Re: More ideas on B5

Date sent:  21-AUG-1996 12:02:52 

>> A couple of final things. The power is provided by the jump point
>> generator. If the jump drive is disabled, the beams will no longer
>> charge.

>Um, er no. In last Saturday's episode, The White Star shut down its'
>jump engines and transferred the power to it's BREW - actually a
>BYEW, but anyway. An option might be to boost the power of the beam
>but at a cost of no high power moves for a while (i.e. only minimal
>speed and turn).

I would have thought that A.) The jump drive is the most power intensive
unit on a ship, and B.) Not all units carry their own power source. In
fact you can expect a single central power source, which I interpret
as being represented on the ship diagram by the jump drive.

Besides, it didn't affect the WS's maneuverability that much when it
decided that running away might be a rather good idea.

>> Worse, if it is carrying a charge, and the BREW itself is hit, BOOM.
>> The ship takes 1d6 damage for each point stored.

>No evidence of this in the series, but I suppose it's logical from 
>the design..

No evidence for any of it, but the 'flavour' seems right. As I've said
before, if you just take the TV sereise as your source of information,
you get a skewed view ('The Hood Effect' where ALL british battleships
blow up in WW2 games due to bad ammo storage. I've already noticed
every man and his dog trying to do the 'bonehead' maneuver after
it becomes clear that they have lost). It's much more important to look
at the background rather than the foreground.

The same goes for Starwars. Just because a SD is listed as having 72
turbolaser batteries does not mean you have to fit 72 FT batteries into
it. 7 will do.
 
Flavour is more important than fact.

+-------------------------------------+--------------------+
| Adam Delafield, I.T. Officer	      | Bolton Institute,  |
|				      | Eagle Tower,	   |
| E-mail : ad4@Bolton.ac.uk	      | College Way,	   |
| Phone  : +44 1204 528851 (ext 3163) | Bolton, UK.	   |
| Fax	 : +44 1204 399074	      | BL3 5AE.	   |
+-------------------------------------+--------------------+