danny_in_space
Member
This was originally posted over at spacebattles.com,
web page
Then I found it at www.B5tech.com
JMS Speaks
Originally Posted by Mac Breck on RASTB5M
quote:
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MB: The Enfali is in a firefight with some raider fighters. Since when have raiders ever been able to do serious damage to a Minbari vessel, and why are no Nials around?
JMS: Even a lion can be brought down by a pack of smaller predators. The Enfalli was alone and the pursuit was a long one, and they just kept taking hit after hit.
MB: Since when do raider fighters have aft guns?
JMS: Raider fighter craft come in as many variations as human fighter craft. The error is in thinking monolithically.
MB: or why we only saw Nials and Whitestars at Minbar, and possibly at B5.
JMS: Bear in mind that there were only ever about a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty whitestars built during the Shadow War. A LOT of those got wiped out during said war, so now you've got maybe 80 or so. You conserve your best ships for big jobs, you don't have them doing this kind of grunt work.
MB: Tannier? The same Tannier from Learning Curve? I'd have double checked the actors name but every airing of TLaDiS had scrunched credits
JMS: Meant to be the same character, but it's not the same actor.
MB: I think hyperspace looked better in Lightwave. Also, the new jumppoints seem to persist much longer than usual, before collapsing.
JMS: Hyperspace is now much more complex than it was using lightwave, with more levels. It was always meant to look pretty hellish, but we could never quite pull it off with lightwave, it always looked 2d. This is more what I
originally had in mind.
MB: In Dulann's vision (when he was in the hallway of the Liandra, checking systems before they took off), he saw Minister Kafka, the right side of his face already beaten up. This hadn't happened yet.
JMS: Recheck your tape...that shot ain't there.
MB: Liandra is 20 years old in 2264, so it was built in 2244, before the Earth-Minbari war. It's a small vessel and yet it has jump engines. Seems odd, since Sheridan thought it was a big deal when he found out that the Whitestar, another small vessel, had jump engines (2260).
JMS: He also didn't know everything about Minbari ships and classes.
MB: The Valen has weapons, so why were they never fired? Maybe they were fired but we never saw them fired.
JMS: The Valen never had time to fire; they were hit within a second of the hand ships coming out of hyperspace (actually as they were coming out)...the hits disabled most of the systems on the new ship (you can see eruptions all over the bridge). The weapons systems were intact elsewhere, but the control mechanisms were down. That's why they kept hammering the Valen, to make sure it wouldn't be able to fire.
MB: Why enter the tail of the comet? Why not just put the comet between you and the enemy ship. You don't have to be in the tail.
JMS: Two-dimensional thinking. Only works if the comet is directly between you and the enemy. If it moves at any other angle, you're revealed.
MB: How is it possible to lose people for any amount of time at all on that small of a ship?
JMS: Given the small ins and outs and access hatches and panels and sub-halls and the like...real possible.
MB: The Liandra, a 20 year old ship, hit the enemy ships, several times with her fireballs (why no traditional Minbari green slicer beams?)
JMS: Not a big enough ship with a big enough power source.
MB: I can't see the Liandra making any headway against a Shadow Battlecrab. "Seems" inconsistent.
JMS: It wasn't a shadow battlecrab. It was tough, but it wasn't one of those. The hand wouldn't give out that kind of power to flunkies.
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Originally posted by the Nuclear Marine
quote:
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TNM: The Ship - This looks nothing like the Minbari ships that fought on the line. It did not look Minbari.
JMS: The Liandra is a Ranger ship. The Rangers, if we recall our history from In the Beginning, were not directly involved in Earth related hostilities during the Minbari War. The EM war was under the aegis of the Warrior caste.
It is also, by design, a small, fast (crew of maybe 20) patrol ship designed to go on the edge, it's not meant to go out there and pulverize fleets. It would have been instantly outgunned and destroyed in the EM war's bigger battles.
