Random bit of discussion,

[ShadowScout]

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

Don't you just hate it when the CGI people cut corners? :wink: Well, even if they messed up the graphix a bit, logic must still prevail!

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.

Actually not entirely - we do know the blue beams are more powerful then EA red lasers, but we also know the minbari green neutron beams are more powerful then the red lasers, and we have no info about the extend of destructiveness for all the "better then red laser beams" guns.
What I dislike is that people follow the info "better then red lasers" and put it together with the info "ship has shadow-skin" to arrive at the conclusion "beam must be full shadow tech", while ignoring the indications to the contrary, and the other plausible (more plausible IMO) conclusions.

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.

True. However, sometimes screen evidence must be corrected in our minds to stay acceptable. Like the instance where the CGI guys forgot to give the Omegas in "Severed Dreams" their little guns... all of them. Now, since the idea that they lost their small turrets behind the second star on the left is ridicolous, and there's no CGI to show they were "blown off" in the prior fighting one can only accept this as error of the CGI people. Same for some other instances. And if one realizes a piece of evidence is tainted by wrongness, one would do well to refain from including in in one's considerations.

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.

Agreed. Much of the problems with AoG's stuff stems from the fact that they did their stuff "too early" in regard to later releases that would contradict them (actually such things should have been stopped by the continuity watchdogs at BP, but unfortunately whoever that were/was/are/is is not as pedantic as I seem to be...)
As for "clinet state weaponry" - no problem with that, since it is what I have been saying from the very beginning.
The Streib are, well... annoying. But maybe they are a recent addition to the alliance around the Shadows...

From ActA -snip-
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.

Attention - bad logic. 'You're arguing more than the evidence can support'.
Just because JMS let's someone say something doesn't mean it really is so. Or would you take everything he let Clarke say at face value?
All this "evidence" says only that they can CLAIM that they can build a weapon using Vorlon design principles.

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.

Actually you're comparing apples and oranges here.
The Equivalent of B-1 or Apache's in your metapher wouldn't be ShadowCruiser or VorlonDreadnoughts - those ships are the equivalent of modern day footsoldiers; and even though a modern day soldier carries vastly more firepower then a spear-wielding barbarian, an barbarian spear can kill a modern soldier just as dead as an full metal jacket round. And if the barbarians jump out of the woods and ambush the soldiers while they're marching to another battlefield ("ShadowDancing"), or attack their flanks when they're fighting another modern army ("Into the Fire"), or simply have overwhelming numerical superiority AND a mystic method of fogging the soldiers thoughts (Walkabout), they certainly can hust the modern force, even though they will suffer for it (two YR ships destroyed for every ShadowVessel - and that With teeps paralyzing them).
Furthermore, as August pointed out, there does seem to be a limit on tech development, at least in the scale JMS used. And the full advancement of the ancients is seen in other things...
And their general tech base is a lot of years more advanced - remember "Thirdspace"; the Vorlons were at pretty much the same point as they are in B5 a million years before that time, and the Shadows were called old when the Vorlons and other ancients were still considering themselves young... now I grant that they probably have slowed to a crawl in their R&D efforts, especially compared to the humans... but still; while there is a limit to the effects their tech can produce, the rest is very much beyond everything the younger races can even dream of (just look at those "living metal" ships - or remember that the magic technomage tech is some trinket the Shadows gave them...)

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

Not so. We do know that they're using "hadowed" ships, but we don't know who produced the parts for them - if the EA is still building them from stockpiles, or if they have a automated factory that is building them, or if they like the technomages are dependent on parts deliveries from some race of ShadowMinions... (latter being my prefered theory, not only because it fits my campaign fluff, but also because also matches the Shadows modus opperandi as evidenced from the TM trilogy - and I came up with it quite a while before the TM trilopgy was released! :wink: )

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.

Agreement!
As long as it isn't a true shadow slicer I'm content. And as I wrote, my idea with the "Multiphased Beam" range of weapons was having them as lesser ShadowTech that the shadows stopped using as obsolete milleania ago, and are now parcelling out to any minion race they need a reward for...

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.

Not ignoring, just putting it in perspective. Words are not evidence, especially considering the ammount of half-truths and lies we encounter from JMS's non-hero characters (and even from some hero-characters).
So I'm taking all he said and thinking about it - does it sound plausible? what doesn't? Would he lie? Why? ...and come to the conclusion that it is implausible the EA guys would have the know-how to do all that, it is implausible that the Shadows would have taught them when they haven't yet had proved their loyality, that it is frankly implausible that they were doing this without a "silent partner" who did the difficult stuff for them - but that the EA guy in charge could of course not tell Gideo this as that one was on a vengeance trip and had a heavily armed ship under his command... so he fed him a story that kept all the bad parts out and tried to get him with the patriotism scam...

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.

You're still taking raw ship power as indication of tech capability, when that might pretty well be limited by other factors. However, I'm saying that understanding the organic ancient tech would be an order of magnitude bigger then completely understanding human make-up and genetics; because the things we really have as evidence indicate that Shadowtech is not only as complicated as an organic structure like a sentiend body, it also incorporates nano-technology of an unheard of level (sentient nano-virus anyone?), and even some tech that defies some laws of physics (technomage systems, "The Eye"). That's where the real advancement is, not in killpower. So I'm saying, ships built with that kind of tech might have a limit on the raw power and toughness they can have, but still understanding the tech that powers them is not something that can be done in a few decades; not without a whole battery of techers (which the Shadows would be fools to give the humans); and reproducing it would be impossible without the tools to make the tools to make the tools, which they don't have (and the shadows again would be fools to provide - for one it wouldn't be smart, for another it wouldn't fit in their "growth through conflict" ideology to just give someone knowledge). Look at the Technomages, before they put in that ban on research aboput their tech, they had a higher tech basis then the EA and centuries to find a way to understand and reproduce their systems - and they failed (and from what we know of the Taratimude they certainly would have tried to become self-sufficient instead of staying dependent on periodical shadoy tech shipments).

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

But noone says how they got there. Who brought them, who made them thus... just because you have a computer standing in your house doesn't mean you built it, now does it?

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.

Nope, we don't know anything from the scripts, but we Do know from the TM trilogy that the hybrid that killed the cerberus afterwards destroyed it's base and then blew up.
As for EA & SHadowTech... well, therer seems to be a time when they don't; as no shady shippies of any kind were reported seen between 2261 and 2267 or so... and we don't know if They continue to build shady shippies, on their own. As often written, I think they must have some silent parnter sitting behind their facade to help them with that...

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.

Actually I'm not saying shadow-built, I'm just saying built by someone who knows Shadowtech, because humans shouldn't be able to manilulate shadowtech to any extent.
Of course, it IS possible that the base was human built with "instant shadow tech" - they just dig the holes, put in the instant tehc pill, add water and in a year it will have grown to a shady shipyard. But for one then they must have gotten that instant tech from someone, and for another I see no reason why the shadows should give them the ability to become indipendent of them when their other MO indicates they prefer to hand out "black box" tech that can't be reproduced as to keep their minions dependent on them and make betrayals more difficult...

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.

One - the thing about the IA understanding Vorlon tech is very much in question - note that the Victory class does NOT have any vorlon tech beyond that mystery gun (which I still believe was salvaged from the battlefield and barely connected to IA power and control lines) - it does not ahve the bio-armor or self-repair we know from the WhiteStar for example; and the talk about the IA "running out of WhiteStars" would seem to indicate that they Do NOT know how to build them without the Vorlons holding their hands and adding their tech themselves.
Two - the Warlocks may use some shadow chips in their computer, but we only have a very questionable source fot the info that it also uses shadowtech in it's armor. And there is actually no indication at all that it does - or did anyone here see the Warlock's armor "go shady"?
Three - none of the indications indicate that younger racess have really started to "cracking ancient tech to a decent degree"; only that some of them Use ships anhanced with ancient tech - and there are some indications that these enhancements come from a finite source (like a stockpile of stuff the ancients left behind when they went beyond the rim, or a factory they forgot to close)
Does it strain belief that they could do it? YES.
Does the evidence seem to suggest that this is actually what is happening? Not really. There are still other explenations that happen to fit the facts - they just clash with the claims. Now if I have an claim straining belief and facts allowing another explenation, I'll prefer to go with that other explenation first...

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.

It's more like "no the Greeks Couldn't have had that tech, no matter what the story of Ikarus says about not managing to stay below the radar and being show down with a heat ray..."
Couldn't have because it just would be illogical that some boy genius figures out the super-tech ten minutes before the show ends to save the day.
Use - yes, when they get it as gift from their new associates.
Build - no, not on their own.
Modify - only within the parameters built in by the original constructors.
Unless JMS comes out and says straight out that the humans did indeed jump over centuries of R&D in mere years I'll stay with logic and prefer any other explenation that fits the facts. And if he did, I'd be very disappointed in him.

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.

No, we don't know the armor too is shadow derived, In fact, it doesn't look like it. And we only have the words of an very questionable CGI artist who's making wild claims about "his baby" on dubious websites.
As for the Dominao - granted, and that's why they didn't find anything hidden in the computer systems. But if you were to glue those dominos on the outside someone would notice... and if someone tried to hide a million dominos some would be found... so what I'm saying is that the Shadowtech must be rather minor, since it didn't show up during Ivanova's examinations and it wasn't discovered by some techie during routine repairs (another point agaisnt the armor - it'd let the cat out of the bag the first time a warlock is hit; not something the guys at Earthforce would want)
I could accept that the warlock armor is common EA construction enhanced by a few things they learned when examining shadow bio-armor - just like fur-wearing stone-age barbarians could come up with better armor after watching roman legionaires with their lorica segmentata; but unless they had enough knowledge to match the roman's metallurgy they could at best copy them in boiled leather instead of iron and steel... and even that would take qhite a while, as making boiled leather is still a big step up from stone age tech. So maybe the study of bio-armor gave the EA engineers a few ideas on how to harden their armor a bit more, or something - that I would have little problem with wrapped around a warlock. But saying that it has true shadowtech armor, when it doesn't even looks like it is a bit of a stretch...

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

That wouldn't be a problem - after all, it'd make sense for the EA to try and build a ship that can take on a Sharlin mano-a-mano. But if the designer adds more and more stuff in online discussions to intimidate trekkies, well...

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.

However, there is no logical reason why the Shadows should teach the humans when they haven't yet proven their worth and devotion (and lack of traiterous thoughts) by serving then faithfully for a few centuries as the Drakh have.
And it seemes contrary to the Shadows credo and prior modus operandi - they don't give away the whole cake and the recipe - they give a piece and then another, and only slowly let even their minions learn their secrets (and only after they have installed some sort of security feature to make sure their gifts aren't easily turned agaisnt them). So even though the humans seem to have been groomed for minion status instead of mere "learn by conflict" lesser race, they still shouldn't have been taught the secrets of true shadowtech now, when even the drak who work for the shadows a few centuries at least haven't had that pleasure yet.
And even then I'd expect the instruction to for one take a lot of time, and for another be useless without the right tools. Take an fully trained jet engineer and drop him on a small island filled with iron-age people and we'll see how long it takes him to come flying back home.

So I'm still saying anything more then the shady shippies in EA hands being the result of black box style tech gifts seems implausible, no matter how much humans are always over-gifted by common SF shows...

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.

So? See above. It just means that there seem to be limits on what they are able or willing to pack intot heir ships (and frankly, I do suspect the Shadows at least do not build their ships as good as they could - but that's another story)

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.

Aahhh, but that would be being a Vorlon in a Planet Killer at Coriana (which it took equal tech to do in); or a Human in 21st century style flak armor on the field of Agincourt (which would not make you invulvnerable to british longbows or a knight's lance)

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.

Exactly.

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.

