Versus Match Omega class Destroyer (Babylon 5) VS Star League McKenna Class Battleship.

[Harlock]

Harlock's also got his figures all wrong there. He claims the shells for a NAC/40 are 0.8 tons each but they're actually 6 tons for 5 shots, well over 1 ton each.

Figures are from the wiki which tells us ammo storage is five rounds for six tons. Thats not five rounds weighing six tons each, its five rounds that weigh six tons total. Or 800kg per round. roughly equal to high calibre real world naval rounds.

As I'll note, you don't supply a single picture to back up your claims or timeline. There's a reason for this.

I just used the video, I could have time stamped it I suppose but the sequence is pretty clean to see.

Keep the line I bolded in mind though, it'll get important in this next part.
There's no inconsistency between the visuals and the dialogue, only claims made up by fanboys trying to salvage their pet universe. Your Casaba Howitzer theory doesn't actually fit what we see, though. We see a glow but we see no rush of asteroids or debris towards the Black Star, nor anything striking it. Actually, let's take a closer look at it.

Ahh, condescension, how lovely. Especially looking at your McKenna stats. Unfortunately your own sources here still don't help your initial position.

So here we go a couple of frames after the nuke cooks off. As we can see, there's a rush of energy that isn't instantaneous.

Well that's the problem isn't it? When a nuke detonates in space the energy is instantaneous. The X-rays are moving at light speed and they are the only direct energy released by the bomb. You sourced Atomic Rockets which is very clear on this fact. They are also of course invisible, you would only be aware of their existence by looking at the effect they have on material around them.
X-Rays in a vacuum do not create a relatively slow moving wall of visual energy, that is just impossible. What you are seeing there is not the direct energy from the bomb, by this part of the sequence its already gone, its done what its going to do. The X-Rays have already struck the rocks, the dust, the ship, it should be all over the Black Star the absolute instant that bomb goes off. Thats how nukes in space work according to your own source.

If you can see a visual wave, and we see two distinct ones, thats not 'energy' and certainly not the X-rays released by the bomb, it is some form of matter reacting to the bombardment by X-Rays. In an atmosphere it would be gases in the air, here its dust and rocks. In hard vacuum it would be nothing, no visual clue to the energy release whatsoever.

As I stated the visuals do not support x-rays being the mechanism, and if you want me to believe they are you need to explain why X-rays can be suddenly seen and why they are moving so slowly.

So there you have it, the initial burst vaporized half the Black Star.

Unfortunately it didn't, because the initial and indeed only burst of energy any nuclear weapon is going to release is X-rays moving at light speed which would have a very clear and immediate effect on the target. No such effect has been observed, and you make no mention of it yourself.

We can also be sure this scenario didn't involve any atmosphere or large masses of asteroids, because this happened in between Jupiter and Mars and we know what that asteroid field is like. At best Sheridan took cover near a small cluster but there's no atmosphere there, not much dust, and nothing like the massive field we'd need to justify some magical casaba howitzer effect.

In real life, sure the asteroid belt isn't dense, but we can see very clearly this asteroid belt is exceptionally dense. That isn't accurate to life, but it is consistent with the visuals shown on screen and that is where we are going.
Personally I don't think the visuals are great either, but we have to fit the explanation to what we see. The energy from the bomb is invisible, the light you see isn't pure X-ray energy, it defies all laws of physics. It must be physical matter of some description heated and propelled by that invisible energy. It cannot be anything else. The only matter there must be related to the asteroids, so thats what I'm going with, but I'm open to other theories.

If you have a canon source that shows higher figures I'm open to it. However I'll note, fighter weapons are also able to rip rather nasty holes in other B5 ships with single shots. Therefore the armor in question must be vulnerable to 200-megawatt pulse cannons. We see one strafe and tear through such armor here, f'rex:



There are several other such incidents in that clipshow.

I see an explosion on the hull, no indication it penetrated. I'll point out those same fighters fired directly into the blast doors of B5 CnC which should be much thinner metal and did nothing to it.

We can also look at the effects of BT weaponry in comparison.

So we can reasonably conclude that a BT infantry weapon is several times stronger than a B5 antifighter weapon, and their antifighter complement is going to get ripped apart soundly if they engage any BT fighters (Which also have vampire armor.)

This is where we are going to start to run into problems with game mechanics. As I understand it there is no difference using these weapons in varied environments. There are I think rules for the heat sinks but not the actual weapons fire. So there is no difference firing a laser in a desert, or a swamp, or an urban battlefield, or high altitude on a fighter.

But we know that there are differences, we know humidity is going to ablate that laser or plasma shot, we know dust in a desert or city will affect it, we know air density, and gravity, and specific compositions are going to affect it. We know range is going to affect it, we know vacuum affects it.
These are all things to consider when working out the energy that strikes a given target, and none of these things can be covered in game mechanics. The game is designed to be played, not to offer a scientifically accurate vision of future combat.

So when you tell me a weapon vaporises a block of armour and that armour weighs however much, no it doesn't. It doesn't vaporise a perfectly neat mass of metal corresponding only to one defined section, it would be the fluke of all flukes if it did that, and to do it over and over again? And does it then melt surrounding armour as it must? What about spalling and impulse damage from flash boiling a chunk of the unit? What about weakening other materials around it from the shock, or the machine falling on its arse thanks to the thrust effect of so much metal becoming a gas? What about the dudes stood nearby?

There's a lot of questions and game mechanics can't answer that or address it, the book would be too long and take too long to play. Lore books and novels can, which is why they tend to be valued more.

Oh no you don't, cheater. You get to use canon. The board game is primary canon to BT. It's stated explicitly by the devs that in cases of conflict, the rules override the fiction.

Panpour III - habitable planet or gas giant?

B5 Wars is canon, JMS himself said so in the foreword, he even used the word canon which is very specific. I tend to avoid it because of the reasons stated above, game mechanics aren't as well considered as other forms of lore, but it is indeed canon.

You'll need to establish that the B5 Games are canon at all before you can use them, then establish that they can override the show's dialogue and visuals. Now I'd be perfectly willing to use the BT books as well, providing the canon rules are followed, but you're just making a vague insinuation here. Present your book quotes and we can examine them.

Or heck, I'll do the work for you, you seem to be going the "Make allegations and never bother to prove anything" path anyway.

Tall words from someone who can't figure out how nukes work in a vacuum when it was in your own source

If I was to use the games I'd do something like taking a scene from the show, say the Mars shuttle in endgame which gives us very high end acceleration figures. I'd use the game to see what stats that shuttle has, then see how it compares to other units. So if the shuttle worked out at a thousand g acceleration and an Omega had half its thrust stats in the game that gives me 500g's.
To me that sounds crazy, but it would be canon under the game system and an example of why I am wary of taking game mechanics at face value.

