Random bit of discussion,

[ShadowScout]

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.

Check the facts - the warlock was designed and half-produced during that period, but it wasn't completely finished - because the EA R&D department couldn't deliver the AG system as they promised. So they actually had to operate the few prototypes which were designed for gravity in a zero-ge environment - not funny. Only after the EA got AG as part of joining the IA did the warlock get it's AG - all existing ones were recalled and refitted.

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.

But you can't consider in the show statements as data - not without a big grain of salt, not when there are soo many lies spoken in the show. So you Always have to think about who's saying what, how likely is it to be true, and how likely is he to be lying. Now, Sheridan has little reason to lie about his taking out the BlackStar for instance, but Clarke has many reasons to lie about almost everything he says. And then to complicate matters further, there are those who have no reason to lie, but were told lies themselves which they now repeat. It just isn't good to ignore all that, because it taints your data. Of course, in some instances everyone of us will bend any questionable data to fit his pet theory - and there agreement will become impossible. The point is to make your pet theories at least interesting and plausible, not construct an unlikely or implausible theory just to back up questionable or frankly errerous data, even if it was shown on the screen.

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.

Depends on how you take that. It would seem unlikely that they could just "jump" "tech levels" and get some understanding of ancient-level stuff without understandintg the stuff in between. But the basic principles of ancient tech, those wouzld be the same as the basic principles as any tech. And by studying ancient tech they will gain at least some ideas on how to improve their own tech, or unlick the next level above their own. But not how to copy ancient tech. Not yet.

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

Which means that either JMS didn't think and the show is to be ranged at the same level as StarTrek in terms of logical (magic particle of the week anyone?), or we have the task of finding an explenation that fixes this trouble and still let's us see B5 et cet. with the respect it deserves. I choose the latter. Feel free to make your own choice, people...

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.

Nope. That's the nice thing about energy guns, if you understand the mechanics, you can build a smaller gun that needs less energy for less effect. It's not as if this gun has an "non-scaled" effect (like a weapon that projects a singularity - that would need a minimum energy that sould be well beyond younger race power tech, but a weapon that just pours out energy to damage things can be constructed to pour out less energy for less power... If You Know How To Build/Modify IT!!!)

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.

One - yes, we do not have enough data here.
Two - still, if the gun works they'd use it elsewhere if they could - the one bug it still has can be easily worked around, for static defenses at least.

As for the BlueStar... yes, it does look nice. However, it has a minbari-style surface pattern and not the WhiteStar-style which I assume goes hand-in-hand with vorlon armor. So you can see this little ship in two ways - either as proof that they can no longer build vorlon-hybrid tech, or as proof that by 2282 they have learned to do so again.

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?

See above - the AG didn't come from EA R&D, it came as gift from the Minbari when the EA joined the IA. See Delenn's speech after the liberation of Earth... sou you're the one using bad date to make your point here... :wink:
And I'm saying that if the humies couldn't even figure out AG after seeing it for 100 years (Centauri) they certainly couldn't be assumed to figure out faar more advanced tech in a mere decade.

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.

Actually I'm pretty certain Garibaldi did NOT know where the gun came from. Remember the discussion in S-5 that started the Victory project? The MINBARI were to supply the know-how, and the humans only the resources. So if anyone knew anything, it was the minbari. And the Minbari certainly wouldn't want the humans to steal their secrets, so they'd play their cards close to their chest, even for Michael. Don't fall into the mind-trap of assuming it's an EA project - it is NOT; they just get the one surviving prototype because they need it to beat that plague.

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.

Many sources. Most from the show, some from the stories. Vorlon tech DOES repair itself. So do the vorlon systems on the WS. It's the minbari tech behind the Vorlon armor that needs repairs when the WS gets hit... and we did get some descriptions from Lennier...

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?

Actually we can make a good guess. If it has to turn it's small turrets, and the big turrets are exactly like bigger versions of the small turrets, it follows that they don't have any new magic system but that some CGI guy was just too lazy to move them in his scene. Now, if they had made the ShadOmega mesh with a completely different style of main turret, then I'd have to accept that the main gusn were quite a bit different from the small guns... but since they didn't I won't.

ItB... can be explained as either prototypes, or an extremely similar looking yet slighty different class of ship (when in fact it was budget considerations that made the CGI boys use an Omega mesh to fill out the screen because the show guys couldn't afford to pay for a new mesh).
Streib... well, either they made a bad bargain with the Shadows, or the ship is just no combat vessel but an exploration ship, forgoing firepower for sensors and stealth... (when of course their addition to the rank of "official ShadowAllies" seems to have come up a lot later then their apperance in the show - back then they were at most manipulated by the Shadows as the Centauri were...)

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?

Well, you do have to take things in perspective. And disregard anything those people may say in private (meaning not sanctioned by the powers that control the B5 universe - WB, BP and JMS) about their "babies". Of course, where their ramblings do make sense, by all means, use them. But when their claims sound unlikely, ignore them.
Warlock shady armor sounds completely unlikely, because it doesn't look shady. In face, one of the most telling aspects of shady armor is that it is somehow "in motion". So the statement that the warlock has shadow-armor must be false. However, it could also be only overstatement - meaning that the warlock has improved EA armor, improved with data gained from studying shadow bio-armor (maybe the one they couated the ShadOmegas with). That sounds acceptable, that isn't clashing with what we see, so that could be it. I'd buy it.

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.

But it's an indication. And since everything else we see there is pretty vorlon-esque too, I'd say somewhere in the future the EA will abandon all attempts on getting shady, but follow the vorlon road. I think it might be the "great burn", where earth gets bombed back into the stone age, and afterwards get's lifted up again with minbari help (who of course will use the meantime to get more vorlones-que themselves). Just a theory, but one that happens to fit the facts. And makes good telling besides... :wink:

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.

Exactly. But for example, an AK-74 (~EA tech) is much easier to reverse-engineer then, say, a H&K G-11 (~minbari tech) yes? Even though they aren't that much different in effect, especially at close range and for unarmored targets. And following that example, how about the gund from the mivie "earser"? If you have barely managed to invent the AK-74, and haven't yet cracked the secrets of your neighbor's H&K G-11 because your tech basee is just not up to it, why in hell should you be able to understand an small gauss rifle even if you get a few from some shady associates???

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

One - how could they jump at level 30 if even after the time where you assume them to have 30 they still haven't managed to do anything from 21 to 29?
Two - why should the level 40 races (which actually should be more like level 90) teach them at the beginning of their association when they haven't taught the races that faithfully and fanatically serve them for centuries?
It just makes no sense.

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?

Still, why should they?
Knowledge is very dangerous, why would you tech someone you weren't yet sure is really on your side? Why would you give raw know-how to a race that could easily stab you in the back (because by then they'd have the knowledge). Especially when the established MO of the Shadows ALWAYS was to give out "black box" tech (see Technomages), and teach only their most devoted servants.
It's about trust and foolishness.
Why would the shadows be so foolish to trust blindly<, when they didn't have to?
I say it's far more likely they supplied the tech, and some "advisors" from one of their trusted minion races who had the know-how; those were responsible for all the shady things in the EA, but they also were the hold the Shadows had - because to keep them and any new tech gifts the EA would have had to stay on the Shadows side... and as reward would slowly, after they did their part, have been taught the promised knowledge.
Think about how you would do purchases over the Internet - would you send, say, 100000 bucks to an PO box for nothing more then a promise? Or would you demand "payment on delivery", And inspect the goods, for every purchase where you don't have an iron-clad official contact that the law could pursue?

As I said, they did figure out artificial gravity.

And as I said: Wrong! :lol: :wink:

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.

See above why not - no race which wants to survive is that trusting.

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.

Actually I built them as "infiltrator-agent race, who once were a part of the militant shadow-thralls, but got burned badly in Valen's War (they actually were two races in a kind of strange sybiotic/parasitic relationship, and the Minbari wiped out the Kaaryt completely, which created a lot of problems for the surviving Daar'gon - mainly when it comes to reproduction)

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.

Actually we do - Justin was square with Sheridan, or Lorien would have said something; and both Shadows and Vorlons were openly stating their side at Coriana to Sheridan/Delenn, and Lorien let everyone see the truth. So we do know the basics, even if not the particulars.

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.

BtW, the Drakh can't have been present in the previous war, because if they had been, the Minbari would have had records of them and recognized them after their run-in with Delenn in "Lines of Communication". However, they had no clue, while the Centauri did know the Drakh from a few centuries past...

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?

Part of the EA plan to prevent another debacle like the minbari war, even against opponents of that power level I'd say.

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?

Still, noone is stupid enough to "uplift" a race without safeguards.
So I'd say your theory might work in principle, but the Shadows would have been too stupid to survive if they had given the EA all the payment before they did the job. I'd say, the basic idea fits, but they would have given out tech as black box gifts, using EA resources to build Hybrids with their tech to fight the war, and only started giving out the real tech secrets after the humans had done the job.

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.

Only if you don't give out know-how, because if they do have knowledge of Shadowtech, they have the tools to defeat the keepers.

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.

See my old posts - that was what I always said they did. However, I don't mean just growing instant tech - that's part of the "black box gift" theory. But to modify such tech, or to build the "instant pieces" from scratch, that you need tool for, and that is what I say the Shadows wouldn't give away before at least five centuries of loyal service.

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!

Ha-HA! Good!
See what I say about trusting unsanctioned statements?

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...

Exactly. Especially when the Shadows supply an "instant armor pill" - just add omega and it grows all over it. :wink:

As for the scripts... well, some people did steal them from bookface (could be done with enough patience), even after JMS asked them not to. The only nice way to get them is to bug JMS until he releases them somehwere. The naughty way is to get on of these highly illegal copies. But never post them here, whole or in part, as that could get Mongoose in trouble with WB and BP, so they would have to delete everything, and/or worse.

 

[nitflegal]

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.

Check the facts - the warlock was designed and half-produced during that period, but it wasn't completely finished - because the EA R&D department couldn't deliver the AG system as they promised. So they actually had to operate the few prototypes which were designed for gravity in a zero-ge environment - not funny. Only after the EA got AG as part of joining the IA did the warlock get it's AG - all existing ones were recalled and refitted.

Ahh, what facts? That's speculation to fit the fact that Delenn offers Luchenko AG as an incentive to join the IA. However, as you enjoy pointing out, can we really accept data from on-screen? The Warlocks were going on shake-down cruises at the end of season 4. EF seems to hve gone over to rotating sections to generate AG. The Warlock has nothing visible to indicate a previous rotating section. Sure, we can postulate that the Titans was a vastly different ship when Ivanova got to it that looked much more like an Omega. However, we can also postulate 3 other different possibilities

1) EF already had AG and Luchenko knew of it but certainly wasn't going to let on, perhaps suspecting that they'd get their hands on some of the Minbari tech goodies which even the Centauri didn't have.

2) Ef already had AG and Luchenko, the new president taking over from a secretive and dictatorial president simply wasn't aware of it.

or

3), My favorite. The Warlocks had AG, but it was not exactly perfected yet, perhaps it cut out on occasion (although probably rarely, else they wouldn't have ditched the rotating section). Perhaps the power expenditure was quite large due to inefficiencies in the EF derived tech. Perhaps it was fairly weak and could only generate 0.5G or so. In any of these instances, Luchenko might have leapt at the chance to get better tech for the ships.

One thing to consider. Remember the short story that JMS wrote about the Titans? They were all walking about on the Titans so one can presume that it had AG (lines like "They walked across the metal flooring into the red-tinted hallway that led to the command deck at one end, and the crew quarters at the other). There is a line in that story that goes as follows; "We had an incident here a year or so back when a telepath that had been altered to function as the central processing system of a Shadow vessel woke up in MedLab." That refers to the season 3 episode "Ship of Tears" 1 and a half years before Ivanova went to take command of the Warlock. Sheridan still has his office on Babylon 5 so it must be before the end of season 5. Ivanova refers to the recent civil war and has to remind herself that Sheridan is now the president. Finally, it states that this all "six days" after Lyta meets Byron. She meets him in Paragon of Animals, the third episode of the season. That would be early 2262. If we accept the B5 convention that the last episodes take place at the end of the year that they are set in and vice versa, then we have to believe that it is only a very few months (3-4) between the time that Delenn offers AG and the time when the Warlock has it fully integrated. I find it very difficult to believe that they could take a major warship designed for no gravity, which one might presume had a rotating section since EF seems to be doing that "now", and in the space of 2-4 months heavily modify it for AG, remove sections, and all, and have it on patrol within months of the offer being made. Sorry, don't buy it. Thus, I argue that they must have had AG of some sort then. I know that the net explanation is that they designed it for AG before they had it, which is really stupid but also doesn't help. They couldn't have forseen the Minbari offer so they must at the least have thought that they were on the verge of cracking AG. That would still be dumb. So, based on what JMS and Tim Earls have said, it would seem that EF DID have AG towards the end of season 4, when they got the offer from Delenn. Again, it's a case of them screwing it up for their earlier continuity. Had we never seen a Warlock, I could accept that they didn't have AG. Had JMS not shown that they did and set the timeframe of having it in early 2262 then I could maybe be convinced that the Warlock was set up for null-G like a Hyperion. Unfortunately, they screwed that up so I think that we have to accept a Warlock with AG around the same time that the Minbari offered it.

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.

Depends on how you take that. It would seem unlikely that they could just "jump" "tech levels" and get some understanding of ancient-level stuff without understandintg the stuff in between. But the basic principles of ancient tech, those wouzld be the same as the basic principles as any tech. And by studying ancient tech they will gain at least some ideas on how to improve their own tech, or unlick the next level above their own. But not how to copy ancient tech. Not yet.

I'd point out that we simply have no clue how Shadow-tech works. It is possible that, after a few hundred thousand years of development, one might finally understand quantum theory and beyond so well that this stuff becomes almost easy. In that case, once EF researchers were taught the theories that would have taken them those millenia to get to they leapfrog that whole period. Heck, they don't even need to understand the underlying theories or the experiments required to develop them. They can take the underlying structure on faith and simply implement the technologies. Again, we have no clue how Shadow-tech works. You're assuming that it is similar to the industrial revolution to today but we simply don't know.

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

Which means that either JMS didn't think and the show is to be ranged at the same level as StarTrek in terms of logical (magic particle of the week anyone?), or we have the task of finding an explenation that fixes this trouble and still let's us see B5 et cet. with the respect it deserves. I choose the latter. Feel free to make your own choice, people...

And that's fine. However, the more on-screen stuff you throw out, the more the universe stops being JMS's Babylon 5 and becomes ShadowScout's Babylon 5 universe, thanks to JMS for the initial development.

