Random bit of discussion,

[Abraxus]

I read the entry on Canadians and laughed...It was great...far off base, but great none the less. I think these guys did their best trying to give each nationality a few defining features....

But it was a laugh...I took it for what it was...a game mechanic slapped onto real life and then put into a game...

Abraxus

 

[Dag'Nabbit]

Considering that the Drakh (who were the major hand-servants of the Shadows) blamed the Earth for the loss of their masters so badly that they put into action a plan to kill the entire world I find it a bit unlikely that Shadow servants did much to help EF overall much. The whole point of the Drakh plague was that they wanted revenge on the EA.

Actually, the Drakh were planning on nuking Earth with the Deathcloud and then using the plague on Minbar. They had to use the plague against Earth when Sheridan et al nuked their Deathcloud.

 

[Anonymous]

OK i give up - i SPose the Cerberus was Gideons Ship? And the Shadow Hybrid? Where does this come from?

Please dont day Crusade - I have had so much difficulty getting holf of anything to do with that.

If no pics are available could some one pur up a decent description?

 

[ShadowScout]

OK, I can sense this is going to be one of those threads... :wink: :lol:

Well, the Green neutron beams from the Minbari ships are generally shown being static in direction or, in a few instances, seeming to track slightly (Sharlin's tail). They don't generally whip 100 degrees in 3 seconds. Not that they couldn't, we simply don't have evidence that they do. Certainly the same beams from the Whitestar noses don't track about.

Let's see... the big green beams seldo do a lot of whipping... but then the big blue beams also are rather static, it's the small blue beams that do those whip-around while trying (unsuccessfully IIRC - my video's are still boxed and S-4 isn't out on DVD yet...) to hit WhiteStars at visual range... However, the small green minbari beams Do whip around too - not as much as the blue beams of the ShadOmegas, but then the green minbari beams aren't turret-mounted as the ShadOmega's are...

Not exactly, since there's really no good way to determine relative power. We do see a complete vaporization of the Whitestar, we have not seen EF weapons commonly do that type of damage in one clean shot.

Agreed. But I never claimed the blue beam should be at EA strength... We do know an red EA laser can cripple a WhiteStar in one shot, blowing apart half the ship so it can conviniently crash into the firing Omega - so a firepower of roughly 150-200% of an EA H-Laser seems plausible, right? Soo, that'd be what, 120+12d10 to 160+16d10... a bit above minbari levels (NL - 150+5d10), yet no need for truly shadow-level firepower...

I guess I fail to see why it's a bad precedent. We have a ship, obviously heavily modified with Shadow-tech.

Not heavily. Lightly. It only has shadow-armor and some diffuser tendrils. It still has EA-style turrets firing it's beams, it has EA-style hangars and, according to AoG, EA style innards - sensors, C&C, Jump Engine, etc.
Why then should it get to fire MSB's?

We have what look like common EF weapons mounts firing beams that behave exactly like Shadow weapons with the exception of being a different color.

Not so. If you claim they "behave exactly like Shadow weapons", then that'd count for almost every beam weapon in the show.
Let's review the particulars of shadow MSB's in regard to the blue mystery beam...

- cut ships apart - nope
- are generated without visible firing port - nope
- are purple - nope
- make a "whorrrsh" sound when fired - nope
- can fire long, sustained beams - not that sustained
- can fire many shots without recharge period - only the little turrets
- can kill big ships with a single hit - no chance to see either way
- can kill small ships with a single hit - yup
- can shift their focus quickly - yup, but that counts for every turreted weapon
- do a lot of damage - yup

That'd be 4 no, four inconclusive and two yes. Not enough to make them brothers in my book...

We do know that there are shots of Shadow Omegas firing continuously from all of their weapons ports (couple of fly-bys) with shots that will single kill a Whitestar.

Not so - only their big guns can kill WhiteStars, the little ones which they fire continously are never seen to do any significant damage - and in the EA civil war Omegas are seen firing their little turrets continously too (with pretty much the same effect . missing the fast moving WhiteStars; so I'd say the Shadows didn't upgrade the tracking system)

But the main thing is that all we know seems to indicate that the Shady modifications are on the Outside only! No sensors, no jump engine, no anti-grav... just a coating of shadow bio-armor and some new guns (which aren't as shady, as they still use barrels to aim their shot, something the shadows don't do). So why should it have a shady reactor?

bit bigger? The gun is designed to take out fleets for heaven's sake.

Well... let's not go there. The very idea that humans should be able to build a gun bigger and more powerful then vorlons and shadows combined is just as wrong as the idea of ancient greek scholars improving the US space shuttle after one week of study.
However, a shadow MSB at full power should be almost as destructive then a vorlon lightning cannon (the vorlons may have an edge there, since I presume they spent more effort in building their ships, as they still pilot them personally, while the shadows seem to have embraced the "quantity over quality" way once they no longer had to risk their own hides...)

Perhaps also of importance is that the Shadow-Omegas may well have been built with actual Shadow help, certainly they don't seem to have built anymore once the Shadows left and the Warlock doesn't seem to have the same tracking blue beams. One can easily use that to argue that at least some of the tech on the Shadow Omegas was not reproducable. Makes a case that EF didn't fully understand what was on the ship, although that's pure supposition

Sorry - was there ever any dobt to that? I would rant even more if someone claimed the EA could figure out shadowtech after studying a few sampled for a decade or two. See the example above - scholars with the knowledge of ancient greece couldn't even begin to understand the basic principles behind a space shuttles fuel! And they'd need centuries before they could even begin to make sense of it's electronic systems. Same with EA and shadowtech, which is at least a million years farther in development (see thirdspace)

See, this is where I have trouble with the argument. The Cerebus was destroyed in 2258 (season 2) while the Technomages were fleeing. That means that EF had a fully-fledged Shadow prototype firing slicer beams TWO YEARS before we saw the Shadow Omegas. Obviously, either the Shadows were dumping technology on them very early or the humans were figuring it out awfully fast. In light of that, I find it hard to argue against EF having access to slicer beams in plenty of time to mount them on a Shadow Omega. Heck, they had two years to perfect and refine the design.

Actually here you have hit on a nice problem - if the EA had ShadowHybrids in testing as early as 2259, why had they nothing better then ShadOmegas in 2261? And the probable answer is... because the ShadowHybrids were too shady - the shadows took all of them when they left for the rim (remember, we know from canon sources they had a CPU-style control system; that's why the one could go insane and waste the Cerberus after all). However, since we have established that the ShadOmegas have normal human crews instead of shadow-CPU's (the radio contact), it follows that they were under control of Clarke and not the shadows, so they couldn't be withdrawn...
However, see above, the EA should not, could not have been able to build all that. Not on their own not even if someone taught them to. Soo - it seems logical that the mainfactuting was in shadow, or shadow minion hands all along; and they were doing a joint-venture with the EA in a quest to create a new breed of shadowship to surprise the Vorlons with... and when the project was canned for relocation beyond the rim, the shadows, or their minions in charge of the project took everything they could with them, and shut down the rest, leaving clarke with only his ShadOmegas as "ace in the hole".
And to answer the next question - the new ShadowHybrid that appeared in the unfilmed crusade scripts came from an reactivated shady shipyard as some might have read there - a shipyard that the shadows left lying around, and that these EA guys reactivated - most likely not on their own though, but with help from those mysterious shadow allies theorized about above (yees, I have been thinking about that a lot - for a campaign of mine where it happened just like that. Even built that shadow minion race... history and all... and my Daar'gon are a bit scarier then the Drakh!)

However, if we accept that it is a EF derived slicer beam than it's semantics. To me, it's like arguing that the Narn lasers shouldn't be called lasers becuase they're modified from the Centauri lasers that they started with. I think calling it a light beam makes an effective serparation from the standard slicer beams...

Not really.
First, Narn "Heavy Lasers" are modified from Centauri "Battle Lasers", and they Are Not called the same as you can see.
Same here - that's why I used the name "Multiphased Beams" - still a connection to shady weaponry, just not that strong a connection.
As for the "light" distinction... well, in "Into the Fire" we see a small (130 meters long according to the scale in "B5 security manual") Scout-type hull fire a purple beam. Unless you want that to be a full MSB like the one fired by the ca. 1000 meter cruiser you will need the "LMSB" designation for that one.

I could accept everything that has not "molecular slicer beam" in it's name. "Molecular Beam" - OK (though reminded me too much of the minbari Molecular Disruptor), "Multiphased Beam" - great (and that's why I did it); "Particle Slicer Beam" - acceptable (if a bit strange sounding, besides, it never really sliced anything); whatever, just not MSB.

However, we can either say that the EF came up with a new weapon that we've never seen before or since that just so happens to act the same as a Shadow Slicer weapon

...which it doesn't - see above...

and just so happens to be on a ship that incorporates Shadow Technology and just happens to come about 2 years after the same military was building Shadow knock-offs with accepted Shadow beams

...which they couldn't have - see above...

and just happens to come from a race that is in a serious alliance with the Shadows and take the straightforward approach that it is (just perhaps) some derivation of the weapon. Or we can discount all of that and say that it's the wrong color. Sorry, but the pro-slicer beam tally board seems to have a lot more data in it.

Not really.
The date points in directions, but just because the MSB also lives nearby it doesn't mean the blue beam is a MSB.
You are right that the blue beam certainly didn't seems to have come out of EA toy boxes. I'd agree that it most likely came gift-wrapped with an card signed "morden". But that doesn't mean it is an MSB. Not every plane the US sells it's allies is a Stealth Fighter, or is it? And that's just what I'm saying - not every weapon the shadows give out to their allies is a MSB; certainly they have guns that are millenai obsolete for them, yet still centuries ahead of everything the younger races have ever seen.

Note that AoG differentiated it from the typical Shadow weapon by calling it a light (hence less capable) version.

See above - it doesn't match up in logic once one sees LMSB's on true shadow vessels.

Incorrect, sorry. In the episode, only two times does the blue sustained beam hit a Whitestar, at 35:16 and 35:18 into the episode. Several times yellow pulse-style bolt hit Whitestars, you're probably thinking of the sequence at 34:27 to 34:29 where a Whitestar in the foreground takes several yellow pulse hits around the rear port-side of the hull. Actually, most of the impacts on Whitestars in the episode are from T-Bolts, at 33:48, 34:03, 34:14, and 34:06. We alo see a single Whitestar explode at 35:24 after it flies into a large explosion coming from the front of a destructing Shadow-Omega.