Of note, the Sabre Cat was an Essex, a small destroyer vastly weaker than the McKenna. Maybe five of those could take a McKenna if it was having a bad day. Still, in minutes it was able to turn a city of a million people into a scar of molten glass and boil a river away completely. What comparable feats do you have for the Omega?

https://www.b5tech.org/science/weapons/particlelaser/particlelaser.html

If we use the low end figures and assume the target is made of iron we get a low end of 43kt per sec for the beams, that will do the job in seconds, not minutes.

or we can use the big chin guns

https://www.b5tech.org/science/weapons/PulseCannons/pulsecannons.html

152kt per shot at low level. Those stats are probably higher as an Omega isn't iron, but as you use iron as a base its fair to do the same.

 

[S'task]

There are I think rules for the heat sinks but not the actual weapons fire. So there is no difference firing a laser in a desert, or a swamp, or an urban battlefield, or high altitude on a fighter.

Incorrect. However the difference is obscured and not laid out explicitly.

All weapons ranges in BattleTech are given in hexes, and any given weapon can fire once per round.

However, Hex size and Round length vary depending on the environment. BattleTech actually has three distinct zones of hexes and round length: Ground, Atmospheric, and Space:

1. Ground scale has 30 meter hexes and 10 second rounds.
2. Atmospheric has 600 meter hexes* and 10 second rounds.
3. Space scale has 18 kilometer hexes and 60 second rounds.

(See Total Warfare pg. 74 to 76.)

This means that a standard Large Laser at ground level has a max range of 450 meters, but while used in atmospheric dogfights has a range of 9000 meters (9 km!), or when fired in space has a range of 270 km!

------------
* Atmospheric hexes are defined as being approximately the same size as 1 Ground scale mapsheet. The standard ground mapsheet in BattleTech is 22 in. by 18 in. (or 660 m by 540 m since 1 inch = 30 m). Thus I took the average of 600 meters for ease of calculation.

 

[Harlock]

I'll stand corrected on the altitude variation, happen to know if they offer modifiers for environmental conditions or range?

 

[The Whispering Monk]

I'll stand corrected on the altitude variation, happen to know if they offer modifiers for environmental conditions or range?

Typically not to damage, but increase difficulty to hit.

Only very specialized weapons get different damage values at different ranges.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Figures are from the wiki which tells us ammo storage is five rounds for six tons. Thats not five rounds weighing six tons each, its five rounds that weigh six tons total. Or 800kg per round. roughly equal to high calibre real world naval rounds.

How... the utter heck do you manage to say something so obviously false and think you'll get away with it? Do you really think you can tell the entire board that five is less than six, therefore five shells weighing a total of six tons are less than one ton each? This is some 1984 level garbage.

I just used the video, I could have time stamped it I suppose but the sequence is pretty clean to see.

Given you claimed the ship was unaffected at the point where half of it was clearly missing in the screenshot, I have my doubts it was actually so clean to see for you.

Ahh, condescension, how lovely. Especially looking at your McKenna stats. Unfortunately your own sources here still don't help your initial position.

Not provided: Proof, as usual.

Well that's the problem isn't it? When a nuke detonates in space the energy is instantaneous. The X-rays are moving at light speed and they are the only direct energy released by the bomb. You sourced Atomic Rockets which is very clear on this fact. They are also of course invisible, you would only be aware of their existence by looking at the effect they have on material around them.
X-Rays in a vacuum do not create a relatively slow moving wall of visual energy, that is just impossible. What you are seeing there is not the direct energy from the bomb, by this part of the sequence its already gone, its done what its going to do. The X-Rays have already struck the rocks, the dust, the ship, it should be all over the Black Star the absolute instant that bomb goes off. Thats how nukes in space work according to your own source.

If you can see a visual wave, and we see two distinct ones, thats not 'energy' and certainly not the X-rays released by the bomb, it is some form of matter reacting to the bombardment by X-Rays. In an atmosphere it would be gases in the air, here its dust and rocks. In hard vacuum it would be nothing, no visual clue to the energy release whatsoever.

As I stated the visuals do not support x-rays being the mechanism, and if you want me to believe they are you need to explain why X-rays can be suddenly seen and why they are moving so slowly.

Unfortunately it didn't, because the initial and indeed only burst of energy any nuclear weapon is going to release is X-rays moving at light speed which would have a very clear and immediate effect on the target. No such effect has been observed, and you make no mention of it yourself.

Pay attention to the bolded sentence here, it's going to come up later.

In real life, sure the asteroid belt isn't dense, but we can see very clearly this asteroid belt is exceptionally dense. That isn't accurate to life, but it is consistent with the visuals shown on screen and that is where we are going.

Personally I don't think the visuals are great either, but we have to fit the explanation to what we see. The energy from the bomb is invisible, the light you see isn't pure X-ray energy, it defies all laws of physics. It must be physical matter of some description heated and propelled by that invisible energy. It cannot be anything else. The only matter there must be related to the asteroids, so thats what I'm going with, but I'm open to other theories.

I see an explosion on the hull, no indication it penetrated. I'll point out those same fighters fired directly into the blast doors of B5 CnC which should be much thinner metal and did nothing to it.

Then... why did the fighters do strafing runs multiple times in those clips and keep blasting ships if they have no ability to penetrate? Are humans in B5 just that stupid?

This is where we are going to start to run into problems with game mechanics. As I understand it there is no difference using these weapons in varied environments. There are I think rules for the heat sinks but not the actual weapons fire. So there is no difference firing a laser in a desert, or a swamp, or an urban battlefield, or high altitude on a fighter.

As pointed out, your understanding is completely, utterly wrong, as wrong as your claims that 5 > 6.

But we know that there are differences, we know humidity is going to ablate that laser or plasma shot, we know dust in a desert or city will affect it, we know air density, and gravity, and specific compositions are going to affect it. We know range is going to affect it, we know vacuum affects it.
These are all things to consider when working out the energy that strikes a given target, and none of these things can be covered in game mechanics. The game is designed to be played, not to offer a scientifically accurate vision of future combat.

All those things are covered in the game mechanics.

So when you tell me a weapon vaporises a block of armour and that armour weighs however much, no it doesn't. It doesn't vaporise a perfectly neat mass of metal corresponding only to one defined section, it would be the fluke of all flukes if it did that, and to do it over and over again? And does it then melt surrounding armour as it must? What about spalling and impulse damage from flash boiling a chunk of the unit? What about weakening other materials around it from the shock, or the machine falling on its arse thanks to the thrust effect of so much metal becoming a gas? What about the dudes stood nearby?

Actually I said it melts the armor, I'd have much, much bigger numbers if it was vaporization but the text says melted, but I don't try to hyper-inflate figures like fanboys do. That also removes a crapload of things you are objecting to. There are also rules for what happens if a dude's standing nearby (You'd need to look at the A Time of War rules for that) and all your other objections borne of ignorance.

