BABYLON 5 CRAFT COMPARISON STUDY
Throughout the next few pages I will attempt to finally come to a definitive conclusion as to the sizes of the vast majority of the ships within the Babylon 5 Universe.
I will attempt to use visual judgement - deductive reasoning - logic and some artistic licence to come to my conclusions.
Right - first we have to start somewhere - and make note that I have got the original sizes from various sources on the web and all ship sizes are LENGTHS in METRES - unless otherwise stated. Also excuse the quality of some of the JPEG'S - after all this is a comparative study not a showcase - GIF'S would have taken too long to download for some of the images.
Let's first of all start with the fighters - here is an example of the fighters using the default set of lengths:
Right - are these figures acceptable - well let's see. I shall start with that old favourite the Starfury at it's more than acceptable figure of 9.56 Metres and let's have a look at the pilot:
Well as we can see - he fits in there nicely! - So I' am going to use the same pilot to scale to judge the sizes of the other fighters.
Will the pilot fit into the Thunderbolt? - Let' see:
As you can see - yes - so I can accept the figure for the Thunderbolt.
What about the Drazi Sky Serpent?
Again - no hassle - so I can accept that figure
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what about the Minbari Nial Fighter?
Well yes He does fit in there quite nicely - But doesn't it seem a bit large to you?
Well I'm going to resize the Nial down to 16m - for reasons I'll state later in the study - now if I do this will everything still work with that pilot? - Let's see....
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Now we come to the Centauri Fighter - well I can tell you that pilot would not fit into the cockpit area! - So I played with the size using my trusty old Supersize plug-in until I could get the pilot into the cockpit pod and the resultant figure was a revised 15.45 Metres - take a look
Okay now - next I tackled the Frazi Narn Fighter - and again I encountered the same problem - that pilot to scale would not fit into the cockpit area. Now I knew that Narn pilots sat in a chair type position in the cockpit from the visual evidence from the first season so I resized that sucker until:
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This gave me a revised length of 22 Metres for the Narn Fighter
Now some people were not happy with the 3D Model used for the study and suggested another- So I downloaded it and compared the sizes again
at 30m it's still too damned big -so what about my 22 Metre figure?
...............settled then!
Now what about the Shadow fighter? - Well I compared the revised Narn fighter with it visually from my review of the relevant first season episode:
Well it doesn't look big enough does it?
So I resized it up to 40m long and it looks a lot better - so I'll stick with that figure
Now let's take a look at the revised charts
Well they look good to me. But someone suggested to me that the Centauri Sentri Fighter was stated to be 20m in length - well let's compare this and see:
Sorry - I can't go for that - look at the size of it now - it's just too damned big! - study the first image - even at 15.45m you could still fit 2 pilots into the cockpit module side by side! - I think I'll stick with 15.45m!
Now lets take a look at the Centauri Craft Comparisons
Well something is blatantly apparent here isn't it? Either the Vorchan is ridiculously large or that Primus is way too small!!
I can accept the shuttle and transport as kosher. Let's take a look at the Vorchan and see if it checks out size wise. Let's start by comparing the Vorchan as it stands with a Minbari Nial and use visual reference from the episode where Lenier stowed away under one of the wings.
Well - you know that looks good enough to me - just to be sure - I'll check it against a Brakhiri Avioki at a stated 1000m length - I guessed that the Vorchan was roughly half the size of one of these when they began opening fire on the Avioki's during the episode:
Well that settles it for me - the Vorchan looks right - so it's the Primus that's too small!!
But you know - some folks are still of the opinion that the Vorchan is still too big. I can accept it at this size - I mean why not? - It is supposed to be gradually replacing the ageing Primus cruisers - but you know something?
Why on earth can't there be two classes of this ship?
It's a tactic used in the Trek universe where there are two Birds of Prey - a large and a small one - I propose that the same applies to the Vorchan ;--The large version is a Destroyer and the smaller version is an Escort/Interceptor class gunboat - more on this later..
