you forgot Omega X and Excalibur. and i think you downplay the fleet too much. post Mimbari war after the rebuild they were on par with the centauri in strength. only the Minbari, Vorlons, and shadows had a clear leg up on them and because those races were 1000 plus more advance

Right, not for combat, wink, wink.

I also liked the utility pod from 2001:A Space Odyssey.. It seemed really functional for maintenance and repairs in space.

It's true though, logical brutalist function over form. And that's why i love the Human designs in B5, no big sweeping curves wings or planes in space, because why would you need them? Big Engines, big guns, copy/paste... boom you're a superpower. Meanwhile all the Alien ships (expect perhaps the Narns) with hundreds or thousands of years of culture, tradition and history have indulged... and dare i say it... stagnated.

This actually has a comparison in Modern History. In the cold war between the Soviet Union and America in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. The soviets used quantity and simplicity (for the most part) for their military, while the Americans tried to make up for Soviet numbers with weapons technology. Soviet tanks and planes were simpler than American ones but they had the advantage in numbers. Eventually though the advances in Americas military technology could not easily be countered by numbers, as shown by the events of the gulf war. While the Soviets were more advanced, more competent, better trained, and had better moral than the Iraqi's, it still is telling how quickly and absolutely lopsided the war turned out to be with far more advanced technology of the Allies being overwhelming in its lethal capacity. Kinda what happened to Earth during the Earth Mimbari War. Another example is from the cold war. While the Americans were paying big bucks to design a pen to wright upside down and in 0 gravity to be used in space, the Soviets simply relied on a pencil to do the same thing.

@@scottperry7311 Always nice to find someone else that appreciates history! Just a couple of things, the soviets were “that” far behind the US in terms of technology, and the US was never “that” far behind in terms of numbers. The Soviet’s did indeed prefer a mass assault doctrine, so when calculating force numbers would include reserve and outdated/obsolete designs in their roster. However the US, would tend to mothball older designs that were no longer combat effective. And indeed in some areas of Tank design for example their super large calibre 125mm guns, Also… the pen/pencil thing was a myth, they both just used pencils.

They strangely use centrifugal technology while everyone else discovered artificial gravity

@@jonojjt6 True. I spoke in pretty broad generalities. The parity of forces and technological advancement of the two sides ebbed and flowed to some degree but became more apparent as the cold war matured. In the 1940s the Soviets had a massive army, while the U.S. only fielded abound 80 or so divisions in total (but had millions of potential soldiers in reserve). At that time as well the technological advantage of the Americans was slim if even present at all in most fields, except radar and the atomic bomb. By the end of the cold war the U.S. had a volunteer military, while in many aspects the equipment it used was now much more superior. One exception to this was the U.S. Navy, which was the largest navy, by far, at the end of WWII, by the end of the cold war the Soviets had a produced a large surface fleet (the Soviets always had a very large submarine fleet, even before WWII) but again the technological advantage rested with the U.S. But both were superpowers and part of the reason for that was that their ability to project force and their technological development compared to other nations was superior. The two side were the equal of each other in many ways, some greater and some lesser. The fear of a nuclear exchange, "Mutually assured destruction" kept open warfare between the two at bay. But through proxy states they tested each other and their military equipment's ability in real world conditions. Ultimately it was not the military might of the U.S. that caused the Soviets Union to collapse, it ability of the Soviet economy to keep pace with U.S. military spending and at the same time provide for the other necessities of their country, along with some other significant factors. Again I am speaking in vast generalities here and there are many examples I can think of that work to the contrary of the trend.

Still, the ability to make jump gates is why the EA was so wealthy for how young it was as a space faring race. They could tax practically anyone who used their gates and in return Earth maintained those gates and if one broke they would either fix it or replace it. That's a hell of an economic power boost.

Fleet and base defense in this case would be incredibly important. The EA would have to dedicate an entire fleet arm to protect it.

