Ahead of my upcoming Babylon 5 rewatch, it may be useful to set the scene of what is going on in the B5 universe when the series pilot episode opens. This information is not strictly necessary, but it may be helpful in reminding people in what space empire did what to whom and when.
The first article focused on the major races and alliances. This second focuses on the B5 station and some of the underlying concepts of the show.
The first article focused on the major races and alliances. This second focuses on the B5 station and some of the underlying concepts of the show.
Click for a bigger version.
The Babylon Project
When humanity was spared annihilation at the hands of the
Minbari, it resulted in a more tolerant and less aggressively militaristic
attitude taking root on Earth. Newly-elected President Luis Santiago was voted
into office in 2248 on a mandate of keeping the Earth Alliance out of war and
also encouraging peaceful relations with other races.
One idea that had been proposed was a version of the League
of Non-aligned Worlds writ large, the creation of an interstellar forum for
peace and diplomacy that could also act as a centre for trade. Just as trade
had helped keep Earth out of a global war for over 140 years during the 20th and 21st centuries, it was hoped it would also create new links
between the major and minor powers of local space.
The original Babylon Station shortly before its destruction in 2250.
The result of these discussions was the Babylon Project. Its
goal was to build a large space station, much larger than anything Earth had
attempted before, which would act as a centre for trade and diplomacy. It was
modelled on the League of Nations and United Nations of old Earth, before the
major powers consolidated into the Earth Alliance in 2085.
It is likely this plan would have foundered if it wasn’t for
the goodwill that Earth had engendered among the League of Non-aligned Worlds
for its intervention in the Dilgar War of 2230-32, as well as the sympathy it
had built up during its war with the Minbari. Startlingly, the Minbari
themselves agreed to send a representative to the station, which added
considerable kudos and interest to the project.
Earth Alliance diplomatic station Babylon 4. Considerably larger than the later Babylon 5, it remains the largest space habitat ever built by humanity. Taking over three years to build, in Sector 14, Epsilon Eridani system, it disappeared without a trace in late 2254 with over 1,300 construction workers and Earthforce personnel on board.
It was decided to build the station in the Epsilon Eridani
system. Located fourteen light-years from Earth* in neutral space, the system
was close enough to permit relatively fast travel from Earth, Narn and several
of the non-aligned homeworlds (and somewhat more distant from Centauri Prime
and Minbar, although still only a few days’ trip). A vast construction site was
set up just outside the orbit of Epsilon Eridani III, three hours from the
local jump gate, and construction got underway in earnest in 2250.
Just a few months into construction, with the forward
docking sphere completed and the main hull taking shape, the
station’s superstructure collapsed and exploded. Most of the construction
material was saved and rebuilding began immediately. The same thing happened again,
and then again. Officially the failures were the result of substandard building
materials and problems with the advanced technologies being used to build the
station, the largest artificial construction ever attempted by humanity.
Unofficially, at least two of the collapses were linked with extremist,
anti-alien terrorism.
Protected by much stronger security measures, Babylon 4 was
finally completed in 2254. The immense station was operational for just 24
hours when it abruptly vanished, disappearing in a flash of light with over
1,300 construction crew still on board. No explanation has ever been provided
for this incident.
The Earth Alliance prepared to cancel the Babylon Project,
judging it an enormous waste of time, resources and political capital. To their
surprise, the Minbari Federation stepped in and offered a substantial amount of
funds to help build a fifth station. The Centauri also donated a significant sum and
the Narns and non-aligned worlds somewhat less. The fifth station would be
significantly smaller and less grand in scale, but it would still serve the
purpose originally intended for the project. It was also decided to move the
construction site into orbit around Epsilon III, much closer to the system’s
jump gate with significant cost savings (despite concerns over security, being
much closer to an attack through the gate).
Babylon 5 was completed in the summer of 2256. It went
online in the autumn, with the station’s command crew and ambassadorial staff
arriving shortly after that. Against the odds, the Babylon Project had
succeeded in getting on-line. Now it would be the job of the crew and
diplomatic staff to make the actual diplomacy work.
Babylon 5
Babylon 5 is located in orbit** around the planet Epsilon
Eridani III (commonly referred to just as Epsilon III), close enough so that
several times a day it enters Epsilon III’s shadow. A hyperspace jump gate has
also been constructed in orbit, allowing smaller, non-jump-capable vessels to
travel to the station. The gate is located far enough away from B5 for hostile
ships to be identified and intercepted, but close enough so that travel from
the gate to the station is fast and smooth. Thrusters on the jump gate allow it
to maintain a constant distance from B5.
