Every Space Fighter Gets This Wrong (Except Babylon 5)

Ninety-nine comments from eighty-five of you asked for this one, the first back in July. So here it is: Babylon 5, all five seasons and the TV films, run through every test this yard has ever built, from the survey to the dark, side by side with our Expanse episode. The twist: under this yard's rule, Earth never spent its free miracle on a drive, because the Centauri gave it the jump gates. It spent it on a phone call home. Plus a spinning station 26 trillion times cheaper than Ceres, the Starfury's backwards shot, the worst (and most realistic) first contact on our list, a station that vanished on purpose, one line about Mars I had to fail, and a fire inside Jupiter that couldn't burn. And from your notes and our old episodes: hyperspace's leash, a living engine for our Arrival manifest, Babylon 4 through the DeLorean survey, and Thirdspace next to Event Horizon. Every name that asked for it is in the roll call at the end. Thank you. Spoiler ALERT! CHAPTERS 00:00 The fighter that flies backwards 02:11 The loophole: 85 of you asked 03:14 The rule: one free miracle (and who gave it to Earth) 05:01 Hyperspace: stay on the beacon 06:11 Test 1, the survey: the station 10:04 Grandma's lab: Babylon 5's spin vs Ceres 11:25 Test 2, the up, the weight, the dark 14:40 Your notes: a three-edged sword 16:02 The Starfury 18:48 Findings: Mars, Jupiter and the phone call 21:24 First contact: share a room, talk, trust 23:16 The school: who are you, what do you want 25:39 Every alien ship has an engine (Arrival) 27:34 Planted: Babylon 4 and the lemon 30:35 The time machine (Back to the Future) 32:00 Doomed: the Markab 33:00 Thirdspace and the Event Horizon problem 34:25 The dark, again: mass drivers (and G'Kar) 36:17 Severed Dreams to Endgame 38:35 The last inspection 40:22 Sleeping in Light 41:50 The verdict, and the roll call Narrated by: Me :) SOURCES Space Settlements: A Design Study, NASA SP-413 (1977): stay under 1 rpm: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19770... Mars fact sheet: surface gravity 3.71 m/s2 (NASA NSSDCA): https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary... Jupiter fact sheet: gravity about 2.5 to 2.6 times Earth's, air 89.8% hydrogen and 10.2% helium (NASA NSSDCA): https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary... Epsilon Eridani, about 10.5 light years away (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon... Nautilus-X, NASA's 2011 rotating-section concept (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus-X Foundation Imaging and Babylon 5's all-CGI effects (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundat... Ron Thornton, who built the station and the Starfury (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Tho...) JMS on the budget: just under $900,000 an episode (1996, JMS on CompuServe): https://lists.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/piper... Why Michael O'Hare left Babylon 5 (TVLine): https://tvline.com/2219020/why-babylo... Michael O'Hare (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael... Thirdspace (1998), and JMS on Lovecraft (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon... Sleeping in Light: filmed in season 4, JMS directed it and switches off the lights (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepin... Andreas Katsulas in Alien Nation, The Game (1989) (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas... The cosmic microwave background, about 2.7 K (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_... The 2021 remaster is 4:3, the CGI was rendered 4:3 (Space.com): https://www.space.com/babylon-5-remas... The NASA Starfury story: the only thing on record I could find is J. Michael Straczynski's December 1995 online post about "inquiries from folks associated with NASA". If you have an original source for a NASA programme or a naming deal, it goes in the pinned comment. FOOTAGE Babylon 5 (1994-1998), its TV films (The Gathering, In the Beginning, Thirdspace) and The Road Home (2023), Warner Bros., used for commentary and criticism. Comic: Babylon 5: In Valen's Name (DC Comics, 1998), cover, used for commentary. Images: O'Neill cylinders, NASA Ames / Rick Guidice (public domain); Nautilus-X, NASA (public domain); Amiga 2000, Wikimedia Commons (public domain); H. P. Lovecraft, 1934, Lucius B. Truesdell (public domain). 3D scenes: Earth and clouds, NASA Blue Marble (public domain); Ceres, NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA Dawn PIA20354 (public domain); Mars, Jupiter and Sun textures, Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0); skeleton, BodyParts3D (c) DBCLS (CC BY-SA 2.1 JP). Clips and thumbnails from our own earlier episodes: The Expanse, Space Battles, Spaceships, First Contact, Close Encounters, Serenity, Arrival, Back to the Future, Event Horizon, Alien Nation. The 3D scenes, the diagrams, the ledger and the ship-yard paperwork were made for this video (drawn in code).