There's a lot of questions and game mechanics can't answer that or address it, the book would be too long and take too long to play. Lore books and novels can, which is why they tend to be valued more.

B5 Wars is canon, JMS himself said so in the foreword, he even used the word canon which is very specific. I tend to avoid it because of the reasons stated above, game mechanics aren't as well considered as other forms of lore, but it is indeed canon.

Given your other inaccuracies in this thread, I'd like to see a scan of the page and the exact words. Nobody accepts B5 Wars as canon, not the official publishers, not the wiki, and not the fans outside of vs. debate fanboys. Further, we need to establish not only that the game is canon, but that it is more canon than the show itself, because otherwise, it can't override that 2-megaton nuke turning a Sharlin into scrap in seconds.

Tall words from someone who can't figure out how nukes work in a vacuum when it was in your own source

If I was to use the games I'd do something like taking a scene from the show, say the Mars shuttle in endgame which gives us very high end acceleration figures. I'd use the game to see what stats that shuttle has, then see how it compares to other units. So if the shuttle worked out at a thousand g acceleration and an Omega had half its thrust stats in the game that gives me 500g's.
To me that sounds crazy, but it would be canon under the game system and an example of why I am wary of taking game mechanics at face value.

https://www.b5tech.org/science/weapons/particlelaser/particlelaser.html

If we use the low end figures and assume the target is made of iron we get a low end of 43kt per sec for the beams, that will do the job in seconds, not minutes.

or we can use the big chin guns

https://www.b5tech.org/science/weapons/PulseCannons/pulsecannons.html

152kt per shot at low level. Those stats are probably higher as an Omega isn't iron, but as you use iron as a base its fair to do the same.

Ah, a fanboy "debate" site akin to SW.NET and Darkstar's stuff. This outa be rich.

Yup, full of nonsense assumptions designed to push B5 up as much as possible. "Popular consensus is B5 armor is twenty times stronger than steel" and "We'll just assume the beam is melting a trench 3 meters deep."

But what's this? X-ray particle laser? I can see the beam. Lasers aren't in space and X-rays aren't visible at all. This was all big and important to you when it was a nuke, so how come it gets a pass now? I can also point to screenshots where the beam is clearly visibly moving below the speed of light. Your adherence to hard science is remarkably inconsistent and the visibility, or not, of energy seems entirely dependent on whether or not the scene supports your side.

The fact is, TV is a visual and audible medium. Everything that happens will either have a visual or audible effect (This is why wind almost never exists on TV and if it does, has extreme effects of blowing things everywhere so that it becomes visible). Generally speaking, we have to ignore that some energies should be invisible to the naked eye and presume the camera is picking them up anyway, possibly through some sort of filter, similar to the way we have to ignore that ship engines obviously produce sound in space and there's whooshing air effects as they fly through a vacuum. Assuming energy should be invisible onscreen will never be consistent, the show designers will not have invisible stuff happening* and have to have a visual display. Thus while we can reasonably judge effects like "This ship was vaporized by what was clearly stated to be a 2 megaton blast" we can't go "Can't have been X-rays because those are invisible, except this other time they're visible, I'll keep those in, consistency is for chumps."

We know the nuke is 2 megatons, dialogue onscreen. If the writers wanted it to be fifty teratons they could have done so, and chose not to. We know it was a significant distance from the Black Star, visual and not something that would need to be adjusted for a visual medium. The exact distance is hazy but can't be less than several kilometers. If the writers and show-runners wanted a closer or contact nuke, they could have done it. If they wanted the nuke to propel an asteroid into the Black Star, they could have done that. They didn't do either. But making the X-ray front move at the speed of light, and be invisible? They couldn't reasonably do that in the limitations of a TV show.

We know a McKenna would take zero damage in the same situation. The conclusion that the McKenna is vastly tougher is inescapable. We have both game and non-game feats, such as the Sabre Cat. I notice you didn't provide any feats for the Omega though, how about an orbital bombardment to match what we say the Sabre Cat do? How about other asteroid feats? We can't use anything involving B5 armor because we've already seen that it appears to be softer than lead against a low-yield nuke. What have you got that isn't a ludicrously wanked fanboy site?

*There's always the few artiste works that actually do make the effort but B5 ain't one of 'em.

Typically not to damage, but increase difficulty to hit.

Only very specialized weapons get different damage values at different ranges.

You run into it sometimes but it's generally optional or weirder rulesets.

 

[Harlock]

How... the utter heck do you manage to say something so obviously false and think you'll get away with it? Do you really think you can tell the entire board that five is less than six, therefore five shells weighing a total of six tons are less than one ton each? This is some 1984 level garbage.

Its straight out of the wiki which cites tactical operations page 408 as its source

The maximum it could weigh is 1.2 tons, but given you want to leave space in your ammo holds to actually move and store those shots safely I'd figure less.

But if you want to use 1.2 tons thats fine by me. If you want to say they are 6 tons back it up.

Given you claimed the ship was unaffected at the point where half of it was clearly missing in the screenshot, I have my doubts it was actually so clean to see for you.

Not provided: Proof, as usual.

You want me to prove the laws of physics? It is right there on atomic rockets, did you not read your own source?

The Nuke releases x-rays, they are the only direct energy released that can hurt the ship. They are invisible, they travel at c, we do not see any indication those x-rays hurt the Black Star.
Something definitely did, I mean it did explode, but it wasn't the direct energy released from the bomb that did it.
We know the mechanism a nuke uses to kill things in space, it is scientific fact, it is described at length in the source you used yourself to calculate the energy released.

Then... why did the fighters do strafing runs multiple times in those clips and keep blasting ships if they have no ability to penetrate? Are humans in B5 just that stupid?

Because the job of a fighter is not to destroy a ship by piercing the hull, it is to make precision attacks to take out vulnerable system outside the armour. Sensors, comms, gun elevation mechanisms.

All those things are covered in the game mechanics.

For example?

Actually I said it melts the armor, I'd have much, much bigger numbers if it was vaporization but the text says melted, but I don't try to hyper-inflate figures like fanboys do. That also removes a crapload of things you are objecting to. There are also rules for what happens if a dude's standing nearby (You'd need to look at the A Time of War rules for that) and all your other objections borne of ignorance.

Not really, it will have effects beyond one particular section of the vehicle. It doesn't stop because it reaches the edges of a structure defined by games rules.

Given your other inaccuracies in this thread, I'd like to see a scan of the page and the exact words. Nobody accepts B5 Wars as canon, not the official publishers, not the wiki, and not the fans outside of vs. debate fanboys. Further, we need to establish not only that the game is canon, but that it is more canon than the show itself, because otherwise, it can't override that 2-megaton nuke turning a Sharlin into scrap in seconds.

tumblr clm

Ah, a fanboy "debate" site akin to SW.NET and Darkstar's stuff. This outa be rich.

