White Star vs. SSV Normandy SR-1

[Alyrium Denryle]

Haven't read the comics and don't care. Haven't read the novels and don't care. They aren't the issue. 700 gees is inconsistent with how things are presented in the series. B5 has a bunch of scenes where the visuals don't match how things work. We don't fret over how the scene with the destruction of the Black Star is problematic with the mentioned mines and how nukes work in space and we don't chew cud and decide 700g Star Furies must be a thing. We chuck the stuff that's obviously bad and move the fuck on.

It is a good thing comics are not the only things I mentioned in support of that claim.

How exactly is 700 Gs inconsistent with god damn anything? The only way that is inconsistent internally that I can think of is if inertial dampeners dont exist. Not only has it been canonically stated they do in the EA (I dont care that you dont care about the comics you have not read). They clearly do, because without them the very concepts of certain ships dont work. You cannot have a functioning Omega destroyer without them. Period. Without extremely high G STL drives with accompanying inertial dampeners, the narratives of entire episodes dont work. With or without narrative time compression and scene cuts, they fail because the time scales involved to make the scene compatible with a lack of inertial dampeners make no god damn sense.

Do they go into combat at 700 Gs? Not with fighters at knife-fight range they dont (and I have calculated out every instance of starfury combat in babylon 5 that it is possible to calculate. They dont go above 90 Gs in combat, usually much slower). That would be crazy because humans dont have the reflexes of a computer. But for getting across long distances? Yeah. They have to. Or the narrative framing of plot critical episodes fails.

It is one thing to say that something was wrong with the Black Star. Maybe its gun ports were open and exposed volatile components to sufficient energy to cause overload. Maybe the nuke propelled asteroid fragments (much closer to the epicenter initially) like a giant shotgun blast (my preferred explanation) that ripped the Black Star apart/critically damaged the engines/reactor. Hell, you can even claim that mistakes were made in the verbal specification of the yield of the nuclear device. That happens. You think you have a 2 MT nuke off the top of your head, but it is actually a 20 MT nuke (which at 800 meters will vaporize .25 meters of titanium and lead to impulse shock throughout the structure of the ship. Hell, even a 2 MT nuke could have been a ship killer from the impulse shock generated from vaporizing armor across the entire forward facing)

But you cannot make the claim that because nukes dont work that way, the Black Star was not destroyed by a nuke. You might chuck it for analysis purposes, but you cannot chuck the event. For the plot to work, it is sufficient that the Black Star was destroyed by way of mining an asteroid field with nuclear weapons and we can fudge the yield.

You cannot do that for the scene I selected. One way or the other, the same squadron of starfuries has to get from one side of a planet to the other. Twice. Similar distances both times. Distance is very large, in the tens of thousands of km. And discounting on-screen elapsed time, the scenario imposes a time limit. A time limit you have yet to dispute as being at most a few minutes.

No matter how you swing that, the acceleration of a Starfury is beyond human survival limits. If we assume the entire transit takes 10 minutes (which is way the hell too long for Sheridan to sit around under a rapidly over-heating defense grid not returning fire), that is still 50 Gs. People exposed to G forces like that in rocket sleds for a couple seconds suffer permanent damage. 10 minutes, well... 16 Gs for a minute is lethal. Do the math on whether or not inertial dampeners are required for that.


How do you rectify that scene? The onus is on you.

Is there something other than a purported lack of inertial dampeners that makes acceleration like that inconsistent? If not, is there something I am missing--something in specific, not just your proclamation from upon yonder lofty throne--that leads you to believe inertial dampeners dont exist and/or that acceleration of 700 Gs (or some other value of G forces that requires inertial dampening) is obviously bad? Do you think elapsed time is something longer than 10 minutes? Do you want to dispute the travel distance? What?

[Rekkon]

To elaborate on this. I did the calculations myself a while back. The beam weapons on an EA destroyer, weapons a White Star's main armament out-classes considerably (given that minbari beam arrays can bisect EA ships fairly readily, and EA beams cannot do the same to their own ships) have yields in KT/sec range at the lowest possible volume of material melted, assuming aluminium. That is the lowest possible calculation that can be reached without resorting to malleable plastics being used for hull armor.

We see Minbari beam weapons from Sharlins bisect EA ships, never from White Stars. If anything, the beam and pulse weaponry on Omegas appear roughly equivalent to those on White Stars, which is notable given the large difference in size. Reference all the EA civil war clips that have the two ships engaging directly.

There is a slight problem with that. Namely, Minbari weapons definitely have a dialable output, and Sheridan was never after instakills. He wanted to beat those ships into submission so that the crews would survive if at all possible. I am still working through the calculations on the weapons of the various powers, so have admittedly not directly compared Sharlin beam arrays to the White Star beams.