Did it ever feature the upgraded Nova that used gravity engines? The books explored it and made a point that with the advent of artifical gravity for EA the Nova, Hyperion, and those few Olympus classes left suddenly became even more useful

Presumably the video focused on serialized models. Most of these are one-offs, except for the Starfury and the Omega-X

@@artembentsionov There are plenty of ships mentioned that were never shown in the tv series or movies though?

@@petertenthije true. The board game has more, and it’s canon

The hybrid was basically a standard Omega that they allowed shadow biopolymer armor to grow on. No two of them were the same as a result.

Earth Force One would be just a civil transport, so it's not really a surprise that it isn't mentioned.

four actually - two forward and two aft.

Unfortunately one of those is it being curb-stomped by the Centauri in a vision shown to Sheridan by Galen. Then again, Galen could’ve deliberately fabricated it to get Sheridan moving in the right direction

@@artembentsionov I think that is true, it is possible that Galen just fabricate it. We can't know for sure what would really happen. Warlock is created to go toe vs toe with Sharlin warcruiser but taking that centari love their Vorhan wolfpacks, a single Warlock may destroy one or two of them before itself been blasted. Second warlock engaged and destroyed one, it would probably be able to destroy rest.

@@Zagoreni02A of course, if we take the Technomage trilogy into account, Galen could probably destroy a Warlock by himself. Even Kosh wasn’t sure which of them was stronger

@@artembentsionov Warlock is well designed ship, it is truly shame we didn't see more. It is possible that we may see them in reboot that is if they dont change EA ship designs completly, and that would suck. Modern version wtih todays CGI of Hyperion, Nova, Omega and Warlock.

@@Zagoreni02A like most fans, I’m both hopeful and wary of the new show. JMS tried to have other spin-offs (like Crusade, Lost Tales, and Legends of the Rangers) and they failed

The raiders fighters were inferior, and they were up against a first class military with much better training and organisation. The casualties against against peer adversaries would be much higher.

Also the nuclear missile broadside batteries.

Your comment reminded me of the energy mines used by the Narn in that last-ditch attack on a Centauri base. I'd like to think that they are holdovers from the original intent of having Omegas use them.

Those forward-facing launchers were unbelievably powerful weapons. The yield on the ordnance they launched was measured in _gigatons._ For a sense of scale, the entire thermonuclear payload of an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, with the most powerful warheads in service mounted, comes to about 91.2 megatons. Assuming the Omega's launchers deliver 2 gigatons per shot, that would make each shot from the Omega's launcher hit with just slightly less explosive force than TWENTY-TWO Ohio-class submarines firing off every last missile they have. Forget laying minefields: that's the sort of firepower you'd want if you were trying to crack _planets._

I agree with you. Im also doubtful about the come back, but JMS always seems like he knows what he's doing so we will have to see. 🤷‍♂️

@@UtopianBroadcast1 It's the fact of jms that gives me a little sliver of hope. I'm just scared in this day and age if one he'll be allowed to follow his vision and two, well do I need to say? Not the days of the 90s anymore.. And I couldn't in a million years see anyone replace Michael, Jerry, Bill, Jeff, Andreas, Richard, Stephen, Bruce, Peter, and the lovely mira who is smile could melt hearts both as mira and delenn 😊

Well, two points- JMS is heading the reboot, so its not like someone who doesn't understand what B5 is about is coming in. And secondly, hey, the chances of any new OG B5 coming out is pretty much nil at this point- so we have a chance for something better, while the OG material is still there to enjoy if ignoring the reboot works best for you. (Hell, the reboot *might* generate enough interest in the classic to get a proper remastering beyond AI upscaling.)

@@Sephiroth144 I wouldn't be shocked if in ten years skilled amatures are deepfaking OG B5 actors onto the reboot cast. A pleasant symmetry with JMS doing all the OG effects on an Amiga PC. (Really a pro workstation but still..)

@@UtopianBroadcast1 JMS is just a woke as the rest of Hollywood. B5 came out before all that nonsense started. I would have loved to see his original idea in full but I doubt this re-boot is going to be anything more then another way to push an agenda not good story telling.