The station is approximately five miles long*** and at least
half a mile wide. The station resembles a long rotating cylinder, held in place
by a non-rotating framework. The spinning cylinder, or carousel, contains all
of the station’s living spaces, including quarters, diplomatic meeting places,
commercial districts and recreation areas. It rotates at 60mph, which generates
a simulated gravity field of 0.9G. A “bulge” in the hull in Green Sector
represents an elevated section of the station which can actually be spun at
different speeds, to allow areas in the station for species from higher or
lower-gravity worlds to dwell in greater comfort. However, no such species has
yet arrived on the station in sufficient numbers to justify such a change to
the station’s configuration.
At the front end of the station is a large spherical
structure. This is the docking sphere or Blue
Sector, which contains the station’s docking bays, Command and Control
(C&C) and Earthforce military facilities, as well as crew quarters. The
station’s Cobra bays, from where the fighter wings launch, are located at the
rear of this section, on the arms which connect the sphere to the rest of the
carousel. Ships dock through the axial launch and recovery bay, from where they
are carried to one of several dozen bays located around the sphere. There is a
secondary bay located directly above the sphere, along the zero-gravity forward
“arms” of the station, where larger ships can dock.
The carousel is divided into four distinct sectors. Red Sector, located behind the docking sphere,
is the station’s primary residential, commercial and entertainment hub. It
contains restaurants, hotels, casinos, conference facilities and the station’s
main shopping market, known as the Zocalo. The rearward part of Red Sector
opens out onto The Garden, a large
section of the carousel’s interior which is effectively hollow. The part of the
Garden in Red Sector contains sports facilities and some very expensive hotels.
Green Sector,
located rearward from Red Sector, contains the station’s diplomatic and
ambassadorial wings, as well as residences for many of the station’s non-human
population and the so-called “Alien Sector”, which contains rooms where the
atmosphere can be changed for the comfort of the residents. The Garden extends
through Green Sector and several public parks are located in this area, such as
the Zen Garden and areas designated for diplomatic functions.
Brown Sector,
colloquially known as “Downbelow”, is located rearwards from Green Sector,
behind the Garden. Originally planned to be a second commercial area, it
suffered from the budget cuts in the planning of the station and was left only
partially developed, with considerably less security infrastructure than much
of the rest of the station. Almost inevitably, this part of the station has
attracted an underclass of citizens, including even homeless people. Brown
Sector tends to be at the centre of some of the less-savoury activities on the
station, including crime, prostitution and the drug trade.
Grey Sector lies
rearwards from Brown Sector, at the far rear end of the carousel. Grey Sector
contains a lot of industrial areas, heavy machinery and fabrication plants.
This sector of the station is heavily automated, with relatively few people
working in it despite its significant size. The low population of this sector,
combined with its strange noises, have led it to being dubbed the “Babylon
Triangle” by some of the more superstitious station residents.
Yellow Sector is
the term given to the station’s non-rotating, zero-G facilities. These include
the station’s fusion reactor (located at the extreme rear of the station),
atmosphere processors, the large radiator fins, the cargo pods, the zero-G
docking bay and the forward cargo stabilisers. Due to the sensitive nature of
its facilities, Yellow Sector is off-limits to all non-Earthforce personnel.
The station’s sheer size can be overwhelming, but relatively
rapid travel can be achieved thanks to transport tubes, which provide rapid
transit between floors, and the station’s Core Shuttle, a high-speed monorail
which runs the length of the station from Blue to Grey Sector just underneath
the main axis. As it’s located near the spin axis, the Core Shuttle is a
low-gravity environment and travellers must take care when boarding and exiting
the cars.
Although designed primarily for peaceful purposes, Babylon 5
is also armed for defence. The station has two fighter wings of 12 fighters
apiece, designated Alpha and Delta Squadrons, along with a number of spare
fighters to replace any lost in combat. These are launched from the Cobra Bays
located along the arms connected the docking sphere to the carousel, and
recovered via the main docking bay. The station also employs a number of
shuttles (including atmospheric shuttles and zero-G ones), hazardous
material-recovery ships and automated camera and cargo pods.
The station also has several dozen pulse array cannons
located along its length. Most of these are located along the zero-G spine of
Babylon 5, but some are mounted on the rotating section to provide coverage
along the underside of the station. These cannons are designed primarily for
anti-fighter operations but in concert could inflict significant damage on
capital ships. Earthforce and the diplomatic corps have clashed over plans to
fit more significant weaponry to the station, the former feeling that B5 is far
too vulnerable to a concerted assault and the latter countering that adding
such heavy weapon batteries to the station runs counter to its mission of
peace.