(One thing I'm curious about is the assumption that we've seen all of the Minbari ships. We've literally seen only a handful. Go to Jane's books on military weapons, planes in particular, and you get all kinds of variation...from ospreys to f16s to cargo jets to hovercraft...why should there be less variation in a more advanced society like the Minbari?)
TNM: The Valen - A flying brick that someone apparently forgot to add weapons.
JMS: Yes. That was the intent. That's why David made fun of it on the balcony. Nobody likes it, it was a compromise between Humans and Minbari (which Dulann also mentions), more politically motivated than structurally sound. We won't be seeing its kind again.
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from http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers/inte.../int_vejar.html
quote:
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A: We had a finite budget, but there were some very spectacular visual effects called for in the show. Trying to figure out a way to do justice to the material, and not have [the film] become incredibly over-budget, was a bit of a challenge. But I knew from working with Joe in the Babylon days that if you approach him with a problem, he always has a solution, and usually the solution turns out to be something better than what was originally there.
He did that with the sequence in the gunnery pod. Originally that was written as a chair that was mounted on the bridge. The floor would go away, this chair would take the gunnery officer down into the pod and the chair would rotate 360 degrees. Well, it became incredibly expensive to try pull that off, and so we were trying to figure out a way that we could do it in a budget-sensitive way. And Joe came up with this idea to have her free-floating in air, which became tremendously difficult for the actress [Myriam Sirois] to do, because she was on wires, but I think the three sequences in the picture that we wound up with are twice as good as what we would have done had we had the chair as originally written
-------------------------------------------------------
from http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers/inte...t_jms_1221.html
quote:
-------------------------------------------------------
Q: Tell us about how you came up with the unusual approach for the Liandra weapons system, which is symbiotic with specialist Sarah Cantrell (Myriam Sirois).
A: Sarah is the ship, in that respect: If she moves, it fires. She jumps into the gunnery pod, and if she sees an incoming ship, she points at it, and the ship fires. It's a much faster reaction period [than conventional controls]. She's constantly getting sensory impulses from every part of the ship.
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[This message has been edited by Deviot (edited January 22, 2002).]
web page
Then I found it at www.B5tech.com
JMS Speaks
Originally Posted by Mac Breck on RASTB5M
quote:
-------------------------------------------------------
MB: The Enfali is in a firefight with some raider fighters. Since when have raiders ever been able to do serious damage to a Minbari vessel, and why are no Nials around?
JMS: Even a lion can be brought down by a pack of smaller predators. The Enfalli was alone and the pursuit was a long one, and they just kept taking hit after hit.
MB: Since when do raider fighters have aft guns?
JMS: Raider fighter craft come in as many variations as human fighter craft. The error is in thinking monolithically.
MB: or why we only saw Nials and Whitestars at Minbar, and possibly at B5.
JMS: Bear in mind that there were only ever about a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty whitestars built during the Shadow War. A LOT of those got wiped out during said war, so now you've got maybe 80 or so. You conserve your best ships for big jobs, you don't have them doing this kind of grunt work.
MB: Tannier? The same Tannier from Learning Curve? I'd have double checked the actors name but every airing of TLaDiS had scrunched credits
JMS: Meant to be the same character, but it's not the same actor.
MB: I think hyperspace looked better in Lightwave. Also, the new jumppoints seem to persist much longer than usual, before collapsing.
JMS: Hyperspace is now much more complex than it was using lightwave, with more levels. It was always meant to look pretty hellish, but we could never quite pull it off with lightwave, it always looked 2d. This is more what I
originally had in mind.
MB: In Dulann's vision (when he was in the hallway of the Liandra, checking systems before they took off), he saw Minister Kafka, the right side of his face already beaten up. This hadn't happened yet.
JMS: Recheck your tape...that shot ain't there.
MB: Liandra is 20 years old in 2264, so it was built in 2244, before the Earth-Minbari war. It's a small vessel and yet it has jump engines. Seems odd, since Sheridan thought it was a big deal when he found out that the Whitestar, another small vessel, had jump engines (2260).
JMS: He also didn't know everything about Minbari ships and classes.
MB: The Valen has weapons, so why were they never fired? Maybe they were fired but we never saw them fired.
