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It sounds like another case where there's contradictory statements. I always had the impression that the Narns were space faring, and other-solar-system-capable is where I'd draw the line on primitive in this context, but there's definitely support for them being planet-bound, especially the direct JMS quote. It does seem possible in the B5 universe to be space faring without building huge amounts of heavy industry or tech much advanced beyond ours, but the Narn likely weren't that. An interesting thing about B5 is that the tech for non-old-one races doesn't give a lot of advantage in a ground fight. Obviously if you have control of space you can bombard enemy positions with impunity and use mass drivers and similar devices for mass destruction, but they don't seem to have any sort of personal armor, power armor, or personal shields for defense, and PPGs are about as powerful as modern rifles in combat, with no super-powered personal weapons or highly effective smart weapons. I think one of the reasons you don't see a lot of big empires and that the less powerful races remain independent is that taking and holding territory (other than small colonies and outposts) takes a lot of manpower and risks significant casualties, it's not like some setups where a few squads of super-soldiers with disintegrator rifles can take over a 20th century country on their own.
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Jul 14, 2023 00:50
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The Ragesh 3 claim could be way more intriguing if it wasn't one hundred years but one thousand. Like if G'Kar came in and mentioned ancient Narn artifacts and Londo is all, bah, absurd, but then Delenn recognises it. Because that'd then line up with the First Shadow War stuff, and then maybe make you wonder on another viewing why the Minbari were saved but the Narns were not.
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Jul 14, 2023 04:21
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Also if Narn was occupied by a superadvanced alien race a thousand years ago who were busy losing a war to a coalition of advanced races, there's plenty of ways that the Narn could've ended up with space travel but without some other technologies and seem relatively primitive.Pantaloon Pontiff posted:An interesting thing about B5 is that the tech for non-old-one races doesn't give a lot of advantage in a ground fight. Obviously if you have control of space you can bombard enemy positions with impunity and use mass drivers and similar devices for mass destruction, but they don't seem to have any sort of personal armor, power armor, or personal shields for defense, and PPGs are about as powerful as modern rifles in combat, with no super-powered personal weapons or highly effective smart weapons. I think one of the reasons you don't see a lot of big empires and that the less powerful races remain independent is that taking and holding territory (other than small colonies and outposts) takes a lot of manpower and risks significant casualties, it's not like some setups where a few squads of super-soldiers with disintegrator rifles can take over a 20th century country on their own. I don't think that we really see much ground combat from alien races in the series aside from more ceremonial fights. The Minbari do have fancy collapsible staffs, and there's an assassin with a fancy disguise cloak and super poison thing, but otherwise we just see aliens punching eachother or stabbing with normal looking blades.
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Jul 14, 2023 05:11
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You do see Minbari fighting humans in the In The Beginning movie, but it's mostly hand-to-hand combat, and I'm assuming that the humans have run out of ammo.
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Jul 14, 2023 08:53
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The most we saw was General Franklin leading EA land force against some other alien rebellion as a favor to the local government. But even then you didn't see anything about the combat, just the aftermath. I seem to recall an image of like VTOL/Skynet Hunter Killer type things but that was about it.
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Jul 14, 2023 10:10
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Eighties ZomCom posted:You do see Minbari fighting humans in the In The Beginning movie, but it's mostly hand-to-hand combat, and I'm assuming that the humans have run out of ammo. It's the Dune paradox: Inevitable a society will be so advanced that guns becomes useless and people have to resort to fighting with knives and swords again.
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Jul 14, 2023 10:41
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Alhazred posted:It's the Dune paradox: Inevitable a society will be so advanced that guns becomes useless and people have to resort to fighting with knives and swords again. There's definitely a reason why projectile weapons are not used in space - they could puncture the outer hull. PPGs are used because they gently caress up flesh but if they hit a big solid metal object the heat quickly diffuses. I can see soldiers in space only being trained to use plasma weapons regardless of context because it's easier than training them twice and maintaining two separate tables of ordnance. And given the close quarters of space vessels, there'd also be a lot of hand to hand combat.