Incorrect, sorry. Or rather, misunderstood. What you cite is probably very correct, but He meant the "sweeping" blue beams from the little turrets - the ones that shoot a lot, but have no real effect. Of course, in the instances where we actually see a big blue eam strike a WS, it goes boom.

Two other things that may be of interest. One is that, suprisingly, the Shadow-Omega beams miss a lot. In fact, we see them sweeping all over the place and see a grand total of two actual impacts. To be blunt, their weapons may be powerful but their targetting sucks. Also, the average blue sustained beam lasts from 3-4 seconds before it fades out, in two instances the next beam fires from the same emplacement in just a hair under one second. Thus, recharge time is negligable for these weapons, at least the ones in the rotating emplacements on the top and botom of the hull.

Which beams - small or large? There is a difference, you know (well, maybe not in the CGI used - IIRC they look like bigger/smaller versoins of each other, but if now someone claims those small turrets are MSB's too I'm gonne get really mad... :wink: )

We also have a JMS penned short story about them where it is revealed that they have a lot of Shadow tech, so much so that the ship actually qualifies as alive.

Incorrect.
Read the story again...
The ship has only a little shadowtech - just enough buried in it's computer system to make teeps on board nervous, make Sheridan get a bad enough feeling to realize what it is, and take over the ship's functions when directed to do so by a more powerful shadowtech system. But not enough to let Ivanova or her maintendence crews find it... and not enough to make a Warlock 'alive' by a looong shot.

Again, I say the Clarke regime made a deal with the Shadows, they built the ShadOmegas to see if EA-Shadow hybridization would work at all, then went on to do the ShadowHybrids. When that project went awry they either put it on hold, or continued it in another location but got cleared out when the Shadows left for the rim, so that Clarke only had the ShadOmegas during the civil war. And then, half a dozend years later, someone in earthforce makes another deal with some other leftover shadowminions, who have more tech know-how then the drakh and can rebuild/reactivate the hybrid shipyard just in time to build another Hybrid for the Excalibur to find...

 

[frobisher]

These Warlocks are seen to be in widespread service in ACtA and Crusade.

You're wrong there I'm afraid - it's noted in the Crusade episode "Each Night I Dream of Home" that Warlocks are thin on the ground, and that it must be someone with a lot of clout who managed to bag one as a taxi...

Between ACtA and Crusade we see a grand total of two of them...

To my eyes, that seems to show that EF had made huge progress in understanding Shadow-tech very quickly and while they were still active allies of the Shadows themselves.

I'd disagree there (on that evidence...). The Warlock seems to incorporate Shadow Tech that doesn't perhaps do what the builders had hoped it would (providing an external override to systems...). It looks like what they took was a "Black Box" system on trust and just incorporated it with the other systems. The Shadow Omega probably had the same sort of overrides, but none survived (... or did they..? Always good for an ISA era scenario like AoG did once...) for this to become an issue , like when the Drakh attacked. It's notable, that only one Warlock was present in the defence fleet in ACtA and Ivanova's ship had had it's Shadow systems neutralised.

Considering that the Drakh (who were the major hand-servants of the Shadows) blamed the Earth for the loss of their masters so badly that they put into action a plan to kill the entire world I find it a bit unlikely that Shadow servants did much to help EF overall much. The whole point of the Drakh plague was that they wanted revenge on the EA.

It's possible that the Drakh hadn't fully formed this opinion until the ISA was founded, with Sheriden at the head, and their "friendly" government on Earth removed, so the Drakh/other Shadow minions involvement with the Warlock programme would have been in place until quite late in season 4.

Now, they could well have been supporting small splinter groups inside of EF and who knows what type of tech they might have shared then. Had Crusade finished, we might actually know. Now we just have speculation that may or may not be right!

Given what has been said about Crusade, there does appear to be a splinter group working with Shadow tech within the EA, but I'm inclined to think they were not Shadow sponsored.

Now this is just my gut feeling, but the Omega Epsilon and Warlock programmes were the direct result of active cooperation with the Shadows and Minions, and the splinter group we start to get the feel for in Crusade (who produced the Hybrid) were perhaps the group that had been researching Shadow Tech for a lot longer, since it had been initially discovered on Mars over a hundred years previously. This is not to say they didn't get valuable input from the Omega E/Warlock programme - they'd have had to have given the progress the made - and they must have had people within that programme. The Splinter group was the ones that the EA had kept from the Shadows and Minions, and perhaps, so secret that Clarke didn't know about it?

Of course, if jms had written into season 2 of Crusade this could have well been blown out of the water but at least we'd have known...

 

[nitflegal]

Actually, the Drakh were planning on nuking Earth with the Deathcloud and then using the plague on Minbar. They had to use the plague against Earth when Sheridan et al nuked their Deathcloud.

Yup, that's a good clarification. However, I think that the larger point still stands, that the primary Shadow servant was intent on wiping out Earth.

Matt

 

[nitflegal]

OK i give up - i SPose the Cerberus was Gideons Ship? And the Shadow Hybrid? Where does this come from?

Please dont day Crusade - I have had so much difficulty getting holf of anything to do with that.

If no pics are available could some one pur up a decent description?

Sadly, it was from Crusade and an unfilmed but authorized JMS script to boot.

I'll see what I have saved on the script outline itself.

Matt

 

[El Cid]

Quote: “We actually have three established pieces of information about Shadow-tech in Earthforce. In 2259, a hybrid Shadow-tech vessel, apparently built at a secret EF base, goes nuts and carves up the Omega-class destroyer Cerebus.”

I’m not convinced that this was a “hybrid Shadow-tech vessel, apparently built at a secret EF base”. I had the impression the base had been built up around the “Shadow ship” and the stupid humans put a pilot into the ship.

Second quote: “So, from what we know, Shadow-tech prototypes were being tested the year Sheridan took command of B5 and had Shadow-Omegas in limited service 2 years later while Warlock class destroyers were just coming off the production line. To my eyes, that seems to show that EF had made huge progress in understanding Shadow-tech very quickly and while they were still active allies of the Shadows themselves. Considering that the Drakh (who were the major hand-servants of the Shadows) blamed the Earth for the loss of their masters so badly that they put into action a plan to kill the entire world I find it a bit unlikely that Shadow servants did much to help EF overall much. The whole point of the Drakh plague was that they wanted revenge on the EA.”

I won’t argue that the humans were pretty clever monkeys but my guess is that Shadow allies were helping Clark and the folks on his side until Sheridan won and Clark was dead.

After that, the Drakh decided to get revenge on earth.

Sidney

 

[Sundog]

Actually, there's no reason Shadow-Allies couldn't still be around well into Crusade on Earth. Just because the Drakh have a huge hate-on for mankind doesn't mean the other Shadow-Allies do, and we have no idea how many there were or what factions existed amongst them.

 

[nitflegal]

OK, I can sense this is going to be one of those threads... :wink: :lol:

That's cool! I'd rather hash it out here and let everyone tear my working theories apart now.

Well, the Green neutron beams from the Minbari ships are generally shown being static in direction or, in a few instances, seeming to track slightly (Sharlin's tail). They don't generally whip 100 degrees in 3 seconds. Not that they couldn't, we simply don't have evidence that they do. Certainly the same beams from the Whitestar noses don't track about.

Let's see... the big green beams seldo do a lot of whipping... but then the big blue beams also are rather static, it's the small blue beams that do those whip-around while trying (unsuccessfully IIRC - my video's are still boxed and S-4 isn't out on DVD yet...) to hit WhiteStars at visual range... However, the small green minbari beams Do whip around too - not as much as the blue beams of the ShadOmegas, but then the green minbari beams aren't turret-mounted as the ShadOmega's are...

I'd have had no problem going with that except one frickin' shot at 35:12 shows the front beams on the Shadow-Omega moving about. Certainly not as much as the turrets but still noticably moving in about a 20 degree arc. And the Minbari green beams are a PitA, as they sometimes move, sometimes don't and stopped moving by season 4. The Whitestars, of course, seem to only shoot their's directly forward.

Not exactly, since there's really no good way to determine relative power. We do see a complete vaporization of the Whitestar, we have not seen EF weapons commonly do that type of damage in one clean shot.

Agreed. But I never claimed the blue beam should be at EA strength... We do know an red EA laser can cripple a WhiteStar in one shot, blowing apart half the ship so it can conviniently crash into the firing Omega - so a firepower of roughly 150-200% of an EA H-Laser seems plausible, right? Soo, that'd be what, 120+12d10 to 160+16d10... a bit above minbari levels (NL - 150+5d10), yet no need for truly shadow-level firepower...

No argument. Frankly, I'm arguing technology more than power. A 44 Magnum and .22 are both pistols using the same technology with vastly different power. I'm not arguing that the beams on the Shadow-Omegas are Shadow strength (although they appear stronger than previous EF weapons) but I am arguing that they may be a weaker example of the same tech used by the Shadows.

I guess I fail to see why it's a bad precedent. We have a ship, obviously heavily modified with Shadow-tech.

Not heavily. Lightly. It only has shadow-armor and some diffuser tendrils. It still has EA-style turrets firing it's beams, it has EA-style hangars and, according to AoG, EA style innards - sensors, C&C, Jump Engine, etc.
Why then should it get to fire MSB's?

Again, we've gotten different responses from BP on this. Beyond that, it's all theory. We know that it has Shadow style skin that covers the whole thing and extends into the hangar bays. We know that the weapons emplacements fire beams that we've never seen before or since their appearance. I find it difficult to argue with the AoG stats, as they were authorized by BP. To my mind, that makes them at least semi-official. However, you do recognize the irony of using the AoG stats for the Shadow-Omega under the argument that they're approved as part of your argument against the AoG stats for the Shadow-Omega which were approved?

We have what look like common EF weapons mounts firing beams that behave exactly like Shadow weapons with the exception of being a different color.

Not so. If you claim they "behave exactly like Shadow weapons", then that'd count for almost every beam weapon in the show.
Let's review the particulars of shadow MSB's in regard to the blue mystery beam...

Fair criticism.

- cut ships apart - nope

I'm unsure how to rate this one. The Whitestars have Vorlon derived adaptive armor and we see elaswhere that Shadow beams generally don't slice open Vorlon ships. In addition, we see Shadow beams making Whitestars explode elsewhere in season 4 rather than cutting. Now, my gut feeling is that this is simply another example of the declining quality of the CGI when NDE got a hold of it but the stuff is up there on screen.