Yup, full of nonsense assumptions designed to push B5 up as much as possible. "Popular consensus is B5 armor is twenty times stronger than steel" and "We'll just assume the beam is melting a trench 3 meters deep."

I didn't use those figures, I used the ones for iron. If you disagree I am sure you can provide an alternative. Ah, yes, you have, the Black Star. But you haven't explained yet what that wave hitting the ship actually is. It definitely isn't x-rays.

But what's this? X-ray particle laser? I can see the beam. Lasers aren't in space and X-rays aren't visible at all. This was all big and important to you when it was a nuke, so how come it gets a pass now? I can also point to screenshots where the beam is clearly visibly moving below the speed of light. Your adherence to hard science is remarkably inconsistent and the visibility, or not, of energy seems entirely dependent on whether or not the scene supports your side.

The visual part would be the 'particle' element of 'x-ray particle laser' you think? Not the X-ray element.

The fact is, TV is a visual and audible medium. Everything that happens will either have a visual or audible effect (This is why wind almost never exists on TV and if it does, has extreme effects of blowing things everywhere so that it becomes visible). Generally speaking, we have to ignore that some energies should be invisible to the naked eye and presume the camera is picking them up anyway, possibly through some sort of filter, similar to the way we have to ignore that ship engines obviously produce sound in space and there's whooshing air effects as they fly through a vacuum. Assuming energy should be invisible onscreen will never be consistent, the show designers will not have invisible stuff happening* and have to have a visual display. Thus while we can reasonably judge effects like "This ship was vaporized by what was clearly stated to be a 2 megaton blast" we can't go "Can't have been X-rays because those are invisible, except this other time they're visible, I'll keep those in, consistency is for chumps."

I don't disagree, in fact you are bang on right. This is why way back at the start I said don't put too much stock in what you see. Taking the visuals alone, thats not a 2 megaton nuke, it doesn't behave like one, doesn't match what science says.

We know the nuke is 2 megatons, dialogue onscreen. If the writers wanted it to be fifty teratons they could have done so, and chose not to. We know it was a significant distance from the Black Star, visual and not something that would need to be adjusted for a visual medium. The exact distance is hazy but can't be less than several kilometers. If the writers and show-runners wanted a closer or contact nuke, they could have done it. If they wanted the nuke to propel an asteroid into the Black Star, they could have done that. They didn't do either. But making the X-ray front move at the speed of light, and be invisible? They couldn't reasonably do that in the limitations of a TV show.

Here is the problem with calling the visuals an interpretation and not a wholly accurate depiction. You can't tell the range, dialogue tells us nothing about it, no figures, nothing to extrapolate. We know it was in range, we don't know what they consider to be in range. A thousand metres? Ten thousand? Six inches?
You either take the visuals as they are, which doesn't support the nuke directly killing the ship, or you discard them and rely on dialogue which then throws out any indications of range. Either way all those calcs you have become meaningless. And thats why I wasn't going to deal with this for the hundredth fucking time. But here we are and there you go, you figured out what everyone else did twenty years ago.

We know a McKenna would take zero damage in the same situation. The conclusion that the McKenna is vastly tougher is inescapable. We have both game and non-game feats, such as the Sabre Cat. I notice you didn't provide any feats for the Omega though, how about an orbital bombardment to match what we say the Sabre Cat do? How about other asteroid feats? We can't use anything involving B5 armor because we've already seen that it appears to be softer than lead against a low-yield nuke. What have you got that isn't a ludicrously wanked fanboy site?

I'm using his stats based on iron for the low end, not his stats based on this random 20x number, because its not something I can support. But I can back his base calcs using iron to give the bare minimum energy.

If you want something else I'll do the particle beam instead

That's more like it! What else is there and does it say why?

 

[Bear Ribs]

Its straight out of the wiki which cites tactical operations page 408 as its source

The maximum it could weigh is 1.2 tons, but given you want to leave space in your ammo holds to actually move and store those shots safely I'd figure less.

But if you want to use 1.2 tons thats fine by me. If you want to say they are 6 tons back it up.[

Reading comprehension really isn't your strong suit, is it?

Ammo Per Ton

0.83 (5 rounds weigh 6 tons)

0.83 (not 800Kg in any case) shots per ton, not tons per shot.

You want me to prove the laws of physics? It is right there on atomic rockets, did you not read your own source?

Your answer has nothing to do with what you quoted, you claimed the ship was unaffected in the clip where the visuals showed half of it gone. The laws of physics have nothing to do with the claim in question, only your lack of attention to detail.

The Nuke releases x-rays, they are the only direct energy released that can hurt the ship. They are invisible, they travel at c, we do not see any indication those x-rays hurt the Black Star.
Something definitely did, I mean it did explode, but it wasn't the direct energy released from the bomb that did it.
We know the mechanism a nuke uses to kill things in space, it is scientific fact, it is described at length in the source you used yourself to calculate the energy released.

And as we can see x-ray lasers onscreen, X-rays are visible to whatever camera system is used, and they seem to move slower than light.

Because the job of a fighter is not to destroy a ship by piercing the hull, it is to make precision attacks to take out vulnerable system outside the armour. Sensors, comms, gun elevation mechanisms.

Citation needed.

For example?

Not really, it will have effects beyond one particular section of the vehicle. It doesn't stop because it reaches the edges of a structure defined by games rules.

See below. All the effects you're talking about happen in the game rules.

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Ah, so as expected it doesn't say what you claimed. Canonical when it comes to B5 gaming, not the B5 universe. Unsurprising. Note that it specifically says the AoG books is secondary, only for things he didn't already have mapped out in the show, so anything in the game that contradicts the 2MT mine blowing away a Sharlin at range can be thrown out.

So sorry, try again.

I didn't use those figures, I used the ones for iron. If you disagree I am sure you can provide an alternative. Ah, yes, you have, the Black Star. But you haven't explained yet what that wave hitting the ship actually is. It definitely isn't x-rays.

The visual part would be the 'particle' element of 'x-ray particle laser' you think? Not the X-ray element.

Hate to break the news to you, but X-rays are also particles, called photons. Now if it was a particle beam, that has a specific definition that involves particles besides photons. But lasers? Lasers are streams of photon particles, such as X-rays. The B5 wiki even spells out that the Omega's lasers are firing high-energy photons, though I don't see any trustworthy references and I'm not sure the B5 CD Rom they're using is actually canon. Problem is, B5 has fat stacks of stuff that isn't canon and its expanded universe is largely not.

https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Laser_cannon?so=search

Nonetheless, we see enough X-Rays and lasers onscreen to conclude that the camera is making such things visible.

I don't disagree, in fact you are bang on right. This is why way back at the start I said don't put too much stock in what you see. Taking the visuals alone, thats not a 2 megaton nuke, it doesn't behave like one, doesn't match what science says.

