the only weapons fire that the Shadow Omegas use is a sustained blue beam from all of the weapons turrets that it swings around exactly like the Shadow slicer beams.
Or exactly like Minbari green beams. Or even like some red laser beams.
In addition, when it touches a Whitestar with no visible damage the ship, special Minbari-Vorlon armor and all, immediately explodes.
Yup. Explodes, just like a WhiteStar does when hit by a Heavy Laser in "No surrender, No retreat" - only then enough of it remains to crash into an Omega.
But it never does cut Anything in half - as a slicer seems to do whenever given half a chance (remember how the narn ships looked after being hit with slicer beams).
With the sole exception of being blue instead of purple, the beam looks (has the same pattern in the beam)
Actually the "bright core and surrounding nebulous effect" pattern is rather common to many B5 show beams - the only thing where the Shadow beam is truly different is that it is a bit more different in color then the others which use two rather similar colors...
and acts exactly the same as a Shadow battlecrab's slicer beam while having similar relative power (rough guess based on the immediacy of the Whitestar's destruction).
Not so - a heavy laser also did enough damage to cripple a WhiteStar, so I wouldn't say a "blue beam" needs truly ancient level damage - Minbari level seemes enough.
Look at what you're writing right there - you say a ShadOmega has twice to four times the firepower of a true Shadow Battlecrab!!
I guess I fail to see why calling them light molecular slicers was a poor choice. Heck, I'm not sure what else they could have called them.
Poor choice because it set a bad precedent.
Also, if you look at the B5W stats, LMSB's can fire every turn, while the big blue beams of the ShadOmega obviously need some recharge time - just like common laser cannons.
As for the powering of ancient weaponry, well, frankly, power is power. Maybe a EA reactor couldn't power a full slicer; I see no reason why they couldn't power a smaller, weaker version of the same technology.
Not really. Oh, maybe a big EA reactor could power One tiny little slicer beam, but not more. You see, even ancients must follow the laws of nature (though they do get to play with technology that can bend them slightly), and a weapon that puts out a big boom needs to power that destructive force somehow; and the bigger it's punch the more power it'll eat.
And we have a plot in crusade telling us the whole power of the gigantic Excalibur for a whole minute is needed to recharge an Vorlon gun for a single shot. Now, even if we assume that this vorlon gun is a bit bigger and more power hungry than a LMSB, it still makes little sense that an common EA reactor could power multiple slicers at all. Of course, there would have been a way around this - AoG could have declared Shadow guns to have their own internal shadowtech power supply (and would have been backed up by a line of text from "infection"), but since they choose to do the Shadows with an reactor system and power distribution like all other races in their game, giving the ancient weapons a power stat just like others, well...
And why wouldn't the Shadows give Clarke a good level of tech? It looks like they were setting up Humanity to be their next servant race, alongside the Drakh.
Sure, maybe. But not at first - they wouldn't give them their best toys before they proved their dedication - or do you think the Shadows are stupid??
And from the flashbacks in Crusade it would seem they later gave the humans even more tech to play with (even though they just didn't manage to make it work properly). I have no problem with the purple beam from the ShadowHybrid to be a MSB, as it for one displayed more destructive power then a normal younger race beam (vaporizing not a small medium class ship like a WhiteStar but a full Omega destroyer in one shot) and for another it Was shadow-purple.
But I have a problem with people making blue beams into slicer beams. Because when you have only screen evidence to go by, it makes sense to go by it. And since there's only three things that screen evidence can tell you (type of damage - beam, pulse, blast, etc.; color of energy - red, green, blue, purple, etc.; and effect - scorched paint, explosion, ship vaporized or cun in half, etc.) I dislike it when two beams that are a completely dfifferent color are made "brothers" in technology. Cousins I have no problem with - hence my calling them "Multiphased Beams" and assuming that was the weapon system the Shadows used in their infancy, later developing the "Molecular Slicer Beam" and "Multiphased Cutter" from it... I also have no problem with these beams being powerful - Minbari green beams should also be powerful IMO (more powerful then in B5W, one of the changes I like in Mongoose's stuff); and I'd have no problem with the ShadOmega big blue beams being even a bit more powerful then Minbari big green beams.
Frankly, if you want to be a strict canonist about it, one could make the point to simply have made it a standard Shadow slicer beam. After all, it cuts through Whitestars like the proverbial hot knife through butter. I'd asume that they hedged a bit and made it a light slicer to prevent some of the howls about giving EF full Shadow Technology.
Hell, after your reasoning almost everyone shoudl have slicer beams! Look at the many other things that can cut through a poor little WhiteStar like butter? Do the Centauri ships that shoot the one carrying Delenn to pieces in hyperspace also have ancient-level weaponry? Do the raiders that wreck the one coming to tell the IA about the Enphili? Do the Minbari who can fire a green beam that can even (of the horror) cut off a Sharlin's tail fin?
Or do all those millenia extra tech development the Shadows had actually mean something, and could it be that their technology really is a bit more advanced then that of your common player character? I realize it must be a hard concept to wrap one's mind around if you are of the "whatta you want - beams are all the same anyway" school of throught...
Strict canonistic would have made it an powerful weapon, true, but not that powerful; and certainly not a true slicer beam because it Just Is Not Purple!
One of the biggest probs seem to be the actual Shadowsouled - never heard of them before and i cant help feeling that they were only put in as a bit of variety for Mongoose. Doesnt mean i dont like them, i happen to think that theyre really cool if used correctly (read Subtly) but ... well what do you think?
Same feeling here - and I don't like them. The Minbari are too often compared to elves for my liking anyway, so I felt a painful twist in my feeling when I saw someone giving them the equivalent of Drow...
Besides, I really dislike the "the Shadows are behind EVERYTHING" kind of thinking - it's so "children's animated TV show", where one and the same villain is behind every plot week after week after week... Oh, I love the idea of a clan of Minbari that split off rather then follow Valen's ways, but the rest... well, at least when I GM I can igore whatever I don't like from the sourcebooks, just as I did with other materials.
