Babylon 1, hahaha! Babylon 2, hahaha! Babylon 3, hahaha! Babylon 4, hahaha! Babylon 5, hahaha! 

I mean, given what happened in the series, you're not technically /wrong/....

Is there a term for a space vehicle/Station that has the traits of a Mary Sue? Because B5 shows why stations need flaws. You can guard those flaws, establish protocols to protect them... But a ship with flaws for whatever reason breeds drama... Just look at Battlestar Galactica. Her flaws were... She's old. Lacks ammunition, (solved by raiding a depot), understaffed, has to look after a fleet that Galactica's old water recycle unit has to replenish the fleets water... Etc etc

I think in the episode in question, it wasn't C&C the Starfurie approached, but an observation deck with even bigger windows. Though there was an episode where a ship took a shot at the windows of C&C and Evoniva called for the blast doors to be closed as she backed up against her railing. Fortunately for her and every one else there, the blast doors held.

The window broke before the blast doors did... ... I REGRET NOTHIIIING!!!

@@Krahazik You're thinking of Severed Dreams. It was Sheridan commanding from the CIC; Ivanova was in a Starfury leading the charge. She ended up colliding with an enemy ship and ejecting in the nick of time.

Let's not arrrrgue and bicker 'bout ooo killed ooo , it's a time for rejoicing.

A classic. well done!

What about the curtains?

Ni!

@@carloshenriquezimmer7543 Its only a model.. Shhh

... huh.

Today years old, huh? ;)

@@ErinPalette Years are "a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles, it’s not applicable." Also, I didn't get you anything.

@@SacredCowShipyards B4 = before, and B4 went back in time before any of the Babylon stations were built. So B4 existed before B4 was built.

I mean, yeah... but the original plan was for it to go *forward*, and the series was supposed to be two five-year series, with B4 becoming 'Babylon Prime' to replace B5 in the second series.

There are a few blips here and there - notably the dockworker strikes - but this would be a constant, endless blessed nightmare that would almost necessitate some sort of null-g transshipment point for people trying to actually get into the station. I'm still amazed that "blowing the one airlock that lets into the landing bays" wasn't somehow a plot point in the stories.

@@SacredCowShipyards John Ringo has a 3 book series about a spacestation/battlestation where that becomes a issue. He goes into alot of station Ops. Live Free or Die, Citadel and Hell's Gate. John's Posleen War series is excellent too.

@@readhistory2023 You get a thumbs up and "Hell yeah!" for the Troy Rising series reference. David Weber's Honorverse books get a nod for practical design notes and combat tactics.

@@SacredCowShipyards >>> _"Blips"?_ You mean _rogue telepaths..._ 😉

@@SacredCowShipyards I... yeah. I can properly agree with you there. Maybe the new show will give us a better look into that particular topic. As for the attack thing, hooo boy you're even more right. That'd be like sabotaging the spinal bay doors on a Venator. Just a totally crippling move to one of its primary functions.

Eh, sorta frictionless. They don't cause conventional abrasion, but you do still get the reduction in relative speed, as well as heat generation, and a very slow (usually completely irrelevant) mechanical creepage of the magnetically interacting materials.

While likely, magnetic bearings still have drag.

@@SacredCowShipyards To follow up on your other point, it being very hard to dock on the outside of a spinning cylinder, it's not at all. You don't need to approach, match rotation, then slowly pull inwards -- which would be extremely hard for the reasons you mention. What you need to do instead is set up a course that is a precise tangent to the outer surface of the cylinder, and then approach on that course at the exact tangential velocity of th surface, which would only be somewhere around 60-100 mph or so. The moment you reach the tangent's contact point, the relative velocity between you and the surface will be exactly zero. That's when a docking clamp will reach up and make secure contact with your ship, which will then be undergoing the same constant acceleration (1g or so) as the inside of the cylindrical surface, and be following the station's rotation. There won't be a sudden yank when the clamp connects; there will only be a sudden onset of acceleration, something that a ship designed for space travel in a Newtonian universe should be able to handle with no issue. Edit: I would argue that is would be *easier and less dangerous* to dock on the outside than to maneuver into a tiny rotating hole.

...and it burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp!

In the future there can only be war

No it was scaled down into a small nature conservatory...Jurasik Park!

And if you miss, you make the best schmear ever.

@@SacredCowShipyards we've been wracking ourselves into the ground for over a hundred years at this point, the only difference here is the novelty of missing the ground for once.

SCS is not the one. SCS is not the one who is. SCS is not the one who was. SCS is not the one who will be. SCS laughs.

@@SacredCowShipyards SCS not the one? Zathras have to talk to Zathras, Zathras tell Zathras to work for the one….Zathras always wanted top bunk, Zathras clearly manipulative bugger, this bad for Zathras.