Here is the problem with calling the visuals an interpretation and not a wholly accurate depiction. You can't tell the range, dialogue tells us nothing about it, no figures, nothing to extrapolate. We know it was in range, we don't know what they consider to be in range. A thousand metres? Ten thousand? Six inches?

Several times larger than the Black Star in any case.

The only things in visuals that need to be taken into account is that the camera can see invisible-to-our-eyes things and it can pick up sounds like engine noises in space, we hardly have to ignore easily visible distances.

You either take the visuals as they are, which doesn't support the nuke directly killing the ship, or you discard them and rely on dialogue which then throws out any indications of range. Either way all those calcs you have become meaningless. And thats why I wasn't going to deal with this for the hundredth fucking time. But here we are and there you go, you figured out what everyone else did twenty years ago.

We take the visuals as they are, they support the nuke directly killing the ship. Your claims of the ship being moved by X-rays (after half of it is gone) are what's false, not the ship being destroyed by the nuke. Your theory of a casaba howitzer clearly doesn't fit because the ship's half gone before your claimed wave of particles hit, and we don't actually see any particles moving.

We also take the dialogue, which has the nuke directly killing the ship, and the other visuals, which has nukes directly killing Shadows and Vorlons in largely empty space without the possibility of the claimed asteroid field effects, to establish that nukes in space at a decent distance will still devastate even the most advanced B5 ships, hence candyfloss armor, especially on less-advanced ships like the Omega.

I'm using his stats based on iron for the low end, not his stats based on this random 20x number, because its not something I can support. But I can back his base calcs using iron to give the bare minimum energy.

If you want something else I'll do the particle beam instead

This presumes that iron is weaker than B5 armor. We see small asteroids failing to disintegrate to the same nuke that incinerated the Black Star. This suggests their candyfloss hulls are actually weaker than random asteroids. We need to treat pure iron as being high-end calcs, unless we can establish that they're actually more energy resistant.

That's more like it! What else is there and does it say why?

There's thousands of pages of rules covering all the situations you mentioned. You'll need to be a bit more specific. A Time of War is infantry-scale and covers things like your mention of a dude standing near a tank when it's hit by a laser (The dude dies, unless he's wearing really good armor and is really lucky). It can be directly converted to Total Warfare/Tactical Operations rules which works on the small-unit to company skirmish levels, which can be expanded in Strategic Operations, then Interstellar Operations where you eventually get up to the Inner Sphere At War ruleset where turns are a month long and individual hexes are 30 light-years across. There's a huge number of different rules levels covering all possible situations and the only question is what level of abstraction the players are interested in.

Then there's alternate rulesets entirely, the Dense Fog card belongs to one of those in the form of the official cardgame. There's also QuickStrike or the ClickyTech Dark Age that was received so poorly and a few others, but I'm not really using any of those and only threw down the card as an example. For the base rules even jungle so dense it can stop anything larger than foot infantry having to crawl through it isn't dense enough to reduce the effects of BT Weaponry, it's just that powerful.

 

[Harlock]

Reading comprehension really isn't your strong suit, is it?

Ammo Per Ton

0.83 (5 rounds weigh 6 tons)

0.83 (not 800Kg in any case) shots per ton, not tons per shot.

Better than yours, it doesn't say the shots are six tons each as you keep stating either. Why haven't you sourced that if we're going that route?

Your answer has nothing to do with what you quoted, you claimed the ship was unaffected in the clip where the visuals showed half of it gone. The laws of physics have nothing to do with the claim in question, only your lack of attention to detail.

I said the ship was unaffected by the x-ray pulse which is invisible and moves at c. If it was affected by it the damage would have been obvious and instant. It wasn't, therefore the ship was unaffected.
It was affected by something, just not the -ray pulse. Simple as that, it isn't a complicated position.

And as we can see x-ray lasers onscreen, X-rays are visible to whatever camera system is used, and they seem to move slower than light.

We see the main beams of an Omega. Now if you want to get deeper into canon the people who designed it say those beams are plasma weapons, not lasers, and as far as I know lasers aren't specified on screen in relation to those guns.
So if you want to call them something else, I'm fine with that.

Citation needed.

We see the part of the hull that took the hit later in the battle, it shows no damage.

Ah, so as expected it doesn't say what you claimed. Canonical when it comes to B5 gaming, not the B5 universe. Unsurprising. Note that it specifically says the AoG books is secondary, only for things he didn't already have mapped out in the show, so anything in the game that contradicts the 2MT mine blowing away a Sharlin at range can be thrown out.

So sorry, try again.

You are wrong, and you don't get to throw out canon that easily. It applies to the B5 universe in general, it says that any liscensee wanting canon information on the subject can find it in this book. Not merely any reader, any liscensee.

It doesn't contradict the nuke, but it also doesn't say how.

Hate to break the news to you, but X-rays are also particles, called photons. Now if it was a particle beam, that has a specific definition that involves particles besides photons. But lasers? Lasers are streams of photon particles, such as X-rays. The B5 wiki even spells out that the Omega's lasers are firing high-energy photons, though I don't see any trustworthy references and I'm not sure the B5 CD Rom they're using is actually canon. Problem is, B5 has fat stacks of stuff that isn't canon and its expanded universe is largely not.

https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Laser_cannon?so=search

Nonetheless, we see enough X-Rays and lasers onscreen to conclude that the camera is making such things visible.

How do you know that is how that weapon works? That it is a beam of pure X-Rays and not other elements mixed in? You said it moves slower than light which corresponds closer to a particle weapon.
Maybe it is a particle weapon, on screen canon doesn't say it is a laser, that comes from the sources you have dismissed, so I guess it is a particle beam. You've helped narrow down canon

Several times larger than the Black Star in any case.

No evidence for that in dialogue, only the visuals which you are now saying are unreliable.

The only things in visuals that need to be taken into account is that the camera can see invisible-to-our-eyes things and it can pick up sounds like engine noises in space, we hardly have to ignore easily visible distances.

No, you don't get to cherry pick what we can and cannot take from visuals and what we can dismiss. You take it as it is, or you leave it.

We take the visuals as they are, they support the nuke directly killing the ship. Your claims of the ship being moved by X-rays (after half of it is gone) are what's false, not the ship being destroyed by the nuke. Your theory of a casaba howitzer clearly doesn't fit because the ship's half gone before your claimed wave of particles hit, and we don't actually see any particles moving.

The visuals do not correspond to how nukes kill things in a vacuum. You know this, it is incontrovertible fact. You know it, stop dancing around the fact that the mechanism by which the black star is killed isn't an accurate representation of a nuke in space.
When I pressed you on this your only defence was 'artistic license' which yeah, probably, but art is not something we can base calculations on.

