Star Trek Vs. Babylon 5

TrekkieJeff2000 · Post by **TrekkieJeff2000** » 2003-02-02 11:48am

Hi I am not sure if this has even been asked but who would win in a war. Star Trek or Babylon 5? Thanks for any help you can give me.

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2003-02-02 11:49am

I believe most agree with the Federation having higher weapon capabilities(mostly discerned from the amount of power a Shadow Vessel can take and that Mimbari Cruiser can be killed by Nukes)

And this should be the Other Sci-Fi.

Grand Admiral Thrawn · Post by **Grand Admiral Thrawn** » 2003-02-02 11:51am

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2003-02-02 11:56am

Which Babylon 5 and Star Trek power are fighting?

Ender · Post by **Ender** » 2003-02-02 11:57am

Trek, by a rather large margin. Unless you go with low end numbers, the Federation is FO level. Abd even with the low end numbers, they can clean the clocks of the YR.

Captain Kruger · Post by **Captain Kruger** » 2003-02-02 11:57am

Babylon 5’s various military powers have such widely divergent technology that you simply can’t make such a general vs. debate with them. We need to be more specific.

Artanis · Post by **Artanis** » 2003-02-02 12:57pm

B5 advantages:
-EA, Centauri, and Narn: Plasma/Ion weapons, and we all know what Ions do to ST ships.
-Ground combat (see: GROPOs)
-Space combat Range
-Starfighters (type XII Phaser, meet 50 Pulse Cannons!

)
-Psionics (use, if not possession)

ST advantages:
-Sheer firepower
-Dominion, Borg
-Federation: possible advantage in detecting the other's ships at FTL (with all the sciency crap on a Fed ship, they have a better chance of spotting a ship in Hyperspace than a B5 ship does of seeing one that's at Warp - B5 ships have no reason to design sensors that can detect ships at that speed/range in the first place.)
-Sheer industrial capability. SD.net: Federation = ~150 Systems. b5tech.com: EA = 30 systems, only a few worlds NOT named "Station" or "Colony"

All this is moot, of course, if they have vastly different FTL speeds, and I've never calculated them out. Does somebody know the relative speeds of ST and B5?

Artanis · Post by **Artanis** » 2003-02-02 12:59pm

Dammit, in all that editing, I forgot to put my opinion

B5 puts up one hell of a fight, much more than ST could against SW, but loses to sheer numbers.

Ender · Post by **Ender** » 2003-02-02 01:02pm

Artanis wrote:B5 advantages:
-Space combat Range

Most B5 combat is a spiting range as well. The maximum ranges have been demonstrated by both sides, but max ranges for Trek are better.

Artanis · Post by **Artanis** » 2003-02-02 01:24pm

It certainly did every time fighters were involved, but it seemed to me that capships tended to stay at range more than ST did. Of course, I'm hardly an expert on the matter, so I'll take your word for it.

Point taken.

*notices his tendancy to be incoherent* "Looks like I was wrong then" (/summary for the sake of being comprehensible)

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 06:48pm

Actually, capship battle usually happens at very close range. Need I remind you that ramming attacks have been successfully conducted with lumbering Omegas against similar-sized targets (as opposed to a giant, impossible-to-miss target like the Death Star) not once, but twice onscreen?

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2003-02-02 06:54pm

I hope you aren't including the ramming attack by Agamemnon against a GOD platform in those two.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 06:56pm

No. One of them was an Omega hitting another Omega in the EA's abortive battle to retake B5. The other was an Omega hitting a Minbari war cruiser in ITB.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2003-02-02 07:00pm

What eras for the res pective groups?

If we're talking all of Trek things get rather interesting... barring the obscure time travel stuff.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2003-02-02 07:02pm

Darth Wong wrote:No. One of them was an Omega hitting another Omega in the EA's abortive battle to retake B5. The other was an Omega hitting a Minbari war cruiser in ITB.

You're referring to Severed dreams. Youre right, but I think that was later in the battle. It started at something like 800 km or so at the beginning I think...

I'll double check some of the battles and get back to you. Some of them do seem to involve close range engagements, but there are a fairly substantial number of long range ones also (IIRC)

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2003-02-02 07:07pm

Ender wrote:Trek, by a rather large margin. Unless you go with low end numbers, the Federation is FO level. Abd even with the low end numbers, they can clean the clocks of the YR.

Depends on which figures you use for B5 too, and who is involved (same for the trek side)

"B5 vs STar Trek" is rather broad. I mean on the Trek side you could bring in anything from the Borg to the dominion to 8472 to the Q to the Krenim, to 29century Feds...

And there is the technomages, the sHadows the Drakh, the Vorlons, the Triad, the Kirishiac, the Mindriders, Lorien, the Walkers, the Thirdspace aliens, and so on.

Its pretty damn broad as it is now. Lets narrow it down some before discussing it (Like ISA vs Dominion, or the Vorlons & Shadows vs the Borg and Dominion, or something like that.)

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 07:22pm

To me, any sci-fi series against any other sci-fi series is supposed to pit its primary groups, either good or bad, against one another, not "everything but the kitchen sink".

