Throughout the TV series Babylon 5, we hear about different sections of the eponymous space station referred to by colours and numbers, e.g. "Green Two" or "Grey Seventeen". These two parts of the classification system seem to be orthogonal: e.g. in the episode "Ceremonies of Light and Dark" in S3, a call is traced to the Green sector and also found to be from level 14, after which they know it comes from Green Fourteen.
I love a good bit of worldbuilding, especially detailed maps of imaginary places. Is it ever explained, perhaps in supplementary materials to the show, exactly how the different "sectors" and "levels" are organised? Is there a canonical map of Babylon 5 showing all the coloured and numbered regions?
Answer
Babylon 5's Art Director Ted Haigh was kind enough to provide a map in the Feb 1993 edition of Cinefantastique. This shows each of the major sections and their functions.
From the show itself (and the in-universe map seen in B5: Shadow Dancing) we can extrapolate the various sectors, their locations and function;
- Brown - Life Support and Waste Reclamation facilities
- Blue - Maintenance and Operational controls
- Green - Arponics and the ambassadorial quarters.
- Grey - Atmosphere monitoring and the station's original power station.
- Red - Public and Commercial facilities including hotels and Medlab
- Yellow - Power supply, fuel tanks, various labs.
This non-canon (but otherwise excellent) image from the licensed B5 Station Guide RPG, courtesy of TheWertZone seems a solid reference.
As an aside, based on Mr Garibaldi's trips in the elevator in B5: Grey 17 is Missing, we can reasonably assume that levels don't simply go from top to bottom (like decks on a Trek starship) but circulate outward from the core of the station in concentric rings with level 1 at the innermost and level 20+ at the outside.



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