We also take the dialogue, which has the nuke directly killing the ship, and the other visuals, which has nukes directly killing Shadows and Vorlons in largely empty space without the possibility of the claimed asteroid field effects, to establish that nukes in space at a decent distance will still devastate even the most advanced B5 ships, hence candyfloss armor, especially on less-advanced ships like the Omega.

I don't deny the bomb was responsible, I debate the method by which it was responsible. Your assertion is not proven, hence your candyfloss armour has no basis.

This presumes that iron is weaker than B5 armor. We see small asteroids failing to disintegrate to the same nuke that incinerated the Black Star. This suggests their candyfloss hulls are actually weaker than random asteroids. We need to treat pure iron as being high-end calcs, unless we can establish that they're actually more energy resistant.

Now we're moving into crazy territory. We have examples of craft deorbiting without immolating so we know B5 materials are superior to iron in terms of physical strength and heat capacity. That also makes them superior to your view of the Black Star.

Indeed if we assume the black star has one metre of armour, for the nuke to vaporise it at a range of about 5k metres the density of that armour would be about twice the density of air at sea level. It would be mist.
You can sit there and claim I'm scrambling to defend my favoured franchise (Its SBY honestly but meh) but on the flip side you are suggesting the Black Star is made out of air. Take a moment to consider that.

There's thousands of pages of rules covering all the situations you mentioned. You'll need to be a bit more specific. A Time of War is infantry-scale and covers things like your mention of a dude standing near a tank when it's hit by a laser (The dude dies, unless he's wearing really good armor and is really lucky). It can be directly converted to Total Warfare/Tactical Operations rules which works on the small-unit to company skirmish levels, which can be expanded in Strategic Operations, then Interstellar Operations where you eventually get up to the Inner Sphere At War ruleset where turns are a month long and individual hexes are 30 light-years across. There's a huge number of different rules levels covering all possible situations and the only question is what level of abstraction the players are interested in.

Then there's alternate rulesets entirely, the Dense Fog card belongs to one of those in the form of the official cardgame. There's also QuickStrike or the ClickyTech Dark Age that was received so poorly and a few others, but I'm not really using any of those and only threw down the card as an example. For the base rules even jungle so dense it can stop anything larger than foot infantry having to crawl through it isn't dense enough to reduce the effects of BT Weaponry, it's just that powerful.

That doesn't really work though, weapons are affected by the environment, I don't just mean trees I mean dust in the air is a far better way of bleeding off energy. The weapons won't perform the same in wildly different environments and if the rules say they do? Then they are not an accurate reflection on reality

But to be fair, lets make it tied to this debate then. How big are the rounds the McKenna fires. What is their velocity, what is their range? How accurate are they? Start small.

 

[S'task]

I'll stand corrected on the altitude variation, happen to know if they offer modifiers for environmental conditions or range?

They do, including rules for Extreme Ranges for Ground scale weapons (extending weapons out additionally to an additional number of hexes equal to their medium range bracket), as well as rules for Line of Sight weapons fire. For the record, the "optional" Line of Sight rule for Ground combat makes Missiles weapons with a long range of 14+ and energy weapons 8+ can fire to "line of sight" (IE to the horizon). (See Tactical Operations Pg 85). They do take additional to hit penalties and lose some damage (as one would expect for such long ranges with atmosphere), but this does lay to rest the canonicity the idea that BattleTech weapons are "short ranged". No, many of them are to the horizon, the normal maximum ranges are, as people have said for YEARS, purposefully truncated for gameplay simplicity.

That doesn't really work though, weapons are affected by the environment, I don't just mean trees I mean dust in the air is a far better way of bleeding off energy. The weapons won't perform the same in wildly different environments and if the rules say they do? Then they are not an accurate reflection on reality

BattleTech has various levels of detail in the rules for how simulationist one wants to get.

The issue here though is that all the rules regarding things like dust, firing through water, etc. are not applicable to this debate, as the weapons those rules are written for are Ground scale combat (the ground level / 10 second scale). Meanwhile the Capital ship weapons that we're needing to compare behave... very differently on those two scales. IE Capital ship weapons are inherently Area of Effect weapons when they hit things at Ground Scale. The rules for firing into Atmosphere from Orbit are detailed in Strategic Operations pg 103 - 110.

Rules for orbit to ground fire CAN take into account atmospheric density, and that does shorten the ranges of the weapons, but it's based on a per hex basis and basically works by making hexes count as more hexes for the purposes of accounting for range (it does not effect damage).

 

[Bear Ribs]

Better than yours, it doesn't say the shots are six tons each as you keep stating either. Why haven't you sourced that if we're going that route?

I said five shells weighing six tons, not six tons each. Your reading comprehension continues to fail.

I said the ship was unaffected by the x-ray pulse which is invisible and moves at c. If it was affected by it the damage would have been obvious and instant. It wasn't, therefore the ship was unaffected.
It was affected by something, just not the -ray pulse. Simple as that, it isn't a complicated position.

But X-rays are clearly visible onscreen in other areas. Even if you want to discount the Omega by claims about particles, the Centauri have pure X-Ray lasers that are also visible on-screen.

We see the main beams of an Omega. Now if you want to get deeper into canon the people who designed it say those beams are plasma weapons, not lasers, and as far as I know lasers aren't specified on screen in relation to those guns.
So if you want to call them something else, I'm fine with that.

Well then show the citations from the people who designed it, and establish that they actually have the authority to declare canon. Don't just keep throwing out random unsupported claims like this.

We see the part of the hull that took the hit later in the battle, it shows no damage.

Well then show it, don't just keep throwing out random unsupported claims like this.

You are wrong, and you don't get to throw out canon that easily. It applies to the B5 universe in general, it says that any liscensee wanting canon information on the subject can find it in this book. Not merely any reader, any liscensee.

It doesn't contradict the nuke, but it also doesn't say how.

How do you know that is how that weapon works? That it is a beam of pure X-Rays and not other elements mixed in? You said it moves slower than light which corresponds closer to a particle weapon.
Maybe it is a particle weapon, on screen canon doesn't say it is a laser, that comes from the sources you have dismissed, so I guess it is a particle beam. You've helped narrow down canon

Ah, the cherry-picking you get up to is hilarious. I wanted to see if you'd bite the hook when I said I wasn't sure if a piece, written and produced by J. Michael Straczynski himself, was canon. Sure enough, you'll fight tooth and nail for a ridiculously broad interpretation of the tabletop mini game's introductory blurb but jumped right at getting to eliminate the word of Straczynski himself if you thought it might give you an advantage. Congrats, you played yourself. If you don't accept Straczynski's words on his own work, logically you also shouldn't accept his words in the blurb of the tabletop game that wasn't his work either. The fact that you managed to contradict yourself that thoroughly in back-to-back paragraphs so I only have to have one quote and you're denying your own statements in it is just the icing on the cake.

No evidence for that in dialogue, only the visuals which you are now saying are unreliable.

