Remember, the Shadows and their allies aren't, say, the Borg or the Klingons. They aren't going to come charging at you. They work behind the scenes, in the shadows and work through others, use others for their own goals.
I saw Babylon 5 like 10 years ago dude.
Shadow Warship Capabilities:
It's important to bear in mind that Shadow ships fall into three categories.
There's the 'modern' vessels, which we saw 90-something-percent of the time in Babylon 5. These ships are piloted by surgically members of the Younger Races and are basically watered-down vessels. As the Shadows philosophy of evolution through chaos requires that the Younger Races have at least some chance of fighting back instead of being bulldozed. I see these as being a little bit above the roughly equivalent to the larger ships of the Federation, Klingons, Romulans and Dominion.
There is really nothing to suggest that is the case. ST ships tend to launch around matter-antimatter warheads. Most of the heavy hitters of the 2nd Age Younger Races were using fission and fusion weapons. Only one or two races were using antimatter and I don't think it was even the Minbari. It was one of the smaller council races.
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Regarding how these ships stack up against Babylon 5 ships, according to a quick double check, the only time we see one of these ships are given pause is at the battle of Gorash, where several Narn ships are able to focus fire and blow off an 'arm' from one of the Shadow ships. According to JMS's comments on the episode, this basically caused the ship to freeze up from the shock and pain, but had the battle gone on a little longer, the ship would have been able to shake this off and rejoin the fight.
- Outside of this, the only time we see Shadow ships go down in Babylon 5 is when there are telepaths involved, who basically cause the Shadow ship to sit still and do nothing while they pump it full of plasma or what have you. Or there's a convenient jumpgate to blow up or if the Shadow ships being fought against are smaller then the ships the heroes are in (see the Shadow fighters vs the White Star during War Without End) or if the the heroes get a drop on the ship and it's their rough equivalent (see the White Star vs the Shadow Scout in Shadow Dancing). And some of that comes down to the White Star's defenses being keyed against Shadow ships and said Shadow ship being more focused on getting away to sound the alarm. Furthermore, even then the White Star was badly damaged and out of the fight for a fair amount of time.
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Regarding telepaths, while teeps aren't unknown in ST, the vast majority of them don't seem to be equal to the mid-to-somewhat high ones we see in Babylon 5 among the Younger Races. Plus, keep in mind that the St races wouldn't have the same historical lore to draw upon to even know to try using telepaths against Shadow ships. And furthermore, that they have to disrupt the connection between the living CPU and the Shadow ship-trying to directly stop the Shadow ship's own systems drives telepaths insane.
[*]While I'm on the topic, there is no way in hell that I can imagine the Federation being willing to genetically modify, much less create, a race of servitors to fight their wars for them. And I'd argue that the Federation would be the ones most likely to do so, as science is the Federation's area of expertise, along with diplomacy. Everyone else, I can just see trying to make bigger ships or bigger guns. Or trying to break out some sort of germ or nano-warfare, which the Shadows are not only better at, but would retaliate with five times as hard with.
1) I think Star Trek gives that impression, because telepathy in Star Trek is less of a social and story impact than Telepaths in B5 were. As for whose is stronger, I don't think I can really say for certain who. I can point to individuals and roughly slap them onto a B5 telepath rating, but we don't know the full extent of any telepaths within Star Trek. Nor do many people seem to recall the actual strength that some telepaths actually have.
So we do have the common examples of Spock and Troi, who were in the show for roughly 10-11 seasons, so you have a rough idea of what they can do. Troi is actually an empath. Not a particularly powerful one, but it's worth noting that Troi had a range that most P5s don't have. She could sense the entire mood of the ship, even locate specifics on the ship. I don't think she could ever pinpoint their location, but she could tell you whether or not said person was on the ship. She could also parse out the feelings of individuals not just a few hundred meters, but she could lock onto someone while she was sitting on the bridge of the Enterprise, in the plant's exosphere (at lest 400 km above them) and tell the captain exactly what they were feeling.
When it comes to range, Troi is basically a match for any well trained P12.
Now, we have seen that with extreme focus, Troi can in fact locate someone. It takes a great deal of focus and we know that at least against a telepath, they have the choice of resisting her.