_"You...have...a destiny!"_

The explanation is that was a deliberate decision to accommodate species from planets with different gravities, but, no, it never really came up otherwise.

I wish that were deliberate.

Well, the central part is bigger. It's also hollow, and has a /lot/ of empty space in it besides that. The stationary part has a fusion reactor, who knows how many batteries of what size, and all kinds of other supplemental stuff.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When you spin the cylinder section in one direction, you also spin the frame section in the opposite direction. Once you have the cylinder and frame moving at the speed you want, you can use thrusters on the frame section to push against the rotation to keep it stable. Just like the little propeller at the tail of a helicopter. Without it, the helicopter just keeps spinning in the opposite direction from the propeller.

My only hope is that the original creator is still attached. Balancing that out on the other end it's the CW

@@GodOfPlague I admire your faith, my friend. I know JMS is involved, but I think the CW will swamp him.

The motor would work on both parts equally.

@@SacredCowShipyards So would the friction.

The layers of gravity were briefly mentioned as a way to accommodate species from different planets.

@@SacredCowShipyards I meant, "wouldn't the spin cause gravity to pull towards the outer hull and the trailing interior bulkhead?" Assuming the interior compartments weren't built at an angle to shift the pull to the deck along the base of the bulkheads... In order to achieve the pull outwards, wouldn't you also be pulled towards the bulkhead counter to the spin? The leading wall would be up and the trailing wall would be down, based on the speed of the rotation needed to achieve the pull outward, if my understanding of artificial gravity is right.

@@almitrahopkins1873 Rotational artificial gravity results in the floor being the outside of the cylinder/ring, as that's the direction of force imparted by the spin.

@@SacredCowShipyards Yes, but there would also be thrust gravity around the circumference of the rotation, wouldn't there? Depending on the size of the circle, it would pull towards the floor and one wall. And it would get much, much worse the further out you were.

Station-keeping is a thing.

That's in the brown sector. ISYN.

ouch! :-D

Also, Babylon 4 had a propulsion system, which undoubtedly made it a LOT bigger.

B4 was Squat and bulkier. B5 was leaner and more simplified. B4 was also made mobile because Mimbar needed it for a certain function.

Even in the future we keep doing disposable crap tsk tsk.

@@barrybend7189 Spoilers, man ;)

@@infostorm618 I didn't say anything but that Minbar needed it. Heck its no spoiler that Minbar needed B5.

I remember seeing that episode and thinking it was pretty well done, as it was a rotating system, and not falling due to gravity. Though there was one episode when Sheridan and Garibaldi were playing baseball, and I was thinking what it would have been like to try simulating the coriolis effect to the motion of the ball, and have it curve off in a crazy way ( think they did that on the expanse at one point really well). Guess I;m just a bit of a physics nerd!

@@fuzzblightyear145 I think they did that with a baseball in Interstellar. I remember being disappointed in JMS's rep for details because I figured the rotational speed would be more like 140mpg iirc at the outer edge and at least 80 at the inner face so I assumed either the line got flubbed, a measurement changed or she was talking about how fast the tram was going. Only more recently did I consider the track isn't dead center and is a hundred meters or so from the center spine making the difference between his rotational velocity where he jumped and where he'd "land" pretty much 60mph. Never doubt JMS's math.

A sci-fi writer who actually does the math. What a novel concept in the 90s, that I think still is pretty unusual.

@@Yora21 You are right, they make sows "grittier and more realistic" but plot trumps most things, and plot holes trump everything

@@Yora21 It was more normal back in the 90's, than it is now. Now, the writing is 100 times more lazy.

It was probably economically sound to use the other races artificial gravity generators to make only special sections in the alien habitation ring in those spaces, while building a spinning cylinder system. Our venerable shipyard master mentioned the issues from the massive spinning gear and transmission systems required for this 'sort of kind of' O'neill cylinder, but I always figured they'd used an electromagnet or infused rare earth magnet ring system, or similar; to make the contacts free but balanced on those rings. Even then if they didn't use alien gravity generators an extra series of inner rings could work to generate more than 1g of inertia for the aliens in that sector.

@@dragonsword7370 Gravity control was a very closely guarded secret. I think only the Minbari and the old races had it... maybe the Technomancers too. IIRC, humans (and probably other races) thought that the Minbari had rotating sections within their ships. I seem to recall someone being surprised by that not being the case. Oh, and Delen's ring thing... That was also shown as secret tech that is basically Clarke-tech (indistinguishable from magic) to the other young races.

I think they retconned that after that episode. It was said that B4 and earlier stations designs could do this (hence the multiple concentric rings) but not B5, as it was cheaper and only had one big spinning drum.

They get a smaller cube.

