Earth Force Lexington Vs Minbari Black Star 

A lesson to be learned.

The man did know how to use a nuke

He only uses them 4 times in his career, it's not like he enjoys it

@@davidpickens8800 that double what humanity has ever done inn war for real 🤷‍♂️😂

At least he didn't ride yelling yeehaw. Hahaha

And it's arguable that he actually does end up living forever thanks to Lorien.

That's a pretty long list, he had a lot of great lines, but so did the rest of the cast for that matter.

Ranks right up there with Lt Worf saying, "I guess today IS a good day to die."

The spirit that separates Humans from the rest of the menagerie. "I have not begun to fight."

@@lindencamelback2305 yep. “I have not yet begun to fight!” Was said by, John Paul Jones, one of my favorite officers from history. It’s so much more powerful when you know the context in which he said it.

I REALLY want to know what episode he says that because its badass

What Sheridan _should_ have said was, "I'm sorry for using the exact same tactic against the Black Star as the Black Star was using first in the same encounter."

He didn't actually say that, it's a variation of an "apology" he gave for destroying a Centauri cruiser that attacked Babylon 5. It's a good one though.

carnorjax007 Episode 22, The Fall of Night. The apologie Sheridan was ordered to give to the Centauri after Destroying one of their cruisers. They tried to blow him up on the way to make it. They failed and Sheridan didn't apologize. Still a great choice of words!

Sheridan "Starkiller". Badass

Nearly anything you can do to "the enemy" is acceptable if it brings victory. It's an outrage if they do it to you. That's human nature, and it seems the Minbari aren't very different in that regard.

Minbari definition of honor is weird. Gunning down men in life boats isn't seen as civilized

He needs a role on modern TV.

To be fair, he just received command.

Haha to me he looked old. But then I'm a huge Tron fan...

@@shootybaking He has a recurring role on 'Supergirl' as the US President.

He is awesome as Sheridan, won me over pretty quickly when Season 2 started, even though I liked Sinclair.

Charles W Yet.........all they really needed were those nukes. Tactical nukes would have been aboard every ship. The battles never should have been so one sided with such weapons. It's a bit of a flaw in the B5 world to be honest. They were even effective against shadow and vorlon ships later on. Every race would have been using them pretty much. Plasma and beam weapons would take up a lot less space obviously but every war ship would have been loaded with nukes and missile weapons. It just makes logical sense. :)

Bill Kennedy Well, don't forget in the Earth Minbari War, EA ships couldn't lock onto Minbari vessels, which made missile and missile-based nuclear weapons almost useless. The only way to fire on a Minbari ship was to get into knife-fighting distance, and pretty much no EA ship could survive that under normal circumstances.

What's this locking on talk? It's a nuke, you just get close and set it off. No direct hits needed lol. They could have built insanely powerful ones too. :)

Bill Kennedy Well, it's the "get close" part EA was having trouble with.

Fighters could get close and just launch the bombs on timers. I know I know I'm getting too real lol. Still a good show. :)

17 yrs

@@NatronFatumallafalla The pilot aired in 1993, 31 years ago!!! Still my favourite show bar none.

ooo shit , i cant stop laughing .. oo man u sir or madam made my day

I wonder how many knew the truth of what was being done rather than the propaganda

The Minbari warrior caste are serious assholes. Yes, they are great at what they do but they are ridiculously prideful and xenophobic. Even Klingons in Star Trek respect humans who show themselves to be tough fighters.

@@robwalsh9843 they werent great at it. They didnt fight anyone before they found the humans. All they had were stories of times gone by. Myths untested by a real foe

@@robwalsh9843 the warrior caste had not had a serious challenge for centuries, probably not since the last war against the shadows. They were so technologically superior that they thought no one was a threat, so they treated everyone condescendingly. They wanted to be left alone, so they other races left them alone because they didn't want to poke a potential world ending bear. So the Minbari started thinking that no one besides the Vorlons could beat them and became enamored with their own legend of superiority.

Same energy as how a Klingon uses cloaking device.

The example you cite was where the general was playing in the game as the Iranian navy and proved that the Iranians could beat/sink the US, despite its vastly superior power.

...or an X wing takes out a Death Star?

