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"Ah ... arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package! How efficient of you!" 1
Power Generation
Example 1A: Power Generation on Babylon 5
Example 1B: Power Loss on Babylon 5
Weaponry
Example 2A: EA Destroyer Colliding with Minbari Sharlin
Example 2B: EA Starfury and Minbari Sharlin
Now I'm a B5'er, not as hard-line as some but I'm still freaky about the show. I want to make it clear that in investigating the technology of Babylon 5 the last thing on my mind was to expose any flaw's in it. However, claims have been made about Babylon 5 that just don't make sense … read on and you'll start to understand.
In recent weeks we have been trying to launch a series of stories based upon the exploits of the crew of the USS Enterprise in the universe of Babylon 5 ("The Enterprise in Babylon").
It is tempting to moralise at this point however all I'll do for now is make the observation that the enmity that exists between the hard-line followers of "Star Trek" (Trekkies) and "Babylon 5" (B5'ers) is, in newsgroups and forums at least, well known. Some of this enmity has even been known to permeate into real life.
If you've read the editorials and introductions on the project you'll know that to make the story work it was necessary to bring together two disparate technologies.
Science Fiction is
fantastic by which I mean "fantasy" rather than "great" or
"exciting" and in TV & Movies it is even more so. In order to entertain us
the producers of audio-visual Science Fiction are forced to bend well-established rules of
physics & chemistry. Let me give you a few examples:
("Babylon 5:" e.g.
"Endgame", "Star Trek") and rockets hurl themselves outwards leaving
vapour trails behind them … wait a minute, this cannot be! Visible light, no matter
how intense can do little more than blind and the emissions of rockets would dissipate so
quickly no vapour trail would be possible. We can all find examples of this kind of TV Science Fiction and deep down (if you have a brain) you all know this is wrong but we accept them in the name of entertainment. Can you imagine what the scene would be like without them? Two ships moving slowly in absolute silence, like two sailing warships trading cannon volleys side by side, debris the only indication of any action ... a little dull I'd say. With the exception of the aerodynamic flight (inexcusable in almost any space scenario) we live with them and even expect them … it's what makes audio-visual Science Fiction fun.
"Babylon 5" is an excellently written and presented series standing head and shoulders above many of it's genre in one key respect. It doesn't have better FX and it doesn't have better aliens (like "Star Trek" they're surprisingly humanoid). No, the one thing that puts "Babylon 5" up there, among the greatest TV science fiction the world has ever seen is its story. Unlike most TV SF it has what is known as "the arc" ... the five year vision of J. Michael Straczynski (JMS) that has, to quote the series, "never wavered" 2. According to JMS the story is one of ethics against a background of war, a war that happens to be set in space.
I once read somewhere that JMS has tried to protect the technology of "Babylon 5" by keeping it hidden and in the background and it is sad to say that he failed … failed appallingly. Don't get me wrong, I think it was an admirable attempt to do it right, unfortunately the fans of Science Fiction want to know the technical details behind their favourite science fiction series and whilst JMS, it seems, was not prepared to provide it others were. I'm not 100% sure who these others are but, since I see them quoted as authoritative sources of information from time to time, I suspect that the "Babylon 5" comics and books are largely responsible. For the record I don't read any of them, okay I read "Book #1: Voices" and thought it was such unadulterated crap that I didn't read any more, but that's it.
Some of the visual
clues are obviously wrong in Babylon 5. The Minbari use a steady beam weapon that is
totally unrealistic ... quite obviously no one would design a beam with such ablative
vulnerability. Most, if not all, of the beams in Babylon 5 seem to work (at least
partially) in the visible spectrum but, to be fair, this is covered by my comments above
about audio-visual Science Fiction. If this were really the kind of beams used in Babylon
5 then it would only be necessary to equip some ships with some form of ablative armour
(say a few large canisters of water fixed to the front) and head it full pelt towards the
nearest enemy vessel and ... boom!!!!
Some of the power ratings quoted seem to be based upon what can be considered throwaway comments. In one episode Susan Ivanova threatened smugglers with a 200MW (200 million watt) pulse cannon located in the forward cargo hold 3. This seems to have become law in Babylon 5 technical data. I've reviewed that particular episode and I have to say it appeared more of a cynical threat more along the lines of "if you don't do what I say you're gonna wake up dead one day". The simple fact is that the official sources (JMS & the series itself) provide nowhere near enough information to make such evaluations & judgements.
Let's try an example, and please don't start screaming and hollering that we're talking through our rear orifices ... we're not. The gentleman who calculated this (one of our team) is not only a rabid Babylon 5 fan but has an MSc in Information Technology and a degree in Biochemistry.
According to the Babylon 5 Technical Manual (and various other resources) Babylon 5 is powered using 8 Tokamak Corporation Fusion reactors giving a total power output of 73 Exawatts (that's 7.3x1019 or 730 million, million, million Watts). To put this in perspective the US consumed 0.19 Terawatts of power in 1972 and consumes less than 0.5 Terawatts today. Current figures indicate that the world uses around 3 Terawatts of power to provide for all its industrial and domestic needs. So, according to the Babylon 5 Technical Manual, Babylon 5 uses significantly more than 24,000,000 times the total energy usage of the world today.
