I know all that, of course. I was referring to the time line. If B1 construction began maybe 1 year after the end of the war, that seems rather quick. Especially considering how many Earth ships the Minbari had destroyed, etc.

But all 4 previous stations had to fit in within the 6 years between the end of the war and the disappearance of B4, which happened 4 years before its reappearance in season 1. That just doesn't seem like nearly enough time, only 1.5 years per station, especially since the station was being built a dozen or more light-years from Earth. Not even with jump gates etc. And for that matter, it might have taken a year or more to have the gate set up in the system. Without that, maybe only military ships would have been able to come and go on their own. In theory, the gate in that system could have been there already, but why? They didn't know about the Great Machine until much later.

Well a lot of that Wikipedia type stuff is necessarily retcon. Those details were never specified in the show. And Jinxo never specified exactly how long he worked on any of the stations, or how long his breaks were. Or how long his contract was supposed to be.

But what WAS specified was that Babylon 4 disappeared 4 years before Babylon 5 became operational. So of the "ten years after the Earth-Minbari war," that only leaves 6 years for all 4 of those stations to be built and then lost, then 4 years and B5 is in place and the series begins.

And if you're saying that the whole thing took place in only 8 years, not 10, then you take off the 4 years between the disappearance of B4 to the opening of B5, means that there were only FOUR years for B1 through B4 to be built - or at least started - and then destroyed/lost. And that four years has to include the COMPLETE construction of B4, since it was essentially complete when it disappeared. That just doesn't seem long enough, and is a consequence of JMS wanting it to be "Babylon 5" and to have the dramatic "ten years after the Earth-Minbari war" in the opening.

A separate issue is the "scuttling" of B5 due to it being a "navigational hazard." Nothing orbiting any planet could ever be a "hazard" to especially interstellar/hyperspace navigation. And even if it somehow was, how is blowing it into a lot of small and not-so-small pieces, still orbiting the planet, supposed to help?

But in the show, the reason given was a hazard to navigation. Which is nonsense. Especially for blowing it up, which by that standard creates thousands/millions of hazards to navigation. Better to scrap it and remove the pieces, especially since some of them - the fusion reactor, for example - might have been quite useful and valuable to one of the less-advanced planets.

A fusion reactor always produces energy, and it's not obsolete, 25-year-old energy.

Also, Babylon 5 was really the only reason for anyone to be in that system. So pirates wouldn't find it useful in that regard. It's not the same as sailing past the coast of Africa to get somewhere else.

But again, without the station being there, there's no reason for cargo ships etc to be in or go through that system. All they would be doing, at most, is coming out the jump gate, turn around, and go back in the gate. And there would really be no point to that either.

And since we only saw one situation where raiders had their own jump-capable base ships, all that would be necessary to render the system unusable to them, would be to make it so they couldn't access the gate. Change the access codes and keep them secret.

As with Somalia, the analogy fails. All those cargo ships would be using hyperspace, so they wouldn't really be "going by" Epsilon 3.

No idea. And anyway, that wasn't said in the show. All that was said, was "hazard to navigation." Which is nonsense. And so is pirates.

Or, the engineer, who says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. Maybe that's me.

Another theory might be that they "had to" blow up the station in order for the seer's vision in season 1 to be true. Which is also more retcon claptrap nonsense, but it's no more illogical than any other off-script claims. And if the seer's vision was really true, she should have also seen the "honor guard" of other ships that was there when they blew it up.

Yes, but in that case they could/should have skipped it entirely. I was just allowing for the possibility that's why they blew up the station at the end, rather than anything that really made sense, even as they "explained" it.

I have to put up with a lot of flaws in movies and TV shows, since too often they come up with stuff without thinking for even a few seconds. Most of the time they're pretty minor, but sometimes there's stuff bad enough that I just don't watch. (A much bigger case in point: the original Stargate movie, whose core flaws carried over into the series-es.) And it's easier to ignore the blowing-up-the-station thing because it was at the very end. Which also, by the way, kinda spoiled the Crusade series, since Franklin was there: it was 20 years later, and he obviously survived the Drakh plague, and left Earth which had been quarantined by the plague because everyone was going to die within 5 years.

Yes, I saw all of those shows when they were first on. The Stargate movie was fun if you don't think about it. But just for starters, the navigation stuff was silly. For one thing, if you're plotting a destination based on visible constellations, you couldn't "address" anything outside a rather small section of OUR galaxy, let alone any other galaxies. Yet the first planet they went to was supposedly in some far-off galaxy. And, while it was millions of light-years away, their "tracking" system somehow plotted that in real time. Ridiculous. And, even in their own scheme you really only need 4 points to draw 2 lines, and where those lines cross is your destination. Adding a 3rd line might seem "3-dimensional space-aware" or something, but it's pointless. Also the "origin point" thing was specious. Each destination would also have its own "origin point" so why not just specify that? Or, if you're going to assume that each gate doesn't "know" where it is, why not require plotting the origin point the same way as the destination?

Basically, it was fun to watch, but just doesn't hold up to even minimal scrutiny. They did what they did because it seemed cool, not because it made any sense, even within itself.

Did you know that Andromeda was actually the 4th attempt at that story idea? Genesis II, Planet Earth, and Strange New World were the "unsuccessful pilots," all set on Earth. In G II and P E, the hero was also called Dylan Hunt. S N W was made somehow without Roddenberry's consent/participation, and the main character was not named Dylan Hunt although he was played by John Saxon who also played Dylan Hunt in P E. Alex Cord had the role in G II. In a way, Alex Cord was Jeffrey Hunter for the first pilot to John Saxon's William Shatner for the second pilot. (And somewhat the third.) But neither of those had the final role, which went to Kevin Sorbo. And the setting moved from Earth (back) to space.

Actually I started watching Earth: Final Conflict because I liked Lisa Howard, and I thought she did very well in that show. But I ended up liking Boone more.