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Jul 14, 2023 10:59
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That gets cited a lot and I think is JMS' reasoning for PPGs but doesn't actually make any sense. We see the ships and B5 get hit by ship weapons that don't just go through the hull, no small arm is going to do poo poo. And even if it did somehow pierce the hull you just patch it up when you get a chance. A bullet size hole isn't a big deal.
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Jul 16, 2023 18:45
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Don't we also see air lock equivalent doors everywhere in the station? Just cordon off the place where there's a puncture like in the video game Faster than Light, until you can get your engineers to fix that stuff. That said, PPGs are way more sci-fi and cool than bullet guns, so you know, let's go plasma rifles and poo poo!
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Jul 16, 2023 18:50
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We don't see a lot of ground combat, but we definitely get a picture - we see an Earthforce division deployed to help put down a rebellion on another world, we see some fighting between Minbari and Humans during In the Beginning, we see the station defense forces repelling boarders on a few occasions, and we see Centauri guard who expect to fight Shadows. They're all basically some dudes with simple body armor and PPGs or hand weapons, and all of them are at risk from 'guys with handguns' or 'guys with melee weapons in close quarters' - station security doesn't have an easy way to deal with 'angry mob starts breaking things'. Compare that with Mobile Infantry from the Starship Troopers book, where soldiers fly around in armor that makes them tougher than modern tanks while as mobile as a combination of a jet and helicopter and has weapons ranging all the way to nukes. Or the escaping scientist family in A Fire Upon the Deep who have only one smart gun in their arsenal and are only expecting a possible wild animal attack, but manage to almost defeat and cause huge casualties to a couple of companies of the equivalent of medieval troops who ambush them. Or compare the heavy PPGs the Centauri brought to deal with Shadows to Star Trek phasers which can just disintegrate an entire small vehicle. Jedit posted:There's definitely a reason why projectile weapons are not used in space - they could puncture the outer hull. PPGs are used because they gently caress up flesh but if they hit a big solid metal object the heat quickly diffuses. I can see soldiers in space only being trained to use plasma weapons regardless of context because it's easier than training them twice and maintaining two separate tables of ordnance. And given the close quarters of space vessels, there'd also be a lot of hand to hand combat. That's the given reason for PPGs, and I'm sure JMS believed it when he said it, but it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. First off, if you do puncture the hull of a spaceship with a bullet, you have a minor maintenance issue, you don't have a gaping wound that's going to suck people out into space. So yeah you have to come back later with something to help you find the hole (like a fog generator), then patch it, but that's not a big deal. A bullet size hole isn't going to clear the air out of a room big enough to have a firefight in, and if your air supply and recycling gets overloaded by that, the boarding party is going to overload it faster than the puncture. It's not a danger to a human, if you put your hand over it you'd seal the hole and probably get a bruise, like if you put your hand over the end of a vacuum cleaner. Meanwhile a weapon like a PPG may not punch a hole as well, but it will superheat a large area (which will probably weaken whatever weak material you are using as a hull). It will also start fires causing significantly more oxygen problems and damage than a small hole It will probably cause worse damage to internal components - a bullet will sever a wire or two requiring you to splice or replace them, but a PPG will melt all of the wires in the area into each other, requiring more work to fix and probably more spare wire than you carry, and a bullet will kill a device that it hits directly, but a PPG will mess up any temperature-sensitive device that it hits near. Bullet damage to internal walls and panels would be a single small hole that you can patch over or fill in and cover up pretty quickly and easily (especially if you only care about a functional fix), PPG damage is going to leave larger, irregular holes, melting, and scorch marks, so you're more likely to have to replace an entire piece instead of just patching. Civilian ships might be thin skinned enough for a bullet to penetrate, but that is pretty risky when they're going into high-traffic areas - random bits of debris in the area will have a regular velocity that gives them more energy hitting the ship than a pistol bullet, so I think you'd want a stronger hull. Military ships are definitely armored way past what small arms can do, we see ships shrug off much more damaging attacks from ship weapons. If military ships were vulnerable to pistol bullets, you could do things like put a bunch of little rocks into containers on a starfury, fly at a ship, then open the containers once you'd in the ship's direction and brake slightly, which would then have a bunch of potential hull penetrators that you can't really track or intercept. Babylon 5 itself is armored like a military ship, and most of the volume has several levels before even getting to the outer hull. Except for the front and back ends of the cylinder the outer hull is the floor, and I'm pretty sure the floors have a 'working floor' that people walk on with space below for wires, pipes, and ventilation to run, so you're not even directly touching the hull. My head cannon is that people say that kind of thing in-universe because it's a popular urban legend, like the military legend that you can't legally target a soldier with a .50 caliber machine gun, you have to say you're targeting their belt buckle since it's an anti-equipment gun. Same with things like Garibaldi saying that spacing is a slow, painful death where you spend five minutes helplessly suffocating - being exposed to vacuum actually knocks you unconscious within 30 seconds, and there isn't a suffocating feeling because there's no CO2 buildup to trigger that.