Yes and no.
Yes to the "tapering level in advancement", No to the rest. Only because you can't get more then 100% from a gun doesn't mean that the tech around it stays at that level too - if the best you can get in speed is still lightspeed (as as close to it as your acceptable "energy output for thrust" rating allows, starship's mass getting greater and greater once you get really close) that doesn't mean that a lightspeed engine built by the minbari and one built by the Vorlons will be at the same level of technical complexity, even if they should have a very similar direct effect.
So I'm saysingt hat even when no further effectual improvements are made, the tech itself will still become complexer over time and with improvements (well, at least with the Shadows - I could see the Vorlons deciding to state something is just perfect and make no further attempts at improvement, but that way of thinking just doesn't mach the shadows "forced evolution" ideology). So when you have a ancient system it will still have all those millenia of refinement it it's construction that should make figuring out how it works and how it can be reproduced an epic struggle and not just an 10-year lab project for the EA R&D department. Even if you could no longer improve a sword doesn't mean that a bronze age culture will figure out how te reproduce a titanuim steel blade from out time - even the basic metallurgy wouls puzzle them for generations. However, it might get them into the iron age when they start experimenting with different kinds of ores...

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.

Exactly.
Oh, I'm sure there are still advancements in beam tech too - in a few million years the Shadows will probably have FTL beams that convert a significant portion of theit target into antimatter (hmmm, something to remember when thinking about Lorien...), but for now that suffices - and significant steps beyond a certain point in technology do take longer after a certain while.
But it's those secondary issues that I'm talking about, not the raw effect of ancient-level tech. Especially in regard to analyzing and reproducing it. See above.

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.

You can say that again. I could spot "changed his mind later"; "wrote something without thinking it through" and "pure desinformation for the hack of it" among his postings... hell, some of it even creeps into the show as I often mentioned (Drala'fi anyone)

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?

Well, the Psi Corps trilogy tells us they found the first organic artefacts on mars somewhere around 2148. However, those were just first glimpses, nothing more. Just two or three pieces of stuff the people at IP didn't, couldn't understand. And from their descriptions I'm not even sure if they were true ShadowTech or something one of their minion races had left behind (after all, they didn't sound shady in their described apperance). However they did have an effect linking them to the Shadows (inducing thoughts about insects in the teep who scanned them), so it could be ither way.

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...

Hmmm - well as I mentioned above, they are just some very, very minor tings, that just happen to drive teeps nuts. Still, it does explain how the humans got into all that in the first place... just couldn't leave things alone, always had to dig deeper in martian soil :wink: It's a classic!
But still, while the study of those artifacts might give them a leg up, they couldn't really begin to get something until they had real shadowtech to look at - and that only became possible in the 2250-ies. And for technology that advanced, 15 years from the current B5-era level of EA tech to understanding shadowtech is too small a time frame without outside interference IMO.
Beacuse if it was that easy to reverse-engineer ancient tech in the B5 universe, it would have been done before. And if it was that easy to reproduce other tech at all, the Minbari could never have held their tech edge for the last thousand years.
It just does not make sense that highly advanced ancient tech should be easier to understand than, say, artificial gravity. Use yes, as especially shadowtech is established as very user-friendly (well, maybe not exactly that, but easy to use), but build without help - no.

 

[frobisher]

Hmmm - well as I mentioned above, they are just some very, very minor tings, that just happen to drive teeps nuts. Still, it does explain how the humans got into all that in the first place... just couldn't leave things alone, always had to dig deeper in martian soil :wink: It's a classic!

Erm, no, that's not the artefacts in question - the ones you're referring to were dug up in the 23rd century. Those were clearly new artefacts that they didn't know what they did.

But still, while the study of those artifacts might give them a leg up, they couldn't really begin to get something until they had real shadowtech to look at - and that only became possible in the 2250-ies.

To be honest, we don't know what the artefacts were. They were certainly real Shadow Tech unless the Shadows were just slumming it out in the out marches...

And for technology that advanced, 15 years from the current B5-era level of EA tech to understanding shadowtech is too small a time frame without outside interference IMO.

Like hyperspace technology, you don't need to understand it, just know how to use it and (perhaps) replicate it. And we're probably talking a century or so, with the discovery of the Shadow vessels in the 2250's giving a severe leg up on research. It should be noted that the Hybrids are much improved after the discovery of the ship on Ganymede (sp?).

Beacuse if it was that easy to reverse-engineer ancient tech in the B5 universe, it would have been done before.

Why? Why couldn't the EA be the first to do it? We're repeatedly told that humanity has a key role to play, that they are in some way different than the other races, and perhaps that is the drive for discovery and risk taking that conservative races like the Minbari lack (who would certainly never have studied Shadow Technology, as the Vorlons would have forbade them).

This ancient tech seemed to be exactly what IPX were looking for, very determinedly, something you don't see the other races do.

The other thing is, of course, they had a template set of energy /"DNA" signatures to look for in other systems nearby to the Sol system, perhaps a leg up compared to the other races.

And if it was that easy to reproduce other tech at all, the Minbari could never have held their tech edge for the last thousand years.

If the Vorlons had been on tidy up after the last war removing all the debris from where they knew it to be, by and large there would be no ancient tech to study on the jump routes.

But then the Sol system was off the jump routes, and the presence of Shadow units stored there seemed to be a suprise to everyone...

You're forgetting the ability of this technolgy to self repair if suitably nurtured. At an extreme, divide a ship in two, nurture both parts and eventually you might have two ships. Of if you in fact had some samples of battle crab hull, and provide a suitable support structure to direct its growth, plus a suitable energy/food source, what's to say that it wouldn't try and be a ship again?

And what if some of the technology found (and this would be at the "Secret EA BAse (TM)") was in fact growth vats (say) for ships?

 

[nitflegal]

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

Don't you just hate it when the CGI people cut corners? :wink: Well, even if they messed up the graphix a bit, logic must still prevail!

And here is where our disagreement will be unsolvable, because it is philosophical. My mindset is that I will accept what is shown on-screen as "real" unless it is directly contradicted. Thus, I can ignore missing Omega turrets because there is no reason for them to be gone and they reappear. However, if the evidence doesn't match my theory I conclude that my theory is in error or incomplete.

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.

True. However, sometimes screen evidence must be corrected in our minds to stay acceptable. Like the instance where the CGI guys forgot to give the Omegas in "Severed Dreams" their little guns... all of them. Now, since the idea that they lost their small turrets behind the second star on the left is ridicolous, and there's no CGI to show they were "blown off" in the prior fighting one can only accept this as error of the CGI people. Same for some other instances. And if one realizes a piece of evidence is tainted by wrongness, one would do well to refain from including in in one's considerations.

See, here again where I think we will have to agree to disagree. You argue that an on-screen piece of evidence doesn't match your theory, therefore the theory must be correct and the evidence discarded. Personally, I can't do that. My concern is that once you start on that path you begin to lose the ability to reflect the show, for one is arbitrarily discarding what we've all seen. As a more practical matter, the more that we do this and the more involved our explanations become the more that the buying public will discount what we've written.

From ActA -snip-
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.

Attention - bad logic. 'You're arguing more than the evidence can support'.
Just because JMS let's someone say something doesn't mean it really is so. Or would you take everything he let Clarke say at face value?
All this "evidence" says only that they can CLAIM that they can build a weapon using Vorlon design principles.

Okay, now you're reaching. This comment was from the head engineer of the project to Girabaldi (who led the project) and Sheridan (whose organization ordered the project). This is about as reliable as dialog will get in the B5 universe. If we discount this than we may as well discount all of the expository dialog in the whole show and just make it all up. Which would probably result in the details of the universe being far more coherent but it wouldn't be Babylon 5 anymore!

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.

Actually you're comparing apples and oranges here.
The Equivalent of B-1 or Apache's in your metapher wouldn't be ShadowCruiser or VorlonDreadnoughts - those ships are the equivalent of modern day footsoldiers; and even though a modern day soldier carries vastly more firepower then a spear-wielding barbarian, an barbarian spear can kill a modern soldier just as dead as an full metal jacket round. And if the barbarians jump out of the woods and ambush the soldiers while they're marching to another battlefield ("ShadowDancing"), or attack their flanks when they're fighting another modern army ("Into the Fire"), or simply have overwhelming numerical superiority AND a mystic method of fogging the soldiers thoughts (Walkabout), they certainly can hust the modern force, even though they will suffer for it (two YR ships destroyed for every ShadowVessel - and that With teeps paralyzing them).

Okay, lets take you analogy a bit further. You're arguing a million years of difference yet with less than a thousand of human development you're charitably describing the situation at Corianna 6. Where are the other 998,000 years of development? Either the Ancients stagnated about a million years or so ago or the technology in the B5 universe is reaching the end of it's development by the younger races time.

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

Not so. We do know that they're using "hadowed" ships, but we don't know who produced the parts for them - if the EA is still building them from stockpiles, or if they have a automated factory that is building them, or if they like the technomages are dependent on parts deliveries from some race of ShadowMinions... (latter being my prefered theory, not only because it fits my campaign fluff, but also because also matches the Shadows modus opperandi as evidenced from the TM trilogy - and I came up with it quite a while before the TM trilopgy was released! :wink: )

That's the point, we don't know at all what the situation is. The point is, what little evidence that there is suggests that the younger races are indeed doing it. Note that Galen's description of the Hybrid in the novel suggests that the power-readings from the Shadow hybrid are Earth-level while the skin and weapons are Shadow.

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.

Not ignoring, just putting it in perspective. Words are not evidence, especially considering the ammount of half-truths and lies we encounter from JMS's non-hero characters (and even from some hero-characters).
So I'm taking all he said and thinking about it - does it sound plausible? what doesn't? Would he lie? Why? ...and come to the conclusion that it is implausible the EA guys would have the know-how to do all that, it is implausible that the Shadows would have taught them when they haven't yet had proved their loyality, that it is frankly implausible that they were doing this without a "silent partner" who did the difficult stuff for them - but that the EA guy in charge could of course not tell Gideo this as that one was on a vengeance trip and had a heavily armed ship under his command... so he fed him a story that kept all the bad parts out and tried to get him with the patriotism scam...

But again, you are arguing that the possibly tainted evidence doesn't match your theory so must be chucked when there is no actual evidence to support your theory. So, the fact that the chief engineer of the Excalibur says that they've built a weapon based on Vorlon technology gets chucked. The fact that the Shadow-Omegas front weapons track without the mounts gets chucked. The fact that Galen in the technomage novel says that the Shadow-Hybrid base was built by EF's New Technologies Division gets chucked. The fact that the Whitestars had Vorlon-influenced Adaptive Armor gets chucked. The fact that Tim Earls states that the Warlock has Shadow-derived armor gets chucked. The fact that the Excalibur was to be fitted with Vorlon armor and shields gets chucked.

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

But noone says how they got there. Who brought them, who made them thus... just because you have a computer standing in your house doesn't mean you built it, now does it?

Nope, but the fact that I have a computer in my house also doesn't mean that God gave it to me.

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.

Nope, we don't know anything from the scripts, but we Do know from the TM trilogy that the hybrid that killed the cerberus afterwards destroyed it's base and then blew up.

That's a good catch and you are correct. So, someone built another Hybrid ship at some point.

As for EA & SHadowTech... well, therer seems to be a time when they don't; as no shady shippies of any kind were reported seen between 2261 and 2267 or so... and we don't know if They continue to build shady shippies, on their own. As often written, I think they must have some silent parnter sitting behind their facade to help them with that...

Well, no. The show ended in 2262. We have no idea what was seen or not during that time.

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.

Actually I'm not saying shadow-built, I'm just saying built by someone who knows Shadowtech, because humans shouldn't be able to manilulate shadowtech to any extent.

Yet, they're building Shadow tech into their Warlocks. They are building Vorlon style weapons.

One - the thing about the IA understanding Vorlon tech is very much in question - note that the Victory class does NOT have any vorlon tech beyond that mystery gun (which I still believe was salvaged from the battlefield and barely connected to IA power and control lines) - it does not ahve the bio-armor or self-repair we know from the WhiteStar for example; and the talk about the IA "running out of WhiteStars" would seem to indicate that they Do NOT know how to build them without the Vorlons holding their hands and adding their tech themselves.

Again, I disagree that this is in question, chief engineer said that this was the case.