Maglev bearings and Hall effect plasma seals would indeed be prudent. Not sure about the mobile turrets: detaching them, and, giving them slow drives and reactive mass recoil dampers (spring loaded massive blocks that move in the reverse direction) would offer better defence-in-depth, like tanks do. Although they would need to be supplemented with fighters, this combined arms military doctrine is already decades old.

B5 station design is just hard sci-fi. It is an O'neill Cylinder done the way we think we might actually eventually build one (circa 1990). The story and a lot of the other design is space opera, which is fine too. IIRC, the relative 'realism' of the station itself was very intentional to give those less realistic elements a (metaphorically) grounded setting.

I will do _all_ the rear entry jokes, thank you very much!

Your grid like tank defense layer sounds like a bad idea. As soon as the first mobile turrets are shot to garbage they block the way for the others to replace them leaving your station with more and more weak undefended spots. So the mobile idea gets stuck by its own components. Your turrets become stationary, more or less. 🤔 Another factor to consider is energy. As soon as you need energy to move things around you cannot use that energy for other purposes like firing to enemy vessels. Mobility makes sense if you want to either get closer to a target to bring it into firing range or to get away as fast as possible. That's why you have fighter and bomber squadrons to get more strategic and tactical options. A space station is already something like the last line of defense. It requires a different set of features depending on the type. If you're designing a trade station then obviously in case of emergency when an enemy fleet is about to show up then it's prime objective is to evacuate inhabitants and cargo as fast as possible. That in mind you could think of a modular design where subsections for cargo and living areas have their own engines and fuel / energy reserves and can detach in an organized protocol to act as escape pods, just bigger and capable of traveling to the next space station or planet in reach. Your station would be more like a flexible 3d grid where things are attached and detached based on the situation. And you do not need separate escape pods which are most of the time not used and if used too small to actually rescue your inhabitants for longer than a few hours until they die either because of lacking food, oxygen or fuel (and therefore being helpless when going into atmosphere or asteroids or other things which you cannot avoid during travel). For smaller research stations you can simply add an engine so most of the time your station does not move, but in case of emergency it can navigate its way home. For larger ones, where thousands of people live permanently, like in a city with agricultural districts and the like you have a different scenario. Essentially you have a small planet. Hopefully resourcefu enough that the enemy is more interested in conquering it than destroying it. Here you need a layered defense. People will gather more at the center and you will have to come up with ideas to make it costly to reach the core for the invader. Think about citadels. Instead of having one wall around a city a citadel has sharp edges and towers and all in order to concentrate firepower from different angles with a combination of small and heavy arms. Sure in space you have to think 3 dimensions, so on your outer hull armor you should have towers as well as turrets on the ground to cover these towers. Good enough to catch enemy fighter squads. If you want to keep some kind of mobility then you can think about a plug in system. So your guns and rocket launchers etc can be pulled back into the armor hull and moved to a deeper level. Then the outer hull is acting like a shield wall. And the next inner ring is preparing for another line of defense. This kind of layering makes it really hard for an enemy to beat your station and turns it into a siege. Who knows? Maybe you let some parts of your shield simply explode in a controlled way which takes down a bunch of invasion forces? Or maybe you let a section use its mass to fly directly into the nearby capital ship to either destroy it or keep them busy wasting ammunition to get that thing out of the way? In any case the effect is that your commander gains time. Could be just enough to get some ally fleet into range or to dry out the enemies resources. They either run out of ammunition or food or fuel. That's what I mean by make it costly.

@@harryd5571 I'm pretty sure they ran out of spare resources just building those 5 stations

It could be as simple as a ring just above the main bearings that rotates at variable speed with a platform on each side. It starts stationary with one side, gets loaded, spins up to match the other side, and gets off loaded. It might take a little while to change speeds depending on mass, but it could transfer a considerable amount of cargo.

Nah, just have two parallel disks centered on the axis of rotation, a standard cargo container width + a bit more "for equipment" apart, and fastened to the rotating section. Mount passive maglev systems to your cargo container, and force it into the gap- if you've engineered it correctly, then centrifugal force will keep it moving "down", with the maglev systems fighting against the relative motion of container and disks, resulting in a low-speed landing of the cargo container at the bottom. Limit the rate and locations where the containers are dropped, and engineer things such that containers that reach the bottom automatically get moved out of the way of the next container, and you have absolutely no need for human involvement in that bit of the system; returning Starfuries could be returned to their launch bays with the same system. You can do a similar sort of thing for escape pods, and for transferring containers from the spin sections to the non-spin sections, the only thing you really need is the "adjustment cylinder" (or escape chute, for escape pods), and a passive (so passively safe) speed control system.

aft section distributes cargo, why brown sector is brown sector, low paying menial labor. all cargo sorted for areas and sections, loaded onto skips, sent into the rotating section mechanically, no people catching boxes >.< easier to match rotation, handle and pack cargo aft where you don't have to worry about anything rotating until it's moved into the main ring from the hub to radiate deeper into the well rather than trying to push against it from the outer ring. once in the ring it cargo containers can be moved entire to whatever section they need to be and broken apart in the case of discrete shipments...more labor, humans going to human. as to bearings, magnetic would be fine. superconducting magnetic bearings is something we could do now given a fusion powerplant ^_^

Silly. The station blew up or disappeared because Jinxy left.