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Jul 16, 2023 19:51
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Surely the projectile weapon issue isn’t about what a single bullet does to the hull? Think about the kinds of fire we see from PPGs in “The Long Dark” or “Falling towards Apotheosis.” We’re talking hundreds or thousands of shots hitting the hull in a relatively confined area. As for whether PPG would do more damage: we don’t know how PPGs work exactly, nor what B5’s hull is made of. Do we ever see a fire start as a result of PPG fire?
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Jul 16, 2023 20:04
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The old AoG game GROPOS has some information about B5 ground combat though it's probably kind of hard to find.
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Jul 16, 2023 20:21
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A weapon that can't penetrate a wall would be appealing if we assume internal non-structural walls are just lightweight partitions. You'd hardly ever have a backstop you can trust. Any of these in-universe reasons for preferring PPGs would suggest Garibaldi's old slug thrower should never have been allowed on the station, but then, rules are often different for the head cop.
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Jul 16, 2023 21:30
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I feel like the biggest reason for the PPG is that it's a tiny but powerful gun. That's just convenient. I don't know if there's a limit to its number of shots, but it seems like you could carry spare power cells pretty easy compared to bullets, and if you needed to use it in a vacuum, it'd still work as opposed to traditional firearms, which would be a bit more complicated to make work right. No idea what's supposed to be different about the big rifle version that the bring out for the more serious fighting.
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Jul 16, 2023 21:32
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Grand Fromage posted:That gets cited a lot and I think is JMS' reasoning for PPGs but doesn't actually make any sense. We see the ships and B5 get hit by ship weapons that don't just go through the hull, no small arm is going to do poo poo. And even if it did somehow pierce the hull you just patch it up when you get a chance. A bullet size hole isn't a big deal. It's a 5 km long station! On that kind of scale you're not going to see the holes also we see fighters blow apart from PPG fire all the time. And finally even if it isn't going to pierce the hull, most spaceships or stations are going to have all sorts of important and dangerous fluids and gases moving around in pipes that you also don't want to poke holes in
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Jul 16, 2023 21:40
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CainFortea posted:It's a 5 km long station! 8 km actually, it's 5 miles long.
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Jul 16, 2023 21:43
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SlothfulCobra posted:No idea what's supposed to be different about the big rifle version that the bring out for the more serious fighting. A longer gun that you can shoulder is easier to aim accurately than a pistol. That'd be true for energy weapons just like with modern guns, unless it has some kind of smartlink autoaim thing that makes it irrelevant. Presumably since it's bigger it would have more power and ammo capacity too. Probably could fire larger and more rapidly accelerated plasma globs.
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Jul 16, 2023 21:54
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I'm pretty sure they said the Narn were a pre-industrial society when the Shadows came to their world. EDIT: G'Kar posted:They came to our world over a thousand of your years ago, long before we went to the stars ourselves. They set up a base in one of our southern continents. They took little interest in us. G'Quan believed they were engaged in a war far outside our own world. Small White Dragon fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jul 17, 2023 |
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Jul 17, 2023 00:36
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Whole lot of room between "pre-industrial" and "before we went to the stars ourselves." 21st century humans haven't been to the stars either.