No, I said they're quite reliable, they actually show more than the unaided eye would.

No, you don't get to cherry pick what we can and cannot take from visuals and what we can dismiss. You take it as it is, or you leave it.

I'm not the one with the bad habit of cherry-picking in this thread, I'm taking it all from the visuals, including that the visuals show visible X-rays at many points so I don't cherry-pick and claim they're visible in one scene and invisible in another.

The visuals do not correspond to how nukes kill things in a vacuum. You know this, it is incontrovertible fact. You know it, stop dancing around the fact that the mechanism by which the black star is killed isn't an accurate representation of a nuke in space.
When I pressed you on this your only defence was 'artistic license' which yeah, probably, but art is not something we can base calculations on.

Not artistic license, proof in the form of X-rays being visible in other scenes. Artistic license is the Doylist reason of course, but the Watsonian one is that omniscient narrator cameras in B5 provably and reliably show visible X-rays and also visible laser beams, likely a few other things that wouldn't be visible to the human eye show up as well.

I don't deny the bomb was responsible, I debate the method by which it was responsible. Your assertion is not proven, hence your candyfloss armour has no basis.

The bomb was 2 megatons. Your claims, which you can't prove, don't change that. If thin interstellar dust was responsible, you still only have the same amount of energy available to show the ship being destroyed due to the distance involved. The armor is candyfloss.

And the thing is, again, a McKenna in the same situation would take zero damage. This is explicit in the rules. There is no possible scenario where the Sharlin has armor in the same ballpark as a McKenna, and since it can survive hits from its own weapons, it also can't have firepower on par with the McKenna which can reliably punch through its own armor. The Omega is, even according to the people on the B5 side in this thread, markedly inferior to the Sharlin. There is no interpretation where the Omega can have the firepower or the armor of the McKenna.

No matter how you argue about X-rays or whether a beam was a particle or laser, you can't actually beat that and noticeably haven't had any counters besides your claims that you should be allowed to use a noncanon tabletop game and quibbling about whether or not lasers should work differently in swamps than grasslands.

Now we're moving into crazy territory. We have examples of craft deorbiting without immolating so we know B5 materials are superior to iron in terms of physical strength and heat capacity. That also makes them superior to your view of the Black Star.

Deorbiting doesn't actually require great heat resistance, we just do it that way IRL because aerobraking saves on highly expensive fuel. Now if you want to post images and perhaps try to calculate the amount of heat by the Kelvin color of the surrounding plasma, then we can talk.

That doesn't really work though, weapons are affected by the environment, I don't just mean trees I mean dust in the air is a far better way of bleeding off energy. The weapons won't perform the same in wildly different environments and if the rules say they do? Then they are not an accurate reflection on reality

Unless the weapons are powerful enough that the dust isn't going to be a significant factor at the absurdly short BT ranges. Nobody complains if the rules for a headshot don't take into account the "padding" effect of a full head of hair vs. a bald guy because the hair isn't enough of a defense to have the slightest effect on the outcome. Similarly in BT, body armor makes a difference at the individual weapon scale but against 'mech scale weapons, there's no difference between a guy in civilian clothes and a guy in full body armor, the laser's going to vaporize both. Heck, hiding behind concrete several inches thick isn't enough to influence 'mech-scale firepower, it only provides any protection against infantry weapons.

But to be fair, lets make it tied to this debate then. How big are the rounds the McKenna fires. What is their velocity, what is their range? How accurate are they? Start small.

The shells are five per six tons, explicitly spelled out as 1.2 tons each, as I've repeatedly told you already. Here:

Naval Autocannon

Naval Autocannon

www.sarna.net

The range on the 40 is a max of 24 18km wide hexes, or 432 kilometers. It hits in the same turn it's fired, a minimum of 7.2km per second but it's exceedingly unlikely to be so low, that's an absolute mandatory floor. Used in an orbital bombardment, it will inflict massive damage in an area about 300 meters wide with more damage at the center.

All standard BattleTech AC rounds are high-explosive armor-piercing shells, the amount this adds to the damage of a NAC/40 as opposed to its kinetic energy isn't spelled out.

Autocannon

Autocannon

www.sarna.net

However note that the Naval Autocannons are secondaries on the McKenna, its primary weapons are the 24 Heavy Naval PPCs in its broadsides.

 

[Harlock]

Fair enough, I'm done. If you really are going to old the position that B5 armour has inferior properties to aluminium foil, and thats not an exaggeration that is the thickness of material in those initial calculations, then so be it.

 

[Spartan303]

Way to go Bear Ribs. What was the deal in being so hostile? That wasn't called for man. Now you took the fun out of it.

 

[Harlock]

I'm way too old and tired for this gotcha shit and if you really do think B5 armour is so weak you can literally put a finger through it, nah, thats not a sound basis to stand on.
I don't think anyone is going to accept that as logical even the other Btech fans so its just a waste of effort to battle over it. If you insist on one side being weak to such absurdity then there is no debate. I cannot comprehend the logic there, and I'm past fighting over canon.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

I think what really matters in this discussion is the speed of the B5 Omega. IF it can realistically pull 15G turns and acceleration rates in 10-100Gs then the McKenna and its fighters have 0 chance of killing it. No shots are gonna hit, and none of the ASF are going to be able to even close with it.

AND IF the B5 ships are used to targeting vessels with that kind of maneuverability...the Omega is not ever going to miss the McKenna except once in a blue moon.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I think what really matters in this discussion is the speed of the B5 Omega. IF it can realistically pull 15G turns and acceleration rates in 10-100Gs then the McKenna and its fighters have 0 chance of killing it. No shots are gonna hit, and none of the ASF are going to be able to even close with it.

AND IF the B5 ships are used to targeting vessels with that kind of maneuverability...the Omega is not ever going to miss the McKenna except once in a blue moon.

That is a good point, though the 15G is more nonsense wank on the B5 fanboy side. The later Warlock class was the first Human ship with artificial gravity, which is why it didn't have that big rotating section the Omega needed to simulate gravity. This was spelled out by Stracynzki himself in the short story he wrote, "Hidden Agendas."

The Inertial Dampers are mentioned in the comic "Against The Odds," which is part of B5 canon. However that comic takes place years after the Omega has been in service, and at any rate the Inertial Dampers are mentioned in the context of the navigation system, and the shuttle immediately crashes when the inertial dampers go down which makes little sense if they're supposed to somehow provide protection from G-forces rather that help the navigation system tell where the ship is. There's no indicator they allow an Omega to fly at high-G acceleration (or for that matter that the Omega has them at all). Indeed as the Warlock entry points out, it actually has much higher acceleration than the Omega because it has artificial gravity and can compensate.

https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Warlock_class_destroyer?so=search

We see the crew of the Omega comfortably walking around even when they're doing combat maneuvers multiple times, so they're probably not doing more than a G or so. The highest acceleration anyone who isn't wanking has suggested is 4G. This is a significant advantage over the McKenna's max 2.5G but still in the general range of faster BT WarShips like the Kimagure.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

@Bear Ribs you're probaly in that most of what ive seen so far caps the Omega at 4-5 Gs of acceleration. Unfortunately, I havent found anywhere what the endurance of the Omega is for sustained thrust and maneuvering.

