Lot of people actually did and still do give a crap about B5 tech, including NASA. Who had designed the civilian construction Starfury variant seen in they beginning of B5: Thirdspace TV movie. As Babylon 5 was one of handful of sci-fi TV series to use real Newtonian physics for the Earth Alliance and to varying degrees for the other alien species.
I phrased that badly. I just meant that it doesn't inspire the same obsessive nit-picking autism as Trek tech. And before anyone gets butthurt, that's not an insult to Star Trek or spergs, I am just as autistic as everyone else posting here in the most autistic thread on the most autistic forum on the internet.
Yeah, I guess the technology in B5 isn't interesting because we already know what most of it is. Rocket-powered fighters, centrifugal gravity. I think some of the station is made of concrete? Definitely doesn't tickle the imagination the same way that the communicators did in the 60s.
It's not that it isn't interesting, it just serves a completely different narrative function in a very different story. B5 humans are just our grandchildren, with all the same flaws. Characters for the most part are soldiers and politicians and stories tend to resolve around conflict between them and that conflict often gets resolved with violence. Technology's main purpose is to show humanity as primitive compared to the other races, and the Vorlons/Shadows as gods compared to everyone else. There's no episode focused around how artificial gravity works on alien ships, because it doesn't matter how it works, just that they have it and human ships don't. There's little technobabble because any weird or wacky tech that shows up is so beyond their current knowledge they don't have a hope in hell of understanding the science behind it and it might as well be magic.
Trek, on the other hand, is supposed to be a utopian future where humanity has evolved. Characters are diplomats and scientists. Conflict tends to be external and be resolved with diplomacy or technology. They always have to try and explain whatever the new or malfunctioning tech causing this week's problem is to demonstrate how advanced and clever they are, and show it's definitely not magic. To be honest, I think that a lot of the technobabble overload from TNG onwards was an embarrassed overreaction to all the times in TOS when it absolutely was just magic.
I was exhausted by the show by the time I finished it, maybe it would have been different if I had seen it when it initially aired. All I knew about it as a young kid was that that was the show that Kevin and his ultra nerd friends watched in Mission Hill.
I can see that, it's definitely not made for binge-watching. I watched it as it aired or in re-runs originally, and these days I take a break of a few weeks between season when I do a rewatch,