Is that what Ivanova had them rip out? Or was that something else? I have no objections to using non-evil shadow tech (and like that they mix it with minbari) but the main characters all were drowning in Vorlon propaganda so I get their reluctance.

@@specialnewb9821 they don't explain what the secret shadow device is. But one of the books state. That in bay one of her ship is kosh's transport. That ship negates the shadow device. The book doesn't say or I forgot if the book says the the armor was ran by the ship or was replaced with vorlon armor. Nothing on the vorlon ship I can after she becomes the One

The Fusion Reactor and the Particle Thrust Engine are all one unit, so the Omega Class Destroyer actually has four fusion plants. That's why you see Omegas stop fighting and go dark in the series when they sustain significant damage to the drive section.

"Starfury. So simple, so elegant, so deadly." Centauri.

Untrue. The cruisers and destroyers remained the backbone. Fyi: those were the ships that did the heavy lifting.

To be honest. Dreadnaught made everyone's navies obsolete, when they slapped 3 times firepower of normal battleships on one ship.

Somebody forgot about the Monitor...

@@Fatherofheroesandheroines wasn't an Ocean going warship, the low freeboard rendered it extremely dangerous to sail in anything other than mild seas, that's why they had little effect other than the introduction of Turrets and that wasn't a new idea

@@andreww2098 except it was an ironclad well before the Dreadnaught. Whcih was my point. IT was FAR more revolutionary than that. It and the MErrimac made history.

Sure!

G.O.D Particle Cannons. Even the Minbari respected those things.

@@wolfgangjr74 I wonder how they stack up against the Sharlin’s antimatter beam

@@artembentsionov i still think they are a Close 2nd to the refined antimatter beams and slicers. It still takes humans a massive lumbering vessel to wield 2 of them versus any of the minbari ships that wield many beams.

@@wolfgangjr74 I think TV Tropes would call the Minbari a Higher-Tech Species. They’d been fighting a massive war 1000 years before the events of the show (so roughly around the 13th-14th century), so it would make sense for them to have better tech. The Sharlin wasn’t even around for that war. They used an older version of the Tinashi frigate, called Tinash-Haza war cruiser back then. On the other hand, humans sure do advance fast. I guess it helps they’ve had help with tech. The Narns sold them older Centauri weapons

@@artembentsionov absolutely agree. The assistance via interference by the senior races with shadow technology and development from other alien base technologies sure did help catch them up in a few hundred years versus thousands. Honestly. What a fantastic show for its time.

The Vree were interesting; they were the 'greys' and had saucers with what my friend called "a shadow-shredder" cannon.

Or by the Centauri in a possible future

Really the only dominant factions in B5 would be the Vorlons or Shadows. No other races in the time period we see (even the other First Ones) could match their combination of numbers and tech. The Walkers of Sigma have great tech on par with the Vorlons or Shadows, but only one ship vs massive fleets of Shadows and Vorlons. The younger races have large fleets, but are qualitatively not even close to Vorlon or Shadow ships.

By the end of B5 Earthforce has pretty much approached parity with the Minbari fleet, especially with the Warlock and advancements in sensors. Even in the Earth Minbari war, the lethality of their weapons wasn't really an issue, it was simply getting a targeting lock.

@@seandlax9 The Walocks were smoked by White Stars, which are much smaller in size. Not sure on what basis they’ve reached parity. And there is no chance Earth Force could have stood toe to toe against the Vorlons or Shadows.

@@seandlax9 maybe on a one-to-one basis. But there were only like 50 Warlocks vs probably hundreds or thousands of Sharlins. The original plan was to gradually phase out the Omegas and replace them with the Warlocks, but the costs of Warlocks proved to be far too high, so instead they were made leaders of Omega. So the Minbari still have the decided advantage

I've never been a fan of CW, but I'm hopeful that JMS will be able to create another amazing show.