@@ShnNar1000x Don't forget another example where during an international navy exercise, A Swedish submarine was able to 'sink' a US carrier. Incidentally, the Minbari were not the only ones to pay in arrogance. The Earth Alliance also fell for this as well when they believed they could handle themselves with the Minbari in a possible first contact some time after their victory over the Dilgar Empire. Londo tried to warn them but they refused to take his advice.

@@KuDastardly The problem was that to the Earth Alliance, the Mimbari were going to destroy them. Mimbari scanners jammed Earth Force scanners, and the last thing Earth Force knew, the Mimbari starships had open gunports, they couldn't see what was going on.

Not everybody, it's just the big-picture guys who often lose sight of smaller problems like say IEDs, which can damage even an MBT and make it a sitting duck or the mentioned speed-boats or even swarms of cheap drones (nobody except the Russians has AA-Gun tanks anymore in larger numbers, because those with their auto-cannons can easily engage drones)

"This is ambassador De'len of the Mimbari. Babylon 5 is under our protection. Withdraw, or be destroyed" "Negative. We have authority here, do not force us to engage your ships" "Why not? Only one human captain has ever survived battle with a Mimbari fleet. He is behind me, you are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else."

Only One man has ever survived an attack by the Minbari, He is Behind me, You are not !, If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Season 3: Severed Dreams. Where Sheridan declares independence from Earth Force. The Minbari used a stealth system that Earth weapons tech could not lock on to them.

I loved that scene. Kind of like the "This is a light house, your call".

'Uh...... we left the stove on....'

Sylar Kane Tough call to say best ever, but it is wonderful! I wish there was more on the Psi Corps Alfred Bester side plot on RU-vid or better yet restart it on a rerun basis.

Honestly to a soldier to have your enemy despise you that much and still get angry over it is considered a source of pride and achievement since it shows that you did your job right

@OriginalTharios Starkiller was family name of Luke in early version of script. And Luke killed Death Star. Rip 500 000 honor servants of Empire. Many of them were simple workers.

It’s a proud warrior race (well caste). Hypocrisy is the name of the game.

It's a way of justifying why they should feel sore that their flagship was clobbered. Otherwise, they would have to admit they f'ed up big time.

I thought it was "John Nuke'em Sheridan".

Larry Tipton this is a pilot movie. Some of the people who worked on TOS worked on Babylon 5.

Irene: This isn't a pilot movie, It was made between Season 4 and 5. 'The Gathering' is the Pilot Movie. I didn't know about TOS crew working on it though, thanks for that. Larry: I'm a trekkie too, I never felt that that meant I couldn't enjoy other Sci Fi shows though. (Not saying that you do, but I'm often amazed at how many people demand that their fandom is the only one that matters.)

Cap Tin so that's why the make up looks more better.

Trek got BETTER after Roddenberry's death. Take off those rose-tinted glasses. Roddenberry refused to have anything but caricatures challenge the ideals of his Federation. It wasn't until Deep Space 9, the BEST TREK OUT THERE, came around, that the maturity of the setting set in on what the universe was like. Roddenberry kept answering every query into the functionality of his Verse with the same answer on the assumption that everyone who wanted to be part of the Federation was worthy of admiration and those who wanted to hold their own ideals of advancement to be beneath them. Just watch the second season of TOS or the first season of TNG to get the point. It wasn't until Roddenberry loosened the reins that we got something cerebral.

To take out a Sharlin class war crusier, you would need a minimum of THREE Omega class destroyers and to hit her fins to disable, cripple or destroy her gravimetric engines

Sun Tzu said that warfare is based on deception.

Matthew Caughey The black star lost a match of poker to captain Sheridan.. they cried fowl, but they have no problem in killing tens of thousands of humans..

Rifleman, it was stupid for the Minbari to cry "fowl" at the use of Sheridan's tactics. The Minbari used stealth technology that the humans did not have. The Minbari fighters could electronically target the Earth fighters, but the reverse was not true. That wasn't "fair" either. It's war. It was stupid that anyone would condemn someone else for playing "unfair" in war.

I know.. That was the point of my reply.

You mean Commander Sheridan! Captain rank is that a senior officer; not an immediate office like Sheridan is.

Babylon 5, epic scifi show from the 90s

+AJ Garnett I doubt it's a reference to McAuliffe. He said it as a reply to an enemy. He meant it like "Up yours." Sheridan said it to himself. He meant it like "Darn, I wish you had a better idea." Totally different meanings, despite being in the context of battle.