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.

Nope. That's the nice thing about energy guns, if you understand the mechanics, you can build a smaller gun that needs less energy for less effect. It's not as if this gun has an "non-scaled" effect (like a weapon that projects a singularity - that would need a minimum energy that sould be well beyond younger race power tech, but a weapon that just pours out energy to damage things can be constructed to pour out less energy for less power... If You Know How To Build/Modify IT!!!)

Ahh, but that's a sham argument. The whole point of the gun on the Excalibur is that it's a super-powerful weapon, beyond anything that the young-races can provide. Sure, they might be able to scale it down to the point where the power-requirements were similar to a Sharlin's neutron cannon. However, why not just put on a neutron cannon? The whole point seems to be to provide the biggest bang that the ship could handle. Apparently, someone decided that the tradeoff was worth it to provide the Victory-class with the most devastating weapon possible. You assume that the gun is so powerful because that's the only weapon they could get. I argue that the cannon is so powerful because they wanted it to be.

In reality, I suspect that the whole point was to provide their new super-ship with a wave-motion gun but to provide an artificial plot-point so that the Victory had to ram the Shadow Planet-killer and provide dramatic tension for Crusade.

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.

One - yes, we do not have enough data here.

Nope, we don't

Two - still, if the gun works they'd use it elsewhere if they could - the one bug it still has can be easily worked around, for static defenses at least.

Okay, let's try this again. The Victory class is brand new from the IA at the time of ACtA. It presumably has the first developed gun. If it was the proof-of concept prototypes, why would we expect to see any others at the same time? Beyond that, we never see planetary defenses in action after that. we never really see any new ships in the fleets after that. To be blunt, for all that we know every planet could have a ring of those weapons 3 years later and we wouldn't know. There's no data for what was in service after the Crusade's aborted first season. I could argue that every warship in 2270 was armed with radioactive-hamster launchers and while you could argue that was amazingly stupid in concept, there's no data to say that they weren't.

Tried another way, your argument is that we don't see those weapons in wide-spread service soon enough to say that it wasn't a stolen Vorlon weapon. I ask you, where would we have seen these weapons on the show in that timeframe and didn't?

As for the BlueStar... yes, it does look nice. However, it has a minbari-style surface pattern and not the WhiteStar-style which I assume goes hand-in-hand with vorlon armor. So you can see this little ship in two ways - either as proof that they can no longer build vorlon-hybrid tech, or as proof that by 2282 they have learned to do so again.

Yup, never mind that we don't know how long that little sucker has been in service, etc. No useful data beyond its existence.

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?

See above - the AG didn't come from EA R&D, it came as gift from the Minbari when the EA joined the IA. See Delenn's speech after the liberation of Earth... sou you're the one using bad date to make your point here...

See above for alternate theories.

Actually I'm pretty certain Garibaldi did NOT know where the gun came from. Remember the discussion in S-5 that started the Victory project? The MINBARI were to supply the know-how, and the humans only the resources. So if anyone knew anything, it was the minbari. And the Minbari certainly wouldn't want the humans to steal their secrets, so they'd play their cards close to their chest, even for Michael. Don't fall into the mind-trap of assuming it's an EA project - it is NOT; they just get the one surviving prototype because they need it to beat that plague.

Oh, I know that it wasn't an EA project. However, it WAS a Giribaldi project. The guy who assigned it to him was the leader of the IA, his wife has a wee bit pf pull with the Minbari government. I'd suspect that Girabaldi would have gotten any information that he needed. Plus, I don't see how they could have kept that info from him, he'd have gone balistic. Sorry, but this is a very weak argument. The head designer says that it's Vorlon-derived tech, the incredibly suspicious project head doesn't disagree. You're effectively arguing that Girabaldi has behaved completely atypically for himself and that a salvaged gigantic canon could be incorporated into his barnd new super-warship and that nobody would know that. Sorry, don't buy it. As for the Minbari thing, please note that the head designer for the project was a human. Is your contention that the head project designer didn't actually know anything about the ship that he was head-designer of? Let's face it, if they'd let that little weasel know the details of the project, they'd sure as heck have no problem keeping Girabaldi informed. One might also point out that, when Garibaldi complains about Drakes' caution, Sheridan replies that "reverse-engineering" Vorlon and Minbari tech is tricky. Seems even Sheridan thinks that they're reverse-engineering Vorlon tech. Sorry, you may agrue all that you want but this seems pretty certain that JMS wants the IA, at least, to be reverse-engineering at least Vorlon tech.

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?

Actually we can make a good guess. If it has to turn it's small turrets, and the big turrets are exactly like bigger versions of the small turrets, it follows that they don't have any new magic system but that some CGI guy was just too lazy to move them in his scene. Now, if they had made the ShadOmega mesh with a completely different style of main turret, then I'd have to accept that the main gusn were quite a bit different from the small guns... but since they didn't I won't.

That's your perogative, but I would simply point out that, in the episode, they do move.

ItB... can be explained as either prototypes, or an extremely similar looking yet slighty different class of ship (when in fact it was budget considerations that made the CGI boys use an Omega mesh to fill out the screen because the show guys couldn't afford to pay for a new mesh).
Streib... well, either they made a bad bargain with the Shadows, or the ship is just no combat vessel but an exploration ship, forgoing firepower for sensors and stealth... (when of course their addition to the rank of "official ShadowAllies" seems to have come up a lot later then their apperance in the show - back then they were at most manipulated by the Shadows as the Centauri were...)

No argument on them being prototypes, it makes sense, or at least the most sense that is reasonable. The Strieb reflect one of my consistent criticisms of B5, they need a fact-checker. The only place that I am aware of the Strieb being mentioned in the Technomage books in an off-hand way. Why on earth wasn't that removed? Note that when Delenn hears about them her reaction isn't "oh, crap, Shadow-servants!" it's "oh, yeah, those little wusses whose butts we thoroughly kicked!" Yet now when we discuss the Strieb we have to try and make them fit as a Shadow servant. Sigh.

Warlock shady armor sounds completely unlikely, because it doesn't look shady. In face, one of the most telling aspects of shady armor is that it is somehow "in motion". So the statement that the warlock has shadow-armor must be false. However, it could also be only overstatement - meaning that the warlock has improved EA armor, improved with data gained from studying shadow bio-armor (maybe the one they couated the ShadOmegas with). That sounds acceptable, that isn't clashing with what we see, so that could be it. I'd buy it.

Umm, okay. Now, does the Whitestar armor look more like that on a Sharlin or that on Vorlon dreadnought?

http://www.starshipmodeler.com/b5/whitestar_side.jpg
http://babylon5.isnnews.net/gallery/minbari/minbari09.jpg
http://www.starshipmodeler.com/b5/vc_rs.jpg

I'd say that it looks a great deal more like Minbari armor, in fact, if you didn't tell me it had Vorlon tech I'd never suspect that it was there.

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.

But it's an indication. And since everything else we see there is pretty vorlon-esque too, I'd say somewhere in the future the EA will abandon all attempts on getting shady, but follow the vorlon road.

No argument, but I'd caution that you're doing something similar to an alien who snatches up a Japanese ship in 1600 and then assumes that the whole world is identical to early Edo period Japan.

I think it might be the "great burn", where earth gets bombed back into the stone age, and afterwards get's lifted up again with minbari help (who of course will use the meantime to get more vorlones-que themselves). Just a theory, but one that happens to fit the facts. And makes good telling besides... :wink:

Heck, you could make an interesting story about the Great Burn being partially due to the prevalence of Shadow tech which perhaps corupted it's owners.

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.

Exactly. But for example, an AK-74 (~EA tech) is much easier to reverse-engineer then, say, a H&K G-11 (~minbari tech) yes? Even though they aren't that much different in effect, especially at close range and for unarmored targets. And following that example, how about the gund from the mivie "earser"? If you have barely managed to invent the AK-74, and haven't yet cracked the secrets of your neighbor's H&K G-11 because your tech basee is just not up to it, why in hell should you be able to understand an small gauss rifle even if you get a few from some shady associates???

Again, you're arguing that they were operating in a vacuum, I'm arguing that they had significant Shadow help.

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

One - how could they jump at level 30 if even after the time where you assume them to have 30 they still haven't managed to do anything from 21 to 29?
Two - why should the level 40 races (which actually should be more like level 90) teach them at the beginning of their association when they haven't taught the races that faithfully and fanatically serve them for centuries?
It just makes no sense.

Again, if they had significant help, yep, they could have. Agains I ask, is your contention that, even if the Shadows spent several years trying to teach the Earthers how to understand the basic tech, they would be incapable of understanding it?

Still, why should they?
Knowledge is very dangerous, why would you tech someone you weren't yet sure is really on your side? Why would you give raw know-how to a race that could easily stab you in the back (because by then they'd have the knowledge). Especially when the established MO of the Shadows ALWAYS was to give out "black box" tech (see Technomages), and teach only their most devoted servants.
It's about trust and foolishness.

Well, we don't actually knwo what the tech transfer was like back in the Taratimude days. We do know they were active for at least 10 years before the first occasion of them going for the tech but after Wierden embraced her very anti-Shadow code. I personally see that supplicant stuff as being initiated as punishement for them embracing that code.

Why would the shadows be so foolish to trust blindly<, when they didn't have to?
I say it's far more likely they supplied the tech, and some "advisors" from one of their trusted minion races who had the know-how; those were responsible for all the shady things in the EA, but they also were the hold the Shadows had - because to keep them and any new tech gifts the EA would have had to stay on the Shadows side... and as reward would slowly, after they did their part, have been taught the promised knowledge.

What do they have to lose. If this war was truly to be fought to the bitter end this time, the Shadows have two choices. Fight with the same resources as they did the last time, knowing that the Minbari have advanced considerably since then or try and imporve thier chances. Let's say that they actively help the humans, what do they risk? With the advances that the humans are making they might be a serious threat in 50 years. If they finally win the war they pretty much control the galaxy and can destroy off the Earth if they wish whenever they get a niff of them getting uppity. Besides, they almost completely control the Earth government and the EF pursestrings at that point. They can shut down research anytime that they want. If they lose, it really doesn't matter because this is the ast war. Heck, it's a nice "sc**w-you" to the Vorlons in that case, since they will have to deal with a possibly Shadow-equipped human race. Is it a big risk? Yep, sure is. However, to win big you need to risk big. Let me put it this way, if I was the Shadows and had decided to actually win this time, knowing what I was up against I might think it an acceptable risk. At the least, the threat is far enoguh in the future that I can worry about dealing with the threat once the war is over.

Think about how you would do purchases over the Internet - would you send, say, 100000 bucks to an PO box for nothing more then a promise? Or would you demand "payment on delivery", And inspect the goods, for every purchase where you don't have an iron-clad official contact that the law could pursue?

If I had two days to live and the website promised the cure for my illness and I was a multimillionaire? You're darned tooting! Again, the last war seems to be being played for keeps. Heck, EF whomped the Drakh in ACtA with just a handful of Warlocks and the rest older ships. Delenn and her Whitestars smacked around the Drakh like they were babies. The Drakh simply aren't all that impressive. They either need the Drakh to be stronger or they need someone else or they risk getting beaten for good.

As I said, they did figure out artificial gravity.

And as I said: Wrong! :lol: :wink:

As I said, see above.

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.

See above why not - no race which wants to survive is that trusting.

Umm, again, if the Drakh are trying to wipe them out, they may well do so. If the alternative is certain death, most any option looks better.

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.

Actually I built them as "infiltrator-agent race, who once were a part of the militant shadow-thralls, but got burned badly in Valen's War (they actually were two races in a kind of strange sybiotic/parasitic relationship, and the Minbari wiped out the Kaaryt completely, which created a lot of problems for the surviving Daar'gon - mainly when it comes to reproduction)

If the Drakh are the infiltrator-type race, which I have no problem with, then I can see them needing a hammer-style race. Looked at in a Star Trek context, the Drakh are the Vorta, the Earth would become the Jem'Hadar.

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.

Actually we do - Justin was square with Sheridan, or Lorien would have said something; and both Shadows and Vorlons were openly stating their side at Coriana to Sheridan/Delenn, and Lorien let everyone see the truth. So we do know the basics, even if not the particulars.

Okay, so you're going to assume that Justin was square with Sheridan when his whole purpose was to have Sheridan turn towards the Shadow-side yet you'll disbelieve Drake, Sheridan, and Garibaldi when they talk of reverse-engineering Vorlon tech!

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.

BtW, the Drakh can't have been present in the previous war, because if they had been, the Minbari would have had records of them and recognized them after their run-in with Delenn in "Lines of Communication". However, they had no clue, while the Centauri did know the Drakh from a few centuries past...

I've little problem with that, let's say that the Drakh were active for a few hundred years. However, if they were Shadow allies at that point they must have been brought into the fold before the Shadows went dormant at the end of the war. Perhaps they were a project around the same time as the technomages to prepare for the next war.

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?

Part of the EA plan to prevent another debacle like the minbari war, even against opponents of that power level I'd say.

Or they simply dovetailed together. Note that after the E-M war the humans were the perfect choice for a race to fight the Minbari. After all, most races were just scared, the humans were scared and p*ssed. Give them an offer of revenge or even just to keep the Minbari from killing them all the next time (note that they didn't really win the war and don't know why it stopped, they must be fairly paranoid that the Minbari might start up again for the same lack of reason that they stopped) and they might leap at the chance. I'd suspect that that was a motivation for EF factions to join them in the first place, including the resultant xenophobia.

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?

Still, noone is stupid enough to "uplift" a race without safeguards.
So I'd say your theory might work in principle, but the Shadows would have been too stupid to survive if they had given the EA all the payment before they did the job. I'd say, the basic idea fits, but they would have given out tech as black box gifts, using EA resources to build Hybrids with their tech to fight the war, and only started giving out the real tech secrets after the humans had done the job.

Had Crusade and ACtA not occurred, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, there are too many data points that support them assisting the humans more actively after that.

Take the Warlock and AG. Had we never seen one, there'd be no problem at all. Had JMS not written his story and set a hard and fast date, I could go with them being less advanced. Had ACtA and Crusade never happened, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. Unfortunately for continuity, those came along and mixed up the details again.

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.

Only if you don't give out know-how, because if they do have knowledge of Shadowtech, they have the tools to defeat the keepers.

Do they? Perhaps. Would the Shadows have noticed? I'd think so. If they'd won the war might they have simply destroyed the human race at that point? Yep, they might have.

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.

