Cobra Bays
The Security Guards salute you as you walk into an EarthForce Military zone, where EarthForce fighter pilots are assembling for an exercise. Babylon 5 Second in Command, Susan Ivanova, is about to put them through their paces. She is a career EarthForce officer, who signed up against her father's wishes during the Earth-Minbari war after her brother Ganya was killed. She is businesslike and tends to bury her feelings.
Sir! Welcome to Babylon 5. I'm Lieutenant Commander Susan Ivanova. I was told by C&C that you would be inspecting us today. May I take you on a tour of the Cobra Bays? We're about to launch Alpha Squadron for a training flight.
Military Inspection
What are the Cobra Bays? Sir, that's the name we give to the fighter stations on Babylon 5. If you look to your left, Sir, you can see a view of the north of the station from MaintBot 23. This is the Command Sphere; and attached to it, you can see some large arms that have the appearance of snake heads, hence the name "Cobra Bays". There are four of these altogether, spaced every 90° around the station, for maximum fighter dispersion.
The cobra's head-part is actually the elevator that retrieves Starfuries from the docking bay in the Command Sphere and loads them back onto the launching racks. Where we are is further south. If you look to the upper left-hand corner of your screen, you can see the start of the actual launching bays. These are reached from levels Blue 8 and Blue 9. Alpha Squadron are just suiting up and going through now.
Preparing for Launch
Stay on this side of the bay, Sir. There's a vacuum on the other side of this bulkhead, because they're about to open the outer space doors. You can see the pilots prepping their Starfuries now through this viewport. We make sure they go through all the proper pre-flight checks.
Each Starfury is held on a tractor cradle that collects the 'Fury from the docking bay, and then brings it up on the loading rail to the Cobray Bay. The track goes along the roof of the bay here. There are twelve tractors for each bay; but here in Cobra Bay 1, you will only see seven of them loaded today.
Yes, Sir, we are indeed hoping that you'll put in a good word to EarthForce Central Command and let us bring our fighter squadrons back up to full strength. Alpha Squadron's down to seven fighters and Delta Squadron's down to nine. We're still trying to get Beta Squadron fully operational, but the conversion is taking time and we ran out of credits. There are a couple of 'Furies in maintentance that we could probably fix, but we've lost a few to the Raiders.
Scrambling Starfury Fighters
Here they go, Sir! You can see how the launching sequence works. First, the outer space doors are opened. Then, the tractor cradle's arms rotate through 90° and release each Starfury in turn. The fighter literally drops through the doorway. Remember, the station's angular velocity is about 30 meters per second here, which gives a good half-gee force to drop each fighter.
The rotation of the station causes the ships to fan out in a spiral, during a drop. That can be good, because it means we can launch all fighters very quickly, without fear of collisions. It also means we have good all-round coverage of the station, if we come under attack from Raiders. Otherwise, if the squadron is going on a mission through the jumpgate, the pilots heat up the engines once they've cleared the station and then form up the squadron, before proceeding to the gate.
Would you care to follow me down into the bay now? Just follow the EarthForce signs.
Click on the Starfury fighter to continue to Alpha Squadron.