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Jul 17, 2023 01:09
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CainFortea posted:It's a 5 km long station! On that kind of scale you're not going to see the holes also we see fighters blow apart from PPG fire all the time. i'm sorry, what
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Jul 17, 2023 03:45
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Narsham posted:Surely the projectile weapon issue isn’t about what a single bullet does to the hull? Think about the kinds of fire we see from PPGs in “The Long Dark” or “Falling towards Apotheosis.” We’re talking hundreds or thousands of shots hitting the hull in a relatively confined area. As I pointed out, bullets aren't even going to penetrate B5's hull - if it was going to penetrate the hull, the debris from destroyed fighters too small to even see on camera would leave giant gaping holes in the station, and we don't see that effect from battle damage during the series. So that kind of fire with firearms instead of PPGs wouldn't actually be a problem for the B5. Even if we assume civilian vessels are thin-skinned enough that a bullet will penetrate the hull, why would a military base their armament decisions for space and land combat on what might happen in extremely unusual boarding actions? Your two example fights involve a well-armed space station fighting a First One level opponent, not something the Earthforce Alliance has ever had happen before (or expected to happen). quote:As for whether PPG would do more damage: we don’t know how PPGs work exactly, nor what B5’s hull is made of. The fact that they usually only leave a small fire (which we see plenty of times) is a special effects issue, not a 'real' property of PPGs. We see that a single shot causes cause deep enough burns on a human body to do organ damage (not just surface trauma), and that amount of is clearly enough to set common materials on fire, melt things like insulation and non-hardened packaging, and otherwise cause a host of problems in a confined environment.
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Jul 17, 2023 05:24
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Clearly there should be a modified Strangelove rule, gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is a diplomatic station! Unless it's with those Minbari sticks, they won't do major damage to the station's systems if one of you idiots hits a wall.
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Jul 17, 2023 06:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:and if you needed to use it in a vacuum, it'd still work as opposed to traditional firearms, which would be a bit more complicated to make work right. No, regular modern firearms (mostly) work just fine in a vacuum. Maybe certain semi or fully auto guns would have problems? The big issue is heat dissipation, so the barrel and maybe lower receiver might overheat. There's also the potential issue of the gun oil possibly sublimating away and causing jams from the lack of lubrication?
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Jul 17, 2023 15:36
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Id think the plasma generators would also have heat problems in vacuum.
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Jul 17, 2023 15:52
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:Babylon 5 itself is armored like a military ship Citation needed. The only part we know for sure is armored are the blast shutters they closed over C&C during combat which protected from a disabled fighter collision in "Severed Dreams". Notably, a similar potential collision against the broad side of the station was considered a "shoot it down, screw first contact" emergency previously in "Soul Hunter". Also, we know that individual PPG hits don't superheat a large area on impact; examples are too numerous to cite, but the blasts partially burning through the ductwork but not melting it in "Conflicts of Interest" is a great visual example of how much penetrating power and heat transfer a small burst of PPG bolts has. Note: not much.
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Jul 17, 2023 18:46
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:As I pointed out, bullets aren't even going to penetrate B5's hull - if it was going to penetrate the hull, the debris from destroyed fighters too small to even see on camera would leave giant gaping holes in the station, and we don't see that effect from battle damage during the series. So that kind of fire with firearms instead of PPGs wouldn't actually be a problem for the B5. Even if we assume civilian vessels are thin-skinned enough that a bullet will penetrate the hull, why would a military base their armament decisions for space and land combat on what might happen in extremely unusual boarding actions? Your two example fights involve a well-armed space station fighting a First One level opponent, not something the Earthforce Alliance has ever had happen before (or expected to happen). To repeat, even if B5's outer hull is heavily armored, there's a large number of INTERIOR walls with are not going to be thick-skinned. And while those were the hottest fire-fights we see, are you really suggesting that a routine shoot-out is going to be over in 2-3 shots? The telepaths pursuing Garibaldi and Lise have already been mentioned. There's smaller gunfights on board B5, mostly in episodes with Bester, but we usually see a fairly high rate of fire. The dark servant in "The Long Dark" is no more a First One than a Drahk or a telepath. Pantaloon Pontiff posted:The fact that they usually only leave a small fire (which we see plenty of times) is a special effects issue, not a 'real' property of PPGs. We see that a single shot causes cause deep enough burns on a human body to do organ damage (not just surface trauma), and that amount of is clearly enough to set common materials on fire, melt things like insulation and non-hardened packaging, and otherwise cause a host of problems in a confined environment. The evidence we have is what is on screen and what JMS says. That's all we have. PPGs do not exist, and have no "real" properties whatsoever. The thrusters on a White Star move it at the speed of plot. And so on. If you want to discuss what you imagine to be "real" in the B5 universe while ignoring both the creator and the available evidence on-screen, then I guess have fun with that, but there's no point in having a discussion with you about it at that stage.