@@UtopianBroadcast1 I have visions of Londo Mollari as a young 20something talking to teenaged Delen about how he has abandonment issues :-(

Pretty sure it compensates for this with armor, better engines, and sheer firepower, with it's only real competition being a Minbari Nial

@@seandlax9 That rings a couple bells in my memory, and would be exactly how they'd definitely compensate for it if it is a big deal.

That depends on what point in the separate timelines we're basing the fleets on.

Babylon 5 always tries to be as realistic as possible, but it still doesn't explain the huge difference in size. Based on appearance, I think there is allot of unused space. For example if you take a look at the explorer class there are only three sections( hanger bay(front), living area(middle), and the engine(back)). The rest of the ship is put together with block structures which makes the ship so long. Also, theres probably allot of storage areas for food and supplies. Lets be honest they probably dont get allot of supplies during patrol.we also have to consider that the designer probably winged it and guess the size of the ships.

The Explorer class has very little habitable space, the majority of its length is given over to carrying supplies for the long missions (2-3 year voyages) and pre-assembled sections required to assemble Jumpgates. Omega is long but a star Destroyer is more than half as wide as it is long (and about 20% of the ships volume is dedicated to a starship hanger thats empty most of the time), Earthforce ships are pretty narrow and have an armour thickness of 13m before you even get to the superstructure of the ship. If you compare them to the supercarriers of today which are about 300x100m and carry around 100 aircraft those aircraft are absolutely rammed in including parking them on the outside of the ship and the vast majority of the ship is dedicated to hanger space. In short the Babylon 5 ships are more realistic of what space would be required to carry an actual starfighter wing.

Machine shops and maintenance bays could have taken up a bulk of that space, not to mention possible storage depots stocked with repair parts to keep the Starfurries combat ready between sorties.

I think you might want to go and check your facts again mate. " Omega is almost 50% longer than a Imperial Star destroyer etc." An Omega is just over 1,700 meters long while a Star Destroyer is 1,600.... that's very close. The Omega is roughly 300m x 300m x 1700m with the rotating section added on to that and a smaller part below the hanger added as well. Please note I'm doing this by 'eye' so it's not 100% accurate. That's roughly 200 million Meters Cubed. The Star Destroyer took a lot of work but as there are accurate size charts it's probably more accurate as well and comes out at 400 million meters cubed. An Omega has 36 starfuries at roughly the same size as 2 tie fighters sitting side by side (they are roughly equal length and height but the fury is twice as wide). It can also carry up to 18,000 troops with supplies and equipment but only has a crew of 850. The star destroyer on the other hand has 144 Tie fighters, can carry 9,700 troops with supplies equipment and vehicles and has a crew of 37,000. So if 1 Fury = 2 Tie then an Omega that is HALF the volume of a Star Destroyer can hold 72 Tie fighters or half the amount as expected. Has far less crew but twice as many troops. If we double the numbers to account for the Omega being half the volume of a Star Destroyer then we get very similar numbers. The big difference is that the Omega seems to require far less crew to operate, something that makes sense for a Sci-Fi ship that will be mostly computerised.

Added note, the USS Nimitz Supercarrier is roughly 1/5 the size of an Omega with a total personnel of about 6,000. So if it was the size of an Omega it would have 30,000 people. Taking into account space required for supplies that space travel would require and ocean travel does not, as well as advances in technology. Going from 30k to 19k people is not an unrealistic situation. Especially when you add in all the room taken up by the armoured hull that is a dozen or so meters thick all around the ship.

Omegas have 6 variants with different loadouts. Standard has the lasers and pulse cannons. Laser version replaces pulse cannons with medium lasers. Plasma uses all pulse cannons. Carrier carries abt 2x starfury numbers and so on.

Yeah odd. He brings in ships i *NEVER* heard pf but misses one of the syrongest classes seen on screen for the EA

The Warlock indeed was incredibly powerful, but I feel a mistake EA made is that they made it too costly to produce. The production of a Warlock was pretty slow and resource-intensive and one Warlock can be overwhelmed by weaker but more numerous ships. Still an awesome warship though. The first in its kind that could one-shot a Sharlin. Even the Minbari would have to think carefully about approaching an EA fleet with a few Warlocks in it.