See my old posts - that was what I always said they did. However, I don't mean just growing instant tech - that's part of the "black box gift" theory. But to modify such tech, or to build the "instant pieces" from scratch, that you need tool for, and that is what I say the Shadows wouldn't give away before at least five centuries of loyal service.

Again, why not. I can make a plausible case for them to have decided that the risks were worth it. Then, all of the data fits and I don't have to throw out any show-evidence to do so. If we go your route, we need to toss several statements and descriptions because they don't fit. Personally, I'll take the theory that contradicts the data of the show the least every time.

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!

Ha-HA! Good!
See what I say about trusting unsanctioned statements?

Yup, there I have previously approved data that says the back-seater was the Badger. I have no on-screen evidence of this mythical Badger in ItB. So, there's no conflict. Heck, even if it was there I could argue that the Badger Mk2 had the cockpit moved to the back and salvage it that way. My point is that I'll toss show data if there is specific data that contradicts it. For Shadow armor on the Warlock, we have no specific data that says that it isn't.

As for the scripts... well, some people did steal them from bookface (could be done with enough patience), even after JMS asked them not to. The only nice way to get them is to bug JMS until he releases them somehwere. The naughty way is to get on of these highly illegal copies. But never post them here, whole or in part, as that could get Mongoose in trouble with WB and BP, so they would have to delete everything, and/or worse.

True enough, hence my hedging about them. No address, no help.

Matt

 

[ShadowScout]

Ahh, what facts? That's speculation to fit the fact that Delenn offers Luchenko AG as an incentive to join the IA.

Actually not quite - read AoG's fluff on the Warlock.

However, as you enjoy pointing out, can we really accept data from on-screen? The Warlocks were going on shake-down cruises at the end of season 4.

But we don't hear Anything about them before the EA gets AG after joining the IA at the end of S-4.

EF seems to hve gone over to rotating sections to generate AG. The Warlock has nothing visible to indicate a previous rotating section. Sure, we can postulate that the Titans was a vastly different ship when Ivanova got to it that looked much more like an Omega. However, we can also postulate 3 other different possibilities

1) EF already had AG and Luchenko knew of it but certainly wasn't going to let on, perhaps suspecting that they'd get their hands on some of the Minbari tech goodies which even the Centauri didn't have.

Unlikely, because then we'd have seen it in their most advanced ships which Clarke would certainly have used for his defense

2) Ef already had AG and Luchenko, the new president taking over from a secretive and dictatorial president simply wasn't aware of it.

unlikels - same reason

3), My favorite. The Warlocks had AG, but it was not exactly perfected yet, perhaps it cut out on occasion (although probably rarely, else they wouldn't have ditched the rotating section). Perhaps the power expenditure was quite large due to inefficiencies in the EF derived tech. Perhaps it was fairly weak and could only generate 0.5G or so. In any of these instances, Luchenko might have leapt at the chance to get better tech for the ships.

Almost. As stated, it was designed for AG which the EA R&D department promised they'd deliver by 2261. But they didn't manage to crack the tech after all, so the prototypes had to leave the space for the AG system empty and make their initial test cruises without - for a starship that's problematic, since even low-g would allow it to function pretty much normally when designed for g-positive environment.
But when the EA got AG as IA entree, the Warlocks finally could be completed to the ship Invanova got after she decided not to continue on B5.

One thing to consider. Remember the short story that JMS wrote about the Titans? They were all walking about on the Titans so one can presume that it had AG (lines like "They walked across the metal flooring into the red-tinted hallway that led to the command deck at one end, and the crew quarters at the other). There is a line in that story that goes as follows; "We had an incident here a year or so back when a telepath that had been altered to function as the central processing system of a Shadow vessel woke up in MedLab." That refers to the season 3 episode "Ship of Tears" 1 and a half years before Ivanova went to take command of the Warlock. Sheridan still has his office on Babylon 5 so it must be before the end of season 5. Ivanova refers to the recent civil war and has to remind herself that Sheridan is now the president. Finally, it states that this all "six days" after Lyta meets Byron. She meets him in Paragon of Animals, the third episode of the season. That would be early 2262. If we accept the B5 convention that the last episodes take place at the end of the year that they are set in and vice versa, then we have to believe that it is only a very few months (3-4) between the time that Delenn offers AG and the time when the Warlock has it fully integrated. I find it very difficult to believe that they could take a major warship designed for no gravity, which one might presume had a rotating section since EF seems to be doing that "now", and in the space of 2-4 months heavily modify it for AG, remove sections, and all, and have it on patrol within months of the offer being made. Sorry, don't buy it.

Don't have to - as I wrote, the official story is that the Warlock was designed for AG from the start, and never fitted with rotating sections, but didn't actually get AG until the IA deal because EA R&D just couldn't hack it. See - it all makes sense...

Thus, I argue that they must have had AG of some sort then. I know that the net explanation is that they designed it for AG before they had it, which is really stupid but also doesn't help.

Not net, but officially accepted by BP and WB.

They couldn't have forseen the Minbari offer so they must at the least have thought that they were on the verge of cracking AG.

true - thought that.

That would still be dumb. So, based on what JMS and Tim Earls have said, it would seem that EF DID have AG towards the end of season 4, when they got the offer from Delenn.

Nope - the time line never ever shows the Warlock with Ag before IA time.
And while it may be dumb to design a ship for one "promised" system, I suppose such stupid things get done in real life too...

Again, it's a case of them screwing it up for their earlier continuity. Had we never seen a Warlock, I could accept that they didn't have AG. Had JMS not shown that they did and set the timeframe of having it in early 2262 then I could maybe be convinced that the Warlock was set up for null-G like a Hyperion. Unfortunately, they screwed that up so I think that we have to accept a Warlock with AG around the same time that the Minbari offered it.

Nope, because then we'd have seen it defending Clarke (or do you honestly think he'd have left his newest unit out of the fight to defend him?) But the Apollo was on Omega, so I think it's safe to assume the Warlock wasn't ready at that time. And since the IA offer came just after that, well...

I'd point out that we simply have no clue how Shadow-tech works. It is possible that, after a few hundred thousand years of development, one might finally understand quantum theory and beyond so well that this stuff becomes almost easy. In that case, once EF researchers were taught the theories that would have taken them those millenia to get to they leapfrog that whole period. Heck, they don't even need to understand the underlying theories or the experiments required to develop them. They can take the underlying structure on faith and simply implement the technologies. Again, we have no clue how Shadow-tech works. You're assuming that it is similar to the industrial revolution to today but we simply don't know.

What we do know however suggests it ain't that easy. Or everyone would be doing it, since ShadowTech in it's current incarnation has been around for at least a million years (vorlontech has, and the Shadows are older, ergo...). If for example the Drakh had shady shippies, then I'd be much closer to accepting that figuring out Shadowtech is easy - but after centuries of serving the Shadows, minding the store ad Z'ha'dum, using their tech and even reading the manuals they stiull haven't got it for themselves. So I am forced to conclude that the humans shouldn't be able to do it either, so any instances where they do use that tech they must have gotten it from someone older then the Drakh who has the neccessary knowledge... and that this knowledge isn't as easy to comy by as you might suggest.

And that's fine. However, the more on-screen stuff you throw out, the more the universe stops being JMS's Babylon 5 and becomes ShadowScout's Babylon 5 universe, thanks to JMS for the initial development.

Well, I see it more as JMS universe with some deatils added and worked out by ShadowScout. But you're right of course - however, that's just it. If JMS stands up and does something worthwhile - fine. If he doesn't, someone else has to. And here I want well thought out stuff. Sometimes in get it from others. Sometimes I don't, and then I make it myself. But since I'm a nice guy I offer my ideas to others to follow or ignore; and to help them make thei choices I outline my thoughts behind my ideas and offer arguments so show why I oppose some other ideas. I also refuse to bow down to any "holy writ" in regard to JMS universe if it doesn't follow plausability. But again, since I'm a nice guy I prefer to assume error instead of deliberate nonsense, and try to find an explenation to fix it. And unless JMS himself comes and tells me I'm wrong I'll contine to do so (and even if JMS comes I'd probably have a similar discussion with him - I accept his word in basic storyline, because these are his characters, and he can play them and fate all in one. But I don't accept his word when it clashes with logic or physics - I'll at least demand an plausible explenation.) Sorry if I can't even accept a good story without trying to make it better :wink:

Ahh, but that's a sham argument. The whole point of the gun on the Excalibur is that it's a super-powerful weapon, beyond anything that the young-races can provide.

AHA!!!
No further questions, your honor.

Sure, they might be able to scale it down to the point where the power-requirements were similar to a Sharlin's neutron cannon. However, why not just put on a neutron cannon? The whole point seems to be to provide the biggest bang that the ship could handle. Apparently, someone decided that the tradeoff was worth it to provide the Victory-class with the most devastating weapon possible. You assume that the gun is so powerful because that's the only weapon they could get. I argue that the cannon is so powerful because they wanted it to be.

Then they'd have made it just as powerful as all the Exy's other guns combined in terms of total energy output, but not as powerful to cripple the ship for a minute - ask Any naval officer if he'd like one gun that can kill anything if it hits, but then leaves his ship defenseless for a minute, or one gun that can kill most things it hits and can be fired every ten seconds with the ship still being able to maneuver etc. too.

In reality, I suspect that the whole point was to provide their new super-ship with a wave-motion gun but to provide an artificial plot-point so that the Victory had to ram the Shadow Planet-killer and provide dramatic tension for Crusade.

Certainly. And it left us to discuss how to best clear up the mess. But I point towards your first, damning sentence here "whole point of the gun on the Excalibur is that it's a super-powerful weapon, beyond anything that the young-races can provide.". And that's just it. So why do you still want to prove they can in fact provide it? Why not use common sense - if it sounds like a vorlon gun, looks like a vorlon gun, shoots like a vorlon gun, hits like a vorlon gun...

Okay, let's try this again. The Victory class is brand new from the IA at the time of ACtA. It presumably has the first developed gun. If it was the proof-of concept prototypes, why would we expect to see any others at the same time?

One - nope, they can't be proof-of concept prototypes, because they're real warships. A PoC prototype would be an old hyperion hull as carrier for just the new gun, to test-fire it (just in case it blows up, so you don't throw good money after bad)

Beyond that, we never see planetary defenses in action after that. we never really see any new ships in the fleets after that. To be blunt, for all that we know every planet could have a ring of those weapons 3 years later and we wouldn't know. There's no data for what was in service after the Crusade's aborted first season. I could argue that every warship in 2270 was armed with radioactive-hamster launchers and while you could argue that was amazingly stupid in concept, there's no data to say that they weren't.

That much is true at least. But if it was an younger race invention, we'd be reading about it, and/or more ships designed around it, in later time periods. And the last time I read the Centauri trilogy, there wasn't anything about more of them... (Forget CGI - the only post-Crusade CGI we have was SiL and since that was made quite a while before all the nice new meshes were made they can only hurt the argument)

Tried another way, your argument is that we don't see those weapons in wide-spread service soon enough to say that it wasn't a stolen Vorlon weapon. I ask you, where would we have seen these weapons on the show in that timeframe and didn't?

Not show - secondary stuff. The Centauri trilogy does mention the Exy, but no sister ships to follow; while they do mention the Centauri consider their rebuild fleet to have a good chance of taking on the IA - not something I'd put any money on if the IA did have the ability to build such guns.

Personally the best I could accept is that these guns were from a stockpile that the minbari got as part of the WhiteStar project, intended for hybrid vorlon/minbari ships and never used because they didn't have the power tech, and the vorlons just forgot to reposses. Then the vorlons build those guns to interface with younger race tech, and were disappointed that they had overestimated the minbari's capabilities.

Yup, never mind that we don't know how long that little sucker has been in service, etc. No useful data beyond its existence.

Exactly.

Oh, I know that it wasn't an EA project. However, it WAS a Giribaldi project. The guy who assigned it to him was the leader of the IA, his wife has a wee bit pf pull with the Minbari government. I'd suspect that Girabaldi would have gotten any information that he needed.

Well, actually not. Garibaldi wouldn't have gotten any tech info - he'd not even have wanted to get any tech info ("again, in plain language please"). And further he'd have known that hte gun came from some minbari facility, but no more (also because the Minbari never tell someone more then he needs to know... Hmmm, they have more in common with Bester then any of 'em would like...)

Plus, I don't see how they could have kept that info from him, he'd have gone balistic. Sorry, but this is a very weak argument. The head designer says that it's Vorlon-derived tech, the incredibly suspicious project head doesn't disagree.

Look at is as outlined above - they get the gun from the minbari, who tell 'em "it's vorlonic, don't feed it after midnight" or something. Wouldn't they say something like they said then?
But why do you think they had to have invented the gun all by temselves, just because they have a "based on" in their text?

You're effectively arguing that Girabaldi has behaved completely atypically for himself and that a salvaged gigantic canon could be incorporated into his barnd new super-warship and that nobody would know that. Sorry, don't buy it.

As for the Minbari thing, please note that the head designer for the project was a human. Is your contention that the head project designer didn't actually know anything about the ship that he was head-designer of?

Well, yes. You seem to think a "head designer" has to know how everything works. That's like saying an architect has to know how the power generators in the basement work, and the computers on the office floor, and the chemical composition of the plastic that mekes up the chairs in the lounge.
Why do you assume he knows how that gun works, while everyone else would assume he doesn't know how the green minbari beams work that the Victory class also mounts? There I see noone objecting to the idea that these were delivered by the Minbari and just plugged in without too many questions...
And it Was said on the show that the Minbari would supply the know-how, and the humans the resources. Since that one statement is not clashing with either logic or plausibility, and since Delenn and Sheridan has no reason to make it up for their very private (unless G'Kar had his eye on them again) discussion.

Let's face it, if they'd let that little weasel know the details of the project, they'd sure as heck have no problem keeping Girabaldi informed. One might also point out that, when Garibaldi complains about Drakes' caution, Sheridan replies that "reverse-engineering" Vorlon and Minbari tech is tricky. Seems even Sheridan thinks that they're reverse-engineering Vorlon tech. Sorry, you may agrue all that you want but this seems pretty certain that JMS wants the IA, at least, to be reverse-engineering at least Vorlon tech.

Yes, trying to.
But them succeeding at this time seems too inplausible to be accepted without loosing a lot of respect with JMS - so I choose to think the problems are not with an almost-done reverse-enginering of vorlon tech, but with patching together not-understood vorlon tech with younger race systems.
As for the rest of the statement... why would they need reverse-engineered minbari tech if they could have the real deal from the Minbari? See your statement about Sheridan's new wife above...
So, since half of the statement you use as "proof" is faulty, and the other half is implausible, I'd again annoy you by assuming that the statement is not to be taken as fact.

