Re: [LoGH] Babylon 5 vs Galactic Empire
Bob (gr8scott@airmail.net)
Mon, 12 Mar 2001 21:57:10 -0600
>
> Frankly I think show vs show 'military' comparisons usually don't work well
> because they have different doctrines behind ship design, different theories
> about FTL technology and so forth. In the end it sounds too much like "My
> dad can beat up your dad."
Or whether Superman can beat Mighty Mouse. Agreed, but I still think
those LGH forward shields are rather impressive given the fact that they
are standing up to 5 million klick ranged beam weapons. The joules
those lasers are putting out to be a threat at that range means they are
that much deadlier up close- sometimes the shield even works at direct
visual range (under 50 km).
So that raises a serious question- why haven't the LGH powers worked up
a better-protected class of ships? Or at the very least something with
more physical armor if power/weight ratios for overall shielding are
impractical? To what extent is doctrine, economics, internal politics
or the need for hulls for imperial patrolling (in the case of the
Empire) driving ship design as opposed to just engineering issues?
To use a real world example, the US could have built an air force
composed of SR-71 fighters. One high-speed fighter could barrel through
an area controlled by an enemy, blaze away at anything with wings and be
very very hard to hit with SAMs or air-to-air missiles.
But it was impractical due to the limitations of the titanium supply,
you can't keep up enough of them long enough to cover an area due to
limited platform numbers/prodigous fuel usage and you must operate off
of a totally secure base. Perhaps most importantly, the number of
planes and pilots would have probably dropped by a factor of ten, which
means far fewer air force general positions. Nobody wants to work
themselves out of a job (probably the real reason we don't have AI in
general use, IMHO).
So is something similar going on that gives us our Napoleonic bomber
stream battles?