Good Point!

+AJ Garnett Who?

+Krister Andersson en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_McAuliffe

After he explained his plan, he said 'nuts i didn't want to live forever anyway...'

"The only Earthling to ever destroy a Minbari ship, is behind me, you are infromt of me, I suggest you consider your next move carefully" ❤. DeLenn loved Sheriden.

Yup, the Minbari are pretty hyprocritical sometimes, arent they

kuribayashi84 I think JMS did not understand the concept of war. I think JMS viewed war as a "game" where you are supposed to "play fair". I also think the Minbari disliked Sheridan because he hurt their ego. The "primitive" human was "supposed" to lose to the advanced Minbari. He was a reminder to them that they were not invincible.

perfectsplit JMS? In war you do not play fair, you strike the enemy where they are weak and of course use deception, look at the landings on Sicily for instance.

Krister Andersson Exactly. In war you do not play fair. JMS's scripts seemed to indicate that war is supposed to be "fair". -The Minbari condemned Sheridan for "cheating" in war by using trickery with the fake distress signal. -Garibaldi condemned the Narns for "fighting dirty" against the Centauri by using booby traps in their war for independence. -Sinclair condemned the Narns for "cheating" by using a sneak attack. -Sinclair also condemned the Narns for attacking a civilian target. -Sinclair also condemned the Japanese for making a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. The fact that all these characters in Babylon 5 actually condemned the use of war tactics that were "unfair" - leads me to believe that JMS seems to think that war is supposed to be "fair". How can you condemn a war tactic because the tactic in question is "unfair"? I would say that the attitude in NCIS and the Battlestar Galactica remake - made more sense. Agent Gibbs told DiNozzo, "War's not fair! We are at war! Every time you eat, every time you sleep, every time you crap, we are at war!" And Starbuck once told her flight student, "This isn't dueling pistols at dawn; this is war. You never want to fight fair. You sneak up on your enemy and you club him from behind." They seem to contrast Sinclair's attitude when he criticizes G'Kar by saying, "Not willing to have a 'fair' fight?" in "Midnight on the Firing Line".

perfectsplit Well if I remember correctly the Narn attacked a Agricultural colony with no defences and that is a bit different. I Think it is Amazing how G´kar evolved during the series, in season 1 and partly in season 2 he was a bastard but he evolved. But in general war is not fair though we have developed some rules. Take WW 2 the Coventry raid, the Dresden raid that was not fair.

That is not Aesop's fable then

Coz net flicks is a load of crap. Just go down your local second hand store and buy the real, actual, disks. Ive seen complete sets of B5 on sale MANY times.

It's on Amazon Prime (as of this comment).

JMS said some WB execs are still mad about the show and politics from the 90s.

@@cesareonthemidway That's a shame, because that show helped make me into better, wiser person for having seen it. Others could benefit from its wisdom.

@@cesareonthemidway spot.on of..not..for. TED TURNER ''''''

The minbari. There's literally no defense for running a genocidal war because one guy died. Especially when the humans repeatedly offered the captain who fired up as a sacrifice. The minbari although technologically advanced were extremely culturally backwards

Right, the Minbari had tech that kept the Earth Alliance ships' long-range targeting systems from locking on to them. They never overcame that disadvantage during the whole war.

I'd settle for a rerelease with the same live-action footage but updated CGI. Sadly the outdated CGI is always the part I struggle most with when watching it. If they did revisit the franchise it would be best if they did a new fresh story in the universe instead of an actual remake.

In reply to your 10 year old post: I suspect that they might have had sensors able to detect the mines, by the faint radiation signature at the very least, but they were looking for a damaged Earth ship at the time and didn't have any reason to suspect a trap.

yh

Phil Maplesden u

This is from Ω

Maybe out of range to damage them???

This is an "asteroid field" in another star system. Its origins, distance from the system's sun, total mass, & disposition are very different from the asteroid belt in the Sol system.

That was only mentioned once. On the B5 wiki site it's considered a continuity error. The destruction of 3 additional ships was mentioned in the first episode to feature Sheridan, it's thus likely the writers were still fleshing out his backstory at the time. Consider this 100% canon.

but it was the established story and should have been used. this sorta of thing is why I didn't like the series Enterprise even though I am a huge star trek fan. in both the original series and next generation, it was established that the first contact with the Klingons was twenty years before tos. so they lost me from the start. also, the series(b5 established that Sheridan, franklin, g'kar, and delenn had never met before Sheridan took command of b5(and I am watching season 2 again right now), but they did in "in the beginning". if there is an established story, it should be stuck to is all i'm saying.

