STARFURY QUESTION ?

[dencor]

Was there any reason why we never saw a starfury land in the fighter bays on the station ? Just curious as to how they would land. I guess they never figured that one out.



thanks
dennis

 

[vacantlook]

The starfuries don't land in the fighter bays. We're shown, I think it's in "Survivors" when President Santiago is there for the political side of delivering a new squadron of starfuries to B5, that starfuries enter into the main docking bay like any shuttle that docks at the station. It is once on the docking platform that that platform is shunted to the cobra bays instead of to the main shuttle bay's shuttle storage area.

 

[Triple F]

This came from Paul Bryant (designer of the Omega Destroyers) while talking about how the furies returned to their launch bays at the ends of the rotating section of the Omega’s much like the Cobra bays on the sation (you never did see them launched from there though).

The great thing about this design as well as B5 is that the ships return in Zero G and are transported back to their bays via an internal elavator. As they get closer to their final berth they increase in weight. It's a great way to design a spacecraft carrier.

 

[dencor]

Thanks. Now I can rest easy. A simple solution.

 

[darth_librarian]

Cool stuff.

 

[Zarto]

This came from Paul Bryant (designer of the Omega Destroyers) while talking about how the furies returned to their launch bays at the ends of the rotating section of the Omega’s much like the Cobra bays on the sation (you never did see them launched from there though).

Quote:
The great thing about this design as well as B5 is that the ships return in Zero G and are transported back to their bays via an internal elavator. As they get closer to their final berth they increase in weight. It's a great way to design a spacecraft carrier.

Eh i find that very strange. I have always logically assumed as indicated in series and told in various articles about B5 ships technical data, that the fighter bays are in the front of the ship before the rotating section. As i understand there would be 2 fighter racks that have 2 starfury fighter squadrons.

Starfuries have always launched from the front end of the Omegas during whole series. The mid section (rotating part) is the habitated area with crew quarters and command deck. Aft section is zero G engines and engineering part and front section is zero G fighter bays.

If i understand you correctly you say starfuries would return in to ends of rotating section, wich i understant means the most outer ends of the rotating part. It would be highly impractical that the only gravity area in the ship that is used for habitation and at best with crew of 1000 (+big number of troops when needed as i understand) would be used partly 1/3? as fighterbays taking valuable G-cravity area.

I can certainly understand the idea behind this, working same way as B5 shooting starfuries away. This is however the first time i hear about this.

http://www.b5tech.com/earthalliance/earthallianceshipsandvessels/earthcapships/omega/omegaviews.jpg
You can see some thingys at the ends of rotating section, could those be fighterbay doors? I have never even tought so before this day. The design is different that of B5 bay doors, wich are more "holes" than the ones in Omega that are pointing out of the hull.

Could only find data from net wich implies fighterbays are in non-G front part of the ship as i have always tought. Could be that designers ideas how things work in Omega weren't same than rest of the teams and so the fighter bays/launch was handeled differently by CGI team than designed by ships orginal designer.

 

[Triple F]

I was surprised when I heard about it as well.

As for B5tech. The vast majority of the site is fan fiction (valiantly) trying to fill in the gaps caused by the lack of supplementary material produced for the show. Going by what I’ve read on other forums and the like, quite a few assumptions and pseudo-facts can be traced back to there.

Also, what little was "officialy" produced for the show came from people that did not design the ship. Paul Bryant did, and that’s what he says. The ships can be launched out the ends of the rotating section, return through the front and (mentioned elsewhere) transferred back to their bays internally.

As long as your not using something like Opera (a temporary limitation of the site). Look at here.

http://ftp.themadgoner.com/B5/B5Scrolls/B5Scrolls.htm

Go to the Extras sections then Extended replies and choose option number 6, contains a few things relating to the Omega. You might find number 7 interesting as well.

Why you never see them working this way might be as simple as all but one of the battles you see with Omegas took place after season 3 – the last year Foundation Imaging worked on B5. So those that followed may simply not have known.

Just in case you can’t see the site – some can’t here’s a bit more aboout the design. He refers to the "Omega" as the Aggie.

Ok, the Aggie. The script called out for a new big ass battle cruiser and I just said 'I want to do this one'. As to the design, no Steve is brilliant and he provided a large number of designs but the Aggie was not one of them. I just roughed it out with about 5 blocks and worked out the basic proportions. The detailed model of the Aggie had over a quarter of a million polygons in it. It was a huge model that you could hold on for ages and ages. You could scrape from one of the front antennas all the way down the axis just missing the centrifuge and continuing out over, and past, the engines. It was definitely detailed enough to carry it. The front of the ship was inspired by an old huge South African steam engine. I wanted it to look as un-aerodynamic as possible.

The antennas were there to make it look even more huge as well as to provide mounting points to sell the ships lighting. I used a lot of oblique lighting because at the time self shadowing polygons in Lightwave didn't work, so lighting sources would shine through polys and illuminate the geometry underneath. It was a royal bitch and if you look at early images of the Aggie you can see from certain frontal shots the lighting's all wrong.

As the script basically said 'If one of these turns up in your system, you know your really really in trouble', the Aggie was designed to be really impressive and could just erupt with projected destruction. The turrets on each forward cheek were just there to get your attention, they were the 'light' weapons. There were the Starfury launch bays, the missile silos and finally the dual Big Ass Cannons under the ships return bay that were supposed to launch gigaton class mines – yes those things were there for a reason.

The little red doors along the hull were the missile silos. The detail was designed for a 19th century broadside effect. You know, camera scraping down the side of the ship as all the hatches open sequentially just like every swashbuckling movie you've ever seen. Then open to a wide shot as the entire ship's side erupts in flame and missiles.

On the centrifuge, if you look closely in some shots, you can see sealed Starfury launch bays. I wrote a whole tactical description of how Starfury flights were deployed in battle. If the launch was defensive then, as the centrifuge rotated, the 'Furies' were deployed evenly around the ship by releasing them at regular intervals. If it was an attack then they were released at the specific degree of rotation closest relative to the target.

Originally the engine section was a complex gimballed affair because when turning a large centrifugal mass the turning thrust axis is not intuitive. For example if the centrifuge is rotating clockwise, to turn the ship to port the thrusters should be pointing down thrusting upwards. I explained this to the guys and they looked at me like I had two heads. I think it was Ronny who said 'Look, just stick some big engines on the back and walk away'. We were under a time crunch as always and that's just what I did. The inspiration for the eventual engine design was WWII pulse jet engines. (Nobody asked me where the fuel was kept either .

 

[darth_librarian]

Triple F, that was some really great research you did there.

 

[Triple F]

At the end of the day, the only real research I did was tracking the contributors to B5Scrolls down. They’re the ones who provided the details. Most of the interesting and/or funny stuff started with the statement “as an aside” mainly because my actual questions where/are (on the whole) unimaginative crap.

It’s also the reason why I keep asking folks is there anything they want an answer to (that might have been bugging them) about the CGI and alien prosthetics, as I’m almost certainly missing many of the more interesting ones.