Two - the Warlocks may use some shadow chips in their computer, but we only have a very questionable source fot the info that it also uses shadowtech in it's armor. And there is actually no indication at all that it does - or did anyone here see the Warlock's armor "go shady"?

More on this later.

Three - none of the indications indicate that younger racess have really started to "cracking ancient tech to a decent degree"; only that some of them Use ships anhanced with ancient tech - and there are some indications that these enhancements come from a finite source (like a stockpile of stuff the ancients left behind when they went beyond the rim, or a factory they forgot to close)

The young races have built both Shadow and Vorlon armor. They have built ships with Shadow and Vorlon-style weaponry.

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.

It's more like "no the Greeks Couldn't have had that tech, no matter what the story of Ikarus says about not managing to stay below the radar and being show down with a heat ray..."
Couldn't have because it just would be illogical that some boy genius figures out the super-tech ten minutes before the show ends to save the day.

This is where I disagree again. Advancement takes so bloody long because you have to figure it out from scratch. However, if someone whose culture has gone through all of that sits down and teaches it to you, you bypass the X years of discovery and experimentation for implementation. As a real-world example, I dated a girl in college who was adopted from Ethipia when she was 9. Until that point, she had never gone to school, never witnessed electricity in her village, etc. She now works as a software developer for Microsoft (and had I married her, I could probably retire!).

No, we don't know the armor too is shadow derived, In fact, it doesn't look like it. And we only have the words of an very questionable CGI artist who's making wild claims about "his baby" on dubious websites.

Doesn't matter my opinion of Earls, he's the goto guy for the ships. if I discount him than I have to discount George Johnsen's stuff over the years on EF ship development and Narn/Centauri weapons.

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.

However, there is no logical reason why the Shadows should teach the humans when they haven't yet proven their worth and devotion (and lack of traiterous thoughts) by serving then faithfully for a few centuries as the Drakh have.

That's a theory. However, it's entirely possible that the humans were being groomed as another Drakh. Certainly they seemed to be much more enthusiastically courted than anyone else that we saw. For all we know Clarke was the end of a line that had proven their devotion and, when the Shadows won, would take control of the humans. Again, we don't know.

And even then I'd expect the instruction to for one take a lot of time, and for another be useless without the right tools. Take an fully trained jet engineer and drop him on a small island filled with iron-age people and we'll see how long it takes him to come flying back home.

Take ten to twenty years building up an infrastructure to support as much as possible with an entire world's miliray resources at your disposal, though.

What are we arguing here? That the young races are building Vorlon and Shadow armor? Check (note that the Excalibur was scheduled to head to Minbar for fitting of Vorlon Armor and shields over it's Minbari armor but this was cancelled due to the Drakh plague). Vorlon weaponry? Check. Shadow weaponry? Definitely on the Hybrid, probably some form on the Shadow-Omega. Organic tech-human interface? On the hybrid? Check.

Once that becomes clear, it's really hard to argue that they aren't cracking ancient etch, at least weaponry, armor, and Vorlon shields.

So? See above. It just means that there seem to be limits on what they are able or willing to pack intot heir ships (and frankly, I do suspect the Shadows at least do not build their ships as good as they could - but that's another story)

Okay, fine. However, a Whitestar with nukes totalled the Shadow homeworld. If anywhere there would be tech that could resist it, they would have put it there. We're theorizing ways right now to make an shield against a nuclear explosion 50 years after we detonated our first one, yet the Shadows couldn't defend against them. If the super-tech isn't on their ships and isn't on their homewold, where is it? At the least, the ancient tech that we have seen simply doesn't look too far advanced. Since we know that the Vorlons put a huge stock in their own lives and we know Vorlons crew the Dreadnoughts it's very difficult to believe that if they had better weaponry and protection that they wouldn't use it. Same with the Shadows on their homeworld. It simply doesn't make sense.

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.

Aahhh, but that would be being a Vorlon in a Planet Killer at Coriana (which it took equal tech to do in); or a Human in 21st century style flak armor on the field of Agincourt (which would not make you invulvnerable to british longbows or a knight's lance)

I'm saying Vorlon Dreadnought, crewed with Vorlons, getting smashed out of the sky not by a suprise attack but after they've turned to engage the AoL forces. Same with the Battlecrabs. We're talking open field here. However, give me a full infantry kit, grenades, and M-16A4 with 10 magazines and put the knight in full plate (or chainmail if we want to continue the Agincourt thing) at the other end of the 500 meter field. I'd do a lot better than the Vorlon seemed to.

So I'm saysingt hat even when no further effectual improvements are made, the tech itself will still become complexer over time and with improvements (well, at least with the Shadows - I could see the Vorlons deciding to state something is just perfect and make no further attempts at improvement, but that way of thinking just doesn't mach the shadows "forced evolution" ideology). So when you have a ancient system it will still have all those millenia of refinement it it's construction that should make figuring out how it works and how it can be reproduced an epic struggle and not just an 10-year lab project for the EA R&D department. Even if you could no longer improve a sword doesn't mean that a bronze age culture will figure out how te reproduce a titanuim steel blade from out time - even the basic metallurgy wouls puzzle them for generations. However, it might get them into the iron age when they start experimenting with different kinds of ores...

here I think we can reach an agreement. I do not see the young races building Battlecrabs or Dreadnoughts during the Crusade period. I do see them getting a lot closer than they should have. For warships, they already have jump-engines, they already have artificial gravity via the Minbari/Centauri, now they have Vorlon/Shadow armor, and Vorlon/Shadow tech weaponry. At that point, they have really closed the raw capability gap, even if their warships are clunkier, require much more personnel, have to be larger, etc.

But still, while the study of those artifacts might give them a leg up, they couldn't really begin to get something until they had real shadowtech to look at - and that only became possible in the 2250-ies. And for technology that advanced, 15 years from the current B5-era level of EA tech to understanding shadowtech is too small a time frame without outside interference IMO.

But we have outside interference. The humans allied with the Shadows and the Minbari allied with the Vorlons. The extent is unkown but the interference really isn't.

Matt

 

[frobisher]

Okay, fine. However, a Whitestar with nukes totalled the Shadow homeworld.

Er, nope. They blew up a Shadow city on the homeworld (which may or may not be their only city there).

Oh, and they apparently pulled survivors from the rubble near ground zero as well... Mr Morden.

 

[redlaco]

+ Warning: Spoilers for the Technomage trilogy novels from Jeanne Cavelos ! +

According to the Technomages trilogy*, Morden was saved by Galen when Sheridan's Whitestar nuked the city on Z'ha'dum. I found this bit a little unrealistic as Galen wished to murder Morden several times during the trilogy (the evil one had killed Galen's love interest after all). But I cannot fault the author as she had no option but to keep him alive to respect what we saw on the show...

* Yeah I know it's only about ¾ cannon, but it's still too good to pass up.

 

[frobisher]

+ Warning: Spoilers for the Technomage trilogy novels from Jeanne Cavelos ! +

According to the Technomages trilogy*, Morden was saved by Galen when Sheridan's Whitestar nuked the city on Z'ha'dum. I found this bit a little unrealistic as Galen wished to murder Morden several times during the trilogy (the evil one had killed Galen's love interest after all). But I cannot fault the author as she had no option but to keep him alive to respect what we saw on the show...

* Yeah I know it's only about ¾ cannon, but it's still too good to pass up.

Oh god, yes - I remember now (I was probably trying to repress...); I also remember flinging the book across the room at that point as well and shouting "Bollocks!!!". There are points at which she connived the plot a bit too much in the trilogy, and that was one of them, the other major time was the entire "back plot" behind "Geometry of Shadows". Gagh!!!

Personally, I prefer to think that didn't happen

 

[redlaco]

Yes at times it was really forced but overall the trilogy is really well written. The strenght of that serie is the characters development. The whole plot of the source of the tech was also really well done too, IMHO.

For the author's defense, it's not easy to write in a given setting when can't break the continuity. Of course she could have created a new Shadow agent, but she knew the impact on the fans would be greater by using good old Morden. 8)

 

[nitflegal]

Okay, fine. However, a Whitestar with nukes totalled the Shadow homeworld.

Er, nope. They blew up a Shadow city on the homeworld (which may or may not be their only city there).

Oh, and they apparently pulled survivors from the rubble near ground zero as well... Mr Morden.

You're correct, they didn't quite total the world! Sigh, must keep enthusiasm dampened when I write this stuff.

Matt

 

[ShadowScout]

OK, back from my little absence... let's continue this...

Erm, no, that's not the artefacts in question - the ones you're referring to were dug up in the 23rd century. Those were clearly new artefacts that they didn't know what they did.

Oh, yes they are.
I am writing about the 2148 artifacts - two or three small knobby (but not black/grey shifting as usual shadowtech does) pieces of organic tech found around Syria Planum back then; which mostly defied all examination, and caused a teep IPX brought in to scan them to go nuts and insect-obsessed... but these artifacts, while not very much in themselves, are what started the idea that there was something on mars that could be found, ultimately leading to the discovery of the "mouse" telepath bomb by Anna Sheridan and the ShadowShip by Miss Kirkish...
But - the 2148 artifacts certainly weren't mentioned during any other instances, so I have to conclude they didn't bring enough result to make something of it (because even if it was top secret, if it had had some results we'd have heard about 'em at least during the Minbari war when they needed every bit of tech they had to win)

To be honest, we don't know what the artefacts were. They were certainly real Shadow Tech unless the Shadows were just slumming it out in the out marches...

Quite likely these artifacts were shadow-connected - who else was on Mars (well, the Vree probably were, but they have no organic tech); and they did induce lots of thoughts about insects - another pointer straight towards our invisible friends. But they weren't described like the shadowtech we all know, so I suppose they could also have been artifact left there by some Shadow-Minion race that helped the Shadows do the grudge work when they were doing their stuff at mars. The later Mouse on the other hand certainly was full shadowtech!

Like hyperspace technology, you don't need to understand it, just know how to use it and (perhaps) replicate it. And we're probably talking a century or so, with the discovery of the Shadow vessels in the 2250's giving a severe leg up on research. It should be noted that the Hybrids are much improved after the discovery of the ship on Ganymede (sp?).

I have no problem with use - and I even have no problem with operating a piece of ShadowTech that created other pieces of ShadowTech. I do have a problem with replicating it - that should be a few centuries in the future at the very least.
And the hybrids... they aren't improved after ganymede, they are improved at Crusade time. We have no idea what went between, and where the improvement came from - my theory is that someone helped the earthies a bit... some rival to the Drakh for the heritage of the Shadows...

Why? Why couldn't the EA be the first to do it? We're repeatedly told that humanity has a key role to play, that they are in some way different than the other races, and perhaps that is the drive for discovery and risk taking that conservative races like the Minbari lack (who would certainly never have studied Shadow Technology, as the Vorlons would have forbade them).
This ancient tech seemed to be exactly what IPX were looking for, very determinedly, something you don't see the other races do.
The other thing is, of course, they had a template set of energy /"DNA" signatures to look for in other systems nearby to the Sol system, perhaps a leg up compared to the other races.

I agree that all their discoveries gave them a leg up. I also agree that they have the fastest R&D department in recorded history (if one forgets that one piece of AoG Dilgar history who were faster still). That's why I grant them a few centuries to come to that point, and not a millenia. But still, if it was That easy, they should have been matching the Minbari tech-wise by now, and they are still a loong way below that. So why do people assume they should be able to jump over tech levels like that, just because they are we?

If the Vorlons had been on tidy up after the last war removing all the debris from where they knew it to be, by and large there would be no ancient tech to study on the jump routes.
But then the Sol system was off the jump routes, and the presence of Shadow units stored there seemed to be a suprise to everyone...

Nope. It surprised noone that the Shadows had ships (and other stuff) lying in wait below the ground everywhere. And the Vorlons seemed incapable of detecting those ships through earth, sand and rock, and so didn't find them to tidy 'em up (or maybe their agreement with the Shadows didn't allow them that - could be too) Remember, there was a Vorlon living in the sol system for quite a few decades, and I'm sure they'd have scanned what they could for shady interference (there were two vorlons when they came in, whenever that was, and one was killed, so I presume they found some on earth... BtW, did any of you get that theme connection between the remaining Vorlon and Luzifer in the "Dark Genesis" book? Funny, isn't it?)