That's your perogative, but I would simply point out that, in the episode, they do move.

Weren't you the one who used the fact that the beams move in ways that the big turrets do not as "proof" that the beams must be magic shadowtech? And now you talk about moving turrets to counter my "CGI laziness" argument? Decide please!

No argument on them being prototypes, it makes sense, or at least the most sense that is reasonable. The Strieb reflect one of my consistent criticisms of B5, they need a fact-checker. The only place that I am aware of the Strieb being mentioned in the Technomage books in an off-hand way. Why on earth wasn't that removed? Note that when Delenn hears about them her reaction isn't "oh, crap, Shadow-servants!" it's "oh, yeah, those little wusses whose butts we thoroughly kicked!" Yet now when we discuss the Strieb we have to try and make them fit as a Shadow servant. Sigh.

Yees, it would have been much, much better if the editor of the TM books would have just removed that one singular mention. In my viw of things I'm just going to ignore it and say that even Technomages can come to wrong conclusions sometimes.

Umm, okay. Now, does the Whitestar armor look more like that on a Sharlin or that on Vorlon dreadnought?
I'd say that it looks a great deal more like Minbari armor, in fact, if you didn't tell me it had Vorlon tech I'd never suspect that it was there.

Yup, it does look more minbari. Not quite... actually not minbari at all, but even less vorlon. Maybe that was the intention? I remind you of the effect this had the first time a WhiteStar met a ShadowShip... I would assume the Volrons custom-made the armor to not look vorlonic. The Shadows had no such scruples with the ShadOmegas... So why do you cite that to defend Mr. Earl's wet dreams about Warlock shadow-armor?

No argument, but I'd caution that you're doing something similar to an alien who snatches up a Japanese ship in 1600 and then assumes that the whole world is identical to early Edo period Japan.

Not exactly - I just say the alien would make some assumptions about general tech level and capabilities.

Heck, you could make an interesting story about the Great Burn being partially due to the prevalence of Shadow tech which perhaps corupted it's owners.

Possibly. But we don't see any of it, so we can't tell. And I'm unwilling to make "evil, evil shadow tech" responsible for something we humans have done many, many times on our own in the past 30 centuries. It's something I really hate about many B5 theories... they always want to make the Shadows responsible for everything bad, just because theywere responsible for a few bad things. Clarke seizes power - the Shadows. Centauri agression - the Shadows. Streib capture innocents for anal probings - the Shadows made thm do it. Minbari warrior clan run amok - must be the Shadows too. Brakiri crop failure - the Shadows were responsible. Drazi bash each other - the Shadows invented green and purple scarves. Raiders steal Spoo shipment - the Shadows organized the heist. Dilgar sun blows up - certainly Shadow influece, everyone knows shadows hate light. Sheridans soup too salty - those damn Shadows are at it again. It's like a children's carton, where the same bad guy pops up every day with anouther sceme for the heros to foil.
I hate it!
Of course, I do know where it comes from - that's basic psychology. But it's just not plausible to blame every bad thing on one external source, instead of thinking just who decided to be an asshole and take his neighbor's stuff/land/freedom/life.

Again, you're arguing that they were operating in a vacuum, I'm arguing that they had significant Shadow help.

And I say that's not logical. That this'd be stupid of the Shadows. Especially since they didn't tech the Drakh like that.

Again, if they had significant help, yep, they could have. Agains I ask, is your contention that, even if the Shadows spent several years trying to teach the Earthers how to understand the basic tech, they would be incapable of understanding it?

One - I say the Shadows would never have survived to reach that tech level if they were that naive.
Two - I say even if they had beed so stupid and taught a few humans, those humans wouldn't have had the tools to do much with that knowledge. And I assume that it would have taken more then a few years to learn enough to gain even a bit of true understandig when it comes to ShadowTech - just imagine how long it takes to learn something of today's tech... Operation - sure, but creation needs all the steps in between to Understand it.

Well, we don't actually knwo what the tech transfer was like back in the Taratimude days. We do know they were active for at least 10 years before the first occasion of them going for the tech but after Wierden embraced her very anti-Shadow code. I personally see that supplicant stuff as being initiated as punishement for them embracing that code.

Not so - you can't take back knowledge; that's why I am so opposed to anyone suggesting that the Shadows break with their usual MO and just teach the humans.
And there is absolutely no indication the Taratimude ever knew how to build the tech they got - every hint just indicates that the only thing they knew that modern TM's do not is how to access the "basic functions" of their tech - something that only Galen rediscovered during the TM trilogy.

What do they have to lose. If this war was truly to be fought to the bitter end this time, the Shadows have two choices.

Actually it wasn't - from the Shadows PoV it would be just like every other war. It was the Vorlons who were preparing for a final solution ever since they spotted Sinclair/Valen coming from the future...

Fight with the same resources as they did the last time, knowing that the Minbari have advanced considerably since then or try and imporve thier chances.

Problem is - they didn't. Or they'd fist have started with their loyal Drakh. Since they don't get the goods, noone lower on the ladder can plausibly get them; only some theoretical minion race Higher on the "shadow loyality scale" can be assumed to know about true Shadowtech.

Let's say that they actively help the humans, what do they risk?

The humans saying "thank you" and joining the vorlons to get their bribe too. That's why giving them black box tech makes so much sense.
It's like a dealer - he'd be stupid to give his desired customers the knowledge to make LSD on their own, he'd give out samples and then offer more - for a price. And only after he for one got them hooked and for another made the desired profit could he teach them to have 'em as "sub-dealers"...

With the advances that the humans are making they might be a serious threat in 50 years. If they finally win the war they pretty much control the galaxy and can destroy off the Earth if they wish whenever they get a niff of them getting uppity. Besides, they almost completely control the Earth government and the EF pursestrings at that point. They can shut down research anytime that they want. If they lose, it really doesn't matter because this is the ast war. Heck, it's a nice "sc**w-you" to the Vorlons in that case, since they will have to deal with a possibly Shadow-equipped human race. Is it a big risk? Yep, sure is. However, to win big you need to risk big. Let me put it this way, if I was the Shadows and had decided to actually win this time, knowing what I was up against I might think it an acceptable risk. At the least, the threat is far enoguh in the future that I can worry about dealing with the threat once the war is over.

And as I wrote, it was the Vorlons who decided to go for broke this time, while the Shadows were still doing thier same old stuff.

If I had two days to live and the website promised the cure for my illness and I was a multimillionaire? You're darned tooting! Again, the last war seems to be being played for keeps.

But if you weren't too rich and thought you had many years and bills yet before you... Third time, It Was The Vorlons Who Thought About Making This The Final Time!!! It's in their philosophy! The Shadows would have been happy with another war, and another, and another, because that was what they wanted. That was what they thought helped the younger races, The Vorlons were so keen on finally ending the wars and making everything just like they said it should be - that was what they wanted, that was what they thought would help the younger races.

Heck, EF whomped the Drakh in ACtA with just a handful of Warlocks and the rest older ships.

One warlock actually, but who's counting.

Delenn and her Whitestars smacked around the Drakh like they were babies. The Drakh simply aren't all that impressive. They either need the Drakh to be stronger or they need someone else or they risk getting beaten for good.

No "for good" in the shadows book, for the fourth time.
And if the Drakh just aren't that impressive, but completely, fanatically loyal, they would have been the first the Shadows would give out raw knowledge to. Since they didn't get any, I think it's safe to assume the humans did just get toys instead of know-how.
Besides, giving Knowledge actually goes against the Shadows credo - because that encourages relying on gifts, while the Shadows were very much for encouraging self-reliance. The Vorlons now... they'd have liked races hanging on their every word... but the Shadows wanted to force races to think for themselves, even if it killed them.

Umm, again, if the Drakh are trying to wipe them out, they may well do so. If the alternative is certain death, most any option looks better.

It's not smart to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. Why would they help the EA to understand tech just so the EA could go after Them a century down the road? But giving them black box gifts to help them get rid of the Drakh works just as well while leaving them reliant on further help. Remember this is not the side of the trusting people, it's the side of Morden, Justin and Shiv'Kala!!!

If the Drakh are the infiltrator-type race, which I have no problem with, then I can see them needing a hammer-style race. Looked at in a Star Trek context, the Drakh are the Vorta, the Earth would become the Jem'Hadar.

Actually the Hammer would be the ShadowShips, the Drakh would be the grunt techs that kept the home office clean and operating. Remember, we never see them before Z'ha'dum blows up...

Okay, so you're going to assume that Justin was square with Sheridan when his whole purpose was to have Sheridan turn towards the Shadow-side yet you'll disbelieve Drake, Sheridan, and Garibaldi when they talk of reverse-engineering Vorlon tech!

Yes, because Lorien supported this one and didn't contradict it when it was in His interest to see the truth spoken. I just assume that Justin choose to wrap his lies in truth - he told the truth about the Shadows intentions, but had a few nasty little lies hidden within - Sheridan's place in it, Anna's status, etc.

I've little problem with that, let's say that the Drakh were active for a few hundred years. However, if they were Shadow allies at that point they must have been brought into the fold before the Shadows went dormant at the end of the war. Perhaps they were a project around the same time as the technomages to prepare for the next war.

Maaaybe. They were around for the Centauri to remember casually, if distantly - means within the last few centuries (after Centauri space age, but long enough ago that they became a tale to frighten children with - very much like Vlad Tsepesh for example). Since the Centauri were not spacefaring during the last Shadow War, the Drakh came to them later. Now tit could be that the Shados "brought them to their side" during Valen's war, but the Drakh needed a bit more time to get into space. But who says the Shadows had to personally initiete them? That could have also been the work on another minion race.
AoG fluff has it that the Drakh were active as ShadowMinions around 2000, spreading discord betweern Centauri and Orieni, got found out and had their homeworld blasted into rubble by the vengeful Orieni (who were vorlon-worshippers and very annoyed at being tricked by shadow-allies). After that the Drakh went to Z'ha'dum and started working real close with ShadowStuff... until that blew up in their faces and they became a nomad race for a few months before setting up shop on centauri prime. But we get nothing on how long they serve the Shadows there. Just the indication I gathered from between the lines that they weren't fighting in Valen's war...

Or they simply dovetailed together. Note that after the E-M war the humans were the perfect choice for a race to fight the Minbari. After all, most races were just scared, the humans were scared and p*ssed. Give them an offer of revenge or even just to keep the Minbari from killing them all the next time (note that they didn't really win the war and don't know why it stopped, they must be fairly paranoid that the Minbari might start up again for the same lack of reason that they stopped) and they might leap at the chance. I'd suspect that that was a motivation for EF factions to join them in the first place, including the resultant xenophobia.

Possibly. Though even in that case I'd say the Warlock is more likely home-grown without any shady help. See above about my opinion about Shadows being responsible for everything...

Had Crusade and ACtA not occurred, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, there are too many data points that support them assisting the humans more actively after that.

Oh, I'll agree that those started a lot of bad ideas. JMS really should have stopped doing B5 when B5 did... :?

Take the Warlock and AG. Had we never seen one, there'd be no problem at all. Had JMS not written his story and set a hard and fast date, I could go with them being less advanced. Had ACtA and Crusade never happened, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. Unfortunately for continuity, those came along and mixed up the details again.

See above - that one isn't a problem unless someone reinterprets the established fluff in an attempt to "prove" the EA actually had AG before the IA gave it to them. :wink:

Do they? Perhaps. Would the Shadows have noticed? I'd think so. If they'd won the war might they have simply destroyed the human race at that point? Yep, they might have.

Maybe. But if it happened at just the right time, it might have cost them their victory. Would they risk that, if they had another option? No, certainly not. After they won, they might have given out proper rewards... might. Before - no way.

Again, why not. I can make a plausible case for them to have decided that the risks were worth it.

Not for an effectively immortal race. Especially not when they have lost a round before, and always have come back to try again. Think from their PoV, not from an human PoV... they play it safe, even if that measn loosing the battle this time. Tech gifts are no risk (especially when you buils a safeguard in every single one), knowledge gifts are.

Then, all of the data fits and I don't have to throw out any show-evidence to do so. If we go your route, we need to toss several statements and descriptions because they don't fit. Personally, I'll take the theory that contradicts the data of the show the least every time.

Bad data always gives bad results. And even the show evidence only fits if you bend it a bit. And the end result becomes very, very unlikely.

Basically, if logic says it couldn't be and the show says it is, I want an explenation before I go with the show. And for younger races and ancient tech, the explenatiosn haven't been satisfactory yet. So I choose to requalify some statements in the opposite direction you choose - where you assume the statemant to be the full truth, I assume the statement to be a half-truth at best, blatant lie at worst; though not even always intentionally so.

Yup, there I have previously approved data that says the back-seater was the Badger. I have no on-screen evidence of this mythical Badger in ItB. So, there's no conflict. Heck, even if it was there I could argue that the Badger Mk2 had the cockpit moved to the back and salvage it that way. My point is that I'll toss show data if there is specific data that contradicts it. For Shadow armor on the Warlock, we have no specific data that says that it isn't.

And no specific data that says there is. Except visual evidence from the show, which you choose to ignore this time, saying "oh, who cares if the Shadow bio-armor Always is black/grey, and usually moving around, the Warlock people just painted grey hexes over it..." If you do pay lip service to "show evidence über alles" don't throw it aside when if becomes convinient for you :wink: :twisted:

 

[nitflegal]

Ahh, what facts? That's speculation to fit the fact that Delenn offers Luchenko AG as an incentive to join the IA.

Actually not quite - read AoG's fluff on the Warlock.

Umm, haven't you been arguing that AoG stats aren't perfect. If you can drop the type of weapons that the Shadow-Omega has I'm not going to worry over much about the Warlock fluff.

However, as you enjoy pointing out, can we really accept data from on-screen? The Warlocks were going on shake-down cruises at the end of season 4.

But we don't hear Anything about them before the EA gets AG after joining the IA at the end of S-4.

Well, we know that Ivanova was going to take command of "one of the new Warlock" cruisers in the same episode that Delenn offered the AG. We know that she was on an operational cruise to Babylon 5 3-4 months later. So, it appear that they were indeed coming out right around that time. Actually, if you go by the official chronology, Delenn made the offer on or about the 4th of December, 2261. The JMS short story happened in early to mid February 2262.