+ken mazoch Yeah those continuity errors were annoying and easily avoided.

double post

agreed.

force still transfers in space. If anything, you're think the air would offer up a bit of resistance. Only one way to know for sure, but it'd take a lot to raise money to put sensors in space and blow stuff up in space and on earth for a compare & contrast

Yes, but all of the energy of the nuke is still released. Just in a different form. The heat from a nuke in air is mostly vis &IR, which can propagate thru air. The various radiations from the nuke would propagate freely in vacuum and actually heat the new target more if absorbed by target. The ionizing effect of the radiation would actually be a bonus! The energy that would have heated air to make an expansive blast wave would all heat and strongly ionize the target. Comments?

@@InfernosReaper Better minds than mine or yours already thought of it and they did experiments. A nuke in space is basically a firecracker, that puts up immense radiation. To your point, air does offer resistance, and a helluva lot more that you think. That's what makes a nuke dangerous, on Earth. The instant displacement of so much air creates a destructive shockwave. Remember Armageddon, why they had to drill to place a nuke in the hole.

@@Zamolxes77 That was one among many things that movie made suprisingly well. The best thing I love is TV picture getting jammed seconds before meteoroid impact on NYC, due to air ionization.

Eric P tac nukes are pretty much mothballed at this point. The rockets they are on are to slow for space combat. They were used to destroy stationary targets. This is the equivalent of a battleship captain asking if they have any C4 explosive left in the armory.

+Joshua Sweetvale ikr? Even when totally outmatched, from what I've heard and seen, Earth Force gave the Minbari a lot of trouble. Londo said that they lasted Two entire years... against an enemy centuries ahead technologically. It must have been one long, bloody rearguard action with the Minbari paying for every step they took, especially the Ground Battles. Sort of like the Battles of Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa in WW2.

Well actually it wasn't the Bombs themself but the asteroidshrapnels that finished of the Drala Fi. The Bombs more or less were engines for the asteroids or lets say atleast a combination of both these aspects.

"Very much like themselves"? No, many of the Minbari at that point were part human thanks to Valen, which even the Minbari didn't know until after they ended the war. They ended the war thinking Minbari souls were being reincarnated in humans. A clear mistake due to Valen's existence being a temporal paradox, but at least it stopped the war.

LOL. When you're in space and don't have to worry about blast waves, I guess.

When you have 1000m ships, 2 megatons suddenly becomes tactical.

In Space nukes and other explosive warheads became much much less effective than in an atmosphere.. nukes and warheads work by creating a pressure wave and heat.. in space there is no air to transmite that pressure wave so the blast is much limited.. neither there is something to properly transmit the heat save by radiation form.. Unless a direct hit the nuke would have much less effect than on a normal atmosphere. They are however much much more effective as EM weapons than on earth

When the strategic-sized nukes are *500* megatons?

Two gigatons. The original concept for Earth Force destroyers included twin gigaton launchers fore, same as `for Narn energy mines launchers. Also missile bays and rotating section fighter bays. CGI couldn't handle as many polypoints as required for this detail level at the time. This is pioneering work as B5 was the first show to use only CGI for space scenes. The episode Zha'dum features such nukes contributed by Narns.

This only worked because they were in a debree field. In open space the Minbari could easily shoot down any projectile with a nuclear warhead, and even if detonated, without the matter of the asteroid being thrown by the explosion, a nuke would just be some radiation that is quickly getting too weak to do anything with distance.

you've touched upon an essential flaw of space battles between alien races, nukes would see a lot more use here's another trope, the asteroid or debris field - which in reality would still be almost entirely empty space. (this is a good thing as rocks of all sizes don't bounce off of ships without consequence.) If such debris were idly floating around so close to one another, they'd be coalescing into larger masses and again providing plenty of space for maneuverability.

The Minbari were capable of striking from well beyond visual range.

Andrew Robertson battlestar galactica is good but with plenty of semi religeous undertones... by all accounts babylon 5 is quality

Hell yes you should!