JMS: The Valen never had time to fire; they were hit within a second of the hand ships coming out of hyperspace (actually as they were coming out)...the hits disabled most of the systems on the new ship (you can see eruptions all over the bridge). The weapons systems were intact elsewhere, but the control mechanisms were down. That's why they kept hammering the Valen, to make sure it wouldn't be able to fire.
MB: Why enter the tail of the comet? Why not just put the comet between you and the enemy ship. You don't have to be in the tail.
JMS: Two-dimensional thinking. Only works if the comet is directly between you and the enemy. If it moves at any other angle, you're revealed.
MB: How is it possible to lose people for any amount of time at all on that small of a ship?
JMS: Given the small ins and outs and access hatches and panels and sub-halls and the like...real possible.
MB: The Liandra, a 20 year old ship, hit the enemy ships, several times with her fireballs (why no traditional Minbari green slicer beams?)
JMS: Not a big enough ship with a big enough power source.
MB: I can't see the Liandra making any headway against a Shadow Battlecrab. "Seems" inconsistent.
JMS: It wasn't a shadow battlecrab. It was tough, but it wasn't one of those. The hand wouldn't give out that kind of power to flunkies.
-------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by the Nuclear Marine
quote:
-------------------------------------------------------
TNM: The Ship - This looks nothing like the Minbari ships that fought on the line. It did not look Minbari.
JMS: The Liandra is a Ranger ship. The Rangers, if we recall our history from In the Beginning, were not directly involved in Earth related hostilities during the Minbari War. The EM war was under the aegis of the Warrior caste.
It is also, by design, a small, fast (crew of maybe 20) patrol ship designed to go on the edge, it's not meant to go out there and pulverize fleets. It would have been instantly outgunned and destroyed in the EM war's bigger battles.
(One thing I'm curious about is the assumption that we've seen all of the Minbari ships. We've literally seen only a handful. Go to Jane's books on military weapons, planes in particular, and you get all kinds of variation...from ospreys to f16s to cargo jets to hovercraft...why should there be less variation in a more advanced society like the Minbari?)
TNM: The Valen - A flying brick that someone apparently forgot to add weapons.
JMS: Yes. That was the intent. That's why David made fun of it on the balcony. Nobody likes it, it was a compromise between Humans and Minbari (which Dulann also mentions), more politically motivated than structurally sound. We won't be seeing its kind again.
-------------------------------------------------------
from http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers/inte.../int_vejar.html
quote:
-------------------------------------------------------
A: We had a finite budget, but there were some very spectacular visual effects called for in the show. Trying to figure out a way to do justice to the material, and not have [the film] become incredibly over-budget, was a bit of a challenge. But I knew from working with Joe in the Babylon days that if you approach him with a problem, he always has a solution, and usually the solution turns out to be something better than what was originally there.
He did that with the sequence in the gunnery pod. Originally that was written as a chair that was mounted on the bridge. The floor would go away, this chair would take the gunnery officer down into the pod and the chair would rotate 360 degrees. Well, it became incredibly expensive to try pull that off, and so we were trying to figure out a way that we could do it in a budget-sensitive way. And Joe came up with this idea to have her free-floating in air, which became tremendously difficult for the actress [Myriam Sirois] to do, because she was on wires, but I think the three sequences in the picture that we wound up with are twice as good as what we would have done had we had the chair as originally written
-------------------------------------------------------
from http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers/inte...t_jms_1221.html
quote:
-------------------------------------------------------
Q: Tell us about how you came up with the unusual approach for the Liandra weapons system, which is symbiotic with specialist Sarah Cantrell (Myriam Sirois).
A: Sarah is the ship, in that respect: If she moves, it fires. She jumps into the gunnery pod, and if she sees an incoming ship, she points at it, and the ship fires. It's a much faster reaction period [than conventional controls]. She's constantly getting sensory impulses from every part of the ship.
-------------------------------------------------------
------------------
[This message has been edited by Deviot (edited January 22, 2002).]