Grand Admiral Thrawn · Post by **Grand Admiral Thrawn** » 2003-02-02 07:32pm

Do you mean the Feds (presumably) vs the EA? The ISA? Minbari? Centauri? FO? LNW? What era?

Balrog · Post by **Balrog** » 2003-02-02 07:37pm

Darth Wong wrote:To me, any sci-fi series against any other sci-fi series is supposed to pit its primary groups, either good or bad, against one another, not "everything but the kitchen sink".

There's still a lot of "primary groups" within that listing: Feds, Roms, Klingons, Borg, Dominion, EA, Narns, Mimbari, Centari, Drazi (perhaps the Shadows/Vorlons? They're rather major players in B5)

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 07:44pm

Balrog wrote:
Darth Wong wrote:To me, any sci-fi series against any other sci-fi series is supposed to pit its primary groups, either good or bad, against one another, not "everything but the kitchen sink".
There's still a lot of "primary groups" within that listing: Feds, Roms, Klingons, Borg, Dominion, EA, Narns, Mimbari, Centari, Drazi (perhaps the Shadows/Vorlons? They're rather major players in B5)

I would regard all of those groups as "primary" except for the Drazi, who are bit players. They're all OK; I was thinking more in terms of these oddballs who show up for one episode or don't get in fights, eg- Q, the Technomages, these "Triads" who were never seen on the show and whose nebulous capabilities offer fertile ground for abuse of vague semantics, etc.

Balrog · Post by **Balrog** » 2003-02-02 07:48pm

Darth Wong wrote:
Balrog wrote:
Darth Wong wrote:To me, any sci-fi series against any other sci-fi series is supposed to pit its primary groups, either good or bad, against one another, not "everything but the kitchen sink".
There's still a lot of "primary groups" within that listing: Feds, Roms, Klingons, Borg, Dominion, EA, Narns, Mimbari, Centari, Drazi (perhaps the Shadows/Vorlons? They're rather major players in B5)
I would regard all of those groups as "primary" except for the Drazi, who are bit players. They're all OK; I was thinking more in terms of these oddballs who show up for one episode or don't get in fights, eg- Q, the Technomages, these "Triads" who were never seen on the show and whose nebulous capabilities offer fertile ground for abuse of vague semantics, etc.

Well, the Drazi were with the Narns against the Centari in Season 5, and we have seen a Technomage fight (Crusader Series)

But it still depends on which "primary" is fighting the other.

Grand Admiral Thrawn · Post by **Grand Admiral Thrawn** » 2003-02-02 08:15pm

We saw a Triad ship very briefly against the VPK.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 08:59pm

Grand Admiral Thrawn wrote:We saw a Triad ship very briefly against the VPK.

Couldn't have been as shit-hot as the rabid Fivers on SB are saying then, since the VPK took quite a while to go down.

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2003-02-02 09:03pm

Darth Wong wrote:
Grand Admiral Thrawn wrote:We saw a Triad ship very briefly against the VPK.
Couldn't have been as shit-hot as the rabid Fivers on SB are saying then, since the VPK took quite a while to go down.

Of course. The rabid fivers over there waved bye bye to reality a long time ago.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2003-02-02 09:13pm

The Triad arent' really clarified in the series - the name and information largely comes from the official material (B5 Wars starship combat game, and the like.) Keep in mind that my information tends to be similar to the Fivers (although I'm not going to attempt to misdirect anyone - at least I hope you dont think I would.)

And really, the B5 Era Triad were not that. On SB some (notably the Adarx person Brian crushed in debatE) tried to make them out to be omnipotents (they aren't. ) If this were more "First One" era - (prior to Minbari, etc - we're talking millions of years) -they'd be more capable than what they are in the B5 era (Although still not more than an order of magnitude more powerful thana ny other First One effectively) - but in the B5 Era they are substantially weaker (they have that one ship, which is PROBABLY individually more powerful than any single Vorlon or Shadow ship excluding planetkillers, but much less powerful than the planetkillers themselves.)

I would think a good matchup might be the ISA (preferrably either Pre Drakh or post Drakh so we can include the Centauri - post Drakh leads to a more powerful ISA) vs the Fed/Romulan/Klingon alliance, Dominion/Cardassians, or Borg. Individual B5 races (even the superpowers) have at most thousands of ships of all kinds (the major players - EA, Minbari, etc.) and most of the League worlds are probably lucky to have hundreds (and less than a thousand.) Collectively, they have a fairly substantial fleet (high thousands to low tens of thousands is my estimate, probably, excluding fighters but including various ship classes) - but its probably fair to say they'd be comparable in number to anything Fed/Klingon/Romulans would assemble (for example, we know the Army of Light in Season 4, excluding the Narn, Centauri, and EA - basically being 2 dozen league races, the white Star fleet, and the Minbari (religious and worker caste, say 2/3 of the total Minbari fleets), assembled some 8000 warships - which represented the majority of their fleets. 12,000-15,000 total ships to 20,000 as generous upper is probably a good estimate. I can clarify more on this if need be.

Any thoughts?