If memory serves, we never see White Stars performing firepower feats comparable to Sharlins (like the one that essentially one-shot an entire EA station in In the Beginning), though there are precious few situations where we get good views of the two classes engaging similar things.

[Ted C]

Despite what you may have heard, there's not much size difference between these ships. Whitestars are not very big (you can scale them against the station to a little over 100m in length). Their advantage is that they are extraordinarily powerful for their size, packing the firepower of a cruiser into a small escort vessel.

As to the actual match? As much as I love the Normandy, I don't see how it's likely to win this encounter. It's optimized for flanking large cruiser's and dreadnoughts that can't maneuver quickly enough to bring their main mass accelerators to bear on such a small, fast target. It would be very hard for the Normandy to land a hit on an aware Whitestar unless it got very close. Frigates are optimized to engage at a range of around 100 km. We don't even know if the Normandy's sensors could overcome Minbari stealth technology to get a firing solution.

As noted by others, the Normandy's barrier defenses are designed to repel solid projectiles; they are essentially useless against beam weapons. Systems Alliance ships do have ablative armor for defense against energy weapons, but I don't think it would hold out long against something as powerful as the Whitestar, which will be putting out tens of kilotons worth of energy per second.

As for which could detect and ambush the other first, I'm still going with the Whitestar. Normandy's stealth system prevents heat emission, but Whitestars seem to have plenty of other ways of detecting other starships. The Normandy's only alternative to infrared appears to be looking out a window.

If it *could* successfully target and hit the Whitestar, I think the Normandy's disruptor torpedoes would be very effective, I just think the Whitestar will almost certainly destroy the Normandy before that can happen.

[Ted C]

Question : Have anybody calculated the firepower of the Thanix cannons?
http://youtu.be/ROV6bmWDY1w?t=55s

CODEX : "Contrary to popular belief, Sovereign's main gun was not a directed-energy weapon. Rather, its massive element zero core powered an electromagnetic field suspending a liquid iron-uranium-tungsten alloy that shaped into armor-piercing projectiles when fired. The jet of molten metal, accelerated to a fraction of the speed of light, destroys targets by impact force and irresistible heat."

I believe that the Codex says that upgrading with a Thanix cannon brings a frigate's firepower up to par with a cruiser. This should be considerably less than roughly 40 KT per shot from a dreadnought. I figure that since a cruiser is about half the length of a dreadnought, it probably has about 1/4 of the firepower, since due to the shorter distance to accelerate the projectile, but that was kind of a guess without doing serious math.

10 KT per shot would be comparable to the main beams of Young Race ships in B5, like the Narn heavy cruiser and Earth Alliance destroyer. The Whitestar main beam seems to run in that range, too.

[Lost Soal]

Can't find the scene but White Stars did cut up a Drakh carrier pretty swiftly, and that was many times the size of a White Star

[Anacronian]

If memory serves, we never see White Stars performing firepower feats comparable to Sharlins (like the one that essentially one-shot an entire EA station in In the Beginning), though there are precious few situations where we get good views of the two classes engaging similar things.

I may remember this wrong but didn't a whitestar cut all the way though a shadow vessle while that lady telepath held the shadow vessle in place?
I don't know how tough a shadow vessle is compared to EA destroyer but if memory serves putting "shadow stuff" on a destroyer was considered a upgrade so it might matter that a whitestar was able to do that.

[Batman]

It's 'vessel' but you're correct, the original White Star managed to drill a hole though a Shadow Battlecrab (eventually) in s3's 'Walkabout'.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Question : Have anybody calculated the firepower of the Thanix cannons?
http://youtu.be/ROV6bmWDY1w?t=55s

CODEX : "Contrary to popular belief, Sovereign's main gun was not a directed-energy weapon. Rather, its massive element zero core powered an electromagnetic field suspending a liquid iron-uranium-tungsten alloy that shaped into armor-piercing projectiles when fired. The jet of molten metal, accelerated to a fraction of the speed of light, destroys targets by impact force and irresistible heat."

I believe that the Codex says that upgrading with a Thanix cannon brings a frigate's firepower up to par with a cruiser. This should be considerably less than roughly 40 KT per shot from a dreadnought. I figure that since a cruiser is about half the length of a dreadnought, it probably has about 1/4 of the firepower, since due to the shorter distance to accelerate the projectile, but that was kind of a guess without doing serious math.

10 KT per shot would be comparable to the main beams of Young Race ships in B5, like the Narn heavy cruiser and Earth Alliance destroyer. The Whitestar main beam seems to run in that range, too.

