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Earth-Minbari War Question

StrikerStriker Provided with distinction
in Babylon 5
Hey:

I was thumbing through GateWorld's forums and decided to drop into the B5 section to see what was going on in there. There was a thread about epic moments/speeches/quotes in the series. In one of the posts someone linked to a video of Londo's speech about the Earth-Minbari War (seen it before, but I always enjoyed the epic speech).

I was reading through the comments and someone mentioned something I didn't know. Did the Drazi and Vree both dispatch a battle fleet to bolster Earth's defenses as they had a mutual defense pact with Earth? According to the comment neither fleet arrived. The Drazi fleet was destroyed by the Vorlons and the Vree fleet was annihilated by one of the few "awake" Shadow ships.

If this is all true does anyone know which book had all this information on it? I've never read the B5 books (yeah yeah I know), but now I'm tempted to do so. :)

Comments

  • ShadowDancerShadowDancer When I say, "Why aye, gadgie," in my heart I say, "Och aye, laddie." London, UK
    Nope thats news to me too
  • BigglesBiggles <font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
    It wasn't in any of the B5 books that I've read, that I can remember.
  • MessiahMessiah Failed Experiment
    That sounds like fan-fiction to me, but you never know with JMS.
  • David of MacDavid of Mac Elite Ranger Ca
    It probably came out of the mongoose RPG, but that's just a wild guess.
  • SeafroggysSeafroggys Ranger
    to be honest that sounds like a stretch, something that would come out of the Mongoose RPG (I love the RPG, don't get me wrong, we've started playing a campaign recently, but some of the background info in the sourcebooks seems like a bit of a stretch of things that don't really add up with the canon info from the series).

    I can definitely see EA having mutual defense pacts, especially with some of the Non-Aligned Worlds. But to be fair, I don't see any of the Non-Aligned races actually honoring that against the Minbari. Which makes sense, as it gives Earth no incentive to honor their end when the Centauri begin going after the Non-Aligned Worlds after the fall of Narn (which also fits with the new Non-Aggression pact with the Centauri).

    But the whole Vorlon/Shadow attacks just seem totally random and left field, and fit as a deus ex machima mechanism to "justify" the reason why the mutual defense treaty was never honored. My explanation makes much better sense.
  • DarthCaligulaDarthCaligula Elite Ranger
    It doesn't make any sense. Why would the Vorlons and Shadows care? And the only race that helped in any way was the Narns by supplying old weapons. Why would these weaker races want to risk upsetting the Minbari?
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    Agreed. It just doesn't make logical sense for the minor races to contribute to Earth's defense. At the time, Earth was just the big guy on the playground, but nothing more. It was a relatively small--though growing--empire that had just barely broken into interstellar travel. Aside from the Dilgar war, nothing else really made them stand out as worth defending, and even then the generally short-term memory of the league races would kick in. As G'Kar said, the Narn only "helped" because they had nothing to lose and everything to gain, and even that support came at a very steep cost.
  • A2597A2597 Fanboy
    yea, sounds like fan fiction to me. earth was still the new kid on the block and I doubt had formed any alliances yet.
  • Republibot 3.0Republibot 3.0 Trainee
    Omega Question

    Hi, everyone. I'm new here. Forgive me for dropping this question in here, but I couldn't find a better thread for it, and the forum won't let me start my own (For obvious reasons)

    So I was just looking at this site's page on the Omega Class destroyers. There's a mention on there about how the Omegas are unwieldy because they lack a counterotating section. I find that inconsistent with what we saw on the show: The Omegas never had any difficulty moving about. I assume the writer of that page was trying to make the ships conform to real physics (Commendable), but there *is* an explanation that would conform to real physics *and* explain what we saw on the show:

    Flywheel.

    The engine section is huge. If there were a flywheel in there, it would counterbalance the main section, and remove the problems that page was talking about. It could be smaller and denser, or smaller and rotating faster, or a combination of the two, and it could easily fit in the forward section of the engineering housing.

    Thoughts?
  • croxiscroxis I am the walrus
    It could work. Still doesn't solve the problem of needing reverse facing engines :P
  • SeafroggysSeafroggys Ranger
    I always thought that having two main engines were too expensive and drew too much power. It'd be more feasible to turn the ship around and use your rear engines as braking thrusters.
  • BigglesBiggles <font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
    Which is why the ships aparently usually came out of jumpgates in reverse, except during combat.
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    For all intents and purposes, the Omega class *must* have a flywheel sustaining immense levels of kinetic energy, one probably hiding within the core of the rotating section or somewhere else discrete (that is, not easily targeted). It's basically a Fanon loophole resolution. It makes logical enough sense as to hand-wave the entire problem away without requiring anything additional to be seen.

    And Biggles is correct on the part about not needing reverse thrusters. If a ship's engines got it up to speed, they can certainly slow it back down. Adding reverse thrusters produces additional unnecessary mass and complexity. Even under optimal situations, conveniently fitted thrusters cannot likely reproduce the thrust of the main engines.

    Any slowing observed after exiting hyperspace was due entirely to some form of dramatic time warp :p
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