EF seems to hve gone over to rotating sections to generate AG. The Warlock has nothing visible to indicate a previous rotating section. Sure, we can postulate that the Titans was a vastly different ship when Ivanova got to it that looked much more like an Omega. However, we can also postulate 3 other different possibilities

1) EF already had AG and Luchenko knew of it but certainly wasn't going to let on, perhaps suspecting that they'd get their hands on some of the Minbari tech goodies which even the Centauri didn't have.

Unlikely, because then we'd have seen it in their most advanced ships which Clarke would certainly have used for his defense

Umm, if the first ship they were installed in was the Warlocks why would we have seen it before? If they were indeed just coming into operation post his death then why would we have seen them at all? he may well have been rushing them into operation and, had the civil war just lasted a few more weeks, had them for the defense of Earth.

2) Ef already had AG and Luchenko, the new president taking over from a secretive and dictatorial president simply wasn't aware of it.

unlikels - same reason

Ahh, so you're saying that Clarke, being an open-minded dictator under Shadow control, would have made sure that all of his potential rivals were kept up to date on his secret projects?

3), My favorite. The Warlocks had AG, but it was not exactly perfected yet, perhaps it cut out on occasion (although probably rarely, else they wouldn't have ditched the rotating section). Perhaps the power expenditure was quite large due to inefficiencies in the EF derived tech. Perhaps it was fairly weak and could only generate 0.5G or so. In any of these instances, Luchenko might have leapt at the chance to get better tech for the ships.

Almost. As stated, it was designed for AG which the EA R&D department promised they'd deliver by 2261. But they didn't manage to crack the tech after all, so the prototypes had to leave the space for the AG system empty and make their initial test cruises without - for a starship that's problematic, since even low-g would allow it to function pretty much normally when designed for g-positive environment.

Again, the JMS story seems to contradict this. Certainly, Ivanova makes no mention of it when she describes her activities on the ship. Note also that the ships were being rolled out or command before EF got the AG tech. Doesn't make any sense at all. Since there is nothing to argue against it save AoG fluff. I can discount it as it seems to contradict with JMS data.

But when the EA got AG as IA entree, the Warlocks finally could be completed to the ship Invanova got after she decided not to continue on B5.

Let's look at the timeline. Let's say that negotiations about the tech took 1-2 months, which is probably far too fast. I'm guessing that it's not plug and play to install said tech, especially since it's Minbari that will need bug worked out. That gives us less than 1-2 months to put the ship back in dock, rework the interior that they would have had to rework for it to work in null-G, install brand new technology into the whole ship, test it, certify it, re-provision the ship, and get Ivanova out for her cruise. Somehow, that seems unlikely. Actually, if you go by the official chronology, Delenn made the offer on or about the 4th of December, 2261. The JMS short story happened in early to mid February 2262. All of that in 60-80 days?

One thing to consider. Remember the short story that JMS wrote about the Titans? They were all walking about on the Titans so one can presume that it had AG (lines like "They walked across the metal flooring into the red-tinted hallway that led to the command deck at one end, and the crew quarters at the other). There is a line in that story that goes as follows; "We had an incident here a year or so back when a telepath that had been altered to function as the central processing system of a Shadow vessel woke up in MedLab." That refers to the season 3 episode "Ship of Tears" 1 and a half years before Ivanova went to take command of the Warlock. Sheridan still has his office on Babylon 5 so it must be before the end of season 5. Ivanova refers to the recent civil war and has to remind herself that Sheridan is now the president. Finally, it states that this all "six days" after Lyta meets Byron. She meets him in Paragon of Animals, the third episode of the season. That would be early 2262. If we accept the B5 convention that the last episodes take place at the end of the year that they are set in and vice versa, then we have to believe that it is only a very few months (3-4) between the time that Delenn offers AG and the time when the Warlock has it fully integrated. I find it very difficult to believe that they could take a major warship designed for no gravity, which one might presume had a rotating section since EF seems to be doing that "now", and in the space of 2-4 months heavily modify it for AG, remove sections, and all, and have it on patrol within months of the offer being made. Sorry, don't buy it.

Don't have to - as I wrote, the official story is that the Warlock was designed for AG from the start, and never fitted with rotating sections, but didn't actually get AG until the IA deal because EA R&D just couldn't hack it. See - it all makes sense...

So, your argument is that the ship would be planned for a major development that might not come about and would make the whole ship far less capable if it failed and they were building more than one at a time. Since JMS data says that the Warlock has AG within 3-4 months after Delenn offers it and it seem borderline impossible for them to retrofit the tech in time (note that the League in Paragon of Animals are demanding thier promised tech, indicating that by the time JMS's story takes place the tech transfers haven't begun) I have no problem discounting AoG data beause it conflicts with other show data (Warlock having AG, the League complaining that the tech transfers haven't started yet at the same time that we get a story showing Warlock with AG). Getting back to the start of this discussion, I have more of a problem with discounting AoG's Shadow-Omega armament because there is no actual show data that contradicts it, just a personal feeling as to how the Shadows must behave.

Thus, I argue that they must have had AG of some sort then. I know that the net explanation is that they designed it for AG before they had it, which is really stupid but also doesn't help.

Not net, but officially accepted by BP and WB.

Yup, and so is the Shadow-Omega armament.

Again, it's a case of them screwing it up for their earlier continuity. Had we never seen a Warlock, I could accept that they didn't have AG. Had JMS not shown that they did and set the timeframe of having it in early 2262 then I could maybe be convinced that the Warlock was set up for null-G like a Hyperion. Unfortunately, they screwed that up so I think that we have to accept a Warlock with AG around the same time that the Minbari offered it.

Nope, because then we'd have seen it defending Clarke (or do you honestly think he'd have left his newest unit out of the fight to defend him?) But the Apollo was on Omega, so I think it's safe to assume the Warlock wasn't ready at that time. And since the IA offer came just after that, well...

Umm, if it wasn't ready for launch, sure. Hitler had the He-162's built and ready to fly for weeks before the fall of Germany. Didn't hear of any of those participating in the battle of Berlin. Didn't see any of the almost completed Panther Ausf F's fighting either. If the Warlocks weren't quite ready and didn't have crews yet (they apparently were still assigning captains) I have no problem with them not being there. Heck, every major battle seems to have one piece of decisive tech that was only 2-3 weeks late.

I'd point out that we simply have no clue how Shadow-tech works. It is possible that, after a few hundred thousand years of development, one might finally understand quantum theory and beyond so well that this stuff becomes almost easy. In that case, once EF researchers were taught the theories that would have taken them those millenia to get to they leapfrog that whole period. Heck, they don't even need to understand the underlying theories or the experiments required to develop them. They can take the underlying structure on faith and simply implement the technologies. Again, we have no clue how Shadow-tech works. You're assuming that it is similar to the industrial revolution to today but we simply don't know.

What we do know however suggests it ain't that easy. Or everyone would be doing it, since ShadowTech in it's current incarnation has been around for at least a million years (vorlontech has, and the Shadows are older, ergo...). If for example the Drakh had shady shippies, then I'd be much closer to accepting that figuring out Shadowtech is easy - but after centuries of serving the Shadows, minding the store ad Z'ha'dum, using their tech and even reading the manuals they stiull haven't got it for themselves. So I am forced to conclude that the humans shouldn't be able to do it either, so any instances where they do use that tech they must have gotten it from someone older then the Drakh who has the neccessary knowledge... and that this knowledge isn't as easy to comy by as you might suggest.

Well, the Drakh didn't seem to have much independence. Heck, they might not have had a R&D program at all. Why would they have tried to develop it. Besides, as you pointed out, they seem to serve as the Drakh's spies and infiltrators. They don't seem to have been chosen for the line of battle. If the Shaows told them not to, do you see them as going forward with research anyways?

Ahh, but that's a sham argument. The whole point of the gun on the Excalibur is that it's a super-powerful weapon, beyond anything that the young-races can provide.

AHA!!!
No further questions, your honor.

LOL, although I'm arguing from the show standpoint.

Sure, they might be able to scale it down to the point where the power-requirements were similar to a Sharlin's neutron cannon. However, why not just put on a neutron cannon? The whole point seems to be to provide the biggest bang that the ship could handle. Apparently, someone decided that the tradeoff was worth it to provide the Victory-class with the most devastating weapon possible. You assume that the gun is so powerful because that's the only weapon they could get. I argue that the cannon is so powerful because they wanted it to be.

Then they'd have made it just as powerful as all the Exy's other guns combined in terms of total energy output, but not as powerful to cripple the ship for a minute - ask Any naval officer if he'd like one gun that can kill anything if it hits, but then leaves his ship defenseless for a minute, or one gun that can kill most things it hits and can be fired every ten seconds with the ship still being able to maneuver etc. too.

But here's the problem with that. They did. Is it stupid? Heck yeah. However, the foolishness of the armament is independent of where it came from. The super-dooper cannon that cripples the ship is just as dumb if it's IA tech or Vorlon. The source is irrelevent to the practicality. Put it this way. You have the super-dooper Vorlon salvaged gun and your team tells you that they can install it and kill the ships'systems everytime it fires or put 10 Minbari Neutron cannon in their place that won't cripple the ship. Which would you choose? They decided tht it was worth it to put in the super-dooper gun, which tells us nothing about its origins.

In reality, I suspect that the whole point was to provide their new super-ship with a wave-motion gun but to provide an artificial plot-point so that the Victory had to ram the Shadow Planet-killer and provide dramatic tension for Crusade.

Certainly. And it left us to discuss how to best clear up the mess. But I point towards your first, damning sentence here "whole point of the gun on the Excalibur is that it's a super-powerful weapon, beyond anything that the young-races can provide.". And that's just it. So why do you still want to prove they can in fact provide it? Why not use common sense - if it sounds like a vorlon gun, looks like a vorlon gun, shoots like a vorlon gun, hits like a vorlon gun...

Again, because we have people who should be in the know say that it isn't salvage but that it is a weapon made by the Earth-Minbari team from Vorlon derived tech. Simple as that, they (and by extension JMS) told us so.

Okay, let's try this again. The Victory class is brand new from the IA at the time of ACtA. It presumably has the first developed gun. If it was the proof-of concept prototypes, why would we expect to see any others at the same time?

One - nope, they can't be proof-of concept prototypes, because they're real warships. A PoC prototype would be an old hyperion hull as carrier for just the new gun, to test-fire it (just in case it blows up, so you don't throw good money after bad)

There may well have been prototypes in Minbari service earlier. What we do know is that these new guns were worthy of note as being so innovative. We know that the Victory and Excalibur both had one. We know that they were the first of many that the IA intended to build because Sheridan comments on that at the end of ACtA. So, either they found a Vorlon arms depot to provide several identical super-dooper cannon or they were expecting to be able to make them.

Beyond that, we never see planetary defenses in action after that. we never really see any new ships in the fleets after that. To be blunt, for all that we know every planet could have a ring of those weapons 3 years later and we wouldn't know. There's no data for what was in service after the Crusade's aborted first season. I could argue that every warship in 2270 was armed with radioactive-hamster launchers and while you could argue that was amazingly stupid in concept, there's no data to say that they weren't.

That much is true at least. But if it was an younger race invention, we'd be reading about it, and/or more ships designed around it, in later time periods. And the last time I read the Centauri trilogy, there wasn't anything about more of them... (Forget CGI - the only post-Crusade CGI we have was SiL and since that was made quite a while before all the nice new meshes were made they can only hurt the argument)

The Centauri books don't provide much info either, unfortunately.

Tried another way, your argument is that we don't see those weapons in wide-spread service soon enough to say that it wasn't a stolen Vorlon weapon. I ask you, where would we have seen these weapons on the show in that timeframe and didn't?

Not show - secondary stuff. The Centauri trilogy does mention the Exy, but no sister ships to follow; while they do mention the Centauri consider their rebuild fleet to have a good chance of taking on the IA - not something I'd put any money on if the IA did have the ability to build such guns.

Note that the Drakh were reported to have smashed the dockyards and destoyed the information stored there "Years of work, wiped out in a second. We'll start over, but it'll take time". He certainly didn't see it as gone for good. As to the Centauri, they have one almighty huge fleet. They've spent centuries building it up. The IA may have superior ships but the Centauri ones aren't bad, and they have a lot more of them. The IA only would have had a single decade after all of their Excalibur research was destroyed before Londo's death. It would have taken longer than that to hope to match the Centauri. Besides, we don't actually know what the Centauri fleet is armed with at that point.

Personally the best I could accept is that these guns were from a stockpile that the minbari got as part of the WhiteStar project, intended for hybrid vorlon/minbari ships and never used because they didn't have the power tech, and the vorlons just forgot to reposses. Then the vorlons build those guns to interface with younger race tech, and were disappointed that they had overestimated the minbari's capabilities.

well, then we agree to disagree.

Oh, I know that it wasn't an EA project. However, it WAS a Giribaldi project. The guy who assigned it to him was the leader of the IA, his wife has a wee bit pf pull with the Minbari government. I'd suspect that Girabaldi would have gotten any information that he needed.

Well, actually not. Garibaldi wouldn't have gotten any tech info - he'd not even have wanted to get any tech info ("again, in plain language please"). And further he'd have known that hte gun came from some minbari facility, but no more (also because the Minbari never tell someone more then he needs to know... Hmmm, they have more in common with Bester then any of 'em would like...)

Again, we have concrete statements to the contrary and nothing to actually back up this assertion besides personal belief. Can't go with that, sorry.

Plus, I don't see how they could have kept that info from him, he'd have gone balistic. Sorry, but this is a very weak argument. The head designer says that it's Vorlon-derived tech, the incredibly suspicious project head doesn't disagree.

Look at is as outlined above - they get the gun from the minbari, who tell 'em "it's vorlonic, don't feed it after midnight" or something. Wouldn't they say something like they said then?
But why do you think they had to have invented the gun all by temselves, just because they have a "based on" in their text?

The same gun installed on the Victory, the same gun that was planned for the several follow-up sister ships. That's a big stash of weapons. . .

As for the Minbari thing, please note that the head designer for the project was a human. Is your contention that the head project designer didn't actually know anything about the ship that he was head-designer of?

Well, yes. You seem to think a "head designer" has to know how everything works. That's like saying an architect has to know how the power generators in the basement work, and the computers on the office floor, and the chemical composition of the plastic that mekes up the chairs in the lounge.

