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The Ships of the Minbari Federation

© David Ye

Continuing with my series on the ships of Babylon 5, I will now look more closely on the Minbari Federation and their ships and technology. The Minbari is the oldest of the big four races that inhabits this galaxy, they fought in the last shadow war a thousand years ago alongside the Vorlons. Basically, their technology and ship design have not changed since that war.

They are a race that believes in order and unity, and most of their beliefs center around the number 3. That is accurately reflected in their ship designs: the Minbari cruiser has three fins in a triangular position, and the fighters look something like an inverted triangular pyramid when seen in a forward position. But what powers the ships is still very much shrouded in mystery, as there are no visible signs of any engine exhaust ports. From the information gathered so far from the show, they appear to be powered through some kind of magnetic field generated by the ship that propels it forward. The same also applies to the fighters except that they move much more faster. The same technology may also be used to generate artificial gravity on their ships, which eliminates the need to install rotating sections and allows the size of each ship to increase exponentially without sacrificing speed and efficiency.

Now, their weapon systems differ from all the other younger races in that they don not seem to have any kind of pulse energy weapons that fire single shots, much like a rifle (with the possible exception of the White Stars). Instead, they incorporate a much more powerful energy beam weapon on all of their cruisers. Each cruiser carries at least half a dozen of these on both lower fins, the center axis and the top fin. Once fired, these weapons can maintain a continuous burst which can vaporise virtually any fighter, and can literally "punch" a hole in the armour of most capital ships. Their fighters carry three smaller versions of this beam weapon positioned like a triangle around the cockpit, one on each vertex. Another type of warship that has been recently introduced in B5 is the White Star class ships. These ships are a result of a "marriage" of two technologies: Minbari and Vorlon. It is much smaller than the cruiser and is about the size of several Minbari fighters put together. These ships are probably the most advanced ships in the galaxy aside from the first ones. They incorporate a semi organic hull design similar to those used on Vorlon ships.

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