You're forgetting the ability of this technolgy to self repair if suitably nurtured. At an extreme, divide a ship in two, nurture both parts and eventually you might have two ships. Of if you in fact had some samples of battle crab hull, and provide a suitable support structure to direct its growth, plus a suitable energy/food source, what's to say that it wouldn't try and be a ship again?
And what if some of the technology found (and this would be at the "Secret EA BAse (TM)") was in fact growth vats (say) for ships?

Now that is one explenation I wrote I could agree to in discussions with you some time ago - but then the result would have to be very shady before it'd work, as it would be impossible to, say, change a ShadowShip piece into a configuration that would make it regrow as ShadOmega ship armor. And it'd take a lot of time...
However, you do have one point I did not consider initially - they could have taken big samples from every piece of enhancement tech the shadows gave them, and regrown it into more pieces of enhancement tech... use one ShadOmega to make another with time, etc.
Still, that wouldn't have given them a way to alter ot modify these pieces...

And here is where our disagreement will be unsolvable, because it is philosophical. My mindset is that I will accept what is shown on-screen as "real" unless it is directly contradicted. Thus, I can ignore missing Omega turrets because there is no reason for them to be gone and they reappear. However, if the evidence doesn't match my theory I conclude that my theory is in error or incomplete.

I prefer to evaluate all I see on the screen - was it intended, then I accept it as evidence; or was it a mistake, then I do not accept it unless there is an easy and non-conflicting explenation for it (like different ship versions, or two hulls of different size that just look the same). But I do not blindly follow some "holy scene" when structuring my arguments...

See, here again where I think we will have to agree to disagree. You argue that an on-screen piece of evidence doesn't match your theory, therefore the theory must be correct and the evidence discarded. Personally, I can't do that. My concern is that once you start on that path you begin to lose the ability to reflect the show, for one is arbitrarily discarding what we've all seen. As a more practical matter, the more that we do this and the more involved our explanations become the more that the buying public will discount what we've written.

Not quite. I say that you have to think about "screen evidence" instead of taking it as perfect. If it was intentional, you have to change your theory, if it was not you have to take a closer look.

And to remind you - you do realize what started this one - my saying that when a turrret fires a beam that uses "banana power" to go in different directions as the turret barrel, that means the CGI people were too lazy to move the turret of their model in that shot, while you seem to be trying to make it an "proof" that the weapons in that turret had magical properties. Please, think this through...

But I agree to your basic statement, that one has to check and also counter-check all such instances, and not fall into the trap "oh, this one scene was messed up by the CGI guys, so I can assume all CGI is messed up unless it suppoiorts my pet theory" Same that goes for CGI also goes for pet theories, even mine... if they don't match up, they have to be discarded.

Okay, now you're reaching. This comment was from the head engineer of the project to Girabaldi (who led the project) and Sheridan (whose organization ordered the project). This is about as reliable as dialog will get in the B5 universe. If we discount this than we may as well discount all of the expository dialog in the whole show and just make it all up. Which would probably result in the details of the universe being far more coherent but it wouldn't be Babylon 5 anymore!

Reliable? Drake? You're calling someone who three days into the movie later is established as the traitor reliable? Especially when he doesn't say anything concrete about the secrets of this weapon?
Though you are right in this one instance of course - I AM reaching for any explenation that could soothe the pain of this brainf... aehmm, idea of JMS. (muttering - "what was he thinking, giving younger races the ability to build a super-gun yb themselves...")

Okay, lets take you analogy a bit further. You're arguing a million years of difference yet with less than a thousand of human development you're charitably describing the situation at Corianna 6. Where are the other 998,000 years of development? Either the Ancients stagnated about a million years or so ago or the technology in the B5 universe is reaching the end of it's development by the younger races time.

I'm saying that while the basic effect seems to have limits, the tech used to attain that effect will still advance. So even when the Shadows have reached the limit of what their gun can do in terms of damage, the tech they use to get this effect should still advance, getting smaller, getting better, betting self-repairing, getting powered by new types of energy, etc. And that's where the other years of R&D go into (and of course, what it takes a Shadow 1000 years to research is done by a human in 100, because with their relative immortality the ancient races just don't have the maniac drive of younger races in general, and the blessing of the great maker for humans in particular, so their research IS faster. So, even though the ancients probably have a million years of advancement or more, they would be caught up with in say a few millenia for effect, and say 50.000 years for full tech basis - but not in a decade, especially not when the humans didn't manage to catch up with even the Centauri in the 100 years since they met them!!!)

That's the point, we don't know at all what the situation is. The point is, what little evidence that there is suggests that the younger races are indeed doing it. Note that Galen's description of the Hybrid in the novel suggests that the power-readings from the Shadow hybrid are Earth-level while the skin and weapons are Shadow.

Yup. And the piece in the unfimed scripts, where the Exy blows a hole into the Hybrid's shadow-skin and sees normal ship structure beneath also supports this. So when I did a B5W SCS for the Hybrid for a web-zine, I really did make it like that - EA innards, gravitic drive system, shadow armor, diffusers and weapons.

But again, you are arguing that the possibly tainted evidence doesn't match your theory so must be chucked when there is no actual evidence to support your theory.

No, I'm just arguing that JMS letting some guy say something on the show doesn't mean that is hard evidence, while most other people seem to take it as the word of god. We all should know by now that JMS likes to let people say things, and later let the heroes discover the truth is a completely different animal.

So, the fact that the chief engineer of the Excalibur says that they've built a weapon based on Vorlon technology gets chucked.

Takes as statement, clashes with logic, explained as JMS either having some interesting back thoughts or lacked in thinking all, and re-evaluated in my view of things as unproven statement again (so I can still like Crusade)

The fact that the Shadow-Omegas front weapons track without the mounts gets chucked.

Explained as CGI laziness - especially since the small guns Do have to move their turrets to move their beams. And anyone who claims it is "proof" that the guns in those barrels are magic should go stand in a corner and be ashamed of taking errors to make his assumtions more mistaken.

The fact that Galen in the technomage novel says that the Shadow-Hybrid base was built by EF's New Technologies Division gets chucked.

Accepted, but with reservations that the shadow-techy parts must have come from somewhere else since humsn technology shouldn't be able to build them at this time.

The fact that the Whitestars had Vorlon-influenced Adaptive Armor gets chucked.

Nope, that fact is completely accepted, just the assumption that the fact that WhiteStars have this armor also means that the minbari can build this armor on their own is questioned.

The fact that Tim Earls states that the Warlock has Shadow-derived armor gets chucked.

Yup. Because Tim said a lot of strange things in bad places - and the armor doesn't even look shady. It looks solid, with a new kind of construction, but not the "living metal" effect of ancient armor.

The fact that the Excalibur was to be fitted with Vorlon armor and shields gets chucked.

Of course - since it doesn't look vorlonesque, not even to the extend the WhiteStar does. And IIRC it was never mentiooned in any canon source that it was to be fitted with vorlon armor & shields (actually, vorlon shields were never ever mentioned in canon stuff at all, and the shield-like effects taken as part of the armor or something even by AoG who made them to represent the show as best as they could...), it was only said that the ships were due for some "final adjustments" or something like that...

See? I only chuck those things that deserve to be chucked. Magic gun barrels indeed...

Nope, but the fact that I have a computer in my house also doesn't mean that God gave it to me.

The Shadow Association thanks you for equalling them with god, but respectfully remind you that even the great and mighty Lorien has agreed that there are forces beyond him (since even he can't create life).

But the fact that you have a computer does mean someone who builds computers build that one, and that someone gave it to you, right?
Even the precence of a computer in a techno-geeks home doesn't mean he built it all, though some of those techno-geeks may very well have assembled their computers from parts they got from the people who build computer parts or their distributors.
But as in building shadowtech, creating computer chips needs a bit more know-how and support structure then the everyday human possesses, and that's just what I was writing. Just because you have one doesn't mean you can build one, yet many of my discussion partners seem to assume just that the fact that the EA is seen driving around Shady-Ships means they can build them.

That's a good catch and you are correct. So, someone built another Hybrid ship at some point.

And it originated at the base from the unfilmed scripts too, as the Exy did follow it's "trail". So far, so good...

Well, no. The show ended in 2262. We have no idea what was seen or not during that time.

But we do know Gideon was obsessed with this thing, and we can assume that he looked at everything he could have. Now, if something of that sort had popped up into the public eye during that time, even if some ships were mysteriously lost, we'd have heard about it during his "obsessive search phase" in the unfilemd scripts, but it took his "deus ex apocalypse box" to let him know there now was a Hybrid running around again - and the box never before could sense an hybrid. Ergo...

Yet, they're building Shadow tech into their Warlocks. They are building Vorlon style weapons.

Nope. They are building their Warlocks with shadowtech hidden deep it it's bowels, but we don't know where this tech comes from (might be leftover peices that are divided and regenerated like frob wrote - that'd also explain why the Warlocks are so slow to buiold, hmmm...). And we don't have anything about the vorlon gun of the Exy, except that we diod NOT see it elsewhere except those two ships. And if the EA or IA had the capability to build more of those guns, why don't they? Why are there no Earth defense sats with just one gigantic reactor and those Vorlon guns? Why are they still using missiles in the "flash-forward" during "Deconstruction of Fallig Stars"?

Again, I disagree that this is in question, chief engineer said that this was the case.

And the president said in S-2 he would make a full investigating in the events surrounding the destruction of EF-1 at Io. Did you bleive that too? After all, it came from a reliable source, didn't it? What? You were not that stupid? Good to hear! So why do you believe everything Drake said?
All I'm saying is not take everything JMS lets his characters say, and not even everathing he sais himself on short notice for fact; just take the statement for what it is instead, a statement, Think about "could it be true", "could the person making this statement believe it to be true" and "what reason could the person have to shade the truth". Here, the resulty are "unlikely"; "possibly"; and "to keep a secret".

The young races have built both Shadow and Vorlon armor. They have built ships with Shadow and Vorlon-style weaponry.

Unfounded assumptions. They have USED ships with shadow and vorlon armor, and ships with shadow and vorlon guns. They have even built those ships. But that does not mean they build those parts, and there are indications that they can't build them anymore, at least not without help or a lot of more R&D.

This is where I disagree again. Advancement takes so bloody long because you have to figure it out from scratch. However, if someone whose culture has gone through all of that sits down and teaches it to you, you bypass the X years of discovery and experimentation for implementation. As a real-world example, I dated a girl in college who was adopted from Ethipia when she was 9. Until that point, she had never gone to school, never witnessed electricity in her village, etc. She now works as a software developer for Microsoft (and had I married her, I could probably retire!).

Yes, but one - you need someone to tech you, and two you need the support structure to use that knowledge. As I wrote, put the jet engineer on an bronze-age planet and while he will certainly raise the tech level, he won't be building any planes within his lifetime. And it's questionable that the Shadows would just teach the humans Full ShadoTech know-how when they have NEVER done so before, and especially not before they had proven their reliability (like the Drakh did by faithfully serving them for centuries).

Doesn't matter my opinion of Earls, he's the goto guy for the ships. if I discount him than I have to discount George Johnsen's stuff over the years on EF ship development and Narn/Centauri weapons.

Nope, he's just a CGI designer. One who made quite a mess of things while he was at it I might note (doubling the size of the WhiteStar in S-5 which made the Omega-crashing scene in "No Surrender, No Retreat" impossible). And an "no longer associated with B5" one. AND one who made wild claims on fan-sites, claims that didn't have to pass WB & BP approval yet clashed with some info that did. By all means, accept his statements if they make sense, but always take them with a big grain of salt; especially everything concering his baby, the warlock.

That's a theory. However, it's entirely possible that the humans were being groomed as another Drakh. Certainly they seemed to be much more enthusiastically courted than anyone else that we saw. For all we know Clarke was the end of a line that had proven their devotion and, when the Shadows won, would take control of the humans. Again, we don't know.