10 KT per second would be low end for the younger races, generally speaking, if we assume steel armor (because it is better than Aluminium), you get the following from Severed Dreams (yes, I have a spreadsheet with other materials). Low middle and high volume figures here represent different estimates for depth of penetration, with the range being all-melt to all-vaporize.

Lowest possible volume: 10-72 kt/sec
Middle range volume:26-187 kt/sec
High end volume:112.6-810.6 kt/sec

[Imperial Overlord]

How exactly is 700 Gs inconsistent with god damn anything? The only way that is inconsistent internally that I can think of is if inertial dampeners dont exist. Not only has it been canonically stated they do in the EA (I dont care that you dont care about the comics you have not read). They clearly do, because without them the very concepts of certain ships dont work. You cannot have a functioning Omega destroyer without them. Period. Without extremely high G STL drives with accompanying inertial dampeners, the narratives of entire episodes dont work. With or without narrative time compression and scene cuts, they fail because the time scales involved to make the scene compatible with a lack of inertial dampeners make no god damn sense.

Well, let's start. What is B5's canon policy? Comics written by whom, taking place in what time period, and checked by whom for accuracy? It's like taking everything in the Star Wars EU as canon. That's why I don't care. The Omega destroyer is not designed to work. It's designed to look like a cool starship and to shout "this race doesn't have artificial gravity tech". That's why despite the inertial compensators you claim that Earthforce has, we see Earthforce and the Narn strap the fuck in for combat. The Centauri and Membari have grav tech and compensators so the Grey Council can stand around while a major fleet battle is happening and Sheridan can pace around the White Star's bridge and Londo can agonize at a window while Narn gets pummelled by Centauri mass drivers. Puny humans get that trick in the later parts of the series, not the beginning.

Humanity's lack of advanced tech is a major plot point, from the Narns selling them guns to the Clark government diving into an alliance to the Shadows to the White Stars being awesome and beyond. It's a major point that is more important than the VFX guys not checking the math on their pretty pictures just as VFX of the Black Star dying being problematic with the actual numbers mentioned and requiring some mental gymnastics not to result in paper mache Sharlins (and their wonderful size problem, another issue where numbers and VFX aren't in wonderful accord) is less important than "Sheridan killed it with improvised mines."

They have to. Or the narrative framing of plot critical episodes fails.

Name them.

How do you rectify that scene? The onus is on you.

I've already done it. Babylon 5 VFX has repeatedly shown itself to be unreliable and focused on making good looking scenes rather than consistent math or physics. Rectifying questionable scenes is the business who take the position the scenes are perfect depictions of the universe.

Is there something other than a purported lack of inertial dampeners that makes acceleration like that inconsistent? If not, is there something I am missing--something in specific, not just your proclamation from upon yonder lofty throne--that leads you to believe inertial dampeners dont exist and/or that acceleration of 700 Gs (or some other value of G forces that requires inertial dampening) is obviously bad? Do you think elapsed time is something longer than 10 minutes? Do you want to dispute the travel distance? What?

I'm not interested in the travel distance in a setting where hard numbers are very rarely mentioned and are often dubious when they are. You've reached out and mandated the existence of a mysterious inertial dampening tech with unknown applications when humanities lack of cool tech like artifical gravity is a major driver for events in the series and a distinct part of the series' flavour. The mighty elder races have mastery of such technology and the development of even limited applications by the younger races is thematically appropriate signifying among other things the Centauri civilization's venerable age and development, the Mimbari's position at the top of the younger race heap, and mankind's development of it in the White Stars and in the new ships in Crusade a coming of age and maturity.

Yes, I'm appealing to writer's intent. You know me well enough that writer's intent carries far more weight with me than "looks cool" VFX.

[Ted C]

10 KT per second would be low end for the younger races, generally speaking, if we assume steel armor (because it is better than Aluminium), you get the following from Severed Dreams (yes, I have a spreadsheet with other materials). Low middle and high volume figures here represent different estimates for depth of penetration, with the range being all-melt to all-vaporize.

Lowest possible volume: 10-72 kt/sec
Middle range volume:26-187 kt/sec
High end volume:112.6-810.6 kt/sec

You can still find how we got that 10 kt/sec estimate on the Wayback Machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100822150 ... rships.htm

[Alyrium Denryle]

10 KT per second would be low end for the younger races, generally speaking, if we assume steel armor (because it is better than Aluminium), you get the following from Severed Dreams (yes, I have a spreadsheet with other materials). Low middle and high volume figures here represent different estimates for depth of penetration, with the range being all-melt to all-vaporize.

