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I have been a longtime fan of Traveller and Babylon 5. I suppose I should say that up front to show that I could not go into this review without bias. I like what Mongoose has done with the new Traveller line, and when I heard that they were releasing B5 material for Traveller, I was overjoyed. To say that I -- and a lot of other people -- were disappointed by Traveller: The Universe of Babylon 5 is pretty accurate. Unfortunately, despite assurances from Mongoose, things did not improve with this offering. There are some things in Warships that are useful, but for Babylon 5 fans it will not be a fun ride.

I will break down the review into three main areas: Content, which covers what ships are presented and their Traveller statistics; Deckplans, the real meat of the book, regarding their quality and design; and a Summary. So, let's get started. Pinch your nose, and let's dive in.

Content

There are twenty-seven ships in this book, covering almost all of the warships seen on-screen; certainly all the major ones of the four major powers. Some ships did not appear on-screen that appear in this book, and there are a handful of warships and variants that did not make the cut. In all, though, any B5 campaign that involves ships having at it with each other will find stat blocks for suitable opponents and PC ships.

The stat blocks are typical for Traveller products: they are fairly straightforward, and in general make reasonably acceptable ships. Readers will find all pertinent systems listed, crew breakdowns by department, and by-location hit charts. There's very little to find fault with, stylistically, with these blocks of data. There is the occasional typographic or typesetting error, but not too many more than a typical RPG offering these days.

These ships are not as well-armed as a standard Traveller ship; all possible hardpoints are not used, for example. But this makes some sense; the ships in Babylon 5 were not bristling with row upon row of triple pulse laser turrets. The cargo capacity of these ships is pretty stunning, as well; in some cases I wasn't sure if these were warships or up-gunned merchant cruisers. (I'm looking at you, Primus.) These warships also have a lot of fuel capacity; six jump-3's for the Hyperion? Most Traveller ships can't even dream of such! But again, it makes sense in this context: it is to more closely represent what was seen on-screen, and fleets of ships performing large refueling operations were simply not seen. You would not want to put a Nova-class in a dreadnought duel with a Plankwell, and that's not the purpose of the book. Some care was obviously taken to make these ships resemble the on-screen counterparts, or at least fit into some coherent vision of the series.

Unfortunately, here is one part where my bias as a B5 fan has to show; I feel it's justified in that these are supposed to be representative of warships seen in Babylon 5, after all. The problem is, they aren't. While the stat blocks were made with all the care necessary for a Traveller game, they don't really resemble what was seen on-screen. I'll bring up the most disheartening example: the Omega-class destroyer. The continuity of the series established that they have four, maybe six, heavy lasers -- big, ship-killer beam weapons. The stat block says it has ten. Even presuming that the medium-sized turrets on the sides were also heavy lasers, there are twelve of those turrets. Further, Omega is virtually bursting with weapons that really have very little to do with what J. Michael Straczynski and Fiona Avery (Babylon 5's continuity editor) established about the ships and technology. There are a number of other inconsistencies, in this example and in the other ships -- Shadow fighters can jump to hyperspace?! -- enough to make someone who would prefer a strict interpretation of the series' ships to wince, several times.

It pretty much comes down to this: As Traveller ships, they're only passable, not terribly optimized, and have some very strange quirks. (Not a horrible thing; some ships should have their own odd quirks.) If this was, say, 'Volume Two' of Fighting Ships, I would be moderately intrigued, though these are definitely not classic Traveller ships. But you don't get this book because it's Traveller; you get it because it's Babylon 5. And in that sense it does not live up to expectations. The sloppiness that has plagued a lot of Mongoose's products shows here, though not as much as in Universe of Babylon 5. The weapons seen in the show were shoehorned into Traveller's ship subsystem without much attention to detail, and don't reflect the show at all well. Even many of the ship systems aren't close to what the ships are supposed to be capable of.