But we do know other instanced of Shadows doing things their way. In every prior example they first gave out "black box" tech, which always had a security feature that allowed them to disable it just in case (technomages); and even after centuries of service the Drakh haven't yet been taught true shadowtech, while they do possess a "security feature" written into their very genetic code (read the TM trilogy, book one). All that sais the Shadows are smart and while they do trust, they always prepare for others trying to abuse this trust.
So why should they now become as crazy as to give the humans undeserved knowledge that might even allow them to harm them? Why won't people just take the Shadows usual MO and apply it to the facts - they giving out black box tech as gifts, and waiting for a few centuries before they do more, special servants excepted 8and those will have other things to ensure their loyality - the Shadows are masters of bio-tech and implanet, and it would seem even Morden has some additions made to his brain...).

Take ten to twenty years building up an infrastructure to support as much as possible with an entire world's miliray resources at your disposal, though.
What are we arguing here? That the young races are building Vorlon and Shadow armor? Check (note that the Excalibur was scheduled to head to Minbar for fitting of Vorlon Armor and shields over it's Minbari armor but this was cancelled due to the Drakh plague). Vorlon weaponry? Check. Shadow weaponry? Definitely on the Hybrid, probably some form on the Shadow-Omega. Organic tech-human interface? On the hybrid? Check.
Once that becomes clear, it's really hard to argue that they aren't cracking ancient etch, at least weaponry, armor, and Vorlon shields.

Faulty assumtions here. Just because they have it doesn't mean they really can build it. That is only proven when it enters serial production. And even if the Victory class really was to be fitted with vorlon armor (which I don't recall being stated explicitely in any canon source, I only heard about the theory in a CGI forum yeara ago after one of the guys there took a Victory mesh and made it with vorlonesque skin), this does not mean they can build this stuff on their own, just that they may still have some left over from their sdays working with the Vorlons on WhiteStars. However, the comment in S-5 about "running out of WhiteStars" WOULD indicate they can't build all their parts after all (otherwise they would just order a bunch of new ones at their minbari factories). The fact that we never see shadow-armored ships in common EA service after the ShadOmegas would indicate that their secret was not within the grasp of Clarke's people (or someone would have traded it to escape the purges after his fall, and the Drakh would have faced fleets of ShadOmegas at Earth). And the fact that we never saw another ose of the vorlon super gun in crusade, yes not even a mention of it could also be taken as an indication that it was irreproducable beyond those two samples (of course, that one could also have been a case of too little show to get there... but still, the way JMS treated the Exy and it's magic gun points more to the "unique weapon" kind of thing then the "prototype")

Okay, fine. However, a Whitestar with nukes totalled the Shadow homeworld. If anywhere there would be tech that could resist it, they would have put it there. We're theorizing ways right now to make an shield against a nuclear explosion 50 years after we detonated our first one, yet the Shadows couldn't defend against them. If the super-tech isn't on their ships and isn't on their homewold, where is it? At the least, the ancient tech that we have seen simply doesn't look too far advanced. Since we know that the Vorlons put a huge stock in their own lives and we know Vorlons crew the Dreadnoughts it's very difficult to believe that if they had better weaponry and protection that they wouldn't use it. Same with the Shadows on their homeworld. It simply doesn't make sense.

So? Actually the way nukes are treated in B5 is another sore point with me... logical extrapulation would more indicate that they'd become standard ammo instead of doomsday weapons, but that's JMS's fault and we have to live with it.
Same for real life tech dreams catching up and overtaking SF - read Jules Vrene and laugh at his assumtions some day. Or, for a closer connection to our time, seek out 1950-ies SF and see where real life eclipsed it.
As for the WhiteStar... well, look at 9-11. Would you say too that "If anywhere there would be tech that could resist it, they would have put it there"? They could have you know - a single missile launcher defending NY could have shot the planes down. But noone expected something like that. And this is why the WS could carry two 5-600 megaton bombs into the heart of the Shadows capital city and blow it up. Because it was already behind the Shadows defensive perimeter, and had been discounted as threat, being empty. I wager if anyone tried to just drive in a WS on a suicide run to Z'ha'dum it's get vaporized long before it came close to the planet...
BtW, it just blew up their capital city, that is bad, but doesn't count as "totalling the planet".

I'm saying Vorlon Dreadnought, crewed with Vorlons, getting smashed out of the sky not by a suprise attack but after they've turned to engage the AoL forces. Same with the Battlecrabs. We're talking open field here. However, give me a full infantry kit, grenades, and M-16A4 with 10 magazines and put the knight in full plate (or chainmail if we want to continue the Agincourt thing) at the other end of the 500 meter field. I'd do a lot better than the Vorlon seemed to.

But we wont show that, we'll just show the scene where one arrow pierces your throat. Can you say how many vorlon ships were destroyed, and how many Army of Light ships fell to one before it was taken down from that one shot? No, I thought so. And that's just the thing - especially since the script says the Vorlons mostly ignored the younger races to kick shadow butt and vica versa - under those circumstances it suddenly bacomes seen in a different light, doesn't it? And if you stand on one side of the field with your buddies and M-16's, and on the other side are standing the russians with their AKM's, and you get the order "ignore the neanderthals with their spears and concentrate on the russkies" you'd be much closer to the scenes at Coriana. Of course, if you saw a neanderthal raisig his spear to throw at you you'd blow him away with a burst, but if you concentrated on the two reds firing at you it may be possible that a few cavemen with clubs sneaked up to you and beat you into a bloody pulp, yes?
Something very much like it has been known to happen to modern armies in the not so distant past... of course, that was before the assault rifle, but still...
And for the battle in sector-83, imagine you and your fellow modern soldiers are marching with their M-16 over their shoulders, when suddenly an much larger number of cavemen jumps out of concealment and engages you at close range, and then somehow they manage to use magic to temporarily blind and paralyze you...
It ain't That easy, being a first one... :wink:

here I think we can reach an agreement. I do not see the young races building Battlecrabs or Dreadnoughts during the Crusade period. I do see them getting a lot closer than they should have. For warships, they already have jump-engines, they already have artificial gravity via the Minbari/Centauri, now they have Vorlon/Shadow armor, and Vorlon/Shadow tech weaponry. At that point, they have really closed the raw capability gap, even if their warships are clunkier, require much more personnel, have to be larger, etc.

I don't see them being able to build Shadow/Vorlon armor, but I do seem them able to improve their own armor with things they learned from the ancients. I don't see them eble to build ancient weaponry, but I see them able to incorporate it into their designs if they get it. I might agree that within a few decades the EA could match the B5-era Minbari, maybe unlocking the secrets of Drakh weaponry (they do have a lot of pieces after the battle of earth and that tech certainly isn't as advanced to need centuries of R&D to undertand) But no understanding or building or true shadowtech, no matter if in part or whole.

But we have outside interference. The humans allied with the Shadows and the Minbari allied with the Vorlons. The extent is unkown but the interference really isn't.

But that's just it! What would be needed to get the effect you want is the shadows and vorlons bending over and giving their younger races full access to all their stuff. And frankly, I can't see them getting that insane after all those millenia of masterful manipulation.
So I have no problem with the humans or minbari getting black box trinkets of ancient tech. I have no problem with them using these trinkets. I have even no problem with some shadow allies providing more trinkets after the Shadows go away to get an ally against the Drakh in a assumed struggle for the Shadows heritage. I only have a problem with younger races suddenly understanding technology millenia more advanced then theit own, especially when they didn't even manage to figure out younger race tech held by their neighbors for decades and centuries.

 

[frobisher]

I have no problem with use - and I even have no problem with operating a piece of ShadowTech that created other pieces of ShadowTech. I do have a problem with replicating it - that should be a few centuries in the future at the very least.

Maybe not. Ground up replication yes, but using inherent abilities of the technology to replicate it would be feasible.

And the hybrids... they aren't improved after ganymede, they are improved at Crusade time.

Which is after Ganymede

We have no idea what went between, and where the improvement came from - my theory is that someone helped the earthies a bit... some rival to the Drakh for the heritage of the Shadows...

I could buy into that too, but certainly my gut feeling is that it isn't the same programme that produced the Shadow Omegas and the Warlocks.

So why do people assume they should be able to jump over tech levels like that, just because they are we?

You'll have to blame jms for that one. "Realistically" the EA shouldn't be making the advances that it does, but because the show is about the "Dawn of the Third Age of Mankind" we get hero (and villian) status...

 

[ShadowScout]

Maybe not. Ground up replication yes, but using inherent abilities of the technology to replicate it would be feasible.

That I'd have no problem with. Same for operating black box shadowtech that created other shadowtech - no problem. It's when we get in the idea of younger races understanding the tech enough to recreate it on their own that I become annoyed... :wink:

Which is after Ganymede

Hell, yes, but that's no connection. It's also after Sheridan came back from the dead, which is probably just as telling a factor for Hybrid improvement.
If you really want to have something you can use as explenation for the Hybrid getting better, take the shadow-implanted teeps - frankling said he wanted EA resources to see if a way could be found to help them, and that cuts both ways - EA guys could learn something by examination of their implanets...

I could buy into that too, but certainly my gut feeling is that it isn't the same programme that produced the Shadow Omegas and the Warlocks.

My feeling is that it is - that it is the core of the progarm, and the ShadOmegas and Warlock tech is only what they "released" to keep their EA contacts happy and funds running...

You'll have to blame jms for that one. "Realistically" the EA shouldn't be making the advances that it does, but because the show is about the "Dawn of the Third Age of Mankind" we get hero (and villian) status...

Yeah. :? I mean, I don't mind a bit special status, or even rapid tech advancement, but I fear JMS did overdo it in a few instances...

 

[frobisher]

Which is after Ganymede

Hell, yes, but that's no connection. It's also after Sheridan came back from the dead, which is probably just as telling a factor for Hybrid improvement.

But the Ganymede incident was (as far as we've seen) the first time that IPX got to play with a (real) Shadow ship unsupervised and try inserting a pilot.

If I was them I would have had the pilot wired to the nines with sensors. Not a sucess, but in the words of Stan Marsh "Dude, I think we learned something today..."

If you really want to have something you can use as explenation for the Hybrid getting better, take the shadow-implanted teeps - frankling said he wanted EA resources to see if a way could be found to help them, and that cuts both ways - EA guys could learn something by examination of their implanets...

Oooh, not fair, that's far too plausible Yup, I'd say that was a cert regardless of anything else we're speculating about.

 

[nitflegal]

I was going to go for another point-by-point reply but my eyes started to swim, so I'll just summarize.

As I said, I think that the argument is somewhat insolvable, simply because our philosophies are so different. If I read you right, your bedrock argument is that you consider it impossible for the younger races to have gained any real ability to harness ancient tech (beyond plug and play) and thus the limited data that might support them doing that has to be considered as in error. My bedrock argument is that any and all data must be assumed to be correct unless it directly contradicts another piece of evidence. That's why, while I am less than fond of a lot of Tim Earl's statements, I am unwilling to disregard the few elements of background infomation on the Warlock or Excalibur from the man who designed them simply because they seem kind of, well, inflated. That's my philosophy for data interpretation from the show. Tied in with that is another philosophy to go with the least convoluted answer at all times, even if it is less elegant.

Take the Excalibur. The head designer tells the project-client in front of the project head (who one might assume is aware of the information and would notice a blatant untruth) that the main cannon of the Excalibur is Vorlon derived but not, one might infer, an actual salvaged Vorlon cannon. One might think that if it was he would have mentioned it, or at least Girabaldi would have clarified it (I'd like to think that Girabaldi would have noticed if someone was using a salvaged super-weapon on his project). Frankly, I am forced to conclude that the humans and Minbari have indeed learned enough about at least one piece of Vorlon weaponry to make one of their own. For me, this tells me that the technology is not so far advanced that the younger races can't begin to understand it. There, in black and white, is pretty damning evidence that they have. We have them saying that the Whitestar incorporates Vorlon technology. I can assume that, at a bare minimum, the Minbari crew aboard the Whitestar understand the tech well enough to maintain it and probably repair it. JMS has stated that the Whitestar armor has some kind of Vorlon tech component, heaven knows how much. You may be correct about the armor, I have it in my Excalibur notes with no source. It may have been in the magazine, I'll look for where it came from.