Well, my dad developed planes for Lockheed and worked on the design teams (F-117 and F/A-22). Did they know what the plastic was in the 3rd avionics bay was? Probably not. Could they tell you how many bays there were and what major systems were in each? Yes? You're arguing that the man who is the chief designer, i.e., the guy who has to sign off on every design incorporated into the ship, have a decent knowledge of the specs written up for every major system and sub-assembly on the ship, etc wouldn't have clue about the tech for the showpiece weapon on his own ship. To take your analogy, your arguing that the chief architect for a building, who spervised the project until completion, wouldn't know that the bottom four floors had been gutted to make an ampitheatre. Put it this way, if he didn't have an idea about the tech contained in that weapon than he wasn't a chief designer, certainly not as we understand them.

Why do you assume he knows how that gun works, while everyone else would assume he doesn't know how the green minbari beams work that the Victory class also mounts? There I see noone objecting to the idea that these were delivered by the Minbari and just plugged in without too many questions...

I don't assume that, I'd suspect he had a passing understanding of those too. he'd have to, to integrate them into his hip.

And it Was said on the show that the Minbari would supply the know-how, and the humans the resources. Since that one statement is not clashing with either logic or plausibility, and since Delenn and Sheridan has no reason to make it up for their very private (unless G'Kar had his eye on them again) discussion.

Then there should have been a Minbari chief designer. In engineering warplanes and warships this is a pretty specific title and type of job. A chief designer who doesn't understand his vesel is useless, becuase his whole job is knowing how to integrate everything and understand the technology to fix things when they invariably don't work. In effect, to dismiss the Vorlon tech thing you need to postulate that

A)Drake was lying about the source of the weapon
B)The ships chief designer didn't understand the technology in his own ship
C)Sheridan was lying when he stated that tech that was reverse-engineered from the Vorlons was present on the Excalibur
D) Garibaldi had no idea of the source of the weapon in the ship-project that he was personally overseeing for his good friend
E)The head of the IA and wife of a former grey council member had no idea that a stockpile of salvaged Vorlon weaponry was being installed on his ship class
F) Sheridan was lying when he noted "techno-organic Vorlon design" when he first saw the Excalibur
G)the weapons fire of the Excalibur's super-gun being described as firing in "a manner reminiscent of Vorlon weapons" is incorrect or falsified

That's a lot of evidence to dismiss just to support a pet theory.

Let's face it, if they'd let that little weasel know the details of the project, they'd sure as heck have no problem keeping Girabaldi informed. One might also point out that, when Garibaldi complains about Drakes' caution, Sheridan replies that "reverse-engineering" Vorlon and Minbari tech is tricky. Seems even Sheridan thinks that they're reverse-engineering Vorlon tech. Sorry, you may agrue all that you want but this seems pretty certain that JMS wants the IA, at least, to be reverse-engineering at least Vorlon tech.

Yes, trying to.
But them succeeding at this time seems too inplausible to be accepted without loosing a lot of respect with JMS - so I choose to think the problems are not with an almost-done reverse-enginering of vorlon tech, but with patching together not-understood vorlon tech with younger race systems.

If it helps your enjoyment of the show, that's fine. However, the evidence seem to be that JMS has let you down on this one.

As for the rest of the statement... why would they need reverse-engineered minbari tech if they could have the real deal from the Minbari? See your statement about Sheridan's new wife above...
So, since half of the statement you use as "proof" is faulty, and the other half is implausible, I'd again annoy you by assuming that the statement is not to be taken as fact.

The entire statement is as follows; "Reverse-engineering Minbari and Vorlon technology so it'll work with Human tech . . . it's never been done before" The issue seems to be the integration of the tech with Human tech, not figuring it out as a tech-base. Note that he compares the process for Vorlon tech with Minbari in that sentence. Sorry, that half of my proof seems to hold up.

That's your perogative, but I would simply point out that, in the episode, they do move.

Weren't you the one who used the fact that the beams move in ways that the big turrets do not as "proof" that the beams must be magic shadowtech? And now you talk about moving turrets to counter my "CGI laziness" argument? Decide please!

I was referring to the beams from the bow cannon which move in that episode even though the barrels of the guns do not. Already decidedthat, thanks.

No argument on them being prototypes, it makes sense, or at least the most sense that is reasonable. The Strieb reflect one of my consistent criticisms of B5, they need a fact-checker. The only place that I am aware of the Strieb being mentioned in the Technomage books in an off-hand way. Why on earth wasn't that removed? Note that when Delenn hears about them her reaction isn't "oh, crap, Shadow-servants!" it's "oh, yeah, those little wusses whose butts we thoroughly kicked!" Yet now when we discuss the Strieb we have to try and make them fit as a Shadow servant. Sigh.

Yees, it would have been much, much better if the editor of the TM books would have just removed that one singular mention. In my viw of things I'm just going to ignore it and say that even Technomages can come to wrong conclusions sometimes.

Actually, they are actually seen serving the Shadows. Not just an idle mention.

Umm, okay. Now, does the Whitestar armor look more like that on a Sharlin or that on Vorlon dreadnought?
I'd say that it looks a great deal more like Minbari armor, in fact, if you didn't tell me it had Vorlon tech I'd never suspect that it was there.

Yup, it does look more minbari. Not quite... actually not minbari at all, but even less vorlon. Maybe that was the intention? I remind you of the effect this had the first time a WhiteStar met a ShadowShip... I would assume the Volrons custom-made the armor to not look vorlonic. The Shadows had no such scruples with the ShadOmegas... So why do you cite that to defend Mr. Earl's wet dreams about Warlock shadow-armor?

Point being that at least one ancient-derived armor didn't look at all like the original. Why can't the Shadow-derived do the same thing? If all of the Vorlon armor has a consistent, distinctive look that isn't incorporated into the hybrid armor why can't the Shadow armor do the same?

No argument, but I'd caution that you're doing something similar to an alien who snatches up a Japanese ship in 1600 and then assumes that the whole world is identical to early Edo period Japan.

Not exactly - I just say the alien would make some assumptions about general tech level and capabilities.

Take that a step further. Alien picks up a Japanese ship from 1880. They get the idea that the tech curve is such that oared and sailed ships of light construction, barely good enough for coastal operations are the norm. Of course, the US and Europe are fielding coal-driven armored warships with turrets at the same time. The Japanese military in 1860 was fighting with swords and arbeques while the Yankees were using breechloaders and prototyping the Gatling gun.

Heck, you could make an interesting story about the Great Burn being partially due to the prevalence of Shadow tech which perhaps corupted it's owners.

Possibly. But we don't see any of it, so we can't tell. And I'm unwilling to make "evil, evil shadow tech" responsible for something we humans have done many, many times on our own in the past 30 centuries. It's something I really hate about many B5 theories... they always want to make the Shadows responsible for everything bad, just because theywere responsible for a few bad things.

can't argue that at all. It's one of many resons that I wish that the whole Crusade thing didn't happen, because it just starts it all again.

Well, we don't actually knwo what the tech transfer was like back in the Taratimude days. We do know they were active for at least 10 years before the first occasion of them going for the tech but after Wierden embraced her very anti-Shadow code. I personally see that supplicant stuff as being initiated as punishement for them embracing that code.

Not so - you can't take back knowledge; that's why I am so opposed to anyone suggesting that the Shadows break with their usual MO and just teach the humans.

Again, we don't know. At the least, a great deal of knowledge was lost by the technomages over the years. How to use their core powers, even general knowledge of where the tech came from.

What do they have to lose. If this war was truly to be fought to the bitter end this time, the Shadows have two choices.

Actually it wasn't - from the Shadows PoV it would be just like every other war. It was the Vorlons who were preparing for a final solution ever since they spotted Sinclair/Valen coming from the future...

Did they know that? Certainly it seems both of them had forgotten the point of the whole deal and were fighting for real. It's what Sheridan chided them about, after all.

Fight with the same resources as they did the last time, knowing that the Minbari have advanced considerably since then or try and imporve thier chances.

Problem is - they didn't. Or they'd fist have started with their loyal Drakh. Since they don't get the goods, noone lower on the ladder can plausibly get them; only some theoretical minion race Higher on the "shadow loyality scale" can be assumed to know about true Shadowtech.

OK, why did the technomages have tech that the Drakh didn't? Perhaps the Drakh were unsuited for it. Perhaps they wouldn't have had plausible deniability if they suddenly became a whup-butt race. The Shadows could control a hugely powerful Earth and people wouldn't be entirely surpised at that, look how fast those damned apes develop! A race that barely anyone knows coming from nowhere might inspire questions. Note that the Shadows seem to like the caste idea. Scientists are specialized. technomages are specialized. the Drakh seem to have been specialized. Perhaps they decided to build an actual army and chose another race for specialization. Again, the most straightforward theory is that EF has started to crack ancient tech. The most believable way to explain that was that they had Shadow help. Other explanations start to reuire more hoop-jumping than I'm comfortable with.

Let's say that they actively help the humans, what do they risk?

The humans saying "thank you" and joining the vorlons to get their bribe too. That's why giving them black box tech makes so much sense.
It's like a dealer - he'd be stupid to give his desired customers the knowledge to make LSD on their own, he'd give out samples and then offer more - for a price. And only after he for one got them hooked and for another made the desired profit could he teach them to have 'em as "sub-dealers"...

But the Shadows control the government. They are basically in control. EF isn't going to do anything that they don't want. More importantly, if they try the Vorlons will destroy them as contaminated. It only takes a couple of tries to convince one to give up.

If I had two days to live and the website promised the cure for my illness and I was a multimillionaire? You're darned tooting! Again, the last war seems to be being played for keeps.

But if you weren't too rich and thought you had many years and bills yet before you... Third time, It Was The Vorlons Who Thought About Making This The Final Time!!! It's in their philosophy! The Shadows would have been happy with another war, and another, and another, because that was what they wanted. That was what they thought helped the younger races, The Vorlons were so keen on finally ending the wars and making everything just like they said it should be - that was what they wanted, that was what they thought would help the younger races.

And I'd contend that it was building to that. The Vorlons did it first, but it seems that their conflict had already grown beyond what was originally intended. Both of them are accused of losing their way, had the Shadows just been doing their thing they wouldn't have been guilty of that. While I agree that the Vorlons started it, I don't think it happened in a vacuum. I'd hazard a guess that these wars had been getting more and more personal for the two ancients, bad blood was beginning to build.

More importantly, the Minbari are the Vorlons lackeys, not much different than the Drakh in many respects. They need to be countered or the Vorlons will impose order that much faster. The Shadows need a balancing agent. Whether it was the Humans I don't know.

Okay, so you're going to assume that Justin was square with Sheridan when his whole purpose was to have Sheridan turn towards the Shadow-side yet you'll disbelieve Drake, Sheridan, and Garibaldi when they talk of reverse-engineering Vorlon tech!

Yes, because Lorien supported this one and didn't contradict it when it was in His interest to see the truth spoken. I just assume that Justin choose to wrap his lies in truth - he told the truth about the Shadows intentions, but had a few nasty little lies hidden within - Sheridan's place in it, Anna's status, etc.

Okay, but Garibaldi's not correcting him is different?

Take the Warlock and AG. Had we never seen one, there'd be no problem at all. Had JMS not written his story and set a hard and fast date, I could go with them being less advanced. Had ACtA and Crusade never happened, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. Unfortunately for continuity, those came along and mixed up the details again.

See above - that one isn't a problem unless someone reinterprets the established fluff in an attempt to "prove" the EA actually had AG before the IA gave it to them. :wink:

Well, can I then argue that the Shadow-Omegas have slicer beams? After all, AoG SCS sheets say that they do. :wink:

Then, all of the data fits and I don't have to throw out any show-evidence to do so. If we go your route, we need to toss several statements and descriptions because they don't fit. Personally, I'll take the theory that contradicts the data of the show the least every time.

Bad data always gives bad results. And even the show evidence only fits if you bend it a bit. And the end result becomes very, very unlikely.

Basically, if logic says it couldn't be and the show says it is, I want an explenation before I go with the show

.
Like I stated, it's an impasse. If the shows says that something is true, I will accept that unless I have show evidence that contradicts it.

Yup, there I have previously approved data that says the back-seater was the Badger. I have no on-screen evidence of this mythical Badger in ItB. So, there's no conflict. Heck, even if it was there I could argue that the Badger Mk2 had the cockpit moved to the back and salvage it that way. My point is that I'll toss show data if there is specific data that contradicts it. For Shadow armor on the Warlock, we have no specific data that says that it isn't.

And no specific data that says there is. Except visual evidence from the show, which you choose to ignore this time, saying "oh, who cares if the Shadow bio-armor Always is black/grey, and usually moving around, the Warlock people just painted grey hexes over it..." If you do pay lip service to "show evidence über alles" don't throw it aside when if becomes convinient for you :wink: :twisted:

[/quote]

As I said, we have cannon info that Vorlon influenced armor doesn't look much like Vorlon armor at all. It actually looks more similar to the Minbari hulls. If the Vorlon derived armor can look nothing like actual Vorlon armor than why can't the Shadow influenced armor look little like actual Shadow armor?

FWIW, this has been an enjoyable discussion. However, I'm probably going to bow out, at least for awhile. We seem to be at the spinning the wheels phase of the discussion, tossing the same old points at each other round after round. I'm spending an hour typing up these responses! Thanks for the discussion as it has been enjoyable but it's getting too nice outside, I need to take my daughter to the park!

Best,
Matt

 

[ShadowScout]

Umm, haven't you been arguing that AoG stats aren't perfect. If you can drop the type of weapons that the Shadow-Omega has I'm not going to worry over much about the Warlock fluff.

AoG info isn't perfect, but I haven't been telling anybody to toss it all out, just check it for plausibility, Hell, a big part of my ramblings are about getting people to think for themselves instead of blindly following some holy writ or divine leader, no matter where it/he comes from. If any canon or official info checks out I say include it as true. And AoG's Warlock story makes a lot more sense then some of the ramblings tim earls let fly...

Well, we know that Ivanova was going to take command of "one of the new Warlock" cruisers in the same episode that Delenn offered the AG. We know that she was on an operational cruise to Babylon 5 3-4 months later. So, it appear that they were indeed coming out right around that time. Actually, if you go by the official chronology, Delenn made the offer on or about the 4th of December, 2261. The JMS short story happened in early to mid February 2262.

Yes. However, in that episode we were just getting into "fast time", so we don't know how much time passed between Delenn's offer, Ivanova's decision, and the actual maiden voyage of her "Titans". I'd say there's just enough time for the IA AG being installed while she has to fix up everything on B5, transfer to her command, etc.; and then we'd have an time frame just right for her to notice something fishy about her shiny new shippie and run to B5 for the Story...

Umm, if the first ship they were installed in was the Warlocks why would we have seen it before? If they were indeed just coming into operation post his death then why would we have seen them at all? he may well have been rushing them into operation and, had the civil war just lasted a few more weeks, had them for the defense of Earth.

