Inside A Shadow Ship?

[Cell]

Truth-Seeker's thread about what is inside a Vorlon ship got me to thinking about this. But what do you think would be inside a main Shadow vessel. We know that there is a living being acting as the CPU, but what else would there be outside of that?

I'm actually at a complete loss over this one, because we know some things about the Vorlons and their culture but we know next to nothing about the Shadows. About the only thing we do know is that their ships are alive, they use living beings as CPUs, they are really old, they live on Z'ha'dum, they love chaos, and they are insubstantial when they need to be (screw JMS' weak sauce argument of them avoiding contact with people because they move really fast like spiders, them being insubstantial works much better and since JMS never actually addresses this problem in-universe that is what I'm going with.) Other than those things we know nothing about them so I have a real hard time thinking about what would be inside one of their ships. Or did The Shadow Within go into this at all and I'm just not remembering?

 

[Truth_Seeker]

Thanks for appreciating my thread,Cell.Our information about the Shadows is very limited but I can make two presumtions based on what we know about them:

1.A Capital Ship certainly has a lot of fighters inside so there should be something like a "Shadow Cobra Bay"(not necessarily the same design) for them.

2.Human telepaths are the CPU-s of the Shadow Vessels and there should be a Command Center made for them where they can merge with the ship.

 

[KoshFan]

Remember how the Shadows launch their fighters? They spit out a big ball of them, and then the fighters scatter. It's in "The Long Twilight Struggle."

 

[puzzle]

Do they travel in standard-issue Shadow vessels? I suppose they might, often enough. In that case, I somewhat doubt if they require a humanoid CPU to pilot the thing. They probably wouldn't appreciate the ship getting jammed by a telepath when their personal well-being depends on it.

So there's probably a fair bit of handy interfaces by which a Shadow can directly use the ship's sensors and capabilities. Perhaps a lot more directly than a humanoid can. Perhaps to do things which a humanoid can't.

Or perhaps they like to travel in a different kind of ship, not designed for mass production and fighting, but customized by their operator and meant to go undetected, not risking inconvenience...

In any case, I don't think they bother to install lights.

 

[Galahad]

It should be pointed out that the CPU of a Shadow vessel is not always a telepath. The Shadows only started installing teeps as CPU's when they twigged what the vorlons were up to (breeding teeps for the express purpose of jamming Shadow ships). They did this in order to have a countermeasure for their weakness.

This is what the entire plot of "Ship of Tears" was centred around (the Shadows using their influence on President Clarke to gain a regular supply of telepaths of their own via the Psi Corp).

Anna Sheridan for example, was not a telepath...pesumably neither was Justin(I'm assuming he went in a vessel because he seems to be talking from experience).

 

[Triple F]

With regards to the shadow fighters. Here’s a quote from Ron Thornton, who came up with the idea of the shadows using organic ships and who designed and built the Battle Crabs and fighters.

The idea that I had was that the Shadows defences were very organic. It laid an egg which burst into lots of shadow fighters! Mindless little killing machines, and the Battle Crabs could generate THOUSANDS of them!! I thought that was conceptually very scary. (Refer to the urban myth of the guy who went to the tropics and on his return had a swelling on his body which eventually POPPED! and thousands of spiders came from the wound !!)

From that it could be envisaged that at least some parts of the ships interior, like the bit where the fighters were created, had a very organic make up.

 

[Mike G]

If memory serves, (and its been a while) the technomage trilogy books have a few scenes that take place inside of a shadow battlecrab.

 

[Truth_Seeker]

Remember how the Shadows launch their fighters? They spit out a big ball of them, and then the fighters scatter. It's in "The Long Twilight Struggle."

Yes,KoshFan I really forgot about that part.The fighters are originally a part of a bigger ball that ejects from the Capital Ship during a battle.So we can presume that there are a lot of those balls inside the vessel.