Let's consider this against the world's current power usage of 3 Terawatts ... Babylon 5 must be a remarkably inefficient machine to require (even under extreme circumstances) that kind of power. Perhaps the computer system requires it? Unlikely, the current trend at least is towards less power not more. It's just conceptually stupid to believe that Babylon 5 would need such power ... whoever came up with that figure (and at this point I am crossing just about every limb whilst I pray that it wasn't JMS) has no real grasp of physics or science in general.
So could this kind of
power be generated? In theory yes, it is possible. If we were to use a cleverly designed
antimatter system which converted matter directly into energy then to generate this kind
of power we'd need 811kg of matter per second or 25.5 million tons per year. Alternatively
we could produce this much energy today using nuclear fusion ... if we detonated 18,250
Megatons of nuclear bombs every second and were able to capture and use all this energy
then, feasibly, it could be done. Of course, we'd run out of nuclear bombs well within the
first second of power output.
Babylon 5 (an O'Neil class Space Station) however uses fusion power. Assuming that Earth technology has advanced to the point where it has perfected stable Lithium Helium fusion then to generate a single watt of power you'd need 6.25x1014 MeV per second. That amounts to 2.5x1013 nuclear reactions. This sounds like quite a lot but then you can get 6.023x1023 reactive units (Avagadro's number) in only 8 grams of matter. That means that to generate 1 watt you only need 3.32x10-10 grams of material per second. So for 7.3x1019 watts you only need 2.424x1010 grams of material per second. For those of you who haven't figured it, that's 2,424 tons per second or 76.44 Billion tons per year. In just one year B5 would use all of Earth's Lithium and that's assuming a 100% efficient reactor.
Still let's assume this is possible. Everything radiates energy in one way or another and Babylon 5 can be no exception ... if it was it would rapidly overheat and, well, what's one more star in the sky? So the Babylon 5 reactor is going to need a lot of cooling. The Mir space station can cool 75 watts of energy by radiation from its seven square metre surface so, if we assume that B5 is extremely energy efficient and only has to dump 1% of its energy, then it needs to lose 7.3x1017 watts.
Technology may have advanced somewhat, perhaps the cooling they have in the future
is 1000 times more efficient than anything we have today. Then all you need is 6.81x1013
m2 (68 million, million square metres). That's 68 million square kilometres, a rectangle
8500 by 8000 km in size or a square over 5000 miles on a side.
There are lots of other figures quoted for instance WhiteStars have a power output of 2.6 ExaWatts (500,000 times the current total power usage of the world) and true EA Advanced Destroyers are quoted as somewhat higher. For exactly the same reasons as above these figures must be considered to be, at best, ludicrous.
Many arguments rage
about what can and can't be done with Babylon 5 ships and weapons. One particular one is
whether or not the destruction of the Minbari
capital ship Black Star could really have been destroyed by a 2 Megaton bomb
(8x1015 Joules deliverable energy) and the simple answer is yes ... easily!
In one case a Minbari ship is destroyed by the more measurable force of a slow moving Earth destroyer (Omega Class). Having reviewed this scene several times the impact is reckoned to be at a relative speed of about 100 ms-1 but in order to be safe we'll assume 500.
Now, according
to the figures from the B5 Technical Manual, an Omega Class Destroyer masses 14.6 million
tons. The total deliverable (kinetic) energy is around 1.76x1015 Joules ...
that means that a 2-megaton bomb would be quite powerful enough to destroy the Black Star.
At one point a Starfury (Sinclair's) attempts to ram a Minbari Sharlin and I must admit my initial reaction was "No chance!" ... a craft that size isn't even going to scratch a ship that big. Well, let's see ...
Assuming the maximum speed of a Starfury is 100,000 ms-1 and the fighter
is in the 20 ton range
then the impact could deliver as much as 1014 joules. It's worth noting that
the B5 Technical Manual quotes Starfuries as near 50 tons but since that makes the
resultant impact energy figures even more ridiculous we'll stick at 20.
We know that about ten times
this energy goes through a Minbari ship like a hot knife through butter so the damage from
such an impact would be quite capable of crippling and possibly destroying such a vessel.
Of course, we don't know how fast Sinclair's fighter was actually going so it may not have
done such damage and, in any case, the Sharlin neutralised it with beams, presumably
tractors or pressors, and then pulled it in with the tractors. However, and this very much
depends on the relative speed, if a Sharlin were to neutralise an incoming vessel with
beams then, kinetic energy being transferred along the beam to the Sharlin, the beams
projectors would be ripped off their mountings. So the ship could be
destroyed just by the act of stopping a
ramming enemy vessel by it's tractor/pressor beam mountings as they rip their way through
the opposite side.
