Shadows

All Shadow ships have advanced gravitic drives with the same extra turning capability as those of the Kra'Vak, advanced FTL drives that don't suffer from scattering, UN style hulls, and graser weaponry. The exception is the modified Earthforce Shadow Omega which has a standard hull and drives. The big Shadows have a drive rating of 5 which is enough to catch nearly all capital ships and most cruisers, but still a little slower than their own light ships and the fastest enemies such as White Stars.

Shadow ships do not carry dedicated point defense systems, but the primary weapons are capable of being used against fighters and thus all warships have a PDS rating.

The ships here have multiple firecons and beams. This is to fit them within the Full Thrust framework: the extra firecons make the ships more resilient and the Shadow beam weapons are very destructive but don't have greater range than other Babylon 5 capitals. Shadows should never target more than one ship unless they are confident of destroying all of them in a single turn.

Shadow ships are able to fire over wide arcs, but usually engage larger ships by firing directly ahead. This is represented here by a combination of lighter weapons with wide arcs and heavy weapons firing forwards only.

Shadow fighters are not specialised, but the Shadow Omega carries EarthForce Thunderbolts which can be attack or interceptor.

Shadow names tend to be thousands of letters long by human standards, so the names here are just an attempt to convey a small taste of the full concept.

The commander in chief of a Shadow fleet is the "eye", or controlling intelligence, literally the overseer.

Shadow ships are individually very powerful, but beware of over-confidence. It's very tempting to emulate the behaviour shown in Babylon 5 and fly straight through the enemy with beams set to slice-and-dice, but it rarely works. The Shadows won their early battles in Babylon 5 so conclusively because they were ambushing inferior forces. Against a larger fleet even the most powerful Shadow ships are in danger of being overwhelmed by numbers at short range, just as happened in the episode 'Shadow Dancing.' Use the speed and agility of the dreadnoughts to pick off enemy ships without letting them concentrate all their fire in return. Consider detaching a group of scouts and destroyers to work around a flank: Shadow escorts have enough firepower to do a lot of damage if they succeed, so your opponent will have to respond.

Using a laser pointer to designate the ships you are shooting at is fun and may disconcert your opponent, but demonic screeching is hard on the throat and not recommended.

Most recent change: October 2008. New SSDs with better symbols.