Deckplans

Here's the heart of the book, what I think most people who are roleplaying or want to roleplay in a Babylon 5 setting will want this book for. Unfortunately, this is also the source of a great many problems. Of the twenty-seven ships that have statistics, twenty-four have associated deckplans. (The ones that don't are the two Shadow vessels and the Vorlon transport.)

Where to begin. First off, I appreciate that making deckplans for these ships is challenging. The Sharlin and the Avioki are both very fluid-looking ships with curvy lines and don't offer themselves at all well to reasonable deckplans. Other ships are rather complicated in their own right. Making deckplans for most of these ships is hard, so I have to give credit for the attempt.

That being said, the deckplans triggered some of the most head-scratching moments of the entire book. The styles of the deckplans vary considerably -- they appear to have been done by four to six different people who did not coordinate to get a single, unified style at all. Again, sloppy editing and design choices on the part of Mongoose.

But that's almost ancillary to the mind-numbing oddness of many of the deckplans themselves. Take the Dag'kar misile frigate, for example. The missile tubes are clearly visible on the ship's design: eight tubes smack dab in the middle of the ship. Why are the missile bays spread out along the sides of the ship, then? The Hermes is much the same way, except with it's fighter bays.

Then there is the Warlock, the super-advanced Earth ship built with some Minbari (and some Shadow) technology. The big boom in the front has been established -- by Straczynski, by Avery, and by the guy who modeled the thing -- as a navigational sensor array on steroids, allowing the ship to pretty much go Where No Man Has Gone Before. You would think that if there was an error, it would be to confuse that big proboscis with one of the hugenormous near-spinal particle beam weapons the thing packs. (At least, in the series; in this book, it doesn't.) But no. It's marked as a launch tube. Also, like most designs in this book, it has a massive amount of cargo space. The Primus is the worst offender of this, I feel, but the Warlock comes close. The Warlock deckplan looks like it suffers from a lazy designer -- again, it's hard for me to belittle the work that the deckplan-makers did since it is NOT easy, but in this case and others... it's hard to see it any other way except 'laziness.'

The deckplans are also not without errors. At least one entire deck is missing from the Omega set. It is not the only set missing decks.

And one final sigh: There is a deckplan for the ubiquitous Raider Delta-V fighter. It looks like parts of it were hand drawn. Literally. With a pencil. Once upon a time, deckplans were indeed drawn with pencil, and some still managed to look good. This... looks less than amateur. It's like they put it at the end (in the 'Mysterious ships of the galaxy' section, despite it being not at all mysterious) to give the reader one last big middle finger when they hit the last page.

Summary

The fact that JMS had nothing at all to do with Mongoose's B5 line is painfully obvious to someone who pays attention to elements of continuity and how these ships reflect what was seen on the show. This is most visible in Mongoose's conversion of Babylon 5 to Traveller. Equally painful is the way that this book and the companion volume released earlier this year were cobbled together with very little editorial oversight. Despite Mongoose's assurances that they're revamping their editorial process, that's not terribly visible in this book. At least they got rid of the horrible greyscale backgrounds on the pages, but that's not a very great comfort. Editorial oversight is still clearly lacking.

I suppose it's because Mongoose doesn't care jack squat about the line anymore, since they're loosing the license this year. I do have to wonder if they ever did care about it, considering they refused to get JMS involved in it at all, and, based on this book, couldn't care less about the continuity of the series.

There's a term that was used once in computer software sales called 'shovelware,' which was software that was just shoved out the door without care for quality and usefulness. This book is shovelware, apparently meant to squeeze a few last bucks out of the B5 line before Mongoose looses it. At $35 USD, this is pricey shovelware. It is not a cheap book for a softcover offering. Between the wildly varying styles of the deckplans, the blatantly non-canon ship statistics, and the lack of care or quality, I feel like a sucker for buying this book. I can't recommend this book, even if you're a Traveller player who wants some interesting ships to put in their game, and especially if you're a B5 fan. A reasonable standard of quality just is not there.