Babylon 5 is run by a crew of 6,500 Earthforce personnel,
who provide the station’s administration, security and defence forces. In
addition to this, there are 1,500 dockworkers on the station and thousands more
permanent civilian residents who work on the station and keep its businesses
and other amenities running. There are also well over 100 ambassadorial staff
on the station, with each ambassador usually attended by a senior aide/chief of
staff and other assistants.
The construction of the Babylon 5 jump gate has also
provided a handy junction point for hyperspace routes leading between the Earth
Alliance, Narn Regime and several of the non-aligned worlds. This has made the
station a hub for both travel and commerce. The station has a total population
– residents and transients combined – of around 250,000 at any one time.
Hyperspace
In the 20th Century it was said that travelling
faster-than-light is impossible. Technically, that is correct. It is not
possible for any spacecraft to exceed the speed of light, which is why the first
few interstellar ships launched from Earth travelled at achingly low speeds,
taking decades to cross a single light-year, the crew cryogenically frozen
until they reached their destination.
However, it is possible to get around the limitation. There
are multiple layers of reality nestled within one another. Many millennia ago,
ancient civilisations discovered how to create wormholes – jump points or vortexes – linking our universe to
the one next door, known as “hyperspace”. Every point in hyperspace corresponds
to a point in normal space, but hyperspace appears to be many orders of
magnitude smaller. Enter hyperspace, travel for a few hundred thousand miles
and pop back out in normal space several light-years from where you were.
This sounds much simpler than it is in practice. Hyperspace
does not have any stars, planets, black holes or other phenomena like our
realm, but it does have immense gravitation eddies which ebb and flow. Some
areas of hyperspace are utterly impassable due to such phenomena, creating
obstacles which ships have to take long detours around. These tides can also
sweep unsuspecting ships off course without warning, leaving them stranded with
no frame of reference on how to get back home.
To this end, the first ancient civilisations which explored
hyperspace began building a network of beacons. These beacons are anchored in
real space, but with signals that penetrate hyperspace (and thus remain fixed
and immobile from the perspective of ships in hyperspace). Over the course of
millennia, other species have joined the interstellar community and added to
the beacon network.
Today tens of thousands of beacons link the disparate worlds of known space together. Even hostile species have hesitated over destroying the beacons, since without them entire sections of the galaxy could be cut off before the painstaking work of rebuilding them was attempted. Network beacons can be shut down, however: during the Earth-Minbari War, the hyperspace beacons for the Sol system was disabled once the Minbari overran the outer colonies, delaying the Minbari advance for many months until they located Earth by other means.
Today tens of thousands of beacons link the disparate worlds of known space together. Even hostile species have hesitated over destroying the beacons, since without them entire sections of the galaxy could be cut off before the painstaking work of rebuilding them was attempted. Network beacons can be shut down, however: during the Earth-Minbari War, the hyperspace beacons for the Sol system was disabled once the Minbari overran the outer colonies, delaying the Minbari advance for many months until they located Earth by other means.
An exit vortex or jump point leading from normal space to hyperspace.
Passing from real space to hyperspace or back again requires
vast quantities of energy, far beyond the capability of most small ships to
generate. Smaller ships require the use of free-standing jump gates to pass
from hyperspace to real space and back again. Jump gates take the form of
massive, multi-pronged constructions which charge up and generate a jump point
between their prongs. More advanced species, like the Minbari and Centauri,
have gates with three prongs, whilst Earth and many of the non-aligned worlds
use four-pronged gates. The gate prongs can usually be adjusted to allow
extremely large ships to enter or leave hyperspace, but a galactic standard
size exists which makes this almost never necessary. Jump gates require
colossal amounts of energy to operate, with multiple fusion reactors built into
them along with failsafes and redundancies. The destruction of a jump gate –
aside from being a crime on a par with disrupting the beacon network – releases
titanic amounts of energy in both hyperspace and real space. It is
strategically unsound because it is impossible for any ship to get out of range
of the explosion (since it propagates in both realms simultaneously) once the
detonation has begun. Trying to open one jump point inside another has the same
effect.
Many species have large vessels which spend months exploring
the fringes of the network, building new jump gates and beacons and expanding
the limits of known space. The Earth Alliance delegates this task to its
largest vessels, the Explorer class. More than two miles long each (although
most of that space is given over to cargo), each Explorer has enough resources
to build multiple gates and beacons before returning to the core systems for
resupply. Earth only has a few of these ships and the programme is expensive,
but it maintains it because of the goodwill it engenders with smaller races and
the positive impact it has on trade.