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Jul 17, 2023 19:28
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Narsham posted:The evidence we have is what is on screen and what JMS says. That's all we have. PPGs do not exist, and have no "real" properties whatsoever. The thrusters on a White Star move it at the speed of plot. And so on. If you want to discuss what you imagine to be "real" in the B5 universe while ignoring both the creator and the available evidence on-screen, then I guess have fun with that, but there's no point in having a discussion with you about it at that stage. I know I started this to some degree, but trying to give human technology realistic properties was a thing in the series. Human ships (and B5 itself) use centrifugal force in place of gravity; Starfuries use inertia and the science was good enough that NASA said it was how they'd do a similar craft. If JMS didn't manage to handle the physics of PPGs with equal accuracy then that is a flaw, but he still did it with the intent of making them function plausibly as objects. If you think about it, it's actually good scene setting. The main focus of the show is humans, and to help us fit in their shoes and their world we get as much information as we need about human tech while the tech of other races is not explained. We know the Minbari have artificial gravity and the Vorlons use organic technology, but nobody ever tells us the hows or whys of it. It's a mystery to us as it is to the Earthforce officers, we discover it as they do, we are encouraged and prepared to think and feel the same way about it.
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Jul 18, 2023 00:26
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Jedit posted:I know I started this to some degree, but trying to give human technology realistic properties was a thing in the series. Human ships (and B5 itself) use centrifugal force in place of gravity; Starfuries use inertia and the science was good enough that NASA said it was how they'd do a similar craft. If JMS didn't manage to handle the physics of PPGs with equal accuracy then that is a flaw, but he still did it with the intent of making them function plausibly as objects. That's not the kind of fidelity that's being discussed here. Pantaloon Pontiff is asserting that the VFX of PPG blasts are not an accurate reflection of their intended function. Anyone who's read even a few pages of the Lurker's Guide would know that's patently absurd.
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Jul 18, 2023 01:19
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And just as I finished my re-watch: https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/1681333005082820608 quote:ATTENTION #BABYLON5 FANS! YOU WANTED IT, YOU ASKED FOR IT, AND IT'S FINALLY HAPPENED! To celebrate B5's 30th Anniversary, the Complete Babylon 5 series will be released ON BLU-RAY December 5, '23. Pre-orders can be placed STARTING TODAY via the retailer of your choice. Huzzah!
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Jul 18, 2023 17:46
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It's nice that JMS gets to make this announcement as opposed to being caught completely offguard, like he has been about the 4:3 remasters etc. Hopefully it has some neat features, like his new commentaries he's been recording for youtube synced up with the episodes or something.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:58
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Yeah, that's good news. Here's hoping they make an effort. The series deserves it.
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Jul 18, 2023 19:44
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Which retailer did you all order from? I couldnt find it on Amazon.
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Jul 18, 2023 22:54
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I said come in! posted:Which retailer did you all order from? I couldnt find it on Amazon. Doesn't appear at my usual suspects yet.
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Jul 19, 2023 03:20
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https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/1681435066088718338
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Jul 19, 2023 03:23
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Odd choice of cover art
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Jul 19, 2023 03:49
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So, not only does it not have any new special features, it has less special features than the dvds! I hate it when they do that.
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Jul 19, 2023 04:16
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Horizon Burning posted:Odd choice of cover art Maybe they're trying to market it to new audiences as a pew pew space battles show? Obviously for older fans the best choice would've been the photo of most of the cast flipping a bird for the camera.
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Jul 19, 2023 08:36
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Looks like they scraped Deviant Art for some low hanging fruit.
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Jul 19, 2023 09:20
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Trying to fool people into thinking it's a Star Wars.
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Jul 19, 2023 09:25
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I'd preorder but I think I'd want to know first whether they fixed those couple of episodes that had problems like missing footage when the remaster was released to streaming
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Jul 19, 2023 09:32
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