As for the Shadows, we know that EF was fielding the prototype Hybrids fairly early. We know that Shadow-tech was present at least on the armor of the Shadow-Omegas and that JMS took credit on Usenet for the cleverness of EF incorporating Shadow-tech into existing hulls. We know that the Shadow-Omegas used weapons that we've not seen on EF ships before or since and that the bow cannons tracked side-to side and downwards without moving the mount. We know that the Warlock had shadow-tech purposefully placed into it's computer core sufficient to cause bad dreams in a latent telepath and immediate recognition of Vorlon-touched humans. We've been told by the designer that Warlock armor is Shady. We know that, on an EF research base, recognizable ship components are being manufactured. We have JMS commenting that the Shadow-Omegas don't have living CPU's and that EF is working on adapting Shadow basic technology.

As for ancient level tech, we have seen that Vorlon ships are not invulnerable to young-races weapons and we know that Vorlons take great stock in Vorlon lives (technomage trilogy). We know that a basic nuke can destroy Shadow battlecrabs and Shadow major cities. We know that in wartime Shadow cities apparently can't respond quickly enough to counter a kamikaze whitestar. It may well be that the younger races are nearing the end of the steep slope on technical learning and entering the much more gradual and perhaps plateauing phase, as the level of differnce between the ancient races and the young races simply doesn't seem that extreme.

From my point of view, the most striaghtforward explanation is simply that the younger races are beginning to crack ancient tech, at a bare minimum Vorlon weaponry and Shadow armor as specifically stated by show sources. Perhaps my problem is that I have no dog in this hunt, while I think that the younger races cracking ancient tech to any great extent is tough to believe it's also not a fall-on-my-sword issue for me. Once I accept that there's the possibility of the younger races beginning to crack the tech, I can start trying to figure out a plausible reason how. Since the Minbari/IA seem to be progressing with Vorlon tech after a close relationship between the Vorlons and Minbari at the same time that EF is progressing with Shadow tech after a similarly close relationship with the Shadows I can speculate that perhaps their fast development is due to several years of active help from those ancient races. If we consider that part of the point of the last war was that the Vorlons and Shadows had turned from their development rationale and were now looking at the conflict as an actual war that had to be "won" then I can begin to accept that the Vorlons and Shadows may actually have been trying to hyper-equip their primary allies to win this war, rather than sow chaos and order. If those races were actively working with these races for years than I don't have an issue with the young races beginning to crack the tech. They're not stupid and they would have had very good teachers.

Finally, a philisophical thought related to game development. Were I writing a product that touched on this, I'd be extremely wary of chucking out any on-screen evidence. You just know that the instant you discount the tracking Shadow-Omegas' bow cannon someone will tear you a new one on the net with a slo-mo movie of that instance. Same with Tim Earls comments, they will be thrown back at you if you discount the Shadow-derived armor.

With that in mind, anyone want to discuss Tim Earls' comments on the Badger class 'Fury?

Matt

 

[ShadowScout]

I was going to go for another point-by-point reply but my eyes started to swim, so I'll just summarize.

Good, saves me another night with too little sleep piercing together my own reply (it's a bit hard when english isn't your native language you know...) :wink:

As I said, I think that the argument is somewhat insolvable, simply because our philosophies are so different. If I read you right, your bedrock argument is that you consider it impossible for the younger races to have gained any real ability to harness ancient tech (beyond plug and play) and thus the limited data that might support them doing that has to be considered as in error.

Exactly. It'd be highly illogical that they could do that if they can't gain an understanding of tech a LOT lower then ancient level... So to save myself from loosing a lot of respect for JMS I choose to consider all data that says they can as misleading.

My bedrock argument is that any and all data must be assumed to be correct unless it directly contradicts another piece of evidence. That's why, while I am less than fond of a lot of Tim Earl's statements, I am unwilling to disregard the few elements of background infomation on the Warlock or Excalibur from the man who designed them simply because they seem kind of, well, inflated.

And I'm unwilling to take all data as holy script, especially because there are instances where even highly "canon" data was proven wrong. And I especially refuse to consider show-statements as data, because you never know when the writer let's someone lie...

That's my philosophy for data interpretation from the show. Tied in with that is another philosophy to go with the least convoluted answer at all times, even if it is less elegant.

That I also suscribe to - but always keep checking. If you eliminate the impossible and more then one remains you'll have to start eliminating the the improbable...

Take the Excalibur. The head designer tells the project-client in front of the project head (who one might assume is aware of the information and would notice a blatant untruth) that the main cannon of the Excalibur is Vorlon derived but not, one might infer, an actual salvaged Vorlon cannon. One might think that if it was he would have mentioned it, or at least Girabaldi would have clarified it (I'd like to think that Girabaldi would have noticed if someone was using a salvaged super-weapon on his project). Frankly, I am forced to conclude that the humans and Minbari have indeed learned enough about at least one piece of Vorlon weaponry to make one of their own. For me, this tells me that the technology is not so far advanced that the younger races can't begin to understand it. There, in black and white, is pretty damning evidence that they have.

Actually not. Even if one would take the statement as true you have one more thing to remember - just because a weapon is "loosely based on vorlon principles" doesn't mean it is as technologically advanced as a vorlon gun. Railguns are also "loosely based" on kinetic impact weapon principles, just like an roman Ballista. But that doesn't mean they're the same...
However, given the "magic power" of the gun and the strange "high energy demand" I feel that there's something fushy here...
- If it was built by younger races, they certainly would have had the know-how to at least allow it to be fired at charge levels that wouldn't over-stress the ship's reactor (just think about it). And that they can't set it to a lower level means that somehow the engineers don't really understand this gun at all.
- If younger races can build it, why don't we see more of those guns? As we don't it would indicate they somehow can't build more of the, because given their power it would be logical to build sats or defensive based with nothing but reactors and one such super-gun to defend very important planets like Earth or Minbar... since they don't, they probably can't.
- If the gun is that powerful (and unfortunately it seems to be), how exactly is it's power in relation to a true vorlon gun? If the Exy cannon was not quite as powerful I could assume the minbari weapons designers learned something from observational data of vorlon ships which let them use their tech to build a lesser version of the vorlon gun - but even they shouldn't be able to match ancients tech.wise, especially since noone in the B5 universe could figure out other races tech when it was much closer to their level...
All that would indiate IMO that there's more to this piece of tech then meets the eye. Take all these data I can find a solution that satisfies all info except that one comment of Drake... that the Exy gun could be a salvaged vorlon weapon sold as "native made" because someone didn't want to show his hand.

We have them saying that the Whitestar incorporates Vorlon technology. I can assume that, at a bare minimum, the Minbari crew aboard the Whitestar understand the tech well enough to maintain it and probably repair it.

Incorrect, Vorlon tech maintains & repairs itself - no need for the crew or even the ship builders to understand anything.

JMS has stated that the Whitestar armor has some kind of Vorlon tech component, heaven knows how much. You may be correct about the armor, I have it in my Excalibur notes with no source. It may have been in the magazine, I'll look for where it came from.

Tell me if you find where this came from. I only saw it as fan-boy speculation...

As for the Shadows, we know that EF was fielding the prototype Hybrids fairly early. We know that Shadow-tech was present at least on the armor of the Shadow-Omegas and that JMS took credit on Usenet for the cleverness of EF incorporating Shadow-tech into existing hulls. We know that the Shadow-Omegas used weapons that we've not seen on EF ships before or since and that the bow cannons tracked side-to side and downwards without moving the mount.

Which certainly was a case of CGI laziness, as the small turrets which evidently fired a weaker version of the very same type of beam did indeed have to move their mount. I guess the CGI guys just thought noone would notice the bow mounts in those scenes...

We know that the Warlock had shadow-tech purposefully placed into it's computer core sufficient to cause bad dreams in a latent telepath and immediate recognition of Vorlon-touched humans.

Yup.

We've been told by the designer that Warlock armor is Shady.

And that it can beat up everything from a Star Destroyer to the Enterprise-E... besides, that cannot be something a CGI designer can decide; only a story writer like JMS can say how much shadowtech lies in the warlock. And since he never once mentioned the armor in his little piece about shady infuences aboard the "Titans", well... I attribute it to Tim Earls doing some wishful dreaming - or being misinterpreted when he meant the Warlock armor was a new generation of EA armor improved with things they learned from examination of shadow bio-armor.

We know that, on an EF research base, recognizable ship components are being manufactured. We have JMS commenting that the Shadow-Omegas don't have living CPU's and that EF is working on adapting Shadow basic technology.

OK ...as long as it's put in perspective.
If the ship components aren't manifactured by EA know-how, but by EA personell operating shadowtech machinery that does the manifacturing without the humans knowing how - no problem.
If the EA is working on adapting shadowtech but tangible results in everything except operating shadowtech are in the distant future - no problem. (actually not in the future - we see from that one glimse of the future that the humans will eventually choose vorlontech to emulate, and abandon shadowtech along the way)
And I never had a problem with the ShadOmegas having normal crews - in fact, that is established in the show and the one reason why they are fully under clarke's control.

As for ancient level tech, we have seen that Vorlon ships are not invulnerable to young-races weapons and we know that Vorlons take great stock in Vorlon lives (technomage trilogy). We know that a basic nuke can destroy Shadow battlecrabs and Shadow major cities. We know that in wartime Shadow cities apparently can't respond quickly enough to counter a kamikaze whitestar. It may well be that the younger races are nearing the end of the steep slope on technical learning and entering the much more gradual and perhaps plateauing phase, as the level of differnce between the ancient races and the young races simply doesn't seem that extreme.

Not quite. But I wrote my viwes on all that before - just because there seems to be a limit on raw effect in JMS's universe doesn't mean that there is an limit to the complexity of the tech. And it's the complexity of the tech that counts in reverse-engineering, not the raw effect. And the humans never managed to reverse-engineer tech from the more advanced of their fellow younger races, so if they can't yet do step three on the tech ladder, why do people allow the thought that they could easily jump everything in between and manage step forty?

From my point of view, the most striaghtforward explanation is simply that the younger races are beginning to crack ancient tech, at a bare minimum Vorlon weaponry and Shadow armor as specifically stated by show sources.

And I strongly object to that idea as it wouldn't be logical or plausible. Development doesn't work that way. You don't just "jump" centuries of advancement. You might advance faster, catching up to the minbari's 1000 year advancement in a mere century, sure. But you don't just jump that, and untold millenia more. Especially not jump, because a lot of all those little discoveries in between will be the tools that you must have to truly understand and manipulate the final tech.

Perhaps my problem is that I have no dog in this hunt, while I think that the younger races cracking ancient tech to any great extent is tough to believe it's also not a fall-on-my-sword issue for me. Once I accept that there's the possibility of the younger races beginning to crack the tech, I can start trying to figure out a plausible reason how.

Tried that - and ther is none. Not for that much of a tech gap. Now, if someone told me the Ikaraan had begun figuring out true ShadowTech I'd have little problem with that - they were at the organic tech stage in full bloom already. If someone told me there was an 10000 year spacefaring race that had begun figuring out vorlon tech I'd again have no problem with that - they'd be fast, but acceptable. But if someone says the EA, with barely 200 years in space, one of the youngest of younger races were to figure out Shadowtech before they figured out artificial gravity, well...

Since the Minbari/IA seem to be progressing with Vorlon tech after a close relationship between the Vorlons and Minbari at the same time that EF is progressing with Shadow tech after a similarly close relationship with the Shadows I can speculate that perhaps their fast development is due to several years of active help from those ancient races.

But you do assume the Minbari do progress with vorlon tehc in any way; while a canon comment from the show leds credibility to the theory that they don't and have to find other ways to replace their losses.