Lowest possible volume: 10-72 kt/sec
Middle range volume:26-187 kt/sec
High end volume:112.6-810.6 kt/sec

You can still find how we got that 10 kt/sec estimate on the Wayback Machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100822150 ... rships.htm

I remember it. We differ primarily in our assumptions for the depth of penetration. I took the geometry of the hull into account. Basically, the drive shaft for the rotating section is protected by a flange. That flange has an over-hanging projection. The beam melted/vaporized the side of the flange, and for that to work it has to have also gone through that projection, which is 9 meters thick. Anything less and the projection would have occluded the side of the flange from the beam.

My higher end calculations assume it cut through the entire flange rather than only affecting the sides, which comes to a depth of penetration of ~39 meters in that location. My extreme low end is 3.5 meters of armor thickness, chosen by way of direct measurement of the hangar bay door thickness you can see on a Hyperion in In the Beginning (scaled against a Starfury).

There are also differences in bore size, I estimated 7 meters. But by coincidence that is 10 kt/sec for my absolute min low.

[Rekkon]

If memory serves, we never see White Stars performing firepower feats comparable to Sharlins (like the one that essentially one-shot an entire EA station in In the Beginning), though there are precious few situations where we get good views of the two classes engaging similar things.

I may remember this wrong but didn't a whitestar cut all the way though a shadow vessle while that lady telepath held the shadow vessle in place?
I don't know how tough a shadow vessle is compared to EA destroyer but if memory serves putting "shadow stuff" on a destroyer was considered a upgrade so it might matter that a whitestar was able to do that.

It did, but that was with a ~25 second burst (a chunk of which was "all power to guns") against a solo sitting duck that was jammed. That is a far longer time on target than White Stars ever get in an actual battle, against Omegas or anything else. Compare that to the firing times they had against Omega-Xs or regular Omegas. In the Beginning shows us Sharlins basically one-shotting Novas and stations. White Stars pack a heavy punch for their size, but they do not equal the big cruisers.

[Ted C]

It did, but that was with a ~25 second burst (a chunk of which was "all power to guns") against a solo sitting duck that was jammed. That is a far longer time on target than White Stars ever get in an actual battle, against Omegas or anything else. Compare that to the firing times they had against Omega-Xs or regular Omegas. In the Beginning shows us Sharlins basically one-shotting Novas and stations. White Stars pack a heavy punch for their size, but they do not equal the big cruisers.

Whitestars seem to be able to rival an Earth Alliance or Narn cruiser for firepower (both *much* bigger ships), but they fall way short of what a Minbari Cruiser can deliver.

[Rekkon]

It did, but that was with a ~25 second burst (a chunk of which was "all power to guns") against a solo sitting duck that was jammed. That is a far longer time on target than White Stars ever get in an actual battle, against Omegas or anything else. Compare that to the firing times they had against Omega-Xs or regular Omegas. In the Beginning shows us Sharlins basically one-shotting Novas and stations. White Stars pack a heavy punch for their size, but they do not equal the big cruisers.

Whitestars seem to be able to rival an Earth Alliance or Narn cruiser for firepower (both *much* bigger ships), but they fall way short of what a Minbari Cruiser can deliver.

That was my impression as well. The White Star's main beam seems comparable to those on Omegas/G'Quans. Same with the secondary pulse armament. The bigger ships mount more of those weapons, but the WS (at about a third the length) is a superior platform in terms of mobility and flexibility.

[Ted C]

The White Star's main beam seems comparable to those on Omegas/G'Quans. Same with the secondary pulse armament. The bigger ships mount more of those weapons, but the WS (at about a third the length) is a superior platform in terms of mobility and flexibility.

I think 1/3 is a stretch. I don't think the ship is more than 150 meters long (compared to 700+ for a Narn cruiser or 1500+ for an Omega destroyer).

In the show, part of the mystique of the Whitestar was that it could do so much in such a small package.

[Anacronian]

Is there a reliable place to find the measurements of a White star - on the net I have found measurements ranging from an even 100 meters to 520 meters and my own rudimentary measurements place it at around 270 meters, Am i missing something here or is there no official source for reliable measurements?

[Alyrium Denryle]

Is there a reliable place to find the measurements of a White star - on the net I have found measurements ranging from an even 100 meters to 520 meters and my own rudimentary measurements place it at around 270 meters, Am i missing something here or is there no official source for reliable measurements?

There is indeed. Official Guide to Babylon 5 (CD ROM, totally 90s)

475.6 meters.

Internal scaling in B5 has always been an issue. Particularly between episodes (or at least, it has been when people do naive pixel counting. You shouldn't. Use angular size instead. Using angular size, I might just have to do a bit of a Scaling project), but the Powers That Be do provide numerous sources that are fairly consistent internally.

