Babylon 5 Mod

[Shadow1980]

P.S. The Humans traded the Jump Gate technology with the Centauri.
Or more correctly, the Centauri found the Humans in pre-jump gate era, and showed the Humans how to use Jumpgates and later showed them how to make their own. All in return for worthless trinkets, as the Centauri could sell these at home for huge profits as "novelties".

[Timstone]

The Vorlons and Shadows are two First Ones. The rest are:
- Kirishiac Lords
- Walker of Sigma 957
- Torvalus
- Triad
- Mindriders
- Lorien (the only one left of his race in this galaxy, he is THE first one)

I could also give a full history, but that would require me to type quite a lot and besides it can be found in the books of B5 Wars. I'm not going to type it out, there might be difficulties concerning copyright and stuff.

You aren't very good with names... yeah right... you're giving the whole name, the season and the possible episode number. Sigh...
Now I recall that episode too. I think they just amplified the gravitic field and with that force they tore the Crab apart. Ah well, I'm too lazy to check.
Anyway, in one Version of the stellar map of B5 (in 2258) there are two jumpgates and in another Version there are three jumpgates. Maybe the other Version already took into account the destroyed jumpgate. Who knows...

Edit:
I know about the Centauri selling jumpgate tech to the Humans, but that doesn't negate the fact that the Humans are one of the few races who ever bothered constructing new gates. And that was what I meant.

[Ragnarok-X]

heh, Timstone is right. Somewhere i read the a post about the first ones history, who was first and who actually was Last of the first ones. Will haul that up later, just for the fun of it.

[Timstone]

Hehe... I've posted that in this thread. Again my omnipotent laziness strikes!
Thanks for the post RagsX!
Oh yeah, right now I'm busy with the general techs (the weapons, I mean)! Woohoo!

[Fyron]

Timstone said:
In stock SE IV there aren't different warppoints, but you can give them different abilities. Look at the Star Trek mod for inspiration. I don't know the right file where you can put that, I must check when I get home. But I think you'll have an answer by then from someone else.

Or in FQM Deluxe to go straight to the source... Note that as in FQM, you can change all warp points to be "unusual" in SystemTypes.txt and allow some of them to have no ability in StellarAbilityTypes.txt to get a wide variety of pictures used for warp points on the maps.

[grumbler]

Now that the B5m2 files are available, I thought I would point out a few things and explain the reasoning. I will start with the components (les weapons, which I didn't mess with much except to give every race a fairly decent weapon for playtest purposes).

One of the first things I did was to change the balance of ship production from planet-based to space-based. This is in accordance with the way the series and JMS's short stories show ships being produced. To make up for the lack of population bonus to shipyard production, I added an additional three base shipyard components that can only be built on 1000kt bases. At their peak, this means a player can construct with 8,000 of each resource per turn. It probably will only make sense to have a few of these mega-shipyards, as even with maintenance discounts they still use a lot of maintenance, but the idea was to have these be the yards building the capital ships, while smaller ships are being built in the smaller shipyards.

Another change was to use the component enhancements to handle engines. One engine will cost roughly 10% of the ship's hull size, with the idea that the "typical" ship will have 40% of the hull devoted to engines. Reactor outputs were "tweaked" to result in a 1-1 correlation between the power needs of small, medium, large, and huge ships and reactors.

Within these parameters, "standard" speeds are:
Fission: 4
Fusion: 6
Antimatter: 9
Gravimetric: 12

The same style of engine was given to fighters (so that larger fighters don't become faster Versions of the smaller fighters, but better-armed and armored Versions at the same speed). However, I decided that fighter reactors made no sense - we continually see in the series references to the limited endurance of fighters. So, fighters have to get back to a planet or get recovered by a carrier to refuel.

Standard speeds (normal/combat) for fighters are:
Fiss 6/5
Adv Fiss 6/6
Fus 9/6
Adv Fus 9/7
Am 12/8
adv AM 12/9

I placed all of the inert armors at the end of the file so that they will appear at the far right of the components list in the ship design screen. This makes sense, because shipbuilders are going to fill in any leftover tonnage with inert armor, and the design process should go left to right.

I was playing a bit with the cost/benefit tradeoffs with crew types. Nothing here is hard and fast, other than wanting to avoid Val's overly generous maintenance reductions for non-First Ones.

The cargo modules are a compromise between Val's huge cargo sections (which drove all other design considerations for freighter-types) and the standard game's small cargo sections (which resisted damage too readily and were too easy to tuck into any type of ship). I am still not satisfied with the tradeoffs made for external cargo bays - they seem too good, for reasons I canot quite articulate.

There are some components that I don't really use anymore, but left in because I thought someone else might be able to make sense of them:

1. The IPX module was originally conceived as a way of reflecting the exploration of a ruins planet without the expense of colonization. There is nothing to prevent the sending of colonists to an IPX setllement, though, so this would be a component used only in human-human games with house rules to prevent exploitation.

2. I left in a lot of Raiders and Ancients components because taking them out seemed like too much work. They are never called for because neither Raiders nor Ancients have been added yet.

[grumbler]

Imperator Fyron said:
I like to see it is an abstraction representing the difficulty of hitting a critical part of the ship at long ranges. Think of it as less critical damage being done, not really less damage overall.

I am not really a fan of using "kinetic weapons" anyway, given that they are not part of the B5 universe,* but if we are going to use them we should rationalize them coherently, not by pretending that there is a lot of "non-critical damage" going on in the game that we just cannot see. Kinetic weapons should have very little if any degradation on damage, but plenty on "to hit" so as to make them distinctive from, say, lasers which would have the opposite (at least after the first few salvos, as debris and the like begin to gather around the target and the attacker).

*(outside, perhaps, the B5Wars books that have a number of other canonical problems as well)

[Fyron]

grumbler said:
Nothing here is hard and fast, other than wanting to avoid Val's overly generous maintenance reductions for non-First Ones.

Wasn't the idea to make the ships take a while and a lot of resources to build, but not be insanely expensive to maintain?

grumbler said:
I am not really a fan of using "kinetic weapons" anyway, given that they are not part of the B5 universe,* but if we are going to use them we should rationalize them coherently, not by pretending that there is a lot of "non-critical damage" going on in the game that we just cannot see. Kinetic weapons should have very little if any degradation on damage, but plenty on "to hit" so as to make them distinctive from, say, lasers which would have the opposite (at least after the first few salvos, as debris and the like begin to gather around the target and the attacker).

*(outside, perhaps, the B5Wars books that have a number of other canonical problems as well)

It was quite coherent and valid... another way to look at it would be a statistical representation of more shots missing at longer ranges. Combat bonuses are far, far too powerful in SE4 for them to be a very good way to try and balance weapons out... Even something as small as a 10% penalty to hit is not really a 10% penalty to hit. It often ends up being more like a 40% penalty to hit, or more, depending on the exact circumstances.

[Shadow1980]

Anybody noticed.... this thread has 1722 Views and 4457 replies o_O
That is technically not possible as a thread gets a view when you reply (as you have loaded the thread to reply in the first place)

[Suicide Junkie]

grumbler said:
One of the first things I did was to change the balance of ship production from planet-based to space-based.

Since when was it really planet-based?
I don't know about the other players, but when I was playing in the PBW B5 game, at least 95% of my construction power was from BSYs.

It seems like most other people shy away from the idea, but when you have 30-50 bases over your homeworld, you can produce a hell of a lot of ships in no time.