You say the Warlocks were operational with EA-made AG some time before they got IA AG. I say if that was the case, Clarke would have had them defending him against Sheridan, either together with the ShadOmegas, or more likely at least the prototype as flagship of the "Sol System Defense Fleet". But that flagship was the Apollo, an Omega, and no warlock to be seen. So I say they can't have been ready then. The fluff explains that in saying the EA developers didn't get the AG online as expected, and since Delenn did offer the bribe of AG, and Luchenko didn't decline with a proud "thanks, but we did that on our own already" I see no reason to bend facts to make an case of EA having AG before IA involvement. Working on it - certainly, close to getting it - maybe, but in no way any workable system. Or Clarke would have used it!

Ahh, so you're saying that Clarke, being an open-minded dictator under Shadow control, would have made sure that all of his potential rivals were kept up to date on his secret projects?

No, but I'm saying that with him gone and the opposition victorious his secret-keepers would have fallen over themselves to be the first to trade his secret projects for favors and non-persecution. Because that's usually what happens in such cases. See WW-2 and how secret Hitler's secret projects were a week after the end.
What's more, the Warlock wasn't that secret, or Ivanova couldn't have had an offer to command one that soon. You can't have it both ways - either the time line works, and it wasn't secret, or it was secret, then we'd have heard about it mid-2262 soonest. Since we didn't I say it wasn't. Especially when it looked soo perfect as a propaganda project - "native EA tech for the next glorious century under the Clarke administration"; Something to make the fleet commanders happy (such people usually like shiny new toys, and the government that let's them play with 'em)

Again, the JMS story seems to contradict this. Certainly, Ivanova makes no mention of it when she describes her activities on the ship. Note also that the ships were being rolled out or command before EF got the AG tech. Doesn't make any sense at all. Since there is nothing to argue against it save AoG fluff. I can discount it as it seems to contradict with JMS data.

Not so.
For one there's no indication in the Story to contradict it. For another there's no indication for the ships being rolled out before the end of the Clarke administration. And this piece of AoG fluff seems very pleasantly moulded around JMS show data, even explaining the niggling little questions (which in truth are again a case of lack in CGI budget - else they could have had the Apollo as Warlock, and raised my estimation of their R&D capabilities by quite a notch)

BtW, there is another piece of evidence pointing against your "EA knows AG" theory... the fact that they still use many rotating sections in Crusade and SiL. If they had great AG system manifacturing capabilities, they'd have refitted at least some of their fleet to it by Crusade time, and half by SoL time. Would eb easy too - just exchange the rotating section of an Omega with an fixed AG-operated G-positive section. (Would even have been easy and cheap to do as CGI, if they had been thinking about it back then). But since they didn't, we can only assume that AG remains rare, and that means they are just slowly getting it into production in IA times, which of course indicates they need some external help because they don't fully understand it themselves (I point toward how fast they got Heavy lasers into service after the Minbari war, the only difference is that we absolutely KNOW they could build those themselves). So, it seems most likely that they are dependent on IA deliveries on AG systems for their early warlocks, and are only very, very slowly getting their own systems into production (as Delenn did promise knowledge instead of black box gifts).

Let's look at the timeline. Let's say that negotiations about the tech took 1-2 months, which is probably far too fast. I'm guessing that it's not plug and play to install said tech, especially since it's Minbari that will need bug worked out. That gives us less than 1-2 months to put the ship back in dock, rework the interior that they would have had to rework for it to work in null-G, install brand new technology into the whole ship, test it, certify it, re-provision the ship, and get Ivanova out for her cruise. Somehow, that seems unlikely. Actually, if you go by the official chronology, Delenn made the offer on or about the 4th of December, 2261. The JMS short story happened in early to mid February 2262. All of that in 60-80 days?

One - the negotiations probably took a lot less time, seeing they involve Sheridan and Delenn, and with Earth in the position they are in; also see the "ISN reports" that seem to indicate the EA joined before the start of 2262. Two - the Warlock was already designed for AG, no need to rework anything. Three - Minbari technicians could probably adapt a few "showcase" AG system so the EA can see what they will get quite easily, and I'd assume Delenn will have thought of that and had some ready - which of course would have to go into the hulls best suited for them, which would be the Warlocks, just for Ivanova to test-drive one...
I see no problem with the time frame.

So, your argument is that the ship would be planned for a major development that might not come about and would make the whole ship far less capable if it failed and they were building more than one at a time.

Basically that's what AoG said, what WB and BP approved, and which I think is the best explenation. It was designed for a system the eggheads promised, but failed to deliver. Though that may have been an "officiel story", it may quite well have been some darker associates who promised an working AG system, but were unable to deliver because they went out of business after Coriana...

Since JMS data says that the Warlock has AG within 3-4 months after Delenn offers it and it seem borderline impossible for them to retrofit the tech in time (note that the League in Paragon of Animals are demanding thier promised tech, indicating that by the time JMS's story takes place the tech transfers haven't begun) I have no problem discounting AoG data beause it conflicts with other show data (Warlock having AG, the League complaining that the tech transfers haven't started yet at the same time that we get a story showing Warlock with AG).

Well, maybe. You do have a point about the slowness of tech tranfers... but I have more points about the lack of any warlock sighting before the EA agreed to tech transfers. Of course, my problem with your point could be explained that the EA as "big one" got a few demonstration AG systems as bribe before the real tech transfers were initiated. Maybe the league did too, and just wanted the rest of their promised cake? However, I don't see any plausible explenation as to why Clarke would let the Warlocks you say were up and running have a free day while Sheridan came gunning for him. So I say they weren't up and running back then, and then we have that piece about the EA showing no sign of AG prior to Delenn offering it as bribe to Luchenko. Maybe JMS didn't quite think the time frame trough, but I say his date all point toward AG coming to the EA as part of the IA deal.

Getting back to the start of this discussion, I have more of a problem with discounting AoG's Shadow-Omega armament because there is no actual show data that contradicts it, just a personal feeling as to how the Shadows must behave.

So you ignore screen evidence if it doesn't fit your theory again? Claiming cyan-blue equals purple just to have ShadOmegas fire super-beams from their barrely when the beams in question never were fired from any kind of barrel and citing lack of turret moveement (which BtW also happens with some scenes of red laser beams) as "proof" that the gun is magic instead that the CGI artist was lazy? :? Puh-leeeze...
Why can't you accept that if it doesn't look like a duck, doesn't work like a duck and doesn't sound like a duck it may not be a duck, even though it did come from an egg...

Yup, and so is the Shadow-Omega armament.

True. And I have no problem with questioning it too, but from my PoV it makes sense, and a lot of it. So I accept it, and don't try to bend evidence as outlined above. I reserve that for things I find "accepted but very implausible" like the Victory magic gun... :wink: :lol:

Umm, if it wasn't ready for launch, sure. Hitler had the He-162's built and ready to fly for weeks before the fall of Germany. Didn't hear of any of those participating in the battle of Berlin. Didn't see any of the almost completed Panther Ausf F's fighting either. If the Warlocks weren't quite ready and didn't have crews yet (they apparently were still assigning captains) I have no problem with them not being there. Heck, every major battle seems to have one piece of decisive tech that was only 2-3 weeks late.

Well, true. However, I wouldn't cite Hitler as standard for gauging other dictator's intelligence. I mean, come on, attacking Russia? While fighting on the other side too? Without winter clothing for his troops? What's a few more blunders besides that...
But you have a point that the Warlocks could have been "almost ready". Yet... if they were, I'd still have expected to see them, and if only with en emergency crew and floating immobile in earth orbit, going down very quickly and impressivels as hitlers few "secret weapons" did in the last weeks of the war... Once Sheridan started moving toward earth, Clarke would have had the Warlocks pressed into service as long as they could have fired a single turret. See your "all or nothing" theory, but Clarke Really knew it was all over if Sheridan got through.

Well, the Drakh didn't seem to have much independence. Heck, they might not have had a R&D program at all. Why would they have tried to develop it. Besides, as you pointed out, they seem to serve as the Drakh's spies and infiltrators. They don't seem to have been chosen for the line of battle. If the Shaows told them not to, do you see them as going forward with research anyways?

I'm just saying if the Shadows had choosen to teach someone, the Drakh would have been first. If the Shadows didn't choose to teach, your point stands valid - then the Drakh would have no reason at all researching ShadowTech, because they could trust their masters to give them all they would need, whenever they neede it. And the Drakh never served as Spies and Infiltrators - that was the ShadowMinion race I built for my campaign. The Drakh always seemed more like Messangers and troublemakers until the Orieni flattened their world, and as mechanics and errant boy afterward.

But here's the problem with that. They did. Is it stupid? Heck yeah. However, the foolishness of the armament is independent of where it came from. The super-dooper cannon that cripples the ship is just as dumb if it's IA tech or Vorlon. The source is irrelevent to the practicality. Put it this way. You have the super-dooper Vorlon salvaged gun and your team tells you that they can install it and kill the ships'systems everytime it fires or put 10 Minbari Neutron cannon in their place that won't cripple the ship. Which would you choose? They decided tht it was worth it to put in the super-dooper gun, which tells us nothing about its origins.

Yup, exactly, Of course, they would have done much better with a "Spinal Neutron Cannon". But they didn't. So either I can assume that they'd let Vree brain-transplant victims work on the Victory class ships, or that for some strange reason they had no other choice (or at least that it didn't turn out as they hoped when they first installed the thing) Which of course meshed beautifully with the "not-understoof plugged-in ancient tech" theory...

Hmmm, though I have a good point there... Imagine a 2275-era production model Victory class with no volronesque gun but a simple Spinal Neutron Cannon instead - fire either it or all the other guns, but no crippling the ship to recharge. Gotta make an SCS some day, when I'm finished with my current B5W SCS making chores for a project about... well, it's supposed to be secret...

Again, because we have people who should be in the know say that it isn't salvage but that it is a weapon made by the Earth-Minbari team from Vorlon derived tech. Simple as that, they (and by extension JMS) told us so.

Not quite. ISN (and -by your definition- JMS by extension) also told us the explosion of EF-1 at Io was an accident. Morden (and -by your definition- JMS by extension) told us he just wanted to help people. Nightwatch (and -by your definition- JMS by extension) people told us they were working for freedom. Londo (and -by your definition- JMS by extension) told us the Regent acted on his own and the Shady control systems for the Auto-Demii came from the black martet. Bester (and -by your definition- JMS by extension) told us a lot of things which we later found out to be unture. I could go on...

Fact is, JMS has shown that he likes building up assumptions, and then whacking people over the ehad with the truth being something else entirely. So why do you blindly cling to the things he lets his puppets say instead of trying to work out why they say what they say, and how likely it is to be true?

There may well have been prototypes in Minbari service earlier. What we do know is that these new guns were worthy of note as being so innovative. We know that the Victory and Excalibur both had one. We know that they were the first of many that the IA intended to build because Sheridan comments on that at the end of ACtA. So, either they found a Vorlon arms depot to provide several identical super-dooper cannon or they were expecting to be able to make them.

One - if there were Minbari prototypes, we'd have had to see them, either in the Shadow War, or in the Minbari civil war, or in the defense of earth in ACtA. Or at least have them mentioned in some book. We didn't, so it's pretty safe to say they weren't any. The gun came practically out of nothing. That suggests they didn't as much build it, as got it somehow. Either salvage, or a leftover depot from the Minbari/Vorlon cooperation Perhaps even "grown from buddings" or something like that - I wrote before that I'd have no problem with unskilled reproduction of ancient tech, just with understanding it. All these explenations are more acceptable to any logical mind that the assumption that the younger races could just reverse-engineer that tech when they couldn't do that to even younger race tech.

The Centauri books don't provide much info either, unfortunately.

True. But while absense of info doesn't prove anything, absence of info where some should be if an assumption were true does speak against said assumtion being true...

Note that the Drakh were reported to have smashed the dockyards and destoyed the information stored there "Years of work, wiped out in a second. We'll start over, but it'll take time". He certainly didn't see it as gone for good. As to the Centauri, they have one almighty huge fleet. They've spent centuries building it up. The IA may have superior ships but the Centauri ones aren't bad, and they have a lot more of them. The IA only would have had a single decade after all of their Excalibur research was destroyed before Londo's death. It would have taken longer than that to hope to match the Centauri. Besides, we don't actually know what the Centauri fleet is armed with at that point.

Actually I suppose they might ahve spent centuries building their fleet up, but expended a lot of it during their war with the narns, and lost more after their surrender to the IA - they certainly had a rtreaty limiting their weapons manifacturing afterwards. And while we don't know what they're armed with, we also don't know if they're armed with much new stuff... again it would have been stupid of the Drakh to give them much new stuff... but who knows, the drakh do make a lot of mistakes, what's one more... :wink:

Again, we have concrete statements to the contrary and nothing to actually back up this assertion besides personal belief. Can't go with that, sorry.

Nope, we have no statement saying that a civilian person, even one who is closely associated with the President knows it all, especially when he's humand and the secrets might be kept by Minbari.
Of course, we do not have any evidence supporting my theories in this matter either, and anyone assuming I am reaching to explain away something that may well have been intentionel just because I have a problem with it being highly illogical would be right I fear. This time.

The same gun installed on the Victory, the same gun that was planned for the several follow-up sister ships. That's a big stash of weapons. . .

Growing tech... see above. And noone knows if the sister ships were All planned to mount the same weaponry, especially in light of it's shortcomings and the alternatives outlined above.

Well, my dad developed planes for Lockheed and worked on the design teams (F-117 and F/A-22). Did they know what the plastic was in the 3rd avionics bay was? Probably not. Could they tell you how many bays there were and what major systems were in each? Yes? You're arguing that the man who is the chief designer, i.e., the guy who has to sign off on every design incorporated into the ship, have a decent knowledge of the specs written up for every major system and sub-assembly on the ship, etc wouldn't have clue about the tech for the showpiece weapon on his own ship. To take your analogy, your arguing that the chief architect for a building, who spervised the project until completion, wouldn't know that the bottom four floors had been gutted to make an ampitheatre. Put it this way, if he didn't have an idea about the tech contained in that weapon than he wasn't a chief designer, certainly not as we understand them.

Did he know how the missiles electronics worked, and if they had some tech parts traded with the Vree for assisting their crashed saucer in Roswell? Would he know if that was the case? Or would he have been told "It's our stuff, you don't need to know more, don't ask any queastions about it, just make sure it works"? And that's just what I'm theorizing about - that the designer weas handed a system, told a story, told not to ask more questions because of interstellar security and had to make it work. It may not have been so, but it might. It certainly sounds more likely then the alternative... in my ears at least, You can disagree, and I can agree not to agree with you. There we are, let's move on to something constructive until someone brings in a new point.