If we consider that part of the point of the last war was that the Vorlons and Shadows had turned from their development rationale and were now looking at the conflict as an actual war that had to be "won" then I can begin to accept that the Vorlons and Shadows may actually have been trying to hyper-equip their primary allies to win this war, rather than sow chaos and order.

But that would be stupid. At least in case of the humans - I could (barely) accept it in case of the Minbari, if one assumes the Vorlons consider them trusted enough after 1000 years of following their dogma. But why in hell would the Shadows teach the unrelaible and fresh humans things they didn't yet teach the century-long serving Drakh? It just wouldn't make any sense, so I discard this theory, and insert an extra factor for my personal theories, an yet unseen ShadowMinion race that serves as the facillator for the human advances, handing them out on Shadow-orders as black box tech and later making their own deal with the humans because they need something from them to secure their position against the Drakh once their masters are gone... sure it's speculation, but it's speculation that solves more problems then it creates, which can't be said of most of the other speculations around this topic.

If those races were actively working with these races for years than I don't have an issue with the young races beginning to crack the tech. They're not stupid and they would have had very good teachers.

But it still would on the one hand make no sense for the Shadows to teach someone they couldn't control - they can't have survived that long by being stupid, and giving equal power to someone who cannot be trusted not to stab you in the back with it would be stupid; every evil overlord knows that. And on the other ahnd even if they had knowledge, without the tools to build the tools they can't do squat. Even if you know in every detail how to build a computer, without the (not inconsiderable) support structure to create chips etc. you can't build one. And if you sit in a bronze age culture you can't even teach them all the steps in between to get them where you can use your know-how to build a computer. And all the knowledge in between is too much to fit in any one human head. And noone would be stupid enough to donate all that knowledge to an bronze age culture before they were sure they wouldn't use it to blow them up in a decade. So it still doesn't make sense.

Finally, a philisophical thought related to game development. Were I writing a product that touched on this, I'd be extremely wary of chucking out any on-screen evidence. You just know that the instant you discount the tracking Shadow-Omegas' bow cannon someone will tear you a new one on the net with a slo-mo movie of that instance. Same with Tim Earls comments, they will be thrown back at you if you discount the Shadow-derived armor.

Same goes vica-versa though - if you include something questionable, the other half of the customer base will tear you that new one.
The best way is of course to find an in-between solution. Or just accept the fact that some screen evidence is just plain wrong (hey, mongoose or ex-AoG people - how many pleople have yet flamed you for not adding an paragraph about Omega and it's detachable SPB turrets? after all... [whining bean-counter voice]the scene in "Severed Dreams" clearly shows us Omegas without turrets, and since they cerainly had them three scenes before that one it must be canon evidence that these turrets are jettisoned at the beginning or latest in the middle of any battle...[/whining bean-counter voice] See where this is going? Do you really want to end up there?)

With that in mind, anyone want to discuss Tim Earls' comments on the Badger class 'Fury?

What did he comment on that one now... IIRC it was intruduced a loong time before he came to screw up CGI scenes - the Badger two-seater was first seen in "A Voice in the Wilderness")

 

[LoneStranger]

Lemme inject my little argument on this.

First off, Vorlon and Shadow ships are mainly organic (from what I've heard), now creating a ship that lives in space is bloody well near impossible as we know things now or in the 2260's when we see that stuff. However, with help from the Vorlons the White Stars had Vorlon-esque adaptive armor (but not at the levels of a true Vorlon ship). Also the EA created Omega Destroyers with Shadow armor and energy diffusers on them (but the diffusers weren't nearly as capable as the versions on Shadow ships. Now this for the most part means that the younger races (Minbari and Human respectively) had help with the tech but in both cases someone had to be taking notes to study later on. As for the care and feeding of the armor, in the cases of the hybrid ships I'm sure there would have to be some of the same overhauls done on those ships as there are on regular Omegas and Sharlins in both fleets.

As for the weapons, I'm reminded of something from the computer game Master of Orion II. In there you got the chance to develop new weapon and ship types for use against whoever was your enemies. Eventually though you wound up researching everything and could only make it smaller and smaller and smaller. This could be part of the reason why Vorlon and Shadow ships hurt so much when they fire. The weapons aren't exceptionally advanced on either ship but the power source used to fire it generates a lot of power in the same space a Hyperion's reactor takes up (for example). That's probably a lot of the problem behind the Excalibur's power failure after the main gun fires, the reactor just can't push out enough power and they probably couldn't find a capacitor system on there to their liking. In fact the capacitor idea could be why the Shadow Omegas were as capable as they were, a small capacitor system housed with each weapon to boost its effectiveness. In that case it looks to be the same thing with the weapons on mainline Shadow vessels.

Just some more to think about.

 

[nitflegal]

As I said, I think that the argument is somewhat insolvable, simply because our philosophies are so different. If I read you right, your bedrock argument is that you consider it impossible for the younger races to have gained any real ability to harness ancient tech (beyond plug and play) and thus the limited data that might support them doing that has to be considered as in error.

Exactly. It'd be highly illogical that they could do that if they can't gain an understanding of tech a LOT lower then ancient level... So to save myself from loosing a lot of respect for JMS I choose to consider all data that says they can as misleading.

Well, to be fair they somewhat have. The Warlock has artificial gravity, for instance and was produced during a real chill in Earth-Minbari relations. It seems unlikely that the Centauri would have sold their tech so it seems that EF has cracked gravity manipulation. That has always been portrayed as the big secret for the Minbari and Centauri.

My bedrock argument is that any and all data must be assumed to be correct unless it directly contradicts another piece of evidence. That's why, while I am less than fond of a lot of Tim Earl's statements, I am unwilling to disregard the few elements of background infomation on the Warlock or Excalibur from the man who designed them simply because they seem kind of, well, inflated.

And I'm unwilling to take all data as holy script, especially because there are instances where even highly "canon" data was proven wrong. And I especially refuse to consider show-statements as data, because you never know when the writer let's someone lie...

As I said, this is a bit of an unsolvable barrier to reaching agreement. I am loathe to disregard problematic data simply because it is a problem. If canon information is proven incorrect by another source of canon information than I'll drop it. As not considering the in-show statements as data, I can't agree. Most of the information that we have is based only on in-show data. I feel that once one begins to pick and choose what is acceptable without having the initials JMS then you have begun to disregard the show as it exists and have begun to modify JMS's universe to better fit your take on it.

Take the Excalibur. The head designer tells the project-client in front of the project head (who one might assume is aware of the information and would notice a blatant untruth) that the main cannon of the Excalibur is Vorlon derived but not, one might infer, an actual salvaged Vorlon cannon. One might think that if it was he would have mentioned it, or at least Girabaldi would have clarified it (I'd like to think that Girabaldi would have noticed if someone was using a salvaged super-weapon on his project). Frankly, I am forced to conclude that the humans and Minbari have indeed learned enough about at least one piece of Vorlon weaponry to make one of their own. For me, this tells me that the technology is not so far advanced that the younger races can't begin to understand it. There, in black and white, is pretty damning evidence that they have.

Actually not. Even if one would take the statement as true you have one more thing to remember - just because a weapon is "loosely based on vorlon principles" doesn't mean it is as technologically advanced as a vorlon gun. Railguns are also "loosely based" on kinetic impact weapon principles, just like an roman Ballista. But that doesn't mean they're the same...

I'm not arguing that point. As I've stated, I do not see the Young races pounding out ships identicle in capabilities to the Shadows and Vorlons. However, I do see them as having made significant in-roads into an understanding of the fundamentals behind their technology.

However, given the "magic power" of the gun and the strange "high energy demand" I feel that there's something fushy here...

Yep, but there it is, established on-screen.

- If it was built by younger races, they certainly would have had the know-how to at least allow it to be fired at charge levels that wouldn't over-stress the ship's reactor (just think about it). And that they can't set it to a lower level means that somehow the engineers don't really understand this gun at all.

Not necessarily. What it does say is that, for whatever reason, they cannot provide a source of enough power to fire the gun as they would another weapon. The easiest explanation is that their understanding of the weapon technology has outstripped their knowledge of power generation technology.

If younger races can build it, why don't we see more of those guns? As we don't it would indicate they somehow can't build more of the, because given their power it would be logical to build sats or defensive based with nothing but reactors and one such super-gun to defend very important planets like Earth or Minbar... since they don't, they probably can't.

We have no real data. We know that the Excalibur was the first presented vessel to use Vorlon-style weaponry and that it was new enough that the bugs had not been worked out. In that instance, it's unsuprising that a project that was co-developed by the Minbari had the technology before earth, let's say. Hence, since the Victory and Excalibur were protoypes I wouldn't expect to see those weapons in defense of Earth yet. We see Warlocks which were commisioned almost 7 years earlier and we see Omegas that have been in service for at least a decade or more. Sleeping in Light simply shows us stock B5 era warships as an honor-guard and Legend of the Ranger shows a patrol style craft Liandra which JMS states is light enough to get wasted even in the E-M war, we see a small ranger ship the Enfalli, and we see a Minbari-Earth mess called the Valen, whcih JMS himself states was a failure. Beyond those we have no idea whatsoever what ships are inservice by the Crusade timeframe, what weapons they carry, what their power-sources are, etc. We certainly have little idea what is out there in service. One other note is that somehow 20 years later Sheridan has a variant Whitestar that we've never seen before, so it may well be that new Whitestar variants are being produced.

If the gun is that powerful (and unfortunately it seems to be), how exactly is it's power in relation to a true vorlon gun? If the Exy cannon was not quite as powerful I could assume the minbari weapons designers learned something from observational data of vorlon ships which let them use their tech to build a lesser version of the vorlon gun - but even they shouldn't be able to match ancients tech.wise, especially since noone in the B5 universe could figure out other races tech when it was much closer to their level...

We simply don't have data, although the Excalibur weapon is certainly portrayed as being very powerful. As for the rest, it's a circular argument. On the one hand, we can say that EF didn't have AG in the first 3 seasons of Babylon 5. However, the two main races that had it, the Centauri and Minbari, weren't helping them get there. Yet, in Season 4, Warlocks began to be commissioned with artificial gravity. Again, let's be clear in our arguments here; are you saying that A) the Shadows and Vorlons weren't helping the young races develop their ancient tech or B) that the young races are incapable of figuring the tech out if the Shadows and Vorlons tried to teach it to them?

All that would indiate IMO that there's more to this piece of tech then meets the eye. Take all these data I can find a solution that satisfies all info except that one comment of Drake... that the Exy gun could be a salvaged vorlon weapon sold as "native made" because someone didn't want to show his hand.

But again, you are arguing that Girabaldi, a naturally suspicious man, wouldn't have a clue where the super-weapon on the ship that was his primary project and pride and joy came from. I'm sorry, that's as impossible as anything else, everything that we know about Girabaldi argues that he would have to know, he's incapable of letting something like that slide. It'd be like saying that the head of the F-22 design team at Lockheed wouldn't be aware that the cannon on his fighters are stripped out of Russian Su-27's. If he did know, he certainly wouldn't have passed up the chance to verbally smack his unliked subordinate around when he bald-faced lied to Sheridan. I'm sorry, but this is an enormous problem with your argument because it just makes no sense at all that the head designer would lie about it and the project head be clueless about the lie.

We have them saying that the Whitestar incorporates Vorlon technology. I can assume that, at a bare minimum, the Minbari crew aboard the Whitestar understand the tech well enough to maintain it and probably repair it.

Incorrect, Vorlon tech maintains & repairs itself - no need for the crew or even the ship builders to understand anything.

Umm, and we know that from where? Certainly, the hull of a Whitestar looks different from the hulls of the Vorlon vessels that we've seen. AFAIK, we've never gotten a description of how Whitestar armor works. It has limited adaptive and regenerative capabilities but we have no idea at all how much it depends on the crew for these functions.

JMS has stated that the Whitestar armor has some kind of Vorlon tech component, heaven knows how much. You may be correct about the armor, I have it in my Excalibur notes with no source. It may have been in the magazine, I'll look for where it came from.

Tell me if you find where this came from. I only saw it as fan-boy speculation...