- are generated without visible firing port - nope

Very true

- are purple - nope

Again true

- make a "whorrrsh" sound when fired - nope

Again, going into season 4 the Shadow weapons sounds pretty much disappeared. Tough to argue one way or the other.

- can fire long, sustained beams - not that sustained

2-4 seconds and well within what we've seen the Shadow Battlecrabs fire.

- can fire many shots without recharge period - only the little turrets

Insufficient data. There is one shot where the bow weapons appear to be firing in a repeated fashion.

- can kill big ships with a single hit - no chance to see either way

True, although we do have evidence that the Whitestars are seriously tough little buggers for thier size, so the fact that they cook off immediately sets a fairly high lower level of power.

- can kill small ships with a single hit - yup

Agreed

- can shift their focus quickly - yup, but that counts for every turreted weapon

Again, the bow weapons track as well in a couple of shots. More importantly, the sustained beam whips around without any interuption.

- do a lot of damage - yup

Agreed

That'd be 4 no, four inconclusive and two yes. Not enough to make them brothers in my book...

More on this later.

We do know that there are shots of Shadow Omegas firing continuously from all of their weapons ports (couple of fly-bys) with shots that will single kill a Whitestar.

Not so - only their big guns can kill WhiteStars, the little ones which they fire continously are never seen to do any significant damage - and in the EA civil war Omegas are seen firing their little turrets continously too (with pretty much the same effect . missing the fast moving WhiteStars; so I'd say the Shadows didn't upgrade the tracking system)

Slight clarification, the small ones are never seen to hit at all so we can't assess them at all. However, one would think that being able to swing a solid beam around would at least allow a greater hit percentage.

But the main thing is that all we know seems to indicate that the Shady modifications are on the Outside only! No sensors, no jump engine, no anti-grav... just a coating of shadow bio-armor and some new guns (which aren't as shady, as they still use barrels to aim their shot, something the shadows don't do). So why should it have a shady reactor?

Tough call. We simply don't know what they've got inside. I'm not neccessarily arguing that it has a Shadow reactor, simply that it has the power to power more powerful weapons.

bit bigger? The gun is designed to take out fleets for heaven's sake.

Well... let's not go there. The very idea that humans should be able to build a gun bigger and more powerful then vorlons and shadows combined is just as wrong as the idea of ancient greek scholars improving the US space shuttle after one week of study.

No argument, the stupidity of the Excalibur is not in dispute.

However, a shadow MSB at full power should be almost as destructive then a vorlon lightning cannon (the vorlons may have an edge there, since I presume they spent more effort in building their ships, as they still pilot them personally, while the shadows seem to have embraced the "quantity over quality" way once they no longer had to risk their own hides...)

Well, the Excalibur cannon seems much stronger than the typical Vorlon Dreadnought, although again it's a bit tough to tell from the limited evidence.

Perhaps also of importance is that the Shadow-Omegas may well have been built with actual Shadow help, certainly they don't seem to have built anymore once the Shadows left and the Warlock doesn't seem to have the same tracking blue beams. One can easily use that to argue that at least some of the tech on the Shadow Omegas was not reproducable. Makes a case that EF didn't fully understand what was on the ship, although that's pure supposition

Sorry - was there ever any dobt to that? I would rant even more if someone claimed the EA could figure out shadowtech after studying a few sampled for a decade or two. See the example above - scholars with the knowledge of ancient greece couldn't even begin to understand the basic principles behind a space shuttles fuel! And they'd need centuries before they could even begin to make sense of it's electronic systems. Same with EA and shadowtech, which is at least a million years farther in development (see thirdspace)

There's a relavent line from JMS's short story on this "“Shadowtech can interface with any other kind of tech it encounters. We had an incident here a year or so back when a telepath that had been altered to function as the central processing system of a Shadow vessel woke up in MedLab. It invaded the station computer system and would’ve taken control of the whole thing if we hadn’t stopped it in time. My guess is that it was designed so that it can adjust to any kind of technology, however advanced or simple, and grow there, the way a weed infests a garden and takes it over unless you’re on guard enough to pluck it out fast.”" It may well be that the tech helpd the researcher out a lot, so for instance it will modify sensors, weapons, or what have you without truly needing to understand it.

See, this is where I have trouble with the argument. The Cerebus was destroyed in 2258 (season 2) while the Technomages were fleeing. That means that EF had a fully-fledged Shadow prototype firing slicer beams TWO YEARS before we saw the Shadow Omegas. Obviously, either the Shadows were dumping technology on them very early or the humans were figuring it out awfully fast. In light of that, I find it hard to argue against EF having access to slicer beams in plenty of time to mount them on a Shadow Omega. Heck, they had two years to perfect and refine the design.

Actually here you have hit on a nice problem - if the EA had ShadowHybrids in testing as early as 2259, why had they nothing better then ShadOmegas in 2261?

My pet theory is that the Shadow hybrid was done with a lot of Shadow help but is basically a Shadow ship through and through. The Shadow-Omegas and Warlocks are actual incoproration of Shadow-tech into actual EF ships.

And the probable answer is... because the ShadowHybrids were too shady - the shadows took all of them when they left for the rim (remember, we know from canon sources they had a CPU-style control system; that's why the one could go insane and waste the Cerberus after all). However, since we have established that the ShadOmegas have normal human crews instead of shadow-CPU's (the radio contact), it follows that they were under control of Clarke and not the shadows, so they couldn't be withdrawn...

Then we should be grateful that Crusade got cancelled because JMS has commented at conventions that we would have seen more Shadow ships in rogue EF hands. However, since it wasn't filmed or written we can probably ignore it!

However, see above, the EA should not, could not have been able to build all that. Not on their own not even if someone taught them to. Soo - it seems logical that the mainfactuting was in shadow, or shadow minion hands all along; and they were doing a joint-venture with the EA in a quest to create a new breed of shadowship to surprise the Vorlons with... and when the project was canned for relocation beyond the rim, the shadows, or their minions in charge of the project took everything they could with them, and shut down the rest, leaving clarke with only his ShadOmegas as "ace in the hole".

Or, as I would argue, the reason that we never saw Shadow-Omegas again nor did we ever see those pesky blue beams again that once that fleet of Shadow-Omegas was destroyed EF couldn't reproduce them. Hence, they had Shadow derived weapons that they didn't fully understand and thus couldn't reproduce them for later ships (not that we have a decent population size to truly know).

And to answer the next question - the new ShadowHybrid that appeared in the unfilmed crusade scripts came from an reactivated shady shipyard as some might have read there - a shipyard that the shadows left lying around, and that these EA guys reactivated - most likely not on their own though, but with help from those mysterious shadow allies theorized about above (yees, I have been thinking about that a lot - for a campaign of mine where it happened just like that. Even built that shadow minion race... history and all... and my Daar'gon are a bit scarier then the Drakh!)

Actually, we don't know that, as the script never explains the source. All that we have are "Then let me enlighten you, as far as I'm able under the regs. This is a research and development facility, one of half a dozen others, all working on weapons technology vital to the protection of Earth and her colonies. The work is extremely dangerous and highly classified. To protect innocents, and the privacy of our work, we've been located well off the beaten track. We're not on any map. Officially, we don't even exist. And we intend to keep it that way." & "A little over ten years ago, during the last war, we came across some of their artifacts. Once we realized what we had, we were authorized to conduct covert research and development on these artifacts. We wanted to see if we could adapt that technology and make it work for us. When the Drakh used some of this same left-over Shadow tech to hit Earth with a plague, our work gained even more importance. Hell, it's altogether possible that we could find a cure here a hell of a lot faster than you could by wandering around the galaxy digging holes." as well as a description of the cavern "Huge, a mile or more across. A great open pit where high tech structures have been built into the walls of the cavern. Catwalks and other support structures ribbon the area above, almost (but not quite) like spiderwebs. Pinpoints of light and spotlights. Large machines on rails move back and forth, carrying pieces of shadow-style ship parts to assembly lines. Give this a good long moment. This has to be our best, most detailed and realistic CGI to date. Possibly use multiple shots. We can make out movement in the darkness, human forms, but they're in darkness and we can't make out details yet."

So, we have some evidence of Shadow influence in the "spiderweb" comment but we have no idea of the origins of the site. Nothing contradicts the idea that EF built the site. Note, they also are experimenting on humans "And sees something terrible and impossible. It's a human, or more properly what was once a human female. But its skin is covered with black, hard matter, similar to a shadow vessel carapace. (Prosthetic is similar in some ways to Delenn's shell in "Revelations.")" acting as guards.

Also, note the phrase " shadow-style ship parts" which one presumes would be recognizable to the audience as Shadow tech. That indicates that several years after the Shadows left EF was producing definite Shadow tech and perhaps even Shadow-style ships.

However, if we accept that it is a EF derived slicer beam than it's semantics. To me, it's like arguing that the Narn lasers shouldn't be called lasers becuase they're modified from the Centauri lasers that they started with. I think calling it a light beam makes an effective serparation from the standard slicer beams...

Not really.
First, Narn "Heavy Lasers" are modified from Centauri "Battle Lasers", and they Are Not called the same as you can see.
Same here - that's why I used the name "Multiphased Beams" - still a connection to shady weaponry, just not that strong a connection.
As for the "light" distinction... well, in "Into the Fire" we see a small (130 meters long according to the scale in "B5 security manual") Scout-type hull fire a purple beam. Unless you want that to be a full MSB like the one fired by the ca. 1000 meter cruiser you will need the "LMSB" designation for that one.

Again, I think that we're arguing semantics. My sole contention is that this weapon is Shadow-influenced and best seems to fit some variant on th Shadow slicer beam.

I could accept everything that has not "molecular slicer beam" in it's name. "Molecular Beam" - OK (though reminded me too much of the minbari Molecular Disruptor), "Multiphased Beam" - great (and that's why I did it); "Particle Slicer Beam" - acceptable (if a bit strange sounding, besides, it never really sliced anything); whatever, just not MSB.

That's fine, call it a Molecular Beam, that would be easiest.

However, we can either say that the EF came up with a new weapon that we've never seen before or since that just so happens to act the same as a Shadow Slicer weapon

...which it doesn't - see above...

Then lets say that it's fairly similar. I see it as being a simpler explanation that on a ship that has been Shadow influenced that has weapons similar to existing Shadow weapons and that are extremely different from anything that we've seen on an EF vessel that we infer that the weapons are Shadow influenced as well.

and just so happens to be on a ship that incorporates Shadow Technology and just happens to come about 2 years after the same military was building Shadow knock-offs with accepted Shadow beams

...which they couldn't have - see above...

They did. What we don't know is the amount of Shadow involvement. the only relevant info that we have is this line "What happened to the Cerberus was a tragic mistake. Shadow tech is organic, it incorporates living being into its operating system. Sometimes the mix goes well, sometimes it doesn't. That's why the Alliance considers it forbidden tech. Sometimes the subject .. goes mad. And the ship that's a part of him also goes mad. Something went wrong during one of those merges. The ship broke free, went on a rampage. We couldn't stop it in time. The Cerberus was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that's all." Since the Shadows were already putting humans in Shadow cruisers at that time one can make the case that the accident was because EF hadn't yet figured out all of the bugs.

and just happens to come from a race that is in a serious alliance with the Shadows and take the straightforward approach that it is (just perhaps) some derivation of the weapon. Or we can discount all of that and say that it's the wrong color. Sorry, but the pro-slicer beam tally board seems to have a lot more data in it.

Not really.
The date points in directions, but just because the MSB also lives nearby it doesn't mean the blue beam is a MSB.

Sure, it doesn't convine one way or the other. What it does give is info that a EF research project with an unknown amount of Shadow involvement was testing ships with slicer beams 2 years before the Shadow Omegas were seen.

You are right that the blue beam certainly didn't seems to have come out of EA toy boxes. I'd agree that it most likely came gift-wrapped with an card signed "morden". But that doesn't mean it is an MSB. Not every plane the US sells it's allies is a Stealth Fighter, or is it? And that's just what I'm saying - not every weapon the shadows give out to their allies is a MSB; certainly they have guns that are millenai obsolete for them, yet still centuries ahead of everything the younger races have ever seen.

Again, I think that the two of us are quibbling with semantics. I have no problem making this weapon inferior to the Battlecrab slicers, doesn't contradict any on-screen evidence and makes some logical sense.

Note that AoG differentiated it from the typical Shadow weapon by calling it a light (hence less capable) version.

See above - it doesn't match up in logic once one sees LMSB's on true shadow vessels.

Fair enough. However, I understand AoG going this route as well. I suppose my concern is that I don't see a hard and fast reason to change established and approved fluff.

Incorrect, sorry. In the episode, only two times does the blue sustained beam hit a Whitestar, at 35:16 and 35:18 into the episode. Several times yellow pulse-style bolt hit Whitestars, you're probably thinking of the sequence at 34:27 to 34:29 where a Whitestar in the foreground takes several yellow pulse hits around the rear port-side of the hull. Actually, most of the impacts on Whitestars in the episode are from T-Bolts, at 33:48, 34:03, 34:14, and 34:06. We alo see a single Whitestar explode at 35:24 after it flies into a large explosion coming from the front of a destructing Shadow-Omega.

Incorrect, sorry. Or rather, misunderstood. What you cite is probably very correct, but He meant the "sweeping" blue beams from the little turrets - the ones that shoot a lot, but have no real effect. Of course, in the instances where we actually see a big blue eam strike a WS, it goes boom.

My comment is that the sweeping blue beams from the turrets never hit a thing during the episode, there are no instances of one causing minor damge since they never hit a Whitestar.

Two other things that may be of interest. One is that, suprisingly, the Shadow-Omega beams miss a lot. In fact, we see them sweeping all over the place and see a grand total of two actual impacts. To be blunt, their weapons may be powerful but their targetting sucks. Also, the average blue sustained beam lasts from 3-4 seconds before it fades out, in two instances the next beam fires from the same emplacement in just a hair under one second. Thus, recharge time is negligable for these weapons, at least the ones in the rotating emplacements on the top and botom of the hull.

Which beams - small or large? There is a difference, you know (well, maybe not in the CGI used - IIRC they look like bigger/smaller versoins of each other, but if now someone claims those small turrets are MSB's too I'm gonne get really mad... :wink: )

Well, then I'm gonna p**s you off! I don't have an issue with making the turret ones lower power versions of the bow cannon, again, no screen evidence to the contrary. I would have a huge problem with inventing another weapon to differntiate the two. If we call the bow cannon a Heavy molecular beam, how about calling those medium or light molecular beams?

We also have a JMS penned short story about them where it is revealed that they have a lot of Shadow tech, so much so that the ship actually qualifies as alive.

Incorrect.
Read the story again...
The ship has only a little shadowtech - just enough buried in it's computer system to make teeps on board nervous, make Sheridan get a bad enough feeling to realize what it is, and take over the ship's functions when directed to do so by a more powerful shadowtech system. But not enough to let Ivanova or her maintendence crews find it... and not enough to make a Warlock 'alive' by a looong shot.

As to being alive, there's this comment "Once the Vorlon ship lands, you can bet the organic Shadowtech will recognize it for what it is and fight like hell, Sheridan had told her. When that happens, someone’s going to have to go in there and fight at an organic level, thought against thought, until the Vorlon ship does to it what the Shadowtech does to everything else: takes over.

All you have to do is make sure the Titans doesn’t tear itself apart before the job’s finished.

She could feel a blind, searing rage emanating form somewhere deep inside the ship, where the sentient, organic Shadowtech had been carefully woven into the ship’s normal computer system … could visualize its thoughts in the darkness behind her eyes, could see its desperation as a bright red flare lashing out in every direction. She held onto the equipment, fighting not to be thrown across the bay."

At the least, some of the ships' computer core does seem to be alive. Beyond that, we simply don't know how prevalent the tech is throughout the ship. The stuff that does activate is enough to fling the ship all over the place and they couldn't find any of it. So, for all that we know there could be Shadow-tech all through that sucker being controlled by the nexus in the core. Tim Earls, who designed the ship, has confirmed that the Warlock armor is derived from Shadow-tech and later dropped a lot of hints about there being Shadow tech throughout the ship, although he never released the specs that he promised back in 2000 so we don't know any of the details.

Again, I say the Clarke regime made a deal with the Shadows, they built the ShadOmegas to see if EA-Shadow hybridization would work at all, then went on to do the ShadowHybrids. When that project went awry they either put it on hold, or continued it in another location but got cleared out when the Shadows left for the rim, so that Clarke only had the ShadOmegas during the civil war. And then, half a dozend years later, someone in earthforce makes another deal with some other leftover shadowminions, who have more tech know-how then the drakh and can rebuild/reactivate the hybrid shipyard just in time to build another Hybrid for the Excalibur to find...

[/quote]

Could be. However, my counter-argument is that someone in EF was fielding Cerebus killing prototypes during the second season and Shadow-Omega hybrids in season 4 before fielding Shadow-tech equipped Warlocks in the same season. I can make a pretty strong case for EF having a fairly advanced Shadow-tech program for several years by season 5.

Now, I agree that this strains belief. However, in B5 a lot of the details just don't make much sense at all. I sincerely wish that JMS had had a vocal and capable technical/military advisor during the run of the show who could have straightened out these details. in many respects I'm kind of glad that Crusade and LotR got canned, since what they would have done to B5 continuity is just scary to contemplate.

Matt

 

[nitflegal]

These Warlocks are seen to be in widespread service in ACtA and Crusade.

You're wrong there I'm afraid - it's noted in the Crusade episode "Each Night I Dream of Home" that Warlocks are thin on the ground, and that it must be someone with a lot of clout who managed to bag one as a taxi...

Between ACtA and Crusade we see a grand total of two of them...

You're correct, they reference it as a "handful" while two Warlocks (four in the novel) are present in ActA. Call it limited service.

Considering that the Drakh (who were the major hand-servants of the Shadows) blamed the Earth for the loss of their masters so badly that they put into action a plan to kill the entire world I find it a bit unlikely that Shadow servants did much to help EF overall much. The whole point of the Drakh plague was that they wanted revenge on the EA.

It's possible that the Drakh hadn't fully formed this opinion until the ISA was founded, with Sheriden at the head, and their "friendly" government on Earth removed, so the Drakh/other Shadow minions involvement with the Warlock programme would have been in place until quite late in season 4.

No argument. However JMS' Crusade script describes an advanced facility that seems to be producing either Shadow-derived vessels or at least large pieces of Shadow-equipment for ships.

Of course, if jms had written into season 2 of Crusade this could have well been blown out of the water but at least we'd have known...

And that's why I always got half excited and half cringing whenever JMS announced a new B5 show.

Matt

 

[frobisher]

Could be. However, my counter-argument is that someone in EF was fielding Cerebus killing prototypes during the second season and Shadow-Omega hybrids in season 4 before fielding Shadow-tech equipped Warlocks in the same season. I can make a pretty strong case for EF having a fairly advanced Shadow-tech program for several years by season 5.

There's one additional factor there though.

The Hybrid was a much more capable vessel than the later Shadow Omega, which is what leads me to believe [though Roman will disagree but he and I already know that ] the two programmes aren't necessarily the same, and the "more advanced" programme is the one without Shadow backing.

 

[frobisher]

It's possible that the Drakh hadn't fully formed this opinion until the ISA was founded, with Sheriden at the head, and their "friendly" government on Earth removed, so the Drakh/other Shadow minions involvement with the Warlock programme would have been in place until quite late in season 4.

No argument. However JMS' Crusade script describes an advanced facility that seems to be producing either Shadow-derived vessels or at least large pieces of Shadow-equipment for ships.

That's what leads me to believe that the Drakh (and friends) don't know about it as they weren't involved

If they did, this base would have been a priority target for a preemptive strike as it could seriously screw up their plans.

 

[nitflegal]

Could be. However, my counter-argument is that someone in EF was fielding Cerebus killing prototypes during the second season and Shadow-Omega hybrids in season 4 before fielding Shadow-tech equipped Warlocks in the same season. I can make a pretty strong case for EF having a fairly advanced Shadow-tech program for several years by season 5.

There's one additional factor there though.

The Hybrid was a much more capable vessel than the later Shadow Omega, which is what leads me to believe [though Roman will disagree but he and I already know that ] the two programmes aren't necessarily the same, and the "more advanced" programme is the one without Shadow backing.

That's an interesting idea. I wouldn't put it past Clarke to be keeping his Shadow allies out of certain loops. Heck, they may simply have not cared, anything that leads to more conflict is good.

Matt

 

[ShadowScout]

I'd have had no problem going with that except one frickin' shot at 35:12 shows the front beams on the Shadow-Omega moving about. Certainly not as much as the turrets but still noticably moving in about a 20 degree arc. And the Minbari green beams are a PitA, as they sometimes move, sometimes don't and stopped moving by season 4. The Whitestars, of course, seem to only shoot their's directly forward.

Personally I'd say the "moving around factor" is not in the weapon, but in the mount. The WhiteStar was too small to mount it's green beam in anything else then a straight-ahead spinal configuration, while the big minbari ships had the extra room to mount their equivalent of turrets (I presume gravitic lenses that "bend" the beam drom the firing port to strike where they wish). The ShadOmage had turrets, which by definition should have a good arc, while the Shadows have something even better then the Minbari, being able to fire their beam wherever they wish, and shift focus more quickly then everyone else too.

No argument. Frankly, I'm arguing technology more than power. A 44 Magnum and .22 are both pistols using the same technology with vastly different power. I'm not arguing that the beams on the Shadow-Omegas are Shadow strength (although they appear stronger than previous EF weapons) but I am arguing that they may be a weaker example of the same tech used by the Shadows.

Actually I'm too. But I'm saying, if someone claims the fact that the weapon was seen punching a hole through a metal sheet "proves" it was a railgun that this would be an incorrect assumption, as it could have also been a common chemical slugthrower with armor piercing rounds... and I say since it didn't look (one of the most important things we can ever get from the show, because in effect it's most of what it is) like the shadow MSB does mean something.

I find it difficult to argue with the AoG stats, as they were authorized by BP. To my mind, that makes them at least semi-official. However, you do recognize the irony of using the AoG stats for the Shadow-Omega under the argument that they're approved as part of your argument against the AoG stats for the Shadow-Omega which were approved?

Hey, if I can use the official info to prove it doesn't match up...
And I see no difficulty with looking behind the facade of "AoG's semi-official, BP-approved info"; just because someone in a position of authority says it's OK doesn't mean the guy who said that did really think it all through, and thus it doesn't mean it's truly good info. hell, you can't even take the info from the show as "absolutely, perfectly canon", because it has happened that the universe changed it's mind (JMS had a change of mind -DralaFi incident between S-2 and ItB-, someone got an idea and didn't check if it mader some earlier part of the story inplausible -comlink genetic coding which prevents Markus from using Franklins link in S-3 should have prevented Garibaldi using a foreign link in S-1 too- / -AoG fluff giving the Centauri a visit by Technomages a few centuries before they were created according to the later TM trilogy- etc.). So you have to use that brain most people who end up with B5 carry for more then ornamentational value (those people tend to stay at "Star Trek" levels :twisted, and think about all the info you get to see if it conflicts somewhere. And if you really desire a BG where there are no such causes of "bad logic" hiding to trip you up in front of your players, you have to do what you can to find a solution that meshes with the rest. And if you want to improve the stuff Mongoose puts out you have to offer them your insights, in the hope that someone there will take notice and start thinking about the problem you see too (and maybe, if you're lucky, even sees your solution and says "hey, that's one we could use...")

I'm unsure how to rate this one. The Whitestars have Vorlon derived adaptive armor and we see elaswhere that Shadow beams generally don't slice open Vorlon ships.

Irrelevant. We know even younger race weaponry - hell, even low tech younger race weaponry like stuff the raides have can turn a whitestar into pretty much wreckage, vorlon armor or no. So while it may survive low-powered shadow weaponry like the balls of energy ShadowFighters "spit", it certainly can't even begin to withstand weapons that are much, much more powerful then the best younger race R&D departments can create...

Now, my gut feeling is that this is simply another example of the declining quality of the CGI when NDE got a hold of it but the stuff is up there on screen.

Amen.

2-4 seconds and well within what we've seen the Shadow Battlecrabs fire.

Actually 2-4 seconds sustained is well within what we see from every younger race too. When it gets to fire longer, that is when we get into the "minbari tech and higher" ratings...

Insufficient data. There is one shot where the bow weapons appear to be firing in a repeated fashion.

...and anyway, as the show progresses and CGI seems to degrade in fluff consistence weapons seem to "forget" the recharge time they had earlier (EA Lasers in the final assault during the civil war, Narn Lasers in their assault on Centauri Prime...) So here again we are stumped by the changing nature of the evidence

However, one would think that being able to swing a solid beam around would at least allow a greater hit percentage.

True, one would assume so. And since it doesn't I take this before all AoG data for a indication that the internal works of the Omega hull wasn't altered much if at all. It clearly used an less capable EA tracking system, it cleartly used EA style jump engines... I think they took vanilla omega hulls, exchanged the guns with ones delivered by the Drakh (after all, the very same blue beam effect was usen for Drakh ships in Crusade later on) and grew shadow bio-armor over the mess. Nothing more.

Tough call. We simply don't know what they've got inside. I'm not neccessarily arguing that it has a Shadow reactor, simply that it has the power to power more powerful weapons.

See just above. I prefer to believe that the ship used the standard Omega reactor, it's just that the red laser beams are far less effective in tranferring their assigned power into raw damage output then the drakhy blue beams..., say, if the red laser beams loose 40% in transition, and the blue drakhy beams loose only 10%... that's be a damage plus of 50% from the base EA laser cannon value...

Well, the Excalibur cannon seems much stronger than the typical Vorlon Dreadnought, although again it's a bit tough to tell from the limited evidence.

Inacceptable. However, we only once see a vorlon lightning cannon shoot at full power - then it blows apart a Shadow Cruiser in the opening engagement of "Into the Fire". But everyone who claims that younger race engineers are able to understand a vorlon weapon system well enbough to rebuild it in a mere 7 years should be givin severe electro shock therapy. and those who think these engineers could actuially improve the gun should be locked away in rubber rooms and forced to watch StarTrek for tthe rest of their lives :wink:
Seriously, it's just too implausible. I can accept that the IA engineers found a few pieces of vorlon ships after the dust settled at Coriana, and barely maneged to find out how to link them with their own tech to create the Victory-class "Super gun", but no more, and it should be at best as capable as a standard vorlon gun.

may well be that the tech helpd the researcher out a lot, so for instance it will modify sensors, weapons, or what have you without truly needing to understand it.

Nay to the first part, yay to the second. It wouldn't help a researcher - more likely it'd take over his lab.
But it would be extremely easy to use as "black box" - you don't need to understand it, you just take a ship hull, plug in the instant shady pill, add water and in a week it will ahve grown into a complete shady sub-system, from bio-armor over the entire ship's surface to an super-fast tracking computer system that is drakh-guranteed side-effect free... :wink:
However, that does also mean you can't build the stuff on your own, and are dependent on the shadows giving out their instant technification pills - a way of doing things that we know from the TM trilogy is something from the Shadows handbook.

My pet theory is that the Shadow hybrid was done with a lot of Shadow help but is basically a Shadow ship through and through. The Shadow-Omegas and Warlocks are actual incoproration of Shadow-tech into actual EF ships.

My pet theory (and take note paddy) is that the first ShadOmega was actually the oldest, a test-bed effort to see how merging the techs would go, done at the very beginning of the Clarke/Shady joint venture. Then the project proceeded to the Cerberus-Hybrid, which didn't work out. Then Clarke wanted some toys as ace against Sheridan, so the shadow minions in charge of that cooperation quickly created a couple more ShadOmegas to please him. Then the Shadows left and the project was stopped, the new shipyard where they tried to get a working hybrid done locked up, etc. And then, while the Drakh were planning their vengeance and getting their claws deeper into the centauri, those other mysterious ShadowMinions re-opened their contact lines with certain earthforce personal, and reactivated the project (probably because they needed something from the EA - quite likely they were trying to trump the Drakh in the club of ex-shadow minions...)

Then we should be grateful that Crusade got cancelled because JMS has commented at conventions that we would have seen more Shadow ships in rogue EF hands. However, since it wasn't filmed or written we can probably ignore it!

Or find an explenation that covers all bases, Like my Daar'gon story (I made all this -well, the basic ideas- up during a time when it wasn't certain yet if crusade would continue or end)

Or, as I would argue, the reason that we never saw Shadow-Omegas again nor did we ever see those pesky blue beams again that once that fleet of Shadow-Omegas was destroyed EF couldn't reproduce them. Hence, they had Shadow derived weapons that they didn't fully understand and thus couldn't reproduce them for later ships (not that we have a decent population size to truly know).

I have no problem with that. Just don't take it further then the minimum - if you say the blue beam was a weapon from the shadows arsenal that's too advanced for the EA guys to understand or reproduce I would agree. I just don't think one should assume it was the best and most modern of shadow systems - after all, they have seen millions of years, and during that time probably mothballed more technology then all races of the IA combined have ever invented...

Actually, we don't know that, as the script never explains the source. All that we have are -snip EA officer rant-

Yup, a lot of nice talk... but remember the source. I for one wouldn't take the statement of that officer as fact, just as I wouldn't take anything JMS wrote as text for Londo as fact. And frankly, in that position I'd expect the EA officer in charge to lie to Gideon like a politician during election time...

as well as a description of the cavern -snip-
So, we have some evidence of Shadow influence in the "spiderweb" comment but we have no idea of the origins of the site. Nothing contradicts the idea that EF built the site.

Except logic - they shouldn't be able to do that. Not on their own. Not in that time frame. After a centurty or two study of shadowtech - maybe, after a decade - no way.

Note, they also are experimenting on humans -snip-

Wanna check up a nice connection? Read TM trilogy book three, those things sound very much like the proto-technomage creatures Galen encounters on Z'ha'dum (and whose apperance a technomage could theoretically assume too if he'd manage to unlock the basic shadowtech functions - something which to date only Galen did within living memory)
Only for these sevitosy it seems the tech is in control, while with the 'mages the mind is in control...

Also, note the phrase " shadow-style ship parts" which one presumes would be recognizable to the audience as Shadow tech. That indicates that several years after the Shadows left EF was producing definite Shadow tech and perhaps even Shadow-style ships.

Nope. Just that this base was capable of producing them (which we already know because the Excalibur destroyed the 2267 Hybrid a few scenes earlier - all those pieces must be the parts for the next hybrid. Of course, noone knows for sure how many were already built at this time, or who/what (if could of course also be that the site was fully automated, and basically build these things by itself, the humand just had to supply the cores as CPU and hope they'd stay sane... or needed some mysterious shadow allies again to set up this shop, and properly prepare their chosen cores to avoid thinghs like the cerberus incident...) helped the humans build them...

Again, I think that we're arguing semantics. My sole contention is that this weapon is Shadow-influenced and best seems to fit some variant on th Shadow slicer beam.

Semantics... are like details, they're everything. Because, if you don't really say what you mean, you can never be sure that you mean what you said, don't you think so? (damn, I'm afraid I'm starting to sound as if JMS writes my lines...)
Anyway, yes to the shadow-influenced, no to the slicer beam.

That's fine, call it a Molecular Beam, that would be easiest.

That was my first thought back when I did my initial reevaluation of AoG's ShadOmega, but it sounded too much like the minbari "Molecular Disruptor"; and I didn't want something that could encourage that line of thinking... which is why I choose the next best thing - I took a look at the small beams of AoG's ShadOmega, saw them labelled "Light Multiphased Cutters", thought "hey, the CGI looks just the same for the two beams, just at different beam thickness, so I could go with the second designation" - thought, done, and that's how I arrived at the name "Multiphased beam". Then I thought up a bit of fluff, and came at these MPB's being an earler shadow weapon system that was later developed into two directions - as fast firing light gun (MultiPhasedCutter) and as armor-piercing high-damage heavy gun (MolecularSlicerBeam).
It does make sense, if you think about it... I even made up a B5W SCS with icons based on the idea back then...)

Then lets say that it's fairly similar. I see it as being a simpler explanation that on a ship that has been Shadow influenced that has weapons similar to existing Shadow weapons and that are extremely different from anything that we've seen on an EF vessel that we infer that the weapons are Shadow influenced as well.

Not really similar - the blue beam is as similar to the MSB as every continous beam in the show is similar to the MSB, no more. The only true connection is the fact that the ship firing it is encased with shadow-skin bio-armor. Let's be honest - if the ships had their shadow armor painted over noone would have claimed the blue beams were anything like a slicer beam... so once you seperate the facts you're left with a beam that doesn't act like a slicer, doesn't look like a slicer, and is fired from a gun barrel and not an unspecified point within the shadow skin. And that just doesn't make it a slicer in my book, no more then the minbari green beam is a MSB because it once was seen cutting off the tail of a Sharlin...

They did. What we don't know is the amount of Shadow involvement.

No, They didn't. Couldn't have. Not alone, as I saw your words indicating - that was what I was objecting to.

What it does give is info that a EF research project with an unknown amount of Shadow involvement was testing ships with slicer beams 2 years before the Shadow Omegas were seen.

No argument there - after all, those Hybrid beams did fill the abovementioned categories for slicer beams. However, that still doesn't make the ShadOmega's blue beams fill those as well. Which is what I'm saying.
And above you my theory about the whys - the Hybrid needed more work, Clarke wanted something, so the guys with that project multiplied their first (tested and working) prototype. But because it had only EA tech innards they couldn't mount true purple MSB's, so they had to find older tech guns that could be supplied by the reactor - the blue beams which also are in use on Drakh warships; even though they had a few purple-firing MSB's lying around for their hybrid project. see - it all sounds logical if you see it like that - sure, a lot of added info and theeorties, but it does explain a lot... which is why I like it, which is why I made it up for my campaign (where y bunch of players would discover it all, and then start playing shadow boxing -no pun intended- against those mysterious other shadow allies, and maybe one day discover what They really want, and why they are so much less confrontational then the Drakh, and so keep on moving behind the scenes...)

Again, I think that the two of us are quibbling with semantics. I have no problem making this weapon inferior to the Battlecrab slicers, doesn't contradict any on-screen evidence and makes some logical sense.

Well, the semantics are important, very important. Because words create thoughts, and thoughts shape reality. And if you give an shady EA ship "Light MSB's" it won't be long before a munchy player says "oh, if light MSB's can be done there's no reason heavy MSB's couldn't be done just as easily" and creates a uber-powered illogical monster (trust me, I have seen them!)
That's one of the reasons why I am so keen on making this distinction - if you were to take a look at the weapon stats I initially suggested to AoG compared to their LMSB:

Light Molecular Slicer Beam
- damage 8d10+8 for 3 turn RoF; 6d10+6 for 2 turn RoF and 4d10+4 per 1 turn RoF, ignores all armor, can be divided into multiple targets.

Heavy Multiphased Beam
- damage 8d10+8 for 3 turn RoF, ignores 2 points of armor.

All other stats remained the same.

I made it less flexible, since we never saw the ShadOmega divide it's beam as the Shadows could, and we never saw it firing many short shots instead of one long beam, and I reduced the armor piercing to something not quite ancient levels, but still above everything else the younger races have ever seen (and since most ships have an armor value of 4-6 it wasn't even a big difference in effect). Everything else I left the same.
That is the scope of the changes I acvocate.

I suppose my concern is that I don't see a hard and fast reason to change established and approved fluff.

Just beacuse an inferior version is already in place does not mean there is no reason to replace it with a better one if the chance arises. Of course I couldn't hope that AoG would officially denounce their old version and enbrace mine, even though it did create a few problems (for one the fact that it led to the assumption that all weapon power was equal in the system, which in turn led to the bad logic that the EA could build a more powerful reactor then the minbari... long story... and for another that it opened the door for everyone and his munchkin brother to put shadowguns on their favorite race which ended in two versions of a shadow-vorlon hybrid "ShadowStar" - one was a joke, but the other was meant seriously by the poor deluded soul... And finally it set a very bad precedent to completely ignore beam color in matching screen showings to B5W weapon systems, something I really dislike...)

Well, then I'm gonna p**s you off! I don't have an issue with making the turret ones lower power versions of the bow cannon, again, no screen evidence to the contrary. I would have a huge problem with inventing another weapon to differntiate the two. If we call the bow cannon a Heavy molecular beam, how about calling those medium or light molecular beams?

I have no problem with AoG's small cannons - only with the "MSB" as large cannon... as I wrote above I basically made my version from the small turrets; I also dropped AoG's "Phasing Pulse Cannons" as the ShadOmega never was seen firing Any kind of pulses... oh, let me juse tell you the changes I made:

AoG ShadOmega weapons layout:
2 Light Molecular Slicer Beams - front;
2 Heavy Phasing Pulse Cannon's - front;
2 Heavy Phasing Pulse Cannon's - aft;
6 Light Multiphased Cutters - starboard
6 Light Multiphased Cutters - port
standard EA omega interceptor suite

My ShadOmega weapons layout:
4 Heavy Multiphased Beams - front;
4 Medium Multiphased Beams - aft;
6 Light Multiphased Beams - starboard
6 Light Multiphased Beams - port
standard EA omega interceptor suite

Now, which sounds better concerning show evidence? And mine had the added benefit of avoiding the quite-a-few-times mentioned minor pitfalls...

As to being alive, there's this comment -snip- At the least, some of the ships' computer core does seem to be alive. Beyond that, we simply don't know how prevalent the tech is throughout the ship. The stuff that does activate is enough to fling the ship all over the place and they couldn't find any of it. So, for all that we know there could be Shadow-tech all through that sucker being controlled by the nexus in the core. Tim Earls, who designed the ship, has confirmed that the Warlock armor is derived from Shadow-tech and later dropped a lot of hints about there being Shadow tech throughout the ship, although he never released the specs that he promised back in 2000 so we don't know any of the details.

Aha. Well, what I meant that the ship certainly isn't alive. The ShadowTech hidden within the ship certainly is of course - that's a defining characteristic of ShadowTech after all.

But we do know something - the tech isn't very prevalent; since neither Ivanova nor her engineers found anything visibly shady (as in "non EA tech looking"). So it can't be a lot of shadow tech

As for Mr. Earls... I have a theory about what he is full of... not something I'd like to mention in public, or anywhere for that matter... but all I really know is that he made a bad name for himself with dropping hints that were completely out of proportion with things we saw in B5 before he came to boost the WhiteStar to 500 meters... frankly I suspect he suffers from a severe case of "phaser envy" and made the warlock as his last, best chance to win those "my starship can beat up your startship" discussions with his fellow CGI artists...

Could be. However, my counter-argument is that someone in EF was fielding Cerebus killing prototypes during the second season and Shadow-Omega hybrids in season 4 before fielding Shadow-tech equipped Warlocks in the same season. I can make a pretty strong case for EF having a fairly advanced Shadow-tech program for several years by season 5.

And I say that's implausible without someone much older doing it for them. See greek scholar example. I have no problem with the EA getting it all as "black box tech" and then trying to use it, in some cases with the same degree of success our greek scholars would ahve with a modern automobile on your typical 21th-century street. But I cannot accept that they magically figure out a technology that is at least a million of years ahead of their current tech level. If someone gave them a manual, they may use it, but unless they do some serious study for at least a few centuries they should have not the slightest idea how to reproduce or alter it.

Now, I agree that this strains belief. However, in B5 a lot of the details just don't make much sense at all. I sincerely wish that JMS had had a vocal and capable technical/military advisor during the run of the show who could have straightened out these details. in many respects I'm kind of glad that Crusade and LotR got canned, since what they would have done to B5 continuity is just scary to contemplate.

Strained belief I can live with - but some things are beyond mere strain.
And I am with you in that wish... oh, what I wouldn'T give to have a time machine so I could travel to JMS's side at the beginning of B5 and join his team to do just that... (and maybe make a few other suggestions - like "a guy in a rubber suit will look like a guy in a rubber suit even if you glue claws on it and call it a Zarg... so try and find something else...")

The Hybrid was a much more capable vessel than the later Shadow Omega, which is what leads me to believe [though Roman will disagree but he and I already know that ] the two programmes aren't necessarily the same, and the "more advanced" programme is the one without Shadow backing.

And I not only hate the very idea, I also find it illogical. You're saying, that the auto-didakt learned more then the university student; while the evolution of human society clearly shows that the opposite is true (as long as the other factors are equal).

I still say that the ShadOmega's were a prototype, and actually first introduces a year or so before the Hybrid to test if there would be any unforseen side effects in such a tech merger, and were only later built in numbers when clarke needed to see some results from this project and the Hybrid didn't work out yet.

Besides, I find it highly suspicious if one claims that two seperate secret organizations are both working on the very same type of project behind the scenes without even knowing of each other...
It'd be like saying that there are two secret organizations in the US each studying, say, UFO's, not knowing of each other but both controlling every level of the government, and the one who has had only a single piece of hull wreckage to study has reverse-engineered a complete flying saucer while the one who had three crashed UFO's to study and a dozend of allied Vree engineers to help them have barely managed to mount flashing lights on their helicopters...

 

[nitflegal]

I'd have had no problem going with that except one frickin' shot at 35:12 shows the front beams on the Shadow-Omega moving about. Certainly not as much as the turrets but still noticably moving in about a 20 degree arc. And the Minbari green beams are a PitA, as they sometimes move, sometimes don't and stopped moving by season 4. The Whitestars, of course, seem to only shoot their's directly forward.

Personally I'd say the "moving around factor" is not in the weapon, but in the mount. The WhiteStar was too small to mount it's green beam in anything else then a straight-ahead spinal configuration, while the big minbari ships had the extra room to mount their equivalent of turrets (I presume gravitic lenses that "bend" the beam drom the firing port to strike where they wish). The ShadOmage had turrets, which by definition should have a good arc, while the Shadows have something even better then the Minbari, being able to fire their beam wherever they wish, and shift focus more quickly then everyone else too.

Unfortunately, the bow mount tracks downwards slightly without the mount itself visibly moving.

I'm unsure how to rate this one. The Whitestars have Vorlon derived adaptive armor and we see elaswhere that Shadow beams generally don't slice open Vorlon ships.

Irrelevant. We know even younger race weaponry - hell, even low tech younger race weaponry like stuff the raides have can turn a whitestar into pretty much wreckage, vorlon armor or no. So while it may survive low-powered shadow weaponry like the balls of energy ShadowFighters "spit", it certainly can't even begin to withstand weapons that are much, much more powerful then the best younger race R&D departments can create...

I think that you're arguing more than the evidence can support. What you've done is set a lower limit on the power but there's no evidence of the higher limit. What we do know is that the bow cannons of the Shadow-Omega do more damage than Shadow fighters or most other non-ancient weaponry since they touch and immediately kill where the others require multiple strikes to destroy a Whitestar.

2-4 seconds and well within what we've seen the Shadow Battlecrabs fire.

Actually 2-4 seconds sustained is well within what we see from every younger race too. When it gets to fire longer, that is when we get into the "minbari tech and higher" ratings...

Again, we have a lower limit with no definite evidence of what the upper limit is.

Insufficient data. There is one shot where the bow weapons appear to be firing in a repeated fashion.

...and anyway, as the show progresses and CGI seems to degrade in fluff consistence weapons seem to "forget" the recharge time they had earlier (EA Lasers in the final assault during the civil war, Narn Lasers in their assault on Centauri Prime...) So here again we are stumped by the changing nature of the evidence

Well, sure. The problem is that I am personally unwilling to dicount canon evidence just because I think that it is sloppy. NDE did a crappy job in many ways but we're stuck with it. The best theory will account for all of the evidence, then we start getting into including as much evidence as we can.

Tough call. We simply don't know what they've got inside. I'm not neccessarily arguing that it has a Shadow reactor, simply that it has the power to power more powerful weapons.

See just above. I prefer to believe that the ship used the standard Omega reactor, it's just that the red laser beams are far less effective in tranferring their assigned power into raw damage output then the drakhy blue beams..., say, if the red laser beams loose 40% in transition, and the blue drakhy beams loose only 10%... that's be a damage plus of 50% from the base EA laser cannon value...

I will say that this is an elgant solution that I id not think of. Say that the Shadow-Omegas were given "client-state" weaponry much like the Shadows gave the Drakh, I suppose the Streib (and I loathe their inclusion in the Technomage trilogy books, as it completely screws them up), etc. I can't fault AoG for not going this route, of ourse, since they were making stats before we had the Strieb.

Well, the Excalibur cannon seems much stronger than the typical Vorlon Dreadnought, although again it's a bit tough to tell from the limited evidence.

Inacceptable. However, we only once see a vorlon lightning cannon shoot at full power - then it blows apart a Shadow Cruiser in the opening engagement of "Into the Fire". But everyone who claims that younger race engineers are able to understand a vorlon weapon system well enbough to rebuild it in a mere 7 years should be givin severe electro shock therapy. and those who think these engineers could actuially improve the gun should be locked away in rubber rooms and forced to watch StarTrek for tthe rest of their lives :wink:

From ActA "The enhanced weapons array is based loosely on Vorlon design. They were intended to be used in ships far more advanced than we're capable of building, with a far greater energy reserve. Firing the big gun uses virtually all of our power.". There, in black and white from the pen of JMS is a direct counter to that argument. Apparently, they can indeed build a weapon using Vorlon design principles. It's certainly not improved but it's not cut from a Vorlon super cruiser and pasted onto the hull.

Seriously, it's just too implausible. I can accept that the IA engineers found a few pieces of vorlon ships after the dust settled at Coriana, and barely maneged to find out how to link them with their own tech to create the Victory-class "Super gun", but no more, and it should be at best as capable as a standard vorlon gun.

I won't argue the latter point, as it's not represented as improved. However, the first part brings up an old argument from the AoG days; exactly how advanced are the ancient races? I would contend that from a military standpoint there is more difference between modern military forces today and those of Napoleon than there are between the young races and the ancients. Napoleon couldn't touch a B-1 or an Apache. We'd blow the hell out of his army without him ever seeing one of our soldiers. In B5? In "Into the Fire" we see Witestars take out a Volron observation base with only a few losses (note that it takes TWO hits from a Vorlon defense gun to kill one of the Whitestars). we see Centauri PPG's kill the Shadows. We see a Sharlin kill a Battlecrab. We see League fire take out th bridge of a Vorlon Dreadnought. We see Vree ships, Nials, and Thunderbolts killing Shadow and Vorlon fighters. we see Johnny-nuke 'em kill battlecrabs with explosives. In short, I don't see any super-advanced stuff, just refined. Shadows don't need jumpgates to navigate. Oooh, they're so advanced. Wait, Explorer class ships don't either. With the exception of Shadows phasing out of Hyperspace (note that the Vorlons use jump-points) we really don't see any super-advanced tech on display. Even the phasing is just a refinement of something every race and their brother can do, that of moving into and out of Hyperspace.

However, that does also mean you can't build the stuff on your own, and are dependent on the shadows giving out their instant technification pills - a way of doing things that we know from the TM trilogy is something from the Shadows handbook.

Yes, we also know that several years after the Shadows leave EF is producing Shadow ship components.

Or, as I would argue, the reason that we never saw Shadow-Omegas again nor did we ever see those pesky blue beams again that once that fleet of Shadow-Omegas was destroyed EF couldn't reproduce them. Hence, they had Shadow derived weapons that they didn't fully understand and thus couldn't reproduce them for later ships (not that we have a decent population size to truly know).

I have no problem with that. Just don't take it further then the minimum - if you say the blue beam was a weapon from the shadows arsenal that's too advanced for the EA guys to understand or reproduce I would agree. I just don't think one should assume it was the best and most modern of shadow systems - after all, they have seen millions of years, and during that time probably mothballed more technology then all races of the IA combined have ever invented...

Well, then we're sort of in agreement. So long as we say that the Shadow-Omegas are equipped with Shaow derived, influenced, or provided weaponry I'm content. If it's not an actual Shadow slicer I don't worry, so long as somewhere it is indicated that they are Shadow-tech of some kind to explain their complete difference from previous EF technology.

Actually, we don't know that, as the script never explains the source. All that we have are -snip EA officer rant-

Yup, a lot of nice talk... but remember the source. I for one wouldn't take the statement of that officer as fact, just as I wouldn't take anything JMS wrote as text for Londo as fact. And frankly, in that position I'd expect the EA officer in charge to lie to Gideon like a politician during election time...

I'm sure that he was shading the truth. That said, it's all that we've got. Dismissing unpleasant evidence is generally a poor idea, because then your'e simply ignoring anything that doesn't support a previous theory. It's inconvenient, therefore I don't accept it.

as well as a description of the cavern -snip-
So, we have some evidence of Shadow influence in the "spiderweb" comment but we have no idea of the origins of the site. Nothing contradicts the idea that EF built the site.

Except logic - they shouldn't be able to do that. Not on their own. Not in that time frame. After a centurty or two study of shadowtech - maybe, after a decade - no way.

Why not? They have had at least 10 years of intensive study of Shadow tech, presumably with significant Shadow assistance. Give me ten years with a group of the finest doctors from the Trafalgar-era Royal Navy and I'll have them performing surgery using techniques and some equipment at the 1950's level. Give 20 of the best Victorian military engineers a ten year class in current military technology and history while having them tear apart the tanks at Aberdeen under expert supervision and WW1 would be very different. Again, look at Shadow tech. Their weapons are more powerful, no doubt. However, they still fire a coherent beam and can be dodged by the young races. They haven't made some significant leap where they just point at their weapons station and every enemy ship within 100 km explodes. We're looking at a technological gap between a Napoleonic field-piece and a German 88, not between an arrow and a cruise missile. In addition, primitive weapons have been shown to kill individual Shadows as well as their ships. If they were that far advanced then the young races' weapons should have no effect at all and be shrugged off. See, here is the fundamental problem with the concept behind the B5 universe; the ancient races really aren't shown as that advanced. Nothing that we see shows a bigger tech gap than that between a Spad and an F-86 with missiles, barely 50 years of Earth technological advancement.

Note, they also are experimenting on humans -snip-

Wanna check up a nice connection? Read TM trilogy book three, those things sound very much like the proto-technomage creatures Galen encounters on Z'ha'dum (and whose apperance a technomage could theoretically assume too if he'd manage to unlock the basic shadowtech functions - something which to date only Galen did within living memory)
Only for these sevitosy it seems the tech is in control, while with the 'mages the mind is in control...

Yep, but there they are, on a base under the control of EF.

Also, note the phrase " shadow-style ship parts" which one presumes would be recognizable to the audience as Shadow tech. That indicates that several years after the Shadows left EF was producing definite Shadow tech and perhaps even Shadow-style ships.

Nope. Just that this base was capable of producing them (which we already know because the Excalibur destroyed the 2267 Hybrid a few scenes earlier - all those pieces must be the parts for the next hybrid.

Well, no we don't know that. heck, for all that we know from the script that hybrid could be the same one that killed the Cerebus, although Lee's comments about them "sometimes" going crazy implies that they've built Shadow-style hips that didn't go nuts. It can be argued that way, but nothing in the script atributes it to that. At the least, EF, long after the Shadows are gone, are continuing to build Shadow-tech ships.

Of course, noone knows for sure how many were already built at this time, or who/what (if could of course also be that the site was fully automated, and basically build these things by itself, the humand just had to supply the cores as CPU and hope they'd stay sane... or needed some mysterious shadow allies again to set up this shop, and properly prepare their chosen cores to avoid thinghs like the cerberus incident...) helped the humans build them...

Yep, or the base could be fully built by EF using wat they know of Shadow tech. You are arguing that the base must be Shadow-built because otherwise your theory falls apart. That could even be the case. However there is no evidence at all in the script that this is wht is going on and at least a touch of evidence from Lee that EF actually does understand Shadow-tech to an extent. Note again that IA is building weapons based on Vorlon technology, the Whitestars have Vorlon technology, the Warlocks have Shadow technology at the minimum in thir computer core and armor, the Shadow-Omegas have Shadow technology, etc. We have a lot of data that supports the idea that the younger races have started cracking ancient tech to a decent degree and really none that point the other way. Does it strain belief that they could do it? Yep, sure does. Does the evidence seem to suggest that this is actually what is happening? Yep, it does seem to be.

Again, I think that we're arguing semantics. My sole contention is that this weapon is Shadow-influenced and best seems to fit some variant on th Shadow slicer beam.

Semantics... are like details, they're everything. Because, if you don't really say what you mean, you can never be sure that you mean what you said, don't you think so? (damn, I'm afraid I'm starting to sound as if JMS writes my lines...)
Anyway, yes to the shadow-influenced, no to the slicer beam.

Again, I can live with that and I like you "monkey-model" theory quite a bit.

They did. What we don't know is the amount of Shadow involvement.

No, They didn't. Couldn't have. Not alone, as I saw your words indicating - that was what I was objecting to.

Couldn't have? Why? Show me one piece of on-screen evidence or written that says that they didn't. I can show you several that suggest that they did, not he least of which is Lee implies it. I am reminded of the reports from WW2 when Peral Harbor happened and there was much ranting that they had to be mercenaries flying German planes, because we all knew that the near-sighted Japanese couldn't fly those planes and certainly were too primitive to build them.

But we do know something - the tech isn't very prevalent; since neither Ivanova nor her engineers found anything visibly shady (as in "non EA tech looking"). So it can't be a lot of shadow tech

Well, no we don't know that. We know that they couldn't find any. We know that the ship can be controlled by this Shaow nexus and we know that the armor is Shadow derived. We know that ivanova also couldn't find the Shadow tech thatwe've been told is incorporated into the armor either. This could mean that th Shadow tech is subtle enough that it's very tough to find. If we were building an aircraft carrier I have little doubt that I could hide 1000 dominos in the ship so that you would never find them without taking the ship into dry-dock and cutting it apart. remember that Ivanova had to look for the tech without alerting anyone as to what she was looking for.

As for Mr. Earls... I have a theory about what he is full of... not something I'd like to mention in public, or anywhere for that matter... but all I really know is that he made a bad name for himself with dropping hints that were completely out of proportion with things we saw in B5 before he came to boost the WhiteStar to 500 meters... frankly I suspect he suffers from a severe case of "phaser envy" and made the warlock as his last, best chance to win those "my starship can beat up your startship" discussions with his fellow CGI artists...

What, you mean just because the Warlock is designed to kill a Sharlin?

Could be. However, my counter-argument is that someone in EF was fielding Cerebus killing prototypes during the second season and Shadow-Omega hybrids in season 4 before fielding Shadow-tech equipped Warlocks in the same season. I can make a pretty strong case for EF having a fairly advanced Shadow-tech program for several years by season 5.

And I say that's implausible without someone much older doing it for them. See greek scholar example. I have no problem with the EA getting it all as "black box tech" and then trying to use it, in some cases with the same degree of success our greek scholars would ahve with a modern automobile on your typical 21th-century street.

Well, give that Archimedes expert and intensive instruction for several years by our finest instructors and I'd hazard a guess that the progress would be remarkable. If we could rule out any Shadow/Drakh guidance I'd have no problem going with this. However, we know that Clark was allied with the Shadows for quite some time. Thus, I can't rule out the Shadows providing Drakh avisors to sit with EF's best and brightest and spend 18 hours a day teaching the humans how it worked.

But I cannot accept that they magically figure out a technology that is at least a million of years ahead of their current tech level. If someone gave them a manual, they may use it, but unless they do some serious study for at least a few centuries they should have not the slightest idea how to reproduce or alter it.

Here's my question yet again; what have we seen the ancients use that is anywhere close to a million years more advanced? Take a Heavy Laser and improve it to be able to move and triple the power and you have something not far different from the Shadows slicer beams. The Shaows can phase out of hyperspace, which means that they don't use jumpoints. Neat but the EF ships can move in hyperspace as well. They need to open a jumpgate but they can perform pretty much the same function. Shadows can maneuver in Hyperspace. Cool, yet so could the EF Cortez. Shadow cruisers can smite a Whitestar yet they can't make a weapon that would fit on something fighter-size and do the same. Were they even 500 years more advanced they should be able to make a ship that can kill any non-ancient ship, be impervious to any damage from such primitive weapons, and be the size of a fighter. They didn't. All of the ancient ships that we see with capital ship power are capital ship sized and can apparently be damaged or destroyed (at least the Vorlon and Shadow ones) by the young races. In essence, I think that my survival chances are higher being a human in an M-1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank dropped on the battlefield of Agincourt than were I a Vorlon on one of their Dreadnoughts at Coriana 6.

Give me just one piece of evidence from the show that they were anywhere close to being represented at that level of advancement and I'd be happy.

The Hybrid was a much more capable vessel than the later Shadow Omega, which is what leads me to believe [though Roman will disagree but he and I already know that ] the two programmes aren't necessarily the same, and the "more advanced" programme is the one without Shadow backing.

And I not only hate the very idea, I also find it illogical. You're saying, that the auto-didakt learned more then the university student; while the evolution of human society clearly shows that the opposite is true (as long as the other factors are equal).

Since I didn't write this, I can easily say that I don't agree with this idea. It makes far more sense that the EF Shadow-tech research projet was and is coordinated.

I still say that the ShadOmega's were a prototype, and actually first introduces a year or so before the Hybrid to test if there would be any unforseen side effects in such a tech merger, and were only later built in numbers when clarke needed to see some results from this project and the Hybrid didn't work out yet.

Well, since we see Omegas in the frellin' Earth-Minbari war (God I hate NDE sometimes) it's tough to argue that there weren't Omegas at least available.

Matt

PS, I haven't had this good a discussion ince the AoG e-mail lists went down!

 

[August]

I think the thing that Nift is trying to elucidate (and doing a damn fine job) is that 'a million years more advanced' is a bit of an over-simplification. There comes a point where weapons and armour eventually come to a tapering level in advancement.

Once you have an energy beam that can negate the molecular bonds of an object contacted (or prehaps over-stimulate them and create a micro-fission reaction that releases heat but effective does the same thing) and you have magnetically imbued materials that resist this reaction, you've pretty much reached the end of the curve.

Just about all that remains at that point is the miniaturization and efficiency issues.

-A

 

[nitflegal]

I still say that the ShadOmega's were a prototype, and actually first introduces a year or so before the Hybrid to test if there would be any unforseen side effects in such a tech merger, and were only later built in numbers when clarke needed to see some results from this project and the Hybrid didn't work out yet.

I suppose for completness's sake I should include this from JMS. Note that I have an unfortunate tendency to discount JMS's Usenet postings when it comes to tech stuff, as they have a tendency to be a wee bit inconsistent.

"The Advanced destroyer group was still somewhat in the works when they hauled
it out to go after the fleet. They'd been expecting mainly to go after other
Earth ships (as was noted in the episode), and didn't count on exclusively
being confronted by Whitestars. Still, there were a lot of them here, and
they did a lot of damage by sheer force of numbers.
jms"

Of course, I have a strong supposition that all of this changed when he came up with the Cerebus idea but I suppose it does show what he was thinking when he wrote the episode. Had he not released that bloody script on Bookface, this would be a lot easier and the whole EF Shadow-tech timeline would make more sense.

Of course, it does raise one interesting question. We believe that EF has only been working on Shadow-tech since the discovery on Mars or there-abouts. Certainly the more canon novels and the comics give that idea. However, what if the rot started a while before that?

Matt

 

[frobisher]

Of course, it does raise one interesting question. We believe that EF has only been working on Shadow-tech since the discovery on Mars or there-abouts. Certainly the more canon novels and the comics give that idea. However, what if the rot started a while before that?

If you're just thinking of the event shown in the show when the Shadow ship was dug up, then you might be in for a suprise

You have to bear in mind the fact that IPX were even looking for alien artefacts on Mars, it was like they were expecting that there would be some to be found...

Which is of course the case

The first indication we get is in the comics detailing with Garibaldi and Sinclair's time on Mars. In proxiimity to the Sahdow vessel, is the facility clearly using alien technology to process the sleeper agents (presumably) by the Psi Corps operatives. There's even a Shadow present...

The B5 magazine later published an (authorised) history of Mars which indicated that a Shadow base had been discovered under Mars in the mid 2150's and a secret resarch base established upon it.

This is re-iterated (though as the discovery of fragments of highly advanced alien technology) in the Earth Alliance Fact Book (last paragraph of page 87) though the aliens aren't named as Shadows of course...

 

[nitflegal]

Of course, it does raise one interesting question. We believe that EF has only been working on Shadow-tech since the discovery on Mars or there-abouts. Certainly the more canon novels and the comics give that idea. However, what if the rot started a while before that?

If you're just thinking of the event shown in the show when the Shadow ship was dug up, then you might be in for a suprise

You have to bear in mind the fact that IPX were even looking for alien artefacts on Mars, it was like they were expecting that there would be some to be found...

Which is of course the case

The first indication we get is in the comics detailing with Garibaldi and Sinclair's time on Mars. In proxiimity to the Sahdow vessel, is the facility clearly using alien technology to process the sleeper agents (presumably) by the Psi Corps operatives. There's even a Shadow present...

The B5 magazine later published an (authorised) history of Mars which indicated that a Shadow base had been discovered under Mars in the mid 2150's and a secret resarch base established upon it.

This is re-iterated (though as the discovery of fragments of highly advanced alien technology) in the Earth Alliance Fact Book (last paragraph of page 87) though the aliens aren't named as Shadows of course...

Yup, I was thinking of the comic with Sinclair and Girabaldi. I've carefully kept that copy of the magazine as well! Actually, I've kept most of them, as the Great Machine one is always good for a laugh or to p**s me off when I feel the need. . .
Actually, one of them has a letter I wrote, I'll have to dig it up for Fionna Avery's answer.
Matt