Looking over to Spock, we know that he has much of the traits of a P5. He's able to communicate via touch telepathy and we know at short distances, he can even put someone into a trance and implant simple commands, such as when he used said power to force a guard into opening the door for him. His brother seemed to have the ability to rid people of their emotional pain. And after the death of a ship carrying several hundred Vulcans, Spock was able to sense (and be pained) by their sudden death. When he was older, Spock was able to pass on his memories and personality to Bones, who was eventually able to cheat death when he discovered his regenerated (cloned?) body. It was also a Vulcan tradition of passing on knowledge and wisdom from one Vulcan to another, as we saw in Enterprise. Tuvok from Voyager was able to mind control people after mind-melding with them.
The next is to focus on characters who are known powerful telepaths. We'll first touch on Spock's father, Sarek. When Sarek had grown older, he was diagnosed with Bendii Syndrome, which caused a loss of emotional control within Vulcans. As a side-effect, they would begin projecting their emotional fits into others nearby. Vulcans could resist the intrusion, but humans could not. What's more, an attendant was able to curb Sarek's emotional projections with his own abilities, except when Sarek was under strong emotional stress. Troi's mother went through a similar experience when she caught the Zanthi fever, which caused her to project her passions onto other members of the station, specifically her lust.
For the most part, Vulcans and Betazoids don't seem to like to use these abilities as weapons, but it's clear that if they wanted to, they could project harmful thoughts onto subjects if they had the malicious will to do so, such as projecting thoughts of self harm or rage onto someone within range. And for a betazoid, that seems to be as close as 400 km, assuming they had a means of focusing on them (such as a face), but we know from ST 10, that focus can allow them to locate said people.
Shinzon's viceroy should just feel lucky that Troi's mother wasn't there, given that she might have just have poured uncontrollable rage into the viceroy and have him murder Shinzon. An ability like that is far beyond what a P12 can do. A P12, from what I understand, would generally need to be within short distance or have made contact.
2) As for telepaths as weapons...the UFP already has them. They created really powerful telepaths as part of a science experiment in government-approved cloning tests. Nor would it be all that difficult, given what we've seen them do with their own genetic tinkering. Such as turning people into spider-people via a few stray bits of DNA code. Anyway, it would be unnecessary. As there are billions of Vulcans and Betazoids to choose from.
Then you have 'Ancient' Shadow vessels. These are piloted by the Shadows themselves and are basically the bog-standard ships of the 'true' Shadow warfleet. These would operate against ships of the Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Dominion fleets like the 'modern' Shadow ships do against the Younger Races in Babylon 5. Basically, you need several larger ships focusing fire at once to hurt one of these ships, and that's difficult with the Shadow ship basically one/two shotting your ships and dancing around you.
There's a reason why the Shadows don't use those ships though. And there's no real reason for the Shadow to feel as if they need to use these ships.
Learning about the races of the Alpha and Beta quadrant:
While its true that the Shadows and their allies would have something of a learning curve when it comes to the various races the two quadrants, I'd argue that they'd have a much easier time of it then most would suspect. This is largely due to how comparatively open the various Star Trek races are with each other, thanks in large part to the Federation.
This seems like a projection of UFP worldview onto their neighbors. Of which their neighbors clearly don't share.
Heck, I can easily see, say, a Drakh ship coming up to some isolated Federation ship or outpost and playing the role of 'newbie aliens who've just started exploring space' and being able to get a fair amount of information for free from the Federation by play acting the clueless and harmless newcomers. Not to mention the sheer treasure trove of knowledge the Shadows and their allies would be able to get if they infiltrated a Federation or Romulan outpost or the like. Remember, Star Trek doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to electronic warfare and computer security.
It doesn't? Would you care to...elaborate? And then explain to me how the Drakh would use that to infiltrate their computer system.
Or they could just go the the Ferengi or those like them and buy information from them.
And knowing the Ferengi, the Drakh would have bought themselves a database of made-up bullshit of such magnitude, that Starfleet Intelligence would probably outsource misinformation to the Ferengi. Someone like Quark is an example of a trustworthy Ferengi and he's more than happy to just insert whatever sounds right for the sake of making a quick buck. The actually scummy Ferengi would probably repackage known information on the freaking Cardassians and pass it off as Federation information, just with some name swaps.
Regarding the Q and those like them:
Based on what we see on screen and ignoring any sort of fan-theories about higher beings manipulating things from behind the scenes, the Q would be unlikely to get involved, much less pressure the Shadows and their allies unless they started gunning for the Q for some reason. At most I can see the Prophets trying to give cryptic warnings and hints, as they do.
The first time we meet Q, it was literally the Continuum putting humanity on trial for having a bad past. I can't imagine how favorably they would look upon a much more powerful, much more malicious, much older, and much more sophisticated race appearing from another dimension and deciding to make that galaxy their plaything.