Then there should have been a Minbari chief designer. In engineering warplanes and warships this is a pretty specific title and type of job. A chief designer who doesn't understand his vesel is useless, becuase his whole job is knowing how to integrate everything and understand the technology to fix things when they invariably don't work. In effect, to dismiss the Vorlon tech thing you need to postulate that

A)Drake was lying about the source of the weapon

Which he could have been. Or just repeating what he was told.

B)The ships chief designer didn't understand the technology in his own ship

Not all. He couldn't, Even today ship designers can't - it's just too much. So either he's the chief designer, and has the overview, or he's a specialist and understands the internal workings of his pet part.

C)Sheridan was lying when he stated that tech that was reverse-engineered from the Vorlons was present on the Excalibur

Or mistaken. Or being told a story too.

D) Garibaldi had no idea of the source of the weapon in the ship-project that he was personally overseeing for his good friend

Or knew the source as in "minbari weapons division", but didn't know their internal secrets. Something that's extremely likely.

E)The head of the IA and wife of a former grey council member had no idea that a stockpile of salvaged Vorlon weaponry was being installed on his ship class

Just like the EA president may not have known that there are still people working with ShadowTech in earthforce you mean? :wink:

F) Sheridan was lying when he noted "techno-organic Vorlon design" when he first saw the Excalibur

G)the weapons fire of the Excalibur's super-gun being described as firing in "a manner reminiscent of Vorlon weapons" is incorrect or falsified[/quote]
No, just that younger race engineers built all that vorlon gun by thwemselves.

That's a lot of evidence to dismiss just to support a pet theory.

Dismiss a troublesome show assumption and finding a pet theory that is logical while still matching all the facts on screen actually.

If it helps your enjoyment of the show, that's fine. However, the evidence seem to be that JMS has let you down on this one.

That may be so. Only he can tell if he wanted it this way, or if he wanted people to think it is this way to surprise them later. But if he did do it without thinking, I'm gonne loose a lot of respect for him... so I'm gonna struggle all the way against the idea. :wink:

The entire statement is as follows; "Reverse-engineering Minbari and Vorlon technology so it'll work with Human tech . . . it's never been done before" The issue seems to be the integration of the tech with Human tech, not figuring it out as a tech-base. Note that he compares the process for Vorlon tech with Minbari in that sentence. Sorry, that half of my proof seems to hold up.

Actually (and I really have to get my videos out of the moving boxes so I'm no longer forced to quote from memory) I'd have no problem with the EA R&D department being busy and succeeding with the integration. Even a greek scholar could build a battery to run a computer on for a while if he tried hard enough and someone told him about chemo-electric processes...
So, as long as it's just integration of black box vorlon tech and human tech - no problem. I'd also have little problem with the EA starting to slowly figure out Minbari tech - that should be within their capabilities if thea get a little help, which the IA could provide an excuse for. But not ancient tech, not for a few centuries yet. So here I could agree with you.

I was referring to the beams from the bow cannon which move in that episode even though the barrels of the guns do not.

And I still say citing that as proof for the guns being Slicer Beams is an error in thinking. For one I do remember even red laser beams sometimed firing even in ways the turrets could not move, for another I do remember the small turrets which fire weaker versions of the very same beam CGI, do need to move around a lot. So I say any lack of movement of the bow turrets is proof only for CGI artists cutting corners, nothing more.

Actually, they are actually seen serving the Shadows. Not just an idle mention.

Were they? I just recall the Streib being mentioned "in the background", as "known shadowminions" but not as actively serving. Have to read the books again (at least those I have already unpacked - don't you'd hate it too if you get months upon months of delays when moving to a new domicle?) Still, one should have removed them from all mentionings... would have avioded problems. Oh, well... we can still say that either the 'mages are mistaken, or the Streib are new to the club and thus not as supported by the Shadows...

Point being that at least one ancient-derived armor didn't look at all like the original. Why can't the Shadow-derived do the same thing? If all of the Vorlon armor has a consistent, distinctive look that isn't incorporated into the hybrid armor why can't the Shadow armor do the same?

Because the warlock armor didn't even look "organic", while the WhiteStar armor did. The Warlock armor looks a Lot like some common metallic structure. I could accept it being enhenced, but never bio-armor. same goes for the Excalibur BtW, but there they're at least speaking about "crystalline armor" and I don't get any problems with that. I also wouldn't have any problems with someone saying the Warlock armor does have some features in common with the Exy's crys-armor - they do both have that "beehive-like pattern"...

Take that a step further. Alien picks up a Japanese ship from 1880. They get the idea that the tech curve is such that oared and sailed ships of light construction, barely good enough for coastal operations are the norm. Of course, the US and Europe are fielding coal-driven armored warships with turrets at the same time. The Japanese military in 1860 was fighting with swords and arbeques while the Yankees were using breechloaders and prototyping the Gatling gun.

Yup - they'd have to look a bit more. But here we're talking about a kind of "special forces" of that time, so one could assume they have the peak of established development. Some variations will of course be around, as not everyoen gets to play with the best toys, but I'd assume they'd mostly be of lower tech (though the 1002260-Minbari rangers might have a few better ships... maybe)

can't argue that at all. It's one of many resons that I wish that the whole Crusade thing didn't happen, because it just starts it all again.

Sigh. Yes. I say it again - B5 should have stopped when it did, or at least be continued within the show framework entirely, maybe by non JMS writers for varietee... hed they made the Dilgar Wars instead of Crusade, or the "dawn of the Earth Alliance" it'd have been a lot better (especially when I see what game companies made of these two topics) Hell, Valen's War and the history of the Cnetauri and Narn would have been better - if lacking in purely human characters. But noo, they had to butcher the Bg with Cursade... :? :x

Again, we don't know. At the least, a great deal of knowledge was lost by the technomages over the years. How to use their core powers, even general knowledge of where the tech came from.

Core powers - lost. Tech origin - surpressed. But if they ever had the knowledge of making their tech, they could have made a final break with the Shadows, something their doctrine would have found very agreeable - even at Wierden's time. Since they didn't, I say they hadn't.

Did they know that? Certainly it seems both of them had forgotten the point of the whole deal and were fighting for real. It's what Sheridan chided them about, after all.

Actually they didn't - the fighting for real only started when Kosh made his choice in "Interludes & Examinations". And Sheridan cided them for using the races they had agreed to help as pawns to fight out Their disagreement; and spoiled their game with Lorien's help, by letting all see their intentions for what they were. Hard to manipulate people when they know who you are and what you want - hey... :wink:

OK, why did the technomages have tech that the Drakh didn't? Perhaps the Drakh were unsuited for it. Perhaps they wouldn't have had plausible deniability if they suddenly became a whup-butt race. The Shadows could control a hugely powerful Earth and people wouldn't be entirely surpised at that, look how fast those damned apes develop! A race that barely anyone knows coming from nowhere might inspire questions. Note that the Shadows seem to like the caste idea. Scientists are specialized. technomages are specialized. the Drakh seem to have been specialized. Perhaps they decided to build an actual army and chose another race for specialization. Again, the most straightforward theory is that EF has started to crack ancient tech. The most believable way to explain that was that they had Shadow help. Other explanations start to reuire more hoop-jumping than I'm comfortable with.

Actually I think the Drakh didn't get TM tech bacuse for one the Shadows needed them for other jobs, for another because they just never needed it, or asked for it. See above.
But the theory that EF has started to crack ancient tech also requires some hoop jumping, and also suspension of plausability. If something is implausible I tend to assume that I don't have all data instead of hammering it to fit all data I have even if some of it is rather questionable.

But the Shadows control the government. They are basically in control. EF isn't going to do anything that they don't want. More importantly, if they try the Vorlons will destroy them as contaminated. It only takes a couple of tries to convince one to give up.

Actually they don't. Clarke had no keeper (or he wouldn't have blown his brains out - either the Keeper would have kept him from suicide, or he would have killed him like the Centauri Regent if his death was neccessary). So the Shadows didn't control the EA government any more then Londo Mollari. And the Vorlons only started destroying anyone contaminated by the Shadows AFTER the war heated up. Before it was all manipulation and shady deals, for both sides. What's more, even if they don't officially join the other side they could still have stabbed the Shadows in the back in just the right time - unless it was in their best interest to pay their half of the bargain too, and the best way to assure that is to not give them the full prize until they do. Same with the Technomages - they got black box tech, for a thousand years. So why should the Shadows suddenly take leave of their senses and break MO with the untried, untrustworthy (just look at our history!) Humans???

And I'd contend that it was building to that. The Vorlons did it first, but it seems that their conflict had already grown beyond what was originally intended. Both of them are accused of losing their way, had the Shadows just been doing their thing they wouldn't have been guilty of that. While I agree that the Vorlons started it, I don't think it happened in a vacuum. I'd hazard a guess that these wars had been getting more and more personal for the two ancients, bad blood was beginning to build.

Perhaps the Shadows were ready for it, but they'd never have tried to start it - it's totally against their philosophy. After all, if they believe in growth through strife, how could they work toward a final victory which would deprive them of the chance to grow in their strife against the Vorlons??? No, that's fully vorlon mentality...

More importantly, the Minbari are the Vorlons lackeys, not much different than the Drakh in many respects. They need to be countered or the Vorlons will impose order that much faster. The Shadows need a balancing agent. Whether it was the Humans I don't know.

Actually not. They needed to make sure what Really defeated them in Valen's time didn't happen again. And that wasn't the Minbari, that was the Minbari organizing most of the other important races into one alliance. The Shadows could easily destroy any one race, especially as long as the agreement with the vorlon about prohibition of direct conflict holds, But they can't wipe out all the races, because that would undo their work. So their goal is to get all races to fight one another, so they get stronger through the fighting, and then test them against true ShadowShips, so they get to see how far they still have to go, while the Vrolons want to avoid all kind of conflict, or at least have all races work together under their guidance. See? The Shadows don't need any counter-force to the Minbari, at least not military-wise... they need no "house soldiers" because that's what they have their CPU-controlled ships for; they do need to set all races at each other's throat. For that they want minions like Morden. And they want minions that do the lowly dirty work of wiping the dust at Z'ha'dum for them - the Drakh and others. Sorry, but I fear someone here suffers from too much pride in humanity - they may be special in this story, but not That special (at least not to the Shadows - the Vorlons do know that the humans are very important because they do have one piece of info the Shadows don't - they know who Valen was, and where he came from. So they know that the Humans are important, not just for this war, but also for the last)

Okay, but Garibaldi's not correcting him is different?

See above - if some Minabri gave Garibaldi a likely story, he'd have little reason and no resources to check it out. And if he had other things to mistrust he wouldn't.

Well, can I then argue that the Shadow-Omegas have slicer beams? After all, AoG SCS sheets say that they do.

You can argue, and I'll argue against it again, because other evidence says that here AoG made a mistake. However, there's no other evidence that indicates AoG made a mistake with their Warlock fluff... or did you see a Warlock before "Endgame"? Or any other EA ship with non-rotational AG? Always check the "facts", and evaluate them against other facts and pure logic. Only discard something if it doesn't fit, and don't use the fitting or non-fitting of one piece to judge another.

Like I stated, it's an impasse. If the shows says that something is true, I will accept that unless I have show evidence that contradicts it.

Yes, impasse. I won't. I'll question everything that strikes me as odd. Sometimes I do get an satisfactory answer and accept it as truth, sometimes I do not and start to create theories to come as close as possible to an "truth" that both fits the show-facts and avoids the problems I see with it. I suppose that is basically a good thing, because else we'd still go with the "the Sun circles the Earth" style of reasoning... :wink:

As I said, we have cannon info that Vorlon influenced armor doesn't look much like Vorlon armor at all. It actually looks more similar to the Minbari hulls. If the Vorlon derived armor can look nothing like actual Vorlon armor than why can't the Shadow influenced armor look little like actual Shadow armor?

Because it's still bio-armor. Now, if the Warlock looked, say, like designed by Giger, I'd say - fine, let it have bio-armor. But since it's surface looks like slabs of metal I find it hard to see any bio in there... while the WhiteStar armor is patterned in a way that makes me think "OK, it could be organic..." So I keep to my theory that tim earls created a false impressing there.

FWIW, this has been an enjoyable discussion. However, I'm probably going to bow out, at least for awhile. We seem to be at the spinning the wheels phase of the discussion, tossing the same old points at each other round after round. I'm spending an hour typing up these responses! Thanks for the discussion as it has been enjoyable but it's getting too nice outside, I need to take my daughter to the park!

Thank you. At least one has the sense of knowing when to stop... I fear that I am a bit stubborn in such regards, and unless someone manages to convince me (whic has happened, never fear) I will latch on such a discussion and seldom be the first to let go... :wink: :roll:
BtW, one hour is good time in comparison. I may be Ok in eglish, but it still takes a bit longer, especially as I'm not so good at speed-typing... I usually take twice or trice that for one of my responses...

 

[nitflegal]

FWIW, this has been an enjoyable discussion. However, I'm probably going to bow out, at least for awhile. We seem to be at the spinning the wheels phase of the discussion, tossing the same old points at each other round after round. I'm spending an hour typing up these responses! Thanks for the discussion as it has been enjoyable but it's getting too nice outside, I need to take my daughter to the park!

Thank you. At least one has the sense of knowing when to stop... I fear that I am a bit stubborn in such regards, and unless someone manages to convince me (whic has happened, never fear) I will latch on such a discussion and seldom be the first to let go... :wink: :roll:
BtW, one hour is good time in comparison. I may be Ok in eglish, but it still takes a bit longer, especially as I'm not so good at speed-typing... I usually take twice or trice that for one of my responses...

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: For what it's worth, I started the last response at 10:00 PM last night, I finished at 12:30 AM this morning (pulling references etc) I am very tired today!

Matt

 

[ShadowScout]

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: For what it's worth, I started the last response at 10:00 PM last night, I finished at 12:30 AM this morning (pulling references etc) I am very tired today!

Hey, that's still better then my score. I may be a night owl, but made the mistake of checking the forums just before going to sleep somewhere around 1:00 here... and couldn't restrain myself from anwereing right away. Somewhere around 4:00 I was finished, and went to my bed, and by the time I was slowly falling asleep I could see the dawn creeping through my window... good thing I had a little afternoon nap the day before or I'd have slept away the day - again... :wink: