Imperial Manticoran Navy vs. Minbari Federation Fleet

[RedLocque]

Hello all,

Lately I have been wondering about possible outcomes of a full fledged conflict between the Imperial Manticoran Navy as of "At All Costs" and the Minbari Federation as of the end of "Babylon 5".
I have to say I'm partial to the Manticorans, but I have to admit it's more out of a personal predilection for the Honorverse than an objective analysis of the capabilities of both navies.

What do you believe would be the result of a an armed conflict between the Star Empire of Manticore and the Minbari Federation?

Can't wait to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Red

[NecronLord]

The Manticorian ships have many missiles in the 10-50 megaton range. Sharlins carry about six of those.

[HMS Sophia]

An example of a heavy cap ships of the manticorans, the Sphinx class super dreadnought had 40 missile launchers in each broadside.
The ship has enough missiles to fire numerous barrages, with each missile's warhead being a high powered bomb pumped laser.

In addition to this, they have their side-walls which make them essentially immune to laser fire at long range, as well as the impeller wedges.
Something tells me the moment a minbari fleet finds a Manticoran wall of battle, they are going to realise what a mistake they made...

The standard cruiser warhead in the later period is a 40 megaton warhead with improved lensing to focus the lasers. Capital ships all used the same missiles, bigger ships just had more launchers.

I don't know how late 'at all costs' is, but if they have pod-laying dreadnought's things simply get worse for the Minbari.

Okay, some fleet numbers (prior to havenite war 1):
The Manticoran navy has 188 super-dreadnoughts, and 121 dreadnoughts (wall of battle ships).
They also have around 800 cruisers of all types, mostly heavy cruisers, and nearly 500 destroyers.

I think these fleet numbers grow in later books, but I simply do not know.

How many ships make up the Minbari fleet?

[Dahak]

"At all Costs" is before Mission of Honor, so they have Podnoughts (and a Sphinx is basically a antique by that time).
The advantage of the Minbari, if they so choose to exercise it, is their ability to jump. Especially if a huge wall of missiles is headed their way they might jump away (if not for some crazy Minbari honour thing or so).

[HMS Sophia]

"At all Costs" is before Mission of Honor, so they have Podnoughts (and a Sphinx is basically a antique by that time).
The advantage of the Minbari, if they so choose to exercise it, is their ability to jump. Especially if a huge wall of missiles is headed their way they might jump away (if not for some crazy Minbari honour thing or so).

Do we have any figures on Minbarri sensor ranges?
I mean the manticoran engagement ranges are much higher than most televised sci-fi, so hell they may be close enough to engage with the more powerful grasers and other broadside armaments...

[Ahriman238]

Manticore has truly insane missile spam capabilities, are invulnerable on two sides, somewhat protected on two more, and waving in the breeze on the other two. Their FTL also makes B5's look like a bicycle. With training wheels.

But it may not be completly one sided. HH ships can't detect objects without impeller wedges except at very close distances. Probably closer than the sensors and weapons of a Minbari ship. Also, during the Earth-Minbari War, the MInbari had a trick of jumping, with great precision, into an Earthforce formation and destroying it with the rift. FInally, there is some question as to the capabilities of HH point-defense regarding objects without wedges, which opens up the question of Minbari fighters, and how effective they might be.

[NecronLord]

Their FTL also makes B5's look like a bicycle.

B5 FTL varies in how effective it is. There's the famous 'divide the galaxy' scene and so on. It's certainly intended to be galactic, it's just little thought is put into what that means on the smaller scale.

[mr friendly guy]

So what happens if a Minbari ship opens a jump gate right inside a Manticorian ship. I thought HH ships are huge so its easier to hit. I imagine the White Star technology is even more accurate.

[HMS Sophia]

So what happens if a Minbari ship opens a jump gate right inside a Manticorian ship. I thought HH ships are huge so its easier to hit. I imagine the White Star technology is even more accurate.

I assume it splits the manticoran vessel in two. However, at that point it becomes hilarious. The chance of hitting one of the fusion bottles on a larger ship is actually pretty good if you're dropping a ship into it, and those have been shown to tear open battle cruiser sized vessels with only one of them going up, something that even contact nukes can't usually do. So that's a good megatonnage of explosion right there.

[Batman]

Their FTL also makes B5's look like a bicycle.

B5 FTL varies in how effective it is. There's the famous 'divide the galaxy' scene and so on. It's certainly intended to be galactic, it's just little thought is put into what that means on the smaller scale.

I don't think it's even all that consistent on the smaller scale. IIRC the trip from B5 to Earth takes anywhere from 12 hours to several days depending on episode, and IIRC the distance was 47 lightyears or thereabouts. That's from 10,000 to 35,000 c when Honoverse hyperdrive tops out at 3,000 c or thereabouts, so, no, not exactly training wheels. The Minbari have the definite strategic mobility advantage here.
I don't think think there's any hard figures on B5 acceleration , YR or otherwise, so sublight maneuverability could go either way.
Range and firepower absolutely go to the Manties-to them, one ls is point-blank range when the B5 powers rarely if ever fight at those distances, and B5 energy weapons are in the KT/s range. On the other hand, the Honorverse main advantage-long range high (by B5 standards) yield missiles-becomes pretty much moot because they also need considerable time to travel those ranges, giving the Minbari ample time to just hyper out again (assuming they can even detect Minbari ships at those ranges-no easily detected wedge, afterall).
One question that I assume is ultimately unanswerable is 'does the Minbari magic stealth work against Honorverse sensors'. Given that it shouldn't have worked against EarthForce-the ship is still plainly visible so optronics should have done the job-that may or may not come into play.
I'd say the best bet for the Minbari to win would be to hyper in just in front of/behind the throat/kilt of the wedge and let lose (assuming they can't actually hyper in inside the wedge, in which case the Manties'd be screwed-due to the wedges, there's zero armour on the top and bottom of the ships but lots of room between the hull and the wedge for the Boneheads to pop in and start blasting).

[Lord of the Abyss]

So what happens if a Minbari ship opens a jump gate right inside a Manticorian ship. I thought HH ships are huge so its easier to hit.

They are also very hard to localize inside their wedge & sidewalls, and unless at maximum acceleration they are not restricted to the center. They can and do drift about randomly inside the wedge, specifically to make it harder to target them.

And if the Minbari do manage to jump inside the wedge, I expect they'll automatically be targeted by the point defense lasers, if nothing else.

[Simon_Jester]

They are also very hard to localize inside their wedge & sidewalls, and unless at maximum acceleration they are not restricted to the center. They can and do drift about randomly inside the wedge, specifically to make it harder to target them.

I've always wondered about just how significant that capability is- because Honorverse ships never seem to have any trouble localizing their targets for fire control. Fire which penetrates the sidewall hits the target much more often than you'd expect if the ship can occupy any point within an area of several square kilometers inside a wedge.

So to me it feels like an informed ability of the ships, one that is not invoked.

And if the Minbari do manage to jump inside the wedge, I expect they'll automatically be targeted by the point defense lasers, if nothing else.

If their targeting radar works like it should, what would actually happen is:

*BLAM*

"We just got a ridiculously powerful signal return from Radar One! It blew out our receivers!"

Because there is now a solid metal object blocking the path of a radar beam that is supposed to be scattered across a wide area of distant space, and the radar receiver which is supposed to be picking up only a tiny fraction of the total emitted power of the radar set is now receiving the full power.

[Xon]

I've always wondered about just how significant that capability is- because Honorverse ships never seem to have any trouble localizing their targets for fire control. Fire which penetrates the sidewall hits the target much more often than you'd expect if the ship can occupy any point within an area of several square kilometers inside a wedge.

So to me it feels like an informed ability of the ships, one that is not invoked.

They do aggressively aggregation of targeting data and expected target locations of every missile, and probably every lasing rod too. After all, Manty firecontroll had a massive boost by having FTL relay nodes, which would be critical for relaying targetting data and basicly using the entire missile swarm as a distributed scanning array.

This would also go a long way to answer why the hell they need so much dedicated bandwidth between the missiles and the host systems.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't understand how this is relevant.

Granted, the Manties put a tremendous amount of work into ECM, ECCM, ECCCM, and so on, that there's tons of networking and complexity. But there's not much evidence for any of this work going into defeating the "where inside the ship's wedge is the ship?"

I can't think of any meaningful points in the series itself where the outcome of any specific event hinges on the ship's ability to maneuver within the wedge. Can you? Or is it just slipped in as some of the infodumps without really mattering, like the Havenite ability to shoot down missiles with main battery energy weapons?

[Ahriman238]

So what happens if a Minbari ship opens a jump gate right inside a Manticorian ship. I thought HH ships are huge so its easier to hit. I imagine the White Star technology is even more accurate.

Yes and no, the largest EarthForce ships are just over two kilometers long. That should be about the length of a SuperDreadnaught, if I recall correctly, even if it's unlikely to have the mass of one.

And when I said they jumped into the middle of a formation as an ambush tactic, I didn't mean that they killed one ship this way, but three or four ships that weren't even flying all that close together. Yeah, the hyperspace windows, or whatever you want to call them in B5, are massive compared to the ships that use them.

I don't think it's even all that consistent on the smaller scale. IIRC the trip from B5 to Earth takes anywhere from 12 hours to several days depending on episode, and IIRC the distance was 47 lightyears or thereabouts. That's from 10,000 to 35,000 c when Honoverse hyperdrive tops out at 3,000 c or thereabouts, so, no, not exactly training wheels. The Minbari have the definite strategic mobility advantage here.
I don't think think there's any hard figures on B5 acceleration , YR or otherwise, so sublight maneuverability could go either way.

Minbar is supposedly Chi Draconis, 25 ly from earth. The Narn Homeworld is about 70 ly from Bablyon 5. Yes, almost anywhere in Babylon 5 can be reached within a couple of days, something that's a lot less impressive when you realize every planet of note can apparently be contained within a 200 ly cube. Until, of course, it comes time to make grand pronouncements with a galactic map.

Ah well, sci-fi tv writers have no sense of scale. Nothing new to report there.

[MaiazuruX]

Minbari have far more ships: 800+ Warships.

Minbari have more precise jump drives, they can jump right in the middle of a formation. Forget long-range. They'd duke it out close range.

Minbari fighters are pretty much the top fighters here.

The Manticoran Naby would get destroyed in a matter of minutes. Unless they got Honor's ridiculous 'reality-warping, author-written' Deus Ex Machina supposedly brilliant military mind with it.

NOTE: Yeah, I dislike Honor. Mainly because she's written as always being on the righteous side, her actions are always excused, those who dislike her are almost always portrayed as losers we should feel contempt for, and she always seems to win through very poor tactics that could be beaten by anyone with true military knowledge. Admiral Nimitz, for instance, would defeat her with his eyes closed.

That book series is too Black and White to me.

[HMS Sophia]

she always seems to win through very poor tactics that could be beaten by anyone with true military knowledge. Admiral Nimitz, for instance, would defeat her with his eyes closed.

Examples? I'm really curious, but I haven't seen enough of the books (reading the 5th currently.)

[Jadeite]

Minbari have far more ships: 800+ Warships.

Which won't matter if they are outgunned by a large enough margin. Also 800+ is a vague number to go by given that you have mentioned nothing about what the composition of that 800ish is.

Minbari have more precise jump drives, they can jump right in the middle of a formation. Forget long-range. They'd duke it out close range.

A single squadron formation in the Honorverse stretches across thousands of kilometers (IIRC, in the beginning of the series, standard distance maintained between warships was 20,000 km). Furthermore, a close range fight would still favor the Manticoran Navy, given their missiles will still work just as fine, as well as counter-missiles, point-defense lasers, and main energy armaments (which I believe have been calced out before on this site as megaton/sec estimates).

Minbari fighters are pretty much the top fighters here.

In their own universe that is. In comparison to HH missiles, they are slow, unwieldy, and easier to destroy.

The Manticoran Navy would get destroyed in a matter of minutes. Unless they got Honor's ridiculous 'reality-warping, author-written' Deus Ex Machina supposedly brilliant military mind with it.

NOTE: Yeah, I dislike Honor. Mainly because she's written as always being on the righteous side, her actions are always excused, those who dislike her are almost always portrayed as losers we should feel contempt for, and she always seems to win through very poor tactics that could be beaten by anyone with true military knowledge. Admiral Nimitz, for instance, would defeat her with his eyes closed.

That book series is too Black and White to me.

You are letting personal dislike cloud your logic.

[Batman]

Minbari have far more ships: 800+ Warships.

As per what? And kindly note that the 2-300 numbers isn't for the entire RMN, it's superdreadnoughts. As in, the biggest ships they have. Their entire fleet is much bigger. Prior to the first Havenite War, Manticore had 1,621 hyper-capable vessels DD and up, and I seriously doubt the numbers fell after hostilities started (especially as towards the end of the Second Havenite War, they had more podnoughts alone than they had SDs at the start of the war).

Minbari have more precise jump drives, they can jump right in the middle of a formation. Forget long-range. They'd duke it out close range.

Define short range please. Unless they can jump inside the wedge area they'll be 100s of kilometres away from the ship. Which is a moderately long engagement range for B5 but spitting distance for the Honorverse.

Minbari fighters are pretty much the top fighters here.

Unsurprisingly, as the Honorverse doesn't have fighters. What was the firepower of a Nial again? Something tells me it's not going to bother anything above LAC level much. Does anybody still have Brian's numbers?

The Manticoran Naby would get destroyed in a matter of minutes. Unless they got Honor's ridiculous 'reality-warping, author-written' Deus Ex Machina supposedly brilliant military mind with it.

Yep. The fact that Honorverse ships are massively more resilient, have massively more firepower, and are actually shielded after a fashion totally don't play into this.
Black Star. 2 MT proximity detonations. Dead Sharlin. Honorverse. 15-40MT x-ray laser warheads on the cruiser level. Multiple hits needed to even mission-kill a cruiser. The MAnties have a serious resilience and firepower advantage here (not to mention a massive range advantage in missile combat, though that may not come to much, and I seriously suspect a considerable range advantage in energy combat-I can't recall a single B5 battle at ranges more than 10,000 km or so when for HH, 1 ls is a brawl). The only things the Boneheads have going for them are the stealth and their jump drives, which should give them the advantage. Not only can they get out of the way of the missile barrages, but they can realspace pretty much anywhere they want while the Manties have to deal with the hyper limit and plod their way insystem from there.

[Simon_Jester]

Minbari jump drives will help more if they're on the offensive- it's to their advantage to try for deep strike options if at all possible, because picking fights with Honorverse combatants is probably a losing proposition for them one on one unless their jump precision and firepower are a lot better than I would expect, from an admitted lack of knowledge.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Black Star. 2 MT proximity detonations. Dead Sharlin.

That just gave me a thought. Considering the damage that an exploding fusion bottle on a Honorverse ship can do to another nearby & unshielded Honorverse ship (as seen in Echoes of Honor), I wonder if an equally unshielded Sharlin that tried jumping inside the wedge and firing would be blown up with its victim even if it succeeds. B5 ships don't appear to use anything like that kind of "star in a bottle" power system and don't explode that violently.

As far as the superiority of B5 FTL goes, the Manticorans ought to at least be able to use the jump gates like any other non-Jump Drive equipped ships can.

[Batman]

Given that the OP gives exactly nada in the way of details, what makes you thing the jump gate network is there? For all we know this happens in a neutral galaxy somewhere were there's neither jump gates nor wormhole junctions.

[White Haven]

Ironically enough, IMO, the real losers in this clash are the Mesans. Their whole plan revolves around taking advantage of the blind spots caused by centuries of technological stagnation to suckerpunch people before they know what's up. A Manticore that's just had to deal with Minbari FTL/STL drive systems is going to taking very little for granted technologically, as they would have just had those blind spots exploited by the Minbari fleet to an extent.

[RedLocque]

I love it! This is exactly what I was looking for when I started this thread.

But you're right, Batman, I didn't rally set the stage; my original inquiry was for the benefit of getting an outside view on my read of both fleets capabilities.

In order for everyone to be able to gage the "real" parameters of this engagement, let me specify as to the overall setting.

A new terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction is discovered and an expedition is organized to explore the region, but since the events of "At All Costs", the Star Empire of Manticore and by default, the Imperial Manticoran Navy, are understandably a whole order of magnitude less trusting of the universe surrounding them; thus, it is decided to form an Emergency Battle-squadron to accompany the mainly scientific vessels in order to protect the Empire's subjects. As a matter of both political maneuvering and a test of Allied military readiness, both the Graysons and the Andermani are invited to form integral of said squadron.
However, as both the Allied naval units and the exploring scientists enter the wormhole, the Mesans manage to de-stabilize the nexus and both groups exit the terminus in the B5 reality, somewhere around the border of Minbari Space on the B5 side. Of course, they set to find out they actual location and manage to run afoul of a Minbari patrol.

Composition of Allied Squadron:
6 Battle Cruisers
3 Battle Cruisers-Pods
12 Heavy Cruisers

Composition of Minbari Patrol:
3 Sharlins
7 Tinashis

Go forth, and have at it!

[Slacker]

The Minbari are annihilated.