Larger ships can generate their own vortexes through the use
of a jump drive. Jump drives are extremely expensive to construct and fit to a
ship, and the energy requirements are quite startling. The Centauri have
developed quite impressive jump drive technology, later sold to Earth and
stolen by the Narns. Minbari jump technology is superior still, with the
Minbari both able to fit jump drives on ships smaller than even the Centauri
have managed and also able to precisely target the departure jump point in real
space from beacon coordinates. During the Earth-Minbari War the Minbari would
open jump points in the midst of Earthforce flotillas, destroying several ships
before the Minbari ships even arrived.
A four-pronged jump gate (probably of Earth construction) and an entry vortex leading into hyperspace.
Due to the gravitational inclines and eddies in hyperspace,
not to mention the disorienting visual distortions (the source of which remains
unknown; according to instrumentation, hyperspace should be completely black)
which make following a target almost impossible, space combat is rarely
attempted in hyperspace.
Because of hyperspace distortions, travel times in
hyperspace do not always scale linearly to distances in real space: it is a
two-day jump from Earth to Babylon 5, for example, covering just 14
light-years, whilst from Babylon 5 to Centauri Prime, over 75 light-years
distant, takes just over three days. There are also hyperfast gravitational
currents in hyperspace which can carry ships to parts of the galaxy thousands
of light-years away in just a few days, but the use of these currents is highly
dangerous and is not advised, due to the unreliable nature of the beacon
network in these areas and the fact that the destination regions are completely
unexplored. Exploration vessels attempting to use these currents often
disappear and are never seen again.****
The superstitious sometimes claim that there are alien
creatures native to hyperspace which do not take kindly to intrusions from our
realm. However, there are several species which have had hyperspace technology
for over a thousand years and these have never turned up a single shred of
evidence to support such claims, and they must be dismissed as fanciful.
Notes
* More recent, more accurate measurements suggest that
Epsilon Eridani is actually 10.5 light-years from Earth and have confirmed that
it possesses two significant asteroid belts, one gas giant and one smaller
planet (not directly observed but inferred from the stable orbits of the two
belts).
** Publicity material for Babylon 5 and occasional official comments suggest that B5 was
actually not in orbit around Epsilon III but located at the planet’s Lagrange 5
point with respect to its moon (presumably not Epsilon Eridani itself, as that
would be located around 5 million kilometres from Epsilon III and the planet
would be barely visible). This is not borne out by the show itself, where B5 is
said to be in direct orbit around Epsilon III several times.
*** The Babylon 5 station was originally designed to be one
mile wide and eleven miles long: only the centrifuge (the main rotating
cylinder, containing the Garden and Green and Red sectors) was going to be 5
miles long, with the forward command sphere and the rear power section and the
front cargo arms adding the remaining length. However, in-episode dialogue constantly
refers to the whole station being five miles long. This creates inconsistencies
since the CGI in the Garden sequences (particularly the end of the episode The Fall of Night, the Season 2 finale)
clearly shows a much wider station than the 0.45 miles it would have been to
keep the scaling correct.
**** This is a retcon needed to explain how Z’ha’dum can lie
on the “Galactic Rim”, which is at least 20,000 light-years from Earth, and
still be reachable from known space in just a few days whilst everyone else
takes days just to travel a few dozen light-years across explored space. This
explanation was required when Z’ha’dum moved from being on the “Rim of Known
Space” to the “Galactic Rim” between the third and fourth seasons.
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs. The Cities of Fantasy series is debuting on my Patreon feed and you can read it there one month before being published on the Wertzone.
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs. The Cities of Fantasy series is debuting on my Patreon feed and you can read it there one month before being published on the Wertzone.
This is cool. I've never watched Babylon 5 but always wanted to. So I'm going to read your stuff then watch along with you. Looking forward to it.
ReplyDeleteGreat write up. Still watching B5 series and movies on DVD or online in 2018. Seems there timeless. I've read many of the books, shorts and so on. Both Canon, Semi-canon and full blown non canon. Fanfic stories for the most part are well written and in keeping with the show. Any resource material you may have please consider sharing it.
ReplyDeleteOn a personal note as a lifer in the the military (22 years USN retired SCPO-IT)I have to nitpick Cpt Sheridan especially when under fire, he takes to long to act or gives unnecessarily long explanations before acting. Truth is you give an order period, no hesitation, no second guessing act and live with the results. I get it for dramatic effect, still, unnecessary for this audience.