more whitestars).

What the Victory DID have was some kind of crystal refactive armour (most likely top end Minbari tech) that dissipates energy. In ACTA level of detail the effect is much the same as adaptive armour (though I wonder if perhaps a degree of shields using the new shield rules supposed to be in Version 2 and the Star Wars mod might work better? Or better yet thinking about, GEGs might be a MUCH closer aproximation to whats seen on the show...)

 

[tneva82]

Victory didnt have Vorlon adaptive hull armour, it was built after the Vorlons had left the galaxy and the ISA and Minbari did not have the know how to reproduce it (the same reason they couldnt build more whitestars).

Interesting. Where has this been mentioned?

Kind of makes new ISA additionals totally unbelievable...No new white stars=can't produce white star carrier, gunship, maybe even blue star(or is that one without it?), possibly white star fighter...

 

[Balance]

Kind of makes new ISA additionals totally unbelievable...No new white stars=can't produce white star carrier, gunship, maybe even blue star(or is that one without it?), possibly white star fighter...

The WS Fighter is canon... The novel "To Dream in the City of Sorrows" (Or something like that) had them as a test-bed for the White Stars that Sinclair briefly flew. Not one of my favorite bits of canon, but they're there, and that book has generally been confirmed as 'official..' (I think it's written by JMS' wife!)

As for the WS models, I can see some 'tweaks' depending on how the armor is grown. Mainly tweaking size, perhaps by modifying frameworks used to guide growth or similar. The WS Carrier is definitely an extreme example of this.

We know very little about the 'growth' of the armor, so it's difficult to make a definitive statement about it.

 

[Locutus9956]

Well the lack of ability to build new whitestars is based on 2 things:

1) AoG fluff. I've said this on numerous occasions but JMS SAID the AoG books were cannon.

2) In in the beginning or season 5 (I cant remember when exactly) one of Sheridans reasons for building the Victory is that 'sooner or later we are going to run out of whitestars' since they cant build any more without the Vorlons.

Incidentally this is one of the reason I hate the entire concept of the whitestar gunship, carrier, fighter, etc. I dont mind them building more in future, with time and research Im sure they could EVENTUALLY reverse engineer the Vorlon biotech to some extent (though to fully reproduce it would take quite a long time in terms of R&D I suspect even for the Minbari).

As for the Victory's energy absobing crystal hull armour its explained in 'A Call to Arms'

 

[tneva82]

2) In in the beginning or season 5 (I cant remember when exactly) one of Sheridans reasons for building the Victory is that 'sooner or later we are going to run out of whitestars' since they cant build any more without the Vorlons.

I don't think that's good enough reason alone...Afterall it could simply mean nobody is building more of them(shadow war over. Why would minbari's be in a hurry to build more ships designed for shadow war...). If nobody build ships and they get destroyed they are going to run out. It doesn't mean they wouldn't have ability to produce more of them.

Never mentioned inability to produce more of them. Just that they needed bigger ships to deal with bigger opponents.

 

[Locutus9956]

true enough but given that the victory DOESNT use said organic hull and the AoG fluff too its not an unreasonable assumption.

(The AoG fluff by the way DID have them produce more whitestars later but these later ones did not have a a fully functioning self repair system and less adaptive armour as they no longer had access to the full vorlon tech skin)

 

[locarno24]

Which might suggest that the White Star and White Star Class II statlines are the wrong way around......