EF Sourcebook FT questions

Jon, In my flawed Titan edition of the EF SB I notice that the Hyperion Record
sheet shows that ship as not having a Jump engine, is this intended or is it a
glitch, it may be cos I also notice the Hyperion does'nt have any Fire control
syestems.......How many should it have???

Regards..................

> Jon,

Roger -
Not having seen the US copies yet, I don't know if these are UK errors or
things CE/WF left out when they did the ship sheets. I've checked back
to the draft ship specs that Zeke sent me for approval a while back, and the
Hyperion has 2 FCs but NO jump engine - AFAIK we've never seen one open
a jump point of its own in the show, they use either fixed gates or come thru
points opened by Omegas or other big stuff. Of course, given B5's track record
on this sort of stuff we'll probably see one make it's own jump point next
week, just to stuff the rules up....:) [Case in point: P.62 of the EFSB says
Omegas have 550 crew, then in "Endgame" they say 1000 per
ship - ho hum.....]

> Jon,
P.62 of
> the EFSB says Omegas have 550 crew, then in "Endgame" they say 1000 per

In B5 Wars the Hyperions do have jump engines.

> Stuart Murray wrote:

> >AFAIK we've never seen one open a

Its funny bringing in AOGs B5W does open a new can of worms.AOG have
constantly quoted that they get their material directly from WB as do CEE, Yet
when I now compare EFSB material and those of B5W there are big
inconsistancies. Yes, I know the the FT variant rules in EFSB group weapons,
but how do you explain the lack of rear firing weapons on the B5W Vorchan
Cruisers, the lack of rear firing heavy lasers on the EFSB Hyperion, 12
fighters on the EFSB Hyperion, only 6 on the B5W version. I'm not criticising
either game but I will certainly take a pinch of salt with either company when
they quote 'official sources'.

Regards..........................

> Stuart Murray wrote:

This raises interesting questions about exactly what "approval" from JMS
and WB actually represents. Certainly on the EFSB, WB/JMS didn't supply
any
info on ship stats - Zeke and myself worked them out as logically as we
could from what we watched on screen (plus the few bits of
mostly-conflicting dialogue..), and I guess the guys at AOG did the same
for B5W. To take one case mentioned, has a Hyperion ever been seen to fire
a rear-arc Beam focus in the show? I think not - the only time I've ever
seen one fire a beam weapon at all was one shot (forward) at the Alexander in
Severed Dreams. Of course, bear in mind that the rules were done from the
material available to us up to about the middle of this year, so we had no
access to the latter half of season 4.
Given that B5W, TBP/EFSB and the B5 Security Manual (the latter not
game-related, but having lots of ship stuff in it) are all supposedly
"official" and "approved", yet all contain different information, I suspect
that JMS really does little except glance at the overall tone of any given
publication; I may be wrong, but if so why weren't some changes requested by
WB to keep all the data in line?

Please also keep in mind that things like ship stats need to be balanced
towards the needs of the GAME as well as being as faithful as possible to
the source; this is the tightrope that all designers of media tie-in