I'll try and find the source this weekend, if I did put something in my notes that didn't come from a primary source I'm going to be very dissapointed.

As for the Shadows, we know that EF was fielding the prototype Hybrids fairly early. We know that Shadow-tech was present at least on the armor of the Shadow-Omegas and that JMS took credit on Usenet for the cleverness of EF incorporating Shadow-tech into existing hulls. We know that the Shadow-Omegas used weapons that we've not seen on EF ships before or since and that the bow cannons tracked side-to side and downwards without moving the mount.

Which certainly was a case of CGI laziness, as the small turrets which evidently fired a weaker version of the very same type of beam did indeed have to move their mount. I guess the CGI guys just thought noone would notice the bow mounts in those scenes...

And why do we know it was a case of CGI laziness? One could make the argument that the ship has developed newer mirrors that are allowing limited tracking in their fixed mounts without even using Shadow-tech. Again, unless you've talked to the CGI artists and gotten an answer from them you have no real info on the situation. It could be laziness, it could be purposeful. We simply don't know. More importantly, it did happen and there is no sure-fire reason why it is impossible. Let me try this tack, in In the Beginning there is one EF fleet scene that has Omega class destroyers clearly visible with their rotating sections locked down. Do we disregard it? We have one episode with the Streib where they get their butts thoroughly kicked by the Aggy. However, we later find out that they are Shadow servants. Should their ship be made more powerful?

We've been told by the designer that Warlock armor is Shady.

And that it can beat up everything from a Star Destroyer to the Enterprise-E... besides, that cannot be something a CGI designer can decide; only a story writer like JMS can say how much shadowtech lies in the warlock. And since he never once mentioned the armor in his little piece about shady infuences aboard the "Titans", well... I attribute it to Tim Earls doing some wishful dreaming - or being misinterpreted when he meant the Warlock armor was a new generation of EA armor improved with things they learned from examination of shadow bio-armor.

But again, much of what is established canon for the ships is drawn from the CGI artists such as Mojo, Mark Dickerson, or Tim Earls. JMS stated to AoG that they were the go-to people for info on the ships, since they designed them, thought out their loadouts, figured out what the weapons-fire should look like, etc. We rely on George Johnsen's writings for many of the details as well. Do we chuck that info simply because it's inconvenient? If Andy Probert gives me data on the Enterprise-refit that doesn't contradict anything from the show do I disregard it if it doesn't match my expectations?

We know that, on an EF research base, recognizable ship components are being manufactured. We have JMS commenting that the Shadow-Omegas don't have living CPU's and that EF is working on adapting Shadow basic technology.

OK ...as long as it's put in perspective.
If the ship components aren't manifactured by EA know-how, but by EA personell operating shadowtech machinery that does the manifacturing without the humans knowing how - no problem.

A possibility.

If the EA is working on adapting shadowtech but tangible results in everything except operating shadowtech are in the distant future - no problem. (actually not in the future - we see from that one glimse of the future that the humans will eventually choose vorlontech to emulate, and abandon shadowtech along the way)

Again, we see a human who is part of the Rangers, flying a Rangers-marked ship. We have no idea if there is an Earth-force anymore or not or what ships they field. Not that there wouldn't be sound reasons for gravitating the Vorlon tech over Shadow tech but we simply don't know for certain.

As for ancient level tech, we have seen that Vorlon ships are not invulnerable to young-races weapons and we know that Vorlons take great stock in Vorlon lives (technomage trilogy). We know that a basic nuke can destroy Shadow battlecrabs and Shadow major cities. We know that in wartime Shadow cities apparently can't respond quickly enough to counter a kamikaze whitestar. It may well be that the younger races are nearing the end of the steep slope on technical learning and entering the much more gradual and perhaps plateauing phase, as the level of differnce between the ancient races and the young races simply doesn't seem that extreme.

Not quite. But I wrote my viwes on all that before - just because there seems to be a limit on raw effect in JMS's universe doesn't mean that there is an limit to the complexity of the tech.

All fair enough. However, it does seem that there is a point of diminishing returns where advancing the next few levels simply isn't all that broadly important. The Ak-74 is much easier to manufacture than a Stg-44 and has much more modern components. To the person using it, there's not a huge difference.

And it's the complexity of the tech that counts in reverse-engineering, not the raw effect. And the humans never managed to reverse-engineer tech from the more advanced of their fellow younger races, so if they can't yet do step three on the tech ladder, why do people allow the thought that they could easily jump everything in between and manage step forty?

My argument is that they jumped to level 30 because the races at level 40 took years to teach it to them.

From my point of view, the most striaghtforward explanation is simply that the younger races are beginning to crack ancient tech, at a bare minimum Vorlon weaponry and Shadow armor as specifically stated by show sources.

And I strongly object to that idea as it wouldn't be logical or plausible. Development doesn't work that way. You don't just "jump" centuries of advancement. You might advance faster, catching up to the minbari's 1000 year advancement in a mere century, sure. But you don't just jump that, and untold millenia more. Especially not jump, because a lot of all those little discoveries in between will be the tools that you must have to truly understand and manipulate the final tech.

Again, my argument is that if the ancient races in question took several years to teach the young races how their tech operates and the principles behind their use than they could do that jump. I will freely admit that there isn't a chance in heck that they could make that advancement ENTIRELY ON THEIR OWN. Were they left to their own devices, they'd still be whacking the Shadow-"mouse" with a rock. However, we now know that factions within Earthforce were allied with the Shadows and the Minbari had been the chosen race of the Vorlons for a very long time. The question is how much support did they provide?

But if someone says the EA, with barely 200 years in space, one of the youngest of younger races were to figure out Shadowtech before they figured out artificial gravity, well...

As I said, they did figure out artificial gravity.

But that would be stupid. At least in case of the humans - I could (barely) accept it in case of the Minbari, if one assumes the Vorlons consider them trusted enough after 1000 years of following their dogma. But why in hell would the Shadows teach the unrelaible and fresh humans things they didn't yet teach the century-long serving Drakh? It just wouldn't make any sense, so I discard this theory, and insert an extra factor for my personal theories, an yet unseen ShadowMinion race that serves as the facillator for the human advances, handing them out on Shadow-orders as black box tech and later making their own deal with the humans because they need something from them to secure their position against the Drakh once their masters are gone... sure it's speculation, but it's speculation that solves more problems then it creates, which can't be said of most of the other speculations around this topic.

Actually, one could modify your theory to the statement that this mysterious Shadow-thrall has been actively assisting the EF forces in cracking Shadow-tech, perhaps as part of an internal war with the Drakh. After all, we know that the Drakh are portrayed as the military arm of the Shadow-Thralls yet we see a "scientist" thrall-race that might perfectly fit the bill for this. Two other things. First, the telepath books hint that the Shadow involvement with Earth might have gone for much longer than one might think. Secondly, we don't know what the Shadow-motivations were. The Drakh might not have progressed as far as they'd hoped. If the Drakh were present for the previous war their performance (after all, the Minbari did "win" (or did they?)) might have prompted the Shadows to look for better minions. They might have decided that the risk was worth it to field someone that could stomp the Minbari. Note that EF cleaned the Drakh's clock in ActA, one might presume that the Minbari would have done the same. Hence, the need for a race more capable than the Drakh. We don't know, but I'd say the argument that the Shadows, reaching desperation to finally win their war against the Vorlons, decided to quickly advance the Humans as a counter is at least as justifiable as saying that we need to throw out several pieces of in-show data and invent another Shadow-thrall race working behind the scenes. Note that the last Shadow war went on for a longer period than the last one, note that right towards the end EF was fielding Warlocks, designed to be able to kill Sharlins. Coincidence or part of the Shadow plan? Had Sheridan not screwed everything up, might EF be fielding significant numbers of Warlocks and maybe evn Shadow-hybrids in 2263-65 to mount an offensive against the Minbari and finally smash the Vorlons' fair-haired race?

quote]If those races were actively working with these races for years than I don't have an issue with the young races beginning to crack the tech. They're not stupid and they would have had very good teachers.

But it still would on the one hand make no sense for the Shadows to teach someone they couldn't control - they can't have survived that long by being stupid, and giving equal power to someone who cannot be trusted not to stab you in the back with it would be stupid; every evil overlord knows that.[/quote]
Well, the keepers might have made that less of a problem. Make the EF high command and the politicians into Shadow-thralls and you won't have nearly as much to worry about.

And on the other ahnd even if they had knowledge, without the tools to build the tools they can't do squat. Even if you know in every detail how to build a computer, without the (not inconsiderable) support structure to create chips etc. you can't build one.

Well, we're talking about organic tech now. What machines will be needed? If the Shadows provided the appropriate vats initialy, they could well "grow" new vats to make the vats to make the vats to make the components. I tend to look at Shadow tech as "just add water" technology. They don't need to build up an infrastructure, they can grow one.

Using the computer analogy; the Shadows supply me with a vat that grows vats to make computers. They show me how to chemically (or telepathically!) ask the computer-making vats to modify the computers to perform a series of new functions. The sentient vats, which are already hard-wired to understand those commands, starts pumping out modified computers. Lets take the Warlock armor. Shadow tech is shown to be highly adaptive. So, we go to our handy vat and tell it to produce a chemical that will bond with EF armor and make it stronger since we're unwilling to have such evident Shadow-tech on display (Minbari might freak out). Let's take it a step further. The Shadows spend several years teaching genetic engineering at an incredibly high level to selected EF researchers. They show them how to minaipulate the genetic code at a very precise level and also tech them the fundamentals of how to undrestand the effects of their manipulations. EF researchers begin to manipulate genetic material to create an incredibly complex organism. Many fail since they are still unsure of many of the details but, eventually, numbers pay off. One organism grows along a surface. Testing weapons fire on that material shows a remarkable degree of protection. They refine it further. It's not as good as Shadow-armor but it's much better than EF armor and as good as Minbari armor. Someone suggests growing it on their new battleship hulls.

We can think up some very inventive ways for this to work that will also have the virtue of being pretty straightforward in explanation.

With that in mind, anyone want to discuss Tim Earls' comments on the Badger class 'Fury?

What did he comment on that one now... IIRC it was intruduced a loong time before he came to screw up CGI scenes - the Badger two-seater was first seen in "A Voice in the Wilderness")

[/quote]

He stated around the time of ItB that the Badger would appear in the movie as a two-seat side-by-side Starfury. According to one of the CGI artists at NDE, they smacked him down and actually used one of AoG's books to do it. So, they weren't included. Yea!

Matt

 

[El Cid]

Where can I find the scripts that weren't filmed?

Sidney

 

[JonAcheson]

Where can I find the scripts that weren't filmed?

Sidney

To my knowledge, you can't. They were up an a web-based electronic publishing site called Bookface that unfortunately went out of business. Their technology only let you read the text from a Java-based browser app, which prevented you from making downloads.

I'd love to see this stuff as extras on the Crusade DVDs, or published in a Crusade Companion book. Or even done as comics.

Jon Acheson

 

[Sundog]

One point:

ShadowScout wrote:
I have no problem with use - and I even have no problem with operating a piece of ShadowTech that created other pieces of ShadowTech. I do have a problem with replicating it - that should be a few centuries in the future at the very least.

Replication of organic systems is usually quite simple. They do it themselves.

I see absolutely no reason for the "skins" of the shadow destroyers to not be self-replicating. Build a normal Omega, crew it, then let a fast-growing organic mesh absorb the whole damn thing - including the crew...

Sounds like something Clarke would be willing to try...

 

[nitflegal]

Where can I find the scripts that weren't filmed?

Sidney

To my knowledge, you can't. They were up an a web-based electronic publishing site called Bookface that unfortunately went out of business. Their technology only let you read the text from a Java-based browser app, which prevented you from making downloads.

I'd love to see this stuff as extras on the Crusade DVDs, or published in a Crusade Companion book. Or even done as comics.

Jon Acheson

Trying to be delicate here so people don't yell at me. They are out there on the net, several in pdf format. I can't tell you where, but they are out there.

Matt