Expert: Steve John Perkins - 7/9/2004

Question
Thank you for your reply. Here is another one. There seems to be some ambiguity re the crews of Shadow ships. Are the ships crewed or not?There are some suggestions that the ships only contain the integrated telepath-pilots,but that seems unrealistic.Would'nt there need to be Shadows on board to take big non-tactical decisions,considering the power of the ships. Also in INTO THE FIRE,there certainly seem to be many Shadows present who communicate with Sheridan and Delenn. When the ships leave our galaxy at the end of the episode,the scene would be meaningless unless the ships contained many shadows indeed.

Answer
the answer to this is that the ships do not need shadows on baord, they are living ships, which use a human or another being as a CPU only. the technomage books quite vividly describe how the experience was for anna, how the ship changed her so it wasnt really her controlling the ship.. but the books also say that annas ship carried people on missions, so like vorlon ships shadows and others can travel on them, but are not needed to in order to control the ship.

it also doesnt have to be a telepath normal humans and aliens will suffice but then they are more susceptable to teeps blocking them and shutting down their ships, thats why they wanted psi corp to provide teeps for their cpu's (blips).

i would recommend highly reading the technomage trilogy of books, they are great and go into more detail on this.

hope this helps

Steve