I was thinking that a ship could match the rotation of the station to stay focused on one spot as well as minimize weapons platforms fire, but that does still have some fuel cost, and require certain maneuvering capabilities that not all ships in 'verse have.

You could say the development of _"explodium"_ caused a *BOOM* in the construction of large space stations...😉

@@Allan_aka_RocKITEman Take your like and go stand in the corner.

@@MonkeyJedi99 >>> Do I have to be _"All alone in the night?"_ 😉

Could be. The show almost never references the null-g sections, aside from occasional B-roll of cargo being moved in and out of the forward hold, and one of the mandibles being blown off in combat.

There were a few cargo transfer points outside the station so at the very least only supplies that were needed in the station itself went down the spine. Any other ship to ship transfer could be floated at the transfer points while commerce too place on/near B5.

@@SacredCowShipyards - if you watch a few of the episodes where it shows the dockworkers handling cargo, you can see that they are often in the forward section near where the shuttles dock, and that they are offloading cargo in partial to full gravity both from the ships AND from some kind of lift in the background off to one side. It looks like the connection point at the front of the spine has an elevator that does precisely what you mentioned and drops the cargo down into the core where it is then distributed by additional lifts and trams throughout the station. You can also see (albeit briefly) additional trams and tubes on maps, in the background when they show the core spine tram, and so on, so there appear to be freight trams and lifts all over the place to facilitate the dispersal of cargo.

And after ne engagement dont become a puny pathetic punching bag for the good guys (looking at your borgs and federation)

@@michelecastellotti9172 Agreed, even after learning more about the Shadows and Vorlons in B5, their ships and tech is still terrifying. In Trek the Borg changed from being a terrifying threat to a joke over time and it was sad. The Dominion as well, but not quite as badly. I've been watching ST:TNG again and also BSG recently. I remember before when I watched these shows for entertainment only and didn't analyse much. They both seemed so well done at that time. Now I look back and see all sorts of plot holes and strange situations because of when and how they were written.

Well, he's certainly familiar with _Firefly_ since he quotes River elsewhere in this comment section.

@@boobah5643 ah, I hadn't seen that.

I appreciate the thought, but Spacedock also has a production team, and not some rando throwing these together out of his shipyard office.

Nobody listens to Zathras.

_"You take, Zathras die. You leave, Zathras die. Either way, it is bad for Zathras."_

Corsair uses magnetic levitation bearings for PC case fans. Those are also zero-friction.

I wouldn't want to tackle a cow, sacred or otherwise. They might step on me.

Maybe try trimming their hooves to make them feel better?

Maglev radically reduces friction, but there's still resistance from the fields.

Conservation of Angular Momentum will keep it spinning once it's spun up. You'd only need bearings to keep the non-rotational sections fixed, since they have a much lower moment of inertia than the much, much larger station. The bigger problem is that anything that large with a nonzero angular momentum is going to be horribly difficult to point in a different direction. So if B5 and the jumpgate weren't at one of Epsilon-3's Lagrange points, B5 would _appear to_ slowly pivot as it orbited Epsilon-3 - because in reality it would always be pointing in _the same direction_ … just like a gyroscope does.

tbf..... they fucking KNEW what happend to 4 xD and also had some idea that the 5 will not blow up

...And the Machine wouldn't allow them to do anything down there until the big war anyway.

Nice example of KISS engineering, that is much easier than matching individual cargo units. With maglev bearings on the full ring, it should be possible to use eddy current brakes as magnetic "clutches" on both sides of the hold accelerate/decelerate to whatever rotation is required. No moving parts is definitely nice for something that can't really be stopped. Ferrofluidic seals could work as no-contact pressure seals from 1atm to space, but this project is starting to look like it might eat a few asteroids worth of rare earth minerals just for magnets...

@@martok_sh oof, no... you don't want a brake on a rotating space station... just spin the thing up and down properly, and then lock it in place, or you'll be sending your station into interesting tumbles every time you attempt a cargo transfer.

Oh, they probably had a huge global contest where huge conglomerates had to more or less build the thing in the vicinity of Earth, for testing etc. Probably plans for using them in other projects. So when the first one went off - not due to any construction errors, but because of sabotage and freakish events in local space - there was already another one in the woodworks. A few bribes and some political pressure and, voila!, Bob's your uncle.

The _need_ to *AVOID ANOTHER MINBARI WAR* was probably an influence as well....