Also, a Narn Heavy Cruiser is slightly over a km long from canon deckplans (I dont remember exactly, I will have to dig up my screenshot archive. I think 1200 meters or so).

[Batman]

Of course, at that size one wonders what's so unusual about the White Star's ability to form its own jump point.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Of course, at that size one wonders what's so unusual about the White Star's ability to form its own jump point.

No one does not. Inverse cube law. Take a ship that is 500 meters by 200 meters by 200 meters.

20000000 cubic meters.

Now, reduce its dimensions proportionately.

It is only about 17000000 cubic meters.

Assuming everything scales appropriately, that is a huge reduction in reactor size and thus reactor power. Ripping a hole in space-time is energetically expensive, Yo.

Now, the Whitestar does not have dimensions like that. It is not a block, it is much more gracile, and so does not have a lot of internal volume proportionate to its length. A 500 meter long ship that can open its own jump point before the White Star came along does not have power for much else. They are civilian liners with little in the way of armament, that sort of thing.

The Whitestar is a complete package. It can open its own jump point, has firepower equal to battlecruiser (against single targets anyway), sports defensive shields and can out-accelerate most fighters.

It Cheats

[Batman]

And yet nobody bats an eye at the Centauri Vorchan having that ability, despite not being much larger (if at all) than a 475 metre White Star.

[Alyrium Denryle]

And yet nobody bats an eye at the Centauri Vorchan having that ability, despite not being much larger (if at all) than a 475 metre White Star.

It is significantly more massive, and 600 meters long.

Oh, and I misspoke above. Not inverse cube law, but Square-Cube law. Mea culpa.

[Batman]

Where's that 600 metre length from? Most sources I've seen make it 300-400 metres, and as shapes go the White Star is actually more solid than the Vorchan.
Note that I'm not necessarily disputing the 600m figure, it's just one I've never run across before.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Where's that 600 metre length from? Most sources I've seen make it 300-400 metres, and as shapes go the White Star is actually more solid than the Vorchan.
Note that I'm not necessarily disputing the 600m figure, it's just one I've never run across before.

I was going from memory but...

http://www.merzo.net/10mpp.htm

No one sources their lengths anymore, I swear. Every page I have found (other than a reference to a B5 computer game that got cancelled in 1998) has its length at 608 meters, and I dont have the time to go in and do the scaling myself. However, everything I have ever seen has it being bigger than a Whitestar in length. Considerably.

Here is a compilation video. To demonstrate some of the scaling issues on screen. You will notice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73fE6H2FUTM

You are kinda left having to say "someone fucked up" or suspending disbelief and concluding that they have pocket vorchans OR another class of small warship that escorts them that is not a Sentri class fighter (which is actually the most reasonable, because in the last scene, we see both said smaller warship, and sentri fighters operating at the same time, but they look very similar).

[Darth Nostril]

Someone definitely fucked up.
Foundation Imaging got booted from B5 thanks to some underhand maneuvering by Doug Netter at the end of Season 3, Netter Digital then took over the CGI. The new animators screwed up majorly by repeatedly saving over the master files with whatever they had been working on so the scaling all went to shit.

Even in the first three seasons there are scaling issues, this was due to funky rendering artifacts if the CGI model was moved too far from the rendering camera so they had to cheat, move the model much closer and scale it down to get it to render right.

Lots more info at the B5 Scrolls http://babylon5.infinispace.net/ - of particular interest is Mojo on ship sizing, the Starfury was scaled for a six foot human male standing upright in the cockpit they then used the Starfury as a reference when creating other ships.

[Highlord Laan]

If memory serves, we never see White Stars performing firepower feats comparable to Sharlins (like the one that essentially one-shot an entire EA station in In the Beginning), though there are precious few situations where we get good views of the two classes engaging similar things.

I may remember this wrong but didn't a whitestar cut all the way though a shadow vessle while that lady telepath held the shadow vessle in place?
I don't know how tough a shadow vessle is compared to EA destroyer but if memory serves putting "shadow stuff" on a destroyer was considered a upgrade so it might matter that a whitestar was able to do that.

Actually, I recall one episode where the where a Whitestar with Sheriden and Delenn aboard took on a Shadow warship. The Whitestars firepower, even a maximum levels, wasn't enough to kill it one on one. It took blowing a hyperspace gate while running like hell.

Whitestars are horrendously powerful for their weight class, hitting far and away above their throw weight even by Minbari standards. But to take on Shadow (and I assume, Vorlon) vessels, they need to work in groups.