@@JH24821 Well numbers are always a weakness, same with the Excalibur and Victory, that is no reason not to build them tho.^^ And that is also prettty much the only valid strategy against a ship of this class, as almost nothing can stand against them for longer than a few seconds, especially when them beams blow right thru them. ;) Well the Warlock was a completly new kind of ship, with an incredible amount of new and advanced tech, up to 15meters of new armor, includig shadow tech and so on, no wonder they are expensive to make, but with streamlining and further advances they will either get a littler cheaper or even more powerful and resilient for the same cost. The Warlock was not just a new Highend Ship, it was a Statement and it sure got heard. :) When i think about the Standoff at B5 when Delenn came with the few Sharlins "If you value your lives, be somewhere else!" - if that werent just 2 Omegas and crap, but Warlocks, which fortunately didnt exist at this time yet, this couldve gone entirely different...

@@wolfwilkopter2231 100% agreed. The Warlock fullfilled its purpose as "heavyhitter" perfectly. It would increase the fire power of any Omega destroyer fleet by a lot just by adding one or more of them. I do wonder though if EA would later have developed a less costly version of the Warlock to start replacing the Omegas. That would have been an incredibly tense showdown because both Sharlin and Warlock have the capacity to one-shot each other. It could have ended with all ships being disabled or destroyed. I assume Delenn would have been safe in her White Star. No point in targeting her (I don't think they would have dared) with the Sharlins next to her.

@James Olberding Sure. Couple of viewers requested a analysis of the different expanse fleets.

@@UtopianBroadcast1 Thank you. Also here's my list of fleet video requests for you to keep in mind (now some of these fleets you might not be familiar with, just so you know): LIST: 1. Dalek Empire Fleet (from Doctor Who) 2. Gamilas/Gamilon Empire (Space Battleship Yamato) 3. Klingon Empire Fleet (Star Trek) 4. Earth Federation Defense Fleet (Space Battleship Yamato) 5. Cylon Empire Fleet (Must include every single Cylon ship design from both the classic 1979 TV Series and 2004 rebooted "Battlestar Galactica" TV Series)

Totally agreed! I also thought that the thunderbolt was inferior to starfury's in space due to increased weight and centre of gravity etc

I’ve read a (non-B5) book where they did exactly that. They had to stop rotation to avoid the stress of maneuvers from tearing the rotational section apart

@@artembentsionov Yes. I would think that any sudden attempt to turn a ship with a rotating section like this could produce lots of dammage. Heck taking a hit on the spinning section could put it out of balance and make the whole ship unstable etc. As I said I find it odd that I've never seen this mentioned, but I've not really been looking.

Something about the rotating sections that I've never heard addressed is according to newton's laws of motion the so called zero gravity section is also spinning. I mean look at the Omega Destroyer. Change the camera perspective and the central section is still while the rest of the ship is spinning in the opposite direction. Change it again and bother sections are spinning half speed in opposite directions. So the entire ship should have gravity right?

@@tancar2004 I think you are talking about your position. If you are on the rotating part the part you are on appears fixed while the rest of the universe seems to rotate? If that is the case Newton does make the distinction between inertial frames (no acceleration) and frames where there is a form of acceleration (like rotation). They are not directly interchangeable and you can of course test the frame you are in to see if there is an acceleartion. Clearly if you are in the rotating part of the ship you are in a non inertial frame as you are experiencing a type of gravity. Not true in the non rotating parts of the ship.

Sure. It will most likely come out at the end of December or early January.

Starfury aurora is technologically inferior to a sentri. It's edge is maneuverability and a well established combined arms doctrine, nothing more factors as significantly.

Pulse Cannons fire fire balls or pulses of energy/plasma, along with beam lasers the standard weapon you see most ships firing in show, rail guns use magnetic rails to sling projectiles at a target for some old fashioned kenetic damage and particle canons fire a confinous beam of sub-atomic particles at near light speed and are frankly terrifying