Then again the power of weapons in Babylon 5 has been, it seems, misquoted. Babylon 5, it is claimed, has pulse cannons rated at 200MW. 200MW is an extremely high rating for a beam weapon (airborne lasers today are only just approaching the 1MW level and then only by linking smaller units together) yet in Babylon 5 we are talking about something a whole lot more compact. We're not saying that this level of power rating is impossible, just high … as said earlier, the problem is that this particular power-rating seems to be based on a throwaway comment made by Lt. Commander Ivanova to a group of smugglers she was trying to coerce 3. Another problem for a weapon of this class is that of power dissipation … that and the fact that it would probably do as much damage to it's enemy with debris since, at that rating, it would surely be a one-shot device.
Other ratings,
however, are so high as to be completely ridiculous. The WhiteStar (everybody's favourite
Babylon 5 spaceship) has a forward cannon (the, ah, Quantum-Gravimetric Discharge Beam)
that rate's 300 Terawatts. Note, not Megawatts ... Terawatts. That's 150 x the power usage
of the world today and 1½ million times the already high Pulse Cannon rating of Babylon 5
... even its weakest weapon (a pulsed neutron cannon) is rated at 500 (100 x the world
today) times that of the B5 Pulse Cannon and it has 4 of them. Okay, I accept that that
this already extremely powerful weapon may be just a small part of the system but, correct
me if I'm wrong, didn't they say that Babylon 5's defence grid now rated it as equivalent
to a full size destroyer?
Whilst most of the younger races in Babylon 5 are of a similar technological development there are differences. Most of the races in Babylon 5 have artificial gravity but one of the youngest (humans) does not and is forced to adopt physical methods of creating pseudo gravity. The best example of this is the 8½ kilometre long space station Babylon 5 of which the largest part (approx. 5 kilometres long and 1 kilometre diameter) is a huge rotating cylinder. The rotation (apparently on frictionless bearings) creates sufficient centripetal force to create 1G (Earth gravity) at the outermost hull of the cylinder.
Unfortunately, and these are omissions from the TV series itself (arguably simple
effect glitches), the use
of such technology
to create pseudo gravity has other, less-well documented effects. No doubt you've seen,
just as we have, some of the splendid waterfalls in Babylon 5's huge gardens? But did you
notice the Coriolis effect? No, neither did we! And that's because they aren't there. The
Coriolis effect is a rotational effect which, simply speaking, means that in a rotating
space station where centripetal forces are in effect falling objects (such as water in a
waterfall) will spiral outwards in a curve. To give an example, in a 50 metre high
waterfall, water at ground level + 50 will be rotating with the station. But at any point
between there and ground level it will be travel progressively slower (than the rotating
station)... so it will fall outwards in a graceful curve.
There are many more data and "facts" about Babylon 5 that are unrealistic and/or uncorroborated by any official source.
There are a other
items that must, to any rational mind, be considered dubious at best. Did anyone ever
consider that the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier (Nimitz class carriers are the largest in
the world today and around 300 metres long) and are they really saying that a relatively
small ship like a White Star, at 250 metres, is nearly as big?
Other claims are simply unsubstantiated, at least by official sources. The Babylon 5 Technical Manual claims that many of the Babylon 5 ships are shielded ... sorry but we don't think we've ever seen any shields (with the exception of the Vorlon Encounter Suit) mentioned in Babylon 5.
Much of the data quoted for Babylon 5 is beyond criticism. In particular ship size & mass, whilst not necessarily believable, are to be accepted, not because it makes sense, but because there is insufficient data to corroborate or refute that quoted.
The biggest problem with Babylon 5 is that the available data relating to power and
weaponry are
staggeringly
unrealistic. "Star Trek" data (No, I'm not going to let you crow about how much
better your universe is than Babylon 5's ... at least not on the basis of anything I've
said!) is also staggeringly unrealistic ... so, in this respect, the two are on a par.
Most "Star Trek" data appears to be "officially" correct (owned by the
makers of the series) whereas (and this is the most positive thing we can say) Babylon 5
data does not appear to have any official backing. If this is true then I can only hope
and pray that JMS keeps it this way ... it's the one thing that keeps Babylon 5's
technological head above the water.
I spoke earlier of the 'enmity' that exists between the hard-line followers of
"Star Trek" and "Babylon 5"' ... I'll go further ... sometimes this
approaches outright war. In any war claims and counter-claims are made and as someone who
is proud to have been inspired by and addicted to "Babylon 5" I agreed with many
of them. Researching the background for our scenario "The Enterprise in Babylon"
has, however, opened my eyes and I
can no longer claim that we hold the technological high ground i.e. that our (B5)
technology made sense where "Star Trek's" did not. But from this viewpoint (oft
expressed in newsgroups and forums) devolves the claim, quite possibly the greatest charge
laid at the feet of the Trekkies by B5'ers, that "Star Trek" is full of
"Technobabble".
Listen to me carefully, I will say this only once ... so is "Babylon 5"! 5
1
Londo Molari from "Babylon 5: In The Beginning"
2"Babylon 5: Endgame" (series 4, episode 20)
3"Babylon 5: Racing Mars" (series 4, episode 10)
4"Babylon 5: In The Beginning"
5Refers (as far as we can tell) to non-official data only.
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