Monroe wrote:[Well its impossible given what they have. And drone technology would probably be too expensive to try as you guys pointed out. We know computers in the future are more potent than our computers. We know they have working AI for example. We know with our computers we can look at one star and determine this. We know as computers advance they can handle more and more operations. So computers should be able to handle looking at the star field to determine a dip in light and where it comes from and act to that.
Now what the Minbari do to counter this I don't know. It would be interesting to play out this scenerio to see what each side could come up with. Maybe divide into teams and think of something that counters the other. But since Minbari can't turn their ships invisible to visible light I don't see how they could counter this. Doesn't mean they can't. Just with their current technology I don't know a way.
But like a lot of things in war one side develops something that kicks ass, the other side develops a counter, and then the original side has to improve.
See, this is not really what I want to do, because we're going way off any known canon. We can keep arguing back and forth " Well EF could do this" " Well then the Mimbari can do this." " Well then EF could..." Into an endless cycle of pure speculation until we reach a point so far from the show material that we might as well be talking about Warhammer for all the relevance of it.
But to be a good sport, I'll do it once. Here are my Mimbari solutions to your light based targeting system
1) Decoys. The Mimbari field collaspable frames with cloth stretched between them. As the whole thing folds down (like those snap open tents) every captial ship can carry dozens of them. They are attached to the fighters, which fly out, bring the decoys up to speed, and then deploy them. The decoys snap open, and the large sail they form blocks out light equal to that of one of their ships. The nature of space means they can just let them go once deployed, they'll sail on on their own without further assistance. I suppose thrusters could easily be added to let them control them even, the technology should be well within Mimbari ability to do so. Also, their cloth nature would make them hard to knock out, most weapons would go right through them and only leave a small hole, meaning it would take several hits before enough light started to leak through for the targeting system to discount it as a fake. Not as good as stealth, but having to guess which targets are real out of dozens of fakes per ship would make your system minimally useful at best.
2) Active counter measure: The Mimbari use their sensors and computers to calculate the angles between them and the EF ships and determine from those angles which stars will be behind them, and how much light they will be obstructing. They then use lights on the front of thier ships to compensate, however much relative dimming of the star light they would have caused is balanced out by shining their own lights at the EF ships, resulting in no dimming effect for the sensors to detect.
There you go, two viable, and completely pulled out of my ass systems that are well within the Mimbari ability to create and use. Stealth advantage is theirs again, not that they really need it. Lets remember, this whole war started when an EF ship opened fire on a Mimbari ship and killed their leader. The EF ship shot off a full salvo, scored several direct hits, and only did moderate damage, enough to cause a support beam to crush the Mimbari leader (I believe, it's been a long while), but over all the ship was still wholly intact and operational. On the flip side, Mimbari ships can destroy EF ships in single shots. Even if we take away the stealth advantage, which is huge, the EF is severally outgunned. The Mimbari also have the greater numbers, and their people are tougher physcially.
I must state again, the show was written so that earth had no chance.
Its a fair question.