We do know the Omega can lock the grav deck down to make maneuvering easier.

It's probably safe to say that the Omega has a decent advantage in thrust over the McKenna, and likely a corresponding advantage in maneuver.

Omega likely has another advantage in sensors because of their Tachyon arrays. So the Omega has FTL sensors over a system wide range. The McKenna only has that in response to detecting jumps. It's unlikely the McKenna will have any truly effective ECM against the Omega.

So sensors and maneuver lean towards the Omega. I'd put the main cannons of the Omega at a higher power level than the HNPPCs on an individual basis with a greater range as well, but the McKenna has MORE.

If the Omega can make it a stern chase where it's greater speed, better sensors and range can be exploited, the McKenna will lose.

If it turns into a dofight...I think the McKenna will come out simply because of the greater number of heavy weapon. In B5 terms, it'd be like an Omega choosing to knife fight with a Nova.

 

[Bear Ribs]

@Bear Ribs you're probaly in that most of what ive seen so far caps the Omega at 4-5 Gs of acceleration. Unfortunately, I havent found anywhere what the endurance of the Omega is for sustained thrust and maneuvering.

We do know the Omega can lock the grav deck down to make maneuvering easier.

It's probably safe to say that the Omega has a decent advantage in thrust over the McKenna, and likely a corresponding advantage in maneuver.

Omega likely has another advantage in sensors because of their Tachyon arrays. So the Omega has FTL sensors over a system wide range. The McKenna only has that in response to detecting jumps. It's unlikely the McKenna will have any truly effective ECM against the Omega.

So sensors and maneuver lean towards the Omega. I'd put the main cannons of the Omega at a higher power level than the HNPPCs on an individual basis with a greater range as well, but the McKenna has MORE.

If the Omega can make it a stern chase where it's greater speed, better sensors and range can be exploited, the McKenna will lose.

If it turns into a dofight...I think the McKenna will come out simply because of the greater number of heavy weapon. In B5 terms, it'd be like an Omega choosing to knife fight with a Nova.

I'm inclined to agree. If the Omega can kite long enough it can probably eventually wear down the McKenna. Note, however, the McKenna is built taking that tactic into consideration and its forward chase armaments are much longer-ranged than its broadsides. Still it suffers from BTechs typical anemic ranges even with its longest-range weaponry, around a thousand kilometers. While B5 ships don't usually engage at such long ranges, we know they can. The Omega will have to keep it up an exceedingly long time unless it gets a golden BB hit on the McKenna's bridge, but it has a more than decent shot at pulling it off and given enough shots, eventually, it's likely to get that golden BB.

In the other scenarios the Fighters are going to preclude that option. Due to the weird way BTech scales its armor, ASF are insanely tough compared to almost any other universe. As in, it's fully possible for a heavy fighter to be shot down from orbit, hit the ground at terminal velocity, and fly itself out of the impact crater and back into orbit to re-enter the fray under its own power. Coupled with our comparisons between B5s "200 Megawatt" weaponry vs. the power of even BTech point-defense guns, any fighter-on-fighter action's going to be a slaughter and they should reliably punch through the Omega's armor once in range.

In scenario 2, Starfuries aren't going to even be speedbumps against SLDF Light Fighters. The SLDF lights are the Trident, Swift, Spad, Zero, Rogue, and Tomahawk. These are a mix of design types ranging from fast interceptors to Macross-style missile boats to dogfighters. The Spad is the slowest at only 4.5Gs while the Swift can do 10.5. Given the firepower and armor disparity, they should be able to easily overtake the Omega and destroy it even if it tries to do a tail chase.

In Scenario 3 we have the medium Hellcat II, Gotha, and Ironsides. In the heavy fighter category, we have the Hammerhead, Ahab, and Rapier. The Ahab and Gotha are tied for slowest of all SLDF fighters at only 4Gs, the rest are able to overtake. It'll go exactly as Scenario 2.

Scenario 4 gets interesting. The "Standard" escort DropShips in the SLDF are the Titan, capable of 4.5Gs on its own and carrying 18 fighters along with some rather extreme firepower of its own, and the Pentagon which carries no fighters but does 5.5Gs and carries a crazy amount of long-range (for BT) firepower. The McKenna has 50 fighters if it's not having its complement reduced as in the other scenarios, so presuming it's an even split, 104 fighters and Six dropShips along with 16 Ares Assault Craft that are normally used for boarding parties.

Boarding parties are going to be a loss for the SLDF, they're intended to board ships much smaller and with far fewer crew than the Omegas and Hyperions. Two Platoons of 28 guys each just aren't going to get anywhere trying to take on a crew of a thousand or more without power armor. The Ares still have enough firepower to match a Medium Fighter and do 5.5Gs so they could contribute, but probably won't see much use.

So again, if the B5 ships try to engage, they'll get eaten by the McKenna's guns, and if they run they can be overtaken by the fighters and DropShips and eaten by their guns.

As an aside note both of them are likely to boggle at the other ship's design. The McKenna's captain, because of the absurd mass of a ship that's 67 million tons despite only being the size of the McKenna, and the Omega captain for the reverse reason as he tries to figure out how somebody made an incredibly tough WarShip that's so lightweight it would float on liquid hydrogen.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

The McKenna's captain, because of the absurd mass of a ship that's 67 million tons despite only being the size of the McKenna, and the Omega captain for the reverse reason as he tries to figure out how somebody made an incredibly tough WarShip that's so lightweight it would float on liquid hydrogen.

IT's for these reasons alone, that I have never really bought the toughness of BTech armor. And I always felt that the B5 ships were a little TOO dense. Mind you, I'm a huge BattleTech fan, and I've been playing it for decades. I have just learned to turn off my brain when I look at the tech.

Toughness seems reversed in these realities from what they should be. Though, in the B5 'verse, the Omega IS a tough beast.

 

[Spartan303]

IT's for these reasons alone, that I have never really bought the toughness of BTech armor. And I always felt that the B5 ships were a little TOO dense. Mind you, I'm a huge BattleTech fan, and I've been playing it for decades. I have just learned to turn off my brain when I look at the tech.

Toughness seems reversed in these realities from what they should be. Though, in the B5 'verse, the Omega IS a tough beast.

Yeah, she has a well earned reputation. One surpassed by the more superior Warlock.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

Yeah, she has a well earned reputation. One surpassed by the more superior Warlock.

The joys of tech UPGRADES!!!!